Commodity money as a theoretical backing for federally issued "gold certificates" to substitute for the gold. Between 1933 and 1970 (when the U.S. officially left the gold standard), one U.S. dollar was technically worth exactly 1/35 of a troy ounce (889 mg) of gold. However, actual trade in gold bullion as a precious metal within the United States was banned after 1933, with the explicit purpose of preventing the "hoarding" of private gold during an economic depression period in which maximal circulation of money was desired by influential economists. This was a fairly typical transition from commodity to representative to fiat money,
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