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GLOBAL PROBLEMS AND THE CULTURE OF CAPITALISM

Richard H, Robbins Rachel A, Dowty

Contents

11 Anti-Systemic Protest

301

Protest as Anti-Systemic: The Two World Revolutions 302 The World Revolution of 1848 303 The World Revolution of 1968 305 The Protests of Labor: Coal Miners in Nineteenth-Century 306 Pennsylvania The Coal Industry and the Worker 's Life 306 Worker Resistance and Protest 309 311 Destroying Worker Resistance Global Peminist Resistance 312 Gender Relations in the Culture of Capitalism 314 316 Strategies of Protest The World Revolution of 2018?

319 319 Direct Action and Occupy Wall Street Anarchism and Direct Action 321 Conclusion 324

12 Religion and Anti-Systemic Protest

325

Indigenous Religious Movements as Anti-Systemic Protest The Ghost Dance The Cargo Cults Zionism in South Africa The Global Challenge of Anti-Systemic Religious Protest Islamic Fundamentalism Islamic Fundamentalism in Iran Protestant Fundamentalism in North America "Terror in the Mind of God"

327 328 328 330

Some Examples of Religious Violence Understanding Religious Violence

Conclusion

vii 343 348 349

13 Solving Global Problems: Some Options and Courses of Action

351

Rethinking Debt, Money, and Economic Growth What Is the Necessary Rate of Growth?

If Economic Growth Is Slowing, How Can Investors Realize Their Continuing Income Streams at the Historic 4 to 6 Percent?

The Sovereign Debt Crisis and The Austerity Myth Some Examples of Sovereign Debt Default

352 353

The Greek Debt Crisis Puerto Rico, Argentina and "Vultures" Extent of the "Austerity" Dilemma Austerity and Inequality Where Do We Stand ?

Debt and the Bargain of 1694 Things We Could Do The Chicago Plan The Public Bank Solution The Debt Strike Conclusion

355 359 360 360 361 363 363 367 367 368 369 370 373 375

333 334 336 337

References

377

Name Index

387

Place and Culture Index

393

341

Subject Index

397

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Preface

o

ver the past 400 to 600 years, a culture and society, originating for the most part in Europe and dedicated to the idea of trade and consumption as the ultimate source of well-being, began to expand to all parts of the globe. In many ways it is the most successful culture and society the world has ever seen, and its technology, wealth, and power stand as monuments to its success; however, accompanying its expansion have been problems growing social and economic inequality, environmental destruction, mass starvation, and social unrest.

Most members of this society and culture perceive these problems as distant from themselves or as challenges for them to meet . However, there is the possibility that these problems, which threaten to negate everything this culture has accomplished, are intrinsic to the culture itself . That is the possibility to be explored in this book.

The outline of this book emerged when, a few years ago, colleagues at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, James Armstrong and Mark Cohen, and the senior author began developing a course on global problems. We wanted to create a course that would help students understand the major global issues that they confront in the mass media problems such as the so-called population explosion, famine and hunger, global environmental destruction, the emergence and spread of new diseases, socalled ethnic conflict and genocides, terrorism, and social protest. We learned quickly that to make the course successful, we had to overcome the often-ethnocentric perspectives of the students, perspectives that were often reinforced by media coverage of global affairs. We needed also to compensate for the students' lack of backgrounds in anthropology, history, and economics, all crucial for understanding the roots of the problems we were to examine. Finally, we needed to illustrate that the problems we examined were relevant to them, that the problems would affect them either directly or indirectly, and that their actions now or in the future would determine the extent to which the origins of these problems could be acknowledged, let alone ever addressed . The form of this book emerged from our efforts at dealing with these pedagogical issues and the classroom interactions that these efforts stimulated .

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This culture flowered in Western Europe, reached fruition in the United States, and spread to much of the rest of the world, creating what some anthropologists, sociologists, and historians call the world system. People disagree on the critical factors in the development of this system and even whether it was unique historically, although most agree on certain basic ideas. Among the most important are the assumptions that the driving force behind the spread of the contemporary world system was industrial and corporate capitalism, and that the spread of the world system is related in some way to the resulting division of the world into wealthy nations and poor nations or into wealthy core, developed, or industrialized areas and dependent peripheral, undeveloped, or nonindustrialized areas.

The spread of the capitalist world system has been accompanied by the creation of distinctive patterns of social relations, ways of viewing the world, methods of food production, distinctive diets, patterns of health and disease, relationships to the environment, and so on. However, the spread of this culture has not gone uncontested; there has been resistance in the form of direct and indirect actions political, religious, and social protest and revolution. How and why capitalist culture developed and the reasons why some groups resisted and continue to resist its development are among the questions posed in this book.

The answers to these questions are based on specific assumptions. First, a central tenet of anthropology is that personal, social, cultural, and historical factors determine the point of view any person might have regarding a certain phenomenon. No less is true of those participating in the culture of capitalism who have created a view of global events that we share . Consequently, these views tend to be, to one extent or another, ethnocentric; that is, they describe, evaluate, and judge events solely from a specific cultural perspective . Among the major purposes of anthropology is to teach ways to avoid ethnocentrism and appreciate the importance of understanding the beliefs and behaviors of others from their perspectives rather than from our own, a view anthropologists refer to as cultural relativism . To some extent ethnocentrism is unavoidable, and the job of the person who interprets global events whether a journalist, economist, sociologist, or anthropologist is to make the event comprehensible to those people for whom that person is writing. Our assumption is that to minimize cultural bias we must recognize that our views of events are partially influenced by our culture and , for that reason, we must make our own culture an object of analysis.

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The Focus of this Book We can summarize our approach in this book as follows: There has emerged over the past five to six centuries a distinctive culture or way of life dominated by a belief in trade and commodity consumption as the source of well-being.

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ix

x

Preface

Second, we assume that an understanding of global events requires us to recognize that no contemporary culture or society exists independent of what anthropologists refer to as the world system, and that each falls within either the core or the periphery of that system. Using this terminology to refer to different parts of the world permits us to avoid the more value-laden distinctions implicit in the use of terms such as developed or undeveloped , modern or traditional , and First , Second , or Third World . World system theorists often include a third category, semiperiphery, to denote those nation-states or regions that are moving toward the core or that have moved out of the core. These distinctions recognize that countries can move from one category to another. For example, the three nation-states that world system theorists consider to have been dominant in the past four centuries the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States all began as semiperipheral to the world system.

Third, we assume that global events and actions cannot be adequately understood without considering the events that preceded them; we must develop a historical perspective. For example, we live in a period of human history largely defined by a sequence of events that began some four to five hundred years ago, loosely termed the Industrial Revolution . Because each of us has lived during only a particular phase of that history, we tend to take it for granted that the world has always been as it is today. Yet the modern industrial world order is, in historical terms, a very recent event. We are deceived by our biology, by our limited life span, into thinking of sixty, seventy, or eighty years as a long time, but in the perspective of human history it is a fleeting moment . Human beings have for most of their existence lived as bands of gatherers and hunters, for a shorter time as agriculturists and farmers, and only recently as industrialists and wage laborers. Yet the Industrial Revolution has transformed the world and human societies as has no other event in history. We cannot understand the events, issues, and problems of today's world without understanding the how's and why's of the Industrial Revolution.

It will be clear that the emergence of capitalism represents a culture that is in many ways the most successful that has ever been developed in terms of accommodating large numbers of individuals in relative and absolute comfort and luxury. It has not been as successful, however, in integrating all in equal measure, and its failure here remains one of its major problems. It has solved the problems of feeding large numbers of people (although certainly not all), and it has provided unprecedented advances in health and medicine (but, again, not for all). It has promoted the development of amazingly complex technological instruments and fostered a level of global communication without precedent. It has united people in common pursuits as no other culture has.

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Yet it remains to be seen when the balance sheet is tallied whether capitalism represents the epitome of "progress" that some claim.

New to this Edition When preparing the sixth edition of this book Barak Obama had just been elected to a second term as President of the United States, Great Britain was a functioning member of the European Union, democratic upheavals were reshaping countries in the Middle East while the world was still recovering from the economic crisis of 2007. Global GDP stood at about $78 trillion and at about $17 trillion in the United States. A lot changed in five years. Authoritarian governments emerged in places as diverse as Poland, the Philippines, Egypt, India, and the United States. Citizens of Great Britain voted to leave the European Union as part of a seeming protest of immigration.

In spite of international accords, carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere has risen from 397 parts per million ( ppm) to almost 407 ppm and the world continues to yearly break old temperature records. New diseases, such as the Zika virus pose threats as do anti-biotic resistant diseases. And Global GDP has declined to about $75 trillion, while in the United States it has climbed to about $18.5 trillion as sovereign debt prompts counties, both poor and rich, to adopt so-called austerity measures including reduction of government services, pension plans, and assistance to the poor.

We have tried to address these concerns, as well as others, in the revisions to the seventh edition. These include the following:

• An expanded discussion of the nature of money and its relationship to debt and economic growth.

• Introduction of content in Chapter 3 on the English financial revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, specifically the establishment of the Bank of England and the beginnings of the modern debt-based financial system.

• An expansion in Chapter 6 of the role of debt in hunger, and specifically a discussion of the debt / food insecurity cycle.

• A discussion in Chapter 10 of how our economic system relates to the occurrence, reaction and remediation of large-scale disasters such as floods, hurricanes and earthquakes.

• A completely revised final chapter (Chapter 13) trying to make sense of the political and economic upheavals of the past five years and the spread of so-called austerity programs. We have discussed several measures specifically involving finance and the creation of our money supply, that could alleviate many of the problems that we discuss in this book.

Preface

As always, we welcome comments and communications from readers and can be reached by email at richard .robbins@ plattsburgh.edu and RDowtyBeech@ newhaven.edu .

This text is available in a variety of formats digital and print . To learn more about our programs, pricing options, and customization, visit www.pearsonhighered.com.

Course material, including an online Global Problems Reader to accompany the text is available at: https: / / courses. lumenlearning.com / suny-plattsburgh-anthro /

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Acknowledgments Many people have contributed to the writing of this book . We have already mentioned our colleagues James Armstrong and Mark Cohen. Others include Alice Dowty, Alfred Robbins, Michael Robbins, Tom Moran, Philip Devita, Gloria Bobbie, Douglas Skopp, Vincent Carey, Larry Soroka, Ellen Fitzpatrick, Ann Kimmage, Michael Miranda, John Hess, Jan Rinaldi, Tina Charland, Tim Harnett, Daphne Kutzer, Monica van Beusekom, Russell Kleinbach, Peggy Lindsey, Dan and Mary Abel, Amy Weisz Predmore, Mark White, Barbara Harris, Art Orme, Sam Baldwin, and Mary Turner, along with the many students who helped us better articulate important issues.

xi

Reviewers of the first edition were John L. Aguilar, Charles O. Ellenbaum, Cynthia Mahmood, Richard Moore, Jon Olson, and Dave Winther. Reviewers of the second edition were Elliot Fratkin, Smith College; James Loucky, Western Washington University; Luis A. Vivanco, University of Vermont; and Vaughn Bryant, Texas A&M University. Reviewers of the third edition were Eric Mielants, Fairfield University; William Leggett, Middle Tennessee; Nancy McDowell, Beloit College; and Benjamin Brewer, James Madison University. Reviewers of the fifth edition were George Esber, Miami University, Middletown; Suzanne Scheld, California State University, Northridge; James Sewastynowicz, Jacksonville State University; and Miguel Vasquez, Northern Arizona University.

