Laing, page 113
\nLaing talks about....
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Leventhal Map Center", "accessDate": "2013-05-07T16:50:00Z", "url": "http://maps.bpl.org/id/10325", "note": "", "contentType": "text/html", "charset": "utf-8", "filename": "10325.html", "md5": "004c4d6042007e6065afa6311bb30bd2", "mtime": 1367945400387, "tags": [], "relations": { "owl:sameAs": "http://zotero.org/groups/166022/items/2SZFGHCV" }, "dateAdded": "2013-05-07T16:50:00Z", "dateModified": "2013-05-07T16:50:00Z" } }, { "key": "4C9A5JZ2", "version": 331, "library": { "type": "group", "id": 145173, "name": "Global-Consumption", "links": { "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/groups/global-consumption", "type": "text/html" } } }, "links": { "self": { "href": "https://api.zotero.org/groups/145173/items/4C9A5JZ2", "type": "application/json" }, "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/groups/global-consumption/items/4C9A5JZ2", "type": "text/html" }, "up": { "href": "https://api.zotero.org/groups/145173/items/9T6EG9TQ", "type": "application/json" } }, "meta": { "createdByUser": { "id": 73838, "username": "haeber", "name": "Jonathan Haeber", "links": { "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/haeber", "type": "text/html" } } }, "numChildren": 0 }, "data": { "key": "4C9A5JZ2", "version": 331, "parentItem": "9T6EG9TQ", "itemType": "note", "note": "Part One: Liberal Formulations
Ch1- Social Processes and Spatial Form: The Conceptual Problems of Urban Planning
Ch2- Social Processes and Spatial Form: The Redistribution of Real Income in an Urban System
Ch3- Social Justice and Spatial Systems
Part Two : Socialist Formulations
Ch4- Revolutionary and Counterrevolutionary Theory in Geography and the Problem of Ghetto Formation
Ch5- Use Value, Exchange Value and the Theory of Urban Land Use
Ch6- Urbanism and the City—An Interpretive Essay
Part Three : Synthesis
Ch7- Conclusions and Reflections
The Right to the City (2008)
HOLYOKE Condensed
\nGramsci (Prison Notebooks, 90-102) perceptively distinguishes, for example, between the parasitic urbanism of the Italian South in the 1930s in which there was a \"literal subjugation of the city to the countryside\" (because the city was the home of a rentier class and a bureaucracy which lived off a surplus extracted from agriculture), and the generative urbanism of the Italian North in which there was a continual enlargement of production through industry and commerce, together with a concomitant creation of a large industrial urban proletariat.
\nIn disciplinary terms, this amounts to integrating two important research and educational traditions—I shall call it building a bridge between those possessed of the sociological imagination and those imbued with a spatial consciousness or a geographical imagination
\nvi vi
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\nIt is useful to contrast with this \"sociological imagination\" the rather more diffuse quality which I have called \"spatial consciousness\" or the \"geographical imagination\".
\nvi vi
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\nThe first, organic space, refers to the kind of spatial experience which appears to be genetically transmitted and, hence, biologically determined
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\nThe second, perceptual space, is more complex. It involves the neurological synthesis of all kinds of sense experience—optical, tactual, acoustic and kinesthetic. This synthesis amounts to a spatial experience in which the evidence of various senses is reconciled.
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\nthird kind of spatial experience is abstract; Cassirer calls this symbolic space. Here, we are experiencing space vicariously through the interpretation of symbolic representations which have no spatial dimension. I can conjure up an impression of a triangle without seeing one simply by looking at the word \"triangle\". I can gain experience of spatial form by learning mathematics and in particular, of course, geometry. Geometry provides a convenient symbolic language for discussing and learning about spatial form, but it is not the spatial form itself.
\nvi vi
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\nour problems would be far from over simply because social space is not isomorphic with physical space
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\nArchitecture, suggests Langer, is an ethnic domain— \"a physically present human environment that expresses the characteristic rhythmic functional patterns which constitute a culture.\" In other words, the shaping of space which goes on in architecture and, therefore, in the city is symbolic of our culture, symbolic of the existing social order, symbolic of our aspirations, our needs, and our fears. If, therefore, we are to evaluate the spatial form of the city, we must, somehow or other, understand its creative meaning as well as its mere physical dimensions
\nvi vi
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\nThe interiors of buildings, for example, often signify much about the nature of the social order and the nature of the social processes which are supposed to go on inside it
\nvi vi vi
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\nIt is no accident that those in the choir somehow seemed closer to God (and hence more privileged) than those in the nave. Sommer (1969) has extended this principle and sought to show how different kinds of spatial
\ndesign in a wide variety of contexts can affect human behaviour and activity systems
\nvi vi
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\nIt is no accident that church and chapel spires dream over Oxford (a town created in the age of church power), whereas, in the age of monopoly capitalism, it is the Chrysler building and the Chase-Manhattan Bank building
\nvi vi vi
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\nwe need a very general methodology for the measurement of spatial and environment symbolism. Here, the techniques of psycholinguistics and psychology have much to recommend them. These techniques allow us to assess the significance of an object or event by examining the behavioural disposition to act with respect to it.
\nbvi
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\nPractical considerations make it almost impossible to use anything other than overt behaviour when large aggregates of population are involved as, for example, in the study of journey-to-work and journey-to-shop phenomena as they occur at the total city scale of analysis
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\nThe evidence is far from being secure, but, at this stage, it seems reasonable to adopt as a working hypothesis the view that individuals possess some proportion (as yet undetermined) of \"common image\" derived from some group norms (and probably certain norms in acting with respect to that image), and a proportion of \"unique image\" which is highly idiosyncratic and unpredictable. It is the common part of the spatial image with which we must first concern ourselves, if we are to squeeze out some details of the real nature of social space
\n--------------------------
\nLynch (i960), for example, indicates that individuals construct spatial schemas which hang together topologically—the typical Bostonian appears to move from one focal point (or node) to another along well-defined paths. This leaves vast areas of the physical space which are not touched and are indeed unknown as far as the individual is concerned
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\nLynch also suggests that certain features in the physical environment create \"edges\" beyond which the individual does not typically penetrate. Both Lee (1968) and Steinitz (1968) confirm his finding that boundaries can be identified for some areas in a city, and these areas seem to form distinctive neighbourhoods
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\nsocial space is complex, non-homogeneous, perhaps discontinuous, and almost certainly different from the physical space in which the engineer and the planner typically work
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\nSocial space is not only variable from individual to individual and from group to group; it is also variable over time.
\nvi vi vi vi vi
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\nthe process of individuation at the interface between the sociological and geographical imagination requires a thorough understanding of two rather different languages and an adequate methodology to govern their combination.
\n--------------------------
\nCh2- Social Processes and Spatial Form: The Redistribution of Real Income in an Urban System
\nThe question then arises as to how changes in the spatial form of a city and changes in the social processes operating within the city bring about changes in an individual's income.
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\nThe failure of employment and residential opportunities to keep in balance with each other has imposed greater accessibility costs on some groups in the population relative to other groups. I shall also try to show how changes in the value of property rights and in the availability and price of resources can occur through the spatial dynamics of city growth. I shall argue that these changes together have a very substantial effect upon income distribution and that their effects become disproportionately important as the size of an urban system increases
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\nTo give a simple example: it is clear that there has not been an equal response in the urban population to the potential of mobility associated with the automobile. The time lag is anything from 20 to 40 years between different groups in the population. It would be very surprising indeed if the better educated and more affluent groups had not taken advantage of this time lag to further their own interests and enhance their own income. The allocation of resources then takes place as an adjustment to this new income distribution and a cumulative process of increasing inequality of income distribution gets under way. This is a crude example, but I think it is very general. Certain groups, particularly those with financial resources and education, are able to adapt far more rapidly to a change in the urban system, and these differential abilities to respond to change are a major source in generating inequalities.
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\nIt should be self-evident that as we change the spatial form of city (by relocating housing, transport routes, employment opportunities, sources of pollution, etc.) so we change the price of accessibility and the cost of proximity for any one household.
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\nIt is useful to begin by dividing goods into purely private goods (which can be produced and consumed without any third-party effects being present) and purely public goods (which, once produced, are freely available to everyone). As Buchanan (1968, 56-7) points out, however, most of the interesting cases lie between these two extremes—i.e., goods which are partly private and partly public
\nvi
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\nIndeed, a case can be made for regarding local political activity as the basic mechanism for allocating the spatial externality fields in such a way as to reap indirect income advantages
\nvi
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\nThe changing location of economic activity in a city means a changing location of job opportunities
\nvi vi vi vi holyoke
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\nMeanwhile most of the growth in new employment has been in the suburban ring and hence the low income groups have gradually been cut off
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\nThey have had to resort to the local employment opportunities in the fairly stagnant industrial areas of the inner city or in the central business district (CBD), which in any case only offers a small proportion of its employment in the unskilled low-income category. By contrast, residents in the suburban communities have a far wider range of options open to them. They can make use of rapid transit facilities into the CBD, they can seek employment locally in growing suburban employment centres, or they can make use of the pattern of ring-roads and beltways to move around the suburban ring.
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\nThese external effects on the value of a property holder's rights are not under the property holder's control nor are they adequately catered for in the pricing system operating in a supposedly free market
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\nWhat this analysis of the housing market shows us is that a free market cannot give rise to prices conducive to a Pareto optimum and that the housing market, for reasons of its own spatial internal logic, must contain group action if it is to
\nfunction coherently. This explains, in turn, why the housing market is so peculiarly susceptible to economic and political pressures, since it is only by organizing and applying these pressures that individuals can defend or enhance the value of their property rights relative to those of other individuals. In this, as in most things, it is the economically and politically weak who probably suffer most, unless institutional controls exist to rectify a naturally arising but ethically unacceptable situation.
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\nTHE AVAILABILITY AND PRICE OF RESOURCES
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\nthere is still an unfortunate tendency to think of resources as \"natural\". I think it far more satisfactory to regard the city as a gigantic resource system, most of which is man-made.
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\nThe urban system thus contains a geographical distribution of created resources of great economic, social, psychological and symbolic significance. Unfortunately, when we get away from the simple production-based definition of resources to a definition linked to consumption, we increase the appropriateness of the concept for examining income inequalities and distribution effects, but decrease our ability to define quantitative measures for resource availability.
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\nCommand over resources, which is our general definition of real income, is thus a function of locational accessibility and proximity. Therefore, the changing spatial form of the city and the continuous process of run-down, renewal and creation of resources within it, will affect the distribution of incomes and may form a major mechanism for the redistribution of real income.
\nClawson writes:
\n\"Any use of rural open space, relatively close to the city, as a substitute for or supplement to open space within the city has unfortunate effects in terms of income class participation. Truly poor people have no chance to live in the country and commute to work, nor to play golf in the country. These uses of rural open space are limited to middle and upper income levels. Moreover, if the more articulate and politically most active parts of the total population see such use of rural open space as one major solution to the open space problem, they may neglect or oppose costly programs which would provide at least some open space in the city centres where it is most lacking and most urgently needed.\" (1969, 170.)
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\nKerner Commission report (1968) will show. Some of the local costs imposed upon a community by the differential availability and accessibility of resources are quantifiable (such as the real extent of overcharging for consumer goods), but there are many other costs (such as a high infant mortality rate, mental disturbance and nervous tension) which are real enough but extraordinarily difficult to measure.
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\nThis may appear an unanswerable question (since so few of the costs can be quantified), but it is nevertheless useful to ask it for doing so directs our attention to an important set of mechanisms generating inequalities in income.
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\nThe smaller groups—the privileged and intermediate groups —can often defeat the large groups—the latent groups—which are normally supposed to prevail in democracy. The privileged and intermediate groups often triumph over the numerically superior forces in the latent or large groups because the former are generally organized and active while the latter are normally unorganized and inactive.\" (Olson, 1965, 128.
\nHOLYOKE
\nIf income redistribution is a \"predictable outcome of the political process\" it is not hard to predict the general flow of that redistribution. In the first place, we can expect a \"central business district imperialism\" in which the well-organized business interests of the central city (with their small-group oligopolistic structure) effectively dominate the looser and weaker coalitions found in the rest of the city. This thesis has recently been powerfully argued by Kotler (1969).
\nwe can also anticipate a \"suburban exploitation of the central city\" hypothesis (Netzer, 1968, 438-48; Thompson, 1965, chapter 7). In other words, we can expect a \"pecking order\" among various groups in the population for the exploitation of the various resources which the city has to offer.
\nThe prospects for equity or for a just redistribution of income in an urban system through a naturally arising political process (particularly one based on a philosophy of individual self-interest) are bleak indeed
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\nA transfer payment may be very significant to a poor man and
\nalmost irrelevant to a rich man. By the same argument, the poor can less afford to lose an external benefit or incur an external cost. This leads us to an intriguing paradox in which the poor are willing to incur external losses for a far lower transfer payment than are the rich.
\nheterogeneity in social and cultural values may make it impossible for groups to get into a \"valid\" negotiating position such as that which is specified in one of Isard's location games. From this it follows that an urban system will be unable to function smoothly (in the sense that conflicts between individuals and groups will not easily be resolved) if there is widespread heterogeneity in the social and cultural values of the population. It seems that the \"natural\" way for this sort of difficulty to be minimized is to seek out a pattern of territorial organization which minimizes both social contact between individuals holding different social and cultural values and also the probability of quarrels over externalities. Territorial and \"neighbourhood\" organization on ethnic, class, social status, religious and other lines thus has an important role to play in minimizing conflict in the urban system
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\nI find it hard to accept either Marcuse's thesis (1964) that there is a growing homogeneity in cultural values (and, therefore, no force for change in society) or the spatial form equivalent of it in which a \"one dimensional man\" dwells in what Melvin Webber (1964) calls \"an urban non-place realm\". There are strong forces working towards cultural heterogeneity and territorial differentiation in the urban system
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\nThe physical spatial form of a city system is a construction in three dimensional Euclidean geometry. The phenomena within it can be conceptualized as points (retail stores, schools, hospitals), lines (transport links), areas (constituencies, territories) and volumes (buildings
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\nImpure public goods, once produced, are freely but not equally available (in terms of quantity or quality) to all individuals in the city system.
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\nThere are various natural forces making for territorial organization in an urban system: kinship and ethnic groupings, communities with shared value systems, individuals with similar ideas about quality of urban environment, are good examples. These forces do not remain static. Ethnic and kinship groupings are breaking down (Webber, 1963) and traditional notions of \"community\" and \"neighbourhood\" are being replaced by something rather different—a neighbourhood concept which is implicit rather than explicit with respect to social organization (Keller, 1969). There are also good logical reasons for arguing in favour of territorial organization. An \"appropriate\" organization can do much to minimize conflict and maximize group coherence and efficiency. Whether or not we can achieve such an organization of space and thereby facilitate the achievement of social objectives depends very much upon whether we can find out what is meant by \"appropriate\"
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\nChapter 3 Social Justice and Spatial Systems
\nI want to diverge from the usual mode of normative analysis and look at the possibility of constructing a normative theory of spatial or territorial allocation based on principles of social justice.
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\nThe reason should be obvious: programmes which seek to alter distribution without altering the capitalist market structure within which income and wealth are generated and distributed, are doomed to failure.
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\nany social, economic and political organization which attains any permanence is liable to cooptation and subversion by special interest groups
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\nFrom this, Burgess elaborated what came to be known as the concentric zone theory of the city
\nvivi
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\nAnd the finest part of the arrangement is this, that the members of the money aristocracy can take the shortest road through the middle of all the labouring districts without ever seeing that they are in the midst of the grimy misery that lurks to the right and left. For the thoroughfares leading from the Exchange in all directions out of the city are lined, on both sides, with an almost unbroken series of shops, and are so kept in the hands of the middle and lower bourgeoisie . . . [that] they suffice to conceal from the eyes of the wealthy men and women of strong stomachs and weak nerves the misery and grime which form the complement of their wealth.
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\nI have never seen so systematic a shutting out of the working class from the thoroughfares, so tender a concealment of everything which might affront the eye and the nerves of the bourgeoisie, as in Manchester. And yet, in other respects, Manchester is less built according to plan, after official regulations, is more an outgrowth of accident, than any other city; and when I consider in this connection the eager assurances of the middle class, that the working class is doing famously, I cannot help feeling that the liberal manufacturers, the Big Wigs of Manchester, are not so innocent after all, in the matter of this sensitive method of construction.\"
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\nIn fact with certain obvious modifications, Engels's description could easily be made to fit the contemporary American city (concentric zoning with good transport facilities for the affluent who live on the outskirts, sheltering of commuters into the city from seeing the grime and misery which is the complement of their wealth, etc.).
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\nThe brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each in his private interest becomes the more repellent and offensive, the more these individuals are crowded together within a limited space. . . . The dissolution of mankind into monads, of which each
\none has a separate principle, the world of atoms, is here carried out to its utmost extreme. . . . Hence it comes too, that the social war, the war of each against all, is here openly declared . . . people regard each other only as useful objects; each exploits the other, and the end of it all is, that the stronger treads the weaker under foot, and that the powerful few, the capitalists, seize everything for themselves, while to the weak many, the poor, scarcely a bare existence remains. . .
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\nWhen put in competition with each other, we find the poor group forced to live in the centre of the city, and the rich group living outside (just as Engels described it). This means that the poor are forced to live on high rent land.
\nThe only way they can adjust to this, of course, is to save on the quantity of space they consume and crowd into a very small area.
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\nWe therefore find a paradox, namely that wealth is produced under a system which relies upon scarcity for its functioning. It follows that if scarcity is eliminated, the market economy, which is the source of productive wealth under capitalism, will collapse. Yet capitalism is forever increasing its productive capacity. To resolve this dilemma many institutions and mechanisms are formed to ensure that scarcity does not disappear
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\nBy 'Haussmann' I mean the practice which has now become general of making breaches in the working class quarters of our big towns, and particularly in areas which are centrally situated, quite apart from whether this is done from considerations of public health and for beautifying the town, or owing to the demand for big centrally situated business premises, or owing to traffic requirements, such as the laying down of railways, streets (which sometimes appear to have the strategic aim of making barricade fighting more difficult). . . . No matter how different the reasons may be, the result is everywhere the same; the scandalous alleys disappear to the accompaniment of lavish self-praise from the bourgeoisie on account of this tremendous success, but they appear again immediately somewhere else and often in the immediate neighborhood! . . . The breeding places of disease, the infamous holes and cellars in which the capitalist mode of production confines our workers night after night, are not abolished; they are merely shifted elsewhere
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\nPareto optimality as it enters location theory is a counter-revolutionary concept, as is any formulation which calls for the maximization of any one of the partial manifestations of surplus value (such as rent or return on capital investment). Yet programming solutions are clearly extremely relevant devices for understanding how resources can best be mobilized for the production of surplus value.
\nvi
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\nIt also means that the organization of knowledge (including the disciplinary divisions) has an inherently status quo or counterrevolutionary posture. The pursuit of knowledge and the organization and dissemination of it are inherently conservative
\nvi
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\nIn this it has first to be recognized that all disciplinary boundaries are themselves counter-revolutionary. The division of knowledge allows the body politic to divide and rule as far as the application of knowledge is concerned
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\nChapter 5 Use Value, Exchange Value and the Theory of Urban Land Use
\nUse value and exchange have no meaning in and of themselves
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\ncreation of exchange value resides in the social process of applying socially necessary labour to objects of nature to yield up material objects (commodities) suitable for consumption (use) by man
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\nMarx there argues that human beings have, through history, become progressively more alienated (1) from the product of labour (from the world of objects and from nature), (2) from the activity of production (as control is lost over the means of production), (3) from their own inherent \"species being\" (which stems from the sense in which human beings are a part of nature and therefore have a human nature) and (4) from each other (as each individual assumes an identity and is forced to compete rather than to cooperate with others).
\nvi vi
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\nMarxist device for bringing use value and exchange value into a dialectical relationship with each other demands consideration for it offers the dual prospect of breathing new life into geographical and sociological studies of land use, and of building a bridge between spatial and economic approaches to urban land-use problems. The latter prospect may be as beneficial to contemporary economics as it is to contemporary spatial analysis.
\nvi vi holyoke
\n--------------------------
\nThe concentric zone, multiple nuclei and sectoral \"theories\" are nothing more than generalized descriptions of patterns of use in the urban space economy
\nvi vi vi
\n--------------------------
\nTo say that space has absolute properties is to say that structures, people and land parcels exist in a manner that is mutually exclusive each of the other in a three-dimensional, physical (Euclidean) space.
\nThe distance between points is relative because it depends upon the means of transportation, on the perception of distance by actors in the urban scene, and so on (see chapter 1).
\nvi vi vi
\n--------------------------
\nBut we cannot ever afford to forget that there cannot be more than one land parcel in exactly the same location. This means that all spatial problems have an inherent monopolistic quality to them. Monopoly in absolute space is a condition of existence not something experienced as a deviation from the spaceless world of perfect competition. In capitalist society this characteristic of absolute space is institutionalized through the private property relation, so that \"owners\" possess monopoly privileges over \"pieces\" of space.
\nvi vi vi vi holyoke
\n--------------------------
\nThe phenomenon of class monopoly is very important in explaining urban structure and it therefore requires elucidation. There is a class of housing consumers who have no credit rating and who have no choice but to rent wherever they can. A class of landlords emerges to provide for the needs of those consumers but since the consumers have no choice the landlords, as a class, have monopoly power.
\n--------------------------
\nInstead of a \"filter down\" theory, therefore, it might be more interesting to examine a \"blow out\" theory. Social and physical pressure is exerted at the bottom end of the housing market and this is transmitted up the socioeconomic scale until the richest are pressured to move (we are leaving out of the picture, of course, the problem of new household formation, in-migration and so on). This formulation is, however, clearly unrealistic for the rich possess the political and economic power to resist encroachment, while the socioeconomic group immediately below them is unlikely to be as unacceptable in its behaviour as is the poorest group
\nvi
\n--------------------------
\nIn practice, the dynamics of the housing market can probably best be viewed as a combination of \"blow out\" and \"filter down\"
\nvi
\n--------------------------
\nCapitalist production cannot afford, in Marx's view, to destroy the institution of private property (in the way it had destroyed many other feudal institutions) because its own existence is predicated on the private ownership of the means of production. Capitalism is therefore prepared to pay a tax on production (rent) as the price for perpetuating the legal basis for its own existence.
\nvi vi
\n--------------------------
\nMonopoly rents can then be interpreted in the neoclassical tradition as arising through the artificial manipulation of scarcity through producers' manipulation of the supply of land
\n--------------------------
\neliminates a distinction which Marx and some subsequent analysts (such as Henry George) are unwilling to forget for obvious ethical reasons
\n--------------------------
\nHence arises the paradox of the American city; house prices are falling most rapidly in what are, from the relational point of view, the most valuable locations
\nvi vi
\n--------------------------
\nIt is not surprising to find, therefore, that the highest rent areas in the city are colonized by commercial activities whose productivity cannot be measured—government offices, banks, insurance companies, stockbrokers, travel agents and various forms of entertainment, are good examples. Hence arises the paradox that some of the most unproductive activity in society is found on land which is supposedly of the greatest marginal productivity by virtue of its location
\nvi vi vi holyoke
\n--------------------------
\nHence, Marx argues (Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations; Capital, volume 3, 879) that a mode of production must create the conditions for its own perpetuation—the reproduction of these conditions becomes as important as production itself.
\nvi
\n--------------------------
\nThere is, for instance, general agreement on the existence of a mode of production called \"feudal\" (Marx called it \"Germanic\"), but disagreement as to what exactly characterizes it and as to the societies to which it may validly be applied. In part, this contention arises because the specific attributes of feudalism were originally established by European historians working in a European context; these attributes have been much modified as scholars have extended their analyses to other contexts such as Japan (Hall, 1962) and early China (Wheatley, 1971).
\nvi
\n--------------------------
\nBaran and Sweezy (1966), for example, argue that the monopoly form of capitalism is qualitatively different from the typical, nineteenth-century, individualistic capitalism
\nvi vi
\n--------------------------
\nKarl Polanyi (1968, 148-9) distinguishes between three distinctive modes of economic integration or coordinating mechanisms—reciprocity, redistribution and market exchange
\nvi vi
\n--------------------------
\nIn general it is accepted by most scholars that egalitarian societies are incapable of supporting urbanism
\nvi
\n--------------------------
\nBut market exchange rests on scarcity, for without it price-fixing markets could not function. So scarcity leads to wealth via the market exchange system while the preservation of market exchange requires that scarcity be maintained.
\nvi
\n--------------------------
\nMax Weber (1904) and other writers (for example, Tawney, 1937) have recognized an essential connection between changes in religious ideology and the rise of European capitalism
\nvi vi holoke
\n--------------------------
\nTo summarize: reciprocity, redistribution and market exchange are three distinctive modes of economic integration. They are indicative of certain correlative features in the ideological superstructure of society: status, class, the projection of both into patterns of political power, definite supportive institutions and states of social consciousness are perhaps the most significant of these features.
\nvi vi
\n--------------------------
\nSurplus labour is therefore that labour power expended by the labourer for the support of someone or something else. From this arises the connection between the Marxist concept of an alienated surplus and alienated labour.
\n--------------------------
\nlatter mode of economic integration therefore leads to a far more vigorous pursuit of surplus labour power than does the former. In other words, slave labour by itself tends to be less exploitive than wage labour.
\nvi vi vi vi vi
\n--------------------------
\nRosa Luxemburg puts it this way: \"simple reproduction as a mere continuous repetition of the process of production on the same scale as before can be observed over long periods of social history. . . . But simple reproduction is the source and unmistakable sign of general economic and cultural stagnation. No important forward step in production would be possible without expanding reproduction; for the basis and also the social incentive for a decisive advancement of civilization lies solely in the gradual expansion of production beyond immediate requirements.\" (1913, 41.
\nvi vi vi
\n--------------------------
\nMarx and Luxemburg both argue that this entails \"primitive accumulation\", which Marx defined as \"nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production\"
\n--------------------------
\nprimitive accumulation requires the concomitant growth of an effective demand for the surplus product produced.
\nMonumental architecture, lavish and conspicuous consumption, and need-creation in contemporary urban society, are all different manifestations of this same phenomenon. The city can thus partly be interpreted as a field for generating effective demand.
\nvi vi vi vi vi vi holyoke
\n--------------------------
\nDependent urbanism arises in situations where the urban form exists as a channel for the extraction of quantities of surplus from a rural and resource hinterland for purposes of shipment to the major metropolitan centres. This colonial form of urbanism is currently characteristic, for example, in much of Latin America (Frank, 1969) but in the early nineteenth century it was, as Pred (1966) notes, dominant in the United States
\nvi vi holyoke
\n--------------------------
\nHoselitz (i960, chapter 8) draws a useful if somewhat simplistic distinction between \"generative\" and \"parasitic\" cities. A generative city contributes to the economic growth of the region in which it is situated, whereas a parasitic city does not. A generative city will allocate a considerable amount of the surplus value accumulated within it to forms of investment that enlarge production. The investments may be in the city or in the surrounding rural area
\nvi vi
\n--------------------------
\nAdam Smith thus resolves to his own satisfaction what has the appearance of a serious moral dilemma—the fact that \"the town may very properly be said to gain its whole wealth and subsistence from the country.\"
\nvi vi vi
\n--------------------------
\nParasitic cities, on the other hand, are characterized by a form of social and economic organization which is dedicated to consuming the social surplus, often through enterprises that are conspicuously wasteful from an economic point of view (whatever their religious or military significance). Wolf (1959, 106-9) regards the theocratic centres of early Mexico as parasitic and C. T. Smith (1967, 329) indicates that many towns in eleventh-century Europe also exhibited parasitic qualities. A parasitic city is geared to simple reproduction rather than to that enlarged reproduction upon which advances in civilization and economy are based.
\nvi vi
\n--------------------------
\nGramsci (Prison Notebooks, 90-102) perceptively distinguishes, for example, between the parasitic urbanism of the Italian South in the 1930s in which there was a \"literal subjugation of the city to the countryside\" (because the city was the home of a rentier class and a bureaucracy which lived off a surplus extracted from agriculture), and the generative urbanism of the Italian North in which there was a continual enlargement of production through industry and commerce, together with a concomitant creation of a large industrial urban proletariat.
\n--------------------------
\nIt is more realistic therefore, to model an urbanized space economy as a surplus-creating, -extracting and -concentrating device.
\nThe pattern of flows in a predominantly redistributive economy can also vary a great deal. The particular structural characteristics of the rank society will be reflected in the built form of the city. Wheatley (1969; 1971) provides some excellent examples of this in his discussion of the symbolic qualities of various city forms. To demonstrate the general point at issue, however, we will examine very briefly the variety of forms assumed by market exchange
\nvi vi vi vi vi holyoke
\n--------------------------
\nAll kinds of combinations can arise with monopolistic production flowing to individual consumers, oligopolistic producers dealing with monopoly consumers and so on.
\nvi vi
\n--------------------------
\nKeynesian policies are designed to cure what is viewed as a structural
\nweakness in the price mechanism. But for Marx the defects in the price mechanism were but a symptom of a deep structural malaise inherent in the circulation of surplus value to create more surplus value. If Marx is correct, then localized breakdowns in the price mechanism (as frequently exhibited, for example, in housing markets) cannot be attributed to mere deficiencies in price information. They are more likely to indicate deep-seated problems in the process of capitalist circulation itself
\nvi vi vi
\n--------------------------
\nThe contemporary metropolis in capitalist countries is a veritable palimpsest of social forms constructed in the images of reciprocity, redistribution and market exchange
\n--------------------------
\nIt is the central thesis of this essay that by bringing together the conceptual frameworks surrounding (i) the surplus concept, (2) the mode of economic integration concept and (3) concepts of spatial organization, we will
\narrive at an overall framework for interpreting urbanism and its tangible expression, the city.
\n--------------------------
\nThis regulation relied initially upon articles of incorporation which gave the city a legal structure and conferred rights and duties on its inhabitants which were markedly different from those which regulated the feudal economy. The city thus assumed the form of a territorial corporation. This corporation was designed to facilitate commerce, but it also sought to promote monopolistic advantages vis-à-vis other cities, as well as to regulate internal conflict.
\nvi vi iv
\n--------------------------
\nThe industrialization that ultimately subdued merchant capital was not an urban phenomenon, but one which led to the creation of a new form of urbanism—a process in which Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham were transformed from insignificant villages or minor trading centres, to industrial cities of great productive might. In this process, it must be added, the once dominant trading centres, fashioned as they were by the peculiar ethic of merchant capitalism as well as by an economic function which was basically parasitic, diminished in economic and political significance. Amsterdam bowed to London and Bristol bowed to Birmingham.
\nvi vi
\n--------------------------
\nSurplus value may be extracted at every transaction point whether it be in the primary, secondary (manufacturing), tertiary (distribution and services) or what may be designated quaternary (financial and money manipulating activities) sectors of the economy
\nvi
\n--------------------------
\nBut as metropolitan areas have increased in size and significance, so the proportion of surplus value extracted through socially unnecessary and unproductive transactions has increased. The contemporary metropolis therefore appears vulnerable, for if the rate at which surplus value is being appropriated at the centre (if profit levels are to be maintained) exceeds the rate at which social product is being created, then financial and economic collapse is inevitable
\nvi
\n--------------------------
\nVeblen (1923) argues that the country towns in nineteenth century America functioned basically as centres of monopoly control over wholesaling, retailing and the shipment of agricultural products
\nvi vi vu
\n--------------------------
\nJane Jacobs (1969) is undoubtedly correct in complaining that large and efficient corporate enterprise (and government activity) create city environments that inhibit a vigorous generative urbanism out of which new work and technological innovation can grow
\nvi vi vi
\n--------------------------
\nThe effective demand for automobiles (as well as oil products, highway construction, suburban construction, etc.) has been created and expanded through the total reorganization of the metropolitan built form so that it is all but impossible to live a \"normal\" social life without a car (except in areas where congestion is so great as to make automobile access expensive and difficult). A need has been created out of a luxury. And it is essential that this effective demand for automobiles—the linch-pin of the contemporary capitalist economies—be maintained and expanded.
\nOn this basis it may be predicted, for example, that public transit systems can be built only insofar as they do not cut into (or effectively expand) the effective demand for transportation equipment.
\nvi vi vi holyoke
\n--------------------------
\nMuch of the expansion of GNP in capitalist societies is in fact bound up in the whole suburbanization process.
\nvi vi vi vi
\n--------------------------
\nIn the redistributive city it was the physical life of buildings which mattered and many buildings were built to last. In the contemporary capitalist city it is the economic life which matters and this economic life-span is contracting as it becomes necessary to increase the rate of circulation of surplus value. Good buildings are torn down to make way for new buildings which will have an even shorter economic life span
\nvi vi
\n--------------------------
\nBut much of the poverty in advanced metropolitan economies is found in populations who are incapable of joining the work force—the aged, female heads of households, and the like. These elements, which Marx called the stagnant group in the industrial reserve army, typically depend upon welfare for survival and therefore can be viewed as a tool for the manipulation of effective demand through government policies
\nvi vi vi vi hoyoke
\n--------------------------
\nThe public provision of public (and sometimes private) goods, together with private and public planning of the urban community \"in the public interest\", are now of major significance in shaping the geography of the contemporary city.
\nvi vi holyoke
\n--------------------------
\nThe Federal Housing Administration (FHA) legislation in the United States, for example, was set up to support mortgage financing of housing in the 1930s, but its main effect was to support financial institutions which were deeply troubled by the reverberations of the depression. The consequence has been, however, to stimulate suburbanization, because FHA loans are mostly geared to financing purchase of new rather than old stock (Douglas Commission, 1968).
\nvi vi Holyoke
\n--------------------------
\nFew individuals find this an adequate measure of their own value or an adequate criterion by which to establish their own self-identity. Nor do many find it entirely satisfying to locate their total identity in a commodity fetishism which proclaims that \"I am what I can buy\" or \"I am what I
\npossess.\" Other measures of value are therefore very important. Here the criteria of moral worth inherent in the older rank societies provide an apparent relief to counter the impersonal and dehumanizing criteria of the market place. Status, rank, prestige and privilege provide more appealing ways of identifying self than that provided through commodity relationships in the market place. .Organizations are thus organized hierarchically, governmental and corporate bureaucracies are internally ordered, professional groups exhibit official or unofficial prestige orderings, each division of labour in society is organized like a mini-rank society, while certain occupations are designated \"high status\" by different ethnic, racial and religious groupings.
\nholyoke vi
\n--------------------------
\nThe prevailing concern with the trappings of the rank society is real enough and produces tangible results in the urban space economy. Dominant organizations and institutions make use of space hierarchically and symbolically. Sacred and profane spaces are created, focal points emphasized, and space is generally manipulated to reflect status and prestige. The contemporary city therefore exhibits many similar features to those found in redistributive cities which Wheatley (1969 1971) interprets as symbolic constructs reflecting the mores of the rank society. It is usually held, for example, that western cities exhibit a focusing of activity at their centre for it is here that maximum accessibility exists to all market activity. In the contemporary city this is scarcely true any longer (the centres are maximally congested). The centre is still a prestigious location, however, and firms bid with prestige and status in mind. It may seem strange to think that what firms are bidding for in the heartless and cold analytics of the von Thünen-Alonso-Muth models is prestige, status and perhaps even divinity at the axis mundi of the capitalist city
\nvi vi vi holyoke
\n--------------------------
\nPeople attempt by all manner of means, to differentiate what the market place has in fact rendered homogeneous. Hence the urban space economy is replete with all manner of pseudo-hierarchical spatial orderings to reflect prestige and status in residential location. These orderings are very important to the self-respect of people, but are irrelevant to the basic economic structure of society
\nvi
\n--------------------------
\nIn the early stages of industrial urbanization reciprocity was typically based on extended kinship relations, ethnic or religious identifications, or on the coming together of particular population groups under some threat (the sense of community is very strong in mining areas for example). Increased mobility and rapid changes in social
\nstructure have done much to loosen these bonds. The former has also meant a lessening of attachment to any one particular locale. Spatial propinquity, geographical immobility and reciprocity in the community are undoubtedly related.
\nThe decline of this traditional form of reciprocity in urban communities (much lamented by writers such as Jane Jacobs) has changed the functioning of the urban community. In the American city, ethnic bonds and a close-knit community structure have done much in the past to help resist the penetration of market exchange relationships into the daily life and hence of human relationships within the community.
\nvivi vi holyoke
\n--------------------------
\nFor example, the structure of the forces of production comes into conflict with the structure of the relations of production—a conflict that is expressed in the increasingly social character of capitalist production and the enduringly private character of capitalist control and consumption
\nvi vi i
\n--------------------------
\nIn other words, and this conclusion will be unpalatable to many, the only method capable of uniting disciplines in such a fashion that they can grapple with issues such as urbanization, economic development and the environment, is that founded in a properly constituted version of dialectical materialism as it operates within a structured totality in the sense that Marx conceived of it.
\nvi vi vi
\n--------------------------
\nVarious strategies have been advanced to deal with this totality. They fall, for the most part, in the two categories of atomistic association and emergent evolution that we have explicitly rejected. An example of the former is Wilson's (1970) entropy formulation while the spectacular design-mysticism of Doxiadis (1968) is surely an excellent example of the latter
\nvi
\n--------------------------
\nThe transformation from reciprocity to redistribution (examined in chapter 6) involved the creation of hierarchical self-sustaining set of social relationships. Marx regarded this as the crystallization of the first great class struggle in the form of the antagonism between town and country.
\nvi
\n--------------------------
\nLefebvre contrasts this first stage of urbanism—the political city—with two later stages—the commercial city and the industrial city
\nvi vi
\n--------------------------
\nThe new form of urbanism generally arose outside of the older cities and subsequently came to absorb the older more traditional functions of the political and commercial city
\nvi holyoke
\n--------------------------
\nLefebvre makes use of the traditional Marxist method of construction by negation and inversion—he seeks to interpret industrial society as a precursor of what he calls the \"urban revolution\":
\n\"when we use the words 'urban revolution' we designate the total ensemble of transformations which run throughout contemporary society and which serve to being about the change from a period in which questions of economic growth and industrialization predominate to the period in which the urban problematic becomes decisive, when research into the solutions and forms appropriate to urban society takes precedence
\nvi vi
\n--------------------------
\nIndustrialization, once the producer of urbanism, is now being produced by it. This subordination of industrial society to urban society entails certain further changes which, in turn, contain the seeds of further conflict
\nvi vi
\n--------------------------
\nIt becomes increasingly difficult to maintain the distinction between public and private particularly through the operation of those externalities discussed in detail in chapter 2.
\nThe antagonism between central city and suburb emerges as a major theme in American politics (again, see chapter 2).
\nvi vi
\n--------------------------
\nAs Lefebvre argues, industrial society homogenizes and urban society differentiates (1970, 169). The strong forces working towards cultural heterogeneity and territorial differentiation in the urban system were subject to detailed analysis in chapter 2. The notion of a \"one-dimensional man\" (Marcuse) living in an \"urban non-place realm\" (Melvin Webber) was explicitly rejected in that chapter and in this I am in entire agreement with Lefebvre.
\nvi vi vi holyoke
\n--------------------------
\nThe urbanization of the countryside implies the elimination of regional life-styles through the forces of the world market. The products and objects available for consumption and use become more standardized, more numerous and less tied to the local base. And the once vibrant life-styles of distinctive geographical regions, together with the distinctive landscapes they fashioned, are transformed into something preserved out of the past for tourists to look at. On this dimension we see increasing uniformity. Yet the urban system has also to be viewed, in the manner of chapter 2, as a giant man-made resource system \"of great economic, social, psychological and symbolic significance\". The growth of this man-made resource system involves the structuring and differentiation of space through the distribution of fixed capital investments. A new spatial structure is
\ncreated and some of the old lines of regional differentiation are revived to accentuate the structure
\nvi vi
\n--------------------------
\nIn the ancient city the organization of space was a symbolic re-creation of a supposed cosmic order. It had an ideological purpose. Created space in the modern city has an equivalent ideological purpose. In part it reflects the prevailing ideology of the ruling groups and institutions in society. In part it is fashioned by the dynamics of market forces which can easily produce results which nobody in particular wants (see chapter 5). Created space is an \"ethnic domain\" in only a very limited sense (see chapter 1). Yet created space is an integral part of an intricate sign-process that gives direction and meaning to daily life within the urban culture. The signs, symbols and signals that surround us in the urban environment are powerful influences (particularly among the young). We fashion our sensibilities, extract our sense of wants and needs, and locate our aspirations with respect to a geographical environment that is in large part created
\nvi vi vi holyoke
\n--------------------------
\nNeed creation and the maintenance of an effective demand are produced through the processes governing the evolution of industrial capitalism. Urbanization provides the opportunity for industrial capital to dispose of the products it creates. In this sense the urbanization process is still being propelled by the requirements of industrial capitalism
\nvi vi vi
\n--------------------------
\nThis is a critical and important issue-and one which is probably the most important source of disagreement between Lefebvre and myself. I regard the channels through which surplus value circulates as the arteries through which course all of the relationships and interactions which define the totality of society. To understand the circulation of surplus value is in fact to understand the way in which society works.
\nvi vi
\n--------------------------
\nLefebvre makes a simplistic but quite useful distinction between two circuits in the circulation of surplus value. The first circuit arises out of industrial activity and involves that simple conversion of naturally occurring materials and forces into objects and powers of utility to man. The second circuit involves the creation and extraction of surplus value out of speculation in property rights (of all sorts) and out of returns gained from the disbursement of fixed capital investments. Lefebvre argues \"Whereas the proportion of global surplus value formed and realized in industry declines, the proportion realized in speculation and in construction and real estate development grows. The secondary circuit comes to supplant the principal circuit\"
\nvi
\n--------------------------
\nSpeculative activity has grown in proportion as fixed capital investment has grown and since urbanism is in part the product of the latter it is hardly surprising that urbanism and the circuit of speculative capital are intimately related to each other. The relevance of this idea is demonstrated in chapters 2 and 5 in this volume. But it is premature to argue that the second circuit has replaced the first
\nvi
\n--------------------------
\nSo where does this leave us with respect to Lefebvre's thesis? To say that the thesis is not true at this juncture in history is not to say that it is not in the process of becoming true or that it cannot become true in the future. The evidence suggests that the forces of urbanization are emerging strongly and moving to dominate the centre stage of world history
\nvi
\n--------------------------
\nWe have the opportunity to create space, to harness creatively the forces making for urban differentiation. But in order to seize these opportunities we have to confront the forces that create cities as alien environments, that push urbanization in directions alien to our individual or collective purpose. To confront these forces we have first to understand them. The old structure of industrial capitalism, once such a force for revolutionary change in society, now appears as a stumbling block. The growing concentration of fixed capital investment, the creation of new needs and effective demands, and a pattern of circulation of surplus value that rests upon appropriation and exploitation, all emanate from the internal dynamic of industrial capitalism.
\nvi vi vi
\n--------------------------
\nWe live, after all, in a world in which the rights of private property and the profit rate trump all other notions of rights. I here want to explore another type of human right, that of the right to the city
\nvi vi
\n--------------------------
\nThe right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights
\nvi vi
\n--------------------------
\nHaussmann clearly understood that his mission was to help solve the surplus-capital and unemployment problem through urbanization. Rebuilding Paris absorbed huge quantities of labor and capital by the standards of the time and, coupled with suppressing the aspirations of the Parisian workforce, was a primary vehicle of social stabilization.
\nvi vi
\n--------------------------
\n, Haussmann threw them back at him saying: \"Not wide enough . . . You have it 40 metres wide and I want it 120.\" He annexed the suburbs and redesigned whole neighborhoods such as Les Halles. To do this Haussmann needed new financial institutions and debt instruments, the Credit Mobilier and Credit Immobilier, which were constructed on Saint-Simonian lines. In effect, he helped resolve the capital-surplus disposal problem by setting up a proto-Keynesian system of debt-financed infrastructural urban improvements
\nvi vi vi
\n--------------------------
\nThe system worked very well for some fifteen years, and it involved not only a transformation of urban infrastructures but also the construction of a new way of life and urban persona. Paris became \"the city of light,\" the great center of consumption, tourism, and pleasure; the cafes, department stores, fashion industry, and grand expositions all changed urban living so that it could absorb vast surpluses through consumerism. But then the overextended and speculative financial system and credit structures crashed in 1868. Haussmann was dismissed; Napoleon III in desperation went to war against Bismarck's Germany and lost
\nvi vi vi Holyoke
\n--------------------------
\nPolitically the situation was dangerous: the federal government was in effect running a nationalized economy and was in alliance with the Communist Soviet Union, while strong social movements with socialist inclinations had emerged in the 1930s. As in Louis Bonaparte's era, a hefty dose of political repression was evidently called for by the ruling classes of the time; the subsequent history of McCarthyism and Cold War politics, of which there were already abundant signs in the early forties, is all too familiar. On the economic front, there remained the question of how surplus capital could be absorbed
\nvi
\n--------------------------
\nIn 1942, a lengthy evaluation of Haussmann's efforts appeared in Architectural Forum. It documented in detail what he had done and attempted an analysis of his mistakes but sought to recuperate his reputation as one of the greatest urbanists of all time. The article was by none other than Robert Moses, who after the Second World War did to New York what Haussmann had done to Paris.
\nThrough a system of highways and infrastructural transformations, suburbanization, and the total reengineering of not just the city but also the whole metropolitan region, he helped resolve the capital-surplus absorption problem. To do this, he tapped into new financial institutions and tax arrangements that liberated the credit to debt-finance urban expansion.
\nvi vi HOLYOKE
\nAs in Second Empire Paris, it entailed a radical transformation in lifestyles, bringing new products from housing to refrigerators and air conditioners, as well as two cars in the driveway and an enormous increase in the consumption of oil. It also altered the political landscape, as subsidized home ownership for the middle classes changed the focus of community action towards the defense of property values and individualized identities, turning the suburban vote towards conservative republicanism. Debt-encumbered home owners, it was argued, were less likely to go on strike. This project successfully absorbed the surplus and assured social stability, albeit at the cost of hollowing out the inner cities and generating urban unrest amongst those, chiefly African Americans, who were denied access to the new prosperity.
\nvi vi vi vi holyoke
\n--------------------------
\nIn the United States, it is accepted wisdom that the housing sector was an important stabilizer of the economy, particularly after the high-tech crash of the late 1990s, although it was an active component of expansion in the earlier part of that decade. The property market directly absorbed a great deal of surplus capital through the construction of city-center and suburban homes and office spaces, while the rapid inflation of housing asset prices—backed by a profligate wave of mortgage refinancing at historically low rates of interest—boosted the U.S. domestic market for consumer goods and services. American urban expansion partially steadied the global economy, as the United States ran huge trade deficits with the rest of the world, borrowing around $2 billion a day to fuel its insatiable consumerism and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq
\nvi vi
\n--------------------------
\nQuality of urban life has become a commodity, as has the city itself, in a world where consumerism, tourism, and cultural and knowledge-based industries have become major aspects of the urban political economy
\nvi vi
\n--------------------------
\nWe now have, as urban sociologist Sharon Zukin puts it, \"pacification by cappuccino
\nvi vi vi holyoke
\n--------------------------
\nThis is a world in which the neoliberal ethic of intense possessive individualism and its cognate of political withdrawal from collective forms of action become the template for human socialization.7 The defense of property values becomes of such paramount political interest that, as Mike Davis points out, the home owner associations in the state of California become bastions of political reaction, if not of fragmented neighborhood fascisms.8
\nWe increasingly live in divided and conflict-prone urban areas.
\nvi vi vi
\n--------------------------
\nThis method is called \"Haussmann.\" . . . No matter how different the reasons may be, the result is always the same; the scandalous alleys and lanes disappear to the accompaniment of lavish self-praise from the bourgeoisie on account of this tremendous success, but they appear again immediately somewhere else. . . . The same economic necessity which produced them in the first place, produces them in the next place.10
\nvi vi vi
\n--------------------------
\nUrbanization, we may conclude, has played a crucial role in the absorption of capital surpluses, at ever increasing geographical scales but at the price of burgeoning processes of creative destruction that have dispossessed the masses of any right to the city whatsoever. The planet as building site collides with the \"planet of slums.\"16
\nvi vi vi
\n--------------------------
\nThe main achievement of the neoliberal assault, then, has been to prevent the public share from expanding as it did in the 1960s. Neoliberalism has also created new systems of governance that integrate state and corporate interests, and through the application of money power, it has ensured that the disbursement of the surplus through the state apparatus favors corporate capital and the upper classes in shaping the urban process.
\nvi vi
\n--------------------------
\nHe is, in effect, turning Manhattan into one vast gated community for the rich. In Mexico City, Carlos Slim had the downtown streets recobbled to suit the tourist gaze
\nvi vi
\n--------------------------
\nThe democratization of that right, and the construction of a broad social movement to enforce its will, is imperative if the dispossessed are to take back the control that they have for so long been denied, and if they are to institute new modes of urbanization. Lefebvre was right to insist that the revolution has to be urban, in the broadest sense of that term, or nothing at all
\nvi vi vi vi
\n--------------------------
\nThe property relationship, for example, creates absolute spaces within which monopoly control can operate.
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Review Sheet
R
p.2 - 3/7/13 10:02 AM
Reading Advertisements in a Colonial/Development Context: Cigarette Advertising and Identity Poli...
In con? trast, most novel commodities in non-Western countries initially arrived from abroad (or were inspired by commodities first produced in the West),2 a process associated with the peripheralization of these countries in the European world economy.3
p.2 - 3/7/13 10:03 AM
Reading Advertisements in a Colonial/Development Context: Cigarette Advertising and Identity Poli...
As Marx suggested, and as was later developed by Marxist/neo-Marxist writing, advertisements would play on the \"exchange value\" of commodities, their socio-cultural (sign) value, rather than their actual \"use value,\" in promoting goods and services.6 Advertisers \"educated,\" tempted, and scared consumers into buying, by emphasizing the significance of doing so for their social and personal status and identity. Consumers, however, were not simply blind receivers of advertised messages. They actively participated in their reading by learning the evolving syntax of advertisement language.7
vi vi vi vi holyoke
p.3 - 3/7/13 10:05 AM
Reading Advertisements in a Colonial/Development Context: Cigarette Advertising and Identity Poli...
vertisements also often promoted im? ported novelties (or local substitutes), and played on the allure ofthe modern/ foreign:8 ads were situated in recently conceived private and public environ- ments, presented alongside other modern consumer goods, and many times asso? ciated with the newly introduced notion of fashion. Their consumption was also associated with positive modernist values like progress, efficiency, and rational? ity. At the same time, the creation of exchange/sign values for such commodities entailed their \"localization\"?the use of indigenous systems of meaning to facil- itate their familiarization and their integration into local consumption. When examining such ads the question is which aspects of the foreign/modern were locally accepted, which were renounced, and which were blended into earlier patterns of consumption.
vi vi vi vi vi vi holyoke
p.3 - 3/7/13 10:07 AM
Many among the effen...
Many among the effendiya worked in white-collar, typi? cally government paid positions, for example, as civil servants or teachers.
p.3 - 3/7/13 10:07 AM
lthough effendis sup...
lthough effendis supported the national cause in its broadest sense, for example, identifying with the call for full national inde? pendence, it is hard to ascribe to the effendiya a unified political outlook; effendis initiated and participated in a variety of political parties.1
p.3 - 3/7/13 10:09 AM
In Egypt (and other ...
In Egypt (and other non-Western nations) the large-scale impact of print capitalism had to await the development of a new, mass education system that fostered the spread of literacy after the First World War.
p.4 - 3/7/13 10:10 AM
ds evolved with the ...
ds evolved with the press it? self, especially new illustrated magazines, which became the hotbed of novel advertisements.
p.4 - 3/7/13 10:10 AM
actual readership mu...
actual readership must have been much higher with unofficial circula? tion, institutional subscriptions, and various forms of public and private commu? nal readership (reading aloud) elevating its numbers
p.4 - 3/7/13 10:11 AM
n 1907, according to...
n 1907, according to the second Egyptian decennial census, 8.5 percent of male and 0.3 percent of female Egyptians could read.19 By 1947 literacy rates had increased to 35 percent for men and 16 percent for women.20
p.4 - 3/7/13 10:11 AM
One of the most impo...
One of the most important but least discussed additions to the press of the period was popular illustrated magazines,22 especially those of Dar al-Hilal. This publishing house was the leader of this new trend and it became the largest press business ofthe period.2
p.4 - 3/7/13 10:11 AM
Instead, the illustr...
Instead, the illustrated magazines introduced the concept of reading for leisure, and promoted a new style of journalism that highlighted fashion, sports, tourism, and local and international cinema.
p.5 - 3/7/13 10:12 AM
Most important, adve...
Most important, advertisements moved their focus from the commod? ity to the consumer, and employed status (stratification) and identity evoking elements of consumption to increase sales.
p.5 - 3/7/13 10:13 AM
ads did begin promot...
ads did begin promoting commodities by playing on the reader's sense of self and place in society
p.5 - 3/7/13 10:13 AM
dvertising was also ...
dvertising was also controlled by a few leading companies which had little incentive to introduce contemporary \"scientific advertising\" based on market research, which was the trend in some Western countries.
p.5 - 3/7/13 10:14 AM
herbini and Sherif e...
herbini and Sherif estimated aggregate advertising in those years at Egyptian pounds (LE) 1.1 million out of LE 856 million or 0.14 percent of the aggregate national income.26 For 1955, Mahmud 'Assaf suggested that Nevertheless, the sum was LE 1.93 of 943 million or 0.205 percent ofthe national income.27 These estimates, while probably not entirely accurate, give some indication of the scope of the business, which even at this later period was not very well- developed. For comparison, in 1950, US expenditures on advertising amounted to 1.98 percent ofthe gross national product.2
p.5 - 3/7/13 10:15 AM
In 1927 this process...
In 1927 this process culminated in a merger between the largest local manufacturer, Matossian, and a multinational, the British American To? bacco Company (BAT). The company that they established, Eastern Tobacco Company (Eastern), now controlled some 80 percent of the market, with its competitor, Coutarelli, the second largest manufacturer,
R
p.6 - 3/7/13 10:17 AM
Reading Advertisements in a Colonial/Development Context: Cigarette Advertising and Identity Poli...
There was a significant difference between promoting the export-oriented, Egyptian cigarettes, which in the decades before the First World War had be? come fashionable world-wide, and cigarettes sold to effendi smokers. The former were a luxury commodity, far beyond the reach ofthe majority of Egyptian con? sumers. Their glamour (and that of Eastern cigarettes more broadly) can still be sensed in Camel cigarettes, which uses oriental icons?the camel, palm trees, and Islamic architecture?in an attempt to impart an eastern aura to this more humble American brand. In the period under discussion advertisements referred to effendi aspirations rather than on those of potential cosmopolitan consumers as in the past.
vi
p.6 - 3/7/13 10:17 AM
Reading Advertisements in a Colonial/Development Context: Cigarette Advertising and Identity Poli...
This iconography was still used sparsely in advertising for the effendis. However, ads for such an audience looked for more modern, rather than past- oriented, images, and for authentic themes taken mostly from contemporary urban life, to cater better to local sensibilities
vi
p.6 - 3/7/13 10:18 AM
a person s preferenc...
a person s preferences in tobacco consumption would reflect his/her social place. Smoking marked the boundaries of three social categories: ahl al-bahd (\"sons ofthe country\"), a lower urban stra- tum; effendiya (\"the educated\"), a middle stratum; and ahl al-dhawat or bashawiya (\"the rich and aristocratic\"), an upper stratum.
p.6 - 3/7/13 10:18 AM
he shisha (water-pip...
he shisha (water-pipe) for ibn al-balad, the cigarette for the effendi, and the cigar for ibn al-dhawat?1 These metaphors were at the core of inclusion in and exclusion (through consumption) from each so? cial group, especially regarding the effendiya, whose members gradually came to dominate the Egyptian cultural (and advertising) scen
p.7 - 3/7/13 10:20 AM
Moreover, the image...
Moreover, the imagery associated with the cigar was that of an \"art object,\" and its appearance in advertisements might have damaged this im? pression. R
p.7 - 3/7/13 10:21 AM
Male effendi smoking...
Male effendi smoking etiquette in ads well demonstrated the middle ground between a desire to appear modern and a strong need for authenticity and be? longing.
p.7 - 3/7/13 10:22 AM
The cigarette was of...
The cigarette was often represented as a means to keep company, to connect, rather than as a way to portray individu? alism (individual identity), the mainstay of British and American cigarette ad? vertising. In ads, smokers offered a cigarette to a friend, or lit a cigarette for a companion as a token of camaraderie and respect. Men were portrayed smok? ing in the course of a conversation,' watching a show, or drinking coffee with others. Advertised cigarette smoking thereby expressed the same sense of social familiarity earlier associated with the habit of the water-pipe.
p.7 - 3/7/13 10:22 AM
We should note that ...
We should note that these advertised cigarettes were expensive and exclusive; contemporary advertising did not cater to mass con? sumption but to limited groups of upwardly mobile effendis.
R
p.8 - 3/7/13 10:24 AM
Reading Advertisements in a Colonial/Development Context: Cigarette Advertising and Identity Poli...
Visitor: I see that you too have fallen in love with Zenith cigarettes. Senior official: I am madly in love with it and I can't smoke anything else but this cigarette. I [also] noticed that the basha [upper-class rank] and many of our friends and colleagues here and in the club smoke it as well. Such story-telling was not a-typical during that period. It may seem na'ive today, but during a period of initial engagement in reading advertisements, the association between the brand and its socio-cultural meaning had to be spelled out (rather than intimated) to be fully grasped by the contemporary readership
vi
p.8 - 3/7/13 10:25 AM
\"The cigarette of al...
\"The cigarette of al-dhawat\" at the bottom of the advertisement further drives the message home?if it was still not clear: this is the brand of the Egyp? tian upper strata. A
p.8 - 3/7/13 10:26 AM
This quick and dynam...
This quick and dynamic smoke, unlike the time-consuming and stationary shisha, better suited the modern, liminal temporality, in which smoking bestrode free time and work.33 Th
p.8 - 3/7/13 10:26 AM
male cigarette smoke...
male cigarette smokers in new-fashioned leisure environments such as the European-style coffeehouse, bar, and hotel. Here the presence of the cigarette transformed leisure spaces into more structured and business-like modern envi? ronments, which were also less communal and more segregated.
p.11 - 3/7/13 10:28 AM
We have no statistic...
We have no statistics on the spread of the cigarette among age groups, but judging from representations of smoking in other media such as lit? erature and cinema, one suspects that its reception had something to do with a generation gap: where the fathers smoked the shisha the younger generation preferred the cigarette. Such a trend was no doubt enforced by the long estab? lished role of smoking as signifier of power: to smoke a cigarette was to confront the father (and his generation) t
R
p.11 - 3/7/13 10:29 AM
Reading Advertisements in a Colonial/Development Context: Cigarette Advertising and Identity Poli...
dentification with the national cause and \"national senti? ments\" were part of the local masculine self.3 Moreover, fascination with in? dustry per se was deeply rooted in the desire to be considered progressive. One striking example, perhaps contrary to the better judgement of most people today, was an ad where cigarette smoking itself was associated with factory production, the cigarette being portrayed as a factory's chimneys [fig. 3]. This image of the cigarette further accorded with its \"industrious\" nature, discussed above in the context of new notions of leisure in work and play in this period. To enforce the patriotic message in the ad, to create familiarity, and to boost the cigarette's status symbol, the legend below the image was a quote from a senior national politician, Makram 'Ubayd: , \"I smoke only this Egyptian cigarette.
vi vi vi vi
p.15 - 3/7/13 10:32 AM
The ensuing discussi...
The ensuing discussion on women in advertisements for cigarettes is inspired by recent literature on women, veiling, and gender politics in the Middle East.36 I
R
p.15 - 3/7/13 10:32 AM
Reading Advertisements in a Colonial/Development Context: Cigarette Advertising and Identity Poli...
Women's smoking was a \"veiled\" activ? ity, so women (like other categories of subordinates such as youth) were not sup? posed to smoke in the presence of people who had authority over them.
vi
p.15 - 3/7/13 10:33 AM
Reading Advertisements in a Colonial/Development Context: Cigarette Advertising and Identity Poli...
ill conspicuous, way for them to do so in public was in the company and under the patronage of men. In advertisements this was often translated into courtship scenes: young and modern in outlook, the female smoker is neverthe? less always accompanied by a male (or males). When smoking, the man would offer a cigarette to the woman or light it for her. This gentlemanly act was also a disguised measure of control: a woman depended for her smoke on the good manners (and goodwill) of her male companion [fig. 5].
vi
p.15 - 3/7/13 10:34 AM
Reading Advertisements in a Colonial/Development Context: Cigarette Advertising and Identity Poli...
Advertisements where women smoked alone were usually devoid of any social context: the image of the smoking woman, while formally dressed, appears with no background, in a private sitting room, and especially next to the cigarette box [fig. 6].
vi
p.17 - 3/7/13 10:35 AM
Reading Advertisements in a Colonial/Development Context: Cigarette Advertising and Identity Poli...
Most significant in contemporary cigarette advertising was what it did not show; advertisements lacked depictions of women smokers in the company of other women, or in private spaces, especially at home. These were the \"natural\" environments for women to smoke, but self-censorship, which prevented such an affront to contemporary standards, well demonstrated the limits of advertis? ing in face of well established socio-cultural norms.
vi
p.17 - 3/7/13 10:35 AM
rom the study of cig...
rom the study of cigarette ads, at the heart of this lifestyle there was a constant dilemma: how to \"progress,\" develop, and be modern, yet maintain tradition, localism, and authenticity. The effendiya as a stratum was negotiating an identity for itself based on creating binary oppositions between \"modern\" and \"traditional\" (distinction from below), and \"Egyptian\" and \"West- ern/foreign\" (distinction from above), when seeking a place within the nation as modern but authentic.4
R
p.17 - 3/7/13 10:37 AM
Reading Advertisements in a Colonial/Development Context: Cigarette Advertising and Identity Poli...
Localization of modern/foreign commodities through the creation of indige? nous sign values for goods centred on attempts to reconcile \"old\" and \"new\" through assigning indigenous meanings to their consumption. Perusal of con? temporary ads shows how male smoking etiquette preserved much of an older one, emphasizing smoking as a social act and the cigarette as a socializing tool, rather than a manifestation of individuality, its common epithet in the West. At the same time, the cigarette was portrayed as a modern socializer, which bet? ter fitted new forms of leisure in play and work and the new spaces such as the European-style coffeehouse and the office, in which such leisure was taken.
vi vi
p.18 - 3/7/13 10:38 AM
ion of women smokers...
ion of women smokers from an identifiable social environment, the sexuality expressed at times in smoking, the absence of women smokers as fashion setters, and especially the male tutelage under which females smoked in public?all hinted at a qualified attempt to attract women smokers.
p.18 - 3/7/13 10:39 AM
Advertisements playe...
Advertisements played on the feeling of being up-to-date and future oriented, while reassuring smokers that cigarette consumption did not contradict the familiar smoking etiquette of the past. This was not unique to advertisers in Egypt and their local crowd. Hilton has demonstrated that the same mechanism worked in British ads. But in the British case the familiarity and attraction of the past were different, represented by images such as Empire and the countryside.4
R
p.18 - 3/7/13 10:40 AM
Reading Advertisements in a Colonial/Development Context: Cigarette Advertising and Identity Poli...
ost important, to make ethnographic sense of advertisements, and to be able to read them historically, we must pay attention to the cultural repertoire in which contemporary social change is negotiated. In our case study this was the struggling development ofa new stratum, whose cultural luggage (examined through the reading of advertisements), was soon to dominate the emerging nation.
vi vi
created with Mantano Reader Premium on 3/7/13 10:40 AM
CONDENSED
\nReview Sheet
\nS
\np.15 - 3/6/13 9:25 AM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nhis book sees much advantage in studying the market as such a web of interactions, and it focuses on a single market in discussing the benefits of this approach. It examines exchange, a notion that well expresses a complexity in which producers, sellers, buyers, and the state are involved in economic activity,
\nvi
\np.16 - 3/6/13 9:28 AM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nembeddedness alludes to a typology of economic regimes based on the nature of socio-cultural and political control over exchange. Here a command economy stands at one extreme in a spectrum, and a free market economy at the other.4
\nvi
\np.16 - 3/6/13 9:30 AM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nThe focus on markets locates the book between fields rather than within any one; most notably, this research makes an attempt to bridge Economic and Business History and Consumption Studies.7
\nvi vi vi
\np.19 - 3/6/13 9:41 AM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nWestern-style consumerism in periphery countries further enforces Dependency by establishing markets for commodities and services manufactured in Core countries, frequently at the expense of satisfying the real needs of societies mostly living close to subsistence level. For Dependency, still more for neo-Marxist cultural critics who share much of its negative view regarding the role of the West, Western cultural transfers are the continuation of Western Imperialism but by different means
\nvi
\np.19 - 3/6/13 9:46 AM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nodernization and Dependency further lack the sensitivity of recent insights coming from Post-Colonial and Subaltern Studies that emphasize agency and resistance in shaping local culture and identity
\nvi vi
\np.19 - 3/6/13 9:47 AM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nhe Introduction so far calls for an understanding of the market as a web of interactions between various players and in varying contexts; taking different forms of market embeddedness within one economy and between different economic regimes to be crucial to understanding exchang
\nvi vi vi
\np.21 - 3/6/13 9:50 AM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nThe study of the tobacco market is also significant in itself. Tobacco has been a major health risk, a large consumer expenditure, and a highly significant consumption habit in everyday life throughout its history. Tobacco production has also been one of the largest industries for commodities in Egypt and elsewhere. The current debates on government regulation and its production and consumption make the historical study of this commodity all the more relevant (see Epilogue)
\nvi
\np.22 - 3/6/13 9:55 AM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nIt further discusses a corresponding development in which the Egyptian cigarette (and “Turkish” cigarettes in general) became fashionable globally. The exotic image of the Egyptian cigarette in the eyes of consumers worldwide played a major role in its initial success in overseas markets.
\nvi
\np.22 - 3/6/13 9:57 AM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nIt studies commercialized representations of Egypt, for example, on cigarette packets, and argues that they were no less important than more highbrow cultural products such as newspapers, books, and the visual arts in spreading such a national imagery. In sum, the first part of the book explores the meanings of “traditional” and “modern” markets in studying the role of consumers, producers/sellers, and the state in their establishment, and the wider interrelations of such markets with contemporary political structure, global trade, and local cultur
\nvi
\np.23 - 3/6/13 10:02 AM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nere a close inspection of production and distribution in the Eastern Tobacco Company, the largest tobacco manufacturer, furnishes insights into supply-side decision-making as the company attempted to reshape demand for tobacco to its own advantage
\nvi vi vi
\np.24 - 3/6/13 10:09 AM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nchapters seven and eight demonstrate, representations of smoking in the press (including advertising), literature, and cinema constituted a significant part of the contemporary discourse on personal and group identity, and power relations between various social segments in Egypt. These chapters indeed trace a process of cultural canonization in which this cultural discourse increasingly reflected the gaze of a new “middle” in Egyptian society, an effendi group who negotiated a place for themselves as modern but authentic Egyptians
\nvi vi vi
\np.29 - 3/6/13 4:52 PM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nnlike most other substances such as sugar, chocolate, coffee, and tea, tobacco spread around the world without the backing of any empire but solely as a result of consumer demand.3
\nvi
\np.30 - 3/6/13 4:58 PM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\n. However, until the turn of the seventeenth century, the debate over the legitimacy of coffee also involved a reaction against the coffeehouse, which officials of the Ottoman state saw as a potential hotbed for many social and political evils.12
\nvi vi vi
\np.33 - 3/6/13 5:09 PM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nOttomans also consumed chewing and snuffing tobaccos. Such ready-to-use tobaccos were usually preferred by nomads because they did not require lighting a fire in order to smoke.32 Snuff was also preferred by religious scholars (ulema), again because it did not require igniting a fire, a hazardous task for those in proximity to books
\nvi
\np.34 - 3/6/13 5:11 PM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nTobacco use was also an act of ultimate consumption – transforming a substance into smoke. The fact that smoking, unlike eating or drinking, was not essential to sustain life further represented the satisfaction associated with spending time and resources on one’s own non-utilitarian desires.
\nvi vi vi vi vi holyoke
\np.34 - 3/6/13 5:17 PM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nThe practicalities associated with preparing one’s smoke, the symbolism of smoking, and the fact that smoking was not related to any productive outcome, suggest that it was a clear manifestation of spending time for the sole purpose of pleasure. It was a practice closely associated with the individual’s ability to enjoy free time, as well as a socio-cultural celebration of leisure through consumption.
\nvi vi vi
\np.35 - 3/6/13 5:24 PM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nConsumption of tobacco and coffee at the bazaar served to create a bond between buyer and seller in order to smooth the way for business transactions. According to Lane, “To a regular customer, or one who makes any considerable purchase, the shopkeeper generally presents a pipe (unless the former have his own with him, and it be filled and lighted), and he calls or sends to the boy of the nearest coffee-shop, and desires him to bring some coffee.”
\nvi vi vi
\np.35 - 3/6/13 5:24 PM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nBefore the emergence of modern culture and new media including literature, cinema, and the press there are limits placed on the historical imagination that guides our “reading” of male smoking. (See chapter seven and eight for a more elaborate discussion of smoking habits and their meaning in Egypt during the first half of the twentieth century
\nvi
\np.41 - 3/6/13 5:36 PM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nhe history of the Egyptian cigarette industry breaks away from the usual import-substituting-industrialization (ISI) story on the periphery, and presents an alternative – the establishment of an export-led industry based on local manufacturing advantages and talent
\nvi vi vi
\np.41 - 3/6/13 5:37 PM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\n2 BUILDING A NEW INDUSTRY IN EGYPT
\nChapter 2
\np.41 - 3/6/13 5:37 PM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nMcKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb published their seminal work.1 Nevertheless, economic historians tend to avoid this topic because explaining transformations in consumption often entails engaging in “soft” (qualitative) evidence rather than hard data; it also calls for expertise in cultural studies to understand the meaning of things and their impact on aggregate demand
\nvi vi vi vi vi
\np.42 - 3/6/13 5:40 PM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nompared with pipe smoking, which was labour intensive, the cigarette was an easy-to-use smoke. In fact, the cigarette was a revolutionary device because it included the instrument of smoking and the smoke itself. Unlike the pipe, cigarettes did not require much preparation before being smoked. The cigarette was small and easy to carry and therefore it did not confine the smoker to one place. The cigarette was also a quick smoke since it took only a few minutes to consume
\nvi
\np.42 - 3/6/13 5:41 PM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nWhile the pipe was a popular pastime, the cigarette represented the opposite: the enhancement of work and at the same time condensation of leisure. This “efficiency” of the cigarette was manifested in several ways: The mobility of the cigarette allowed the user to smoke while engaging in other activities. Its consumption did not require much attention by the smoker and therefore it could be done while he or she was at work. In fact, tobacco proved to be a work-enhancing substance. Unlike other substances, such as hashish and opium, tobacco did not seem to interfere with the mental process to the extent that slowed productivity. Moreover, it probably helped smokers to allay hunger and thirst, so they could concentrate on their work for an extended period. The cigarette was therefore the perfect commodity for obtaining relief and instant satisfaction while at work.
\nvi vi vi vi vi
\np.42 - 3/6/13 5:42 PM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\n. According to this account, proposed mainly by historians of Europe, modernity stood for a more rigid distinction between work and
\nvi vi vi vi
\np.43 - 3/6/13 5:42 PM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nree time, and leisure is actually a modern concept that came to represent time free from work.5 In Europe (especially Britain) such novel notions of a more structured time developed with economic changes, which we associate with the Industrial Revolution and in which working time and the working space became more structured/disciplined and separated units.
\nvi vi
\np.43 - 3/6/13 5:44 PM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\ngether with direct British economic and political control after 1882 further enhanced this process. But what does the transition to cigarette consumption in fact tell us about such transitions? If we take the description above at face value, the pipe could have re-established itself as a habit of leisure in this new division between work and free time. However, it was the cigarette that resisted this division that came into fashion, because it allowed for leisure while at work, and at the same time catered to more structured leisure outside work. Its private and public consumption was thus efficient not only because it was quick and easy to use but because it enabled bridging the gap of this new dichotomy in everyday life. How this was accomplished by different segments of Egyptian society is explained next. The cigarette became part of a new office culture that first developed with the establishment of a large state bureaucracy and educated professionals the effendiyya. At the turn of the century, a survey among journalists, professionals best associated with the effendiyya, showed that most were passionate cigarette smokers.6 Because of its work-enhancing qualities, the quick reception of the cigarette may indicate that a new work ethos was developing, putting extra value on efficient use of time, which became more structured and precious, and emphasizing sustained work.
\nvi
\np.43 - 3/6/13 5:47 PM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nepresented a break from the past and certain dynamism associated with modernity. The high quality Egyptian cigarette, soon to become famous around the world, was the perfect commodity for this purpose. Its consumption symbolized successful adaptation to global changes while still keeping an authentic Egyptian identity.
\nvi
\np.44 - 3/6/13 5:49 PM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nn all these cases the transition to cigarette consumption was closely related to the intensification of work and an increase in workload, in which the cigarette offered quick satisfaction and comfort while at work.
\nvi vi
\np.46 - 3/6/13 5:57 PM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nThe cigarette industry further benefited from the commercial advantages that came with the first wave of globalization in the period before the First World War. Well integrated into the world economy via international trade routes, Egypt was an ideal place to start an export-oriented business,
\nvi vi vi
\np.47 - 3/6/13 5:59 PM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nThe Egyptian cigarette industry soon became the most renowned industry in the region and cigarettes made with Eastern tobacco – the plant cultivated in the Ottoman Empire, Greece, and the Balkans – would be globally associated with Egypt.
\nvi vi vi vi
\np.49 - 3/6/13 6:21 PM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nccordingly, the Egyptian government introduced taxes on imported tobaccos, while reinforcing the existing monopoly on imports of cigars and tumbak.36 This produced a rapid increase in customs revenues on imported tobacco from £E441,443 (Egyptian pound) in 1889 to £E727,788 in 1890.37 From 1890 to 1913 tariffs on tobacco were as profitable to the state as the duties on all the other commodities imported into Egypt combined.
\nvi
\np.51 - 3/6/13 6:51 PM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nSince making cigarettes by hand required little initial capital and was done in a small workshop, production could start gradually, while tobaccomen continued to run their already established businesses. This combination of few legislative barriers to entry, low capital investment, and relatively small risk involved in initial manufacturing made cigarette production ideal for small entrepreneurs. Indeed, for Greek and later Armenian immigrants, the business became one of the main channels of economic mobility in Egypt
\nvi vi vi
\np.54 - 3/6/13 7:02 PM
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\nThe cigarette industry thus developed from small made-to-order manufacturing to large-scale production of a ready-to-use consumer good
\nvi vi
\np.59 - 3/6/13 7:15 PM
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\nhe globalizing world before the First World War experienced much convergence in consumers’ tastes as many new commodities were entering international trade and their consumption worldwide was being enhanced by new marketing methods. The usual accounts of such processes maintain that metropolitan preferences trickled down to the periphery, often through transitions in local elite consumption; the impact of the Egyptian (and Eastern) cigarette on the international market tells a different story whereby a commodity from the periphery initially influenced global taste.
\nvi vi
\np.60 - 3/6/13 7:18 PM
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\nreat cotton boom of the early 1860s.
\nvi
\np.60 - 3/6/13 7:20 PM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nhe introduction of new retailing businesses into Egypt was manifested throughout the country by the appearance of the Greek store, offering novel commodities and lending services, in practically every village in Egypt.5 But it was in the city, especially in the newly built European-style parts of Alexandria and Cairo, that novel high-end retailing establishments became most conspicuous. This was especially so as the cotton boom and its aftermath fed Ismail’s grand plans to transform Egypt into a Western country and Cairo into a second Paris, a vision best illustrated by the rebuilding of the Azbakiyya quarter, which became the centre of novel retailing in Egypt.6 Ismail’s visit to the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1867 influenced this large development project
\nvi
\np.62 - 3/6/13 7:29 PM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nccordingly, manufacturers named their outlets after the name of the factory, which more often than not was their own family nam
\nvi
\np.63 - 3/6/13 7:30 PM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nUnlike the bazaar, where retail was conducted in an open space,17 the new stores lured consumers with their attractive shop windows. Furthermore, upon entering the store, consumers were secluded from the outside by these glass barriers, and their attention riveted on the commodities lavishly presented within. These were branded and packaged, rather than sold in bulk. The little information that we have on the interiors of the shops suggests that they were well decorated to entice customers still more. In 1933, an article in the Greek magazine The Sphinx, published in Egypt, described the Gianaclis store as “marvellous for its Arabian-style decor”.18 The cigarette stores were likewise highly specialized, offering a wide selection of different brands. In 1915, the price list of Dimitrino and Co., one of the bigger manufacturers, contained 55 different cigarette brands.
\nvi vi vi
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\nandmade Egyptian cigarettes were expensive by any standard, although tourists who purchased them in Egypt no doubt considered them a great buy compared with their price back home
\nvi
\np.64 - 3/6/13 7:33 PM
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\nor consumers, exclusive cigarette venues were places to shop and socialize. Shoppers visited several different stores, compared the various brands for quality and price, and bought the cigarettes of their choice. They received service from knowledgeable salespeople, who spoke several different languages. The cigarette stores were also gathering places where people met to smoke.21 Their location in the more fashionable districts of the cities, next to other highlights such as coffeehouses, restaurants, the Opera, and the big hotels, further integrated cigarette shopping with other modes of socialization and leisure.
\nvi
\np.66 - 3/6/13 7:37 PM
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\nmost significant form of promoting cigarettes was on-site advertising because cigarette stores, with their central location, flashy window-cases, and large signs, were a constant advertisement to the crowd passing by.
\nvi
\np.66 - 3/6/13 7:38 PM
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\nThe following study of contemporary advertising techniques allows a glimpse into the contemporary art of persuasion, which was very much influenced by the development of the spectacle in Victorian Britain.28 It further demonstrates how processes of commodification and commercialization of the cigarette (and other products) promoted popular iconography of Egypt in that country and abroad
\nvi vi
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\n7 companies in Egypt circulated 130 different series of cigarette cards.29 These were small printed pictures or photographs that manufacturers placed inside cigarette packets. The purpose of the cards was to induce smokers to continue to purchase the same brand in order to collect the entire series. Some cards depicted Egyptian landscapes, politicians, famous actors and actresses, but a large proportion of these cards showed pictures of women in sexually suggestive poses.
