Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities by Grant McCracken

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 1091 people of color, the environment itself), one gets not just a more complete story, but a very different one. Carroll Pursell Dr. Pursell is Adeline Barry Davee Distinguished Professor of History and director of the Program in the History of Technology and Science, Case Western Reserve University. Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities. By Grant McCracken. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. Pp· xv+174; notes, bibliography, index. $27.50. This collection ofessayson consumerculture by anthropologist Grant McCracken addresses the history oftechnology only by implication. Mc­ Cracken argues that scholars have too long regarded technological in­ novation and its expansion ofproduction as a kind ofindependent vari­ able of Western civilization. He maintains instead that the drive to consume material goods has acted as an engine of technological inno­ vation and of cultural change over the past several hundred years. In other words, historians have emphasized the “supply side” of the equa­ tion and neglected consumerdemand—a force regarded by McCracken as dominant. This theme, which by opposition or correction relates his work to the study of technology and culture, remains an undercurrent throughout the volume. McCracken argues that the expansion of consumer goods, far from objectifying manipulation of the masses for the benefit of a capitalist elite, has actually democratized Western society, promoted social mo­ bility, and provided individuals with greater capacity for creating and defining themselves. The power of material goods to embody and ex­ press cultural meaning emerges as more significant than either their economic role or their function, in Veblen’s analysis, as a marker of sta­ tus. More explicit than McCracken’s assumption regarding technolog­ ical change, this theme suffers from being frequently asserted without rigorous proof. For, although Culture and Consumption promises a co­ herent theoretical approach to its subject, it remains a collection of es­ says, some more convincing than others, unsuccessfully connected by a series of introductions and bridging passages that, rather than uni­ fying the whole, point out the disparity of its parts. Still, the parts are stimulating to anyone seekingan understandingofthe rise and function of consumer culture. The book’s first section is devoted to “History” and includes three essays, the first of which applauds the explosion of historical works on 1092 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE consumerism but questions their Whiggish application of contempo­ rary morality to the past. Two essays follow summarizing McCracken’s own work. One explores patina as a reinforcer ofstatus before the con­ sumerrevolution enthroned the conceptofnovelty. The other discusses a contemporary woman whose curatorial attitude toward a large col­ lection of heirlooms and use of them as mnemonic emblems of family history offer McCracken a window onto premodern consumer con­ sciousness. The second section, “Theory,” contains two chapters that succeed separately but do not provide a general theory. The first, an essay on clothing as language, arguesagainst the popularlanguage met­ aphor of cultural analysis by proving that we typically “read” an indi­ vidual’s clothes for a sense of his or her essence not in linear sequence, as with words, but as a simultaneously perceived field. The second, which McCracken describes as the linchpin of his book, describes how meaning is transferred from the world in general to specific consumer goods and then to the individual consumer, who in a sense then returns it transformed to the larger world. The third section, devoted to “Practice,” contains four essays that, although provocative in their own right, do not contribute to proving the linchpin theory. These final chapters cover such topics as gender construction and consumption (women’s “dress-for-success” look as an example of a rehabilitated trickle-down theory), continual acts of consumption as bridges to meaning displaced for security’s sake into the future, and the so-called Diderot effect (the drive for harmony among one’s possessions, which initially prevents people from con­ suming beyond their means but finally drives them to replace everything in order to harmonize with a single upscale acquisition). As this summary indicates, McCracken contributes perceptively to cur­ rent debate on consumer culture, but his work suffers by promising more than it delivers. Jeffrey L. Meikle...