mccracken culture consumption

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Culture and Consumption: A TheoreticalAccount of the Structure and Movement ofthe Cultural Meaning of Consumer GoodsGRANT McCRACKEN*

Cultural meaning in a consumer society moves ceaselessly from one location toanother. In the usual trajectory, cultural meaning moves first from the culturallyconstituted v/oM to consumer goods and then from these goods to the individualconsumer. Several instruments are responsible for this movement: advertising, thefashion system, and four consum ption rituals. This article analyzes the movementof cultural meaning theoretically, showing both where cultural meaning is residentin the contemporary North American consumer system and the means by whichthis meaning is transfen-ed from one location in this system to another.

C onsumer goods have a significance that goes be-yond their utilitarian character and commercialvalue. This significance rests largely in their ability tocarry and communicate cultural meaning (Douglas andIsherwood 1978; Sahlins 1976). During the last decade,a diverse body of scholars has made the cultural sig-nificance of consumer goods the focus of renewed ac-ademic study (Belk 1982; Bronner 1983; Felson 1976;Furby 1978; Graum ann 1974-1975; Hirschman 1980;Holman 1980; Leiss 1983; Levy 1978; McCracken1985c; Prown 1982; Quimby 1978; Rodman and Phi-libert 1985; Schlereth 1982; Solomon 1983). Thesescholars have established a subfield extending acrossthe social sciences that now devo tes itself with increasingclarity and thoroughness to the study of "person-object"relations. In this article, I propose to contribute a theo-retical perspective to this em erging subfield by showingthat themeaning carried bygoods has a mobile qualityfor which prevailing theories make no allowance.A great limitation of present approach es to the studyof the cultural meaning of consum er goods is the failureto observe that this meaning is constantly in transit.Cultural m eaning flows continually between its severallocations in the social world, aided by the collective

and individual efforts of designers, producers, advertis-ers, and consumers. There is a traditional trajectors- tothis movement. Usually, cultural meaning is drawnfrom a culturally constituted world and transferred to Grant McCracken is Assistant Professor, Depanment of Con-sumer Studies, University ofGuelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada NIG2 W I . The author thanks the following individuals for their contri-bution to the paper: Michael Ames, Duncan Joy, Mary Ellen Roach-Higgins. K.O.L. Burridge, and the anonymo us reviewers of this Jour-nal.

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a consumer good. Then the meaning is drawn from theobject and transferred to an individual consumer. Inother words, cultural meaning is located in three places:the culturally constituted world, the consumer good,and the individual consumer, and moves in a trajectory'at two points of transfer: world to good and good toindividual. The Figure summarizes this relationship. Inthis article 1 propose to analyze this trajectory of mean-ing, taking each of its stages in turn.Appreciating the mobile quality of cultural meaningin a consumer society should help to illuminate twoaspects of consumption in modern society. First, sucha perspective encourages us to seeconsumers and con-sumer goods as the way-stations of meaning. In thisman ner, we focus on structural and dynamic propertiesof consumption that have not always been emphasized.Second, the"trajecto ry" perspective asks us to see suchphenomena as advertising, the fashion world, and con-sumption rituals as instruments of meaning movement.We are encouraged to acknowledge the presence of alarge and powerful system at the heart of modern con-sumer society that gives this society some of its coher-ence andflexibilityeven as it serves as a constant sourceof incoherence and discontinuity. In sum, this perspec-tive can help to dem onstrate some of the full complexityof current consumption behavior and to reveal in amore detailed way just what it is to be a "consumersociety."

LOCATIONS OF CULTURALMEANING: THE CULTURALLYCONSTITUTED WORLDThe original location of the cultural meaning thatultimately resides in consumer goods is the culturally

Cc JOU RNAL OFCONSUMER RESEARCH Vol. 13 June 1986


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72 THE JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCHFIGURE

MOVEMENT OF MEANING

Culturally Constituted World1

Advertising/FashionSystem11

FashionSystem1Consumer Goods1PossessionRitual

1ExchangeRitual1GroomingRitual

1DivestmentRitualIndividual Consumer

KEY: I I Location of Meaning ^ Instrument of Meaning Transfer

constituted world. This is the world of everyday expe-rience in which the phenomenal world presents itselfto the individual's senses fully shaped and constitutedby the beliefs and assumptions of his/her culture. Cul-ture constitutes the phenomenal world in two ways.First, culture is the "l ens " through which the individualviews phenomena; as such, it determines how the phe-nomena will be apprehended and assimilated. Second,culture is the "blu eprin t" ofhum an activity, determin-ing the co-ordinates of social action and productive ac-tivity, and specifying the beh aviors and objects that issuefrom both. As a lens, culture determines how the worldis seen. As a blueprint, it determines how the world willbe fashioned by human effort. In short, culture consti-tutes the world by supplying it with meaning. Thismean ing can be characterized in terms of two concepts:cultural categories and cultural principles.Cultural Categories

Cultural categories are the fundamental coordinatesof mean ing (M cCracken 1985a), representing the basicdistinctions that a culture uses to divide up the phe-nomenal world. For instance, all cultures specify cat-egories of time. In our culture these categories includean elaborate system that can discriminate units as fineas a "second " and as vast as a "mille nniu m." Our cul-ture also makes less precise but no less significant dis-tinctions between leisure and work time, sacred andprofane tim e, and so on . Culture s also specify ca tegoriesof space. In our culture these categories include mea-surement and "occasion." Cultures also segment theflora, fauna, and landscape of natural and supernaturalworlds into categories. Perhaps the most imp ortant cat-

egories are those that cultures create in the humancommunitythe distinctions of class, status, gender,age, and occupation.Cultural categories of time, space, nature, and personmake up the vast body of categories, creating a systemof distinctions that organizes the phenomenal world.Each culture establishes its own special vision of theworld, thus rendering the understandings and rules ap-propriate to one cultural context preposterously inap-propriate in another. A specific culture makes a privi-leged set of terms, within which virtually nothing ap-pears alien or unintelligible to the individual memberof the culture and outside of which there is no order,no system, no safe assumption, and no ready compre-hension. In sum, by investing the world with its ownparticular meaning, culture "co nstitu tes" the world. Itis from a world so constituted that the meaning destinedfor consumer goods is drawn.

