Consumer agency and social change: Experiences from post-World War South Africa

[eng] This study proposes a novel approach to understanding the contribution that consumer action makes to social change, both at the level of conceptual generalisation and when applied to institutionalised practices in particular historical settings. Conceptually, I develop an anthropologically generalisable account of consumption, drawing especially on Marshall Sahlins’ pioneering Culture and practical reason (1976). Against economistic understandings of consumer agency, we do better to defend a more culturally self-aware and ethically articulate mode of explanation. From this perspective, I argue, it is the expressive potential of consumer practices that most fundamentally sets them apart from productive practices. In making this argument I nonetheless avoid the excessive culturalism that arises when ignoring both the effect of economic variables on consumer agency and the manner in which consumption is tied up with relationships of power. When analysing the institutional dimension of consumption, most existing literature approaches it as a form of action limited to the market, while taking the market to be synonymous with the economic domain as such. This way of approaching the subject draws attention to significant forms of consumption but obfuscates the historically specific and contingent complexity of human livelihoods even in societies in which market exchange and capitalist forms of market-oriented production are firmly established. In particular, such approaches tell us very little about how those poor in financial resources consume, both within societies characterised by comparatively high average income and beyond. Consumption is better approached as a form of action exercised within all three institutional spheres of the “human economy” discussed in Karl Polanyi’s later work: not only the market, but also redistribution and reciprocity. Prima facie significant fields of consumption can then be analysed in terms of their ability to create, alter or destroy widespread forms of social integration and political mobilisation, but such analysis must proceed in a manner that is fully alive to the peculiarities of given social formations. Drawing on both political-economic and ethnographic literature, I illustrate this approach by examining three fields of consumption in South Africa from 1948 to the present: clothing, housing and faith healing. These consumer practices have been dynamically bound up with both class and racial power dynamics, while leading to the formation of novel forms of solidarity of the sort commonly discussed in terms of sub-cultures, new social movements and sects or kinship groups. In light of these case studies, it is necessary to challenge three misleading but pervasive claims about consumption that continue to inform contemporary critical social theory. Firstly, the economistic dogma that the market form of integration, and market-oriented production in particular, has the capacity to systematically structure consumer practices offers little purchase on how people really behave when consuming. Secondly, conceptualising consumption as a form of reproduction of an entire social order is a functionalist canard that critical social theory still needs to disown. We encounter this tenet even in the sophisticated work of Pierre Bourdieu, which remains enormously influential throughout the contemporary social sciences and which is invoked in all major studies of consumption. A third problem, also perpetuated by Bourdieu’s thinking on the subject, is the critical tendency to reduce all consumer agency to a form of instrumental domination. This can only be sustained as a valid generalisation by offering a flattened account of consumer motivation that ultimately negates agency and that collapses qualitatively distinct ethical modes of evaluation and action into one another. While such an approach is of some limited use for unmasking the domination that reciprocity can entrench, the price one pays for generalising such claims is, ultimately, an inability to recognise the gift when one sees it

Arguing from identity: ontology to advocacy in Charles Taylor's political thought

In this thesis I discuss three normative claims that I take to be central elements of Charles Taylor’s political thought. The first of these is Taylor’s contention that, in contemporary pluralistic societies, justifying socially prevailing norms by appealing to universally binding moral values is unlikely to promote social solidarity. Because this approach tends to downplay the goods that people realise through membership in particular associations, Taylor believes we must adopt a model of justification that does not prioritise universal over particular goods if we are to further social co-operation. A second claim Taylor defends is that commitment to the liberal value of collective self-rule implies treating patriotically motivated public service as a non-instrumental good. We should not, Taylor argues, regard collective association as nothing more than a means to satisfying private goals. Taylor advances a third claim, that is, he maintains that liberal toleration for diverse ways of life may require a perfectionist state that supports particularistic ways of life when they are threatened by decline. I offer a qualified defence of the first two claims, but suggest that the third is less compelling. I attempt to do this by evaluating Taylor’s claims against the standards of lucid argumentation that he himself lays down. In discussing social and political norms, which he describes as “advocacy” issues, Taylor argues that our normative commitments necessarily rely on an underlying social ontology. More specifically, Taylor argues that the political values we defend are those that enable us to secure the interests we have as the bearers of an identity possessing both individual and collective dimensions. In setting out the conditions that favour integrated and free identity formation we may thereby reach a clearer understanding of the political norms that we wish to endorse. I argue that, while Taylor’s ontological reflections might well incline us to accept his model of justification and his account of patriotic social commitment, they do not of themselves dispose us to accept state perfectionism