Miller Daniel Poverty Morality

Journal of Consumer Culture
http://joc.sagepub.com The Poverty of Morality

Daniel Miller Journal of Consumer Culture 2001; 1; 225 The online version of this article can be found at: http://joc.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/1/2/225
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Journal of Consumer Culture
THEMED SECTION: MORALITY AND CONSUMPTION
The Poverty of Morality

DANIEL MILLER University College London
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 benets 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. Thompsons 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 q consumer culture q materialism q morality q poverty
IF 20 YEARS AGO THE TOPIC OF CONSUMPTION was unduly neglected across all the disciplines, today our problem seems as much constituted by a deluge of writing about our relationship with goods as by the ood of goods themselves. I want to argue, however, that this ood of writings may only amount to a trickle of insights into the nature of consumption,
Copyright 2001 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Vol 1(2): 225243 [1469-5405] (200111) 1:2; 225243; 019741]
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consumers and consumer culture. The discrepancy between the quantity and the quality of research is largely a result of the central role taken by morality within consumption research which has led to this branch of studies becoming largely a site where academics can demonstrate their stance towards the world, rather than a place where the world stands as a potential empirical critique of our assumptions about it. I am going to write this in the form of a general commentary since I do not wish to cite any particular instances of that which I oppose. My excuse is that this case is unusual in that the people I most oppose are probably amongst the people I most admire and respect. I vastly prefer the overt moralists I critique here to the amoral or indeed immoral stances of those that they are critiquing. This is a plea to change style and direction, but I am trying not to lose too many friends as a result! My targets seem to be interdisciplinary including scholars in sociology, cultural studies, economics, and consumer studies. My characterization seems to me largely untrue of history and I would have to confess to a bias that makes me think/hope that anthropology tends to be more nuanced. The stance I am critiquing seems to me more characteristic, though by no means conned, to US writing, where I would argue there has been considerable continuity in both the form of moralism and the beliefs about why people consume. Take, for example, the centrality of status competition and emulation to both Veblen and the recent work of Schor (1998), with the main difference being the degree to which Schor sees this factor as having spread through the population at large. IS CONSUMPTION MATERIALISTIC? My basic position is fairly simple. It seems to me that writings about consumption 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 capitalism, 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 sense consumption has throughout history been seen as intrinsically evil. While production creates the world, consumption is the act whereby we use it up. Contemporary views perpetuate the historical sense of consumption as a wasting disease (Porter, 1993) whose diagnosis and prognosis are established; the only legitimate debate is about its cure. This is no great surprise since my argument follows closely the excellent history of this same moralism published by Horowitz (1985). Although he shows some changes in the nature of that moralism over time, it is the continuities in the basic ideological stance to the growth of consumerism that are striking. My case amounts to little more than the argument that this continues to be true today. That is, current writings about mega-malls and virtual reality shopping are recycling texts and arguments that may span millennia (e.g. Sekora, 1977). What all of this prevents is not only a proper encounter with actual studies of consumption and consumers but the emergence of an alternative critique based on that scholarly encounter, one that is sufciently nuanced to be appropriately targeted at the complex and contradictory processes of consumption that can actually be observed (Miller, 1998b, 2001). I consider all three of these assumptions: that consumption is materialistic, that it is capitalist and that it is incompatible with environmentalism. I also briey tackle some other baggage that trails in the wake of this moralism, in particular the assumption that mass consumption is a form of Americanization of the world. But the central issue is that of materialism. The critique of materialism is extraordinarily basic. There is an abiding sense in this literature that pure individuals or pure social relations are sullied by commodity culture. Indeed the central plank of the colloquial term materialism is that this represents an attachment or devotion to objects that is at the expense of an attachment and devotion to persons. There may be people for whom the problem of materialism is genuine. I am sure we should all be deeply sympathetic to the dreadful plight of cosmopolitans who feel they have too many pairs of shoes and feel guilty because their cereal wasnt really organic, or that they bought their child a present instead of spending the requisite amount of quality time with them. I guess there are many reasons why such people are appalled by the waste and quantity of consumer goods. But what is not acceptable is that the study of consumption, and any potential moral stance to it, be reduced to an expression of such peoples guilt and anxieties. What this obviates is a quite different morality, an ethics based on a passionate desire to eliminate poverty. We live in a time when most human suffering is the direct result of the lack of goods. What most of humanity desperately needs is more consumption,
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more pharmaceuticals, more housing, more transport, more books, more computers. I would consider myself a hypocrite if I saw the aspiration of any other person to at least the same level of consumption that I enjoy with my family as anything other than reasonable. And I have never and I really do mean never met an academic carrying out research on the topic of consumption who appeared to practise for their own family this substantially lower level of consumption. So at a time when more than half the world does not have basic goods I nd it hard to respect an approach to consumption whose only consideration is the superuity of commodities. Indeed I think we need to start with a fundamental question. Are most commodities of benet to most people? Let us start with material culture itself. I do not believe in the pre-cultural human being stripped of the material world. Even Eastern philosophies that see enlightenment as the elimination of desire do not support the colloquial term materialism, since their aims are to eliminate desire in respect to persons as much as to things, while the contemporary critique of materialism is supposed to liberate people from things in order for them to engage in pure social relations. My upbringing in anthropology starts from the opposite concept of authenticity. Our bedrock for authentic social relations