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  • Selling Out or Buying In? Debating Consumerism in Vancouver and Victoria, 1945–1985 by Michael Dawson
  • David Monod (bio)
Michael Dawson. Selling Out or Buying In? Debating Consumerism in Vancouver and Victoria, 1945–1985. University of Toronto Press. xii, 215. $29.95

Place is important in Michael Dawson's study of attitudes towards retail hours and Sunday shopping in Vancouver and Victoria. History is rooted in the material context of its creation; as Henri Lefebvre wrote, place is time made physical. For Dawson, the locality reveals that big processes (he discusses "mass consumption") happen within specific contexts to people with particular habits, values, interests, and expectations. Focusing on places allows for a more nuanced history of post-war consumerism. As Dawson shows, not all mass retailers supported extended opening hours, and not all small businesses opposed it; not all consumers liked it, and not all workers resisted it. To Dawson, this demonstrates that consumerism did not arrive uncontested; its growing reach was negotiated. Opponents of the neoliberal order take heart: we are not mere victims of irresistible economic forces!

This is a good book, but I must admit that I found myself, as I read it, reflecting on the questions it raised about the writing of history. Although Dawson writes vigorously and engagingly, I was not surprised to learn that Sunday shopping or the retraction of early closing laws were contested, nor was I surprised that reality is complicated and that people do not always behave according to their presumed interests. What I did find interesting was the way in which place emerged as a defining concept not just interpretively but also methodologically. There is something topographical about Dawson's presentation of the material; it is a kind of mapping exercise. The book is organized thematically, not chronologically, even though it covers a substantial chunk of time. How living with consumerism over a forty-year period changed the attitudes of people does not come through very clearly. Rather, documenting the existence of debate, the points of origin and intersection for different interests, and their contradictions and negotiations was itself the point.

Dawson's work reveals a current discomfort with writing history in a linear way. Many young scholars in my field have rejected the idea of progressive, accretive, change. Part of the reason for this is that narrative, with its directionality, was deconstructed at the end of the last century by post-structuralists, and it has since become one of the historian's unmentionables. More recently, the discipline's contribution to the colonial project has made many historians leery of "writing over" the stories of the "history [End Page 587] poor." Linear history, with its emphasis on cause and effect and its selectivity (what Catherine Hall called our "blind eyes") seems to inherently privilege the powerful because they contributed most obviously to change. Our current computational mindset is also hostile to chronology, cause, effect and narrative. In the hyperlinked information universe, simultaneity, not linearity, is the ideal. As a result, "hyphenated histories" are becoming prevalent – works that present the inclusion of multiple and discordant voices as the primary goal. History seems to be less about clarifying than about assembling.

One of the corollaries of the retreat from linear narrative is that historians are no longer preoccupied with showing how one set of actions are caused by another in an observed "object" world. In fact, Mark Hewitson has written convincingly about the "death" of causality in history. What ever happened to E.H. Carr's assertion that "history is the study of causes"? We do not need to reduce causality to absurdity and search for monocausal explanations. But not all contributing and contingent factors are equally important, and our research used to give us the expertise and the confidence to say so. I wonder how we explain change over time if we do not focus on how change comes about? Thick descriptions of the kind presented by Dawson are valuable, and, when written engagingly, as this study is, they make for a pleasant read. But, at my age, I confess to being less interested in history's topography than I am in knowing how people got across it.

David...

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