Elusive Consumption

Karin M. Ekström, Helene Brembeck

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781859737637
• eBook ISBN: 9781000180589
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

In the context of rising consumerism and globalization, books on consumption are numerous. These tend to be firmly rooted in particular disciplines, however sociology, anthropology, business or cultural studies and as a result often present a blinkered view. Charged with the mission of unravelling what consumption means and how it operates, the worlds leading experts were flown to a secluded location in Sweden to 'battle it out'. This pioneering book represents the outcome. Ranging from the 'little black dress' to on-line communities, Elusive Consumption challenges our very understanding of consumerism. How successful is the advertising world in manipulating our buying patterns? Does the global marketplace promote cultural homogeneity or heterogeneity? Is the West really more of a 'consumerist civilization' than other countries? Does the advertising of certain products influence a voters choice of political party? How are products associated and marketed to different genders? These controversial topics and many more are discussed. Covering virtually every aspect of the word 'consumerism', Elusive Consumption provides a state-of-the-art view of the highly commercialized society we inhabit today. Some might have it that consumers are unwitting pawns, completely lacking in agency. Others might argue that consumer choices are empowering and subtly shape production. Richard Wilk, Colin Campbell, John F. Sherry, Richard Elliott, Russell Belk, and Daniel Miller who offers the most persuasive argument in this battle royal?

Part I
Grasping the Topic

1
Morals and Metaphors: The Meaning of Consumption

Richard Wilk

Introduction

I was inspired by the provocative title ‘elusive consumption’ to delve into the vague, undefined and intangible nature of the concept of consumption that most social scientists use in their work. Consumption turns out to be one of those common-sense concepts that usually ‘goes without saying’, meaning that we rarely argue about whether something really belongs in the category. In practice, the harder you try to define the term, the fuzzier its meanings and boundaries become, which suggests that there is indeed something important hidden behind our casual agreement about its meaning.

In the process of trying to find the elusive meaning of consumption, I have encountered some familiar problems and issues. Scholars working on problems and issues of consumption have long noted the close linkage between consumption and morality. Almost every aspect of consumption is laden with moral value and meaning, so that attitudes and values towards consumption are shaped by moral and often religious values that have very little to do with acts of consumption themselves (the modern scholarship on this topic begins with Douglas 1966; see also, Horowitz 1988). My approach to defining consumption explains why moral issues are an inevitable aspect of consumption; they are built into the meaning of the term at a fundamental level.

Some have tried to define consumption as an activity specific to particular groups of people, sectors of society or sections of the economy. Others take a more abstract approach and see consumption as a process diffused throughout the world, defined as reducing or destroying matter, energy or order in a way that reduces their value to humans (Stern 1997). Both approaches pay little attention to the way people use the term in everyday speech, and assume that the scientific usage can be entirely divorced from the folk-meaning, a prospect we find both unlikely and unfruitful. To understand the meanings of consumption, we follow a suggestion by Belk, Ger and Askegaard in an important paper called ‘Metaphors of Consumer Desire’(1996), and use the tools of cognitive linguistics. This takes me far from my usual field of expertise in economic and historical anthropology, and I am not by any means a trained linguist or cognitive scientist. I have only been able to venture into the new field of cognitive linguistics with the help and guidance of George Lakoff, who is one of the intellectual founders of the discipline.

I have to add one further qualification, which is that my analysis is based entirely on American English. I suspect that many of the idioms and expressions have equivalents in other European languages, but how relevant this analysis is to other languages is an open question.

What is Cognitive Linguistics?

Cognitive linguistics is a relatively new discipline that cuts across the conventional fields of linguistics, cognitive science, mathematics and philosophy. Its tenets are stated in a series of works by George Lakoff and collaborators (Lakoff & Johnson 1980; Lakoff 1987; Lakoff & Johnson 1999); this is in turn based on work by cognitive psychologists like Rosch, anthropological linguists like Berlin and Kay, and ultimately the philosophy of Wittgenstein. I will provide a very compressed and partial tutorial in the discipline, since it forms the basis for my analysis of the category of consumption as a cognitive domain.

The classic theories of language and grammar tell us that the world is composed of discrete entities and concepts like ‘chairs’ and ‘balls’, all of which share a certain set of qualities. The category is determined by the minimum common list of shared qualities, for example four legs and a back. Cognitive linguistics says instead that concepts and categories are typically complex, often fuzzy, and without clear boundaries or common shared qualities. Instead they are structured in particular ways:

• They have a prototypical object or action at the centre – an idealized typical chair with four legs and a back, for example.
• Other members of the set can be more or less central, more or less chair-like, so membership may be graded rather than categorical.
• They often have a radial structure – the prototype is at the centre, and other members can each be related to the prototype in different ways. All members of the set are bound together by their relationship to the prototype, not their relationship to each other. Some instances of the category may be related to the central prototype through metaphor.

According to cognitive linguists, the categories of speech and thought are interconnected in many different ways. The most obvious, and most studied relationships are hierarchies and other typologies, so that, for instance, a stool is a kind of chair, or the seat is one of the parts of a chair. However, Lakoff finds these cases to be relatively trivial. The most important key to understanding the relationships between concepts is founded in the fundamental way the human brain works, which is often through metaphorical linkages between categories. Typically, we map abstract concepts and categories onto more concrete and physically experienced categories through metaphor. The concept is made tangible through a metaphorical linkage to a class of object with which we have direct physical experiences.

To use one of his examples, modern Americans have come to comprehend the abstract concept of time through a metaphorical link to resources, especially money (Lakoff & Johnson 1980: 7; Lakoff 1987: 209–10). Resources in general, and money in particular, are used not only in everyday speech, but also in the way we reason, as a common metaphorical source for time: we spend it, save it, waste it and so on. This is more than a linguistic curiosity; the qualities of money actually affect the way we behave towards time, which is treated as if it were divisible, valuable, measurable and interchangeable, as if each minute, like each penny, has exactly the same size and value. Metaphor therefore does a lot more than structure categories of speech.

Lakoff says that basic level concepts are often grounded in direct bodily experiences like pain or hunger that all human beings share. In addition, hundreds of ‘primary metaphors’ that we use both in reasoning and as the basis for action are also grounded in common everyday experiences, sometimes so common that they give rise to metaphors that arise spontaneously in many cultures around the world. Examples include: Desire is Hunger, Anger is Heat, and Achieving a Purpose is Getting a Desired Object (Lakoff 1987: 380–415). There are also conceptual metaphors that are specific to particular cultures.

Conceptual metaphors are based upon non-metaphorical concepts of various kinds:

• Kinaesthetic Image Schemas – based on basic body perceptions of directions, basic sensory-motor schemas like containers, part-whole relationships, liquids and surfaces. The sequence of Source ® Path ® Goal is one of the most common image-schemas.
• Frames, including scenarios – conceptual structures that may take the form of a conventionalized story or sequence, such as ‘rain’ which includes a whole stereotypical scenario of clouds, humidity, rainfall and lingering mud.

Many complex concepts can be understood in terms of two or more metaphors. Lakoff shows that for Americans, anger is metaphorical fire: it burns, boils, steams and explodes. But anger is also a wild animal (out of control), and a kind of insanity (crazy). Fire is the most important, primary metaphor, but the others must be included to understand the way Americans visualize, and act out, their anger.

Furthermore, in his book Moral Politics, Lakoff shows that within a single culture, there can be conflicting and contending metaphorical systems. In his example, American conservatives see government as a metaphorical ‘strict father’, while liberals are more likely to cast the political system as a ‘nurturant parent’. The contending metaphorical systems also inform and structure quite distinct models of moral behaviour, gender roles, attitudes towards capital punishment, etc. So these metaphors have real power; they help people visualize, simplify and judge complex situations, and find actions that seem consonant with their more fundamental beliefs about parenthood and authority. The implication is that, faced with new problems and issues, people tend to use old and established metaphors. Changes in behaviour need to be based on new metaphorical linkages, which is why so much public and private argument and debate is so rich in visual schemas and prototypical scenarios.

Economic Metaphors

When I was trained as an archaeologist, consumption was not a category of analysis; it did not exist. Instead, archaeologists started with objects instead of people, and developed a model of ‘the life cycle of the artefact’. The notion was that ‘raw’ materials existed in nature, until taken up by humans and modified into artefacts, which were then used until worn out, and then discarded (cf. Schiffer 1976), so the basic cycle looks like this:

PRODUCTION ➔ USE ➔ DISCARD

This ‘life cycle’ metaphor is based on the fundamental human experience of ontology, the growth and development of an organism from origin to demise.

BIRTH ➔ LIFE ➔ DEATH

The metaphorical construction here is that Objects are People, and therefore they have lives. The speech of museologists, archaeologists and collectors of objects and antiques are full of these kinds of life-cycle metaphors that personify objects. In the long spans of time that archaeologists study, types of objects are ‘born’, and they eventually ‘die out’. One subtle effect of this metaphor is that people become invisible, because the objects substitute for them. The basic model of the economy that appears in most economics textbooks accomplishes the same end with a similar metaphorical construction. Economists divide the economy into a productive sector, a market and the household sector, again with a flow between them.

PRODUCTION ➔ EXCHANGE ➔ CONSUMPTION

The life-cycle metaphor then tells us that consumption is like senility, loss of energy, decline in value, ultimately death and disappearance. For economists, all the action and excitement has always been in the first two stages; consumption is just the part of the economy where things end up after all the interesting activities take place in factories and markets. The clearest implication from this metaphorical construction is that Consumption is Death. As with an individual life, the flow of an object’s life is inexorable and irreversible, so there is no possibility, for example, that demand could precede supply. The economist sees production as the vital force that drives the engine of the economy forward.

