On Tue, 15 Oct 2002 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> This however, is a fairly marginal point in my essay; the reality is > that so- called cargo cults were often villager-initiated co-operatives > and political movements which were opposed because they potentially made > more sense than it was safe to allow. That sounds like it'll be a great book Thiago; I look forward to reading it. But when it comes to describing capitalist consumption as irrational, emotional and directly analogous to tribal practices, I think you should skip over positional goods and obsolescence theorists and go straight to the locus classicus, Veblen's _Theory of the Leisure Class_. His whole book is built on making parallels between modern society and those described by anthropology. And the essence of "conspicuous consumption" for him is explicitly the same as potlatch: to destroy wealth conspicuously in order to signify one's status. He thinks that everything that is high status in modern society can be revealed to be wasteful, and the more high wasteful, and the more wasteful, the more high status. And his prose is lively and sarcastic and his analyses of wastefulness are great. He has many followers. One updatings that sticks closely to his ideas is Quentin Bell's _On Human Finery_. And one that extends it into multindimensionality is Alison Lurie's _The Language of Clothes_. Both books also follow him in their lively writing and absence of jargon. Michael
