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Abstract. This article contends that the study of consumption is often subsumed
within an ideological concern to castigate society for its materialism at the expense of
an alternative morality that emerges from an empathetic concern with poverty and
the desire for greater access to material resources. Examples are given of the benefits
that accrue to populations from an increased quantity of goods in certain
circumstances. An anti-materialist ideology is favoured by associating consumption
with production rather than studying consumers themselves and their struggles to
discriminate between the positive and negative consequences of commodities. The
form of morality attacked here is also associated with a generalized critique of
Americanization that tends to appropriate on behalf of the United States all blame
and thereby agency for regressive global and local developments. The Americanization
thesis also tends to ignore the contribution of much of the rest of the world to the
production of consumer culture and contemporary capitalism, and to deny the
authenticity of regional consumer culture. Parallels are drawn with E.P. Thompson’s
essay The Poverty of Theory and its critique of similarly disengaged ideological critiques
that led academics away from the study of experience.
Key words
Americanization ● consumer culture ● materialism ● morality ● poverty
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IS CONSUMPTION MATERIALISTIC?
My basic position is fairly simple. It seems to me that writings about con-
sumption are saturated by a pervasive anxiety most acutely felt by fairly
well-off academics, mainly in the USA, about the possibility that they may
be too materialistic. This is combined with a genuine desire to critique the
inequalities and exploitation that follow various aspects of modern capital-
ism, and most recently a strident environmentalism. Put together, these have
produced a veritable industry consisting of the critique of almost all aspects
of consumption as a means to attack the triple-headed Cerberus of
materialism, capitalism and planetary exploitation. This moral stance is so
powerful that it refuses to be altered by exposure to the many actual studies
of consumers and consumption in which they appear as other than that
which this critique requires them to be for the purposes of expressing its
moral position.
The result is an extraordinarily conservative vision of consumption. In
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a very few objects and images form the basis of such a complex symbolic
nexus that they become the medium of highly sophisticated cosmological
and social projects (e.g. Munn, 1973; Myers, 1986). In our own society,
however, the sheer plethora of things seem to make this impossible. We can
certainly see the possibility, glimpsed by Simmel (1978), that we become
superficially related to so many things that we are deeply involved in none,
leading to what he saw as the blasé condition of some urban life. In addition
the recent literature has assumed that the conditions under which we are
led to desire, for example, branded goods through intense advertising are so
problematic that any subsequent relationship of identity that we forge
through them must be inauthentic.
What worries me is that this bogey of a deluded, superficial person who
has become the mere mannequin to commodity culture is always someone
other than ourselves. It is the common people, the vulgar herd, the mass
consumer, a direct descendant of the older ‘mass culture critique’ of the
1960s. It is never the rounded person who is encountered within an ethno-
graphic engagement. If, however, we approach our own social relations and
practice with the same level of respect, the same empathy and the same
patience that a good ethnographer attempts to bring to the apparent auth-
enticity of others, then we see something quite different – a world where
a pair of Nike trainers or Gap jeans might be extraordinarily eloquent about
the care a mother has for her child, or the aspirations of an asthmatic child
to take part in sports.
We need to start with an acknowledgement that there are many things
in the world that we see quite unproblematically as beneficial, and which
we surely have in mind when we think in terms of the elimination of
poverty, that is adequate housing, cheap pharmaceuticals, warm clothing,
nutritious food.Why has all of this somehow become something other than
consumption? Why is this not the foundation of consumer culture? Why,
to use a title of a previous book, are we so afraid to acknowledge con-
sumption? But it is not just objects. We see people whose possibilities in
the world are constantly enhanced by huge quantities of knowledge: the
library that supplies an endless possibility of books, the transport that allows
them a diversity of places to experience, the development of information
technology so that I can spend one hour correcting my (awful!) spelling
instead of a week and use email to work with colleagues in Australia and
not just in my department.
But what of the less obviously utilitarian things of the world? Do we
really need a hundred styles of trousers to choose from, cuisines from every
part of the world, an even faster computer? Again we can only consider
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such things from the basis of that same respectful encounter. After all we
do not respect Australian Aboriginals for reducing their object world to the
bare necessity of utility – even if they are not all original affluent societies
(Sahlins, 1974). The idea that the people of Amazonia, or Melanesia or
Aboriginal Australia either were or are people of simple or basic needs is
such a bizarre distortion of a century of anthropology as to beggar belief.
