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2001; 1; 225 Journal of Consumer CultureDaniel Miller

The Poverty of Morality

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225

THEMED SECTION: MORALITY AND CONSUMPTION

The Poverty of MoralityDANIEL MILLERUniversity College London

Abstract. This article contends that the study of consumption is often subsumedwithin an ideological concern to castigate society for its materialism at the expense ofan alternative morality that emerges from an empathetic concern with poverty andthe desire for greater access to material resources. Examples are given of the benefitsthat accrue to populations from an increased quantity of goods in certaincircumstances. An anti-materialist ideology is favoured by associating consumptionwith production rather than studying consumers themselves and their struggles todiscriminate between the positive and negative consequences of commodities. Theform of morality attacked here is also associated with a generalized critique ofAmericanization that tends to appropriate on behalf of the United States all blameand thereby agency for regressive global and local developments. The Americanizationthesis also tends to ignore the contribution of much of the rest of the world to theproduction of consumer culture and contemporary capitalism, and to deny theauthenticity of regional consumer culture. Parallels are drawn with E.P. Thompson’sessay The Poverty of Theory and its critique of similarly disengaged ideological critiquesthat led academics away from the study of experience.

Key wordsAmericanization ● consumer culture ● materialism ● morality ● poverty

IF 20 YEARS AGO THE TOPIC OF CONSUMPTION was unduly neglectedacross all the disciplines, today our problem seems as much constitutedby a deluge of writing about our relationship with goods as by the floodof goods themselves. I want to argue, however, that this flood of writingsmay only amount to a trickle of insights into the nature of consumption,

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consumers and consumer culture. The discrepancy between the quantityand the quality of research is largely a result of the central role taken bymorality within consumption research which has led to this branch ofstudies becoming largely a site where academics can demonstrate theirstance towards the world, rather than a place where the world stands as apotential empirical critique of our assumptions about it.

I am going to write this in the form of a general commentary since Ido not wish to cite any particular instances of that which I oppose. Myexcuse is that this case is unusual in that the people I most oppose are prob-ably amongst the people I most admire and respect. I vastly prefer the overtmoralists I critique here to the amoral or indeed immoral stances of thosethat they are critiquing. This is a plea to change style and direction, but Iam trying not to lose too many friends as a result! My targets seem to beinterdisciplinary including scholars in sociology, cultural studies, economics,and consumer studies. My characterization seems to me largely untrue ofhistory and I would have to confess to a bias that makes me think/hopethat anthropology tends to be more nuanced. The stance I am critiquingseems to me more characteristic, though by no means confined, to USwriting, where I would argue there has been considerable continuity inboth the form of moralism and the beliefs about why people consume.Take, for example, the centrality of status competition and emulation toboth Veblen and the recent work of Schor (1998), with the main differencebeing the degree to which Schor sees this factor as having spread throughthe population at large.

IS CONSUMPTION MATERIALISTIC?My basic position is fairly simple. It seems to me that writings about con-sumption are saturated by a pervasive anxiety most acutely felt by fairlywell-off academics, mainly in the USA, about the possibility that they maybe too materialistic. This is combined with a genuine desire to critique theinequalities and exploitation that follow various aspects of modern capital-ism, and most recently a strident environmentalism. Put together, these haveproduced a veritable industry consisting of the critique of almost all aspectsof consumption as a means to attack the triple-headed Cerberus ofmaterialism, capitalism and planetary exploitation. This moral stance is sopowerful that it refuses to be altered by exposure to the many actual studiesof consumers and consumption in which they appear as other than thatwhich this critique requires them to be for the purposes of expressing itsmoral position.

The result is an extraordinarily conservative vision of consumption. In

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a sense consumption has throughout history been seen as intrinsically evil.While production creates the world, consumption is the act whereby weuse it up. Contemporary views perpetuate the historical sense of con-sumption as a wasting disease (Porter, 1993) whose diagnosis and prognosisare established; the only legitimate debate is about its cure. This is no greatsurprise since my argument follows closely the excellent history of this samemoralism published by Horowitz (1985). Although he shows some changesin the nature of that moralism over time, it is the continuities in the basicideological stance to the growth of consumerism that are striking. My caseamounts to little more than the argument that this continues to be truetoday. That is, current writings about ‘mega-malls’ and ‘virtual reality shop-ping’ are recycling texts and arguments that may span millennia (e.g. Sekora,1977). What all of this prevents is not only a proper encounter with actualstudies of consumption and consumers but the emergence of an alterna-tive critique based on that scholarly encounter, one that is sufficientlynuanced to be appropriately targeted at the complex and contradictoryprocesses of consumption that can actually be observed (Miller, 1998b,2001).

I consider all three of these assumptions: that consumption is materi-alistic, that it is capitalist and that it is incompatible with environmentalism.I also briefly tackle some other baggage that trails in the wake of this moral-ism, in particular the assumption that mass consumption is a form ofAmericanization of the world. But the central issue is that of materialism.

