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50 HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY, VOLUME 30 (4)

LAUREN J. COOK REBECCA YAMIN JOHN P. MCCARTHY

Shopping as Meaningful Action: Toward a Redefinition of Consumption in Historical Archaeology

ABSTRACT

Much archaeological scholarship on consumption has approached its subject matter as the means to an end-e.g., as a way of studying socioeconomic status-rather than as a proper object of study in its own right. The “consumer choice” school, and, more recently, advocates of consumer behavior studies, have supported approaches that emphasize quantitative methods, at the same time downplaying the “qualitative” or symbolic aspects of consumption. A considerable body of literature on the symbolic aspects of consumption exists both in historical archaeology and other fields. The intention of this essay is to draw together this recent literature on consumption and combine it into a single approach that emphasizes shopping as the meaningful action at the very heart of consumption. With the emphasis on agency, this approach presents shopping as that crucial moment of transformation where identity, intention, and symbol combine in the decision to purchase, to own, an object.

Introduction

The passive voice implies that people receive whatever happens to them as so many buffets and blows, including their ideas about god and death; the active voice encour- ages a search for expectations held about human agency (Douglas 1982:ix).

In his paper, “Could Shopping Really Mat- ter?,” presented at the Rutgers University Center for Historical Analysis in April 1993, Daniel Miller (1993) told a story about Walter Ben- jamin with which it is uncomfortably easy to identify. Benjamin’s celebrated collection of essays, Illuminations, begins with a short piece on book collecting (Benjamin 1968:59-67), an activity that he apparently thought was different from other kinds of shopping. For Benjamin, a

collector’s relationship to his books is a “relationship to objects which does not emphasize their functional utilitarian value . . . but studies and loves them as the scene, the stage, of their fate. The most profound enchantment for the collector is the locking of the individual items within a magic circle in which they are fixed as the final thrill, the thrill of acquisition, passes over them” (Benjamin 1968:60). As Miller pointed out, while Benjamin “provides one of the most sympathetic and eloquent accounts of shopping that we have available” (Miller 1993:5), he did not seem to recognize that shoppers for less intellectual commodities than books might have similar experiences.

Historical archaeologists have tended to distance themselves from the shopping done by their subjects of study. They seldom approach consumers as social actors like themselves, exer- cising choice in a variety of situations. Instead, the act of choice, the “why” of consumption, disappears in analyses which focus on what people bought, or, more accurately, threw out. Choice is seen as either determined by economics or as a small, at best passive, voice, inau- dible, submerged in the noisy black box of mass culture.

The fact that mass culture is even a consideration in historical archaeology reflects the expan- sion of the discipline over the last several de- cades. The incomplete response to the challenge of this broadening of subject matter underlies this paper. With particular reference to consumption, a rich area in which to examine the expression of class and ethnicity, the general approaches taken within the discipline are briefly reviewed and a different approach is proposed. While the proposed approach is not a complete departure from the direction of some recent scholarship, an attempt is made here to clarify the differences between past approaches which minimize the active role of the consumer and the proposed approach which puts the consumer at the center of the decision-making process. The study of shoppers and their relationship to their objects of choice “beyond their functional

Historical Archaeology, 1996, 30(4):50-65. Permission to reprint required.

SHOPPING AS MEANINGFUL ACTION: TOWARD A REDEFINITION OF CONSUMPTION 51

utilitarian value,” as conscious and knowing users and shapers of culture (e.g., Beaudry et al. 199 1) is recommended.

Approaching Consumption Through Historical Archaeology

Historical archaeologists initially viewed 17th- century British North America as a “frontier society,” which implied limited access to goods. When the subject was considered at all it was easy to see consumption as a passive process of “using up” whatever goods happened to be available. The 17th- and 18th-century sites first stud- ied were most often identified with the wealthy white men who owned them, and an “art historical” approach that emphasized the time differential between the availability of ceramic types in the Old World and in the New was seen as sufficient (e.g., Kelso 1979:91-95; cf. Kelso 1984: 176-182). Evidence of consumption in the archaeological record was interpreted as reflecting patterns in the availability of goods and resources.

