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Table of Contents
Global capitalism and its contradictions
Global capitalism and its contradictions
Week 3: A world of commodities
Ryan Schram
ANTH 1002: Anthropology in the world
Wednesday, August 17, 2022
Slides available at https://anthro.rschram.org/1002/2022/3.2
Main reading: West (2012)
Other reading: Marx ([1867] 1972)
Global experiences
The arcades of Sydney
A slogan for World Square is “Quench your thirst for global experiences at World Square.”
The world at your doorstep
Storefronts in World Square, downtown Sydney
Tune in next time…
A temporary wall as advertisement in World Square, downtown Sydney
We got apples
Apples on display in a supermarket at World Square.
And carrots
Prepacked carrots on display in a supermarket at World Square
From our kitchen to yours
A shelf of boxes of readymade mixes
Food is sacred
A shelf of boxes of various dried beans and grains, each bearing a label, “Food is sacred”
Daigou [代购], personal shoppers or “model consumers”?
Daigou [代购] purchase goods on behalf of overseas clients, and document their purchasing online.
They also produce live streams while they shop, watched by many more than just their customers.
Like the beauty bloggers examined by Woronov (2016), daigou present themselves as “everyday experts” in the world of luxury consumption.
- They are “experts” at being bourgeois individuals.
- The expanding consumer culture of the urban middle class of China has created a space in which they offer themselves as role models: “model consumers” (Woronov 2016).
Haul of mirrors
“Haul videos” on Youtube allow us to see daigou in a wider frame.
Destiny Marie, dir. 2022. I Spent over 2,000 Dollars Shopping (Haul). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gZR4yQTQKg.
The producers of haul videos merely display what they have bought, emphasizing the sheer quantity and the total spent, like a score. (This example may in fact be satire, but if it is, it’s good.)
You can score points on social media, either as a daigou, blogger, or haul-video maker, but who benefits?
- The fame one earns as a model bourgeois individual is also work.
- Shopping media cultivates the proper ethos of individualism in audiences.
Individualism is learned
Media texts about shopping, and the experience of shopping, provide a structure—a template—which we learn to apply to other domains.
- Hospital care
- University education
There is no such thing as modernity
The conventional view of history is that every society moves from tradition to modernity, from a state of constraint to one of individual freedom.
In this view, consumption is simply a realization of the individual’s freedom to choose.
Yet look at how much effort is needed to suppress awareness of social relations, and to teach people to be the right kind of individual.
References and further reading
Marx, Karl. (1867) 1972. “Capital, Vol. 1 [Selections].” In The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker, 309–43. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
West, Paige. 2012. “Village Coffee.” In From Modern Production to Imagined Primitive: The Social World of Coffee from Papua New Guinea, 101–29. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
Woronov, T. E. 2016. “‘Model Consumers’: Beauty Bloggers, Everyday Experts, and Governmentality in Urban China.” In New Mentalities of Government in China. Routledge.