Paper long abstract:

Recent work on materiality has demonstrated the usefulness of abandoning any analytical distinction between persons and things. In this paper I build on these insights in order to discuss the production and sale of bogolan cloth in San, a provincial town in Mali.

San bogolan is not consumed locally, but sold to traders in Bamako, and most of it exported to various locations outside Mali. For this reason it has often been classified as a commodity, an object made for commercial reasons only, and therefore devoid of any cultural meaning or value.

Contrary to this view, I show how commercially produced cloths can be seen as distributed persons in Gell's sense of the term, that is, as material extensions of the persons who made them. As such, the cloths embody not only their makers' personhood. They are also aesthetic "traps", expressing the social efficacy of these makers and attempting to draw others into commercial exchange.