As the range of sites investigated broadened, both chronologically and in terms of site types, the field was faced with new problems and new avenues of potential research. The rise of cultural resource management was in part responsible for the broadening of focus, as sites that were not occupied by the rich and famous were more likely to be investigated. In addition, the inclusion of 19th- and 20th-century sites even further diversified the subject matter. This became increasingly important as historical archaeology spread out from the eastern seaboard into areas that were not brought into the Euroamerican sphere until after 1800. Class and ethnic differences, when framed by the context of urban or plantation sites, were difficult to ignore. Conveniently, more emphasis was also being placed on the study of class and ethnicity in the social sciences, resulting in the development of analytical frameworks for approaching the “lifestyles of the poor and insignificant.” The class and ethnic differences between occu- pants of archaeological sites provided the oppor- tunity to explore the material expression of class

and ethnicity, a promise that has not yet been fully realized, but which constitutes, at this writing, an ongoing project within the discipline.

The addition of 19th-century and later sites to the sampling universe in historical archaeology, as well as closer interaction with professional historians, led to consideration of the Industrial Revolution and its implications, among which the issue of class was most prominent. How- ever, class was not confronted head-on in historical archaeology, but instead became buried in a virtual obsession with “socioeconomic status.” Socioeconomic status first appears in the literature in the early 1970s (e.g., Miller and Stone 1970:lOO) as a catchall concept, a way around the problem of distinguishing between the effects of class and ethnicity (Williams 1983:66). The term appears to have found its way into the discipline without any critical evaluation of its as- sumptions. Among these is the assumption that social status and economic status are somehow equivalent, or that the two concepts cannot or should not be analyzed separately from one another.

George Miller’s (1980, 1991) economic scaling system for refined white ceramics provides a quantitative means of assessing the relative economic costs of 19th-century assemblages, and was adopted during the early 1980s as a tool for investigating socioeconomic status. Using Miller’s scaling methods, archaeologists working with 19th-century sites began to search out quantitative evidence of socioeconomic status. Much of this work took place under the unfortunate rubric of “consumer choice,” while, in fact, much of the research in question failed to ad- dress why consumers chose any one thing over another. Instead, it focused on drawing linkages between particular artifact types and the abstract “socioeconomic status” of their owners. With few exceptions, socioeconomic status was in- ferred from the documented occupation of the site’s head of household, who was most often male. While women’s things, i.e., ceramic table wares, got most of the analytical attention, the meanings of those things were reduced to their monetary value and thus converted back into a measure of the status of the breadwinner. Scal-


ing is a valuable method, but it was also a con- venient way for analysts in a hurry to get mea- surable results.

The “consumer choice” school searched for “index artifacts” such as chess pieces, ceramic figurines, or fragments of violin bows that would indicate households of high status (Garrow 1987:229-230). They also searched for patterns in artifact assemblages that would serve the same purpose, that is, identify the socioeconomic status of consumers. At its most extreme, the “consumer choice” school appeared to be prepar- ing for an end run around the documentary record. In discussing the ceramic assemblage from the Green Mansion site in Windsor, Ver- mont, Spencer-Wood (1987:62) claimed that “the relative socioeconomic position of the Green family could have been determined, in the ab- sence of extensive documentation, by applying Miller’s ceramic price-scaling indices to their archaeologically recovered whiteware.”

In a departure from the more extreme posi- tions of “consumer choice,” a group of scholars (LeeDecker et al. 1987) turned to modeling consumption through flowcharts and other means. Calling their work “consumer behavior studies,” these scholars drew on a variety of disciplines outside of anthropology, including market research, sociology, economics, and psychology. Consumer behavior studies tend to focus on research that provides quantitative data that can be grouped to reveal “patterns” of expenditure and by extension of consumption (Klein and LeeDecker 1991; Henry 1991; LeeDecker 1991; Holt 1991; Huelsbeck 1991; Klein 1991). The focus has moved not merely away from individual acts but has become intentionally dissoci- ated, distanced, “not linked to any specific commodity or population segment” (Henry 199 1:4). Consumer behaviorists consider anthropology less relevant than other disciplines, because anthro- pologists “have tended to focus on consumer- behavior-related [sic] research on non-Western, non-market economies” (Henry 1991 :4). There are in fact, a number of anthropological treat- ments of consumption in Western societies (e.g., Douglas and Isherwood 1979), and many more on market economies (e.g., Polanyi 1944, 1968;

Appadurai 1986b). Daniel Miller (1995a) also reviews consumption studies in anthropology.

The emphasis in consumer behavior studies on modeling, measurement, and explanation illus- trates the all-too-common tendency in American and British social science to see cultural phenomena as natural phenomena to be explained through models, as with other natural phenomena (Giddens 1979; Ricoeur 1991:125-143; Colapietro 1993: 101, 105-106). The prominence of this tendency in archaeology is the legacy of the New Archaeology of the 1960s, and its influence in historical archaeology owes much to the influx of prehistorians trained in the New Archaeology in the 1970s. For an extreme example of applying models from the natural sciences to historical archaeological data, see South (1988).

