Abstract
What is a global price? Studying the making of prices in spot, options and futures markets, the article ethnographically addresses this question by using world cotton trade as its empirical context. It argues that global market prices are not set by the mere coming together of demand and supply, but are produced as mercantile tools. These tools or prosthetic prices are realized by a multiplicity of actors. The article shows that instead of focusing narrowly on price setting, policy makers and researchers should attend to the conditions of price realization. In world and regional markets, prices are realized in multiple forms. Drawing on contemporary economic anthropology and sociology, the article maps the rich world of prices in their multiple manifestations and processes of realization. Price realization in the world cotton market is performed and maintained by constant interventions in the making of the markets and their prices through different forms of perceptions, scientific assumptions, standardizations of the object of exchange, various calculative tools, rumours and indexes. In conclusion, the article hints at the political implications and social scientific consequences of seeing the world price as a mercantile prosthesis.
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