Consumption

Consumption

Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld

For centuries, consumption offered one of the most palpable realms for the West to distinguish itself from the Rest.1 In 1503, Queen Isabella of Spain decreed that only those American Indians found to consume human flesh could be legally enslaved, motivating colonisers to reject as many natives as possible as cannibals and widen the division between Old world and New. In the late 1800s, indignant missionaries condemned the Kwakiutl potlatch on Vancouver Island where thousands of blankets were burned and canoes destroyed in the course of exuberant feasts. Such practices ‘retarded civilizing influences and encouraged idleness among the less worthy Indians’, in the words of the first Indian superintendent in 1873 (quoted in Bracken 1997: 35). Later Indian agents would urge jail in order to reform those disposing of goods in this way. Towards the end of the twentieth century, images of Amazonian Indians with painted bodies and video recorders grabbed attention, not because they showed that modernity had arrived in the jungle, but because the strange mix of hi-tech goods and traditional adornment affirmed that primitives still could not get ‘progress’ quite right (Conklin 1997). As a basic professional habit, anthropologists have long sought to recast such exoticism as coherent cultural practice. For economically-minded anthropologists, spectacular cases of consumption motivate a more specific theoretical agenda. They have been pivotal in efforts to develop socially-centred economic theory.

As anthropologists have explained both the unfamiliar (rainforest VCRs, flaming blankets, porridges of human bone meal) and familiar (Christmas shopping, Barbie dolls, Coca-Cola), they have turned from economists’ commitment to the ‘sovereignty of individual choice’ to the ‘sovereignty of relations’, both human–human and human–object relations. Certainly, individuals do make decisions, even selfish ones for pleasure or status. But by systematically connecting their choices to topics omitted in economic analysis – the source of preferences, the institutional impact of material use, and the intimate experience of an object – anthropologists try to explain the obliging social relationships at work in consumption practice (Orlove and Rutz 1989).

Yet for their shared commitment to the social, anthropologists have disagreed about the scope of consumption’s importance. Debates spring up about the relative weight of consuming amid production and exchange, the role of households rather than individuals, and real impact of consumption on the development of the political economy. Offering a loosely historical perspective here, I sketch five approaches to consumption that are at times complementary and other times competing. Presented here under the labels contractual, ecological, categorical, material and processual, they do not exhaust all that has been done by anthropologists. Rather they illustrate the distinctiveness of anthropology’s contribution to the analysis of consumption and, increasingly, consumer society.

First, some definitional issues. In The world of goods, an important text for current anthropological study of consumption, Douglas and Isherwood (1979:57) defined consumption as follows: ‘a use of material possessions that is beyond commerce and free within the law’. Its broadness reflects a widely shared analytical goal, to fashion concepts that work both in consumer societies and in less industrialized societies with subsistence economies. By emphasizing ‘material possessions’, though, Douglas and Isherwood productively narrow the discussion. Watching films, sightseeing, reading advertisements, visiting museums and such intangible experiences related to consumption fall outside the primary focus. If cultural studies and allied researchers have made much of dematerializing consumer practice, reducing commodities to signs and consumption to communication (compare Campbell 1995), anthropologists have been at their most creative taking up the physical. The sense that consuming involves the irreversible commitment of goods requiring their replacement emphasizes the passage of time, sensory experience, the occupation of space – phenomena basic to human experience and economic practice.

Contractual consumption

Ceremonial feasts like the potlatch mentioned at the outset draw immediate attention to their rich, almost overwhelming physical details. Powerful Kwakiutl men hosted the gatherings (that in fact were not called ‘potlatch’, but had names such as kadzitla [marriage], tlinagila [eulachon grease potlatch] and k’ilas [feast]) to legitimate the political dominance of their lineage, to consecrate a young man’s claim to chiefly title, and to forge alliances between local kin groups. In addition to the gifts of blankets and other trade goods, chiefs would serve great quantities of dry berry cakes, crab apples, viburnum berries, candlefish oil and dried salmon. Guests would partake of this surfeit constrained by a protocol that rewarded discipline in eating. Etiquette demanded that one not ask for food, kept portions small, and limited them to one course (Wolf 1999). Whatever the restrictions, though, participants consumed their fill. When he defined the term ‘potlatch’, Franz Boas used such phrases as ‘to feed, to consume’, ‘system for the exchange of gifts’, and ‘place of being satiated’ (Mauss 1990: 86 n13).