\nvi
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\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nC. Lagoudakis, the Greek owner of a print-shop, was the first to introduce lithography (an essential technology in printing colour images) when he started to serve the special packaging needs of the Egyptian cigarette industry.33
\nvi vi vi
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\nne manufacturer, George Kiriacou, playing on his own name, even called his factory King George and received royal permission to name one of his brands after King George V.36
\nvi
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\nPacket designs also suggested to consumers that the cigarette originated in Pharaonic, ancient Greek, or medieval Arab cultures. They thereby obscured the modern and industrial nature of their commodities, and associated their smokes with ancient practices. Suggesting that cigarettes carried exotic and timeless tastes and aromas, they mystified smoking itself.
\nvi vi
\np.70 - 3/6/13 7:49 PM
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\nUntil recently scholars mainly studied the development of Egyptian national iconography from a highbrow perspective. They examined the endeavours of Egyptian intellectuals and artists to shape national images through various fields of cultural production such as novels, poems, sculpture, and painting. What went missing were other, less conscious but not less important popular venues, through which such iconography was canonized. The analysis of cigarette packets demonstrates how commercialized geographic, cultural, and ethnographical images, with which manufacturers tried to advance the sale of their goods, contributed to this process. Such images of Egypt penetrated the everyday life of upper class Egyptians for whom the ready-made cigarette became a staple. It is therefore possible to suggest a connection between this commercial art and the development of national iconography in this country. After all, it was people like Lutfi al-Sayyid, a devout smoker,39 who established the Pharaonic movement in Egypt and were responsible for the introduction of novel images into the repertoire of Egyptian nationalism.
\nvi
\np.70 - 3/6/13 7:51 PM
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\nforegoing section thus suggested a dialogue between high and low cultures (if indeed a distinctive division between the two ever existed) in bringing about a graphic repertoire that would be associated with the Egyptian nation
\nvi vi vi
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\nDemand for cigarettes started to develop in Europe, Britain, and the US in the 1880s,41 concurrently with rapid growth of the Egyptian cigarette industry. In the globalizing world economy before the war, it was easy for manufacturers of Egyptian cigarettes to export their goods because Egypt was conveniently located on major trading routes. Furthermore, the opening of the country and the rise in foreign trade after the cotton boom of the 1860s promised manufacturers reliable and cheap ways to ship their commoditi
\nvi
\np.73 - 3/6/13 8:07 PM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nhe initial charm of the Eastern tobacco cigarettes took longer to dispel, and as late as 1903 Eastern brands constituted about 25 per cent of the national market.61 At this time Duke’s American Tobacco Company (ATC), a conglomerate that came to control most US cigarette production, engaged in a negative advertising campaign against Eastern brands.62
\nvi
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\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nIn 1913 R.J. Reynolds, one of the companies created after the break-up of ATC under the anti-trust laws, introduced the first brand to be sold nationwide.67 In the fierce competition that developed in the American market the company sought a way to excel. The brand-name Camel was picked in an attempt to compete against Liggett & Myers’ leading brand, Fatima,68 and the manufacturer further associated its brand with the Orient by printing the Pyramids, palm trees, and Islamic architecture on the packets in order to affiliate it with the renowned Egyptian cigarette. Many years later, when the reputation of the Egyptian cigarette has all but disappeared, Camel still stands as a reminder of its past glory and its influence on international production and consumption of cigarettes.
\nvi vi vi vi
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\nIn both cases, the success of local manufacturers in selling their luxury commodities testified to their skill in adjusting contemporary Western promotion techniques to the marketing of the Egyptian cigarette.
\nvi
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\nStill more, in the period after the First World War, with the introduction of machine production to Egypt, earlier forms of promoting the luxury handmade cigarette also trickled down to selling practices in the mass market
\nvi
\np.76 - 3/6/13 8:15 PM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nxurious colonial smoke was associated with a cultural hodgepodge of ancient Egypt, Greece, and the Arab East. It also demonstrated how these images, in turn, shaped the popular image of Egypt in the eyes of Egyptians and non-Egyptians alike. This opens (but leaves without conclusive answers) a whole new set of questions regarding the role of marketing and advertising in shaping mass culture and the iconography of Egyptian nationalism.
\nvi
\np.76 - 3/6/13 8:17 PM
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\nhe role of the Egyptian cigarette in introducing cigarettes to new environments worldwide, and especially its lasting impact on American consumer taste and production, stands in contrast to the conventional association of modern (material and intellectual) commodities with Western origins and Western global dissemination of such commodities through trade and advertising. My case study implies a more open-ended exchange of commodities worldwide that further accounted for the development of a truly global taste for goods such as the cigarette. In this, it joins a growing volume of research on the advancement of modernity as an international process. The impact of the Egyptian cigarette on world consumption augments other examples of two-way exchanges between centre and periphery rather than simple, one-sided transitions
\nvi vi vi vi vi
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\n4 INCONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTIO
\nchapter 4
\np.81 - 3/6/13 8:26 PM
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\nnderstanding consumption under financial constraints Consumption Studies have so far mostly focused on the development of affluent capitalist societies. They usually take as their premises the emergence and rapid development of mass markets in which progressively larger groups of relatively better-off consumers gain access to a gathering stream of commodities. In modern consumer societies (mostly in the West), luxury goods quickly become necessities. Although differences in quantity and quality of goods remain prevalent, there is a general notion of rapid “democratization” in consumption, which is largely responsible for the creation of consumer culture (or cultures)
\nvi
\np.81 - 3/6/13 8:26 PM
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\nocusing on conspicuous consumption, and often on the development of local middleclasses, which is closely associated with such consumerism.
\nvi
\np.81 - 3/6/13 8:27 PM
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\nuggest that even those living close to subsistence consume in ways that create meanings for themselves and their social surroundings. In other words, my aim is to demonstrate a variety of venues in which even inconspicuous consumption is shaped by choice.7 We also need to explain rationale and entitlement in personal, family, and stratabased allocation of limited resources
\nvi vi vi
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\nfollowing analysis integrates quantifiable variables in tobacco consumption with a qualitative study of varying smoking patterns under harsh economic conditions
\nvi
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\nigarettes (and coffee) were offered to guests at meetings and wedding ceremonies, or to the fukaha (reciters of the Koran) in the intervals between recitations.25 Scarcity increased the social value of cigarettes as tokens of appreciation and an expression of generosity or wealth, attributes that did not necessarily harmonize with the meaning of consumption among the more affluent.
\nvi vi vi holyoke
\np.85 - 3/6/13 8:39 PM
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\nyrout, somewhat critically, reported how tea and sugar took precedence over other seemingly more substantial foodstuffs in the countryside: “This black tea [highly concentrated and very sweet tea] has become the drug of the fellah. Imports have tripled in a few years.
\nvi
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\nvernment has on occasion raised the duty to three times its original figure, to make it less accessible to the fellah. But the evil has not diminished, for those who have acquired the habit will do without necessary food, and starve their families rather than give it up.”26 In both cases of the tea and sugar and the cigarettes, such diet preferences stood for stratification (class-oriented consumption patterns) and real-life choices of less-affluent consumers which were central to the quality and meaning of their life
\nvi vi vi
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\nhis meant that the price of Matossian’s cheaper brands consisted on average of approximately 76 per cent tariff costs. By comparison, tariffs constituted about 23 per cent of Matossian’s most expensive brand. So the system of indirect taxation on tobacco exerted a much greater impact on the prices of cheaper brands, and in fact on the proportional percentage of tax paid by the less-affluent consumers who bought them.
\nvi vi
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\ngyptian government (like many others at the end of the era of globalization) was taking protective measures by raising tariff barriers in an attempt to encourage Import Substitute Industrialization (ISI) projects in the aftermath of the Depression
\nvi vi
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\n5 MANUFACTURING AND SELLING IN THE LOCAL MARKET
\nchapter 5
\np.95 - 3/6/13 9:00 PM
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\nBy distributing their own products directly to consumers, manufacturers cut the costs of middlemen, making the role of the traditional tobacco seller (dakhakhini) obsolete, although producers might have incorporated some tobacco sellers into their distribution networks. The large number of employees in the Armenian enterprises clearly suggests that distribution, and to some extent retailing, were closely integrated with production in these companies. For example, by 1918 Melkonian had 80 cigarette selling posts in Egypt and the Sudan.
\nvi
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\nThe development of nationwide retailing also meant that manufacturers for the Egyptian market, unlike the producers of luxury cigarettes, limited the number of their tobacco brands so as to facilitate distribution and increase brand recognition
\nvi
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\nCreating such brand recognition was an important stage in retailing nationwide because it enabled manufacturers to employ a large number of sales persons who were not tobacco specialists or simply to sell their cigarettes via general retailing venues (the Greek stores in the countryside
\nvi
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\nThe introduction of machines revolutionized the business by increasing production capacity while significantly reducing the price per cigarette. As a result, these two manufacturers came to dominate cigarette production in their respective countries. A “tobacco war” started when Duke’s American Tobacco Company (ATC) tried to penetrate the British market. In 1902, when the war ended, ATC and Imperial Tobacco – a group of British manufacturers headed by Wills – began to cooperate in the global market.15 For this purpose, they established one of the first multinational companies, BAT, which soon dominated international production of cigarettes and was to exert a major effect on the Egyptian industry in the years to come
\nvi vi vi
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\nBAT attempted other strategies. In 1907, it introduced the first cigarette-making machines in Egypt via Maspero Frères.22 However, the company soon discovered that production of cheap cigarettes did not yield the anticipated advantage over local competitors. This was because Egyptians continued to smoke water-pipes, and when they did smoke cigarettes they preferred to roll their own, or, if they could afford it, to buy handmade cigarettes, which were considered better quality than machinemade. In 1908, BAT tried yet again radically to change the existing tobacco market in Egypt.23 The company approached the Egyptian government an
\nvi
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\noffered financial and expert help in resuming domestic cultivation of tobacco. BAT also offered to compensate the government for the annual sum of its current revenues from import tariffs, which was about £E1,700,000.24 In exchange, BAT would have the right to control local cultivation and the government would prohibit tobacco imports to Egypt. This was not the first time that a tobacco multinational had tried to interfere with the region’s tobacco market. In 1902, Duke’s American Tobacco Company had attempted to gain control of the Middle Eastern supply market.2
\nvi
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\n. Indeed, older ventures where economies of scale were less profitable, producers in areas such as the furniture industry, which benefited from the high costs of shipment incurred by imports, or producers of commodities that better catered to local tastes, also survived, albeit mostly in the form of small-scale (workshop) production. Moreover, modest consumers in Egypt could afford far fewer of the commodities that producers abroad increasingly sold in mass markets in developed economies. For example, the market for ready-to-wear clothing remained very limited for an extended period because textile production mostly took place at home or was tailored-made for the relatively small group of consumers who could afford it. Under such conditions, repair and refurbishing services also limited markets for new items. Nevertheless, large-scale manufacturing, such as tobacco production for the local market, had a long-term effect on the Egyptian economy and these businesses would also constitute the backbone of production by the state after nationalization in the wake of the 1956 events (see epilogue
\nvi
\np.100 - 3/6/13 9:13 PM
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\nhe following account, based on a close reading of the contemporary press, attempts to strike a balance between intra-industry conflict and its wider context, the dramatic events of 1919, in examining how this industrial change was integrated into a broader scheme of things: cross-industry workers’ unrest, unionization, and a close relationship between workers and the national movement
\nvi vi
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\nIn 1900, Lagoudakis, who founded the earliest paper mill catering to the production of handmade cigarettes, visited the United States.32 There he observed for the first time the work of cigarette-making machines. He realized that these machines would make manual production obsolete, hence damage his business. He therefore decided upon his return to Egypt to convert his paper mill to production of other paper products
\nvi
\np.101 - 3/6/13 9:14 PM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nluxury cigarettes, switching to machines was not an option because they produced a large number of brands, which required different blends and sizes of paper and therefore did not fit into standardized mass production. Even more so, customers valued the handmade cigarette, and manufacturers hesitated to ruin their reputation as makers of luxury cigarettes by introducing machines.
\nvi
\np.102 - 3/6/13 9:17 PM
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\nor example, in August 1908 workers at Matossian established a union to fight a reduction in their wages.36 In response, the factory introduced cigarette-making machines and fired nine strikers.37 This further drove workers to organize, and by 1910 the Matossian union had 200 members.
\nvi
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\nwhere workers struggled against the BAT-owned Gamsaragan factory, the local council resolved to impose a 9 per cent tax on the output of Gamsaragan, but the factory relocated rather than pay the tax.72
\nvi
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\nIn July 1924, Matossian embarked on a second campaign, which advertised a lottery based on coupons tucked inside its cigarette packets. The company promised consumers that it would distribute prizes worth a total of £E4,000, without any change in the quality of the tobacco that it used in making cigarettes.77 This promise was significant because, as suggested in chapter four, at that period manufacturers usually attempted to cut costs of production, for example, by using cheap and low quality tobaccos from the Far East. Matossian also distributed inside the cigarette packets photographs of members of the Egyptian parliament.
\nvi
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\nHe complained that he bought 60 packets of cigarettes and found inside 45 photos of Muhammad Bak Basyuni and 15 photos of Bayumi Bak Madkur.
\nvi vi
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\nIn April 1923, one firm included in every box of cigarettes a numbered lottery coupon for a prize of one million German marks.81 This was a promotion ploy rather than the promise of a big win because Germany was experiencing hyper-inflation at the time.
\nvi vi
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\n6 MULTINATIONAL INTERFERENCE AND ITS DEMISE
\nChapter 6
\np.111 - 3/6/13 10:01 PM
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\nut a report by the Labour Conciliation Board (LCB) implies that BAT was able to buy industrial peace by paying redundant rollers a substantial amount of severance pay.10
\nvi
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\nEven more so, BAT was becoming more aware globally of the rise of nationalism and its possible negative impact on its business, and it sought to counter this issue by downplaying its direct involvement in such markets and operating via local subsidiaries.23 While the Matossians were able to secure their own position in Eastern, Britons soon filled most of the important managerial and administrative positions in the company.
\nvi vi
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\nt is particularly necessary in the case of Egypt that we should not create ill will over our handling of this commodity, otherwise it may do us much harm in our efforts to get surplus foodstuffs from that country.”36 Indeed, MESC was quite worried about cultivation of local agricultural products. It was greatly preoccupied with investigating ways to ensure adequate supply of the countryside with basic non-agricultural goods to secure a minimal standard of living for the fellahs, fearing the breakout of epidemics and reduction in production of much needed foodstuffs.
\nvi
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\nIn the letter, the company suggested that the Tobacco Controller and the Economic and Inter-Allied Department of the Ministry of War Transport assure the abovementioned BAT director J.G. Wells that Eastern would be allowed to import larger quantities of tobacco than the ones approved by MESC and would also enjoy a better ratio of the tobacco imported to the Middle East. In reaction to this, a MESC dispatch to the Ministry of War Transport ended: “We have often previously been embarrassed when Eastern Company have known details of tobacco quotas not only of Egypt but also Palestine, Aden, Saudi Arabia and Iraq while these were still under discussion between London and ourselves, and in view of the Centre’s rigid rule that territorial quotas should not be disclosed to individual firms, we would be grateful if you could take the question up in London.”
\nvi
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\nstipulated that companies should employ at least 75 per cent Egyptian employees, to whom they should pay at least 65 per cent of the total salaries paid to employees. For the purposes of Egyptianization, the law defined an employee as a person who performs administrative or specialized tasks or supervises others’ work. The companies had to employ at least 90 per cent Egyptian workers, to whom they had to pay at least 80 per cent of the total salaries paid to workers.
\nvi
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\nThe factory and the distribution networks also had their own managerial hierarchies (see below). BAT controlled Eastern by placing a small number of Britons in key management and administrative positions. With the exception of the Matossians, only Britons sat on Eastern’s board.
\nvi
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\nThe gap in wages between Britons and the rest was not limited to managerial positions but was common among other employees as well. The Matossians were the exception. Joseph Matossian’s salary and benefits as a vice-chairman were about 20 per cent higher than those of Eastern’s British chairman. The fact that Britons earned more did not necessarily imply discrimination according to nationality. It suggested that Eastern was willing to compensate employees with special skills for their relocation to Egypt. Furthermore, Eastern had to pay its British employees wages comparable to similar positions in other BAT enterprises.
\nvi vi
\np.121 - 3/6/13 10:51 PM
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\noreover, Eastern’s pay scale shows a huge gap in wages between management and employees. Ewan John Taylor, the chairman of the company, earned approximately £E833 per month, S.A. Redwood, the factory manager, earned approximately £E277 per month, and B.F. Tashrow, the sales manager, earned approximately £E144 per month.64 In comparison, most district distributors, the worst paid category of employees, earned £E5-10 per month.65
\nvi vi
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\nThe company’s generosity towards its workers stemmed from the fact that at that time it enjoyed a period of increased production as a result of the war. Furthermore, Eastern was sensitive to its position as a British company in Egypt. It encouraged non-political unionism, which Kamil proposed, and was willing to pay relatively high wages to ensure smooth operation.
\nvi
\np.123 - 3/6/13 10:56 PM
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\nthough BAT worked through a subsidiary, Eastern was to a large extent a British enterprise, structured and managed as a BAT venture.
\nvi
\np.123 - 3/6/13 10:57 PM
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\nLocal non-Egyptian staff also earned more than their Egyptian colleagues. Still, Eastern’s “welfare-capitalism”, its readiness to buy industrial peace, meant that Egyptian staff was among the best-compensated and enjoyed benefits equalled only by few in other industries, which contradicts the somewhat stereotypical view of multinationals as exploiters of local workforce.
\nvi
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\nAT’s experience in Egypt (through Eastern) thus suggests a complex picture, which was closely related to specific political and economic conditions, and defied neo-liberal or dependency/ anti-globalist generalizations regarding the role of FDI in local economic developmen
\nvi vi
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\nSmall and medium-size manufacturers consisted of three broadly defined groups. The first was manufacturers who earlier had produced high quality handmade cigarettes
\nvi
\np.125 - 3/6/13 11:02 PM
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\nhe second group of manufacturers in the industry consisted of Armenian and Greek businesses that produced primarily for the Egyptian market
\nvi
\np.125 - 3/6/13 11:03 PM
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\nA third group consisted of latecomer Egyptian manufacturers who developed their businesses in the 1930s. Although none of them became a significant producer, the press coverage that they received and their own extensive advertising campaigns enable us to see how these manufacturers politicized competition within the industry and used national sentiment and the “national struggle” to promote private interests. One such manufacturer was al-Ittihad (the Union), which was established in late 1934 with much support from Abbas Halim, an Egyptian aristocrat who built a political power base by promoting labour issues
\nvi
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\nHe concluded: “Every smoker who chooses this company’s cigarettes over the cigarettes of other companies will also take part in the awakening of Egypt.”98 But the Egyptian public was in no hurry to change its cigarette preferences, and the company went into liquidation only two years after having started production.
\nvi vi
\np.128 - 3/6/13 11:13 PM
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\nhe situation in Eastern, like that in other foreign-owned businesses, changed dramatically in 1956. On 1 November 1956, the Egyptian government began to sequester British, French, and Jewish property in the wake of the Suez Crisis.109 The government put major industrial companies under the jurisdiction of the newly established Egyptian Economic Organization (al-Mu’assasa al-Iqtisadiyya).110 On 23 May 1957, the government expropriated British and French shareholdings in nine of these major companies,111 including Eastern, in an act that finalized what was by now de facto nationalization of these companies.
\nvi vi
\np.129 - 3/6/13 11:14 PM
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\nasser’s regime did not stop short at nationalizing foreign property, but continued to bring the entire economy under strict government control. In October and November 1961, the regime moved to rid itself further of the influence of the local businessmen. It arrested thirty-seven individuals, among whom were Joseph and Jean-Pierre Matossian.116
\nvi vi
\np.129 - 3/6/13 11:15 PM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nround the same time, Eastern’s old competitor Coutarelli was nationalized as well, and became the Nasser Cigarette Company.
\np.129 - 3/6/13 11:17 PM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nEconomic nationalism implicitly served workers to improve on their bargaining power against foreign and local minority employers and allowed non-market based entry to new Egyptian entrepreneurs. Through Egyptianization it had the potential of advancing employment of local nationals in public companies at both blue and white collar positions, and to better their wages and benefits. Nationalization later facilitated a major asset transfer to the Egyptian government, a process made easy by the highly integrated structure of the cigarette industry and many other large businesses in Egypt.
\nvi vi vi vi
\np.130 - 3/6/13 11:18 PM
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\nconomic transitions were no doubt facilitated by immediate historical developments such as the establishment of MESC during the Second World War. Nationalization also took place under the clout of the 1956 war, and Arab Socialism later emerged under the influence of a bi-polar international system. Nevertheless, Egyptian economic nationalism, which stood at the core of these transitions, was a long-term development linking the Monarchical and Revolutionary eras.
\np.133 - 3/6/13 11:19 PM
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\n7 SMOKING AS A CULTURAL DISTINCTION
\nChapter 7
\np.133 - 3/6/13 11:20 PM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nmoking was used to demarcate social groups and novel social hierarchies in a changing Egyptian society; representations of tobacco consumption created a sense of “You are what you smoke.” As such, smoking delineated the boundaries between three social categories: ahl al-balad (sons of the country)
\nvi
\np.134 - 3/6/13 11:21 PM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nlower urbanite stratum, effendiyya (the educated), a middle stratum, and ahl al-dhawat or bashawiyya (the rich and aristocratic), an upper stratum.1 The discussion below demonstrates that each group was represented as having its own corresponding smoking preference, the shisha for ibn al-balad, the cigarette for the effendi, and the cigar for ibn al-dhawat. Such metaphors gradually developed into a new effendi cultural (including material culture) canon, creating an effendi outlook that came to dominate the Egyptian national culture. They were also at the core of inclusion and exclusion processes based on creating binary oppositions between “modern” and “traditional” from below, and “Egyptian” and “western/foreign” from above, through which the new effendi middle negotiated a place for itself within the nation as modern but authentic. This was well expressed in the three categories of cultural classification suggested above: ibn al-balad (traditional but backward), ibn al-dhawat (modern but foreign), and effendi (modern and authentic/Egyptian
\nvi vi vi vi
\np.134 - 3/6/13 11:24 PM
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\nIt is argued that representations of shisha consumption, and still more so cigars, were conflated with notions of otherness. They suit a Bourdieu-type analysis of different kinds of smoking as means of creating social distinctions.2
\nvi vi vi vi vi
\np.134 - 3/6/13 11:25 PM
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\nhe chapter goes against the formal analysis of distinctions that operates well in the case of the shisha and the cigar. Rather, it emphasizes negotiations of identity within the effendiyya based on various smoking patterns, standing for agreements, tensions, and contradictions in the discourse on the nature of this group. Put differently, chapter eight explores the more intricate representations of effendi agency rather than the externalized, more rigid categorybased manifestations of otherness employed in representations of the other social groups.
\nvi
\np.134 - 3/6/13 11:26 PM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nhe categories suggested above are more discursive than analytical and they are treated here as cultural rather than social typologies. Real-life consumption practices certainly corresponded with such representations, or were taken against such backdrops; but smoking preferences were also grounded in the economic realities discussed in earlie
\nvi
\np.135 - 3/6/13 11:26 PM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nchapters, which determined a person’s ability to consume tobacco. T
\nvi
\np.135 - 3/6/13 11:26 PM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nReadings in effendi culture production encompass cinema, literature (including autobiography), and the local press (contemporary advertising, images of smokers in photographs and cartoons, and written commentaries on smoking). For the purpose of my discussion, I intentionally ignore the boundaries between “popular” and “normative” culture (sometimes referred to as “low” and “high,” “mass” and “elite” culture)
\nvi vi vi holyoke
\np.136 - 3/6/13 11:34 PM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nEgypt the shisha was not associated with state officials’ backwardness and reactionism; such qualities were assigned to the cigar, which represented the overly westernized elite (see below).
\nvi
\np.136 - 3/6/13 11:35 PM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nThis passive worldview of the Ottoman ancien régime was unfavourably juxtaposed to the enthusiasm and dynamism of the younger Revolutionary generation, which also upheld a modern lifestyle in which the shisha was “out”
\nvi
\np.137 - 3/6/13 11:36 PM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nthough many an effendi rose from this social group and its environment represented a familiar social background, it was also the place from which one departed and which became the antithesis of the protagonist’s new lifestyle after he had improved his social status through education (I use masculine forms in this analysis because the protagonists in such narratives were overwhelmingly male). In this context the consumption of shisha served to emphasize the gap created by the perceived development (or advancement) of the effendi over his former social environment, and his own former life.
\nvi vi vi holyoke
\np.137 - 3/6/13 11:38 PM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nnotion of traditional smoking in the popular coffeehouses, in which one seemingly spent time for no purpose other than a passing pleasure, stood in contrast to an effendi sensibility which emphasized utilitarian use of free time and was therefore critical of unstructured time and resources endlessly wasted (see next chapter
\nvi vi vi holyoke
\np.137 - 3/6/13 11:39 PM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nhafla stood in contrast to the more formal environment of the European-style café and the stylish nightclub, places of leisure frequented by the up-and-coming effendi and the upper class basha, in which the cigarette and the cigar were the main smoking preference
\nvi vi vi
\np.138 - 3/6/13 11:40 PM
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\nOften shisha smoking was associated with traditional men of social and economic influence and father figures. It represented their authority but also their backward world-view, as opposed to that of the modern effendi.
\nvi
\np.138 - 3/6/13 11:41 PM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nn the conversation, the father, seated, dressed in a galabiyya and smoking a shisha, followed the conventional wisdom of his age by suggesting that his educated son would improve his lot by seeking a post with the government. His son, standing before his father, wearing a European suit and refraining from smoking, had quite a different plan: to look for a more productive occupation in the free market by developing his father’s metal workshop into a steel factory
\nvi vi vi vi vi vi holyoke
\np.139 - 3/6/13 11:53 PM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nWhen such quotes are taken as evidence of a differentiation process, the descriptions above stand for effendi criticism of lax attitudes to spending, and place an implicit value on austerity and a properly budgeted expenditure. In addition, they contrast a “rational” approach, associated with calculated allocation of time and money, to the ibn al-balad-type “irrational” (and “wasteful”) treatment of such resources. Accordingly, effendi criticism created “right” and “wrong” ways to consume and group distinctions based on consuming (or not consuming) in the right way. In her analysis, based on interviews with dwellers of lower-class neighbourhoods in Cairo, el-Messiri demonstrated that this group gave a very different interpretation and value judgment to similar consumption patterns among (self-identified) ibn al-balad persons of a later period.1
\nvi vi vi
\np.140 - 3/6/13 11:56 PM
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\nTheir decision not to advertise undoubtedly had much to do with the fact that consumers of such a well-established commodity would not be persuaded by an advertisement in the press. As I showed elsewhere, advertisements of the period were mostly a showcase for new commodities rather than a means for increasing sales of established ones.13 Even more important, readers were mostly from the effendis, and advertisers saw no point in promoting the shisha for such an audience.
\nvi
\np.140 - 3/6/13 11:58 PM
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\nas a British commentator noted, the cigar demanded “that touch of art which mass production never knows.”15
\nvi
\np.141 - 3/6/13 11:58 PM
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\nThe cigar was also very different from the cigarette. Stronger in smell and larger in size, it stood for power, authority, and success. Although both the cigar and the cigarette were associated with modernity, the vision of modernity suggested by these two commodities was different. The indigenous effendi cigarette stood for a local modern way of life (see chapter two). In contrast, the cigar was the perfect stranger (or Other); it took its meanings and allure from abroad and was coveted but also made to look sinister for the same reason. It manifested affluence and was associated with the hedonistic and westernized upper-class Egyptians (al-bashawiyya or ahl al-dhawat)
\nvi vi vi
\np.145 - 3/7/13 12:05 AM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nThe discussion above showed that the shisha and the cigar were strong metaphors of distinction and otherness. Shisha smoking represented a spectrum of effendi encounters with (and often criticism of) the life he left behind when he climbed the social ladder through education. It stood for “traditional” life in the hara, sometimes a nostalgic past but mainly the site of
\nvi
\np.146 - 3/7/13 12:05 AM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nissed opportunities, backwardness, a stifling resistance to change, and even immorality. Cigar smoking, by contrast, represented a distinction “from above” and was identified with foreign modernity and inequality, a limit to entry, economic and political dominance by the contemporary elite, and outright corruption. While coffeehouses kept the tradition of shisha smoking alive, the cigar never “trickled down” to other social groups in Egypt and was soon to disappear. It was the cigarette, rather than the cigar, that came to represent Nasser and his regime, whose rule would be strongly associated with the coming of age of effendi culture
\nvi vi
\np.147 - 3/7/13 12:07 AM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nrepresentations of cigarette smoking were employed in intra-group debates rather than inter-group distinctions discussed in the previous chapter. There were right and wrong ways to smoke a cigarette, and an elaborate etiquette determined where, when, how, and with whom one smoked.
\nvi
\np.148 - 3/7/13 12:09 AM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nhe development of an effendi smoking etiquette well demonstrates the middle ground between a desire to appear modern, and consequently different, and a strong need for authenticity and belonging, which was at the root of contemporary identity politics, including national identity
\nvi vi vi vi
\np.148 - 3/7/13 12:10 AM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\ngarette, like former tobacco smoking devices, was more often used as a means to socialize. Smokers offered a cigarette to a friend, or lit a cigarette for a companion as a token of camaraderie and respect. One also offered a cigarette to a stranger as an icebreaker, a token of courtesy and admiration, a way to solicit help, or thanks for a service rendered. Smoking took place during a conversation, while watching a show, or drinking coffee or alcoholic beverages with others. In all this, cigarette smoking remained quite similar to that of the shisha, and it expressed the same sense of authenticity and familiarity which was earlier associated with the consumption of the water-pipe.
\nvi
\np.148 - 3/7/13 12:12 AM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nEven more so, it was at the setting for countless other activities – standing, walking, writing, waiting for work at one’s desk (or in line), and talking over the phone – where past smoking vehicles could not fit in. Cigarette smoking represented a busier lifestyle, in which one took one’s leisure (in the form of smoking) when one could and sometimes even on the job
\nvi
\np.149 - 3/7/13 12:14 AM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nWhen the cigarette appeared in novel leisure environments such as the European-style coffeehouse, nightclub, bar, hotel, and private party (as opposed to neighbourhood festivities open to all), it created a similar feeling as in the workplace, but in reverse – transforming leisure spaces into more structured and business-like environments. These environments were less communal and more segregated. For example, unlike the neighbourhood coffeehouse, the European-style coffeehouse where cigarette smoking often took place was ostensibly open to all but in practice it was exclusive in price, status-symbols (clothing), and location (in the newer parts of the city).
\nvi vi holyoke
\np.149 - 3/7/13 12:15 AM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\n; contemporary advertising did not cater to mass consumption but to limited groups of upwardly mobile effendis and the affluent. After the First World War, cigarette advertising experienced a significant shift from a focus on the commodity and its qualities to the consumer.
\nvi vi vi
\np.150 - 3/7/13 12:17 AM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nThey hinted at the importance of public display in a society going through rapid transitions, where the individual found himself in new environments in which older status symbols, and the familiarity associated with village or neighbourhood life, were gradually fading and being replaced to some extent by the consumption of goods
\nvi
\np.154 - 3/7/13 12:42 AM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nBut such representations do provide a perspective on contemporary negotiations of everyday life in matters such as the meaning of work and the time one spent on pleasure, the changing spaces in which work and leisure took place, and the enhanced role of fashion and consumption as social mobility quickened its pace.
\nvi vi
\np.154 - 3/7/13 12:43 AM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nWomen’s smoking was a “veiled” activity, so women (like other categories of subordinates such as youth) were not supposed to smoke in front of people who had authority over them,
\nvi
\np.155 - 3/7/13 12:45 AM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\ncigarette manifested power. Even more so, smoking was associated with masculinity and a distinctly male practice, which was enforced by a male etiquette of cigarette consumption
\nvi
\np.155 - 3/7/13 12:45 AM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nhen the mother figure smoked it symbolized the exceptional character of such a woman and, in a kind of a zero-sum game within the family, the diminished role of the male protagonist.
\nvi
\np.155 - 3/7/13 12:46 AM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nWomen also smoked in the absence of the male head of the family in cases of death or divorce. This was especially so for older women, whose age gave them immunity from criticism,
\nvi
\np.156 - 3/7/13 12:47 AM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nother type of woman who smoked was young, usually upper class, and liberated
\nvi
\np.156 - 3/7/13 12:55 AM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nIn this discourse, Layla represents the uncompromising modernist view that promoted free interaction between the sexes, as long as it took place in the relative safety of a public place of leisure and manifested itself in the act of smoking.
\nvi
\np.157 - 3/7/13 12:59 AM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\ndvertisements where women smoke alone are usually devoid of any social context: the image of the smoking woman, while formally dressed, appears with no background, in a private sitting room, and especially next to the cigarette box (see fig. 8.1). In such cases it is not clear whether the advertisement was meant to promote smoking among women by using female images of smokers or to sell cigarettes to men by using a pretty face.
\nvi
\np.160 - 3/7/13 1:06 AM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nildren were not allowed to smoke because such entitlement was an adult male prerogative, which was socially justified by the economic and social responsibilities shouldered by men, and because of the direct association between cigarette consumption, power, and sexuality. I
\nvi
\np.161 - 3/7/13 1:17 AM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\ns discussed in the last chapter, under the Revolutionary regime in Egypt the cigar became associated with the ancien régime and the nouveau riche who attempted to join it. At the same time, the cigarette entered the iconography associated with the new regime.
\nvi
\np.161 - 3/7/13 1:18 AM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nimagery of heavy cigarette consumption while at work was ascribed to the image of Nasser himself, the leader who smoked while working tirelessly to provide a better future for his people. Being modern but gradually becoming more popular, hence authentic, over time, the cigarette during this era both represented the self-imagery of Nasser’s seemingly youthful and dynamic regime and stood as the antithesis of the cigar of the politicians of the older generation (see fig. 8.2). The cigarette, in a sense, well represented the victory of the effendiyya, which now politically, as well as culturally, had won the day.
\nvi
\np.164 - 3/7/13 1:31 AM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nWorking-class Britons did not smoke the shisha like the Egyptian ahl al-balad; but their equivalent was the clay pipe,46 which like the shisha received unilinear treatment.
\nvi
\np.164 - 3/7/13 1:32 AM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nNevertheless, shisha smoking was at times represented as a familiar and comforting smoke giving relief from the contemporary hectic pace of life. Similar attitudes resonated in Britain towards smoking the briar pipe.49 In both cases this was a distanced perspective of a nostalgic middle-class or effendi glance back at a smoking habit which was on the wane in both social spheres.
\nvbi
\np.164 - 3/7/13 1:33 AM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\npipe and cigar smokers objected to the introduction of the cigarette in the press because they associated it with the coming of the mass market and a threat to the more individualistic and refined smoking culture. Writers also portrayed the cigarette as inferior in taste, effeminate, and passive, and equated its consumption to the evils of speed and pressure associated with modern life.5
\nvi
\np.167 - 3/7/13 8:59 AM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nhere was no essential difference between the smoking cultures in the “East” and the “West”. In both, the vehicles for smoking changed over time to accommodate economic and socio-cultural transitions. Such transitions in Egypt and Britain showed similarities in the decline of the shisha and the clay pipe; they were quite different in the reception of the cigar, and assigned diverse and at times contradictory meanings to the public consumption of the cigarette. The final victory of the cigarette as the ultimate modern smoke worldwide suggests certain similarities in the way this small and quick smoke fitted global transitions (and the success of advertising the cigarette).
\nvi vi
\np.167 - 3/7/13 9:03 AM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nThey suggested that cultural formulations of consumption patterns were significant in building social categories of otherness and self, and thus helped shape the collective identity of the effendi middle stratum. The spread of mass consumption of cigarettes did not damage this process because the multifaceted cigarette could withstand being imbued with many, sometimes conflicting, meaning
\nvi
\np.171 - 3/7/13 9:11 AM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nlthough the book’s third part took pains to distinguish representations from actual smoking patterns among Egyptians, it argued for some correlations between the two, which were reflected in relatively low, “veiled” female smoking and high, socially-boosted cigarette smoking among men. In this the third part showed that interactions within the market could not be fully understood without taking into account the role of culture in determining preference and choice
\nvi
\np.172 - 3/7/13 9:15 AM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\notal profits in the 2002 fiscal year increased by six per cent over the year before to £E2.3 billion.6 The government enjoys even larger funds coming from indirect taxation on cigarettes and tobacco. In 1999, taxes on imported cigarettes amounted to 65 per cent of the final price, and 61 per cent on domestic ones.7 In 1997 total revenues from taxes were $319 million, and they constituted 2.5 per cent of the total government tax revenue for that year.
\nvi
\np.174 - 3/7/13 9:19 AM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nFor the majority of females, smoking is still a “veiled” practice, not to be discussed with researchers by either the man or the woman of the household
\nvi
\np.175 - 3/7/13 9:23 AM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nSince the late 1990s there has been a revival in shisha smoking in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East. While shisha consumption diminished in the past, it never stopped in popular circles or left the lower-class coffeehouse. The shisha and hand-rolled cigarettes have also replaced machine-made cigarettes for those suffering financial hardship in the past and in the present.28 Nevertheless, the recent trend is more associated with a fashion of the middle and upper strata, and their renewed quest for authenticity (similar to the one discussed in chapters seven and eight).29 Some, aware of the perils of cigarettes, also (wrongly) conceive the shisha as a less harmful way to smoke. Considered “traditional” and “local” shisha smoking among such crowds is quite different from lower-class consumption at the venues where smoking takes place, the tobacco used, and the meaning of smoking
\nvi vi vi
\np.175 - 3/7/13 9:24 AM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nFashion smokers are usually young students and professionals, and women smoke as well as men. When asked by reporters, women invariably suggest that smoking in public asserts their freedom and independence; these testimonies are then contrasted with the reaction of “the man in the street”, sometimes even the waiter serving the shisha, who condemn women’s smoking as inappropriate, disgraceful, and “mannish”.
\nvi vi
\np.178 - 3/7/13 9:31 AM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\nThe government is still halfheartedly committed to an economic policy according to which tobacco (considered a necessity) should be supplied cheaply to the majority of the populatio
\nvi
\np.179 - 3/7/13 9:32 AM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\n1980, Philip Morris established contacts via Eastern with Hassan Soleib, vice-chairman of the People’s Assembly Committee of Industrial Development, in an attempt to prevent any legislation against tobacco advertising. Soleib made it clear that no such legislation could pass without going through his committee first, and he asked Philip Morris for a “scientific paper” on smoking and health. The legislation passed only after direct intervention by the then president of Egypt Anwar al-Sadat. Philip Morris later enlisted the help of its representative in Egypt, Mustafa El-Beleidi, who was also chairman of the Egyptian Chamber of Commerce in further lobbying the government (especially the Minister of Health) in an attempt to delay implementation of the same law until the company’s current and in preparation stock could be sold, and as long as possible thereafter. In 1993 an internal Philip Morris document entitled “The threat of a total ban on tobacco advertising in Egypt – strategy guidelines and action plan” outlined various ways in which the company, with aid from other factors in the tobacco industry, should react against a proposed law on advertising; the same year such a law failed to pass in the Egyptian People’s Assembly. Information on industry intervention with the government is available only for tobacco multinationals, but one may assume that Eastern was also actively involved in lobbying regarding tobacco laws and regulation in Egyp
\nvi
\np.179 - 3/7/13 9:34 AM
\nSmoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East : The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000
\no why is it that convincing smokers to stop still constitutes an up-hill battle? Significant physical and emotional habituation are an obvious answer. However, the difficulty in persuading smokers to kick the habit also lies in the undeniable fact that the cigarette really complements contemporary life on many levels
\nvi vi
\ncreated with Mantano Reader Premium on 3/7/13 10:42 AM
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Review Sheet
L
p.19 - 2/24/13 10:12 PM
Land of Necessity
Thus, the key words national, transnational, scarcity, abundance, desire, luxury, and necessity are the volume’s pivot points
vi
p.19 - 2/24/13 10:12 PM
Land of Necessity
The essays visit houses, tourist districts, cinemas, retail venues, factories, fields, junkyards, Indian reservations, resorts, and beaches to recover some of the ways that national, binational, and transnational forces fashioned public and private sites of consumption
vi
p.19 - 2/24/13 10:14 PM
Land of Necessity
While few would deny the central role necessity plays in human behavior, most scholars of consumer culture are far more attentive to the machinations of desire. In part this is because consumer culture has been narrated as the consequence of an enormous leap from subsistence to abundance
vi
p.20 - 2/24/13 10:17 PM
Land of Necessity
The borderlands are framed to the south by Mexico City, the second-largest city in the world, and to the north by Los Angeles, the eighth-largest city in the world. Until 1800, Mexico City was the New World’s capital of trade and merchandising. During the next fifty years the borderlands began to squirm out of Mexico City’s grip, but for several decades even after much of the region became U.S. territory, Mexico City remained its fulcrum and reference point.
vi
p.20 - 2/24/13 10:18 PM
Land of Necessity
twentieth century, movie and television production, automobile orientation, and the jet airplane as manufactured product and transportation—all significant contributors to the emergence of consumer culture in the United States—fostered circuits of exchange that strengthened the magnetism of Los Angeles, for Mexicans and Americans alike.
vi
p.28 - 2/24/13 10:31 PM
Land of Necessity
Mercantile trade with Asia, European colonization of the Americas and Caribbean, and the brutal harnessing of a tractable labor force on New World plantations, along with greater household productivity in northern Europe and the British North American colonies resulted in the trade of what might be considered the first mass-consumed non-subsistence goods: tobacco, tea, and sugar
vi
p.28 - 2/24/13 10:32 PM
Land of Necessity
The extensive choice and variety of items at increasingly lower prices resulted in ‘‘a shared language of goods.’’
vi vi holyoke
p.29 - 2/24/13 10:35 PM
Land of Necessity
‘‘It seems to me that one of the good and most important businesses in this land is merchandise. . . . The profit is so sure and so large that a wellstocked shop here is the richest thing in the world.’’ Spanish clothing, paper, and wine, European velvet, damask, and linen, Asian spices, silks, and ceramics, he maintained, could be turned into gold: he called it ‘‘alchemy,’’
vi
p.31 - 2/24/13 10:46 PM
Land of Necessity
The consequent heaps of output in turn generated what became the central problem of industrial capitalism: distribution.
Capitalist solutions to the distribution problem initially set store in the
search for new markets, which in the nineteenth-century United States took many shapes, including deepening trade networks with Europe, pursuing the imperialist ideology of Manifest Destiny, and expanding the nation’s territorial size.
vi
p.33 - 2/24/13 10:50 PM
Land of Necessity
Things changed within a few decades in such dramatic ways that the borderlands were swept up into the new economy. By the 1880s, the daunting amount of agricultural commodities and processed goods in the United States demanded either political or economic adjustments: the excess, some of which rotted or was sunk or burned, gave rise in the United States to political movements such as populism and socialism
vi
p.33 - 2/24/13 10:51 PM
Land of Necessity
entrepreneurs being buried alive by the commodities they hoarded, as in the climatic moment of the Frank Norris novel The Octopus (1901), when a silo of wheat erupts
vi
p.33 - 2/24/13 11:15 PM
Land of Necessity
With the emergence of what historian Susan Strasser has identified as ‘‘marketing-driven production,’’ advertising assumed responsibility for spreading awareness of ‘‘new problems’’ that could be solved only by adopting ‘‘new habits,’’ which in turn generated ‘‘new needs’’ that marketing-driven production promised to meet.≤≤
vi holyoke
p.33 - 2/24/13 11:15 PM
Land of Necessity
In the United States and around the world, the standard of living—as an anthropometric measure of well-being and as an aspiration—remained low: through 1900, nearly three-quarters of all Americans lived in the kind of wrenching poverty that results in short life expectancy and high infant mortality.
vi vi
p.34 - 2/24/13 11:16 PM
Land of Necessity
. In contrast, U.S., Western European, and Japanese commercial and political leaders developed capitalist-friendly solutions to the problem of distribution, largely based on the equation of the surplus of commodities with abundance, rather than with excess or maldistribution.
vi vi
p.34 - 2/24/13 11:18 PM
Land of Necessity
With some exceptions, the paradigm of abundance frames the study of consumer capitalism almost unquestioningly, despite scarcity’s persistence
vi vi
p.35 - 2/24/13 11:22 PM
Land of Necessity
Soon 70 percent of investment in northern Mexico was foreign, much of it from the United States. The region’s mines, particularly its copper ones, yielded great wealth, due to rising demand as communications cables reached around the globe and power lines electrified cities, businesses, and homes
vi
p.38 - 2/24/13 11:32 PM
Land of Necessity
Well into the twentieth century, it was assumed that industrial production fortified national integrity and independence. Furthermore, making things—processing raw materials into finished goods—was the most exalted, and potentially profitable, form of economic activity. So the Mexican state, with its sense of national destiny rooted in its interior, tried to keep its periphery in a subordinate economic position. Nevertheless, manufacturing did develop in some Mexican border states: Nuevo Léon’s largest city, Monterrey, for instance, was well on its way to becoming Mexico’s center of steel, beer, glass, and textile production well before 1910.≥
vi
p.39 - 2/24/13 11:34 PM
Land of Necessity
. National advertising campaigns taught consumers to di√erentiate between seemingly like choices. The multiplication of branded goods diminished the appearance of surplus, thus allowing prices to stabilize, and even rise. Advertising for packaged and branded goods, which initially pitched ‘‘use value’’ and reliability, built clusters of connections identifying the brand with ‘‘the good life,’’ while also making subjective appeals that tapped into the anxieties and dreams of particular target markets.≥∑ Branded goods, the
single most important contribution advertising agencies made to the formation of consumer culture, have tended toward reinforcing nationalist identities, preoccupations, and fears. Regardless of where it is bottled, Coke, for instance, is American, as are Levi’s, and the National Basketball Association.
vi vi
p.40 - 2/24/13 11:39 PM
Land of Necessity
economy shifted, in the apt formulation of historian Susan Strasser, from production-oriented marketing to marketing-oriented production.
vi holyoke
p.41 - 2/24/13 11:41 PM
Land of Necessity
Thanks to the zona libre, the borderlands’ first department stores emulating the grand emporiums of London and Paris opened in Mexican, not U.S., border towns. Within two decades, however, they and most other commercial businesses had moved to the U.S. side of the border: the e≈ciencies of the U.S. transportation and communications networks trumped the zona libre’s absence of tari√s.
vi
p.42 - 2/24/13 11:48 PM
Land of Necessity
Borderlands’ department stores, as well as local grocery and variety stores, melded the aesthetics of the borderlands and of abundance such that they reflected and reinforced class and ethnic identities far more trenchantly than national ones
vi
p.43 - 2/25/13 9:46 AM
Land of Necessity
While anti–chain store sentiment resulted in as many as forty states imposing special regulations and taxes on the largest chain stores in the 1920s, it is likely that nowhere was the political animus as deep as in Texas, home to Wright Patman, who as Congressman in the 1930s authored and attempted to push through Federal regulations hampering the operations of national chains.∂π
vi vi vi holyoke
p.44 - 2/25/13 9:50 AM
Land of Necessity
Before the dollar was desegregated, to paraphrase a pioneering historical study about African-American consumers, advertising pitches conflated the modern, the American, and the white, while many commercial venues reinforced these associations by barring or limiting access.∑∞ Nevertheless, the consumption of canned foods, ready-made clothing and shoes, or cinematic dramas conveyed the awareness of participating in ‘‘modern life’’ regardless of racial status or origins
vi
p.46 - 2/25/13 9:56 AM
Land of Necessity
. Despite measures in the United States that served consumers as well as businesses, such as the extension of the post o≈ce’s services to rural areas (1896), the initiation of parcel post (1912), the creation of the Department of Commerce (1902), and the establishment of the Food and Drug Administration (1906), the U.S. government has tended to favor business needs over those of consumers. (Consider the battles to impose consumer safety standards on automobiles and cigarettes, not coincidentally the twentieth century’s most profitable, dangerous, and symbolically charged mass-produced items.∑
vi vi
p.47 - 2/25/13 10:01 AM
Land of Necessity
Perhaps most far-reaching was the ‘‘therapeutic ethos,’’ which emerged from mainstream Protestant promises in the 1880s and 1890s that salvation—indeed, self-realization—could begin here on earth through the consumption of uplifting goods, experiences, and places. Leisure, mass culture, vacations, and tourism augmented the middle-class value system, remaking theater into a site of uplift rather than corruption, Sunday into a day of recreation rather than of rest, night into a time for adult fun, rural areas into pleasure resorts, and the Southwest into a scenic place where one could marvel at ‘‘untouched nature’’ found in the landscapes and peoples
vi vi
p.48 - 2/25/13 10:02 AM
Land of Necessity
As economists like Simon Patten, journalists like Charles Lummis, fabulists like the author of The Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum, and Hollywood movie studios refashioned desire and pleasure as uplifting, popular culture oriented its diversions around them
p.48 - 2/25/13 10:05 AM
Land of Necessity
Surplus cast as abundance, rather than as over-supply, eased the task of recalibrating attitudes toward materialists and sensualists, such that each could join the ranks of virtuous citizens. Part of this far-reaching adjustment in attitudes hinged upon the expansion of notions of usefulness so that necessity could become a subjective and dynamic consideration. Marketers played an important role in this process, identifying, as the historian Susan Strasser has shown, ‘‘new needs,’’ which mandated ‘‘new habits,’’ and, thus, ‘‘new products.’’
p.49 - 2/25/13 10:09 AM
Land of Necessity
Lacking access to the various safety valves that in the United States di√used rising discontent about inequality, such as an open frontier (until 1890), an expanding economy, racial scapegoating, and the quest for empire (after 1898), Mexico’s solution to the distribution problem was the one of last resort: civil war.
Put bluntly, the Mexican Revolution (1910–20) ruined the immediate prospects for Mexico’s border states to benefit from rising transnational flows of capital, labor, and commodities
p.56 - 2/25/13 11:00 AM
Land of Necessity
hone what the historian Susan Porter Benson has identified as consumption practices rooted in ‘‘self-denial, rather than self-fulfillment.’’π≤ She shows how U.S. working classes in the 1920s and 1930s acted as ‘‘inconspicuous consumers,’’ unlike the ‘‘conspicuous consumers’’ social critic Thorstein Veblen first taunted in his 1899 classic, Theory of the Leisure Class. In short, Benson’s work contravenes the widely held notion that ‘‘a rising and inclusive tide’’ of consumption swept across the United States during the twentieth century.π≥ Other historians too are working to shift focus from the peoples who have ‘‘adapted to abundance’’ toward the many who have made do with scarcity. Consumer practices in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands present further opportunities to assess self-denial and inconspicuous consumption within the context of rising levels of material abundance, particularly in the 1920s and 1930s, pivotal decades in this matrix.
vi vi holyoke
p.56 - 2/25/13 11:02 AM
Land of Necessity
But the worldwide collapse of capitalist economies due to overproduction and underconsumption seemed to discredit consumer capitalism as the answer to the problem of distribution. In places where fascism took hold or where communism tightened its grip, state-centered solutions to the problem of distribution gained traction
vi
p.57 - 2/25/13 11:06 AM
Land of Necessity
Sales of durable goods like automobiles and home appliances plummeted, but debtors were loath to miss
monthly installment payments for what they already possessed, particularly their automobiles. Millions of Americans reverted to the homegrown and homemade; in doing so they purchased seeds, bulk textiles, glass jars, and other producer goods, but they did not lose their taste for consumer goods. Instead, they dreamt about what they might buy when times got better.π∑
New Deal programs stepped up e√orts of the U.S. federal government to foster a well-run, well-regulated, and subsidized consumer economy.
vi
p.58 - 2/25/13 11:07 AM
Land of Necessity
These programs, as well as fdr’s failed e√ort during the Second World War to amend the Bill of Rights with the guarantee to all U.S. citizens of an ‘‘American standard of living’’ (which Congress trimmed down to the G. I. Bill of Rights), transformed the U.S. government from an enthusiastic bystander into an active participant in consumer society.
vi vi vi vi vi holyoke
p.70 - 2/25/13 11:33 AM
Land of Necessity
Disrupting Boundaries
Consumer Capitalism and Culture in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 1940–2008
esay #2
p.72 - 2/25/13 11:38 AM
Land of Necessity
By the end of 1945, not only had the United States won the war, dominated its allies, and mostly avoided depredations and damages to its own territory, but it now stood ready to export consumer democracy, in the shape of the Marshall Plan, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, tari√ and trade agreements, and corporate investments, not to mention U.S.-made consumer goods.
vivi
p.74 - 2/25/13 12:05 PM
Land of Necessity
. Places and goods imbued with characteristics and symbols of the folk, the primitive, and the ancient attracted Western intellectuals and dreamers, who, uneasy with capitalism and disdainful of the mass-produced, were prone to antimodernist positions and places.
vi
p.75 - 2/25/13 12:09 PM
Land of Necessity
Antonio Bermúdez, the director of Mexico’s nationalized oil company pemex before he was named head of pronaf, tried to make the border into ‘‘a great show window,’’ and thus Mexico into an emporium of goods and services for the world’s richest consumers, Americans
vi
p.76 - 2/25/13 12:12 PM
Land of Necessity
. The bip would not have succeeded were it not for low transportation costs, due in large part to the development of a smooth system for the transfer of standardized forty-foot-long containers from cargo ships, to railroad cars, to truck beds. The container was to global production of consumer goods what the moving assembly line was to Ford’s organization of factory production.≤∑
vi
p.76 - 2/25/13 12:12 PM
Land of Necessity
. Through the 1970s and 1980s, the maquiladora sector grew, as did duty-free zones (frequently known as ‘‘Special Economic Zones’’ or ‘‘Export Processing Zones’’) in other parts of Mexico, Central America, Latin America, as well as throughout the developing world, including China’s Pearl River Delta, eight enclaves in India, and ports in Germany, Portugal, and France.≤
vi vi
p.78 - 2/25/13 12:17 PM
Land of Necessity
The outsourcing and o√shoring of U.S. manufacturing and the significant
economic setbacks cutting into United States and Mexican wages since the 1970s have coincided with the boom in ‘‘discounting,’’ and the concomitant ‘‘logistics revolution’’ in product distribution. These developments characterize the years between the opening of the first Wal-Mart in the United States in 1962 and then of Mexico’s first one in 1991. Today this retail corporation is the largest private employer in Canada, the United States, and Mexico
vi
p.78 - 2/25/13 12:18 PM
Land of Necessity
As the historian Nelson Lichtenstein posits, Wal-Mart is ‘‘the template for world capitalism’’ in which the retailer is ‘‘king and the manufacturer his vassal.’’≥
vi vi vi holyoke
p.78 - 2/25/13 12:18 PM
Land of Necessity
Although Edward Filene opened his Boston bargain basement in 1909
holyoke
p.78 - 2/25/13 12:19 PM
Land of Necessity
An era of manufacturers’ control over prices ended in 1975 when the U.S. Congress passed the Consumer Goods Pricing Act, which abolished the practice of ‘‘retail price maintenance’’ through which manufacturers could insist that retailers sell their products above certain price levels
vi
p.82 - 2/25/13 12:28 PM
Land of Necessity
Mike Davis, a historian and social critic, calls Tijuana’s residents ‘‘consummate bricoleurs,’’ in praise of their exercise of choice and agency in building expressive homes, yards, and streetscapes out of the debris of the border’s nationalist versions of capital- ism.∂
vi
p.83 - 2/25/13 12:34 PM
Land of Necessity
What does nation mean when people, money, and goods come and go? What di√erentiates private from public spaces? One nation from another? The illegal alien, the
shadows, crevices, and in-between spaces, where consumption happens differently than in the living rooms, bars, and bedrooms represented on television.∂
vi vi vi holyoke
p.84 - 2/25/13 12:37 PM
Land of Necessity
transnational flows of culture and capital, which themselves create, exacerbate, and then advertise the stark contrasts between scarcity and abundance
p.84 - 2/25/13 12:39 PM
Land of Necessity
Studies of aΔuent societies, like William Leach’s landmark study of the United States, titled Land of Desire, explore the amplification of relative, rather than real, measures of deprivation. Heedlessly and shamelessly, marketing campaigns peddle diet foods, light beers, and automobiles in a world of hungry, thirsty, and shoeless people. It is no wonder that in the borderlands, as in other impoverished and not so impoverished places, real senses of need and necessity compete with relative wants and desires, giving rise to both tremendous hope and profound despair.
vi vi
p.86 - 2/25/13 12:46 PM
Land of Necessity
underground economy accounts for 10 percent of the United States Gross Domestic Product (gdp), about 50 percent of Mexico’s, and as much as three-quarters of Nigeria’s and Thailand’s, each home to global cities (Lagos and Bangkok) that match the U.S.-Mexico borderlands as environmental and human wastelands.
vi
p.86 - 2/25/13 12:50 PM
Land of Necessity
Crossing the border in all these cases enriches the market value of commodities ranging from used shoes to male labor in slaughterhouses, from transistor radios to female household labor. Such forms of shadow production perforce beget what we could call shadow consumption, which often, though not always, takes place in the interstices of the economy, society, and culture: in streets, alleys, squatters’ shacks, colonias, automobiles, junkyards, and elsewhere
vi vi vi
p.88 - 2/25/13 12:52 PM
Land of Necessity
. After the Second World War, evangelical preachers who could not get on U.S. radio due to their solicitation of ‘‘donations’’ in exchange for prayers promising to rescue listeners from disease and poverty, leased air time from the station, which was renamed xera. In 1959 a marketing company, incorporated in Texas as InterAmerican Radio Advertising, acquired the facilities, boosted its capacity to 250,000 kW, and then recruited a disc jockey whose madcap style and on-air sales o√ers became famous: Wolfman Jack.
vi
p.91 - 2/25/13 1:04 PM
Land of Necessity
Consumer goods themselves, however, as particular kinds of objects with certain forms of branding, have firm identities that situate them within particular national groupings: ‘‘made in the U.S.A.,’’ ‘‘à la francaise,’’ ‘‘Chinamade,’’ ‘‘muy Mexicano.’’ It is thus evident that globalization is not erasing the meaning of borders or wiping out national and regional di√erences.
p.105 - 2/25/13 1:06 PM
Land of Necessity
Amy S. Greenberg
Domesticating the Border
Manifest Destiny and the ‘‘Comforts of Life’’ in the U.S.-Mexico Boundary Commission and Gadsden Purchase, 1848–1854
essay #3
p.111 - 2/25/13 4:45 PM
Land of Necessity
This essay suggests that competing views of the market, of consumption, and of the place of domesticity in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands were also contributing factors to the failure of the Bartlett-led commission and to the ultimate resolution of the international boundary with the Gadsden Purchase
vi vi vi
p.114 - 2/25/13 4:57 PM
Land of Necessity
Mexicans have never celebrated their arid and mountainous northern frontier, or el norte, in the same romantic manner that U.S. residents have embraced their frontier
vi
p.118 - 2/25/13 6:52 PM
Land of Necessity
The explosion of illicit trade was largely limited to Mexico’s northeast, where the Rio Grande marked the southern edges of Texas. The lack of rivers and roads further west limited the licit and illicit spread of commercial goods. To make matters worse, a blockade of Sonora’s primary port on the Gulf of California, Guaymas, during the U.S.Mexico War e√ectively paralyzed trade in the region for a year and a half, and the Gold Rush, starting in 1849, drained both population and resources from the area in exchange for a serious cholera epidemic that further devastated Guaymas. There was little sarsaparilla, or any other goods, available to residents of this area
vi vi vi
p.120 - 2/25/13 6:55 PM
Land of Necessity
Bartlett, like other Whigs, linked social disorder with the absence of strong social institutions, and he turned to those institutions for a solution.≥∑ Based on the amount of attention that Bartlett’s narrative and letters devote to houses, their construction, and their furnishing, the foremost civilizing institution missing from the border, in his opinion, was the well-ordered family home
vi vi
p.123 - 2/25/13 7:01 PM
Land of Necessity
In each of these accounts, it is commercial goods—from furniture, to books, to musical instruments, to artworks—that are highlighted as key to a cultured and admirable domestic sphere. The Germans were praiseworthy precisely because they conformed to the emerging norms of domestic ideology, not only by consuming goods in the service of domestic bliss, but also through their restrained and refined masculine practices. Frederick Law Olmsted, another northeastern Whig traveler through the borderlands in the 1850s, was similarly impressed by the domestic arrangements of the German settlers of Texas, while caustically critical of the homes of American slave owners.
vi vi holyoke
p.125 - 2/25/13 7:32 PM
Land of Necessity
As a subscriber to domestic ideology that linked refined homes with civilization, he was more than willing to compromise with Mexico on the location of the boundary; other Whigs, sharing his views of the link between consumer goods and civilization, supported his position
vi vi
p.127 - 2/25/13 7:38 PM
Land of Necessity
The U.S.-Mexico War had a dramatic impact on the rise of consumer culture in the borderlands. Merchants on both sides of the new borderline grew wealthy from smuggling, and new towns sprang up along the Rio Grande in order to facilitate the burgeoning illegal trade,
vi vi
p.127 - 2/25/13 7:40 PM
Land of Necessity
Competing visions of the relationship between consumption and settlement, as well as partisanship and the desire among southern Democrats for a workable southern railroad route, shaped congressional debates over the BartlettConde agreement. The Democrat Emory rationalized expansion into Chihuahua and Sonora in part because he saw no need for market penetration of the region prior to its settlement. For John Bartlett, as for many sympathetic Whigs, the U.S.-Mexico borderlands were less than fully desirable because they could not easily be integrated into the market. The region did not lend itself to the distribution of consumer goods: the comfortably furnished households that he associated with a well-ordered society were few and far between
vi vi vi
p.135 - 2/25/13 7:43 PM
Land of Necessity
Rachel St. John
Selling the Border
Trading Land, Attracting Tourists, and Marketing American Consumption on the Baja California Border, 1900–1934
essay #4
p.135 - 2/25/13 7:45 PM
Land of Necessity
Not only could they buy postcards, cheap land, and illicit liquor, but they could also consume the novelty of crossing the international boundary
vi
p.137 - 2/25/13 7:50 PM
Land of Necessity
While border promoters tapped into the borderlands aesthetic, which, as Lawrence Culver shows in his essay in this volume, was so prevalent in Southern California at this time, the selling of the border itself depended on the legal, political, economic, and symbolic significance of the boundary line. In marketing the Baja California border, promoters emphasized not the shared history of the United States and Mexico in the borderlands, but rather the stark divide between those two nations along the boundary line.
vi
p.138 - 2/25/13 7:52 PM
Land of Necessity
In their correspondence and contracts, land promoters created an image of the border as a space that o√ered the best of both nations. As they bought, sold, and developed border ranchlands over the following decades, these men reinforced the conception of the Baja California border as both of, and apart from, the United States and thus an ideal site for American investment
vi
p.138 - 2/25/13 7:53 PM
Land of Necessity
. Under the rule of Porfirio Díaz (1876–1910), the Mexican government embraced foreign investment as the key to national development
vi
p.138 - 2/25/13 7:53 PM
Land of Necessity
attract
were a group of Southern California land speculators who saw the potential to extend their regional real estate empire south of the border. Organizing as Mexican land companies, these men bought vast tracts of land along the boundary line. The San Ysidro Ranch Company (syrc) purchased approximately 35,000 acres near Tijuana, while Los Angeles Times chief Harrison Gray Otis’s Colorado River Land Company (crlc) secured control of more than 860,000 acres extending south from the boundary line through the Colorado River delta
vi
p.141 - 2/25/13 8:00 PM
Land of Necessity
Tourism promoters constructed a version of Mexican culture that they hoped to sell to Americans on the blank slates of the small and recently established cities of Tijuana and Mexicali
p.141 - 2/25/13 8:02 PM
Land of Necessity
blanketed the Southern California market with advertisements that stressed the novelty and romance of crossing the boundary line. By the 1910s, thousands of American tourists from all parts of the United States visited Tijuana annually. For many, their trip across the border was their first to Mexico
p.142 - 2/25/13 8:04 PM
Land of Necessity
When rebel forces invaded Tijuana in 1911, even the Mexican Revolution became a tourist attraction. Southern Californians, like Americans elsewhere on the border, flocked to the boundary line for a better view of the battles
vi vi
p.142 - 2/25/13 8:06 PM
Land of Necessity
Rather than providing Americans with an opportunity to meet and engage with Mexican citizens, a trip to Tijuana more often o√ered contrived interactions with performers and salespeople who reinforced preexisting conceptions of Mexicans
vi vi
p.146 - 2/25/13 8:11 PM
Land of Necessity
Photographers set up businesses on the border to cater to tourists by providing serapes, sombreros, and signs indicating a borderline location: the resulting photographs were a ubiquitous part of the Tijuana tourist experience
vi
p.147 - 2/25/13 8:13 PM
Land of Necessity
According to local rumor, the first Mexicali business had been no more than a plank under a mesquite tree from which an enterprising businessman sold mescal and tequila to the Americans laboring to build the dry town of Calexico on the U.S. side of the line.∂
vi
p.148 - 2/25/13 8:14 PM
Land of Necessity
Pushed out of Bakersfield in 1913, the trio first founded The Owl (or El Tecolote) in Mexicali and later the Tivoli Bar in Tijuana. By 1924, they had expanded into brewing, importing European spirits, gambling, and racing and were reported to be making as much as $40,000 to $100,000 a week from just one of their clubs in Mexicali.∂
vi
p.150 - 2/25/13 8:17 PM
Land of Necessity
The predominantly middle- and working-class residents of the agricultural Imperial Valley, along with visiting salesmen and investors, frequented the many bars and brothels of Mexicali.∑≤ Tijuana, by contrast, was home to high-end resorts and racetracks that drew on the booming populations in San Diego and Los Angeles. The Tijuana vice industry achieved its pinnacle with the opening of the Agua Caliente resort and casino
vi vi
p.150 - 2/25/13 8:21 PM
Land of Necessity
‘‘Would you escape the rigid conventionalities which limit one’s enjoyment in this country?’’ promoters lured Americans across the line with promises not just of drinks and diversions, but of temporary reprieves from the restrictions of American society.
p.152 - 2/25/13 8:24 PM
Land of Necessity
Americanization of Tijuana was complete: ‘‘At Tia Juana [sic], these Mexicans find on their side of the line, an American town, run by American capital, harboring American underworld women and American white slavers, the medium of exchange being American money, and all this unbridled debauchery being accomplished through the medium of the American language.’’
vi
p.153 - 2/25/13 8:27 PM
Land of Necessity
the Mexicans did not have the right to work, not even in the vice dens. It felt as if we were in a foreign country.’’π≤ In response to these conditions, Mexican nationalists and labor organizers like Legaspy demanded that territorial o≈cials close Americanowned vice establishments, or at least require that they hire Mexicans
vi vi
p.154 - 2/25/13 8:31 PM
Land of Necessity
In 1926, governor of Baja California Abelardo Rodríguez launched a major wave of reforms after the Peteets, an American family of four, committed suicide following a horrific trip to Tijuana during which the two daughters were said to have been drugged and raped. Within days of the suicides, Rodríguez ordered fifty-two saloons to close
vi
p.157 - 2/25/13 8:37 PM
Land of Necessity
The border vice districts only began to decline with the onset of the Great Depression, the return of horseracing to
California, and the repeal of Prohibition in 1933. Shortly after his election in 1934, Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas finally brought the heyday of border vice to an end when he decided to close the border casinos as part of his widereaching nationalist project.
vi vi
p.165 - 2/25/13 8:40 PM
Land of Necessity
Cinema on the U.S.-Mexico Border
American Motion Pictures and Mexican Audiences, 1896–1930
essay #5
p.165 - 2/25/13 8:42 PM
Land of Necessity
≥ These movie theaters that served the Mexican community in south Texas formed part of Mexican cinematic culture (a cultural formation composed of exhibition, the social space of the
movie theater, and the films themselves).
vi vi vi
p.166 - 2/25/13 8:42 PM
Land of Necessity
This contention runs counter to scholarship that characterizes U.S. mass culture solely as an instrument of cultural imperialism and Americanization
vi
p.166 - 2/25/13 8:43 PM
Land of Necessity
most scholars of Chicano history have perceived cinema as a peripheral part of immigrant life that was antithetical to migrants’ ‘‘traditional’’ culture or as a pastime engaged in primarily by their second-generation children
vi
p.166 - 2/25/13 8:44 PM
Land of Necessity
The consumption of U.S. motion pictures could, though it seems paradoxical, nurture Mexican national identity. Thus, rather than assuming that the mere presence of U.S. cultural formations—in this case silent cinema— indicates cultural hegemony, I focus on the local and national factors that influenced the social meanings that Mexicans living along the border in the twenties created out of the consumption of U.S. mass culture
vi
p.166 - 2/25/13 8:45 PM
Land of Necessity
Mexican theaters in
El Paso connected border residents not only to American mass culture but also to processes of modernization at the heart of postrevolutionary Mexican nation building.
vi
p.167 - 2/25/13 8:46 PM
Land of Necessity
Anglo entrepreneurs introduced moving pictures in some borderland cities, including El Paso, before 1900, it was itinerant Mexican exhibitors who brought what would constitute Mexican cinema culture to the borderlands. After Lumière representatives introduced the cinématographe at Mexico City’s Droguería Plateros (a drugstore on Plateros St.) in 1896, sixteen movingpicture theaters quickly sprouted up in the capital, in addition to thirty jacalones (temporary structures dedicated to cinema exhibition placed in public spaces).
vi vi
p.169 - 2/25/13 8:51 PM
Land of Necessity
. This thriving entertainment scene garnered the city the tag ‘‘the Broadway of the Southwest.’’ After civic reformers successfully campaigned to rid El Paso of gambling and prostitution (which did not eradicate these activities, but only moved them over the border), some El Paso entertainment impresarios began to o√er the public movies instead of vice. For example, in 1905, when the city prohibited gambling, a popular gaming establishment called the Wig Wam became a nickelodeon. Soon, theaters such as the Bijou, the Lyric, the Majestic, and the Crawford o√ered combined programs of vaudeville, stock theater, and motion pictures. The less elaborate second-run theaters like the OK, the Iris, the Grecian, the Unique, and the Princess began showing motion pictures almost exclusively
vi vi
p.169 - 2/25/13 8:52 PM
Land of Necessity
Ciudad Juárez. In 1903, the city council agreed to underwrite the construction of a theater, in part in the hopes of persuading juarenses to spend their leisure dollars in Juárez rather than across the border in El Paso.
vi
p.170 - 2/25/13 8:54 PM
Land of Necessity
Although initially El Paso and Juárez residents mingled at movie exhibitions, by the First World War cinematic spaces were di√erentiated. Reports suggest that an audience drawn from both sides of the Rio Grande watched the first moving picture exhibition in El Paso in 1896.∞Ω Likewise, historian Mario T. García found no evidence that ‘‘the early movie houses such as the Crawford, the Grand, the Little Wigwam, and the Bijou specifically excluded Mexicans during the first years of the twentieth century.’’≤≠ During and after the Mexican revolution, however, movie exhibition on the border’s binational character shifted. El Paso’s Anglo and Mexican populations increasingly went to different theaters, and when Juárez residents crossed the border, they tended to find themselves in ‘‘Mexican’’ theaters.
vi
p.173 - 2/25/13 9:01 PM
Land of Necessity
businessmen like Lacoma who opened these cinemas were part of a transnational commercial class. Their enterprises spread across the border region into northern Mexico and the southwestern United States, and sometimes linked the borderlands to New York City, Mexico City, and Los Angeles in transnational chains of commerce.
vi
p.175 - 2/25/13 9:05 PM
Land of Necessity
Calderón–Salas Porras circuit combined movie exhibition with other cultural events and expressions. All of their theaters featured vaudeville, touring stock theater, and performances by renowned Mexican actors, writers, and playwrights
vi
p.175 - 2/25/13 9:05 PM
Land of Necessity
adopted a modern architectural aesthetic that made use (as did many of the most up-to-date movie palaces in the United States, such as the Aztec Theater in San Antonio) of pre-Columbian motifs and design elements, which in Mexico referenced the country’s glorious, if mythologized, indigenous past.≥
vi
p.177 - 2/25/13 9:09 PM
Land of Necessity
chief among his purposes in entering the movie exhibition and distribution business was the ‘‘education and democratization of the Mexican people by means of film.’’ He confidently claimed that in terms of education, which was what he thought ‘‘the Mexican people need,’’ cinema was in a position to do ‘‘something . . . worth while—more than the government perhaps.’’ Its democratic space, in which the ‘‘lower, middle, and higher classes’’ could mix, would expose the ‘‘peon’’ to members of the ‘‘better class,’’ thus inspiring the working-class moviegoer to ‘‘take more pride in himself, dress better and more cleanly.’’
vi vi vi vi
p.177 - 2/25/13 9:09 PM
Land of Necessity
The Calderón–Salas Porras consortium and the activities of Juan de la Cruz Alarcón illustrate how despite transnational business practices promoting a primarily U.S.-made product, Mexican theaters contributed to the development of a distinct version of mexicanidad, rather than an Americanized class
of Mexicans.
vi vi vi
p.179 - 2/25/13 9:12 PM
Land of Necessity
∫ Providing Mexican audiences with modern entertainment in architectural spaces specifically coded as modern not only filled a market niche neglected by Anglo entrepreneurs, it also positioned cinema owners, along with other Mexican businessmen, as agents of modernity
vi vi agents of modernity
p.179 - 2/25/13 9:14 PM
Land of Necessity
Moviegoing, the ‘‘favorite diversion,’’ went hand in hand with activities promoting national and community values. In El Paso–Juárez, for example, Mexican residents were urged not to miss William Duncan, ‘‘the king of courage,’’ appearing in El torbellino, ‘‘the last word in dramatic series,’’ or the three rolls of film taken during the
recent fiestas patrias (independence day celebrations), presumably in Ciudad Juárez, which featured ‘‘all the Mexicans.’’∑
vi
p.179 - 2/25/13 9:15 PM
Land of Necessity
harkened back to the practices of early exhibitors, who, following their predecessors, circus and fair performers, had often ingratiated themselves with sometimes recalcitrant local elites by contributing a portion of their profits to local causes
vi vi
p.183 - 2/25/13 9:25 PM
Land of Necessity
The way other national and racial groups were depicted in U.S. cinematic productions o√ered a foil against which Mexican filmmakers could create their own representations. As the national industry developed, the screen became another space for the construction of national and racial identities. Padilla’s homegrown and regionally circulated film would find its industrialized and national counterparts in the productions of the Mexican film industry, based in the capital, which o√ered narratives and visions of national identity for domestic and international consumption
vi vi
p.183 - 2/25/13 9:26 PM
Land of Necessity
Mexican audiences a≈rmed their national identity as Mexican. They also
experimented with the new gender ideals, modes of self-presentation, and social practices presented on the screen: each was a hallmark of the ‘‘modern’’ as it seeped into the lives of ordinary people. Nowhere was this process more freighted than in the border region, where a competing nationalism—Americanism—made strong and vigorous claims on all that was modern
vi
p.190 - 2/26/13 11:51 AM
Land of Necessity
Lawrence Culver
Promoting the Pacific Borderlands
Leisure and Labor in Southern California, 1870–1950
essay #6
p.192 - 2/26/13 12:11 PM
Land of Necessity
Nordho√, a Prussian immigrant who spent his later childhood in Ohio, proved a devout believer in American democracy and capitalism, yet he was troubled by the urbanization and monopolistic business practices of the Gilded Age. Most of all, this immigrant was appalled by what he saw as the inundation of eastern cities by a ‘‘semi-barbarous foreign population’’ of southern and eastern European immigrants
vi vi holyoke?
p.192 - 2/26/13 12:12 PM
Land of Necessity
Nordho√’s book posited southern California as a place where middling white farmers could live in a citrus-scented agricultural utopia—a veritable Je√ersonian Polynesia
vi vi vi
p.194 - 2/26/13 1:01 PM
Land of Necessity
An increasing number of his fellow citizens—particularly in the urban Northeast and Lummis’s native New England—called on Americans to embrace a more leisurely life. Others, from philosopher John Ruskin to Henry David Thoreau, also advocated a return to nature, or the pursuit of the ‘‘simple life.’’ Their arguments were buttressed by changing realities and perceptions in American society. As the nation grew more prosperous, both the middle and upper classes began to shed the old Puritan abhorrence of leisure
vi vi vi holyoke
p.194 - 2/26/13 1:04 PM
Land of Necessity
At the other end of the socioeconomic spectrum, social reformers and some physicians charged that industrial workers were trapped
in mindless, menial labor that threatened their physical and mental health. Like Lummis, these other proponents of leisure argued that rest could be curative, restoring vigor to a nation that had been rendered e√ete by Victorian manners and enervated by the closing of the frontier.π
vi vi holyoke
p.195 - 2/26/13 1:23 PM
Land of Necessity
. In this book, Lummis presented a Pueblo culture that was balanced and contented, unlike supposedly harried Anglo-American culture. His writing recast the borderlands as a landscape of leisure. The Land of Poco Tiempo took its title from a Spanish phrase he loosely translated as ‘‘pretty soon.’’ In the title chapter of the book, Lummis asked, ‘‘Why hurry with the hurrying world? The ‘Pretty Soon’ of New Spain is better than the ‘Now! Now!’ of the haggard United States. The opiate sun soothes to rest, the adobe is made to lean against, the hush of the day-long noon would not be broken. Let us not hasten—mañana will do. Better still, pasado mañana.’’∞
vi
p.197 - 2/26/13 1:26 PM
Land of Necessity
With Land of Sunshine, Lummis was but one of a host of editors using new print technologies to bring color, advertising copy, and themed essays about the ‘‘good life’’ to nationally-circulated magazines promoting fashion, home decoration, and travel
vi vi
p.199 - 2/27/13 6:02 PM
Land of Necessityt
Hollywood, though certainly not the only source for a new culture of consumerism and leisure, popularized this lifestyle. The fact that the nation’s growing middle class accepted and emulated this life of consumerism and leisure would have profound implications for southern California and the nation as a whole
vi
p.200 - 2/27/13 6:05 PM
Land of Necessity
Avalon, the only town on Catalina, exhibited the same racial discrimination found in much of the United States in this era. A small section of Avalon, known as ‘‘Sonoratown,’’ was where Mexicans and other people of color barred from Anglo neighborhoods lived
vi vi vj
p.201 - 2/27/13 6:08 PM
Land of Necessity
encourage and foster the catching of all fishes, and especially tuna, yellowtail, sea bass, etc., with the lightest rod and reel tackle,’’ and to discourage ‘‘unsportsmanlike’’ commercial fishing. Distinctions such as these bore close parallels to class-based distinctions characterizing attitudes toward hunting: those with the money to hunt for leisure were sportsmen, while those who hunted for subsistence were ‘‘poachers.’’
