Order 1185395: Culture and Consumption

Chapter 1

WHY PEOPLE WANT GOODS

Silence in Utility Theory

It is extraordinary to discover that no one knows why people want goods. Demand theory is at the very center, even at the origin of economics as a discipline. Yet 200 years of thought on the subject has little to show on the question. It is important to know why demand is sometimes stable, sometimes careers along with inflating speed, and sometimes goes slack while people save rather than spend. But economists carefully shun the ques- tion of why people want goods. They even count it a virtue not to offer suggestions. In the past, too many illicit intrusions from psychology have damaged their theoretical apparatus' It has now been painstakingly cleansed. lt can answer questions about consumers' responses to changes in prices and incomes, so long as the period is short term and so long as "tastes" can be treated as given, as the ultimate unexplainable factor of demand that is used to explain everything else. On this academically restricted basis the machine can grind powerfully and exceedingly flne' But when it comes to policy problems, the theoretical gears

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Gooos As AN INToRMATToN SYSTEM mesh badly with social reality. The cool consensus that econo- mists display on questions of economic method dissolves into a heated wrangle when a major economic crisis appears.

lf theoretical economists try not to know about what makes the consumer tick, there are others who will not let him alone. They inveigh against the destructive greed of the consumer society, environmentalists and moralists, and economists, too, when wearing their "applied" hat. The consumer himself may well feel puzzled. With barely a twinge of guilt when he catches himself reaching for more furnishings or food, he partly sup- ports the formal economist's view that his behavior is based on rational choice. He does not usually believe that he himself is a mindless moron, an easy victim for the advertiser's wiles, though he admits that others may be. He would agree that once he decides to get something, he chooses between brands and takes price and income level into account, much as the text- books say. But the economist's view leaves much unexplained. Often it is not so much a sense of having made a decision but of having been overtaken by events. The new thing-the better lawn mower or bigger freezer-has somehow become, of its own accord, a necessity. It exerts its own imperative to be ac- quired and threatens that the household, without it, will regress to the chaos of a more primitive era. Far from exercising a sovereign choice, the wretched consumer, as often as not, feels like the passive holder of a wallet whose contents are pre- empted by such strong forces that moral reproaches seem impertinent.

Any vacuum sucks in its own filling. In the absence of an explicit account, implicit ideas about human needs creep into economic analysis unseen. The two main assumptions use each other for support, yet the cornbination is still dubious. On the one hand is the hygienic or materialist theory; on the other, the envy theory of needs. According to the first our real needs, most basic and universal, are our physical needs, those we have in common with livestock. Probably to avoid a too grossly veter-

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Why People Want Goods

inary approach, a curious moral split appears under the surface of most economists' thoughts on human needs; they do recog- nize two kinds of needs, spiritual and physical, but they accord priority to the physical. They allow it the dignity of a necessity, while they downgrade all the other demands to a class of arti- ficial wants, false, luxurious, even immoral. Luc Boltanski calls this bias "biological Manicheeism." 1 That famous heresy divided the universe between evil, the low biological side of man's nature, and good, the spiritual side. But the economists who make the same split unofficially change the heretical signs, so that the biological becomes the good and the spiritual is unjustified.

The hygiene approach seems to promise an objective defini- tion of poverty since it can generally show that the poor in any country have worse morbidity rates than the rich. But the prom- ise is illusory, for it cannot deliver a way of defining poverty cross-culturally that is not counterintuitive. True, this tribe or that is poor in material things, its housing has to be remade every year, its children run naked, its food is deficient in nu- trients, its death rate is high-but are these sufficient to capture the notion of poverty? If the hygiene standard is used alone, improved death rates over the last 200 years would imply that there are no poor left in England. In fact, however, poverty studies never risk going out of business even in rich, industrial societies, but they do face an awkward problem of definition. Material standards have been indubitably raised: "Obviously even those at the very foot of society in contemporary Britain enjoy a standard of living that is somewhat higher than that of the poorest in Victorian society a hundred years ago and much higher than in many underdeveloped countries." z "People who in this country are reckoned-or who reckon themselves- poor today are not necessarily so by the standards of twenty- five years ago or by the standards of other countries." :i What other countries? The hygienic criterion suggests those which are malaria-ridden and lack public sanitation- Many of the

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Goons As AN INronMArroN SysrEM countries that anthropologists study are poor on such mate- rial criteria-no wall-to-wall carpets, no air conditioning-but they do not regard themselves as poor. The Nuer of the Sudan in the 1930s would do no trade with the Arabs because the only things they had to sell were their herds of cattle, and the only things they could possibly want from trade were more cattle.4 Since the materialist approach cannot stand by itself, the economist is led to buttress it with a relativist view that invokes an envy theory to supplement materialism. "Poverty is a relative concept. Saying who is in poverty is to make a relative statement rather like saying who is short or heavy." 5 To explain the discontent in that relative condition, they are led to impute to the objects of their study feelings of covetousness and envy. For example, Albert Hirschmann believes in a uni- versal feeling of envy which can be suspended by what he calls the "tunnel effect" at the beginning of a process of eco- nomic development.