For Marcel Mauss, the potlatch was a ‘total social fact’. He observed that it addressed all major dimensions of social life: economic, political, religious and social organization (1990: 38–9). Both Mauss and Boas read the complexity of the event in terms of the obligations it created among people; the sequences of ritualized consumption becoming the contractual nodes that bind and rebind social groups. Seeking to undo Canadian stereotypes of wasteful, backward Indian economies, for example, Boas rationalized the gifts of blankets stacked hundreds deep and the ceremonial meals that stretched for days in terms of capital obligations. The vocabulary of ‘capital possessed’, ‘debts’, ‘creditors’ and ‘loans’ dominate his analysis (Boas 1899). Eschewing the rhetoric of industrial economies, Mauss abstracts from the potlatch and other ceremonial exchange a general theory of the gift. He locates the power of the gift in its inalienability, its unbreakable tie to the giver that compels the receiver to respond. Subsequent research traditions would refine Mauss’s argument, discarding a concern with consumption and limiting his ideas to the sphere of exchange. However, consuming appears as a crucial intermediary in his logic of the gift: ‘In all this there is a succession of rights and duties to consume and reciprocate, corresponding to rights and duties to offer and accept’ (Mauss 1990: 14). Consumption specifically contributes to the ‘intricate mingling of symmetrical and contrary rights’.

Issues of inalienability and obligation so central to contractual notions of material culture have remained important concepts as anthropologists have reopened debates about gifts, commodities, and consumption. Arjun Appadurai’s edited volume, The social life of things (1986), inspired research by dissolving the binary logic that pitted gifts against commodities. Arguing instead that a good’s value hinges on the way exchange is instituted, Appadurai analyses the social settings and ideals that make it possible for an object to swing from alienated, interchangeable commodity to singular, meaning-laden emblem and back again. With chapters on the precocious use of gold in prehistoric Europe, the trade in medieval relics, and the role of homespun in India’s independence movement, among others, the volume expands anthropology’s concern with the politics of non-capitalist exchange to the politics of value wherever commodities circulate.

Ecological consumption

As anthropology matured as a discipline, the ‘total social fact’ of feasts was deconstructed. The potlatch received a more explicitly economic analysis and the consumption that took place became read in more individualized terms. Status replaced obligation as an analytic variable; elaborate feasting signaled not so much social contracts but prestige economies. Thus, in his synthetic overview of anthropology Melville Herskovits writes (1948: 287): ‘The prestige economy is a topsy-turvy system, where gain comes through expenditure rather than through saving, and the highest position is reserved for those who most conspicuously spend the contributions of the less privileged, for the vicarious enjoyment of the contributors’. The argument owes much to Thorstein Veblen’s (1944 [1899]) discussion of conspicuous consumption (Herskovits 1948: 286). Yet, Herskovits seems unable to accept the purely emulative individual that Veblen describes. Enjoyment remains collective, even if fundamentally unequal.

In North American anthropology, the economic turn produced an even more hard-nosed materialist analysis of consumption. Extending long-standing ideas that linked culture with natural environments, ecological anthropology takes a distinctive form in the 1960s with the work of Rappaport (1984 [1968]) and Lee and De Vore (1968), among others (for example, Flannery 1968). In the seminal work Pigs for the ancestors, Rappaport (1984 [1968]) examines feasting, consumption ritual, and food taboos, not for the social world they create, but for the regulation of relationships between people and their environment.