vi
p.203 - 2/27/13 6:12 PM
Land of Necessity
These strange, marooned garden planters, as much as anything else, testified to the socioeconomic change underway on the island, which would only accelerate after 1919, when the Bannings sold Catalina to Chicago chewing-gum magnate William Wrigley. Wrigley, an entrepreneur of the new consumer culture, turned Catalina into one of the most popular tourist destinations in the American West during the 1920
vi vi vi vi vi
p.213 - 2/27/13 6:34 PM
Land of Necessity
.’’ The spread of ranch houses throughout the United States, though not solely a consequence of residential developments in Palm Springs, demonstrates the extent of the influence of resort leisure in the Southwest on national urban and suburban development.∂≠
Charles Nordho√ and Charles Fletcher Lummis imagined an escape from modernity in the leisure of the ‘‘Great Southwest,’’ which was not a region removed from modern life, but a place that emerged in response to consumer culture’s emphasis on domestic and recreational consumption
vi
p.218 - 2/27/13 6:35 PM
Land of Necessity
Evan R. Ward
Finding Mexico’s Great Show Window
A Tale of Two Borderlands, 1960–1975
essay #7
p.219 - 2/27/13 6:38 PM
Land of Necessity
it fostered the creation of new ‘‘borderlands’’ cities on Mexico’s Caribbean and Pacific coasts, including the resort towns of Cancún, Ixtapa, and Los Cabos, which were planned and built by a collaboration between Banco de México and fonatur (the tourism arm of the Mexican state).
vi
p.219 - 2/27/13 6:38 PM
Land of Necessity
In e√ect, these peripheral, planned cities on the coast became the locus of the new borderlands between the United States and Mexico, for it was here that the two nations now met, and here new boundaries between them were now drawn
vi vi
p.225 - 2/27/13 6:59 PM
Land of Necessity
Bermúdez might have read The Image, which cultural critic and historian Daniel Boorstin published in 1961, to learn that American tourists craved ‘‘elaborately contrived indirect experience.’’ They wanted to travel to landscapes of accommodation—where they could stay in ‘‘American-style’’ hotels and ‘‘remain out of contact with foreign peoples’’—rather than to landscapes of negotiation
vi vivivi
p.225 - 2/27/13 7:01 PM
Land of Necessity
When the program was terminated in 1964, private and public o≈cials in Mexico looked for a way to employ the thousands of braceros who were returning to Mexico. This wave of return migrants included Antonio Bermúdez’s brother, Jaime, who eventually opened the first industrial park for in-bond factories in Ciudad Juárez, under the mandates of the bip.≤
vi
p.231 - 2/27/13 7:31 PM
Land of Necessity
The coastal border towns have now become the aesthetic and architectural face of Mexico, o√ering a setting that looks like Mexico but feels like the United States
vi
p.232 - 2/27/13 7:33 PM
Land of Necessity
. Numerous factors, however, conspired to thwart pronaf’s e√orts to boost border tourism and retail sales, not the least of which was the border region’s demographic growth. The introduction of the maquiladora program, the demise of the Bracero Program, and weakness of the tourism infrastructure, among other things, rendered pronaf ine√ective. Most importantly, however, the absence in border cities of entertainment options for families, the developing taste for resorts, and the growing preference for jet travel diminished the importance of the border to Mexico’s tourist economy
vi
p.238 - 2/27/13 7:34 PM
Land of Necessity
At the Edge of the Storm
Northern Mexico’s Rural Peoples in a New Regime of Consumption, 1880–1940
essay #8
p.241 - 2/27/13 7:44 PM
Land of Necessity
new involvement in what social anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls ‘‘the work of consumption’’ has been unremarked upon. Appadurai observes that mastering consumption’s ‘‘multiple rhythms and how to integrate them is not just work—it is the hardest sort of work, the work of the imagination . . . , [for] the work of consumption is as fully social as it is symbolic, no less work for involving the discipline of the imagination
vi
p.242 - 2/27/13 7:47 PM
Land of Necessity
Within a rural order dominated by merchants and landowners, then, rural peoples confronted a regime of consumption marked by a scarcity of goods and minimal, if not absent, purchasing power
vi
p.243 - 2/27/13 7:48 PM
Land of Necessity
. By the first decade of the twentieth century, a new regime of consumption rooted in forms of both industrial and commercial capitalism had broken the hold of northern Mexico’s old elites.≤≠ What is more, these new
capitalistic forms pushed the land-poor and landless into new markets for their labor and for their necessities
vi
p.244 - 2/27/13 7:51 PM
Land of Necessity
The price of their struggle, as the political theorist Antonio Gramsci captured it when thinking about Europeans in the 1920s and 1930s, was lives passed in a state of ‘‘alarmed defense.’’ He points to how this permanent mobilization left ‘‘traces of autonomous initiative’’ in the documentary record
vi
p.244 - 2/27/13 7:51 PM
Land of Necessity
left to the margins nevertheless made themselves into consumers and made their homes and communities into in-between spaces
vi
p.255 - 2/27/13 8:29 PM
Land of Necessity
On the giant Watts Farms in Cameron County, Texas, for instance, overseers enforced the monopoly of the company store. By 1910 surveillance of laborers’ provisioning practices was so intense, that its foreman caught Ramón Rangel attempting to purchase a pound of macaroni from a store outside the operation. What is more, he had permission to beat Rangel and confiscate the pasta
vi
p.255 - 2/27/13 8:30 PM
Land of Necessity
The boycott of the Watts Farms store was an e√ort of Mexican migrants to decouple consumption from work and to assert that the marketplace for goods should be free and fair, even when the one for labor was not
vi
p.255 - 2/27/13 8:31 PM
Land of Necessity
. In one local after another, members sought not only to double wages—from a miserably low fifty cents to a dollar for picking one hundred pounds of cotton—and to break the power of big operations, but also to widen their access to stores and theaters and cafés and public services
vi
p.269 - 2/27/13 8:35 PM
Land of Necessity
Robert Perez
Confined to the Margins
Smuggling among Native Peoples of the Borderlands
essay #9
p.280 - 2/28/13 11:32 AM
Land of Necessity
We have, to begin with, the absolute need of awakening in the savage Indian broader desires and ampler wants. To bring him out of savagery into citizenship we must make the Indian more intelligently selfish before we make him unselfishly intelligent. We need to awaken in him wants. In
his dull savagery he must be touched by the wings of the divine angel of discontent.
vi vi
p.284 - 2/28/13 11:43 AM
Land of Necessity
armed agents found leave to patrol Indian lands on the grounds of enforcing Prohibition; this opening only widened over the course of the century, as laws multiplied in the e√ort to prevent the transit of contraband, whether banned substances or migrant laborers and their families. Finally, and more importantly, the Cocopah assumed to be smugglers demonstrated striking boldness in their show of strength in the face of aggressive tactics by federal agents, the sheri√’s department, and the U.S. military
p.285 - 2/28/13 11:47 AM
Land of Necessity
Reports in 1994 indicated that the drug tra≈ckers and the Mexican military were preying on the Tarahumara people in Chihuahua: the tra≈ckers were clearing Tarahumara land, including ancient forests, to grow marijuana and opium poppies. With the land cleared, they forced the Tarahumaras and Pimas into the mountains to cultivate the crops.
p.295 - 2/28/13 12:05 PM
Land of Necessity
Peter S. Cahn
Using and Sharing
Direct Selling in the Borderlands
essay #10
p.296 - 2/28/13 12:10 PM
Land of Necessity
This logic inverts the traditional economic calculation in which productive activity leads to consumptive power; in the direct-selling industry, consumption precedes financial gain
vi vi vi
p.296 - 2/28/13 12:10 PM
Land of Necessity
As direct-selling companies multiply throughout the United States and Mexico, they disseminate their message about the primacy of consumption to an ever-wider audience
vi vi
p.297 - 2/28/13 12:11 PM
Land of Necessity
reveals a pattern characteristic of a late-capitalist, transnational economy: orientation toward consumption over one toward production
vi
p.297 - 2/28/13 12:12 PM
Land of Necessity
By 1930, the company counted twenty-five thousand distributors nationwide, over 80 percent of whom lived in towns of fewer than 2,500 people, mostly west of the Mississippi. Not only did rural women like these women lack access to department stores, they relied on their social networks for information about products
vi vi
p.297 - 2/28/13 12:13 PM
Land of Necessity
Mary Kay sold cosmetics and Mary Crowley sold home decorations and gifts. Both women parlayed small initial investments into multimillion-dollar companies that helped make Texas synonymous with direct selling. Along the way they innovated signature rewards for their distributors: the Mary Kay Cadillac, now known as a ‘‘career car,’’ is an iconic symbol of late-twentieth-century consumer culture in the United States.
vi
p.302 - 2/28/13 12:21 PM
Land of Necessity
No clinical evidence supports the theory that megadoses of antioxidants prevent the formation of free radicals in the human body. In one study, participants who received beta carotene supplements, a popular antioxidant, showed higher rates of lung cancer than the control group
vi
p.312 - 2/28/13 12:55 PM
Land of Necessity
Just as work in Omnilife o√ers an alternative to the burdens of the formal economy, so do its products o√er an alternative to the uncertainties of allopathic medicine
vi vi vi
p.315 - 2/28/13 1:13 PM
Land of Necessity
male-dominated societies like Mexico’s, women whose work closely resembles their domestic duties receive more approval than those women who enter the corporate world. Seen as a service profession, direct selling does not threaten stereotypical gender norms and keeps women grounded in the realm of consumption
p.316 - 2/28/13 1:18 PM
Land of Necessity
For Mexican migrants in the United States, the promise of Omnilife turns the liabilities of the formal economy into advantages in the informal one. Direct selling does not privilege legal status, education, or language skills. It fosters community instead of atomizing an already fragmented population
vi vi vi vi holyoke
p.319 - 2/28/13 1:19 PM
Land of Necessity
Sarah Hill
El Dompe, Los Yonkes, and Las Segundas
Consumption’s Other Side in El Paso–Ciudad Juárez
essay #11
p.320 - 2/28/13 1:29 PM
Land of Necessity
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, mass consumption in the United States grew in tandem with services for convenient and sanitary disposal of unwanted and used-up goods. What might be termed ‘‘mass disposal’’ thus is fundamental to mass consumption in the United States
vi
p.321 - 2/28/13 1:31 PM
Land of Necessity
Many materials and goods that simply end their short lives in landfills throughout most of the United States endure in reincarnated form as recovered, repaired, and renewed merchandise in Ciudad Juárez, a foreign city that profits handsomely from Americans’ abandonment of their earlier historical practice of what Strasser called ‘‘object stewardship’’
vo
p.322 - 2/28/13 1:32 PM
Land of Necessity
This essay explores some folk naming practices like fronchi that have sprung up in the fertile soil of rejected-goods tra≈c across the border. I discuss the naming of three sites of consumption/disposal in the pages that follow—el dompe (the dump), los yonkes (junkyards), and las segundas (secondhand
vi vi vi vi
p.322 - 2/28/13 1:33 PM
Land of Necessity
Entwined in this political economy of acquisition/disposal run threads of race, class, gender, and national identity, weaving together a thick cloak of waste and recovery. Naming practices in the market of secondhand and discarded goods reveal a distinct local cultural formation, subject to conditions over which borderland consumers and disposers have little control but which they nonetheless creatively mark through an inventive borderlands idiom
vi
p.325 - 2/28/13 2:10 PM
Land of Necessity
No doubt a greater volume of waste and discards originated in El Paso than Juárez. So, at the outset of El Paso’s modern history, it possessed both a population density and access to goods that made trash disposal a more urgent problem than it was for neighboring Juárez
vi vi
p.326 - 2/28/13 2:12 PM
Land of Necessity
city scavengers in El Paso probably profited not from the collected household fees, but in the market for recovered materials. Beginning in 1896, El Paso city directories show a number of junk dealers and materials processors trading in all manner of detritus and refuse, amassing, sorting, refining and selling their materials to various industries.≤∂
vi vi vi vi holyoke
p.327 - 2/28/13 2:19 PM
Land of Necessity
Just as it was elsewhere in the United States, waste disposal at El Paso’s dump was secondary to materials recovery. At the turn of the twentieth century, dumps served primarily as centralized recovery repositories where armies of scavengers worked—in the most appalling conditions—feeding the supply chain of small-scale industrial buyers of waste materials.
vi
p.328 - 2/28/13 2:21 PM
Land of Necessity
The name dompe for dump might have come into common usage in the 1890s because, as newspapers and city records show, ‘‘Mexicans’’ made up the scavenging labor force under non-Mexican bosses.≤∏ Few of El Paso’s junk dealers between 1896 and 1917 appear to have been Mexican; their Ashkenazi surnames—Blott, Bloch, Rosenberg, and Trachtenberg—are consistent with those of waste traders elsewhere in the United States.≤π
vi
p.328 - 2/28/13 2:22 PM
Land of Necessity
Mexicans living on the city’s south side and particularly young boys—posed a persistent problem for the scavenger’s monopoly: they used their own carts to intercept trash in ‘‘American’’ neighborhoods or charged rates that undercut the scavenger’s fees for carting
vi vi vi vi
p.329 - 2/28/13 2:25 PM
Land of Necessity
In the early 1970s, long after El Paso had closed its dump and turned to the modern, industrial technology of landfilling, a scrappy band of scavengers on Juarez’s city dump had cornered the regional market for recovered materials. By then, resource recovery had squarely repositioned itself on the Mexican side of the border. In 1972, a curious fight erupted between the scavenging cooperative and the local o≈ce of the Mexican Treasury
vi vi
p.329 - 2/28/13 2:28 PM
Land of Necessity
Although my friend’s hometown possessed no yonkes, the etymology of yonke seemed obvious. Autopartes usadas, on the other hand, did not make sense
vi
p.330 - 2/28/13 2:30 PM
Land of Necessity
To procure parts to keep an aged but everexpanding fleet of cheap cast-o√ vehicles viable, juarenses turned to losyonkes, where they could find acres and acres of used vehicles ready to be cannibalized for components
vi
p.331 - 2/28/13 2:31 PM
Land of Necessity
These terms likely lack yonke’s currency on the border, because historically no Mexican equivalents existed in the interior of the country: yonkes specialize in imported used automobile parts to serve in the repair of used imported automobiles. When junkyards began opening up in Juárez, chock-full of American junkers, they might have purposefully mimicked American junkyards and hence imported their very name: yonke
vi vi vi
p.332 - 2/28/13 2:34 PM
Land of Necessity
During his term in o≈ce (1983–86) he imposed a new restriction on the yonkes: the businesses could no longer call themselves yonkes. According to Yonkeros Association President Lozoya, Bermúdez said to him: ‘‘I’m not going to give you even a single new permit for another yonke.’
vi
p.334 - 2/28/13 2:38 PM
Land of Necessity
225 illegal yonkes around the city, whose exterior walls and signage reference their illegality. Since the illegal yonkes are not registered, they do not bother with cumbersome mandated nomenclature. They call themselves, simply
vi
p.334 - 2/28/13 2:38 PM
Land of Necessity
In 2005, 450 registered members of the Yonkeros Association competed for customers
vi
p.334 - 2/28/13 2:39 PM
Land of Necessity
yonkes (when they have painted signs), or in lieu of verbal signage, they indicate their wares with fences made of crushed, cubed automobiles, a formerly universal symbol in Juárez for yonkeros.
vi vi vi
p.336 - 2/28/13 2:42 PM
Land of Necessity
reclassify a transient object with unambiguously negative value. He suggested that the soon-to-be-legal chocolate was, in e√ect, ‘‘garbage’’: ‘‘We want to be business partners with the U.S. and Canada, not their largest basurero de chatarra automovile.’’≥∫ In this he upped the ante—by turning chatarra into basura, or junk into trash
vi
p.336 - 2/28/13 2:43 PM
Land of Necessity
calling this shopping ‘‘malinchando,’’ a term that comes from the name of Malinche, the Indian princess who was Cortéz’s consort and who served as his translator during the conquest of Mexico. To malinchear is to act as a traitor (and, it almost goes without saying, to act as a female traitor). So in crossing the river to purchase fabric, Socorro avoided the (slightly) more pricey Mexican vendors, and in so doing, sold them out.
vi
p.337 - 2/28/13 2:45 PM
Land of Necessity
Like yonkes—which no longer strictly refer to junkyards but now to businesses that both sell and install used automobile parts—las segundas now refers to markets that might sell used goods, or might sell cheap Asian fayuca, or both. To juarenses, it does not really matter, because las segundas has always clearly indicated that what these markets provide is access to goods from elsewhere
vi
p.348 - 2/28/13 2:57 PM
Land of Necessity
This era created a rather marked ‘‘Mexicanness’’ both in the practice and meaning of consumption, but again, it was incomplete. The border was precisely its place of leakage and eventual breakdown, with the rampant growth of vice tourism in border cities such as St. John details for Tijuana, with the extensive smuggling of consumer goods from the United States (termed fayuca), with the back-and-forth migration of people, and, after 1965, with a new system of export-oriented manufacturing resulting in the construction of what would become thousands of maquiladoras
vi
p.348 - 2/28/13 2:58 PM
Land of Necessity
By the 1980s, amid the ruins of the national project, a new consumer structure grew: its central features include a high volume of imported goods (Asian as well as North American), advanced capitalist
consumer firms, notably U.S. or U.S.-style chain and big-box retailers, and Mexican mass media conglomerates whose reach extends through Latin America and the United States
vi
p.349 - 2/28/13 3:00 PM
Land of Necessity
limited access and purchasing power so severely curtails choice. Understanding how border residents negotiate consumptionprovisioning systems—that is, taking class into consideration—is as important as inquiry into habits, tastes, and wants that together shape identity
vi
p.350 - 2/28/13 3:01 PM
Land of Necessity
The 2,000-mile boundary between the United States and Mexico is the only place in the world where a developed country shares a border with a developing country
vi
p.351 - 2/28/13 3:02 PM
Land of Necessity
Cahn’s fieldwork on the appeal to border people of direct selling for companies like Amway, Mary Kay, and Omnilife shows the transformative power of consumption activity for poor migrants surviving on the edges of the mainstream economy. Akin to drug tra≈cking, direct selling often entails constant consumption of the product one sells—reversing the production-consumption cycle. It, too, promises economic independence and self-realization through informal means that bypass mainstream economic institutions and procedures
vi
p.357 - 2/28/13 3:15 PM
Land of Necessity
However, as this volume shows, the meaning of the border is constantly shifting. Frontera, línea, escape, paso, garita, zona libre, zona de tolerancia, or frontier, borderlands, border, limit, sin, free zone, duty free: somehow all terms involve patterns of consumption and circulation of merchandise. Consumption, therefore, is a singular tool with which to study the changing
vi
p.359 - 2/28/13 3:17 PM
Land of Necessity
In Spanish, la línea never took the mythical connotation of the English word frontier, except when talking about Native Americans, whom both nation-states—Mexico and the United States—were willing and in agreement about controlling and hopefully exterminating, as Perez’s essay delineates. La frontera became a frontier, with all its cultural connotations in English, in the twentieth century, but in a less bucolic and romantic way than we might imagine. In Mexico, it became el Norte: the adventure, hope, and opportunity of an economic escape. Hence, contemporary Mexico’s mythic ‘‘West’’ is the North, and its allure is shown by remesas (remittances), the narrative themes of popular Mexican and Central American cultures, and in the local popular heroes in the interior, say, Michoacán or Zacatecas
vi
p.361 - 2/28/13 3:24 PM
Land of Necessity
That is, it was
believed on the one hand that Mexicans naturally engaged in primitive forms of consumption that gave the collective unit (family, community) primacy over the individual, while Americans, on the other hand, naturally followed individualistic consumption habits, which were cast as modern. Thus the U.S.Mexican border came to be the natural ground to look at the encounter of tradition and modernity, a perspective that this volume, in part, perpetuates
vi vi
p.364 - 2/28/13 3:31 PM
Land of Necessity
In 1890s Mexico City, Henry Adams felt betrayed by the lack of Mexican exoticism—Mexico was too American—and in 1919 a U.S. radical, Charles Phillips, saw in the omnipresence in Mexico City of the Singer sewing machine, the Oliver typewriter, and Libby’s potted beef, ‘‘the modern age of Mexico’’:
Mexican cities mean nothing without Oliver, Singer, and Libby
vi vi
p.367 - 2/28/13 3:36 PM
Land of Necessity
Legally, the border went from a loose line to fixed boundary, while in the imaginaires of both nations it went from a fixed boundary to a loose social and cultural line that, notwithstanding, is still assumed to be an unchanging boundary
vi
p.367 - 2/28/13 3:37 PM
Land of Necessity
A recent iteration of this fear came from Samuel Huntington’s formulation of ‘‘The Hispanic Challenge
vivi read in intro
created with Mantano Reader Premium on 3/1/13 12:12 AM
FULL NOTES
\nPARTI HISTORIES 0F NATIONS, CONSUMERS, AND BORDERLANDS
3 Drawing Boundaries between Markets, Nations, and Peoples, 1650-1940
Alexis McCrossen
48 Disrupting Boundaries: Consumer Capitalism and Culture in the
U.S.Mexico Borderlands, 1940-2008
Alexis McCrossen
PART II NATIONAL AND TRANSNATIONAL CIRCUITS OF CONSUMPTION
83 Domesticating the Border: Manifest Destiny and the “Comforts of
Life” in the Boundary Commission and Gadsden Purchase,
1848Ñ1854
Amy S. Greenberg
113 Selling the Border: Trading Land, Attracting Tourists, and Marketing
American Consumption on the Baja California Border, 19004934
Rachel St. John
143 Cinema on the U.S.Mexico Border: American Motion Pictures and
Mexican Audiences, 1896-1930
Laura Isabel Serna
168 Promoting the Pacific Borderlands: Leisure and Labor in Southern
California, 18704950
Lawrence Culver
196 Finding Mexîcds Great Show Window: A Tale of Two Borderlands,
1960-1975
Evan R. Ward
PART III CONSUMPTION IN NATIONAL AND TRANSNATIONAI. SPACES
217 At the Edge of the Storm: Northern Mexicds Rural Peoples in a
New Regime of Consumption, 1880~1940
Iosefßarton
248 Confined to the Margins: Smuggling among Native People
ofthe Borderlands
Robert Perez
274 Using and Sharing: Direct Selling in the Borderlands
Peter S. Cahn
298 El Dompe, Los Yonkes, and Las Segundas: Consumptiorfs Other
Side in E1Paso*Ciudad Iuárez
Sarah Hill
REFLECTIONS
325 The Study of Borderlands Consumption: Potentials and Precautions
Howard Campbell and Iosiah MCC. Heyman
333 On La Frontera and Cultures of Consumption: An Essay of Images
Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo
Review Sheet
p.17 - 2/24/13 10:09 PM
Indeed, it is widely...
Indeed, it is widely assumed that where necessity reigns, consumer culture is anemic. This volume seeks to demonstrate otherwise, not simply because privation defines the experience of many borderlanders past and present, but because even amidst excess (of time, money, things) necessity plays a defining role in shaping social life and cultural patterns.
p.18 - 2/24/13 10:11 PM
While few boundaries...
While few boundaries were in place in the early modern period when this story begins, through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, strenuous e√orts were made on behalf of separating nations, peoples, and markets. Of course countervailing forces against separation (in the case, for instance, of peoples living in the borderlands) and toward integration (in the case, for instance, of international markets for commodities) complicated nationalistic and imperialistic designs
p.18 - 2/24/13 10:11 PM
my essays in Part I ...
my essays in Part I dwell on scarcity and necessity in the borderlands: initially of goods, eventually of purchasing power
p.18 - 2/24/13 10:12 PM
bring into focus the...
bring into focus the mutually constitutive nature of scarcity and abundance, needs and wants
L
p.19 - 2/24/13 10:12 PM
Land of Necessity
Thus, the key words national, transnational, scarcity, abundance, desire, luxury, and necessity are the volume’s pivot points
vi
p.19 - 2/24/13 10:12 PM
Land of Necessity
The essays visit houses, tourist districts, cinemas, retail venues, factories, fields, junkyards, Indian reservations, resorts, and beaches to recover some of the ways that national, binational, and transnational forces fashioned public and private sites of consumption
vi
p.19 - 2/24/13 10:13 PM
Laura Serna, also a ...
Laura Serna, also a historian
p.19 - 2/24/13 10:13 PM
Amy Greenberg, Rache...
Amy Greenberg, Rachel St. John, and Lawrence Culver, all historians
p.19 - 2/24/13 10:13 PM
Sarah Hill, a cultur...
Sarah Hill, a cultural anthropologist, do the same for Mexican incredulity about the border region’s mexicanidad
p.19 - 2/24/13 10:13 PM
historians Josef Bar...
historians Josef Barton and Robert Pere
p.19 - 2/24/13 10:14 PM
cultural anthropolog...
cultural anthropologists Peter Cahn and Sarah Hill
p.19 - 2/24/13 10:14 PM
contrast between sca...
contrast between scarcity and abundance that attracted me to the borderlands as a site of study, but gradually other vectors came into view, not the least of which was that extending between necessity and desire
L
p.19 - 2/24/13 10:14 PM
Land of Necessity
While few would deny the central role necessity plays in human behavior, most scholars of consumer culture are far more attentive to the machinations of desire. In part this is because consumer culture has been narrated as the consequence of an enormous leap from subsistence to abundance
vi
p.20 - 2/24/13 10:16 PM
Mexican consul Salva...
Mexican consul Salvador Duhart, Marilyn Monroe, and Captain Roberto Pini at a publicity event for Pan American Airways, ca. 1950
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p.20 - 2/24/13 10:17 PM
Land of Necessity
The borderlands are framed to the south by Mexico City, the second-largest city in the world, and to the north by Los Angeles, the eighth-largest city in the world. Until 1800, Mexico City was the New World’s capital of trade and merchandising. During the next fifty years the borderlands began to squirm out of Mexico City’s grip, but for several decades even after much of the region became U.S. territory, Mexico City remained its fulcrum and reference point.
vi
p.20 - 2/24/13 10:18 PM
Land of Necessity
twentieth century, movie and television production, automobile orientation, and the jet airplane as manufactured product and transportation—all significant contributors to the emergence of consumer culture in the United States—fostered circuits of exchange that strengthened the magnetism of Los Angeles, for Mexicans and Americans alike.
vi
p.22 - 2/24/13 10:20 PM
As much as consumer ...
As much as consumer culture is a transnational phenomenon, it seems that the various forms it takes contribute more to the perpetuation of perceptions of national di√erences than to their diminution
p.25 - 2/24/13 10:23 PM
Nations require boun...
Nations require boundaries to delimit and separate territories and peoples, but markets are attracted to territorial and political boundaries, clustering around them, pushing against them, maximizing opportunities rising out of the accumulation of asymmetries in such close proximity.
The borderline separating the United States and Mexico after an 1828 ‘‘treaty of limits’’ became ever more visible with each decade
p.26 - 2/24/13 10:25 PM
By the 1880s, it was...
By the 1880s, it was possible to stroll along wide, dusty streets that marked the line in border cities, stepping across the north-south railroad tracks that bisected the boundary
p.26 - 2/24/13 10:26 PM
In this context, the...
In this context, then, it is clear that drawing boundaries contributed to the particular development of consumer culture in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands that this volume investigates
p.27 - 2/24/13 10:26 PM
With broad strokes t...
With broad strokes this essay explores the emergence of markets and nations between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries.
p.27 - 2/24/13 10:27 PM
In the 1930s these t...
In the 1930s these tendencies toward national fortification increased
p.27 - 2/24/13 10:29 PM
investment and inter...
investment and interest in trade networks, expansion of towns and cities, increased agricultural productivity, and population growth together combined to motivate certain groups to abandon what economists call ‘‘target income behavior’’ (working just to meet needs).
L
p.28 - 2/24/13 10:31 PM
Land of Necessity
Mercantile trade with Asia, European colonization of the Americas and Caribbean, and the brutal harnessing of a tractable labor force on New World plantations, along with greater household productivity in northern Europe and the British North American colonies resulted in the trade of what might be considered the first mass-consumed non-subsistence goods: tobacco, tea, and sugar
vi
p.28 - 2/24/13 10:32 PM
Between 1720 and 177...
Between 1720 and 1770, British North American per capita consumption of ‘‘the baubles of Britain,’’ as historian T. H. Breen memorably called tea, shoe buckles, candle wax, and other British imports, increased 50 percent. Although, as Breen explains, ‘‘the rich and well-born had been buying imported goods from distant lands for as long as societies have kept records
L
p.28 - 2/24/13 10:32 PM
Land of Necessity
The extensive choice and variety of items at increasingly lower prices resulted in ‘‘a shared language of goods.’’
vi vi holyoke
p.28 - 2/24/13 10:32 PM
ritualistic actions ...
ritualistic actions centered on consumer goods—boycotts, destruction of tea, pledges against imports—that in Breen’s view contributed to the emergence of a common sensibility as ‘‘American.’’
p.29 - 2/24/13 10:33 PM
Until the late sixte...
Until the late sixteenth century, when the Pacific port of Acapulco opened up trade with Manila, and thus all of Asia, Veracruz was the sole destination of the Spanish galleons, large cargo ships that traveled in fleets, whose shipments were then loaded onto carts that traveled the well-worn road to Mexico City.
p.29 - 2/24/13 10:34 PM
1629,
1629,
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p.29 - 2/24/13 10:35 PM
Land of Necessity
‘‘It seems to me that one of the good and most important businesses in this land is merchandise. . . . The profit is so sure and so large that a wellstocked shop here is the richest thing in the world.’’ Spanish clothing, paper, and wine, European velvet, damask, and linen, Asian spices, silks, and ceramics, he maintained, could be turned into gold: he called it ‘‘alchemy,’’
vi
p.29 - 2/24/13 10:36 PM
Thus creoles were ab...
Thus creoles were able to lay claim to Spain, and to develop as did colonial Britons an ‘‘imagined community’’ of Spaniards in the New World.
p.29 - 2/24/13 10:37 PM
Hispanic material cu...
Hispanic material culture contributed to settlers’ ongoing sense of themselves as Spanish, particularly as they intermarried with the native populations of the New World.
p.30 - 2/24/13 10:40 PM
New Spain would foll...
New Spain would follow its own path, despite the mother country’s policies. In part this was because, unlike British North America, it was self-su≈cient in terms of necessities due to vigorous intercolonial trade, the work of skilled artisans, and obrajes (workshops) that employed as many as fifty hands well before any such enterprise on the Atlantic seaboard hired half as many
L
p.31 - 2/24/13 10:46 PM
Land of Necessity
The consequent heaps of output in turn generated what became the central problem of industrial capitalism: distribution.
Capitalist solutions to the distribution problem initially set store in the
search for new markets, which in the nineteenth-century United States took many shapes, including deepening trade networks with Europe, pursuing the imperialist ideology of Manifest Destiny, and expanding the nation’s territorial size.
vi
p.31 - 2/24/13 10:48 PM
U.S. trade interests...
U.S. trade interests and its desire to open up new markets provided a strong impetus for the formation of the Republic of Texas (1836–45), the U.S. annexation of Texas (1845), and the U.S.-Mexico War (1846–48).
p.31 - 2/24/13 10:49 PM
Today the United Sta...
Today the United States and Mexico are among each other’s principal trading partners; the United States as a whole only does more business with Canada and China
p.32 - 2/24/13 10:50 PM
Until the 1880s, inh...
Until the 1880s, inhabitants faced shortages and scarcity because centers of agriculture and manufacturing were accessible only by carts, stagecoaches, and horses
L
p.33 - 2/24/13 10:50 PM
Land of Necessity
Things changed within a few decades in such dramatic ways that the borderlands were swept up into the new economy. By the 1880s, the daunting amount of agricultural commodities and processed goods in the United States demanded either political or economic adjustments: the excess, some of which rotted or was sunk or burned, gave rise in the United States to political movements such as populism and socialism
vi
p.33 - 2/24/13 10:51 PM
Land of Necessity
entrepreneurs being buried alive by the commodities they hoarded, as in the climatic moment of the Frank Norris novel The Octopus (1901), when a silo of wheat erupts
vi
p.33 - 2/24/13 10:52 PM
‘‘institutions of ab...
‘‘institutions of abundance,’’ such as the advertising agency.≤∞
L
p.33 - 2/24/13 11:15 PM
Land of Necessity
With the emergence of what historian Susan Strasser has identified as ‘‘marketing-driven production,’’ advertising assumed responsibility for spreading awareness of ‘‘new problems’’ that could be solved only by adopting ‘‘new habits,’’ which in turn generated ‘‘new needs’’ that marketing-driven production promised to meet.≤≤
vi holyoke
p.33 - 2/24/13 11:15 PM
Land of Necessity
In the United States and around the world, the standard of living—as an anthropometric measure of well-being and as an aspiration—remained low: through 1900, nearly three-quarters of all Americans lived in the kind of wrenching poverty that results in short life expectancy and high infant mortality.
vi vi
p.34 - 2/24/13 11:16 PM
Land of Necessity
. In contrast, U.S., Western European, and Japanese commercial and political leaders developed capitalist-friendly solutions to the problem of distribution, largely based on the equation of the surplus of commodities with abundance, rather than with excess or maldistribution.
vi vi
p.34 - 2/24/13 11:17 PM
from a factory where...
from a factory where a hand would roll one hundred cigarettes a day to one where a machine rolled 120,000 an hour boggles the imagination. So in terms of the historical narrative, scarcity gets left aside
L
p.34 - 2/24/13 11:18 PM
Land of Necessity
With some exceptions, the paradigm of abundance frames the study of consumer capitalism almost unquestioningly, despite scarcity’s persistence
vi vi
p.34 - 2/24/13 11:18 PM
Since perhaps as man...
Since perhaps as many as nine in ten Mexicans had little to no expendable income in 1900, Mexican manufacturers, in the analysis of one economic historian, ‘‘faced a very insecure and limited consumer goods market.’’
p.34 - 2/24/13 11:19 PM
Mexican manufacturer...
Mexican manufacturers did not invest heavily in improving manufacturing capacity or in the sorts of vast marketing schemes that in the end remade the economy, culture, and society of the United States
p.35 - 2/24/13 11:20 PM
by 1900 railroad lin...
by 1900 railroad lines connected U.S. border cities to Chicago
L
p.35 - 2/24/13 11:22 PM
Land of Necessity
Soon 70 percent of investment in northern Mexico was foreign, much of it from the United States. The region’s mines, particularly its copper ones, yielded great wealth, due to rising demand as communications cables reached around the globe and power lines electrified cities, businesses, and homes
vi
p.35 - 2/24/13 11:24 PM
. Most of the commod...
. Most of the commodities extracted
p.37 - 2/24/13 11:24 PM
from Mexico’s northe...
from Mexico’s northern states entered the global market via rail connections between U.S. border cities and U.S. ports, rather than via the scattered Mexican rail lines and underdeveloped Mexican Gulf ports.≤Ω
p.37 - 2/24/13 11:28 PM
In 1885, the Díaz ad...
In 1885, the Díaz administration lifted all import duties in the region in order to encourage commerce on the Mexican side of the border, which it hoped would counteract the encroaching Americanization of the region.
p.38 - 2/24/13 11:31 PM
Since the economic p...
Since the economic prosperity of the northern border states was largely to the profit of foreigners, it seemed to threaten mexicanidad, that is, Mexican national integrity. The increased volume and value of cross-border trade destabilized the centuries-old trade circuit between Europe, the port of Veracruz, and Mexico City. As northern Mexico entered the orbit of the United States, new trade circuits developed that threatened to overshadow Veracruz as a
trade hub
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p.38 - 2/24/13 11:32 PM
Land of Necessity
Well into the twentieth century, it was assumed that industrial production fortified national integrity and independence. Furthermore, making things—processing raw materials into finished goods—was the most exalted, and potentially profitable, form of economic activity. So the Mexican state, with its sense of national destiny rooted in its interior, tried to keep its periphery in a subordinate economic position. Nevertheless, manufacturing did develop in some Mexican border states: Nuevo Léon’s largest city, Monterrey, for instance, was well on its way to becoming Mexico’s center of steel, beer, glass, and textile production well before 1910.≥
vi
p.39 - 2/24/13 11:34 PM
Land of Necessity
. National advertising campaigns taught consumers to di√erentiate between seemingly like choices. The multiplication of branded goods diminished the appearance of surplus, thus allowing prices to stabilize, and even rise. Advertising for packaged and branded goods, which initially pitched ‘‘use value’’ and reliability, built clusters of connections identifying the brand with ‘‘the good life,’’ while also making subjective appeals that tapped into the anxieties and dreams of particular target markets.≥∑ Branded goods, the
single most important contribution advertising agencies made to the formation of consumer culture, have tended toward reinforcing nationalist identities, preoccupations, and fears. Regardless of where it is bottled, Coke, for instance, is American, as are Levi’s, and the National Basketball Association.
vi vi
p.40 - 2/24/13 11:39 PM
Land of Necessity
economy shifted, in the apt formulation of historian Susan Strasser, from production-oriented marketing to marketing-oriented production.
vi holyoke
p.40 - 2/24/13 11:41 PM
In extending their r...
In extending their reach to the borderlands, emergent institutions of abundance, particularly mail-order firms and department stores, introduced new consumer products as well as branded goods to the region. The Mesilla Valley’s
Amador family, for instance, stocked its thriving general store in Las Cruces, New Mexico, with necessities and luxuries—bicycles, furs, lingerie, sewing machines, saddles, whips, tobacco, and processed foods including the American Biscuit Company’s ‘‘Uneeda Biscuit’’—that a host of regional and national suppliers, including Chicago’s mail-order giants, Montgomery Ward and Sears and Roebuck, shipped via railroad.
L
p.41 - 2/24/13 11:41 PM
Land of Necessity
Thanks to the zona libre, the borderlands’ first department stores emulating the grand emporiums of London and Paris opened in Mexican, not U.S., border towns. Within two decades, however, they and most other commercial businesses had moved to the U.S. side of the border: the e≈ciencies of the U.S. transportation and communications networks trumped the zona libre’s absence of tari√s.
vi
p.41 - 2/24/13 11:43 PM
El Paso’s White Hous...
El Paso’s White House Department Store (1900–84), which became part of a long-lived regional chain extending to San Francisco. Its competitor, the Popular Dry Goods Company, ‘‘the Popular,’’ also initially opened for business in Ciudad Juárez under the name Las Tres B.B.B. (buena, bonita, and barata, or ‘‘good, pretty, and cheap’’) before moving its display and inventories to El Paso.
p.41 - 2/24/13 11:44 PM
One historian of the...
One historian of the borderlands suggests that department stores, the most dazzling of the institutions of abundance, were modern ‘‘borderlands institutions,’’ similar to Spanish missions and presidios. He shows how Tucson’s Jácome’s Department Store (1896–1980) fostered a common borderlands identity among the residents of northern Sonora and southern Arizona through ritualistic
p.42 - 2/24/13 11:46 PM
grand opening ceremo...
grand opening ceremonies for a new store building, the deployment of local decorative motifs and historical figures, and policies that welcomed a multiethnic, multinational, and cross-class clientele.∂∂
L
p.42 - 2/24/13 11:48 PM
Land of Necessity
Borderlands’ department stores, as well as local grocery and variety stores, melded the aesthetics of the borderlands and of abundance such that they reflected and reinforced class and ethnic identities far more trenchantly than national ones
vi
p.43 - 2/24/13 11:49 PM
. W. Woolworth’s and...
. W. Woolworth’s and Co., for instance, which introduced the five and dime retail concept in the 1870s, had more than 1,000 branches in the 1920s, but none in the borderlands until the 1930s. Between 1912 and 1930, the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, known as the ‘‘A & P,’’ opened more than 16,000 grocery stores, of which only a handful were in Texas and California.
L
p.43 - 2/25/13 9:46 AM
Land of Necessity
While anti–chain store sentiment resulted in as many as forty states imposing special regulations and taxes on the largest chain stores in the 1920s, it is likely that nowhere was the political animus as deep as in Texas, home to Wright Patman, who as Congressman in the 1930s authored and attempted to push through Federal regulations hampering the operations of national chains.∂π
vi vi vi holyoke
p.43 - 2/25/13 9:48 AM
So the Helply-Selfly...
So the Helply-Selfly Grocery, Fort Worth’s knocko√ of the national chain, Piggly Wiggly, expanded to thirteen stores by 1927. It, like other local and regional chains, sold heavily-advertised national brands as well as in-house brands and local foodstu√s, while introducing parking spaces for automobiles, expanding retail floor space, providing carts for shoppers, and making other adjustments to incorporate the automobile
p.43 - 2/25/13 9:48 AM
In the 1910s and 192...
In the 1910s and 1920s, Los Angeles was ‘‘the staging ground,’’ in the words of an urban historian, for commercial forms that catered to consumers who drove cars
p.43 - 2/25/13 9:48 AM
In 1931, a suburb of...
In 1931, a suburb of Dallas became home to one of the first outdoor shopping malls in the United States,
Highland Park Village, whose Spanish-revival architecture emphasized Texas’s northernmost city’s ties to the border.
L
p.44 - 2/25/13 9:50 AM
Land of Necessity
Before the dollar was desegregated, to paraphrase a pioneering historical study about African-American consumers, advertising pitches conflated the modern, the American, and the white, while many commercial venues reinforced these associations by barring or limiting access.∑∞ Nevertheless, the consumption of canned foods, ready-made clothing and shoes, or cinematic dramas conveyed the awareness of participating in ‘‘modern life’’ regardless of racial status or origins
vi
p.45 - 2/25/13 9:52 AM
reveals how older re...
reveals how older retail forms incorporated elements of the new consumer culture. Evident is the outcome of the revolution in packaging—tin cans, bottles, and paper boxes—that eliminated most retail in bulk commodities.
p.45 - 2/25/13 9:53 AM
Small and large stor...
Small and large store owners alike found themselves at the mercy of brands, since customers requested them by name and often would not accept substitutes. In the 1920s slogans tied multimedia campaigns together—store posters proclaiming ‘‘good for life,’’ ‘‘made in the South,’’ or ‘‘So Mild!’’ echoed jingles heard on the radio, which themselves repeated ad copy in magazines and newspapers. Well through midcentury, the small shop was a vital conduit for branded goods, especially to geographically and economically marginalized consumers
L
p.46 - 2/25/13 9:56 AM
Land of Necessity
. Despite measures in the United States that served consumers as well as businesses, such as the extension of the post o≈ce’s services to rural areas (1896), the initiation of parcel post (1912), the creation of the Department of Commerce (1902), and the establishment of the Food and Drug Administration (1906), the U.S. government has tended to favor business needs over those of consumers. (Consider the battles to impose consumer safety standards on automobiles and cigarettes, not coincidentally the twentieth century’s most profitable, dangerous, and symbolically charged mass-produced items.∑
vi vi
p.46 - 2/25/13 9:57 AM
newspapers in the Un...
newspapers in the United States and Mexico introduced the fashion, automotive, and lifestyle pages, while also joining a global network of media enterprises connected by transoceanic cables, wireless communications, and news services.∑∏ Soon entirely new forms of communication—moving pictures, radio, and eventually television—heralded the ‘‘information age.’’
p.46 - 2/25/13 10:00 AM
Museums and other ve...
Museums and other venues for exhibitions, such as world’s fairs, purposefully fostered attention to design, hosted fashion shows, and in many cases—through taxonomic displays of peoples and objects —reinforced notions of racial, cultural, and national superiority that in turn supported imperialist and capitalist relations at home and abroad.∑
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p.47 - 2/25/13 10:01 AM
Land of Necessity
Perhaps most far-reaching was the ‘‘therapeutic ethos,’’ which emerged from mainstream Protestant promises in the 1880s and 1890s that salvation—indeed, self-realization—could begin here on earth through the consumption of uplifting goods, experiences, and places. Leisure, mass culture, vacations, and tourism augmented the middle-class value system, remaking theater into a site of uplift rather than corruption, Sunday into a day of recreation rather than of rest, night into a time for adult fun, rural areas into pleasure resorts, and the Southwest into a scenic place where one could marvel at ‘‘untouched nature’’ found in the landscapes and peoples
vi vi
p.48 - 2/25/13 10:02 AM
Land of Necessity
As economists like Simon Patten, journalists like Charles Lummis, fabulists like the author of The Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum, and Hollywood movie studios refashioned desire and pleasure as uplifting, popular culture oriented its diversions around them
p.48 - 2/25/13 10:05 AM
Land of Necessity
Surplus cast as abundance, rather than as over-supply, eased the task of recalibrating attitudes toward materialists and sensualists, such that each could join the ranks of virtuous citizens. Part of this far-reaching adjustment in attitudes hinged upon the expansion of notions of usefulness so that necessity could become a subjective and dynamic consideration. Marketers played an important role in this process, identifying, as the historian Susan Strasser has shown, ‘‘new needs,’’ which mandated ‘‘new habits,’’ and, thus, ‘‘new products.’’
p.48 - 2/25/13 10:06 AM
U.S. response to abu...
U.S. response to abundance, in the Mexican borderlands after the turn of the century, no such ideological sleight of hand was necessary. The problem of distribution presented itself in the age-old shape of scarcity: scarcity of imported goods due to the end of the zona libre (1905), scarcity of water due to drought (1906–08), scarcity of food and fuel due to a subsistence crisis across Mexico (1907–08).
p.48 - 2/25/13 10:06 AM
Spending time and mo...
Spending time and money across the border took on an aura of abandon, of leaving behind the ethics of work and thrift, which reinforced notions of U.S. superiority
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p.49 - 2/25/13 10:09 AM
Land of Necessity
Lacking access to the various safety valves that in the United States di√used rising discontent about inequality, such as an open frontier (until 1890), an expanding economy, racial scapegoating, and the quest for empire (after 1898), Mexico’s solution to the distribution problem was the one of last resort: civil war.
Put bluntly, the Mexican Revolution (1910–20) ruined the immediate prospects for Mexico’s border states to benefit from rising transnational flows of capital, labor, and commodities
p.50 - 2/25/13 10:40 AM
demand, large-scale ...
demand, large-scale cash crop cultivation transformed much of Texas’s Rio Grande Valley and California’s Imperial Valley. When the First World War laid siege to Europe’s agricultural acreage, large-scale farming operations in California and Texas further profited from surging demand for staples. Furthermore, rising wartime demand for copper and petroleum led to the expansion of mining, drilling, and processing operations on the U.S. side of the border. Once the fighting was over in Mexico and Europe, the United States had leapt far ahead of Mexico.
p.50 - 2/25/13 10:41 AM
Not until the 1970s ...
Not until the 1970s did much of northern Mexico’s agricultural infrastructure modernize with hydrology projects, highway building, and refrigerated trucks.
p.51 - 2/25/13 10:42 AM
. Along with oil, av...
. Along with oil, aviation, shipping, and shipbuilding, the film business contributed to Los Angeles’s growth, such that by 1930 it was the fifth largest city in the Unites States.
p.52 - 2/25/13 10:43 AM
Since the 1920s, Mex...
Since the 1920s, Mexican border towns catered to the recreational needs of U.S. sailors and soldiers. Beginning in the 1970s another wave of militarization along the border began, this time in response at first to narcotics smuggling, and later to concerns about national security related to unauthorized entry of people into the United States
p.52 - 2/25/13 10:45 AM
These measures were ...
These measures were part of a broad set of responses to the cumulative e√ects of modernity, particularly high levels of immigration to the Atlantic coast during the previous four decades, new concentrations of wealth and populations in large cities, and emergent cultural obsessions with novelty, youth, and sex.
p.52 - 2/25/13 10:46 AM
In this way the bord...
In this way the border became modern, for it o√ered a safety valve for people unwilling to adhere to vice regulations promising tradition and stability. Despite the significant revenue Mexican border towns generated catering to the vice and tourist trade, on balance, U.S. border cities prospered far more than did Mexican ones during the 1920s. They hosted numerous national and regional conven
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p.52 - 2/25/13 10:46 AM
Land of Necessity
Despite the significant revenue Mexican border towns generated catering to the vice and tourist trade, on balance, U.S. border cities prospered far more than did Mexican ones during the 1920s.
p.53 - 2/25/13 10:47 AM
During the 1920s and...
During the 1920s and 1930s the Mexican federal government claimed significant amounts of previously private land and resources for the nation. The intent of Article 27 of Mexico’s 1917 Constitution was to reclaim Mexico for Mexicans: not only does it mandate that all natural resources in Mexico are national property whose private exploitation is only permissible through concessions, but it also forbids foreigners from owning land within sixty-two miles of Mexico’s territorial borders and thirtyone miles of its coasts.
p.53 - 2/25/13 10:48 AM
but in 1934 Mexico b...
but in 1934 Mexico banned vice industries from border towns
p.54 - 2/25/13 10:49 AM
In the 1960s, what h...
In the 1960s, what had become an insatiable U.S. market for marijuana and narcotics transformed northern Mexico into the home of more than three hundred clandestine airfields. The magnitude of the trade was so great that the U.S. government launched ‘‘Operation Intercept’’ against crossborder drug smuggling in 1969. It is estimated that as of 2007, at least 70 percent of controlled substances enter the United States via the border with Mexico
p.54 - 2/25/13 10:53 AM
Most people living o...
Most people living on the Mexican side of the border shopped in U.S. border towns for provisions, including medicines, milk, and tinned foods, as well as for durable consumer goods like automobiles. A 1926 study reveals the enormity of this trade. That year, juarenses spent ten times as much in El Paso ($15 million) as in their own city: in U.S. stores they bought ‘‘fruits, vegetables, staple items, canned meats, clothing, shoes, cars, furniture, o≈ce supplies, medicines, perfumes, soaps
p.55 - 2/25/13 10:57 AM
The residents of Nog...
The residents of Nogales and Mexicali spent four hundred times as much across the border as in their own towns.
p.55 - 2/25/13 10:58 AM
included bordercross...
included bordercrossing Mexican shoppers among ‘‘modern consumers.’’ The modern consumer, rendered iconic in popular visual and print culture, connotes the aΔuent and the comfortable classes. Consider, in contrast, what the anthropologist Josiah Heyman identifies as the ‘‘consumer proletariat’’: people alienated from the means of production and consumption
p.55 - 2/25/13 10:58 AM
As ‘‘producers’’ wit...
As ‘‘producers’’ without land, tools, or capital, they had no choice but to sell their labor to farming, mine, railroad, and other operations. As ‘‘consumers’’ without access to springs, fields, or commons, they had to turn to the market for tinned foods, factory-made tortillas, water, fuel, and ready-made clothing. This state of a√airs, known as ‘‘market dependency,’’ irked and threatened the central Mexican government when it considered its northernmost citizens
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p.56 - 2/25/13 11:00 AM
Land of Necessity
hone what the historian Susan Porter Benson has identified as consumption practices rooted in ‘‘self-denial, rather than self-fulfillment.’’π≤ She shows how U.S. working classes in the 1920s and 1930s acted as ‘‘inconspicuous consumers,’’ unlike the ‘‘conspicuous consumers’’ social critic Thorstein Veblen first taunted in his 1899 classic, Theory of the Leisure Class. In short, Benson’s work contravenes the widely held notion that ‘‘a rising and inclusive tide’’ of consumption swept across the United States during the twentieth century.π≥ Other historians too are working to shift focus from the peoples who have ‘‘adapted to abundance’’ toward the many who have made do with scarcity. Consumer practices in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands present further opportunities to assess self-denial and inconspicuous consumption within the context of rising levels of material abundance, particularly in the 1920s and 1930s, pivotal decades in this matrix.
vi vi holyoke
p.56 - 2/25/13 11:02 AM
Land of Necessity
But the worldwide collapse of capitalist economies due to overproduction and underconsumption seemed to discredit consumer capitalism as the answer to the problem of distribution. In places where fascism took hold or where communism tightened its grip, state-centered solutions to the problem of distribution gained traction
vi
p.57 - 2/25/13 11:05 AM
sharecroppers, tenan...
sharecroppers, tenant farmers, unskilled young men, and industrial workers were among the most likely to consider the viability of forms of distribution other than market-oriented ones, but various ideological, political, and social conditions foreclosed those possibilities.
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p.57 - 2/25/13 11:06 AM
Land of Necessity
Sales of durable goods like automobiles and home appliances plummeted, but debtors were loath to miss
monthly installment payments for what they already possessed, particularly their automobiles. Millions of Americans reverted to the homegrown and homemade; in doing so they purchased seeds, bulk textiles, glass jars, and other producer goods, but they did not lose their taste for consumer goods. Instead, they dreamt about what they might buy when times got better.π∑
New Deal programs stepped up e√orts of the U.S. federal government to foster a well-run, well-regulated, and subsidized consumer economy.
vi
p.58 - 2/25/13 11:07 AM
Land of Necessity
These programs, as well as fdr’s failed e√ort during the Second World War to amend the Bill of Rights with the guarantee to all U.S. citizens of an ‘‘American standard of living’’ (which Congress trimmed down to the G. I. Bill of Rights), transformed the U.S. government from an enthusiastic bystander into an active participant in consumer society.
vi vi vi vi vi holyoke
p.58 - 2/25/13 11:08 AM
After U.S. president...
After U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt lifted Prohibition in 1933 and Mexican president Lázaro Cárdenas banned the vice industries in 1934, revenues from vice tourism in Mexico declined precipitously, and so with them went the economic fortunes of Mexican border towns and residents. In the attempt to provision border residents, the Mexican government reestablished duty-free zones in communities along the border with California and Arizona.π∫ At the same time a large but unknown number of people of Mexican descent, half of whom might have been U.S. citizens, were forcibly expulsed from the United States.
p.59 - 2/25/13 11:09 AM
Aztec Brewery, San D...
Aztec Brewery, San Diego, ca. 1937. Photograph courtesy Photograph Collection, San Diego Historical Society.
p.59 - 2/25/13 11:19 AM
So U.S.-Mexico trade...
So U.S.-Mexico trade, which had hit a low in 1933 after more than a decade of gains, doubled by 1939
p.64 - 2/25/13 11:22 AM
On the history of ad...
On the history of advertising and marketing in the United States, see Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed; Marchand, Advertising; Fox, Mirror Makers; Lears, Fables of Abundance; Laird, Advertising; Garvey, Adman in the Parlor
p.64 - 2/25/13 11:23 AM
On production-driven...
On production-driven marketing versus marketing-driven production, see Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed
p.65 - 2/25/13 11:23 AM
On commerce’s appeal...
On commerce’s appeal to imagination, see Leach, Land of Desire; Campbell, Romantic Ethic; Lears, Fables of Abundance
p.65 - 2/25/13 11:24 AM
On chain stores in t...
On chain stores in the United States, see Tedlow, New and Improved, chap. 4; Strasser, ‘‘Woolworth to Wal-Mart’’; Lebhar, Chain Stores in America; Liebs, Main Street to Miracle Mile, 121–29;
p.66 - 2/25/13 11:24 AM
On the development o...
On the development of automobile-oriented commerce, see Liebs, Main Street to Miracle Mile;
p.66 - 2/25/13 11:24 AM
Longstreth, City Cen...
Longstreth, City Center to Regional Mall. On franchises, see Marx, ‘‘Development of the Franchise
p.67 - 2/25/13 11:26 AM
On structure of valu...
On structure of values, see Leach, Land of Desire, 235
p.67 - 2/25/13 11:26 AM
Marchand, Advertising
Marchand, Advertising
p.67 - 2/25/13 11:26 AM
Leach, Land of Desir...
Leach, Land of Desire, 233–44; Horowitz, Morality of Spending, chap. 3;
p.67 - 2/25/13 11:27 AM
On refrigeration and...
On refrigeration and agricultural markets, see Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed
p.68 - 2/25/13 11:27 AM
On Mexican cross-bor...
On Mexican cross-border shopping, see Adkisson and Zimmerman, ‘‘Retail Trade on the U.S.-Mexico Border’’
p.68 - 2/25/13 11:30 AM
Roy Rosenzweigand Je...
Roy Rosenzweigand Jean-Christophe Agnew, ‘‘In Memoriam: Susan Porter Benson,’’ AHA Perspectives (October 2005), 55. See Benson’s posthumously published monograph, Household Accounts, as well as ‘‘Living on the Margin’’ and ‘‘Gender, Generation, and Consumption
p.68 - 2/25/13 11:31 AM
On U.S. working-clas...
On U.S. working-class (urban and rural) consumption, see Ownby, American Dreams in Mississippi; Heinze, Adapting to Abundance; Hurley, Diners, Bowling Alleys; Nickles, ‘‘‘More Is Better’: Mass Consumption, Gender, and Class Identity’’; Blanke,
‘‘Consumer Choice, Consumer
p.68 - 2/25/13 11:31 AM
The historian Frank ...
The historian Frank Trentmann’s published essays provide further admonitions to move the field toward inclusion of consumers with little disposable income; see especially ‘‘Bread, Milk and Democracy’’; ‘‘Beyond Consumerism’’; ‘‘The Modern Evolution of the Consumer’’; ‘‘Knowing Consumers.’’ See also Brewer and Trentmann, eds., Consuming Cultures, Global Perspectives
p.69 - 2/25/13 11:32 AM
On installment payme...
On installment payments and consumer debt servicing in the U.S. during the 1930s, see Calder, Financing the American Dream; Olney, ‘‘Avoiding Default.’
p.69 - 2/25/13 11:32 AM
On the U.S. politica...
On the U.S. political shift from a ‘‘producerist’’ to ‘‘consumerist’’ orientation, 1800–1960, see McGovern, Sold American; Donohue, Freedom from Want; Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics, 95–175; Glickman, Living Wage, 133–62; Cross, ‘‘Corralling Consumer Culture.’
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p.70 - 2/25/13 11:33 AM
Land of Necessity
Disrupting Boundaries
Consumer Capitalism and Culture in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 1940–2008
esay #2
p.70 - 2/25/13 11:34 AM
Or consider Mexican ...
Or consider Mexican ‘‘border blasters,’’ radio stations that operated just south of the border for half a century after 1931 to avoid U.S. communications regulations
p.70 - 2/25/13 11:34 AM
endless examples of ...
endless examples of how ‘‘consumption practices con- tinuously disrupt conventional boundaries.’
p.71 - 2/25/13 11:36 AM
In heeding social th...
In heeding social theorist Arjun Appadurai’s 1993 call to ‘‘think ourselves beyond the nation,’’ historians, anthropologists, and other scholars are directly questioning what historian David Thelen identifies as the ‘‘faith that the border can keep people and nations apart.’’∂
p.71 - 2/25/13 11:37 AM
they join the push t...
they join the push to partially divest the academy of a nation-centric approach to organizing research and teaching
p.72 - 2/25/13 11:37 AM
U.S. capital moved s...
U.S. capital moved south, in particular reopening mines and smelters, while Mexican laborers headed north to fields, factories, and construction sites. The U.S. and Mexican governments initiated a guest-worker system, the Bracero Program (1942–64)
p.72 - 2/25/13 11:38 AM
. Once in the United...
. Once in the United States, Mexican migrants worked for low wages while consuming mass-produced goods. On their return to Mexico, they brought back new ideas about consumption, along with suitcases, sacks, and boxes of consumer goods associated with the United States
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p.72 - 2/25/13 11:38 AM
Land of Necessity
By the end of 1945, not only had the United States won the war, dominated its allies, and mostly avoided depredations and damages to its own territory, but it now stood ready to export consumer democracy, in the shape of the Marshall Plan, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, tari√ and trade agreements, and corporate investments, not to mention U.S.-made consumer goods.
vivi
p.72 - 2/25/13 11:39 AM
Massive amounts of U...
Massive amounts of U.S. funding for the reconstruction of ‘‘the free world’s’’ economies were channeled into industries that produced consumer goods and defense matériel
p.73 - 2/25/13 12:02 PM
Simultaneously, expl...
Simultaneously, explosive social movements insisting that groupbased identities replace the monolithic (though raced, gendered, and classed) ‘‘American’’ identity further pushed the shift away from the mass market toward a segmented one. Significantly, just when U.S. electoral politics had achieved a commendable measure of inclusivity with the 1965 Voting Rights Act, political campaigns shifted from pitching appeals to the mass electorate toward interest group politics
p.73 - 2/25/13 12:02 PM
Competition between ...
Competition between capitalism and communism in the arena of consumption simmered and sometimes boiled over, perhaps best exemplified by the 1959 ‘‘Kitchen Debates’’ between the U.S. vice president Richard Nixon and the Russian premier Nikita Khrushchev. In them, ‘‘the American standard of living,’’ as embodied in the all-electric kitchen, Pepsi, and television, wreaked psychic havoc on the boisterous Khrushchev
p.74 - 2/25/13 12:04 PM
Mexican government g...
Mexican government gambled that a nationalized consumer economy built on mexicanidad would protect it from foreign dependency, particularly on the United States. Likewise, it encouraged the use of indigenous design for consumer goods, hoping to cash in on indigenismo
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p.74 - 2/25/13 12:05 PM
Land of Necessity
. Places and goods imbued with characteristics and symbols of the folk, the primitive, and the ancient attracted Western intellectuals and dreamers, who, uneasy with capitalism and disdainful of the mass-produced, were prone to antimodernist positions and places.
vi
p.74 - 2/25/13 12:06 PM
Mexico sponsored
wha...
Mexico sponsored
what are known as import-substitution policies—high import tari√s, subsidies for internal improvements, and loans for new factories—in order to encourage, if not force, Mexicans to ‘‘buy Mexican
p.74 - 2/25/13 12:08 PM
As they had earlier,...
As they had earlier, bordercrossing consumers defied expectations that the boundary line should separate the two nations.
p.75 - 2/25/13 12:08 PM
In 1961, the Mexican...
In 1961, the Mexican state introduced a state-funded development agency known as pronaf (Program Nacional Fronterizo)
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p.75 - 2/25/13 12:09 PM
Land of Necessity
Antonio Bermúdez, the director of Mexico’s nationalized oil company pemex before he was named head of pronaf, tried to make the border into ‘‘a great show window,’’ and thus Mexico into an emporium of goods and services for the world’s richest consumers, Americans
vi
p.75 - 2/25/13 12:10 PM
Despite these e√orts...
Despite these e√orts, during the 1960s the U.S. side of the border became, in the words of the Mexican diplomat and scholar Carlos Ferrat, ‘‘a big mall for the Mexicans.’’≤≤ In keeping with the metaphor, Mexico remained an adult amusement park for Americans, who found packaged leisure on its beaches and in its resorts, as well as elsewhere in the Caribbean and Central America.≤≥
p.76 - 2/25/13 12:11 PM
Nevertheless, the Me...
Nevertheless, the Mexican government recognized the centrality of the consumer—as tourist, as shopper, as citizen—to national economic health, just as the United States government had a few decades earlier
p.76 - 2/25/13 12:11 PM
Initiated in 1965 in...
Initiated in 1965 in response to the social crisis brought on by the end of the Bracero Program the previous year, the Border Industrialization Program (bip) facilitated the establishment of maquiladoras,
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p.76 - 2/25/13 12:12 PM
Land of Necessity
. The bip would not have succeeded were it not for low transportation costs, due in large part to the development of a smooth system for the transfer of standardized forty-foot-long containers from cargo ships, to railroad cars, to truck beds. The container was to global production of consumer goods what the moving assembly line was to Ford’s organization of factory production.≤∑
vi
p.76 - 2/25/13 12:12 PM
Land of Necessity
. Through the 1970s and 1980s, the maquiladora sector grew, as did duty-free zones (frequently known as ‘‘Special Economic Zones’’ or ‘‘Export Processing Zones’’) in other parts of Mexico, Central America, Latin America, as well as throughout the developing world, including China’s Pearl River Delta, eight enclaves in India, and ports in Germany, Portugal, and France.≤
vi vi
p.77 - 2/25/13 12:13 PM
The costs of the goo...
The costs of the goods assembled in the Mexican export zone, and other export zones, ought to include rendering the region into one of the world’s environmental disaster areas, its cities into overcrowded, underserviced landscapes, and many of its residents, particularly women, into a vulnerable population.
p.77 - 2/25/13 12:14 PM
As in the United Sta...
As in the United States, Mexico’s rate of inflation began to skyrocket in the early 1970s. But it was far worse in Mexico, hitting 100 percent in 1976,
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p.78 - 2/25/13 12:17 PM
Land of Necessity
The outsourcing and o√shoring of U.S. manufacturing and the significant
economic setbacks cutting into United States and Mexican wages since the 1970s have coincided with the boom in ‘‘discounting,’’ and the concomitant ‘‘logistics revolution’’ in product distribution. These developments characterize the years between the opening of the first Wal-Mart in the United States in 1962 and then of Mexico’s first one in 1991. Today this retail corporation is the largest private employer in Canada, the United States, and Mexico
vi
p.78 - 2/25/13 12:18 PM
Land of Necessity
As the historian Nelson Lichtenstein posits, Wal-Mart is ‘‘the template for world capitalism’’ in which the retailer is ‘‘king and the manufacturer his vassal.’’≥
vi vi vi holyoke
p.78 - 2/25/13 12:18 PM
Land of Necessity
Although Edward Filene opened his Boston bargain basement in 1909
holyoke
p.78 - 2/25/13 12:19 PM
Land of Necessity
An era of manufacturers’ control over prices ended in 1975 when the U.S. Congress passed the Consumer Goods Pricing Act, which abolished the practice of ‘‘retail price maintenance’’ through which manufacturers could insist that retailers sell their products above certain price levels
vi
p.78 - 2/25/13 12:20 PM
These developments i...
These developments in the scale and e≈ciency of retail and manufacturing are built on a foundation of labor exploitation. Wal-Mart and other discount corporations discriminate against female and foreign workers in terms of pay, promotions, and benefits, and externalize other labor costs such as health insurance and workers’ compensation. While prices have never been lower than in 2007 and store inventories never more closely attuned to market demands, the WalMart template of ‘‘always low prices’’ depends on correspondingly always low wages.≥
p.79 - 2/25/13 12:22 PM
The disparity betwee...
The disparity between the compensation of low-wage workers and corporate bosses in the borderlands and across the United States is astounding: managers of assembly plants in Juárez make more than $2,000 a week, while employees earn between $25 and $100 a week, and while ceo annual compensation is 364 times more than that of the lowest-paid employees
p.80 - 2/25/13 12:24 PM
Northern Mexicans sp...
Northern Mexicans spent as much as two-thirds of their household income on food.≥∫ What we could call the sovereignty of the tortilla, but for the fact of eight-fora-dollar packages of Top Ramen instant noodles, continues to cast the borderlands onto the same terrain as early modern French cities, eighteenth-century English villages and cities, or nineteenth-century cities in the United States, where everyone but a lucky few spent all their income on food and shelter.≥Ω
p.81 - 2/25/13 12:25 PM
Michael Harrington i...
Michael Harrington identified as the ‘‘other America,’’ when his 1962 exposé of that name drew attention to the 22 percent of Americans who lived below the o≈cial poverty line
p.81 - 2/25/13 12:25 PM
Using the U.S. feder...
Using the U.S. federal government’s definitions of poverty, which take into account a range of ‘‘decencies’’ in addition to necessities like food, about 86 percent of all Mexicans live in poverty, in contrast with 12 percent of U.S. residents.
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p.82 - 2/25/13 12:28 PM
Land of Necessity
Mike Davis, a historian and social critic, calls Tijuana’s residents ‘‘consummate bricoleurs,’’ in praise of their exercise of choice and agency in building expressive homes, yards, and streetscapes out of the debris of the border’s nationalist versions of capital- ism.∂
vi
p.82 - 2/25/13 12:29 PM
In open air marketpl...
In open air marketplaces, as well as large warehouses, cash-poor borderlanders dig through mountains of used cloth- ing, sort through old machine tools, and carefully examine discarded house- hold appliances and decorative items. The United States exports nearly one billion dollars’ worth of used clothing a year, much of which is smuggled into Mexico.
p.83 - 2/25/13 12:32 PM
pheriwalas—the socia...
pheriwalas—the social theorist Arvind Rajagopal examines how these exemplars of India’s informal economy have been cast as ‘‘symbols of metropolitan space gone out of control.’’ His account of the aΔuent minority’s vision of Mumbai’s streets ‘‘as but the circuitry of the formal economy in which they themselves work’’ could well describe nationalist dreams for the border as a line separating the two nations and as a conduit channelling the orderly exchange of goods, capital, and labor (only when o≈cially demanded).
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p.83 - 2/25/13 12:34 PM
Land of Necessity
What does nation mean when people, money, and goods come and go? What di√erentiates private from public spaces? One nation from another? The illegal alien, the
shadows, crevices, and in-between spaces, where consumption happens differently than in the living rooms, bars, and bedrooms represented on television.∂
vi vi vi holyoke
p.84 - 2/25/13 12:35 PM
Extending commodity-...
Extending commodity-chain analysis into the realm of ‘‘making do’’ opens up the study of what the cultural theorist Arjun Appadurai terms ‘‘the social life of things.’’ Ultimately such analysis, which brings together economic, cultural, social, and theoretical considerations, emphasizes the positive consequences of hybridity.
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p.84 - 2/25/13 12:37 PM
Land of Necessity
transnational flows of culture and capital, which themselves create, exacerbate, and then advertise the stark contrasts between scarcity and abundance
p.84 - 2/25/13 12:38 PM
Simultaneous with th...
Simultaneous with the tremendous increase in the volume of global trade since 1980 has been a remarkable decrease in extreme poverty throughout the world: today a billion people live on a dollar a day, twenty years ago two billion did. There are many plausible explanations for this, one of which is the liberalization of trade
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p.84 - 2/25/13 12:39 PM
Land of Necessity
Studies of aΔuent societies, like William Leach’s landmark study of the United States, titled Land of Desire, explore the amplification of relative, rather than real, measures of deprivation. Heedlessly and shamelessly, marketing campaigns peddle diet foods, light beers, and automobiles in a world of hungry, thirsty, and shoeless people. It is no wonder that in the borderlands, as in other impoverished and not so impoverished places, real senses of need and necessity compete with relative wants and desires, giving rise to both tremendous hope and profound despair.
vi vi
p.85 - 2/25/13 12:44 PM
’ Many commodity cir...
’ Many commodity circuits depend on the border’s alchemical magic to create value. Consider the quotidian hiring of undocumented workers or the spectacular movement of millions of dollars’ worth of contraband.
p.85 - 2/25/13 12:45 PM
Since the 1990s, ‘‘g...
Since the 1990s, ‘‘global illicit trade,’’ according to the editor of Foreign Policy, Moisés Naím, has ‘‘moved away from fixed hierarchies and toward decentralized networks; away from controlling leaders and toward multiple, closely linked, dispersed agents and cells; away from rigid lines of control and exchange and toward constantly shifting transactions as opportunities dictate.’’∑∑ In doing so, it has saturated the world’s borderlands
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p.86 - 2/25/13 12:46 PM
Land of Necessity
underground economy accounts for 10 percent of the United States Gross Domestic Product (gdp), about 50 percent of Mexico’s, and as much as three-quarters of Nigeria’s and Thailand’s, each home to global cities (Lagos and Bangkok) that match the U.S.-Mexico borderlands as environmental and human wastelands.
vi
p.86 - 2/25/13 12:46 PM
Moving drugs, guns,...
Moving drugs, guns, stolen goods, sex workers, and slaves across the border enhances, rather than creates, their market value
p.86 - 2/25/13 12:47 PM
Money laundering bec...
Money laundering became so extensive in the 1990s, after many restrictions on the movement of currency were lifted, that a Journal of Money Laundering Controlbegan regular publication in 1997
p.86 - 2/25/13 12:49 PM
Today, millions of d...
Today, millions of dollars are made through transporting discarded and used goods, such as clothing, auto parts, tools, and appliances, from the United States into Mexico without paying import duties. Further millions are made in the smuggling of Chinese-made consumer goods into Mexico
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p.86 - 2/25/13 12:50 PM
Land of Necessity
Crossing the border in all these cases enriches the market value of commodities ranging from used shoes to male labor in slaughterhouses, from transistor radios to female household labor. Such forms of shadow production perforce beget what we could call shadow consumption, which often, though not always, takes place in the interstices of the economy, society, and culture: in streets, alleys, squatters’ shacks, colonias, automobiles, junkyards, and elsewhere
vi vi vi
p.87 - 2/25/13 12:51 PM
At the dawn of the t...
At the dawn of the twenty-first century it is the bodies of paragons of the underground economy—illegal aliens, street peddlers, drug dealers, hawkers—who absorb similar blows.
p.88 - 2/25/13 12:52 PM
Station xer, home to...
Station xer, home to the notorious self-proclaimed Dr. John (‘‘Goat Gland’’) Brinkley, was one of several ’’border blasters’’ set up just south of the border after the passage of the U.S. Radio Act of 1927.
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p.88 - 2/25/13 12:52 PM
Land of Necessity
. After the Second World War, evangelical preachers who could not get on U.S. radio due to their solicitation of ‘‘donations’’ in exchange for prayers promising to rescue listeners from disease and poverty, leased air time from the station, which was renamed xera. In 1959 a marketing company, incorporated in Texas as InterAmerican Radio Advertising, acquired the facilities, boosted its capacity to 250,000 kW, and then recruited a disc jockey whose madcap style and on-air sales o√ers became famous: Wolfman Jack.
vi
p.90 - 2/25/13 1:00 PM
Over the past quarte...
Over the past quarter of a century, national interests have led to U.S. and Mexican insistence on dismantling trade barriers and implementing other neoliberal policies, such that today the border is porous enough that billions of dollars’ worth of goods and capital flow freely and legally.∏∫ Simultaneously, however, the geographic fact of the border’s permeability contributes to the heavy flow of undocumented migrants and illegal goods across it
p.90 - 2/25/13 1:01 PM
the region is a ‘‘st...
the region is a ‘‘staging ground’’ for globalization.π
p.91 - 2/25/13 1:03 PM
Particularly instruc...
Particularly instructive is the Latin American intellectual Néstor García Canclini’s warning that the aesthetics of ‘‘fragmentation,’’ ‘‘recomposition,’’ and ‘‘hybridity’’ obscure how globalization ‘‘reorders di√erences and inequalities without eliminating them
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p.91 - 2/25/13 1:04 PM
Land of Necessity
Consumer goods themselves, however, as particular kinds of objects with certain forms of branding, have firm identities that situate them within particular national groupings: ‘‘made in the U.S.A.,’’ ‘‘à la francaise,’’ ‘‘Chinamade,’’ ‘‘muy Mexicano.’’ It is thus evident that globalization is not erasing the meaning of borders or wiping out national and regional di√erences.
p.91 - 2/25/13 1:05 PM
very real boundaries...
very real boundaries nevertheless remain fixed, dividing the borderlands such that despite all else, it is a land of necessity for most who make it their home
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p.105 - 2/25/13 1:06 PM
Land of Necessity
Amy S. Greenberg
Domesticating the Border
Manifest Destiny and the ‘‘Comforts of Life’’ in the U.S.-Mexico Boundary Commission and Gadsden Purchase, 1848–1854
essay #3
p.105 - 2/25/13 4:32 PM
In the view of north...
In the view of northern critics, the Gadsden Purchase was a prime example of a southern slave power attempting to corrupt the political process to its own ends: in this case acquiring more land for slavery and hopefully a southern transcontinental rail
p.106 - 2/25/13 4:33 PM
Gadsden territory wa...
Gadsden territory was defined in northern public discourse by its stunted trade, lack of consumer goods, and primitive family homes
p.106 - 2/25/13 4:33 PM
. Bartlett’s politic...
. Bartlett’s political position should have placed him at the forefront of proponents of Manifest Destiny in the early 1850s, but he became, instead, the leading voice condemning acquisition of territory in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. As this essay will explore, his prolific writings from and about the region both shaped and reflected a conflict between divergent views of the place of consumption and domesticity in American society and the potential value of the borderlands within American civilization
p.107 - 2/25/13 4:38 PM
Bartlett, a notable ...
Bartlett, a notable scholar of Native American ethnology, gained his position thanks to his political connections to the Whig Party, then in power.≥ He joined the Boundary Survey for the money, for the adventure, and for the chance to examine the terra incognita of the Southwest
p.108 - 2/25/13 4:40 PM
Bartlett’s account w...
Bartlett’s account was ‘‘a publication that would irritate Emory for years while he worked on his own narrative,’’ eventually published in 1859 at government expense as Report on the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey, made under the Direction of the Secretary of the Interior.∏
p.108 - 2/25/13 4:40 PM
As boundary commissi...
As boundary commissioner, Conde was a superb advocate for Mexican interests, but they were Mexico’s interests broadly understood. Although Conde was himself from northern Mexico, his allegiance lay with Mexico City; at one point he attempted to trade land along the Gila River to the United States in return for land on the Pacific Coast, suggesting the relative value he placed on the two regions
p.109 - 2/25/13 4:42 PM
The dearth of suppli...
The dearth of supplies and their expense was partially due to the simultaneous beginnings of gold fever, but the ineptitude (some said outright corruption) of Bartlett’s brother, appointed to handle those supplies, exacerbated the situation. Di≈culties with the Apaches, who had terrorized Mexican residents of the region for decades, were probably inevitable, but in refusing to share alcohol with the Native Americans he encountered, the teetotaler Bartlett helped alienate potential allies.
p.110 - 2/25/13 4:44 PM
Historians have posi...
Historians have posited a variety of explanations for the failure of the Bartlett-Conde agreement, ranging from the ineptitude of commission members, to the start of the California Gold Rush, to the shift of political power in Washington in 1853 following the election of Democrat Franklin Pierce to the presidency
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p.111 - 2/25/13 4:45 PM
Land of Necessity
This essay suggests that competing views of the market, of consumption, and of the place of domesticity in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands were also contributing factors to the failure of the Bartlett-led commission and to the ultimate resolution of the international boundary with the Gadsden Purchase
vi vi vi
p.111 - 2/25/13 4:47 PM
By placing the debat...
By placing the debates over the border in their cultural context, it becomes apparent that more than a railroad was at stake in the question of a compromise agreement: the role of consumption within American culture in the 1850s was also under consideration
p.111 - 2/25/13 4:48 PM
Furthermore, each pa...
Furthermore, each party professed commitment to the central role of the home, the family, and women in American life. Whigs, on the whole, were more willing than Democrats to transfer control of household matters to women, were more supportive of women’s rights movements, and were more willing to share the political spotlight with women. Divisions between the parties on expansionism and gender were far from clean ones, however, because the ideologies of domesticity and expansionism were not necessarily opposed.∞
p.112 - 2/25/13 4:50 PM
Domesticity and nati...
Domesticity and national expansion were thus mutually reinforcing.∞
p.112 - 2/25/13 4:50 PM
Catharine Beecher di...
Catharine Beecher directed women to purchase ‘‘superfluities’’ in order to promote the national economy, pointing out that consumption of such goods ‘‘is as indispensable to promote industry, virtue, and religion, as any direct giving of money and time.’’
p.113 - 2/25/13 4:51 PM
Andrew Jackson Downi...
