Immaculate Consumption - Springer Link

International Journal of Historical Archaeology, Vol. 3, No. 3, 1999

Immaculate Consumption: A Critique of the "Shop till you drop" School of Human Behavior LouAnn Wurst1 and Randall H. McGuire2

Consumer behavior and choice models have assumed a major role in historical archaeology. Recent interest in consumption is an honest attempt to move beyond an emphasis on production. Consumer models have clear material referents, making them useful in historical archaeology. These models, however, separate production from consumption, and privilege the autonomous individual as the preferred unit of analysis. They also reinforce and validate ideologies that obscure inequalities and power relations in modern society. For us the important issue is how people reproduce themselves as social beings. Focusing on social reproduction integrates both production and consumption. KEY WORDS: consumerism; ideology; social reproduction; class. INTRODUCTION Consumption has assumed a major role in American society. The phrase "Shop till you Drop" has become commonplace and many of us define ourselves as consumers first and producers second if at all. A shirt emblazoned "Work till you drop" would never appear under an American's Christmas tree. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that these ideas have found their way into historical archaeology. The goal of recent interest in consumption is to move beyond a simple emphasis on production and capture the complexity of everyday life. Consumption models also have a clear material referent, making them applicable within the limitations of historical archaeology. However, these models also conceal implicit dangers; they reify the separation of production from consumption, and privilege the autonomous individual as the preferred unit of analysis. At the most fundamental level, using these models 1 Department 2

of Anthropology, SUNY— Brockport, Brockport, New York, 14420. Department of Anthropology, Binghamton University, Binghamton, New York, 13902-6000. 191 1092-7697/99rt»00-0191$16.0a«>© 1999 Plenum Publishing Corporation

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reinforces and validates ideologies that obscure inequalities and power relations in modern society. In this paper, we suggest that the important issue is not what people consume, but how they produce and reproduce their everyday lives. Focusing on the process of everyday life has the advantage of integrating both production and consumption as traditionally conceived, and everyday life has clear material consequences that can be approached archaeologically. CONSUMER CHOICE MODELS IN HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY Consumer choice and consumer behavior models have assumed an important role in historical archaeology. Spencer-Wood started the ball rolling in 1987 with her edited volume Consumer Choice in Historical Archaeology. This early work was primarily interested in using consumer goods to define socioeconomic status, an approach that views material culture as the reflection of social stratification. This focus continued in Klein and LeeDecker's (1991) Historical Archaeology special issue where contributors emphasized general patterns and quantitative methods. More recent work has taken advantage of the burgeoning literature derived from post-modern theory on consumer behavior. Authors such as Danny Miller (1987, 1995, 1996), Grant McCracken (1988), and Arjun Appadurai (1986) focus on the consumer choices as symbolically meaningful action. Cook et al. (1996) borrow from this approach to move the discussion in historical archaeology away from consumption as an analytical tool, and toward shopping as a meaningful action. Space does not permit a complete review of this copious literature, although consumer behavior studies in historical archaeology generally share three basic traits: (1) they all place emphasis on gender and the household, (2) most utilize the autonomous individual as the basic unit of analysis, and (3) they focus on choice in consumer goods as symbolically meaningful action. A CRITIQUE OF CONSUMER CHOICE MODELS Our critique of these models of consumer choice take two forms. The first focuses on the reification and universalization of both individuals and choice. The second deals with the artificial separation of production and consumption as "separate spheres." Consumer behavior models generally view choice as an individual action. Group identity is therefore created as the aggregate of seemingly independent individual choices. The emphasis on "choice" within academia is part of the current trend to make people active participants in history and culture change. While this is a laudable goal, the rhetoric of consumer choice obfuscates the underlying social relations of power and control. As Ewen and Ewen (1992, p. 197) note, equating consumption and choice involves a very undemocratic assumption: "If consumption is choice, then choice is inevitably dependent on one's ability to consume.