Cultural Categories in ContemporaryNorth AmericaIt is worth noting that cultural categories in presentday North America appear to have unique character-istics. First, they possess an indeterminacy that is notnormally evident in other ethnographic circumstances.For instance, cultural categories of person are markedby a persistent and striking lack of clarity, as are culturalcategories of age. Second, they possess an apparent"elective" quality. Devoted as it is to the freedom ofthe individual, contemporary' North American societypermits its members to declare at their own discretionthe cultural categories they presently occupy. Exercisingthis freedom, teenagers declare themselves adults,mem bers of the working class declare themselves middleclass, the old declare themselves young, and so on. Cat-egory membership, which in most cultures is morestrictly specified and policed, is in our own society muchmore a matter of individual choice. In our culture, in-dividuals are to a great extent what they claim to be,even when these claims are, by some sober sociologicalreckoning, implausible.We must note a third characteristic of cultural cat-egories in contemporary North America: they are sub-ject to constant and rapid change. The dynamic qualityof present day North American cultural categoriesplainly adds to their indeterminacy. More important,however, this dynamism also makes our cultural cate-gories subject to the manipulative efforts of the indi-vidual. Social groups can seek to change their place inthe categorical scheme, w hile m arketers can seek to es-tablish or encourage a new cultural category of person(e.g., the teenager, the "yuppie") in order to create anew market segment. Cultural categories in contem-porary North America are subject to rethinking andrearrangement by several parties.


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CULTURE AND CONSUMPTION 73

The Substantiation of Cultural CategoriesCultural categories are the conceptual grid of a cul-turally constituted world. They determine how thisworld will be segmented into discrete, intelligible parcelsand how these parcels will be organized into a largercoherent system. For all their importance, however,cultural categories have no substantial presence in theworld they organize. They are the scaffolding on whichthe world is hung and are therefore invisible. But cul-tural categories are constantly substantiated by humanpractice. Acting in conformity with the blueprint ofculture, the members of a community are constantlyrealizing categories in the world. Individu als con tinuallyplay out categorical distinc tions, so that th e world theycreate is made consistent with the world they imagine.In a sense, the m embers of a culture are constantly en-gaged in the constructionthe constitutionof theworld they live in.One of the most important ways in which culturalcategories are substantiated is through a culture's ma-terial objects. As we shall see in a moment, objects arecreated according to a culture's blueprint and to thisextent, objects render the categories of this blueprintmaterial and substantial. Thus, objects contribute tothe construction of the culturally constituted worldprecisely because they are a vital, tangible record ofcultural meaning that is otherwise intangible. Indeed,it is not too much to say that objects have a "perfor-m ative " function (Austin 1963;Tam biah 1977) insofaras they give cultural meaning a concreteness for theindividual th at it would not otherwise have. The cultural

meaning that has organized a world is made a visible,demonstrable part of that world through goods.The process by which a culture makes its culturalcategories manifest has been studied in some detail byanthropologists. Structural anthropology has supplieda theoretical scheme for this study, and several subspe-cialties, such as the anthropologies of art, clothing,housing, and material culture, have supplied areas ofparticular investigation. As a result of this work, thereis now a clear theoretical understanding of the way inwhich linguistic and especially nonlinguistic media ex-press cultural categories (Barthes 1967; deSaussure1966; Levi-Strauss 1963, p. 116; Sahlins 1976). Thereis also a wide range of empirical investigation into theareas of spatial organization (Doxtater 1984), houseform (Bourdieu 1973; Cunningham 1973), art (Fernan-dez 1966; Greenberg 1975), clothing (Adams 1973;McCracken 1986; Schwarz 1979), ornam ent (Drewal1983). technology (Lechtman and Merrill 1977), andfood (Ap padurai 1981; Douglas 1971; Ortner 1978).This study of material culture has helped to show howthe world is furnished with material objects that reflectand contribute to its cultural constitutionhow cul-tural categories are substantiated.

The S ubstantiation of Cultural Categoriesin GoodsGoods may be seen as an opportunity to express thecategorical scheme established by a culture. G oods arean opportunity to make culture m aterial. Like any other

species of material culture, goods allow individuals todiscriminate visually among culturally specified cate-gories by encoding these categories in the form of a setof material distinctions. Categories of person dividedinto parcels of age, sex, class, and occupation can berepresented in a set Of material distinctions by meansof goods. Categories of space, time, and occasion canalso be reflected in this medium of communication.Goods help substantiate the order of culture.Several studies have examined the way in which goodsserve in this substantiatio n. Sahlins' study (1976) of thesymbolism of North American consumer goods ex-amines food and clothing "systems" and shows theircorrespondence to cu ltural categories of person. Levy's(1981) study of the correspondence between food typesand cultural categories of sex and age in American so-ciety is anothe r excellent illustration of the way in whichone can approach the demographic information carriedin goods from a structuralist point of view. Both of thesestudies demonstrate that the order of goods is modelledon the order of culture. Both studies also demonstratethat much of the meaning of goods can be traced backto the categories into which a culture segments theworld. The substantiation of class categories by con-sumer goods has been considered by Belk, Mayer, andBahn (1981), Coleman (1983), Davis (1956), Form andStone (1957), Goffman (1951). Sommers (1963), V er-shure, Magel, and Sadalla (1977), and Warner and Lunt(1941). The substan tiation of gender categories has beenless well examined but appears to be drawing morescholarly attention (Allison et al. 1980; Belk 1982;Hirschman 1984; Levy 1959). The substa ntiation of agecategories also appears to be receiving more attention(Disman 1984; Olson 1985; Sherman and Newm an1977-1978; Unruh 1983).Cultural Principles

Cultural meaning also consists of cultural principles.In the case of principles, meaning resides in the ideasor values that determine how cultural phenomena areorganized, evaluated, and construed, tf cultural cate-gories are the result of a culture's segmentation of theworld into discrete parcels, cultural principles are theorganizing ideas by which the segmentation is per-formed. Cultural principles are the charter assumptionsthat allow all cultural phenomena to be distinguished,ranked, and interrelated. As the orienting ideas forthought and action, cultural principles find expressionin every aspect of social life, goods not least of all.