Regardless of whether or not they are suscep- tible to explanation, cultural phenomena are meaning-centered and, as such, they call for understanding and ultimately interpretation. Although quantitative approaches and modeling can undoubtedly contribute to understanding consumption, there appears to be an empty space at the very heart of consumer behavior studies. This is a direct result of most of its (published) practitioners’ apparent unwillingness to directly confront issues of agency; where do decisions on consumption originate? Whatever influences bear on those decisions, they originate with individual actors, who are in most cases conscious of, and in control of, their own intentions and motives.

Consumption, to be understood, must not only be “linked to specific commodities and population segments” (Henry 1991:4) but must also be linked to individual, intentional, communicative acts. Any approach that is concerned with understanding the meaning of consumption must of necessity concern itself with the concrete and specific instances in which meanings are expressed and interpreted by socially motivated actors. This sort of information is most com- monly encountered in documents, a principal data source for historical archaeology. Of course, the meaning of each act of consumption to each individual is not and could not be re-


corded, in documents or otherwise, but what has been recorded offers an important key to understanding consumption.

Agency and the Act of Consumption

To a great extent, the omission of individuals as consumers in consumer choice and consumer behavior studies in historical archaeology has meant the omission of women. With the emphasis on household income as reflected by the value of the things in the archaeological record, women-historically the shoppers in the United States-have been left out. In her discussion of the wealth of Thomas Hamlin of western New Jersey, for instance, Friedlander (1991: 19-20) mentions Hamlin’s wives only briefly and then as the bearers of Hamlin’s children and in the case of his second wife, as widow and custodian of a portion of his estate. She does not consider the role of either wife in the accumulation of the household goods that form the bulk of the material for her analysis of Thomas Hamlin’s wealth, household, and world.

By contrast, Terry Klein (1991) outlines four explanatory models for the accumulation of ceramic assemblages and evaluates them for their fit with excavated assemblages. One of these models is the “changing role of women model.” Klein’s preliminary finding is that the changing role of women model has the best fit with the assemblages. Klein bases the model on the work of Diana Wall (1987, 1991) and others. The women who are the subject of Wall’s study are principal actors in projecting their households’ social class, even though the monetary means for this projection originates with their husbands.

Wall’s work reflects a growing body of work in historical archaeology that addresses both agency and the symbolic dimension of material culture. Some of this work, including Wall’s, is discussed further, below.

The Symbolic Dimension

Anthropological approaches, and approaches from within the general field of cultural studies,

are directly relevant to the dynamics of consumption in market economies including modern, if not modernist, Western economies. Mary Douglas (1982:34-38) once began an essay on money and exchange with a detailed critique of the concept of ritual among Western scholars. She saw ritual as generally undervalued by some scholars who were considering it to be “mere ritual,” formal, empty, vestigial, something that by definition had lost what meanings it once held, but somehow hung on and continued to be practiced, outside the mainstream, in the backwa- ters of culture. Douglas disagreed, and established that rituals are essential practices, “trans- mitters of culture,” key to interpreting the meanings that underlie the “universe of values” that must be present before exchange can occur. In sum,

Rituals serve to contain the drift of public meaning. Ritu- als are conventions that set up public definitions . . . . To manage without ritual is to manage without clear meanings, and possibly without memories. . . . Goods, in this perspective, are ritual adjuncts; consumption is a ritual process whose primary function is to make sense of the inchoate flux of events (Douglas and Isherwood 1979:65).

It should come as no surprise to social scien- tists of any discipline that, as a social activity, consumption is rife with symbolism. Exchange at all levels demands ritual, from the opening and closing of stock exchanges with gavels and bells, to ordering dinner in a restaurant, to using a credit card. This symbolic content is a crucial element in a process that converts time and labor into a medium of exchange, which is then itself converted into material things, into personal and group identity, into self and community. It would indeed be surprising if consumption were not pregnant with symbolism. That symbolism does not figure more prominently in historical archaeological analyses of exchange than it does may be because the symbolic structures involved appear “natural” and are more easily internalized than those which are exotic and which at first “make no sense” (Mauss 1967; Hyde 1983).