tends to be Mauss (1954) who in The Gift starts with the example of children exchanged as though they were things and then considers things exchanged as though they were persons. That is to say, the authenticity of non-capitalist society is seen in the inseparable nature of persons and things. It is the trajectory towards capitalist society that leads to the development of an ideology of pure personhood (e.g. Sennett, 1976) and an increasing distance from things that during the Enlightenment started to be seen as radically other to persons, as something that could detract from rather than enhance our humanity. I do not wish to retrace my own steps to a philosophy of subjectobject relations which is presented as a general theory of objectication and then culture in Miller (1987). Sufce to say I take a dialectical view. Humanity and social relations can only develop through the medium of objectication. Subjects are as much the product of objects as the other way around (exemplied in Bourdieu, 1977). It is possible for these objects to become oppressive when they are sundered from us, as Marx suggests, under capitalism or, as Simmel suggests, when we can no longer assimilate them within the growth of the subjective. As with all culture, material culture is contradictory in its consequences for humanity but this should not detract from its centrality to the very possibility of our humanity. Clearly, however, this process is rather different in a society with a paucity of things from a society with an abundance. In our image of Australian Aboriginal material culture
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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 supercially related to so many things that we are deeply involved in none, leading to what he saw as the blas 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, supercial 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 ethnographic 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 authenticity 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 benecial, 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 consumption? 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 afuent 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 consumption. 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 nd 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 ethnographic explorations. The rst (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 nd a society that has seen a radical transformation over the last century in its ideals of love and care.Where once specic gestures based on social norms, such as owers 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 ne 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 nds the one article that satises this subtle and exacting need. A woman who feels her boyfriend has paid sufcient 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 Trinidadians, just like Australian Aborigines, are concerned to nd 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 suggested 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 consumption, 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 perspective of the people one is working with, whether Londoners or Trinidadians 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 superciality is impossible. For all I know if I carried out eldwork in parts of Los Angeles I would nally encounter these, as it were, poor rich materialists, who have lost the capacity for anything other than supercial 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 eldwork 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 nd people who have sacriced 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 difculty 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 difculty in establishing 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 peoples 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 Veblens 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. Its 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 interested in consumption as a stance towards an often glib comment on the morality of the zeitgeist. In this respect there remains a considerable distinction 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 accentuate 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 rst 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 capitalism 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. 199200) that the cornerstone of historical research is the concept of experience that is a commitment to empathetically engage as closely as possible with peoples
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experience of their time. While morality and theory seem to require no such encounter (they already know what they are against), the ethnographic enquiry I wish to promote, and the historical enquiry promoted by Thompson, represent a quest for an empathetic enquiry into experience. This is why I would argue today that the empirical encounter has actually become the proper source of contemporary radicalism as against the spurious claims to radicalism from theory and morality. Yet, rounded scholarship that is devoted to communicating the humanity of the consumer not using them merely to test hypotheses remains conspicuously rare in any of the disciplinary researches into consumption. This is why it is equally important not to assume that consumption under capitalism is mere capitalist consumption. Thompson had no doubt that he was studying capitalism. But he never allowed his portrayal of the English working class to be merely a pawn in the game of critiquing capitalism. Indeed his primary task was to rescue the portrayal of the working people and return them to the esh and blood humanity of experience. It was the theorists who had reduced the proletariat to simply a motif to be deployed within radical rhetoric. Similarly the task today is to rescue the humanity of the consumer from being reduced to a rhetorical trope in the critique of capitalism. The moralistic critique of consumption actually dehumanizes and fetishizes the consumer, and thereby serves the cause of the very capitalism it claims to critique. Thompsons portrayal of the working class never denied the possibility of their own perspicacity and sense of struggle. In my rst work on consumption (Miller, 1987) my aim was precisely to argue that it is not just a bunch of enlightened academics who feel alienated and cheated by the excesses of capitalism. Most people feel that they tend to be dehumanized and alienated from the vast scale and mechanized form of modern mass production. For this reason modern consumption should not be dismissed as merely the end point of a process which is used to characterize capitalism as a whole. Rather I argued that consumption was the very means that people used to try and create the identity they feel they have lost as labourers for capitalism, using the mass of goods to counter the homogenization and massivity of capitalist production. Far from expressing capitalism, consumption is most commonly used by people to negate it. To merely critique it as the creature of capitalism is therefore to ignore the practice of actual consumers. But the moralists who need to use consumption for their critique of capitalism cannot understand that for ordinary people consumption is actually the way that they confront, on a day-to-day basis, their sense of alienation.