We owe a special debt of gratitude to Sylvia Shephard for her initial support of the project; to Sarah Kelbaugh, Dave Repetto, Nancy Roberts, and Barbara Reiley of Pearson and Jennifer Jacobson and Dan Vest of Ohlinger Publishing Services for guiding the project through to its present edition; as well as Kani Kapoor, Allison Campbell, Michelle Hacker, Philip Alexander, Carly Czech and whoever else I might have inadvertently omitted who helped bring this to fruition. And special thanks go to Amy, Rebecca, and Evan who tolerated with unusual understanding our periods of self -imposed isolation. Needless to say, the final form of the book, for better or worse, is the result of our own decisions.

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Part One

Introduction: The Consumer, the Laborer, the Capitalist, and the Nation-State in the Society of Perpetual Growth [WJhat difference it would make to our understanding if we looked at the world as a whole, a totality, a system, instead of as a sum of self-contained societies and cultures; if we understood better how this totality developed over time; if we took seriously the admonition to think of human aggregates as “ inextricably involved with other aggregates, near and far, in weblike, netlike, connections.”

ERIC WOLF , Europe and the People without History

On or about December 1910, wrote novelist Virginia Woolf, human character changed .1 On his repeated visits to the United States, Frenchman Andre Siegfried (1928; see also Leach 1993:266) noted much the same thing: "A new society has come to life in America," he said . "It was not clear in 1901 or 1904; it was noticeable in 1914, and patent in 1919 and 1925." Samuel Strauss (1924, 1927; see also Leach 1993:266), a journalist and philosopher writing in the 1920s, suggested the term consumptionism to characterize this new way of life that, he said, created a person with a philosophy of life that committed societies to produce more and more things, and required individuals to buy more this year than last, and more next year than this, in perpetuity. It is obvious, Strauss said, that Americans have become committed to consider their standard of living as a "sacred acquisition." It means, also, that countries are committed to perpetual economic growth, regardless of the moral or intellectual costs.

There is no question that in America, the half -century from 1880 to 1930 marked a major transition in the rate and level of commodity consumption the purchase, use, and waste of what comedian George Carlin called "stuff ." Food production grew by almost 40 percent from 1899 to 1905; the production of men's and women's readymade clothing, along with the production of costume jewelry, doubled between 1890 and 1900; and glassware and lamp production went from 84,000 tons in 1890 to 250,563

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quote, which has been widely used (see, e.g., Fjellman 1992:5; Lears 1983), appeared in an essay, "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown," in The Captain' s Death Bed and Other Essays, but was originally part of a paper Woolf read to the Heretics, Cambridge, on May 18, 1924. "On or about December 1910 human character changed . . . The change was not sudden and definite . .. But a change there was nevertheless, and since one must be arbitrary, let us date it about the year 1910" (Woolf 1950).

1The

1

2 Part I Introduction tons in 1914. In 1890, 32,000 pianos were sold in the United States; by 1904, the number sold increased to 374,000 ( Leach 1993:16).

During this period, the perfume industry became the country's tenth largest; at one department store, sale of toiletries rose from $84,000 to $522,000 between 1914 and 1926. The manufacture of clocks and watches went from 34 million to 82 million in ten years. By the late 1920s, one of every six Americans owned an automobile.

Of course, these figures are dwarfed by what Americans and others around the world consume today. World and national consumption expanded at an unprecedented pace during the twentieth century, with household consumption expenditures reaching over $40 trillion in 2015, three times the level of 1975 and six times that of 1950. In 1900, real consumption expenditure was barely $1.5 trillion ( United Nations Development Programme 1997). Today there are as many cars in the United States as the number of people with drivers' licenses, and the rest of the world is doing everything that it can to catch up. China and India, alone, have added at least half -a-billion middle-class consumers in the new century demanding everything that consumers in the West desire .

However, although consumption rates were not nearly as high as they are today, the early twentieth century is notable because it marked the early phase of what Ernest Gellner (1983:24) called the society of perpetual growth and the creation of a new type of culture: consumer capitalism.

Aside from a few notable periods of economic contraction, such as the periodic depressions of the nineteenth century, the great worldwide depression of the 1930s, the recession of the early 1980s, the Asian financial collapse of 1997, and the economic crisis of 2007-2008, the global economy has grown reasonably well worldwide, although some parts of the world have historically done a better job than others.

Economic growth is traditionally measured by the growth of gross domestic product (GDP) a measure of the money value of all goods and services produced and sold in a given time period . Table 1.1 and Figure 1.1 portray the yearly growth of global GDP during the past two millennia up to the onset of the twenty-first century.

Over the long term, but particularly over the past two centuries, the growth of GDP in the global economy, especially among European offshoots (e.g., the United States and Australia ) and Japan, has been spectacular: a 300-fold increase in the amount of goods consumed, the number of goods produced, and the fortunes that have been made. A global citizen of today is almost nine times as wealthy as his or her counterpart some 200 years ago; in some parts of the world, the average citizen has increased his or her wealth almost twenty-five times over the same period.

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Table 1.1 Level and Rate of Growth of GDP per Capita: World and Major Regions, A. D . 1-1998 1000 1820

Region

-

-

-

1998

1 1000 1000 1820 1820 1998

Level of Growth (1990 International Dollars)

Annual Average Compound Growth Rate

1

Western Europe

450

400

1,232

17,921

Western Offshoots (e.g., United States, Australia)

400

400

1,201

Japan

400

425

Latin America

400

Eastern Europe and Former USSR

0.01

0.14

1.51

26,146

0.00

0.13

1.75

669

20,413

0.01

0.06

1.93

400

665

5,795

0.00

0.06

1.22

400

400

667

4,354

0.00

0.06

1.06

Asia (excluding Japan)

450

450

575

2,936

0.00

0.03

0.92

Africa

425

416

418

1,368

-

0.00

0.00

0.67

World

444

435

667

5,709

-

0.00

0.03

0.95

SOURCE: Adapted from Maddison (2003:28).

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Part I Introduction

Figure 1.1 Rate of per Capita GDP Growth by Region: A.D. 1-1998 30,000 -|

25,000

Western Europe Western Europe Offshoots

20 , 000

Japan Latin America Eastern Europe and Former USSR

15,000

Asia (excluding Japan)

Africa

10, 000

World

5,000

0 1

1000

1820

To put perpetual growth into perspective, imagine that in the year 2010 you earned and spent $30,000 a year ( or that some corporation earned $300,000,000). A growth rate of about 3 percent a year is necessary to maintain a healthy economy. Consequently, by 2015, you ( or the corporation in this case) must have earned and spend $34,855 ( or $348,550,000) and by 2035, earn and spend $63,507 (or $635,070,000 ). If we factor in an inflation rate of 3 percent on top of our necessary growth rate, the figures are even higher (see Table 1.2).

The emergence of the society of perpetual growth and the culture of capitalism marked a new stage in an ongoing global historical process that began ( to the extent that it can be said to have a beginning) anytime from the fifteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. The creation of the human type that characterizes this stage, the consumer, followed soon after the emergence of two other historically unique categories of human types: the capitalist and the laborer. Merchants had existed, of course, for thousands of years, and people had always labored to produce goods and liked to consume what they'd produced . But never before in history has there existed a society founded on three categories of people: the capitalist, whose sole purpose is to invest money to earn more; the laborer, whose sole means of support comes from the sale of his or her labor; and the consumer, whose sole purpose is to purchase and consume ever-increasing quantities of goods and services.

At some point in their lives, virtually everyone plays the roles of consumer, laborer, or capitalist: as consumers, they buy goods and services; as laborers, they work for wages; and as capitalists, they invest money in banks, insurance policies,

Table 1.2 Required Growth in Income and Spending over a Twenty-Five Year Period Required Income Growth 3 Percent (with 0% inflation)

Required Income Growth at 6 Percent (with 0% inflation) or Income Growth at 3 Percent and Inflation at 3 Percent

Year

Individual

Corporate

Individual

Corporate

2010

$ 30,000

$ 300,000,000

$ 30,000

$ 300,000,000

2015

34 ,855

348,550,000

40,494

404 ,940,000

2020

40, 495

404,950,000

54,661

546,661,000

2025

47 ,048

470,048,000

73,783

737 ,830,000

2035

63,507

635,070,000

134,434

1,344 ,340,000

3

4 Part I Introduction

Figure 1.2 Patterns of Relations in the Culture of Capitalism Consumer

$

$

Nationstate Laborer

>

$

Capitalist

pension plans, stocks (slightly more than half of American families participate in the stock market, either directly or through investment accounts ), education, or other enterprises from which they expect to profit. What ties together these roles, and indeed the entire culture, is money.

Thus, we can perhaps best conceptualize the working of the culture of capitalism as sets of relations between capitalists, laborers, and consumers, tied together by the pursuit of money, each depending on the other, yet each placing demands on, and often conflicting with, the others. Regulating these relationships is the fourth element in our scheme, the nation-state . In this cultural scheme, the nation-state serves as, among its other functions, a mediator, controlling the creation and flow of money and setting and enforcing the rules of interaction. But most importantly, it must maintain economic growth. (Figure 1.2 is a highly simplified model, but it serves to underline the key features and unique style of the culture of capitalism.)

However, money is, obviously, the key to understanding this culture.

Jacob Needleman (1991:40-41) wrote that, in another time and place, not everyone has wanted money above all else. People, he said,

have desired salvation, beauty, power, strength, pleasure, prosperity, explanations, food, adventure, conquest, comfort. But now and here, money not necessarily even the things money can buy, but money is what everyone wants .... Therefore, if one wished to understand life, one must understand money in this present phase of history and civilization.

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People require money as a means of exchange and, for the modern capitalist system to function, money must constantly increase in supply that is, it must perpetually grow. Why this is so is not immediately apparent, even to many economists, but should the money supply fail to expand, the whole system could collapse in economic, political, and social ruin. Thus, virtually all of the issues discussed in this book relate in one way or the other to money and people's efforts to acquire it or compensate for the lack of it.

But first, given its central role in the working of the entire society, let's begin with a brief primer on the nature of money and an exploration of how money has assumed its importance and how it determines how we live our lives.

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Alchemists believed that the philosopher 's stone could convert something worthless into something of value, namely, worthless metal into gold . By adopting paper money as a medium of exchange, the culture of capitalism has invented a new philosopher 's stone one every bit as powerful as that sought by magicians of another time.

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SOURCE: Chronicle/Alamy Stock Photo

A Primer on Money: The Philosopher 's Stone Commonly we consider money primarily as a standardized means of exchange that is, as a substance with which the value of goods and services can be compared and traded, a tool, so to speak .

But to view money only in that way is to misunderstand its true importance. To better explain, think, instead, of the philosopher 's stone . Magicians or alchemists of the past sought the philosopher 's stone because it was thought to have the magical power to transmute base metals into gold, which implies taking something that was considered worthless and converting it into something of value. Money is the modern-day equivalent of the philosopher 's stone.