The life-cycle metaphor leaves all the activity, value and economic growth on the production side, while consumption is a passive process of decay and even waste. Just as with a life, any growth must be followed, and eventually balanced by decline, production has to be balanced with consumption, or the entire system is out of balance. The ‘magic of the market’, so beloved of neoclassical economists creates just this balance, at least in the imagination.

Another common economists’ metaphor that de-emphasizes consumption is that money is water. This is a particularly good example of what Lakoff and Johnson call ‘entity and substance metaphors’. These generally involve viewing events, activities, emotions and ideas – none of which are concrete objects – as entities and substances (1980: 25). Economists use a whole series of hydraulic metaphors, which portray the substance of economic transaction, money, utility or value as liquid. Economic transactions are flows that can slow to a trickle under pressure, before pouring forth into the marketplace. Economists speak of rising tides, liquid assets, economic pumps, spending like water, dangerous leakage, bringing things to a boil, and even pouring money down the toilet. The economy is therefore often visualized as a system of plumbing, but the wells, pumps and piping are the interesting part, and consumption is just water going down the drain. Adam Smith said that ‘Consumption is the sole purpose of production’, (1985: 338), but the hydraulic metaphor leads economists to think that consumption needs no analysis. Whatever is pumped forth naturally drains away.

Economic hydraulics is a specialist metaphor, used by a small professional class and politicians as part of their persuasive rhetoric (see McCloskey 1985). I am more concerned here with the folk models of consumption that inform everyday life and behaviour, because they, perhaps more than economic rhetoric, are the basis of consumption metaphors in the other social sciences.

In everyday American English, ‘consumption’ is what Lakoff calls a radial category, with a prototype at the centre, and the other members of the category belong by virtue of their relationship to the prototype, rather than through their coherent relationship to each other. So, for example, putting a painting on the wall, lying on the beach in the sun, and flushing the toilet, are all acceptable examples of consumption, but it is otherwise impossible to see how they are alike (and many scholars have strained to try to write a definition of consumption that does find their common characteristics). They are related to each other only because of their metaphorical connections to the prototype at the centre.

Consumption is also a graded category. Some things strike us as better examples of consumption than others. Borgmann says, ‘plants consume carbon, animals consume plants …’ (2000: 418), but the transformation of carbon in the process of photosynthesis seems to be less like consumption than cows eating grass. Or think about burning a pile of leaves, versus putting the same leaves on a compost pile. Burning leaves seems more consumption-like than composting, just as going shopping, moving up and down the aisles hunting for the right shirt, is more consumption-like than sitting in a car listening to the radio. Some things seem more like consumption than others because of their proximity and resemblance to the prototype.

Consumption is Fire

What makes many of these disparate activities into consumption is their metaphorical relationship to the prototypical act of eating. Eating and consuming are also connected to each other through their common metaphorical relationship to fire, and the act of burning. Burning is historically the first English usage of the verb consume, attributed to the Wyclif Bible in 1382, in a biblical passage where a sacrifice ‘with fier shal be consumyd.’ (Lev. 6:23). Other early usages include ‘unto ashes they will a man consume’ (OED places this in 1430, Lydgate 1555: 19). Some other actions of fire – destruction, wasting away and vanishing – were also applied to consumption. Fire is still a powerful metaphor for consumption that destroys completely, leaving behind nothing useful.

• People have money to burn.
• Fortunes go up in a puff of smoke.
• Overindulgence in drugs causes total burnout.

Fire of course has a dual nature – both destructive and useful. It warms, comforts, and purifies; it lies at the centre of the hearth, and sanctifies the sacrifice. It is not surprising that consumption, as metaphorical fire, also has both destructive and utilitarian connotations (see Nordman). It can run out of control and become wanton gluttony, excessive luxury leading to corruption and ruin, while at the same time it is the daily ‘fuel’ that keeps the human ‘engine’ going, the centre of social life and domestic commensality.

It is no surprise that two of the Old Testament God’s most important acts involved miraculous fire. He appeared to Moses as a bush that burned, but was not consumed, and during the siege of Jerusalem, he kept the temple lamp burning for seven nights with oil sufficient for only one. Later, Christians saw the fire of the lord as holy in itself; being consumed by god’s fire was an act of giving up one’s volition, submitting and becoming fuel in a larger fire.

As a natural (an even supernatural) force, fire metaphors do not portray humans in the central role in consumption. Fire consumes what you feed it; it dies if it is not fed, and if you let it loose it can consume everything in its path, but it has a will of its own and we are often helpless before it. The Consumption is Fire metaphor tells us that people consume what they are given; the rich consume more than the poor because they have more fuel. During the twentieth century, though, Americans came to believe that consumption was a matter of individual volition and will, and that consumption was not so much a natural force like fire, as something under conscious control that expresses the inner i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Grasping the Topic
• Part II Odysseys in Time and Space
• Part III Performing Identities
• Part IV Visual Visuality