Andrew Jackson Downing asserted in 1847 that a refined domestic environment presented an ‘‘unfailing barrier against vice, immorality, and bad habits.’’ Famed landscape architect and designer Calvert Vaux claimed that an ‘‘all-encircling civilization,’’ expressed through a tastefully decorated home, was ‘‘within reach of every class,’’ implying that the failure of a home to adhere to the standards these authors set forth was clear evidence of the unworthiness of its occupants
p.113 - 2/25/13 4:51 PM
including the presen...
including the presence of a parlor, carpets, an attractive yard, plastered walls, a fireplace mantle, and possibly a library.
p.113 - 2/25/13 4:52 PM
Whigs, in particular...
Whigs, in particular, upheld the view that consumption could be an almost religious activity, which would promote the moral uplift of both a woman’s home and the larger environment in which she lived
p.114 - 2/25/13 4:57 PM
At the same time, th...
At the same time, the refined family home was heavily loaded with both class and gender significance, particularly to domesticated women and their political supporters in the Whig party
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p.114 - 2/25/13 4:57 PM
Land of Necessity
Mexicans have never celebrated their arid and mountainous northern frontier, or el norte, in the same romantic manner that U.S. residents have embraced their frontier
vi
p.114 - 2/25/13 4:58 PM
For Mexico City, esp...
For Mexico City, especially after 1848 according to historian Juan Mora-Torres, ‘‘the border represented nothing but a series of new problems it was incapable of solving:
p.115 - 2/25/13 5:02 PM
The illustrations in...
The illustrations in both Emory’s and Bartlett’s volumes also supported the idea of Manifest Destiny, presenting a vision of the Southwest often closer to Albany than Albuquerque
p.115 - 2/25/13 5:03 PM
The result of these ...
The result of these artistic choices was to present a visual portrait of territory open to Manifest Destiny, where the landscape was familiar
p.116 - 2/25/13 5:03 PM
But Bartlett’s faith...
But Bartlett’s faith in Manifest Destiny wavered during his excursions
p.116 - 2/25/13 5:04 PM
, Bartlett had alrea...
, Bartlett had already reached a conclusion about the value of Sonora to the United States: it was worthless.≤∏
p.117 - 2/25/13 5:07 PM
The Santa Fe trade w...
The Santa Fe trade was, of course, world renowned and profitable in the 1840s. Emory himself noted in his 1846 reconnaissance of the Gila River that the Santa Fe trade alone merited the annexation of New Mexico to the United States. American consumer goods had made deep inroads into northeastern Mexico by the late 1840s.
p.117 - 2/25/13 5:08 PM
that port quickly de...
that port quickly declined
as a commercial center when smugglers realized they could easily move goods across the river away from the tax collectors of the city. New towns sprang up along the Rio Grande to handle the illicit trade, and newspapers from the period featured ads from traders willing to ‘‘receive and forward freight at almost any point on the Rio Grande,’
p.117 - 2/25/13 5:09 PM
‘‘The river is navig...
‘‘The river is navigable to the place during the whole year, and we understand large quantities of goods are now being sent there for sale. They are not subject to duties under the Mexican tari√, when shipped to this point from an American port.’’
p.118 - 2/25/13 6:51 PM
stunted nature of co...
stunted nature of commerce in the region.
p.118 - 2/25/13 6:51 PM
commission openly be...
commission openly bemoaned the lack of trade in El Paso del Norte (Ciudad Juárez)
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p.118 - 2/25/13 6:52 PM
Land of Necessity
The explosion of illicit trade was largely limited to Mexico’s northeast, where the Rio Grande marked the southern edges of Texas. The lack of rivers and roads further west limited the licit and illicit spread of commercial goods. To make matters worse, a blockade of Sonora’s primary port on the Gulf of California, Guaymas, during the U.S.Mexico War e√ectively paralyzed trade in the region for a year and a half, and the Gold Rush, starting in 1849, drained both population and resources from the area in exchange for a serious cholera epidemic that further devastated Guaymas. There was little sarsaparilla, or any other goods, available to residents of this area
vi vi vi
p.119 - 2/25/13 6:53 PM
Scarcity and idlenes...
Scarcity and idleness, in Bartlett’s view, characterized the region
p.119 - 2/25/13 6:54 PM
Fronterizos, who vie...
Fronterizos, who viewed Mexico City with suspicion, were accustomed to their independence from governance. In a region far from the control of either the United States or Mexico, borderlands residents ‘‘rather than states,’’ as historian Juan Mora-Torres explains, ‘‘shaped social relations.’’
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p.120 - 2/25/13 6:55 PM
Land of Necessity
Bartlett, like other Whigs, linked social disorder with the absence of strong social institutions, and he turned to those institutions for a solution.≥∑ Based on the amount of attention that Bartlett’s narrative and letters devote to houses, their construction, and their furnishing, the foremost civilizing institution missing from the border, in his opinion, was the well-ordered family home
vi vi
p.120 - 2/25/13 6:56 PM
These were not the ‘...
These were not the ‘‘comfortable’’ homes he and other refined Americans venerated back in the United States. These were not the sorts of homes that could civilize the region
p.121 - 2/25/13 6:56 PM
Bartlett’s perceptio...
Bartlett’s perception, however, the overriding problem with the adobe homes on the border was not that they were made out of mud, but that they lacked proper furnishings and domestic goods. Bartlett remarked in his narrative upon the absence of wood floors and glass windows in the region, as well as further problems.
p.122 - 2/25/13 6:59 PM
Bartlett reserved hi...
Bartlett reserved his admiration for the German settlers of Texas, who closely conformed to the standards
of middle-class American domesticity.
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p.123 - 2/25/13 7:01 PM
Land of Necessity
In each of these accounts, it is commercial goods—from furniture, to books, to musical instruments, to artworks—that are highlighted as key to a cultured and admirable domestic sphere. The Germans were praiseworthy precisely because they conformed to the emerging norms of domestic ideology, not only by consuming goods in the service of domestic bliss, but also through their restrained and refined masculine practices. Frederick Law Olmsted, another northeastern Whig traveler through the borderlands in the 1850s, was similarly impressed by the domestic arrangements of the German settlers of Texas, while caustically critical of the homes of American slave owners.
vi vi holyoke
p.124 - 2/25/13 7:29 PM
Emory himself did no...
Emory himself did not author. His single reference to the interior of a house is in the context of religious commentary.
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p.125 - 2/25/13 7:32 PM
Land of Necessity
As a subscriber to domestic ideology that linked refined homes with civilization, he was more than willing to compromise with Mexico on the location of the boundary; other Whigs, sharing his views of the link between consumer goods and civilization, supported his position
vi vi
p.125 - 2/25/13 7:35 PM
In the long term, Ba...
In the long term, Bartlett’s views contributed to American perceptions of the borderlands and Mexico itself as uninhabitable and undomesticated
p.125 - 2/25/13 7:35 PM
Gadsden Purchase opp...
Gadsden Purchase opponents drew on images of the Mesilla Valley remarkably similar to those found in Bartlett’s letters to the Providence Journal
p.127 - 2/25/13 7:38 PM
Bartlett’s narrative...
Bartlett’s narrative, so bound up with consumption, was itself o√ered up in the Episcopalian church’s o≈cial organ, The Churchman, as something to be consumed by anti-expansionist northeasterners at leisure
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p.127 - 2/25/13 7:38 PM
Land of Necessity
The U.S.-Mexico War had a dramatic impact on the rise of consumer culture in the borderlands. Merchants on both sides of the new borderline grew wealthy from smuggling, and new towns sprang up along the Rio Grande in order to facilitate the burgeoning illegal trade,
vi vi
p.127 - 2/25/13 7:40 PM
Land of Necessity
Competing visions of the relationship between consumption and settlement, as well as partisanship and the desire among southern Democrats for a workable southern railroad route, shaped congressional debates over the BartlettConde agreement. The Democrat Emory rationalized expansion into Chihuahua and Sonora in part because he saw no need for market penetration of the region prior to its settlement. For John Bartlett, as for many sympathetic Whigs, the U.S.-Mexico borderlands were less than fully desirable because they could not easily be integrated into the market. The region did not lend itself to the distribution of consumer goods: the comfortably furnished households that he associated with a well-ordered society were few and far between
vi vi vi
p.127 - 2/25/13 7:42 PM
Although a sarsapari...
Although a sarsaparilla bottle marked the initial point in the U.S.-Mexico boundary, these debates about the relationship between expansion, settlement, and consumption would continue to inform U.S. policies and attitudes toward the border region and Mexico long after Bartlett’s and Emory’s work was done
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p.135 - 2/25/13 7:43 PM
Land of Necessity
Rachel St. John
Selling the Border
Trading Land, Attracting Tourists, and Marketing American Consumption on the Baja California Border, 1900–1934
essay #4
p.135 - 2/25/13 7:45 PM
Land of Necessity
Not only could they buy postcards, cheap land, and illicit liquor, but they could also consume the novelty of crossing the international boundary
vi
p.136 - 2/25/13 7:47 PM
Linking shopping for...
Linking shopping for curios, buying real estate, and partaking of prohibited vices, both American and Mexican boosters constructed a consumers’ border that o√ered investment opportunities, exotic experiences, and illicit activities unavailable in the United States.
p.136 - 2/25/13 7:47 PM
As it had in the 185...
As it had in the 1850s boundary commissions described by Amy Greenberg in the previous essay, consumption came to define American ideas and interest in the border in the first third of the twentieth century
p.137 - 2/25/13 7:49 PM
Historians have writ...
Historians have written extensively about the political, economic, social, and cultural ramifications of American investment, tourism, and vice, but they have only rarely explored how and why Americans were attracted to the border
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p.137 - 2/25/13 7:50 PM
Land of Necessity
While border promoters tapped into the borderlands aesthetic, which, as Lawrence Culver shows in his essay in this volume, was so prevalent in Southern California at this time, the selling of the border itself depended on the legal, political, economic, and symbolic significance of the boundary line. In marketing the Baja California border, promoters emphasized not the shared history of the United States and Mexico in the borderlands, but rather the stark divide between those two nations along the boundary line.
vi
p.138 - 2/25/13 7:52 PM
Acquiring and Consum...
Acquiring and Consuming Land along the Baja California Border
The origins of American consumption along the Baja California border lay in land
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p.138 - 2/25/13 7:52 PM
Land of Necessity
In their correspondence and contracts, land promoters created an image of the border as a space that o√ered the best of both nations. As they bought, sold, and developed border ranchlands over the following decades, these men reinforced the conception of the Baja California border as both of, and apart from, the United States and thus an ideal site for American investment
vi
p.138 - 2/25/13 7:53 PM
Land of Necessity
. Under the rule of Porfirio Díaz (1876–1910), the Mexican government embraced foreign investment as the key to national development
vi
p.138 - 2/25/13 7:53 PM
Land of Necessity
attract
were a group of Southern California land speculators who saw the potential to extend their regional real estate empire south of the border. Organizing as Mexican land companies, these men bought vast tracts of land along the boundary line. The San Ysidro Ranch Company (syrc) purchased approximately 35,000 acres near Tijuana, while Los Angeles Times chief Harrison Gray Otis’s Colorado River Land Company (crlc) secured control of more than 860,000 acres extending south from the boundary line through the Colorado River delta
vi
p.139 - 2/25/13 7:56 PM
Real estate south of...
Real estate south of the border sold for a fraction of the price of comparable property north of the line; along the Tijuana River, Mexican land went for one hundred and fifty dollars an acre, while similar lands on the American side cost four or five hundred dollars an acre.∞≤
p.140 - 2/25/13 7:58 PM
‘All Aboard for This...
‘All Aboard for This Trip to a Foreign Land!’’:
Cultural Tourism and the Selling of Exotic Mexico on the Border
While only a few wealthy investors engaged in the border real estate market, many more middle-class Americans consumed border goods and experiences as tourists
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p.141 - 2/25/13 8:00 PM
Land of Necessity
Tourism promoters constructed a version of Mexican culture that they hoped to sell to Americans on the blank slates of the small and recently established cities of Tijuana and Mexicali
p.141 - 2/25/13 8:01 PM
While American capit...
While American capitalists controlled most of the transportation and larger vice-related establishments, a small group of Mexicans and recent European immigrants established curio shops and staged cultural exhibitions
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p.141 - 2/25/13 8:02 PM
Land of Necessity
blanketed the Southern California market with advertisements that stressed the novelty and romance of crossing the boundary line. By the 1910s, thousands of American tourists from all parts of the United States visited Tijuana annually. For many, their trip across the border was their first to Mexico
p.141 - 2/25/13 8:02 PM
: more than fifteen ...
: more than fifteen busses and five trains ran from San Diego to Tijuana each day of the summer of 1915
p.141 - 2/25/13 8:02 PM
Promoters sold the b...
Promoters sold the border crossing as a novel symbolic experience that tourists could consume
p.141 - 2/25/13 8:03 PM
Once across the boun...
Once across the boundary line, tourists sought Mexican encounters, sights, experiences, and souvenirs to satisfy their expectations of foreign adventure.
However, aside from the boundary monuments and customs houses, the first border tourists would have seen little evidence that they had left U.S. territory. With its dusty roads and wooden buildings, Tijuana looked like any other town in the U.S. West in 1900.
p.142 - 2/25/13 8:04 PM
. Antonio Elosúa’s ‘...
. Antonio Elosúa’s ‘‘Typical Mexican Fair’’ promised tourists ‘‘everything Mexican,’’ including a bullfight, a local Mexican regimental band, Mexican dancing girls, cockfights, gambling, a cabaret, and a Mexican café
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p.142 - 2/25/13 8:04 PM
Land of Necessity
When rebel forces invaded Tijuana in 1911, even the Mexican Revolution became a tourist attraction. Southern Californians, like Americans elsewhere on the border, flocked to the boundary line for a better view of the battles
vi vi
p.142 - 2/25/13 8:05 PM
Viewing Mexicans bec...
Viewing Mexicans became a central part of cultural tourism along the border. ‘‘The ‘soldados’ or soldiers of the fort in picturesque uniforms, natives in the sombreros and serapes of the Mexican race, brighteyed senoritas and sedate senoras,’’
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p.142 - 2/25/13 8:06 PM
Land of Necessity
Rather than providing Americans with an opportunity to meet and engage with Mexican citizens, a trip to Tijuana more often o√ered contrived interactions with performers and salespeople who reinforced preexisting conceptions of Mexicans
vi vi
p.143 - 2/25/13 8:07 PM
In romanticizing Mex...
In romanticizing Mexicans, promoters placed particular emphasis on the Spanish aspects of Mexican ethnicity. Publicity for bullfights gave top billing to matadors and bulls imported from Spain and dancing exhibitions featured ‘‘Spanish’’ dancers
p.144 - 2/25/13 8:08 PM
These condescending ...
These condescending depictions of Mexicans were highlighted in the ubiquitous photographs of tourists swathed in serapes and sombreros, often astride donkeys.
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p.146 - 2/25/13 8:11 PM
Land of Necessity
Photographers set up businesses on the border to cater to tourists by providing serapes, sombreros, and signs indicating a borderline location: the resulting photographs were a ubiquitous part of the Tijuana tourist experience
vi
p.146 - 2/25/13 8:11 PM
Progressive-era mora...
Progressive-era moral reforms within the United States heightened the legal distinctions between the United States and Mexico.
p.146 - 2/25/13 8:12 PM
Everybody Goes Where...
Everybody Goes Where Everything Goes’’: The Rise of Border Vice Districts
p.146 - 2/25/13 8:12 PM
Soon gambling, drink...
Soon gambling, drinking, horseracing, and other activities prohibited under American law became the central features of border tourism.∂≥ As such, they became intertwined with American tourists’ conceptions of Mexico and Mexican culture.
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p.147 - 2/25/13 8:13 PM
Land of Necessity
According to local rumor, the first Mexicali business had been no more than a plank under a mesquite tree from which an enterprising businessman sold mescal and tequila to the Americans laboring to build the dry town of Calexico on the U.S. side of the line.∂
vi
p.148 - 2/25/13 8:14 PM
Land of Necessity
Pushed out of Bakersfield in 1913, the trio first founded The Owl (or El Tecolote) in Mexicali and later the Tivoli Bar in Tijuana. By 1924, they had expanded into brewing, importing European spirits, gambling, and racing and were reported to be making as much as $40,000 to $100,000 a week from just one of their clubs in Mexicali.∂
vi
p.148 - 2/25/13 8:15 PM
Even the American he...
Even the American heavyweight boxer Jack Johnson operated two Tijuana nightclubs, one of which catered exclusively to African Americans. Following the passage of the Volstead Act, the number of saloons in Tijuana doubled, from thirty to sixty, in a mere four years
p.149 - 2/25/13 8:15 PM
Walker-Otis Anti–Rac...
Walker-Otis Anti–Race Track Betting Bill in 1909, the Red Light Abatement Act in 1913, and a law outlawing prizefighting in 1916, prostitutes, pimps, and race and fight promoters moved across the border
p.148 - 2/25/13 8:16 PM
As California passed...
As California passed a series of moral reform laws, including the
p.149 - 2/25/13 8:16 PM
Home to numerous bro...
Home to numerous brothels, saloons, and opium dens, Mexicali’s Chinatown in particular became synonymous with vice.
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p.150 - 2/25/13 8:17 PM
Land of Necessity
The predominantly middle- and working-class residents of the agricultural Imperial Valley, along with visiting salesmen and investors, frequented the many bars and brothels of Mexicali.∑≤ Tijuana, by contrast, was home to high-end resorts and racetracks that drew on the booming populations in San Diego and Los Angeles. The Tijuana vice industry achieved its pinnacle with the opening of the Agua Caliente resort and casino
vi vi
p.150 - 2/25/13 8:17 PM
Opulent resorts like...
Opulent resorts like Agua Caliente attracted such celebrities as Buster Keaton, Jack Dempsey, Charlie Chaplin, and Al Capone.∑≥
p.150 - 2/25/13 8:20 PM
There was never any ...
There was never any doubt that border vice promoters built these establishments for American consumers, consequently their advertising e√orts concentrated on the American market
p.150 - 2/25/13 8:20 PM
Symbols of ‘‘Old Mex...
Symbols of ‘‘Old Mexico’’ and ‘‘Jazz-Age America’’ commingled in advertisements for Tijuana’s and Mexicali’s nightclubs and bars. One advertisement for the Sunset Inn coupled the o√er of a ‘‘bit of quaint Old Mexico’’ with illustrations of a jazz band, a modern couple
on the dance floor, and a young flapper seated at a table adorned with a cocktail and cigarettes
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p.150 - 2/25/13 8:21 PM
Land of Necessity
‘‘Would you escape the rigid conventionalities which limit one’s enjoyment in this country?’’ promoters lured Americans across the line with promises not just of drinks and diversions, but of temporary reprieves from the restrictions of American society.
p.152 - 2/25/13 8:22 PM
By all accounts, the...
By all accounts, these marketing e√orts were incredibly successful. On Labor Day, 1927, sixteen thousand automobiles passed into Tijuana
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p.152 - 2/25/13 8:24 PM
Land of Necessity
Americanization of Tijuana was complete: ‘‘At Tia Juana [sic], these Mexicans find on their side of the line, an American town, run by American capital, harboring American underworld women and American white slavers, the medium of exchange being American money, and all this unbridled debauchery being accomplished through the medium of the American language.’’
vi
p.153 - 2/25/13 8:25 PM
Border Closings and ...
Border Closings and the Control of American Consumption
As the border vice districts flourished, moral reformers on both sides of the boundary petitioned Mexican o≈cials to outlaw them
p.153 - 2/25/13 8:25 PM
vice districts gave ...
vice districts gave U.S. o≈cials the right to regulate Americans’ consumption by preventing them from crossing the border altogether
p.153 - 2/25/13 8:26 PM
many local Mexican r...
many local Mexican residents demanded government suppression of the drinking, gambling, and prostitution that threatened the social and commercial health of local families and businesses.π≠ Their attitudes reflected the outlook of a binational reform movement that encompassed both the United States’ sweeping prohibitions and the Mexican government’s regulatory approach to vice.
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p.153 - 2/25/13 8:27 PM
Land of Necessity
the Mexicans did not have the right to work, not even in the vice dens. It felt as if we were in a foreign country.’’π≤ In response to these conditions, Mexican nationalists and labor organizers like Legaspy demanded that territorial o≈cials close Americanowned vice establishments, or at least require that they hire Mexicans
vi vi
p.153 - 2/25/13 8:29 PM
Many Americans asked...
Many Americans asked that the Mexican government establish a fifty-mile-wide ‘‘dry-zone’’ (a vice-free zone) adjacent to the boundary line. As one San Diego resident suggested, ‘‘[Mexican president] Obregón should move the hell holes fifty miles from the border.’
p.154 - 2/25/13 8:30 PM
. In 1915, Governor ...
. In 1915, Governor Cantú announced a plan of heavy taxation that he claimed would eliminate all ‘‘vicious vices.’’∫≤
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p.154 - 2/25/13 8:31 PM
Land of Necessity
In 1926, governor of Baja California Abelardo Rodríguez launched a major wave of reforms after the Peteets, an American family of four, committed suicide following a horrific trip to Tijuana during which the two daughters were said to have been drugged and raped. Within days of the suicides, Rodríguez ordered fifty-two saloons to close
vi
p.155 - 2/25/13 8:32 PM
Local o≈cials, howev...
Local o≈cials, however, remained reluctant to completely shut down the vice districts, and with good reason—vice was extremely profitable for them personally. Kickbacks and payo√s were pervasive
p.155 - 2/25/13 8:32 PM
vice tourism provide...
vice tourism provided a much-needed economic stimulus to the isolated and often overlooked territory of Northern Baja California. Although many casinos preferred to hire American workers, public sentiment and the demands of the Mexican labor movement resulted in a 1925 court decision that required companies to employ Mexican nationals as at least 50 percent of their workforce. Thanks to this law and continued pressure by local unions, large numbers of Mexicans eventually found work in the vice service industry.∫
p.155 - 2/25/13 8:33 PM
During Cantú’s admin...
During Cantú’s administration, the government of Baja California collected between thirteen and fifteen thousand dollars each month from one Mexicali brothel alone. With this increased income, Cantú was able to build a high school in Mexicali and to improve the roads throughout the district.
p.155 - 2/25/13 8:33 PM
theater and library ...
theater and library in Mexicali. All along the border, American vice underwrote progressive improvements in Mexican territory
p.156 - 2/25/13 8:35 PM
In 1924, the U.S. St...
In 1924, the U.S. State Department notified the Mexican government that due to the ‘‘flagrant immoralities’’ at Tijuana and Mexicali, the California–Baja California border would be closed after nine at night. Two years later, after outrage erupted over the Peteet suicides, reformers convinced the U.S. government to close the San Ysidro port of entry at 6 p.m.
p.157 - 2/25/13 8:36 PM
Governor Rodríguez a...
Governor Rodríguez attempted to retaliate by establishing his own border controls—temporarily initiating registration requirements in 1924 and closing the border to nighttime railroad tra≈c in 1929. While ultimately unsuccessful, Rodríguez’s e√orts represented a symbolic reassertion of Mexican sovereignty
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p.157 - 2/25/13 8:37 PM
Land of Necessity
The border vice districts only began to decline with the onset of the Great Depression, the return of horseracing to
California, and the repeal of Prohibition in 1933. Shortly after his election in 1934, Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas finally brought the heyday of border vice to an end when he decided to close the border casinos as part of his widereaching nationalist project.
vi vi
p.158 - 2/25/13 8:38 PM
Lured south by adver...
Lured south by advertisements that proclaimed the border the perfect place to buy land, experience an exotic foreign culture, and access forbidden vices, American consumers both discovered and contributed to the development of cultural images, urban environments, and international relations that have been remarkably persistent
p.158 - 2/25/13 8:38 PM
Furthermore, it tran...
Furthermore, it transformed the American demand for vice into a problem of Mexican supply
p.158 - 2/25/13 8:39 PM
Between 1900 and 193...
Between 1900 and 1934, promoters transformed the border into a site of American consumption; it was left to the Mexicans and Americans on both sides of the line to live with the consequences of the reality they created
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p.165 - 2/25/13 8:40 PM
Land of Necessity
Cinema on the U.S.-Mexico Border
American Motion Pictures and Mexican Audiences, 1896–1930
essay #5
p.165 - 2/25/13 8:41 PM
1927, the Mexican na...
1927, the Mexican national weekly México en
Rotograbado referred to the opening of a movie theater, the Cine Alcázar in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, as a ‘‘patriotic act.’’ The magazine lauded the cinema’s proprietors (the Calderón brothers, Rafael and Enrique, and their associate Juan Salas Porras) for their activities ‘‘in favor of cultural di√usion
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p.165 - 2/25/13 8:42 PM
Land of Necessity
≥ These movie theaters that served the Mexican community in south Texas formed part of Mexican cinematic culture (a cultural formation composed of exhibition, the social space of the
movie theater, and the films themselves).
vi vi vi
p.166 - 2/25/13 8:42 PM
Land of Necessity
This contention runs counter to scholarship that characterizes U.S. mass culture solely as an instrument of cultural imperialism and Americanization
vi
p.166 - 2/25/13 8:43 PM
precursor to the Gol...
precursor to the Golden Age of Mexican cinema (typically dated from the mid-1930s to the 1940s).∑
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p.166 - 2/25/13 8:43 PM
Land of Necessity
most scholars of Chicano history have perceived cinema as a peripheral part of immigrant life that was antithetical to migrants’ ‘‘traditional’’ culture or as a pastime engaged in primarily by their second-generation children
vi
p.166 - 2/25/13 8:44 PM
Land of Necessity
The consumption of U.S. motion pictures could, though it seems paradoxical, nurture Mexican national identity. Thus, rather than assuming that the mere presence of U.S. cultural formations—in this case silent cinema— indicates cultural hegemony, I focus on the local and national factors that influenced the social meanings that Mexicans living along the border in the twenties created out of the consumption of U.S. mass culture
vi
p.166 - 2/25/13 8:45 PM
Land of Necessity
Mexican theaters in
El Paso connected border residents not only to American mass culture but also to processes of modernization at the heart of postrevolutionary Mexican nation building.
vi
p.167 - 2/25/13 8:45 PM
. Besides one well-k...
. Besides one well-known theater, El Colón, the history of Mexican moviegoing in El Paso fell, literally, outside of the boundaries of the city’s o≈cial historical memory
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p.167 - 2/25/13 8:46 PM
Land of Necessity
Anglo entrepreneurs introduced moving pictures in some borderland cities, including El Paso, before 1900, it was itinerant Mexican exhibitors who brought what would constitute Mexican cinema culture to the borderlands. After Lumière representatives introduced the cinématographe at Mexico City’s Droguería Plateros (a drugstore on Plateros St.) in 1896, sixteen movingpicture theaters quickly sprouted up in the capital, in addition to thirty jacalones (temporary structures dedicated to cinema exhibition placed in public spaces).
vi vi
p.167 - 2/25/13 8:47 PM
they arranged to o√e...
they arranged to o√er short runs of vistas they obtained from dealers in Mexico City or through connections abroad. When they could, exhibitors took the railroads introduced as part of the Porfiriato’s modernizing e√orts, but it was not uncommon for them to ride horses or mules, or even go on foot to reach out-of-the-way places, including the cities, towns, rancherías, haciendas, and pueblos along the northern border
p.168 - 2/25/13 8:49 PM
In all, it is likely...
In all, it is likely that some settlements hosted several di√erent itinerant exhibitors, who would have screened moving pictures made in European and U.S. studios.
p.169 - 2/25/13 8:49 PM
The itinerant exhibi...
The itinerant exhibitors’ activities followed long-standing patterns of the circulation of popular entertainment. Anecdotal evidence indicates that lantern slide shows and panoramas circulated, at least at the annual Feria de Juárez, before itinerant film exhibitors began making Ciudad Juárez and El Paso stopping points on their routes. Theatrical troupes, circuses, and other attractions traveled similar circuits, often (as itinerant movie exhibitors would do later) following the calendar of local religious celebrations.∞∂
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p.169 - 2/25/13 8:51 PM
Land of Necessity
. This thriving entertainment scene garnered the city the tag ‘‘the Broadway of the Southwest.’’ After civic reformers successfully campaigned to rid El Paso of gambling and prostitution (which did not eradicate these activities, but only moved them over the border), some El Paso entertainment impresarios began to o√er the public movies instead of vice. For example, in 1905, when the city prohibited gambling, a popular gaming establishment called the Wig Wam became a nickelodeon. Soon, theaters such as the Bijou, the Lyric, the Majestic, and the Crawford o√ered combined programs of vaudeville, stock theater, and motion pictures. The less elaborate second-run theaters like the OK, the Iris, the Grecian, the Unique, and the Princess began showing motion pictures almost exclusively
vi vi
p.169 - 2/25/13 8:52 PM
Land of Necessity
Ciudad Juárez. In 1903, the city council agreed to underwrite the construction of a theater, in part in the hopes of persuading juarenses to spend their leisure dollars in Juárez rather than across the border in El Paso.
vi
p.169 - 2/25/13 8:53 PM
Over the course of t...
Over the course of the first two decades of the twentieth century, investment in tourist venues like saloons, curio shops, and a bullring, along with increasing political and economic instability, served to stymie investment in theaters for locals in Ciudad Juárez.∞
p.170 - 2/25/13 8:53 PM
The activities of it...
The activities of itinerant exhibitors, referred to as tragaleguas (literally ‘‘league eaters’’
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p.170 - 2/25/13 8:54 PM
Land of Necessity
Although initially El Paso and Juárez residents mingled at movie exhibitions, by the First World War cinematic spaces were di√erentiated. Reports suggest that an audience drawn from both sides of the Rio Grande watched the first moving picture exhibition in El Paso in 1896.∞Ω Likewise, historian Mario T. García found no evidence that ‘‘the early movie houses such as the Crawford, the Grand, the Little Wigwam, and the Bijou specifically excluded Mexicans during the first years of the twentieth century.’’≤≠ During and after the Mexican revolution, however, movie exhibition on the border’s binational character shifted. El Paso’s Anglo and Mexican populations increasingly went to different theaters, and when Juárez residents crossed the border, they tended to find themselves in ‘‘Mexican’’ theaters.
vi
p.171 - 2/25/13 8:55 PM
Mexican Theaters in ...
Mexican Theaters in El Paso: Exhibitors as Agents of Modernity
p.171 - 2/25/13 8:55 PM
The bilingual public...
The bilingual publicity buzz around the celebrity’s quick visit suggests that Mexican and Anglo audiences along the border were equally invested in film culture, sharing a great deal in terms of their tastes in films and stars
p.171 - 2/25/13 8:56 PM
Moving Picture World...
Moving Picture World, an industry publication, declared in 1918, ‘‘the peace which reigns from Matamoros to Juárez’’—that is, along the border—was nurturing a ‘‘good transborder trade’’ in film.
p.172 - 2/25/13 8:58 PM
Mainstream theaters ...
Mainstream theaters in El Paso likely practiced de facto segregation—discouraging certain types of patrons based on appearance or class or relegating Mexican patrons to the galleries that were typically reserved for African Americans
p.172 - 2/25/13 8:59 PM
By 1925, a large eno...
By 1925, a large enough audience existed to support eleven Mexican movie theaters in El Paso.≤∫ These theaters, which ran the gamut in terms of size and elegance, served elite Mexican expatriates, the large working class from Mexican communities on both sides of the border, and poorer refugees who belonged to neither class.
p.172 - 2/25/13 8:59 PM
In the United States...
In the United States, the cinema, like other spaces of consumer culture, became a ‘‘theater of racial di√erence’’ where the nation’s racial pecking order was imposed and resisted.≤
p.172 - 2/25/13 9:00 PM
‘one side exclusivel...
‘one side exclusively for Mexicans,’’ and ‘‘even educated cultured Mexicans’’ were ‘‘sometimes roughly ordered to stay on their side.’’ Mexican audiences not only resisted this expression of white supremacy but also jockeyed for status, distancing themselves from African Americans through protests and boycotts.
p.173 - 2/25/13 9:01 PM
1920s became increas...
1920s became increasingly Mexican. By 1928, two-thirds of the block’s shops were owned by Mexicans, some of whom owned several businesses.≥≥ Silvio Lacoma, who began operating two theaters in Ciudad Juárez a decade earlier, built The Colón after finding that his El Paso theaters, The Cristal and The Estrella, were lucrative operations
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p.173 - 2/25/13 9:01 PM
Land of Necessity
businessmen like Lacoma who opened these cinemas were part of a transnational commercial class. Their enterprises spread across the border region into northern Mexico and the southwestern United States, and sometimes linked the borderlands to New York City, Mexico City, and Los Angeles in transnational chains of commerce.
vi
p.174 - 2/25/13 9:02 PM
Before becoming invo...
Before becoming involved in motion picture exhibition, the Calderón brothers, Rafael and Juan, owned a Ciudad Chihuahua department store, El Nuevo Mundo, that specialized in the distribution of imported dry goods from Europe and the United States.
p.174 - 2/25/13 9:03 PM
The Calderón–Salas P...
The Calderón–Salas Porras consortium pursued a simultaneously modern
and nationalist approach to cinema exhibition. Their entrance into the field involved a study-tour in San Antonio, where they learned how the business operated and bought their first manual film projector
p.174 - 2/25/13 9:04 PM
. The crowning momen...
. The crowning moment of their cinematic endeavors came a few years later, with the construction of the new Alcázar Theater on the corner of Second and Victoria streets in Ciudad Juárez, the project praised in México en Rotograbado. The exhibition of the monumental epic Ben-Hur, starring Durango native Ramón Navarro, marked the theater’s grand opening in January 1927
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p.175 - 2/25/13 9:05 PM
Land of Necessity
Calderón–Salas Porras circuit combined movie exhibition with other cultural events and expressions. All of their theaters featured vaudeville, touring stock theater, and performances by renowned Mexican actors, writers, and playwrights
vi
p.175 - 2/25/13 9:05 PM
Land of Necessity
adopted a modern architectural aesthetic that made use (as did many of the most up-to-date movie palaces in the United States, such as the Aztec Theater in San Antonio) of pre-Columbian motifs and design elements, which in Mexico referenced the country’s glorious, if mythologized, indigenous past.≥
vi
p.175 - 2/25/13 9:06 PM
Cine El Azteca, buil...
Cine El Azteca, built in Ciudad Chihuahua in 1929 under the direction of Mexican architects Manuel O’Reilly and Carlos Arróniz, combined this aesthetic with a nationalist scene depicting the founding of the city of Tenochtitlán (Mexico City) on the theater’s curtain.
p.176 - 2/25/13 9:07 PM
By 1919, Alarcón, a ...
By 1919, Alarcón, a former newspaperman, and his associates owned six theaters in El Paso and were the exclusive distributors for Vitagraph productions in Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador
p.176 - 2/25/13 9:07 PM
While the Calderón b...
While the Calderón brothers concentrated on a diverse set of commercial enterprises ranging from retail to entertainment, Alarcón situated himself as the leader of film distribution and exhibition not only in the border region, but also in Mexico and Central America
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p.177 - 2/25/13 9:09 PM
Land of Necessity
chief among his purposes in entering the movie exhibition and distribution business was the ‘‘education and democratization of the Mexican people by means of film.’’ He confidently claimed that in terms of education, which was what he thought ‘‘the Mexican people need,’’ cinema was in a position to do ‘‘something . . . worth while—more than the government perhaps.’’ Its democratic space, in which the ‘‘lower, middle, and higher classes’’ could mix, would expose the ‘‘peon’’ to members of the ‘‘better class,’’ thus inspiring the working-class moviegoer to ‘‘take more pride in himself, dress better and more cleanly.’’
vi vi vi vi
p.177 - 2/25/13 9:09 PM
Land of Necessity
The Calderón–Salas Porras consortium and the activities of Juan de la Cruz Alarcón illustrate how despite transnational business practices promoting a primarily U.S.-made product, Mexican theaters contributed to the development of a distinct version of mexicanidad, rather than an Americanized class
of Mexicans.
vi vi vi
p.177 - 2/25/13 9:10 PM
In their view, cinem...
In their view, cinema as a leisure activity educated, uplifted, and encouraged patriotism in audience members, while as a business it contributed to Mexico’s economic modernization
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p.179 - 2/25/13 9:12 PM
Land of Necessity
∫ Providing Mexican audiences with modern entertainment in architectural spaces specifically coded as modern not only filled a market niche neglected by Anglo entrepreneurs, it also positioned cinema owners, along with other Mexican businessmen, as agents of modernity
vi vi agents of modernity
p.179 - 2/25/13 9:14 PM
Texas, movie theater...
Texas, movie theaters became centers of both recreation and community life for their Mexican audiences
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p.179 - 2/25/13 9:14 PM
Land of Necessity
Moviegoing, the ‘‘favorite diversion,’’ went hand in hand with activities promoting national and community values. In El Paso–Juárez, for example, Mexican residents were urged not to miss William Duncan, ‘‘the king of courage,’’ appearing in El torbellino, ‘‘the last word in dramatic series,’’ or the three rolls of film taken during the
recent fiestas patrias (independence day celebrations), presumably in Ciudad Juárez, which featured ‘‘all the Mexicans.’’∑
vi
p.179 - 2/25/13 9:15 PM
also doubled as a co...
also doubled as a community center that hosted events and celebrations, like the 1924 ‘‘Función Teatral a Beneficio de la Alianza Hispano-Americana’’ (Theatrical Benefit for the Hispanic American Alliance
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p.179 - 2/25/13 9:15 PM
Land of Necessity
harkened back to the practices of early exhibitors, who, following their predecessors, circus and fair performers, had often ingratiated themselves with sometimes recalcitrant local elites by contributing a portion of their profits to local causes
vi vi
p.180 - 2/25/13 9:21 PM
Teatro Rex in El Pas...
Teatro Rex in El Paso exhibited the photographs of contestants in a beauty contest sponsored by a local Spanish-language newspaper. In this instance, the aspirant beauty queens occupied a similar set of social spaces as movie stars, whose images regularly adorned the entrances and lobbies of movie theaters.∑
p.181 - 2/25/13 9:22 PM
. Padilla used the m...
. Padilla used the materials he had on hand—American feature films from the teens, Mexican documentary footage of the revolution, still photographs, and some very brief scenes he shot himself—to tell his own version of the revolutionary general’s life.
p.181 - 2/25/13 9:23 PM
. Padilla’s film, an...
. Padilla’s film, an example of what is called a ‘‘compilation film,’’ went through a number of iterations, exemplified by the change of title from Pancho Villa en Columbus (Pancho Villa in Columbus), to La venganza de guerillero (The Revenge of the Warrior), to Hazanas de Pancho Villa (Feats of Pancho Villa), before Padilla finally settled on La venganza de Pancho Villa (Pancho Villa’s Vengeance).∑∫ The narrative of the film—in its essence an action film—roughly recounts the life of Villa such that he appears as a nationalist hero, rather than as an emblematic figure whose rise from humble origins underscores a critical view of Mexican society as it was prior to and during the Revolution.
Padilla’s film was never screened in Mexico City, the cosmopolitan center of Mexican political, social, and cultural life. It did, however, make the rounds across a wide swathe of northern Mexico and southeastern Texas. In addition to showing the film in small towns, perhaps borrowing a church wall or setting up a tent, Padilla rented the film to cinema owners in exchange for a percentage of the ticket sales.
p.182 - 2/25/13 9:24 PM
That Padilla’s film—...
That Padilla’s film—in which a Pancho Villa, constructed out of recycled images, many of them stereotypical, was an avenger rather than a bandit—was popular with Mexican audiences on the border is no surprise
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p.183 - 2/25/13 9:25 PM
Land of Necessity
The way other national and racial groups were depicted in U.S. cinematic productions o√ered a foil against which Mexican filmmakers could create their own representations. As the national industry developed, the screen became another space for the construction of national and racial identities. Padilla’s homegrown and regionally circulated film would find its industrialized and national counterparts in the productions of the Mexican film industry, based in the capital, which o√ered narratives and visions of national identity for domestic and international consumption
vi vi
p.183 - 2/25/13 9:26 PM
Land of Necessity
Mexican audiences a≈rmed their national identity as Mexican. They also
experimented with the new gender ideals, modes of self-presentation, and social practices presented on the screen: each was a hallmark of the ‘‘modern’’ as it seeped into the lives of ordinary people. Nowhere was this process more freighted than in the border region, where a competing nationalism—Americanism—made strong and vigorous claims on all that was modern
vi
p.190 - 2/26/13 11:51 AM
Land of Necessity
Lawrence Culver
Promoting the Pacific Borderlands
Leisure and Labor in Southern California, 1870–1950
essay #6
p.190 - 2/26/13 12:04 PM
‘Great Southwest’’ w...
‘Great Southwest’’ was perceived as a very di√erent place—one that promised a life of leisure to the middle class.
p.190 - 2/26/13 12:06 PM
The crucial di√erenc...
The crucial di√erence, however, was that those places o√ered leisure as a vacation. Southern California would o√er leisure as a permanent way of life.
As Amy Greenberg’s essay in this volume demonstrates, Anglo-Americans were at first unsure if the arid Southwest, which they had taken from Mexico, could be made profitable. Tourism proved a key strategy for pursuing economic development in southern California and the Southwest, as well as in Mexican border communities, as Rachel St. John’s essay about Tijuana illustrates. Laura Serna’s essay shows how investment in local movie theaters in El Paso-Ciudad Juárez flourished at the same time the twin border cities became vibrant tourist attractions.
p.191 - 2/26/13 12:09 PM
. While Anglo touris...
. While Anglo tourists and residents could enjoy recreation in the warm climate and scenery of the region, their leisure depended upon the labor of others
p.191 - 2/26/13 12:09 PM
That labor system ma...
That labor system made possible the culture of leisure that emerged in southern California, which democratized leisure for Anglo-Americans by exploiting the labor of others
p.191 - 2/26/13 12:10 PM
This essay traces th...
This essay traces the themes of labor and leisure by examining the promotion of southern California and the borderlands to tourists and potential residents during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Tourist leisure and resident labor at two resorts in the Pacific U.S.-Mexico borderlands, Catalina Island and Palm Springs, provide an example of these mechanisms at work.
p.191 - 2/26/13 12:11 PM
demonstrate how the ...
demonstrate how the evolution of a leisure-oriented consumer culture and tourist culture in southern California contributed to the appearance and culture of modern American suburbia
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p.192 - 2/26/13 12:11 PM
Land of Necessity
Nordho√, a Prussian immigrant who spent his later childhood in Ohio, proved a devout believer in American democracy and capitalism, yet he was troubled by the urbanization and monopolistic business practices of the Gilded Age. Most of all, this immigrant was appalled by what he saw as the inundation of eastern cities by a ‘‘semi-barbarous foreign population’’ of southern and eastern European immigrants
vi vi holyoke?
p.192 - 2/26/13 12:12 PM
Land of Necessity
Nordho√’s book posited southern California as a place where middling white farmers could live in a citrus-scented agricultural utopia—a veritable Je√ersonian Polynesia
vi vi vi
p.193 - 2/26/13 12:13 PM
Enervated by the rus...
Enervated by the rush of modern life and threatened by ‘‘un-American’’ immigrants, Americans could here be cured of illness and regain their vitality, without falling prey to the diseases of more humid tropical climes. In an era when disease was common and tuberculosis a constant danger, a climate that encouraged health would prove irresistible.
p.193 - 2/26/13 12:13 PM
Nordho√ asserted tha...
Nordho√ asserted that southern California possessed other resources of significant value. His prose made it clear that this new land would prosper not from the labor of diligent white farmers, but instead through the deployment of workers drawn from the resident nonAnglo population. Nordho√ asserted, for example, that the Chinese made excellent servants. As for Californio rancho families, he pronounced them picturesque and the ‘‘moderate’’ pace of their lives admirable.
p.193 - 2/26/13 12:59 PM
Nordho√, who espouse...
Nordho√, who espoused hope for southern California as a refuge for yeoman farmers, instead used the region’s climate and existing population to imagine a future which shared more with the antebellum South
p.194 - 2/26/13 1:00 PM
When the Atchison, T...
When the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad completed a line connecting Los Angeles to the east in 1885, the Southern Pacific Railroad’s monopoly ended. The resulting fare and rate war between di√erent railway lines produced the region’s first boom
p.193 - 2/26/13 1:00 PM
settlement within it...
settlement within it, remained slow.
This changed in the 1880s, largely due to the railroad
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p.194 - 2/26/13 1:01 PM
Land of Necessity
An increasing number of his fellow citizens—particularly in the urban Northeast and Lummis’s native New England—called on Americans to embrace a more leisurely life. Others, from philosopher John Ruskin to Henry David Thoreau, also advocated a return to nature, or the pursuit of the ‘‘simple life.’’ Their arguments were buttressed by changing realities and perceptions in American society. As the nation grew more prosperous, both the middle and upper classes began to shed the old Puritan abhorrence of leisure
vi vi vi holyoke
p.194 - 2/26/13 1:04 PM
Land of Necessity
At the other end of the socioeconomic spectrum, social reformers and some physicians charged that industrial workers were trapped
in mindless, menial labor that threatened their physical and mental health. Like Lummis, these other proponents of leisure argued that rest could be curative, restoring vigor to a nation that had been rendered e√ete by Victorian manners and enervated by the closing of the frontier.π
vi vi holyoke
p.195 - 2/26/13 1:15 PM
‘‘Great Southwest.’’...
‘‘Great Southwest.’’ In reality, his books actually described a fairly limited region of northern Arizona and New Mexico: specifically, an area within a forty-mile band
p.195 - 2/26/13 1:15 PM
Lummis
Lummis
p.195 - 2/26/13 1:15 PM
By annexing the enti...
By annexing the entire region as a vast recreational hinterland, Los Angeles gained added allure—and a means of combating more cosmopolitan San Francisco, which had long promoted Yosemite and the Sierras as additional attractions for visitors
p.195 - 2/26/13 1:15 PM
Instead, it o√ered a...
Instead, it o√ered an exotic world to tourists—all of it accessible from the Santa Fe Railway. The Fred Harvey hotels along its route, which numbered fifteen by 1901, sold Indian crafts and exotic regional atmosphere along with meals and accommodations
L
p.195 - 2/26/13 1:23 PM
Land of Necessity
. In this book, Lummis presented a Pueblo culture that was balanced and contented, unlike supposedly harried Anglo-American culture. His writing recast the borderlands as a landscape of leisure. The Land of Poco Tiempo took its title from a Spanish phrase he loosely translated as ‘‘pretty soon.’’ In the title chapter of the book, Lummis asked, ‘‘Why hurry with the hurrying world? The ‘Pretty Soon’ of New Spain is better than the ‘Now! Now!’ of the haggard United States. The opiate sun soothes to rest, the adobe is made to lean against, the hush of the day-long noon would not be broken. Let us not hasten—mañana will do. Better still, pasado mañana.’’∞
vi
p.196 - 2/26/13 1:24 PM
Moreover, it was the...
Moreover, it was the ideal location for Anglo investment: ‘‘the kingdom of Something for Nothing.’’ Lummis proved unambiguous on this point. He asserted that Mexican labor was inexpensive, contented, and unlikely to strike. This docility, Lummis claimed, was due to the ‘‘fact’’ that ‘‘twelve days’ work in the year is enough to supply one peon with the necessities of life.’’∞≤ While he depicted the U.S. Southwest as an escape from capitalism, Lummis presented Mexico as another sort of fantasy—a place where Anglos could enrich themselves without guilt or compunction
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p.197 - 2/26/13 1:26 PM
Land of Necessity
With Land of Sunshine, Lummis was but one of a host of editors using new print technologies to bring color, advertising copy, and themed essays about the ‘‘good life’’ to nationally-circulated magazines promoting fashion, home decoration, and travel
vi vi
p.198 - 2/27/13 6:01 PM
Motion pictures told...
Motion pictures told the world—as no single booster ever could—that southern California might be a wonderful place for recreation
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p.199 - 2/27/13 6:02 PM
Land of Necessityt
Hollywood, though certainly not the only source for a new culture of consumerism and leisure, popularized this lifestyle. The fact that the nation’s growing middle class accepted and emulated this life of consumerism and leisure would have profound implications for southern California and the nation as a whole
vi
p.199 - 2/27/13 6:04 PM
Catalina Island, loc...
Catalina Island, located twenty-six miles o√ the coast of Los Angeles, and Palm Springs
p.199 - 2/27/13 6:04 PM
These resorts also d...
These resorts also demonstrated the extent to which Anglo leisure depended on Mexican and Native American labor
p.200 - 2/27/13 6:04 PM
At Catalina, their c...
At Catalina, their corporation, the Santa Catalina Island Company (scic), created the first corporate resort in the United States, a precursor to later corporate resorts such as Sun Valley and Vail.
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p.200 - 2/27/13 6:05 PM
Land of Necessity
Avalon, the only town on Catalina, exhibited the same racial discrimination found in much of the United States in this era. A small section of Avalon, known as ‘‘Sonoratown,’’ was where Mexicans and other people of color barred from Anglo neighborhoods lived
vi vi vj
p.201 - 2/27/13 6:08 PM
Land of Necessity
encourage and foster the catching of all fishes, and especially tuna, yellowtail, sea bass, etc., with the lightest rod and reel tackle,’’ and to discourage ‘‘unsportsmanlike’’ commercial fishing. Distinctions such as these bore close parallels to class-based distinctions characterizing attitudes toward hunting: those with the money to hunt for leisure were sportsmen, while those who hunted for subsistence were ‘‘poachers.’’
vi
p.202 - 2/27/13 6:10 PM
foreign fishing nati...
foreign fishing nations’’ represented by nearly three-quarters ‘‘of the people engaged in commercial net fishing.’’ The critic complained that they ‘‘are not even citizens of the United States, yet we permit them to directly . . . dictate the laws governing the taking of our fish and our national food supply
p.203 - 2/27/13 6:10 PM
Ultimately, Catalina...
Ultimately, Catalina’s waters, up to a three-mile radius from shore, were classified as a fish preserve where only recreational hook-and-line fishing would be permitted. Commercial net fishing was banned. After 1913, local fishermen— mostly working-class ‘‘ethnics’’—either had to relocate, find new employment, or make the transition from fisherman to recreational fishing guide
p.203 - 2/27/13 6:11 PM
Born in Sonora, Pesc...
Born in Sonora, Pesciado originally came to Catalina as a child in the 1850s and fished and hunted to provide food for sheep-herding operations on the island. When the island developed as a tourist center, Pesciado partnered with another fisherman, George Michaelis, to operate a charter fishing boat in Avalon
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p.203 - 2/27/13 6:12 PM
Land of Necessity
These strange, marooned garden planters, as much as anything else, testified to the socioeconomic change underway on the island, which would only accelerate after 1919, when the Bannings sold Catalina to Chicago chewing-gum magnate William Wrigley. Wrigley, an entrepreneur of the new consumer culture, turned Catalina into one of the most popular tourist destinations in the American West during the 1920
vi vi vi vi vi
p.205 - 2/27/13 6:15 PM
since the 1910s Indi...
since the 1910s Indian and Hispanic cultures had been utilized in the theming of towns like Santa Fe and Santa Barbara, or of tourist districts in border towns like Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez. In Palm Springs, the desert landscape would be used to fashion an Orientalist theme dependent for its e√ect on dates, palm trees, and camels
p.208 - 2/27/13 6:21 PM
Here he displayed hi...
Here he displayed his vast collection of artifacts from the U.S. Southwest, Mexico, and South America. Built of cobblestones excavated from the adjacent arroyo, El Alisal included a mission bell built into its exterior façade, a reminder of Lummis’s role in founding the California Landmarks Club to preserve and restore the state’s Spanish missions
p.208 - 2/27/13 6:22 PM
Helen Hunt Jackson’s...
Helen Hunt Jackson’s novel Ramona (1884), with its nostalgic evocation of the California rancho past, carried a similar implicit message as did Land of Poco Tiempo, Land of Sunshine, and El Alisal. Vast numbers of eastern and Midwestern tourists travelled to ranchos, missions, and other sites with purported links to the events of the novel
p.209 - 2/27/13 6:25 PM
Ramona tourism and r...
Ramona tourism and refurbished historic sites cast ‘‘Southwestern’’ architecture as a viable style Anglos could adopt. It contributed to the craze for Mission and Spanish Revival architecture, furniture, and décor, which remade Santa Fe, New Mexico and Santa Barbara and left an indelible architectural imprint on southern California as well as the U.S. Southwest
p.211 - 2/27/13 6:29 PM
These houses dot the...
These houses dot the landscape like jewels. Built largely of native material, they blend with their surroundings admirably, and their tiled roofs, pools, patios, balconies, gardens of desert growth, [and] splashing fountains, add their own charms to the establishment of Nature herself.’’≥∏ Such home-building ‘‘seekers of beauty’’ included razor magnate King Gillette and cereal mogul W. K. Kellogg
p.211 - 2/27/13 6:30 PM
another developer st...
another developer stated that ‘‘careful discrimination in the matter of lot buyers is also being made, as to race, desirability, etc., thus ensuring a high order of neighbors.’’
p.212 - 2/27/13 6:33 PM
The movement of fami...
The movement of family social life and leisure time into the backyard, and the construction of patios, barbecues, and swimming pools, allowed suburbanites to live a resort lifestyle year-round, at least as long as weather permitted
L
p.213 - 2/27/13 6:34 PM
Land of Necessity
.’’ The spread of ranch houses throughout the United States, though not solely a consequence of residential developments in Palm Springs, demonstrates the extent of the influence of resort leisure in the Southwest on national urban and suburban development.∂≠
Charles Nordho√ and Charles Fletcher Lummis imagined an escape from modernity in the leisure of the ‘‘Great Southwest,’’ which was not a region removed from modern life, but a place that emerged in response to consumer culture’s emphasis on domestic and recreational consumption
vi
p.218 - 2/27/13 6:35 PM
Land of Necessity
Evan R. Ward
Finding Mexico’s Great Show Window
A Tale of Two Borderlands, 1960–1975
essay #7
p.218 - 2/27/13 6:36 PM
Adolfo López Mateos ...
Adolfo López Mateos (1958–64) to make the border into a ‘‘show window’’ through the National Border Program (pronaf).
p.218 - 2/27/13 6:37 PM
pronaf, however, did...
pronaf, however, did not bring family- or resort-oriented tourism.
The consumer orientation of pronaf made way for the emergence of the Border Industrialization Program (bip), which gave rise to in-bond factories, maquiladoras
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p.219 - 2/27/13 6:38 PM
Land of Necessity
it fostered the creation of new ‘‘borderlands’’ cities on Mexico’s Caribbean and Pacific coasts, including the resort towns of Cancún, Ixtapa, and Los Cabos, which were planned and built by a collaboration between Banco de México and fonatur (the tourism arm of the Mexican state).
vi
p.219 - 2/27/13 6:38 PM
Land of Necessity
In e√ect, these peripheral, planned cities on the coast became the locus of the new borderlands between the United States and Mexico, for it was here that the two nations now met, and here new boundaries between them were now drawn
vi vi
p.220 - 2/27/13 6:44 PM
Casting the U.S.-Mex...
Casting the U.S.-Mexican border as ‘‘an enormous show window 1,600 miles long,’’ idealized Mexico’s ability to transform its border space into a giant shopping center
p.220 - 2/27/13 6:44 PM
Antonio Bermúdez tha...
Antonio Bermúdez that brought the program to the border region. A former president of Mexico’s state-owned petroleum company, Petroleos Mexicanos (pemex)
p.222 - 2/27/13 6:51 PM
Initially, pronaf pr...
Initially, pronaf programs did not attempt to improve border cities’ retail sectors (except in terms of artisan crafts), focusing instead on improving the tourist infrastructure
p.222 - 2/27/13 6:52 PM
The Mexican modernis...
The Mexican modernist architect Mario Pani—who had designed hotels, the Ciudad Universitaria, and the showcase of middle-class Mexican consumerism, the suburban Ciudad Satélite, in Mexico City—was hired on commission to produce a proposal for modernizing the façade for the border cities.∞∞ Sleek exteriors exuding Mexico’s quest for modernity, with dignified interiors reflecting the nation’s history, would showcase Mexico’s progress and heritage. Located near the U.S.-Mexican border on new wide thoroughfares, with beautiful gates at the international boundary, Pani’s centers would include cultural venues, upscale hotels, and, most importantly, retail sites
p.222 - 2/27/13 6:53 PM
’ Sounding more like...
’ Sounding more like Victor
Gruen, famed Austrian architect and developer of the first enclosed shopping center, than the ex-director of pemex, Bermúdez continued, ‘‘Shopping centers are a vital necessity and each day evolve and improve the appearance and presentation of those in the principal countries of the world.
p.223 - 2/27/13 6:55 PM
While evidence of pr...
While evidence of pronaf’s accomplishments can be found in the built environment of nearly all the border cities, Ciudad Juárez was its primary beneficiary
p.223 - 2/27/13 6:56 PM
ultramodern museum d...
ultramodern museum dedicated to ancient, colonial, and modern Mexican art, a shopping center, a convention hall designed by Mario Pani, a market featuring Mexican handicrafts, several supermarkets, a charro stadium, and the posh Camino Real Hotel would all be built in what came to be known as the Zona Pronaf
p.224 - 2/27/13 6:58 PM
For instance, it mis...
For instance, it mistakenly subsidized certain items produced nationally, such as cotton clothing, shoes, soaps, and canned seafood, that neither tourists nor Mexican nationals were inclined to buy. pronaf fell short, as one Mexican critic contended, because it ‘‘tried to go head to head, using basically artificial means, with the most industrialized country in the world
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p.225 - 2/27/13 6:59 PM
Land of Necessity
Bermúdez might have read The Image, which cultural critic and historian Daniel Boorstin published in 1961, to learn that American tourists craved ‘‘elaborately contrived indirect experience.’’ They wanted to travel to landscapes of accommodation—where they could stay in ‘‘American-style’’ hotels and ‘‘remain out of contact with foreign peoples’’—rather than to landscapes of negotiation
vi vivivi
p.225 - 2/27/13 7:01 PM
Land of Necessity
When the program was terminated in 1964, private and public o≈cials in Mexico looked for a way to employ the thousands of braceros who were returning to Mexico. This wave of return migrants included Antonio Bermúdez’s brother, Jaime, who eventually opened the first industrial park for in-bond factories in Ciudad Juárez, under the mandates of the bip.≤
vi
p.225 - 2/27/13 7:02 PM
development. It was ...
development. It was the production of consumer goods, rather than the consumption of consumer services, that would bring Mexico’s borderlands to economic maturity
p.226 - 2/27/13 7:03 PM
While pronaf activit...
While pronaf activities mainly targeted the northern border cities, Bermúdez spent significant amounts of time and money south of the border along Baja California’s coasts, where he initiated development plans for beach resorts
p.226 - 2/27/13 7:03 PM
By 1966 pronaf spent...
By 1966 pronaf spent more money on tourism development at Ensenada and Punto Estero in Baja California than in any of the cities that lay directly adjacent to the international boundary line, save Ciudad Juárez and Nogales
p.226 - 2/27/13 7:04 PM
He was especially op...
He was especially optimistic about the development of the frontier state of Quintana Roo, where Cozumel and Islas Mujeres were, in his assessment
p.228 - 2/27/13 7:06 PM
The e√orts of fonatu...
The e√orts of fonatur and Banco de México to design resorts largely intended for North American tourists gave rise to a series of new decentralized ‘‘border towns’’ along Mexico’s coastlines. The involvement of Mexico’s federal authorities in developing Cancún, Los Cabos, Ixtapa, Loreto, Huatulco, Playa del Carmen, and other new tourist towns di√erentiated these new resorts from earlier ones, like Acapulco, which had been an international destination since the 1940s
p.228 - 2/27/13 7:08 PM
His o≈ce then analyz...
His o≈ce then analyzed sea and air temperatures, wind quality, natural disasters, and sun patterns. With the input of travel experts, politicians, and hoteliers, five sites for development were selected: Cancún, Ixtapa, Los Cabos, Huatulco, and Loreto
p.229 - 2/27/13 7:08 PM
The dependence on ai...
The dependence on air travel to channel tourists to the new coastal resorts further highlights the border region’s drawbacks as a tourist site
p.229 - 2/27/13 7:10 PM
With the completion ...
With the completion of Cancún’s airport, the number of Cancún’s ‘‘border crossings’’ increased markedly. When coupled with the peso devaluations in the early 1980s, Cancún soon came to exemplify ‘‘mass tourism
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p.231 - 2/27/13 7:31 PM
Land of Necessity
The coastal border towns have now become the aesthetic and architectural face of Mexico, o√ering a setting that looks like Mexico but feels like the United States
vi
p.231 - 2/27/13 7:32 PM
Not only did Marriot...
Not only did Marriott, Ritz Carlton, Westin, and Hilton build properties after the peso devaluations of the 1980s, Spanish hotel companies like Sol Meliá also extended their Caribbean presence into Mexico’s new borderlands, as did other Spanish chains like Oasis, Occidental, Barcelo, Riu, and Iberostar. A range of factors facilitated the ease with which the Spanish hoteliers adapted to Mexico, including the willingness of Spanish o≈cials to diplomatically intervene on their behalf.
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p.232 - 2/27/13 7:33 PM
Land of Necessity
. Numerous factors, however, conspired to thwart pronaf’s e√orts to boost border tourism and retail sales, not the least of which was the border region’s demographic growth. The introduction of the maquiladora program, the demise of the Bracero Program, and weakness of the tourism infrastructure, among other things, rendered pronaf ine√ective. Most importantly, however, the absence in border cities of entertainment options for families, the developing taste for resorts, and the growing preference for jet travel diminished the importance of the border to Mexico’s tourist economy
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p.238 - 2/27/13 7:34 PM
Land of Necessity
At the Edge of the Storm
Northern Mexico’s Rural Peoples in a New Regime of Consumption, 1880–1940
essay #8
p.238 - 2/27/13 7:37 PM
At the bottom of the...
At the bottom of the o≈cial inquest form, the justice tersely closed the case: ‘‘Nothing of value.
p.238 - 2/27/13 7:37 PM
justice found some i...
justice found some items that told of the dead man’s world: two small
p.238 - 2/27/13 7:38 PM
sacks of seed corn a...
sacks of seed corn and beans, receipts for sales of ixtle fiber, paid-up accounts from company stores, and punched railway tickets.
p.239 - 2/27/13 7:38 PM
The few steps betwee...
The few steps between his jacal and his tiny fields of corn and beans defined his local limits of provisioning, his trails between his strips of ixtle and the nearest railroad sidings traced the regional boundaries of wage labor, and his journeys on the Ferrocarriles Nacionales de México and the Atchison, Topeka, & Santa Fe Railroad outlined his transnational circuit of migratory work
p.239 - 2/27/13 7:39 PM
Even as they improvi...
Even as they improvised to make common cause, the people with whom José Silva joined hardly hung together on ties forged out of tradition or long acquaintance as neighbors. They were, in fact, most of them strangers to each other, neighbors for fleeting moments
p.239 - 2/27/13 7:40 PM
The very harvesters ...
The very harvesters who were resisting the hacienda’s e√orts at expropriation, in 1917, themselves evicted recent migrants from the miserably unproductive corn rows that they cultivated along railways and roads.∑
p.240 - 2/27/13 7:40 PM
rural Mexicans disco...
rural Mexicans discovered that they possessed weapons of resistance, made potent by their very own entrance into the market as producers and as consumers
p.241 - 2/27/13 7:41 PM
The focus of this es...
The focus of this essay, then, is on women and men who began in local places with whatever assets were at hand, who entered new arenas of production and consumption, and who struggled to join their individual abilities with collective resources in order to make their way
p.241 - 2/27/13 7:43 PM
Mexican ixtle harves...
Mexican ixtle harvesters sought to sustain themselves in a local world of provisioning even as they crossed into a boundless arena of consumption
p.238 - 2/27/13 7:43 PM
José Silva’s
José Silva’s
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p.241 - 2/27/13 7:44 PM
Land of Necessity
new involvement in what social anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls ‘‘the work of consumption’’ has been unremarked upon. Appadurai observes that mastering consumption’s ‘‘multiple rhythms and how to integrate them is not just work—it is the hardest sort of work, the work of the imagination . . . , [for] the work of consumption is as fully social as it is symbolic, no less work for involving the discipline of the imagination
vi
p.241 - 2/27/13 7:45 PM
defining. Here, in t...
defining. Here, in these emergent social forms—part networks, part movements, part organizations—we can grasp an early stage of globalization from below.∞≤
p.242 - 2/27/13 7:46 PM
. In the half centur...
. In the half century from the late 1840s to the early 1890s, allied mercantile and landed elites achieved dominance over commercial exchange across northern Mexico.
p.242 - 2/27/13 7:47 PM
imposed tight limits...
imposed tight limits upon the households of both the small provincial middle class and the local peasantry
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p.242 - 2/27/13 7:47 PM
Land of Necessity
Within a rural order dominated by merchants and landowners, then, rural peoples confronted a regime of consumption marked by a scarcity of goods and minimal, if not absent, purchasing power
vi
p.243 - 2/27/13 7:47 PM
. The new rural elit...
. The new rural elites, in turn, formed alliances with an emerging industrial class, all of whom relentlessly sought status through every means possible, including conspicuous consumption
p.243 - 2/27/13 7:48 PM
. The new entreprene...
. The new entrepreneurial elite ventured into new forms of advertising, distribution, and retail, their e√orts resulting in a flood of new products into the towns and cities of northern Mexico
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p.243 - 2/27/13 7:48 PM
Land of Necessity
. By the first decade of the twentieth century, a new regime of consumption rooted in forms of both industrial and commercial capitalism had broken the hold of northern Mexico’s old elites.≤≠ What is more, these new
capitalistic forms pushed the land-poor and landless into new markets for their labor and for their necessities
vi
p.244 - 2/27/13 7:50 PM
Growing numbers of m...
Growing numbers of migrants and laborers were denied customary access to land, timber, and water.≤≤ As a consequence, northern rural laborers crowded onto fewer and fewer acres, now more dependent than ever on wages earned working in factories in the desert throughout northern Mexico, like La Laguna in Durango or the Agricultural Company of San Diego in Coahuila
p.244 - 2/27/13 7:50 PM
Denied the means to ...
Denied the means to survive apart from the market, landless Mexicans improvised their means of survival, finding themselves in company stores buying the beans their parents’ generation had grown for themselves. What emerged was a permanent consumer revolution spurred by capitalist power, a central theme in the history of twentieth-century Mexico and the United States
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p.244 - 2/27/13 7:51 PM
Land of Necessity
The price of their struggle, as the political theorist Antonio Gramsci captured it when thinking about Europeans in the 1920s and 1930s, was lives passed in a state of ‘‘alarmed defense.’’ He points to how this permanent mobilization left ‘‘traces of autonomous initiative’’ in the documentary record
vi
p.244 - 2/27/13 7:51 PM
Land of Necessity
left to the margins nevertheless made themselves into consumers and made their homes and communities into in-between spaces
vi
p.244 - 2/27/13 8:06 PM
Mexicans on the move...
Mexicans on the move in turn shaped an in-between space where neither the old nor the new regime of consumption reigned
p.245 - 2/27/13 8:07 PM
In the early 1890s, ...
In the early 1890s, new investors, big and small, consolidated their control over several modernizing haciendas and many small operations and promptly attacked the customary rights of laborers to work small plots to grow corn and beans
p.246 - 2/27/13 8:08 PM
How northern Mexican...
How northern Mexican rural peoples managed was, in one sense, a question of place. No conventional map captures the space through which they moved
p.246 - 2/27/13 8:10 PM
Only in the twentiet...
Only in the twentieth century did these displaced ixtle harvesters break out of their circle to connect with a wider world
p.246 - 2/27/13 8:11 PM
communities began in...
communities began in 1913 to invade the haciendas and to reclaim their lands, thus challenging the provisioning regime that had changed their lives.
p.247 - 2/27/13 8:14 PM
Catch a brief glimps...
Catch a brief glimpse of the remarkable concatenation of market exchanges in San Miguel. Here was a lively trade in liquor, in peasantmanufactured fiber products, in transportation from field to market, in stolen goods, and in grain
p.248 - 2/27/13 8:14 PM
. Joined to the tave...
. Joined to the taverns were the great cockfights of the north, where people from several communities and regions gathered to hear ballad singers and colporteurs
p.248 - 2/27/13 8:14 PM
news of the larger w...
news of the larger world, where political talk flowed as freely as mezcal, and where workers made contact with labor contractors from Tampico and Baja California and from Texas and California.∂
p.248 - 2/27/13 8:15 PM
After 1915, a cohort...
After 1915, a cohort of women sowed small plots near their residences in burgeoning new settlements like San Miguel, as well as on land they reclaimed from decimated haciendas, idled mines, and abandoned rural factories
p.248 - 2/27/13 8:16 PM
Soon they entered re...
Soon they entered regional trading centers as well, where they not only occupied marketing stalls but also commanded a new public visibility. Established merchants blocked their further advance, but these eight women nonetheless gained a visible role in the marketplace, an advantage that other women defended by forming rotating credit societies and organizing producers’ and consumers’ cooperatives.
p.249 - 2/27/13 8:17 PM
ejidos, collective a...
ejidos, collective agrarian communities, established cooperative stores and credit associations
p.249 - 2/27/13 8:17 PM
harvesters boycotted...
harvesters boycotted the Hacienda de San Carlos’s tienda de raya
p.249 - 2/27/13 8:18 PM
they took agrarian c...
they took agrarian censuses that revealed snapshots of this new direction. In one settlement after another, communities had organized rural unions, established cooperative stores, and broken the hold of the tienda de raya.∑≤
But a biting irony lay at the heart of this remarkable transition. In the act of seizing the political and economic initiative, communities had made permanent the very discipline of market-oriented consumption that they had sought to fend o√.
p.249 - 2/27/13 8:19 PM
In these migratory m...
In these migratory movements, the men and women of Guerrero, of Presa de Guadalupe, of San Miguel, and of places like them, entered into situations that demanded their compliance with new work routines, new time constraints, and new provisioning habits.
p.250 - 2/27/13 8:20 PM
was Vicente Lira, wh...
was Vicente Lira, who had first entered the local stream of seasonal laborers on southern Coahuila’s Hacienda de San Carlos in 1893, where he had harvested ixtle alongside José Silva
p.251 - 2/27/13 8:21 PM
join together as the...
join together as they resisted pressures on the delicate balance they sought to maintain between work and consumption
p.251 - 2/27/13 8:23 PM
In the face of mount...
In the face of mounting pressure, women’s maintenance of kinship and community relationships proved crucial
p.253 - 2/27/13 8:25 PM
Over the next half c...
Over the next half century, the full immersion of Mexican laborers in a consumer economy resulted in their near complete exploitation
p.253 - 2/27/13 8:26 PM
As they walked the a...
As they walked the aisles of the store, they found an array of goods, ranging from foodstu√s (all of it canned or salted) to clothes (almost all work clothes, with few suits and dresses) to shoes (mostly work shoes), along with a small stock of tractor and truck parts. Variety there was, in the sense of a range of brands of necessities— P&G soap and Octagon laundry soap, Log Cabin syrup and Karo syrup—but no large selection of commodities.
p.254 - 2/27/13 8:27 PM
Not only did giant o...
Not only did giant operations, like the Post operations in the Texas Panhandle, the Taft holdings in south Texas, and the De Bremond irrigated farms in southern New Mexico, succeed in tightly yoking work and consumption, but they also managed to harness state power for this purpose.
p.254 - 2/27/13 8:28 PM
Melecio Pequeño and ...
Melecio Pequeño and two other members of a picking gang from the hacienda of San Juan del Retiro, in Coahuila, were short $104 after sending remittances to their families, and so were sentenced to construct an all-weather road to their employers’ cotton farm in 1910
p.254 - 2/27/13 8:28 PM
, found themselves d...
, found themselves digging irrigation ditches without pay
p.254 - 2/27/13 8:29 PM
debt peonage, which ...
debt peonage, which became a standard form of coerced labor in the U.S. Southwest after 1915, much as it was across the U.S. South since the 1880s
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p.255 - 2/27/13 8:29 PM
Land of Necessity
On the giant Watts Farms in Cameron County, Texas, for instance, overseers enforced the monopoly of the company store. By 1910 surveillance of laborers’ provisioning practices was so intense, that its foreman caught Ramón Rangel attempting to purchase a pound of macaroni from a store outside the operation. What is more, he had permission to beat Rangel and confiscate the pasta
vi
p.255 - 2/27/13 8:30 PM
defense organization...
defense organization, the Agrupación Protectora Mexicana
p.255 - 2/27/13 8:30 PM
Sustained by contrib...
Sustained by contributions from Mexican migrant workers throughout the Southwest, the Agrupación Protectora boycotted the Watts Farms’ commissary during 1911 and 1912
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p.255 - 2/27/13 8:30 PM
Land of Necessity
The boycott of the Watts Farms store was an e√ort of Mexican migrants to decouple consumption from work and to assert that the marketplace for goods should be free and fair, even when the one for labor was not
vi
p.255 - 2/27/13 8:31 PM
Land of Necessity
. In one local after another, members sought not only to double wages—from a miserably low fifty cents to a dollar for picking one hundred pounds of cotton—and to break the power of big operations, but also to widen their access to stores and theaters and cafés and public services
vi
p.256 - 2/27/13 8:32 PM
spinach pickers’ uni...
spinach pickers’ union that began in the south Texas town of Mathis in December of 1941
p.256 - 2/27/13 8:32 PM
working hours, and t...
working hours, and to improve water quality and sanitation in the tent village. Soon the members were mounting a broader drive, first to institute a night school, next to campaign against discrimination in local stores and theaters, and finally to desegregate public parks
p.256 - 2/27/13 8:34 PM
With support from Me...
With support from Mexican American union locals, Texas and California civil rights organizations, and the Congress of Industrial Organizations, this movable community boycotted Shermer’s Grocery Store and picketed Roy’s Café and the Lamesa Theater during the month of October 1942
p.257 - 2/27/13 8:35 PM
By gaining a new rep...
By gaining a new repertory of collective action—the mobile working-class community, knit together from the myriad networks of migrating families; the labor local, built in the fires of class mobilization; the civil rights campaign, assembled in the course of political awakening
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p.269 - 2/27/13 8:35 PM
Land of Necessity
Robert Perez
Confined to the Margins
Smuggling among Native Peoples of the Borderlands
essay #9
p.269 - 2/28/13 12:49 AM
We live in our cars ...
We live in our cars while the hueros are in million-dollar houses. Do you know how much a house costs in Santa Barbara or Malibu? We can’t a√ord a house in our land. So a lot of us grow and transport herb. It’s like, whatever, we sell it to them anyway. It’s simple, we have to survive
p.269 - 2/28/13 12:53 AM
As many as 60 percen...
As many as 60 percent of borderlands native peoples live in poverty
p.269 - 2/28/13 12:53 AM
The imposition of th...
The imposition of the international boundary line through and adjacent to the lands of native peoples served to accelerate the course of the trajectory from abundance to scarcity, but not without opening up opportunities for resistance, including smuggling
p.271 - 2/28/13 12:55 AM
According to one Moh...
According to one Mohave elder, the songs are a ‘‘map
p.271 - 2/28/13 11:14 AM
A lot of our songs a...
A lot of our songs are maps, so you know that we traveled a lot.
p.274 - 2/28/13 11:18 AM
Catholic missionarie...
Catholic missionaries believed that the native
peoples of the region led woefully inadequate lives. Their lack of material possessions, ignorance of Christianity, disinterest in accumulation, and unwillingness to produce beyond their wants were all proof that a state of savagery prevailed in the midst of apparent abundance.
p.274 - 2/28/13 11:18 AM
The native peoples’ ...
The native peoples’ reluctance to ‘‘apply themselves to their cultivation with diligence and industry’’ was a common complaint
p.275 - 2/28/13 11:19 AM
. Because concentrat...
. Because concentrating the native population into a small number of towns facilitated policing and expropriating labor, the Spanish often relied on force to relocate Indians into missions and pueblos
p.275 - 2/28/13 11:20 AM
many consequences wa...
many consequences was the willingness of some native peoples to enter into underground economic practices as a matter of cultural, social, and economic survival
p.275 - 2/28/13 11:20 AM
Spanish cattle ranch...
Spanish cattle ranching in New Spain resulted in such ‘‘cataclysmic landscape change,’’ as one geographer has described it, that it could be considered ‘‘ecological colonialism.’’
p.276 - 2/28/13 11:22 AM
The constant conflic...
The constant conflict with some native peoples has been posited as one of the causes for the weakening of the Spanish Empire such that Mexico could achieve its independence
p.276 - 2/28/13 11:24 AM
In the 1820s and 183...
In the 1820s and 1830s, shortly after Mexican independence from Spain, ‘‘presents to Indians became fewer and shabbier, provoking ‘humiliating’ excuses from cash-poor northern Mexican o≈cials and violent outbursts by Indian visitors
p.277 - 2/28/13 11:24 AM
Mexican independence...
Mexican independence from Spain in 1821 does not appear to have substantially diminished participation in the underground economy
p.278 - 2/28/13 11:28 AM
formation of network...
formation of networks of dissent, a phenomenon that Josef Barton and Sarah Hill also explore in their essays in this part of the volume, and that Laura Serna touches on in her essay about Mexican cinema in part II of this volume. These networks united diverse Indian peoples: they planned rebellions, organized illegal religious gatherings, and coordinated raids on haciendas and non-Indian settlements.
p.278 - 2/28/13 11:29 AM
Apaches living in Ar...
Apaches living in Arizona raided Sonora and Chihuahua for horses and cattle.
p.279 - 2/28/13 11:30 AM
By the end of the 18...
By the end of the 1880s, Indians were no longer active in the cross-border livestock trade; more research is needed into Indian underground economic activities during the decades between 1890 and 1920. What might be called ‘‘technological colonialism’’—barbed wire fences, railroads, heavy farm and mining machinery, and lightweight arms—joined with the violent policies of the Porfiriato in northern Mexico, the equally violent but also paternalistic policies of the U.S. government, and the organizational e√orts of reformers
p.279 - 2/28/13 11:31 AM
unable to fully prov...
unable to fully provision themselves, and thus entered into the matrix of the consumer
p.280 - 2/28/13 11:31 AM
economy, much as did...
economy, much as did the Mexican ixtle harvesters Joe Barton discusses in the previous essay
p.280 - 2/28/13 11:31 AM
Just as ‘‘Americaniz...
Just as ‘‘Americanization’’ of immigrants during this period focused in part on bringing them into line with market-oriented production and consumption, so did the proliferation of Indian schools, Indian agents teaching modern husbandry and home economics, and Protestant missionaries intent on conversion
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p.280 - 2/28/13 11:32 AM
Land of Necessity
We have, to begin with, the absolute need of awakening in the savage Indian broader desires and ampler wants. To bring him out of savagery into citizenship we must make the Indian more intelligently selfish before we make him unselfishly intelligent. We need to awaken in him wants. In
his dull savagery he must be touched by the wings of the divine angel of discontent.
vi vi
p.282 - 2/28/13 11:34 AM
And so navait, peyot...