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At a moment when, for many, basic economic survival is becoming difficult, this equation spells mass disenfranchisement. If choice is limited to the marketplace, those priced out have no voice." In some ways, the notion of "choice" actually trivializes human action. For example, Ewen and Ewen (1992, p. 196) suggest that discussing a women's decision to work as a "choice" supposes that women are immune from economic necessity. We argue that all individuals are not equivalent and that all choices are not similar. Because individuals are social beings, social position both restricts choices and makes choices possible. Consumer choice is therefore imbedded in social process rather than simply a cause of social processes. We find it self-evident that all people are not equivalent. In any social context only certain individuals—holders of privileged social status within certain social groups—will have broad freedom of choice. The ability of certain social groups and social positions within groups to choose is restricted by material and social parameters. Broad freedom of choice implies access to ample resources, such as land, money, and implements of production. A wealthy, nineteenth-century New York farmer may choose whether or not to expand his dairy herd, buy a new combine, or build a new house, but the farmer with only ten acres will have none of these choices. Or, to use a modern example, if you can afford to spend $50,000 on a car your choices are overwhelming, but if you can only afford to spend $1,000 they are extremely meager. Choices are restricted by social relationships of dominance and subordination. The female head of a nineteenth-century middle-class household can choose the dishes her family will dine from, while her domestic servant has no choice but to use what she is given. Custom or cultural norms also structure what choices are available. Many Americans continue to eat turkey and drink egg nog every Christmas. The legal structure will also deny some individuals and groups choices while granting them to others. Before the passage of women's property acts in the nineteenth century, women could not own land in their own right, obviously limiting her choices. In the antebellum south, a plantation owner could choose between buying new furniture and buying a slave, while the enslaved persons had no such choice because they were legally commodities. To put all of this perhaps too simply, choice is a privilege of the powerful and the well to do. Perhaps the most pernicious result of failing to recognize that people's choices are restricted is the use of choice to blame the victim. We have probably all had students in our classes who have announced that poor people "choose to be poor," "choose to be on welfare," or "choose to have more children" to continue exploiting social welfare programs. If human behavior is determined by choice, then those that fail, are exploited, or suffer, must do so because they have made bad choices, not because they are trapped in social and material realities that constrain and oppress them. Choices are socially and culturally channeled: symbolic choice does not equal autonomous choice. Liz Cohen (1982) discusses how at the beginning of this

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century immigrant working class families had different ideas of home life than liberal reformers and resisted attempts to have the reformers aesthetic imposed on them. Choices are symbolic because they are socially created and define an individual in a field of social identities. Social identity shapes an individual's likes and dislikes. Individuals can and do manipulate their identity through role violations, but they do so in a field defined by social identities. This "play" at the individual level does not change the structure of defined social identities (Zavarzadeh, 1995). Social identities are created by people; by the complex interactions both within and without groups. Social identities are reproduced, creating patterning, and this is what archaeologists study. In addition to the fact that not all individuals are equal, it is also true that not all choices are equal. The June 8, 1998, New York Times (Kristoff, 1998) reported the contemporary dilemma of Ban Wan Yai of Thailand who had to decide between buying food for her daughter or paying for a lifesaving operation for herself. She chose to feed her daughter. This is not the same type of choice as "Do I buy a Mercedes or a BMW?" Choices vary in kind and in magnitude. Some may be trivial, "Do I eat dark or light turkey meat for Christmas dinner?" Whereas other choices are life defining, "Do we continue to struggle and survive here or cash everything in for tickets to America?" Social position, power, and wealth alters the situation so that the same choice does not have the same significance for all. If food makes up 75% of a household's expenses, choosing what to buy for dinner involves a different set of calculations, significances, and alternatives than if food represents only 20% of the available income. Choices occur within social, cultural, and economic relationships, and thus they always affect other people. This is clearest in the case of slavery, where people are the commodity. A modern consumer may choose to buy Nike sneakers made in an East Asian sweatshop based on price, style, and symbolic meaning, yet the consequence of this choice is the continued exploitation of sweatshop workers and the erosion of better paid jobs for American workers. Focusing the analysis on the consumer's choice rather than the social relations that it is part of obscures the consequences our choices have on other people. Most consumer behavior models are based on the dichotomous separation of production and consumption. Production refers to the world of work while consumption is a referent for the domestic realm. Gibb (1996, p. 22) recognizes that the separation of production and consumption is based on twentieth-century biases and may not describe everyday life in the past, yet argues that he is only interested in consumption. McCracken cleverly maintains the distinction while redefining consumption as the entire dichotomy "to include the processes by which consumer goods and services are created, bought, and used" (McCracken, 1988, p. xi). All consumption theorists preface their arguments with the caveat that production and consumption are linked; we argue instead that they are but two manifestations of the same thing.