The critique of materialism is extraordinarily basic. There is an abidingsense in this literature that pure individuals or pure social relations are sulliedby commodity culture. Indeed the central plank of the colloquial term‘materialism’ is that this represents an attachment or devotion to objects thatis at the expense of an attachment and devotion to persons. There may bepeople for whom the problem of materialism is genuine. I am sure weshould all be deeply sympathetic to the dreadful plight of cosmopolitanswho feel they have too many pairs of shoes and feel guilty because theircereal wasn’t really organic, or that they bought their child a present insteadof spending the requisite amount of ‘quality time’ with them. I guess thereare many reasons why such people are appalled by the waste and quantityof consumer goods. But what is not acceptable is that the study of con-sumption, and any potential moral stance to it, be reduced to an expressionof such people’s guilt and anxieties. What this obviates is a quite differentmorality, an ethics based on a passionate desire to eliminate poverty.We livein a time when most human suffering is the direct result of the lack ofgoods. What most of humanity desperately needs is more consumption,

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more pharmaceuticals, more housing, more transport, more books, morecomputers. I would consider myself a hypocrite if I saw the aspiration ofany other person to at least the same level of consumption that I enjoy withmy family as anything other than reasonable. And I have never – and I reallydo mean never – met an academic carrying out research on the topic ofconsumption who appeared to practise for their own family this substan-tially lower level of consumption. So at a time when more than half theworld does not have basic goods I find it hard to respect an approach toconsumption whose only consideration is the superfluity of commodities.

Indeed I think we need to start with a fundamental question. Are mostcommodities of benefit to most people? Let us start with material cultureitself. I do not believe in the pre-cultural human being stripped of thematerial world. Even Eastern philosophies that see enlightenment as theelimination of desire do not support the colloquial term ‘materialism’, sincetheir aims are to eliminate desire in respect to persons as much as to things,while the contemporary critique of materialism is supposed to liberatepeople from things in order for them to engage in pure social relations. Myupbringing in anthropology starts from the opposite concept of authen-ticity. Our bedrock for authentic social relations tends to be Mauss (1954)who in The Gift starts with the example of children exchanged as thoughthey were things and then considers things exchanged as though they werepersons. That is to say, the authenticity of non-capitalist society is seen inthe inseparable nature of persons and things. It is the trajectory towardscapitalist society that leads to the development of an ideology of pure per-sonhood (e.g. Sennett, 1976) and an increasing distance from things thatduring the Enlightenment started to be seen as radically other to persons,as something that could detract from rather than enhance our humanity.

I do not wish to retrace my own steps to a philosophy of subject–objectrelations which is presented as a general theory of objectification and thenculture in Miller (1987). Suffice to say I take a dialectical view. Humanityand social relations can only develop through the medium of objectifica-tion. Subjects are as much the product of objects as the other way around(exemplified in Bourdieu, 1977). It is possible for these objects to becomeoppressive when they are sundered from us, as Marx suggests, under capi-talism or, as Simmel suggests,when we can no longer assimilate them withinthe growth of the subjective. As with all culture, material culture is con-tradictory in its consequences for humanity but this should not detract fromits centrality to the very possibility of our humanity. Clearly, however, thisprocess is rather different in a society with a paucity of things from a societywith an abundance. In our image of Australian Aboriginal material culture


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a very few objects and images form the basis of such a complex symbolicnexus that they become the medium of highly sophisticated cosmologicaland social projects (e.g. Munn, 1973; Myers, 1986). In our own society,however, the sheer plethora of things seem to make this impossible.We cancertainly see the possibility, glimpsed by Simmel (1978), that we becomesuperficially related to so many things that we are deeply involved in none,leading to what he saw as the blasé condition of some urban life. In additionthe recent literature has assumed that the conditions under which we areled to desire, for example, branded goods through intense advertising are soproblematic that any subsequent relationship of identity that we forgethrough them must be inauthentic.

What worries me is that this bogey of a deluded, superficial person whohas become the mere mannequin to commodity culture is always someoneother than ourselves. It is the common people, the vulgar herd, the massconsumer, a direct descendant of the older ‘mass culture critique’ of the1960s. It is never the rounded person who is encountered within an ethno-graphic engagement. If, however, we approach our own social relations andpractice with the same level of respect, the same empathy and the samepatience that a good ethnographer attempts to bring to the apparent auth-enticity of others, then we see something quite different – a world wherea pair of Nike trainers or Gap jeans might be extraordinarily eloquent aboutthe care a mother has for her child, or the aspirations of an asthmatic childto take part in sports.

We need to start with an acknowledgement that there are many thingsin the world that we see quite unproblematically as beneficial, and whichwe surely have in mind when we think in terms of the elimination ofpoverty, that is adequate housing, cheap pharmaceuticals, warm clothing,nutritious food.Why has all of this somehow become something other thanconsumption? Why is this not the foundation of consumer culture? Why,to use a title of a previous book, are we so afraid to acknowledge con-sumption? But it is not just objects. We see people whose possibilities inthe world are constantly enhanced by huge quantities of knowledge: thelibrary that supplies an endless possibility of books, the transport that allowsthem a diversity of places to experience, the development of informationtechnology so that I can spend one hour correcting my (awful!) spellinginstead of a week and use email to work with colleagues in Australia andnot just in my department.