Pigs for the ancestors illustrates how ecological research entailed charting the flow of resources from fields and forests through foods to humans and back to the environment. In a series of dense tables, Rappaport lays out the energy expended by Tsembaga men and women as they raise their crops. We learn, for example, that clearing underbrush requires 0.65 calories per square foot, harvesting taro uses 1.1 calories per pound and so on. Pigs are revealed for their costly energetic inefficiencies:

“The ratio [of energy derived from pigs to energy expended in raising the pigs] could hardly have been better than 1:1 and may, indeed, have been less favorable. That is, it is quite possible that more energy was expended to raise food for pigs than was returned in the form of pork. (Rappaport 1984 [1968]: 62)

Within a dynamic system of energy flows, consumption practices from food taboos to ritual feasts take form as the regulatory mechanisms of the system. Thus, Rappaport extracts from the cultural rules that prohibit fighting men from eating ‘cold’ foods such as catfish or snakes a system-operator that directs ‘most of the subsidiary sources of animal protein to two categories very much in need of them: women and children’ (1984 [1968]: 80). In a similar vein, a long chapter lays out how the length of the multi-year ritual cycle that culminates in the year-long Kaiko festival ‘is regulated by the demographic fortunes of the pig population’ (1984 [1968]: 153). More to the point, the dancing, feasting and rituals of the Kaiko that signal the end of years of truce and the commencement of hostilities are a ‘means for disposing of a parasitic surplus of animals’ (1984 [1968]: 159). The consumption of meat sanctified through the ritual restores a disruptive variable within the broad ecosystem (livestock population) back within sustainable limits.

Seeking ecological explanations on the scale of human cultural evolution, Harris carried the cultural materialist project the farthest. He rigorously assessed everything from India’s sacred cattle to Aztec human sacrifice for their population-level material consequences. Dismissing ideological or psychological explanations of broad patterns of human behaviour, Harris insisted that explanations be tied to ‘the specific ecological and reproductive pressures’ experienced by people within particular environments (1977: 105). This commitment led in one instance to his famous argument, drawn in large part from Michael Harner’s research, that the massive rituals of human sacrifice undertaken by the Aztec elite, involving upwards of 100,000 people, were akin to ‘a state sponsored system geared to the production and redistribution of substantial amounts of animal protein in the form of human flesh’ (1977: 109). To make the case, Harris elaborates on two points. First, the bodies that tumbled down the pyramids after having their hearts plucked out were in fact cut up and eaten. Second, the Mesoamerican ecosystem lacked protein because the last ice age had left the area ‘in a more depleted condition, as far as animal resources are concerned, than any other region’ (1977: 110). Having deployed an ecological cost–benefit calculus in this most notorious instance of ritual excess, Harris’s subsequent application of cultural materialist logic to the condominiums of Reagan era yuppies seems positively tame (1989: 374–6).

Critiques leveled against the cultural ecology envisaged by Rappaport and Harris have been varied and often intense. Symbolic anthropologists dismiss it as ‘functionalist’ and ‘reductionistic’. Even sympathetic researchers have had trouble defining boundaries of ecosystems that permit Rappaport-style analysis. Those who pursue related topics today embrace the idea of ‘political ecology’ that emphasises the global economic forces at work in local environments. Yet even as the earlier cultural ecology seems to have lost its audience, two concerns at the centre of its analysis have re-emerged. On the one hand, the problem of the ecological sustainability of consumer society crops up in research on macroscopic issues (US energy use and global warming: Stern et al. 1997) and microscopic ones (the taste for the lips of certain tropical fish and the demise of Pacific ocean reefs: Safina 1997). On the other hand, inspired by Latour’s (1999) arguments that society must be seen as a collective of human and non-human agencies, some researchers are coming back to the project of detailing the intimate, regulating relationships between human communities and the material world.

Categorical consumption

The mainstream of consumption studies has pursed a symbolically-oriented path blazed, in part, by a frequent target of Harris’s criticisms, Mary Douglas. Where Harris insisted that cultural rules of consumption came down to their distributive consequences for calories, protein and valued material resources, Douglas reads food taboos for the tenacity of human desire to preserve the clarity of cultural categories. In Purity and danger (1966) she argues, for example, that the ancient Israelite pork taboo stems from the taxonomic ambiguities of pigs, animals rendered culturally impure because they had cloven hooves but did not chew a cud the way ‘real’ ungulates should. Shunning pork preserved the cultural intelligibility of Israelite cuisine.

With the publication of The world of goods, Douglas worked with Isherwood to extend the categorical analysis of consumption to the full range of commodities in a modern consumer society. ‘Instead of supposing that goods are primarily needed for subsistence plus competitive display, let us assume that they are needed for making visible and stable the categories of culture’, they write (Douglas and Isherwood 1979: 59). In this view, goods’ utility distracts from their fundamental service to people who accumulate commodities in order to make sense of their place in the world. ‘Forget that commodities are good for eating, clothing and shelter; forget their usefulness and try instead the idea that commodities are good for thinking; treat them as a nonverbal medium for the human creative faculty’ (1979: 62). In framing the argument, the authors work through hypothetical cases of solitary consumers: the person who wolfs his/her food standing by his/her refrigerator vs. the solitary diner who still uses a butter knife and reserves mint for lamb and mustard for beef. In their analysis, they discern in almost all cases the ‘joint production, with fellow consumers, of a shared universe of values’ (1979: 67).

Pierre Bourdieu deepened this categorical approach by exposing how class-based systems of preferences for goods take shape in relation to one another. Using data drawn from extensive surveys of working-, middle- and upper-class possessions, tastes for music, interest in photography, enthusiasms for painters and so on, Bourdieu maps 1970s French social spaces. By substituting the term ‘social space’ for class, he tries to get at a ‘set of distinct and co-existing positions which are exterior to one another and which are defined in relation to one another’ in fields of economic, social and cultural capital (Bourdieu 1998: 6). Social position, in other words, is not reducible to economic resources or status or education or even any clustered set of these variables (Bourdieu 1984: 106). Rather a person’s place in social space (and concomitant authority) emerges through the habitual set of differentiations – among goods, artistic works, physical activities, occupations – that the individual can produce. Consumption matters enormously in all of this for the power of consumers’ selections to naturalize divisions among people where little else about their work or training could.

Having titled his work on the power of taste Distinction, Bourdieu must later take pains to dispel the ‘disastrous’ misunderstanding that he is arguing that the search for status drives all human behaviour (Bourdieu 1998: 9). Two key ideas mitigate reading Bourdieu as a simple restatement of Veblen’s conspicuous consumption. First, the generative force for Bourdieu’s consumers is not emulation, but a practical (that is, not fully conscious) recurrent decision making that produces a unity of style. Sometimes this appears easily accountable in the ledgers of prestige, for example commercial employers’ preference for foreign cars and university teachers’ affinity for flea markets. Yet Bourdieu also accounts for why the employers opt for dogs and the teachers cats, a choice that seems less driven by envy and social ambition. Second, ultimately for Bourdieu durable correspondences between any set of objects and specific social positions do not matter. Whether the nobility enters a boxing ring or retreats to a golf course is in itself immaterial. What matters is how the act of discriminating among goods and activities positions the consumer in a field of relations, and consequently produces that field. Indeed ‘position-takings’ works as a synonym for consumption events in Bourdieu’s scheme (Bourdieu 1998: 7).

Leading the symbolic analysis of consumer goods in another direction, Grant McCracken (1988) emphasises cumulative consequences over time, rather that conceptual orchestration of society in the present. His simplest case involves the furnishings of Lois Roget’s farmhouse. Having observed Roget’s care for and display of oil lamps, dining room sets, the deed for her house, and myriad other objects, McCracken (1988: 49) uses the phrase ‘curatorial consumption’ to account for ‘a pattern of consumption in which an individual treats his or her possessions as having strong mnemonic value, and entertains a sense of responsibility to these possessions that enjoins their conservation, display, and safe transmission’.

McCracken acknowledges how atypical curatorial consumption has become in an era when people inherit little and purchase a lot. The practice, though, fits with other past and current behaviour explored by McCracken that links the substantiation of cultural categories (that is, the project outlined by Douglas and Isherwood) with the problem of change. If, as he writes (1988: 130), consumer goods ‘are important and ubiquitous agents of change and continuity’, they are also limited in the ways they can be deployed. As a meaning system, for example, commodities work narrowly, communicating best when conforming to standard codes. McCracken, in fact, did an experiment with clothing types and showed that the more subjects mixed and matched elements from different clothing styles (for example, of a hippie and a businessman) the more incoherent the social message. A suit jacket with bellbottoms was more likely to elicit confusion and pity from a viewer, as in ‘He’s lost his job and is on the skids’, than respect for a fresh perspective of, say, a free-spirited businessman (McCracken 1988: 65). Pursuing the possibilities of material innovation through studies of patina, fashion and anomalous purchases, McCracken argues that cultural disorder can be tamed through the symbolic role played by commodities. Goods allow social structure a ‘relatively consistent expression in the face of the disruptive potential of radical social changes’, yet they also channel change as this becomes necessary (1988: 137).

Material consumption

Anthropology’s concern with the symbolic dimensions of modern consumption unfolds in relation to cultural studies, sociology and the general explosion of consumption studies in the social sciences (Miller 1995a). Across disciplines, a rather individualized variant of the categorical approach came to be stressed. Reviewing the sociological literature on consumption, for instance, Campbell said, ‘Generally we may say that special emphasis tends to be placed on those theories that relate consumption to issues of identity and, within this, to those that represent consumption as an activity which conveys information about the consumer’s identity to those who witness it’ (Campbell 1995: 111). The roots of this approach tap ideas of Barthes (1972) and Baudrillard (1981, 1983) that stressed the role of commodities as signs encoding the myths of consumer ideologies divorced from actual referents. Some anthropological writing seems to move in the direction of lifestyle research (Friedman 1994a; Lofgren 1994).

Yet for practical and theoretical reasons, the lifestyle approach does not prevail in anthropology. On a pragmatic level, most anthropologists are committed to an ethnographic methodology; that is, research that recovers both information about behaviour and beliefs, on the one hand, and the wider contexts that make such behaviour possible and meaningful, on the other. At its most basic, this method pushes anthropologists to examine consumer behaviour beyond moments of purchase. The stereotype of individualized consumers seeking the psychological rewards of a particular lifestyle rarely holds when research opens up to describe the settings and people that bear on prior planning for and subsequent use of a good. Even studies taking shopping as their focus find obligation, duty, love (Miller 1998b) or conversely disempowerment and dehumanisation (Chin 2001) rather than the fulfillment of individual dreams. Indeed, the more thorough the examination of the contexts of shopping, the less mass retail appears as capable of sustaining meaningful relationships and identities (Carrier 1994).

Anthropological consumption theory in the 1980s also directed research away from a purely symbolic or communication approach. Miller’s work has been seminal. In Material culture and mass consumption (1987) he restores materiality as a key problem of identity and social relations in a consumer society. He departed from cultural studies’ preoccupation with a textual analysis of consumption to show the multiple layers – symbolic, temporal, sensory – through which subjectivities form. Asserting the widest significance for this project, Miller refutes the Marxist argument that production represents the only legitimate circumstance in which people develop relations and political consciousness. Reaffirming Douglas and Isherwood’s thesis, he writes that mass consumption is ‘the dominant context through which we relate to goods’ (Miller 1987: 4) and by extension the means by which we create identities, link ourselves to social groups, express class and taste and form our understanding of ourselves and others (1987: 215). Yet the core action for Miller is not categorization, but objectification.

Working with the ideas of Georg Hegel, Karl Marx, Nancy Munn and Georg Simmel, Miller charts how the subject forms in a sequence of encounters with the object world. While such unities of subjects and products have been argued for small-scale societies, Material culture and mass consumption shows both the relevance and tensions of these arguments when transferred to consumer societies. Forced to redefine the alienable objects of mass production into the inalienable objects of community and selfhood, the consumer habitually tackles a fundamental contradiction in modern society. Moving to decentre capital’s power, Miller outlines how producers – including manufacturers, retailers and marketers – survive not by dictating choices to consumers but through interacting with them and adjusting to them. Thus, he pushes his argument about objectification from the individual to society: ‘A balance between subjectivism and objectivism can be seen as a balance between the weight assigned to the two main forces of production and consumption’ (1987: 168).

