Anthropology

Critique of Economics

Several of the most prominent anthropologists to write about consumption have specifically criticized [Page 50]economists' and political economists' approaches to consumption. Whereas economic approaches to consumer culture take as their starting point the assumption that people want to consume, anthropologists have preferred to ask why people want to consume. The World of Goods, published in 1978 by anthropologist Mary Douglas and econometrician Baron Isherwood, was an early example of anthropologists arguing against economic views of consumption. Douglas and Isherwood focused on understanding the human motivations that lie behind consumption, arguing that people feel compelled to acquire consumer goods because these goods are ways of communicating to others by signifying one's status and identity. The use of consumption practices to communicate status was also taken up by Pierre Bourdieu in Distinction. Distinction, while not strictly ethnographic, is very influential in anthropology for at least two reasons: Bourdieu's arguments deal with the anthropological perspective that consumer practices are actually a reflection of broader underlying social structures, and his theoretical positions are drawn from empirical research into practices of everyday life.

Other anthropologists have followed Douglas and Bourdieu in arguing that many people engage in consumption for reasons much more complex and diverse than dominant definitions of market economics would imagine. Such arguments critique the assumption of economics that consumers' behavior is universal and predictable by emphasizing that contemporary market economies are only one historically and culturally specific context in which consumption takes place. Further, although economists hold that consumers will behave in consistently self-interested ways, much anthropological research has shown the many apparently “non-rational” motives can inform consumption practices. Daniel Miller has argued that the self-interested consumer is a myth, and that “rational” behavior is at best a partial explanation of how and why people consume; he uses the example of the stereotypical housewife, a figure who is frequently the center of most domestic consumption, but whose shopping practices are largely an altruistic act of caring for other family members.

...