Book Reviews

backgrounds to discover Oceanic pasts and presents. It provides an engaging read for anyone interested in Oceania, material culture, historic anthropology, and colonial and pre-colonial history. Elisabeth Betz Sociology and Anthropology, La Trobe University

Consumption and its Consequences

D. Miller.
Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012. x + 185 pp. notes, index, London: Wiley ISBN 978-0745661070. AUD $94.95 (Hc.); ISBN 978-0745661087. AUD $32.95 (Pb.)

Whats wrong with consumption? asks Daniel Miller in the title of the opening chapter. His answer, essentially, is not much. Decades of ethnographic research into consumption have given Miller a deep appreciation of the poetry and beauty of the social meaning invested in consumer objects. His writing is lled with sensitivity and integrity to real experiences of consumption (cf. pp. 6467) and he makes an important call for more anthropological research into such experiences (p. 62). The book begins and ends with an entertaining discussion between characters representing different aspects of Millers personality about the practical consequences of consumption. In between is a recapitulation of his major theoretical and empirical contributions to the eld. The thrust of the argument here is this: the real reason why people want things is not the determination of structures such as markets, inequality and advertising. People want things because things act as culture (p. 183) dened as the idiom by which we become and subsequently understand who we are (p. 63). If markets, advertising and inequality disappeared, the demand for goods would remain the same because the underlying need to express societal values (p. 39), social relationships and wider cosmologies (p. 183) would remain.

One almost wants to join Miller in the autonomous space (p. 90) that he constructs for consumption, and to think about it not as a superstructure of production but rather in and of itself (p. 90). From this space Miller throws out some of the dirty elitist bathwater of some approaches in Western Marxism, but the baby of those approaches is also unfortunately missing from the analysis: Miller studiously ignores consumption as a driving factor in many economies and the structural considerations that this gives onto. Baudrillard in this account reduces people to mere mannequins who passively wear the clothes that ensure the fashion industrys constant prot (pp. 54, 57). People do not want to feel like passive mannequins, Miller argues, and they express this in their consumption choices and so are not passive, Q.E.D. Miller creates straw mannequins of the broader structural arguments of Baudrillard and Bauman, and whoosh, clunk, splash! Out they go with the dirty water. With this, he turns the heteronomous consumer into a mannequin more than Baudrillard or Bauman do. He avoids dismissing that consumer as deluded, stupid fooled by advertising (p. 137) but also avoids describing the consumer as part of a relatively normal heteronomy (in terms of roles, for example) in social life. Miller has a problem with moral concerns in consumption research, particularly if the researchers are critical of consumption (p. 182). He makes use of an insecure scholar trope to dismiss critical accounts. Here scholars shore up their identities through their work, projecting onto consumption what they wish or need it to be (p. 182) and showing how deep they are by showing how shallow everyone else is (p. 107). If they engage in pure critique, then their work is inevitably self-indulgent and regressive (p. vii). Ironically, given his concern with identity and the construction of values, he provides no treatment of such identity politics in the work of less critical scholars. If the reader employs the insecure scholar trope, they may detect an attempt in Millers work to identify with rather than against consumer society. In cautious approaches of ecological economics this

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aversion is itself self-indulgent and regressive, insofar as it is an escape from the questions of the possible need for dis-consumption (a general reduction in consumption) in the context of ecological crisis and climate change. Another key feature of the book is what we might call morality-washing, where moral cleansing of consumption replaces or obscures discussion of the practical consequences of consumption. Advertising is okay because it is local, not culturally imperialistic (p. 111) and because people are not fooled by it (p. 137). Consumption is okay because it is about love rather than selshness (p. 184), the social rather than the antisocial (p. 184), because it is active and creative rather than passive (p. 108), and part of authentic rather than inauthentic culture (p. 62). Ethical consumption and downsizing, on the other hand, are questionable because they are self-interested (p. 155) and hypocritical in their privilege (pp. 6, 13). Morality-washing thus enables some of the more prominent silences of the book. Firstly, Miller does not discuss what kind of creativity mass consumption allows in the appropriation of meaning. Meanings may be appropriated on an individual or subcultural level without impacting society more generally. Advertising may not fool people, but what does it do to their culture, consistently conveying as it does the message that commodities are roads to identity, recognition and desire? Consumption may be about love, but what about the parents who must work longer hours and stay away from their children in order to buy love for them, or those who cannot afford to do so at all? The reader must therefore ask of this book the simple question why consumption?. It should be completely facile to point out that all of the capabilities that Miller attributes to material culturelove, creativity, identity, desires and cultural valuescan also be expressed and manifested through activities that do not involve the purchasing and appropriation of commodities. Miller does not address the extent to which this commoditisation progressively colonises our lives, nor the consequences of that colonisation.

