Comment

Since the mid-1980s, historical studies on the subject generically known as "consumer culture" have experienced an explosive growth. First stimulated by the turn-of-the-1960s critics of mass consumer society, thereafter fine-tuning their methodologies especially as they probed the recesses of female desire in the body, domesticity, and shopping, historians of consumption widened their scope in the mid-1980s to investigate the mainsprings of successive waves of economic transformation in the shifting traffic, use, and meaning of commodities. Since the turn of the twenty-first century researchers have ventured out onto a global terrain. This is a forbiddingly harsh land from the point of view of material inequality: can it be that this rosy term, "consumer culture," so redolent of the affluence of Western industrial societies, is meaningful when applied to subsistence economies? That is surely one question that will occur to readers as they become acquainted with Miss J. Mashela as she flouted the restraints of South African apartheid to filch electricity for her Cape Town shanty and, all the more so, when they compare her cunning to that of Marian Hastings, the nabob's wife par excellence, as she decked herself out in oriental splendor to elbow her way into late-eighteenth-century British aristo-bourgeois society.

Do the histories of these two figures really belong together? In a manner, yes. As evidence of female agency in consumption practices, the aching sensibility of the Western-shod Mumbai matron trying to make sense of the new world of British manufacture, the striving of the Chilean middle-class housewife to purchase a washing machine, and the rage of well-off American professional women as they find their consumer union under attack as a communist-front organization work well when read against one another. It is indeed their range and variety in terms of place, time, and situation that constitute the overriding problematic of these two special issues of the Journal. In principle, this array looks like a game of catch-up, by means of which models of historical research developed in the most advanced research areas are applied to the less well explored regions, which in practice means being brought from the United States and western Europe to Latin America, East Asia, and Africa, and from the haves of the world to the have-nots. At one level, widening the scope of study from the main area from which we derive our conventions about consumer cultures, namely the wealthy capitalist West, is all to the good. For there is a distinct epistemological problem, so far as knowing about the history of consumer societies, in the self-referentiality of contemporary consumer culture. When read through the lense of rapidly disseminating Western models of mass consumption, the material world acquires a distortedly flat look, and profound differences of experience around the use of commodities, such as the washing machine or kitchen stove, which derive from any number of conditions—from the availability of fuel to the grip of government and hard-to-decipher moralities of spending—lend themselves to being characterized as similar. Whether it is to dispel the fiction of statistics or to unpack notions of individual subjectivity, collective material needs, or the elaboration of meaning around goods, the historiography of consumer culture needs to recognize—as these two issues implicitly do—that the roads to the historical recovery of consumer practice are myriad: if there is a Western model, it is the effect of Western technological and cultural domination. Accordingly, to study alternative and subaltern practices by juxtaposing them against studies of conventional notions of Western consumption is a sure means of challenging unexamined assumptions about the institutions and ethics underlying Western moral economies of getting and spending.

This process of contextualizing in place and time is particularly significant for the study of consumer culture since we lack any general theory for why people consume. The determinants of consumer practice are recognized as ranging from the economic calculus involved in obtaining commodities to the psychological satisfactions derived from their possession. And social history, which has become pretty much the main approach to studying consumption, is typically spongiform in its...