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Part I Introduction

Historically there is a very real connection between money and alchemy. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, at the birth of the European modern world, new technologies produced new stuff . Ships brought new goods from the near and far east; the steam engine produced new efficiencies in mining; innovations in farming methods increased food production. The problem was money. There wasn't enough of it, and without money, people couldn't buy what was being produced or purchase services that were being offered.

Money at the time consisted largely of gold and silver coins. The use of precious metals as a medium of exchange can be traced back 5,000 years to Mesopotamia and coins to the seventh-century B.C. These are examples of commodity money , substances that had value in themselves. However, there is just so much gold and silver, and if their supply doesn't increase as fast as the production of commodities or services, economies can't grow. That's where alchemy and the philosopher 's stone come in.

If enough gold and silver could not be discovered, mined, and turned into coins, why not seek the method of turning lead or any base metal into gold alchemy. And that's what people tried to do. Virtually every European ruler at the time had a court alchemist working on discovering the secret of how to convert base metals into gold .

The main work of Sir Isaac Newton, the most famous scientist of the period , was first and foremost alchemy and, later, as Warden of the English Mint, prosecuting counterfeiters of the new paper money ( Dobbs 1975; Wennerlind 2011) . But when alchemists failed to solve the gold problem, the next solution was credit-money, substituting paper for coins.

Precedent existed for paper money. "Exchange" or "demand" notes paper certificates that could be exchanged for a valuable commodity, generally gold or silver were first used in China in the twelfth century and became common in Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (Williams 1997). Thus, a trader in Milan might buy textiles from someone in Bruges and pay with a paper note backed by gold that the seller could retrieve from a third party. Generally, banks or governments issued exchange notes or paper money, but virtually anyone could do it . Theoretically, these notes represented a specific amount of some valuable metal usually gold or silver that could be retrieved on demand by the holder of the note.

The issuing of paper money was a huge step in helping to accelerate economic growth because there was potentially no limit to the amount of money that could be created. This was the first step in money magic: paper, which was essentially

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The issuing of paper money was a huge step in helping to accelerate economic growth .

SOURCE: Rafael Ben-Ari/Fotolia

5

6 Part I Introduction worthless, now had the same value as gold, silver, or other precious metals. In a wonderful book, Money and Magic: A Critique of the Modern Economy in the Light of Goethe' s Faust , economist Hans Binswanger (1994) describes how Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who served as finance minister at the Weimar court, used his classic work Faust ( published in two parts in 1808 and 1832) for a commentary on the industrial economy, and, more specifically, on the nature of money The original Faust, on whom the story is based, was a magician, an alchemist. In Goethe's book, Faust makes a bargain with Mephistopheles a devil and together they create a new society based on paper money. Binswanger suggests the alchemist's attempts to convert lead into gold were abandoned

—

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not because they were futile, but because alchemy in another form has proved so successful that the arduous production of gold in the laboratory is no longer necessary. It is not vital to alchemy's aim, in the sense of increasing wealth, that lead actually be transmuted into gold. It will suffice if a substance of no value is transformed into one of value: paper, for example, into money. ( Binswanger 1994:9)

There was, however, a couple of big loopholes with paper money that promised convertibility into gold or silver. First, it required trust; people had to trust that the gold or silver promised really existed and was accessible . Second, banks or other entities that issued money were under no legal obligation to have on hand an amount of gold or silver equivalent to the deposits they held or the amount of paper money they issued .

Banks were allowed to practice what is called fractional reserve banking; this means simply that they had to keep on hand only a fraction of gold deposited, lending the rest and assuming that not everyone would demand their gold deposits all at once. Thus, while the paper money was theoretically backed by gold or silver, the bulk of the paper money issued was backed by nothing at all. Banks settled theoretically on about a 1:10 ratio; that is, for every dollar deposited, they could lend out ten paper dollars, even though they did not have on hand the gold on which the money was based . This gave to banks, and other private financial institutions, the power to literally create money out of thin air. On the one hand, banks profited from the interest on the loans, and, on the other, people had more money to spend. Problems occurred when, after an economic boom, the economy slowed down and depositors demanded their gold . Unable to pay all their depositors because they had issued notes in excess of the amount of gold they had on hand, banks failed and people lost their savings.

In 1913, the U.S. government tried to address some of these problems by creating the Federal Reserve Bank to control and stabilize the money supply. The Federal Reserve Bank, which is a private corporation, creates money buying stuff , usually U.S. government bonds, although, theoretically it can buy anything. The money that it uses to buy things, is simply created out of thin air. The debt represented by the bonds or securities issued by the government becomes an asset (i.e., money owed to the Federal Reserve) that the Federal Reserve then distributes to member banks who, allegedly following the fractional reserve requirement, can lend it out or invest it at a 10:1 ratio to earn interest and / or dividends. Money simply represents debt (see Brown 2010; Hallsmith and Lietaer 2012). Paper money was still tied to gold, and a person could retrieve paper for gold, but the Federal Reserve could ensure that banks had enough on hand, or could quickly acquire it, to honor withdrawals. In that way, banks could honor requests for gold but be able to create new money by lending it out as interestbearing debt. But the Federal Reserve could still not address the limitations imposed on economic growth by tying money to a fixed commodity. Solving that problem required another bit of magic in the form of another government decree.

The next stage in the evolution of modern money occurred in 1931 when the United States stopped allowing people in the country to convert paper money into gold. The value of money was still tied to the value of gold, and exchanges with foreign governments still occurred in gold. However, in the 1960s the United States had flooded the world with so many dollars, partially because of spending on the war in

Part I Introduction

Indo-China, that it could no longer back its money with gold. Consequently, in 1971, when Great Britain asked to cash in its dollars for gold, the Nixon administration unilaterally severed the link between dollars and gold. This marked the final shift from commodity to fiat or debt money paper that was used as evidence of a claim to economic value but that, legally, was not redeemable for anything. As we'll see later when we examine the history of global finance, war has frequently been intimately linked to changes in the nature and amount of money.

As might be expected, with dollars backed by nothing, the money supply could rapidly grow, and theoretically could then match or exceed the growth or potential growth of the economy. More importantly, the Federal Reserve in the United States ( which serves as the U.S. central bank ) and central banks in other countries could develop ways to control the money supply, ensuring that it grew fast enough to keep up with economic growth but not so fast that inflation resulted . Inflation would occur when the amount of money exceeded the value of goods and services that people demanded, thus driving up the prices as buyers competed for scarce resources. If , however, the supply of goods and services exceeded the money supply, prices would decline as sellers competed for limited dollars, which would lead to deflation. Thus, balancing the amount of money in circulation with the goods and services that could be purchased is a major challenge for central banks, such as the U.S. Federal Reserve.

When we think of money, we think of bills and coins. But that is only a small part (5 percent to 10 percent) of the money supply. The rest exists only as figures on paper ( or in computers ) in banks and in the records of other financial institutions.

Figure 1.3 show the kinds of money, or money stocks, in circulation in the United States along with their growth from 1959 to 2016. You'll note that money is categorized by how easy it is to spend or the extent to which it serves as a store of value as opposed to a means of exchange. Currency , the easiest to spend, consists of paper notes and coins in circulation; Ml includes currency plus traveler 's checks, demand deposits, and other checkable deposits; M2 includes Ml plus "near money" savings deposits, money market securities mutual funds, and other short time deposits. M3, which the Federal Reserve ceased publishing in 2006, consists of large time deposits, institutional money market funds, and other assets that serve largely as long-term stores of value.

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Figure 1.3 U.S. Money Supply by Type: 1959-2016 SOURCE: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL; https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2 /series/M2 /; http://www

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8 Part I Introduction

In sum, the M2 money supply in 2016, over $13 trillion, was more than forty-three times larger than it was in 1959, $300 billion. You can perhaps begin to see why money represents a magical process. Because fiat or debt money is backed by nothing other than the legal power of the nation-state, but can be converted into all kinds of goods and services, we have further succeeded in the alchemist's goal of taking something that is essentially worthless ( paper ) and turning it into objects of value (whatever we can obtain with this paper ).

But, as Faust learned in his bargain with the devil, there is often a price to pay for access to the philosopher 's stone .

The Consequences of a System of Debt Money

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One of the obvious consequences of issuing money as interest-bearing debt, is that the more money is issued, the more must be paid back . Put another way, the more money, the more debt. Figure 1.4 shows the growth of total debt government, corporate, financial, and consumer in the United States from 1951 to 2015. It now exceeds more than $60 trillion. Global debt is over $200 trillion, but we'll examine that in Chapter 13.

The key thing to remember about debt money is that it is lent into existence as interest-bearing debt. Consequently every dollar, euro, or pound must earn interest with money that doesn't yet exist. The interest it earns goes to the bank or the people or institutions who own the debt . As we'll see, this has enormous implications for our financial system and for the division of our societies into debtors and creditors. But consider for now that everything you buy, every service you pay for, or every tax that you pay, contains interest on someone's or something's debt .

Lending money into existence has advantages theoretically only people who are capable of paying it back will get it; and, lending money with a requirement that it be repaid with interest disciplines people to work. However, debt money also concentrates wealth in the hands of a few, and, perhaps most importantly, it also exerts constant pressure for economic growth at any cost in order to maintain the interest payments on the money lent. Put another way, the money supply can grow, and

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FIGURE 1.4 Total U.S. Debt Liabilities: 1951-2015 SOURCE: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TCMDO

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Part I Introduction

continue to do so only if there is a corresponding amount of economic activity. That is, when money is lent into existence it must earn itself and the interest. But, how does the money continue to grow?

To answer this question economist Barbara Garson deposited $50,000 (a publisher 's advance on the book she was writing) in a small rural bank, the Bank of Millbrook, New York, and asked them to help her trace what happened to her money. The bank couldn't just hold it, because they had to pay interest on the deposit. The money had to keep moving and growing. So while giving Garson 2Vi percent interest, they immediately sold it to Chase Bank at W2 percent; but Chase, of course, had to move it out at a still higher rate. As Garson said,

I thought of my money as the raw material that banks need and want in order to make more money. But I was beginning to sense, however fuzzily, that it could also be a hot potato that Millbrook passed to Chase and Chase had to pass quickly to the next guy. Whoever held it , even for a second , had to pay interest .

Which means he had to be able to collect interest . If he coiddn' t , he got burned . (Garson 2001:39-40 emphasis added )

Thus Chase lent money to, among others, a Brooklyn fish company, which, Garson discovered, got much of its fish from East Asia, and to an oil company in Malaysia that was building a new refinery. Marveling at the power of money to mobilize people and resources, Garson traveled to Malaysia to see how her money was at work and discovered that thousands of people were getting jobs directly and indirectly through the money invested in the refinery. She also spoke to the fishermen in the area, some of whose catch may have been going to the Brooklyn fish market and discovered that the oil refinery polluted coastal waters and forced the fishermen to go farther out to sea for their catch. They talked to Garson about the good old days and the catches they used to bring home and the amount of work they have to do today to succeed .

"Some fisherman are lazy," one of the fishermen commented, "If they caught a lot today, they don't go out tomorrow. But I think differently. If we catch a lot today we go out tomorrow, catch more."

But another man, says Garson, politely disagreed . "You're free to do what you want. You can go out three day a week or twenty days a month. You stop when you have enough."