But what of the less obviously utilitarian things of the world? Do wereally need a hundred styles of trousers to choose from, cuisines from everypart of the world, an even faster computer? Again we can only consider


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such things from the basis of that same respectful encounter. After all wedo not respect Australian Aboriginals for reducing their object world to thebare necessity of utility – even if they are not all original affluent societies(Sahlins, 1974). The idea that the people of Amazonia, or Melanesia orAboriginal Australia either were or are people of simple or basic needs issuch a bizarre distortion of a century of anthropology as to beggar belief.It is precisely the richness of their symbolism, the interpenetration of socialand material relations, the way cosmology and morality is absorbed in andexpressed through myth, material culture and other such media that makesup the core of anthropological teaching. Trobriand islanders are known fortheir huge piles of conspicuously long yams and the voyages of Kula toexchange armshells, not for their attachment to strict functionalism. It isoften the poor who are most assertive about the centrality of symbolic con-sumption. It was those living in the worst slums of England that kept thebest room of the house as a ‘parlour’ reserved almost exclusively for show(Roberts, 1973). Peasant villagers in India often get into debt not for basicland rights but by funding wedding feasts. It is the complexity of thesymbolic systems of the peoples of the world, not some base utilitarianism,that anthropologists look for, expect to find and celebrate in their studies.So the question we ought to be asking of our own society is whether thereis any similarly rich symbolic structure within our own material culture.

To answer this question I approach our material culture in the samespirit as I would that of Melanesia or Amazonia, that is through the nuanceof ethnographic immersion. As examples I summarize two such ethno-graphic explorations. The first (Miller, 1998a) is concerned with a street ofshoppers in North London. What do they do with the sheer quantity anddiversity of goods? My argument in a nutshell is that we find a society thathas seen a radical transformation over the last century in its ideals of loveand care.Where once specific gestures based on social norms, such as flowerson Friday from husband to wife, were respected, today we feel that love isdemonstrated only in the sensitivity shown by one individual for all thatthey have learnt about the particular nature of the other. When a mothershops for her child she may feel that there are a hundred garments in thatshop that would be fine for all her friends’ children but she loves her ownchild enough that the exact balance between what his or her school friendswill consider ‘cool’ and what her family will consider respectable mattershugely to her, enough for her to reject the lot and keep on searching untilshe finds the one article that satisfies this subtle and exacting need. Awoman who feels her boyfriend has paid sufficient attention that he cansuccessfully buy her a pair of suitable shoes while unaccompanied feels


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she really has a boyfriend to treasure. How this relates to commerce andcapitalism I examine later; for now my only concern is to suggest that it ispossible that people appropriate this plethora of goods in order to enhanceand not to detract from our devotion to other people.

My second example is from Trinidad (Miller, 1994) where an oil boomturned this island from a developing region to a relatively wealthy one withaccess to large amounts of consumer goods. My argument is that Trini-dadians, just like Australian Aborigines, are concerned to find a mediumfor objectifying their values and moral orders. Prior to the arrival of massconsumption the primary vehicle for this task was other people. In short,Trinidadians had strong and explicit views about what ‘women are like’,what ‘Indians are like’, what ‘big shot people are like’. In my analysis I sug-gested that most of these dualistic and powerful stereotypes about gender,class, ethnicity and so forth are a result of the working out of a fundamentalset of dualistic values that arose from their radical experience of modernity,particularly through the rupture of slavery and the subsequent centrality offreedom. In short, as in most societies, categories of persons become theobjects that objectify our values. I then analysed the products of mass con-sumption, the cars, the clothes, the interior furnishings that have emergedwith the oil boom and suggested that during that period there was a shiftfrom the use of categories of persons to that of categories of things as themeans to objectify these fundamental values and dualisms. Material culturepresented several advantages over persons as vehicles for the expression ofthese symbolic systems. Furthermore, to some degree this released theburden on people as objects for the expression of value and led to a greaterfreedom to treat individuals more in terms of their particular character andless as mere tokens or stereotypes that stood for some particular value ormoral position. So in this case the rise of material culture with the complexsymbolism of mass consumer goods tended to lessen the treatment ofpeople as stereotypes.

So in both these cases the mere desire to behave as a conventionalanthropologist – by which I mean to empathetically consider the per-spective of the people one is working with, whether Londoners or Trini-dadians – creates the potential for exploring the appropriation of materialculture in both settings in an analogous fashion to that of studying materialculture in an Australian Aboriginal society. I do not wish to suggest thatthe postmodern perspective on rampant superficiality is impossible. For allI know if I carried out fieldwork in parts of Los Angeles I would finallyencounter these, as it were, poor rich materialists, who have lost the capac-ity for anything other than superficial relationships with persons and things.


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But at the very least we need to consider the possibility that the sheerquantity of contemporary material culture might, amongst certain peoplesand in certain circumstances, enhance their humanity and develop theirsociality.