"The tunnel effect operates because advances of others supply information about a more benign external environment; receipt of this information produces gratification; and this gratification over- comes, or at least suspends, envy. Though long noted as the most uninviting of the scven deadly sins because, unlike gluttony, pride, etc., it does not provide any initial fun to its practitioners, envy is nevertheless a powerful human emotion. This is attested to by the writings of anthropologists, sociologists, and economists, who all have proclaimed, in general quite independently of one another, that if you advance in income or status whilc I remain where I was, I will actually feel worse off than beforc because my ielative position has declined." 6

This is a very weak argument, however. Anthropologists have written tomes on the subject of envy.

Their fieldwork has forced it on their attention. Whatever they write about, whether about gifts, about witchcraft, demons, zombies, ancestors, or parish pump politics, their frequent point of reference is fear of envy, individual envy-deflecting tech- niques, and community envy-controlling edicts. If economists r8

Why People Want Goods

think that the demand for goods is influenced by envy, then anthropology is one place to turn for understanding it'? As we shall see, difierent types of social organization can be distin- guished according to the envy-controlling techniques they deploy' The psychological state, unqualified by institutional differences, cannot do service for a subjective definition of poverty' Anyone can be envious, rich, or poor. But if we reject envy and keep materialism we are left with a mild wonder about the irrational human wish for fine carpets and new kitchens, much as one might question why dogs should want jeweled collars as well as food and exercise.

Fortunately a shift in emphasis is in the air- Titmuss wrote ". we have sought too diligently to find the causes of pov- erty among the poor and not in ourselves. our frame of reference in the past has been too narrow. Thought, research, and action have been focused too heavily on the poor; poverty engineering has thus been abstracted from society." 8

Self-criticism of Economists

There is no justification in traditional utility theory for assum- ing anything about physical or spiritual needs, still less about envy. The theory merely assumes the individual to be acting rationally, in that his choices are consistent with each other and stable over the short time that is relevant. lt says that his tastes should be taken as given, that he responds to a fall in prices by readiness to buy a larger quantity and to a rise by buying less, and that he responds in consistent fashion to changes in his income. As he gets more of a particular good his desire for additional units of it weakens. For the anthropologist this mini- mum watertight rationality leaves the individual impossibly isolated. His rational objectives are tidied out of sight and

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Gooos As AN INpoRMATIoN SysrEM trivialized under the term "tastes." It is hard to know where to begin to think about his social problems. But no rebuke that the anthropologist can deliver will be as severe as the self- criticism of the economists themselves on this very score.

Economists are their own harshest critics when it comes to the limitations of consumption theory, but naturally the strong- est criticism comes from those who have some improvement to propose. Accordingly, Kelvin Lancaster said in a well-turned passage:

The theory of consumer behaviour in deterministic situations as set out by, say, Debreu (1959, 1960) or Uzama (1960) is a thing of great aesthetic beauty, a jewel set in a glass case. The product of a long process of refinement from the nineteenth century Utility theo- rists through Slutsky and Hicks-Allen to the economists of the last twenty-five years, it has been shorn of all irrelevant postulates so that it now stands as an example of how to extract the minimum of results from the minimum of assumptions.e

The criticisms are old, widespread, and still fashionable. "Hardly more than a collection of isolated, arbitrary defini- tions," Leontieff said, describing the theory of consumer be- havior.lo "One may wonder why such a theory has survived as a fundamental part of standard economics," said Michael and Becker. The defense usually falls back on the plea that de- mand theory, for all its weaknesses, still provides the most powerful method of analyzing choice. Indeed, it is probably true that there is no field of choice in which it cannot be used. But Michael and Becker will have none of this:

To whatever extent income and prices do not explain observed be- haviour the explanation rests with variations in tastes, since they are the portmanteau in the demand curve. . . For economists to rest a large part of their theory of choice on dilferences in tastes is disturb- ing, since they admittedly have no usel'ul theory of the formation of tastes, nor can they rely on a well-developed theory of tastes from any other discipline in the social sciences, since none exists. Of coursc, by incorporating an intuitivcly appealing explanation in each case economists usually interpret these observations in reasonable

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Why People Want Goods

ways. The important point, however. is that thc received theory of choice itself is of modest use in that undertaking.ll

To the inquiring anthropologist, the econclmists certainly seem to be unsatisfied consumers of their own product, and very self-critical of their own narrowness.

The early masters of cconomic thcory were. in fact, intensely in- terested in the general deternlinants of economic progress and the broacl conclitions of wealth or poverty. l-he titte An Enquiry ittto the Nature antl Cturses ol thc ll'eulth ol Nulit.tn.r could nol have been chosen by one wl.to thought that thc price nrechanism in a short-run commodity market was the esscnce of economics. Adam Smith reached down to the fundamental factors that spell riches or poverty for a particular nation.12

That economics is still supposed to be reaching down into those factors, but has tied its own hands, is E. J. Mishan's plair.rt. Be- cause of admitted ignorance about real conditions of exis- tence, the economists, he says, have busily ferreted

out of welfare analysis all those tacit assumptions that appear to say sorncthing about thc economic universc. tsut this purging of tacit enrpiricisr-n has gone too far. Any generalisation but the most trivial is sure to collapse when all bounds to tcchnical and behaviour possi- bilities are removed-whcn allowance is made for any and every imaginable situation. . . . What thc subject badly needs is a strong infusion of empiricism to end its unchecked wandcrings in the empyrean and to bring it down to earth fcet first'1:r