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The conception of materialism held by Karl Marx, for example, could not have been more distinct from that employed within much critique of modern consumption. As recently pointed out by Stallybrass (1998), Marx saw that the problem for the proletariat was that they were sundered from people because they were sundered from things. Marxs enemy was poverty and the lack of possessions. He fully recognized the vital role of material culture within the development of social and cultural relations. The contemporary concept of materialism was quite alien to Marx himself, since even a cursory knowledge of his life suggests that he was very far from being any kind of an ascetic (Wheen, 1999). By contrast the western Marxism of the 1970s embraced a version of asceticism that assumed that contemporary material culture because it is created by capitalism is thereby tainted and will pollute those who live with it and through it. This asceticism proved its undoing. It allowed the political right wing to associate socialism with poverty. This ascetic left became deeply unpopular in a world where the actual proletariat still considered itself to be engaged in a struggle for a basic standard of living. This opened the way to the victory of the right-wing governments of Reagan, Thatcher and their ilk. More recently a reaction to this asceticism appeared in the form of a branch of cultural studies that seemed to celebrate modern consumerism as quite the opposite a kind of heroic form of resistance or appropriation that was inevitably benecial. The profundity of Thompson and Williams did not prevent a move whereby mass culture became popular culture and, merely because it was practised by working people, it was viewed as somehow authentic and noble. Materialism in the sense employed by academics such as Thompson is precisely what we should embrace. It is a commitment to the unity of thought and experience, to our grounded existence (Thompson, 1978: 210). The problem with the critics of consumption is not that they are too materialist what they see as the doomed condition of the world. To my mind the central problem of research on consumption is that most of the researchers are simply not materialist enough. They show little sense of the more profound kind of materialism that genuinely critical academic enquiry has tried to foster over the last century, as exemplied by researchers such as E.P. Thompson. They are insufciently steeped in the materiality of ordinary experience and conduct insufcient eldwork on social relations and material culture as human praxis. Much of what is developing in the contemporary critique of consumption is therefore replaying all that went wrong in the development of the European-based western Marxist critique of capitalism of 20 years ago, with exactly the
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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 production. Numerous little crafts are ne as a personal hobby, but as an economic foundation they are simply a recipe for increasing poverty. William Morris produced marvellous craft works, but I dont know many people who can afford to buy them. My own stance derives from the traditions of European 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 longterm benet 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 afuent societies most people do not feel their needs have been fullled (e.g. Segal, 1998). It saw industrialization as having the potential for decreasing hours of work. The problem has been the decline in these developments as against the growing inuence of a US model that is driven by the stock market and short-term nancial 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 specic 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 inequality or higher pressures on work; what is required is a politics that remains consistent in regarding human welfare as its goal. A CRITIQUE OF THE AMERICANIZATION CRITIQUE Imagine that we are carrying out a study of contemporary consumption amongst the middle class in Thailand (it could equally well be Nigeria or Sri Lanka). We have documented the involvement of this class in a wide range of modern consumer products. We have watched their kids watching Pokemon, we have seen the man in the family nally able to afford that Mercedes-Benz he has had his eyes on for some time. We observe a party well lubricated with bottles of whisky. After accumulating our evidence we write an academic article using this as a case study in Americanization.