It is precisely the richness of their symbolism, the interpenetration of social
and material relations, the way cosmology and morality is absorbed in and
expressed through myth, material culture and other such media that makes
up the core of anthropological teaching. Trobriand islanders are known for
their huge piles of conspicuously long yams and the voyages of Kula to
exchange armshells, not for their attachment to strict functionalism. It is
often the poor who are most assertive about the centrality of symbolic con-
sumption. It was those living in the worst slums of England that kept the
best room of the house as a ‘parlour’ reserved almost exclusively for show
(Roberts, 1973). Peasant villagers in India often get into debt not for basic
land rights but by funding wedding feasts. It is the complexity of the
symbolic systems of the peoples of the world, not some base utilitarianism,
that anthropologists look for, expect to find and celebrate in their studies.
So the question we ought to be asking of our own society is whether there
is any similarly rich symbolic structure within our own material culture.
To answer this question I approach our material culture in the same
spirit as I would that of Melanesia or Amazonia, that is through the nuance
of ethnographic immersion. As examples I summarize two such ethno-
graphic explorations. The first (Miller, 1998a) is concerned with a street of
shoppers in North London. What do they do with the sheer quantity and
diversity of goods? My argument in a nutshell is that we find a society that
has seen a radical transformation over the last century in its ideals of love
and care.Where once specific gestures based on social norms, such as flowers
on Friday from husband to wife, were respected, today we feel that love is
demonstrated only in the sensitivity shown by one individual for all that
they have learnt about the particular nature of the other. When a mother
shops for her child she may feel that there are a hundred garments in that
shop that would be fine for all her friends’ children but she loves her own
child enough that the exact balance between what his or her school friends
will consider ‘cool’ and what her family will consider respectable matters
hugely to her, enough for her to reject the lot and keep on searching until
she finds the one article that satisfies this subtle and exacting need. A
woman who feels her boyfriend has paid sufficient attention that he can
successfully buy her a pair of suitable shoes while unaccompanied feels
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she really has a boyfriend to treasure. How this relates to commerce and
capitalism I examine later; for now my only concern is to suggest that it is
possible that people appropriate this plethora of goods in order to enhance
and not to detract from our devotion to other people.
My second example is from Trinidad (Miller, 1994) where an oil boom
turned this island from a developing region to a relatively wealthy one with
access to large amounts of consumer goods. My argument is that Trini-
dadians, just like Australian Aborigines, are concerned to find a medium
for objectifying their values and moral orders. Prior to the arrival of mass
consumption the primary vehicle for this task was other people. In short,
Trinidadians had strong and explicit views about what ‘women are like’,
what ‘Indians are like’, what ‘big shot people are like’. In my analysis I sug-
gested that most of these dualistic and powerful stereotypes about gender,
class, ethnicity and so forth are a result of the working out of a fundamental
set of dualistic values that arose from their radical experience of modernity,
particularly through the rupture of slavery and the subsequent centrality of
freedom. In short, as in most societies, categories of persons become the
objects that objectify our values. I then analysed the products of mass con-
sumption, the cars, the clothes, the interior furnishings that have emerged
with the oil boom and suggested that during that period there was a shift
from the use of categories of persons to that of categories of things as the
means to objectify these fundamental values and dualisms. Material culture
presented several advantages over persons as vehicles for the expression of
these symbolic systems. Furthermore, to some degree this released the
burden on people as objects for the expression of value and led to a greater
freedom to treat individuals more in terms of their particular character and
less as mere tokens or stereotypes that stood for some particular value or
moral position. So in this case the rise of material culture with the complex
symbolism of mass consumer goods tended to lessen the treatment of
people as stereotypes.
So in both these cases the mere desire to behave as a conventional
anthropologist – by which I mean to empathetically consider the per-
spective of the people one is working with, whether Londoners or Trini-
dadians – creates the potential for exploring the appropriation of material
culture in both settings in an analogous fashion to that of studying material
culture in an Australian Aboriginal society. I do not wish to suggest that
the postmodern perspective on rampant superficiality is impossible. For all
I know if I carried out fieldwork in parts of Los Angeles I would finally
encounter these, as it were, poor rich materialists, who have lost the capac-
ity for anything other than superficial relationships with persons and things.