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The distinction is maintained because it is assumed to be difficult to link the domestic world to larger social concerns. Many researchers view consumer behavior models as a middle range theory that provides the key to linking socioeconomic status, gender, class, and so forth to the household. Many scholars have utilized consumer behavior models as the means to approach gender. Recognizing the importance of women and the female sphere has lead directly to models arguing for the importance of consumption. This approach reifies the idea that the separation of production and consumption is linked to gender; production equals male while consumption equals female. Ironically, this situation actually trivializes women and gender because in any dichotomous separation one element must be dominant; therefore, consumption is seen as the lesser of the two (Jay, 1981). Many theories of consumer choice originate in an attempt to transcend the idea that production, and therefore the male sphere, is determinate. We share the goal of emphasizing the importance of gender and the domestic sphere, but reject the ideas of the separation of production and consumption and the gendered association of these spheres. Instead, we would argue that these issues are best approached through the study of the production and reproduction of everyday life. As Godelier (1986, p. 1) points out, humans do more than live in society, they must make society to live. Humans make society in their everyday lives.

SOCIAL REPRODUCTION Social reproduction is a complex phenomena. It entails the biological procreation of new humans, the socialization of these individuals and the reproduction of social relationships. This occurs both intergenerationally, with the raising of children, and intragenerationally, as individual's social relationships change with age. The process takes place within a dynamic, constantly changing cultural, social, and material context. People never simply replicate what has gone before but must constantly reinvent and modify their social relationships to reproduce them. Like consumption, reproduction has often been seen in opposition to production. In this opposition reproduction involves unchanging female domestic activities that support the dynamic male realm of production. Over 20 years of feminist scholarship has shown the dichotomy and the assumption of a passive domestic sphere driven by a dynamic productive realm to be false. People must produce things to live and reproduce, but they must also reproduce themselves and their social relations that they enter into in order to engage in production. Thus, production and reproduction are not separate activities, spheres, or realms but simply two aspects of the same process, which we would call everyday life. Our emphasis on the production and reproduction of everyday life subsumes many of the same processes as theories of consumer choice but it discards any notion that these processes are autonomous. People produce things to consume,

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consume things to produce, consume things in the process of social reproduction, and produce social beings and social relationships. Thus, the issue is not what people buy, but the social relations that enable and constrain what they buy.

WHY ARE CONSUMER CHOICE MODELS SO POPULAR? Because of the popularity of consumer choice models in historical archaeology, we think that it is important to examine where these ideas really come from and to try to understand why historical archaeologists accept them so freely. We would answer by saying that these ideas are part of the historically constituted ideology of modern capitalism. As such they embody taken-for-granted assumptions about human relations that mystify, reinforce, and propagate existing social relations (Larrian, 1995; Zavarzaheh, 1995; Eagleton, 1996). This ideology presents unique aspects of modern capitalism as being universal, and denies and obscures the oppositional nature of class groups in the capitalist system. While most scholars talk about the historical creation of the consumer culture, the dates for the origin of consumer culture have been pushed back to the eighteenth century (McKendrick, 1982), and even to the fifteenth and sixteenth century (Mukerji, 1983). The search for the "origins" of consumer culture results in essentializing consumption. At the most basic level, consumer choice models assume that "consumption" is a universal phenomena in United States history and that individuals have always defined their social and cultural selves through consumption. In contrast, we argue that consumption is historically constituted and globally positioned. People have always consumed. While this seems obvious, consumer theorists assume more; that consumption is about autonomous individuals acting through autonomous choices. The assumption of essentialized consumerism and that individuals create identity through consumption are products of capitalism. In their modern form, these ideas have a history that goes no further back in time than the 1920s. The assumptions of modern consumption are also products of the western Capitalist Core and have little or no reality in global peripheries. Stuart Ewen (1976, 1992, 1988) has examined the development of modern consumer culture in several of his books. By modern consumer culture he refers to the dominance of consumption as the means by which a majority of the population define their social and cultural identities. Ewen notes that it was only in the second half of the nineteenth century that identity became equated with consumption in the United States. In this era the middle and ruling classes differentiated themselves internally, and from the working and underclasses through their ability to consume durable goods (houses, coaches, appliances, dishes, etc.). The highest quality subsistence goods (food, clothing, etc.). This is what the turn-of-the-century sociologist Thorstein Veblen (1899) called "conspicuous consumption" and it supplanted earlier means of differentiating identity such as titles, wealth, land holding status, kinship, or legal status (i.e. slave vs. free).