During my own fieldwork the materialism that is being attacked hasbeen actually found to be much more prevalent amongst the impoverished.It is when I work with the unemployed, or those living on governmenthousing estates that I find people who have sacrificed their concern forothers, sometimes their own kin, because of sheer desire or a felt desperateneed for things. It is people without education who tend to have difficultyappropriating the plethora of goods because it requires detailed knowledgeand research to assimilate them. It was the people who found they couldnot relate to their kitchen furnishing who also had difficulty in establish-ing friendships and social lives (Miller, 1988). These experiences leave mefeeling that I have the evidence to argue that increases in education, inwealth and in people’s relationship with their material culture are also oftenthe foundation for enhancing their social relations.

Instead it seems to me that research on consumption, especially thatwithin the USA, derives from something completely different than thedesire to study actual consumption or consumers, something far removedfrom this commitment to ethnographic or equivalent experience based onan empathetic encounter with consumers. Rather, I see an astonishingcontinuity between the most recent discussions of consumption and thefoundational work of Veblen and those that preceded him (see Horowitz,1985). The mark of this ‘Veblenesque’ critique is that it always takes themost extreme examples of conspicuous consumption as its characterizationof all consumption. So just as once it was the tiny sector of nouveau riche– those who could afford footmen and other such servants – that wereVeblen’s true consumers, so now it is always the evident excesses of wealthyconsumers that come to stand for consumption in itself. As Veblen assertedthe puritan value of labour and the priority of utility over display, so todaysymbolic expressions are never true ‘needs’ and are bound to expressnegative values such as status competition or insatiable greed. Consumptionis still conspicuous consumption, and vicarious consumption based onemulation and the desire to deny labour. It’s just that the examples used toillustrate the arguments have shifted by a century.

As I have written elsewhere (Miller, 1995) I have as much of a problemwith the idea that consumption is an intrinsic good as that it is an intrinsicbad. I would not wish to generalize from the two instances I have just givento any version of a conclusion that suggested consumption must always be


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seen as a good thing.These are the two sides of a coin that seems only inter-ested in consumption as a stance towards an often glib comment on themorality of the zeitgeist. In this respect there remains a considerable dis-tinction between a material culture studies devoted to the ethnographicencounter with the dialectics of culture as social and material practice, andsome cultural studies that seem to reduce the study of consumption to itspotential contribution to what they call ‘debates’ and which contain manyexamples of consumption as a heroic struggle or act of resistance. I hopethat my stance towards consumption has been consistently dialectical(Miller, 1987, 2001). I assume that there are both positive and negativeelements to all such developments and it is the task of politics to accentu-ate the possibilities for human welfare and ameliorate the negative effects.

IS CONSUMPTION CAPITALIST?The title of this article is intended to evoke the classic essay by E.P.Thompson, The Poverty of Theory (1978). Thompson is important in that, atthe time he wrote his withering critique of Althusser, it might have beenthought that theory – just like morality – is an intrinsically good thing foracademics, and that to attack theory or morality is to profane the sacrosanct.In fact, his essay remains exemplary because I would argue that the problemwith the critique of consumption as capitalist culture has a great deal incommon with the critique of capitalism that characterized 1970s westernMarxism, and is making a series of rather similar misjudgements andmistakes.

On the one hand there was at that time a profound and necessarycritique of inequality, which I hope most academics still support. Marxistideas seemed to most academics in western Europe to constitute the veryessence of a moral critique, a feeling that social evils had to be exposed andopposed. Unfortunately several tendencies within that movement may havemade it counterproductive to the critique of inequality in the longer term.The first was part of what Thompson called The Poverty of Theory. He arguedthat theory (today I would say morality) can become a form of closure. Itrecognizes the world only in as much as what it observes is generated bythe stance it takes to the world. If consumption is capitalist, then only thoseconsumption acts that are consistent with the dominant image of capital-ism are recognized as true consumption. Second, it becomes abstracted fromits relationship to the empirical. Althusser dismissed historical research asmere empiricism. By contrast, Thompson argues (pp. 199–200) that thecornerstone of historical research is the concept of experience that is acommitment to empathetically engage as closely as possible with people’s


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experience of their time. While morality and theory seem to require nosuch encounter (they already know what they are against), the ethnographicenquiry I wish to promote, and the historical enquiry promoted byThompson, represent a quest for an empathetic enquiry into experience.This is why I would argue today that the empirical encounter has actuallybecome the proper source of contemporary radicalism as against the spuri-ous claims to radicalism from theory and morality.Yet, rounded scholarshipthat is devoted to communicating the humanity of the consumer – notusing them merely to test hypotheses – remains conspicuously rare in anyof the disciplinary researches into consumption.

This is why it is equally important not to assume that consumptionunder capitalism is mere capitalist consumption. Thompson had no doubtthat he was studying capitalism. But he never allowed his portrayal of theEnglish working class to be merely a pawn in the game of critiquing capi-talism. Indeed his primary task was to rescue the portrayal of the workingpeople and return them to the flesh and blood humanity of experience. Itwas the theorists who had reduced the proletariat to simply a motif to bedeployed within radical rhetoric. Similarly the task today is to rescue thehumanity of the consumer from being reduced to a rhetorical trope in thecritique of capitalism. The moralistic critique of consumption actuallydehumanizes and fetishizes the consumer, and thereby serves the cause ofthe very capitalism it claims to critique.