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But at the very least we need to consider the possibility that the sheer
quantity of contemporary material culture might, amongst certain peoples
and in certain circumstances, enhance their humanity and develop their
sociality.
During my own fieldwork the materialism that is being attacked has
been actually found to be much more prevalent amongst the impoverished.
It is when I work with the unemployed, or those living on government
housing estates that I find people who have sacrificed their concern for
others, sometimes their own kin, because of sheer desire or a felt desperate
need for things. It is people without education who tend to have difficulty
appropriating the plethora of goods because it requires detailed knowledge
and research to assimilate them. It was the people who found they could
not relate to their kitchen furnishing who also had difficulty in establish-
ing friendships and social lives (Miller, 1988). These experiences leave me
feeling that I have the evidence to argue that increases in education, in
wealth and in people’s relationship with their material culture are also often
the foundation for enhancing their social relations.
Instead it seems to me that research on consumption, especially that
within the USA, derives from something completely different than the
desire to study actual consumption or consumers, something far removed
from this commitment to ethnographic or equivalent experience based on
an empathetic encounter with consumers. Rather, I see an astonishing
continuity between the most recent discussions of consumption and the
foundational work of Veblen and those that preceded him (see Horowitz,
1985). The mark of this ‘Veblenesque’ critique is that it always takes the
most extreme examples of conspicuous consumption as its characterization
of all consumption. So just as once it was the tiny sector of nouveau riche
– those who could afford footmen and other such servants – that were
Veblen’s true consumers, so now it is always the evident excesses of wealthy
consumers that come to stand for consumption in itself. As Veblen asserted
the puritan value of labour and the priority of utility over display, so today
symbolic expressions are never true ‘needs’ and are bound to express
negative values such as status competition or insatiable greed. Consumption
is still conspicuous consumption, and vicarious consumption based on
emulation and the desire to deny labour. It’s just that the examples used to
illustrate the arguments have shifted by a century.
As I have written elsewhere (Miller, 1995) I have as much of a problem
with the idea that consumption is an intrinsic good as that it is an intrinsic
bad. I would not wish to generalize from the two instances I have just given
to any version of a conclusion that suggested consumption must always be
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seen as a good thing. These are the two sides of a coin that seems only inter-
ested in consumption as a stance towards an often glib comment on the
morality of the zeitgeist. In this respect there remains a considerable dis-
tinction between a material culture studies devoted to the ethnographic
encounter with the dialectics of culture as social and material practice, and
some cultural studies that seem to reduce the study of consumption to its
potential contribution to what they call ‘debates’ and which contain many
examples of consumption as a heroic struggle or act of resistance. I hope
that my stance towards consumption has been consistently dialectical
(Miller, 1987, 2001). I assume that there are both positive and negative
elements to all such developments and it is the task of politics to accentu-
ate the possibilities for human welfare and ameliorate the negative effects.
IS CONSUMPTION CAPITALIST?
The title of this article is intended to evoke the classic essay by E.P.
Thompson, The Poverty of Theory (1978). Thompson is important in that, at
the time he wrote his withering critique of Althusser, it might have been
thought that theory – just like morality – is an intrinsically good thing for
academics, and that to attack theory or morality is to profane the sacrosanct.
In fact, his essay remains exemplary because I would argue that the problem
with the critique of consumption as capitalist culture has a great deal in
common with the critique of capitalism that characterized 1970s western
Marxism, and is making a series of rather similar misjudgements and
mistakes.
On the one hand there was at that time a profound and necessary
critique of inequality, which I hope most academics still support. Marxist
ideas seemed to most academics in western Europe to constitute the very
essence of a moral critique, a feeling that social evils had to be exposed and
opposed. Unfortunately several tendencies within that movement may have
made it counterproductive to the critique of inequality in the longer term.
The first was part of what Thompson called The Poverty of Theory. He argued
that theory (today I would say morality) can become a form of closure. It
recognizes the world only in as much as what it observes is generated by
the stance it takes to the world. If consumption is capitalist, then only those
consumption acts that are consistent with the dominant image of capital-
ism are recognized as true consumption. Second, it becomes abstracted from
its relationship to the empirical. Althusser dismissed historical research as
mere empiricism. By contrast, Thompson argues (pp. 199–200) that the
cornerstone of historical research is the concept of experience that is a
commitment to empathetically engage as closely as possible with people’s
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same danger that true moral effect will be lost under the overwhelming
desire for moral affect.
