Art by dispossession at El Paso saddleblanket company: Commodification and graduated sovereignty in global capitalism

Abstract

The El Paso Saddleblanket Company (EPSB) is one of the largest and longest-lived traffickers in the accouterments of Southwestern style interior decorating in the USA. Since its founding, the EPSB has come to occupy a central place in the increasingly globalized production and consumption of “ethnic art.” Products include vaguely Southwestern USA/Northern Mexican-looking pottery, tin mirror and picture frames, rustic wooden niches, and other items, that are widely used to decorate homes in what has come to be called “the Santa Fe style.” This chapter examines one such item, the “knock-off” Navajo textiles sold at EPSB and other textiles like them, and the commodity chains that connect their makers in the USA, Mexico, and India to EPSB’s retail and wholesale outlets. David Harvey’s characterization of the important role of “accumulation by dispossession” in the historical development of neoliberal capitalism, Aihwa Ong’s work on “graduated sovereignty,” and Igor Kopytoff’s “biographical approach” to studying the meaning of material culture within the process of commoditization are combined to provide the interpretive framework for this transnational story. This triple analytical frame offers new perspectives into how the problematic connections between the aestheticization of objects as art and the negotiation of differential claims to sovereignty are co-produced within the geographic and cultural spaces opened up by global commercial flows.