Emphasizing material culture, Miller has offered fresh takes on such issues as modernity, shopping, Christmas and the political economy. Emblematic of these efforts is Miller’s de-escalation of brand name consumer commodities from the realm of ‘irrationalized, meta-symbolic life’ to one of specific practice. His article, ‘Coca Cola: a black sweet drink from Trinidad’ seeks precisely ‘to plunge us down from a level where Coke is a dangerous icon that encourages rhetoric of the type West versus Islam, or Art versus Commodity and encourages instead the slower building up of a stance towards capitalism which is informed and complex’ (Miller 1998a: 170). After reviewing the commercial localization of Coke in general and its establishment in Trinidad in the wake of US troop deployment in particular, Miller talks about what Trinidadians drink, when and why. What matters to consumers is not the corporate positioning of brands in relation to one another but the difference between the ‘black’ sweet drink and the ‘red’ sweet drink. The ‘red’ drink (actually a category of drinks) conjures up nostalgic images of Trinidad’s past, a history of emergence from plantation economies and the transformation of East Indians from indentured labourers in the cane fields to part of the mix of national culture. Perceived as the sweetest of drinks, the red drink supposedly connects both with the sugar-seeking habits of East Indians and with the general fast food tastes of Trinidadians.

In contrast, the black sweet drink is ‘summed up in the notion of a “rum and coke” as the core alcoholic drink for most people of the island’ (Miller 1998a:179). Black sweet drinks are consumed on their own, too, not just Coke but cheaper versions such as ‘Bubble Up’, produced in an industrial estate near the squatting community where its primary consumers lived (and where Miller carried out his research). They ordered it at local parlours by saying ‘gimme a black’ or they selected the alternative with ‘gimme a red’. The more Miller pursues the story of Coca-Cola, the more rich details of Trinidadian ethnic identities, national self-image and local corporate competition are revealed. Chastising academics for picking Coca-Cola as ‘their favourite image of the superficial globality’, Miller demonstrates that close attention to actual consumption, and competitive struggle for consumers, sublates the general form of capitalism into the specifics of people, livelihoods, politics and history.

Through review articles, edited volumes and other publishing projects, Miller has been one of the most consistent advocates of the study of modern consumer societies. More pointedly, he insists that studying consumption will transform anthropology, resulting in ‘a final expunging of latent primitivism’ (Miller 1995b: 269). The breadth of topics employing a material culture approach would seem to bear him out. Tupperware (Clarke 1999), used clothing (Tranberg-Hansen 2000), ethnically correct dolls (Chin 1999) and other everyday products of advanced industrial capitalism have all received critical analysis for their cultural meanings and social consequences. Activities that anthropologists once ignored as trivial, such as catalogue shopping, receive thoughtful treatment in relation to such core theoretical problems of gift exchange, commodification and alienability (Carrier 1990).

Processual consumption

The expanding literature has none the less provoked concern and criticism. In her review of Jonathan Friedman’s edited volume, Consumption and identity, Mary Weismantel, who has herself researched household consumption as a sphere of power relations and cultural change (Weismantel 1988), rejects the significance of consumption for understanding social structure. She writes (1997: 381), ‘this book reveals both the substantive richness of studies of consumption and the theoretical weakness of post-Marxist economic anthropology. Absent the polemical vigour provided by a rousing critique of capital, eschewing Marx’s subtle understanding of modernity’s essential contradictions, work on consumption no longer holds the promise of reinvigorating postcolonial anthropology’. More moderately, Carrier and Heyman (1997) seek to redirect rather than dismiss consumption studies. Warning that the scholarly turn to consumption is ‘dangerously partial’, they want to restore the political economy, conflict, inequality and dynamic processes. As a practical matter, they urge shifting the analytical gaze from ‘cheap consumables’ to housing markets, households, and other institutional structures that constrain and direct consumption.

