Quiz 2- Consumer Culture

Harvey Molotch

• Anthropologists seek interconnections

• Interconnections include cultural variations

• Interconnections are essential to consumer culture

Why do anthropologists say critics are wrong?

• That producers rely on stereotypes of consumers

• People assume consumption is always bad

  • Not constructive, creative, or positive

• Critics ignore interconnections

  • Ignore that we connect immaterial values (imagination, love, aesthetics) to material goods

Why do critics not see the interconnections?

Critics ignore what consumers do with the stuff the buy

Michel de Certeau

• Consumption is production

• Consumers make something when they use goods

• Consumers produce meanings of objects and of themselves, thus producing society

Materiality

• Focuses on relationships between humans and things

• Examines what people do with things

• Redefine consumption: living with things

Tim Dant

• Consumption is how we fit consumer goods into our ways of living

• Living with things contributes to our social life

  • Positive and essential human interactions with consumer goods

Epistemic Fallacy

• Reality coincides with our knowledge of reality

• Anthropology rejects this

Goal of Anthropology

Using comparison to understand similarities and differences among world’s peoples

Culture

• Not customs, beliefs, or rules

  • People have “agency” a choice among alternative actions

• What people do produces and reproduces cultures

  • Beliefs, values, and attitudes emerge from people’s actions

  • What people do depends on what they did

• Cultures have histories

• Culture constantly emerges from repeated practices of a group

What do people do?

They engage in practices as they pursue their projects

Practices

• Meaningful actions that are connected to other practices

• Drawn into projects

  • Routine, strategic, big, small, one person or multiple, short or long term

Projects

• Shaped by cultural values

• Require interconnections with things and other people

• Create “social fields”

Social Field

• We take on different social roles in various fields

• Relationships shift in various fields

Sociality

• Social dimensions of action that are constantly emerging in social fields

• Dependent on materiality

Rethinking the “Great Divide”

• What people do in social fields blurs that divide

Material Culture

• Things that people make or modify

• Different cultures have different material cultures

• Intangible material culture exists

Ian Woodward

• 3 Case Studies of Special Objects

• Special objects have special relationships with their owners

  • Important for different reasons

• Objects act on subjects and have effects on people

Goods

• Exchangeable

• Commodities

• Merchandise

Focal Object

• Marker of identity

• Sense of self

Daniel Miller

• Theory of Materiality:

  • People act on objects and objects act on people

  • Objects do social work and help create sociality

  • Rejects the Modernist divide

• Studying consumption means studying the effects consumer goods have on people

• Anthropologists should show how the things that people make, make people

The Great Divide

• Age of Reason created the divide between subjects and objects

• Divide determines the morality of relationships

  • Human-human relationships are proper, real, moral

  • Human-object relationships are suspicious- false, inauthentic, deceptive

Ontology of the Great Divide

• Ontology: The nature of being, of coming into existence, and the relationships of different kinds of beings

• Modernist ontology assumes two beings: subjects and beings

  • Alterity: Other in relation to the self/ego; a relational status

  • Humans (subjects) should express their alterity from objects

  • But humans may be objectified- denied the qualities that belong to subjects

Bruno Latour

• We have never been modern because “moderns” have never truly adopted the Great Divide

• Subjects can be objectified and objects can be subjectified

• Actant: Any entity able to “act” socially and have effects to do social work

New Ontology

• Relationism

• Relations determine subject or object status in some interactions depending on the social field

• Intersubjectivity is key to materiality

• Humans and non-humans can be subjects or objects

Consumer goods are good for us….

• Based on what we do with consumer goods

  • We construct alliances with them

  • We enroll them in our projects

  • Goods are actants and do social work

Distinguish the “one” out of the millions of goods produced and sold

• Related to alterity

• Distinguishing the individual (ego) from the collective (society)

The Rise of the Individual in the Modern Period

• Individualism, modernity, and consumerism arose together with capitalism

• Rise of professionals, merchants, and managers- new social categories that are not dependent on God or birth

  • Able to make your way in the world

• Knowledge is based on individual human reason

What is an Human “Individual”?

• Distinct legal and moral entity that happens to coincide with a human body

• Responsible for own decisions and actions

• The building block of society

Why is society a human invention?

• Humans first exist as individuals, them come together to make societies

Central problem in social theory

Relationship of the individual to society

Modern, Cartesian Ontology Idea of Individuals

Individuals are very different from society

Ontology of relationism

• Individuals make societies as societies make individuals

• Individual does not preexist society

• Social field determines whether individuality or group membership is more important

• We “enroll” things/consumer goods to express our individuality or group membership

The Singular and the Common

• Igor Kopytoff

• Singular Objects are unique, commodities are standardized

• Consumers buy commodities, then they are singularized, then they can become allies in our projects

  • This changes the commodity status

  • Decommoditized commodities are not alienating

  • Creates relationships with unique individual

• Recommoditized to end the singular relationship

• Singularization = individuation

Scotus vs Heidegger “Thisness”

• Scotus: Discrete characteristics that other objects do not have

  • Modern consumerism- everything is identical

• Heidegger: Objects are individuated by their relationships with others

  • Relational criterion, relational ontology

Commodities

• Standardized

• Exchangeable

• Merchandise

• Available for sale

• These goods are considered alienating by Marxism

Thisness of People and Goods

• Humans today are part of massive collective but we can individuate or singularize ourselves by decommoditizing commodities and forming relationships with them

• Creates unique thisness for objects and people

• By individuating our possessions, we emerge as individuals- how individuals are made

  • Major project we undertake throughout much of our lives