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Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities
"This book compiles and integrates highly innovative work aimed at bridging the fields of anthropology and consumer behavior." — Journal of Consumer Affairs "... fascinating... ambitious and interesting... " — Canadian Advertising Foundation Newsletter "... an anthropological dig into consumerism brimming with original thought... " — The Globe and Mail "Grant McCracken has written a provocative book that puts consumerism in its place in Western society — at the centre." — Report on Business Magazine "... a stimulating addition to knowledge and theory about the interrelationship of culture and consumption." — Choice "[McCracken's] synthesis of anthropological and consumer studies material will give historians new ideas and methods to integrate into their thinking." — Maryland Historian "The book offers a fresh and much needed cultural interpretation of consumption." — Journal of Consumer Policy "The volume will help balance the prevailing cognitive and social psychological cast of consumer research and should stimulate more comprehensive investigation into consumer behavior." — Journal of Marketing Research "... broad scope, enthusiasm and imagination... a significant contribution to the literature on consumption history, consumer behavior, and American material culture." — Winterhur Portfolio "For this is a superb book, a definitive exploration of its subject that makes use of the full range of available literature." — American Journal of Sociology "McCracken's book is a fine synthesis of a new current of thought that strives to create an interdisciplinary social science of consumption behaviors, a current to which folklorists have much to contribute." — Journal of American Folklore This provocative book takes a refreshing new view of the culture of consumption. McCracken examines the interplay of culture and consumer behavior from the anthropologist's point of view and provides new insights into the way we view ourselves and our society.
174 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1988
8 people are currently reading
262 people want to read
About the author
Grant McCracken
19 books49 followersI'm an anthropologist, born in Canada, now living in, and studying, the US. I divide my life into two halves. One is the writing half. The other is for clients: Netflix, the Ford Foundation, the White House, among others. My new book, out in late December from Simon and Schuster is called The New Honor Code.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
August 8, 2019
I was aware of a linkage between consumption and cultural identity (i.e., hippie/counterculture, business persons, construction/blue-collar workers, military, police/security, hospital/clinic, firemen, politicians, computer geeks, teenagers, Baby Boomers, hipsters, yippies, gangbangers, religious faith statement garments, race/gender/class identification, etc.) but I did not bother with or think of exploring how consumption might have become a historical driving force behind cultural change, technical progress, culture assimilation or displaced childhood emotions!
Remember the sled "Rosebud" from the iconic Orson Welles movie, Citizen Kane? Kane was the ultimate consumer forever seeking his, displaced, initial happiness and ecstacy from receiving his most beloved Christmas gift as a child.
'Culture & Consumption' by Grant McCracken, an academic review of consumption studies, made my awareness of buying into stuff concrete and visible, forcing what has been in front of my face about purchases and my cultural assumptions to the fore.
I have not been actively thinking about advertising and other media-induced purchases (go Hawks! - new uniform colors means I have to get that new t-shirt, right?) which have been simply background noise to me since my hippie wanna-be days (actually, I WAS really poor then) in the 1960's/1970's. Did you get that asymmetrical haircut yet? Which has to be maintained by a salon hair stylist every month. Or push those old straight-edged sweaters and tops to the back of your closet, replaced by new blouses and tops with edges going up and down like a rollercoaster ride. The old running shoes simply won't do if they can't light up when you walk on them! Or, omg, if they have the wrong color or decorations or manufacturer label! Who cares if they still are in good shape! Status, class identification, showy sign of wealth - WAY more important! MUST POST PHOTO TO INSTAGRAM NOW! Hah! Got a hundred more followers! The plastic surgery which must never be mentioned has paid off - social influencers are invited to the best parties! Must renew that spa membership...
I have avoided most of the inane and idiotic crazes (like platform shoes, Big Hair [an accident - my hair would not curl even with a permanent], the Tamagotchi pet craze (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamag...), and other such money-pit and some, more high-maintenance, consumption fads, recognizing them for what they were - temporary and media-driven (gluten-free for better health, even if you are not allergic! only a few pennies more even if our product never had any gluten in the first place!), but I have jumped in with both feet in many other fashion and cultural fads (pet rocks, anyone? shoulder-padded blouses? 'necessary' six-inch high heels for sexy-looking calfs? protein diets?)
Have any of you 'updated' your perfectly working ten-year-old refrigerators and stoves to the modern metallic, IOT connected kitchen appliances? https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/appl...