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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) originate 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 commodication 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 commodity 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 materials 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 inicted 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 academic production. Indeed what such articles mainly serve to accomplish is the continued domination of a particular US stance on the topic of consumption 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 benet of one groups moral stance. My argument rests on the degree to which the critique of Americanization 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 exception 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 produced 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
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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 rst 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-colonialism), capitalism or American inuence. 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 passionate 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 admittedly ctional 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 Japanese had managed to convince themselves that consumer culture is actually something that had come to them from America and was a threat to authentic 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
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culture is not really theirs however much they possess it. I remember perceiving the pathology of this when talking to a Trinidadian who, during the oil boom, had purchased 25 pairs of jeans. However many pairs he purchased, 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 superciality of this constant emulation that is ridiculed in his work. It is not that surprising that Naipaul later nds 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 realization that he had in fact simply refused to countenance the authenticity of change and the uidity of culture that was evident even around Stonehenge. Only then could he start to think of Trinidad itself as at least potentially authentic. Much of my own eldwork in Trinidad has been an attempt to demonstrate that consumption can be a process for the construction of inalienable and authentic culture from a regional and not just an individual perspective. I deliberately wrote about the most tainted and least likely examples of local culture: a soap opera produced in the US, Coca-Cola, the celebration of Christmas, the workings of capitalist rms 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 localization 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 distribution, 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 specic 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 Trinidadian 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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become one of the most pernicious examples of Americanization. I suspect peoples throughout the world are thoroughly oppressed by a critique of Americanization which constantly tells them that the culture they increasingly inhabit can never be theirs and denies any role they may have played in its production. Indeed we have reached the absurd stage when the only activity that is granted authenticity for most of the world is that of resistance. CONCLUSION: THE MORALITY OF POVERY AGAINST THE POVERTY OF MORALITY Nothing in my experience of eldwork, whether in peasant villages in India or state housing in London, suggests to me that there are social benets to poverty. I cannot accept that the day-to-day struggle of most of the people of this world to increase their income is deluded. My problem is rather why the branch of academic enquiry I am concerned with seems to start from the premise that goods are to the detriment of their owners. I can only explain this by the following logic. First that many of these academics belong to that tiny class that really do feel they have enough. Second that many of them come from a historical tradition in which the entrepreneurial production of wealth developed in and through a protestant ideology of asceticism. That Weber remains the best foundation for analysing the dominant ideology of these academics is conrmed historically by Horowitz and remains evident today. Indeed there are yet older roots in the fear of consumption as an intrinsically destructive activity, the place where objects are used up. Third it seems fair to add that the fear of materialism is shared by most people around the world even during their pursuit of possessions. What has been ignored are the measures most people take as consumers to counter the anti-social potential of their material culture (see Gell, 1986, and Wilk, 1989, on the role of the house in this regard). Instead I would argue that the proper starting point for the study of consumption is precisely this and several other contradictions that seem fundamental both to consumption and modern social relations. What wealth brings with it is not some simple good or bad effect but the clearer emergence of historical contradictions, for example, the incompatibility of a sense of freedom and the desire for social reciprocity, or the replacement of the interests of consumers by a host of virtual consumers such as auditors, consultants, economists and litigious groups that claim to stand on behalf of consumers but usurp their interests. These contradictions are to my mind much closer to the actual struggles of contemporary consumers (see Miller, 2001).
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In this article I have not dealt in any detail with environmentalists critiques, basically because I accept them as a proper concern for the welfare of our descendants and our responsibility to our environment. But even this critique is weakened when it becomes a front for an ascetic repudiation of the need for goods per se. At this point it may become an enemy rather than an ally of the struggle over inequality and poverty, such as when the need to show how structural adjustment results in the removal of welfare provision for the poor is lost in a tide of green concerns about the World Trade Organization or when forest conservationists turn a blind eye to the needs of impoverished forest dwellers. There is no reason, however, for environmentalism merely to follow the ancient suspicion of consumption as that process which uses up resources and which thereby labels it an intrinsic evil. A genuine measure of sustainability that welcomes the ability of science to nd methods to increase wealth without harming the planet is surely compatible. Similarly the desire to give credit to the way consumers consume and the authenticity of some of their desire for goods need not detract from the academic critique of the way companies attempt to sell goods and services, or exploit workers in doing so. I see nothing in this article that contradicts, for example, the recent critique launched by Klein (2001). Finally I certainly hope that there is nothing in this article which would suggest that I have any desire to reduce the centrality of morality to the academic analysis of consumption. My own starting point in seeking to become a professional academic was Habermas (1972) argument against the illusion of such a morally neutral academia. What I have attacked in this article is the poverty of that morality that in its desire to attack materialism has increasingly separated itself from a consideration of the experience of poverty, the attack on inequality, the cry of injustice, and the need to increase the standard of living. In short an admission that among other things poverty is constituted by a lack of material resources. This may be properly tempered by environmentalist concerns, where these remain directed at the welfare of populations as well as that of the planet. What we learn from the academic study of consumption is not that material culture is good or bad for people. Rather we learn that people have to engage in a constant struggle to create relationships with things and with people, and there is much to be gained from an empathetic documentation of those struggles. In the meantime a literature that allows the anxieties of the rich to obscure the suffering of the poor and seems constantly to assume that goods are intrinsically bad for people is simply not my idea of a moral approach to the topic of consumption. It is rather a sign of an academic discipline that has lost touch with what it purports to study.