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74 THE JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH

Culturat principles, like cultural categories, are sub-stantiated by material culture in general and consumergoods in particular. It is worth observing that culturalcategories and cultural principles are mutually presup-posing, and their expression in goods is necessarily si-multaneous. Therefore, goods are incapable of signi-fying one without signifying the other. When goodsshow a distinction between two cultural categories, theydo so by encoding some thing of the principle accordingto which the two categories have been distinguished.Thus, the clothing that distinguishes between men andwomen or b>etween high and low classes also revealssomething of the na ture of the differences that are sup-posed to exist between these categories (McCracken1985c). Clothing communicates both the supposed"delicacy" of women and "strength" of men or boththe supposed "refinement" of a higher class and "vul-garity" of a lower one. Apparently, the categories ofclass and sex are never communicated without this in-dication of how and why they are to be distinguished.The world of goods, unlike that of language, never en-gages in a simple signalling of difference. In fact, goo dsare always more forthcoming and more revealing. Inthe world of goods, signs are always, in a sense, moremotivated and less arbitrary than in the world of lan-guage.

Cultural principles in contemporary North Americahave the same indeterminate, changeable, electivequality that cultural categories do. Such principles as"naturalism " can fall in to disrepute in one decade, onlyto be rehabilitated and advanced to a new place of im-portance in another, as occurred in the 1960s. Theprinciple of "dish arm ony " that the punk aesthetic findsso useful was once not a principle but merely the termfor phenomena that had somehow escaped the suc-cessful application of another principle. The ethno-graphic literature on the meaning of objects as principlemay be found in Adams (1973), Drewal (1983), Fer-nandez (1966), and McCracken (1982a). Substantiveliterature that shows the presence and nature of themeaning of objects as principle in contem porary NorthAmerican society is not abundant. Levy (1981) makespassing reference to this question, as does Sahlins(1976), and the idea is implicitly treated in the w ork ofLohof (1969) on the meaning carried by the Marlborocigarette. The idea also surfaces in the attempt of so-ciologists to make objects an index of status and class.For example, Laumann and House (1970) sought toestablish the meaning of household f^urniture and re-sorted to the principles of "mo der n" and "traditi onal."Felson in his study of "material life styles" (1976) pos-ited something called a "bric-a-brac factor" while Davis(1958) coined the term "Bauhaus Japanesey" to char-acterize a certain principle of interior design. The prin-ciple of "science" (or, more exactly, the concern fortechnical m astery of nature and the confidence that h u-man affairs can be benignly transformed through tech-

nological inno vation ) was a favorite motif of the kitchenappliances and automobiles in 1950s and 1960s NorthAmerica (Csikszentimihalyi and Rochberg-Halton1981, p. 52). Scholars in the material culture arm ofAmerican studies and art history have made the mostnotable contribution here (Quimby 1978; Schlereth1982). Prown (1980) and Cohen (1982), for instance,have examined the principles evident in American fur-niture.It is plain in any case that, like cultural categories,cultural principles are substantiated by consumer goods,and these goods, so charged, help make u p the culturallyconstituted world. Both cultural categories and prin-ciples organize the phenomenal world and the effortsof a comm unity to manipulate this world. Goods sub-stantiate both categories and principles and thereforeenter into the culturally constituted world as both theobject and objectification of this world. In short, goodsare both the creations and the creators of the culturallyconstituted world.

INSTRUMENTS OF MEANINGTRANSFER: WORLD TO GOODMeaning first resides in the culturally constitutedworld. To become resident in consum er goods, meaningmust be disengaged from this world and transferred togoods. The present section proposes to examine two ofthe institutions that are now used as instruments ofmeaning transfer: advertising, and product design aspracticed in the fashion system.

AdvertisingAdvertising works as a potential method of meaningtransfer by bringing the consumer good and a repre-sentation of the culturally constituted world togetherwithin the frame of a particular advertisement. Thecreative director of an advertising agency seeks to con-join these two elements in such a way that the viewer/reader glimpses an essential similarity between them.When this symbolic equivalence is successfully estab-lished, the viewer/reader attributes to the consumergood certain prop erties s/he know s exist in the culturallyconstituted world. The icnown properties of the cultur-ally constituted world thus come to reside in the un-known properties of the consumer good and the transferof meaning from world to good is accomplished.The mechanics of such a complicated process deservemore detailed exposition. The creative director is con-cerned with effecting the successful conjunction of twoelements, one of which is specified by a client. In mostcases, the client gives the director a consum er good, thephysical properties an d packaging of which are fixedand not subject to manipulation. The second element.


