Ranthropologist

Tag: materialism

  • The Gift

    The Gift

    I have a very ambivalent relationship with Christmas, for several reasons. Being an atheist is part of it, but not the most important part, since most of the celebrations I attend are not religious (and I think the season has lost most of its overt religious overtones in any case). My ambivalence stems more from the orgy of materialism that happens this time of year. This is not a new story; many people lament the focus on gifting. But lately I have been lamenting it from a broader perspective. As I have done my gift shopping this year I have been more aware than ever before of the economic aspects of the Christmas season. In particular, I have been doing a great deal of thinking about the cheap seasonal items that litter the aisles of department stores from Neiman Marcus to Walmart. Of course the point is to get people to buy buy buy, but at what cost? Literally, that cost can be very low; for example, I saw a display of holiday-themed watches at Macy’s, bedecked with garish holiday motifs, selling for $9.99 and an additional 20% off on top.

    So, these cheap watches are retailing for around $8, which means they may have cost Macy’s $6, which means they were manufactured for perhaps $3… and they will probably last for maybe two holiday seasons before breaking or simply being tossed away. That, to me, is an environmental cost. In addition, there is a social cost in considering the wages paid to the overseas laborers who made the watch. To make and sell a watch that only retails for $8 probably means that the wages being paid the workers are vanishingly low. Is it worth all the associated costs to make it possible for us to buy this essentially disposable, unnecessary item?

    On the flip side of the cheap seasonal gifts is the focus on big-ticket items like gaming consoles, computers, phones, and the like. When did it becoming standard operating procedure for people of average income to buy gifts costing hundreds or even thousands of dollars? The newest iPad, for example, costs a minimum of $499 for the bare-bones version. A new iPhone can cost even more. The latest XBox is priced at around $550 – and that’s the holiday sale price for the unit with the fewest accessories. This level of gifting goes not just for adults but for children. My little cousin, who is not yet 10, asked for an iPod Touch and a Bose speaker to go with it. I don’t blame her for it; it’s what all the kids want, just like I wanted (and got!) the Barbie Dream Camper when I was around the same age. It just seems that the de rigueur toys are becoming more and more expensive, and people are more willing to go into hock to get them.

    Gifting has ancient cultural origins that are rooted in the concept of reciprocity. Generalized reciprocity is what happens when people who are very close do things for each other without expecting anything in return – things like household tasks, food procurement, and the like. It’s what people do to manage all that needs to be done in a small, tight-knit group and it has its modern-day equivalent in things like doing laundry, taking out the garbage, etc. Everyone contributes (or should) and no one expects payment. However, move outside the family group and reciprocity becomes more complicated. Balanced reciprocity requires that individuals provide mutual assistance – basically, if you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. Relationships can go sour quickly if one person doesn’t hold up their end by doing something for the other person in return. This is where things start to move from reciprocity to obligation. A person who has done many things for someone but hasn’t been paid back can gain power over that person, because favors owed are a form of currency. This is essentially the beginning of resource stratification and ultimately income inequality; those who owe are obligated to the person who gives, and those who owe eventually can become slaves (or, to put it in Marxist terms, proletariat). In his book Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches, Marvin Harris quotes an Inuit proverb that speaks to this idea: “Gifts make slaves just as whips make dogs.” I would argue that in many ways we are now slaves to an unbalanced system of reciprocity wherein we not only feel obligated to each other, but to an economic system that overwhelms us with messages convincing us we need things that in reality, we simply want. We are less in thrall to each other than we are to the entire capitalist ideology and the myriad hegemonic messages of status-seeking and vertical mobility that keep it firmly in place. And it is this system that compels us to spend $9.99 on a cheap watch to give to someone out of a sense of obligation more than a real desire to give them a gift. We’ve all had that feeling: “What am I going to get for great-aunt Martha? I know, here’s a cheap watch!” Is that really what we should be doing?

    All this may sound too complex to explain the simple idea of showing people we care about them by giving them a gift. That idea is still there, but I think the demonstration of it is what has gone awry. I believe just as much appreciation can be conveyed by a small but well-chosen token as by an extravagant gadget or bauble. And I think the joy of the season should be returned to appreciating things that we might not otherwise have. How can a thing be special when it is expected or demanded? When my grandfather was a boy growing up in the far northern reaches of Canada, he said he looked forward every December to the special and exotic gift to his family of a box of oranges delivered by plane. Just imagine being excited by such a thing today. Perhaps the thing to do is to remember the difference between want and need, both when giving and being asked what we would like to receive. I’m not suggesting that we should only ever give people socks and underwear, but simply that we remember what is really important: relationships, experiences, and the occasional meaningful gift instead of the orgy of expectations and obligations that characterize this time of year. We should remember that things do not make us who we are, and giving to or receiving things from people we barely know or see creates a web of reciprocal obligations that can spiral out of control and lead to cheap and pointless gifting and all its associated economic exploitation and environmental waste.