We believe that the ritual aspects of consumption are, as they must be, most clearly expressed, and hence most clearly visible, in the


interactions, the rituals, that accompany the decisions and acts that lead up to and accompany the acquisition of goods, a domain or set of behaviors that are referred to here as shopping. Furthermore, consideration of meaning or symbolism in consumption, in fact, demands analyses that refer back, even implicitly, to the place where they are articulated-the act of shopping.

Consumption lies beyond the strictly economic and falls within the social realm, as a social phenomenon. Material goods establish visible and stable categories of culture, but their as- signed, shared meanings seem to be unstable, subject to flow and drift (Douglas and Isherwood 1979). Objects can become significant elements in maintaining social relations. Their meanings are not inherent but rather are ascribed, and considerable differences may exist between the public meanings of material culture established through advertising and the private meanings of things ascribed by individuals (Ames 1980).

Recent research by material culture specialists (e.g., Carson et al. 1994) has delineated the to- pography of this social manipulation of the physical world as far back as the beginning of the 18th century in North America. At varying times in different communities along the eastern seaboard, consumption of luxury goods emerged as an element in class consciousness and class- based social strategies among urban merchants, increasingly prosperous artisans, and wealthy rural landowners and farmers (Sweeney 1994). These developments were made possible by increasing trade in the seaports and, in rural areas, by the increasing exploitation of the labor of enslaved Africans and indentured laborers drawn from the underclasses of Europe and Britain. In a sense they were an extension to the New World of such developments as the “Great Rebuildings” of a century or two earlier, made possible by the profits generated by enclosure of common land (Johnson 1992; Platt 1994).

During the 18th century, Americans of all classes learned to read social class through the medium of material possessions: “Eighteenth-century Americans communicated perceptions of status and politics to other people through items of

everyday material culture, through a symbolic universe of commonplace ‘things’” (Breen 1994:447). Demand for these luxuries preceded, and may have to some degree motivated, the Industrial Revolution of the latter part of the century (Carson 1994).

During the 19th century, with the advent of mass production and distribution of goods, a “market revolution” saw deep changes in material life (Wilentz 1990). A shift in the scale of consumption took place as even rural areas saw mass consumption of manufactured goods which were alienated from their producers as commodities. The sort of imported goods that had been emblematic of elites a century earlier began to appear across the spectrum of the social classes. In New York, recent immigrants and members of the native-born working classes living in the notorious Five Points slum district could afford to own and use imported British ceramic sets (Brighton 1996). This example may be an extreme case, made possible by the unparalleled access to markets enjoyed by New Yorkers, but it highlights the increased access to goods throughout the nation as transportation improve- ments reduced shipping costs.

Three traits have been associated with this market revolution: 1) the ceaseless introduction of new products, 2) widespread reliance on cash economies and monetary debt, and 3) advertising (Williams 1982). The impact of these changes was felt throughout society, as the “vision,” the public meaning of those goods, was available for consumption even by those who could not afford actually to purchase the goods themselves. In this way the needs of the imagination as well as those of the body came to be exploited by com- merce. Pierre Bourdieu (1984), writing about contemporary French society, defined class not solely in terms of relations of production in the strictly Marxist sense, but also by habits and tastes which are associated with economic posi- tions. In this sense “taste” is the acquired ability to differentiate and appreciate distinctions among various objects. Thus goods are part of a social reality of signs and classificatory systems closely related to social position (Bourdieu


1984). Advertising creates distinctions between objects, stratifying them in a system of codes, and establishing direct links between consumption of specific goods and social status (Baudrillard 1988:19).

Around the turn of the 20th century, the bour- geois ethos of work, saving, civic responsibility, and morality of self-denial was increasingly re- placed with a new set of values sanctioning pe- riodic leisure, compulsive spending, and a morality of individual fulfillment. A therapeutic ethos of self-realization provided the necessary institu- tional “bridge” for this transformation (Lears 1983). The satisfaction of private needs had unintended public consequences in the formation of a particular consumer culture. This relationship between consumption and self-realization was portrayed, often critically, in the contemporary fiction of Henry James. In James’ writing, commodities often became unacknowledged reference points in self-identity. The act of consumption, then, becomes the constitutive act not only of material life but of contemporary culture, as well (Agnew 1983).

Recent scholarship has examined commoditization as a social process. The transformation of goods to commodities is a cultural and cognitive shift, not just an economic process. Not all goods are commodities. Commoditization is a process of becoming, in that objects take on multiple meanings, analo- gous to the multiple social identities which individuals express (Kopytoff 1986). People “en- code” objects with meanings; but it is “things-in- motion,” the circulation and exchange of commodities, that illuminates their social context (Appadurai 1986a).