And so navait, peyote, and other hallucinogens became the first ‘‘controlled substances’’ in the region: they were the original items of the aboriginal drug trade.≥
p.282 - 2/28/13 11:35 AM
In the 1880s and 189...
In the 1880s and 1890s, native peoples’ demand for ceremonial hallucinogens, especially peyote, increased. U.S. o≈cials charged with overseeing Indians broke up peyote meetings, confiscating the hallucinogen and ceremonial items in the e√ort to halt its use. In frustration, the U.S. government banned peyote in 1899, which only transformed the substance into contraband.
p.282 - 2/28/13 11:35 AM
Thus as a result of ...
Thus as a result of the 1899 peyote laws, they found themselves involved in the first ‘‘drug smuggling’’ operations of the twentieth century
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p.284 - 2/28/13 11:43 AM
Land of Necessity
armed agents found leave to patrol Indian lands on the grounds of enforcing Prohibition; this opening only widened over the course of the century, as laws multiplied in the e√ort to prevent the transit of contraband, whether banned substances or migrant laborers and their families. Finally, and more importantly, the Cocopah assumed to be smugglers demonstrated striking boldness in their show of strength in the face of aggressive tactics by federal agents, the sheri√’s department, and the U.S. military
p.285 - 2/28/13 11:47 AM
Land of Necessity
Reports in 1994 indicated that the drug tra≈ckers and the Mexican military were preying on the Tarahumara people in Chihuahua: the tra≈ckers were clearing Tarahumara land, including ancient forests, to grow marijuana and opium poppies. With the land cleared, they forced the Tarahumaras and Pimas into the mountains to cultivate the crops.
p.286 - 2/28/13 11:56 AM
The Tohono O’odham r...
The Tohono O’odham reservation in southern Arizona, about three million acres of land that has a seventy-five-mile-long border with Mexico, illustrates the magnitude of drug smuggling’s imprint on native peoples and their lands near the international boundary line
p.286 - 2/28/13 11:57 AM
O’odham tribal membe...
O’odham tribal members were on both sides of the drug busts: Indian trackers in the Customs Service, known as ‘‘Shadow Wolves,’’ found many of the bales of pot, while some of their fellow tribal members were arrested for smuggling
p.286 - 2/28/13 11:57 AM
. For example, in 19...
. For example, in 1999 Customs agents found 356 pounds of marijuana in the care of a Tohono O’odham tribal judge,
p.287 - 2/28/13 11:57 AM
The U.S. Customs and...
The U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency employs a group of Indians known as ‘‘shadow wolves’’ to help patrol for smuggling
p.287 - 2/28/13 11:58 AM
For instance, the To...
For instance, the Tohono O’odham Tribal Council supports building a seventy-five-mile border fence, at more than a million dollars a mile, but other tribal members are against it.∑∞ One opponent explains, ‘‘That border continues to separate who we are
p.288 - 2/28/13 12:00 PM
‘‘Up until the 1950s...
‘‘Up until the 1950s our people would commonly cross the border for community and cultural events without a problem. With the tightening of the border since then, we have begun to be divided. We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us.
p.288 - 2/28/13 12:00 PM
You can’t travel any...
You can’t travel anywhere near the border without getting harassed by the Border Patrol. If you have brown skin and especially if you got long hair, you’re gonna get stopped and questioned. White people travel to Big Bend National Park and never have a problem
p.290 - 2/28/13 12:02 PM
The colonization of ...
The colonization of native peoples, the criminalization of their sacraments, the drawing of a line— the border—through their territory, the expropriation of their lands, and the extensive e√ects of capitalist regimes of production and provisioning together
L
p.295 - 2/28/13 12:05 PM
Land of Necessity
Peter S. Cahn
Using and Sharing
Direct Selling in the Borderlands
essay #10
p.295 - 2/28/13 12:06 PM
Ciudad Juárez, many ...
Ciudad Juárez, many of them migrants from Mexico’s interior, have long supplemented their income with direct selling. When sociologist María Patricia Fernández-Kelly conducted fieldwork there in the 1980s, she found that although their supervisors frowned on it, many women sold cosmetics in the maquila factories
p.295 - 2/28/13 12:07 PM
Her friend persisted...
Her friend persisted, so Georgina agreed to try one of the company’s products, a co√ee designed to promote weight loss. One taste of Omnilife’s Cafetino won her over
p.295 - 2/28/13 12:07 PM
Thus convinced, Geor...
Thus convinced, Georgina left Mary Kay to enroll in Omnilife
p.296 - 2/28/13 12:08 PM
Well-known firms suc...
Well-known firms such as Avon, Tupperware, and Amway, as well as newer companies like Omnilife, base their business on a model known as direct selling
p.296 - 2/28/13 12:08 PM
Though the companies...
Though the companies don’t acknowledge it in publicity, direct sellers like Georgina devote more energy to consuming products than they do to selling them.
p.296 - 2/28/13 12:08 PM
As the companies fre...
As the companies frequently remind distributors, you cannot recommend a product that you have not tried
p.296 - 2/28/13 12:09 PM
By using the product...
By using the products, direct sellers come to embody the claims of the company to potential clients. The transformed
p.296 - 2/28/13 12:09 PM
transformed body ser...
transformed body serves as the most e√ective advertising, and therefore obtaining it is the first work-related task of the aspiring direct salesperson
L
p.296 - 2/28/13 12:10 PM
Land of Necessity
This logic inverts the traditional economic calculation in which productive activity leads to consumptive power; in the direct-selling industry, consumption precedes financial gain
vi vi vi
p.296 - 2/28/13 12:10 PM
Land of Necessity
As direct-selling companies multiply throughout the United States and Mexico, they disseminate their message about the primacy of consumption to an ever-wider audience
vi vi
p.297 - 2/28/13 12:11 PM
Land of Necessity
reveals a pattern characteristic of a late-capitalist, transnational economy: orientation toward consumption over one toward production
vi
p.297 - 2/28/13 12:11 PM
In the early 1900s, ...
In the early 1900s, for instance, Yankee peddlers sold their eclectic array of goods on credit throughout the predominantly rural United States.≥ For decades, men dominated the ranks of door-to-door sellers, but in the 1880s, the company now called Avon began to recruit women in rural areas across the United States to sell perfume
L
p.297 - 2/28/13 12:12 PM
Land of Necessity
By 1930, the company counted twenty-five thousand distributors nationwide, over 80 percent of whom lived in towns of fewer than 2,500 people, mostly west of the Mississippi. Not only did rural women like these women lack access to department stores, they relied on their social networks for information about products
vi vi
p.297 - 2/28/13 12:12 PM
recruited to the ran...
recruited to the ranks of ‘‘Avon ladies’’ on the assumption that they would be willing to work to purchase nonnecessary consumer goods, like cosmetics, but not to pay household bills.∂
L
p.297 - 2/28/13 12:13 PM
Land of Necessity
Mary Kay sold cosmetics and Mary Crowley sold home decorations and gifts. Both women parlayed small initial investments into multimillion-dollar companies that helped make Texas synonymous with direct selling. Along the way they innovated signature rewards for their distributors: the Mary Kay Cadillac, now known as a ‘‘career car,’’ is an iconic symbol of late-twentieth-century consumer culture in the United States.
vi
p.299 - 2/28/13 12:15 PM
Unlike cosmetics and...
Unlike cosmetics and decorations, Omnitrition’s energy drinks and weight-loss powders appealed to men as well as women. Initially, the company’s most profitable and visible distributor was Jerry Rubin, the former anticapitalist activist. Journalists dubbed his transformation ‘‘yippie turned yuppie,’’ but he defended his decision to champion direct selling by explaining that it was a solution to rampant under- and unemployment.
p.299 - 2/28/13 12:15 PM
Rubin persuaded inde...
Rubin persuaded independent scientists Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw to market their ‘‘designer foods’’ through Omnitrition’s network of distributors. Pearson and Shaw, based in Los Angeles, had achieved national prominence as proponents of taking megadoses of vitamins to slow aging. They experimented on themselves and then published their findings as Life Extension: A Practical Scientific Approach, which included photographs of the authors in skimpy bathing suits making bodybuilding poses.
p.299 - 2/28/13 12:15 PM
The company soon exp...
The company soon expanded internationally. Mexico, due to its proximity, ample pool of unemployed, and tradition of herbal medicine, made a logical first choice
p.299 - 2/28/13 12:16 PM
Mexican receptivity ...
Mexican receptivity to direct selling is clear: for example, the direct-sales firm Herbalife achieved astounding sales of two million dollars worth of vitamin supplements during its first six weeks of operations in Mexico, and Amway recruited some 170,000 Mexican distributors in its first years of operations in the country.
p.300 - 2/28/13 12:17 PM
. Such accusations h...
. Such accusations have dogged multilevel marketers, those direct sellers who compensate distributors based on a percentage of the sales of their recruits, since a Federal Trade Commission investigation of Amway in 1979. Because Amway required that its distributors sell some product to customers each month, the ftc ruled that it was not a pyramid scheme, though the company paid a fine for misrepresenting potential earnings to new recruits
p.301 - 2/28/13 12:20 PM
As vitamin supplemen...
As vitamin supplements, the products avoid U.S. government regulation, due to a 1999 federal case where Pearson and Shaw successfully challenged the Food and Drug Administration’s right to verify the health claims made on labels of nutritional supplements.∞≤
Since her first taste of Omnilife’s co√ee, Georgina’s enthusiasm for the products has not diminished. She begins every day with a hot cup of Cafetino
p.301 - 2/28/13 12:20 PM
during the day, she ...
during the day, she drinks a bottle mixed with Omnilife supplements Kenyan and Magnus, which give her mental and physical energy. In the Texas heat, she drinks a vitamin called EgoLife, which rehydrates the body. She takes chewable pills designed to prevent diabetes and puts a calcium supplement in her children’s breakfast cereal
p.301 - 2/28/13 12:21 PM
Pointing to a displa...
Pointing to a display of Omnilife bottles on the wall of her o≈ce, she calls the product line her ‘‘medicine cabinet
L
p.302 - 2/28/13 12:21 PM
Land of Necessity
No clinical evidence supports the theory that megadoses of antioxidants prevent the formation of free radicals in the human body. In one study, participants who received beta carotene supplements, a popular antioxidant, showed higher rates of lung cancer than the control group
vi
p.302 - 2/28/13 12:22 PM
In his public appear...
In his public appearances, Vergara comments favorably about the novel uses for the products that he learns about from his distributors. A man in Argentina told him about using the company’s anticellulite gel as a topical Viagra
p.302 - 2/28/13 12:22 PM
. In my fieldwork, I...
. In my fieldwork, I met Omnilife customers who fashion facial masks by mixing several powders into a paste, feed the vitamins to their pet birds, or inject the products into their veins
p.302 - 2/28/13 12:23 PM
significant financia...
significant financial outlay. On average, a box of thirty packets of vitamin powder retails for nearly thirty dollars. Georgina o√ers her clients individual packets of the vitamin powders, making the cost less burdensome. Many clients, like Georgina, lack health insurance, so a medical emergency can devastate them economically. Vitamin supplements can prevent future illness or alleviate existing symptoms, she believes
p.303 - 2/28/13 12:24 PM
When distributors fi...
When distributors first enroll, they qualify to purchase the product at a 20 percent discount. Each product also carries a point value that correlates to its cost. As distributors increase their point totals through subsequent purchases, their discount increases to a maximum of 40 percent. At that level, called bronze distributor, they can recruit other distributors into their organizations to ascend in rank to silver, then gold, and finally diamond distributor. Georgina decided to make bronze as quickly as she could after enrolling. This required her to purchase about four hundred dollars of product every two weeks for two consecutive months. Despite the large initial outlay, she felt it was worthwhile because she could sample a range of the products en route to reaching the maximum discount level.
After four years as an Omnilife bronze distributor, Georgina has not risen further in the company hierarchy. Advancing to the next level, silver, requires that a distributor enroll three recruits, each of whom must earn one hundred dollars every two weeks in commission checks. Georgina counts three distributors below her, but none of them generates a commission check. Mostly, her recruits purchase Omnilife products for their own consumption, not for selling to others. If she reached silver status, Georgina could claim a larger portion of her network’s sales volume in commissions.
p.304 - 2/28/13 12:26 PM
Omnilife’s most rich...
Omnilife’s most richly compensated distributor, who happens to be Jorge Vergara’s first cousin, claims a monthly gross income of two hundred thousand dollars. Of course, such outsized earnings are the exception
p.304 - 2/28/13 12:26 PM
To the contrary, man...
To the contrary, many enroll merely to purchase the company’s products at a discount. Despite the company’s e√orts to discourage treating the products as prescription medicine, most distributors first learn about Omnilife while searching for relief from a physical or mental illness.
p.304 - 2/28/13 12:27 PM
Jorge Vergara unders...
Jorge Vergara understands that only a tiny percentage of distributors treat Omnilife as a business. He is also aware that a multilevel compensation scheme requires massive numbers of base-level distributors to generate revenue for those above them in the pyramid. Omnilife wages a constant communications campaign to recruit new distributors and to encourage them to consume once they enroll
p.304 - 2/28/13 12:28 PM
Upon returning to hi...
Upon returning to his hometown of Guadalajara, Vergara invested in ventures ranging from pork wholesaling to an Italian restaurant, but ended up eating more food than he sold. In a few years, he was ‘‘fat, sick, and broke.’’ A friend invited him to try Herbalife’s weight loss products.
p.305 - 2/28/13 12:30 PM
He acknowledges the ...
He acknowledges the undocumented status of some migrants in the audience but assures them that they need no papers to achieve their dreams. What they will have to do is break with the usual routine of backbreaking labor. ‘‘
p.306 - 2/28/13 12:30 PM
Strenuous work not o...
Strenuous work not only compensates migrants poorly, he claims, but also it leaves them susceptible to illness. Vergara’s message resonates with Georgina, who experienced both meager wages and unwanted weight gain when she worked at McDonald
p.307 - 2/28/13 12:32 PM
Vergara reduces the ...
Vergara reduces the formula for success to the pithy phrase, ‘‘Use and
share.’’ He elaborates, ‘‘Don’t chase money. That’s why you came to the United States, and you didn’t find it. Don’t chase money; chase results to help people. It depends on you—no one else—how much you earn.’’ Earning money in Om
p.307 - 2/28/13 12:32 PM
Vergara reduces the ...
Vergara reduces the formula for success to the pithy phrase, ‘‘Use and
share.’’ He elaborates, ‘‘Don’t chase money. That’s why you came to the United States, and you didn’t find it. Don’t chase money; chase results to help people
p.308 - 2/28/13 12:33 PM
Vergara encourages h...
Vergara encourages his audience to ‘‘imagine yourself in a village in Mexico scratching your belly while earning five thousand dollars a month.’’ Far from the arduous work they find in the borderlands, migrants hear in Omnilife the promise of earning more money while enjoying a relaxing lifestyle in their home country
p.308 - 2/28/13 12:34 PM
‘Permanent tourists,...
‘Permanent tourists,’’ those who have overstayed their visas, must navigate work and leisure without alerting authorities to their undocumented status.∞∑ In Omnilife, Mexican migrants have the opportunity for public recognition without fear of reprisals
p.309 - 2/28/13 12:46 PM
The most e√ective wa...
The most e√ective way to impart Vergara’s lessons about consumption, however, is in the thrice-weekly training sessions held in support centers.
Any enrolled distributor may open a support center to provide counsel for her organization and to attract new recruits.
p.309 - 2/28/13 12:47 PM
standardized in reco...
standardized in recommending the plan to ‘‘use and share.’
p.310 - 2/28/13 12:47 PM
. I pass a tax prepa...
. I pass a tax preparer, a travel agency, and a print shop before reaching the door that reads ‘‘Omnilife U.S.A. Centro De Apoyo Oficial. Distribuidores Independientes’’ (O≈cial Support Center. Independent Distributors). Below the stenciled writing, Georgina has posted a handwritten sign advertising free English classes
p.311 - 2/28/13 12:53 PM
The only obstacle to...
The only obstacle to achieving success is a distributor’s own self-imposed limitations. It is as simple as beginning to drink the product
p.312 - 2/28/13 12:53 PM
In keeping with Verg...
In keeping with Vergara’s distinction, Jesús emphasizes that the products function as food, not as medicine. Even so, the women and men in Georgina’s support center treat Jesús like a doctor dispensing prescriptions.
p.312 - 2/28/13 12:54 PM
I see a pus-filled w...
I see a pus-filled wound on his shin. A workplace accident mangled one of his legs, he explains. He has been through a skin graft and medical care, but still lacks feeling in his foot. Without asking further questions, Jesús prescribes Power Maker
p.312 - 2/28/13 12:55 PM
In relative terms, t...
In relative terms, the high prices of the vitamin powders do not seem so unreasonable. Georgina acknowledges
that the products are expensive, but adds, ‘‘They’re worthwhile. It’s more expensive to go to the hospital.
L
p.312 - 2/28/13 12:55 PM
Land of Necessity
Just as work in Omnilife o√ers an alternative to the burdens of the formal economy, so do its products o√er an alternative to the uncertainties of allopathic medicine
vi vi vi
p.313 - 2/28/13 1:06 PM
By the 1990s, the pr...
By the 1990s, the proliferation of Tupperware parties and catalogs of cosmetics familiarized most Mexicans with direct selling
p.313 - 2/28/13 1:07 PM
Moreover, most indep...
Moreover, most independent distributors allow customers to pay for their orders in installments, without charging interest. Most importantly, companies do not require that representatives demonstrate legal status, higher education, or willingness to work a set schedule. With this flexibility comes the possibility of earning additional income. Few distributors reach the level of Olivia and her husband, who built their own house from their Omnilife profits. Still, for Georgina, working in
Omnilife o√ers an ‘‘emotional’’ paycheck. She improves her own health and gains satisfaction from helping others to feel better
p.314 - 2/28/13 1:08 PM
Traditionally, migra...
Traditionally, migrant workers have followed the same pattern, accepting physically demanding jobs as a way to save money for durable goods or to support relatives in their sending community. Georgina’s job as an Omnilife distributor demands work, too: attending motivational meetings, reading company literature, leading training sessions, and recruiting interested clients. But in multilevel marketing, consumption
p.314 - 2/28/13 1:09 PM
Vergara, on the othe...
Vergara, on the other hand, frames low-wage toiling not as noble sacrifice but as misdirected energy. He faults fast-food workers like Georgina for lack of vision.
p.314 - 2/28/13 1:10 PM
Vergara celebrates c...
Vergara celebrates consumption as the path to material rewards and physical healing.
Downplaying production has the e√ect of also devaluing steady income
p.315 - 2/28/13 1:13 PM
Sex-toy parties give...
Sex-toy parties give a modern twist to the traditional gender roles associated with many direct sellers like Mary Kay and Avon. They overturn the stereotype of the sexually passive woman who sacrifices her own pleasure for her family’s benefit
p.315 - 2/28/13 1:13 PM
Direct sellers still...
Direct sellers still su√er from vulnerabilities inherent to the industry: no health care, no guaranteed salary, no employer benefits. In the same way that the notion of providing help substitutes for earning an income, the rhetoric of entrepreneurship in direct selling substitutes for job stability
L
p.315 - 2/28/13 1:13 PM
Land of Necessity
male-dominated societies like Mexico’s, women whose work closely resembles their domestic duties receive more approval than those women who enter the corporate world. Seen as a service profession, direct selling does not threaten stereotypical gender norms and keeps women grounded in the realm of consumption
p.315 - 2/28/13 1:14 PM
Although women domin...
Although women dominate the lower ranks of Omnilife distributors, as they ascend the hierarchy, their husbands tend to join the business, so that nearly all top-level leaders are married couples
p.316 - 2/28/13 1:16 PM
Omnilife’s competito...
Omnilife’s competitors market their vitamins with the imprimatur of a scientific advisory board and lectures by biologists accompanied by PowerPoint slides. Omnilife, by contrast, no longer mentions scientists Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw in its promotional material, nor does it reveal who formulates its more recent products.
p.316 - 2/28/13 1:16 PM
To avoid an illegal ...
To avoid an illegal pyramid structure that prioritizes the business opportunity over retail sales, Omnilife and other direct sellers require that their distributors meet minimum purchase requirements. Yet, little selling takes place in direct selling.
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p.316 - 2/28/13 1:18 PM
Land of Necessity
For Mexican migrants in the United States, the promise of Omnilife turns the liabilities of the formal economy into advantages in the informal one. Direct selling does not privilege legal status, education, or language skills. It fosters community instead of atomizing an already fragmented population
vi vi vi vi holyoke
p.316 - 2/28/13 1:18 PM
Georgina commonly se...
Georgina commonly sees defection among her roster of already-enlisted distributors. These facts point to the tenuousness of an economic strategy that glorifies consumption in a climate of scarcity
p.316 - 2/28/13 1:18 PM
That Omnilife contin...
That Omnilife continues to find willing distributors throughout the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, however, illustrates the appeal of a message that ascribes transformative powers to consumption
L
p.319 - 2/28/13 1:19 PM
Land of Necessity
Sarah Hill
El Dompe, Los Yonkes, and Las Segundas
Consumption’s Other Side in El Paso–Ciudad Juárez
essay #11
p.319 - 2/28/13 1:20 PM
Three decades before...
Three decades before the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (nafta), Mexico carved out a thirty-kilometer territory along its northern border for a ‘‘free trade zone.’’ There, factories that produced goods for export to the United States lured Mexicans to work
p.319 - 2/28/13 1:21 PM
fronchi is an abbrev...
fronchi is an abbreviation stamped plainly in dark green on the amber-colored license plates of all vehicles that had been fronterizado (borderized): legally imported to border cities like Ciudad Juárez, but whose use in Mexico was restricted to the thirty-kilometer northern border free trade zone
p.319 - 2/28/13 1:21 PM
Unlike fronchis, veh...
Unlike fronchis, vehicles with ‘‘chih mex‘‘ plates could travel throughout Mexico, where they could be repeatedly sold in regional used-car markets. Fronchis, by contrast, were limited to the free trade zone, so as
not to depress prices for Mexican-manufactured vehicles
p.319 - 2/28/13 1:22 PM
in Juárez, fronchi l...
in Juárez, fronchi license plates marked their drivers as not entirely Mexican, but rather Mexicans tied by secondhand imports to American culture. Fronchis piloted their relics of American manufacturing might more or less freely back and forth across the international boundary, but only within clearly delimited internal borders that established fronchi cars and their drivers as hybrid subjects, neither fully Mexican, nor unequivocally American
p.320 - 2/28/13 1:25 PM
Soon, Mexicans who c...
Soon, Mexicans who could cross the border to shop came to prefer American brands.≤ Those who could not cross the border either paid dearly in Juárez for Mexican-made merchandise, or they turned to the lively trade in secondhand American goods that emerged alongside the flow of new goods across the border.
p.320 - 2/28/13 1:25 PM
And as fronchis demo...
And as fronchis demonstrate, Mexican fronterizo consumer culture often absorbed things gotten rid of in the United States
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p.320 - 2/28/13 1:29 PM
Land of Necessity
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, mass consumption in the United States grew in tandem with services for convenient and sanitary disposal of unwanted and used-up goods. What might be termed ‘‘mass disposal’’ thus is fundamental to mass consumption in the United States
vi
p.321 - 2/28/13 1:31 PM
Land of Necessity
Many materials and goods that simply end their short lives in landfills throughout most of the United States endure in reincarnated form as recovered, repaired, and renewed merchandise in Ciudad Juárez, a foreign city that profits handsomely from Americans’ abandonment of their earlier historical practice of what Strasser called ‘‘object stewardship’’
vo
p.321 - 2/28/13 1:31 PM
(used European cloth...
(used European clothing, for example, journeys across Africa nowadays in a burgeoning secondhand trade that mimics the global production system
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p.322 - 2/28/13 1:32 PM
Land of Necessity
This essay explores some folk naming practices like fronchi that have sprung up in the fertile soil of rejected-goods tra≈c across the border. I discuss the naming of three sites of consumption/disposal in the pages that follow—el dompe (the dump), los yonkes (junkyards), and las segundas (secondhand
vi vi vi vi
p.322 - 2/28/13 1:33 PM
Land of Necessity
Entwined in this political economy of acquisition/disposal run threads of race, class, gender, and national identity, weaving together a thick cloak of waste and recovery. Naming practices in the market of secondhand and discarded goods reveal a distinct local cultural formation, subject to conditions over which borderland consumers and disposers have little control but which they nonetheless creatively mark through an inventive borderlands idiom
vi
p.322 - 2/28/13 1:34 PM
most border resident...
most border residents, as well as observers, such terms as dompe and yonke form part of the taken-forgranted lexicon that defines the borderlands’ inherent hybridity
p.323 - 2/28/13 1:36 PM
‘‘We had just arrive...
‘‘We had just arrived [to Juárez] to look for maquila [factory] jobs. We were told we could find work at ‘el dompe,’ which we thought was a maquila. So we took the bus here
p.323 - 2/28/13 1:36 PM
Seasoned scavengers ...
Seasoned scavengers suggested that she camp out, because some land at el dompe would soon be for sale. Within weeks she and her husband built a shanty, and they eventually began formal land payments
p.323 - 2/28/13 1:37 PM
But to Mexicans livi...
But to Mexicans living anywhere in Mexico
but the border, Guadalupe’s confusion would be very understandable: in Mexican Spanish, basurero describes the place where basura (garbage or trash
p.323 - 2/28/13 1:37 PM
So why in Juárez did...
So why in Juárez did the basurero (or tiradero) get called ‘‘el dompe’’? The short answer most readily o√ered whenever I have asked is that dompe is slang; people tell me: ‘‘Dompe comes from ‘dumping,’’’ (or dompear).∞≠ But this response just begs other questions: why use the English language to describe an activity engaged in by Mexicans, in Mexico?
p.324 - 2/28/13 2:06 PM
One elderly city eng...
One elderly city engineer, eighty-six-year-old Francisco Ochoa, thoughtfully suggested to me in June 2006 that dompe became a common term in Juárez because so much of the city fled to El Paso as refugees in 1914, when Pancho Villa’s occupying army drove them across the border: ‘‘The rich [Mexicans] settled in Sunset Heights, and the poor settled in Chihuahuita [El Paso’s ‘‘Mexican’’ neighborhood’’], and they took on American customs that became part of Juárez later as they came and went back and forth across the border
L
p.325 - 2/28/13 2:10 PM
Land of Necessity
No doubt a greater volume of waste and discards originated in El Paso than Juárez. So, at the outset of El Paso’s modern history, it possessed both a population density and access to goods that made trash disposal a more urgent problem than it was for neighboring Juárez
vi vi
p.326 - 2/28/13 2:11 PM
El Paso codified sti...
El Paso codified still more practices associated with dumping, while Juárez left the activity unregulated. In April 1886, the city established a patronage monopoly for waste carting: the city scavenger. Appointed by the City Council for a two-year term, the scavenger paid a bond for the right to charge residents a fee to collect all refuse in the city
p.326 - 2/28/13 2:12 PM
From the 1880s onwar...
From the 1880s onward, city ledgers in El Paso indicate both income and expenses from the city scavenger. Here again, the contrast with Juárez is notable; no corresponding o≈ce existed, and the city recorded no accounts associated with waste hauling
p.326 - 2/28/13 2:12 PM
. The scavenger also...
. The scavenger also received exclusive rights to mine the city’s waste stream for recoverable materials (another ordinance in 1886 declared that only the scavenger had access to the city dumping grounds
L
p.326 - 2/28/13 2:12 PM
Land of Necessity
city scavengers in El Paso probably profited not from the collected household fees, but in the market for recovered materials. Beginning in 1896, El Paso city directories show a number of junk dealers and materials processors trading in all manner of detritus and refuse, amassing, sorting, refining and selling their materials to various industries.≤∂
vi vi vi vi holyoke
p.327 - 2/28/13 2:19 PM
Land of Necessity
Just as it was elsewhere in the United States, waste disposal at El Paso’s dump was secondary to materials recovery. At the turn of the twentieth century, dumps served primarily as centralized recovery repositories where armies of scavengers worked—in the most appalling conditions—feeding the supply chain of small-scale industrial buyers of waste materials.
vi
p.328 - 2/28/13 2:21 PM
Land of Necessity
The name dompe for dump might have come into common usage in the 1890s because, as newspapers and city records show, ‘‘Mexicans’’ made up the scavenging labor force under non-Mexican bosses.≤∏ Few of El Paso’s junk dealers between 1896 and 1917 appear to have been Mexican; their Ashkenazi surnames—Blott, Bloch, Rosenberg, and Trachtenberg—are consistent with those of waste traders elsewhere in the United States.≤π
vi
p.328 - 2/28/13 2:22 PM
Nonetheless, it appe...
Nonetheless, it appears that, regardless of who was awarded the scavenger o≈ce or ran junk businesses, those who carted, sorted, and managed materials for Jewish, Anglo, and other ethnic bosses were Mexican, and that Mexicans were intimately associated with waste hauling
L
p.328 - 2/28/13 2:22 PM
Land of Necessity
Mexicans living on the city’s south side and particularly young boys—posed a persistent problem for the scavenger’s monopoly: they used their own carts to intercept trash in ‘‘American’’ neighborhoods or charged rates that undercut the scavenger’s fees for carting
vi vi vi vi
p.329 - 2/28/13 2:25 PM
Land of Necessity
In the early 1970s, long after El Paso had closed its dump and turned to the modern, industrial technology of landfilling, a scrappy band of scavengers on Juarez’s city dump had cornered the regional market for recovered materials. By then, resource recovery had squarely repositioned itself on the Mexican side of the border. In 1972, a curious fight erupted between the scavenging cooperative and the local o≈ce of the Mexican Treasury
vi vi
p.329 - 2/28/13 2:26 PM
Treasury wanted to c...
Treasury wanted to charge import duties. The scavengers’ cooperative protested loudly and publicly, taking out newspaper ads that asked, rhetorically, ‘‘What nationality is garbage?’’
p.329 - 2/28/13 2:26 PM
robust networks of m...
robust networks of materials traders that kept consumer recovery vital
p.329 - 2/28/13 2:27 PM
driving Juárez’s mai...
driving Juárez’s main north-south artery, a Mexican academic friend of mine wondered out loud why the businesses amassed along this highway called their wares ‘‘autopartes usadas
L
p.329 - 2/28/13 2:28 PM
Land of Necessity
Although my friend’s hometown possessed no yonkes, the etymology of yonke seemed obvious. Autopartes usadas, on the other hand, did not make sense
vi
p.330 - 2/28/13 2:28 PM
why ‘‘explain’’ yonk...
why ‘‘explain’’ yonke with autopartes usadas (a direct appropriation of ‘‘used auto parts), he mused, when refacciones (repair parts) would serve suitably? Why explain one imported concept (yonke) with yet another (autopartes usadas) that was not nearly as legible as yonke
p.330 - 2/28/13 2:28 PM
Luis Alberto Urrea b...
Luis Alberto Urrea blandly notes that on the border, junkyards become yonkes and dumps become dompes, tautologically reinforcing a commonsense notion that lexical migrations simply happen, yielding—to paraphrase Eric Wolf— words without history.
p.330 - 2/28/13 2:29 PM
Recall that fronchis...
Recall that fronchis are worn-out American cars; they hunger constantly for spare parts. Thus, with the mass migration of used American cars across the border, a market system for feeding them replacement parts—also used— migrated with them
L
p.330 - 2/28/13 2:30 PM
Land of Necessity
To procure parts to keep an aged but everexpanding fleet of cheap cast-o√ vehicles viable, juarenses turned to losyonkes, where they could find acres and acres of used vehicles ready to be cannibalized for components
vi
p.331 - 2/28/13 2:31 PM
Land of Necessity
These terms likely lack yonke’s currency on the border, because historically no Mexican equivalents existed in the interior of the country: yonkes specialize in imported used automobile parts to serve in the repair of used imported automobiles. When junkyards began opening up in Juárez, chock-full of American junkers, they might have purposefully mimicked American junkyards and hence imported their very name: yonke
vi vi vi
p.331 - 2/28/13 2:32 PM
both the material an...
both the material and symbolic matters of yonkes have been a thorn in the side of government o≈cials who seek to regulate the flow of American goods—used and otherwise—into border cities.
p.331 - 2/28/13 2:33 PM
Such claims of conce...
Such claims of concern for Mexican nationality only thinly veil the class bias at the heart of such worries. Mid-twentieth-century elites often complained about American dilution of juarense consumer culture, though they themselves tra≈cked freely back and forth across the boundary line. They feared, nonetheless, that the ‘‘weakly’’ cultured working class could not withstand
the forces of apparent ‘‘yankification’’ inherent in the consumption of American goods.≥
L
p.332 - 2/28/13 2:34 PM
Land of Necessity
During his term in o≈ce (1983–86) he imposed a new restriction on the yonkes: the businesses could no longer call themselves yonkes. According to Yonkeros Association President Lozoya, Bermúdez said to him: ‘‘I’m not going to give you even a single new permit for another yonke.’
vi
p.332 - 2/28/13 2:35 PM
Bermúdez required th...
Bermúdez required that such businesses call themselves ‘‘autopartes usadas.’’
The yonkeros dutifully complied with the new requirements. Lozoya’s business, for example, changed its name from Yonke Japón (he specializes in parts for Japanese imports, a further layer of irony) to Autopartes Usadas Japón
p.332 - 2/28/13 2:35 PM
primary customers ‘‘...
primary customers ‘‘didn’t know what autopartes meant
p.332 - 2/28/13 2:35 PM
The revised signage ...
The revised signage read: ‘‘Autopartes Usadas (Yonke) Japón.’’
When I asked Lozoya why he thought his clientele could not make sense of autopartes usadas, he explained that most of his customers come from El Paso.
p.333 - 2/28/13 2:36 PM
As Juárez began to d...
As Juárez began to dominate the regional market for used auto parts in the 1970s (e√ectively putting El Paso’s automobile junkyards out of business by the end of the decade), the yonkes no doubt supplied an important source of foreign revenue for the city
p.333 - 2/28/13 2:36 PM
With yonkes, U.S. re...
With yonkes, U.S. residents (mostly Mexican in nationality or ethnicity) travel to Juárez specifically to acquire used goods that have been imported to Mexico.
p.333 - 2/28/13 2:36 PM
. Bermúdez’s fears o...
. Bermúdez’s fears of what his uncle called ‘‘yankifying’’ did not extend to the Americanization of Mexican industry in the maquila sector
p.333 - 2/28/13 2:37 PM
the term junk/yonke ...
the term junk/yonke instead of the more respectable Englishlanguage origin ‘‘used auto parts.’’ Whatever the case may be, it reveals juarense elites’ discomfort with their city’s integration into the American consumer market, for new, used, and junked stu√.
p.333 - 2/28/13 2:37 PM
he seems to have wan...
he seems to have wanted the fact of their foreign origins to remain clear, albeit in a sanitized fashion
p.334 - 2/28/13 2:38 PM
yonkeros’ concerns s...
yonkeros’ concerns subsequently came to center on the di√erence between themselves as registered, duty-paying, law-abiding businesses and the unregistered, ‘‘illegal’’ yonkes whose numbers have exploded in recent years
L
p.334 - 2/28/13 2:38 PM
Land of Necessity
225 illegal yonkes around the city, whose exterior walls and signage reference their illegality. Since the illegal yonkes are not registered, they do not bother with cumbersome mandated nomenclature. They call themselves, simply
vi
p.334 - 2/28/13 2:38 PM
Land of Necessity
In 2005, 450 registered members of the Yonkeros Association competed for customers
vi
p.334 - 2/28/13 2:39 PM
Land of Necessity
yonkes (when they have painted signs), or in lieu of verbal signage, they indicate their wares with fences made of crushed, cubed automobiles, a formerly universal symbol in Juárez for yonkeros.
vi vi vi
p.334 - 2/28/13 2:39 PM
yonkes are not only ...
yonkes are not only the main source of used auto parts on the border; they are also the most visible reminder of a thriving underworld of car thievery, chop shops, and reselling that explains the persistently high auto insurance rates in El Paso.
p.335 - 2/28/13 2:40 PM
They wanted to devel...
They wanted to develop the yonkes’ business image such that they could sever the association between criminality and used auto parts. The failed plan would have given them a fighting chance against, on the one hand, the AutoZones, Pep Boys, and the like that skim their most prosperous customers, and on the other, illegal yonkes that continue to poach on the lower end of the market
p.335 - 2/28/13 2:41 PM
No clear consensus e...
No clear consensus emerged: some students said that juarenses do not use the term chocolate, others reported that chueco means a vehicle that lacks a title and plates (indeed, chocolate does not appear in the
university’s extensive slang glossary, first compiled in 1985, while chueco does). But one student explained that chocolate refers to vehicles that are ‘‘tolerated,’’ despite being illegal
L
p.336 - 2/28/13 2:42 PM
Land of Necessity
reclassify a transient object with unambiguously negative value. He suggested that the soon-to-be-legal chocolate was, in e√ect, ‘‘garbage’’: ‘‘We want to be business partners with the U.S. and Canada, not their largest basurero de chatarra automovile.’’≥∫ In this he upped the ante—by turning chatarra into basura, or junk into trash
vi
p.336 - 2/28/13 2:43 PM
. One place that Soc...
. One place that Socorro found she could achieve a slight advantage was in her choice of fabric stores. If she traveled by bus to el centro, bypassed the Mexican fabric stores in and around Avenida Lerdo, and walked across the bridge to El Paso, she could procure her materials at a favorable price
L
p.336 - 2/28/13 2:43 PM
Land of Necessity
calling this shopping ‘‘malinchando,’’ a term that comes from the name of Malinche, the Indian princess who was Cortéz’s consort and who served as his translator during the conquest of Mexico. To malinchear is to act as a traitor (and, it almost goes without saying, to act as a female traitor). So in crossing the river to purchase fabric, Socorro avoided the (slightly) more pricey Mexican vendors, and in so doing, sold them out.
vi
p.336 - 2/28/13 2:44 PM
Under a loosely tied...
Under a loosely tied plastic tarp that shielded her from the sun but also captured its heat like a convection oven, she sat limply behind a table filled with dusty plastic hair accessories: the classic fayuca (contraband) of the city’s growing underground import econnomy. That the market called las segundas o√ered little that was secondhand posed no paradox for juarenses
p.337 - 2/28/13 2:45 PM
In this sense, the M...
In this sense, the Mexican predilection for creative reuse—‘‘Mexican’’ recycling, as Claudio Lomnitz calls it—is coming under the same influences that fostered the American tendency to simply throw something away once it is out of fashion, modestly marred, or reveals a tiny defect
L
p.337 - 2/28/13 2:45 PM
Land of Necessity
Like yonkes—which no longer strictly refer to junkyards but now to businesses that both sell and install used automobile parts—las segundas now refers to markets that might sell used goods, or might sell cheap Asian fayuca, or both. To juarenses, it does not really matter, because las segundas has always clearly indicated that what these markets provide is access to goods from elsewhere
vi
p.337 - 2/28/13 2:46 PM
‘‘los cerrajeros,’’ ...
‘‘los cerrajeros,’’ where hundreds of stalls are set up and torn down every day in one of Juárez’s oldest working-class neighborhoods, La Chaveña, is still largely dedicated to used merchandise
p.338 - 2/28/13 2:46 PM
tools, appliances, a...
tools, appliances, and kitchenwares, many acquired from flea markets, garage sales, pawn shops, and Goodwill shops throughout the U.S. Southwest
p.338 - 2/28/13 2:46 PM
Now, however, they t...
Now, however, they tinker with used imported and domestic merchandise, repairing fans, air conditioners, power tools, TVs, phones, and so forth, in order to resell them to cash-poor juarenses who scrupulously inspect and test the wares
p.338 - 2/28/13 2:47 PM
What made her shoppi...
What made her shopping trips a form of malinchando was that when she crossed the border to the United States, she betrayed her side. The El Paso stores she went to were not exactly American: Socorro, as do most other Mexicans, called these shops ‘‘los chinos.’’ The stores on El Paso Street, mostly owned by Koreans and Chinese, have come to rely almost exclusively on a Mexican workingclass clientele who cannot drive to El Paso’s distant malls and big-box discount stores. They stock not goods made in the U.S., but imports
p.339 - 2/28/13 2:49 PM
Television productio...
Television production, which Juárez used to dominate for the North American market, is now practically nonexistent, even though overall factory employment had recovered somewhat in 2005 and 2006.∂∞ The reason? China’s cheaper labor— nearly a quarter of the cost of Juárez labor
p.339 - 2/28/13 2:49 PM
Perhaps the fabric t...
Perhaps the fabric that Socorro purchased in 1994–95 in los chinos did not come from China, but within little more than a decade it would have
p.339 - 2/28/13 2:50 PM
Indeed, as nafta has...
Indeed, as nafta has unfolded, the internal borders within Mexico that kept export-oriented production and foreign-goods importation isolated to the region adjacent to the border with the United States
have disappeared. Now Blockbuster, Wal-Mart, and Kentucky Fried Chicken are as likely to operate in Ciudad Juárez as they are in Oaxaca, Cuernavaca, or Dallas. Venues such as a bar in Guadalajara, calling itself Bar Yonke Recycle, suggest that the border’s once-unique slang has left footprints
p.339 - 2/28/13 2:51 PM
, I discovered in ea...
, I discovered in early 2007 that the cultural formation that used to be distinct to the border—the peculiar American English–inflected language of discard and recovery—has migrated southward, settling not just in every border city and township but even deep in the interior of the country. Businesses calling themselves yonkesnow range across the states of Sonora, Baja California (del Norte), and Tamaulipas. Some describe themselves as selling autopartes— one in Quereterro even calls itself Autopartes Yonke Outlet.∂∂
p.340 - 2/28/13 2:51 PM
American import slan...
American import slang might now be unraveling in the face of a dramatically transformed global economy. Throughout Juárez’s markets, the impact of China is everywhere
p.340 - 2/28/13 2:51 PM
Brokers from Mexico’...
Brokers from Mexico’s Pacific coast and southern California have contacts with buyers in China—foundries, paper plants, and so forth, so Juárez materials buyers contend with them, instead of locals. Perhaps, in the not-too-distant future, a new language will emerge to mark this extraordinary turn of fortune
p.346 - 2/28/13 2:53 PM
It is thus clear tha...
It is thus clear that practices and mandates associated with a consumer economy bind the two nations together, and not just along the border, as Evan Ward’s essay about the emergence of a ‘‘new’’ borderlands along Mexico’s Pacific and Gulf coasts amply illustrates
p.346 - 2/28/13 2:54 PM
Each item and activi...
Each item and activity of consumption is simultaneously loaded with symbolic meanings and a material process of daily existence. Some, but only some, consumption involves identity construction
L
p.348 - 2/28/13 2:57 PM
Land of Necessity
This era created a rather marked ‘‘Mexicanness’’ both in the practice and meaning of consumption, but again, it was incomplete. The border was precisely its place of leakage and eventual breakdown, with the rampant growth of vice tourism in border cities such as St. John details for Tijuana, with the extensive smuggling of consumer goods from the United States (termed fayuca), with the back-and-forth migration of people, and, after 1965, with a new system of export-oriented manufacturing resulting in the construction of what would become thousands of maquiladoras
vi
p.348 - 2/28/13 2:58 PM
Land of Necessity
By the 1980s, amid the ruins of the national project, a new consumer structure grew: its central features include a high volume of imported goods (Asian as well as North American), advanced capitalist
consumer firms, notably U.S. or U.S.-style chain and big-box retailers, and Mexican mass media conglomerates whose reach extends through Latin America and the United States
vi
p.349 - 2/28/13 2:59 PM
This illicit economy...
This illicit economy also fuels the growth of money-exchange houses, expensive restaurants, bars, hotels, and high-end retail stores, but rampant drug violence disrupts everyday consumer activity and scares o√ investors and tourists. Mysteriously large deposits of cash bolster the border banking and finance sectors; the border region has more banks per capita than any other region in the United States or Mexico.
p.349 - 2/28/13 3:00 PM
. It is important to...
. It is important to draw a distinction between the ‘‘normal’’ practices of consumption (such as Mexican fronterizos buying U.S. milk in local supermarkets) and explicitly identity-oriented consumption (such as purchasing compact discs of the narcocorrido musical genre). Our point is not to devalue poor people’s deployment of ethnic or national taste when making buying decisions—in fact, this volume amply demonstrates the contrary—but to point out that everyday consumption also involves other types of discretion
L
p.349 - 2/28/13 3:00 PM
Land of Necessity
limited access and purchasing power so severely curtails choice. Understanding how border residents negotiate consumptionprovisioning systems—that is, taking class into consideration—is as important as inquiry into habits, tastes, and wants that together shape identity
vi
p.350 - 2/28/13 3:01 PM
Land of Necessity
The 2,000-mile boundary between the United States and Mexico is the only place in the world where a developed country shares a border with a developing country
vi
p.350 - 2/28/13 3:02 PM
Despite Mexico’s rel...
Despite Mexico’s relative poverty, extraordinary pockets of prosperity and lavish consumer lifestyles exist in Mexico, its northern states, and its border cities, including Monterrey, Tijuana, and Ciudad Juárez
p.350 - 2/28/13 3:02 PM
It is thus too simpl...
It is thus too simple to study border consumption as if Mexico and the United States are two monolithic societies: capitalist and traditionalist, rich and poor
L
p.351 - 2/28/13 3:02 PM
Land of Necessity
Cahn’s fieldwork on the appeal to border people of direct selling for companies like Amway, Mary Kay, and Omnilife shows the transformative power of consumption activity for poor migrants surviving on the edges of the mainstream economy. Akin to drug tra≈cking, direct selling often entails constant consumption of the product one sells—reversing the production-consumption cycle. It, too, promises economic independence and self-realization through informal means that bypass mainstream economic institutions and procedures
vi
p.351 - 2/28/13 3:04 PM
Sarah Hill’s, Laura ...
Sarah Hill’s, Laura Isabel Serna’s, and Lawrence Culver’s essays serve as a corrective to the tendency of many border scholars to distill this complex process to ‘‘hybridization.’
p.351 - 2/28/13 3:04 PM
Here we see the limi...
Here we see the limitations of hybridity as a framework, for as Hill demonstrates, nationalist meanings assert themselves in the Mexican marketplace, even when the goods being traded are used imports
p.351 - 2/28/13 3:05 PM
Serna’s historical s...
Serna’s historical study
[Duke University Press does not hold electronic rights to this image. To view it, please refer to the print version of this title.]
shows that border crossing resulted not in simplistic bricolage of two national cultures but rather in an endogenous U.S.-side Spanish-language film industry with overt Mexican themes, imagery, and heroes
p.352 - 2/28/13 3:05 PM
initially Anglos sou...
initially Anglos sought the exotic leisure of Southwestern homes precisely because they were emblematic of ‘‘the Other,’’ but by the 1950s all that remained of hybridity in their progeny, the ranch house, was the demand for cheap Mexican labor to build it, maintain it, and clean it
p.352 - 2/28/13 3:06 PM
Upper-class Mexicans...
Upper-class Mexicans, ‘‘Hispanic yuppies,’’ or ‘‘Anglo yuppies’’ have greater freedom than do working-class Mexicanos on either side of the border. It is vital to examine how power shapes consumer practices on the border and elsewhere.
p.352 - 2/28/13 3:06 PM
Many border resident...
Many border residents resist hybridity more fervently than do their compatriots living in the interior: they espouse nationalist, ethnic, or racist reasons for wishing to ‘‘buy American’’ or to maintain their mexicanidad
p.355 - 2/28/13 3:09 PM
What was discussed a...
What was discussed at the meeting between Taft and Díaz is less important than what was indeed performed by both presidents: namely, the border. The meeting constituted the true inauguration, the final mark of existence, of a hitherto illusory boundary between two modern nation-states that by then had existed for nearly a century.
p.356 - 2/28/13 3:11 PM
Teddy Roosevelt’s re...
Teddy Roosevelt’s reform and expansion of the U.S. state, including the economic, cultural, and political integration of the Southwest into the nation, paralleled Díaz’s consolidation of the Mexican state, which included connecting the outlying territory to central Mexico through large railroad networks and industrial development. The border became real, because it meant what it was supposed to mean to begin with—that the mythical nations on either side were now consolidated, separate states
p.356 - 2/28/13 3:12 PM
Or rather, this was ...
Or rather, this was always meant
to be the division between the West and the ‘‘non-West,’’ the modern and the backward.
p.356 - 2/28/13 3:13 PM
Most of this volume’...
Most of this volume’s contributions seek to expose the random and unstoppable historical construction of a border region, but the border has become such a mighty political, economic, and cultural category that at times, alas, in dismantling it, we ourselves create but another episode in its intellectual construction
p.357 - 2/28/13 3:13 PM
A border line, a bor...
A border line, a border zone, borderlands, real, visible, clearly demarcated . . . those were the final marks of larger historical processes—the formation of nations and states in the context of the conquest of native peoples and the collapse of competing European empires.
L
p.357 - 2/28/13 3:15 PM
Land of Necessity
However, as this volume shows, the meaning of the border is constantly shifting. Frontera, línea, escape, paso, garita, zona libre, zona de tolerancia, or frontier, borderlands, border, limit, sin, free zone, duty free: somehow all terms involve patterns of consumption and circulation of merchandise. Consumption, therefore, is a singular tool with which to study the changing
vi
p.358 - 2/28/13 3:16 PM
The most important m...
The most important merchandise in the borderlands, however, has been always human labor. Mexicans were never included in the accumulating immigration restrictions the United States erected between the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) and the First Quota Act (1920)
L
p.359 - 2/28/13 3:17 PM
Land of Necessity
In Spanish, la línea never took the mythical connotation of the English word frontier, except when talking about Native Americans, whom both nation-states—Mexico and the United States—were willing and in agreement about controlling and hopefully exterminating, as Perez’s essay delineates. La frontera became a frontier, with all its cultural connotations in English, in the twentieth century, but in a less bucolic and romantic way than we might imagine. In Mexico, it became el Norte: the adventure, hope, and opportunity of an economic escape. Hence, contemporary Mexico’s mythic ‘‘West’’ is the North, and its allure is shown by remesas (remittances), the narrative themes of popular Mexican and Central American cultures, and in the local popular heroes in the interior, say, Michoacán or Zacatecas
vi
p.359 - 2/28/13 3:17 PM
What ought to be und...
What ought to be understood is that the border came to represent the possibility of escape through consumption for both sides. For Americans it meant sexual adventure, alcohol, and drugs, or else Mexican arts and crafts and images of a pristine lost world, of solidarity and community, with which many U.S. travelers and intellectuals sought to remedy their dismay with U.S. urban growth and industrialism. For Mexicans, the border also o√ered an escape, from violence during the revolution, from poverty at all times, but also from a rigid class structure that possession of commodities could, and still can, subvert
p.359 - 2/28/13 3:18 PM
But somehow, since t...
But somehow, since the end of the nineteenth century, the region that was ‘‘de paso’’ (a temporary way station en route to somewhere) gained fame as a site of moral and legal flexibility. U.S. consumers soon appropriated the zona de tolerancia and zona libre on the way to temporary bliss of a bargain found, a rush acquired.
p.360 - 2/28/13 3:19 PM
Except for some form...
Except for some forms of anarchism, in the 1920s and 1930s the Left often, in Mexico or Moscow, blended with a sort of Victorian belief in the value of the family, women’s role as mothers, homophobia, and stringent notions of hygiene and sanitation that extended to sexual practices
p.360 - 2/28/13 3:19 PM
’ Prostitution and g...
’ Prostitution and gambling moved not only to Las Vegas, Nevada but also illegally to Chicago and to Mexico City, where the 1930s and 1940s were epic decades recounted in all sorts of sinful anecdotes
p.360 - 2/28/13 3:20 PM
In terms of consumpt...
In terms of consumption, Mexican elites are axiomatically cast as Europeanized, Americanized, modernized, racist, individualistic, consumerist, and globalized, in contrast with the Mexican poor, who are aprioristically considered traditional, rural, and anti-urban, somehow really Mexican, not consumerist, not racist, not individualistic, and not yet globalized. Although Josef Barton’s essay for this collection shows that elites and poor contributed to the emergence of global economies
p.360 - 2/28/13 3:20 PM
’ It assumes an orig...
’ It assumes an original pristine state of the Mexican poor, as if until the late nineteenth century they had remained community-based, rural, traditional
p.360 - 2/28/13 3:20 PM
In the study of cons...
In the study of consumption in the borderlands, to maintain this sharp cultural distinction between rich and poor reinforces Mexico’s ontological distinction vis-à-vis the United States. For if Mexico’s poor were considered consumerist and westernized as its elites, then radical cultural di√erences between U.S. and Mexican cultures would be very di≈cult to maintain
p.360 - 2/28/13 3:21 PM
The borderlands is, ...
The borderlands is, above all, a testing zone of di√erent cultural patterns of consumption that do not adhere to notions of consumers as traditional and poor or modern and elite. Narco nouvelles riches consume what would be seen by old Monterrey, Saltillo, or Mexico City elites as gaudy, but they are vast consumers of Mexican, U.S, Asian, and European products
p.361 - 2/28/13 3:23 PM
Commodity fetischism...
Commodity fetischismus was as strong for him as for the migrant worker who sold him the TV—it was fayuca, but in the form of the waste left by migrant workers in La Piedad.
L
p.361 - 2/28/13 3:24 PM
Land of Necessity
That is, it was
believed on the one hand that Mexicans naturally engaged in primitive forms of consumption that gave the collective unit (family, community) primacy over the individual, while Americans, on the other hand, naturally followed individualistic consumption habits, which were cast as modern. Thus the U.S.Mexican border came to be the natural ground to look at the encounter of tradition and modernity, a perspective that this volume, in part, perpetuates
vi vi
p.362 - 2/28/13 3:26 PM
The belief that U.S....
The belief that U.S. and Mexican cultures are separate entities is linked, in turn, to ideas about Americanization, Mexicanization, hybridization, and nationalization that also course through the volume.
The conviction that the two nations are di√erent in essential ways needs some revision
p.362 - 2/28/13 3:26 PM
Nineteenth-century e...
Nineteenth-century economists tended to consider ‘‘native’’ clothing, sombreros, or pulque as outside the realm of consumption. In fact, most of what we call ‘‘traditional’’ clothing symbolized patterns of consumption established, transformed, and demanded by Spanish and Indian authorities in di√erent cities and towns.
p.362 - 2/28/13 3:27 PM
A blend of Mexican a...
A blend of Mexican and foreign propaganda techniques sold beer throughout the country. Perhaps the state, with its connections to northern breweries and concerns for social hygiene, promoted the shift in tastes and habits away from homebrewed pulque. National and foreign hygienists believed that rather than experimenting with useless U.S.-style prohibition or continuing with the dan
p.363 - 2/28/13 3:27 PM
gerous pulque, whose...
gerous pulque, whose sanitary conditions were hard to control, beer had to triumph as soon as possible.∞∞ Beer, a border product, won the contest.
p.363 - 2/28/13 3:27 PM
In Mexico City, in t...
In Mexico City, in the 1920s, Jewish and Lebanese immigrants demonstrated, long before Avon or Omnlife —the interesting recent cases studied by Peter S. Cahn in this volume—that with innovative forms of credit, Mexico City’s poor could become active consumers
p.363 - 2/28/13 3:28 PM
In the city, these v...
In the city, these vendors went door to door selling religious images, fabrics, socks, cloth, and basic hardware on installment payments.
p.363 - 2/28/13 3:28 PM
According to various...
According to various recollections from these vendors, collected in the 1980s through oral histories, very rarely did they encounter problems. Mexicans, they said, were great consumers and good clients.∞
p.363 - 2/28/13 3:28 PM
No one in Mexico Cit...
No one in Mexico City, of course, thought that to buy a santito from ‘‘el alemán’’—as the peddlers were often called, and wanted to be called rather than being identified as Jews—was a threat to either
their religiosity or their Mexicanness.
p.364 - 2/28/13 3:29 PM
Mexican food is a wo...
Mexican food is a world commodity, as is Frida Kahlo, but they are also, and perhaps more importantly, U.S. commodities. Industrialized products started to reach the U.S. Southwest and northern Mexico in the late nineteenth century; to consume tinned food became standard even in these far reaches before the turn of the century, as Barton’s inventory of one of the grocery stores in south Texas suggests
p.364 - 2/28/13 3:30 PM
collective dreams of...
collective dreams of all sorts and styles of consumptions proliferated: the utopia of gold, of the television, of the stereo, of the Troca, of sex (for Mexicans), and the allure of exotic adventures, alcohol, cheap labor, nannies, and sex (for U.S. citizens
L
p.364 - 2/28/13 3:31 PM
Land of Necessity
In 1890s Mexico City, Henry Adams felt betrayed by the lack of Mexican exoticism—Mexico was too American—and in 1919 a U.S. radical, Charles Phillips, saw in the omnipresence in Mexico City of the Singer sewing machine, the Oliver typewriter, and Libby’s potted beef, ‘‘the modern age of Mexico’’:
Mexican cities mean nothing without Oliver, Singer, and Libby
vi vi
p.365 - 2/28/13 3:32 PM
Curiously, though th...
Curiously, though this volume’s contributions do not deal with it, food can be seen as an extremely revealing historical phenomenon, especially on the U.S.-Mexican border. Moving from central Mexico to the border, or from New England to the deserted Southwest, the path went from relative caloric abundance to profound scarcity. But for Mexico at some point in the twentieth century this path changed, and the closer to the border one got, the cheaper the calories became, in a way that Mexico had not known
p.366 - 2/28/13 3:33 PM
In contrast, Rachel ...
In contrast, Rachel St. John argues that the political and cultural allure of a tourist border was that it ‘‘created a commodified Mexican culture that was simply meant to amuse and entertain.’’ This same version of Mexican culture, Evan Ward argues, is what Cancún o√ers up at a much better advantage than border cities could—its Mayan-themed architecture, ubiquitous air conditioning, and sandy beaches combine to draw hundreds of thousands of tourists. In each place—Lummis’s ‘‘Great Southwest’’ of the turn of the twentieth century, the Tijuana of the twenties, and the Cancún of the nineties—promoters drawing distinctions between the United States and Mexico called upon ‘‘theming,’’ a practice that had its origins in 1880s international exhibitions, with their prominent ‘‘Streets of Cairo’’ or ‘‘Mexican Town’’ or ‘‘History of Habitation’’ exhibits, where Mexico was often somehow included. 1950s Disneyland, just on the southern edge of Los Angeles, was but a continuation of this trend
p.366 - 2/28/13 3:34 PM
Scarcity, as Alexis ...
Scarcity, as Alexis McCrossen remarks, defined the region, although the patterns of consumption, commerce, and exchange prior to the mid–nineteenth century are only marginally
p.366 - 2/28/13 3:34 PM
understood, despite ...
understood, despite the e√orts of Robert Perez in the first part of his essay in this volume
p.366 - 2/28/13 3:35 PM
How the region went ...
How the region went from scarcity to various forms of abundance lending themselves to consumption and interactions that could be labeled ‘‘Mexican,’’ ‘‘American,’’ ‘‘national,’’ ‘‘transnational,’’ ‘‘Mexicanizing,’’ ‘‘Americanizing,’’ ‘‘modern,’’ ‘‘global,’’ ‘‘uprooting,’’ ‘‘communitarian,’’ or ‘‘hybrid’’ is the story the contributions to this volume tell in variegated ways
p.366 - 2/28/13 3:35 PM
story of the border ...
story of the border as a concept has moved from the invisible line between radically opposed imagined ontologies to the massive ecological, social, political, and economic presence of borderlands between two ‘‘worlds’’ which are conceived of as more than two nations. Mexico and the United States constitute two assumed civilizations that were, and are, nevertheless totally, in human and economic terms, integrated
L
p.367 - 2/28/13 3:36 PM
Land of Necessity
Legally, the border went from a loose line to fixed boundary, while in the imaginaires of both nations it went from a fixed boundary to a loose social and cultural line that, notwithstanding, is still assumed to be an unchanging boundary
vi
p.367 - 2/28/13 3:37 PM
Agassiz’s theories n...
Agassiz’s theories never defeated those of his great enemy, Charles Darwin. But his racial views of what could happen to the United States in light of Mexico’s racial promiscuity were then, and are still now, a common fear
L
p.367 - 2/28/13 3:37 PM
Land of Necessity
A recent iteration of this fear came from Samuel Huntington’s formulation of ‘‘The Hispanic Challenge
vivi read in intro
p.368 - 2/28/13 3:37 PM
In general, thanks t...
In general, thanks to their transnationalism, these volume’s contributions show the importance of race without necessarily reproducing racial marking as a necessary intellectual or political argument
p.369 - 2/28/13 3:38 PM
Were theater entrepr...
Were theater entrepreneurs ethnic because they were Mexicans who o√ered conditions for Mexican consumers that racialized U.S. commercial spaces denied them, or were they ethnic because they were selling something radically different than what U.S. film entrepreneurs were producing? Why ‘‘ethnic’’? Could a successful Jewish Mexican entrepreneur, Jacobo Granat, who in the 1930s became an owner of various theaters in the north of Mexico and in the capital, be considered equally ethnic
p.369 - 2/28/13 3:40 PM
Lynching people of M...
Lynching people of Mexican descent gave voice to what historian Richard Hofstadter called in the 1950s ‘‘ethnic nationalism,’’ an
expression of anguish about lost status and extinction of privilege.
p.370 - 2/28/13 3:42 PM
The new authenticity...
The new authenticity is la frontera, the kingdom of the ephemeral, the post-, the fragmentary, the hybrid.
p.371 - 2/28/13 3:43 PM
That is, I am partic...
That is, I am particularly ill equipped to understand how the U.S.Mexico border is, to quote a classic (Anzaldúa), ‘‘una herida supurante’’ (a weeping wound
p.371 - 2/28/13 3:43 PM
The border is geogra...
The border is geography, a line, but it is something else. It is transnationalism, experimentation, the boom of the lumpen, clashes, drugs, and irreverence—cultural encounters of all kinds.
p.371 - 2/28/13 3:44 PM
What is literature i...
What is literature in American English without the input of people who are Jewish, Chinese, Puerto Rican, Irish, Mexican, African, Hindus, or mojados
created with Mantano Reader Premium on 3/1/13 12:11 AM
Capitalism and neocapitalism have produced abstract space, which INCLUDES THE 'world of commodities', its 'logic' and its worldwide stra- tegies, as the power of money and that of the political state. This space is founded on the vast network of banks, business centres and mojor productive entities, as also on motorways, airports and information lattices. Within this space the town - once the forcing-house of accumulation, fountainhead of wealth and centre of historical space - has disintegrated.
\nIf, by abandoning all our critical faculties, we were to accept this 'distinctiveness' at face value, we would get a mental picture of a space given over completely to unproductive expense, to a vast wastefulness, to an intense and gigantic potlatch of surplus objects, symbols and energies, with the accent on sports, love and reinvigoration rather than on rest and relaxation. The quasi-cultist focus of localities based on leisure would thus form a striking contrast to the productive focus of North European cities. The waste and expense, meanwhile, would appear as the end-point of a temporal sequence starting in the workplace, in production-based space, and leading to the consumption of space, sun and sea, and of spontaneous or induced eroticism, in a great 'vacationland festival'.
\n. As for the question of who does the producing, and how they do it, the more restricted the notion becomes the less it connotes creativity, inventiveness or imagination; rather, it tends to refer solely to labour. 'It was an immense step forward for Adam Smith to throw out every limiting specification of wealth-creating actevity [and to consider only] labour in general. . . .
\nvi vi
\np.74 - 1/5/13 12:24 PM
\n. Since the time of Marx and Engels the concept of production has come to be used so very loosely that it has lost practically all definition. We speak ol the production of knowledge, or ideologies, or writings and meanings, of images, of discourses, of language, of signs and symbols; and, similarly, of 'dream-work' or of the work of 'operational' concepts, and so on
\nit is obvious, sad to say, that repetition has everywhere defeated uniqueness, that the artificial and contrived have driven all spontaneity and naturalness from the field, and, in short, that products have vanquished works. Repetitious spaces are the outcome of repetitive gestures (those of the workers) associated with instruments which are both duplicatable and designed to duplicate: machines, bull- dozers, concrete-mixers, cranes, pneumatic drills, and so on.
\nAny determinate and hence demarcated space necessarily embraces some things and excludes others; what it rejects may be relegated to nostalgia or it may be simply forbidden. Such a space asserts, negates and denies. It has some characteristics of a 'subject', and some of an 'object'. Consider the great power of a façade, for example. A façade admits certain acts to the realm of what is visible, whether they occur on the façade itself (on balconies, window ledges, etc.) or are to be seen from the façade (processions in the street, for example). Many other acts, by contrast, it condemns to obscenity: these occur behind the façade. All of which already seems to suggest a 'psychoanalysis of space'. In connection with the city and its extensions (outskirts, suburbs), one occasionally hears talk of a 'pathology of space', of 'ailing neighbourhoods', and so on. This kind of phraseology makes it easy for people who use it - architects, urbanists or planners - to suggest the idea that they are, in effect, 'doctors of space'.
\nThe analysis of any space brings us up against the dialectical relationship between demand and command, along with its attendant questions: 'Who?', 'For whom?', 'By whose agency?', 'Why and how?' If and when this dialectical (and hence conflictual) relationship ceases to obtain - if demand were to outlive command, or vice versa — the history of space must come to an end.
\nAlways distinct and clearly indicated, such traces embody the 'values' assigned to particular routes: danger, safety, waiting, promise. This graphic aspect, which was obviously not apparent to the original 'actors' but which becomes quite clear with the aid of modern-day cartography, has more in common with a spider's web than with a drawing or plan. Could it be called a text, or a message? Possibly, but the analogy would serve no particularly useful purpose, and it would make more sense to speak of texture rather than of texts in this connection. Similarly, it is helpful to think of architectures as 'archi-textures', to treat each monument or building, viewed in its surroundings and context, in the populated area and associated networks in which it is set down, as part of a particular production of space. Whether this approach can help clarify spatial practice is a question to which we shall be returning.
\nIn Japan, for instance, which is a hyper-industrialized and hyper-urbanized nation, traditional living-quarters, daily life, and rep-resentational spaces survive intact - and this not in any merely folkloric ssense, not as relics, not as stage management for tourists, not as consumption of the cultural past, but indeed as immediate practical 'reality'. This intrigues visitors, frustrates Japanese modernizers and technocrats, and delights humanists. There is an echo here, albeit a distant one, of the West's infatuation with village life and rustic homesteads
\nWhen it comes to the question of what the Bauhaus's audacity produced in the long run, one is obliged to answer: the worldwide, homogeneous and monotonous architecture of the state, whether capitalist or socialist.
\n1 Do the spaces formed by practico-social activity, whether land-scapes, monuments or buildings, have meaning? 2 Can the space occupied by a social group or several such groups be treated as a message? 3 Ought we to look upon architectural or urbanistic works as a type of mass medium, albeit an unusual one? 4 May a social space viably be conceived of as a language or discourse, dependent upon a determinate practice (reading/ writing) ?
\nOnce diversified, places opposed, sometimes complemented, and sometimes resembled one another. They can thus be categorized or subjected to a grid on the basis of 'topias' (isotopias, heterotopias, utopias, or in other words analogous places, contrasting places, and the places of what has no place, or no longer has a place — the absolute,
\nAppropriation should not be confused with a practice which is closely related to it but still distinct, namely 'diversion' (détournement). An existing space may outlive its original purpose and the raison d'être which determines its forms, functions, and structures; it may thus in a sense become vacant, and susceptible of being diverted, reappropriated and put to a use quite different from its initial one. A recent and well-known case of this was the reappropriation of the Halles Centrales, Paris's former wholesale produce market, in 1969-71. For a brief period, this urban centre, designed to facilitate the distribution of food, was translormed into a gathering-place and a scene of permanent festival -in short, into a centre of play rather than of work - for the youth of Paris.. The diversion and reappropriation of space are of great significance, for they teach us much about the production of new spaces.
\nDiversion is in itself merely appropriation, not creation — a reappropriation which can call but a temporary halt to domination
\nA defining characteristic of (private) property, as of the position in space of a town, nation or nation state, is a closed frontier. This limiting case aside, however, we may say that every spatial envelope implies a barrier between inside and out, but that this barrier is always relative and, in the case of membranes, always permeable.
\n. The pedigree of the philosophical endorsement of excess, of superfluity — and hence of transgression — in this connection goes back to Spinoza; it may be traced thence, via Schiller, Goethe, and Marx — who detested asceticism, even if he sometimes allowed himself to be seduced by the notion of a proletarian' version of it - to its culmination in Nietzsche.
\nThus we are concerned, once again, with gaps and tensions, contacts and separations. Yet, through and beyond these various effects of meaning, space is actually experienced, in its depths, as duplications, echoes and reverberations, redundancies and doublings-up which engender — and are engendered by — the strangest of contrasts: face and arse, eye and flesh, viscera and excrement, lips and teeth, orifices and phallus, clenched fists and opened hands - as also clothed versus naked, open versus closed, obscenity versus familiarity, and so on.17
\n.... the mirror helps to counteract the tendency of language to break up the body \"ii\" I'»'!'\"., 1'iM il freezes the Ego into a rigid form rather than leading it towards .........'ink'tice in and through a space which is at once practical and symbolic
\nhould the 'Ego' fail to reassert hegemony over itself by defying its own image, it must become Narcissus - or Alice. It will then be in danger of never rediscovering itself, space qua figment will have swallowed it up, and the glacial surface of the mirror will hold it forever captive in its emptiness, in an absence devoid of all conceivable presence or bodily warmth.
\nthe mirror is an object in space which informs us about space, which speaks of space. In some ways a kind of 'picture', the mirror too has a frame which specifies it, a frame that can be either empty or filled. Into that space which is produced first In natural and later by social life the mirror introduces a truly dual spatial ity: a space which is imaginary with respect to origin and separation, but also concrete and practical with respect to coexistence and differen-dation.
\nTo the question of whether such a space is a representation of space or a representational space, the answer must be neither - and both, Theatrical space certainly implies a representation of space - scenic space - corresponding to a particular conception of space (that of the classical drama, say - or the Elizabethan, or the Italian). The representational space, mediated yet directly experienced, which infuses the work and the moment, is established as such through the dramatic action itself.
\nA homogeneous and utterly simultaneous space would be strictly imperceptible. It would lack the conflictual component (always resolved, but always at least suggested) of the contrast between symmetry and asymmetry. It may as well be noted at this juncture that the architectural and urbanistic space of modernity tends precisely towards this homogeneous state of affairs, towards a place of confusion and fusion between geometrical and visual which inspires a kind of physical discomfort. Everything is alike. Localization - and lateralization - are no more. Signifier and signified, marks and markers, are added after the fact -as decorations, so to speak. This reinforces, if possible, the feeling of desertedness, and adds to the malaise. This modern space has an analogical affinity with the space of the philosophical, and more specifically the Cartesian tradition. Unfortunately it is also the space of blank sheets of paper, drawing-boards, plans, sections, elevations, scale models, geometrical projections, and the like
\nBut capitalism is surely approaching a threshold beyond which reproduction will no longer be able to prevent the production, not of things, but of new social relations.
\nFor millennia, monumentality took in all the aspects of spatiality that we have identified above: the perceived, the conceived, and the lived; representations of space and representational spaces; the spaces proper to each faculty, from the sense of smell to speech; the gestural and the symbolic. Monumental space offered each member of a society an image of that membership, an image of his or her social visage.
\nOnly through the monument, through the intervention of the architect as demiurge, can the space of death be negated, transfigured into a living space which is an extension of the body; this is a transformation, however, which serves what religion, (political) power, and knowledge have in common.
\nA spatial work (monument or architectural project) attains a complexity fundamentally different from the complexity of a text, whether prose or poetry. As I pointed out earlier, what we are concerned with here is not texts but texture. We already know that a texture is made up of a usually rather large space covered by networks or webs; monuments constitute the strong points, nexuses or anchors of such webs.
\nAnd, inasmuch as sites, forms and functions are no longer focused and appropriated by monuments, the city's contexture or fabric - its streets, its underground levels, its frontiers — unravel, and generate not concord but violence. Indeed space as a whole becomes prone to sudden eruptions of violence
\nbuildings and dwelling-places have been dressed up in monumental signs: first their façades, and later their interiors. The homes of the moneyed classes have undergone a superficial socialization' with the introduction of reception areas, bars, nooks and furniture (divans, for instance) which bespeak some kind of erotic life. Pale echoes, in short, of the aristocratic palace or town house. The town, meanwhile, now effectively blown apart, has been 'privatized' — no less superficially — thanks to urban 'decor' and 'design', and the development of fake environments. Instead, then, of a dialectical process with three stages which resolves a contradiction and 'creatively' tran-scends a conflictual situation, we have a stagnant opposition whose poles at first confront one another 'face to face', then relapse into muddle and confusion
\nIt reduces significant oppositions and values, among them pleasure and suffering, use, and labour. Such condensation of society's attributes is easily discernible in the style of administrative buildings from the nineteenth century on, in schools, railway stations, town halls, police stations or ministries.
\nwitness the predominance of 'ameni-ties', which are a mechanism for the localization and 'punctualization' of activities, including leisure pursuits, sports and games. These are thus concentrated in specially equipped 'spaces' which are as clearly demarcated as factories in the world of work. They supply 'syntagmatic' links between activities within social spaces as such - that is, within a space which is determined economically by capital, dominated socially by the bourgeoisie, and ruled politically by the state.
\ncapitalism cannot be analysed or explained by appealing to such binary oppositions as those between proletariat and bourgeoisie, wages and profit, or productive labour and parasitism; rather, it is comprised of three elements, terms or moments — namely land, labour and capital, or in other words rent, wages and profit — which are brought together in the global unity of surplus value.
\nSymbols and symbolisms are much-discussed topics, but they are rarely discussed intelligently. It is too often forgotten that some if not all symbols had a material and concrete existence before coming to symbolize anything. The labyrinth, for instance, was originally a military and political structure designed to trap enemies inextricably in a maze. It served too as palace, fortification, refuge and shelter before coming to stand for the womb
\n. Much more than that, its mystery and its sacred (or cursed) character are attributed to the forces of nature, even though it is the exercise of political power therein which has in fact wrenched the area from its natural context, and even though its new meaning is entirely predicated on that action
\nBy and large, however, horizontal space symbolizes submission, vertical space power, and subterranean space death.
\nThe order was not decorative, nor were the columns and the capitals. 'The Greek orders are none other than the structure itself, to which that form was given which was most appropriate to its function. In the orders adopted from the Greeks the Romans saw only a decoration which might be removed, omitted, displaced, or replaced by something else.'5
\nThe paradoxical fact is that this intuitus, in a sophisticated and impoverished form, was destined to become a habitus. A representation of space embodied in stone, in the city, in paternalistic law, in the Empire, would be transformed into a representational space, submerged into a rediscovered, degenerate mundus - a subterranean and hellish abyss. And this representational space would in turn become Christianity's 'foundation' - and its basic resource. This occurred during the long decline of the Empire and the city. As Augustine, that barbarian of genius, would put it, 'Mundus est immundus.'
\nThe 'mental' is 'realized' in a chain of 'social' activities because, in the temple, in the city, in monuments and palaces, the imaginary is transformed into the real.
\nlast and most important, the right of (private) property
\n— put an end to the mere contemplation of nature, of the Cosmos or of the world, and pointed the way towards the mastery which transforms instead of simply interpreting
\nThe nations, the nation states, were now aboui to appear. Monastic culture was on the ebb. What was about to disappear was absolute space; it was already crumbling as its supports gave way. What then was about to emerge? The space of a secular life, freed from politico-religious space, from the space of signs of death and oi non-body.
\nWhat is really being engendered and produced (or reproduced) here, however, is the divine act of creation itself.
\nWe should therefore remind ourselves that antiquity looked upon trade and tradespeople as external to the city, as outside its political system, and so relegated them to the outskirts. The basis of wealth was still real property, ownership of the land. The medieval revolution brought commerce inside the town and lodged it at the centre of a transformed urban space.
\nThe cathedral church was certainly not far away, but its tower no longer bore the symbols of knowledge and power; instead the freestanding campanile now dominated space — and would soon, as clock-tower, come to dominate time too.
\nSocial space is multifaceted: abstract and practical, immediate and mediated.
\nFrom the experience of river and sea voyages were applied to urban reality. The town was given written form - described graphically. Bird's-eye views and plans proliferated. And a language arose for speaking at once of the town and of the country (or of the town in its agrarian setting), at once of the house and of the city. This language was a code of space.28
\nThe façade tells us much - and much that is surprising. It is curious, in view of its artificial and studied character, that the façade is arguably the basis for the 'organic' analogy. The notion of façade implies right and left (symmetry), and high and low. It also implies a front and a back - what is shown and what is not shown - and thus constitutes a seeming extension into social space of an asymmetry which arose rather late in the evolution of living organisms as a response to the needs of attack and defence
\nWhat did war produce? The answer is: Western Europe -the space of history, of accumulation, of investment, and the basis of the imperialism by means of which the economic sphere would eventually come into its own. Violence is in fact the very lifeblood of this space, of this strange body.
\nThese were true tableaux, bird's-eye views; the town was putting itself in perspective, like a battlefield, and indeed a siege in progress was often depicted, for war often raged around the towns, and they were forever being taken, violated and despoiled, The-towns were the location of wealth, at once threatening (and threatened) 'objects' and 'subjects' of accumulation - and hence too 'subjects' of history
\nNeither Marx and Engels nor Hegel clearly perceived the violence at the core of the accumulation process (though Marx did consider pirates and corsairs, the sixteenth-century traffic in gold, etc.), and thus its role in the production of a politico-economic space.
\nThe optical (or visual) formant The 'logic of visualization' identified by Erwin Panofsky as a strategy embodied in the great Gothic cathedrals now informs the entirety of social practice. Dependence on the written word (Marshall McLuhan) and the process of spectacularization (Guy Debord) are both functions of this logic, corresponding respectively to each of its two moments or aspects: the first is metaphoric (the act of writing and what is written, hitherto subsidiary, become essential - models and focal points of practice), and the second is meonymic (the eye, the gaze, the thing seen, no longer mere details or parts, are now transformed into the totality).
