Daniel Miller, Consumption and Its Consequences, London: Polity Press, May 2012 Hdbk, 9780745661070; Pprbk, 9780745661087.
Daniel Miller’s new book argues for three critical points, with which I happen to concur. Observing him pound these points home makes me wish fervently that it was Miller who was regularly invited to offer critical commentary on materialism, consumerism or climate change policy on BBC4 radio, and not the usual public intellectuals who do little more than echo received wisdom or economic pseudo-science (Miller’s term). His insights here deserve a wider hearing. The book seeks to be formally innovative and more accessible than the average academic book. While the polemical arguments are relatively winning, the format is perhaps less successful than the author might wish.
Of the three critical points, the first is one that Miller has argued since his first book in 1987. The argument is that consumption is almost always glossed as a moral failing, when it in fact is a necessary constituent of culture; indeed a reflexive relationship with things defines the human condition. But worse this misunderstanding leads to misrepresentation, which in turn, leads to a longstanding, misguided association of consumption with all sorts of social and moral pathologies. Miller also summarizes his three wonderful theoretical ideas about consumption. First is the peanut butter theory, the point that much contemporary consumption is driven by the desire to find lowest common denominator solutions that please most, delight few, and offend none. I concur, believing that this is the marketing strategy that accounts for the success of middle brow chain restaurants. His second theory holds that most shopping is mundane rather than hedonistic. And mundane shopping is governed by an overarching morality of thrift, is an act of devotional love and dutiful labour (mostly female) shoppers direct to the glorification of the family. In thrift driven shopping also can be detected the ancient tripartite structure of religious sacrifice. And his third theory may be called either the denim theory or the little black dress theory. This idea is that a good bit of consumption is driven by the goal of achieving normality; in my work, I have referred to this under the rubric of authoritative performance. It is an idea we get from Hegel, by way of the late anthropologist Mary Douglas, that consumption is about stabilising cultural categories and principles within culturally particular webs of significance.This theory has legs; for example, it helps explain the passion for branded products in zones recovering from conflict where brands may represent stability, continuity, and again, normality for traumatized populations. Together these theories give the lie to popular representations of consumption as to do with wasteful, hedonistic, selfish materialism.
The second major point is that consumption has very little directly to do with the planetary environmental catastrophe that is slowly unfolding. Anyway, much of the world still struggles with under-consumption; pleas for asceticism in emerging economies will go unheeded and should do he argues. More importantly, directing policy or political efforts to reforming consumption will have little consequence for this catastrophe. The problem actually lies in two other parts of the global economic system, with production and distribution. Indeed, climate science as Miller agrees would lend support to this latter assertion. Miller places his proposal for combating climate change in the mouths of three protagonists who populate his first and last chapters. It boils down to allowing natural science to arbitrate the nature of climate change, government to regulate production and distribution more effectively, and education to promote lasting changes in values. The proposals are better argued than my summary, but perhaps run a bit counter to some of Miller’s own findings on consumption. But his masterful explanation in chapter 5 of how the morality of thrift conflicts with so-called ethical consumption to the detriment of the latter is worth the price of the book
And the third major point is that citizens ought to wrest control of the debate over the first two issues –climate change and consumption –from economics and psychology. Miller roundly condemns economics and psychology as pernicious pseudo-sciences in chapter 6. The problem with economics’ stranglehold over public commentary about matters of public interest including consumption and climate change is, as eminent anthropologists such as Maurice Godelier in the 1960s, and Marshall Sahlins in the 1970s, and now Miller argue, that it is primarily an ideological justification for the culture of capitalism. With notable exceptions such Amartya Sen, Millers suggests economic thinking conjoins an extreme mathematical methodolatry ill-suited to accounting for underdetermined human culture, with a simplistic moral philosophy, and a utopian nostalgia for a world of emotionless rational automatons. This unsavoury stew provokes all sorts of mischief in the realm of social policy, including that related to climate change.
Two qualities detract from Miller’s engaging work. Miller tends to ignore both significant social theory about, and ethnographic and anthropologically inspired work on consumption outside of that produced by a circle of British anthropological colleagues and students at UCL. A few examples: on p. 101-103, a discussion of immigrant identity seeking through consumption ignores much work on “culture swapping” and the post- assimilationist approach to migrant consumer culture more generally that has developed over the past 15 years. On p.106, he argues that unlike “most other books” on consumption, he is alone in staking a stance on consumption that marks an advance on the views of the early 20th century commentator Thorsten Veblen who codified the ideas of conspicuous consumption and status competition through consumption. Here, forefathers Bataille, Simmel, and Baudrillard are given short shrift, especially and inexcusably, the latter. Latour, Callon and Bauman, fellow contemporary scholars of materiality likewise are conspicuously absent. On pp.111-113 he rediscovers the well-known disconnect between account managers and cultural creatives in the advertising world, and the chestnut that advertising’s direct effects are indeterminant. This lapse in perspective is ironic because recognition of the disconnect, not only between creatives and account managers, but also between them, brand managers, and business strategists has given rise to the proliferation of—wait for it—an explosion of employment in corporate anthropology and ethnography like that of the practitioners who annually gather at the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference.
This neglect of contemporary scholarship of consumption and its antecedents in continental social theory induces two unfortunate effects. First it renders it occasionally parochial, and second, conveys a certain hard-spiritedness. This is a pity for someone who clearly strives to be a contributing public intellectual, and whose voice should certainly be heard in many quarters. And for a classically trained anthropologist like me it shirks one of our primary disciplinary responsibilities, that being to listen as hard as we might to the many disparate voices that make up the human conversation, and in turn, to let them be heard by others.
A second weakness is the format. Miller book-ends four engaging, fairly scholarly chapters with two written in the form of a dialogue between the three academic persona, a Filippina, whose job is to represent the voice of the poor in emerging economies, and two blokes, one of whom represents a kind of wooly, green activism, and the other middle of the road reformist social scientist. I loudly applaud Miller for exploring alternative modes of representation but the dialogue is stilted especially when compared with the more conventional prose on offer in the other chapters. And the problem with these chapters is that despite Miller’s aim for accessibility, only the well-educated public minded citizen will navigate them. For stylists of consumption there is still only one person to turn to, and that is to Stephen Brown, whose brilliant send-ups of consumption and marketing can be accessed at http://www.sfxbrown.com/index.
Eric J. Arnould, PhD
Professor of Consumer Marketing, University of Bath and Visiting Professor of Marketing, Southern Denmark University
mktganthropology 