The shifts of meaning that commodities un- dergo as their images are consumed and trans- formed allows them to become active elements of self-creation. Consumption, i.e., shopping, is an activity which “translates the object from an alienable to an unalienable condition; that is, from being a symbol of estrangement and price value to being an artifact invested with particular inseparable connotations,” a symbol with which the owner identifies through possession (Miller 1987: 190). Miller’s treatment of shop-

ping as an activity by which people appropriate goods-and concurrent meanings-in the creation of their own identities has significant implications for historical archaeology. In place of the simplistic and condescending idea that mass consumption is merely the manifestation of an alienated populace being manipulated by capitalist interests, Miller sees consumers constantly giving new meanings to products that may have been defined completely differently by advertisers and manufacturers. Supported by recent research, he argues that advertising, despite all of its resources, has little power to affect long-term purchasing trends (Miller 1987: 169). Ironically then, mass production and mass communication have failed to homogenize culture, defeated from the outset by the symbolic dimension of consumption on which they rely for whatever effec- tiveness, whatever power, they might possess. What emerges are personal, class, and ethnic identities, vibrant subcultures that are dynami- cally and diametrically opposed to a “mass culture.”

The role of consumption in the accumulation of a material ensemble that plays into individual self-worth and self-definition has long been ac- cepted for the wealthy, whose “conspicuous consumption” of goods and services, Veblen (1899) argued, could be seen as a strategic manipulation of resources to fit social ends. In fact, conspicuous consumption could take on the colorings of One’s Christian Duty. Catherine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe (1991[1869]:237-238) reminded the well-to-do that any savings in the purchase of “superfluities” would be more than offset by the increased demands for charity, as those who supplied such goods and services lost their livelihoods. But conspicuous consumption by those less well off was never recommended, and considerable effort--and ink-was expended by moralists who felt that the working classes could ill afford to express themselves in this manner. Lydia Marie Child, whose American Frugal Housewife was an early 19th-century bestseller, cautioned:

The prevailing evil of the present day is extravagance . . . . It is really melancholy to see how this fever of ex-


travagance rages, and how it is sapping the strength of our happy country. It has no bounds; it prevails all ranks, and characterizes all ages (Child 1965[1833]:89, 110).

Shopping as Politics

Reacting to Walter Benjamin’s condemnation

Curbing working-class spending, or channeling it toward “simple” and inexpensive, rather than “extravagant” items, would be recurrent themes of social reformers. They would never succeed in effecting such a change, however. Working- class consumers would continue to regard ornate and “extravagant” decoration as appropriate (Cohen 1986).

Evidence also exists that 20th-century working- class consumers defy the limits set by limited economic resources, to say nothing of space, maintaining such seemingly superfluous customs as a parlor in which ornaments are displayed only to be seen on special occasions (Miller 1987:197). Robert Roberts, who grew up in an extremely poor neighborhood in Salford, a satel- lite town of Manchester, England, explains working-class parlor decor not as an instance of emu- lating the middle class but as setting off that section of the working classes who saw themselves as respectable from those who were beyond the pale (Roberts 1973:34-36). Class struggle more often than not emerges in daily life as a struggle within, rather than between, classes (Meacham 1977:23-28; Hobsbawm

Economic determinism will neither explain nor otherwise account for working-class consumer behavior. In a capitalist, industrialized society the working classes do not control the means of production, yet their members do express themselves individually and as a subculture through other components, which Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton (198 1:49) call the “means of action.” As historical archaeologists analyze more sites associated with working-class residents, it becomes particularly important to develop an approach that will allow for the recog- nition of these “means of action.” Miller’s ac- tivist treatment of shopping as action that mat- ters and that has political implications is a good place to start.

1984: 182- 183).

of shopping as “phantasmagoria,” a sort of trance condition in which people lose consciousness of reality, Miller (1993:2) proposes that shopping is the very activity over which people do have some control. He points out that while politics, generally seen as the domain of men, gets respect, shopping, the domain of women, is seen as its opposite. While it is considered in- telligent to have political opinions about world events over which individuals have very little power, it is considered trivial to concern oneself with the many shopping decisions over which individuals have absolute power.