If it were even agreed whether consumption was an end in itself or a means to an end, that would be a starting Point. But some- times consumption is treated as if it were a cost in keeping up the supply of healthy labor to the market, as if the consumer were a glorified carthorse to be fed, watered, and kept fit. Kuznets is not happy with this view; he remarks that over the long his- torical period of modern economic growth the

rise in food supply and improved health conditions should . ' . have made for a better quality of the body of workers' But if the addi- tional lood, health and recrcation outlays are trcated as so many

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Goorls AS AN INnonMATrotr SysrEM economic costs (rather than as final consumption), the implication would be that living is for work; and thc distinction between final consumption, or product, and intermediate consumption, or costs, so basic in the ideological framework of modern society as well as in economic analysis and measurement, would be obliterated.la On the other hand the more traditional view, treating consump- tion as the end or objective of all work 15 is equally objec- tionable. It demeans labor and disallows its right to be taken as an end in itself, always treating work as an input into some- thing else.

As Frank Knight put it so wisely: When we consider that productive activity takes up the larger part of the waking lives of the great mass of mankind, it is surely not to be assumed without investigation or inquiry that production is a means only, a necessary evil, a sacrifice made for the sake of some good entirely outside the production process. We are impelled to look for ends in the economic process itself, and to give thoughtful consideration to the possibilities of participation in economic activity as a sphere of self-expression and creative achievement.lG

But Knight knew that he was working in a humane tradition. As Jevons insisted: "Economics does not rest upon the laws of human enjoyment; if these laws are developed by no other sciences they must be developed by economists." 17 And what about the challenge to Benlham's own account of utility? "By utility is meant that property in any object whereby it tends to produce benefit, advance, pleasure, good or happiness or . . . to prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil or unhappi- ness." 18 No one argues that human enjoyment should be separated off from work, but something in the construction of utility theory often makes it seem so.

Is there any reason why consumption should be found at the end or the beginning of a one-way avenue? Piero Sraffa iden- tifies the tendency to focus on costs of production and outputs with the advent of the marginal method and deplores the loss of the earlier view of the economy as a seamless garment. His own Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities le

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l{hy People Want Goods

is an attempt to restore something akin to .,the original picture of the system of production and consumption as a circular pro- cess," . . which "stands in striking contrast to the view pre- sented by modern theory, of a one-way avenue that leads from 'Factors of Production' to 'Consumption Goods,.',:0 His in- vestigation "is concerned exclusively with such properties of an economic system as do not depend on changes in the scale of production or in the proportions of .factors.' ',

This standpoint, which is that of the old classical economists from Adam Smith to Ricardo, has been submerged and for- gotten since the advent of the "marginal,, method. The reason is obvious. The calculation of marginal differences requires attention to be focused on change, for without change either in the scale of an industry or in the proportions of the factors of production, "there can be neither marginal product nor marginal cost. In a system in which, day after day, production continued unchanged in those respects, the marginal product of a factor (or alternatively the marginal cost of a product) would not be merely hard to find-it just would not be there to be found.,, :1 The work that follows these prefatory remarks ought to be of great value to anthropology because of our tradition of work- ing in the "ethnographic present." This is a special tense that aims to concentrate past, present, and future into a continuous present. Perhaps not always used honestly, the ethnographic present has more merit than a reconstructed and misconstrued time dimension. It synthesizes into one temporal point the events of many periods, the value of the synthesis lying in the strength of the analysis of the perceived present. Whatever is important about the past is assumed to be making itself known and felt here and now. Current ideas about the future likewise draw present judgments down certain paths and block off others. It assumes a two-way perspective in which the in- dividual treats his past selectively as a source of validating myths and the future as the locus of dreams. The tense refers to a two-way filter being used in the present to sort out from

Goops As AN INrtoRMATroN SvsrEM the myths and dreams some sets that plausibly interlock as guides to action.

The ethnographic present assumes an unchanging economic system. Given the short time in which he has to do his research, the main problem to which a functional anthropologist of the 1950s and 1960s addressed himself was the understanding of an economy found in the here and now, a snapshot view, so implicitly deemed to be unchanging. The economic analysis explained how resources are channeled to the political and re- ligious systems and the religious and political analyses ex- plained how the economic system is sustained and credibly clothed in the raiment of distributive justice. Sraffa's book is too specialized and idiosyncratic to be directly useful to the an- thropologist seeking to join issue with economists, but it is en- couraging to realize that we have been speaking good prose without knowing it; we have been analyzing a circular process, so much so that the ethnographic picture could often be called production of ancestors by means of ancestors or production of cattle by means of,cattle.

This is admittedly only a small qualification, not much to boast of, for entering a debate about the consumer society. One source of encouragement is that no one else seems to have much idea of why people want goods. When it comes to the other side of the same question, the reasons for not spending, there are also some intriguing misconceptions to straighten out.

Chapter 2

WHY THEY SAVE

According to Keynes

Saving is investment. It is also consumption postponed. As the level of future income depends on the amount of saving, the decision to consume now or to consume in the future is im- portant in macroeconomics. In a famous passage Keynes de- clared that a psychological rule causes men to be disposed to increase their consumption as their income increases, but not by as much as by the increase in income. These considerations will lead, as a rulc, to a greater proportion of income being saved as real income rises. . . . We take it as a funda- mental psychological rule of any modern community that, when its real income is increased it will not increase its consumption by an absolute equal amount, so that a greater amount must be saved.l This "rule" relates the propensity to consume to a capacity to be satisfied at a particular level of real income. It relates it thereby implicitly to a capacity of goods themselves to satisfy "real" wants. It might be assumed, therefore, that in the past century, when real income has increased steadily and impres- sively, the proportion saved out of income should have increased accordingly. But the long historical rise in real income has not been accompanied by a proportionate rise in savings. To the anthropologist it would be very surprising if it had. That savings

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Chapter 3

THE USES OF GOODS

Redefining Consumption

To make a fresh start on the subject, an anthropological defini- tion of consumption would help. To speak sensibly of consump- tion here, in industrial society, in terms that also apply without strain to distant tribal societies that have barely seen commerce, still less capitalism, is indeed a challenge. But unless we make the attempt there can be no anthropology of consumption. We need somehow to extract the essence of the term, while ignor- ing the potentially misleading local effects. One boundary may be drawn by an idea essential to economic theory: that is, that consumption is not compelled; the consumer's choice is his free choice. He can be irrational, superstitious, traditionalist, or experimental: the essence of the economist's concept of the individual consumer is that he exerts a sovereign choice. An- other boundary may be drawn by the idea central to national bookkeeping that consumption starts where market ends. What happens to material objects once they have left the retail outlet and reached the hands of the final purchasers is part of the

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The Uses of Goods

consumption process. These two boundaries raise various prob- lems and borderline cases for economics and do not make a completely satisfactory definition. Together they assume that consumption is a private matter. Consumption that is provided by government as part of its functioning is not properly part of consumption. Central heating or cups of tea drunk in bureau- cratic offices count as part of the cost of administration, in the same way as cups of tea or central heating provided by busi- nesses count as costs of production, not as output, when they make their income tax returns. As to consumption being un- coerced, this is not a straightforward matter either. When a city is proclaimed a smokeless zone by law, householders are not free to burn log fires if they choose; nor are car purchasers free to ignore government regulations as to safety, noise, and so on. But by and large the two boundaries capture the essence of the idea and the detailed tidying-up is a matter of convention. So if we define consumption as a use of material possessions that is beyond commerce and free within the law, we have a concept that travels extremely well, since it fits parallel usages in all those tribes that have no commerce.

Seen under this aspect, consumption decisions become the vital source of the culture of the moment. People who are reared in a particular culture see it change in their lifetime: new words, new ideas, new ways. It evolves and they play a part in the change. Consumption is the very arena in which culture is fought over and licked into shape. The housewife with her shopping basket arrives home: some things in it she reserves for her household, some for the father, some for the children; others are destined for the special delectation of guests. Whom she invites into her house, what parts of the house she makes available to outsiders, how often, what she offers them for music, food, drink, and conversation, these choices express and generate culture in its general sense. Likewise, her husband's judgments as to how much of his wages he allots to her, how much he keeps to spend with his friends, etc., result in the

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Gooos AS AN INroRMATtow SysrEM channeling of resources. They vitalize one activity or another. They will be unconstrained if the culture is alive and evolving. Ultimately, they are moral judgments about what a man is, what a woman is, how a man ought to treat his aged parents, how much of a start in life he ought to give his sons and daughters; how he himself should grow old, gracefully or dis- gracefully, and so on. How many of his aunts and uncles and orphaned nephews is he expected to support? Do family obli- gations stop him from migrating? Should he contribute to his union? Insure against sickness? Insure for his own funeral? These are consumption choices which may well involve heavy costs, and which, when made, may determine the evolution of culture.

In most cultures reported over the world, there are certain things that cannot be sold or bought. One obvious case with us is political advance (which should not be bought); as to selling, a man who is capable of selling his honor, or even of selling his grandmother, is condemned by clich6. Everywhere there is at least a notion of some area of untrammeled individual choice. If any local tyrant could march into your home, turn out your friends or force you to add unchosen names to your visiting list, tell you whom you can see and speak to and whom to ignore, then personal freedom and dignity would be lost. If he did it by passing laws, by threat of guns, by threat of lost liveli- hood, he would probably be judged more immoral even than the rich man who might seek to buy your support. We have in fact succeeded in defining consumption as an area of behavior hedged by rules which explicitly demonstrate that neither com- merce nor force are being applied to a free relationship.

This is why, no doubt, in our society the line between cash and gift is so carefully drawn. It is all right to send flowers to your aunt in the hospital, but never right to send the cash they are worth with a message to "get yourself some flowers"; all right to offer lunch or drinks, but not to offer the price of a lunch or a drink. Hosts may go to extravagant lengths to attract and

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The Uses of Goods

please guests-short of offering them money to come to the party. Social sanctions protect the boundary. Apparently, some fabled New York hostess in the 1890s, worrying how to surpass her rival who habitually gave each guest a rich jewel, was worried even more by their derision when, her turn having come, she folded a crisp $100 bill in each napkin. The right to give cash is reserved for family intimacy. Here again there are details that could be tidied up. But in general it is true to say that around the field of consumption we have a spontaneous, opera- tive boundary between two kinds of services: professional, paid with money and to be classed with commerce, and personal, recompensed in kind and in no other way. Within the field of personal services, freely given and returned, moral judgment of the worth of people and things is exercised. This establishes the first step in a cultural theory of consumption.

A Universe Constructed from Commodities

Instead of supposing that goods are primarily needed for sub- sistence plus competitive display, let us assume that they are needed for making visible and stable the categories of culture. It is standard ethnographic practice to assume that all material possessions carry social meanings and to concentrate a main part of cultural analysis upon their use as communicators.

In every tribal study an account is given of the material parts of the culture. Like us, the members of a tribe have fixed equipment, houses, gardens, barns, and like us, they have durable and nondurable things. The anthropologist usually devotes some space to marshaling the evidence for deciding' from the vantage point of our technology, whether, for ex- ample, the cattle husbandry is efficient, the farmer's knowl- edge of his soils and seasons accurate, the hygienic precautions and the amount of food taken adequate, etc- The material

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Gooos As AN INr,oRMATtoN Sysrnrvr possessions provide food and covering, and this has to be un- derstood. But at the same time it is apparent that the goods have another important use: they also make and maintain so- cial relationships. This is a long-tried and fruitful approach to the material side of existence which yields a much richer idea of social meanings than mere individual competitiveness.

A well-known case is Evans-Pritchard's account of the place of cattle in Nuer lives: The network of kinship ties which links members of local commu- nities is brought about by the operation of exogamous rules, often stated in terms of cattle. The union of marriage is brought about by the payment of cattle and every phase of the ritual is marked by their transference or slaughter. The legal status of the partners is defined by cattle rights and obligations.

Cattle are owned by families. When the head of the household is alive he has full rights of disposal over the herd, though his wives have rights of use in the cows and-his sons own some of the oxen. As each son, in order of seniority, reaches the age of marriage he marries with cows from the herd. The next son will have to wait till the herd has reached its earlier strcngth before'he can marry in his turn. . . . The bond of cattle between brothers is continued long after each has a home and children of his own, for when a daughter of any one of them is married the others rcceive a large portion of her bride-wealth. Her grandparents, maternal uncles, paternal and ma- ternal aunts, and even more distant relatives also receive a portion. Kinship is customarily defined by reference to these payments, being most clearly pointed at marriage, when movements of cattle from kraal to kraal are equivalent to lines in a genealogical chart. It is also emphasized by division of sacrificial meat among agnatic and cognatic relatives. . . Nuer tend to define all social processes and relationships in terms of cattle. Their social idiom is a bovine idiom.l

This approach to goods, emphasizing their double role in providing subsistence and in drawing the lines of social rela- tionships, is agreed upon, practically axiomatic among anthro- pologists, as the way to a proper understanding of why people need goqds. But there are some problems about transferring the insight to our own ethnograPhy of ourselves.

Each branch of the social sciences has been bogged down

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The Uses ol Goods

until it has drawn a distinctive line between the level of human behavior that its techniques are adapted to analyze and all other levels. Durkheim, for example, required the identihcation of "social facts" by his rules of method.2 Each such isolation of a part or layer of the social process is a self-denying ordinance, an austerity, practiced for the sake of learning not to pose unanswerable questions. Of course there is always a loss of richness, which the gains in clarity have to justify. Long before Durkheim, economists had carved out a sphere of "economic facts" by disregarding the ends of hunran activity and con- centrating on problems of choice. The history of anthropology has been 6ne of continual disengagement of theoretical fields from the intrusive assumptions from common sense. In each case enlightenment has followed a decision to ignore the phys- iological levels of existence which sustain the behavior in ques- tion. For interpreting bizarre kinship terminologies it was at first assumed that the clue to the uses of the terms "Father" and "Mother" would lie in some long-abandoned arrangements for marriage and procreation. No advance was made until kinship terms were cut free from their obvious biological meanings and seen as constituting a system for organizing social relations -a system based on the metaphors of engendering and rear- ing. In turn, L6vi-Strauss made a similar stand when he ridi- culed the idea that the origin of totemism was some gastronomic criterion that reserved the most delicious foods to privileged persons. Animals which are tabooed are chosen, he said, be- cause they are good to think, not because they are good to eat. So he was able to reveal a systematic relation between natural and human species as the typical basis of primitive thought.s Again, as another example, in nineteenth-century comparative religion, medical materialism blocked the interpretation of ideas about the contagiousness of magic. Scholars were sidetracked by occasional signs of medical benefit following rites of purifi- cation. But it can be argued that these rites are better under- stood as being concerned with rnaking visible the boundaries

I rll. il

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Goons AS AN INpoRMATToN SvsrEM between cognitive categories than with pathogenicity in the strict medical sense.a Now we are trying the same exercise with consumption goods, bracketing away for the moment their prac- tical uses. If it is said that the essential function of language is its capacity for poetry, we shall assume that the essential func- tion of consumption is its capacity to make sense. Forget the idea of consumer irrationality. 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.

