The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption

Rating:
Summary: Accounting for tastes
Review: In this book, a renowned structural anthropologist collaborates with an economist to propose an explanation for one of the great mysteries of economics: where do "preferences" come from? Much of neoclassical economics rests on the assumption that, once we know the basic desires and tastes for a given population, we can then understand how people make rational decisions about how to acquire them and how to allocate their resources. The actual preferences themselves, however, are a black box. Douglas & Isherwood tackle this problem, evaluating several theories of "rational" economic actors from cross-cultural and systems theoretical perspectives. Their answer is that many of these mysteries are not so mysterious after all: we have good reasons for valuing the things we value, and many of the apparently frivolous fads and fashions are in fact life-and-death matters. "Good taste" is an index of social connections, of reproductive fitness, of one's ability to mobilize resources -- and in a society increasingly dependent on information and services rather than physical products, the race to remain on the cutting edge becomes like traveling with the Red Queen, faster and faster just to stay in place. Along the way, Douglas throws out a number of gems which are incidental to her argument, including a proposal for why women's work is always and everywhere valued less than men's. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in what anthropologists can tell us about the deep logics of behavior in the consumer society.

Rating:
Summary: Accounting for tastes
Review: In this book, a renowned structural anthropologist collaborates with an economist to propose an explanation for one of the great mysteries of economics: where do "preferences" come from? Much of neoclassical economics rests on the assumption that, once we know the basic desires and tastes for a given population, we can then understand how people make rational decisions about how to acquire them and how to allocate their resources. The actual preferences themselves, however, are a black box. Douglas & Isherwood tackle this problem, evaluating several theories of "rational" economic actors from cross-cultural and systems theoretical perspectives. Their answer is that many of these mysteries are not so mysterious after all: we have good reasons for valuing the things we value, and many of the apparently frivolous fads and fashions are in fact life-and-death matters. "Good taste" is an index of social connections, of reproductive fitness, of one's ability to mobilize resources -- and in a society increasingly dependent on information and services rather than physical products, the race to remain on the cutting edge becomes like traveling with the Red Queen, faster and faster just to stay in place. Along the way, Douglas throws out a number of gems which are incidental to her argument, including a proposal for why women's work is always and everywhere valued less than men's. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in what anthropologists can tell us about the deep logics of behavior in the consumer society.

Rating:
Summary: A Classic
Review: This is one of the early anthropological critiques of neo-classical economics. Many of the ideas expounded here are now being seriously pondered by economists who are attempting to find ways around them. Douglas,who is arguably the best known British anthropologist of her generation, has a particular insight into the way economist think - possibly because her husband is an economist. This makes her uniquely qualifed to provide us with an anthropology of consumption, that does not dismiss economists, as much as show how much they miss by not understanding the cultural dimensions of consumption.

Rating:
Summary: An excellent discussion of consumption and culture.
Review: Written in 1979 and revised recently in 1996, Douglas and Isherwood's classic breaks through our own love/hate relationship with consumption and the biased interpretations of history and the present to look in a reasoned fashion at the patterns with which all people choose to buy things and the affiliations we create using these things. Lamenting the fact that economics has restricted itself by limiting human tastes to a black-box phenomenon, Douglas (a renowned, now retired, anthropologist) rips open the box and finds many convincing arguments for the uses of goods as a means of communication in all societies.

Additionally, they discuss previous and current ideas about why people save, or don't consume, and provide excellent comparative analyses between societies in Great Britain, blacks and whites in the US, the Nuer of the Sudan, and Zimbabwe's Lele people. What the reader comes away with is a deeper understanding of how people use consumption, both consciously and unconsciously, to provide information about themselves, send messages to others, and try to control the flow of culture and information to best benefit themselves and their interests.

The writing, which I have the impression was mostly written by Douglas since I'm familiar with her style from other books, feels a bit cerebral but is extremely lucid and will keep you on your toes with novel interpretations of familiar cultural phenomena.