    In my final analysis, I’d like to see the whole idea of Christmas giving turned on its head by being happy with what we already have. As hokey and cliche as it sounds, let’s give of ourselves for the holidays. Let’s spend time together. Let’s enjoy something traditional that is symbolic instead of extravagant – like my grandpa’s box of oranges. Let’s stop giving things and give thanks instead.

  • Stereotypes, Generalities, and Banalities

    Stereotypes, Generalities, and Banalities

    Another Super Bowl has passed, and with it has passed several attempts by corporations to trick us into thinking we need to buy what they are selling. We all know that the Super Bowl is about more than the game of football; for many, it is a social opportunity as well as a sporting event. Over the past several years, the commercials have become as big, if not a bigger, draw than the game itself. It seems to me that before this became the standard, the commercials were actually better. Madison Avenue saw it for what it was: an enormous audience of sports fans and their associated hangers-on. No longer did the commercials need to be tailored specifically to football fans; they could be crafted to appeal to the general American public, which included the spouses, friends, and families of the actual football fans. I feel no shame in admitting that for years I, too, was more interested in the commercials than in the game. Now, however, my interest has taken a decidedly different turn.

    Two commercials in particular caught my interest, and they were both produced in the service of the same corporation. Chrysler created one ad for its Jeep division, and another for its Ram truck division. The Jeep commercial features a serious narrative intoned by Oprah Winfrey, telling us that we cannot be “whole again” until our men and women in uniform are back home with their families after completing their heroic service. The Ram commercial is soundtracked with an old speech by famous conservative radio commentator Paul Harvey, who extols the virtues and values of the American family farmer. In both commercials, the money shot of the product being sold is saved until the end. This serves the purpose of luring the viewer into a particular state of mind – one of admiration for our heroes, whether military or farming – and then associates that feeling of pride, nostalgia, and lump-in-the-throat patriotism with the product. Manipulative? Absolutely. Does it work? Absolutely.

    So what’s my problem here? I don’t assume that every Super Bowl ad viewer is credulous enough to fall for the Madison Avenue hype. Most viewers know they are being manipulated, even if unconsciously. But how many people really stop to think about it? I’m sure there are reams of research on effective advertising strategies that trick consumers into believing they need things that in reality, they simply want. However, I do think the kind of shameless manipulation manifested in the Jeep and Ram ads is particularly egregious. What do Jeeps have to do with the socioeconomic realities that make so many young Americans believe their only real hope of success in life is to join the military? These young men and women are not heroes in the sense that this commercial wants us to believe; that is, they are not heroic because they put themselves in harm’s way. They are ordinary people with ordinary foibles, and serving in the military does not, in and of itself, make them “heroes.” (This is also a rant for another day; I believe the word hero needs to be defined much more narrowly and that it is cheapened by applying it to every single person who does a difficult job.) If anything, their heroism lies in accepting an extremely narrow range of choices in life and making the best of it. Jeep has nothing to say about changing the structural realities of our society such that status inequalities are erased and military service truly becomes one choice among many, as opposed to an avenue of escape for those who have very few avenues to pursue.

    I have the same issue, although slightly less so, with the hero farmer portrayed by Ram. Undoubtedly family farming is strenuous and difficult work that is not taken lightly by those who pursue it; but at the same time, being a farmer does not somehow instill men (and the commercial features only men as the farmers, with women and children as support staff) with deeper, or truer, or greater values than the rest of us. I realize that the commercial is not meant to imply that only family farmers have these strong, quintessential American values of hard work and sacrifice; but the symbolism of the farmer is very powerful in our national gestalt. And just like the Jeep commercial, I wonder what, exactly, Ram trucks have to do with these values. In my reading about these commercials I read a comment stating that in reality, Ram trucks are probably out of the price range of the average family farmer today – especially since family farms are a dying breed and those that succeed do so without tricked out Rams that are really luxury cars in disguise.

