Fungibility Fungibility In economics, fungibility is the property of a good or a commodity whose individual units are essentially interchangeable. For example, since one kilogram of pure gold is equivalent to any other kilogram of pure gold, whether in the form of coins, ingots, or in other states, gold is fungible. Other fungible commodities include sweet crude oil, company shares, bonds, other precious metals, and currencies. Fungibility refers only to the equivalence of each unit of a commodity with other units of the same commodity and not to the exchange of one commodity for another, which is barter. The word "fungibility"
Commodity pathway diversion to identify in which phase of its life an object is considered a commodity. Appadurai defines a commodity situation as "the situation in which [an object's] exchangeability for some other thing is a socially relevant feature." In his introduction to "The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective", Appadurai references the work of Nancy Munn and Igor Kopytoff as influential to the discussion of commodity pathways and diversions. Both scholars advocate analyzing the entire trajectory or "social life" of a commodity to understand its full value. In her article "The Spatiotemporal Transformations of Gawa Canoes", anthropologist Nancy Munn, argues