In fact, a processual approach tackles these concerns in studies of people living in far more uncertain economies than those of North American or European consumer societies. Belizean urban Creole children (Wilk 1994), peri-urban wage earners in the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu (Philibert and Jourdan 1996), the Southern Tswana communities during an era of European missionisation (Comaroff 1997), Haya coffee cultivators of Tanzania (Weiss 1996) count among those faced with rapidly remaking their social world under pressures of capitalist expansion, globalization and other dislocations of modernity. Anthropologists have turned to consumption as a setting where those changes literally hit home. Picking up the thread of community and household material life, they follow it back to distant fields of power, including colonial ideologies, national development programmes and transnational labour markets.

Sidney Mintz’s magisterial study of sugar illustrates the most ambitious effort to see history through consumption. In Sweetness and power, Mintz observes: ‘A single source of satisfaction – sucrose extracted from the sugar cane – for what appears to be a widespread, perhaps even universal, human liking for sweetness became established in European taste preferences at a time when European power, military might, and economic initiative were transforming the world’ (Mintz 1985: xxv). In trying to account for the relation between sugar and European power, he departs from past approaches that would have sought the answer primarily in forms of production, the regulation of trade, the role of the state and so on. While he does attend to those issues, he also insists ‘one needs to understand just what makes demand work’ (1985: xxv). His long chapter on consumption details fourteenth century recipes that call for using sugar to spice fish, meats or vegetables that had been so pounded and mashed as to be rendered ‘soft and mushy, with its principal ingredients disguised’ (1985: 85). He goes on to describe the cunning subtleties (sugar sculptures) served up by the nobility in the seventeenth century, including one that featured a stag that ‘bleeds’ claret wine when an arrow is removed from its flank (1985: 93). Finally, he shows sugar’s transformation from luxury to a basic necessity that furnished quick energy through a debased cuisine of sweetened suet puddings and weakened sugary tea to an overworked nineteenth-century labouring class.

Weismantel similarly uses food to tell the story of capitalism’s expansion, but in intimate and day-to-day terms. Her analysis of Andean peasant cuisine during a period of economic crisis during the 1980s illustrates three key elements of a processual approach. First, she draws attention to changes in incomes and resources needed for social reproduction. The parish economy of Zumbagua, Ecuador, centered on barley cultivation and sustained an indigenous Quichua culture marked as subordinate, in part just for the way Quichua peasants could support themselves through the labour in their fields and the cuisine of their hearths. Yet households in the parish relied on city wages, earnings gained in a national economy that is perceived as ethnically white, to participate fully in community life. The inequities that structured the national economy were felt in gendered terms in the parish. Shut out from most urban jobs, women took growing responsibility for the fields. Contending with national racial ideologies that devalued their labour, men struggled in the city to keep steady jobs. When men succeeded, though, the bread, fruits and other treats they provided for the house upon their return eclipsed the social value of women’s crops. The responsibility for different and insecure incomes embedded men and women in ethnically polarized relations of production and set the stage for conflict.

Second, she demonstrates that macroeconomic changes create inconsistency in previously taken-for-granted routines of consumption. Basic hearty breakfasts of toasted ground barley, for example, that farmers once consumed unquestioningly to warm up after working the morning chores now becomes the mark of being a backward Indian in the eyes of successful male wage earners. Bags of bread borne by fathers annoy mothers who laboured to provide a filling meal of grains from their field. Weismantel acknowledges that for subordinate peasants, little of their culture could be taken for granted as unconscious habit or doxa. Yet, she adds, ‘in Zumbagua today, the aggressive presence of white foods is met by the stubborn, uncelebrated existence of barley at the core of indigenous doxa. If children’s longing for bread … represent pressure to assimilate, barley products stand for cultural resistance’ (1988: 159–60).

With diversification of consumption comes the third element of processual analysis: the tracking of sequences of consumption events among multiple consumers as a politically forceful dialogue. Expenditure, material display, meals and social spending work as statements that respond to and seek to persuade others about their cultural loyalties (Wilk 1994). Not only do meals of barley or bread symbolically resist or support Ecuador’s dominant Hispanicised culture. The requirements of accumulating for public consumption – getting the seeds into the earth and the crops from the field or taking up life in raw new concrete block shantytowns – cause people to practise the routines they wish to communicate messages about. The leanness of any occupation open to Andeans means that allegiances projected through goods are hard to earn and harder to fake. Nevertheless, messages are often mixed. Pure indigenous or white cultural forms are hard to find in the eclectic household economies of rural communities. Consumption emerges, then, as a fluid, highly charged and powerfully persuasive medium of social relations.