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Working people and the underclass were distinguished by the fact that they did not have the resources to participate in this culture of consumption; they could consume little beyond their basic necessities. The rhetoric of consumption in the nineteenth century created a surface vision of equality and success that was at odds with the material process of its production. As Ewen (1988, p. 60) notes, "if factory industrialism was producing icons of material abundance for some, it was bringing misery into the lives of others." While the success of some was determined by the goods they had, for others, particularly the industrial workers, wealth was measured negatively by the goods they needed but did not have (Dawley, 1976, p. 149). Even for the middle classes, the material "success" of consumption was a shallow one. In essence, the material pretension of consumption "was more a social mask, claiming a power that was not theirs, than it was an achievement of real social power" (Ewen, 1988, p. 64). In this context, material consumption can be seen as a "symbolic fringe benefit" or "cultural wage," which allowed the "middle class" to identify materially with the upper classes, yet occupy a position in relation to power that was closer to that of the working classes (Ewen, 1988, p. 64). The false economic prosperity of the 1920s extended this culture of consumption for the first time to the working classes and gave a false start to modern mass consumer culture. Workers could now routinely purchase durable goods and could afford more choice in subsistence goods. This led to an ideology that replaced an emphasis on productive class relations with levels of consumption (Ewen, 1976, p. 26-30). The fact that most people could now consume created the illusion that the class differences of the earlier period had disappeared (McGuire, 1991). The new consumerist ideology held that American society was no longer divided by qualitative class differences, rather, only gradational differences in levels of consumption remained to mark group differences. Modern advertising that equated consumption with identity, worth, and social position arose in tandem with this change to mass produce the values that would drive the process. The basic class structure of the country had not, however, changed. Workers still toiled in factories, shops, and offices owned by others who derived profit from their labor. What had changed was consumption. The great depression reduced the resources of the working class and set back the rise of mass consumer culture but the immense prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s extended mass consumer culture throughout the working classes. At this same time American mass consumer culture spread throughout the core of the capitalist world to Europe and Japan (Ewen, 1976). The levels of wealth that exist today in the United States, western Europe, and Japan are immense in comparison to any other point in history. Even with the massive erosion of real wages for the working class over the last 20 years, most people in these societies have sufficient resources to significantly engage in a consumer culture; they truly can "shop till they drop" and people have an immense range of choices. This is not, however, a worldwide phenomena. Just as consumption in the nineteenth century did not characterize the way of life of the majority of Americans, modern consumption is not a global phenomenon.

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For the vast majority of people in the world today, consumption still means just coming up with the necessities of life and often having to choose between those necessities. More importantly, the ability of core consumers to consume is in large part based on the exploitation of workers in peripheral areas of the world. Middleclass American archaeologists have consumer choices, East Asian Nike workers do not. The reality of shopping in America is that it is actually the Nike workers that are "dropping." The ideology of consumerism creates an illusion of equality and sameness in core societies and represents the interests of the powerful as the interests of all. In modern core capitalist societies we are all consumers, except for a minority underclass that is dismissed as lazy and dependent. The general power to consume is viewed as everyone generally having power. We can see that differences in consumption are relative; some of us drive old Chevies and some of us drive BMWs, and thus the impression is created that the social differences between us are also relative and unimportant. This generates the very powerful illusion that we all have the same interests in the economic and social system; a rising tide raises all boats. The ideology defines our common interest as that of consumers. Obviously, consumers benefit if prices are lowered. But what about our interests as producers? Here we do not all have the same interest. If prices are lowered or maintained by depressing the real wages of workers, as they have been over the last 20 years, than workers will loose more than they gain. By the same logic, if auto production is shifted from unionized factories to nonunionized overseas plants, while production of computer software soars, unionized auto workers will suffer but knowledge workers in the computer industry will benefit from cheaper autos. But, we all know that although real wages for working people have been falling, prices for consumer goods continue to rise modestly. The real winners in the game are those people who own stock and profit from both the decline in wages and the modest rise in prices. The illusion that we are all consumers is reinforced by global processes. The contemporary culture of consumption in core societies depends upon the production of cheap consumer goods especially in the toy, electronics, textile, clothing, and shoe industries. Capitalists have shifted production in these industries to peripheral locations in Asia and Latin America where their workers do not receive adequate wages to participate in the consumer culture. The reality that the people who make our consumer goods cannot afford to buy them is hidden from consumers in the core because these workers are on the other side of the world. We therefore find the adoption of consumerist models by individuals who wish to use their research to challenge class, gender, and racial inequalities in the modern world particularly misguided. By embracing the logic, language, and symbolism of individual consumer choice they are in fact actively reinforcing that which they wish to critique. Just as brightly colored wrapping paper conceals the true nature of the gift, the focus on individual meanings and consumption masks

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