    So we get back to the original point: tugging at our patriotic and bootstrap individualistic values; wanting to see in ourselves what the commercials stereotype, generalize, and banalize about the essential symbols of American culture; and being tricked into thinking that cars, of all things, have anything whatsoever to do with it. Feel free to admire the values, but think carefully about what they really mean… and think extra carefully before accepting the false, hegemonic notion that you can purchase them.

  • Economic Maladaptation

    Economic Maladaptation

    Near the end of the semester in my Human Origins course, I teach about two concepts: the epidemiologic transition, and the demographic transition. Both of them have to do with overall improvements in quality and length of life in societies that have reached a certain level of knowledge and wealth. In the epidemiologic transition, knowledge and innovations regarding health and medicine combine to reduce the incidence of infectious disease, and generally increase the overall health and longevity of the population. Mortality from non-infectious diseases such as heart disease and cancer increase as life expectancy increases. So, instead of dying young of an infectious disease, you live longer and ultimately perish from a disease or condition linked to old age and/or the consequences of a Westernized lifestyle (such as poor diet and lack of exercise). Combine this with the demographic transition, which sees life expectancy increase, and a drop in death rates followed by a drop in birth rates as societies industrialize and modernize, and you have a perfect recipe for booming population growth. Not every society in the world has gone through both of these transitions, but enough have that what should have been viewed as benefit is now becoming a detriment. Put in evolutionary terms, what was once adaptive is becoming maladaptive. I hypothesize that it is not these two transitions themselves that are to blame, but yet another transition, which I am going to call the economic transition.

    So what is the economic transition? As the world has modernized, starting at least four centuries ago with the age of European exploration and colonization in the 16th and 17th centuries, the global economic system that we know today as capitalism has taken hold. Capitalism, and the quest for profit through the exchange of material goods, is in many ways a beneficial and adaptive system for human groups. However, link it to the natural human desire to achieve status, and then link status to the ownership of material things and the symbols of exchange that make that ownership possible (i.e., money), and add in the longer-lived and massively expanded human population we are dealing with today, and you have a recipe for maladaptive disaster. Capitalism, superficially, is extremely similar to biological evolution and natural selection – call it economic selection. Left to its own devices, the natural consequence of capitalism is to concentrate wealth in the hands of a very few people or groups. This can work in some circumstances, especially when the social group affected is reasonably sized. Competition can lead to greater resource acquisition for the overall group, which is then redistributed by the leaders who had the greatest hand in acquiring it. This is what happens in the Big Man system that used to characterize many native economies in places like Papua New Guinea. The Big Man worked hard and gained followers who worked on his behalf to grow the biggest garden and the largest herd of pigs, and as harvest or slaughter time came, he rewarded his followers for their hard work. Those who worked the most gained the most, but nobody went without basic necessities. Why? Because in small groups, the well-being of the group depends on the well-being of the individuals who comprise it. The Big Man, for his part, was well compensated for his leadership efforts, but he did not end up with portions that were much larger than those of his workers; his gains instead had to do with status and leadership power (which from an evolutionary standpoint tends to correlate with greater reproductive success – to me, this is the underlying impetus for the development of these sorts of systems).

    The Big Man system is a sort of proto-capitalism. Anybody could aspire to be a Big Man, and with enough hard work and charisma, individuals could work their way into the top status tiers of these groups. The key difference is that the Big Man did not keep the majority of the wealth for himself, and he did not attempt what true capitalism attempts today: gather the most wealth possible while paying as little as possible to acquire it (whether for raw materials, workers, overhead, or what have you). The capitalist world system is designed to concentrate wealth. It is theoretically true that anybody can compete in this system, but with 7 BILLION competitors, success is anything but assured, and the structural obstacles to reaching that success are more numerous and complex than I can possibly attempt to explain in one post.

    I still haven’t really explained the economic transition yet, because at least a basic knowledge of economic systems is important. Nevertheless, I can describe it simply as a transition from small-group based competitive yet redistributive systems to a system based on personal financial gain that thrives on the perpetuation of class inequality. In a survival of the fittest economic system, inequality is the only possible outcome. What’s even more insidious about this transition is that even those at the bottom of the class and income scale believe that this is the way it is supposed to be, and that the only way out is through acquisitiveness and consumption. I have already written on this at some length in posts discussing hegemony. This is hegemony in a nutshell. The economic transition is maladaptive because it relies on continued resource consumption, and it is linked to the large and long-lived global population that consumes those resources. The economic transition, if it continues to its logical conclusion, ultimately means the ultimate biological maladaptation for the human species, to wit: extinction.