For all the sharp analysis of inequality and power, this close study of consumption embedded in community life can falter on two fronts. The first is a return to the parochialism of village studies mired in details of local consumption practices and inventories of small samples of household possessions. As advocated by Miller, studying mass consumption was supposed to liberate anthropology precisely from this narrowness. Second, tracking consumers’ novel consumption of commodities amid traditional material culture can strike an overly celebratory note. While it is true that ‘one often finds that the goods have been transformed, at least in part, in accordance with the values of the receiving culture’ (Howes 1996: 5) the transformation may be rather trivial in the face of the political and economic changes that otherwise erode people’s autonomy.

Wilk escapes some of these problems by linking the study of consumption to the study of media (Wilk 1994). He argues that consumption in Belize City is a contentious dialogue about appropriate development models that he terms ‘official state’, ‘internationalist metropolitan’, ‘ethnic’ and ‘Creole urban’. Yet rather than focusing simply on the variations among consumer styles, he examines the media, especially television, in order to reconnect style to the power of time. Television programming matters in post-colonial nations like Belize, not simply for the consumer imagery it broadcasts, but for its effect on ‘colonial time’, the timing of the transfer of new commodities that endowed jet-setting elite consumers with the cachet of being the first to consume the latest metropolitan fashion. By disrupting the fashion hierarchy that consigned the Third-World poor to the end of the line, television enables competing visions of both present stylishness and future realities.

Historical analysis can also rescue processual approaches from its parochialism. In an innovative study of colonial culture and power, Thomas (1991) links the local uses of goods by both Pacific Islanders and Europeans to the wider give and take of political strategies. He tracks the acquisition of foreign objects, everything from rifles that get inlaid with shells to stone adzes that become carefully painted into European portraits, as an unfolding discourse of power and identity. Extending analysis over two centuries, Thomas recalls Mauss by reconnecting problems of gift giving and reciprocity to the use and display of goods. He intends to subvert anthropologists’ taken-for-granted ideas about gifts, yet by once again offering a holistic context that cross-cuts theoretical boundaries between exchange, use, display and consumption of goods, Thomas calls to mind the fullness of materialized social lives that Mauss explored. Thomas illustrates the ways material culture interconnects coloniser and colonised political strategy, economic effort and cultural values, forming dense (if not total) social facts.

Recently, after offering several thoughtful pieces on consumption, the anthropologist Jonathan Friedman declared that ‘no theory of consumption is feasible because consumption is not a socially autonomous phenomenon’ (Friedman 1994b: 17). His comment reflects anthropology’s long-standing concern to shift attention from individual consumer to the social world made possible through the use of goods. However, his dismissal misses its mark. Precisely this concern with the social and cultural dimensions of consumption has helped to make consumption an important focus of anthropological theorizing. Much of this theory elaborates on a few basic concerns. Most anthropologists agree that consuming does fundamental work in stabilizing cultural categories and consequently consumer motivation relates to basic culture-making habits of people as members of communities. Additionally, the exchange of goods or withholding them from exchange, matters of alienability and inalienability, are rooted in the political ordering of society; apparently individualized habits of purchasing, giving and possessing are key arenas where authority is naturalized or challenged. Oriented by these ideas, the economic anthropology of consumption has developed along the several lines of analysis covered in this review. As researchers expand their ambitions, to new social classes, new products and new intersections between consumption and media, anthropology will not only keep up with ‘the unsentimental march of history towards mass consumption’ (Miller 1995b: 268) but help account for the inequalities, variations and creativity this march produces.

Note

1. Preparation of this article was aided by Rhiannon Jones and her research into recent consumption theory. I am grateful to her for sharing her work with me.

References

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