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the representation of the culturally constituted world,is constrained and free in almost equal proportions. Theclient, sometimes drawing on marketing research andadvice, will specify the properties being sought for theconsumer good. Armed with these specifications, thecreative director now enjoys a wide range of discretion-ary control. Subject only to th e negative constraints ofbudgetary limitations and the positive constraints of acontinuous brand image, the director is free to deliverthe desired symbolic properties in any one of a nearlyinfinite n um ber of ways.This delivery process consists of a lengthy and elab-orate series of choices (Dyer 1982; McCracken 1984;Sherry 1985; W illiamson 1978). The first choice is adifficult one. The director must identify with sufficientclarity for his/her own purposes the properties tha t aresought for the good in question. This procedure some-times results in a period of complicated discourse be-tween client and director where the parties alternatelylead and follow one another into a sharpened appre-ciation of the properties sought for the consum er good.In any case, the advertising firm will enter into its ownconsultative process in order to establish clarity suffi-cient for its own purposes. The second choice in thedelivery process is equally difficult but perhaps lessconsultative. The director m ust decide where the prop-erties desired for the ad reside in the culturally consti-tuted world. The director has at his/her disposal a vastarray of possibilities from which to choose. Place mustbe selected, and the first choice here is whether the adwill have a fantasy setting or a naturalistic one. If thelatter is chosen, it must be decided whether it will bean interior or an exterior setting, an urban or rurallandscape, or a cultivated or untamed environment.Time oi"day and time of year must also be chosen. Ifpeople are to appear in the advertisement, their sex,age. class, status, and occupation must be selected andtheir clothing and body postures and affective statesspecified (Goffman 1979). These are the pieces of theculturally constituted world that can be evoked inthe ad.It must be noted that this selection process can beperformed more o r less well, according to the skill andtraining of the director. There is no simple route fromthe desired properties for the consumer good to thepieces of the culturally co nstituted world that can evokethem in the advertisement. As members of the adver-tising profession point out, this is a creative processwhere the most appropriate selections for the adver-tisement are not so much calculated as glimpsed. Im-precision and error in this creative process are not onlypossible but legion. It mu st also be noted th at the processof selection, because it is creative, proceeds at uncon-scious as well as conscious levels. Directors are not al-ways fully cognizant o fhow and why a selection is m ade,even when this selection presents itself as compellingand necessary (e.g., Arlen 1980, pp. 99, 119).

In sum, the director must choose from among alter-natives that have been created by the network of culturalcategories and principles that constitute a culture'sworld. The chosen alternatives will reflect those cate-gories and principles th at a director decides mo st closelyapproximate the meaning that the client seeks for theproduct. Once these two choice processes are complete,a third set of choices must be m ade. The director mustdecide just how the culturally constituted world is tobe portrayed in the advertisement. This process consistsof reviewing all of the objects that substantiate the se-lected meaning and then deciding which of these objectswill be used to evoke this meaning in the advertisement.Finally, the director must decide how to present theproduct in its highly contrived context. Photographicand visual conventions will be exploited to give theviewer/reader the opportunity to glimpse an essentialequivalence between the two elem ents of world and ob-ject. The director must bring these two elements into aconjunction that encourages a metaphoric identificationof sameness by the would-be con sumer. W orld and goodmust seem to enjoy a special harmonymust be seento go together. When the viewer/reader glimpses thissameness (after one or many exposures to the stim uli),the process of transfer has taken place. Meaning hasshifted from the culturally constituted world to theconsumer good. This good now stands for a culturalmeaning of which it was previously innocent.

Visual images and verbal material appear to assumea very particular relationship in this transfer process.It is chiefly the visual aspect of an advertisement thatconjoins the world and the object when a meaningtransfer is sought. Verbal ma terial serves chiefly as akind of prompt that instructs the viewer/reader in thesalient properties that are supposed to be expressed bythe visual part of the advertisement. Text (especiallyheadlines) makes explicit what is already implicit in theimage. Text provides instructions on how the visualpart of the advertisement is to be read. The verbal com-ponent allows the director to direct the viewer/reader'sattention to exactly those meaningful properties thatare intended for transfer (cf., Barthes 1983, pp. 33-39;Dyer 1982, pp. 139-182 ; Garfinkle 1978; Moeran1985).All of this must now be successfully decoded by theviewer/reader. It is worth emphasizing that the viewer/reader is the final autho r in the process of transfer. Thedirector brings the world and the consumer good intoconjunction and then suggests their essential similarity.It is left to the viewer/reader to see this similarity andeffect th e transfer of meaningful prop erties. To this ex-tent, the view er/reader is an essential participant in theprocess of meaning transfer, as Williamson (1978, pp.40-70) notes. The viewer/reader must complete thework of the director.Advertising is a conduit through which meaningconstantly pours from the culturally constituted world


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to consumer goods. Through advertising, old and newgoods continually give up old meanings and take onnew ones. As active participants in this process, theviewer/reader is kept informed of the present state andstock of cultural m eaning that exists in con sumer goods.To this extent, advertising serves as a lexicon of cu rrentcultural meanings. In large part, advertising maintainsa consistency between what Sahlins calls the "order ofculture" and the "order of goods" (1976, p. 178).The Fashion System

The fashion system is less frequently observed, stud-ied, and understood as an instrument of meaningmovement, yet this system also serves as a means bywhich goods are systematically invested and divestedof meaningful properties. The fashion system is asomewhat more complicated instrument for meaningmovement than advertising. In the case of advertising,movement is accomplished by the efforts of an adver-tising agency to unhook meaning from a culturallyconstituted world and transfer it to a consumer goodby means of an adv ertisemen t. In the case of the fashionsystem, the process has more sources of meaning, agentsof transfer, and media of communication. Some of thisadditional complexity can be captured by noting thatthe fashion world works in three distinct ways to transfermeaning to goods.In one capacity, the fashion system performs a trans-fer of meaning from the culturally con stituted world toconsumergoods that is remarkabiy similar in characterand effect to the transfer performed by advertising. Thesame effort to conjoin aspects of the world and a con-sumer good is evident in m agazines or newspapers, andthe same process of glimpsed similarity is sought after.In this capacity, the fashion system taices new styles ofclothing or home furnishings and associates them withestablished cultural categories and principles, movingmeaning from the culturally constituted world to theconsumer good. This is the simplest aspect of themeaning-delivery capacity of the fashion system (andironically, the one that Barthes (1983) found so per-plexing and difficult to render plain).In a second capacity, the fashion system actually in-vents new cultural meanings in a modest w ay. This in-vention is undertaken by opinion leaders who helpshape and refine existing cultural meaning, encouragingthe reform of cultural categories and principles. Theseare distant opinion leaders: individuals who by virtueof birth, beauty, or accomplishment are held in highesteem. These distant opinion leaders are sources ofmeaning for individuals of lesser standing. In fact, ithas been suggested that the innovation of meaning isprompted by the imitative appropriations of those oflow standing (McCracken 1985c; Simm el 1904). Clas-sically, the high-standing individuals com e from a con-ventional social elite: the upper classes. These classes.