    I actually didn’t mean for this post to be a treatise on my view of our world’s economic problems, but these things just come out as they come out. This is the starting point for many more specific posts to come. What started my ruminating on this particular topic (other than the fact that I ruminate about it just about every single day) was thinking about our obsession with material things, and wondering how in the world we can save ourselves from ourselves. How can we modify the system so that status comes from the person you are rather than the things you own? How can we actually slow down the economic engine, and adopt a philosophy of economic balance, instead of constant growth? When will we realize that the values of our lives come from experiences, rather than possessions?

    Let me end this post with a question for my readers: what are your fondest memories? What makes you smile when you need a boost? Do these memories revolve around things, or people and experiences? One of my favorite memories, one I call on when I want to feel happy, is from 2001 when I surprised my mom by coming home from Albuquerque for Christmas one week early. I called her from outside her front door. As we spoke, I made it sound like I was still in Albuquerque. I knocked on her door and laughed to myself as she said “Hold on sweetheart, there’s someone at the door.” She opened the door and saw me, and I will never, ever forget the look on her face or how she dropped the phone and grabbed me into a hug of joy. This is a memory that I could never buy, yet it makes me happier than any material thing I have ever owned. I think that if we consciously remember what truly has given us joy in our lives, it may lead us out of the materialism = happiness lie that so many forces are leading us to believe.

  • Check Out My New iShell!

    Check Out My New iShell!

    In my cultural anthropology class, I show a film called “First Contact” that details the first encounter of a highland New Guinea tribe with outsiders. The contact occurred sometime in the 1940s, and was between the tribe and a group of white Australian gold prospectors. The prospectors found the gold they were looking for in the highlands, and employed the native people to help them mine it. They paid the natives with shells, which the Australians brought with them by the hundreds, purchased for only a few dollars on the coast. In return, the Australians took the gold nuggets that the natives helped them mine from the interior rivers.

    My students, in reaction to this film, often point out the unfairness of the Australians taking away the natives’ gold. To this, I ask them to explain why it is unfair. “It’s gold!” they protest. “The natives are just getting worthless shells!” This is my opportunity to point out that one man’s gold is another man’s worthless pebble. This amply and, often to the students, shockingly, drives home the point that the things to which we assign value are often completely arbitrary. But, the real point is made when I then discuss the value of the gold to the natives today. No longer do the people of the New Guinea highlands value shells – something that was exceedingly hard for them to come by pre-contact (hence their value). Today, if the Australians had told them of the value of the gold to the world outside their valley, those very same natives from 1940 and their descendants could be much better off than they are now. But, the Australians conveniently – and deliberately, I have no doubt – continued to pay the natives in the shell currency they valued, along with items such as cloth and steel tools, all the while concealing the fact that just a few of the “worthless” gold nuggets they were hauling away could have kept the tribespeople in shells, cloth, and axes for generations to come.

    Today we live in a world where we still value arbitrary things. Just witness the explosion in businesses that will buy “your old gold jewelry, fillings, and coins!” Gold is worth more than ever, but at its base it is still just a shiny rock. Even more bizarre, when you really stop to think about it, is the fact that some of the arbitrary things to which we assign value are themselves simply symbols – abstractions that represent something else just as abstract. What I mean is that we value the symbolic signs of wealth: the brand name, the label, the job title, the very size of the LCD-HDTV screen. Is it really the car we value, or the shiny medallion that graces its hood? Is a flat screen LCD TV worth as much to us, symbolically, if it says, maybe, “BOB BOBSON ELECTRONICS” along the bottom instead of SONY? “I have the latest iPhone. Check out all my apps!” a friend may brag. A no-name phone still places and receives calls, probably has apps of its own, but if it’s not an iPhone or related high-status device, how does that affect its symbolic value? It’s no secret that marketers know this and capitalize on it for all it’s worth… and it’s also no secret that even if you know it, you’ll probably still fall for it.

    So what does value all come down to in the end? How much of what we value is based on want vs. need? All we really need, down to the bare bones, is food, water, shelter, and (I would argue) companionship. But what we want has, in many ways, also become what we need. Value translates into status – the status that comes from having the most and the biggest shells, or the most gold nuggets, or the biggest screen. Nothing has really changed – it’s only the arbitrary markers of what constitutes status today that have shifted.