Thompson’s portrayal of the working class never denied the possibilityof their own perspicacity and sense of struggle. In my first work on con-sumption (Miller, 1987) my aim was precisely to argue that it is not just abunch of enlightened academics who feel alienated and cheated by theexcesses of capitalism. Most people feel that they tend to be dehumanizedand alienated from the vast scale and mechanized form of modern massproduction. For this reason modern consumption should not be dismissedas merely the end point of a process which is used to characterize capital-ism as a whole. Rather I argued that consumption was the very means thatpeople used to try and create the identity they feel they have lost as labour-ers for capitalism, using the mass of goods to counter the homogenizationand massivity of capitalist production. Far from expressing capitalism, con-sumption is most commonly used by people to negate it.To merely critiqueit as the creature of capitalism is therefore to ignore the practice of actualconsumers. But the moralists who need to use consumption for theircritique of capitalism cannot understand that for ordinary people con-sumption is actually the way that they confront, on a day-to-day basis, theirsense of alienation.


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The conception of materialism held by Karl Marx, for example, couldnot have been more distinct from that employed within much critique ofmodern consumption. As recently pointed out by Stallybrass (1998), Marxsaw that the problem for the proletariat was that they were sundered frompeople because they were sundered from things. Marx’s enemy was povertyand the lack of possessions. He fully recognized the vital role of materialculture within the development of social and cultural relations. The con-temporary concept of materialism was quite alien to Marx himself, sinceeven a cursory knowledge of his life suggests that he was very far from beingany kind of an ascetic (Wheen, 1999).

By contrast the western Marxism of the 1970s embraced a version ofasceticism that assumed that contemporary material culture – because it iscreated by capitalism – is thereby tainted and will pollute those who livewith it and through it. This asceticism proved its undoing. It allowed thepolitical right wing to associate socialism with poverty. This ascetic leftbecame deeply unpopular in a world where the actual proletariat still con-sidered itself to be engaged in a struggle for a basic standard of living. Thisopened the way to the victory of the right-wing governments of Reagan,Thatcher and their ilk. More recently a reaction to this asceticism appearedin the form of a branch of cultural studies that seemed to celebrate modernconsumerism as quite the opposite – a kind of heroic form of resistance orappropriation that was inevitably beneficial. The profundity of Thompsonand Williams did not prevent a move whereby mass culture became popularculture and, merely because it was practised by working people, it wasviewed as somehow authentic and noble.

Materialism in the sense employed by academics such as Thompsonis precisely what we should embrace. It is a commitment to the unity ofthought and experience, to our grounded existence (Thompson, 1978:210). The problem with the critics of consumption is not that they aretoo materialist – what they see as the doomed condition of the world. Tomy mind the central problem of research on consumption is that most ofthe researchers are simply not materialist enough. They show little senseof the more profound kind of materialism that genuinely critical academicenquiry has tried to foster over the last century, as exemplified byresearchers such as E.P. Thompson. They are insufficiently steeped in themateriality of ordinary experience and conduct insufficient fieldwork onsocial relations and material culture as human praxis. Much of what isdeveloping in the contemporary critique of consumption is thereforereplaying all that went wrong in the development of the European-basedwestern Marxist critique of capitalism of 20 years ago, with exactly the


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same danger that true moral effect will be lost under the overwhelmingdesire for moral affect.

The elimination of poverty depends on industrialization and mass pro-duction. Numerous little crafts are fine as a personal hobby, but as an econ-omic foundation they are simply a recipe for increasing poverty. WilliamMorris produced marvellous craft works,but I don’t know many people whocan afford to buy them. My own stance derives from the traditions of Euro-pean social democracy. This tradition aims for higher taxation to fundincreased welfare and redistribution and stronger state and internationalbureaucracy to curb the immoral effects of short-term competition-drivenmarkets,such that,for example,pension funds run companies to provide long-term benefit to pensioners and not to siphon money from business to stockmarkets (Clark, 2000). But this social democratic tradition has established itscomplementarity to market economies and industrialization after seeing thedestructive effects of the simplistic rejection of the 1970s (see Nove, 1983).

The social democratic programme fought for an increasing level ofwealth based on redistribution as well as production. It recognized that evenin affluent societies most people do not feel their needs have been fulfilled(e.g. Segal, 1998). It saw industrialization as having the potential for decreas-ing hours of work. The problem has been the decline in these develop-ments as against the growing influence of a US model that is driven by thestock market and short-term financial goals (see Henwood, 1997; Hutton,1996), and which has become associated with the increasing pressures onwork described by Cross (1993) and Schor (1992). But this is a specific setof associations; it is not even intrinsic to capitalism, it is the particularcombination of capitalism with liberalism that is characteristic of certainneo-liberal regimes. The social democratic alternative suggests there isnothing intrinsic to consumer societies that should lead to either inequal-ity or higher pressures on work; what is required is a politics that remainsconsistent in regarding human welfare as its goal.