Drawing on his work in Trinidad, Miller (1993:4) argues that in the act of striving for cheapness and value, together with the notion of availability and variety, shoppers effectively “provide the principal point of articulation between shopping as a domestic act and an expression of cultural values on the one hand and the macro world of the political economy on the other.” Despite being urged to buy locally-made goods in support of an anti-IMF lobby, Trinidadians sought the best value they could find no matter where the goods were made. Miller’s point is that shopping decisions can and do have political implications; he cites the Green movement and consumer cooperatives as two recent examples of consumer efforts that have effected politics and recommends that the British left “reform as the consumer’ s party,” thereby affirming a link between consumer demands and more conventional welfare demands (Miller 1993:20).

Miller (1995b) emphasizes the political role of consumption in the present-day world economy, where consumption decisions have recognizable political implications on a variety of scales (Fig- ure 1). Such “overt” politicization of consumption is not a new phenomenon, of course; it pre- dates even the organized consumers’ movements of the late 19th century. In British North America, boycotts aimed at imported commodi-

SHOPPING AS MEANINGFUL ACTION TOWARD A REDEFINITION OF CONSUMPTION 57

material display (Trautman 1989:52-53): “Ambi- tious individuals within the middle class sought to gain entrance into genteel society in part by assuming elite prerogatives of dress and display” (Calvert 1994:260). Conceptions of appropriate garb clearly varied with social class, and the refusal of many members of the “lower sort” to be marginalized through clothing was doubtless a major factor in the lack of success of sumptuary legislation.

Some Examples

A number of recent archaeological studies adopt interpretive perspectives that emphasize the “active voice” in the construction and renewal of culture. Generally, these studies have not emphasized consumption per se, but as they focus on why their subjects acquired goods, and on how acquired goods were employed by their users for cultural ends, they are relevant to any

FIGURE 1 The politics of consumption (Courtesy of disCUsslOn of consumption in historical archaeology. Andrew Singer )

Diana Wall’s study of middle-class women in ties took place in the late 1760s and mid-1770s, 19th-century New York, the example used by leading up to the American Revolution (Nash Klein (1991) in the development of his changing 1986:207). Those boycotts were intended to role of women model, shows the usefulness of influence Britain’s economic policies toward the treating consumers as conscious actors working colonies, as well as to stimulate colonial produc- toward social ends. Citing two 19th-century tion, and thus served overtly political ends women’s diaries (Bleeker 1799-1806; Lay 1851- (Greene 1992:179; Breen 1994). 1878), Wall (1991:70) notes that “New York

On a smaller scale, consumption decisions are women shopped for household goods at least as a key component in the construction of personal early as the turn of the 19th century.” Poorer and group identity. Historically, few issues are and richer middle-class women chose table and as politically charged as the definition of group tea wares that, in the case of table wares, re- identities (Mach 1993). Thus, wherever con- flected similar attitudes toward “the ritual of sumption, or non-consumption, of particular family meals” and tea wares that showed slightly goods or commodities is used to express-or to different attitudes toward tea. While a hierarchi- limit expression of-identity, then consumption cal inventory of goods, in terms of economic of those items will almost certainly have politi- worth, to which members of different classes cal implications and overtones. An example of have differential access is implicit in Wall’s ar- such politically charged consumption would be gument, she does not treat the distinctions be- the numerous attempts by 17th-century legislative tween the tea wares in lower middle-class and bodies to enforce “sumptuary laws,” which were upper middle-class households as simple reflec- intended to prevent individuals from dressing tions of cost, but rather interprets them as ex- above their economic position. Sumptuary laws pressions of different attitudes toward the serv- encoded, and were intended to enforce, a par- ing of tea-of differing socially-motivated ac- ticular relationship between economic power and tions that were in essence different rituals.


David Burley’s (1989) study of the use of transfer-printed tea wares among the hivernant Metis, semi-nomadic bison hunters, dramatically demonstrated that seemingly impractical possessions may become essential ingredients in the expression of ethnic identity. Although the purchase and use of Staffordshire teaware began as a way for Metis women to display their desir- ability as wives for white traders, the wares eventually became a “necessary component of material culture tied to social action” (Burley 1989:104).

The Boott Mills project, conducted by the Department of Archaeology at Boston University, was designed specifically to investigate the lifeways of a late 19th-century urban proletariat, workers in one of the large textile mills in Lowell, Massachusetts (Beaudry and Mrozowski 1988; Beaudry 1989). Participants in the project came to look at its subjects, mill hands who lived in boardinghouses and tenements built by their employers, from the inside out, focusing on working people themselves, rather than merely as labor employed in the service of capital or as the beneficiaries of paternalistic concern. The project approached a variety of aspects of material life-diet, alcohol and tobacco use, table wares, the built environment, clothing-as areas in which working-class residents of two sites created and maintained culture. A good deal of variation occurred in the way that they used these things toward that end.

