Although anthropologists and historians increasingly talk about one another, they rarely talk to one another. This volume is the product of a year-long dialogue between historians and anthropologists on the topic of commodities. Three of the papers (by Cassanelli, Geary, and Spooner) were delivered to the Ethnohistory Workshop at the University of Pennsylvania during 1983–4. The others (with the exception of my own introductory essay) were delivered at a symposium on the relationship between commodities and culture hosted by the Ethnohistory Program, in Philadelphia, on May 23–5, 1984.

Lee Cassanelli, my colleague in the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania, first proposed the theme of commodities and culture for the 1983–4 Ethnohistory Workshop. To him and to Nancy Farriss (also of the Department of History, and the guiding spirit of the workshop from its inception in 1975), I owe many years of stimulating interdisciplinary dialogue. Lee Cassanelli's proposal coincided fortuitously with a conversation I had with Igor Kopytoff and William Davenport (my colleagues in the Anthropology Department at Penn), in the course of which we agreed that the time was ripe for a revitalized anthropology of things.

The May 1984 symposium, which led directly to the planning of this volume, was made possible by grants to the Ethnohistory Program from the National Endowment for the Humanities and from the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania.