Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 1995. 24:141...(j1 Copyright © 1995 by Annual Reviews Inc. All rights reserved

CONSUMPTION AND

COMMODITIES

D. Miller

Department of Anthropology, University College, London WClE 6BT, England

KEY WORDS: material culture, political economy, housing, clothing, food

ABSTRACf

This review contends that the study of consumption and commodities repre­sents a major transformation in the discipline of anthropology. It documents this metamorphosis by examining how the debate on gifts and commodities transcended its original formulation as good versus evil. It then examines the recent growth and maturity of material culture studies and nascent develop­ments that may give rise to a political economy of consumption. It notes, however, that there is still a paucity of ethnographic research specifically devoted to these topics. The review concludes by arguing that the study of consumption and commodities is particularly close to traditions established in the study of kinship and it may come to replace kinship as the core of anthro­pology, even though the two topics often have been viewed as antithetical.

The Metamorphosis of Anthropology

The study of consumers and their commodities might seem a relatively straightforward addition to the repertoire of anthropology, developing as a concern once commodities become a significant part of the lives of the peoples being studied. It would then join established domains such as the anthropology of medicine or law. My argument, however, is that consumption is not simply one more such accretion. Rather it is a sign of a fundamental transformation in all aspects of the discipline. Although the term consumption might have re­ferred to the use of noncommodified goods, as Hugh-Jones points out (67) in relation to drugs, I use the term largely in relation to commodities.

0084-6570 95/1015-0141$05.00 141

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142 MILLER

The centrality of consumption to the very existence of anthropology is evident in the many cartoons found over the last century in magazines such as The New Yorker and Punch (e.g. with stereotypical natives shown in a panic) accompanied by captions such as "Put away the radio (or television or refrig­erator)-the anthropologists are coming." Mass commodities and mass con­sumption predate the emergence of modern anthropology, which was devel­oped in clear but usually implicit alterity, originally drawing its students mostly to societies defined by the absence of such goods.

We might have predicted that almost any discipline other than anthropol­ogy would have provided the foundation for the contemporary study of con­sumption. Yet an examination of publications of the 1950s through to the 1970s yields a surprising result: Outside of the commercially oriented litera­ture and some esoteric modeling in economics, almost nothing was written about consumption in any of the humanities or social sciences (e.g. sociology, human geography, or history). This absence is extraordinary, given the level of research on, for example, production and labor (90).

This silence was broken in the late 1970s by two anthropologists. Douglas (33) and Bourdieu (14) have both provided enormously important critiques of the more parochial forms of anthropology, thereby demonstrating what the discipline could achieve in the modern world. Their style of applied and modified structuralism became central to the understanding of consumption in disciplines ranging from advertising studies to cultural studies.

Douglas & Isherwood (33) contrasted economists' approaches to consump­tion with a perspective that treated commodities as a system of categories. They then used these ideas to return to economic concerns such as definitions of relative impoverishment. In her later work, Douglas (32:66-87) has concen­trated on the implications of her more general culture theory, based on grid­group analysis, for the study of consumption and material culture.

Bourdieu's (14) study of consumption built on his earlier work, which assigns objects a particular role in the naturalization of ideology (13). His analysis of taste in France illustrates the idea that the more mundane and taken-for-granted the object, the greater its significance in making ideological assumptions second nature. Consumption preferences in tandem with educa­tional exposure are taken to be the core mechanism for ensuring that a claim to meritocracy is actually a cover for the maintenance of established social hier­archy.

Another influential figure was Sahlins, although his La Pensee Bourgeoise (109:166-204) was more an application of semiotics than a consideration of consumption per se. Baudrillard's writings (e.g. 7), which were influenced by anthropology and in turn influenced Sahlins and others, might also seem foundational. But Baudrillard's later work turned him more into the guru of

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CONSUMPTION AND COMMODITIES 143

postmodernism, and his writings, although they mention consumption end­lessly, became antithetical to the ethnographic study of this topic.

It was no coincidence that a discipline defined in the popular imagination by the very absence of this topic should, in its struggle for metamorphosis, initiate a return to an interest in consumption. After all, the lack of interest in other disciplines was itself symptomatic of an ideological blind spot, whereby academics denied in their work that which they pursued in their leisure. After 1980, however, anthropology was followed by a prodigious literature on this topic in half a dozen disciplines (90).

In the mid- to late 1980s another group of anthropologists demonstrated the different ways consumption might be contextualized by the discipline. In 1986, Appadurai, in an influential introduction to a significant range of case studies (4:1-63), reattached this concern to a well-established anthropological dialogue on the topic of gifts and commodities. His critique of that literature was vital because it was precisely this dichotomy that allowed the commodity to be dismissed as desocialized and therefore beyond the pale of anthropologi­cal study.

In 1987 Miller (85) provided a general theory of consumption, recasting the Hegelian philosophy used by Marx and Simmel, among others, as an approach to contemporary consumption. Miller contextualized consumption in terms of a well-established analysis of culture as objectification. Because this work emphasized the potentially active role of consumers in resocializing commodi­ties, it was particularly influential on disciplines such as media studies and design studies, which were moving from an emphasis on producers to consum­ers. In 1988 McCracken (83) provided a culmination to an often-ignored trajectory in anthropology through which the discipline had become widely appropriated by students in commerce and advertising. Finally, in 1989 Rutz & Orlove's edited collection (108) recontextualized the study of consumption in the one branch of anthropology that might have been anticipated as the original source of this interest-economic anthropology.

Of course all of this work had its precedents. One can find studies at any period of anthropology on subjects such as spheres of exchange (11), the study of prestige goods (39), or cargo cults (145). In traditional functionalist mono­graphs the topic often arose within a final chapter on social change. These studies might be said to have been about consumption, but none of them created the sense of a sustained and explicit concern with consumption. By the 1990s the study of commodities and consumption was no longer cast as the radical repudiation of primitivist refusal. It has become the mundane accep­tance that most peoples who are being studied are either themselves engaged in such activities as a central aspect of their lives or they are affected by other peoples' consumption as mediated through global capitalism. Consumption, if defined as an increasing reliance on commodities produced by others, may

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144 MILLER

well have expanded during this period. Nevertheless the previous neglect, which was by no means restricted to anthropology, was the result of a partial and restricted academic (and ideologically constrained) gaze rather than the lack of an object of study.

The study of consumption as mundane practice has been much less reflex­ive than the interest in postmodernism, which occurred around the same pe­riod, but it is perhaps far more radical in its consequences for the discipline. The regional differences that emerge through ethnography in the practices of fashion, driving, and home decoration relativizes the anthropologist's own practice as much it relativizes those studied. Central Africans in suits, Indone­sian soap operas, and South Asian brands are no longer inauthentic copies by people who have lost their culture after being swamped by things that only North Americans and Europeans "should" possess. Rather there is the equality of genuine relativism that makes none of us a model of real consumption and all of us creative variants of social processes based around the possession and use of commodities.

It is for this reason that I conclude this review with an argument that the study of consumption is most akin to the anthropological study of kinship, the same domain to which it was most opposed in a previous generation. Because the transformation of anthropology is of concern, almost all of the cited litera­ture consists of studies in anthropology and material culture. Anthropologists should be aware of the vast recent (and growing) literature in other disciplines (see 90), but these interdisciplinary links are not addressed here.

Beyond Good and Evil

If the prior absence and relatively sudden eruption of interest in consumption is closely bound up with the ideological foundations of anthropology as a discipline, it is not surprising that much of the early literature on consumption is replete with moral purpose. Whereas in early times such debates might have centered on modernization and development, the particular timing of a concern with consumption coincided with a high point in the influence of Western Marxism on anthropology and its associated terminology of hegemony and resistance.

Much of the literature focused on the Marxist notion of the commodity (55, 125). Commoditization embedded the growth of commodities within the more general abstraction of labor, the destruction of embedded customary relations, and the opening up of small-scale societies to market forces and capitalism. Many anthropologists also followed the scenario developed by Polanyi (101) and others for historical transformations. Not surprisingly, anthropologists sought to identify with and protect vulnerable groups and to ensure the sur­vival of their subject matter (and friends). The obvious affinity has been with

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CONSUMPTION AND COMMODITIES 145

the emergence of a larger so-called green consciousness in which the survival of human cultural diversity is also the survival of a relevant anthropology.

As a result, much of the literature on commodification is couched in terms of resistance. The task is well encapsulated in the title of Comaroff's article, "From goodly beasts to beastly goods" (25). She describes the deep symbolic and material integration of cattle as a particular class of goods, and documents the threat of a dissolution of such linkages to a totalizing cultural system. At the same time, she recognizes parallels between cattle and money and the importance of the specificity of each as a medium both of cosmology and of exchange. The approach thereby echoes older gift-commodity distinctions but also transcends them. Although much disputed, the theme of resistance also represents one of the most influential interpretations of Melanesian cargo cults (145) as a coming to consciousness of the disinherited, comparable to militant millenarianism among the historical poor of Western Europe. The place of myth in such rejection is well described by Guss (52) for the Yekuana of southern Venezuela, where a culture hero who produced the goods deceived the Spanish into thinking they had invented them.