for instance, originated the "preppie look" that has re-cently trickled down so widely and deeply. More re-cently, opinion leaders have come from a group of un-ashamedly nouveau riche characters who now dom inatetelevision in evening soap operas such as "Da llas " and"D yna sty" and who appear to have influenced the con-sumer and lifestyle habits of so many North Americans.Motion picture and popular music stars, revered fortheir status, their beauty, and sometimes their talent,also form a relatively new group of opinion-leaders. Allof these new opinion leaders invent an d deliver a speciesof meaning that has been largely fashioned from theprevailing cultural coordinates established by culturalcategories and cultu ral principles. These op inion leadersare permeable to cultural inn ovation s, changes in style,value, and attitude, which they then pass along to thesubordinate parties who im itate them .In a third capacity, the fashion system engages in theradical reform of cultural meanings. Some part of thecultural meaning of western industrial societies is alwayssubject to constant and thoroughgoing change. Thisradical instability of meaning is due to the fact thatwestern societies are, in the language of Claude Levi-Strauss (1966, pp. 233-234). "hot societies." Westernsocieties willingly accept, indeed encourage, the radicalchanges that result from deliberate human effon andthe effect of anonymous social forces (Braudel 1973,p. 323; Fox and Lears 1983; McC racken 1985d;McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb 1982). As a result,cultural m eaning in a hot, western, industrial, complexsociety is constantly undergoing systematic chang e. Incontradistinction to virtually all ethnographic prece-dent, members of such a society live in a world thatis deliberately and continually being transformed(McCracken 1985b). Indeed, it is no exaggeration tosay that hot societies demand change and depend on itto drive certain economic, social, and cultural sectorsin their world (cf.. Barber and Lobel 1953; Fallers 1961).The fashion system serves as one of the conduits tocapture and move highly innovative cultural meaning.The groups responsible for the radical reform of cul-tural meaning are those existing at the margins of so-ciety, e.g., hippies, punks, orgay s(BIu mb erg 1974; Field1970; Meyersohn and Katz 1957). Such groups inventa much more radical, innovative kind of culturalmeaning than their high-standing partners in meaning-diffusion leadership. Indeed, such innovative groupsrepresent a departure from the culturally constitutedconventions of contemporary North American society.They illustrate the peculiarly western tendency to tol-erate dramatic violations of cultural norms. Thesegroups redefined cultural categories, if only through thenegative process of violating such cultural categories asage and status (hippies and punks), or gender (gays).The redefined cultural categories and a number of at-tendant cultural principles have now entered the cul-tural mainstream. The innovative groups become


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"meaning suppliers" even when they are devoted tooverturning the established order (e.g., hippies) or aredetermined not to allow their cultural inventions to beabsorbed by the mainstrea m, (e.g., punks ; cf., Hebdige1979; Martin 1981).If the sources of cultural meaning are dynamic andnumerous, so are the agents who gather up culturalmeaning and effect its transfer to consumer goods. Inthe case of the fashion system, the agents form two m aincategories: (1) product designers, and (2) fashion jou r-nalists and social observers. Product designers maysometim es be the very conspicuous individuals w ho es-tablish themselves as arbiters of clothing design in fash-ion centers such as Paris or Milan, and who surroundthemselves with a cult of personality. Other productdesigners, e.g., architects and interior designers, some-times achieve a roughly comparable stature and exertan equally international influence (Kron 1983). Moreoften, however, they are unknown outside their ownindustries (Clark 1976; Meikle 1979; Pulos 1983). Thedesigners of Detroit automobiles are a case in pointhere, as are the product developers in the furniture andappliance industries. (Individuals such as RaymondLoewy are exceptions that prove the rule.)The second category of agents consists of fashionjournalists and social observers. Fashion journalists maybelong to the print or film media and may have a highor a low profile. Social observers may be journalistswho study and document new social developmentse.g.. Lisa Birnbach (1980), Kennedy Fraser (1981), TomWolfe (1970), Peter York (1980). or they may be aca-demics who have undertaken a roughly similar inquiryfrom a somewhat different point of viewe.g., RolandBarthes (1972). and Christopher Lasch (1979). Marketresearchers are beginning to serve in this capacity aswelle.g., John Naisbett (1982) Arnold Mitchell(1983), and possibly, John Molloy (1977).These groups share a relatively eq ual division of labor.Journalists perform their part of the enterprise by serv-ing as gate keepers of a sort. They review aesthetic, so-cial, and cultural innovations as these first appear andthen classify the innovations as either important ortrivial. In this respect, journalists resemble the gate-keepers in the art (Becker 1972) and music (Hirsch1972) worlds. Journalists are supposed to observe asbest they can the whirling mass of cultural innovationand decide what is ephemeral and what will endure.After they have completed their difficult winnowingprocess, journalists engage in a dissemination processto make their decisions known. It must be admittedthat everyone in the diffusion chain (Rogers 1983) playsa gatekeeping role and helps to influence the tastes ofindividuals looking for opinion leadership. Journalistsare especially im portan t because they m ake their influ-ence felt even before an innovation passes to its "earlyado pters" (Baumgarten 1975; Meyersohn and Katz1957; Polegato and Wall 1980).