Remember 'planking'? Not all socially-manipulated consumerism requires an expenditure of money for status or class membership. I have photos of me lying on top of my van - at least, it didn't cost me anything!
Thankfully, I'm past all that (as I type on my updated faster expensive iPad, my fourth, and as my thoughts stray occasionally to wondering what ebook Prime Amazon is offering despite the urban convenience of three library systems I belong to within a 15-minute drive from my home) since I have become an elder, right?
Western consumption apparently became a thing because of England's Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603)! She used expenditure as an instrument of government, inspired by Renaissance Italy. Court became theater spectacle. Consumption communicated a Monarch's legitimacy, power and status. Going beyond the Italian aristocracy, she forced the English aristocracy to pay her bills for ostentation, squandering their fortunes, with a side effect of causing an end to the trickling down and sharing of the aristocracy wealth with their local serfs. She gave royal favors to those who paid her bills, making them dependants of the Court. She made expenditures a status symbol as well.
Family status, a badge of hereditary honor, was huge to the Tudors, and goods with a patina of age was a consumption status for them. The older a desk, a chair, table plate, etc. had been important. But the new requirement to buy new stuff to show status in Elizabeth's Court upended the keeping of old things for future generations and status. Instead, new stuff was the thing, which caused the aristocracy to buy mostly for personal gratification instead of the family or their local community.
Plus, a competitive spirit was deliberately aroused by Queen Elizabeth's machinations. Social wars commenced.
Gentle reader, you probably can see the social evolution of consumerism to our present time, right? Community hospitality, lifestyle uniformity, and social relationships were/are deeply affected by consumerism.
'Culture and Consumption' is a brief academic review of serious scholarship studies, not really for either in-depth or pop-culture readers. McCracken is summarizing results of studies looking at the "cultural and communicative properties of consumer goods." He wants to study "the relationship between consumer goods and social change...contribute to a long neglected inquiry into the full structural complexity of the North American social system...Braudel suggests that the modern West may have originated in a peculiar attitude toward consumer goods." "Western, developed societies have distinguished themselves as an ethnographic oddity by their willingness to submit to continual change. Unlike 'traditional' worlds, the modern West has made itself, in the words of Lévi-Strauss, a "hot" society, one committed by ideological principle to its own transformation through constant change..." "It has not been asked enough just how it is that the modern West manages so successfully to defy ethnographic precedent and survive in the face of this continual change. Nor is it often wondered how the West sustains it's commitment to change when conservative forces appear to predominant with such authority elsewhere in the human community." "Goods are in Sahlins's words an 'object-code'. They establish a medium in which cultural meaning can be variously manipulated. Goods establish an opportunity for a community to express and contemplate cultural meaning in a medium other than language, and to do so in a way that positively aids both the reform and the preservation of this meaning. Goods, as Sahlins's object-code, allow meaning to be made visible and they allow for its use as an agent of change and continuity. It is in these capacities that goods serve as a means by which the continual change of developed Western societies is both encouraged and endured."
"Consumer goods are able to accomplish this miracle for culture because, as we have noted in chapter 5, they capture the categories and principles of culture in a form that makes them ever present and newly convincing. When culture exists in goods, it is played out everywhere in the material world. Everywhere one looks, every man-made thing one touches, everything one sees is fashioned according to cultural categories and principles. In goods, culture makes itself ubiquitous."
"But goods are something more than a mere diacritic of culture. They do more than merely exhibit it. They are indeed very like an advertisement. They seem not only to describe but also to persuade. When culture appears in objects, it seems to make itself appear inevitable, as the only sensible terms in which anyone can constitute their world. Culture uses objects to convince."
"Groups who wish to reform society, to change culture, are often powerless in the face of this conservative aspect of goods. Radical groups may successfully dispute the political and social principles on which their society is founded. But it proves much more difficult to root out old ideas from their most secure and perhaps more persuasive loci, the physical objects of the material world. For instance, it is surely in part because of the thoroughness with which this society has inscribed the cultural categories of 'maleness' and 'femaleness' in the object code and material world, that it is so difficult to contend with the problem of sexism...sexist stereotypes are thoroughly grounded in even the subtlest details of everyday life and object code. It is in this capacity that the meaning in goods assumes a hegemonic significance."
"Material cultural makes culture material. It makes it palpable, present, and ubiquitous. To borrow the phrasing of the poet Hass, when culture is insinuated into our physical landscape, our housing, and its furnishing, the premises of its existence are also the premises of our existence. Idealogy and the material world are one."