In many contemporary religious movements the commodity stands, at least rhetorically, as the symbol of contamination, which a purifying religiosity, such as some cases of fundamentalism, needs to reject. For example, the Amish ( 130) community constructs itself around a self-conscious refusal to accept most of the possibilities of consumption that surrounds it. Without such religious resources, resistance is more difficult, as Weismantel ( 139) reveals by documenting the considerable pressures on groups to adopt commoditized white bread over their own cereal products.

Resistance often takes the form of taming (i.e. strategies that dilute the potential destructive effects of monetary exchange and of commodities) (10, 63, 1 17). For example, the Kava ceremony in Fiji is a ritual by which money can be introduced but then subsumed within traditional cosmologies ( 128). In other cases commodities are accepted through particular routes that become important in the construction of gender relations (18, 19, 102). This theme meshes well with Munn's (97) observation of the importance of a refusal to consume even in a society without mass goods. In this case, the purpose is to ensure that objects are first used in exchanges that will expand the social relations (fame) of the group.

Although such work often includes sensitive ethnographic analysis, a prob­lem arises when certain corollaries of this process become assumed (e.g. that commoditization implies any particular change in social structure). Recent work has provided a number of counter-examples to what may nevertheless be the most common sequence. For example, most studies assume that commodi­fication will be resisted by a sphere of more intimate relationships that become defined against it (e.g. relationships said to be based on love), as is the case in

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146 MILLER

North America (21). But Geschiere (43) notes that in some West Mrican cases it is the most intimate sphere that has adapted easily to using commodification as idiom, whereas other areas of social life refuse this possibility. Much of the emphasis has been on exchange, but Overing's (98) example of a South American community in which shopping is understood as being more parallel to hunting than to exchange is probably not an isolated case.

The concept of resistance, when oversimplified as a rejection of mass commodities, has also been criticized, e.g. in Abu-Lughod's (1) discussion of the use of lingerie among young Bedouin women. Hugh-Jones (66) discusses the manner in which certain communities, such as Amazonian Indians, have been constantly used in Western debates as models for the natural or so-called green refusal of materialism. He contrasts this usage to his own experience in the region: He often observed an avaricious greed for goods. He thereby points to a common problem, which is the use of other peoples to exemplify ideal states, standing vicariously for our own resistance. Ethnography may be better used in uncovering the local conditions and entanglements (126) that account for the wide variety of different attitudes to consumption that are being en­countered in the field.

Curiously, Western Marxism not only provided the foundation for conceiv­ing of commodification as an embodiment of evil, but it also provided for a much more positive reading of its effects. In the tradition that developed into cultural studies, through the influence of figures such as Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall, there has been an attempt to rescue the concept of culture from being dismissed as mere superstructure to a foundational economy. This res­cue involved demonstrating the active agency of mass populations living within conditions of late capitalism. An exemplary article was Hebdige's (57) study of how British subcultural groups appropriated for their own purposes a commercial distinction originally intended to create a female motor scooter to complement the male motorcycle.

In anthropological literature influenced by this tradition, the notion of resis­tance as taming was shifted into the more active notion of appropriation. Here the new possibilities represented by the consumption of commodities became the primary idiom for the development of social relations. For example, Miller (86) copied Strathern's representation of a dialectic of gender in Melanesia with an examination of the appropriation of government housing in London understood as the reconstitution of gender as exchange. Carrier (16, 17) exam­ined several strategies by which consumers construct personal relations in the teeth of what might be seen as the alienating consequences of commerce. In other regions there has been more concern with continuity between established social systems and the recontexualization of commodities. For example, Thomas (126) demolished the idea that Pacific peoples were merely duped by European travelers with worthless beads. Other studies of how the sapeurs of

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CONSUMPTION AND COMMODITIES 147

Brazzaville appropriated French designer fashions or how Trinidadians turned an American soap opera into the objectification of their own key concerns have been regarded as celebratory of consumption strategies (38, 87). At its most extreme, this tendency was theorized by de Certeau (28a) as the key "tactics of the weak."

Such studies of appropriation are assimilated easily into the more estab­lished tradition of localization in anthropology (34). As such they have been criticized, for example by Moeran (94), who suggests that it has become almost impossible for anthropologists to admit to cultural homogenization because localizing anthropologists might suspect that they simply had not looked for the true subtleties that would have allowed them to discern signifi­cant new cultural difference.

Less overtly moralistic but perhaps closer to the core ideology of the discipline has been the literature on gift-commodity distinctions and the condi­tions of alienability (48, 121, 136). Recent literature has followed Appadurai's (4:1-63) critique of the dichotomy. Work on Pacific ethnography and history (110, 126) has helped modify earlier debates by showing continuities between what now appear to have been increasingly complex subtleties of exchange in the past and the workings of commodity-based exchange that developed with colonialism. A recent book on barter (68) has attempted to remove this cate­gory from a pseudo-evolutionary position as primitive exchange, emphasizing instead how it also modifies any simple distinction between commodity and gift.

This general debate may be said to have reached its climax with Gell's (42) brilliantly subversive article, which begins with the astonishing claim that the classic form of gift exchange (that used in Melanesian social reproduction) is best understood as derived from and, therefore, secondary to commodity bar­ter. To make this claim, Gell has to show that commodity-like exchange, far from being a recent result of colonial presence, was a key characteristic of precolonial trade in Melanesia. Gell's article seems to neatly conclude this autocritique of a dichotomy that has been severely restrictive of our ability to take commodities seriously as objectifications of social relations (but see 131). In the future, the use of Mauss (82) is likely to be more nuanced, as suggested by Carrier (17). More generally, the remainder of the 1990s will probably see a movement beyond any simple moralizing of commoditization and mass con­sumption as either destructive or liberating, concentrating instead on examin­ing how these processes often differ from the assumptions made in dominant models of modernization. Critical attention may then be focused on the more unequivocally evil aspect of commoditization-the impact of pure market ideologies, such as structural adjustment.

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148 MILLER

The Commodity as Material Culture

A major contribution to the development of studies of commodities and con­

sumption has come from another surprising source. Just when material culture had appeared to be fading out as the last legacy of nineteenth-century evolu­

tionary anthropology, it has returned as the vanguard precisely because of its

ability to focus on the commodity and its social significance. Much of the early literature came out of ethnoarchaeology and the centrality of material culture

theory to archaeological reconstruction of the past (39, 65, 114), which on

occasion, as in the long-term Garbage Project (103), became major research projects on contemporary consumption patterns. Other sources have included

the revitalization of the anthropology of art and critical consideration of muse­ums and their collections (e.g. 23)

Douglas and Bourdieu were probably the sources cited most frequently by

the archaeological theorists. This is partly because they suggested a more

active role for objects in the constitution of social relations than did most European social anthropologists. In Bourdieu's case, objects play a major role

as a system of order essential for the inculcation of habitus (13). Douglas's edited book on drinks (31) brings out a useful distinction in the consideration of objects as symbols. On the one hand, drinks may construct the world. An

example is Mars's (81) documentation of how drinking patterns in Newfound­

land determine social worlds and reputations. By contrast, in other papers, such as Bott's (12) on the use of Kava in Tonga, drinks reflect not a given

world so much as an ideal world.

Some anthropologists have been prepared to focus on the commodity per se. For example, Kopytoff's (75) notion of the biography of the commodity

has been influential because it addressed the core concern of alienability. The

most extensive relevant literature is, however, dispersed among articles about particular domains of commodities. There is, for example, an extensive litera­

ture in material culture studies on textiles, which is now being recast in terms of the place of clothes as fashion (1, 56, 74, 111). This new literature provides a kind of case study for larger debates about the commodity as appearance or surface. Instead of glib remarks about the superficiality of life in commodified

culture, we have here a contextualized analysis of a particular range of com­modities as surfaces and their relation to identity ap.d individualism (38, 89: 219-231).

It is not surprising that anthropological study has been most extensive

where there is clear continuity with an earlier, less commodified period. For example, Sahlins (111) emphasizes the degree to which the later use of expen­sive goods in a sense completes an earlier cultural project that was attempting to glorify the appearance of Hawaiian chiefs. Some of the most interesting contributions relate to historical evidence of earlier commodification (54).

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CONSUMPTION AND COMMODITIES 149

An equally extensively studied domain is that of food and drink. Again, although there have been some synchronic structuralist studies, in most re­gions the concern is mainly with either continuity or change from less commodified conditions ( 107, 139). A common theme has been the use of food and drink by communities in the construction of their own sense of nostalgia for customary sociability. This construction often takes the form of a nationalistic ideal such as the so-called traditional Japanese ( 1 19) or Belizian ( 142) way as opposed to a new Western individualism or autonomy.

Given this concern with continuity, the literature is less extensive on ob­jects without such clear precedents. It is much harder to find ethnographic analyses of motorized vehicles, for example, although the literature is supple­mented by those researchers in cultural studies and sociology who have moved toward a more ethnographic approach (57, 95, 143; but see 82). The more mundane of these modern commodities, such as cars and supermarkets, tend to be neglected (but see 72), but there is no shortage of anthropologists wishing to study the latest advances in technology, such as cyberspace or genetic engineering.

Within the study of increasing commodification perhaps the most interest­ing literature has examined how key items in modern consumption are used to objectify, and thereby understand, the nature of modernity as social experi­ence. This focus developed because for many people the entry into consump­tion is also seen as their entry into self-conscious modernity. Weir's ( 138) analysis of the consumption of Qat in Yemen concludes on this theme, and Moeran (93) examines the key terms used to conceptualize these shifts in consumption. Wilk's ( 141) analysis of Belizian consumption suggests that, given the extensive range of new commodity and media images, people can construct a whole series of imaginative scenarios as to the kinds of people they might wish to be, e.g. more Americanized, neo-indigenized, or nationalistic. Given the importance of objectifying this sense of the modern, it is not surpris­ing that the same process appears to be equally important in constructing an explicit and abstracted sense of the past. In many cases the construction of a particular sense of tradition appears to be related directly to increased com­moditization (36, 106).

Particularly common seems to be the use of new commodities to objectify a sense of the nation-state, encompassing smaller groups but held against a global sophistication that would transcend it. Of course this may be encoun­tered through many different historical trajectories. Foster (37) shows how in New Guinea, as in many relatively new political entities, there is often an association between commodities, elites, and a new nation-state (see also 5, 62). In the papers edited by Tobin ( 127), the Japanese appear so concerned with retaining certain elements of nationalistic identity that they (and equally the anthropologists) tend to label as Western almost all new developments that

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150 MILLER

threaten social cohesion. A variant of this theme is the use of consumption to study the reformation of identity among ethnic minorities (e.g. 79, 104).

Several of these studies demonstrate how societies on the periphery of the industrial world often seize readily upon new possibilities of consumption and use them to embody elements of modernity that are as yet resisted in metro­politan regions working through slower transformations of class and peasant relations. In a parallel to Lukacs's notion of "the consciousness of the proletar­iat," communities with a particular experience of rupture and dislocation may use commodities to embody more extreme forms of modernity such as radical freedom or transnational identity (see 45, 89). A related observation is Turner's (129) evidence for the high degree of sophistication shown by Ama­zonian Indians in exploiting images of neo-authentification on television. These portrayals of the developing world as often being in the vanguard of new practices of consumption provide a useful contrast to earlier studies that implied that such societies would always be in the rear of processes of mod­ernization conceived of as pseudo-evolutionary.

The Political Economy of Consumption

I suggested in the introduction that economic anthropology was surprisingly late in developing the topic of consumption. It has, however, provided much of the more recent literature. Often ignored in mainstream anthropology are the extensive writings by anthropologists who either have gone to work in market­ing and business studies or write for that audience. Any general perusal of recent consumer studies (6, 9, 64, 116) would show the increasing inl1uence of qualitative and ethnographic research. Marketing literature is replete with attempts to classify consumers in cultural terms cast as lifestyles. There are clear parallels with anthropological classifications, e.g. Douglas's work on basic cultural strategies in consumption (32:66-87). But with the exception of Bourdieu, few anthropologists have returned to mine these findings for their potential contribution to more general anthropological theory, nor have they until recently attempted to directly study institutions such as marketing and its relation to consumption (but see 76).

A very different approach to the study of consumption arises out of another branch of economic anthropology. This is a long-standing interest in the evalu­ation of wealth and poverty and the abilities of households to cope with different forms of demand. Studies in Latin American slum households at a time of high inl1ation and falling income may make consumption decisions highly salient and expose the processes by which priorities are established (113). For example, Jelin (71) has studied actual consumption priorities within Buenos Aires, and Fonesca (35) has examined the significance of family relations and economic support with respect to the importance of male siblings in a Brazilian slum. As in the case of sociologists studying in more af11uent

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CONSUMPTION AND COMMODITIES 151

areas (99), the emphasis is still largely on household relations with respect to their place in production rather than consumption. An exception is work con­cerned with women's domestic lives (51).

Most studies provide generalized pictures of the effects of commoditiza­tion. An exception is the degree of detail provided by Heyman in his study of communities on the United States-Mexico border (59-61). He examines the flow through of commodities as objects in the home, both those that may be used productively, such as sewing machines, and those that clearly are objects of consumption. Heyman's work provides a useful insight into how house­holds transfonn their patterns of consumption from the kind of intense self­sufficiency described by Gudeman & Rivera (49) to a dependence on the market that does not necessarily diminish with increasing poverty.

Anthropologists have been concerned with mapping out the detailed changes that are simply glossed over in economists' descriptions of aggregate behavior and also with challenging the assumptions of economics itself with regard to motivation. In particular, they contrast the use of more individualistic models with their own focus on the social foundations of demand. Rutz & Orlove (108) talk in tenns of a "social economy" approach, which addresses concerns similar to those of economists but with an emphasis on social struc­ture and social values. Rutz's own work (107) in Fiji is concerned with time expenditure partly in relation to models formulated by the economist Gary Becker. He also deals with the importance of social status in explaining

choices made in food consumption. This approach dovetails with the attempts of anthropologists to emphasize continuity with consumption concerns that predate this degree of market integration (110, 111, 126).

The anthropological critique of economics has passed beyond the old for­malist-substantivist debate to a more radical questioning of basic economic tenninology and the presentation of growing empirical support for the idea that the pure market relations presupposed as foundational to modern con­sumption may simply not exist, even within highly developed consumer mar­kets (3, 17, 29). Previously, anthropologists tended to accept the concept of the market as a model of metropolitan societies and focused on the integration or resistance of their community to this model. In the future, there probably will be increasing emphasis on this critique of basic terms such as the market and even capitalism with respect to all regions.

Another likely future trend arises from a common critique made of anthro­pological studies of consumption, which is their separation from studies of production. It is not surprising that earlier studies had this tendency, because in many cases they were aimed specifically at repudiating what was seen as an obsessive concern with relations of production as opposed to consumption. By the 1990s it has become evident that neither of these pursuits is best carried out in isolation. The most forceful critique of this literature has come from outside

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152 MILLER

anthropology but is certainly pertinent to anthropologists. It is easiest to docu­ment the relationship between production and consumption within particular product domains, which is where most such investigations occur. For example, within the literature on food there is an unusual article on meat production and consumption in Italy ( 132). The literature on textiles is also better than most in relating production specifically to consumption (8, 15, 24, 56). One such linkage is noted for Cameroon, where consumption goods viewed as the mate­rial culture of success may be important for the establishing the credit of the entrepreneur ( lOS). My forthcoming study of commerce in Trinidad is directed specifically at the rearticulation of the study of business with that of consump­tion.

If there is increasing interest in the relationship between consumption and production within one community, there is an already established concern ( 134) for the relationship between first-world consumption and its effects upon production in the developing world (144). Mintz's (92) book on sugar pro­vides one of the clearest examples of this relationship. He documents the immense consequences that increasing consumption of sugar had for the emer­gence of industrial society in Europe, where it provided a particularly conven­ient form of available energy, but even more so for the development of agro­industrial sugar plantations in the Caribbean. Anthropologists such as Hugh­Jones (66) and historians such as Goodman (46) are now undertaking similar work with regard to items such as tea, coffee, tobacco, and drugs. One need only add spices and specify opium to appreciate how fundamental the evolu­tion of new consumption tastes were to the development of colonialism. On a much smaller scale, Swallow ( 123) noted how even quite particular fashion items, such as cheesecloth, can still have a devastating effect on communities of South Asian weavers as demand rises and falls for reasons that are unknown and unpredictable for the producers.

Although earlier work concentrated on consumption and commoditization as synonymous with the penetration of what was assumed to be homogenizing mass consumption, recent work emphasizes the diversity of consumption among different regions and classes and in relation to gender (72, 78, 127). Sahlins (110) has shown how these assumptions about homogenization often ignore the legacy of major centers of Old W orId commerce such as China and India and that even in areas such as Hawaii and the northwest coast of the United States there were powerful imperatives toward particular modes of consumption (54, 126). The increasing use of the terms local and global have allowed for a fuller consideration of the contribution all regions make to the development of diverse regimes of consumption. As such they represent a marked improvement upon terms such as Americanization and Westerniza­tion.

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Another interest has been in commodities made in the third world specifi­cally for first-world consumption. Spooner ( 120) pointed out the ironies of a notion of authenticity that concerned Western consumers of Turkmenian car­pets but that is likely to impinge on the Turkman more in terms of the blue jeans that they import in exchange for such carpets. Most commonly, anthro­pologists have been concerned with the loss of self-sufficiency in the regions where they are researching (44). Increasingly, however, the notion of authen­ticity has transcended the origin of goods to become an ascription to be investigated in its own right ( 135). Indeed, there are cases where imported images may be more empowering of local concerns than are locally produced images (87). Nevertheless, because first-world consumption has, if anything, increased its control over third-world economies as a result of new trade agreements such as GATT and NAFTA, the need for anthropological research on this topic is evident. Given that there is also an increasingly direct link between first-world consumption and both disempowerment and suffering in the developing world, this is also perhaps the area where a critical perspective is most required.

What is perhaps still missing in completing this rearticulation is intense ethnographic investigation of first-world consumption imperatives. This is partly the legacy of both Marxist and market positions that saw consumer desires as merely the outcome of capitalist development. This view is probably not correct because the desire for commodity differentiation, which developed from the 1960s' repudiation of early homogenizing mass production, preceded rather than followed the development of those post-Fordist production meth­ods that have constituted one of the most important shifts in capitalism in recent years. This observation parallels the finding that an eighteenth-century consumer revolution may also have in many respects preceded the nineteenth­century industrial revolution (84).

There is little anthropological literature on major shifts in first-world con­sumption and their cosmological foundations, for example, the rise of green goods and associated practices (70, 1 15). Even an activity as fundamental as shopping is only now starting to be subject to ethnographic and historical inquiry, and these studies already indicate the very different experience of shopping in contexts such as London, Moscow, and Tokyo ( 17, 22, 26, 27, 69). Despite influential papers on markets and bazaars, there is relatively little work on, for example, price construction in consumer markets. Yet as Alexan­der (3) argues, prices show remarkably little relation to demand when studied in detail.

Consumption and Kinship

This section contends that the study of consumption will come to replace kinship as the core of anthropology, and this change will represent a surpris-

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ingly slight shift in the discipline. This would be the case even if capitalism were replaced by an alternative system (socialist societies were at least as modernizing in this regard), as long as that system continued to produce mass goods through industry. It would also be true even if (as now) global poverty expanded, as long as the process well documented by Heyman (59-61) contin­ued. That is, poverty is defined less in terms of a loss of self-sufficiency than as the relative dispossession of mass goods.

The reason for this shift is partly the decline in kinship as something defined through an alterity with commodified relations. More importantly, there is a shift, which is likely to spread even to the huge populations of South Asia and China, through which people rely increasingly upon goods that they do not themselves produce-one definition of consumption. Under such con­ditions, the construction of social relations may be carried out increasingly through the practice of consumption, with goods replacing persons as the key medium of objectification for projects of value. But contrary to the expecta­tions of an anthropology that was born out of opposition to this trend, this will not be the end of disciplinary authenticity. Indeed there are some likely advan­tages. After all, using persons such as the mother's brother or the ethnic Other as the objectification of one's values is not without problematic implications for the ways in which they become regarded and treated. This problem may be alleviated in part when this role is played more often by organic vegetables or computer games. If we accept that the primary significance of kinship to anthropology has been based on the finding that kinship has been a powerful idiom in diverse societies for almost anything the anthropologist chose to study, then to argue the same for commodities is not necessarily to anticipate major change.

If anything, the ideology that gave birth to anthropology represents just a particular stage. It was a reaction to the industrial revolution, during which a so-called pure society was defined against commodities. The period I antici­pate is more like that which preceded it, in which this relationship was not considered particularly problematic. The use of objects, even commoditized objects as the vehicle for kinship itself, is hardly a rarity. A case in point is the home and its accumulation of possessions. In less commodified societies there is often a considerable degree of identification between home and kindred and especially lineage. (49). Partly for this reason, the home often becomes a crucial object in the transition from less commodified to more commodified regimes. Gell's (4 1) work on the Muria and Wilk's ( 140) work on the Kekchi Maya are two of the clearest examples that capture the role of the home in these key moments of transition to greater commodification.

But what of the home in societies that are among the most commodified in the contemporary world? Studies that have attempted to investigate these links with the same ethnographic and historical concerns as Gell and Wilk have

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found that little has changed. The home remains a key arena through which the forms of sociability are defined according to dynamic but often intensely normative criteria. The European bourgeoisie were as obsessed with house­hold thrift as the Colombian peasant (40, 49, 133). Norwegian working-class housewives use the decoration of their homes to produce a highly egalitarian and normative foundation for sociability (50, 5 1; see also 77). The placement of media technologies is studied as a construction of "the moral economy of the home" (1 18). The exchange between male labor and female aesthetic in appropriating state kitchens in London becomes the practice through which gender reestablishes itself as difference against an ideology of modernist ho­mogenization (86). Similarly, recent work in France on homes and domestic rituals suggests that commodity status does not diminish the centrality of domestic routines to the establishment of a system of values that is objectified neither in persons nor in the taxonomies of material culture per se but, as Bourdieu argued for less commodified societies, in the practices that involve both ( 14, 73, 1 12; cf 53).

The home as commodity is not the only domain in which kinship and consumption are simply each other's context, with no clear direction for reduc­tionist analysis. Whether it is Hendry's (58) uncovering of the aesthetic foun­dation for the wrapping of gifts in Japan or Mars's (8 1) study of drinking patterns, the centrality of such rituals to social life makes it problematic to see them as merely the form taken by social relations. As Strathern (122) and others who have studied new reproductive technologies have argued, kinship and commodity have become inextricably linked. Indeed, Hirsch's (62a) analysis of discussions about reproductive technologies suggests that they are being used to work out a stance to the economy. What is condemned is birth that comes too close to "shopping for babies" or that involves too much state control over family decisions.