When journalists have identified genuine innova-tions, product designers begin the task of drawingmeaning into the mainstream and investing it in con-sumer goods. The product designer differs from the ad-vertising agency director in that s/he transforms notonly the symbolic properties of a consumer good butalso its physical properties. Apart from fashion andtrade shows (which reach only some potential consum -ers), the product designer does not have a meaning-giving context such as the advertisement where s/hecan display the consumer good. Instead, the consumergood will leave the designer's hands and enter any con-text the consumer choo ses. Product design is the m eansa designer has to convince the co nsum er th at a specificobject possesses a certain cultural meaning. The objectmust leave the designer's hands with its new symbolicproperties plainly displayed in its new physical prop-erties.The designer, like the agency director, depends onthe consumer to supply th e final act of association andeffect the meaning transfer from world to object. Butunlike the agency director, the product designer doesnot have at his/her disposal the highly managed, rhe-torical circum stances of"an advertisem ent to encou rageand direct this meaning transfer. The designer can notinform the consumer of the qualities intended for theobject; these qualities mu st be self-evident in the object,so the consum er can effect the meaning transfer for h im /herself. Therefore, it is necessary that the consumerhave access to the same sources of information aboutnew fashions in meaning that the designer has. Thejournalist makes this information available to the con-sumer so that s/he can identify the cultural significanceof the physical properties of a new object. In short, thedesigner relies on the journalist at the beginning andthen again at the very end of the meaning transfer pro-cess. The journalist supplies new meaning to the de-signer as well as to the recipient of the designer's work.In this way, both advertising and the fashion systemare instruments for the transfer of meaning from theculturally constituted world to consumer goods. Theyare two of the means by which meaning is invested inthe object code. It is thanks to them that the objects ofour world carry such a richness, variety, and versatilityof meaning and can serve us so variously in acts of self-definition and social communication.

LOCATIONS OF CULTURALMEANING: CONSUMER GOODSThat consum er goods a re the locus of cul tura l mean -ing is too well-established a fact to need elaborate dem-onstrat ion here. This is what Sahlins has to say aboutone product categoryclothing (1976, p. 179):

Considered as a whole, the system of American clothingam oun ts to a very complex schem e of cultural categories


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and the relations between them, a veritable mapit doesnot exaggerate to sayof the cultural universe.What can be said of clothing can be said of virtually allother high-involvement product categories and severallow-involvement ones. Clothing, transportation, food,housing exteriors and interiors, and adornment all serveas media for the expression of the cultural mea ning thatconstitutes our world.That goods possess cultural meaning is sometimesevident to the consumer and sometimes hidden. Con-sumers may consciously see and manipulate such cul-tural meanings as the status of a consumer item. Justas often, however, individual consumers recognize thecultural meaning carried by consumer goods only inexceptional circumstances. For instance, consumerswho have lost goods because of burglary, sudden im-poverishm ent, or the divestment th at occurs with agingevidence a profound sense of loss and even mourning(Belk 1982, p. 185). The possession rituals about to bediscussed also suggest that th e meaningful prop erties ofconsumer goods are not always conspicuously evident10 a consum er, however much they serve to inform andcontrol his/her action.It was observed at the beginning of this article thatthe last decade has seen an outpouring of work on thecultural significance of consumer goods. Indeed, thewealth of this literature reassures us that the study ofthe cultural meaning carried by goods is a flourishingacademic enterprise. None of this literature, however,addresses the question of the m obile quality of culturalmeaning, and we may wish to make this question anoperative assumption in the field. When we examinethe cultural m eaning of consumer goods, we may wishto determine where cultural meaning came from andhow it was transferred.

INSTRUMENTS OF MEANINGTRANSFER: GOOD TO CONSUMERThus far we have tracked the movement of culturalmeaning from the culturally constituted world to con-sumer goods and have considered the role of two in-struments in this process. We must now address howmeaning, now resident in consumergoods, moves fromthe consumer good into the life of the consumer. Inorder to describe this process, a second set of instru-ments of meaning transfer must be discussed. Theseinstruments appear to qualify as special instances of"symbolic action" or ritual (Munn 1973; Turner 1969).Ritual is a kind of social action devoted to the manip-ulation of cultural meaning for purposes of collectiveand individual communication and categorization.Ritual is an opportunity to affirm, evoke, assign, or re-vise the con ventional symbols and meanings of the cul-tural order. To this extent, ritual is a powerful and ver-satile tool for the man ipulation of cultural m eaning. In

the form of a classic rite of passage, ritual is used tomove an individual from one cultural category of personto another, where s/he gives up one set of symbolicproperties, e.g., those of a child, and takes up another,e.g., those ofan adult (Turner 1967; Van G ennep 1960).Oth er forms of ritual are devoted to different social ends.Some forms are used to give "experiential reality" tocertain cultural principles and concepts (Tambiah1977). Still other forms are used to create certain po-litical contracts (McCracken 1982b). In short, ritual isput to diverse ends in its manipulation of culturalmeaning. In contemporary North America, ritual isused to transfer cultural meaning from goods to indi-viduals. Four types of rituals are used to serve this pu r-pose: exchange, possession, grooming, and divestmentrituals. Each of these rituals represents a different stagein a more general process by which meaning is movedfrom consumer good to individual consumer.