The elimination of poverty depends on industrialization and mass pro-
duction. Numerous little crafts are fine as a personal hobby, but as an econ-
omic foundation they are simply a recipe for increasing poverty. William
Morris produced marvellous craft works, but I don’t know many people who
can afford to buy them. My own stance derives from the traditions of Euro-
pean social democracy. This tradition aims for higher taxation to fund
increased welfare and redistribution and stronger state and international
bureaucracy to curb the immoral effects of short-term competition-driven
markets,such that,for example,pension funds run companies to provide long-
term benefit to pensioners and not to siphon money from business to stock
markets (Clark, 2000). But this social democratic tradition has established its
complementarity to market economies and industrialization after seeing the
destructive effects of the simplistic rejection of the 1970s (see Nove, 1983).
The social democratic programme fought for an increasing level of
wealth based on redistribution as well as production. It recognized that even
in affluent societies most people do not feel their needs have been fulfilled
(e.g. Segal, 1998). It saw industrialization as having the potential for decreas-
ing hours of work. The problem has been the decline in these develop-
ments as against the growing influence of a US model that is driven by the
stock market and short-term financial goals (see Henwood, 1997; Hutton,
1996), and which has become associated with the increasing pressures on
work described by Cross (1993) and Schor (1992). But this is a specific set
of associations; it is not even intrinsic to capitalism, it is the particular
combination of capitalism with liberalism that is characteristic of certain
neo-liberal regimes. The social democratic alternative suggests there is
nothing intrinsic to consumer societies that should lead to either inequal-
ity or higher pressures on work; what is required is a politics that remains
consistent in regarding human welfare as its goal.
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We blithely ignore the evidence that neither Pokemon nor whisky nor
Mercedes-Benz (any more than most of modern consumer culture) origi-
nate in the USA. Contemporary consumer culture is actually produced
throughout the world. Instead we focus upon the following features. First
the loss of what we see as authentic culture, which we imply is that which
historically characterized the people of that particular region. We see this
authentic culture as replaced by what we regard as an inauthentic culture
that cannot really express the people of this region in the way the displaced
material culture was able to do. Second we focus upon the evidence for
commodification and what we see as the rise of materialism, hedonism and
individualism, all of which we associate with the same replacement of
authentic by inauthentic material culture. Third we focus on the evidence
for globalization and the incorporation of these peoples in global com-
modity capitalism. Fourth we draw attention to the development of class
distinctions and status and other differences within that society as expressed
by these consumption patterns. Finally we conclude that the combination
of all these factors is evidence for the continued spread of Americanization
to the critique of which we believe we have now contributed.
Could it be that such apparently well-meaning, morally upright papers
might at another level be largely self-serving, condescending, or even racist
forms of academic production that primarily project the interests of
middle-class American academics? I assume that the authors of such materi-
als sincerely believe that these articles are an expression of their genuine
concern with the welfare of other peoples and the damage they believe is
being inflicted upon others by powerful forces they associate with their own
society. So in no sense do I wish to impugn their motives. I simply want to
suggest that they may misunderstand the implications of their own aca-
demic production. Indeed what such articles mainly serve to accomplish is
the continued domination of a particular US stance on the topic of con-
sumption itself – a stance that I criticized earlier – but here exported to the
rest of the world. In a sense it may amount to an exploitation of the world
for the benefit of one group’s moral stance.
My argument rests on the degree to which the critique of American-
ization makes the following assumptions. First that the only population who
have the right to claim an authentic relationship to modern consumer
culture are US citizens. Second that black people (with the possible excep-
tion of a home-grown US black middle class) cannot use such things as an
expression of their own authenticity. Third that the only place to have pro-
duced and to claim credit for the construction of this commodity culture
is the USA. Fourth that only the USA and its own form of capitalism can
237
claim the ‘blame’ for the creation of class and social differences wherever
they may be found. Fifth that such wealth is in and of itself an inauthentic
attribute for people from the developing world who therefore have less right
to it than the ‘naturally’ wealthy of the first world. In effect wealthy black
people of the developing world are an anomaly – they appear in academia
like an ugly aberration in the purity of more authentic otherness. Sixth that
all relationships of the rest of the world to commodity culture can be
characterized as one either of ‘acceptance’ – which is then symptomatic of
colonial or post-colonial ‘settlements’ – or one of ‘resistance’ – which is
when other people are deemed to have responded ‘properly’. Finally all
other societies are deemed to be ‘naturally’ good, so if two tribal groups in
Africa attempt to commit genocide, or a Korean government suppresses its
people this is not some expression of the complex history of that region
but must be the side effect of either colonialism (now usually post-colonial-
ism), capitalism or American influence. Under this condescending attitude
only the USA or western Europe can be authentically bad.