\n). Spatial practice thus simultaneously defines: places - the relationship of local to global; the representation of that relationship; actions and signs; the trivialized spaces of everyday life; and, in opposition to these last, spaces made special by symbolic means as desirable or undesirable, benevolent or malevolent, sanctioned or forbidden to particular groups
\nrifts occur between the conceived, the perceived and the directly lived - between representations of space and representational spaces. The truf theoretical problem, however, is to relate these spheres to one another, and to uncover the mediations between them
\nYet through their experimental activity these painters were acute witnesses to the beginnings of the 'crisis of the subject' in the modern world. In their pictorial practice they clearly apprehended a new fact, one bound up with the disappearance of all points of reference: the fact, namely, that only signifying elements could be communicated, because only they were independent of the 'subject'
\nPicasso's space heralded the space of modernity
\nwhether Haussmann's or the later, codified versions of the Bauhaus or Le Corbusier; what is involved in all cases is the effective application of the analytic spirit in and through dispersion, division and segregation.
\nAbstract space has many other characteristics also. It is here that desire and needs are uncoupled, then crudely cobbled back together. And this is the space where the middle classes have taken up residence and expanded - neutral, or seemingly so, on account of their social and political position midway between the bourgeoisie and the working class. Not that this space 'expresses' them in any sense; it is simply the space assigned them by the grand plan: these classes find what they seek namely, a mirror of their 'reality', tranquillizing ideas, and the image of a social world in which they have their own specially labelled, guaranteed place. The truth is, however, that this space manipulates them, along with their unclear aspirations and their all-too-clear needs. As a space where strategies are applied, abstract space is also the locus of all the agitations and disputations of mimesis: of fashion, sport, art, advertising, and sexuality transformed into ideology
\nConfined by the abstraction of a space broken down into specialized locations, the body itself is pulverized. The body as represented by the images of advertising (where the legs stand for stockings, the breasts for bras, the face for make-up, etc.) serves to fragment desire and doom it to anxious frustration, to the non-satisfaction of local needs
\nthe identification of sex and sexuality, of pleasure and physical gratification, with 'leisure' occurs in places specially designated for the purpose — in holiday resorts or villages, on ski slopes or sundrenched beaches. Such leisure spaces become eroticized, as in the case of city neighbourhoods given over to nightlife, to the illusion of festivity. Like play, Eros is at once consumer and consumed
\n. Is this because of what Schelsky calls 'the iron law of commercial terrorism'? Undoubtedly — but it is also, and most of all, because of the process of localization, because of the fragmentation and specialization of space within a form that is nevertheless homogeneous overall.
\nAbstract space contains much, but at the same time it masks (or denies) what it contains rather than indicating it. It contains specific imaginary elements: fantasy images, symbols which appear to arise from 'something else'. It contains representations derived from the established order: statuses and norms, localized hierarchies and hierarchically arranged places, and roles and values bound to particular places. Such 'representations' find their authority and prescriptive power in and through the space that underpins them and makes them effective.
\nYet Oscar Niemeyer's Brasilia clearly fits the bill. Nor has this fact gone unnoticed.10 So faithfully is technocratic and state-bureaucratic society projected into the space of Brasilia that there is an almost self-consciously comic aspect to the process.
\nvi vi vi vi
\nreading of a space that has been manufactured with readability in mind amounts to a sort of pleonasm, that of a 'pure' and illusory transparency. It is hardly surprising that one soon seems to be contemplating the product of a coherent activity, and, even more important, the point of emergence of a discourse that is persuasive only because it is coherent. Surely this effect of transparency - so pleasing, no doubt, to lovers of the logical — is in fact the perfect booby trap.
\nFor the working class, as is well known, the primary product of capitalism in its 'ascendant' phase — the capitalism of the belle époque, with its competitiveness, its princely rate of profit, and its blind but rapid accumulation — was slums at the edge of the city. This trend quickly destroyed the space of traditional residential buildings, where bourgeois lived on the lower floors, and workers and servants in the garrets. The one-room slum dwelling that had once been found, typically, at the end of a dark passageway, in a back courtyard or perhaps even in a cellar, was thus banished to peripheral neighbourhoods or suburbs. If this was a belle époque, it belonged to the bourgeoisie. It was at this juncture that the idea of housing began to take on definition, along with its corollaries: minimal living-space, as quantified in terms of modular units and speed of access; likewise minimal facilities and a programmed environment
\nSuburban houses and 'new towns' came close to the lowesl possible threshold of sociability - the point beyond which survival would be impossible because all social life would have disappeared.
\nAs a matter of fact 'boundaries' is too weak a word here, and it obscures the essential point; it would be more accurate to speak of fracture lines revealing the true — invisible yet highly irregular - contours of 'real' social space lying beneath its homogeneous surface.
\n. Zoning, for example, which is responsible — precisely — for fragmentation, break-up and separation under the umbrella of a bureaucratically decreed unity, is conflated with the rational capacity to discriminate
\nAbstract space is thus repressive in essence and par excellence - but thanks to its versatility it is repressive in a peculiarly artful way: its intrinsic repressiveness may be manifested alternately through reduction, through (functional) localization, through the imposition of hierarchy and segregation - or through art.
\nFar more abstract signs and signifiers protect the spaces of elites - rich neighbourhoods or 'select' spots - from intruders. Prohibition is the reverse side and the carapace of property, of the negative appropriation of space under the reign of private property
\na stark contrast occurs at dusk as the lights come on in the areas given over to 'festivity', while the 'business' districts are left empty and dead. Then in a brightly illuminated night the day's prohibitions give way to profitable pseudo-transgressions
\ncapitalism, and more generally development, have demonstrated that their survival depends on their being able to extend their reach to space in its entirety: to the land (in the process absorbing the towns and agriculture, an outcome already foreseeable in the nineteenth century, but also, and less predictably, creating new sectors altogether — notably that of leisure)
\n. In the most modern urban planning, using the most highly perfected technological applications, everything is produced: air, light, water - even the land itself. Everything is factitious and 'sophisticated'; nature has disappeared altogether, save for a few signs and symbols — and even in them nature is merely 'reproduced'. Urban space is detached frorn natural space, but it re-creates its own space on the basis of productive capacity. Natural space, at least under certain socio-economic conditions, becomes a scarce commodity
\ncentre of the Greek city was forever being moved: from the semicircular area where chiefs and warriors conferred about their expeditions and divided up their booty to the city temple, and from the temple to the agora, a place of political assembly (and later, thanks to annexed arches and galleries, of commerce).
\n. In the past one bought or rented land. Today what are bought (and, less frequently, rented) are volumes of space: rooms, floors, flats, apartments, balconies, various facilities (swimming-pools, tennis courts, parking-spaces, etc.). Each exchangeable place enters the chain of commercial transactions
\nExchangeability and its constraints (which are presented as norms) apply not only to surfaces and volumes but also to the paths that lead to and from them.
\n**The commodity asks for nothing better than to appear. And appear it does -visible/readable, in shop windows and on display racks. Self-exhibition is its forte. Once it is apparent, there is no call to decode it; it has no need of decipherment after the fashion of the 'beings' of nature and oi the imagination. And yet, once it has appeared, its mystery only deepens. Who has produced it? Who will buy it? Who will profit from its sale? Who, or what purpose, will it serve? Where will the money go? The commodity does not answer these questions; it is simply there, exposed to the gaze of passers-by, in a setting more or less alluring, more or less exhibitionistic, be it in a nondescript small shop or in a glittering department store.**
\ncontains potentialities — of works and of reappropriation -existing to begin with in the artistic sphere but responding above all to the demands of a body 'transported' outside itself in space, a body which by putting up resistance inaugurates the project of a different space (either the space of a counter-culture, or a counter-space in the sense of an initially Utopian alternative to actually existing 'real' space).
\nA moment comes when people in general leave the space of consumption, which coincides with the historical locations of capital accumulation, with the space of production, and with the space that is produced; this is the space of the market, the space through which flows follow their paths, the space which the state controls - a space, therefore, that is strictly quantified. When people leave this space, they move towards the consumption of space (an unproductive form of consumption). This moment is the moment of departure — the moment of people's holidays, formerly a contingent but now a necessary moment. When this moment arrives, 'people' demand a qualitative space. The qualities they seek have names: sun, snow, sea. Whether these are natural or simulated matters little. Neither spectacle nor mere signs are acceptable. What is wanted is materiality and naturalness as such, rediscovered in their (apparent or real) immediacy.
\nneocapitalism and neo-imperialism share hegemony over a subordinated space split into two kinds of regions: regions exploited for the purpose of and by means of production (of consumer goods), and regions exploited for the purpose of and by means of the consumption of space.
\nThe above-mentioned quantity-quality contradiction is not grounded in a (binary) opposition but rather in a three-point interaction, in a movement from the space of consumption to the consumption of space via leisure and within the space of leisure; in other words, from the quotidian to the non-quotidian through festival (whether feigned or not, simulated or 'authentic'), or again from labour to non-labour through a putting into brackets and into question (in a half-imaginary, half-real way) of toil.
\nUnder neocapitalism or corporate capitalism institutional space answers to the principles of repetition and reproducibility - principles effectively hidden by semblances of creativity. This bureaucratic space, however, is at loggerheads with its own determinants and its own effects
\n. Later, however, perhaps towards the end of the period of accelerated growth, these same countries are liable to discover how such spaces may be pressed into the service of cultural consumption, of 'culture itself, and of the tourism and the leisure industries with their almost limitless prospects. When this happens, everything that they had so merrily demolished during the belle époque is reconstituted at great expense. Where destruction has not been complete, 'renovation' becomes the order of the day, or imitation, or replication, or neo-this or neo-that. In any case, what had been annihilated in the earlier frenzy of growth now becomes an object of adoration. And former objects of utility now pass for rare and precious works of art.
\nThe science of space should therefore be viewed as a science of use, whereas the specialized sciences known as social sciences (including, for example, political economy, sociology, semiology and computer science) partake of exchange, and aspire to be sciences of exchange — that is, of communication and of the communicable.
\nFor appropri ation and for use, therefore — and against exchange and domination
\nWhat is different is, to begin with, what is excluded: the edges of the city, shanty towns, the spaces of forbidden games, of guerrilla war, of war. Sooner or later, however, the existing centre and the forces of homogenization must seek to absorb all such differences, and they will succeed if these retain a defensive posture and no counterattack is mounted from, their side.
\nhouses, walls, public spaces - as to elicit a nervous admiration. Appropriation of a remarkably high order is to be found here.
\nIn the United States the federal government collects a certain percentage on petrol sales, so generating vast sums oi money for urban and inter-urban highway construction. The building of highways benefits both the oil companies and the automobile manu-facturers: every additional mile of highway translates into increased car sales, which in turn increase petrol consumption, hence also tax rev-enues, and so on. Goodman calls this 'asphalt's magic circle'.
\nvicious circle is set in train which for all its circularity is an invasive force serving dominant economic interests
\nThe whole of space is increasingly modelled after private enterprise, private property and the family — after a reproduction of production relations paralleling biological reproduction and geni-tality.
\nThe production of space is thus transformed into its opposite: the reproduction of things in space. And mimesis (simulation, imitation) becomes merely a reproducibility grounded in received knowledge, tech-nology and power, because reproducibility is what ensures the renewal (or reproduction) of existing social relations.
\nIn the end, the invention of a space of enjoyment necessarily implies going through a phase of elitism. The elites of today avoid or reject quantitative models of consumption and homogenizing trends. At the same time, though they cultivate the appearance of differences, these elites are in fact indistinguishable from one another.
\nleisure is as alienated and alienating as labour; as much an agent of co-optation as it is itself co-opted; and both an assimilative and an assimilated part of the 'system' (mode of production). Once a conquest of the working class, in the shape of paid days' off, holidays, weekends, and so on, leisure has been transformed into an industry, into a victory of neocapitalism and an extension of bourgeois hegemony to the whole of space.
\nThey serve the reproduction of production relations. Space thus controlled and managed constrains in specific ways, imposing its own rituals and gestures (such as tanning), discursive forms (what should be said or not said), and even models and modulations in space (hotels, chalets — the emphasis being on private life, on the genital order of the family). Hence this space too is made up of 'boxes for living in', of identical 'plans' piled one on top of another or jammed next to one another in rows
\nThe space of leisure tends — but it is no more than a tendency, a tension, a transgression of 'users' in search of a way forward — to surmount divisions: the division between social and mental, the division between sensory and intellectual, and also the division between the everyday and the out-of-the-ordinary (festival).
\nThe space of leisure bridges the gap between traditional spaces with their monumentality and their localizations based on work and its demands, and potential spaces of enjoyment and joy; in consequence this space is the very epitome of contradictory space. This is where the existing mode of production produces both its worst and its best — parasitic outgrowths on the one hand and exuberant new branches on the other — as prodigal of monstrosities as of promises (that it cannot keep).
\nabstract space is in fact inherently violent. The same goes for all spaces promising a similar security: residential suburbs, holiday homes, fake countrysides and imitations of nature.
\n** It is signs and images - the world of signs and images - that tend to fill the interstices in question. Signs of happiness, of satisfaction. Signs and images of nature, of Eros. Images and signs of history, of authenticity, of style. Signs of the world: of the other world, and of another - a different - world. Neo-this and neo-that, consumed as novelties, and signs of the old, the venerated, the admirable. Images and signs of the future. Signs and images of the urban, of 'urbanness'. This world of images and signs, this tombstone of the 'world' ('Mundus est immundus') is situated at the edges of what exists, between the shadows and the light, between the conceived (abstraction) and the perceived (the readable/visible). Between the real and the unreal. Always in the interstices, in the cracks. Between directly lived experience and thought. **
\nThe 'city' can be conceived of neither as a productive enterprise and unit, as a kind of vast factory, nor as a consumption unit subordinated to production.
\nAs a scientist and technician, obliged to produce within a specified framework, he has to depend on repetition. In his search for inspiration as an artist, and as someone sensitive to use and to the 'user', however, he has a stake in difference. He is located willy-nilly within this painful contradiction, forever being shuttled from one of its poles to the other. His is the difficult task of bridging the gap between product and work, and he is fated to live out the conflicts that arise as he desperately seeks to close the ever-widening gulf between knowledge and creativity.
\n. The truth of space thus leads back (and is reinforced by) a powerful Nietzschean sentiment: 'But may the will to truth mean this to you: that everything shall be transformed into the humanly-conceivable, the humanly-evident, the humanly-palpable! You should follow your own senses to the end
\nSocial relations, which are concrete abstractions, have no real existence save in and through space. Their underpinning is spatial
\nThe masculine virtues which gave rise to domination by this space can only lead, as we are only too well aware, to a generalized state of deprivation: from 'private' property to the Great Castration.
\n. Is a final metamorphosis called for that will reverse all earlier ones, destroying phallic space and replacing it with a 'uterine' space?
\ngroups, classes or fractions of classes cannot constitute themselves, or recognize one another, as 'subjects' unless they generate (or produce) a space
\nThe notion of appropriation implies far more and is far more exigent than the (highly speculative) thesis of a 'mirror-consciousness'.
\nOn the horizon, then, at the furthest edge of the possible, it is a matter of producing the space of the human species — the collective (generic) work of the species — on the model of what used to be called 'art'; indeed, it is still so called, but art no longer has any meaning at the level of an 'object' isolated by and for the individual.
\ninvestigation of daily life in various industrial sectors (such as the silk industry in the region of Privas).
\nMoments' were conceived of as points of rupture, of radical recognition of possibilities and intense euphoria. This idea was to be put to work to understand sublime moments of revolutionary fervour, such as the day the Paris Commune was declared. It was also to shape the consciousness of many students in the uprising of 1968.
\nrevolutionary potential of their own tactic of creating 'situations' as opposed to what they saw as Lefebvre's more passive stance of experiencing 'moments' when they happened to arise. The continued engagement with situationist ideas (as represented, for example, in Guy Debord's La Société du spectacle) seems to have had an important role. For example, Debord's critical observation that the 'moment', as Lefebvre initially conceived of it was purely temporal, as opposed to the spatio-temporality of the 'situation', is tacitly countered in Lefebvre's later works on urbanization and the production of space.
\nLefebvre here draws upon his intimate knowledge of philosophy, his reflections on Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, his experiential encounters with poetry, art, song and carnival, his connections with the surrealists and situationists, his intense involvement in Marxism both as a current of thought and as a political movement, his sociological enquiries into urban and rural conditions of life, his particular conception of totality and dialectical method.
\ntacit or implicit criticisms of structuralism
\nof critical theory and deconstruction, of semiotics, of Foucault's views on the body and power, and of Sartre's version of existentialism
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Review Sheet
p.3 - 2/21/13 11:15 AM
inger's emerging int...
inger's emerging internationalism was accomplished without American government assistance, at a time when few American businessmen recognized the need or desirability of persistent efforts to seek foreign markets
p.3 - 2/21/13 11:16 AM
Increased sales were...
Increased sales were linked with the amelioration of poverty brought about by the diffusion of tech- nology. Singer management concluded that poverty could be removed from society by self-help, and that the company was placing in the hands of hundreds of thousands a technological device by which the masses could improve their station in life as well as their material rewards. Singer executives in the nineteenth century prided themselves on this, their world's work
p.4 - 2/21/13 11:18 AM
lias Howe's favorabl...
lias Howe's favorable Massachusetts court decision in 1854 resulted in the requirement that all other sewing machine companies pay him a license fee.
p.4 - 2/21/13 11:19 AM
Albany agreement of ...
Albany agreement of October 24, 1856, America's first patent pool.
p.5 - 2/21/13 11:20 AM
All other firms had ...
All other firms had to pay a license fee of $15.00 \"for each machine for the right under all of said patents.\" This move by the infamous combination clearly indicates that patent control could be concomitant with market control.9
p.5 - 2/21/13 11:22 AM
The reasoning behind...
The reasoning behind this drive for European markets was based on the assumption that manufacturing interests abroad were more solidly established and would have surplus capital to invest in \"developing and introducing inventions.\" The Scientific American felt that this situation would enable European manufacturers to compete with each other in supplying the nascent American sewing machine market.'
p.6 - 2/21/13 11:25 AM
A buyer was found a...
A buyer was found and the French patent was sold for 30,000 francs. The contract terms gave to Charles Callebout \"all the rights of proprietorship and profit of Messrs. Singer and Clark for France and the colonies.\" Callebout was to commence manufacturing at once and pay New York 15 per cent on all sales up to 4,700 machines.1
p.7 - 2/21/13 11:27 AM
he Civil War strengt...
he Civil War strengthened the sewing machine industry's con- cern for foreign markets. In their attempt to recoup the \"immense sums\" lost in shipments and consignments to the South, the northern sewing machine manufacturers turned with renewed interest to overseas markets.
p.7 - 2/21/13 11:28 AM
These investments we...
These investments were made despite the increased American tariff on pig iron (a prime material used in the machine), Howe's private tariff ($1.00) on all machines exported, and \"the abnormal state of exchange.
p.8 - 2/21/13 11:31 AM
It is illumi- nating...
It is illumi- nating of the industry's attitude that it was the one dollar paid to Howe on all machine exports which was singled out as the primary danger to the industry and not the Greenbacks nor the Morrill tariff of 1862.21 During the subsequent decades, the monopolistic protection afforded by the patent system was systematically with- drawn as Congress failed to renew the basic patents, and in 1877 the patent pool ended.
p.8 - 2/21/13 11:32 AM
George Ross McKenzie...
George Ross McKenzie, age forty-three, most impressed his asso- ciates with the force of his personality and ideas. Though his per- sonality remained on-guard throughout his life, he was highly work-oriented with a penchant for organization. He succeeded Clark as president on the latter's death in 1882. It was during McKenzie's seven years as president that the company made strenu- ous efforts to perfect a foreign sales and marketing organization and built its Scottish and Austrian factories.
p.9 - 2/21/13 11:33 AM
. Independent of ban...
. Independent of bankers, Singer management financed its own marketing and manufacturing expansion. The Singer company made two major decisions in its foreign business between 1864 and 1867: the appointment of two general agents for Great Britain and Europe, and the construction of an assembly plant in Glasgow, Scotland. These decisions re-inforced the underlying situation: the company's exports were in 1864 over 40 per cent of total production, a development which led Clark to advise that autumn, \"At this period the extension of the foreign trade is extremely important.\" 23
p.9 - 2/21/13 11:34 AM
Many American firms ...
Many American firms preferred to use an export commission house
p.9 - 2/21/13 11:35 AM
\"Sample machines ly...
\"Sample machines lying in far-off commission houses, and elegant office correspondence neatly done by a clerk on a type-writer,\" warned a trade editor in 1884, \"will never build up an export trade.\"
p.10 - 2/21/13 11:36 AM
They both ap- proach...
They both ap- proached the problems of creating and maintaining a market for Singer sewing machines by concentrating upon the building of a permanent sales and marketing organization. Their effectiveness is documented by the way that the London and Hamburg offices became the headquarters of Singer's European, African, Asian, and colonial business, and retained this position into the 1890's when New York began to exert greater control over the foreign business
\"
p.10 - 2/21/13 11:36 AM
\"Peacefully Working to Conquer the World:\" The Singer Manufacturing Company in Foreign Markets, 1...
What was desired, McKenzie informed all agents in a circular letter of 1882, was \"a respectable, reliable, permanent, and steadily improving organization, sure to bring us a better class of sales [which would] ultimately obtain [for the company] the control of all the business worth having.\"
vi
p.10 - 2/21/13 11:37 AM
The lowest operation...
The lowest operational level was the local office, composed of a manager, a bookkeeper, a salesman or woman, and usually a few porter- mechanics. Operating from this office were the canvassers who received a down payment if the machine was bought on time, and the collectors who personally visited every account in their district and collected the remaining weekly payments.
p.11 - 2/21/13 11:38 AM
Wood- ruff's strateg...
Wood- ruff's strategy was based in part on building a sales organization which would promote efficiency among local agents by inducing them to sell for personal profit and showing them that there was money in this trade.
p.11 - 2/21/13 11:39 AM
The real difficulty ...
The real difficulty we have to contend with,\" he informed New York, \"is to get men to act at all.\" He wanted to weed out the lazy agents and leave only those who were eager to sell the Singer machine. To those he would offer large discounts as a reward for their industry.2
p.12 - 2/21/13 11:42 AM
Canvassers had initi...
Canvassers had initially to collect at least five shillings on each machine sold on the hire-purchase plan. They were also to provide information on the solvency and character of the buyer, whose payments were to be made on a schedule of weekly pay- ments. The canvasser would be paid a small salary plus a commis- sion of 15 per cent. Out of these time payments, the company had to meet the cost of delivery of the machine, the instruction of the customer in its use, and the commission to the canvasser.
p.12 - 2/21/13 11:43 AM
he London office fel...
he London office felt that such a system would make it possible to watch the canvassers to \"see that they do\" their duty.
\"
p.13 - 2/21/13 11:44 AM
\"Peacefully Working to Conquer the World:\" The Singer Manufacturing Company in Foreign Markets, 1...
Further changes involved instituting the fidelity and guarantee funds for all office managers and sales personnel. Adopted in 1879, the fidelity fund in Great Britain involved the payment of ?1 per year \"as a special assurance against dishonesty and embezzlement by that class of employees generally.\" 36 The money collected in 1880 amounted to ?800.11.4 from 1,077 employees. In the following year when 70 employees defaulted (a sum of ?997.3.10), the blame was placed on the laxity of the office managers who failed to check the daily returns. To encourage honesty, Woodruff began in early 1882 to distribute to the employees one-third of the amount de- posited. It was hoped that this change would minimize the negative psychology of the fund and strengthen \"a spirit of loyalty and self-interest among all employees.\"
vi
p.13 - 2/21/13 11:46 AM
\"Peacefully Working to Conquer the World:\" The Singer Manufacturing Company in Foreign Markets, 1...
The guarantee fund provided that every canvasser must as a condition of his employment provide a fund of ?50 \"for his personal honesty.\" This sum was created by small weekly payments withheld from his earned commissions, and when the full amount was collected, it was invested, and the employee received the interest.
vi
p.14 - 2/21/13 11:48 AM
Woodruff felt that s...
Woodruff felt that standards for acceptable canvassers ought to be established, and then \"fix the rate of pay that will secure such men- then hold agents responsible to find these men.\"
p.14 - 2/21/13 11:48 AM
The London office vi...
The London office viewed the sub-division of a territory into canvassing districts as \"the backbone and life of our branch office system.\" By the extension of this policy, Woodruff stated, \"the old world has been conquered, and our great industry raised to such a pinnacle of success.\" 42 The English organization served as a model for the continental, Latin American, and colonial offices under London's control
p.14 - 2/21/13 11:50 AM
enabling the hierarc...
enabling the hierarchy to make regular checks. In the words of a circular of 1885, the collector-salesman system was designed to give the firm \"entire control of our men, perfect knowledge of their work, and the power to so direct them that each knows his work, and does it without loss of time or inter- ference.\" Such a system would result in \"binding good employees to our service\" and \"neutralize . . . the constant efforts of the op- position to withdraw men from our staff.\"
p.15 - 2/21/13 11:51 AM
A few years later in...
A few years later in Mexico, one of the remaining franchised commission houses still used by Singer was admonished by McKen- zie on the declining sales of machines. In reviewing a very old story, the Scotsman reminded his Latin correspondent of a few eternal verities of the trade. The system of small branches was best, for where the Singer machine was just one item in the inventory of a dealer, sales would be low, and if the dealer stocked other and cheaper machines the Singer would not be sold. The solution was salaried agents. \"No territory can be considered as controlled,\" McKenzie admonished, \"which is not properly occupied and actually worked,\" for if a point \"remains unoccupied, the opposition is sure to get a foothold most damaging to both the Company and to any agent controlling contiguous territory.\"
p.15 - 2/21/13 11:52 AM
e became the key man...
e became the key man in the expansion of Singer's business in that part of the world and was active until his retirement thirty-seven years later in 1902. As with Woodruff in England, Neidlinger tried to educate agents to a cash business, an atypical tactic for an American sewing machine company in the European market in the 1860's.
p.16 - 2/21/13 11:52 AM
eidlinger sought two...
eidlinger sought two objectives in his operation. He wanted to indoctrinate the agents with certain behavior patterns, and at the same time train the customers to pay for the goods promptly. He found the first task more difficult. \"It is really unaccountable,\" he once wrote, \"that when men are left to themselves to act indepen- dently, [they] so easily deviate from the path of duty in which they have been trained, namely . . . to keep their eyes open and see what each and every man under their control is doing, but . . . they so often work on in the dark . . . wholly forgetting that the solidity and safety of the business [is] under their care. It would seem that they expect me to come and do what [it] is their duty to do.\"
\"
p.16 - 2/21/13 11:53 AM
\"Peacefully Working to Conquer the World:\" The Singer Manufacturing Company in Foreign Markets, 1...
The objective was to condition the customers so that they would feel morally obligated to make their payments promptly
p.16 - 2/21/13 11:54 AM
Sales personnel in t...
Sales personnel in town were required to call daily before 9 A.M. to receive instructions from the local manager, and to return in the evening to deliver the money collected during the day.
p.17 - 2/21/13 11:55 AM
he effectiveness of ...
he effectiveness of Neidlinger's organization can be judged by his sales which showed an increase of over 200 per cent from 1876 through 1883. He estimated his sales in 1884 to be 182,000 machines which would remit an estimated ?300,000.5o This commercial success led the competition to complain. \"Herr Neidlinger, makes a move,\" one European trade journal remarked in 1887, \"and in- stantly there is consternation among the ranks of the enemy.\"
p.17 - 2/21/13 11:56 AM
inger Manufacturing ...
inger Manufacturing Company . . . [whose machines enjoyed] a very considerable sale in the German market.\" Contributing to this were Singer's \"numerous own branches, offices, applying largely the installment and canvassing systems which are efficiently sup- ported by an abundance of capital.
p.17 - 2/21/13 11:57 AM
The policy of encour...
The policy of encouraging talent to rise within the organization was traditional. This system was once characterized by an English trade journal as \"a real ivy plan; everybody is en- couraged to climb and to cling.\"
p.18 - 2/21/13 11:58 AM
There is no evidence...
There is no evidence that the New York management was influenced by a nationalistic desire to enhance America's role and influence in Europe. Such sentiments were expressed twenty years later, but that occurred when the awakening of America to the economic opportunities offered by foreign markets was being popu- larized and rationalized by the press and the trade journals gen- erally.
p.18 - 2/21/13 11:59 AM
lasgow, Scotland, wa...
lasgow, Scotland, was chosen by McKenzie, not for tempera- mental considerations, but because it offered such economic advan- tages as an iron smelting industry, cotton thread companies, and an active ship-building and steamship business with world-wide trade and shipping connections.
p.19 - 2/21/13 11:59 AM
r he indicated that ...
r he indicated that low labor costs and shipping facilities were on his list of prerequisites. Seventeen years later he remarked to a visitor that it was the cheapness and docility of labor that was perhaps the most important considera- tion.5
p.19 - 2/21/13 12:00 PM
After additions in 1...
After additions in 1876 this new establishment could produce 3,000 ma- chines a week. An English trade journal, Engineering, reported that \"the Singer machine factory at Bridgeton is now the largest in the United Kingdom
p.19 - 2/21/13 12:01 PM
In May 1882, at Kil...
In May 1882, at Kilbowie, nine miles west of Glasgow on the Clyde River, construction was begun on what became upon completion in 1885 the largest sewing ma- chine factory in the world. It was capable of producing 10,000 machines a week and employing over 5,000 persons. The buildings covered twenty-one acres
p.20 - 2/21/13 12:01 PM
The construction of ...
The construction of a foundry in Austria in 1883 illuminates the company's desire to circumvent tariff barriers. In February 1882, a new Austrian tariff increased the duty on sewing machine stands by 10 per cent. Neidlinger felt the new tariff made \"it almost, if not entirely, impossible for foreigners to compete with home manufac- turers.\"
\"
p.20 - 2/21/13 12:02 PM
\"Peacefully Working to Conquer the World:\" The Singer Manufacturing Company in Foreign Markets, 1...
The primary advantage of such a move was to increase the chances of Singer being \"looked upon as home manufacturers.\"
vi
p.21 - 2/21/13 12:03 PM
former's proximity t...
former's proximity to the world-wide steamship companies in Glasgow, enabled the firm to gain a competitive advantage in the Latin American, African, and Asian markets.
p.21 - 2/21/13 12:04 PM
Once a commercial fo...
Once a commercial foothold was established in Europe by its own efforts, both the agents and the New York office avoided official contacts except as they dealt with the company's legal status or trade name. This is not especially hard to explain. The firm's push outward into foreign markets came during the 1860's and 1870's when the energies of the government were concentrated at home. The burden of ex- panding the market fell directly on the individual firm
p.21 - 2/21/13 12:04 PM
One benefit of such ...
One benefit of such organization was that the reports from thousands of agents provided the firm with a virtual monopoly of information on the actual and potential market for the sewing machine. The Singer organization was in operation a private con- sular service better than any the government offered
p.21 - 2/21/13 12:05 PM
Aside from gathering...
Aside from gathering information, Singer's organization gave it a great deal of publicity through the persistent personal contact of its canvassers and collector
p.22 - 2/21/13 12:05 PM
Or, as Woodruff onc...
Or, as Woodruff once phrased it, the system was as \"a living moving army of irresistible power, peacefully working to conquer the world.\" 63 By the twentieth century it was casually explained as making the machine, taking it out and selling it, and collecting and remitting the money in order to make another machine.
\"
p.22 - 2/21/13 12:06 PM
\"Peacefully Working to Conquer the World:\" The Singer Manufacturing Company in Foreign Markets, 1...
he New York Daily Tribune in 1872 felt the lure of the Oriental market to be \"one of the untold wonders of this century. The Japanese are buying our agricultural implements, sewing machines, furniture, flour and grain\" in return for which the imports of raw silk and hemp gave \"employment to thousands of busy hands.\"
vi
p.22 - 2/21/13 12:07 PM
The sewing machine w...
The sewing machine was in the vanguard of this American com- mercial and technological penetration of the world market.
p.24 - 2/21/13 12:11 PM
Singer, as with all...
Singer, as with all other firms seeking foreign markets, had to grapple with several simultaneous political and economic developments concomitant with European protectionism after the 1880's. These difficulties included patent legislation and laws to protect national industries, as in Britain's Merchandise Marks Act of 1887, as well as tariff barriers. The decade also brought a strong commercial thrust by German and other American firms seeking continental and colonial markets. In both countries manufacturing interests sought government aid to protect their domestic markets and to help them obtain foreign sale
\"
p.25 - 2/21/13 12:12 PM
\"Peacefully Working to Conquer the World:\" The Singer Manufacturing Company in Foreign Markets, 1...
However, the German sewing machine manufac- turers opposed an exclusionist policy. They were astute enough to see that Singer would build a factory in Germany as it had at Floridsdorf in 1883.
vi
p.25 - 2/21/13 12:13 PM
hree factors would s...
hree factors would seem to account for Singer's successful re- sponse to German protectionism: Neidlinger's effective leadership maintained and sustained an efficient, aggressive organization; the threat of a branch factory served to block wholesale German retalia- tion; and the weak condition of the German manufacturers rendered partial measures ineffective.
\"
p.26 - 2/21/13 12:13 PM
\"Peacefully Working to Conquer the World:\" The Singer Manufacturing Company in Foreign Markets, 1...
The commercial safety-valve, he explained was to be the Far East.'75 The Singer Company turned toward the Orient to maintain a high level of production to sustain the organization while it searched for ways to control the effects of European trade depressions, competition, and protectionist policies. It was not a leader in reaching this deci- sion; as McKenzie admitted, its rivals were using that market as a way to cope with Singer. Other American industries, such as petroleum, were already active in the Far East.
vi
p.26 - 2/21/13 12:13 PM
cKenzie admitted to ...
cKenzie admitted to the stockholders in the spring of 1884 that since the company's organization was susceptible to fluctuations in the purchasing level of a market, the depression of 1884 \"rendered doubly hard the work of maintaining our vast organizatio
\"
p.26 - 2/21/13 12:14 PM
\"Peacefully Working to Conquer the World:\" The Singer Manufacturing Company in Foreign Markets, 1...
Advised by a Scottish missionary on the peculiarities of the China trade and assured of the general support by missionaries in China for the sewing machine's introduction as a \"civilizing medium,\" the London office dispatched Edward Sang, the Brussels agent, to Shanghai.76 Sales were meagre; only 2,216 machines were sold from 1884 through July 1887, but the poor results seem to be typical for this trade in China.\"7
vi
p.26 - 2/21/13 12:15 PM
\"Peacefully Working to Conquer the World:\" The Singer Manufacturing Company in Foreign Markets, 1...
China, the total market to be exploited contained six million people. \"These colossal figures of population are quite exasperating,\" he wrote. He advised New York that the Chinese market was \"of the greatest possible value to the entire future of your trade and position in the world's markets.\" He envisioned the developing Chinese market absorbing the older styles of machines \"for years after that style of machine is dead and buried in European countries.\" 7
vi
p.27 - 2/21/13 12:16 PM
New York sent London...
New York sent London's chief inspector to make a thorough in- vestigation of the China market in 1888. He reported the major obstacle was neither opposition to the introduction of the sewing machine, nor the cheapness of hand labor, but rather the style of clothing which used loose seams. \"The Chinese have,\" John Mitchell observed, \"a decided objection to hard, rigid stitching, and in this fact lies and will be for many years our chief difficulty in developing the sewing machine business in China.\"
p.27 - 2/21/13 12:16 PM
This temporary, tact...
This temporary, tactical withdrawal from the China market, a decade before it became a popular subject for American imperial- ists, challenged Singer's confidence about being able to market its product among diverse peoples and cultures.
p.27 - 2/21/13 12:17 PM
It was only after th...
It was only after the turn of the century that the Russian market partially provided for this desired resul
p.27 - 2/21/13 12:17 PM
1890's, unlike those...
1890's, unlike those of earlier decades, benefited from a more experienced leader- ship in Washington and a commercially-alert consular service which provided aid as well as information, whereas earlier companies like Singer had to rely in large measure on their own resources
p.28 - 2/21/13 12:18 PM
His hope of 1882 to ...
His hope of 1882 to build a respectable, reliable, and permanent organization had been achieved. The com- pany's factories on two continents, the strong leadership of the general agents, supported by thousands of local sales personnel in most countries of the world, together formed an aggressive and an effective organization which was well along towards its goal of peacefully working to conquer the world.
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FULL
Review Sheet
p.8 - 2/18/13 11:01 AM
In its values it fla...
In its values it flaunted the culture's identification with appearances and material possessions, reaffirmed the culture's dedication to productivity, personified the culture's pretensions to an egalitarian society. The department store was the bourgeoisie's world. It was the world of leisurely women celebrating a new rite of consumption.
B
p.9 - 2/18/13 11:06 AM
bon-marche-miller
It was a commitment to assembling thousands of employees in a single work place. It was a commitment to an organizing principle requiring a meticulous division of labor, a super-imposition of several hierarchical levels of command, and a systematization of the entire work process. It was a commitment to a production principle based on quantity and economy of costs and to a consumption principle based on self-indulgence.
vi
p.9 - 2/18/13 11:06 AM
The department stor...
The department store was not only the bourgeoisie's world; it was the most visible symbol of how that world was changing.
p.9 - 2/18/13 11:07 AM
The store's clientel...
The store's clientele reflected the throngs who were flocking to summer resorts, the swarms who were packing the city mass transit, the crowds who were reading the new mass press
B
p.9 - 2/18/13 11:52 AM
bon-marche-miller
But bourgeois culture in France had other roots, roots of thrift and /-self-restraint, of a sense of community that stressed stability and harmony and the natural exercise of authority that came with familiarity in its relationships, roots that worshipped individual fulfillment and an independent place in society, roots that longed for distinction from those on lower social rungs, roots that believed in the family as the fundamental and most reliable of organizing principles; and so, much of this was troubling as well because it clashed with other values and traditions the bourgeoisie held dear.
vi vi vi
p.10 - 2/18/13 11:54 AM
In the years before ...
In the years before the First World War the Bon Marche was the quintessential big store. It was the world's largest department store, and if its claim to being the world's first was somewhat askew, few people if any were willing to argue.
B
p.10 - 2/18/13 12:00 PM
bon-marche-miller
More specifically, what I have chosen to focus on in this study is the process by which the individuals who built and ran the Bon Marche sought to create new sets of social relationships, perceptions, and roles that would permit the adaptation of themselves, their work force, their clientele, and the bourgeois public to the changing society
vi
p.12 - 2/18/13 12:02 PM
have turned to sour...
have turned to sources that business historians in the past have been prone to overlook: pictures, public relations remnants, the historical paraphernalia of the firm's internal social life.
p.12 - 2/18/13 12:03 PM
One such theme cente...
One such theme centers on the role of paternalism, paternalism here referring not simply to employer-sponsored benefits for employees, but to the pervasive idea of an internal work community that accompanies these benefits and that informs all relationships within the enterprise.
B
p.13 - 2/18/13 12:04 PM
bon-marche-miller
In France it could be found most prominently among some of the largest, the most dynamic, and the most innovative firms in the French economy well into the twentieth century, where it served purposes in accordance with its times. In the United States it flourished under the name of welfare capitalism, spreading most rapidly after the 1890s and reaching its peak in the 1920s. That is, paternalism became most entrenched in the United States —was viewed as most necessary by American businessmen—at precisely the moment when the modern corporation was being formed
vi
p.14 - 2/18/13 12:06 PM
More to the point, e...
More to the point, even if convergence along Western lines were to occur, there remains the question of why the Japanese economy grew so rapidly and so successfully without shedding its paternalistic skin. Better still, one needs to ask in what ways the Japanese paternalistic style—most rooted within the largest firms— contributed to this rapidity and success.
p.14 - 2/18/13 12:07 PM
I have placed the st...
I have placed the store's very rich and deeply imbedded paternalistic relationships at the center of my analysis because I have come to believe that these relationships provide the key to understanding how the Bon Marche, as a bourgeois institution, approached the problem of adaptation to the basic changes of its age
B
p.14 - 2/18/13 12:13 PM
bon-marche-miller
It has also meant turning paternalism on its head, viewing paternalism not simply as an entrepreneurial strategy directed at workers, but as an entrepreneurial response to businessmen's own needs for socialization in a period of changing business role
vi vi vi
p.15 - 2/18/13 12:24 PM
his is especially tr...
his is especially true in regard to those changes— bureaucratization, the emergence of a mass society—which have characterized Western culture since the latter part of the nineteenth century. Max Weber's perception of an unrelenting rationalizing process and his speculations on the disenchantment of the modern world have largely contributed to this frame of mind.
B
p.15 - 2/18/13 12:24 PM
bon-marche-miller
progressed through the obliteration of its earlier organic, orgemeinschaftlich, ties.8
vi
p.15 - 2/18/13 12:25 PM
institutions like th...
institutions like the department store—reflection as they were of the bourgeoisie's world—posed at the same time a fundamental dilemma for a culture that continued to value family ties and community relationships
B
p.16 - 2/18/13 12:26 PM
bon-marche-miller
Once reoriented, they can lend themselves to the purposes of change and, even more, provide the social cohesion necessary for the successful and rapid realization of that change. Investigators of transitional developments in India have seen this occurring. They have, for example, pointed to how the cohesiveness of the caste structure, once adapted for new ends, can be effective in achieving political and social change.9 Likewise, an observer of the Japanese factory system has suggested that the Japanese factory represents a \"rephrasing\" of \"feudal loyalties, commitments, rewards, and methods of leadership\" within the framework of modern industry, and he has gone on to remark that this rephrasing was critical to Japan's evolution into a modern industrialized economy.1
vi
p.16 - 2/18/13 12:26 PM
bon-marche-miller
Yet social change need not occur through a radical break with the past.
vi
p.16 - 2/18/13 12:27 PM
bon-marche-miller
n short gemeinschaftlich values persistent in bourgeois culture—were now identified with the workings of a mass, bureaucratic enterprise and were, in fact, made to work for the success of that enterprise.
vi
p.16 - 2/18/13 12:28 PM
bon-marche-miller
A third theme—the role of the family firm in French economic development
vi
p.17 - 2/18/13 12:29 PM
eluctant to dilute a...
eluctant to dilute authority and control through expansion, preferring established security to the risks of dynamism, and emphasizing an entrepreneurial role predicated on traditional relationships rather than on drive and competitiveness, the French family firm, according to Landes, has been an inherently conservative business institution.11
p.17 - 2/18/13 12:30 PM
Landes is an histor...
Landes is an historian who has constantly sought the answers to economic questions in the realm of social speculations. His influence has particularly been felt in his suggestion that entrepreneurial and attitudinal factors, not a supposed lack of resources and ready capital, were principally responsible for braking French economic growth once the race to industrialization had begun in the West.
B
p.18 - 2/18/13 12:32 PM
bon-marche-miller
n looking at the social history of a specific family firm that was also one of the most successful business endeavors in France before the First World War, I have been drawn to precisely these sorts of questions. My concern has been to point to the positive role that household values can play in the evolution of a modern business enterprise, such as bringing a sense of loyalty and cohesiveness to a bureaucratized and large-scale work environment
vi vi
p.19 - 2/18/13 12:34 PM
As we shall see, the...
As we shall see, the Bon Marche was a firm not only permeated with household relationships, but a firm that relied upon these relationships for its transition into a modern business enterprise, a firm that utilized these relationships to secure its remarkable success, and, what is more, a firm that recognized the essential role that these relationships played in assuring the continuity of that success.
B
p.19 - 2/18/13 12:34 PM
bon-marche-miller
Lastly, the themes of paternalism, social change, and the family firm come together in some reflections on that elusive but inescapable subject for anyone writing on the transformations of modern times—the idea of a managerial revolution.
vi vi vi
p.20 - 2/18/13 1:38 PM
bon-marche-miller
gain returning to the earlier themes of paternalism and of social change, that bureaucratization and rationalization m business, accompanied by a correspondingly growing role for managers, has not necessarily entailed a disappearance of household relationships within the enterprise. Impersonal bureaucratized, managerially run firms, on the one hand, the household relationships of the family firm, on the other, have been a contrast too keenly drawn in the past. The managerial and family ethos are not mutually exclusive; they can in fact work together, the one complementing and completing the other. This, certainly, was the case with the Bon Marche
p.20 - 2/18/13 1:39 PM
bon-marche-miller
Labor history has told us much about working-class movements, working-class lives, the nature of working-class work. But it has told us little about how the history of the workers has been molded by the values and concerns of the men who employed them.
vi vi vi vi
p.20 - 2/18/13 1:39 PM
bon-marche-miller
They have told us much about business firms, business structures, and business politics, but they have had little to say on the businessman as a contributor and participant in his wider social world, or on the intertwining of the growth and success of an enterprise with its employee relations. Thus, for both business and labor historians, the history of the businessman has been made to stand apart from the history of the worker.
vi vi
p.21 - 2/18/13 1:40 PM
bon-marche-miller
t will remind the historian of modern society that his is the history of both the middle and working classes, and that the history of one has in fact been the history of the other
vi vi vi vi vi vi vi
p.21 - 2/18/13 1:40 PM
bon-marche-miller
Social historians need to realize that the bourgeoisie as much as the working class gave shape to the society that emerged with industrialization (and that labor does not exclude the white-collar worker). Economic historians need to acknowledge the social context within which economic changes take place.
vi vi
p.23 - 2/18/13 1:42 PM
bon-marche-miller
No longer was Paris an impassable maze of streets and alleyways, too narrow to accommodate the traffic of a mid-century capital, too haphazard in design to permit cross-town circulation. Now the broad boulevards that Baron Haussmann had built cut through Paris along a rational plan that effectively removed those barriers to intra-city travel that for centuries had confined Parisians to their immediate quarter or that rendered unpleasant any effort to shuttle about.
vi vi vi vi vi
p.24 - 2/18/13 1:43 PM
bon-marche-miller
hey could not but have reflected on how well Haussmann's new boulevards would serve the purpose for which they were assembling.
vi vi vi vi
p.24 - 2/18/13 1:45 PM
Yet what was signifi...
Yet what was significant about this particular moment in September was that for the first time a store was being constructed that was formally conceived and systematically designed to house a grand magasin.
p.24 - 2/18/13 1:45 PM
'the only [store] sp...
'the only [store] specifically constructed and entirely intended for a great trade in nouveautes .\"
p.24 - 2/18/13 1:45 PM
nouveautes
nouveautes
p.25 - 2/18/13 3:04 PM
Zola conveyed to us ...
Zola conveyed to us in the character of Mouret was indeed part of the unfolding of the moment, but Mouret is too much a hodgepodge of varied observations and literary imagination, and too lacking in historical roots, to provide us with more than a feel for the developments with which we are concerned
B
p.25 - 2/18/13 3:05 PM
bon-marche-miller
he first of these was a revolution in retailing that can be traced to the appearance of new kinds of stores—dry goods ^ firms known as magasins de nouveautes—in the 1830s and 1840s. After a period of testing and growth, these firms, with their accent on turnover, were to lead to the formation of the department store
vi vi
p.25 - 2/18/13 3:12 PM
bon-marche-miller
department stores, in France as elsewhere, did not spring up overnight. All the great emporia of the prewar era—the Bon Marche, the Louvre, the Printemps, and others—had either modest or intermediate origins,
vi vi
p.26 - 2/18/13 3:15 PM
bon-marche-miller
encroached on the trade of his neighbor. The guilds regulated and limited entry into the various trades. They insisted that each seller be confined to a single specialty
vi
p.26 - 2/18/13 5:26 PM
There were certain \"...
There were certain \"privileged places\" of commerce in each major town that were outside the guilds's jurisdiction, as were the -v colporteurs or peddlers that thronged the city streets. There were also the great fairs and the merciers, the one group of merchants who were permitted to sell all varieties of merchandise (although they were prohibited from all forms of manufacture). Yet none of these represented much of a break with the prevailing traditions of the period. The \"privileged places\" tended to establish their own guild-like regulations, while colporteurs, who might engage in more competitive trading, were by their very nature anything but the vanguard of a commercial revolution.
p.26 - 2/18/13 5:26 PM
s. Nor should we dou...
s. Nor should we doubt that the advances in window display and store decor that were common in London in the eighteenth century were unknown to the Parisians.
p.28 - 2/18/13 5:28 PM
Advertising, aside f...
Advertising, aside from traditionally acceptable methods, was rejected almost out of hand, and apparently the idea that consumption could be encouraged through price or service innovations never occurred to these merchants.
p.28 - 2/18/13 5:29 PM
The idea of \"shoppin...
The idea of \"shopping\" was, for all practical purposes, non-existent, as entry into a shop J entailed an obligation to make a purchase. Returns or even exchanges were unheard of.
p.29 - 2/18/13 5:32 PM
By the 1830s, howeve...
By the 1830s, however, there were definite signs of change—advertisements from the late 1830s called attention to fixed and marked prices—and with the 1840s one could truly begin to speak of magasins de nouveautes which had broken radically with the commercial traditions of the past.
B
p.29 - 2/18/13 5:33 PM
bon-marche-miller
silks, woolens, cloths, shawls, lingerie, hosiery, gloves, ready-to-wear, and the like, plus occasionally items like furs, umbrellas, and sewing^goods.7 Yet for the times this constituted a revolutionary gtouping^bf what were still regarded as diverse sets of specialties, and almost immediately there were complaints from the tradition-minded small merchants.8
vi vi vi
p.30 - 2/18/13 5:36 PM
freedom to view the ...
freedom to view the merchandise without being harassed to buy v it.\"
B
p.30 - 2/18/13 5:36 PM
bon-marche-miller
One account spoke of \"monster stores\" (and already was complaining of their bureaucratic character).11
vi
p.31 - 2/18/13 5:39 PM
bon-marche-miller
The principle of organization by departments had become fundamental. Hierarchical chains of command were developing.1
vi
p.32 - 2/18/13 5:44 PM
bon-marche-miller
backgrounds of Chauchard and Heriot remain obscure, although we do know that the former had been a clerk at another magasin de nouveautes, the Pauvre Diable. This too forms part of a familiar pattern—that of ambitious men with training at one store seeking the financial support of another party (Chauchard and Heriot turned to a certain Fare) and then launching their own enterprise or buying into partnership.
vi
p.33 - 2/18/13 5:46 PM
A. T. Stewart's \"Ma...
A. T. Stewart's \"Marble Palace\" must have created an even greater stir among New Yorkers.
p.33 - 2/18/13 5:47 PM
ike his Parisian con...
ike his Parisian confreres, Stewart's business was predicated upon the new merchandising practices of low markup and low and fixed prices, bulk buying, free entry, and returns. In 1862 he built still another building—this time a \"Cast Iron Palace\"—
p.34 - 2/18/13 5:47 PM
n 1896, little more ...
n 1896, little more than an architectural carcass, A. T. Stewart's passed into the hands of John Wanamaker of Philadelphia.1
p.34 - 2/18/13 5:57 PM
Other innovative and...
Other innovative and growing stores in New York in the 1850s and 1860s included Lord and Taylor; Arnold, Constable and Co.; and Macy's. The latter's sales volume was not yet impressive—only 1,024,621 dollars in 1870—but it was far more diverse than either Stewart's or the Parisian stores at this time/ selling house furnishings, toys, stationery, and books in addition to dry goods.
p.34 - 2/18/13 5:58 PM
In 1872 Whitely took...
In 1872 Whitely took for himself the name of the \"Universal Provider,\" although at the time this represented more pretensions than reality.1
p.34 - 2/18/13 5:59 PM
Ralph Hower
Ralph Hower
p.35 - 2/18/13 5:59 PM
devoted a fair porti...
devoted a fair portion of his study of Macy's to demonstrating that American retail developments paralleled rather than imitated those in France. Not surprisingly, Hower stressed diversification of merchandise lines as the kev element in the development of the department store, thus placing Macy's well near the head of the pack.
B
p.35 - 2/18/13 6:00 PM
bon-marche-miller
From the above account it should be clear that between 1840 and 1870 a significant change in retailing took place on both sides of the Atlantic and that by the 1870s this had led to the emergence of commercial enterprises which roughly were approximating—in their size, their organization and practices, and especially their unity of conception—what we have come to know as the modern department store.
vi
p.36 - 2/18/13 6:03 PM
by 1870 France was ...
by 1870 France was still in a fairly early stage of industrialization, there were nevertheless industries that had matured to the point where they could provide an abundant and steady flow of goods to the market at relatively low cost. This was especially true of the textile industry, the one sector upon which the new dry-goods stores were most dependent for their stocks
p.37 - 2/18/13 6:08 PM
initiatives on the p...
initiatives on the part of new mercTiarrts~'to purchase such batches at low prices, became a growing practice, from at least the mid-1840s on, as advertisements of the time'attest.22 With the 1850s came the advent of special great salesTanother consequence of increasing productive capacity in an era when the market was still largely unregulated and subject to fluctuation
B
p.38 - 2/18/13 6:11 PM
bon-marche-miller
Their concerns were elsewhere, with alleviating a ^nearly unbearable traffic situation, with providing work for potentially troublesome construction workers, and above all with making Paris the brilliant capital of Europe. But as they cut through the tortuous back alleys of the city, laying down long, wide boulevards ideal for cross-city travel—and mass public transit—they created the very conditions by which the new stores could tap the vast Parisian market. Concurrently, the rationalization of the city's layout was accompanied by a reorganization of the more than seventeen omnibus companies that had sprung up since the first concession had been established in 1828. In 1855 a single service, the Compagnie Generale des Omnibus, was formed. Five years later it was transporting more than 70,000,000 passengers annually, still another advantage to enterprising merchants who no longer looked to the immediate neighborhood, or to chance passersby, for their clientele.27
vi
p.38 - 2/18/13 6:12 PM
bon-marche-miller
bsolutely critical to the development of /'either, was the coming of the railroad
vi
p.39 - 2/18/13 6:16 PM
bon-marche-miller
It was the ^ railroad, increasing the regularity, volume, and speed of the flow of goods and materials first into the factories and then out of the factories and into the city markets, that made possible the coming of big business in both production and distribution. The effects of this process in France were perhaps slower and less extensive than those described by Alfred Chandler for the United States.30
vi vi vi
p.39 - 2/18/13 6:17 PM
bon-marche-miller
hat a number of emerging department stores were to find their fortunes partly in their proximity to major commuter stations, partly in the expanse of their mail-order trade, was also a consequence of locomotive power.
vi
p.40 - 2/18/13 6:18 PM
bon-marche-miller
of the more familiar technological or industrial revolutions.31 In part this may be seen in an ever greater specialization of. busine.aajfiles or functions over the first half of the century; indeed both small shopkeepers who were now exclusively retailers and the magasins de nouveautes formed part of this process.
p.40 - 2/18/13 6:21 PM
But the development ...
But the development of large-scale business also required the ability to manage, / coordinate, and control one's operations, and this came only . with the first big business itself—the railroad.
p.41 - 2/18/13 6:24 PM
ll of which is not t...
ll of which is not to say that either the new manufacturing or new retail establishments drew directly from the railroad experience. But the model—along with a transferable body of knowledge—was there.3
B
p.41 - 2/18/13 6:25 PM
bon-marche-miller
oucicaut, unfortunately, is a figure of whom we know far too little, although certain facts are apparently clear. He was born in Belleme in 1810, the son of a Norman hatter. He was Catholic. At the age of eighteen he left home and took to the road as the \"associate\" of an itinerant peddler.
vi
p.44 - 2/18/13 6:30 PM
bon-marche-miller
Bon Marche expanded haphazardly during the middle decades of the century, either by adding to existing structures or by acquiring adjoining ones. In any event, it was not until the neighboring Hospice des Petits-Menages was finally torn down in 1868 that Boucicaut was able to obtain control of the remainder of the block and truly contemplate a wholesale reconstruction of the Bon Marche.
vi vi
p.45 - 2/18/13 6:33 PM
bon-marche-miller
In sheer size alone the Bon Marche far surpassed the magasins de nouveautes of the late 1860s. Sales volume in 1877 was 73,000,000 francs, more than three times what it had been when the new building was begun. Employees now numbered 1,788, an astounding figure for tKe period. Only the Louvre^ourd be seen to be competing on similar terms at this time.
vi
p.45 - 2/18/13 6:33 PM
bon-marche-miller
ristide Jr. had never taken an active interest in the house. Preferring agriculture, the arts, and travel to the commercial life—not altogether unusual for the SQonjof a successful merchant—he remained removed from the daily affairs of the business.
vi
p.46 - 2/18/13 6:34 PM
Meanwhile his own he...
Meanwhile his own health was steadily failing, and within two years after his father's death he too was in his grave, passing the store on to his mother. With Madame Boucicaut we come upon another legendary figure in French commerce. Born of peasant origins and out of wedlock, she had come to Paris in the 1830s as an apprentice in a laundry. Later she was to find work in a small restaurant, and it was here that she met Aristide Boucicaut.
p.46 - 2/18/13 6:37 PM
After her death it i...
After her death it indeed became fashionable to assume that she had personally taken over the direction of the house during the remaining eight years of her life (she died in 1887). Yet store archives reveal that she was frequently absent from Paris during these years,
p.47 - 2/18/13 6:40 PM
. In contrast to the...
. In contrast to the limited liability corporation (societe anonyme), however, the directors of a societe en commandite were financially responsible for the firm's obligations.
p.48 - 2/18/13 6:43 PM
new departments and ...
new departments and in the enlarging of offices (by 1906 there were several thousand persons working at the store who were not directly involved in the selling process
p.48 - 2/18/13 6:43 PM
Then in 1912 a majo...
Then in 1912 a major extension was opened directly across the Sevres-Bac intersection and joined to the original building by an underground passage.
B
p.49 - 2/18/13 6:44 PM
bon-marche-miller
In America Macy's sales volume in 1914 was 17,000,000 dollars and Marshall Field's retail volume in 1906 was 25,000,000. Only Wanamaker's combined operation in Philadelphia and New York was perhaps as large, or larger, than the Bon Marche. No published sales figures for this period are available, however.
vi vi
p.50 - 2/18/13 6:45 PM
mass society, bureau...
mass society, bureaucratization, rationalization— need to be made tangible, to be translated into the workings of the grand magasin that the Bon Marche had now become. In what way was the Bon Marche a mass marketplace? How did the machine work? How was the strategy of mass retailing converted into the structure of a rationalized operation?
p.50 - 2/18/13 6:46 PM
When sales of these ...
When sales of these lines expanded to the point that they merited a department of their own, a split from the original department occurred. Rarely were totally new departments created from scratch.
B
p.51 - 2/18/13 6:48 PM
bon-marche-miller
When Boucicaut entered the Bon Marche, the store carried shawls, cloaks, and tippets; garment linings and millinery items; a literie (perhaps beds, perhaps bedding); a mercerie section; and assorted fabrics and cotton goods.3 Thirty years later, at the time of Zola's visit, the Bon Marche maintained thirty-six separate departments.
vi vi vi
p.52 - 2/18/13 6:49 PM
In the 1860s a ready...
In the 1860s a readyto-wear department was added, initially confined to garments such as cloaks and overcoats. By the end of the decade, however, the department was offering bathing suits and various fashion dresses, although the latter apparently were models cut to individual measurements.
B
p.52 - 2/18/13 6:50 PM
bon-marche-miller
Meanwhile men's wear, first introduced as shirts and ties in the 1860s, was substantially expanded during the following decade, while the 1870s further witnessed the addition of a separate children's section and the introduction of A. Boucicaut gloves, the first in a long line of Bon Marche trademarks.
vi
p.52 - 2/18/13 6:50 PM
amping ware in the 1...
amping ware in the 1880s.
p.53 - 2/18/13 6:51 PM
Then in the 1880s tw...
Then in the 1880s two of the principal mainstays of the modern department store—stationery and toy counters—were added, while shoes, not traditionally a part of nouveautes, received a department of their own
p.53 - 2/18/13 6:58 PM
Altogether, more tha...
Altogether, more than 200 items, from household wares to sport and garden goods to kitchen utensils to baby carriages, were offered for sale. With the turn of the century there was still further expansion into house, kitchen, and
p.54 - 2/18/13 6:59 PM
cosmetic wares, tele...
cosmetic wares, telephones, tea (at the China counter), photography goods, toilet paper (Bon Marche trademark), musical instruments, paint, and cinematographs.
B
p.54 - 2/18/13 7:00 PM
bon-marche-miller
In short, it does not permit us to reassemble the complexity of the history of merchandise diversification as it occurred at the Bon Marche. In the absence of further documentation, that is a story that simply cannot be retold. But the list does reflect, in a significant way, what we mean when we refer to the department store as a mass retailer, or mass marketplace
vi
p.54 - 2/18/13 7:12 PM
bon-marche-miller
In other industries in the nineteenth century, such decisions tended to lead to the building of new plants, or to backward and forward integration, or to mergers. At the department store the path of growth lay, as it would for most enterprises in the following century, in diversification, in the selling of new lines of merchandise.
vi vi
p.55 - 2/18/13 7:13 PM
bon-marche-miller
10,000 clients that probably entered the store on good days in the 1880s, or the 15,000-18,000 persons that Georges d'Avenel, a decade later, suggested passed daily through the doors of the Bon Marche and of the Louvre, or the 70,000 clients who perhaps came on the days of special sales.7
vi vi
p.55 - 2/18/13 7:13 PM
we can begin to gras...
we can begin to grasp in what way the department store had come to function as a mass marketplace for an emerging mass society
B
p.55 - 2/18/13 7:15 PM
bon-marche-miller
We can see that the prodigious sales figures represented an increasing turn towards the purchase of comfort, amusement, and luxury. And thus we can see the essential reality of the mass market—a new commercial concept designed to accommodate (and induce) a society that more and more would seek its identity in the variety of goods it consumed.
vi vi vi
p.56 - 2/18/13 7:17 PM
he relationship betw...
he relationship between mass retailing and its. financing was a simple one. Rapid turnover, the most basic of new merchandising practices, was combined with a policy of cash sales only. As a result, the flow of cash into store coffers was both constant and plentiful. Accounts receivable and similar betes-noires that haunted smaller operations were simply not a problem. Once the mechanism of low margins, low prices, high stockturns, and high volume was set in motion, operating capital became readily available
p.56 - 2/18/13 7:18 PM
But it is likely tha...
But it is likely that such projects as the 1869 building were paid for, at least in part, from savings that employees placed with the firm for a return of six percent interest. By the 1880s this savings program had evolved into merely a service for encouraging thrift among the work force. But then later expansion—especially the acquisition and construction of new buildings—was financed through statutory deductions from the net profits and from the creation of a reserve fund that eventually grew to 40,000,000 francs
B
p.56 - 2/18/13 7:18 PM
bon-marche-miller
rench practice of autofinancement, the store's owners and managers tended to reject dependency on outside financial sources.
vi
p.57 - 2/18/13 7:19 PM
bon-marche-miller
Because the department stores bought in quantity, because they bought regularly, their special sales alleviating the layoffs and shutdowns that came with slack seasons, and because they bought from labor-intensive industries consisting of small and medium-sized firms, they were in a position to dictate the terms of supply.
vi
p.57 - 2/18/13 7:20 PM
bon-marche-miller
Department stores bought on credit, interest-free, thereby shifting to the manufacturer the initial financing of supplies. By the time the credit came due, the goods had frequently been sold, again illustrating the linkage between turnover and capital. The stores also required that deliveries be staggered; so that in still another way operating costs—this time the costs of warehousing—were largely shouldered by the supplier.
vi
p.57 - 2/18/13 7:21 PM
Contracted condition...
Contracted conditions were always honored and kickbacks to its buyers were never tolerated.
p.58 - 2/18/13 7:23 PM
Whether wholesaling ...
Whether wholesaling of dry goods and housewares began to follow the same pattern as occurred in the United States toward the middle of the century, where the telegraph and railroad gave rise to large-scale jobbing firms with extensive purchasing and sales networks, is uncertain.
B
p.58 - 2/18/13 7:24 PM
bon-marche-miller
Developed as these wholesaling networks had become, however, the department stores preferred to build buying organizations of their own.
vi vi
p.58 - 2/18/13 7:25 PM
bon-marche-miller
More important, they established direct contacts with manufacturers by dispatching their buyers (department heads) on a regular basis to the factories themselves
vi
p.59 - 2/18/13 7:26 PM
First, many stores b...
First, many stores became entrepreneurs much in the fashion of the old putting-out system. Gathering about them a network of small workshops or individual workers, they passed on a variety of goods that would have to be sewn or finished by hand. Arrangments of this sort included work on lingerie, shirts, some ready-to-wear, and cabinets. Dresses made to measure or requiring final individual touches were also often completed in this way.
B
p.59 - 2/18/13 7:26 PM
bon-marche-miller
Some stores had the work done by workshops for young girls at convents, and in Belgium it was not unknown for work to be farmed out to the prisons.11 However the Bon Marche, despite its religious connections,12 preferred to rely upon small workshops of several people, upon intermediaries who passed the work on to individuals at their homes, or directly upon workers themselves, many of whom passed daily at the Bon Marche to receive orders or to be handed merchandise in need of completion.
vi
p.60 - 2/18/13 7:27 PM
Finally, the house c...
Finally, the house could bypass state regulations, since it was not the habit to hold inspections in the homes of individual workers
B
p.60 - 2/18/13 7:27 PM
bon-marche-miller
here were workshops for shirts and men's clothing; for trousseaus, baby clothes, and white goods; for women's hats and ready-to-wear items such as coats or cloaks; for made-to-measure clothes like skirts, blouses, evening and wedding gowns; and, finally, for wall hangings, upholstery, mattress and cabinet work.
vi
p.60 - 2/18/13 7:28 PM
bon-marche-miller
All department store history,\" wrote one commentator at the turn of the century, \"is dominated by this idea. . . . Circulate the capital as often as possible.\"13
vi vi vi
p.60 - 2/18/13 7:28 PM
The Bon Marche worke...
The Bon Marche worked because it accelerated the flow of goods from the producer to the consumer, high velocity turnover generating high volume sales and rapid cash intake.
p.61 - 2/18/13 7:33 PM
There were two princ...
There were two principal routes that these flows took, one of merchandise, the other of paper.15 The first began at the receiving service, where the goods the store bought were delivered in bulk (by Madame Boucicaut's death a single year accounted for 87,000 parcels with a combined weight of 6,000 tons).
p.61 - 2/18/13 7:34 PM
atter process entail...
atter process entailing several transactions beyond the actual selling itself. First, the seller led the client to a cashier (73 in the time of Zola), where he cried out the sale and price to be paid. The cashier then wrote this down in a book at his counter and called back the terms to ascertain he had heard them correctly. On particularly heavy days a third person—debiteurs—acted as an intermediary to free the seller for his principal duties, these debiteurs being drawn from less burdened store sectors.16
p.61 - 2/18/13 7:35 PM
First, the package ...
First, the package was wrapped by gar^ons and then transmitted below to the central depot, a service that occupied 130 men in
p.62 - 2/18/13 7:35 PM
906. Here the packag...
906. Here the package was sorted and classified according to destination, and then loaded onto wagons for final delivery by coachmen and delivery boys. This in itself was a substantial operation. Eighty to 100 horses, with 30 to 40 wagons, were in use by 1876, the number growing to 150 horses and double the wagons twenty years later.17
p.62 - 2/18/13 7:36 PM
The route of paper b...
The route of paper began as well with the arrival of goods that were shipped by suppliers. The invoice was\" accepted by the receiving department, forwarded to the department head for approval and signature, and then sent again upstairs for a check by the verification bureau, and then for payment by the cash house. This latter office, known as the caisse centrale, functioned as well as a central accounting bureau where final records were kept. Fifteen men worked on these records in 1882, nearly 50 in 1906. A second route of paper followed the sale of the goods. Here three operations occurred between the offices and the selling floors below
B
p.63 - 2/18/13 7:38 PM
bon-marche-miller
he Bon Marche was like a great consumption empire, drawing to its center a cosmopolitan throng, conquering its provinces with its promotional legions, and then reaping the tribute from its outlying territories. The firm thought of provincials and foreigners as subjects to be won, and solicited them as eagerly as it did the Parisians. For mastering the former it relied upon the press, and the national rail system to herd them to Paris. Indeed while all the grands magasins scrambled after this market, the Bon Marche especially became known for the trade.18
vi vi vi vi vi
p.63 - 2/18/13 7:40 PM
bon-marche-miller
ut the greatest source of the empire's prosperity lay not in bringing its subjects to the center, but rather in bringing the center to them.
vi vi vi
p.64 - 2/18/13 7:42 PM
bon-marche-miller
TABLE ONE22 Dates Sales Volume Mail-order Paris 1871-72 33,949,621 5,079,839 — 1876-77 72,693,993 13,196,974 — 1886-87 123,234,523 17,320,302 13,338,532 1895-96 159,420,596 26,463,062 19,662,714 1902-03 188,455,416 33,293,982 25,160,119
vi
p.66 - 2/18/13 7:45 PM
There was one other ...
There was one other service whose multifarious duties were indispensable to the movement of flows through all sectors of the store. This was the gar^ons, a misnomer for a group of fully grown men who numbered 350 by 1882. Primarily, the gar^ons performed the heavy labor at the Bon Marche. They cleaned the building, assisted in the kitchens and eating rooms, carried packages down to the basement from the cashiers and mail-order, worked in the receiving
p.67 - 2/18/13 7:46 PM
ervice and the centr...
ervice and the central depot, and assisted clients who needed help with their bundles.
p.67 - 2/18/13 7:46 PM
In a sense it was th...
In a sense it was the gargons who made the system work, providing as they did the communications network between one division and anothe
B
p.67 - 2/18/13 7:46 PM
bon-marche-miller
A second dimension to the management of flows was the creation of layers of managerial authority
vi vi
p.67 - 2/18/13 7:48 PM
bon-marche-miller
ach department head received his own budget, bought his own merchandise, and hired and fired the personnel in his charge. He further, of course, supervised sales except during trips to the factories, when the ranking second took over command. This meant that it was also the department head who set the rates of mark-up and mark-down and who prepared the displays and departmental advertising.
vi
p.68 - 2/18/13 7:49 PM
Again we may suppose...
Again we may suppose that Boucicaut remained the ultimate authority, most likely chairing all meetings of the council. Otherwise each administrator was allocated precise managerial duties for specific departments and offices or services.
p.69 - 2/18/13 7:53 PM
By formal standards ...
By formal standards it was a hybrid design, combining a multi-divisional model's decentralizing tendencies with equivalent functionally centralized features. It was also, in some respects, a casual one, for, as systematic as components of the design could become, organizational planning in a comprehensive way was simply not part of the Bon Marche's thinking.
p.69 - 2/18/13 7:53 PM
ndeed no organizatio...
ndeed no organizational charts are to be found in fhe store records,
B
p.70 - 2/18/13 8:00 PM
bon-marche-miller
hrough decentralization at the departmental level the Bon Marche could fix responsibility for its most essential operations, and coordinate buying and selling for a wide range of merchandise
vi
p.70 - 2/18/13 8:02 PM
bon-marche-miller
here was one other dimension to the management of flows beyond the design of an organizational structure. This was the incessant push towards greater efficiency, the penetration of a broad rationalizing process into all spheres of store operations.
vi vi
p.71 - 2/18/13 8:04 PM
There was a certain ...
There was a certain protean quality to rationalization at the Bon Marche. In the delivery service it led to the partition of Paris into ten divisions to simplify classifications in the depot and to avoid duplication of routes as much as possible. In mail-order it was manifested through files on past purchases to increase the efficiency of mass catalogue mailings.
B
p.71 - 2/18/13 8:04 PM
bon-marche-miller
Telephone lines were increasingly installed for interservice communication or for communication between sectors such as departments and their workshops. Sliding chutes, turning tables, and what must have been a form of conveyor belt were used to funnel packages to the central depot. Technology, in fact, became so important that in 1910 Edouard Hocquart, the
vi vi vi
p.72 - 2/18/13 8:05 PM
store engineer who h...
store engineer who had devised the belted system and installed the first escalators in the house, was named to the council.
B
p.72 - 2/18/13 8:05 PM
bon-marche-miller
precise procedures were established no later than the 1880s to assure a constant flow of daily store data into the central accounting office of the store. A set of mail-order records from 1895 to 1903 further reveals an extensive breakdown on sales, expenses, and operations by sectors and months and includes, as well, comparisons with the figures of the previous years for each of these areas.
vi
p.72 - 2/18/13 8:06 PM
onsiderable attentio...
onsiderable attention was given to the computation of inventories, and that both the cost of goods and current market prices were taken into account. Above all, we know that by computing rates of stock-turn for individual departments, Parisian department stores had, by the 1880s, acquired the capacity to evaluate both the overall success with which store flows were being managed and the performance of individual units in this process.27
B
p.72 - 2/18/13 8:07 PM
bon-marche-miller
Perhaps most symbolic of rationalization at the Bon Marche was the blanc, the great white sale that occurred in late
vi vi vi
p.73 - 2/18/13 8:07 PM
bon-marche-miller
nuary or early February as a diversion from the winter offseason
vi
p.73 - 2/18/13 8:09 PM
So ultimately organi...
So ultimately organizational design at the grand magasin came to mean the bureaucratization and rationalization of retail trade in France. Extreme division of labor, a corps of middle and top managers, and an inexorable impulse towards seeking the most efficient means of carrying out operations were the components that made the department store work.
B
p.77 - 2/18/13 8:12 PM
bon-marche-miller
n the realm of worker relations, the family spirit remained pervasive, again bringing cohesion to the businessman's world and to the conditions of authority that he attached to it. Highly personal and often highly paternalistic—increasingly with an eye to fixing and disciplining an industrial work force—the family affair remained wedded to those household traditions that informed the very idea of the firm
vi vi
p.78 - 2/18/13 8:19 PM
bon-marche-miller
uilding the Bon Marche required more than pioneering marketing strategies and administrative structures. There was also a need for more complex business roles to adapt to the management of an organizational endeavor and a need for more complex employee relations to form, shape, and integrate a mass bureaucratic work force
vi
p.78 - 2/18/13 8:20 PM
bon-marche-miller
BUILDING ORGANIZATION MEN: THE BASE Internal relationships at the Bon Marche centered on the creation of organization men.
vi vi
p.79 - 2/18/13 8:21 PM
bon-marche-miller
Most clerks were drawn from the lower middle class, very often the sons and daughters of small shopkeepers, although gargons and other employees who performed manual labor tended to come from peasant stock. Both groups were predominantly provincial in origin, the gar^ons almost exclusively so, while approximately four-fifths of the clerks were born outside Paris.
vi
p.79 - 2/18/13 8:22 PM
bon-marche-miller
all Bon Marche clerks had some previous selling experience.3 This was a store requirement. It was a requirement that the Boucicauts could make because high salaries and other favorable conditions attracted a surplus of applicants to Bon Marche positions, and it was a requirement that enabled the Boucicauts to rely on other stores for their salesclerks' initial training.
vi
p.80 - 2/18/13 8:24 PM
An applicant present...
An applicant presented himself not to the owner but to the head of the department for which he was applying. Here his appearance and references were checked and his name, age, place of birth, recent work experience, and Parisian address noted in a special book
B
p.80 - 2/18/13 8:28 PM
bon-marche-miller
rocedures were a way of life at the Bon Marche. Employees were recruited according to store procedures, they were fired or retired according to store procedures, and in between they were expected to work according to store procedures. For some, particularly when nettled by procedural pettiness or by that special ability of procedures to gainsay common sense,
vi
p.81 - 2/18/13 8:30 PM
bon-marche-miller
Procedures served still another function; they helped to form a new kind of seller. Prescribing the one right way of selling permitted the Boucicauts to wean their employees away from the old habits of haggling and cheating still rampant in the small shops of the country
vi
p.81 - 2/18/13 8:32 PM
bon-marche-miller
Thus the Boucicauts dictated a uniform code of behavior that ranged from the employee's appearance to his selling of merchandise. Absolute courtesy was demanded at all times, and the employee was warned against any negligence in his dress or language. He was also obliged to respond to all questions with \"the greatest of readiness,\"
vi
p.82 - 2/18/13 8:33 PM
bon-marche-miller
In small shops employees were paid almost solely on the basis of a fixed salary. But at the Bon Marche commissions formed the most substantial part of a salesclerk's pay. Zola claimed that the commission, on the average, was more than double the regular salary, so that a seller earning from 1,200 to 1,500 francs annually on a fixed salary might, on the whole, receive 3,600 francs in a year.
vi vi
p.83 - 2/18/13 8:35 PM
bon-marche-miller
but quantity and speed as the measurement of performance. And commissions fit the new selling environment in still another way: they fostered individualism and competitiveness. They were a frequent cause of quarrels between clerks, and, if they might produce some nasty moments, they also interfered with unionization efforts.7
vi vi
p.83 - 2/18/13 8:36 PM
The competitive spir...
The competitive spirit was reinforced by the Boucicauts' decision to fill all positions in the hierarchy through promotion from the ranks. This policy again served to immerse the work force in the dynamism of the organization by tying rewards to competitiveness, performance, and effor
p.83 - 2/18/13 8:37 PM
nd those who made it...
nd those who made it to the top, passing through positions far more complex and lucrative than any situation an independent shopkeeper might enjoy, would never cease in later years to remind the lowly of their own humble origins.
B
p.84 - 2/18/13 8:37 PM
bon-marche-miller
pension programs that would later be established, the policy of promotion suggested that to enter the Bon Marche was to enter a career, and by 1890, perhaps earlier, the store was receiving applications stating that \"my aim in entering your honorable house is to create for myself a definitive situation/
vi
p.84 - 2/18/13 8:38 PM
bon-marche-miller
Of the nearly 400 persons who entered the store in 1873, 39,_percent were fired in their first five years.
vi vi vi steiger figures
p.85 - 2/18/13 8:41 PM
bon-marche-miller
Trade slackened twice a year, from June to September and from December (aside from toys and fancy goods) to February. Some department stores were notorious for wholesale dismissals during these periods.
vi
p.85 - 2/18/13 8:41 PM
bon-marche-miller
But the most frequent cause for dismissal was a break in the disciplinary or procedural structures of the stor
vi vi
p.87 - 2/18/13 8:45 PM
bon-marche-miller
et meddling with employees' personal habits went still deeper, to a concern for that fundamental tenet of bourgeois culture—respectability—and its adaptation to a new bourgeois milieu. Undoubtedly the Boucicauts' own moral standards were strongly at play here. Each was a practicing Catholic and both Zola and a store cashier noted a reign of virtuousness at the Bon Marche.13
vi vi vi
p.87 - 2/18/13 8:46 PM
bon-marche-miller
Hence the Boucicauts did not hesitate to correlate private character with public behavior (and public image), and among notations in the employee register could equally be found: \"Good employee. Married, separated from his wife and living in marital fashion with another woman (this situation does not permit us to keep him)\"; and \"Left voluntarily. Lived with a woman with a bad past. Had to choose between the woman or the House. Good employee\";
vi
p.88 - 2/18/13 8:48 PM
Finally, the Boucica...
Finally, the Boucicauts did not tend to fire employees of long standing except for direct acts of insubordination. After five years with the firm and especially after the ten-year mark those employees who left generally did so on their own.
p.89 - 2/18/13 9:12 PM
Even the leaders of ...
