Excitantia and the Everyday: the Rise of Plebeian Luxuries
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.
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