Are we trapped into thinking that you can't have human sexuality without "consuming" a product? It seems an odd thing to consider having sex as an act of consumption. Very odd indeed but it is the sort of notion that a lot of cultural critics would enjoy playing with. "Ah, the commodification of sex!" And the anthropologists would get ready to present another paper on the commodification of everything.As David Graeber has pointed out (in an unpublished manuscript about consumption) we tend to assign a lot of things to the consumption category that don't belong there. Things like watching television of playing baseball. Or even having sex. There is a problem in doing this.
One problem is that these things have little to do with consumption and a lot to do with human sociability, human interaction and human delight, fun, production, and other things. Sport, for example (and sporting can mean several things, here).
The Yodora example, if nothing else, is just one more reminder that what we may want to call consumption is not consumption at all, but a re-invention, or maybe just an instrumentality, a tool to do something social: have sex, hang out with friends and feel that you don't smell bad. Or a discursive instrumentality: Yodora as a tool for after-dinner charla in Colombia.
Might it be useful to stop using the term consumption unless things are really used up or destroyed in their use? The idea of conservation of matter argues against using consumption incautiously because stuff that we buy is usually transformed through use and not destroyed at all. The Yodora cream runs out because it goes onto your skin and then is sweated off, or washed off, and it goes somewhere else, where someone or something else may have to deal with it. So following a product through its recycling and re-use, following Desjeux's (2001) product itinerary, is often enlightening for this very reason. We aren't consumers. We are transformers.
A lot of what Daniel Miller (1998) and others, like Appadurai (1986) and Desjeux have done, and we should be glad of this, is to point out how what we uncritically call consumption is rarely what it seems to be. It is almost never about buying into what the product's makers have in mind, and it is very often something rather creative, something conditioned by individual understandings, individual re-writings onto the meaning-board of a manufactured product. What else was Roland Barthes (1988) writing about when when he pointed out that authors don't simply communicate meaning to readers? Readers write their own meanings onto what they read. Simple enough. People make new meanings of the stuff they buy. This is a venerable idea, one that Nancy Munn (1986) writes about: value transformation through exchange, a helpful way way of looking at goods in exchange systems which does not, as far as I know, show up in Miller's work. (Daniel, tell me if I am wrong, here!)
But it seems anthropology is stuck in consumption mode. We are using up an idea that marketers handed to us. Anthropologists too often use words like consumption or commodity when those words really don't fit what people actually do. People don't consume, they transform.
Maybe we should be done with the word consumption when we are talking about economics, exchange, or products. What passes as consumption from the perspective of marketers is not really consumption at all. Consumption is about using up things, or destroying, potlatch-like, the goods that you have accumulated. David Graeber is right: a soccer match on a neighborhood playground in Bolivia is not consumption. Neither is watching television, nor is having sex. We use things that we have purchased to do these things. But does this mean people who buy stuff are co-opted, through their purchase, into in an ideology that descends from some corporate boardroom in some wealthy city? Are these people less human? Is their participation in a single and harmful kind of social system thus insured? Maybe, but if so, just how does this work, exactly?
Certainly a lot of products which people buy aren't worth a shit, many of them are down right harmful in the short and long run. Sometimes people find out about this and stop buying whatever they bought. Sometimes, the harm in buying and using something is not obvious, and sometimes it is obvious enough but people keep buying it anyway, often for rather complex reasons. Some of those reasons may include clever advertising. Other reasons may include our greedy stomachs or our faulty folk-sociology (enhanced by amoral advertising) about health and safety. Think of some fast foods, most Sports Utility Vehicles, and nearly (but not all) hand guns, which are often very bad for people in the long run.
But some things that people make, sell, buy and use are a great deal of fun and don't do too much damage. The point is that each instance (or context) in which a product is bought, taken home, used, re-used, interpreted, argued about, and passed on (to the next user or to the garbage can) can have rather different consequences from another product in another context.
What different sorts of products have in common in the patterned ways in which they are used and re-interpreted has not been much explored, except by archaeologists.These patterns are worth looking at.
I have a hunch that things we eat are are used and shared in rather peculiar ways that may not match the way lawn mowers or carpeting are bought and used. Some things are displayed. Some things are served at a table. Some things, like some kinds of underwear, are hidden. We need a vigorous contemporary archaeology and another look at material culture, here, as much as we need a theory of economic value. We may not need a theory of consumption at all.
So I don't think Daniel Miller has it right by using the term consumption all the time. Perhaps it is time to try replacing the term with transformation.
Our understanding of ourselves and our human relatives elsewhere in the world as we buy and sell and use stuff that we did not make with our own hands is just beginning. Taking an archaeological view, in which money can be seen as a very recent innovation and mass-manufactured and globally marketed goods as something even newer, we can forgive ourselves for not having adequate models for understanding what all is going on when we buy and use stuff. Stuff like Yodora.
It isn't enough to say, as some anti-consumption straw-woman might, "ah, that Yodora. There goes the commodification of human life, again!" But it doesn't make sense to simply say "there is again the creative power of consumption! See how people resist the corporate world by consuming Yodora to have sex!" Too many of us who study 'consumers' tend to do one or the other.
Using Yodora as a discursive tool, as an element in an informal, after-dinner salon, however, doesn't have anything to do with consumption at all, and everything to do with sharing a few laughs and getting to know the comfort levels of host, hostess, and guest with topics and behaviors that only show up among close friends, and after some good food and a little white wine.
The empirical question of what else Yodora is about requires some field data, and, among other things, some pharmacological data about what happens when Yodora use strays from the use indicated on the product's label and, for example, into the intimate lives of gay men in Colombia.
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Works Cited
Appadurai, A. 1986 The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (edited volume). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Barthes, Roland. 1988. Image, Music, Text. New York: MacMillan
D. Desjeux, 2001. La méthode des itinéraires comme méthode comparative appliquée à la comparaison intercutlturelle. (http://www.argonautes.fr downloaded 04/2009).
Graeber, David. n.d. Consumption. Unpublished manuscript provided by the author.
Miller, Daniel. 1998. A Theory of Shopping. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP.
Munn, Nancy. 1986 The Fame of Gawa: A Symbolic Study of Value Transformation in a Massim Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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