Theoretical Individualism

The time is ripe for this new approach. Individualist theories of knowledge and behavior have had their day and run their course. Here and there the outposts are still manned. Perhaps Peter Blau is one of the most forceful exponents of the eighteenth-century tradition (to which economics as a whole is heir). The Benthamite view of human psychology starts and ends with the individual agent. Other people appear only in- sofar as they may help or hinder his life project. He can use or be used by them, but they lurk always in a shadow cast by his egocentric awareness. Blau's theory of social structure tried to build up society from the simplest relations between individ- uals. He concedes that most pleasures have their roots in social life: "There is something pathetic about the person who de- rives his major gratifications from food and drink as such, since it reveals either excessive need or excessive greed, the pauper' . . . the glutton." 5 Anyway, there are no simple processes in the relations between individuals. They can only be postulated arbi- trarily, and so Blau's focus upon power is itself an arbitrary and biased restriction: "The satisfaction a man derives from exer- cising power over others requires that they endure the depriva-

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The Uses ol Goods

tion of being subject to his power; . . . individuals associate with one another because they all profit from the association. But they do not necessarily all proflt equally, nor do they share the cost of providing the benefits equally. . . ." And so onward to a theory of individualistic social exchange. Blau stands in a low grid/low group position, where the view of a world organized as a competitive, power-seeking game between individuals has a priori rightness. His work is a rescue job, salvaging an ap- proach whose reverberations will appeal automatically to other thinkers who also share the same standpoint. But the anthro- pologist can recognize this approach itself as an example of a cultural bias rooted in a certain kind of social experience. Other cultural biases derive from other social forms. Our ulti- mate task is to find interpretative procedures that will uncover each bias and discredit its claims to universality. When this is done the eighteenth century can be formally closed, and a new era that has been here a long time can be officially recognized.

The individual human being, stripped of his humanity, is of no use as a conceptual base from which to make a picture of human society. No human exists except steeped in the culture of his time and place. The falsely abstracted individual has been sadly misleading to Western political thought.G But now we can start again at a point where major streams of thought converge, at the other end, at the making of culture. Cultural analysis sees the whole tapestry as a whole, the picture and the weaving process, before attending to the individual threads.

At least three intellectual positions being developed today encourage such an approach. One, the philosophical movement styled Phenomenology started by taking seriously the question of our knowledge of other persons. It sets the individual squarely in a social context, treating knowledge as a joint con- structive enterprise. Knowledge is never a matter of the lone individual learning about an external reality. Individuals inter- acting together impose their constructions upon reality: the world is socially constructed.T

Structuralism is a convergent movement whose implicit the-

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lir 'ill,"ii

Goons AS AN INponMATIoN SYSTEM

ory of knowledge transcends the efforts of the individual thinker, and focuses upon social processes in knowledge. ln its many forms, modern structural analysis, the offspring of the electronic computer, affords possibilities of interpreting culture and of relating cultural to social forms, possibilities that outpace any approaches that doggedly start with the individual.s

Ancl finally, closest to the present task, is the Californian movement in sociology called "social accounting" or ethno- methodology. This takes it for granted that reality is socially constructed and also takes it for granted that reality can be analyzed as logical structures in use. It focuses on interpreta- tive procedures-on the methods of verification used by lis- teners, methods of proving credibility used by speakers, on the whole system of accountability which operates in everyday life.e Their approach to the testing and confirming of information starts from the idea that meaning is embedded, that it is never easily picked from the surface of a communication. Speech is only one channel, and speech itself does not make sense unless it matches the information that is scanned by the hearer from the physical demeanor and surroundings of the speaker-spac- ing, timing, orientation, clothing, food, and so on. And, of course, this has to include goods. Though for the present it focuses on procedures of interpretation, for its further develop- ment this approach will certainly need to turn to cultural analy- sis. For culture is a possible pattern of meanings inherited from the immediate past, a canopy for the interpretative needs of the present.

Fixing Public Meanings

But what is meaning? It flows and drifts; it is hard to grasp. Meaning tacked to one set of clues transforms itself. One per- son gets one pattern and another a quite different one from the

64

The Uses of Goods

same events; seen a year later they take a different aspect again. The main problem of social life is to pin down meanings so that they stay still for a little tirne. Without some conventional ways of selecting and fixing agreed meanings, the minimum consensual basis of society is missing. As for tribal society, so too for us: rituals serve to contain the drift of meanings. Rituals are conventions that set up visible public definitions. Before the initiation there was a boy, after it a man; before the marriage rite there were two free persons, after it two joined as one. Before admission to a hospital, the doctor's certificate of ill health; before the formal declaration of death, the dead is accounted alive; before the body is found, no murder charge sticks; without formal testimony, slander is not slander; without a witnessed signature, the deceased's last will is not valid. To manage without rituals is to manage without clear meanings and possibly without memories. Some are purely verbal rituals, vocalized, unrecorded, but they fade on the air and hardly help to limit the interpretative scope. More effective rituals use material things, and the more costly the ritual trappings, the stronger we can assume the intention to fix the meanings to be. Goods, in this perspective, are ritual adjuncts; consumption is a ritual process whose primary function is to make sense of the inchoate flux of events.