Even the leaders of the Chambre Syndicale des Employes—the commercial employees' union—were forced to admit that Bon Marche employees were the most favored of their profession, and the league of small shopkeepers that virulently opposed the department stores was always judicious in its personal treatment of the Boucicauts.
p.90 - 2/18/13 9:21 PM
Thus, for example, p...
Thus, for example, paternalism was interjected into the Bon Marche's rationalized work environment because it could complement the recruiting and shaping of a department store work force.
B
p.90 - 2/18/13 9:29 PM
bon-marche-miller
Again the 1869 origins of a broad paternalistic scheme were significant, two citywide strikes of commercial employees occurring in that year and the dedication itself coming only one week before a near total walkout of the work force. These events began with the formation of an employees' Chambre Syndicale in 1868. The following year, claiming over 5,000 adherents, the movement threatened to strike in May if the new stores did not agree to a Sunday closing. The employees got their way, many major stores acquiescing to their demands, those that did not being forced to close for lack of personnel
vi
p.91 - 2/18/13 9:31 PM
or the first time in...
or the first time in significant numbers, the Louvre receiving a shipment of a hundred girls, compliments of the Assistance Publique. Employee plans to open cooperatives never materialized, and eventually the duration of the strike sapped morale.
B
p.91 - 2/18/13 9:32 PM
bon-marche-miller
But, above all, paternalism was interjected into the Bon Marche's work environment because of the tensions and difficulties which that environment produced. This is a subject that requires a deeper look at the Boucicauts' work policies and the conditions they created for the Bon Marche employee.
vi vi
p.91 - 2/18/13 9:32 PM
bon-marche-miller
For example, 43 percent of the group who entered in 1873— the year after the first section of the new building was opened—left before five years, and of these a considerable portion did so in the first yea
vi
p.93 - 2/18/13 9:38 PM
bon-marche-miller
There were conflicts between each other and between competing departments over the quest for commissions, conflicts with office clerks who received bonuses for detecting faulty commission claims, and conflicts between the desire to sell as much and as often as possible and the need to maintain a posture of honesty at all times.
vi vi vi
p.94 - 2/18/13 9:38 PM
Bachelors often con...
Bachelors often congregated in special hotels for clerks. Others who had their own lodgings changed their addresses with great frequency (to avoid paying rents?).23
p.94 - 2/18/13 9:38 PM
Employees were notor...
Employees were notorious habitues of the music halls and cabarets, and their average annual expense on clothing and cleaning might reach 400-500 francs.25
B
p.94 - 2/18/13 9:39 PM
bon-marche-miller
lerks were also expected to be well dressed for work, and all had middle-class pretensions, so that even the frugal employee was obliged to spend a fair percentage of his salary on his attire.
vi
p.94 - 2/18/13 9:39 PM
bon-marche-miller
In the summer the work day extended from 7:30 in the morning until perhaps 9:00 at night, and in the winter from 8:00 in the morning until 8:00 at night (by 1889 the latter hours were maintained year around).
vi
p.95 - 2/18/13 9:40 PM
bon-marche-miller
Health conditions were another matter of concern. Department stores as a group were criticized for their unsanitary conditions, particularly in regard to poor ventilation and the great quantities of dust that accumulated in back rooms and offices. Tuberculosis rates of commercial employees were reputedly among the highest in Paris.27
vi
p.95 - 2/18/13 9:41 PM
bon-marche-miller
t is not surprising, therefore, that the Bon Marche and other stores gradually adopted a policy of not hiring persons over thirty, or that Madame Boucicaut set fifty years as the retirement age when she founded a pension fund. Many employees were well used up by that time.
vi
p.96 - 2/18/13 10:44 PM
Thus it was far more...
Thus it was far more difficult for the individual employee to develop a sense of a personal relationship with the House than it was in smaller firms or especially in the traditionalist small shops. When the employee did break out of the rigid specialization, he did so as a pawn, shifted about for specific needs, as on the occasion of great sales when clerks were at a premium and administrators arranged the wholesale transfer of personnel
B
p.96 - 2/18/13 10:45 PM
bon-marche-miller
on Marche rarely brought the clerk into contact with Boucicaut himself. Orders were passed through a series of hierarchical levels, each of which demanded absolute obedience.
vi
p.97 - 2/18/13 10:46 PM
bon-marche-miller
when a bell rang and he left through a specified door. Hence there was little room for individual initiative, and this regimentation was enforced by a corps of internal police—the inspectors—who were certainly the most detested persons in the store. These men maintained a constant surveillance over the personnel, exercised absolute authority to preserve absolute order, and were notorious for their ruthlessness.29
vi vi
p.97 - 2/18/13 10:47 PM
hey were attributed ...
hey were attributed a demeaning title and were dressed in livery to appeal to the clientele. They also were given numbers which they wore on their uniforms and by which they could be identified.
p.97 - 2/18/13 10:47 PM
the gar^ons.
the gar^ons.
p.98 - 2/18/13 10:49 PM
Zola noted that the ...
Zola noted that the ambition of all clerks was to be accepted either at the Bon Marche or at the Louvre, and that a return to the smaller stores was looked on as a \"downfall.\"31
B
p.98 - 2/18/13 10:50 PM
bon-marche-miller
Department stores were creating not only a new kind of work force but a new kind of middle-class man.
vi
p.99 - 2/18/13 10:51 PM
bon-marche-miller
Department stores, insurance companies, big banks, and other big operations like railroads, however, forced, a change in this current. Middle-class careers continued to expand, but now more and more they were being channeled into permanently salaried positions with an organization and within an impersonal and hierarchical work environment. The men who entered these careers continued to identify with bourgeois culture and to pursue the conventions of a bourgeois life style. But neither bourgeois respectability nor bourgeois status could cloak the reality of an occupational milieu remarkably similar to that of the working class (Zola was in the habit of referring to department stores as \"the great steam engine\").32
vi vi vi vi vi holyoke steigers
p.99 - 2/18/13 10:52 PM
bon-marche-miller
hus, integration of the work force was the critical issue at the Bon Marche not only because the success of the firm depended in the end on the employee's adaptation to his new work environment, but also because it touched on the question of whether white-collar workers could be effectively reconciled to the middle-class world that they would now have to inhabit.
vi vi
p.99 - 2/18/13 10:54 PM
Boucicauts recogniz...
Boucicauts recognized that a new, institutionalized paternalism, reproducing in its
p.100 - 2/18/13 10:54 PM
wn way the family re...
wn way the family relations of the traditional business household, could be adapted to far larger, far different, kinds of enterprises as a means of retaining a community spirit within an impersonal and rationalized work environment
B
p.100 - 2/18/13 10:55 PM
bon-marche-miller
Boucicauts never sought merely to counterpoise bureaucracy with a paternalistic veneer. Rather, they endeavored to blend the one with the other, restructuring and reorienting old household values to correspond to the style and the goals of their rationalized work system. In this way they could correlate their paternalism with their firm's structure and purpose, thus projecting an image of an internal work community to tie the personnel to the House, its leadership, and its dynamic aspirations. Basically wedded to the French household tradition, the Boucicauts were to cope with fundamental changes in their culture, not by abandoning its practices and its tenets, but by redefining these to fit their new needs and new ends.
vi vi vi holyoke
p.100 - 2/18/13 10:56 PM
he first, a providen...
he first, a provident fund, was founded in 1876 and was financed by setting aside a certain sum each year, to be determined by the Boucicauts, from the annual net profits. All employees below the rank of department head or inspector, and who had been with the firm for at least five years, were eligible to participate. An account was opened in the employee's name, and each year a share of the general allocation was deposited in it
B
p.101 - 2/18/13 10:57 PM
bon-marche-miller
Thus the money was left to accrue over the years with an annual four percent interest added to it. If the employee quit or was fired, his amount was redistributed into the general fund, unless the Boucicauts chose to provide him with part of his balance.33 However, women who left the store to marry received their balance in full on the day of their wedding (the Boucicauts, in their bougeois fashion, were never ones to feel fully comfortable with the prospect of cultivating careers for single middle-class women).
vi
p.102 - 2/18/13 10:59 PM
In their most obviou...
In their most obvious way the two plans were designed to foster stability among the personnel.
p.102 - 2/18/13 11:00 PM
Moreover, of the 4,4...
Moreover, of the 4,417 persons who passed the five-year mark before 1900, approximately 50 percent were to remain with the firm for twenty years or longer.35
B
p.103 - 2/18/13 11:00 PM
bon-marche-miller
Pensions and provident accounts also meant control. Once the employee accepted the prospect of making his career with the firm in exchange for retirement benefits in the end, he inherently was led to accept as well the work and authority relationships at the Bon Marche.
vi vi vi
p.103 - 2/18/13 11:02 PM
bon-marche-miller
Madame Boucicaut, wishing to continue the work her husband began, has undertaken a heavy task [i.e., the Bon Marche]. In order to deal successfully with this task she needs and counts on your complete devotion; in exchange she shall prove to you that her solicitude will not be lacking. . . .\"
vi vi
p.105 - 2/18/13 11:05 PM
bon-marche-miller
Profit-sharing of this sort could work in almost any establishment of some size. But its advantages to employers were especially appropriate in those firms where a bureaucratic work environment required a common sentiment of cooperation for the system to run efficiently,
vi
p.106 - 2/18/13 11:08 PM
So in its most compl...
So in its most complete form the provident fund served the Boucicauts' purposes by first recreating a house community spirit and then equating this with the structure and objectives of a modern department store. Having established the means through which a paternalistic gesture could lead employees to identify their interests with those of their patron, the Boucicauts could propose to their personnel that they view themselves as part of a greater Bon Marche household, where all worked together for the success of the firm and, in the end, the glory of each other.
B
p.106 - 2/18/13 11:08 PM
bon-marche-miller
ot a discordant note could be heard. M. Boucicaut very much sensed that he had won every heart and every will and it was certainly one of the greatest joys of his life to see the enthusiasm that greeted him when he cried out: 'It is my wish that every employee be a pillar of my House.'
vi vi
p.107 - 2/18/13 11:10 PM
bon-marche-miller
ll employees, meanwhile, dined at the store twice daily. Like the living quarters, facilities for eating entered into the Boucicauts' plans for their new building, and above the sales galleries they constructed a vast kitchen and four dining rooms, the largest of which could accommodate 800 persons at a single setting.
vi
p.107 - 2/18/13 11:10 PM
The fourth dining ro...
The fourth dining room was intended for gargons, coachmen, stablehands, and other employees who performed manual labor
B
p.107 - 2/18/13 11:10 PM
bon-marche-miller
There were also programs for the education and leisure of the employees. In 1872 the Boucicauts began evening courses in English and German. The lessons were free, open to all employees, and given in the building after work by instructors especially hired for this purpose. The German class drew few students and was later dropped. But English lessons were not unpopular and each year the Boucicauts sent the best students to London for six months' additional study at House expense.
vi vi
p.108 - 2/18/13 11:11 PM
The house provided f...
The house provided free instruments on loan and offered a 25 percent discount and easy terms for employees who wished to buy their own. Fencing lessons began in 1875. As usual, these courses were held in the building, in the evening after work, and under the direction of special professors, one of whom at least was permanently attached to the firm to lead the choral and orchestral groups
B
p.108 - 2/18/13 11:12 PM
bon-marche-miller
First, in the 1870s, the Boucicauts hired a doctor to give free consultations during mornings at the store, and later they set up a nearby infirmary in the rue de la Chaise
vi vi
p.108 - 2/18/13 11:12 PM
bon-marche-miller
6 percent interest on accounts that were opened with the House. The response was far from negligible. By 1886, 927 employees had entrusted over 3,200,000 francs to the firm.
p.108 - 2/18/13 11:13 PM
bon-marche-miller
Boucicauts once more found a felicitous interplay between their values and their needs. Catholicism and bourgeois respectability, filtered through their sentiments of responsibility and good will, could lead the Boucicauts to sponsor music and fencing lessons and even a lecture series to lure their employees out of the cabarets and music halls that young, single clerks were so prone to frequent
vi
p.109 - 2/18/13 11:15 PM
bon-marche-miller
Boucicauts' need to form a quality work force that would bring an air of gentility to a mass sales environment. So, more than indulging a personal bias, the Boucicauts again crossed into their employees' private lives—this time to cultivate gentlemanly behavior as well as to enforce it—because they saw in this a way to shape a new kind of salesclerk.48
vi vi vi vi
p.109 - 2/18/13 11:17 PM
. The music classes ...
. The music classes very quickly were turned into musical societies—undoubtedly their original destination—that performed in municipal competitions throughout France, in summer concerts in the square outside the store, and in grand concerts that were held twice a year inside the building itself. In a later chapter we shall see how well these performances suited the public relations of the firm. The functional side to the Boucicauts' kitchens—their ability to feed a work force of thousands and to do so in three sequential shifts so that no more than a third of the sales force was ever off the floor at one time—should not be ignored. And it is scarcely difficult to understand why Boucicaut chose to initiate language lessons at the store (or why he did not choose to provide instruction in Latin and Greek).
B
p.110 - 2/18/13 11:18 PM
bon-marche-miller
More important, paternalism that encouraged thrift, that sought to broaden the employees' minds, to refine their sensibilities, and to protect their virtue fell directly in line with the great dream of all nineteenth-century employers to check the development of working-class consciousness by turning their workers into bourgeois themselves (what, after all, could be more properly bourgeois than a piano in the living room?).
vi
p.110 - 2/18/13 11:20 PM
bon-marche-miller
For bourgeois culture in the late nineteenth century, one of the great dilemmas was how to continue to expand its ranks without simply creating a new enemy in its midst. This is why so many white-collar employers sought to shore up the traditional bourgeois orientations by insisting on dress codes for their employees (at the Bon Marche, men were not only expected to be properly attired, but to wear top hats upon their arrival and departure).
vi vi
p.111 - 2/18/13 11:21 PM
bon-marche-miller
The distinction was an important one, for it was strictly maintained linguistically and it suggested a separate class identity that meshed with a difference in function, even though both groups were, in reality, engaged in machine-like or semi-skilled work
vi
p.111 - 2/18/13 11:21 PM
bon-marche-miller
that existed within the House—and French society—between \"employees\" and \"workers.\" The former term applied only to those persons who earned a fixed salary,
vi
p.111 - 2/18/13 11:21 PM
bon-marche-miller
o be sure, the role of employees like gargons was somewhat vague here. But too much confusion between them and the clerks was avoided through such mechanisms as separate titles and separate dining rooms.
vi
p.112 - 2/18/13 11:23 PM
bon-marche-miller
the Boucicauts essentially could repeat the same kind of message they had proffered with the provident fund: that the lives of the employees and the life of the House were one and the same. Thus the Boucicauts evolved a highly elaborate paternalism to extend and to consolidate their system of work and to provide an associational frame for integrating the employee into the firm. They established programs to respond to the functional needs confronting the formation of a department store work force and they erected mechanisms of control that could facilitate discipline and counteract a recurrence of the strike of 1869.
vi vi
p.112 - 2/18/13 11:25 PM
bon-marche-miller
s a member of this household or community he too was part of making the Bon Marche what it was, and that his ultimate identity and role with the firm was in the framework of contributing in common to the growth and prosperity of the new commercial emporium. This would always be the message behind the grand famille image,
vi
p.113 - 2/18/13 11:26 PM
In the mid-nineteen...
In the mid-nineteenth century middle and top management was still a rare phenomenon. Only railroads and a few industries were big enough to create something in the way of a managerial structure.
B
p.113 - 2/18/13 11:27 PM
bon-marche-miller
how to insure that they would live by and for the goals of the organization—in short, how to build the sort of organization man who a century later would be turned into a stereotype—were questions that the Boucicauts were obliged to resolve. Here again they sought the answers in a synthesis of rationalized work conditions, on the one hand, traditional household relationships, on the other.
vi
p.114 - 2/18/13 11:28 PM
Department heads re...
Department heads received a percentage on the yearly sales increase of their departments, and thus might earn, overall, from 12,000 to perhaps 25,000 francs annually. Averages for seconds, who also received a percentage, could run from 9,000 to 12,000 francs.
p.115 - 2/18/13 11:32 PM
It is unfortunate th...
It is unfortunate that we do not know why the elevator worked so well for some, less well for others. Patronage undoubtedly was something of a factor in a store where so many employees entered on the reference of a member of the hierarchy, or were relatives besides.
p.116 - 2/18/13 11:33 PM
Indeed it is not dif...
Indeed it is not difficult to imagine the world of clans and proteges and bureaucratic power plays that must have lain behind so much of the Bon Marche's history. Anyone who has spent some part of his life within an organization knows the story well.
B
p.116 - 2/18/13 11:35 PM
bon-marche-miller
erformance and competitiveness. This, after all, was one of the principal advantages that such a recruitment system could bring to the Boucicauts; for by creating increasingly lucrative and powerful positions along a hierarchical ladder, and by making these positions available to the most successful at the immediate rung below, the Boucicauts could expect to intensify the ambitions, drive, and output of those persons they entrusted with authority. Continued access to the highest ranks, where power and profits were greatest, was guaranteed through a policy that required interesses to retire at the age of fifty.
vi vi
p.117 - 2/18/13 11:36 PM
bon-marche-miller
most ranking employees were involved in the Boucicauts' paternalism in one way or another. This was particularly so of the administrators who as a group were trustees of the funds. Individual interesses were also in charge of programs such as housing arrangements or the music and fencing lessons, while department heads were responsible for the quality of the food service.
vi
p.117 - 2/18/13 11:38 PM
ociete en commandite...
ociete en commandite that Madame Boucicaut formed in 1880. By the statutes of this societe, ownership of the store was divided into 400 shares of 50,000 francs each. Madame Boucicaut retained 250 shares and distributed the remainder to 95 employees and 1
p.118 - 2/18/13 11:38 PM
culptor, a friend of...
culptor, a friend of the family.59 The largest shareholder among the employees was Gouin, Madame Boucicaut's relative and president of the council, who purchased 10 shares. Administrators each bought 4 shares, vvith the exception of one who bought only 2. Thirty-four department and office heads bought either 1 or 2 shares apiece, 7 inspectors and 17 seconds generally 1 share apiece, about 9 other members of the hierarchy from 1 to 2 shares apiece, and approximately 18 regular employees 1 share apiece.60
p.120 - 2/18/13 11:50 PM
To an aging woman, w...
To an aging woman, without an heir, whose adult life had been caught up in the building of the greatest store that Paris had ever seen, a store that existed as an extension of the Boucicaut household, and a store whose success, moreover, was largely predicated on these household relationships, this solution was clearly the only means of preserving beyond her death the Bon Marche as she and her husband had known it and wished it to be.
B
p.120 - 2/18/13 11:51 PM
bon-marche-miller
Like the paternal relations at the base, it suggested a restructuring of the old pattern of succession in the small shops where the loyal assistant might marry the patron's daughter and become heir to the boutique. Now the heirs were assistants who had placed their hopes and savings with the store and its dynamic intentions
vi vi
p.121 - 2/18/13 11:52 PM
bon-marche-miller
lead their employees to see their relationship with the Bon Marche as one of participation in an organizational and active commercial household.
vi vi
p.121 - 2/19/13 12:02 AM
bon-marche-miller
Similarly they often referred to the personnel in household terms— \"your people\" Karcher wrote on one occasion and \"the Bon Marche family\" on several others. Yet Karcher's letters were also replete with the imagery of an active and successful department store, and the world they depicted was one of departments and bureaus, a myriad of different employees, and sales figures in the millions. They revealed a loyalty not only to Madame Boucicaut but to the Bon Marche and what it represented,
vi
p.122 - 2/19/13 12:02 AM
bon-marche-miller
It makes me proud to march in the ranks of a peaceful army that knows how to reap such victories.\"
vi vi
p.122 - 2/19/13 12:04 AM
bon-marche-miller
RITUALIZATION
vi vi
p.123 - 2/19/13 12:05 AM
bon-marche-miller
hus rituals, Durkheim went on to note, were the most forceful affirmation of those bonds that hold collectivities together.67 At the Bon Marche, where an inner world ambiance was cultivated through store gatherings, celebrations, and ceremonies, ritualization served much the same purpose.
vi vi
p.123 - 2/19/13 12:06 AM
House ceremonies, li...
House ceremonies, like rationalization, could take many forms.
B
p.123 - 2/19/13 12:06 AM
bon-marche-miller
There were periodical summer picnics such as the 1886 outing to Madame Boucicaut's suburban estate at Fontenay-aux-Roses.
vi
p.123 - 2/19/13 12:06 AM
bon-marche-miller
hus magical scenes of a Disneyesque Bon Marche, Dumas-like scenes of moonlight and sword play covered the programs of in-House concerts or those of the Assauts d'Escrime that the store held annually.
vi
p.124 - 2/19/13 12:07 AM
bon-marche-miller
gatherings and festivities and the community life they projected were rarely separated from a context of dynamism or control.
vi
p.124 - 2/19/13 12:09 AM
He recalls the provi...
He recalls the provident fund founded for them and then, to the applause of everyone, he announces the new foundation whose statutes he will read. \"The reading proceeds amidst a profound silence. Everyone followed line by line the text read by M. Weber, so well that a
p.124 - 2/19/13 12:09 AM
The pension fund, to...
The pension fund, too, began with an evening gathering of the personnel.
p.125 - 2/19/13 12:10 AM
he end of each page ...
he end of each page one could hear a great, brief rustling: three thousand sheets turning simultaneously. . .
B
p.125 - 2/19/13 12:10 AM
bon-marche-miller
Mme. Boucicaut gives you a million; yet she promised you nothing. Imitate her example and in turn, without promising her anything, give her what is in your power, your devotion and concern that you owe to the interests of this great Bon Marche family—this is at least the sense of his speech if not the precise text/'6
vi
p.128 - 2/19/13 12:16 AM
charitable deeds and...
charitable deeds and maternal acts, for she left practically all her fortune to benevolent institutions or her employees. A document of some thirty-seven pages, her will provided for sizeable donations to associations for artists, teachers, and destitute journalists, Catholic programs for young workers, and religious groups of all denominations.
p.128 - 2/19/13 12:17 AM
ut above all, and in...
ut above all, and in keeping with the traditions of the House, her thoughts turned to her personnel, to \"those who are my devoted collaborators, whatever rank they may occupy in this great House which my husband and I have, with them, brought to this present level of esteem and prosperity.\" To these men and women she bequeathed more than 13,000,000 francs, to be distributed in proportion to time of service and with distinctions between employees and ouvriers. In addition, individual grants to numerous employees, past and present, figured prominently among gifts to family and friends. So as with most households, it was especially in death that the idea of one big family filled the air.75
B
p.129 - 2/19/13 12:18 AM
bon-marche-miller
The Boucicauts preserved and cultivated a sense of fiefdom. The store was their creation, their status, their lives, never merely a financial end in itself.
vi
p.129 - 2/19/13 12:19 AM
Madame Boucicaut tur...
Madame Boucicaut turned the Bon Marche into a societe en commandite, this was to assure that the firm would remain a family enterprise of sorts following her death.
B
p.129 - 2/19/13 12:20 AM
bon-marche-miller
restructuring of traditions and values to fit new conditions. Once we recognize that paternalism was also a response to the Boucicauts' own needs to acclimate to their new business roles, it becomes clear that the French family firm was a far more flexible instrument than the conclusions of David Landes and others would tend to allow.
vi
p.130 - 2/19/13 12:22 AM
if they preferred t...
if they preferred to carve for themselves a niche beyond their daily routine of profits and losses, if their goal was to retain a sense of their firm as a personal expression of themselves, then their paternalism enabled them to play out these roles.
p.130 - 2/19/13 12:22 AM
dynamic French busin...
dynamic French business enterprise and bask in the renown that this endeavor could bring, then their paternalism, as it was structured, permitted them to play out these roles as well.
B
p.130 - 2/19/13 12:22 AM
bon-marche-miller
Increasingly the Bon Marche was referred to as an oeuvre
vi
p.130 - 2/19/13 12:22 AM
bon-marche-miller
ictorial images, poetical allusions to old and new empires, celebrations and rituals, attributed an exceptional status to the House. There was the sensation that the Bon Marche was something profound, something extraordinary, a great adventure upon which all its members had embarked. Most of all, there was thegrandc fartiille image, the central theme in the creation of a new idea of the firm, and a concept that permitted the Boucicauts to anchor themselves in the traditional value system, while they again redefined these values for their own, and new, purposes
vi
p.131 - 2/19/13 12:33 AM
But the very samenes...
But the very sameness of these years was in itself significant, pointing to the persistence of household relationships in a period of increasing managerial control
p.131 - 2/19/13 12:33 AM
HE TWO AND A HALF DE...
HE TWO AND A HALF DECADES following Madame Boucicaut's death witnessed little change
p.132 - 2/19/13 12:35 AM
ach of these bodies ...
ach of these bodies was compact and closed. Only those persons who held four shares or more—that is those persons who had invested at least 200,000 francs in the societe—had the right to attend either assembly.
p.132 - 2/19/13 12:36 AM
Thus for most of the...
Thus for most of the prewar period these assemblies were elite affairs
p.133 - 2/19/13 12:37 AM
eal power, however, ...
eal power, however, resided not with the assemblies but with a third new governing body—the gerance—whose three directors presided over the council of administrators (interesses in charge of individual store sectors) and supervised the day-to-day affairs of the House.
p.133 - 2/19/13 12:40 AM
efore 1893, inter es...
efore 1893, inter esses continued to play a strong leadership role at their meetings, often initiating discussions, while all decisions were made in the name of the council. After 1893 few discussions were initiated by the administrators. References to the council as a body were now generally limited to its consultation on matters presented by the directors, and all decisions were authorized either anonymously or by \"MM. les Gerants.\" Power relationships between the directors and the assemblies were far more complex,
p.134 - 2/19/13 12:42 AM
n turn, then, the di...
n turn, then, the directors came to the assemblies with immense management authority
p.136 - 2/19/13 12:46 AM
As individuals, the ...
As individuals, the directors appear to have led successful but uncolorful lives. The heroic years of the Bon Marche died with the Boucicauts, and the era of the directors is tinged with that greyness one has come to expect of prosperous bureaucratic regimes. These were not men to inspire passionate or dramatic (and certainly not humorous) biographies, and there is little likelihood that they will ever abandon their semi-anonymous corner of posterity. Most were simply career bureaucrats, organization men who made it to the top, men concerned with sales and balance sheet figures, with keeping a steady course, and with running their operations as efficiently as possible. In this respect they fit our image of the new managers who were beginning to dominate the business scene, our image of the passing of the business setting from an entrepreneurial to a managerial stage.
p.136 - 2/19/13 12:48 AM
indeed it is the ele...
indeed it is the element of continuity as much as the element of change that needs to be stressed. And nowhere is this clearer than in their continuation of the Boucicaut synthesis that wed the traditional world of household to the emerging world of bureaucracy.
p.138 - 2/19/13 12:51 AM
Yet the problem of l...
Yet the problem of liquidation was not so easily resolved. Shares that had sold at 50,000 francs in 1880 increased enormously in value, selling for 360,000 francs in 1893 and for a staggering 600,000 francs by 1898.10 But as long as severe limitations on share transfers existed, it was difficult to convert one's paper fortune into hard currency
p.138 - 2/19/13 1:11 AM
Still, if standards ...
Still, if standards for share transfer were considerably relaxed, the assemblies steadfastly refused to authorize sales to outsiders. Not until the very end of the prewar period would open sales come about. Thus, even after the passing of the Boucicauts, the Bon Marche remained a closed family firm of sorts,
p.139 - 2/19/13 1:12 AM
Perhaps marriage pat...
Perhaps marriage patterns of this sort were simply accidental. More likely, however, they followed from the tendency of directors and administrators to introduce the world of the Bon Marche into their family lives and to raise their children with a sentiment of personal attachment to the firm and its traditions.
B
p.139 - 2/19/13 1:13 AM
bon-marche-miller
In the Mougel family a copy of Madame Boucicaut's will was kept for all to read.12 Indeed one may speak of a cult of the Bon Marche that was handed down from generation to generation, so that even today the greatgrandson of Jules Plassard displays the pictures of Aristide and Marguerite Boucicaut in his salon, while the descendants of still other important figures retain a strong interest in the current and past affairs of the House
vi
p.140 - 2/19/13 1:24 AM
Authority itself bec...
Authority itself became dependent on a certification of historical descent, respect for Boucicaut traditions, and commercial prowess that added to the glory of the House.
p.142 - 2/19/13 1:26 AM
Qualities of leaders...
Qualities of leadership were defined in much the same way. Directors and administrators were presumed to be a commercial elite, and initiations into the council might require a pledge \"to work for the grandeur and the success of the House.\"
p.142 - 2/19/13 1:26 AM
Infidelity was in fa...
Infidelity was in fact the greatest of sins in the language of the House,18 and praise for one's devotion was rarely missing from tributes to individual directors.
p.144 - 2/19/13 1:30 AM
Directors were the ...
Directors were the finest example of the kind of organization men whom the Boucicauts had wished to form. In the choices they made on their own identity and on that of the firm they illustrate, as had the Boucicauts, how closely knit together managerial and family values could be.
p.145 - 2/19/13 1:31 AM
But for all, unquest...
But for all, unquestionably, there was the realization that paternalism had been crucial to the success of the store, and that leadership roles would have to be set in this mold if the prosperity of the firm was to be maintained.
p.145 - 2/19/13 1:32 AM
As long as shares re...
As long as shares remained in the possession of employees or former employees or \"their representatives,\" the well-being of the House and its personnel could be assured. Outsiders could not be expected to show the same generosity as those men schooled in the Boucicaut traditions, and, as Fillot cautioned in his most telling remark, in a House where \"prosperity is intimately tied to the interest of our employees, any blow to their privileges could have repercussions whose seriousness would be difficult to measure.\"24
p.145 - 2/19/13 1:34 AM
There was an intense...
There was an intense quality to the paternalistic image running through the speeches of these years, betraying in the directors a persistent and thinly veiled fear that a break in the paternalistic structure might bring the whole magnificent venture tumbling
B
p.146 - 2/19/13 1:35 AM
bon-marche-miller
Directors did not alter the conditions of work significantly, but they did add to their tensions with such innovations as the widespread use of auxiliary employees.
vi
p.146 - 2/19/13 1:36 AM
ery likely the use o...
ery likely the use of auxiliaries followed from increased taxes on department stores that were a consequence of the anti-department store movement
B
p.147 - 2/19/13 1:37 AM
bon-marche-miller
A league of small shopkeepers, organized in 1888, initiated a scathing attack on department store work as the embodiment of the decline in lower-middle-class careers.27
vi
p.148 - 2/19/13 1:40 AM
In 1900 the \"loi de...
In 1900 the \"loi des sieges\" (the seat law) gave women clerks the right to sit down when not waiting on customers. In 1903 the government extended laws on hygiene and safety requirements to commercial establishments. In 1906 a six-day work week became law. In 1907 commercial employees won the right to participate in the conseils des prud'hommes. Meanwhile, demands for shorter hours and for the right of employees to dine with their families led many stores to shorten their business hours. In 1901 the Bon Marche began closing its doors at seven in the evening.33
p.149 - 2/19/13 1:42 AM
The incident began a...
The incident began among the gar^ons, then spread to the rest of the personnel, who held meetings to express their grievances. The immediate cause of the affair seems to have been a heavy demand on overtime as the store strained to prepare for the coming world's fair and for a partial move into a new annex.
p.169 - 2/19/13 2:27 AM
nstitutionalized pat...
nstitutionalized paternalism was the major concern
p.171 - 2/19/13 9:18 AM
The House made simil...
The House made similar arrangements, including a change in dinner hours, to accommodate all those who wished to attend the funeral of Fillot's wife in 1900.46 Employees were also expected to share in the responsibility of keeping up the Boucicauts' grave
B
p.172 - 2/19/13 9:20 AM
bon-marche-miller
and as the largest commercial employer in Paris the Bon Marche remained remarkably free of the problems that other stores encountered. Not only were there no strikes, but there is no evidence that a Chambre Syndicale section was ever set up at the Bon Marche as it was at the Printemps, the Samaritaine, and elsewhere.50
vi
p.174 - 2/19/13 9:25 AM
bon-marche-millervi
The letter ended with the preposterous but nevertheless evocative statement that \"I will do everything vvithin my weak means to throw back the invader for the honor of France and the Grands Magasins du Bon Marche.\"
p.174 - 2/19/13 9:26 AM
The war stirred anot...
The war stirred another employee, who had entered in 1900, to write one of his managers, asking him to convey to the directors \"the very sincere wishes I have for them personally ^nd for our beloved Bon Marche; please thank them too for the good deeds that they have lavished on their mobilized employees since the beginning of the war and inform them of ^y great gratitude.\"
p.175 - 2/19/13 9:27 AM
She added that durin...
She added that during his final days all her husband's thoughts and words had been \"of the Bon Marche, so that one might say that he died not in his home but in the House that he loved so much and that he was so loath to leave.\"
p.175 - 2/19/13 9:27 AM
erhaps nothing captu...
erhaps nothing captures better those things that I have tried to express in these two chapters than an event which occurred in the spring of 1907.
p.176 - 2/19/13 9:28 AM
led by their junior ...
led by their junior directors and administrators who had planned and edited the book, were commemorating the event in the form of a superbly laid-out volume that contained the photographs and signatures of the more than seven thousand men and women under Fillot's direction.5
B
p.177 - 2/19/13 9:32 AM
bon-marche-miller
nd, like the \"familial banquets\" upon which it followed, the livre d'or was clearly conceived by them to confirm, this time from base level up, wha
vi
p.178 - 2/19/13 9:33 AM
bon-marche-miller
a carefully cultivated store ideology had long been asserting: that the Bon Marche was the sum of the common and active participation of all its members in an extraordinary and momentous commercial adventure.
vi
p.178 - 2/19/13 9:33 AM
bon-marche-miller
a consummate symbol of the new commercial community, dynamic and bureaucratic in nature, that they and their predecessors had ceaselessly sought to create. At bottom the livre d'or was a compendium not only of Bon Marche history, but of the reconciliation between traditional bourgeois values and the coming of the modern business firm.
vi vi
p.180 - 2/19/13 9:34 AM
bon-marche-miller
AMONG THOSE PHRASES SO readily associated with the new department stores, and so loosely turned to as though their very mention was sufficient to raise the tone of the discussion to a plane of significance, was the \"democratization of luxury.\" The term itself is a superficial one, and in some ways \"^misleading. Although mass retailing gave way to stores expressly directed at a lower-class clientele, the principal firms like the Bon Marche remained middle-class institutions.
vi
p.180 - 2/19/13 9:35 AM
bon-marche-miller
It stood for a market that was now prepared to turn practically any retail article into a mass-consumer good. And thus, at a more fundamental level, it stood for the realization that bourgeois culture was coming more and more to mean a consumer culture, that the two were, in fact, becoming interchangeable. The department store alone did not lead to the appearance of a consumer society, but it did stand at the center of this phenomenon. As an economic mechanism it made that society possible, and as an institution with a large provincial trade it made the culture of consumption a national one.
vi
p.182 - 2/19/13 9:38 AM
bon-marche-miller
Selling consumption was a matter of seduction and showmanship, and in these Boucicaut excelled, enveloping his marketplace in an aura of fascination that turned buying into a special and irresistible occasion. Dazzling and sensuous, the Bon Marche became a permanent fair, an institution, a fantasy world, a spectacle of extraordinary proportions, so that going to the store became an event and an adventure.
vi
p.182 - 2/19/13 9:40 AM
bon-marche-miller
This was particularly true of the main gateway on the rue de Sevres. Monumental and ornate, it rose the entire height of the building and was seated under a cupola, crowned with a pediment, conceived as an archway for the first two stories, and decorated with caryatids and reclining statues of the gods. The impression was that of entering a theatre, or perhaps even a temple
vi
p.182 - 2/19/13 9:40 AM
bon-marche-miller
along the upper floors ran balconies from which one could view, as a spectator, the crowds and activity below.
vi
p.183 - 2/19/13 9:41 AM
bon-marche-miller
Nearby was a buffet, a room whose fine furnishings, curtains, and palm leaves made it not unlike the lounge of a theatre.3 Part opera, part theatre, part museum, Boucicaut's eclectic -'^extravaganza did not disappoint those who came for ashow.
vi
p.183 - 2/19/13 9:42 AM
bon-marche-miller
nside, the spectacle of flowing crowds intensified, orchestrated by barred passages, by cheap, tempting goods on the first floor that brought still another crush to the store's most observable arena, and by a false disorder that forced shoppers to travel the breadth of the House.4
vi
p.183 - 2/19/13 9:43 AM
bon-marche-miller
Everywhere merchandise formed a decorative motif conveying an exceptional quality to the goods themselves. Silks cascaded from the walls of the silk gallery, ribbons were strung above the hall of ribbons, umbrellas were draped full blown in a parade of hues and designs. Oriental rugs, rich and textural, hung from balconies for the spectators below.
vi
p.184 - 2/19/13 9:45 AM
bon-marche-miller
So thg^store, monumental, theatrical, fantastical, became an attraction in its own right to entice the public to visit the displays and^o~mak^aLJ:heir trip an extraordinary experience.
vi
p.184 - 2/19/13 9:46 AM
The presentation of ...
The presentation of concerts as regularly scheduled public events was itself of recent date, developing rapidly along.'ffiesORes only in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. But their growing proliferation under middle-class sponsorship for predominantly middle-class audiences pointed to the extent to which an enterprising bourgeoisie, cognizant of a growing bourgeois demand
p.185 - 2/19/13 9:47 AM
Still, the step from...
Still, the step from I promoting entertainment events as a consumer event in ! themselves to exploiting them for substantially wider commercial purposes was a considerable one, and it is here that Boucicaut's productions take on significance, standing as it were on the threshold of modern marketing techniques.8
p.185 - 2/19/13 9:48 AM
Now anything partaki...
Now anything partaking of middle-class identities and middle-class tastes, or even simply of public fads, could become a means to a totally unintended and disassociated end: the promotion of a consumer society
p.185 - 2/19/13 9:49 AM
And if formal choral...
And if formal choral societies, had equally become a widespread phenomenon over the past forty years, to be found largely among artisans and clerks but encouraged by middle-class audiences who warmed to this exhibition of solidarity with their own image of themselves (a side that did not escape the Boucicauts), then these societies too could be turned to the mass marketer's account, selling far more than good cheer and bad music.
p.185 - 2/19/13 9:49 AM
see William Weber, M...
see William Weber, Music and the Middle Class (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1975).
p.186 - 2/19/13 9:51 AM
Winter concerts—far ...
Winter concerts—far more lavish in their conception, attended by invitation only, and apparently something of a society event—10 played to as many as 7,000 persons (of whom several thousand were employees).
B
p.186 - 2/19/13 9:52 AM
bon-marche-miller
At the same time the House was careful to invite the heads of railway stations and officials well-placed in the post office, all of whom could be of considerable importance to a store with such a large mailorder trade
vi vi
p.187 - 2/19/13 9:55 AM
bon-marche-miller
The lights, flowers, and splendors heaped beneath the eyes of the guests, the eminent artists one has applauded, all in the end shimmer, sound, and run together in the memory of someone the least distracted, and one remains dazzled, dazed for some time while trying to recover the necessary stability to arrive at some sort of judgment. \"Let us speak first of the hall. In less than an hour the store, glutted with merchandise, abandoned to a world of gnomes or genies, is rapidly transformed, as in a fairyland, into a bewitching palace, dazzling with its lights, filled with flowers and exotic bushes whose effect is splendid. Everywhere carpets and silk tapestries from the Orient are flung and hung in abundance, forming charming salons, hallways, and retreats
vi
p.188 - 2/19/13 9:55 AM
bon-marche-miller
Immense departments, earlier filled with customers, soon will serve as an altar to the cult of music. .. .\"n It wasr then, on concert evenings that image and reality at last btended into one. Merchandise counters gave way to a stage, sfclesclerks transformed themselves into performers, the building became a deluxe concert hall. So ready to portray his emporium as a theatre, or the opera, or a land of enchantment, Boucicaut had found the supreme effect. Spectacle and entertainment, on the one hand, the world of consumption, on the other, were now truly indistinguishable.
vi
p.188 - 2/19/13 9:57 AM
bon-marche-miller
he store was equally fond of publishing descriptions of itself and its wonders. At first the firm relied upon the national press, which has never been known for its high standard of ethics. Articles on the Bon Marche, most likely prepared in the offices of the same, appeared in LfIllustration and Le Monde Illustre throughout the 1870s and early 1880s.14
vi
p.188 - 2/19/13 9:58 AM
bon-marche-miller
Suspicions about the origins of these articles are raised by the fact that: (1) articles in both journals were often the same; (2) the articles frequently were filled with blatant advertising content; (3) handwritten copies of the articles exist in the Bon Marche Archives. For a further discussion of collusion between the Bon Marche and the press, see Chapter VI.
vi
p.189 - 2/19/13 10:18 AM
One article, recount...
One article, recounting a sale.of Oriental rugs and porcelain, exclaimed that \"all Artistic PaBis gathered at the Bon Marche that day, and the store offered the sight of a vast Oriental museum . . . transporting the imagination to the sunny land of a thousand and one nights.^
B
p.189 - 2/19/13 10:18 AM
bon-marche-miller
Basements were a \"veritable labyrinth.\" Giant electrical machines producing light for thousands of lamps were described in meticulous detail. Statistics abounded on the hundreds of employees in various services or on the thousands of letters the store received daily
vi
p.190 - 2/19/13 10:20 AM
A children's game fr...
A children's game frximJ±LeJtum,of_the century consisted of a maze of the city, wiiadmgjix)irv-the Bon Marche to the Arc de Triomphe
B
p.190 - 2/19/13 10:21 AM
bon-marche-miller
he role of illustrated cards here was especially interesting. At least as far back as the sixteenth century, peddlers had passed from village to village selling cheap images of royal personnages, famous villains, customs, costumes, and a multitude of other subjects. In particular they sold images of religious scenes, pictures of saints to hang on one's wall or to carry on one's person.16 These were the distractions of an earlier time, the medium for transporting oneself beyond the realm of the ordinary, the paraphernalia of a child's magical world.
vi
p.191 - 2/19/13 10:22 AM
bon-marche-miller
o present these now with pictures of the Bon Marche on the back, or as a series of scenes of sights ofParisJ.hat included a view of the Left Bank emporium, or simply to change the subject to scenes of middle-class life in which the Bon Marche might figure prominently (a theme we shall return to shortly) jvas to create a whole new enchanted world of association.
vi
p.191 - 2/19/13 10:24 AM
Although the Bon Ma...
Although the Bon Marche continued to distribute cards with traditional themes, religious subjects were no longer among these. The Boucicauts were not politically naive. But then this too was reflective of the transfer of magic to secular, indeed commercial, concerns
B
p.192 - 2/19/13 10:25 AM
bon-marche-miller
Above all, the spectre of a modern wonder was to be found in the ubiquitous pictures of the building. Everywhere the Bon Marche was to be seen—on the backs of cards and catalogues, the frontispiece of agendas, the headings of store stationery, store order forms, and store invoices—rising from the ground as the most colossal and fabulous of palaces, wings stretched nearly to the horizon, crowds crushing along its window displays, carriages, omnibuses, and delivery wagons, creating a flurry of activity on the streets before it.
vi
p.192 - 2/19/13 10:26 AM
bon-marche-miller
Zola noted that: \"... tends (0 replace the church. It marches to the religion of the cash di?sk^p.f beauty, of coquetery, and fashion. [Women] go there to pass the hours as they used to go to church: an occupation, a place of enthusiasm where they struggle between their passion for clothes and the thrift of their husbands; in the end all the drama of life with the hereafter of beauty.\"
vi vi vi vi
p.192 - 2/19/13 10:27 AM
bon-marche-miller
\"It was the cathedral of modern commerce, solid and light, made for a people of clients.\" Zola, Au kmheur. p. 27
vi
p.193 - 2/19/13 10:27 AM
bon-marche-miller
For increasingly large numbers of women! a new, irresistible fjculf of consumption had been createct
vi
p.193 - 2/19/13 10:28 AM
A working-class clie...
A working-class clientele undoubtedly existed, but its numbers were limited by the cash-only policy.
B
p.193 - 2/19/13 10:30 AM
bon-marche-miller
here was, in fact, something distinctively respectable about the Bon Marche that could make it forbidding to those who lacked middleclass pretensions, let alone middle-class means. Tb£_store drew its tone from the quarter that enveloped itA one that was known for its affluence, its Catholic orders,, and its bienpensant ways. As a specialty the Bon Marche catered to the religious trade,24 an accent on propriety characteristic of the store's custom as a whole.
vi vi
p.193 - 2/19/13 10:31 AM
bon-marche-miller
ays maintained stocks of religious articles and, later, religious uniforms. Catholics themselves, the Boucicauts during the early years of the store relied on nuns of the quarter to aid them in their paternalism.
vi
p.194 - 2/19/13 10:33 AM
In another note, Zo...
In another note, Zola refers to the attraction of the petit bourgeoisie to the new stor
B
p.194 - 2/19/13 10:34 AM
bon-marche-miller
Finally, pictures in catalogues and agendas leave no doubt that this was a store selling, for the most part, to a bourgeois clientele. In fact not until the end of the prewar period did work clothes appear in Bon Marche catalogues, and even then these were primarily of the genre of uniforms for grooms, chauffeurs, valets, and bell boys, that is uniforms most likely bought by their bourgeois employers.
vi
p.194 - 2/19/13 10:34 AM
bon-marche-miller
o leaf through the catalogues, the agendas, and the illustrated cards of the Bon Marche is to come upon the world of French bourgeois culture before the First World War in a way that perhaps no other medium can so vividly convey.2
vi
p.195 - 2/19/13 10:36 AM
bon-marche-miller
he images and accoutrements bespeak a reality all their own. It is through them that we begin to understand what we mean when we refer to the respectability or to the solidity or the certainty of prewar bourgeois life.
vi
p.195 - 2/19/13 10:36 AM
bon-marche-miller
here are the covers of blanc catalogues that itemize the details of a proper bourgeois household: the richness of collections, the richness of embroidery, the solidity of storage chests, the very indispensability of linen to the bourgeois way of life. There were certain things, these scenes remind one, that a bourgeois home could not do without. There had to be too many sheets. There had to be curtains on the windows. There had to be tablecloths on the dining table (the dining room itself being another bourgeois requisite).28
vi
p.195 - 2/19/13 10:37 AM
bon-marche-miller
he household had to be equipped to entertain in the proper fashion. And itjjad to have servants, at least one or two.
vi vi
p.196 - 2/19/13 10:38 AM
bon-marche-miller
his was a carefully patterned society where appearance was always, to a point, a function of occasion, a_badgg.that one_uaderstood what was correct and adhered to it rigorously.
vi
p.196 - 2/19/13 10:39 AM
bon-marche-miller
This was also a civil, leisurely, and gregarious society, an \" image equally conveyed in agenda events and catalogue pictures. It was a society of sociable visits or days of reception. It was a society that ate well and that held large dinners. It was a society that patronized theatres as a social event
vi
p.196 - 2/19/13 10:40 AM
bon-marche-miller
here were always badminton games and tennis games or bicycle rides or hunting forays. This was a very active society. By the turn of the century the Bon Marche was selling gymnastic equipment for the entire family. But it was also a very relaxed society. An 1880 summer clothing catalogue carried the following scenes: women sitting on a bench in a garden, women in a park, women holding parasols or fans, women painting, girls chasing butterflies, girls looking at chickens on a farm.
vi
p.196 - 2/19/13 10:40 AM
bon-marche-miller
There were whole series devoted to vacations at the seashore or adventures in the country. Life, these pictures tell us, was warm and secure, its pleasures a thing to be taken for granted.
vi
p.197 - 2/19/13 10:47 AM
bon-marche-miller
Family life also meant family expectations, a final image that these pictures convey. Children were expected to be bien eleves, a concept that ranged from proper bearing to learning a the social graces. Bon Marche catalogues carried back braces • 'recommended as a support for persons having a tendency to • fctoop\" and support collars \"to prevent children from lowerling their heads.\" Catalogue scenes showed that gentlemen Always shook hands.
vi
p.197 - 2/19/13 10:50 AM
bon-marche-miller
As a reproduction of bourgeois life in these years, the Bon Marche catalogues, agendas, and illustrated cards thus offer a glimpse of a world and its values that has rarely been replicated. Yet there is a good deal to be found in these materials beyond simply the reflection of a class' self-image. Far more than a mirror of bourgeois culture in France, the Bon Marche gave shape and definition to the very meaning of the concept of a bourgeois way of life
vi vi
p.198 - 2/19/13 10:51 AM
bon-marche-miller
Institutions like the Bon Marche made bourgeois life palpable. They produced a vision of a bourgeois life style that became a model for others to follow. The relationship betweeixihe Bon M?-rhp and its culture was therefore a symbiotic oae^.wlth jmalkations that were several and profound.
p.198 - 2/19/13 10:52 AM
bon-marche-miller
iTone respect the Bon Marche came to serve essentially the same role as the Republican school system, at least for those of middle-class means or middle-class aspirations. It became a bourgeois instrument of social homogenization, a means for disseminating the values and life style of the Parisian upper middle-class to French middle-class society as a whole. It did this by so-lowering prices that the former's possessions became mass-consumer items. But it also did this by becoming a kind of cultural primer. The Bon Marche showed people how they should dress, how they should furnish their home, and how they should spend their leisure time. It defined the ideals and goals for French society. It illustrated how successful people or people who wished to be successful or people on their way to becoming successful lived their lives
vi vi vi
p.198 - 2/19/13 10:53 AM
bon-marche-miller
hjjg, through the Bon Marche, Pan^nd the countryside 'becameriTrTre^aiiKe.
vi vi
p.198 - 2/19/13 10:53 AM
bon-marche-miller
Provincials who shopped by mail-order or who travelled to Paris to buy directly from the store (and these must have numbered in the tens of thousands or more every year) shared in a common culture, whether they lived in the large towns of Normandy or in the small villages of Auvergne.
vi vi
p.199 - 2/19/13 10:54 AM
bon-marche-miller
Perhaps more important, the Bon Marche spread bourgeois culture to the new white-collar workers, steering these floaters toward middle-class shores. The Bon Marche offered these people, whose formidable growth toward the end of the century was largely a product of the grands magasins themselves, a way of life to imitate and the access and identification that would enable them to do so.
vi vi
p.199 - 2/19/13 10:55 AM
bon-marche-miller
Through the department store, middle-class pretensions could find satisfaction because images and material goods were coming to 1 constitute life style itself. Bon Marche goo^sji^rc^sointerwoven„with. perceptions o f vfhe~4xmrgebis way oflife^that a purchase of a Bon Marche tablecloth or a coat for the theatre /^becamea purchase of bourgeois s tat us foo
vi vi
p.199 - 2/19/13 10:55 AM
bon-marche-miller
ecoming bourgeois had / always, to a point, been a matter of consumption, but never / so clearly, never so extensively, and never at prices that made its attainment so comparatively easy
vi vi
p.200 - 2/19/13 10:57 AM
bon-marche-miller
t rather buying certain goods in order to live that way of life. By Bon Marche standards, identity was to be found in the things one possessed. Consumption itselXbecame a substitutejor being bourgeois. AtTofwhich implied that the principal medium of consumption—the department store—now became the arbiter of boui^eois^dexitity/, defining it accordingly witfi what the House had to sell.
vi
p.200 - 2/19/13 10:59 AM
t the same time, new...
t the same time, new needs were created almost^ystematically, so that the definition of life style was kept('fluid\\nd open in accordance with changes in the consumer^goeus available. Fashions were the clearest example of this.
B
p.200 - 2/19/13 10:59 AM
bon-marche-miller
Any craze, or even any event, became an occasion for consumption. As FrancoRussian relations drew closer together, Russian toy soldiers began to appear on Bon Marche counters. In 1892 a Bon Marche gift catalogue pictured French and Russian soldiers saluting each other, thus placing bourgeois consumption at the service of public policy, and public policy at the service o
vi
p.201 - 2/19/13 11:00 AM
bourgeois consumption.
bourgeois consumption.
p.201 - 2/19/13 11:00 AM
In 1910 the Bon Marc...
In 1910 the Bon Marche advertised \"complete installations for modern kitchens,\" perhaps one of the first instances in the creation of what was to become the most powerful urge behind the culture of consumption—the belief that new meant better, and hence indispensable.
B
p.201 - 2/19/13 11:02 AM
bon-marche-miller
Much like the theatre, whose image the Bon Marche was always ready to assume, the House offered itself as a bourgeois social fixture, a meeting ground and a place to be seen as well as a place of entertainment.
vi
p.202 - 2/19/13 11:04 AM
Like the Revolutiona...
Like the Revolutionaries of 1793, the Bon Marche created a calendar all its own. Winter was a time when white goods and New Year's gifts were bought, spring and fall a time when old fashions were discarded and new styles adopted
p.202 - 2/19/13 11:17 AM
Most interesting of ...
Most interesting of all, in this vein, were the agendas. Like illustrated cards, these too were deeply rooted in the popular culture of France, having as forerunners the almanacs of earlier days. Almanacs as simple calendars, listing the days of the year, the phases of the moon, and church holidays can be traced as far back as Roman times.31
B
p.203 - 2/19/13 11:19 AM
bon-marche-miller
lmanacs were probably the most widely read of publications, often the only literary contact for great numbers of individuals. Their popularity led propagandists, as well as publishers, to issue almanacs in abundance.
vi
p.204 - 2/19/13 11:20 AM
bon-marche-miller
erhaps the^ftrs^of their kind offered by the new grands magasins, theagendas/basically were calendar books with space to jot down daily^engagements. Like earlier almanacs they contained a range of information and amusing diversions. There were cartoons, menus, and extracts of articles and engravings from encyclopedias or other books. There were also theatre plans and lists and information on the postal system, lycees, museums, churches, hospitals, police commissariats, and occasionally notaries.
vi
p.204 - 2/19/13 11:22 AM
bon-marche-miller
In one sense, then, Bon Marche agendas were a brilliant vehicl^for^store self-promotion.
vi
p.204 - 2/19/13 11:22 AM
bon-marche-miller
ut, in a still larger sense, they were another means of identifying the Bon Marche with the bourgeois way of life. By placing store news alongside details on churches, theatres, lycees, and notaries, agendas implied that the Bon Marche was another bourgeois social institution of Paris.
vi vi
p.204 - 2/19/13 11:23 AM
bon-marche-miller
Reception Day\" pages and monthly dinner menus, agendas further suggested that a visit to the Bon Marche was another part of the bourgeois social calendar.
vi
p.205 - 2/19/13 11:26 AM
w bonheur des dames
w bonheur des dames
B
p.205 - 2/19/13 11:32 AM
bon-marche-miller
less alluring, side to the department store world. To the store's fashionable shoppers was added \"la foule,\" the masses of women whose identity was captive to the goods they could buy. To the magnificence of displays was added the decline in standards, old Bourras' carefully crafted umbrellas failing dismally beside the cheaper wares of Mouret.
vi vi
p.205 - 2/19/13 11:32 AM
bon-marche-miller
To the energy and immensity of the organization was added the image of a steam engine, where employees were atomized, where old ties were discarded, and where everything was ruled by a struggle for existence. In_Zola's vjftionjhprp was an awareness that a way of life wasj>assing, that with the.department storg prpprg/ ir^^~s©ck4y-more impersonal, more_ uniform, more machine^ike, more mass-like.
vi vi vi vi vi vi vi holyoke
p.206 - 2/19/13 11:34 AM
bon-marche-miller
most contemporary observers expressed an ambivalence of sorts about the new stores. Generally the attitude was favorable, as in the studies of Henri Garrigues and Leon Duclos, two doj^oral-stiiderrts-^io regarded the grands magasins as a gr(ea{ step towards progress. Yet Garrigues regretted that employees were \"nothingjbiit cogs in a vast .machine,\" and he saw in mass production and mass distribution the cre^; ation of a uniformity \"without thought, without character.\" Similarly, Duclos observed that the new stores had a pernicious influence on craftsmanship, that beneath the appearance of luxury was a decline in quality.
vi vi
p.206 - 2/19/13 11:36 AM
bon-marche-miller
However, I must confess that the great bazar, by creating a uniformity of clothing and furniture in these little households, wounds certain undying feelings in me. . . . We have arrived at a day when precut clothes are less expensive than uncut cloth. ... In the past a dress a woman made was like
vi vi vi vi holyoke
p.207 - 2/19/13 11:36 AM
bon-marche-miller
er biography. Now ... the same design and the same cut of clothing cover women who certainly are not of the same upbringing, that is to say, of the same soul. . .
vi vi
p.207 - 2/19/13 11:38 AM
bon-marche-miller
Giffard grasped and accepted. But in Giffard's mind they were also an immoral world, a world where one could find: \"The husband who has driven his wife to the great bazar, who leaves her for long hours as prey to the seductions of lace, who leaves her to go on and on in the wonderful storev house of attractions where she empties her purse, her eyes on fire, her face reddened, her hand shivering, placed on that of a gloves salesman, while he goes off during this time with shady women to the furnished hotels of the eighteenth rank.\"4 In this world, beyond the glitter, or indeed as part of the spectacle, passions were unleashed, illicit love affairs rampant, perversions not unknown.
vi vi vi
p.208 - 2/19/13 11:39 AM
eanwhile through the...
eanwhile through the stores circulated men known as \"frotteurs\"—\"the maniacs who follow the crowds in order to rub up against them,\" while outside the store were \"the hideous pustules of the grands bazars,\" hawkers of all sorts, including prostitutes who waited in prey for the passing throngs.5
B
p.208 - 2/19/13 11:39 AM
bon-marche-miller
In particular they tended to focus on two of the problems Giffard had raised—the situation of female clerks and rampant kleptomania—each of which requires some discussion.
vi vi
p.209 - 2/19/13 11:42 AM
For most writers thi...
For most writers this attention was never far removed from a more prurient interest in the personal lives of the demoiselles, an interest in the lives of petit bourgeois girls living away from home, making their own living, and concentrated in large stores, where they were in constant contact with young men
p.209 - 2/19/13 11:43 AM
aking a lover was co...
aking a lover was common and acceptable, and Sunday picnics or introductions by friends made it difficult for fresh arrivals from the provinces to escape seduction for long
p.209 - 2/19/13 11:44 AM
arriage remained the
arriage remained the
p.210 - 2/19/13 11:44 AM
goal of practically ...
goal of practically all demoiselles and those who succeeded often left their jobs.
p.210 - 2/19/13 11:45 AM
Demoiselles captured...
Demoiselles captured the bourgeois public's attention because they were so unlike other working women. Most came from middle-class origins—albeit at the bottom of the scale—and most, because of their work and the salaries they earned, were drawn closer to the center of French middle-class culture.9
B
p.210 - 2/19/13 11:45 AM
bon-marche-miller
Women clerks were not quite full-fledged bourgeoises, but they were not quite working class eithe
vi
p.211 - 2/19/13 11:47 AM
bon-marche-miller
In their manners and their dress dpnwtfpllps rnnlfj npppnr nlmnnt ^distiT^iishahle from_ \"\" more proper bourgeois women. They might frequent restaurants and cabarets catering especially to them, but they also spent their leisure time and money on the same sorts of pursuits as other middle-class people.10 Demoiselles and the ladies they waited on were not all that far apart. This is what made the question of dissoluteness far more disturbing than the standard Sodom and Gomorrah tales emanating from the factories.11 Debaucheries among working-class women were one thing^jmo^ women ^omelhing else again.
vi
p.211 - 2/19/13 11:48 AM
hey questioned what ...
hey questioned what it was like to do parcellized work in large, anonymous firms and, as with the concern over sex, they questioned how such work affected one's home and family life. In another sense they questioned the spread of burea^^aUzatiOJDL-to bourgeois culture itself.
B
p.212 - 2/19/13 11:50 AM
bon-marche-miller
The image of department stores as dens of iniquity took a still sharper turn over the issue ofshopliftin£
vi
p.212 - 2/19/13 11:50 AM
ola estimated that e...
ola estimated that each day seven to eight thefts occurred at the Bon Marche. In 1893 the Bon Marche took 662 thefts to the courts, the Louvre 467,1
p.212 - 2/19/13 11:50 AM
So concerned were th...
So concerned were the stores that they obliged inspectors to divide their duties between disciplining employees and policing the clientele.
p.212 - 2/19/13 11:51 AM
Much of this stealin...
Much of this stealing was done by professionals or by common shoplifters. Some women came to the store with dresses specially designed for hiding merchandise.
p.212 - 2/19/13 11:51 AM
Early-stttdres\"r>fWe...
Early-stttdres\"r>fWeptcuryn^ primarily on two themes.
p.213 - 2/19/13 11:53 AM
nder monomania, indi...
nder monomania, individuals might become so obsessed with a certain idea that they would be led to behave deliriously, although in all other instances they would remain rational.
p.213 - 2/19/13 11:53 AM
To Marc the disease ...
To Marc the disease was \"monomania of theft,\" \"an instinctive, irresistible propensity to steal,\"
p.214 - 2/19/13 11:54 AM
If kleptomaniacs wer...
If kleptomaniacs were monomaniacs, then the principal question remained whether they were criminally accountable for their actions.
B
p.215 - 2/19/13 11:55 AM
bon-marche-miller
But by the end of the century kleptomania suddenly began to appear in a new light. Whereas in the past the focus had been on the pathology of the individual, psychiatrists now began to emphasize the social milieu in which kleptomania occurred. No longer a mere function of personal eccentricities, klep to man i a :w&s_ now.. seen-taU^^hape d^iicixleter^ mined^by forces of cultural chan^e.^ was the rise of the department store and the sharp increase in kleptomania-like behavior that seemed to accompany it.
vi
p.216 - 2/19/13 11:56 AM
bon-marche-miller
et what particularly struck this generation of psychiatrists was both the sheer number of kleptomaniacs arrested in department stores and the fact that so few of these were incited to steal elsewhere.
vi vi vi
p.216 - 2/19/13 11:57 AM
two doctors added: ...
two doctors added: \"Never, she told us, had she been driven to steal in les pctits magasins .r/
B
p.217 - 2/19/13 11:57 AM
bon-marche-miller
f kleptomaniacs committed so many thefts in department stores, then it was not only because they were predisposed to steal but because the department stores created conditions that incited them to^dojso..
vi vi v
p.217 - 2/19/13 11:58 AM
Lacassagne wrote of ...
Lacassagne wrote of \"excitants20 of the social order that might be called the apperitifs du crime.\"
B
p.217 - 2/19/13 11:58 AM
bon-marche-miller
\"These immense galleries, as freely accessible to the idle in search of distractions or adventures as to serious shoppers, enclose and expose . . . the richest cloths, the most luxurious dress articles, the most seductive superfluities. Women of all sorts, drawn to these elegant surroundings by instincts native to their sex, fascinated by so many rash provocations, dazzled by the abundance of trinkets and lace, find themselves overtaken by a sudden, unpremeditated, almost savage impulse. They place a clumsy if furtive hand on a display and voila, with one unthinking stroke, they wipe out the most respectable past, improvise as shoplifters, and render themselves criminal; soon they will have to explain themselves before the authorities and justice.
vi
p.218 - 2/19/13 11:59 AM
bon-marche-miller
I saw things as if through a cloud, everything stimulated my desire and assumed, for me, an extraordinary attraction. I felt myself swept along towards them and I grabbed hold of things without any outside and superior consideration intervening to hold me back. Moreover I took things at random, useless and worthless articles as well as useful and expensive articles. It was like a monomania of possession/'2
vi vi
p.218 - 2/19/13 12:00 PM
bon-marche-miller
For others the reaction was just the contrary, a desolation at the thought that \"they will henceforth be deprived of the grands magasins which had become for them everything in their life.\"23
vi
p.218 - 2/19/13 12:01 PM
bon-marche-miller
The implications of all this were not lost on the department stores, who did their best to hush up these thefts. Women who were apprehended, particularly the well-to-do, were taken to an office where they were invited to make a contribution to the welfare of the poor. Still, the fact of rampant kleptomania became a matter of public knowledge. It was a subject that again evoked a mixture of fascination and reprobation for reasons that are not difficult to understand, especially if we return to two more themes in the writings of psychiatrists on department store thefts.
vi vi holyoke steigers
p.219 - 2/19/13 12:02 PM
bon-marche-miller
\"When I can grab some silk, then I am just as if I were drunk. I tremble, although not from fear because the sordidness of what I have just done does not occur to me at all; I only think of one thing: to go into a corner where I can rustle it at my ease, which gives me voluptuous sensations even stronger than those I feel with the father of my children.\"26
vi
p.220 - 2/19/13 12:03 PM
bon-marche-miller
What made department store thefts such an irresistible subject to the psychiatrists studying them and such an alarming subject to those who read about them was that so many of these women came from thoroughly respectable bourgeois backgrounds,
vi
p.220 - 2/19/13 12:03 PM
omen stealing things...
omen stealing things of little or no consequence that they could easily afford.
B
p.220 - 2/19/13 12:04 PM
bon-marche-miller
In the end, departm^t^tore Meptomania remained a limited preblemrT)espite the horror it aroused, few took seriously_ the ^prospect of a mass criminalization of French middle-class women. France did not become a nation half Jekyll, half Hyde. Still, there was something in the whole affair to torment the middle-class soul. Bourgeois institutions were expected to uphold the moral order, not threaten it,
vi
p.221 - 2/19/13 12:05 PM
Looking at kleptoman...
Looking at kleptomania from the bourgeois point of view was like seeing one's reflection in an El Greco painting—distorted, taken to extremes, and yet possessing an underlying, recognizable reality.
B
p.221 - 2/19/13 12:06 PM
bon-marche-miller
Professional grievances - againstthe-grandsnrmgasmo camefrom a number of sources. Artisanslike cabinet-makers complained bitterly that department stores were cornering the market in their trade and were contracting their work out to lesser skilled craftsmen under demeaning conditions, thereby destroying both their work and their community.34 Factory agents and other intermediaries between production and distribution complained that their professions were being outright annihilated. Even factory owners had their complaints. For some the increased orders of department stores were accompanied by an all but titular control of production. \"Today,\" Zola noted, \"the Bon Marche and the Louvre make the law.\"
vi vi
p.222 - 2/19/13 12:08 PM
bon-marche-miller
50 pieces for practically nothing, only to sell them subsequently at 3 francs apiece. It was circumstances like this that explained why a linen manufacturer was willing to supply an employees' cooperative during the 1869 strike.3
vi
p.222 - 2/19/13 12:11 PM
bon-marche-miller
The economist Charles Gide, for instance, noted that only those_shops that were not in direct competition with the new s tores bad Jield th e i rown oj_-t\\a d_a u g me n t e d their ITumbers. The rest were driven to relying on what he saw as tfie^depTorable (pathetic might be a better word) tactics of kickbacks to servants, extension of credit, and gifts to shoppers who bought a certain amount of merchandise.37 Joseph Bernard, who wrote a dissertation on the problem of small shopkeepers, agreed that their numbers had not decreased, but remarked that \"the crisis is no less the bitter for it.
vi
p.222 - 2/19/13 12:11 PM
ayous also maintaine...
ayous also maintained that specialty chain stores were jriore of a threat than department stores to the small shopkeepers.
B
p.223 - 2/19/13 12:12 PM
bon-marche-miller
And, while others might debate the matter, the shopkeepers themselves had few doubts about where they stood. With increasing keenness they sensed that their livelihood, their community, and their traditions were threatened with extinction in the face of the department stores.
vi vi
p.225 - 2/19/13 12:17 PM
bon-marche-miller
RE GUARANTEED MILK BY THE GRANDS MAGASINS DU LOUVRE To our clients Our baby milk will be taken from the natural source, and the stock of nurses offered to our lady clients will not for an instant permit them to suppose that this 'Property of the Louvre' has anything in common with the Soldes et Occasions [clearance and bargain sales] of which we give notice each week. Besides, in spite of the devotion of our feminine personnel, we will not accept any of our employees for the articles of this special counter. The excessive work that we impose upon them, making them anemic rather quickly, obliges us to be faithful to our principles and to offer only 'Guaranteed Merchandise'4
vi
p.226 - 2/19/13 12:18 PM
bon-marche-miller
These are not merchants that you are visiting; you are visiting artists, fantaisistes, idealists, psychologists, the inventors of tricks, the disciples of Dr. Charcot, the emulators of Robert Houdin.
vi vi vi
p.228 - 2/19/13 12:22 PM
As it was, the comme...
As it was, the commercial tax rate never got out of hand from the department stores' point of view. According to one set of figures, the Bon Marche only paid about ten percent of its profits in total taxes as late as 1913.55
B
p.228 - 2/19/13 12:25 PM
bon-marche-miller
he small shopkeepers were the vestiges of an earlier bourgeoisie, one that had set limits on the capitalistic impulse within it. As the century progressed, they came to share less and less in common with the other side of their class, dynamic and expansive in character,
vi
p.229 - 2/19/13 12:27 PM
bon-marche-miller
And yet, to see in the fate of the shopkeepers simply an issue between old versus new, lower bourgeoisie versus upper, would be to perceive only one side of things. The conflicts within bourgeois culture went deeper, and were far less clearcut. The small shopkeepers may haw -represented another bourgeois era, but they also bore within them values and traditions that the remainder of their class continued to cherish.
vi vi vi
p.229 - 2/19/13 12:27 PM
bon-marche-miller
They still maintained a sense of community. If they were egalitarian, they also had a sense of place and position.
vi
p.230 - 2/19/13 12:28 PM
people like Zola and...
people like Zola and Garrigues and Giffard and the psychiatrists into sharper relief. Both were troubled by the mass bureaucratic consequences of department stores, both asked what was to become of bourgeois life and culture in an impersonal, uniform, and overly materialistic age, the small shopkeepers simply raising this to a more specific and less ambiguous level. Indeed one is struck by the degree to which certain issues—employee relations, immorality, and decline in standards—were repeated in the writings of both sets of critics. What seemed to be at stake for everyone involved was a whole way of life, a whole set of traditional or gemeinschaftlich
p.230 - 2/19/13 12:28 PM
Their presence had ...
Their presence had given way to fears and doubts and anxieties and grievances, and these would have to be dispelled if the future of the department store was to be a secure one.
p.231 - 2/19/13 12:30 PM
Service to the commu...
Service to the community had always beengart of Jt^Boi^MaixM Following the^iegToFParis in 1870-1871, the Boucicauts had turned their store into a distribution center for food stuffs sent over from England. Several years later they had begun the practice of distributing milk to the poor of the quarter
B
p.231 - 2/19/13 12:30 PM
bon-marche-miller
But being an institution in store ideology had always meant far more. It had meant that the Bon Marche was as traditional a part of French culture as the Arc de Triomphe or even Notre Dame, and as integral a part of the bourgeois way of life as lycees or reception days.
vi vi vi
p.232 - 2/19/13 12:31 PM
or example, by envel...
or example, by enveloping their store in an aura of fantasy the Boucicauts projected a world of magic and drama in the very midst of their bureaucratic machine. Enchantment and bureaucracy were not incompatible by Bon Marche terms.
p.232 - 2/19/13 12:33 PM
There was an element...
There was an element of splendor and romance in the Bon Marche wagons that filled the streets of Paris with their carefully groomed horses, their coachmen in top hats and great coats, and their gargons in livery. Even more, there was an element of ritualizntion n sense of pom£_andj^remony in the loading of the wagons and their outward processions™
B
p.232 - 2/19/13 12:33 PM
bon-marche-miller
he Bon Marche went to such lengths to produce this effect as to wrap the blanc in a mythology of its own, store history attributing the origins of the sale to a legendary moment of Boucicaut inspiration prompted by a snowbound Paris.
vi
p.233 - 2/19/13 12:34 PM
bon-marche-miller
Dress codes, livery for gar^ons, the accent on service, and evening concerts were all means of softening apprehensions over compromised standards in an era of mass production and mass distribution. The same might be said of the design of the House. Architecturally the Bon-MarGhe~was^arJt^La nineteenth-century movement to create, new kinds-ef-SrtFuc^ tures for new kinds of purposes, a new city-architecture for masses and for motion.
vi
p.233 - 2/19/13 12:35 PM
bon-marche-miller
Or rather function, as Boucicaut saw it, had a multiplicity of meanings, and thus stone was as necessary a medium as iron and glass, pediments as necessary as thin metal columns, palatial reading rooms as necessary as light open bays. This too made the Bon Marche very much a part of the architecture of its century, not simply in its eclecticism but in its deeply felt need that bourgeois buildings should represent more than the purpose for which they were intended. Like banks, railroad stations, and later hotels, each of which repeated the same monumental effects, the department store offered itself as something far more distinguished, far more traditional, and far more transcendent than the mass materialistic apparatus it had, in fact, become.
vi vi vi
p.234 - 2/19/13 12:38 PM
Mottos were one more...
Mottos were one more means of overcoming prejudices. The Bon Marche fell back on the aphorism \"loyaute fait ma force\" (honesty is my strength), not only because it sounded nice, but because it was a direct reference to concurrence deloyale (dishonest competition), two of the dirtiest words in the French commercial language
B
p.235 - 2/19/13 12:49 PM
bon-marche-miller
specially sensitive to charges of immorality because of its large Catholic and provincial clientele, the Bon Marche did its best to appear as chaste as a convent.
vi
p.235 - 2/19/13 12:52 PM
bon-marche-miller
Zola noting that \"today the people of the quarter raise their daughters to enter the Bon Marche.\"61 Imagery of this sort was particularly important because it was here that Bon Marche public relations found their most pervasive role. Above all, the selling of the department store was to depend on the uses of paternalism for external socialization ends.
vi vi
p.236 - 2/19/13 12:53 PM
bon-marche-miller
n the end, the very idea of a greater Bon Marche household was so essential to public relations because it went to the heart of public uneasiness over the passing of traditions and of community values.
vi vi
p.236 - 2/19/13 12:55 PM
Consumers were remin...
Consumers were reminded that their evening shopping lengthened the work day and separated families at mealtime. Claims that electric lighting concealed defects in merchandise made long hours a matter of consumer interest as well as of consumer complicity.
B
p.237 - 2/19/13 12:56 PM
bon-marche-miller
Principally, however, the public learned of household relationships through three media. One was the agendas—the Bon Marche publication most closely associated with the idea of a larger bourgeois community—and another was the special House pamphlets such as A Visit to the Bon Marche or An Historical Account of the Bon Marche. Thirdly, there was the press, whose collaboration with the store has already been noted.
vi
p.237 - 2/19/13 12:57 PM
bon-marche-miller
Yet the Bon Marche also had powerful means to influence publications. There was, of course, the power of advertisements. There was also the power of payoffs from House coffers. Direct evidence of this exists in the case of an article in an American journal.65
vi
p.237 - 2/19/13 12:58 PM
bon-marche-miller
Surveillance of the press was extensive. Following the death of Madame Boucicaut, the House prepared a twelve-page document classifying over 250 newspaper articles on the subject.
vi
p.238 - 2/19/13 1:00 PM
bon-marche-miller
On another level it meant the projection of a Boucicaut image that combined philanthropy with commercial genius and that portrayed the store's founders not only as creators of Paris' greatest emporium but also as creators of a great social institution.
vi
p.238 - 2/19/13 1:01 PM
bon-marche-miller
The biography then proceeded, in all but a few lines, to recount his life as one of benevolent deeds towards his employees and his community.
vi
p.238 - 2/19/13 1:02 PM
bon-marche-miller
\"It is one of the most beautiful creations of contemporary progress. And this creation, this marvel, is due to the genius i one man.\" Further on the notice remarked: \"One cannot repeat it too much: M. Boucicaut has not simply founded a powerful and steadfast commercial house; he fias founded a humanitarian work, a social institution.
vi vi holyoke
p.239 - 2/19/13 1:04 PM
bon-marche-miller
As on the internal plane, the House always retained a personal element—the idea of a Maison Boucicaut—even well after the passing of the founders. There was never a semblance of corporate anonymity. The Boucicaut image could be found nearly everywhere, and in later years directors made a point of picturing themselves as Boucicaut associates, and as the heirs and continuators of their predecessors' ideas. The structure of ownership and its family character were made public knowledge.
vi
p.241 - 2/19/13 1:08 PM
bon-marche-miller
Herein lay the significance of Bon Marche imagery: its ability to bring together in one comprehensive impression all the disjointed pieces of nineteenth-century French bourgeois culture. The Bon Marche was a machine, but it was also a family; it was change but it was also tradition; and there was no clearcut distinction between one sphere or the other. Bon Marche paternahsm in_the public realm thus took on the same~association as it did in the pnvate^one, the concept / of household now inseparable fromjts_new business setting.
vi vi
p.241 - 2/19/13 1:09 PM
bon-marche-miller
Bon Marche paternalism became the measure of Bon Marche success^ Vaunted-ior'Tts solidary and participatory effects, paternalism was presented as the organizational glue that made the^store work. Accounts of the House moved readily from a grande famille image to that of a beehive or an ant colony, as though the one were interchangeable with the other. They depicted a powerful organization that was enormously successful because each man performed his specialized task as best he could, linking his own destiny to that of the firm.
vi vi vi vi vi holyoke
p.242 - 2/19/13 1:10 PM
M. Boucicaut rested ...
M. Boucicaut rested the success of his House on a tight solidarity between patron and employee, and he was convinced that all the advantages secured the latter cemented this solidarity for the greater good of a
B
p.242 - 2/19/13 1:11 PM
bon-marche-miller
It was House solidarity in the Bon Marche fashion that brought prosperity to those who worked and who managed the machine, and a consumer's paradise to those who shopped in it.
vi
p.242 - 2/19/13 1:11 PM
bon-marche-miller
In Bon Marche imagery the family traditions of the French business community had not only survived, but had become transformed into the central ingredient of a mass bureaucratic market.
vi
p.242 - 2/19/13 1:12 PM
In the Bon Marche v...
In the Bon Marche vision there was ncTpTace tor classTdiscord or conflict, no place for that nagging bourgeois nightmare that its century of change, with all its conglomerations of money and men, its factories and now its huge service bureaucracies, might be carrying within it the seeds of its collapse. The_Bo.n Marr.he world was a harmonious blend ofjorder, unity^r solidarity as the bourgeoisie interpreted the word at theend of the nineteenth century.
B
p.243 - 2/19/13 1:13 PM
bon-marche-miller
Ultimately, then, the Bon Marche turned employee socialization completely inside out, revealing the creation of organization men to be public virtues as well as private achievements.
vi vi
p.243 - 2/19/13 1:13 PM
So public relations,...
So public relations, in Bon Marche hands, portrayed a department store world far from the menace that many envisioned. They demonstrated that change of this sort could come about without a decline in standards, without a direct threat to the morals and order of bourgeois society, without a suppression of those bourgeois values and relations that seemed, on the surface, to have little in common with a mass, industrialized age.
B
p.244 - 2/19/13 1:14 PM
bon-marche-miller
Indeed if the underlying current of the new stores was one of increasing rationalization, on the surface the practice of affairs remained personal and communal.
vi vi
p.244 - 2/19/13 1:14 PM
Later Dubuisson rema...
