What is the value of a Tibetan prayer wheel?

Abstract

With Buddhism’s integration into the global market economy, the trade in Buddhist commodities is booming. I ask how the value of such goods is measured, communicated, and contested by the diverse range of actors who buy and sell them. The analytical framework draws on recent conceptual developments in the fields of religion and of technology to develop Jens Beckert’s typology of value. While Beckert draws on Durkheim’s sociology of religion to differentiate between physical and symbolic values, I take the example of a powerful Buddhist technology, the Tibetan prayer wheel, to demonstrate the entanglement of materiality and belief in the different types of value ascribed to religious goods.