While she says that she didn't realize it at the time, she later thought it was the most subversive thing she heard in all her travels: "The one thing my money could not do," she says, "was stop"(Garson 2001:105-106).

Thus for our economic system to work, the money that is lent into existence must keep working, in perpetuity, to earn more. But, as Garson found out, it continues to grow only at a cost, in this case to coastal environments. And this highlights another problem with debt money the limit on things into which money can be converted .

Although the money supply might be unlimited, the goods and services that people can buy with their money are not. But if economic growth (and the supply of money ) must increase every year (and, according to most economists, must increase at a rate of at least 3 percent to maintain a healthy economy ), then so must the things that money can buy. When money was tied to and limited by a commodity such as gold, the money supply was constantly trying to keep up with the goods and services available.

However, once money was uncoupled from anything of value and could infinitely grow, the situation was reversed and goods and services began to chase the money supply. Thus, where we used to have a situation where we needed more and more gold to grow, now we simply need more and more stuff . In other words, the money supply must grow if the economy is to remain healthy , and for the money supply to grow, there must be a steady increase in the goods or services that money can buy. It is from this simple fact that many of the problems we discuss in this book derive.

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Parti Introduction

Figure 1.5 The Conversion of Natural, Political, and Social Capital into Money

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Economic Capital (Money)

Consequently, for the economy to grow, there must be a constant conversion of things that have no monetary value into things that do that is, there must be constant commodification, because money can only grow through a process whereby nonmonetary wealth, goods, or values are converted into things of monetary worth (see, e.g., Bourdieu 1986:243). In this conversion process lies the genius of capitalism.

In it also lies the secret of our Faustian bargain. Through the operation of a myriad of rules, regulations, values, and laws, the culture of capitalism encourages the conversion of items and activities that have no intrinsic monetary worth but that are nevertheless valuable and even necessary in other ways into items and activities that can be bought and sold in the marketplace . Thus, trees, lakes, and mountains must be converted into things that can be sold in the marketplace; activities once associated with family life and given freely, such as child care, food preparation, and education, must be converted into monetary activities; and freedom itself can be exchanged for money as powerful corporations use their money to gain political access and power (see Figure 1.5).

In sum, then, our culture works largely on a magical principle in which money, an item of no intrinsic value, perpetually increases in quantity by being lent into existence while we work to convert more and more nonmonetary capital into goods and services that this money can buy. Of course, this is a simplification of everything that must be done to keep the system working. In the next four chapters, we describe how the consumer, the laborer, the capitalist, and the nation-state operate to maintain this magic act. In Part II we'll examine what economists term the externalities of the work ing of the market , such as the environmental damage witnessed by Barbara Garson,

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Parti Introduction

and in Part III we'll explore the ways that groups of people have found to resist the sometimes-negative consequences on their lives from these externalities. The final chapter will propose some of the actions that are necessary to remedy the problems we will explore.

This book does suggest that what we term capitalism has been distorted by a financial system that requires perpetual growth, and that this growth is unsustainable. Not everyone agrees; some, including most mainstream economists, argue that sustained economic growth can solve many of the problems that we'll be examining.

Consequently, much of this book is designed to explain how we got where we are and weigh the evidence of whether the harms done by a commitment to perpetual economic growth are greater or lesser than the good.

11

Chapter 1

Constructing the Consumer Learning Objectives 1.1 Describe the role of the four factors in the creation of a consumer

economy.

1.2 Explain the role of childhood in consumer capitalism.

1.3 Describe the globalization of consumer capitalism.

1.4 Summarize the impact of a consumption-driven lifestyle

of capitalist culture.

The consumer revolution is a strange chapter in the ethnographic history of the species. For what may have been the first time in its history , a human com munity willingly harbored a nonreligious agent of social change, and permitted it to transform on a continual and systematic basis virtually every feature of social life.

GRANT MCCRACKEN, Culture and Consumption The .. . metamessage of our time is that the commodity form is natural and inescapable. Our lives can only be well lived (or lived at all) through the purchase of particular commodities. Thus our major existential interest consists of maneuvering for eligibility to buy such commodities in the market. Further, we have been taught that it is right and just — ordained by history, human nature, and God — that the means of life in all its forms be available only as commodities .... Americans live in an overcommodified world, with needs that are generated in the interests of the market and that can be met only through the market.

STEPHEN FJELLMAN, Vinyl Leaves

The culture of capitalism is devoted to encouraging the production and sale of commodities. For capitalists, the culture encourages the accumulation of money; for laborers, it encourages the accumulation of wages; and for consumers, it encourages the accumulation of goods. In other words, capitalism defines sets of people who, behaving according to a set of learned rules, act as they must act .

There is nothing natural about this behavior. People are not naturally driven to accumulate wealth. There are societies in which such accumulation is discouraged .

Human beings do not have an innate drive to accumulate commodities; again, there are plenty of societies in which such accumulation is discouraged . People are not driven to work; in fact, contrary to popular notions, members of capitalist culture work far more than, say, people who live by gathering and hunting (see, e.g., Schor 1999 ). How does culture, as anthropologists use the term , encourage people to behave in some ways and not in others ? Specifically , how does the culture of capitalism encourage the accumulation of money ,

12

Constructing the Consumer

13

wages , commodities , and debt ? How does it , in effect , encourage perpetual growth and what amounts to perpetual change?

It is not easy to describe the effects of culture on people's lives; anthropologists have noted that culture consists of all learned beliefs and behaviors, the rules by which we order our lives, and the meanings that human beings construct to interpret their universes and their places in them. Yet, using these abstract descriptions, it is difficult to understand how pervasive our culture can be in determining our view of the world . It may help, therefore, to provide a metaphor for culture in the form of a practice of another culture: the sandpaintings of the Navajo of the American Southwest.

Among the Navajo there is a healing practice in which a curer, using colored sand, cornmeal, or other bits of material, draws on the ground a miniature representation of the universe. Although there are perhaps a thousand versions of these drawings, each contains vital elements of what, for the Navajo, define the general conditions of existence. Navajo conceptions of space are indicated by symbols of the world 's directions and that of social life by the distribution of Navajo houses (,Hogans ) and mythic beings; values are represented in the stories and chants associated with each sandpainting.

Material items critical to Navajo existence (e.g., horses or ritual items ) are also portrayed. Once the work is completed, the patient sits on or in the sandpainting, and a curing ceremony, accompanied by chanting and prayer, proceeds. Illness, the Navajo claim, is the result of persons' losing their proper place in the world; the aim of the ceremony is to restore the patient to that place. When the ceremony is completed and harmony restored, the sandpainter destroys the painting.

Navajo sandpainting contains all the elements of what anthropologists often mean by the term culture. Like the sandpainting, a culture serves to define the universe as it is supposed to exist for a people. The sandpainting contains the key elements and symbols Navajo sandpaintings serve as therapeutic stages on which a person's place in the universe is defined and ritually enacted .

SOURCE: Chuck Place/Alamy Stock Photo

14 Chapter 1

that people use to locate themselves in physical and social space. It affirms the place of the person in the created world and the values that govern people's lives. Like the sandpainting, particular cultural representations serve as therapeutic frames that communicate to us who and what we are and how we figure in the larger order of things. These representations are therapeutic because they help people resolve the contradictions and ambiguities that are inherent in any cultural definition of reality and self .

Furthermore, every society has its sandpainters, those individuals who are given or who take responsibility for representing the universe to others and who have the power to define those elements that are essential for others in locating and defining their identities. In some societies, as among the Navajo, it is the curer, shaman, mythmaker, or storyteller; in others, it is the priest, poet, writer, artist, singer, or dancer. In capitalism, the sandpainter works in churches, synagogues, or mosques; in theaters; through television sets; at sporting events; or in the shopping malls that reaffirm the vision of abundance central to the consumers' view of the world . Contemporary sandpainters, including marketing specialists, advertisers, government agents, corporate public relations specialists, entertainers, and journalists, create a vision of the world designed to maximize the production and consumption of goods. They have helped to create a culture in which the prime elements are commodities and in which the consumer 's first duty is to buy (or "Shop till you drop," as a popular bumper sticker advises). It is a culture in which virtually all our everyday activities work, leisure, the fulfillment of social responsibilities, and so on take place in the context of commodities, and in which shopping, like the sandpainting cure, serves as a therapeutic activity. These contemporary sandpainters construct for us a culture in which at one time or another every individual assumes the identity of consumer. The question we need to explore first is, Hozu zvas the universe of the consumer and the consumer her- or himself created ?

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Remaking Consumption 1.1

Describe the role of the four factors in the creation of a consumer economy.

The consumer did not, of course, appear full blown in the early twentieth-century United States. Mass consumption of certain goods notably addictive substances such as tobacco, opium, rum, gin, coffee, and tea arguably fueled the Industrial Revolution and even Europe's colonial domination of Asia, Latin America, and Africa (see, e.g., Trentmann 2016). This consumption also defined the methods by which later commodities were produced, distributed, and consumed (see, e.g., Trocki 1999 ). But, since these items were physically addictive and required little marketing, merchants generally paid little attention to how these and other goods were marketed or displayed, assuming that when people needed their products, they would buy them.

It was this attitude in the United States of a century ago that was to undergo a profound change .

The change did not occur naturally. In fact, the culture of nineteenth-century America emphasized moderation and self -denial, not unlimited consumption. People, workers in particular, were expected to be frugal and save their money; spending, particularly on luxuries, was seen as "wasteful." People purchased only necessities basic foodstuffs, clothing, household utensils, and appliances or shared basic items when they could . If we look at a typical inventory of the possessions of an American family of 1870-1880, we find a pattern very different from that of today. In 1870, 53 percent of the population lived and worked on farms and produced much of what they consumed. One Vermont farmwife recorded making 421 pies, 152 cakes, 2,140 doughnuts, and 1,038 loaves of bread in one year (Sutherland 1989:71). Household items were relatively simple a dinner table, wooden chairs, beds, and perhaps a carpet or rug. There were a few appliances to aid housework cookstoves, eggbeaters, apple parers, pea shellers, and coffee mills but

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Constructing the Consumer

most other housework required muscle; even hand-cranked washing machines were not available until the late 1870s. Although most people, except the poorest or most isolated families, did buy some readymade clothing, most of the items people wore were made at home and were largely functional. Furthermore, because the vast majority of American families lived on farms, most of the family capital was invested in farming tools and implements. There were, of course, exceptions. The wealthy members of society competed with each other in the ostentatious display of wealth and luxury, as they had for centuries. But they represented a small percentage of the population.

Of course, Americans did not yet have electricity, the automobile had yet to be invented, and the money supply was far more limited than it is today. Nevertheless, to transform buying habits, luxuries had to be transformed into necessities. In America, this was accomplished largely in four ways: a revolution in marketing and advertising, a restructuring of major societal institutions, a revolution in spiritual and intellectual values, and a reconfiguration of space and class.

First, there was a major transformation of the meaning of goods and how they were presented and displayed . For most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, retailers paid little attention to how goods were displayed. The first department store Bon Marche opened in Paris in 1852, allowing people to wander through the store with no expectations that they make a purchase. Enterprises such as Bon Marche were devoted to "the arousal of free-floating desire," as Rosalind Williams put it (McCracken 1988:25). The display of commodities helped define bourgeois culture, converting the culture, values, attitudes, tastes, and aspirations of the bourgeoisie into goods, thus shaping and transforming them (Miller 1994).

But Bon Marche was an exception. In stores in the United States, most products were displayed in bulk, and little care was taken to arrange them in any special way.

Prepackaged items with company labels did not even exist until the 1870s, when Ivory Soap and Quaker Oats appeared (Carrier 1995:102 ). Shop windows, if they existed, were simply filled with items that had been languishing in back rooms or warehouses for years. Even the few large department stores of the mid-nineteenth century, such as that of Alexander Turney Stewart, the Marble Palace in New York, paid little attention to display. It was not until the 1890s and the emergence of the department store in the United States as a major retail establishment that retailers began to pay attention to how products were presented to the public.

The department store evolved into a place to display goods as objects in themselves. When Marshall Field's opened in Chicago in 1902, six string orchestras filled the various floors with music, and American Beauty roses, along with other cut flowers and potted palms, bedecked all the counters. Nothing was permitted to be sold on the first day, and merchants in the district closed so that their employees could visit Field's. Later, elaborate theatrical productions were put on in the stores, artworks were exhibited, and some of the most creative minds in America designed displays that were intended to present goods in ways that inspired people to buy them. The department store became a cultural primer telling people how they should dress, furnish their homes, and spend their leisure time (Leach 1993).

Advertising was another revolutionary development that influenced the creation of the consumer. The goal of advertisers was to aggressively shape consumer desires and create value in commodities by imbuing them with the power to transform the consumer into a more desirable person. Before the late 1880s, advertising was looked down on and associated with P. T. Barnum-style hokum. In 1880, only $30 million was

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16 Chapter 1 invested in advertising in the United States; however, by 1910, new businesses, such as oil, food, electricity, and rubber, were spending $600 million, or 4 percent of the national income, on advertising. By 1929, advertising was an $11 billion enterprise, and by 1998, the amount spent globally on advertising reached $437 billion. By 2016, global advertising expenditures reached almost $500 billion (Handley 2016; Lee 2012 ), or more than the GDP of Sweden.

By the early twentieth century, national advertising campaigns were being initiated and celebrities were being hired to offer testimonials to their favorite commodities. Advertising cards, catalogs, and newspaper ads became a regular feature of American life . Outdoor advertising billboards, signs, and posters appeared everywhere. Electrical advertising neon and flashing signs were marketed, and Broadway became famous as the "Great White Way." Today, advertising plays such a ubiquitous part in our lives that we scarcely notice it, even when it is engraved or embroidered on our clothing.

Another boon to merchandising was the idea of fashion: the stirring up of anxiety and restlessness over the possession of things that were not "new" or "up-to-date."

Fashion pressured people to buy not out of need but for style from a desire to conform to what others defined as "fashionable."

It is hardly surprising, then, that the garment industry in America led the way in the creation of fashion; its growth in the early 1900s was two or three times as great as any other industry. By 1915, it ranked only behind steel and oil in the United States.

Fashion output in 1915 was in excess of $1 billion; in New York alone, 15,000 establishments made women's clothes. New fashion magazines Vogue, Cosmopolitan , and the Delineator set fashion standards and defined what the socially conscious woman should wear, often using royalty, the wealthy, and celebrities as models. In 1903, the fashion show was introduced in the United States by Ehrich Brothers in New York City; by 1915, it was an event in virtually every U.S. city and town. Relying on this popularity, the first modeling agency was founded in New York by John Powers in 1923 (Leach 1993:309 ). The entertainment industry contributed by making its own major fashion statements as American women of the 1920s sought to imitate stars such as Clara Bow. The importance of fashion hasn't changed, and fashion magazines remain, as film critic Manohla Dargis (2009 ) put it, "temples of consumption." Reviewing the documentary, The September Issue, about the creation of a single issue of Vogue, she notes that the glossy images, expensive clothes, and accessories displayed in its pages are about creating desires and transforming wants into needs. The magazine, of course, wants to sell the stuff that adorns its pages; however, more than that, it wants to instill in the reader sets of aspirations. It seeks to define tastes using attractive models and celebrities to define what the well-dressed woman should wear.

Another addition to the marketing strategy was service, which included not only consumer credit (charge accounts and installment buying) but also a workforce to fawn over customers. Customers became guests.

William Leach suggested that service may have been one of the most important features of the new consumer society. It helped, he said, mask the inequality, poverty, and labor conflicts that were very much a part of the United States at this point in its history. If one wanted to understand how consumer society developed, Leach said, one could look at the rise of service. As economic inequality rose in America, and as labor conflict increased, Americans associated service with the "promise of America."

Service conveyed to people the idea that everything was all right, that they had nothing to worry about, and that security and service awaited them. Service expressed what economists then and now would refer to as the "benevolent side" of capitalism that exchanged a steady flow of profits for greater comfort. From this perspective capitalism did not just seek profit, but satisfied people's needs by being more efficient. "Capital," said one turn-of -the-century economist, "reigns because it serves" ( Locke 1984:111).

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Constructing the Consumer

The Transformation of Institutions The second way in which American buying habits were changed was through a transformation of the major institutions of American society, each redefining its function to include the promotion of consumption. Educational and cultural institutions, governmental agencies, financial institutions, and even the family itself changed their meaning and function to promote the creation of the ultimate consumer.

Before 1900, the contributions of universities to the capitalist economy largely dealt with how to "make" things that is, with the production of commodities.

Virtually no attention was paid to selling or keeping track of what was sold . For example, there was no systematic examination of mass retailing, credit systems, or banking offered by America's schools or universities. In the twentieth century, however, that began to change . For example, in New York City there was the good-design or artsin-industry movement; schools, such as the Pratt Institute and the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts ( now Parsons School of Design ), developed and began to prepare students to work in the emerging sales and design industries and in the large department stores. The University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School for Business and the Harvard School for Business introduced programs in accounting ( virtually nonexistent before then ), marketing, and sales. In 1919, New York University's School of Retailing opened; in the mid-1920s, Harvard and Stanford established graduate business schools as did such schools as Northwestern and other universities in Michigan, California, and Wisconsin soon after. Today, there are virtually no two-year or fouryear colleges that do not offer some sort of business curriculum.

Museums also redefined their missions to accommodate the growth of the consumer culture. The American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Newark Museum all heavily endowed by wealthy patrons such as J . P. Morgan began to make alliances with business. Curators lectured to designers on Peruvian textiles or primitive decorative art. The head of the American Museum of Natural History, Morris D'Camp Crawford, assisted by the head of the anthropology department, Clark Wissler, urged businesspeople and designers to visit the museum. Special exhibits on the history of fashion and clothing were arranged, and Wissler even borrowed the window-display techniques of New York department stores for his exhibits ( just as window-display designers had borrowed the idea of the mannequin from anthropologist Franz Boas's exhibit of foreign cultures at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago ). The editor of Women' s Wear magazine praised the museum for being "the most progressive force in the development of the designer" ( Feach 1993:166).

The second set of institutions to aid in the development of consumer culture comprised agencies of the local and federal governments. The state, as an entity, had long taken a lively interest in commerce within its borders ( as we'll see when we examine the history of global capitalist expansion in Chapter 3) . But prior to the twentieth century, the state's concerns focused largely on the manufacture of commodities, the organization of business, the control of labor, and the movement of goods. It wasn't until the twentieth century that state agencies began to concern themselves with the consumption end of the business cycle . In fact, it may not be an exaggeration to say that the government did more to create the consumer than did any other institution.

Nothing better represents the increasing role of the federal government in the promotion of consumption than the growth of the Commerce Department under Herbert Hoover, who served as its head from 1921 until his election as president in 1928. When the Commerce Building opened in Washington in 1932, it was the biggest office structure in the world (and was not surpassed in size until the Pentagon was built a decade later ). At the time, it brought together in one building virtually all the government departments that had anything to do with business, from the Patent Office to the Bureau

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18 Chapter 1 of Foreign and Domestic Commerce (BFDC), then the most important agency of the department. From 1921 to 1930, the congressional appropriation for the BFDC rose from $100,000 to more than $8 million, an increase of 8,000 percent. The number of BFDC staff increased from 100 to 2,500.

Hoover clearly intended the Department of Commerce to serve as the handmaiden of American business, and its main goal was to help encourage consumption.

For example, between 1926 and 1928, the BFDC, under Hoover 's direction, initiated the Census of Distribution ( or "Census of Consumption," as it was sometimes called ) to be carried out every ten years. (It was unique at that time; Britain and other countries did not initiate government-sponsored consumer research until the 1950s. ) It detailed where the consumers were and what quantities of goods they would consume; it pointed out areas where goods were "overdeveloped" and which goods were best carried by which stores. The Commerce Department endorsed retail and cooperative advertising and advised merchants on service devices, fashion, style, and display methods of all kinds. The agency advised retail establishments on the best ways to deliver goods to consumers, redevelop streets, build parking lots and underground transportation systems to attract consumers, use colored lights, and display merchandise in "tempting ways." The goal was to break down "all barriers between the consumers and commodities" (Leach 1993:366 ).

Hoover also emphasized individual home ownership. In his memoirs, he wrote that "a primary right of every American family is the right to build a new house of its heart's desire at least once. Moreover, there is the instinct to own one's own house with one's own arrangement of gadgets, rooms, and surroundings" (Nash 1988:7).

The Commerce Department flooded the country with public relations materials on "homebuying" ideas, producing a leaflet entitled Own Your Own Home, along with the film Home Sweet Home. They advocated single-dwelling homes over multiunit dwellings and suburban over urban housing. The leaflet recommended a separate bedroom for each child, saying it was "undesirable for two children to occupy the same bed whatever their age." Regardless of the reasons for these recommendations, the materials produced by the Commerce Department all promoted maximum consumption. Thus, the government responded, as much as did educational institutions, to the need to promote consumption.

Another step in creating a consumer economy was to give the worker more buying power. The advantage of this from an economic perspective is not easy to see.

From the point of view of an industrialist or an employer, the ideal situation would be to pay as low a wage as possible to keep production costs down and increase profits.

However, each producer of goods would prefer other producers to pay high wages, which would allow the other producers' workers to buy more of their own products.

The idea that higher wages would serve as an incentive for laborers to work harder or that higher wages might allow the worker to become a consumer occurred relatively late to factory owners and investors. The working class, they assumed, would work only as hard as they needed to get their basic subsistence, and to pay them more would only result in their working less. And when an occasional economic boom gave workers the spending power to consume at a higher level, the middle and upper classes would condemn them for their lack of thrift.

The economic power derived from turning workers into consumers was realized almost by accident. As industry attempted to increase efficiency, it developed new methods. Henry Ford introduced the assembly line, one of the apparently great innovations, to the manufacturing of automobiles. Workers occupied positions on the line from which they did not move ("Walking," Ford said, "is not a remunerative activity") and from which they would perform a single task . It was a process that required almost no training and that "the most stupid man could learn within two days," as Ford said. In essence, each worker had to repeat the same motion every ten seconds in a nine-hour workday.

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Constructing the Consumer

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Workers resisted this mind-numbing process. When Ford introduced his assembly line, absenteeism increased and worker turnover surged. In 1913, Ford required 13,000 to 14,000 workers to operate his plant, and in that year 50,000 quit.

But Ford solved the problem: He raised wages from the industry standard of two to three dollars per day to five dollars, and he reduced the working day to eight hours.

Soon labor turnover fell to 5 percent, and waiting lines appeared at Ford hiring offices.

Furthermore, production costs for Ford's Model T fell from $1,950 to $290, reducing the price to consumers. Most importantly, the rise in wages made Ford workers consumers of Ford automobiles, and, as other manufacturers followed suit, the automobile industry prospered. By 1929, there were 23 million automobiles in the United States; by 1950, there were more than 40 million. Today, including light trucks, there are 1.3 cars for every individual.

In addition to the money coming from higher wages, buying power was increased by the expansion of credit . Credit, of course, is essential for economic growth and consumerism, because it means that people, corporations, and governments can purchase goods and services with only a promise to pay for them at some future date. Buying things on credit that is, going into debt has not always been acceptable in the United States. It was highly frowned upon in the nineteenth century. It was not fully socially acceptable until the 1920s (Calder 1999 ), at which time it promoted the boom in both automobile and home buying.

The increased ease of obtaining home mortgages was a key to the home-building boom of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, a boom that in turn fueled subsidiary industries appliances, home furnishings, and road construction. By 1960, 62 percent of all Americans could claim to own their own home up from 44 percent in 1940, a percentage that has increased only to 64 percent in 2014. By 2016, U.S. homeowners owed more than $8 trillion in mortgages. Home mortgages had the further function of disciplining the workforce by forcing it to work to make credit payments. At the same time, homeowners gained a capital asset that served as a hedge against inflation. Automobile loans also added to consumer debt and, similarly, fueled subsidiary economic growth malls, highways, vacation travel, and so on. Credit cards gave holders a revolving line of credit with which to finance purchases. U.S. household debt, excluding mortgages, reached $3.1 trillion by 2016 (see Figure 1.1). This debt represents enormous confidence in the future of the economy because this money does not exist. Lenders in our economy simply assume that the money will exist when it comes time for people to repay their debts.

None of this would have been possible without a government financial policy that put limits on interest rates ("usury ceilings"), passed "truth-in-lending" laws, made it easier for certain groups (women and minorities) to borrow, and offered

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20 Chapter 1 subsidized student loans. Thus, credit increased consumer debt while creating a "mass market" for consumer goods, which served further to stimulate economic growth (see Guttmann 1994).

In addition to changes in the way workers were viewed and the expansion of credit, there had to be a change in the way retail establishments were organized . The emergence of the consumer was accompanied by an enormous growth in retail chain stores. Until this point, people shopped in small stores or large family-owned department stores. The 1920s saw the rise of the large retail conglomerates. In 1886, only two chains operated more than five stores; in 1912, 177 companies operated 2,235 stores; by 1929, nearly 1,500 companies were doing business in 70,000 outlets. In 2012, Wal-Mart alone had over 8,500 stores worldwide, and, with over 2 million employees, is the largest employer in the world (Copeland and Labuski 2013).

The Transformation of Spiritual and Intellectual Values In addition to changing marketing techniques and modifying societal institutions to stimulate consumption, there had to be a change in spiritual and intellectual values from an emphasis on such values as thrift, modesty, and moderation toward a value system that encouraged spending and ostentatious display. T. J . Jackson Lears argued that, from 1880 to 1930, the United States underwent a transformation of values from those that emphasized frugality and self -denial to those that sanctioned periodic leisure, compulsive spending, and individual fulfillment (Lears 1983). This shift in values, said Lears, was facilitated in American life by a new therapeutic ethos, an emphasis on physical and psychological health. This shift was promoted in part by the growth of the health professions and the popularity of psychology, along with the increasing autonomy and alienation felt by individuals as America ceased being a land of small towns and became increasingly urban. Advertisers capitalized on these changes by altering the way products were advertised; rather than emphasizing the nature of the product itself , they began to emphasize the alleged effects of the product and its promise of a richer, fuller life. Instead of simply being good soap, shoes, or deodorant, a product would contribute to the buyer 's psychological, physical, or social well-being (Lears 1983:19 ).

Clothing, perfumes, deodorant, and so on would provide the means of achieving love; alcoholic beverages would provide the route to friendship; and the proper automobile tires or insurance policy would provide the means of meeting family responsibilities. Commodities would be the source of satisfaction and a vital means of self -expression. Ponder, for example, the following description by a forty-year-old man of the relationship between himself and his expensive Porsche: Sometimes I test myself . We have an ancient, battered Peugeot, and I drive it for a week. It rarely breaks, and it gets great mileage. But when I pull up next to a beautiful woman, I am still the geek with glasses. Then I get back into my Porsche. It roars and tugs to get moving. It accelerates even going uphill at 80.

It leadeth trashy women ... to make pouting looks at me at stoplights. It makes me feel like a tomcat on the prowl Nothing in my life compares except driving along Sunset at night in the 928, with the sodium vapor lamps reflecting off the wine-red finish, with the air inside reeking of tan glove-leather upholstery and the . . . Blaupunkt playing the Shirelles so loud that it makes my hairs vibrate. And with the girls I will never see again pulling up next to me, giving the car a once-over and looking at me as if I was a cool guy, not worried, instead of a 40-year-old schnook writer. ( Belk 1988:148)

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In the late nineteenth century, a series of religious movements emerged that became known as mind -cure religions. William James, in his classic 1902 book Varieties of Religious Experience , drew attention to the mind-cure movements, although he was not

Constructing the Consumer

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the first to use the term. These movements New Thought, Unity, Christian Science, and Theosophy, among others maintained that people could simply, by an act of will and conviction, cure their own illnesses and create heaven on earth. These movements were, as William Leach (1993:225) phrased it, "wish-oriented, optimistic, sunny, the epitome of cheer and self -confidence." Absent were sin, darkness, and evil; it was all sunshine and health.

These movements held that salvation would occur in this life and not in the af terlife. Mind cure dismissed the ideas of sin and guilt. God became a divine force, a healing power. Proponents argued that Americans should banish ideas of duty and self -denial. As one early twentieth-century advocate put it:

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If you want to get the most out of life, just make up your mind that you were made to be happy, that you are a happiness machine, as well as a work machine. Cut off the past, and do not touch the morrow until it comes, but extract every possibility from the present . Think positive, creative, happy thoughts, and your harvest of good things will be abundant. ( Success Magazine 1903)

These new religions made fashionable the idea that, in the world of goods, men and women could find a paradise free from pain and suffering; they could find, as one historian of religion put it, the "good" through "goods."

Popular culture also promoted the mind-cure ideology. As examples, there were L . Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard ofOz , which Leach characterized as "perhaps the best mind cure text ever written," and the Billikens doll, a squat Buddha-like figure, sometimes male and sometimes female, that represented the "god of things as they ought to be." Its success was without parallel in the toy trade and helped incite the doll craze in America. Billikens, it was said, would drive away petty annoyances and cares. One contemporary put it this way: "An atmosphere of gorged content pervades Billikens. No one can look at him [or her ] and worry."

The popularity of the Billikens doll signaled change in spiritual values: It was now permissible to seek self -fulfillment in this life and find elements of satisfaction in manufactured commodities. The world was a good place: There was no misery; poverty, injustice, and inequities were only in the mind. There was enough for everyone.

These changes were not unique to America. Many of the same changes occurred in other nations, most notably Great Britain, Germany, and France (Carrier 1995), and are occurring now all over the world. The consumer revolution of the early twentieth century was not the first of its kind either but it evolved with great intensity and rapidity in America.

Thus, by the 1930s, the "consumer" as a category of person had, as Lizabeth Cohen (2003) points out, replaced the "citizen," adopting a spiritual and intellectual framework that glorified the continued consumption of commodities as personally fulfilling and economically desirable a moral imperative that would end poverty and injustice.

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The Reconfiguration of Time, Space, and Class The creation of the consumer did not stop in 1930. Since that time, the institutions of our society, particularly those of corporate America, have become increasingly more adept at creating sandpaintings in which people inhabit worlds whose very nature requires the continuous consumption of goods and services. The need to consume has reordered our organization of time, reconstructed

Pillow Pets, the latest craze in stuffed toys, are a direct descendent of the Billikens doll, a figure designed to drive away worries and cares and convince people that the world is a good place with plenty for everyone.

SOURCE: Yumeto Yamazaki/AFLO/Newscom

22 Chapter 1 our living space, created new spaces for the encouragement of consumption, and altered the ways that we view one another.

Into the early nineteenth century in the United States, holiday celebrations most religious, but some secular marked each year. Washington's Birthday, for example, was one of the most important (see, e.g., Schmidt 1995:47). But holidays were not generally times for gift giving and consumption. In fact, most people, particularly merchants and trades people, viewed holidays and festivities as impediments to work discipline, and they made an effort to reduce their number.

By the late nineteenth century, however, retailers began to recognize the commercial potential of holidays. In 1897, the trade journal Dry Goods Economist mocked those who viewed holidays as "an interruption of business" instead of an opportunity for "special sales and attractive displays." The modern retailer, they said, knew that there was "never a holiday" that did not make for increased business. Thus, as Leigh Eric Schmidt observes, "holidays, rather than being impediments to disciplined economic advancement, were seen as critical for consumption and profit" (Schmidt 1995:37).

Valentine's Day is a good example. Until the fourteenth century, St . Valentine was known largely for his "steadfastness in the face of torturous martyrdom." English poet Geoffrey Chaucer is generally credited with laying the foundation for the pairing of St. Valentine with lovers when, in his Parliament of Fowls , he wrote that birds were said to choose their mates on St . Valentine's Day (Schmidt 1995:40ff .). Thus, St. Valentine became the patron saint of lovers. On St. Valentine's Day in Scotland, young women would try to divine their future mates, while among the elites it became a day for romantic poetry and gift giving, gloves being a popular item. By the 1840s and 1850s in the United States, the practice of exchanging cards became widespread . By the late nineteenth century, the meaning of the term valentine had changed .

Instead of referring to a person's sweetheart or betrothed, it came to refer to a commodity, a commercial product that could be consumed like any other. By the end of the nineteenth century, department stores were filling their windows with love missives, jewelry, and other suggestions for gifts. In 1910, a traveling salesman by the name of Joyce C. Hall began a postcard business specializing in Valentine missives that would evolve into Hallmark Cards. By the 1990s, Hallmark had 40 percent of the American greeting card business (Schmidt 1995:100 ) . Of course, other holidays, such as Christmas, soon followed Valentine's Day as occasions for mass consumption, and by the early 1920s, flowers for Mother 's Day became firmly fixed in the holiday firmament. Thus, our organization of time, our calendar of festivities, became redefined to promote consumption.

The need to create consumers also redefined our conception of space. Home ownership, for example, particularly of the product-greedy single-family home, cast people out from city centers into the sprawling suburbs, which necessitated new roads and more cars, and, in the end, virtually destroyed public transportation. Retailers and developers quickly realized the possibilities inherent in these new communities; people, they reasoned, had an endless desire to consume. "Our economy," said Macy's board chairman Jack Isodor Straus, "keeps on growing because our ability to consume is endless. The consumer goes on spending regardless of how many possessions he or she has. The luxuries of today are the necessities of tomorrow" (Cohen 2003:261). But it was also believed that suburbanites were growing reluctant to travel to urban centers to shop. The solution was to bring the market to the people, and retailers and developers relocated shopping areas from city centers to spacious shopping centers and malls. Consumers gave various reasons for shifting their shopping from downtown to shopping centers, but the most important issues seemed to involve convenience easy accessibility ( malls and shopping centers were always constructed adjacent to new

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DANCE ON STILTS AT THE GIRLS’ UNYAGO, NIUCHI

Newala, too, suffers from the distance of its water-supply—at least the Newala of to-day does; there was once another Newala in a lovely valley at the foot of the plateau. I visited it and found scarcely a trace of houses, only a Christian cemetery, with the graves of several missionaries and their converts, remaining as a monument of its former glories. But the surroundings are wonderfully beautiful. A thick grove of splendid mango-trees closes in the weather-worn crosses and headstones; behind them, combining the useful and the agreeable, is a whole plantation of lemon-trees covered with ripe fruit; not the small African kind, but a much larger and also juicier imported variety, which drops into the hands of the passing traveller, without calling for any exertion on his part. Old Newala is now under the jurisdiction of the native pastor, Daudi, at Chingulungulu, who, as I am on very friendly terms with him, allows me, as a matter of course, the use of this lemon-grove during my stay at Newala.

FEET MUTILATED BY THE RAVAGES OF THE “JIGGER” (Sarcopsylla penetrans)

The water-supply of New Newala is in the bottom of the valley, some 1,600 feet lower down. The way is not only long and fatiguing, but the water, when we get it, is thoroughly bad. We are suffering not only from this, but from the fact that the arrangements at Newala are nothing short of luxurious. We have a separate kitchen—a hut built against the boma palisade on the right of the baraza, the interior of which is not visible from our usual position. Our two cooks were not long in finding this out, and they consequently do—or rather neglect to do—what they please. In any case they do not seem to be very particular about the boiling of our drinking-water—at least I can attribute to no other cause certain attacks of a dysenteric nature, from which both Knudsen and I have suffered for some time. If a man like Omari has to be left unwatched for a moment, he is capable of anything. Besides this complaint, we are inconvenienced by the state of our nails, which have become as hard as glass, and crack on the slightest provocation, and I have the additional infliction of pimples all over me. As if all this were not enough, we have also, for the last week been waging war against the jigger, who has found his Eldorado in the hot sand of the Makonde plateau. Our men are seen all day long—whenever their chronic colds and the dysentery likewise raging among them permit—occupied in removing this scourge of Africa from their feet and trying to prevent the disastrous consequences of its presence. It is quite common to see natives of this place with one or two toes missing; many have lost all their toes,

or even the whole front part of the foot, so that a well-formed leg ends in a shapeless stump. These ravages are caused by the female of Sarcopsylla penetrans, which bores its way under the skin and there develops an egg-sac the size of a pea. In all books on the subject, it is stated that one’s attention is called to the presence of this parasite by an intolerable itching. This agrees very well with my experience, so far as the softer parts of the sole, the spaces between and under the toes, and the side of the foot are concerned, but if the creature penetrates through the harder parts of the heel or ball of the foot, it may escape even the most careful search till it has reached maturity.

Then there is no time to be lost, if the horrible ulceration, of which we see cases by the dozen every day, is to be prevented. It is much easier, by the way, to discover the insect on the white skin of a European than on that of a native, on which the dark speck scarcely shows. The four or five jiggers which, in spite of the fact that I constantly wore high laced boots, chose my feet to settle in, were taken out for me by the all-accomplished Knudsen, after which I thought it advisable to wash out the cavities with corrosive sublimate. The natives have a different sort of disinfectant—they fill the hole with scraped roots. In a tiny Makua village on the slope of the plateau south of Newala, we saw an old woman who had filled all the spaces under her toe-nails with powdered roots by way of prophylactic treatment. What will be the result, if any, who can say?

The rest of the many trifling ills which trouble our existence are really more comic than serious. In the absence of anything else to smoke, Knudsen and I at last opened a box of cigars procured from the Indian store-keeper at Lindi, and tried them, with the most distressing results. Whether they contain opium or some other narcotic, neither of us can say, but after the tenth puff we were both “off,” three-quarters stupefied and unspeakably wretched. Slowly we recovered—and what happened next? Half-an-hour later we were once more smoking these poisonous concoctions—so insatiable is the craving for tobacco in the tropics.

Even my present attacks of fever scarcely deserve to be taken seriously. I have had no less than three here at Newala, all of which have run their course in an incredibly short time. In the early afternoon, I am busy with my old natives, asking questions and making notes. The strong midday coffee has stimulated my spirits to

an extraordinary degree, the brain is active and vigorous, and work progresses rapidly, while a pleasant warmth pervades the whole body. Suddenly this gives place to a violent chill, forcing me to put on my overcoat, though it is only half-past three and the afternoon sun is at its hottest. Now the brain no longer works with such acuteness and logical precision; more especially does it fail me in trying to establish the syntax of the difficult Makua language on which I have ventured, as if I had not enough to do without it. Under the circumstances it seems advisable to take my temperature, and I do so, to save trouble, without leaving my seat, and while going on with my work. On examination, I find it to be 101·48°. My tutors are abruptly dismissed and my bed set up in the baraza; a few minutes later I am in it and treating myself internally with hot water and lemon-juice.

Three hours later, the thermometer marks nearly 104°, and I make them carry me back into the tent, bed and all, as I am now perspiring heavily, and exposure to the cold wind just beginning to blow might mean a fatal chill. I lie still for a little while, and then find, to my great relief, that the temperature is not rising, but rather falling. This is about 7.30 p.m. At 8 p.m. I find, to my unbounded astonishment, that it has fallen below 98·6°, and I feel perfectly well. I read for an hour or two, and could very well enjoy a smoke, if I had the wherewithal—Indian cigars being out of the question.

Having no medical training, I am at a loss to account for this state of things. It is impossible that these transitory attacks of high fever should be malarial; it seems more probable that they are due to a kind of sunstroke. On consulting my note-book, I become more and more inclined to think this is the case, for these attacks regularly follow extreme fatigue and long exposure to strong sunshine. They at least have the advantage of being only short interruptions to my work, as on the following morning I am always quite fresh and fit.

My treasure of a cook is suffering from an enormous hydrocele which makes it difficult for him to get up, and Moritz is obliged to keep in the dark on account of his inflamed eyes. Knudsen’s cook, a raw boy from somewhere in the bush, knows still less of cooking than Omari; consequently Nils Knudsen himself has been promoted to the vacant post. Finding that we had come to the end of our supplies, he began by sending to Chingulungulu for the four sucking-pigs which we had

bought from Matola and temporarily left in his charge; and when they came up, neatly packed in a large crate, he callously slaughtered the biggest of them. The first joint we were thoughtless enough to entrust for roasting to Knudsen’s mshenzi cook, and it was consequently uneatable; but we made the rest of the animal into a jelly which we ate with great relish after weeks of underfeeding, consuming incredible helpings of it at both midday and evening meals. The only drawback is a certain want of variety in the tinned vegetables. Dr. Jäger, to whom the Geographical Commission entrusted the provisioning of the expeditions—mine as well as his own—because he had more time on his hands than the rest of us, seems to have laid in a huge stock of Teltow turnips,[46] an article of food which is all very well for occasional use, but which quickly palls when set before one every day; and we seem to have no other tins left. There is no help for it—we must put up with the turnips; but I am certain that, once I am home again, I shall not touch them for ten years to come.

Amid all these minor evils, which, after all, go to make up the genuine flavour of Africa, there is at least one cheering touch: Knudsen has, with the dexterity of a skilled mechanic, repaired my 9 × 12 cm. camera, at least so far that I can use it with a little care.

How, in the absence of finger-nails, he was able to accomplish such a ticklish piece of work, having no tool but a clumsy screw-driver for taking to pieces and putting together again the complicated mechanism of the instantaneous shutter, is still a mystery to me; but he did it successfully. The loss of his finger-nails shows him in a light contrasting curiously enough with the intelligence evinced by the above operation; though, after all, it is scarcely surprising after his ten years’ residence in the bush. One day, at Lindi, he had occasion to wash a dog, which must have been in need of very thorough cleansing, for the bottle handed to our friend for the purpose had an extremely strong smell. Having performed his task in the most conscientious manner, he perceived with some surprise that the dog did not appear much the better for it, and was further surprised by finding his own nails ulcerating away in the course of the next few days. “How was I to know that carbolic acid has to be diluted?” he mutters indignantly, from time to time, with a troubled gaze at his mutilated finger-tips.

Since we came to Newala we have been making excursions in all directions through the surrounding country, in accordance with old habit, and also because the akida Sefu did not get together the tribal elders from whom I wanted information so speedily as he had promised. There is, however, no harm done, as, even if seen only from the outside, the country and people are interesting enough.

The Makonde plateau is like a large rectangular table rounded off at the corners. Measured from the Indian Ocean to Newala, it is about seventy-five miles long, and between the Rovuma and the Lukuledi it averages fifty miles in breadth, so that its superficial area is about two-thirds of that of the kingdom of Saxony. The surface, however, is not level, but uniformly inclined from its south-western edge to the ocean. From the upper edge, on which Newala lies, the eye ranges for many miles east and north-east, without encountering any obstacle, over the Makonde bush. It is a green sea, from which here and there thick clouds of smoke rise, to show that it, too, is inhabited by men who carry on their tillage like so many other primitive peoples, by cutting down and burning the bush, and manuring with the ashes. Even in the radiant light of a tropical day such a fire is a grand sight.

Much less effective is the impression produced just now by the great western plain as seen from the edge of the plateau. As often as time permits, I stroll along this edge, sometimes in one direction, sometimes in another, in the hope of finding the air clear enough to let me enjoy the view; but I have always been disappointed.

Wherever one looks, clouds of smoke rise from the burning bush, and the air is full of smoke and vapour. It is a pity, for under more favourable circumstances the panorama of the whole country up to the distant Majeje hills must be truly magnificent. It is of little use taking photographs now, and an outline sketch gives a very poor idea of the scenery. In one of these excursions I went out of my way to make a personal attempt on the Makonde bush. The present edge of the plateau is the result of a far-reaching process of destruction through erosion and denudation. The Makonde strata are everywhere cut into by ravines, which, though short, are hundreds of yards in depth. In consequence of the loose stratification of these beds, not only are the walls of these ravines nearly vertical, but their upper end is closed by an equally steep escarpment, so that the

western edge of the Makonde plateau is hemmed in by a series of deep, basin-like valleys. In order to get from one side of such a ravine to the other, I cut my way through the bush with a dozen of my men.

It was a very open part, with more grass than scrub, but even so the short stretch of less than two hundred yards was very hard work; at the end of it the men’s calicoes were in rags and they themselves bleeding from hundreds of scratches, while even our strong khaki suits had not escaped scatheless.

NATIVE PATH THROUGH THE MAKONDE BUSH, NEAR MAHUTA

I see increasing reason to believe that the view formed some time back as to the origin of the Makonde bush is the correct one. I have no doubt that it is not a natural product, but the result of human occupation. Those parts of the high country where man—as a very slight amount of practice enables the eye to perceive at once—has not yet penetrated with axe and hoe, are still occupied by a splendid timber forest quite able to sustain a comparison with our mixed forests in Germany. But wherever man has once built his hut or tilled his field, this horrible bush springs up. Every phase of this process

may be seen in the course of a couple of hours’ walk along the main road. From the bush to right or left, one hears the sound of the axe— not from one spot only, but from several directions at once. A few steps further on, we can see what is taking place. The brush has been cut down and piled up in heaps to the height of a yard or more, between which the trunks of the large trees stand up like the last pillars of a magnificent ruined building. These, too, present a melancholy spectacle: the destructive Makonde have ringed them— cut a broad strip of bark all round to ensure their dying off—and also piled up pyramids of brush round them. Father and son, mother and son-in-law, are chopping away perseveringly in the background—too busy, almost, to look round at the white stranger, who usually excites so much interest. If you pass by the same place a week later, the piles of brushwood have disappeared and a thick layer of ashes has taken the place of the green forest. The large trees stretch their smouldering trunks and branches in dumb accusation to heaven—if they have not already fallen and been more or less reduced to ashes, perhaps only showing as a white stripe on the dark ground.

This work of destruction is carried out by the Makonde alike on the virgin forest and on the bush which has sprung up on sites already cultivated and deserted. In the second case they are saved the trouble of burning the large trees, these being entirely absent in the secondary bush.

After burning this piece of forest ground and loosening it with the hoe, the native sows his corn and plants his vegetables. All over the country, he goes in for bed-culture, which requires, and, in fact, receives, the most careful attention. Weeds are nowhere tolerated in the south of German East Africa. The crops may fail on the plains, where droughts are frequent, but never on the plateau with its abundant rains and heavy dews. Its fortunate inhabitants even have the satisfaction of seeing the proud Wayao and Wamakua working for them as labourers, driven by hunger to serve where they were accustomed to rule.

But the light, sandy soil is soon exhausted, and would yield no harvest the second year if cultivated twice running. This fact has been familiar to the native for ages; consequently he provides in time, and, while his crop is growing, prepares the next plot with axe and firebrand. Next year he plants this with his various crops and

lets the first piece lie fallow. For a short time it remains waste and desolate; then nature steps in to repair the destruction wrought by man; a thousand new growths spring out of the exhausted soil, and even the old stumps put forth fresh shoots. Next year the new growth is up to one’s knees, and in a few years more it is that terrible, impenetrable bush, which maintains its position till the black occupier of the land has made the round of all the available sites and come back to his starting point.

The Makonde are, body and soul, so to speak, one with this bush.

According to my Yao informants, indeed, their name means nothing else but “bush people.” Their own tradition says that they have been settled up here for a very long time, but to my surprise they laid great stress on an original immigration. Their old homes were in the south-east, near Mikindani and the mouth of the Rovuma, whence their peaceful forefathers were driven by the continual raids of the Sakalavas from Madagascar and the warlike Shirazis[47] of the coast, to take refuge on the almost inaccessible plateau. I have studied African ethnology for twenty years, but the fact that changes of population in this apparently quiet and peaceable corner of the earth could have been occasioned by outside enterprises taking place on the high seas, was completely new to me. It is, no doubt, however, correct.

The charming tribal legend of the Makonde—besides informing us of other interesting matters—explains why they have to live in the thickest of the bush and a long way from the edge of the plateau, instead of making their permanent homes beside the purling brooks and springs of the low country.

“The place where the tribe originated is Mahuta, on the southern side of the plateau towards the Rovuma, where of old time there was nothing but thick bush. Out of this bush came a man who never washed himself or shaved his head, and who ate and drank but little.

He went out and made a human figure from the wood of a tree growing in the open country, which he took home to his abode in the bush and there set it upright. In the night this image came to life and was a woman. The man and woman went down together to the Rovuma to wash themselves. Here the woman gave birth to a stillborn child. They left that place and passed over the high land into the valley of the Mbemkuru, where the woman had another child, which

was also born dead. Then they returned to the high bush country of Mahuta, where the third child was born, which lived and grew up. In course of time, the couple had many more children, and called themselves Wamatanda. These were the ancestral stock of the Makonde, also called Wamakonde,[48] i.e., aborigines. Their forefather, the man from the bush, gave his children the command to bury their dead upright, in memory of the mother of their race who was cut out of wood and awoke to life when standing upright. He also warned them against settling in the valleys and near large streams, for sickness and death dwelt there. They were to make it a rule to have their huts at least an hour’s walk from the nearest wateringplace; then their children would thrive and escape illness.”

The explanation of the name Makonde given by my informants is somewhat different from that contained in the above legend, which I extract from a little book (small, but packed with information), by Pater Adams, entitled Lindi und sein Hinterland. Otherwise, my results agree exactly with the statements of the legend. Washing?

Hapana—there is no such thing. Why should they do so? As it is, the supply of water scarcely suffices for cooking and drinking; other people do not wash, so why should the Makonde distinguish himself by such needless eccentricity? As for shaving the head, the short, woolly crop scarcely needs it,[49] so the second ancestral precept is likewise easy enough to follow. Beyond this, however, there is nothing ridiculous in the ancestor’s advice. I have obtained from various local artists a fairly large number of figures carved in wood, ranging from fifteen to twenty-three inches in height, and representing women belonging to the great group of the Mavia, Makonde, and Matambwe tribes. The carving is remarkably well done and renders the female type with great accuracy, especially the keloid ornamentation, to be described later on. As to the object and meaning of their works the sculptors either could or (more probably) would tell me nothing, and I was forced to content myself with the scanty information vouchsafed by one man, who said that the figures were merely intended to represent the nembo—the artificial deformations of pelele, ear-discs, and keloids. The legend recorded

by Pater Adams places these figures in a new light. They must surely be more than mere dolls; and we may even venture to assume that they are—though the majority of present-day Makonde are probably unaware of the fact—representations of the tribal ancestress.

The references in the legend to the descent from Mahuta to the Rovuma, and to a journey across the highlands into the Mbekuru valley, undoubtedly indicate the previous history of the tribe, the travels of the ancestral pair typifying the migrations of their descendants. The descent to the neighbouring Rovuma valley, with its extraordinary fertility and great abundance of game, is intelligible at a glance—but the crossing of the Lukuledi depression, the ascent to the Rondo Plateau and the descent to the Mbemkuru, also lie within the bounds of probability, for all these districts have exactly the same character as the extreme south. Now, however, comes a point of especial interest for our bacteriological age. The primitive Makonde did not enjoy their lives in the marshy river-valleys.

Disease raged among them, and many died. It was only after they had returned to their original home near Mahuta, that the health conditions of these people improved. We are very apt to think of the African as a stupid person whose ignorance of nature is only equalled by his fear of it, and who looks on all mishaps as caused by evil spirits and malignant natural powers. It is much more correct to assume in this case that the people very early learnt to distinguish districts infested with malaria from those where it is absent.

This knowledge is crystallized in the ancestral warning against settling in the valleys and near the great waters, the dwelling-places of disease and death. At the same time, for security against the hostile Mavia south of the Rovuma, it was enacted that every settlement must be not less than a certain distance from the southern edge of the plateau. Such in fact is their mode of life at the present day. It is not such a bad one, and certainly they are both safer and more comfortable than the Makua, the recent intruders from the south, who have made USUAL METHOD OF good their footing on the western edge of the CLOSING HUT-DOOR plateau, extending over a fairly wide belt of country. Neither Makua nor Makonde show in their dwellings anything of the size and comeliness of the Yao houses in the plain, especially at Masasi, Chingulungulu and Zuza’s. Jumbe Chauro, a Makonde hamlet not far from Newala, on the road to Mahuta, is the

most important settlement of the tribe I have yet seen, and has fairly spacious huts. But how slovenly is their construction compared with the palatial residences of the elephant-hunters living in the plain.

The roofs are still more untidy than in the general run of huts during the dry season, the walls show here and there the scanty beginnings or the lamentable remains of the mud plastering, and the interior is a veritable dog-kennel; dirt, dust and disorder everywhere. A few huts only show any attempt at division into rooms, and this consists merely of very roughly-made bamboo partitions. In one point alone have I noticed any indication of progress—in the method of fastening the door. Houses all over the south are secured in a simple but ingenious manner. The door consists of a set of stout pieces of wood or bamboo, tied with bark-string to two cross-pieces, and moving in two grooves round one of the door-posts, so as to open inwards. If the owner wishes to leave home, he takes two logs as thick as a man’s upper arm and about a yard long. One of these is placed obliquely against the middle of the door from the inside, so as to form an angle of from 60° to 75° with the ground. He then places the second piece horizontally across the first, pressing it downward with all his might.

It is kept in place by two strong posts planted in the ground a few inches inside the door. This fastening is absolutely safe, but of course cannot be applied to both doors at once, otherwise how could the owner leave or enter his house? I have not yet succeeded in finding out how the back door is fastened.

MAKONDE LOCK AND KEY AT JUMBE CHAURO

This is the general way of closing a house. The Makonde at Jumbe Chauro, however, have a much more complicated, solid and original one. Here, too, the door is as already described, except that there is only one post on the inside, standing by itself about six inches from one side of the doorway. Opposite this post is a hole in the wall just large enough to admit a man’s arm. The door is closed inside by a large wooden bolt passing through a hole in this post and pressing with its free end against the door. The other end has three holes into which fit three pegs running in vertical grooves inside the post. The door is opened with a wooden key about a foot long, somewhat curved and sloped off at the butt; the other end has three pegs corresponding to the holes, in the bolt, so that, when it is thrust through the hole in the wall and inserted into the rectangular opening in the post, the pegs can be lifted and the bolt drawn out.[50]

MODE OF INSERTING THE KEY

With no small pride first one householder and then a second showed me on the spot the action of this greatest invention of the Makonde Highlands. To both with an admiring exclamation of “Vizuri sana!” (“Very fine!”). I expressed the wish to take back these marvels with me to Ulaya, to show the Wazungu what clever fellows the Makonde are. Scarcely five minutes after my return to camp at Newala, the two men came up sweating under the weight of two heavy logs which they laid down at my feet, handing over at the same time the keys of the fallen fortress. Arguing, logically enough, that if the key was wanted, the lock would be wanted with it, they had taken their axes and chopped down the posts—as it never occurred to them to dig them out of the ground and so bring them intact. Thus I have

two badly damaged specimens, and the owners, instead of praise, come in for a blowing-up.

The Makua huts in the environs of Newala are especially miserable; their more than slovenly construction reminds one of the temporary erections of the Makua at Hatia’s, though the people here have not been concerned in a war. It must therefore be due to congenital idleness, or else to the absence of a powerful chief. Even the baraza at Mlipa’s, a short hour’s walk south-east of Newala, shares in this general neglect. While public buildings in this country are usually looked after more or less carefully, this is in evident danger of being blown over by the first strong easterly gale. The only attractive object in this whole district is the grave of the late chief Mlipa. I visited it in the morning, while the sun was still trying with partial success to break through the rolling mists, and the circular grove of tall euphorbias, which, with a broken pot, is all that marks the old king’s resting-place, impressed one with a touch of pathos.

Even my very materially-minded carriers seemed to feel something of the sort, for instead of their usual ribald songs, they chanted solemnly, as we marched on through the dense green of the Makonde bush:—