Exchange RitualsIn contemporary North American exchange ritualsespecially Christmas and birthday ritualsone partychooses, purchases, and presents consumer goods toanother (Caplow 1982). This movement of goods is alsopotentially a movement of meaningful properties. Oftenthe gift-giver chooses a gift because it possesses themeaningful properties s/he wishes to see transferred tothe gift-receiver. Th us, the w oman who receives a par-ticular kind of dress is also made the recipient of a par-ticular concept of herself as a woman (Schwartz 1967).The dress contains this concept and the giver invitesthe recipient to define herself in its terms. Similarly,many of the contin uou s gifts that flow between parentsand children are m otivated by precisely this notion . Thegifts to the child contain symbolic properties that theparent would have the child absorb (Furby 1978, pp.312-313).The ritual of gift exchange establishes a potent meansof interpersonal influence. Gift exchange allows indi-viduals to insinuate certain symbolic properties intothe lives of a gift recipient and to initiate possiblemeaning transfer. In more general terms, consumersacting as gift-givers a re made agents of meaning transferto the extent that they selectively d istribute goods withspecific properties to individuals who may or may nothave chosen them otherwise. The study of gift exchange,well established in the social sciences (Davis 1972;Mauss 1970; McCracken 1983; Sahlins 1972), is alreadyunderway in the field of consumer research (Belk 1979)and deserves further study. Attention must be given tothe choice process used by a giver to identify the giftwith the cultural meanings s/he seeks to pass along tothe recipient. Attention must also be given to the sig-nificance of gift wrapping and presentation as well asthe context (time and place) in which gift presentatio nsare m ade. Th ese aspects of the dom estic ritual of gift


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CULTURE AND CONSUMPTION 79giving are vitally importa nt to the meaningful propertiesof the goods exchanged.Possession Rituals

Consumers spend a good deal of time cleaning, dis-cussing, comparing, reflecting, showing off, and evenphotographing many of their possessions. Housewarm-ing parties sometimes provide an opportunity for dis-play, while the process of home "personalization"(Hirschman 1982, pp. 37-38; Kron 1983; Rapoport1968, 1982) especially serves as the occasion for muchcomparison, reflection, and discussion. Though theseactivities have an overt functionality, they all appearto have the additional effect of allowing the consumerto claim possession as his/her own. This claiming pro-cess is not a simple assertion of territoriality throughownership. Claiming is also an attempt to draw fromthe object the qualities that it has been given by themarketing forces of the world of goods. This process ismost conspicuous when it fails to take place. For ex-ample, occasionally a consumer will claim that a pos-sessiona car, house, article of clothing, or othermeaning-carr>ing good"never really seemed to be-long to m e." There are certain goods that the consum erneVer successfully claims because s/he never success-fully claims their symbolic properties. The consumergood becomes a paradox: the consum er owns it withoutpossessing it; its symbolic properties remain imm ovable.Normally, however, the individual successfully de-ploys possession rituals and manages to extract themeaningful properties that have been invested in theconsumer good. If the cultural meaning has been trans-ferred, consumers are able to use goods as markers oftime, space, and occasion. Consum ers draw on the abil-ity oH hese goods to discriminate between such culturalcategories as class, status, gender, age, occupation, andlifestyle. Since possession rituals allow the consumer totake possession of the meaning of a consumer good,these rituals help complete the second stage of the tra-jectory of the movem ent of cultural m eaning. As wehave seen, advertising agencies and the fashion worldmove cultural meaning from the culturally constitutedworld into a consumer good. Using possession rituals,individuals move cultural meaning out of their goodsand into their lives.It is worth observing that possession rituals, especiallythose devoted to personalizing the object, almost seemto enact on a small scale, and for private pu rposes, theactivities of meaning transfer perf^ormed by the adver-tising agency. The act of personalizing is, in effect, anattempt to transfer meaning from the individual's ownworld to the newly obtained good. The new context inthis case is the individual's complement of consumergoods, which has assumed a personal as well as publicmeaning. Indeed, perhaps it is chiefly in this way thatan anonymous possessionmanifestly the creation of

a distant, impersonal mass manufacturing processisturned into a personal possession th at belongs to some-one and speaks for them. Perhaps it is in this mannerthat individuals create a personal world of goods thatreflects their own experience and concepts of self andworld. The meaning that advertising transfers to goodsis the meaning of the collectivity. The meaning thatpersonal gestures transfer to goods is the meaning ofthe collectivity as this meaning has been inflected bythe particular experience of the individual consumer.Grooming Rituals

It is clear that some of the cultural meaning drawnfrom goods has a perishable nature. As a result, theconsumer must draw cultural meaning out of his/herpossessions on a repeated basis. When a continua l p ro-cess of meaning transfer from goods to consumer isnecessary, the consumer will likely resort to a groomingritual. The purpose of this ritual is to take the specialpains necessary to insure that the special, perishableproperties resident in certain clothes, hair styles, andlooks are, as it were, "coa xed " out of their resident goodsand made to live, however briefly and precariously, inthe life of the individual consumer. The "going out"rituals with which one prepares for an evening out aregood examples of this process. These rituals illustratethe time, patience, and anxiety with which an individualwill prepare him/herself for the special public scrutinyof a gala evening or dinner party. Gro om ing rituals armindividuals who are "going out" with the particularlyglamorous, exalted, meaningful properties that exist intheir "best" consumer goods. Once captured and maderesident in an individual, these meaningful propertiesgive him /her new powers of confidence, aggression, anddefense. The language with which advertisements de-scribe certain make-up, hair-styling goods, and clothingtacitly acknowledge the meaningful properties availablein goods that special groom ing rituals release.Sometimes, however, it is not the consumer but thegood that must be groomed. T his occurs when the con-sumer cultivates the meaningful p roperties ofan objectin the object rather than coaxing out the properties inhim/herself. The extraordinary amounts of largely re-dundant time and energy lavished on certain automo-biles is perhaps the best case in point here (Myers 1985,p. 562). This type of grooming ritual supercharges theobject so that it, in tu rn, may transfer special heightenedproperties to an owner. Here again, the individual's rolein meaning investment is evident. The importance tothe consumer of cultivating consum er goods so that theycan release their meaningful qualities is most strikinglyhighlighted by the behavior of aging individuals. Sher-man and Newman report that the occupants of nursinghomes who regard themselves as being "at the end ofthe lin e" engage in a process of "decathecting [removingthe emotional significance from] the significant objectsin their lives" (1977-1978, p. 188).