"Some of their (consumer goods) power in this regard stems from the nature of their symbolism...They display the principles according to which they were constituted. They come appended with a record of the cultural co-ordinates according to which they and the concepts they signify were formed."
"This feature of objects gives them extraordinary significance for the study of the world of goods. To know that goods carry these cultural principles is to begin to understand how it is that goods serve as a kind of tableau in which meaning of this cultural universe is written...Here too goods may be seen to assume a 'hegemonic' significance. They can enter as meaning carriers into the rhetoric of persuasion with which one group wins the obedience of another."
"This significance is increased by the fact that goods communicate their meaning sotto voce. This makes them an especially effective and stealthy means for the communication of certain potentially controversial political messages. Communication through goods, these messages are largely hidden from conscious awareness of the recipient. They do nevertheless enter into consciousness, there to take up residence and exert their influence. For instance, messages that are communicated in this sureptitious manner can persuade an underclass of its 'unworthiness' without once presenting itself to the light of full scrutiny. The messages carried by consumer goods help diminish the possibility of close scrutiny, conscious understanding, and counterassertion.".
The author goes on to discuss how the object-coding of consumer goods can exercise fluidity, expanding to help societies accept new categories of meaning, such as in cultural attitudes toward adolescence (clothing, music), or gendered activities (my example: sports), or radical political dissatisfaction (my example: tattoos, hair styles); or, in other words, unintentional cultural assimilation. "It puts at the disposal of culture a semiotic device that gives familiar cultural co-ordinates to a novel situation."
"...goods are a creative medium in which invention can take place through experimentation with existing cultural meanings. In the other, goods serve as an opportunity for a group to engage in an internal and external dialogue in which changes are contemplated, debated, and then announced... opportunity for creativity and experimentation...means of the internal and external reflection and disclosure...[for example] radical feminists... settled for clothing worn by working-class men, thereby moving across cultural categories of both gender and class in pursuit of an appropriate set of symbols...novel messages... recombination of familiar material in unconventional ways."
Conclusion?
"The contribution made by goods to social change is not well understood...What can also be accomplished by this omnibus study is an understanding of one of the means by which this society survives as one of the most astonishing oddities in the ethnographic record: a society that makes change its constant, and radical transformation its rule of thumb."
I have lived through so many periods of social Sturm and Drang now. In my humble experience, I know Wall Street, commerce and industry will find a way to monitize and sell any deadly upheaval, with the end result of making whatever comes out of it wholly conventional and socially palatable and bourgeois, no matter whatever the political solution that happens to fall out of the current mayhem, murders, and injustice. Gentle reader, perhaps the current tense and important conversations over guns and immigration will eventually be inadvertently placed and re-solved by the usual interested entrepreneurial consumer market and their servitors. In my experience, they definitely "make it so".
Sigh.
This book has extensive Notes, References, and Index sections.
Remember the sled "Rosebud" from the iconic Orson Welles movie, Citizen Kane? Kane was the ultimate consumer forever seeking his, displaced, initial happiness and ecstacy from receiving his most beloved Christmas gift as a child.
'Culture & Consumption' by Grant McCracken, an academic review of consumption studies, made my awareness of buying into stuff concrete and visible, forcing what has been in front of my face about purchases and my cultural assumptions to the fore.
I have not been actively thinking about advertising and other media-induced purchases (go Hawks! - new uniform colors means I have to get that new t-shirt, right?) which have been simply background noise to me since my hippie wanna-be days (actually, I WAS really poor then) in the 1960's/1970's. Did you get that asymmetrical haircut yet? Which has to be maintained by a salon hair stylist every month. Or push those old straight-edged sweaters and tops to the back of your closet, replaced by new blouses and tops with edges going up and down like a rollercoaster ride. The old running shoes simply won't do if they can't light up when you walk on them! Or, omg, if they have the wrong color or decorations or manufacturer label! Who cares if they still are in good shape! Status, class identification, showy sign of wealth - WAY more important! MUST POST PHOTO TO INSTAGRAM NOW! Hah! Got a hundred more followers! The plastic surgery which must never be mentioned has paid off - social influencers are invited to the best parties! Must renew that spa membership...
I have avoided most of the inane and idiotic crazes (like platform shoes, Big Hair [an accident - my hair would not curl even with a permanent], the Tamagotchi pet craze (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamag...), and other such money-pit and some, more high-maintenance, consumption fads, recognizing them for what they were - temporary and media-driven (gluten-free for better health, even if you are not allergic! only a few pennies more even if our product never had any gluten in the first place!), but I have jumped in with both feet in many other fashion and cultural fads (pet rocks, anyone? shoulder-padded blouses? 'necessary' six-inch high heels for sexy-looking calfs? protein diets?)
Have any of you 'updated' your perfectly working ten-year-old refrigerators and stoves to the modern metallic, IOT connected kitchen appliances? https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/appl...
Remember 'planking'? Not all socially-manipulated consumerism requires an expenditure of money for status or class membership. I have photos of me lying on top of my van - at least, it didn't cost me anything!
Thankfully, I'm past all that (as I type on my updated faster expensive iPad, my fourth, and as my thoughts stray occasionally to wondering what ebook Prime Amazon is offering despite the urban convenience of three library systems I belong to within a 15-minute drive from my home) since I have become an elder, right?
Western consumption apparently became a thing because of England's Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603)! She used expenditure as an instrument of government, inspired by Renaissance Italy. Court became theater spectacle. Consumption communicated a Monarch's legitimacy, power and status. Going beyond the Italian aristocracy, she forced the English aristocracy to pay her bills for ostentation, squandering their fortunes, with a side effect of causing an end to the trickling down and sharing of the aristocracy wealth with their local serfs. She gave royal favors to those who paid her bills, making them dependants of the Court. She made expenditures a status symbol as well.
Family status, a badge of hereditary honor, was huge to the Tudors, and goods with a patina of age was a consumption status for them. The older a desk, a chair, table plate, etc. had been important. But the new requirement to buy new stuff to show status in Elizabeth's Court upended the keeping of old things for future generations and status. Instead, new stuff was the thing, which caused the aristocracy to buy mostly for personal gratification instead of the family or their local community.
Plus, a competitive spirit was deliberately aroused by Queen Elizabeth's machinations. Social wars commenced.
Gentle reader, you probably can see the social evolution of consumerism to our present time, right? Community hospitality, lifestyle uniformity, and social relationships were/are deeply affected by consumerism.
'Culture and Consumption' is a brief academic review of serious scholarship studies, not really for either in-depth or pop-culture readers. McCracken is summarizing results of studies looking at the "cultural and communicative properties of consumer goods." He wants to study "the relationship between consumer goods and social change...contribute to a long neglected inquiry into the full structural complexity of the North American social system...Braudel suggests that the modern West may have originated in a peculiar attitude toward consumer goods." "Western, developed societies have distinguished themselves as an ethnographic oddity by their willingness to submit to continual change. Unlike 'traditional' worlds, the modern West has made itself, in the words of Lévi-Strauss, a "hot" society, one committed by ideological principle to its own transformation through constant change..." "It has not been asked enough just how it is that the modern West manages so successfully to defy ethnographic precedent and survive in the face of this continual change. Nor is it often wondered how the West sustains it's commitment to change when conservative forces appear to predominant with such authority elsewhere in the human community." "Goods are in Sahlins's words an 'object-code'. They establish a medium in which cultural meaning can be variously manipulated. Goods establish an opportunity for a community to express and contemplate cultural meaning in a medium other than language, and to do so in a way that positively aids both the reform and the preservation of this meaning. Goods, as Sahlins's object-code, allow meaning to be made visible and they allow for its use as an agent of change and continuity. It is in these capacities that goods serve as a means by which the continual change of developed Western societies is both encouraged and endured."
"Consumer goods are able to accomplish this miracle for culture because, as we have noted in chapter 5, they capture the categories and principles of culture in a form that makes them ever present and newly convincing. When culture exists in goods, it is played out everywhere in the material world. Everywhere one looks, every man-made thing one touches, everything one sees is fashioned according to cultural categories and principles. In goods, culture makes itself ubiquitous."
"But goods are something more than a mere diacritic of culture. They do more than merely exhibit it. They are indeed very like an advertisement. They seem not only to describe but also to persuade. When culture appears in objects, it seems to make itself appear inevitable, as the only sensible terms in which anyone can constitute their world. Culture uses objects to convince."