Wolf (1982) wrote of the people without history, and Wolf was a pas-
sionate anthropologist deeply concerned with the welfare of peoples all
around the world as well as the effects of colonialism and dependency. Yet
curiously it is the mechanical application of blame/credit to the eponymous
West (notwithstanding a sometimes contradictory employment of the term
‘post-colonial’) for whatever continues to happen wherever it continues to
happen, that ensures that as far as we are concerned these continue to be
peoples without history. The paradox of the critique of Americanization is
that in essence it is itself a form of Americanization. The paradox is that
by claiming all the blame for modern culture Americans can in effect take
all the credit. Its starting point is that all consumer culture is in some respect
deeply American. I have already noted that none of the goods in my admit-
tedly fictional case were of US origin. The absurdity of this was brought
home to me when I reviewed a book called Re-Made in Japan (Tobin, 1992).
This was a series of studies about consumer culture in Japan. It makes clear
that, notwithstanding the obviously huge contribution that the Japanese
have made to the production of contemporary consumer goods, the Japan-
ese had managed to convince themselves that consumer culture is actually
something that had come to them from America and was a threat to authen-
tic Japaneseness for this reason.
Potentially this denial of the contribution of the rest of the world to
the production of modern culture is a disastrous state of affairs since as the
people of each region of the world become users of commodity culture,
they come to feel that they have become somehow less authentic, that this
238
culture is not really theirs however much they possess it. I remember per-
ceiving the pathology of this when talking to a Trinidadian who, during the
oil boom, had purchased 25 pairs of jeans. However many pairs he pur-
chased, he could never really possess them, since jeans would always remain
American and he was not. What is being exported is the sense of alienation.
When studying in Trinidad I took as my starting point the sentiments
expressed in the novel The Mimic Men by V.S. Naipaul (1967). Naipaul
appeared to be suggesting that without a deep history of their own, this
mixture of displaced peoples have no hope of ever being other than mimics
of the commodity culture and pretensions that are developed elsewhere. It
is the relentless superficiality of this constant emulation that is ridiculed in
his work. It is not that surprising that Naipaul later finds himself almost
inexorably drawn to the region of Stonehenge – the wellspring of precisely
the one culture he does regard as authentic, that of Britain. In an inspiring
book, The Enigma of Arrival (1987), he starts to come to terms with his real-
ization that he had in fact simply refused to countenance the authenticity
of change and the fluidity of culture that was evident even around Stone-
henge. Only then could he start to think of Trinidad itself as at least poten-
tially authentic.
Much of my own fieldwork in Trinidad has been an attempt to demon-
strate that consumption can be a process for the construction of inalienable
and authentic culture from a regional and not just an individual perspec-
tive. I deliberately wrote about the most tainted and least likely examples
of local culture: a soap opera produced in the US, Coca-Cola, the cel-
ebration of Christmas, the workings of capitalist firms and most recently
the internet (Miller, 1994, 1997; Miller and Slater, 2000). In each case I
emphasized what might be called a posteriori rather than a priori culture. That
is, we have to allow culture to be the product of the subsequent localiz-
ation of global forms, rather than only that which has some deep historical
and local tradition. I argued that not only must Coca-Cola be understood
in Trinidad as ‘a black sweet drink’ that comes from Trinidad itself (see also
Watson, 1997), but that capitalism itself, as a system of production and distri-
bution, is actively consumed and localized as much as the goods it produces.
Even the latest example of evident globalization – the internet – turns into
a powerful instrument for establishing the specific qualities of highly
parochial and national cultural practices as well as objectifying a form of
strident nationalism. By the same token I have tried to focus on the Trini-
dadian export not just of music and style but of company managers and
web designers.
My conclusion is that the critique of Americanization has actually
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