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In the field of consumer research, the study of ritualhas been significantly advanced by Rook (1984), whohas observed how much consumption behavior is rit-ualized and who has noted the value of studying con-sumption from a ritual perspective, and by Rook andLevy (1982), who have examined grooming ritual andgrooming prod uct sym bolism. It is clear that groomingrituals are one of the m eans by which ind ividua ls effecta transfer of symbolic properties. In grooming rituals,the meaning moves from consumer goods to the con-sumer. Grooming rituals help draw cultural meaningout of these goods and invest it in the c onsum er.Divestment Rituals

Individuals who draw mean ing out of goods come toview these meaning sources in personal terms, asso-ciating goods with their own personal properties. Thepossible confusion between consumer and consumergood encourages the use of the divestment ritual. Di-vestment rituals are employed for two purposes. W henthe individual purchases a good that has been previouslyowned, such as a house or a car, the ritual is used toerase the meaning associated w ith the previous owner.The cleaning and redecorating of a newly purchasedhome, for instance, may be seen as an effort to removethe meaning created by the previous owner. Divestmentallows the new owner to avoid contact with the mean-ingful properties of the previous owner and to free upthe m eaning p roperties of the possession, claiming themfor him/herself. The second divestment ritual takesplace when the individual is about to dispense with agood, either by giving it away or selling it. The consum erwill attempt to erase the meaning that has been investedin the good by association. In moments of candor, in-dividuals suggest that they feel "a little strange aboutsomeone else wearing my old co at." In mo men ts of stillgreater candor, they will confess that they fear the dis-possession of personal meaning, a phenomenon thatresembles the "merging of identities" that sometimestakes place between transplant donors and recipients(Simmons, K lein, and S immons 1977, p. 68). Both rit-uals suggest a concern that the meaning of goods canbe transferred, obscured, confused, or even lost whengoods change ha nds (Douglas 1966). Therefore, goodsmust be emptied of meaning before being passed alongand cleared of meaning when taken on. W hat looks likesimple superstition is, in fact, an implicit acknowl-edgement of the moveable quality of the mean ing withwhich goods are invested.

In sum, personal ritua ls are variously used to transferthe meaning contained in goods to individual consum -ers. Exchange rituals are used to direct goods chargedwith certain meaningful properties to those individualsthe gift-giver supposes are needful of these properties.In an exchange ritual, the giver invites the receiver topartake of the properties possessed by the good. Pos-session rituals are practiced by an owner in order to

retrieve a good's meaningful properties. Possession rit-uals are designed to transfer a good's properties to itsowner. Groom ing rituals are used to effect the con tinualtransfer of perishable propertiesproperties likely tofade when possessed by the consumer. Grooming ritualsallow the consumer to "freshen" the properties s/hedraws from goods. These rituals can also be used tomaintain and "brighten" certain of the meaningfulproperties resident in goods. Finally, divestment ritualsare used to empty goods of meaning so that meaning-loss or meaning-contagion cannot take place. All ofthese rituals are a kind of microcosmic version of theinstruments of meaning transfer that move meaningfrom world to goods, since these rituals move meaningfrom goods to consumer.

LOCATIONS OF CULTURALMEANING: INDIVIDUAL CONSUMERS

Cultural meaning is used to define and orient theindividual in ways that we are only beginning to ap-preciate. It is clear that individuals living in a contem-porary Western industrial culture enjoy a wide rangeof choice in the meaning they may draw from goods.It was observed at the start of this article that contem-porary North American culture leaves a great deal ofthe individual undefined. One of the ways individualssatisfy the freedom and fulfill responsibility of self-def-inition is through the systematic appropriation of themeaningful properties of goods. Plainly this task is notan easy one, nor is it always successful. Many individ-uals seek kinds of meaning from goods that do not existthere. Others seek to appropriate kinds of meaningto which they are not, by some sober sociological reck-oning, entitled. Still others attempt to constitute theirlives only in te rms of the m eaning of goods. All of theseconsumer pathologies are evident in modern consump-tion behavior and all of them illustrate how the processof meaning transfer can go wrong, to the cost of theindividual and society. In normal situations, however,the individual uses goods in an unproblematical mannerto constitute crucial parts of the self and the world. Thelogic, imperatives, and details of this process of self-and world construction through goods are enormouslyunderstudied and are only now attracting rigorousstudy. Our culture has studied its own beliefs and prac-tices with a thoroughness and enthusiasm unheraldedin the ethnographic record. With the same thoroughnessand enthusiasm it has also made material possessionsone of its most compelling preoc cupations. It is there-fore doubly odd and unfortunate that the study of theuse of goods in the construction of self and world shouldhave suffered such prolonged and profound neglect.

SUMMARYOnly recently has the field of "person-object" rela-tions escaped the limitations imposed upon it by its


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CULTURE AND CONSUMPTION 81founding father, Thorstein Veblen. The field has begunto recognize that the cultural meaning carried by con-sumer goods is enormously more various and complexthan the Veblenian insistence on status was capable ofrecognizing. But now that the field has made this ad-vance, it might consider the possibility of another. Itmight begin to take account of the alienable, moveable,manipulable quality of meaning. This article has soughtto encourage such a development by giving a theoreticalaccount of th e structure and movement of the culturalmeaning of consumer goods. It has suggested thatmeaning resides in three locations: the culturally con-stituted world, the consumer good, and the individualconsumer Advertising, the fashion system, and con-sumer rituals have been identified as the means by whichmeaning is drawn out of, and transferred between, theselocations. Advertising and the fashion system movemeaning from the culturally constituted world to con-sumer goods, while consumer rituals move meaningfrom the consumer good to the consumer. This is thetrajectory of the movement of cultural meaning inmodern developed societies.

[Received May 1985. Revised December 1985.]

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