"Groups who wish to reform society, to change culture, are often powerless in the face of this conservative aspect of goods. Radical groups may successfully dispute the political and social principles on which their society is founded. But it proves much more difficult to root out old ideas from their most secure and perhaps more persuasive loci, the physical objects of the material world. For instance, it is surely in part because of the thoroughness with which this society has inscribed the cultural categories of 'maleness' and 'femaleness' in the object code and material world, that it is so difficult to contend with the problem of sexism...sexist stereotypes are thoroughly grounded in even the subtlest details of everyday life and object code. It is in this capacity that the meaning in goods assumes a hegemonic significance."
"Material cultural makes culture material. It makes it palpable, present, and ubiquitous. To borrow the phrasing of the poet Hass, when culture is insinuated into our physical landscape, our housing, and its furnishing, the premises of its existence are also the premises of our existence. Idealogy and the material world are one."
"Some of their (consumer goods) power in this regard stems from the nature of their symbolism...They display the principles according to which they were constituted. They come appended with a record of the cultural co-ordinates according to which they and the concepts they signify were formed."
"This feature of objects gives them extraordinary significance for the study of the world of goods. To know that goods carry these cultural principles is to begin to understand how it is that goods serve as a kind of tableau in which meaning of this cultural universe is written...Here too goods may be seen to assume a 'hegemonic' significance. They can enter as meaning carriers into the rhetoric of persuasion with which one group wins the obedience of another."
"This significance is increased by the fact that goods communicate their meaning sotto voce. This makes them an especially effective and stealthy means for the communication of certain potentially controversial political messages. Communication through goods, these messages are largely hidden from conscious awareness of the recipient. They do nevertheless enter into consciousness, there to take up residence and exert their influence. For instance, messages that are communicated in this sureptitious manner can persuade an underclass of its 'unworthiness' without once presenting itself to the light of full scrutiny. The messages carried by consumer goods help diminish the possibility of close scrutiny, conscious understanding, and counterassertion.".
The author goes on to discuss how the object-coding of consumer goods can exercise fluidity, expanding to help societies accept new categories of meaning, such as in cultural attitudes toward adolescence (clothing, music), or gendered activities (my example: sports), or radical political dissatisfaction (my example: tattoos, hair styles); or, in other words, unintentional cultural assimilation. "It puts at the disposal of culture a semiotic device that gives familiar cultural co-ordinates to a novel situation."
"...goods are a creative medium in which invention can take place through experimentation with existing cultural meanings. In the other, goods serve as an opportunity for a group to engage in an internal and external dialogue in which changes are contemplated, debated, and then announced... opportunity for creativity and experimentation...means of the internal and external reflection and disclosure...[for example] radical feminists... settled for clothing worn by working-class men, thereby moving across cultural categories of both gender and class in pursuit of an appropriate set of symbols...novel messages... recombination of familiar material in unconventional ways."
Conclusion?
"The contribution made by goods to social change is not well understood...What can also be accomplished by this omnibus study is an understanding of one of the means by which this society survives as one of the most astonishing oddities in the ethnographic record: a society that makes change its constant, and radical transformation its rule of thumb."
I have lived through so many periods of social Sturm and Drang now. In my humble experience, I know Wall Street, commerce and industry will find a way to monitize and sell any deadly upheaval, with the end result of making whatever comes out of it wholly conventional and socially palatable and bourgeois, no matter whatever the political solution that happens to fall out of the current mayhem, murders, and injustice. Gentle reader, perhaps the current tense and important conversations over guns and immigration will eventually be inadvertently placed and re-solved by the usual interested entrepreneurial consumer market and their servitors. In my experience, they definitely "make it so".
Sigh.
This book has extensive Notes, References, and Index sections.
March 22, 2009
Unravels the history of consumerism/consumption which finds its genesis in the Elizabethan/Tudor Dynasty. Fascinating read; reveals that at first, consumption was used as a way to manipulate the masses. sad that our entire culture is now based on it.
highly recommend.
highly recommend.
October 20, 2021
This was a great, accessible book on the history of consumption, how objects take on meaning from culture, and theories for analyzing consumption. I felt constantly inspired by ideas new to me and was able to make many connections to my own consumption habits and current cultural references even though this book was published over 30 years ago! It also felt very neutral, compared to other cultural studies books which often lean either far left or capitalist optimist lol.
June 9, 2020
Fascinating!
Read
July 1, 2022Necessary read to understand the nature of goods and meanings.
December 6, 2008
Famous Diderot effect in here.
August 22, 2011
A classic connecting societal influences in our consumption behavior.
September 19, 2014
For my review of the book please go to http://ediblematters.wordpress.com/20...
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews