Editor's Introduction: The Many Faces of Materialism

The Many Faces of Materialism

So commonplace is the charge that modern industrial societies suffer from runaway materialism that we often make such claims without much thought. This issue of Advertising & Society Review gathers together a range of works in a way designed to “make strange” this second-nature assertion.

Often, the flat statement that Americans—or other citizens of modern economies—have been reduced to meaningless lives of chasing goods is the corollary to a critique of advertising. Yet such thinking seldom accommodates the range of human objectives served by the purchase of objects or the multiplicity of appeals ads use to match their goods with those consumer intentions. A now classic attempt to reorient scholarly investigation of materialism is reprinted in this issue, Michael Schudson’s “An Anthropology of Goods,” first published in his 1985 Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion. Schudson’s first charge to his readers is to look more broadly at the human relationship to objects:

If one is to arrive at an understanding of the modern passion for goods, an examination of advertising is an essential step but it is not the first step—as marketers know very well and as social critics should learn. The first step, it seems to me, is to gain an understanding of the role material possessions play in human lives not just in advertising-saturated societies but in any society

(129–130).

From here, Schudson turns to a survey of the anthropological literature on consumption and exchange, supplemented by a smattering of literary comparisons and some strategic points taken from both Adam Smith and Karl Marx. The result is a provocative argument in favor of a more humane—and more informed—study of material behavior in modern societies. Many of the key sources used by Schudson are worthy of follow-up for students of material culture: Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood’s The World of Goods and Mihalyi Csikzentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton’s The Meaning of Things are both works that reliably rock conventional thinking. The basic bedrock for all this work, Marcel Mauss’s The Gift, is the definitive study of human exchange, based on a broad synthesis of reports from the so-called “primitive” societies of Mauss’s own time but also from the records of archaic societies.¹

All these works lead to a view of human consumption as a complex behavior, the output of a cultural forge that seamlessly melds the social, spiritual, cognitive, and material. Using this framework, we can see that each act of purchase distills into one instant the society’s past, the buyer’s present, and the hopes or fears of both for the future. Having taught these works for a number of years, I now find it impossible to imagine any act of human consumption that could be reduced to the “merely material.” The actors and their actions are simply more subtle—and more worthy—than that. The original works in this issue extend and illuminate this complicated, socially-grounded behavior along the lines explored and reviewed by Schudson.

Two of the articles in this issue explore specific examples of consumer behavior in American history as symptoms of profound, even revolutionary, social change. The first, “Advertising Success through Consumption: 1900–1929” by Monica Brasted, begins by establishing the unusual material conditions of the early industrial period. The simultaneous birth of democracy and factory production created a fluid social circumstance that is recognized by American historians but not often by social critics of the present-day United States.² The fall of the social hierarchy brought about by the Industrial Revolution also demolished the sumptuary customs that had precluded common folk from consuming goods reserved for the aristocracy. At the same time, modern manufacturing reduced the prices for these goods, while putting cash into the hands of ordinary folks who wanted to purchase them. The result was an outburst of impudent consumption that pointedly challenged the hegemony of the hereditary aristocracy, expressed the “go ahead” attitude of the new citizens of the republic, and built the material scaffold of the new American passion for upward mobility. By the end of the 1800s, magazines like the...