Excitantia and the Everyday: the Rise of Plebeian Luxuries
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Sidney W. Mintz EXCITANTIA AND THE EVERYDAY: THE RISE OF PLEBEIAN LUXURIES his paper1 sets forth a discussion of the does this mean that the ethnographic portraits consumption of goods and services, that we have been given of these societies by our Tas anthropologists have focused upon it. predecessors are complete or correct in every Consumption is a subject beloved of economists, detail, or that the societies themselves are frozen and it has gained popularity as a research topic in time, unchanged and unchanging. Yet it can among historians and sociologists in the last two be argued that they were more like each other decades or so. The history of its study among than any was like, say, Finnish society, or British anthropologists, however, has been curious—a society, or Japanese society. coefficient, really, of the kinds of society at which In that first era of ethnography, it addressed the ethnographic, data-collecting aspect of our societies such as these for good reasons. But discipline was traditionally aimed, especially anthropology did not feel limited by its own during that era when the field of anthropology choices. Alfred Louis Kroeber writes: was achieving its greatest growth. The societies with which ethnography After all, the subject of anthropology is concerned itself—those of the so-called non- limited only by man [he means man and literate or ‘primitive’ peoples—were typically woman; this was written almost fifty years small, relatively unstratified, non-Western, ago]. It is not restricted by time—it goes highly localized, non-machine in their back into geology as far as man [and technology, and both integrated and divided woman] can be traced. It is not restricted by ties of blood and kinship. Of course those by region but is worldwide in scope. It has societies were many other things, too; this specialized on the primitives because no crude list is only suggestive. But they were not other science would deal seriously with Western, or big, or literate, or based on machines, them, but it has never renounced its intent or prodigal in their consumption of fossil fuels, to understand the high civilizations also. or urban, or anonymous in their social relations. Anthropology is interested in what is most For examples, there are the supposedly ‘classic’ exotic in mankind [and womankind] but instances: Malinowski’s Trobriand Islanders, equally in ourselves, here, now, at home. Evans-Pritchard’s Nuer, Firth’s Tikopians, (Kroeber 1953: xiii) Fortes’s Tallensi, and so on. From this one sees that the nature of the societies being chosen Kroeber wrote that in 1953. But by then what is in these ways shared. That is not to say that he asserted was already being played out in these societies were like each other; there is no a whole new era of anthropological inquiry. need to reduce the so-called primitive world to The change in subject matter happened quite a sample of one, even less than would be true suddenly, and also quickly. Boas in the Americas, for capitalism itself, which clearly takes on a and Malinowski, Radcliffe Brown and Rivers different character in different cultures. Nor in the Old World, had marked together the suomen antropologi | volume 41 issue 1 spring 2016 45 Sidney W. Mintz beginnings of modern ethnographic fieldwork, short, production and consumption in such societies somewhere between the start of this century are intimately connected parts of the same thing. and the end of the First World War. Raymond When anthropologists began, really only Firth was Malinowski’s student and Leach’s with the Second World War, to look at larger, teacher; Alfred Kroeber was Boas’s student richer, more modernized and energetic societies, and—to name one—Julian Steward’s teacher. they discovered that those societies—societies They stand for the period. Firth, Malinowski’s like Finland, for example—were simply student, was as clearheaded and astute as ever, too big and too many-sided to be mastered when this writer last saw him, in 1994. Kroeber ethnographically. Thinking back to their earlier died in 1960, but he had been Boas’s first Ph.D. experiences and the triumphs of the first in 1901. Between them, Kroeber and Firth ethnographers, they did the expectable: they oversaw the first three quarters of anthropology chose and studied communities within such in this century, and the zenith of that sort (if societies, which they hoped were somehow you will, of the ‘primitive’ sort) of ethnography. representative of them. When this writer went Because of the kinds of society to Puerto Rico in 1948 as one of the student anthropologists chose to study in the classic team organized by Julian Steward to test some period, the study of production and the study of his ideas about complex societies, we did just of consumption were of a piece with the that. We were expected to add insights at a later societies themselves, most