From here it is a short step to the identification of the over- all objective that rational beings, by definition, can be supposed to set themselves. Their own rationality must press them tc) make sense of their environment. The most general objective of the consumer can only be to construct an intelligible universe with the goods he chooses. How does this cognitive construction proceed? To start with, a social universe needs a demarcated temporal dimension. The calendar has to be notched for annual, quarterly, monthly, weekly, daily and shorter periodicities. The passage of time can then be laden with meaning. The calendar gives a principle for rotation of duties, for establishing prece- dence, for review and. renewal. Another year passed, a new

65

Goons AS AN INn'oRMATroN SysrEM beginning; 25 years, a silver jubilee; 100, 200 years, a cen- tennial or bicentennial celebration; there is a time for living and a time for dying, a time for loving. Consumption goods are used for notching off these intervals: their range in quality arises from the need to differentiate through the calendar year and the life cycle.

This argument does not deny that there is such a thing as private enjoyment. It is developed to assert a straight analytic need to recognize how enjoyment is structured and how much it owes to social standardization. Those who fancy a simple life, with only enough goods for a modest subsistence, should try to imagine a standardized meal, say breakfast, served at all mealtime slots in the weekday, at all meals in the week, at all meals in the year including Christmas Day and Thanksgiving. Food is a medium for discriminating values, and the more numerous the discriminated ranks, the more varieties of food will be needed. The same for space. Harnessed to the cultural process, its divisions are heavy with meaning: housing, size, the side of the street, distance from other centers, special limits, all shore up conceptual categories. The same for clothing, trans- port, and sanitation; they afford sets of markers within the spatial and temporal frame. The choice of goods continuously creates certain patterns of discrimination, overlaying or rein- forcing others. Goods, then, are the visible part of culture. They are arranged in vistas and hierarchies that can give play to the full range of discrimination of which the human mind is capable. The vistas are not fixed: nor are they randomly arranged in a kaleidoscope. Ultimately, their structures are an- chored to human social purposes.

Hearing this, the economist usually asks: what about the solitary consumer? The man who feeds alone can hardly be said to be sustaining a universe of meanings; the man who reads or listens to music alone, goes for walks alone, what of his consumption of books and shoeleather? The answer comes in three parts. Admittedly, there is a class of solitary feeding,

66

The Uses ol Goods

where the person wolfs or bolts his food, probably standing by his refrigerator in his overcoat; this should count as part of a private hygiene, in the same way as his use of soap and tooth- brushes. Private hygiene is probably a small item in the sum of consumption goods. But - even so, if a person normally chooses his soap and pares his nails for entirely nonsocial reasons the advertising industry is wildly wrong. The lonely walks may count as private hygiene, too, as long as the walker never shares his experience by speaking or writing about it. But the music is another matter. The music lover presumably knows a lot about music and is observing the fine discrimina- tion and shifts of practice that are the history of music; he may even be passing judgment (albeit privately) on whether one performance is better than another. He is sharing in an in- tensely social, cultural process. So, too, is the solitary eater who unthinkingly adopts the sequential rules and categories of the wider society; the man who uses a butter knife when he is alone, even if he doesn't dress for dinner. He would never reverse the conventional sequence, beginning with pudding and ending with soup, or eat mustard with lamb or mint with beef. We may reckon his observance of the rules followed by other consumers as a way of keeping him in practice, or perhaps as a memorial rite. If the gastric juices flow best when the meal is well con- structed, well served, and enjoyed in good company, the soli- tary consumer may be helping his own digestion by adopt- ing the social criteria. But he is certainly helping to uphold the latter. In general, the case of the solitary consumer is a weak counter to the argument that consumption activity is the joint production, with fellow consumers, of a universe of values. Consumption uses goods to make firm and visible a particular set of judgments in the fluid processes of classifying persons and events. We have now defined it as a ritual activity.

But the individual needs compliant fellows if he is to succeed in changing the public categories, reducing their disorder and making the universe more intelligible. His project of creating

67

Gooos As AN INpoRMATlor.r Sysrrna intelligibility depends heavily on them. He must ensure their attending his rituals and inviting him to rheirs. By their freely given presence he obtains a judgment from them of the fitness of the choice he makes of consumer goods for celebrating par- ticular occasions and a judgment on his own relative standing as a judge, as well as a judgment on the fitness of the occasion to be celebrated. Within the available time and space the in- dividual uses consumption to say something about himself, his family, his locality, whether in town or country, on vacation or at home. The kind of statements he makes are about the kind of universe he is in, affirmatory or defiant, perhaps competitive, but not necessarily so. He can proceed, through consumption activities, to get agreement from fellow consumers to redefine some traditional events as major that used to be minor, and to allow others to lapse completely. [n England, Guy Fawkes Day comes forward where Halloween used to be. Christmas over- shadows New Year in England but not in Scotland, and Mother's Day still hovers on the brink of recognition. The same for the decoration of the home and even the constitution of a meal. Consumption is an active process in which all the social categories are being continually redefined.

For anthropologists the word potlatch sums up this char- acteristic of feasting, inviting guests, and competing in hos- pitable honors. There are many variants of the potlatch de- scribed in American Northwest Coast ethnography. A Skagit Indian described the potlatch as "shaking hands in a material way." For these Indians of Puget Sound, the activities of the food cycle and the social season of a single year are posited in socio-religious theory. The cumulative successes and failures of many years were expressed in winter ceremonials. Al- though a usually prosperous village might have had such a poor summer that its headman could afford few extravagances in the next winter, his success in past winters would nevertheless be commemor- ated in potlatches, with the attitude that his bad luck was only tem- porary and that he would recover from his debts in another season. Only repeated misfortune, of several consecutive years, would reduce

68

The Uses ol Goods

his standing enough to alter potlatch behavior toward hinr' He would

postpone potlarching. "a"iJp"r'riv.!" *tl']|::'d loss of status bv

announcing his obligatron' on putti" occasions'. Although his de-

meanor did not convey ;;#t;tt;t"t or humilitv' his words did'

expressing an apologetic' ^f*"'i "ti"gingly guilty.attitude about his

bad luck. In grandiose r^'g'lgt-t'"' oi 'iot" "t.rottv a hired spokes-

man, extolled,h" gtn"'o'i?iTitt't guests and-compa'ed it with his

own feeble though *"u--J"ii "ri"t'tt t" be the same' Because the

source of bad luck *tt ;;;;ili-iud u"hu'iot' and because good

men were honest men, tt'*it "ttltt"ry that he publicly confess and

then promise to '"ro'rn"i'i'' pttiittf' leader\ confessions and

resolutions usually *"t"'*"ulrt"i i'n generatiti"s' He merely alluded

to a misdeed that he d;;;*iqif have become known to his

audience. He did not tp""ifi who JitJ what or exactly what he as a

chief was going to do ubo-ut'it' And his humble words were punctu-

ated by even more tl"b;;;;';iory reminding the assemblage of

the brilliance ot i'i' o*n pi'i '"i tft"t tl hi: i1"-"*trs' Such a per-

formance was the ultimaie expression of upper-class diglll-'-rr-,:1"

face of adversity a goJ '"putution' mere words of condescenston'

and a defensive attitude to"ld t"t'in even a faltering career among

the Skagit for quite some Years' While upper-clu" mei io* t'ut"t gradually-as

a result of a serres

of economic set-backs, ;il; ;-;;*iv formed villages' descendants

of commoners, *t'" uui'g'uOgingty adm{ed l?^:n" ot another pot-

latch circle as importantin'ifta"g"ut Espccially if they had sud-

denlv bccome rich' they were looked upon as conniving vulgarians

;:iiiil;;;i'-"'t' iooJ'io"'n" rheir wearth would be over- looked at give-aways 'pt";t;;'

hosts. of the' old guard' who con-

temptuously identified ;";;il;';' *itt'. 'rt"lt former anonymity'

Antl when ,h" ""'"'"''"p;;t;;;i;;;iv' potlatched' their betters' the

elite who mattered' *oJinot acknowledge invitations' A potlach of

this kind *u. u firr.o."T'lr" *,q;",r" of fotlatching made it almost

impossible for untested tf"i*"itirl high station to crash the society

of Skagit bluebloods' U'ittt " new village had steadily grown ln

numbers und p'o'ptt'tfo'"'-u g"nttution.or two' during which time

its leaders huO *aintuinla " rnttft servility 'on

public occasions' it

would never come to'u"1.."p,.0 byold,.influer.rtial villages as a

worthy rival. One *^'"uV *t'[tt the Skagit publicly expressed re-

lp*'i.;';;;tt ru*itit" o'ld tot-unities was to allow them to com-

pete on the same '"tt"l il.i: p:tpl-"-:l Droven' established

lineage. and scorn ";J i;"' of Johnnies-com'e-lur"ly had a sound

practical bu'i', octo'o'iig i"'st"git t*ionalizations about social class

69

Goons AS AN INpoRMATtoN SysrEM behavior. Nouveaux riclres potlatchers lacked training for the manip- ulation of wealth and were liable to provoke, intentionally or unin- tentionally, embarrassing situations. That is, they might insult the pride of their august guests, which would only have to be avenged to no one's particular social or economic advantage. They were not to be trusted on general principlcs. Most had reputations for flial impiety, because their leadership was of recent origin and was due to the disloyalty of an ancestor (of several generations ago) and his break with his parental village to found a new one.10

Surely we can see here a parallel to the way in which we ourselves proceed to fix or to challenge public meanings.

Chapter 4

EXCLUSION, INTRUSION

Goods as. Material Culture

To keep sane, there is a minimal objective which, by definition' the rational individual must seek for his lifetime. The concept of economic rationality says nothing anywhere about any gen- eral objective of the individual. Hicks, who did so much to purge demand theory of unwarranted psychology, drew atten- tion to this gaP:

we ought to think of the consumer as choosing according to his pref- ,.n...1 b.t*""n certain objectives; in deciding, more or less as the entrepreneur decides, between alternative means of reaching these objectives. The commodities which he purchases are for the most puit -"unt to the attainment of objectives, not objectives them- selves.l

The need to be able to choose rationally in an intelligible world is simply an extension of the concept of economic rationality' Without it, all the other assumptions of the concept amount to very little. All other living beings submit their experience to a species-specific organizing framework that limits the scope

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