With tobacco and alcohol, the boardinghouse residents challenged the efforts of their employers to control their behavior (Bond 1989a, 1989b; Cook 1989a). By purchasing clay pipes with Irish “rebel” slogans, some workers vicari- ously involved themselves in the political life of the old country (Cook 1989b). In their clothing and personal effects they mimicked their employers, albeit in less expensive materials (Ziesing 1989). The boardinghouse keepers purchased the food and table wares, but the residents exercised some influence over their own diet; they could and frequently did change boardinghouses if the food did not meet with their liking (Landon 1989). That they apparently chose to eat from the plain, white, cheap dishes supplied by the

boardinghouse keepers indicates that table wares were symbolically unimportant within the boardinghouse world (Dutton 1989). Residents were evidently more concerned with how much food they were served than they were with the qual- ity of the dishes on which it was presented to them.

Through consumption, Lowell mill workers manipulated their world to suit their own ends to the extent that they were able, but they did not do so uniformly. They appear, at the distance of a century, to have put more of themselves into some aspects of material life than others. But, students of popular culture (e.g., Ewen and Ewen 1982; Fiske 1989) assure us that in the context of present-day American society, few people accept culture, material or otherwise, as given; instead they appropriate it and reinterpret it-they use it, and no reason exists to suppose that the Boott Mill employees did otherwise, even in their rented spaces with someone else’s dinner dishes.

Jean Howson’s critique of the archaeology of plantation slavery also recommends an approach that puts more emphasis on agency, allowing for multiple meanings for artifacts depending on their use in social action. What archaeologists should study, writes Howson, “is how domina- tion operates and how responses to it are en- acted, which means that differences in material remains should be examined in terms of their function within a context of social action, rather than as static markers . . . . Material culture must be understood not as merely reflecting social relations, but as participating actively in their creation, operation, and maintenance” (Howson 1990:99). The embeddedness of meanings within contexts of social action is crucial to interpreting those meanings.

In much the same way that Howson rejects acculturation as a “passive model for a dynamic process” in her discussion of African resistance to the plantation system, acculturation is not the model being used to interpret the material remains recovered from mid- 19th-century deposits associated with the Five Points, a New York City neighborhood populated mainly by newly arrived immigrants. While being portrayed as


hopelessly degraded slum dwellers by contemporary observers (e.g., Dickens 1842; Foster 1990[ 1850]), the working-class residents of the Five Points used their limited resources to ac- quire fashionable goods including the latest styles of ceramic sets and objects d’art (Brighton 1996), elegant glassware, and all manner of personal items from decorated toothbrushes to cos- tume jewelry. They used New York’s markets as a source of variety that could be manipulated in the interest of group identity, choosing foods that maintained ethnic boundaries within the working-class community without imitating Old World patterns (Milne and Crabtree 1996). Im- migrant workers openly contested the nature of American national identity by using clay smok- ing pipes with patriotic symbols. At the same time, they faced an exclusionary job market that favored native-born Americans (Reckner 1996). Most Five Points residents could not afford to own property, but by shopping for and owning movable goods they expressed their rights and identities as members of a society increasingly divided by class and obsessed with consumerism (Yamin 1996).

In rural contexts, Purser and Stewart- Abernathy have explored the role of mass-pro- duced goods in the construction of identity. Purser’s (1992) work on Paradise, California, traces a change from consumption patterns that blurred distinctions between the consumer and other community members to patterns that emphasized distinctions between individuals. Stewart-Abernathy’s (1992) study of an Ozark farmstead in late 19th- and early 20th-century northwestern Arkansas found “two contradictory symbol systems, one agrarian and traditional, the other industrial and modern” (Stewart-Abernathy 1992:119). However, he points out that while industrial penetration succeeded in “capturing markets and consumer dollars for hundreds of thousands of canning jars and sets of table wares,” it was actually overwhelmed by the suc- cessful capture by the rural community of the power to assign lasting meaning to glass canning jars and other industrial products as symbols of rural life (Stewart-Abernathy 1992: 120).

