Cashmere provides an ideal material for examining how humans co-opt tangible and intangible qualities into their ascription of value. The fiber's relative worth lies at the intersection of its tangible qualities (e.g., softness, lightness, strength) and intangible qualities (e.g., rarity, history, authenticity, sustainability). Mediating the relationship between those qualities are actors with very different stakes: the families of Mongolian herders who comb goats together each spring, the brokers and buyers who weigh it and feel it to adjudicate it for fashion houses, and the advertisers and marketers who decide what is desirable in global markets of end consumers. This article examines three nodes in the production and circulation of Mongolian cashmere to show how different forms of value—economic, social, linguistic, moral—accrue to material goods and travel, or not, from one context to another. I focus on interactions as moments of qualic evaluation. Here embodied, tactile experiences of qualia—which might seem to be immune to perceptual difference and “outside culture”—in fact differ. The example shows how valuation in a transnational commodity chain depends on both exploiting semiotic gaps in the chain and nonetheless meeting a threshold of commensurability, neither of which is divorceable from physicality.

中文翻译：

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价值结构：羊绒商品链中的触感、体验和排斥

羊绒为研究人类如何将有形和无形品质纳入其价值归属提供了理想的材料。纤维的相对价值在于其有形品质（例如柔软度、轻盈度、强度）和无形品质（例如稀有性、历史性、真实性、可持续性）的交集。调节这些品质之间关系的是具有不同利害关系的参与者：每年春天一起梳理山羊的蒙古牧民家庭，权衡它并感受它以便为时装公司做出裁决的经纪人和买家，以及决定什么的广告商和营销商。受到全球终端消费者市场的欢迎。本文考察了蒙古羊绒生产和流通的三个节点，以展示不同形式的价值——经济、社会、语言、道德——从一种环境到另一种环境，物质财富和旅行都会产生或不产生。我专注于将互动作为定性评估的时刻。这里所体现的感受性的触觉体验——似乎不受感知差异和“外部文化”的影响——实际上是不同的。这个例子表明，跨国商品链中的估值如何既依赖于利用链中的符号缺口，又依赖于满足可通约性的门槛，而这两者都无法脱离物质性。