of whose economic stage, in order to deal with the fact that the activities were quite neatly bounded. One communities we studied were integrated within reason why the kula ring is of such consummate larger socio-cultural systems. But we soon interest, for example, is because it transcends discovered that that was easier said than done. Trobriand locality. Malinowski writes of it with What those larger systems were, how to describe wonder, since it involved so many communities them adequately, turned out to be beyond our stretched over so many miles of open sea. The powers. The People of Puerto Rico (Steward et al. raiding of Dinka herds by the Nuer catches our 1956), the book that came out of that experience, attention because they are Dinka, and not Nuer, was a pioneering work. But it was not wholly herds. But these wider connections, which are successful because the techniques to do what we always present to some degree (Lesser 1961), were attempting to do had not yet been devised. are ancillary to the basic economic system in Most of the conceptual and methodological each case. The larger systems of production problems persist, a half a century later. and consumption (of which these untypical externalities are admittedly a part) are linked TracinG THE linKAGES internally in each instance, by arrangements not betWeen production only for production, but also for circulation or and consuMption distribution. Such arrangements ‘on the inside’ reveal, rather like a pinball machine when it In the Puerto Rican sugar plantation community lights up, who has power; whence it comes; and this writer studied, it soon became apparent how it is transmitted in space and time. In each that production and consumption were hardly case it is possible to see how power works, so connected to each other at all. My friends that access to the basic material needs of life were rural proletarians who had no productive is not interdicted by supervening authority. In property, except perhaps a few shovels and a suomen antropologi | volume 41 issue 1 spring 2016 46 Sidney W. Mintz couple of chickens. They sold their labor in When anthropologists took up the study order to acquire the means to buy what they of consumption again—I have in mind, for needed to live. In these ways, they were not example, Arm Stoler’s 1975 study of Javanese at all like Trobrianders or Nuer or Tikopians. rice cultivators, or Mary Weismantel’s 1988 In the community in which I worked, which study of an Ecuadorian village—they often produced sugarcane from which raw sugar was found themselves dealing with communities in made and shipped elsewhere for final refining, some ways analogous to what 1 have described it would not be entirely off the mark to say here for my friends, the Puerto Rican sugarcane that production and consumption really weren’t workers. The penetration of the modem world connected, except by labor. People did not consume into local life had particular and peculiar effects what they produced, and did not produce what on their focus, and on their methods of study, of they consumed. The community, such as it was, small communities. existed to produce sugar. Even the sugar that Said differently, the early ethnographers people consumed there had nothing to do with chose societies that lay at least superficially the sugar they produced there. Working there, outside capitalism, while the later ethnographers it was easy to see how that vital connection began dealing with societies that lay much more between production and consumption, which squarely within it. That is a change of focus of the early ethnographers saw on every side as enormous proportions, and one with which we they did their work, might easily be forgotten are still, and will for long be, struggling. Studies when one was studying the modern world. of consumption in societies of ‘our’ sort, of a Of course production and consumption capitalistic sort, will be at a substantial remove are everywhere linked; but in some eras, the from, say, the Trobriands, no matter how we go mystification of that linkage has been more about it. Of course, that has to do with the way subtle. More than a decade ago, and nearly forty capitalism transforms economic relationships. years after that Puerto Rican fieldwork, I wrote a Within the past century and a half there book about the history of sugar, in which I tried have been many attempts to analyze the large- to document a connection between production scale historical processes behind such changes. and consumption. In that case, the connection The scholars who did so differed widely in their was, on the one hand, between production and interpretations and in their scope of treatment; consumption in the insular sugar-producing but all confront more or less directly certain colonies; and, on the other, between production basic features of economic change that appeared and consumption in the metropolitan powers, in within Europe, somewhere between the my case in the United Kingdom.