A CRITIQUE OF THE AMERICANIZATION CRITIQUEImagine that we are carrying out a study of contemporary consumptionamongst the middle class in Thailand (it could equally well be Nigeria orSri Lanka). We have documented the involvement of this class in a widerange of modern consumer products. We have watched their kids watch-ing Pokemon, we have seen the man in the family finally able to afford thatMercedes-Benz he has had his eyes on for some time. We observe a partywell lubricated with bottles of whisky. After accumulating our evidence wewrite an academic article using this as a case study in Americanization.


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We blithely ignore the evidence that neither Pokemon nor whisky norMercedes-Benz (any more than most of modern consumer culture) origi-nate in the USA. Contemporary consumer culture is actually producedthroughout the world. Instead we focus upon the following features. Firstthe loss of what we see as authentic culture, which we imply is that whichhistorically characterized the people of that particular region. We see thisauthentic culture as replaced by what we regard as an inauthentic culturethat cannot really express the people of this region in the way the displacedmaterial culture was able to do. Second we focus upon the evidence forcommodification and what we see as the rise of materialism, hedonism andindividualism, all of which we associate with the same replacement ofauthentic by inauthentic material culture. Third we focus on the evidencefor globalization and the incorporation of these peoples in global com-modity capitalism. Fourth we draw attention to the development of classdistinctions and status and other differences within that society as expressedby these consumption patterns. Finally we conclude that the combinationof all these factors is evidence for the continued spread of Americanizationto the critique of which we believe we have now contributed.

Could it be that such apparently well-meaning, morally upright papersmight at another level be largely self-serving, condescending, or even racistforms of academic production that primarily project the interests ofmiddle-class American academics? I assume that the authors of such materi-als sincerely believe that these articles are an expression of their genuineconcern with the welfare of other peoples and the damage they believe isbeing inflicted upon others by powerful forces they associate with their ownsociety. So in no sense do I wish to impugn their motives. I simply want tosuggest that they may misunderstand the implications of their own aca-demic production. Indeed what such articles mainly serve to accomplish isthe continued domination of a particular US stance on the topic of con-sumption itself – a stance that I criticized earlier – but here exported to therest of the world. In a sense it may amount to an exploitation of the worldfor the benefit of one group’s moral stance.

My argument rests on the degree to which the critique of American-ization makes the following assumptions. First that the only population whohave the right to claim an authentic relationship to modern consumerculture are US citizens. Second that black people (with the possible excep-tion of a home-grown US black middle class) cannot use such things as anexpression of their own authenticity. Third that the only place to have pro-duced and to claim credit for the construction of this commodity cultureis the USA. Fourth that only the USA and its own form of capitalism can


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claim the ‘blame’ for the creation of class and social differences whereverthey may be found. Fifth that such wealth is in and of itself an inauthenticattribute for people from the developing world who therefore have less rightto it than the ‘naturally’ wealthy of the first world. In effect wealthy blackpeople of the developing world are an anomaly – they appear in academialike an ugly aberration in the purity of more authentic otherness. Sixth thatall relationships of the rest of the world to commodity culture can becharacterized as one either of ‘acceptance’ – which is then symptomatic ofcolonial or post-colonial ‘settlements’ – or one of ‘resistance’ – which iswhen other people are deemed to have responded ‘properly’. Finally allother societies are deemed to be ‘naturally’ good, so if two tribal groups inAfrica attempt to commit genocide, or a Korean government suppresses itspeople this is not some expression of the complex history of that regionbut must be the side effect of either colonialism (now usually post-colonial-ism), capitalism or American influence. Under this condescending attitudeonly the USA or western Europe can be authentically bad.

Wolf (1982) wrote of the people without history, and Wolf was a pas-sionate anthropologist deeply concerned with the welfare of peoples allaround the world as well as the effects of colonialism and dependency. Yetcuriously it is the mechanical application of blame/credit to the eponymousWest (notwithstanding a sometimes contradictory employment of the term‘post-colonial’) for whatever continues to happen wherever it continues tohappen, that ensures that as far as we are concerned these continue to bepeoples without history. The paradox of the critique of Americanization isthat in essence it is itself a form of Americanization. The paradox is thatby claiming all the blame for modern culture Americans can in effect takeall the credit. Its starting point is that all consumer culture is in some respectdeeply American. I have already noted that none of the goods in my admit-tedly fictional case were of US origin. The absurdity of this was broughthome to me when I reviewed a book called Re-Made in Japan (Tobin, 1992).This was a series of studies about consumer culture in Japan. It makes clearthat, notwithstanding the obviously huge contribution that the Japanesehave made to the production of contemporary consumer goods, the Japan-ese had managed to convince themselves that consumer culture is actuallysomething that had come to them from America and was a threat to authen-tic Japaneseness for this reason.

Potentially this denial of the contribution of the rest of the world tothe production of modern culture is a disastrous state of affairs since as thepeople of each region of the world become users of commodity culture,they come to feel that they have become somehow less authentic, that this


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culture is not really theirs however much they possess it. I remember per-ceiving the pathology of this when talking to a Trinidadian who, during theoil boom, had purchased 25 pairs of jeans. However many pairs he pur-chased, he could never really possess them, since jeans would always remainAmerican and he was not.What is being exported is the sense of alienation.

When studying in Trinidad I took as my starting point the sentimentsexpressed in the novel The Mimic Men by V.S. Naipaul (1967). Naipaulappeared to be suggesting that without a deep history of their own, thismixture of displaced peoples have no hope of ever being other than mimicsof the commodity culture and pretensions that are developed elsewhere. Itis the relentless superficiality of this constant emulation that is ridiculed inhis work. It is not that surprising that Naipaul later finds himself almostinexorably drawn to the region of Stonehenge – the wellspring of preciselythe one culture he does regard as authentic, that of Britain. In an inspiringbook, The Enigma of Arrival (1987), he starts to come to terms with his real-ization that he had in fact simply refused to countenance the authenticityof change and the fluidity of culture that was evident even around Stone-henge. Only then could he start to think of Trinidad itself as at least poten-tially authentic.

Much of my own fieldwork in Trinidad has been an attempt to demon-strate that consumption can be a process for the construction of inalienableand authentic culture from a regional and not just an individual perspec-tive. I deliberately wrote about the most tainted and least likely examplesof local culture: a soap opera produced in the US, Coca-Cola, the cel-ebration of Christmas, the workings of capitalist firms and most recentlythe internet (Miller, 1994, 1997; Miller and Slater, 2000). In each case Iemphasized what might be called a posteriori rather than a priori culture.Thatis, we have to allow culture to be the product of the subsequent localiz-ation of global forms, rather than only that which has some deep historicaland local tradition. I argued that not only must Coca-Cola be understoodin Trinidad as ‘a black sweet drink’ that comes from Trinidad itself (see alsoWatson,1997),but that capitalism itself, as a system of production and distri-bution, is actively consumed and localized as much as the goods it produces.Even the latest example of evident globalization – the internet – turns intoa powerful instrument for establishing the specific qualities of highlyparochial and national cultural practices as well as objectifying a form ofstrident nationalism. By the same token I have tried to focus on the Trini-dadian export not just of music and style but of company managers andweb designers.

My conclusion is that the critique of Americanization has actually


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become one of the most pernicious examples of Americanization. I suspectpeoples throughout the world are thoroughly oppressed by a critique ofAmericanization which constantly tells them that the culture they increas-ingly inhabit can never be theirs and denies any role they may have playedin its production. Indeed we have reached the absurd stage when the onlyactivity that is granted authenticity for most of the world is that of‘resistance’.

CONCLUSION: THE MORALITY OF POVERY AGAINST THE POVERTY OFMORALITYNothing in my experience of fieldwork, whether in peasant villages inIndia or state housing in London, suggests to me that there are social ben-efits to poverty. I cannot accept that the day-to-day struggle of most ofthe people of this world to increase their income is deluded. My problemis rather why the branch of academic enquiry I am concerned with seemsto start from the premise that goods are to the detriment of their owners.I can only explain this by the following logic. First that many of theseacademics belong to that tiny class that really do feel they have enough.Second that many of them come from a historical tradition in which theentrepreneurial production of wealth developed in and through a protes-tant ideology of asceticism. That Weber remains the best foundation foranalysing the dominant ideology of these academics is confirmed histori-cally by Horowitz and remains evident today. Indeed there are yet olderroots in the fear of consumption as an intrinsically destructive activity, theplace where objects are used up. Third it seems fair to add that the fearof materialism is shared by most people around the world even duringtheir pursuit of possessions. What has been ignored are the measures mostpeople take as consumers to counter the anti-social potential of theirmaterial culture (see Gell, 1986, and Wilk, 1989, on the role of the housein this regard). Instead I would argue that the proper starting point for thestudy of consumption is precisely this and several other contradictions thatseem fundamental both to consumption and modern social relations. Whatwealth brings with it is not some simple good or bad effect but the cleareremergence of historical contradictions, for example, the incompatibility ofa sense of freedom and the desire for social reciprocity, or the replacementof the interests of consumers by a host of ‘virtual’ consumers such as audi-tors, consultants, economists and litigious groups that claim to stand onbehalf of consumers but usurp their interests. These contradictions are tomy mind much closer to the actual struggles of contemporary consumers(see Miller, 2001).


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In this article I have not dealt in any detail with environmentalists’critiques, basically because I accept them as a proper concern for the welfareof our descendants and our responsibility to our environment. But even thiscritique is weakened when it becomes a front for an ascetic repudiation ofthe need for goods per se. At this point it may become an enemy ratherthan an ally of the struggle over inequality and poverty, such as when theneed to show how structural adjustment results in the removal of welfareprovision for the poor is lost in a tide of green concerns about the WorldTrade Organization or when forest conservationists turn a blind eye to theneeds of impoverished forest dwellers. There is no reason, however, for en-vironmentalism merely to follow the ancient suspicion of consumption asthat process which uses up resources and which thereby labels it an intrinsicevil. A genuine measure of sustainability that welcomes the ability of scienceto find methods to increase wealth without harming the planet is surely com-patible. Similarly the desire to give credit to the way consumers consumeand the authenticity of some of their desire for goods need not detract fromthe academic critique of the way companies attempt to sell goods andservices, or exploit workers in doing so. I see nothing in this article thatcontradicts, for example, the recent critique launched by Klein (2001).