Shopping may itself be transformed into a major instrument for the enact­ment of a commitment to family values. This is one of the main conclusions of a comparative analysis of the festival of Christmas that focused specifically on the relationship between materialism and the family (88). The modern Christ­mas and its foundational myth, composed by Dickens, points to a fundamental dialectic in modernity between the freedom represented by commodities and the continued desire for normative sociability represented by kinship, in short, the foundation for what also became the popular appropriation of anthropol­ogy. This dialectic has become a common theme in ethnographies concerned with commercial life. There are parallels with a theme well explored in Tam­biah's ( 124) study of Buddhist amulets, in which a spiritual life regenerated in rural asceticism becomes essential to commercial success in town (see also 105, 106).

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Traditional kinship studies excelled in repudiating what might have been thought of as the homogenizing effect of any assumed biological foundation to kin relations. Similarly, ethnographic studies of homes and

'possessions as

commodities are indicating just as diverse a set of regimes. Many of the assumed attributes of consumer societies such as individualism and status competition tum out to be those of regions most often identified with con­sumption (e.g. North America). People in Japan or West Africa may also believe this global discourse about the inevitable effects of consumption, but their actual consumption practices may suggest a quite different conclusion, which is that consumption, like kinship, is simply a domain through which diverse projects of value are objectified.

Conclusion

The starting point for many studies of consumption has been to regard it simply as an erosion of culture. As societies enter into the world economy they are assumed to give up their historical birthright for a mess of homogenizing consumption porridge, resulting in an almost measurable loss of culture, which is understood as those attributes of difference that originally made them of interest to anthropological study. Only when mass consumption is regarded as diversity a posteriori-that is, a source of difference emerging from trajecto­ries that are not merely reliant upon past historical diversity-will the signifi­cance of this new area of concern become evident. Consumption needs to be regarded as what Parkin calls a "return of the exotic" ( 100), whereby we are all equally bizarre but authentic versions of consumer society.

Anthropology faces a choice. It may become merely an elegy for suppos­edly lost specificity or it may attempt to discover how people using goods that they did not produce and that they experience only as consumers nevertheless struggle to create social and cultural identities. These investigations are ex­actly what other disciplines are now looking to anthropology to provide. The major academic growth areas of cultural studies, media studies, and women's studies often attack anthropology's foundation in colonial ideology. Neverthe­less, these areas have looked increasingly to anthropology's core traditions of ethnography and comparative studies in order to escape from two decades of intense concentration on textual studies that projected assumptions about the effect of these texts, with remarkably little concern for the actual people upon whom these effects were supposed to have occurred. For example, media studies at first neglected to ask how audiences actually responded to soap opera (2, 28, 78, 87, 96). In this context anthropology becomes virtually subsumed within a study of consumption because what is being sought is the ability to ascertain the actual significance of cultural productions and norms on the lives of persons and communities.

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In this new phase of anthropological study, consumption is detached from a critique of capitalism as a domain whose alienatory potential might remain just as evident under socialism or some other economic system. Desire for goods is not assumed to be natural, nor goods per se as either positive or negative. Poverty is regarded as a relative lack of resources rather than the preservation of authenticity. Critical analysis is not directed at the existence of mass con­sumption but at the inequalities of access and the deleterious impact of con­temporary economic institutions on much of the world's population. Terms such as the market and the commodity are scrutinized as often glib generali­ties. The future responses to the possibilities of consumption are likely to be increasingly varied, including green and ascetic rejections as well as elabora­tions of acquisition and display.

In short, a new maturity in the anthropological study of consumption may represent a new maturity for the discipline as a whole. It is difficult to appreci­ate that an emphasis on commodities may not be at the expense of an empathy with society and a concern with social relations, but this opposition stems from a particular ideology that this literature suggests the discipline can transcend. When reading Mauss's The Gift (82), we often ignore the fact that his first example is not the much quoted case of the hau, in which objects in noncom­modified societies are found to have person-like qualities, but rather the toanga, in which persons are found to have object-like qualities.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I thank the following colleagues for suggestions and references: James Carrier, Josiah Heyman, Robert Foster, Ann Raulin, Michael Rowlands, Nicholas Thomas, and Richard Wilko

Any Annual Review chapter, as well as any article cited in an Annual Review chapter, may be purchased from the Annual Reviews Preprints and Reprints service.

1-800-347-8007; 415-259-5017; email: arpr@ciass.org

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