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References
Bourdieu, P. (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clark, G. (2000) Pension Fund Capitalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cross, G. (1993) Time and Money. London: Routledge. Gell, A. (1986) Newcomers to the World of Goods, in A. Appadurai (ed.) The Social Life of Things, pp. 11038. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Habermas, J. (1972) Knowledge and Human Interests. London: Heinemann. Henwood, D. (1997) Wall Street. New York: Verso. Horowitz, D. (1985) The Morality of Spending. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Hutton, W. (1996) The State Were In. London: Vintage. Klein, N. (2001) No Logo. London: Flamingo. Mauss, M. (1954) The Gift. London: Cohen and West. Miller, D. (1987) Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Oxford: Blackwell. Miller, D. (1988) Appropriating the State on the Council Estate, Man 23: 35372. Miller, D. (1994) Modernity: an Ethnographic Approach. Oxford: Berg. Miller, D. (ed.) (1995) Acknowledging Consumption. London: Routledge. Miller, D. (1997) Capitalism:An Ethnographic Approach. Oxford: Berg. Miller, D. (1998a) A Theory of Shopping. Cambridge: Polity. Miller, D. (1998b) A Theory of Virtualism, in J.G. Carrier and D. Miller (eds) Virtualism:A New Political Economy. Oxford: Berg. Miller, D. (2001) The Dialectics of Shopping. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Miller, D. and Slater, D. (2000) The Internet:An Ethnographic Approach. Oxford: Berg. Munn, N. (1973) Walpiri Iconography. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Myers, F. (1986) Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute Press. Naipaul, V.S. (1967) The Mimic Men. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Naipaul, V.S. (1987) The Enigma of Arrival. London: Viking. Nove, A. (1983) The Economics of Feasible Socialism. London: George Allen and Unwin. Porter, R. (1993) Consumption: Disease of the Consumer Society, in J. Brewer and R. Porter (eds) Consumption and the World of Goods. London: Routledge. Roberts, R. (1973) The Classic Slum. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Sahlins, M. (1974) Stone Age Economics. London: Tavistock. Schor, J. (1992) The Overworked American. New York: Basic Books. Schor, J. (1998) The Overspent American. New York: Harper Perennial. Segal, J. (1998) Consumer Expenditure and the Growth of Needs-Required Income, in D. Crocker and T. Linden (eds) The Ethics of Consumption, pp. 17697. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littleeld. Sekora, John (1977) Luxury:The Concept in Western Thought: Eden to Smollett. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Sennett, R. (1976) The Fall of Public Man. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Simmel, G. (1978) The Philosophy of Money. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Stallybrass, P. (1998) Marxs Coat, in P. Spyer (ed.) Border Fetishisms. London: Routledge. Thompson, E.P. (1978) The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays. London: Merlin Press.
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Tobin, J. (ed.) (1992) Re-Made in Japan. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Watson, J. (1997) Golden Arches East. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Wheen, F. (1999) Karl Marx. London: Fourth Estate. Wilk, R. (1989) Houses as Consumer Goods, in H. Rutz and B. Orlove (eds) The Social Economy of Consumption, pp. 297322. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Wolf, E. (1982) Europe and the People without History. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Daniel Miller teaches material culture at the Department of Anthropology at University College London. He is currently conducting eldwork on the concept of value in the contemporary political economy. Recent books include Capitalism: An Ethnographic Approach (Berg, 1997); A Theory of Shopping (Polity/ Cornell University Press, 1998); Virtualism: A New Political Economy (ed.), with J. Carrier (Berg, 1998); The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach, with Don Slater (Berg, 2000); Car Cultures (ed.) (Berg, 2001); and The Dialectics of Shopping (Chicago University Press, 2001). Address: Department of Anthropology, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK. [email: d.miller@ucl.ac.uk]
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