Finally I certainly hope that there is nothing in this article which wouldsuggest that I have any desire to reduce the centrality of morality to theacademic analysis of consumption. My own starting point in seeking tobecome a professional academic was Habermas’ (1972) argument against theillusion of such a morally neutral academia. What I have attacked in thisarticle is the poverty of that morality that in its desire to attack materialismhas increasingly separated itself from a consideration of the experience ofpoverty, the attack on inequality, the cry of injustice, and the need toincrease the standard of living. In short an admission that among otherthings poverty is constituted by a lack of material resources. This may beproperly tempered by environmentalist concerns, where these remaindirected at the welfare of populations as well as that of the planet.What welearn from the academic study of consumption is not that material cultureis good or bad for people. Rather we learn that people have to engage ina constant struggle to create relationships with things and with people, andthere is much to be gained from an empathetic documentation of thosestruggles. In the meantime a literature that allows the anxieties of the richto obscure the suffering of the poor and seems constantly to assume thatgoods are intrinsically bad for people is simply not my idea of a moralapproach to the topic of consumption. It is rather a sign of an academicdiscipline that has lost touch with what it purports to study.


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Press.Clark, G. (2000) Pension Fund Capitalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Cross, G. (1993) Time and Money. London: Routledge.Gell, A. (1986) ‘Newcomers to the World of Goods’, in A. Appadurai (ed.) The Social

Life of Things, pp. 110–38. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Habermas, J. (1972) Knowledge and Human Interests. London: Heinemann.Henwood, D. (1997) Wall Street. New York: Verso.Horowitz, D. (1985) The Morality of Spending. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins

University Press.Hutton,W. (1996) The State We’re In. London: Vintage.Klein, N. (2001) No Logo. London: Flamingo.Mauss, M. (1954) The Gift. London: Cohen and West.Miller, D. (1987) Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Oxford: Blackwell.Miller, D. (1988) ‘Appropriating the State on the Council Estate’, Man 23: 353–72.Miller, D. (1994) Modernity: an Ethnographic Approach. Oxford: Berg.Miller, D. (ed.) (1995) Acknowledging Consumption. London: Routledge.Miller, D. (1997) Capitalism:An Ethnographic Approach. Oxford: Berg.Miller, D. (1998a) A Theory of Shopping. Cambridge: Polity.Miller, D. (1998b) ‘A Theory of Virtualism’, in J.G. Carrier and D. Miller (eds)

Virtualism:A New Political Economy. Oxford: Berg.Miller, D. (2001) The Dialectics of Shopping. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Miller, D. and Slater, D. (2000) The Internet:An Ethnographic Approach. Oxford: Berg.Munn, N. (1973) Walpiri Iconography. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Myers, F. (1986) Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute

Press.Naipaul,V.S. (1967) The Mimic Men. Harmondsworth: Penguin.Naipaul,V.S. (1987) The Enigma of Arrival. London: Viking.Nove, A. (1983) The Economics of Feasible Socialism. London: George Allen and

Unwin.Porter, R. (1993) ‘Consumption: Disease of the Consumer Society’, in J. Brewer and

R. Porter (eds) Consumption and the World of Goods. London: Routledge.Roberts, R. (1973) The Classic Slum. Harmondsworth: Penguin.Sahlins, M. (1974) Stone Age Economics. London: Tavistock.Schor, J. (1992) The Overworked American. New York: Basic Books.Schor, J. (1998) The Overspent American. New York: Harper Perennial.Segal, J. (1998) ‘Consumer Expenditure and the Growth of Needs-Required

Income’, in D. Crocker and T. Linden (eds) The Ethics of Consumption, pp. 176–97.Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

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Sennett, R. (1976) The Fall of Public Man. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Simmel, G. (1978) The Philosophy of Money. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Stallybrass, P. (1998) ‘Marx’s Coat’, in P. Spyer (ed.) Border Fetishisms. London:

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Tobin, J. (ed.) (1992) Re-Made in Japan. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Watson, J. (1997) Golden Arches East. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Wheen, F. (1999) Karl Marx. London: Fourth Estate.Wilk, R. (1989) ‘Houses as Consumer Goods’, in H. Rutz and B. Orlove (eds) The

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Daniel Miller teaches material culture at the Department of Anthropology at UniversityCollege London. He is currently conducting fieldwork on the concept of value in thecontemporary political economy. Recent books include Capitalism: An Ethnographic Approach(Berg, 1997); A Theory of Shopping (Polity/ Cornell University Press, 1998); Virtualism: A NewPolitical Economy (ed.), with J. Carrier (Berg, 1998); The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach,with Don Slater (Berg, 2000); Car Cultures (ed.) (Berg, 2001); and The Dialectics of Shopping(Chicago University Press, 2001). Address: Department of Anthropology, University CollegeLondon, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK. [email: [email protected]]


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