Three important ideas link these studies: 1) the use of material culture in symbolic communication, 2) the centrality of meaning as a focus of study, and 3) the conscious use of material culture by people to achieve particular social ends. The use of objects as symbols is pan-cultural, although particular objects and their symbolism vary between cultures. Some scholars have gone so far as to argue that people’s interaction with certain categories of objects as physical entities is inextricable from the interaction with them as symbols. The domestic objects that clutter living spaces are “meaningful only as part of a communicative sign process and are active ingredients of that process” (Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton 1981:173). As symbols, artifacts constitute “the visible part of culture” by serving as continuous reminders-visible markers-of social relationships (Douglas and Isherwood 1979:66-67). Material items are often consciously and intentionally used by people to communicate conceptions of self to others (Krampen 1979; Beaudry et al. 1991), and that communicative dimension is central to the argu- ment made in this paper.

Summary and Conclusion

This article has been a selective exploration of symbolic, interpretive, and contextual trends in the study of the history, sociology, and archaeology of consumption. It is neither intended as a summary of consumer studies (Shackel 1993; Martin 1993; Miller 1995c) nor, heaven forbid, as a history of consumerism in Western society (McKendrick et al. 1982; Forty 1986; Shammas 1990). Rather, the intention has been to choose from among various strands observed in recent, and not so recent, historical archaeological scholarship and weave them into something approaching an integrated fabric.

Sufficient work seems to have been done to approach systems of consumption as social relationships in which power is exercised to some degree by all participants and in which, as Roland Barthes (1974:88) has recalled, no mere commodity changes hands without its image be-


ing purchased or appropriated as well. Images have meaning, and it seems clear that the future of consumer studies in historical archaeology must, with the rest of the discipline, increasingly move toward meaning-centered, interpretive approaches in order to maintain relevance to contemporary anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies. We believe, as has been set out above, that in order to approach meaning in consumption, one must investigate both specific commodities and specific consumers. In short, one must buck at least one scholarly tendency that seeks to portray social acts in abstract terms or, to paraphrase Mary Beaudry (1986), as if the artifacts somehow consumed themselves.

The necessary focus on consumption as a social act in the hands of particular actors, with particular agendas, will require increased attention to shopping which, as Miller reminds one, is where the political dimension of consumption becomes visible. Shopping and consumption stand in somewhat the same relationship as pa- role and langue, as competence and knowledge. An increased focus on shopping as the visible part of consumption can only increase the understanding of consumption as a cultural process, and allow researchers to make more powerful our interpretations of meaning in past social and economic interaction.

A focus on shopping can also spatialize consumption and fix it in time. Shopping takes place at specific times, in places that are invested with both economic and symbolic power, whether the market of the preindustrial town, the urban arcades that so fascinated Benjamin, the department stores of the turn-of-the-century city, or the pages of the Montgomery Ward catalogue (Buck-Morss 1989; Schlereth 1989; Purser 1992; Slater 1993).

Nearly a century ago, Thorstein Veblen (1899), in a powerful critique of elite consumption, coined the term “conspicuous consumption” to describe a form of consumption that flaunted the wealth of the consumer. Veblen saw this behavior as the province of the very wealthy, and he considered it as a form of communication and social display, a modern version of the potlatch. Recent studies in historical archaeol-

ogy, history, material culture, and other fields indicate that, to some degree, nearly all consumption is intended to be conspicuous to someone, even if only, as with Walter Benjamin’s (1968) books, to ourselves. Every shopping act is a social dance in which carefully constructed meanings, roles, and statements are exchanged, acted out, and negotiated. To that extent one might say that material culture, both in the past and in the present, consumes us.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We are indebted, most of all, to Daniel Miller for his stimulating talk given at the Rutgers University Center for Historical Analysis in April of 1993. We also wish to thank Claudia Milne, Michael Bonasera, Doville Nelson, Paul Reckner, and Steven Brighton, all members of the Foley Square/Five Points team, for sharing early results of documentary and artifact analysis, The work is being conducted by John Milner Associates under contract to the General Services Administration. The Boott Mills research was funded by the Department of the Interior, National Park Service, which does not necessarily agree with anything written here. An early version of this paper was presented at the 1994 annual meeting of The Society for Historical Archaeology Conference on Historical and Underwater Archaeology in Vancouver, BC. We are grateful to Dr. Mary C. Beaudry for comments on that version, and to Julia King, Terry Klein, Ann Smart Martin, and an anonymous reviewer, for their useful comments. We also would like to thank Andy Singer for permission to use his cartoon “No Exit.” The authors, of course, remain responsible for any errors of fact or interpretation presented herein.

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