Miller briey discusses the ecological limits to consumption but he does not take a rm position on the severity of anthropogenic climate change (indeed he introduces some David Hulme-inspired scepticism though he leans towards action), leaving the books proposed solutions wanting. He thus leaves dis-consumption off the agenda, opting instead for piecemeal reforms to weed out bad substances and practises. The most forcefully argued suggestion is for the provision of primary and secondary education programs on the supply chains of consumer products (pp. 140141). He also calls for more government regulation of capitalist commerce (pp. viii, 176). He advocates an ethical concern for the future of the planet and a sustainable environment (viii) even alongside a strong argument that ethical consumption (which does not include disconsumption) can be contrary to the practical side of such ethics (p. 87). So who should read this book? You should if you talk about the mannequins who work fty hours a week and drive to shopping malls on weekends. Read it as a challenge to dip your critique in a cold water of empirical engagement. Read this book if you are a marketer and you feel impotent (but skip pp. 109115 where the strong hypodermic model of advertising is replaced with something like a cake icing tube model). It will give you a better idea of the potent desires invested in consumption, and perhaps inform your further attempts to harness these to the purchase of commodities. Read this book if you are a graduate student and you are depressed by environmental problems. It may help you to get over your distaste at vacuous consumer culture as you adjust to your new, more harmonious life in it. Read this book in combination with Confronting Consumption (Princen et. al. 2002)for a less morality-washed view, grounded in ecological economics, of the consumption problem and some potential solutions. Read Millers straw mannequins such as Zygmunt Bauman who, far from depicting climate change as merely some kind of moral retribution for the crime of succumbing to afuenza (p. 22) presents in Consuming Life a cogent critique in terms of

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dissatisfaction in consumption, commoditisation, social stratication and democratic politics. Read David Graebers Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion and Desire (2007) for a critique of the naturalising of consumption as the expression of social desires. Lastly, read this book if you have any interest at all in a eld whose importance to the world and to anthropology, for better or worse, is absolutely paramount. Simon Burns School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne

Cultural, Development and Social Theory: Towards an Integrated Social Development

J. Clammer.
London: Zed Books, 2012. viii + 291 pp., bibliog., index. ISBN 978-1780323145. USD $34.95 (Pb.)

As an anthropologist teaching in a development studies program, I found this book refreshing and illuminating. It pushes the boundaries on many points in a eld that all too often has proven itself to be staid and all too often wedded to the neoliberal growth model associated with mainstream development agencies around the world and multilateral organisations, such as the United Nations, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. In the rst chapter (Transforming the discourse of development: cultures, suffering and human futures), Clammer, a discipline broker between anthropology and sociology, sets the stage for the rest of the book by noting that at the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century, the world continues to be a place of growing social inequalities between and within nation-states. This reinforces huge issues of poverty; ethnic, social and gender inequality; abuses of human rights, massive environmental degradation and global warming; unsustainable resource depletion; illiteracy and lack of access to education; woefully inadequate health care;

and conict and wars (pp. 34). Although he recognises that much work in cultural studies, literary and art criticism, sociology and presumably anthropology is trivial and narcissistic given the woeful state of much of humanity and the global eco-system due to corporate globalisation, he faults development studies for tending to neglect many of the more progressive ideas in the social sciences and humanities and excessively embracing conventional economics. The author in chapter two (On cultural studies and the place of culture in development) argues that conventional development thought has only recently become to recognise culture as a reexive concept that touches on the existential aspects of human life. He asserts that culture is relevant to the development experience in that it recognises real people, individuals with emotions, memories, stories and values, who suffer and seek meaning in their suffering (p. 48). Clammer argues in chapter three (Aid, culture and context) that aid policies fostered by international development agencies, NGOs, and businesses tend to promote corporate globalisation rather than critique it or offer alternatives to it. Nevertheless, he maintains that an emancipatory politics is ourishing as evidenced by numerous social movements and gatherings, such as the World Social Forum, that in one form or other challenge the global status quo. In chapter ve (Reframing social economics: economic development, post-development and alternative economics), Clammer argues that economic anthropology has the potential to provide development practitioners with alternatives to current forms of globalized capitalism, more ecologically responsible modes of being in the world, and forms of sociality that overcome the fragmentation and alienation of some much contemporary life (pp. 115116). He laments, however, that to date an anthropology of utopias remains a virtually non-existent endeavour and that anthropologists have tended to cede the study of intentional communities and social movements to sociologists. In chapter six (Culture and climate justice), Clammer argues that environmental/climate justice requires that humans learn to live in

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