Later Dubuisson remarked: \"It is necessary that she [the client] consider the grand magasin as a second home,
B
p.245 - 2/19/13 1:16 PM
bon-marche-miller
And of still greater consequence was that all this pertained to a deeper side, a dimension beyond the proposal that a traditional way of life had not disappeared with the coming of the department store. At bottom the real goal of store public relations, as it had been of internal socialization, was to suggest a new concept of the bourgeois community, one that resided within, and was intrinsically a part of, a rationalized, mass, and dynamic context. In the end, if everything the Bon Marche represented was to be accepted, it was preciseljrbecause the Bon Marche itself was to be perceived as a model of a new world where the rational and the enchanting, the organizational and the familial, the efficient and the personal, and the concentrated and the integrated were all cut alikefrom the same fabric
vi vi
p.246 - 2/19/13 1:17 PM
bon-marche-miller
and in the-falLoL19J9 a strike occurred at the Bon Marche, the first since the creation ^Hfve new store fifty years previously. The strike lasted several weeks—at first it spread to four-fifths of the personnel—and in the end it turned violent before the last few thousand strikers capitulated with no immediate noticeable gains.2 Meanwhile other changes had occurred at the Bon Marche during the war years that were to have an even greater impact on the future of the store. One of these was the decision to expand into branch stores.
vi vi
p.247 - 2/19/13 1:19 PM
bon-marche-miller
This in turn raised the question of changing the organization of the firm to a societe anonyme or limited liability corporation
vi
p.247 - 2/19/13 1:19 PM
There had also been ...
There had also been some feeling that the anonyme form would provide real surveillance over year-end accounts in contrast to the rubber-stamp role of the surveillance commission in a societe en commandite,
B
p.247 - 2/19/13 1:19 PM
bon-marche-miller
Above all, 1910 remained a time when tradition was the final arbiter, when men like Fillot feared that any tampering with the organization as it presently stood would be a leap into the dark.
vi vi
p.248 - 2/19/13 1:20 PM
bon-marche-miller
By 1920 the forces for change were again ascendant, and in the summer of that year the final remnants of the familial form of ownership that Madame Boucicaut had set up in 1880 were abandoned, the Bon Marche converted into a societe anonyme.5
vi vi vi
p.248 - 2/19/13 1:21 PM
Altogether, the Hous...
Altogether, the House spent more than 10,000,000 francs in some form or other on its employees and workers because of the war experience.6
B
p.250 - 2/19/13 1:23 PM
bon-marche-miller
bviously, if the faces were new, the spirit was the same. The corporation may have accentuated the separation of ownership and control, but it did not collide with the old ethos among management of belonging to an institution larger than oneself, one with traditions, and one to which the manager was expected to feel a sense of loyalty while pursuing dynamic and rationalized business policies.
vi
p.251 - 2/19/13 1:27 PM
By the 1920s the Bon...
By the 1920s the Bon Marche no longer stood alone as the Parisian department store extraordinaire. Theye-were pfw giants—especially the Printemps_and the Galeries Lafayette—that were now as important as the House\" orfTfie'Left BankT
B
p.251 - 2/19/13 1:29 PM
bon-marche-miller
This book began with the premise that the department store was a creation of bourgeois culture, both capturing and threatening many things that culture stood for
vi
p.252 - 2/19/13 1:30 PM
. If few had envisio...
. If few had envisioned that they were building a mass, bureaucratic society, when it arrived most recognized it as a creature of their own making
B
p.252 - 2/19/13 1:30 PM
bon-marche-miller
Throughout this narrative it has been my contention that bourgeois culture in France was dwide_cLwithin4tself, not so much befu^n^upper and-lower'bourgeoisie or the forces of progress and stagnation as between two sets of values and attitudes, one that drove^it^tocreate vyhat the--other was bound to regret. If it was^-a-etrlture that gave way to rationalized structures like the department store, it was also a culture that remained impregnated with strong relationships between family and business and one that believed in individual achievement. If it was a culture that carried within it a materialistic streak leading inexorably to a cult of consumption, it was also a culture whose sense of distinctions, selfrestraints, and standards saw in much of this reason for fear and for horror.
vi vi vi
p.252 - 2/19/13 1:31 PM
bon-marche-miller
There was ajricjgjn^he bourgeois personalityJhatj^as miTfrqfeaim^ a sideJ^iEvei±ed_bY^the bureaiKrafeationjof Jpusiness arid, middl^class careers, ancTByTKe emergence of a mass consumer societyrThis^ culture^acfcome to face by the end of the century
vi vi
p.252 - 2/19/13 1:32 PM
bon-marche-miller
The significance of the Bon Marche and its history lay in its ability to resolve this dilemma by redefiningiraditiens-to fitnew social contexts. rfrfnnrilmg-Ap^jj^gggt. strains . within bourgeoisj^ture.
vi
p.253 - 2/19/13 1:32 PM
bon-marche-miller
A sense of an internal House community was associated with the workings of a dynamic and rationalized system. All this was accomplished through innovative uses of paternalistic traditions, uses that eased owners, and later managers, into new business roles that they would now have to occupy. The method was systematic but almost elegant in its simplicity. Household relationships were redesigned to build an organizational work force of managers and clerks. The new relationships in turn provided the basis for the reorientation of the family firm. One followed from another just as tradition became imbedded in change
vi
p.253 - 2/19/13 1:33 PM
Bon Marche paternali...
Bon Marche paternalism—revealed that one set of values need not disappear with the triumph of the other.
B
p.253 - 2/19/13 1:34 PM
bon-marche-miller
It was a society that leaned in many directions. It was bureaucratic but it was also familial. It was a mass society, but it was also one that incorporated a sense of community and hierarchy. There was no gemeinschaftlichlgesellschaftlich shift, the modern carrying within it a strong element of traditionalism. There was no disenchantment in the Weberian sense, the world of rationality creating its own world of magical entrancement.
vi vi vi
p.254 - 2/19/13 1:35 PM
bon-marche-miller
It was a society where bourgeois ambitions and identities of the past were transmuted to fit an organizational setting. It was a society where public relations continued to picture a world in which things changed and yet time held still. It was a society sold to consumerism
vi vi
p.254 - 2/19/13 1:36 PM
bon-marche-miller
We have been told that French businessmen were inherently conservative and that the French family firm was an institution unsuitable for an era of expansion and innovation. We have also been told, in analyses that have built upon this perspective, that the French bourgeoisie entered this century hesitantly and reluctantly, that they were imprisoned by their past, and that it was only after two decades of crisis and collapse— largely resulting from a failure to accommodate to change— that they found within themselves the means to come to terms with their present. The arguments have been persuasive, but only so long as they have limited us to seeing one side of the picture. Once we draw back all the curtains, once we open up the world of the creative and the successful as well as the evasive and the obsolete, we stumble upon a bourgeoisie that was drawn to its new century, that was fascinated by the transformations occurring about it, and that was capable of committing itself to these changes precisely because it learned how to do so without undermining its traditions.
vi vi
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CONDENSED
bon-marche-miller
It was a commitment to assembling thousands of employees in a single work place. It was a commitment to an organizing principle requiring a meticulous division of labor, a super-imposition of several hierarchical levels of command, and a systematization of the entire work process. It was a commitment to a production principle based on quantity and economy of costs and to a consumption principle based on self-indulgence.
vi
p.9 - 2/18/13 11:52 AM
bon-marche-miller
But bourgeois culture in France had other roots, roots of thrift and /-self-restraint, of a sense of community that stressed stability and harmony and the natural exercise of authority that came with familiarity in its relationships, roots that worshipped individual fulfillment and an independent place in society, roots that longed for distinction from those on lower social rungs, roots that believed in the family as the fundamental and most reliable of organizing principles; and so, much of this was troubling as well because it clashed with other values and traditions the bourgeoisie held dear.
vi vi vi
p.10 - 2/18/13 12:00 PM
bon-marche-miller
More specifically, what I have chosen to focus on in this study is the process by which the individuals who built and ran the Bon Marche sought to create new sets of social relationships, perceptions, and roles that would permit the adaptation of themselves, their work force, their clientele, and the bourgeois public to the changing society
vi
p.13 - 2/18/13 12:04 PM
bon-marche-miller
In France it could be found most prominently among some of the largest, the most dynamic, and the most innovative firms in the French economy well into the twentieth century, where it served purposes in accordance with its times. In the United States it flourished under the name of welfare capitalism, spreading most rapidly after the 1890s and reaching its peak in the 1920s. That is, paternalism became most entrenched in the United States —was viewed as most necessary by American businessmen—at precisely the moment when the modern corporation was being formed
vi
p.14 - 2/18/13 12:13 PM
bon-marche-miller
It has also meant turning paternalism on its head, viewing paternalism not simply as an entrepreneurial strategy directed at workers, but as an entrepreneurial response to businessmen's own needs for socialization in a period of changing business role
vi vi vi
p.15 - 2/18/13 12:24 PM
bon-marche-miller
progressed through the obliteration of its earlier organic, orgemeinschaftlich, ties.8
vi
p.16 - 2/18/13 12:26 PM
bon-marche-miller
Once reoriented, they can lend themselves to the purposes of change and, even more, provide the social cohesion necessary for the successful and rapid realization of that change. Investigators of transitional developments in India have seen this occurring. They have, for example, pointed to how the cohesiveness of the caste structure, once adapted for new ends, can be effective in achieving political and social change.9 Likewise, an observer of the Japanese factory system has suggested that the Japanese factory represents a \"rephrasing\" of \"feudal loyalties, commitments, rewards, and methods of leadership\" within the framework of modern industry, and he has gone on to remark that this rephrasing was critical to Japan's evolution into a modern industrialized economy.1
vi
p.16 - 2/18/13 12:26 PM
bon-marche-miller
Yet social change need not occur through a radical break with the past.
vi
p.16 - 2/18/13 12:27 PM
bon-marche-miller
n short gemeinschaftlich values persistent in bourgeois culture—were now identified with the workings of a mass, bureaucratic enterprise and were, in fact, made to work for the success of that enterprise.
vi
p.16 - 2/18/13 12:28 PM
bon-marche-miller
A third theme—the role of the family firm in French economic development
vi
p.18 - 2/18/13 12:32 PM
bon-marche-miller
n looking at the social history of a specific family firm that was also one of the most successful business endeavors in France before the First World War, I have been drawn to precisely these sorts of questions. My concern has been to point to the positive role that household values can play in the evolution of a modern business enterprise, such as bringing a sense of loyalty and cohesiveness to a bureaucratized and large-scale work environment
vi vi
p.19 - 2/18/13 12:34 PM
bon-marche-miller
Lastly, the themes of paternalism, social change, and the family firm come together in some reflections on that elusive but inescapable subject for anyone writing on the transformations of modern times—the idea of a managerial revolution.
vi vi vi
p.20 - 2/18/13 1:38 PM
bon-marche-miller
gain returning to the earlier themes of paternalism and of social change, that bureaucratization and rationalization m business, accompanied by a correspondingly growing role for managers, has not necessarily entailed a disappearance of household relationships within the enterprise. Impersonal bureaucratized, managerially run firms, on the one hand, the household relationships of the family firm, on the other, have been a contrast too keenly drawn in the past. The managerial and family ethos are not mutually exclusive; they can in fact work together, the one complementing and completing the other. This, certainly, was the case with the Bon Marche
p.20 - 2/18/13 1:39 PM
bon-marche-miller
Labor history has told us much about working-class movements, working-class lives, the nature of working-class work. But it has told us little about how the history of the workers has been molded by the values and concerns of the men who employed them.
vi vi vi vi
p.20 - 2/18/13 1:39 PM
bon-marche-miller
They have told us much about business firms, business structures, and business politics, but they have had little to say on the businessman as a contributor and participant in his wider social world, or on the intertwining of the growth and success of an enterprise with its employee relations. Thus, for both business and labor historians, the history of the businessman has been made to stand apart from the history of the worker.
vi vi
p.21 - 2/18/13 1:40 PM
bon-marche-miller
t will remind the historian of modern society that his is the history of both the middle and working classes, and that the history of one has in fact been the history of the other
vi vi vi vi vi vi vi
p.21 - 2/18/13 1:40 PM
bon-marche-miller
Social historians need to realize that the bourgeoisie as much as the working class gave shape to the society that emerged with industrialization (and that labor does not exclude the white-collar worker). Economic historians need to acknowledge the social context within which economic changes take place.
vi vi
p.23 - 2/18/13 1:42 PM
bon-marche-miller
No longer was Paris an impassable maze of streets and alleyways, too narrow to accommodate the traffic of a mid-century capital, too haphazard in design to permit cross-town circulation. Now the broad boulevards that Baron Haussmann had built cut through Paris along a rational plan that effectively removed those barriers to intra-city travel that for centuries had confined Parisians to their immediate quarter or that rendered unpleasant any effort to shuttle about.
vi vi vi vi vi
p.24 - 2/18/13 1:43 PM
bon-marche-miller
hey could not but have reflected on how well Haussmann's new boulevards would serve the purpose for which they were assembling.
vi vi vi vi
p.25 - 2/18/13 3:05 PM
bon-marche-miller
he first of these was a revolution in retailing that can be traced to the appearance of new kinds of stores—dry goods ^ firms known as magasins de nouveautes—in the 1830s and 1840s. After a period of testing and growth, these firms, with their accent on turnover, were to lead to the formation of the department store
vi vi
p.25 - 2/18/13 3:12 PM
bon-marche-miller
department stores, in France as elsewhere, did not spring up overnight. All the great emporia of the prewar era—the Bon Marche, the Louvre, the Printemps, and others—had either modest or intermediate origins,
vi vi
p.26 - 2/18/13 3:15 PM
bon-marche-miller
encroached on the trade of his neighbor. The guilds regulated and limited entry into the various trades. They insisted that each seller be confined to a single specialty
vi
p.29 - 2/18/13 5:33 PM
bon-marche-miller
silks, woolens, cloths, shawls, lingerie, hosiery, gloves, ready-to-wear, and the like, plus occasionally items like furs, umbrellas, and sewing^goods.7 Yet for the times this constituted a revolutionary gtouping^bf what were still regarded as diverse sets of specialties, and almost immediately there were complaints from the tradition-minded small merchants.8
vi vi vi
p.30 - 2/18/13 5:36 PM
bon-marche-miller
One account spoke of \"monster stores\" (and already was complaining of their bureaucratic character).11
vi
p.31 - 2/18/13 5:39 PM
bon-marche-miller
The principle of organization by departments had become fundamental. Hierarchical chains of command were developing.1
vi
p.32 - 2/18/13 5:44 PM
bon-marche-miller
backgrounds of Chauchard and Heriot remain obscure, although we do know that the former had been a clerk at another magasin de nouveautes, the Pauvre Diable. This too forms part of a familiar pattern—that of ambitious men with training at one store seeking the financial support of another party (Chauchard and Heriot turned to a certain Fare) and then launching their own enterprise or buying into partnership.
vi
p.35 - 2/18/13 6:00 PM
bon-marche-miller
From the above account it should be clear that between 1840 and 1870 a significant change in retailing took place on both sides of the Atlantic and that by the 1870s this had led to the emergence of commercial enterprises which roughly were approximating—in their size, their organization and practices, and especially their unity of conception—what we have come to know as the modern department store.
vi
p.38 - 2/18/13 6:11 PM
bon-marche-miller
Their concerns were elsewhere, with alleviating a ^nearly unbearable traffic situation, with providing work for potentially troublesome construction workers, and above all with making Paris the brilliant capital of Europe. But as they cut through the tortuous back alleys of the city, laying down long, wide boulevards ideal for cross-city travel—and mass public transit—they created the very conditions by which the new stores could tap the vast Parisian market. Concurrently, the rationalization of the city's layout was accompanied by a reorganization of the more than seventeen omnibus companies that had sprung up since the first concession had been established in 1828. In 1855 a single service, the Compagnie Generale des Omnibus, was formed. Five years later it was transporting more than 70,000,000 passengers annually, still another advantage to enterprising merchants who no longer looked to the immediate neighborhood, or to chance passersby, for their clientele.27
vi
p.38 - 2/18/13 6:12 PM
bon-marche-miller
bsolutely critical to the development of /'either, was the coming of the railroad
vi
p.39 - 2/18/13 6:16 PM
bon-marche-miller
It was the ^ railroad, increasing the regularity, volume, and speed of the flow of goods and materials first into the factories and then out of the factories and into the city markets, that made possible the coming of big business in both production and distribution. The effects of this process in France were perhaps slower and less extensive than those described by Alfred Chandler for the United States.30
vi vi vi
p.39 - 2/18/13 6:17 PM
bon-marche-miller
hat a number of emerging department stores were to find their fortunes partly in their proximity to major commuter stations, partly in the expanse of their mail-order trade, was also a consequence of locomotive power.
vi
p.41 - 2/18/13 6:25 PM
bon-marche-miller
oucicaut, unfortunately, is a figure of whom we know far too little, although certain facts are apparently clear. He was born in Belleme in 1810, the son of a Norman hatter. He was Catholic. At the age of eighteen he left home and took to the road as the \"associate\" of an itinerant peddler.
vi
p.44 - 2/18/13 6:30 PM
bon-marche-miller
Bon Marche expanded haphazardly during the middle decades of the century, either by adding to existing structures or by acquiring adjoining ones. In any event, it was not until the neighboring Hospice des Petits-Menages was finally torn down in 1868 that Boucicaut was able to obtain control of the remainder of the block and truly contemplate a wholesale reconstruction of the Bon Marche.
vi vi
p.45 - 2/18/13 6:33 PM
bon-marche-miller
In sheer size alone the Bon Marche far surpassed the magasins de nouveautes of the late 1860s. Sales volume in 1877 was 73,000,000 francs, more than three times what it had been when the new building was begun. Employees now numbered 1,788, an astounding figure for tKe period. Only the Louvre^ourd be seen to be competing on similar terms at this time.
vi
p.45 - 2/18/13 6:33 PM
bon-marche-miller
ristide Jr. had never taken an active interest in the house. Preferring agriculture, the arts, and travel to the commercial life—not altogether unusual for the SQonjof a successful merchant—he remained removed from the daily affairs of the business.
vi
p.49 - 2/18/13 6:44 PM
bon-marche-miller
In America Macy's sales volume in 1914 was 17,000,000 dollars and Marshall Field's retail volume in 1906 was 25,000,000. Only Wanamaker's combined operation in Philadelphia and New York was perhaps as large, or larger, than the Bon Marche. No published sales figures for this period are available, however.
vi vi
p.51 - 2/18/13 6:48 PM
bon-marche-miller
When Boucicaut entered the Bon Marche, the store carried shawls, cloaks, and tippets; garment linings and millinery items; a literie (perhaps beds, perhaps bedding); a mercerie section; and assorted fabrics and cotton goods.3 Thirty years later, at the time of Zola's visit, the Bon Marche maintained thirty-six separate departments.
vi vi vi
p.52 - 2/18/13 6:50 PM
bon-marche-miller
Meanwhile men's wear, first introduced as shirts and ties in the 1860s, was substantially expanded during the following decade, while the 1870s further witnessed the addition of a separate children's section and the introduction of A. Boucicaut gloves, the first in a long line of Bon Marche trademarks.
vi
p.54 - 2/18/13 7:00 PM
bon-marche-miller
In short, it does not permit us to reassemble the complexity of the history of merchandise diversification as it occurred at the Bon Marche. In the absence of further documentation, that is a story that simply cannot be retold. But the list does reflect, in a significant way, what we mean when we refer to the department store as a mass retailer, or mass marketplace
vi
p.54 - 2/18/13 7:12 PM
bon-marche-miller
In other industries in the nineteenth century, such decisions tended to lead to the building of new plants, or to backward and forward integration, or to mergers. At the department store the path of growth lay, as it would for most enterprises in the following century, in diversification, in the selling of new lines of merchandise.
vi vi
p.55 - 2/18/13 7:13 PM
bon-marche-miller
10,000 clients that probably entered the store on good days in the 1880s, or the 15,000-18,000 persons that Georges d'Avenel, a decade later, suggested passed daily through the doors of the Bon Marche and of the Louvre, or the 70,000 clients who perhaps came on the days of special sales.7
vi vi
p.55 - 2/18/13 7:15 PM
bon-marche-miller
We can see that the prodigious sales figures represented an increasing turn towards the purchase of comfort, amusement, and luxury. And thus we can see the essential reality of the mass market—a new commercial concept designed to accommodate (and induce) a society that more and more would seek its identity in the variety of goods it consumed.
vi vi vi
p.56 - 2/18/13 7:18 PM
bon-marche-miller
rench practice of autofinancement, the store's owners and managers tended to reject dependency on outside financial sources.
vi
p.57 - 2/18/13 7:19 PM
bon-marche-miller
Because the department stores bought in quantity, because they bought regularly, their special sales alleviating the layoffs and shutdowns that came with slack seasons, and because they bought from labor-intensive industries consisting of small and medium-sized firms, they were in a position to dictate the terms of supply.
vi
p.57 - 2/18/13 7:20 PM
bon-marche-miller
Department stores bought on credit, interest-free, thereby shifting to the manufacturer the initial financing of supplies. By the time the credit came due, the goods had frequently been sold, again illustrating the linkage between turnover and capital. The stores also required that deliveries be staggered; so that in still another way operating costs—this time the costs of warehousing—were largely shouldered by the supplier.
vi
p.58 - 2/18/13 7:24 PM
bon-marche-miller
Developed as these wholesaling networks had become, however, the department stores preferred to build buying organizations of their own.
vi vi
p.58 - 2/18/13 7:25 PM
bon-marche-miller
More important, they established direct contacts with manufacturers by dispatching their buyers (department heads) on a regular basis to the factories themselves
vi
p.59 - 2/18/13 7:26 PM
bon-marche-miller
Some stores had the work done by workshops for young girls at convents, and in Belgium it was not unknown for work to be farmed out to the prisons.11 However the Bon Marche, despite its religious connections,12 preferred to rely upon small workshops of several people, upon intermediaries who passed the work on to individuals at their homes, or directly upon workers themselves, many of whom passed daily at the Bon Marche to receive orders or to be handed merchandise in need of completion.
vi
p.60 - 2/18/13 7:27 PM
bon-marche-miller
here were workshops for shirts and men's clothing; for trousseaus, baby clothes, and white goods; for women's hats and ready-to-wear items such as coats or cloaks; for made-to-measure clothes like skirts, blouses, evening and wedding gowns; and, finally, for wall hangings, upholstery, mattress and cabinet work.
vi
p.60 - 2/18/13 7:28 PM
bon-marche-miller
All department store history,\" wrote one commentator at the turn of the century, \"is dominated by this idea. . . . Circulate the capital as often as possible.\"13
vi vi vi
p.63 - 2/18/13 7:38 PM
bon-marche-miller
he Bon Marche was like a great consumption empire, drawing to its center a cosmopolitan throng, conquering its provinces with its promotional legions, and then reaping the tribute from its outlying territories. The firm thought of provincials and foreigners as subjects to be won, and solicited them as eagerly as it did the Parisians. For mastering the former it relied upon the press, and the national rail system to herd them to Paris. Indeed while all the grands magasins scrambled after this market, the Bon Marche especially became known for the trade.18
vi vi vi vi vi
p.63 - 2/18/13 7:40 PM
bon-marche-miller
ut the greatest source of the empire's prosperity lay not in bringing its subjects to the center, but rather in bringing the center to them.
vi vi vi
p.64 - 2/18/13 7:42 PM
bon-marche-miller
TABLE ONE22 Dates Sales Volume Mail-order Paris 1871-72 33,949,621 5,079,839 — 1876-77 72,693,993 13,196,974 — 1886-87 123,234,523 17,320,302 13,338,532 1895-96 159,420,596 26,463,062 19,662,714 1902-03 188,455,416 33,293,982 25,160,119
vi
p.67 - 2/18/13 7:46 PM
bon-marche-miller
A second dimension to the management of flows was the creation of layers of managerial authority
vi vi
p.67 - 2/18/13 7:48 PM
bon-marche-miller
ach department head received his own budget, bought his own merchandise, and hired and fired the personnel in his charge. He further, of course, supervised sales except during trips to the factories, when the ranking second took over command. This meant that it was also the department head who set the rates of mark-up and mark-down and who prepared the displays and departmental advertising.
vi
p.70 - 2/18/13 8:00 PM
bon-marche-miller
hrough decentralization at the departmental level the Bon Marche could fix responsibility for its most essential operations, and coordinate buying and selling for a wide range of merchandise
vi
p.70 - 2/18/13 8:02 PM
bon-marche-miller
here was one other dimension to the management of flows beyond the design of an organizational structure. This was the incessant push towards greater efficiency, the penetration of a broad rationalizing process into all spheres of store operations.
vi vi
p.71 - 2/18/13 8:04 PM
bon-marche-miller
Telephone lines were increasingly installed for interservice communication or for communication between sectors such as departments and their workshops. Sliding chutes, turning tables, and what must have been a form of conveyor belt were used to funnel packages to the central depot. Technology, in fact, became so important that in 1910 Edouard Hocquart, the
vi vi vi
p.72 - 2/18/13 8:05 PM
bon-marche-miller
precise procedures were established no later than the 1880s to assure a constant flow of daily store data into the central accounting office of the store. A set of mail-order records from 1895 to 1903 further reveals an extensive breakdown on sales, expenses, and operations by sectors and months and includes, as well, comparisons with the figures of the previous years for each of these areas.
vi
p.72 - 2/18/13 8:07 PM
bon-marche-miller
Perhaps most symbolic of rationalization at the Bon Marche was the blanc, the great white sale that occurred in late
vi vi vi
p.73 - 2/18/13 8:07 PM
bon-marche-miller
nuary or early February as a diversion from the winter offseason
vi
p.77 - 2/18/13 8:12 PM
bon-marche-miller
n the realm of worker relations, the family spirit remained pervasive, again bringing cohesion to the businessman's world and to the conditions of authority that he attached to it. Highly personal and often highly paternalistic—increasingly with an eye to fixing and disciplining an industrial work force—the family affair remained wedded to those household traditions that informed the very idea of the firm
vi vi
p.78 - 2/18/13 8:19 PM
bon-marche-miller
uilding the Bon Marche required more than pioneering marketing strategies and administrative structures. There was also a need for more complex business roles to adapt to the management of an organizational endeavor and a need for more complex employee relations to form, shape, and integrate a mass bureaucratic work force
vi
p.78 - 2/18/13 8:20 PM
bon-marche-miller
BUILDING ORGANIZATION MEN: THE BASE Internal relationships at the Bon Marche centered on the creation of organization men.
vi vi
p.79 - 2/18/13 8:21 PM
bon-marche-miller
Most clerks were drawn from the lower middle class, very often the sons and daughters of small shopkeepers, although gargons and other employees who performed manual labor tended to come from peasant stock. Both groups were predominantly provincial in origin, the gar^ons almost exclusively so, while approximately four-fifths of the clerks were born outside Paris.
vi
p.79 - 2/18/13 8:22 PM
bon-marche-miller
all Bon Marche clerks had some previous selling experience.3 This was a store requirement. It was a requirement that the Boucicauts could make because high salaries and other favorable conditions attracted a surplus of applicants to Bon Marche positions, and it was a requirement that enabled the Boucicauts to rely on other stores for their salesclerks' initial training.
vi
p.80 - 2/18/13 8:28 PM
bon-marche-miller
rocedures were a way of life at the Bon Marche. Employees were recruited according to store procedures, they were fired or retired according to store procedures, and in between they were expected to work according to store procedures. For some, particularly when nettled by procedural pettiness or by that special ability of procedures to gainsay common sense,
vi
p.81 - 2/18/13 8:30 PM
bon-marche-miller
Procedures served still another function; they helped to form a new kind of seller. Prescribing the one right way of selling permitted the Boucicauts to wean their employees away from the old habits of haggling and cheating still rampant in the small shops of the country
vi
p.81 - 2/18/13 8:32 PM
bon-marche-miller
Thus the Boucicauts dictated a uniform code of behavior that ranged from the employee's appearance to his selling of merchandise. Absolute courtesy was demanded at all times, and the employee was warned against any negligence in his dress or language. He was also obliged to respond to all questions with \"the greatest of readiness,\"
vi
p.82 - 2/18/13 8:33 PM
bon-marche-miller
In small shops employees were paid almost solely on the basis of a fixed salary. But at the Bon Marche commissions formed the most substantial part of a salesclerk's pay. Zola claimed that the commission, on the average, was more than double the regular salary, so that a seller earning from 1,200 to 1,500 francs annually on a fixed salary might, on the whole, receive 3,600 francs in a year.
vi vi
p.83 - 2/18/13 8:35 PM
bon-marche-miller
but quantity and speed as the measurement of performance. And commissions fit the new selling environment in still another way: they fostered individualism and competitiveness. They were a frequent cause of quarrels between clerks, and, if they might produce some nasty moments, they also interfered with unionization efforts.7
vi vi
p.84 - 2/18/13 8:37 PM
bon-marche-miller
pension programs that would later be established, the policy of promotion suggested that to enter the Bon Marche was to enter a career, and by 1890, perhaps earlier, the store was receiving applications stating that \"my aim in entering your honorable house is to create for myself a definitive situation/
vi
p.84 - 2/18/13 8:38 PM
bon-marche-miller
Of the nearly 400 persons who entered the store in 1873, 39,_percent were fired in their first five years.
vi vi vi steiger figures
p.85 - 2/18/13 8:41 PM
bon-marche-miller
Trade slackened twice a year, from June to September and from December (aside from toys and fancy goods) to February. Some department stores were notorious for wholesale dismissals during these periods.
vi
p.85 - 2/18/13 8:41 PM
bon-marche-miller
But the most frequent cause for dismissal was a break in the disciplinary or procedural structures of the stor
vi vi
p.87 - 2/18/13 8:45 PM
bon-marche-miller
et meddling with employees' personal habits went still deeper, to a concern for that fundamental tenet of bourgeois culture—respectability—and its adaptation to a new bourgeois milieu. Undoubtedly the Boucicauts' own moral standards were strongly at play here. Each was a practicing Catholic and both Zola and a store cashier noted a reign of virtuousness at the Bon Marche.13
vi vi vi
p.87 - 2/18/13 8:46 PM
bon-marche-miller
Hence the Boucicauts did not hesitate to correlate private character with public behavior (and public image), and among notations in the employee register could equally be found: \"Good employee. Married, separated from his wife and living in marital fashion with another woman (this situation does not permit us to keep him)\"; and \"Left voluntarily. Lived with a woman with a bad past. Had to choose between the woman or the House. Good employee\";
vi
p.90 - 2/18/13 9:29 PM
bon-marche-miller
Again the 1869 origins of a broad paternalistic scheme were significant, two citywide strikes of commercial employees occurring in that year and the dedication itself coming only one week before a near total walkout of the work force. These events began with the formation of an employees' Chambre Syndicale in 1868. The following year, claiming over 5,000 adherents, the movement threatened to strike in May if the new stores did not agree to a Sunday closing. The employees got their way, many major stores acquiescing to their demands, those that did not being forced to close for lack of personnel
vi
p.91 - 2/18/13 9:32 PM
bon-marche-miller
But, above all, paternalism was interjected into the Bon Marche's work environment because of the tensions and difficulties which that environment produced. This is a subject that requires a deeper look at the Boucicauts' work policies and the conditions they created for the Bon Marche employee.
vi vi
p.91 - 2/18/13 9:32 PM
bon-marche-miller
For example, 43 percent of the group who entered in 1873— the year after the first section of the new building was opened—left before five years, and of these a considerable portion did so in the first yea
vi
p.93 - 2/18/13 9:38 PM
bon-marche-miller
There were conflicts between each other and between competing departments over the quest for commissions, conflicts with office clerks who received bonuses for detecting faulty commission claims, and conflicts between the desire to sell as much and as often as possible and the need to maintain a posture of honesty at all times.
vi vi vi
p.94 - 2/18/13 9:39 PM
bon-marche-miller
lerks were also expected to be well dressed for work, and all had middle-class pretensions, so that even the frugal employee was obliged to spend a fair percentage of his salary on his attire.
vi
p.94 - 2/18/13 9:39 PM
bon-marche-miller
In the summer the work day extended from 7:30 in the morning until perhaps 9:00 at night, and in the winter from 8:00 in the morning until 8:00 at night (by 1889 the latter hours were maintained year around).
vi
p.95 - 2/18/13 9:40 PM
bon-marche-miller
Health conditions were another matter of concern. Department stores as a group were criticized for their unsanitary conditions, particularly in regard to poor ventilation and the great quantities of dust that accumulated in back rooms and offices. Tuberculosis rates of commercial employees were reputedly among the highest in Paris.27
vi
p.95 - 2/18/13 9:41 PM
bon-marche-miller
t is not surprising, therefore, that the Bon Marche and other stores gradually adopted a policy of not hiring persons over thirty, or that Madame Boucicaut set fifty years as the retirement age when she founded a pension fund. Many employees were well used up by that time.
vi
p.96 - 2/18/13 10:45 PM
bon-marche-miller
on Marche rarely brought the clerk into contact with Boucicaut himself. Orders were passed through a series of hierarchical levels, each of which demanded absolute obedience.
vi
p.97 - 2/18/13 10:46 PM
bon-marche-miller
when a bell rang and he left through a specified door. Hence there was little room for individual initiative, and this regimentation was enforced by a corps of internal police—the inspectors—who were certainly the most detested persons in the store. These men maintained a constant surveillance over the personnel, exercised absolute authority to preserve absolute order, and were notorious for their ruthlessness.29
vi vi
p.98 - 2/18/13 10:50 PM
bon-marche-miller
Department stores were creating not only a new kind of work force but a new kind of middle-class man.
vi
p.99 - 2/18/13 10:51 PM
bon-marche-miller
Department stores, insurance companies, big banks, and other big operations like railroads, however, forced, a change in this current. Middle-class careers continued to expand, but now more and more they were being channeled into permanently salaried positions with an organization and within an impersonal and hierarchical work environment. The men who entered these careers continued to identify with bourgeois culture and to pursue the conventions of a bourgeois life style. But neither bourgeois respectability nor bourgeois status could cloak the reality of an occupational milieu remarkably similar to that of the working class (Zola was in the habit of referring to department stores as \"the great steam engine\").32
vi vi vi vi vi holyoke steigers
p.99 - 2/18/13 10:52 PM
bon-marche-miller
hus, integration of the work force was the critical issue at the Bon Marche not only because the success of the firm depended in the end on the employee's adaptation to his new work environment, but also because it touched on the question of whether white-collar workers could be effectively reconciled to the middle-class world that they would now have to inhabit.
vi vi
p.100 - 2/18/13 10:55 PM
bon-marche-miller
Boucicauts never sought merely to counterpoise bureaucracy with a paternalistic veneer. Rather, they endeavored to blend the one with the other, restructuring and reorienting old household values to correspond to the style and the goals of their rationalized work system. In this way they could correlate their paternalism with their firm's structure and purpose, thus projecting an image of an internal work community to tie the personnel to the House, its leadership, and its dynamic aspirations. Basically wedded to the French household tradition, the Boucicauts were to cope with fundamental changes in their culture, not by abandoning its practices and its tenets, but by redefining these to fit their new needs and new ends.
vi vi vi holyoke
p.101 - 2/18/13 10:57 PM
bon-marche-miller
Thus the money was left to accrue over the years with an annual four percent interest added to it. If the employee quit or was fired, his amount was redistributed into the general fund, unless the Boucicauts chose to provide him with part of his balance.33 However, women who left the store to marry received their balance in full on the day of their wedding (the Boucicauts, in their bougeois fashion, were never ones to feel fully comfortable with the prospect of cultivating careers for single middle-class women).
vi
p.103 - 2/18/13 11:00 PM
bon-marche-miller
Pensions and provident accounts also meant control. Once the employee accepted the prospect of making his career with the firm in exchange for retirement benefits in the end, he inherently was led to accept as well the work and authority relationships at the Bon Marche.
vi vi vi
p.103 - 2/18/13 11:02 PM
bon-marche-miller
Madame Boucicaut, wishing to continue the work her husband began, has undertaken a heavy task [i.e., the Bon Marche]. In order to deal successfully with this task she needs and counts on your complete devotion; in exchange she shall prove to you that her solicitude will not be lacking. . . .\"
vi vi
p.105 - 2/18/13 11:05 PM
bon-marche-miller
Profit-sharing of this sort could work in almost any establishment of some size. But its advantages to employers were especially appropriate in those firms where a bureaucratic work environment required a common sentiment of cooperation for the system to run efficiently,
vi
p.106 - 2/18/13 11:08 PM
bon-marche-miller
ot a discordant note could be heard. M. Boucicaut very much sensed that he had won every heart and every will and it was certainly one of the greatest joys of his life to see the enthusiasm that greeted him when he cried out: 'It is my wish that every employee be a pillar of my House.'
vi vi
p.107 - 2/18/13 11:10 PM
bon-marche-miller
ll employees, meanwhile, dined at the store twice daily. Like the living quarters, facilities for eating entered into the Boucicauts' plans for their new building, and above the sales galleries they constructed a vast kitchen and four dining rooms, the largest of which could accommodate 800 persons at a single setting.
vi
p.107 - 2/18/13 11:10 PM
bon-marche-miller
There were also programs for the education and leisure of the employees. In 1872 the Boucicauts began evening courses in English and German. The lessons were free, open to all employees, and given in the building after work by instructors especially hired for this purpose. The German class drew few students and was later dropped. But English lessons were not unpopular and each year the Boucicauts sent the best students to London for six months' additional study at House expense.
vi vi
p.108 - 2/18/13 11:12 PM
bon-marche-miller
First, in the 1870s, the Boucicauts hired a doctor to give free consultations during mornings at the store, and later they set up a nearby infirmary in the rue de la Chaise
vi vi
p.108 - 2/18/13 11:12 PM
bon-marche-miller
6 percent interest on accounts that were opened with the House. The response was far from negligible. By 1886, 927 employees had entrusted over 3,200,000 francs to the firm.
p.108 - 2/18/13 11:13 PM
bon-marche-miller
Boucicauts once more found a felicitous interplay between their values and their needs. Catholicism and bourgeois respectability, filtered through their sentiments of responsibility and good will, could lead the Boucicauts to sponsor music and fencing lessons and even a lecture series to lure their employees out of the cabarets and music halls that young, single clerks were so prone to frequent
vi
p.109 - 2/18/13 11:15 PM
bon-marche-miller
Boucicauts' need to form a quality work force that would bring an air of gentility to a mass sales environment. So, more than indulging a personal bias, the Boucicauts again crossed into their employees' private lives—this time to cultivate gentlemanly behavior as well as to enforce it—because they saw in this a way to shape a new kind of salesclerk.48
vi vi vi vi
p.110 - 2/18/13 11:18 PM
bon-marche-miller
More important, paternalism that encouraged thrift, that sought to broaden the employees' minds, to refine their sensibilities, and to protect their virtue fell directly in line with the great dream of all nineteenth-century employers to check the development of working-class consciousness by turning their workers into bourgeois themselves (what, after all, could be more properly bourgeois than a piano in the living room?).
vi
p.110 - 2/18/13 11:20 PM
bon-marche-miller
For bourgeois culture in the late nineteenth century, one of the great dilemmas was how to continue to expand its ranks without simply creating a new enemy in its midst. This is why so many white-collar employers sought to shore up the traditional bourgeois orientations by insisting on dress codes for their employees (at the Bon Marche, men were not only expected to be properly attired, but to wear top hats upon their arrival and departure).
vi vi
p.111 - 2/18/13 11:21 PM
bon-marche-miller
The distinction was an important one, for it was strictly maintained linguistically and it suggested a separate class identity that meshed with a difference in function, even though both groups were, in reality, engaged in machine-like or semi-skilled work
vi
p.111 - 2/18/13 11:21 PM
bon-marche-miller
that existed within the House—and French society—between \"employees\" and \"workers.\" The former term applied only to those persons who earned a fixed salary,
vi
p.111 - 2/18/13 11:21 PM
bon-marche-miller
o be sure, the role of employees like gargons was somewhat vague here. But too much confusion between them and the clerks was avoided through such mechanisms as separate titles and separate dining rooms.
vi
p.112 - 2/18/13 11:23 PM
bon-marche-miller
the Boucicauts essentially could repeat the same kind of message they had proffered with the provident fund: that the lives of the employees and the life of the House were one and the same. Thus the Boucicauts evolved a highly elaborate paternalism to extend and to consolidate their system of work and to provide an associational frame for integrating the employee into the firm. They established programs to respond to the functional needs confronting the formation of a department store work force and they erected mechanisms of control that could facilitate discipline and counteract a recurrence of the strike of 1869.
vi vi
p.112 - 2/18/13 11:25 PM
bon-marche-miller
s a member of this household or community he too was part of making the Bon Marche what it was, and that his ultimate identity and role with the firm was in the framework of contributing in common to the growth and prosperity of the new commercial emporium. This would always be the message behind the grand famille image,
vi
p.113 - 2/18/13 11:27 PM
bon-marche-miller
how to insure that they would live by and for the goals of the organization—in short, how to build the sort of organization man who a century later would be turned into a stereotype—were questions that the Boucicauts were obliged to resolve. Here again they sought the answers in a synthesis of rationalized work conditions, on the one hand, traditional household relationships, on the other.
vi
p.116 - 2/18/13 11:35 PM
bon-marche-miller
erformance and competitiveness. This, after all, was one of the principal advantages that such a recruitment system could bring to the Boucicauts; for by creating increasingly lucrative and powerful positions along a hierarchical ladder, and by making these positions available to the most successful at the immediate rung below, the Boucicauts could expect to intensify the ambitions, drive, and output of those persons they entrusted with authority. Continued access to the highest ranks, where power and profits were greatest, was guaranteed through a policy that required interesses to retire at the age of fifty.
vi vi
p.117 - 2/18/13 11:36 PM
bon-marche-miller
most ranking employees were involved in the Boucicauts' paternalism in one way or another. This was particularly so of the administrators who as a group were trustees of the funds. Individual interesses were also in charge of programs such as housing arrangements or the music and fencing lessons, while department heads were responsible for the quality of the food service.
vi
p.120 - 2/18/13 11:51 PM
bon-marche-miller
Like the paternal relations at the base, it suggested a restructuring of the old pattern of succession in the small shops where the loyal assistant might marry the patron's daughter and become heir to the boutique. Now the heirs were assistants who had placed their hopes and savings with the store and its dynamic intentions
vi vi
p.121 - 2/18/13 11:52 PM
bon-marche-miller
lead their employees to see their relationship with the Bon Marche as one of participation in an organizational and active commercial household.
vi vi
p.121 - 2/19/13 12:02 AM
bon-marche-miller
Similarly they often referred to the personnel in household terms— \"your people\" Karcher wrote on one occasion and \"the Bon Marche family\" on several others. Yet Karcher's letters were also replete with the imagery of an active and successful department store, and the world they depicted was one of departments and bureaus, a myriad of different employees, and sales figures in the millions. They revealed a loyalty not only to Madame Boucicaut but to the Bon Marche and what it represented,
vi
p.122 - 2/19/13 12:02 AM
bon-marche-miller
It makes me proud to march in the ranks of a peaceful army that knows how to reap such victories.\"
vi vi
p.122 - 2/19/13 12:04 AM
bon-marche-miller
RITUALIZATION
vi vi
p.123 - 2/19/13 12:05 AM
bon-marche-miller
hus rituals, Durkheim went on to note, were the most forceful affirmation of those bonds that hold collectivities together.67 At the Bon Marche, where an inner world ambiance was cultivated through store gatherings, celebrations, and ceremonies, ritualization served much the same purpose.
vi vi
p.123 - 2/19/13 12:06 AM
bon-marche-miller
There were periodical summer picnics such as the 1886 outing to Madame Boucicaut's suburban estate at Fontenay-aux-Roses.
vi
p.123 - 2/19/13 12:06 AM
bon-marche-miller
hus magical scenes of a Disneyesque Bon Marche, Dumas-like scenes of moonlight and sword play covered the programs of in-House concerts or those of the Assauts d'Escrime that the store held annually.
vi
p.124 - 2/19/13 12:07 AM
bon-marche-miller
gatherings and festivities and the community life they projected were rarely separated from a context of dynamism or control.
vi
p.125 - 2/19/13 12:10 AM
bon-marche-miller
Mme. Boucicaut gives you a million; yet she promised you nothing. Imitate her example and in turn, without promising her anything, give her what is in your power, your devotion and concern that you owe to the interests of this great Bon Marche family—this is at least the sense of his speech if not the precise text/'6
vi
p.129 - 2/19/13 12:18 AM
bon-marche-miller
The Boucicauts preserved and cultivated a sense of fiefdom. The store was their creation, their status, their lives, never merely a financial end in itself.
vi
p.129 - 2/19/13 12:20 AM
bon-marche-miller
restructuring of traditions and values to fit new conditions. Once we recognize that paternalism was also a response to the Boucicauts' own needs to acclimate to their new business roles, it becomes clear that the French family firm was a far more flexible instrument than the conclusions of David Landes and others would tend to allow.
vi
p.130 - 2/19/13 12:22 AM
bon-marche-miller
Increasingly the Bon Marche was referred to as an oeuvre
vi
p.130 - 2/19/13 12:22 AM
bon-marche-miller
ictorial images, poetical allusions to old and new empires, celebrations and rituals, attributed an exceptional status to the House. There was the sensation that the Bon Marche was something profound, something extraordinary, a great adventure upon which all its members had embarked. Most of all, there was thegrandc fartiille image, the central theme in the creation of a new idea of the firm, and a concept that permitted the Boucicauts to anchor themselves in the traditional value system, while they again redefined these values for their own, and new, purposes
vi
p.139 - 2/19/13 1:13 AM
bon-marche-miller
In the Mougel family a copy of Madame Boucicaut's will was kept for all to read.12 Indeed one may speak of a cult of the Bon Marche that was handed down from generation to generation, so that even today the greatgrandson of Jules Plassard displays the pictures of Aristide and Marguerite Boucicaut in his salon, while the descendants of still other important figures retain a strong interest in the current and past affairs of the House
vi
p.146 - 2/19/13 1:35 AM
bon-marche-miller
Directors did not alter the conditions of work significantly, but they did add to their tensions with such innovations as the widespread use of auxiliary employees.
vi
p.147 - 2/19/13 1:37 AM
bon-marche-miller
A league of small shopkeepers, organized in 1888, initiated a scathing attack on department store work as the embodiment of the decline in lower-middle-class careers.27
vi
p.172 - 2/19/13 9:20 AM
bon-marche-miller
and as the largest commercial employer in Paris the Bon Marche remained remarkably free of the problems that other stores encountered. Not only were there no strikes, but there is no evidence that a Chambre Syndicale section was ever set up at the Bon Marche as it was at the Printemps, the Samaritaine, and elsewhere.50
vi
p.174 - 2/19/13 9:25 AM
bon-marche-millervi
The letter ended with the preposterous but nevertheless evocative statement that \"I will do everything vvithin my weak means to throw back the invader for the honor of France and the Grands Magasins du Bon Marche.\"
p.177 - 2/19/13 9:32 AM
bon-marche-miller
nd, like the \"familial banquets\" upon which it followed, the livre d'or was clearly conceived by them to confirm, this time from base level up, wha
vi
p.178 - 2/19/13 9:33 AM
bon-marche-miller
a carefully cultivated store ideology had long been asserting: that the Bon Marche was the sum of the common and active participation of all its members in an extraordinary and momentous commercial adventure.
vi
p.178 - 2/19/13 9:33 AM
bon-marche-miller
a consummate symbol of the new commercial community, dynamic and bureaucratic in nature, that they and their predecessors had ceaselessly sought to create. At bottom the livre d'or was a compendium not only of Bon Marche history, but of the reconciliation between traditional bourgeois values and the coming of the modern business firm.
vi vi
p.180 - 2/19/13 9:34 AM
bon-marche-miller
AMONG THOSE PHRASES SO readily associated with the new department stores, and so loosely turned to as though their very mention was sufficient to raise the tone of the discussion to a plane of significance, was the \"democratization of luxury.\" The term itself is a superficial one, and in some ways \"^misleading. Although mass retailing gave way to stores expressly directed at a lower-class clientele, the principal firms like the Bon Marche remained middle-class institutions.
vi
p.180 - 2/19/13 9:35 AM
bon-marche-miller
It stood for a market that was now prepared to turn practically any retail article into a mass-consumer good. And thus, at a more fundamental level, it stood for the realization that bourgeois culture was coming more and more to mean a consumer culture, that the two were, in fact, becoming interchangeable. The department store alone did not lead to the appearance of a consumer society, but it did stand at the center of this phenomenon. As an economic mechanism it made that society possible, and as an institution with a large provincial trade it made the culture of consumption a national one.
vi
p.182 - 2/19/13 9:38 AM
bon-marche-miller
Selling consumption was a matter of seduction and showmanship, and in these Boucicaut excelled, enveloping his marketplace in an aura of fascination that turned buying into a special and irresistible occasion. Dazzling and sensuous, the Bon Marche became a permanent fair, an institution, a fantasy world, a spectacle of extraordinary proportions, so that going to the store became an event and an adventure.
vi
p.182 - 2/19/13 9:40 AM
bon-marche-miller
This was particularly true of the main gateway on the rue de Sevres. Monumental and ornate, it rose the entire height of the building and was seated under a cupola, crowned with a pediment, conceived as an archway for the first two stories, and decorated with caryatids and reclining statues of the gods. The impression was that of entering a theatre, or perhaps even a temple
vi
p.182 - 2/19/13 9:40 AM
bon-marche-miller
along the upper floors ran balconies from which one could view, as a spectator, the crowds and activity below.
vi
p.183 - 2/19/13 9:41 AM
bon-marche-miller
Nearby was a buffet, a room whose fine furnishings, curtains, and palm leaves made it not unlike the lounge of a theatre.3 Part opera, part theatre, part museum, Boucicaut's eclectic -'^extravaganza did not disappoint those who came for ashow.
vi
p.183 - 2/19/13 9:42 AM
bon-marche-miller
nside, the spectacle of flowing crowds intensified, orchestrated by barred passages, by cheap, tempting goods on the first floor that brought still another crush to the store's most observable arena, and by a false disorder that forced shoppers to travel the breadth of the House.4
vi
p.183 - 2/19/13 9:43 AM
bon-marche-miller
Everywhere merchandise formed a decorative motif conveying an exceptional quality to the goods themselves. Silks cascaded from the walls of the silk gallery, ribbons were strung above the hall of ribbons, umbrellas were draped full blown in a parade of hues and designs. Oriental rugs, rich and textural, hung from balconies for the spectators below.
vi
p.184 - 2/19/13 9:45 AM
bon-marche-miller
So thg^store, monumental, theatrical, fantastical, became an attraction in its own right to entice the public to visit the displays and^o~mak^aLJ:heir trip an extraordinary experience.
vi
p.186 - 2/19/13 9:52 AM
bon-marche-miller
At the same time the House was careful to invite the heads of railway stations and officials well-placed in the post office, all of whom could be of considerable importance to a store with such a large mailorder trade
vi vi
p.187 - 2/19/13 9:55 AM
bon-marche-miller
The lights, flowers, and splendors heaped beneath the eyes of the guests, the eminent artists one has applauded, all in the end shimmer, sound, and run together in the memory of someone the least distracted, and one remains dazzled, dazed for some time while trying to recover the necessary stability to arrive at some sort of judgment. \"Let us speak first of the hall. In less than an hour the store, glutted with merchandise, abandoned to a world of gnomes or genies, is rapidly transformed, as in a fairyland, into a bewitching palace, dazzling with its lights, filled with flowers and exotic bushes whose effect is splendid. Everywhere carpets and silk tapestries from the Orient are flung and hung in abundance, forming charming salons, hallways, and retreats
vi
p.188 - 2/19/13 9:55 AM
bon-marche-miller
Immense departments, earlier filled with customers, soon will serve as an altar to the cult of music. .. .\"n It wasr then, on concert evenings that image and reality at last btended into one. Merchandise counters gave way to a stage, sfclesclerks transformed themselves into performers, the building became a deluxe concert hall. So ready to portray his emporium as a theatre, or the opera, or a land of enchantment, Boucicaut had found the supreme effect. Spectacle and entertainment, on the one hand, the world of consumption, on the other, were now truly indistinguishable.
vi
p.188 - 2/19/13 9:57 AM
bon-marche-miller
he store was equally fond of publishing descriptions of itself and its wonders. At first the firm relied upon the national press, which has never been known for its high standard of ethics. Articles on the Bon Marche, most likely prepared in the offices of the same, appeared in LfIllustration and Le Monde Illustre throughout the 1870s and early 1880s.14
vi
p.188 - 2/19/13 9:58 AM
bon-marche-miller
Suspicions about the origins of these articles are raised by the fact that: (1) articles in both journals were often the same; (2) the articles frequently were filled with blatant advertising content; (3) handwritten copies of the articles exist in the Bon Marche Archives. For a further discussion of collusion between the Bon Marche and the press, see Chapter VI.
vi
p.189 - 2/19/13 10:18 AM
bon-marche-miller
Basements were a \"veritable labyrinth.\" Giant electrical machines producing light for thousands of lamps were described in meticulous detail. Statistics abounded on the hundreds of employees in various services or on the thousands of letters the store received daily
vi
p.190 - 2/19/13 10:21 AM
bon-marche-miller
he role of illustrated cards here was especially interesting. At least as far back as the sixteenth century, peddlers had passed from village to village selling cheap images of royal personnages, famous villains, customs, costumes, and a multitude of other subjects. In particular they sold images of religious scenes, pictures of saints to hang on one's wall or to carry on one's person.16 These were the distractions of an earlier time, the medium for transporting oneself beyond the realm of the ordinary, the paraphernalia of a child's magical world.
vi
p.191 - 2/19/13 10:22 AM
bon-marche-miller
o present these now with pictures of the Bon Marche on the back, or as a series of scenes of sights ofParisJ.hat included a view of the Left Bank emporium, or simply to change the subject to scenes of middle-class life in which the Bon Marche might figure prominently (a theme we shall return to shortly) jvas to create a whole new enchanted world of association.
vi
p.192 - 2/19/13 10:25 AM
bon-marche-miller
Above all, the spectre of a modern wonder was to be found in the ubiquitous pictures of the building. Everywhere the Bon Marche was to be seen—on the backs of cards and catalogues, the frontispiece of agendas, the headings of store stationery, store order forms, and store invoices—rising from the ground as the most colossal and fabulous of palaces, wings stretched nearly to the horizon, crowds crushing along its window displays, carriages, omnibuses, and delivery wagons, creating a flurry of activity on the streets before it.
vi
p.192 - 2/19/13 10:26 AM
bon-marche-miller
Zola noted that: \"... tends (0 replace the church. It marches to the religion of the cash di?sk^p.f beauty, of coquetery, and fashion. [Women] go there to pass the hours as they used to go to church: an occupation, a place of enthusiasm where they struggle between their passion for clothes and the thrift of their husbands; in the end all the drama of life with the hereafter of beauty.\"
vi vi vi vi
p.192 - 2/19/13 10:27 AM
bon-marche-miller
\"It was the cathedral of modern commerce, solid and light, made for a people of clients.\" Zola, Au kmheur. p. 27
vi
p.193 - 2/19/13 10:27 AM
bon-marche-miller
For increasingly large numbers of women! a new, irresistible fjculf of consumption had been createct
vi
p.193 - 2/19/13 10:30 AM
bon-marche-miller
here was, in fact, something distinctively respectable about the Bon Marche that could make it forbidding to those who lacked middleclass pretensions, let alone middle-class means. Tb£_store drew its tone from the quarter that enveloped itA one that was known for its affluence, its Catholic orders,, and its bienpensant ways. As a specialty the Bon Marche catered to the religious trade,24 an accent on propriety characteristic of the store's custom as a whole.
vi vi
p.193 - 2/19/13 10:31 AM
bon-marche-miller
ays maintained stocks of religious articles and, later, religious uniforms. Catholics themselves, the Boucicauts during the early years of the store relied on nuns of the quarter to aid them in their paternalism.
vi
p.194 - 2/19/13 10:34 AM
bon-marche-miller
Finally, pictures in catalogues and agendas leave no doubt that this was a store selling, for the most part, to a bourgeois clientele. In fact not until the end of the prewar period did work clothes appear in Bon Marche catalogues, and even then these were primarily of the genre of uniforms for grooms, chauffeurs, valets, and bell boys, that is uniforms most likely bought by their bourgeois employers.
vi
p.194 - 2/19/13 10:34 AM
bon-marche-miller
o leaf through the catalogues, the agendas, and the illustrated cards of the Bon Marche is to come upon the world of French bourgeois culture before the First World War in a way that perhaps no other medium can so vividly convey.2
vi
p.195 - 2/19/13 10:36 AM
bon-marche-miller
he images and accoutrements bespeak a reality all their own. It is through them that we begin to understand what we mean when we refer to the respectability or to the solidity or the certainty of prewar bourgeois life.
vi
p.195 - 2/19/13 10:36 AM
bon-marche-miller
here are the covers of blanc catalogues that itemize the details of a proper bourgeois household: the richness of collections, the richness of embroidery, the solidity of storage chests, the very indispensability of linen to the bourgeois way of life. There were certain things, these scenes remind one, that a bourgeois home could not do without. There had to be too many sheets. There had to be curtains on the windows. There had to be tablecloths on the dining table (the dining room itself being another bourgeois requisite).28
vi
p.195 - 2/19/13 10:37 AM
bon-marche-miller
he household had to be equipped to entertain in the proper fashion. And itjjad to have servants, at least one or two.
vi vi
p.196 - 2/19/13 10:38 AM
bon-marche-miller
his was a carefully patterned society where appearance was always, to a point, a function of occasion, a_badgg.that one_uaderstood what was correct and adhered to it rigorously.
vi
p.196 - 2/19/13 10:39 AM
bon-marche-miller
This was also a civil, leisurely, and gregarious society, an \" image equally conveyed in agenda events and catalogue pictures. It was a society of sociable visits or days of reception. It was a society that ate well and that held large dinners. It was a society that patronized theatres as a social event
vi
p.196 - 2/19/13 10:40 AM
bon-marche-miller
here were always badminton games and tennis games or bicycle rides or hunting forays. This was a very active society. By the turn of the century the Bon Marche was selling gymnastic equipment for the entire family. But it was also a very relaxed society. An 1880 summer clothing catalogue carried the following scenes: women sitting on a bench in a garden, women in a park, women holding parasols or fans, women painting, girls chasing butterflies, girls looking at chickens on a farm.
vi
p.196 - 2/19/13 10:40 AM
bon-marche-miller
There were whole series devoted to vacations at the seashore or adventures in the country. Life, these pictures tell us, was warm and secure, its pleasures a thing to be taken for granted.
vi
p.197 - 2/19/13 10:47 AM
bon-marche-miller
Family life also meant family expectations, a final image that these pictures convey. Children were expected to be bien eleves, a concept that ranged from proper bearing to learning a the social graces. Bon Marche catalogues carried back braces • 'recommended as a support for persons having a tendency to • fctoop\" and support collars \"to prevent children from lowerling their heads.\" Catalogue scenes showed that gentlemen Always shook hands.
vi
p.197 - 2/19/13 10:50 AM
bon-marche-miller
As a reproduction of bourgeois life in these years, the Bon Marche catalogues, agendas, and illustrated cards thus offer a glimpse of a world and its values that has rarely been replicated. Yet there is a good deal to be found in these materials beyond simply the reflection of a class' self-image. Far more than a mirror of bourgeois culture in France, the Bon Marche gave shape and definition to the very meaning of the concept of a bourgeois way of life
vi vi
p.198 - 2/19/13 10:51 AM
bon-marche-miller
Institutions like the Bon Marche made bourgeois life palpable. They produced a vision of a bourgeois life style that became a model for others to follow. The relationship betweeixihe Bon M?-rhp and its culture was therefore a symbiotic oae^.wlth jmalkations that were several and profound.
p.198 - 2/19/13 10:52 AM
bon-marche-miller
iTone respect the Bon Marche came to serve essentially the same role as the Republican school system, at least for those of middle-class means or middle-class aspirations. It became a bourgeois instrument of social homogenization, a means for disseminating the values and life style of the Parisian upper middle-class to French middle-class society as a whole. It did this by so-lowering prices that the former's possessions became mass-consumer items. But it also did this by becoming a kind of cultural primer. The Bon Marche showed people how they should dress, how they should furnish their home, and how they should spend their leisure time. It defined the ideals and goals for French society. It illustrated how successful people or people who wished to be successful or people on their way to becoming successful lived their lives
vi vi vi
p.198 - 2/19/13 10:53 AM
bon-marche-miller
hjjg, through the Bon Marche, Pan^nd the countryside 'becameriTrTre^aiiKe.
vi vi
p.198 - 2/19/13 10:53 AM
bon-marche-miller
Provincials who shopped by mail-order or who travelled to Paris to buy directly from the store (and these must have numbered in the tens of thousands or more every year) shared in a common culture, whether they lived in the large towns of Normandy or in the small villages of Auvergne.
vi vi
p.199 - 2/19/13 10:54 AM
bon-marche-miller
Perhaps more important, the Bon Marche spread bourgeois culture to the new white-collar workers, steering these floaters toward middle-class shores. The Bon Marche offered these people, whose formidable growth toward the end of the century was largely a product of the grands magasins themselves, a way of life to imitate and the access and identification that would enable them to do so.
vi vi
p.199 - 2/19/13 10:55 AM
bon-marche-miller
Through the department store, middle-class pretensions could find satisfaction because images and material goods were coming to 1 constitute life style itself. Bon Marche goo^sji^rc^sointerwoven„with. perceptions o f vfhe~4xmrgebis way oflife^that a purchase of a Bon Marche tablecloth or a coat for the theatre /^becamea purchase of bourgeois s tat us foo
vi vi
p.199 - 2/19/13 10:55 AM
bon-marche-miller
ecoming bourgeois had / always, to a point, been a matter of consumption, but never / so clearly, never so extensively, and never at prices that made its attainment so comparatively easy
vi vi
p.200 - 2/19/13 10:57 AM
bon-marche-miller
t rather buying certain goods in order to live that way of life. By Bon Marche standards, identity was to be found in the things one possessed. Consumption itselXbecame a substitutejor being bourgeois. AtTofwhich implied that the principal medium of consumption—the department store—now became the arbiter of boui^eois^dexitity/, defining it accordingly witfi what the House had to sell.
vi
p.200 - 2/19/13 10:59 AM
bon-marche-miller
Any craze, or even any event, became an occasion for consumption. As FrancoRussian relations drew closer together, Russian toy soldiers began to appear on Bon Marche counters. In 1892 a Bon Marche gift catalogue pictured French and Russian soldiers saluting each other, thus placing bourgeois consumption at the service of public policy, and public policy at the service o
vi
p.201 - 2/19/13 11:02 AM
bon-marche-miller
Much like the theatre, whose image the Bon Marche was always ready to assume, the House offered itself as a bourgeois social fixture, a meeting ground and a place to be seen as well as a place of entertainment.
vi
p.203 - 2/19/13 11:19 AM
bon-marche-miller
lmanacs were probably the most widely read of publications, often the only literary contact for great numbers of individuals. Their popularity led propagandists, as well as publishers, to issue almanacs in abundance.
vi
p.204 - 2/19/13 11:20 AM
bon-marche-miller
erhaps the^ftrs^of their kind offered by the new grands magasins, theagendas/basically were calendar books with space to jot down daily^engagements. Like earlier almanacs they contained a range of information and amusing diversions. There were cartoons, menus, and extracts of articles and engravings from encyclopedias or other books. There were also theatre plans and lists and information on the postal system, lycees, museums, churches, hospitals, police commissariats, and occasionally notaries.
vi
p.204 - 2/19/13 11:22 AM
bon-marche-miller
In one sense, then, Bon Marche agendas were a brilliant vehicl^for^store self-promotion.
vi
p.204 - 2/19/13 11:22 AM
bon-marche-miller
ut, in a still larger sense, they were another means of identifying the Bon Marche with the bourgeois way of life. By placing store news alongside details on churches, theatres, lycees, and notaries, agendas implied that the Bon Marche was another bourgeois social institution of Paris.
vi vi
p.204 - 2/19/13 11:23 AM
bon-marche-miller
Reception Day\" pages and monthly dinner menus, agendas further suggested that a visit to the Bon Marche was another part of the bourgeois social calendar.
vi
p.205 - 2/19/13 11:32 AM
bon-marche-miller
less alluring, side to the department store world. To the store's fashionable shoppers was added \"la foule,\" the masses of women whose identity was captive to the goods they could buy. To the magnificence of displays was added the decline in standards, old Bourras' carefully crafted umbrellas failing dismally beside the cheaper wares of Mouret.
vi vi
p.205 - 2/19/13 11:32 AM
bon-marche-miller
To the energy and immensity of the organization was added the image of a steam engine, where employees were atomized, where old ties were discarded, and where everything was ruled by a struggle for existence. In_Zola's vjftionjhprp was an awareness that a way of life wasj>assing, that with the.department storg prpprg/ ir^^~s©ck4y-more impersonal, more_ uniform, more machine^ike, more mass-like.
vi vi vi vi vi vi vi holyoke
p.206 - 2/19/13 11:34 AM
bon-marche-miller
most contemporary observers expressed an ambivalence of sorts about the new stores. Generally the attitude was favorable, as in the studies of Henri Garrigues and Leon Duclos, two doj^oral-stiiderrts-^io regarded the grands magasins as a gr(ea{ step towards progress. Yet Garrigues regretted that employees were \"nothingjbiit cogs in a vast .machine,\" and he saw in mass production and mass distribution the cre^; ation of a uniformity \"without thought, without character.\" Similarly, Duclos observed that the new stores had a pernicious influence on craftsmanship, that beneath the appearance of luxury was a decline in quality.
vi vi
p.206 - 2/19/13 11:36 AM
bon-marche-miller
However, I must confess that the great bazar, by creating a uniformity of clothing and furniture in these little households, wounds certain undying feelings in me. . . . We have arrived at a day when precut clothes are less expensive than uncut cloth. ... In the past a dress a woman made was like
vi vi vi vi holyoke
p.207 - 2/19/13 11:36 AM
bon-marche-miller
er biography. Now ... the same design and the same cut of clothing cover women who certainly are not of the same upbringing, that is to say, of the same soul. . .
vi vi
p.207 - 2/19/13 11:38 AM
bon-marche-miller
Giffard grasped and accepted. But in Giffard's mind they were also an immoral world, a world where one could find: \"The husband who has driven his wife to the great bazar, who leaves her for long hours as prey to the seductions of lace, who leaves her to go on and on in the wonderful storev house of attractions where she empties her purse, her eyes on fire, her face reddened, her hand shivering, placed on that of a gloves salesman, while he goes off during this time with shady women to the furnished hotels of the eighteenth rank.\"4 In this world, beyond the glitter, or indeed as part of the spectacle, passions were unleashed, illicit love affairs rampant, perversions not unknown.
vi vi vi
p.208 - 2/19/13 11:39 AM
bon-marche-miller
In particular they tended to focus on two of the problems Giffard had raised—the situation of female clerks and rampant kleptomania—each of which requires some discussion.
vi vi
p.210 - 2/19/13 11:45 AM
bon-marche-miller
Women clerks were not quite full-fledged bourgeoises, but they were not quite working class eithe
vi
p.211 - 2/19/13 11:47 AM
bon-marche-miller
In their manners and their dress dpnwtfpllps rnnlfj npppnr nlmnnt ^distiT^iishahle from_ \"\" more proper bourgeois women. They might frequent restaurants and cabarets catering especially to them, but they also spent their leisure time and money on the same sorts of pursuits as other middle-class people.10 Demoiselles and the ladies they waited on were not all that far apart. This is what made the question of dissoluteness far more disturbing than the standard Sodom and Gomorrah tales emanating from the factories.11 Debaucheries among working-class women were one thing^jmo^ women ^omelhing else again.
vi
p.212 - 2/19/13 11:50 AM
bon-marche-miller
The image of department stores as dens of iniquity took a still sharper turn over the issue ofshopliftin£
vi
p.215 - 2/19/13 11:55 AM
bon-marche-miller
But by the end of the century kleptomania suddenly began to appear in a new light. Whereas in the past the focus had been on the pathology of the individual, psychiatrists now began to emphasize the social milieu in which kleptomania occurred. No longer a mere function of personal eccentricities, klep to man i a :w&s_ now.. seen-taU^^hape d^iicixleter^ mined^by forces of cultural chan^e.^ was the rise of the department store and the sharp increase in kleptomania-like behavior that seemed to accompany it.
vi
p.216 - 2/19/13 11:56 AM
bon-marche-miller
et what particularly struck this generation of psychiatrists was both the sheer number of kleptomaniacs arrested in department stores and the fact that so few of these were incited to steal elsewhere.
vi vi vi
p.217 - 2/19/13 11:57 AM
bon-marche-miller
f kleptomaniacs committed so many thefts in department stores, then it was not only because they were predisposed to steal but because the department stores created conditions that incited them to^dojso..
vi vi v
p.217 - 2/19/13 11:58 AM
bon-marche-miller
\"These immense galleries, as freely accessible to the idle in search of distractions or adventures as to serious shoppers, enclose and expose . . . the richest cloths, the most luxurious dress articles, the most seductive superfluities. Women of all sorts, drawn to these elegant surroundings by instincts native to their sex, fascinated by so many rash provocations, dazzled by the abundance of trinkets and lace, find themselves overtaken by a sudden, unpremeditated, almost savage impulse. They place a clumsy if furtive hand on a display and voila, with one unthinking stroke, they wipe out the most respectable past, improvise as shoplifters, and render themselves criminal; soon they will have to explain themselves before the authorities and justice.
vi
p.218 - 2/19/13 11:59 AM
bon-marche-miller
I saw things as if through a cloud, everything stimulated my desire and assumed, for me, an extraordinary attraction. I felt myself swept along towards them and I grabbed hold of things without any outside and superior consideration intervening to hold me back. Moreover I took things at random, useless and worthless articles as well as useful and expensive articles. It was like a monomania of possession/'2
vi vi
p.218 - 2/19/13 12:00 PM
bon-marche-miller
For others the reaction was just the contrary, a desolation at the thought that \"they will henceforth be deprived of the grands magasins which had become for them everything in their life.\"23
vi
p.218 - 2/19/13 12:01 PM
bon-marche-miller
The implications of all this were not lost on the department stores, who did their best to hush up these thefts. Women who were apprehended, particularly the well-to-do, were taken to an office where they were invited to make a contribution to the welfare of the poor. Still, the fact of rampant kleptomania became a matter of public knowledge. It was a subject that again evoked a mixture of fascination and reprobation for reasons that are not difficult to understand, especially if we return to two more themes in the writings of psychiatrists on department store thefts.
vi vi holyoke steigers
p.219 - 2/19/13 12:02 PM
bon-marche-miller
\"When I can grab some silk, then I am just as if I were drunk. I tremble, although not from fear because the sordidness of what I have just done does not occur to me at all; I only think of one thing: to go into a corner where I can rustle it at my ease, which gives me voluptuous sensations even stronger than those I feel with the father of my children.\"26
vi
p.220 - 2/19/13 12:03 PM
bon-marche-miller
What made department store thefts such an irresistible subject to the psychiatrists studying them and such an alarming subject to those who read about them was that so many of these women came from thoroughly respectable bourgeois backgrounds,
vi
p.220 - 2/19/13 12:04 PM
bon-marche-miller
In the end, departm^t^tore Meptomania remained a limited preblemrT)espite the horror it aroused, few took seriously_ the ^prospect of a mass criminalization of French middle-class women. France did not become a nation half Jekyll, half Hyde. Still, there was something in the whole affair to torment the middle-class soul. Bourgeois institutions were expected to uphold the moral order, not threaten it,
vi
p.221 - 2/19/13 12:06 PM
bon-marche-miller
Professional grievances - againstthe-grandsnrmgasmo camefrom a number of sources. Artisanslike cabinet-makers complained bitterly that department stores were cornering the market in their trade and were contracting their work out to lesser skilled craftsmen under demeaning conditions, thereby destroying both their work and their community.34 Factory agents and other intermediaries between production and distribution complained that their professions were being outright annihilated. Even factory owners had their complaints. For some the increased orders of department stores were accompanied by an all but titular control of production. \"Today,\" Zola noted, \"the Bon Marche and the Louvre make the law.\"
vi vi
p.222 - 2/19/13 12:08 PM
bon-marche-miller
50 pieces for practically nothing, only to sell them subsequently at 3 francs apiece. It was circumstances like this that explained why a linen manufacturer was willing to supply an employees' cooperative during the 1869 strike.3
vi
p.222 - 2/19/13 12:11 PM
bon-marche-miller
The economist Charles Gide, for instance, noted that only those_shops that were not in direct competition with the new s tores bad Jield th e i rown oj_-t\\a d_a u g me n t e d their ITumbers. The rest were driven to relying on what he saw as tfie^depTorable (pathetic might be a better word) tactics of kickbacks to servants, extension of credit, and gifts to shoppers who bought a certain amount of merchandise.37 Joseph Bernard, who wrote a dissertation on the problem of small shopkeepers, agreed that their numbers had not decreased, but remarked that \"the crisis is no less the bitter for it.
vi
p.223 - 2/19/13 12:12 PM
bon-marche-miller
And, while others might debate the matter, the shopkeepers themselves had few doubts about where they stood. With increasing keenness they sensed that their livelihood, their community, and their traditions were threatened with extinction in the face of the department stores.
vi vi
p.225 - 2/19/13 12:17 PM
bon-marche-miller
RE GUARANTEED MILK BY THE GRANDS MAGASINS DU LOUVRE To our clients Our baby milk will be taken from the natural source, and the stock of nurses offered to our lady clients will not for an instant permit them to suppose that this 'Property of the Louvre' has anything in common with the Soldes et Occasions [clearance and bargain sales] of which we give notice each week. Besides, in spite of the devotion of our feminine personnel, we will not accept any of our employees for the articles of this special counter. The excessive work that we impose upon them, making them anemic rather quickly, obliges us to be faithful to our principles and to offer only 'Guaranteed Merchandise'4
vi
p.226 - 2/19/13 12:18 PM
bon-marche-miller
These are not merchants that you are visiting; you are visiting artists, fantaisistes, idealists, psychologists, the inventors of tricks, the disciples of Dr. Charcot, the emulators of Robert Houdin.
vi vi vi
p.228 - 2/19/13 12:25 PM
bon-marche-miller
he small shopkeepers were the vestiges of an earlier bourgeoisie, one that had set limits on the capitalistic impulse within it. As the century progressed, they came to share less and less in common with the other side of their class, dynamic and expansive in character,
vi
p.229 - 2/19/13 12:27 PM
bon-marche-miller
And yet, to see in the fate of the shopkeepers simply an issue between old versus new, lower bourgeoisie versus upper, would be to perceive only one side of things. The conflicts within bourgeois culture went deeper, and were far less clearcut. The small shopkeepers may haw -represented another bourgeois era, but they also bore within them values and traditions that the remainder of their class continued to cherish.
vi vi vi
p.229 - 2/19/13 12:27 PM
bon-marche-miller
They still maintained a sense of community. If they were egalitarian, they also had a sense of place and position.
vi
p.231 - 2/19/13 12:30 PM
bon-marche-miller
But being an institution in store ideology had always meant far more. It had meant that the Bon Marche was as traditional a part of French culture as the Arc de Triomphe or even Notre Dame, and as integral a part of the bourgeois way of life as lycees or reception days.
vi vi vi
p.232 - 2/19/13 12:33 PM
bon-marche-miller
he Bon Marche went to such lengths to produce this effect as to wrap the blanc in a mythology of its own, store history attributing the origins of the sale to a legendary moment of Boucicaut inspiration prompted by a snowbound Paris.
vi
p.233 - 2/19/13 12:34 PM
bon-marche-miller
Dress codes, livery for gar^ons, the accent on service, and evening concerts were all means of softening apprehensions over compromised standards in an era of mass production and mass distribution. The same might be said of the design of the House. Architecturally the Bon-MarGhe~was^arJt^La nineteenth-century movement to create, new kinds-ef-SrtFuc^ tures for new kinds of purposes, a new city-architecture for masses and for motion.
vi
p.233 - 2/19/13 12:35 PM
bon-marche-miller
Or rather function, as Boucicaut saw it, had a multiplicity of meanings, and thus stone was as necessary a medium as iron and glass, pediments as necessary as thin metal columns, palatial reading rooms as necessary as light open bays. This too made the Bon Marche very much a part of the architecture of its century, not simply in its eclecticism but in its deeply felt need that bourgeois buildings should represent more than the purpose for which they were intended. Like banks, railroad stations, and later hotels, each of which repeated the same monumental effects, the department store offered itself as something far more distinguished, far more traditional, and far more transcendent than the mass materialistic apparatus it had, in fact, become.
vi vi vi
p.235 - 2/19/13 12:49 PM
bon-marche-miller
specially sensitive to charges of immorality because of its large Catholic and provincial clientele, the Bon Marche did its best to appear as chaste as a convent.
vi
p.235 - 2/19/13 12:52 PM
bon-marche-miller
Zola noting that \"today the people of the quarter raise their daughters to enter the Bon Marche.\"61 Imagery of this sort was particularly important because it was here that Bon Marche public relations found their most pervasive role. Above all, the selling of the department store was to depend on the uses of paternalism for external socialization ends.
vi vi
p.236 - 2/19/13 12:53 PM
bon-marche-miller
n the end, the very idea of a greater Bon Marche household was so essential to public relations because it went to the heart of public uneasiness over the passing of traditions and of community values.
vi vi
p.237 - 2/19/13 12:56 PM
bon-marche-miller
Principally, however, the public learned of household relationships through three media. One was the agendas—the Bon Marche publication most closely associated with the idea of a larger bourgeois community—and another was the special House pamphlets such as A Visit to the Bon Marche or An Historical Account of the Bon Marche. Thirdly, there was the press, whose collaboration with the store has already been noted.
vi
p.237 - 2/19/13 12:57 PM
bon-marche-miller
Yet the Bon Marche also had powerful means to influence publications. There was, of course, the power of advertisements. There was also the power of payoffs from House coffers. Direct evidence of this exists in the case of an article in an American journal.65
vi
p.237 - 2/19/13 12:58 PM
bon-marche-miller
Surveillance of the press was extensive. Following the death of Madame Boucicaut, the House prepared a twelve-page document classifying over 250 newspaper articles on the subject.
vi
p.238 - 2/19/13 1:00 PM
bon-marche-miller
On another level it meant the projection of a Boucicaut image that combined philanthropy with commercial genius and that portrayed the store's founders not only as creators of Paris' greatest emporium but also as creators of a great social institution.
vi
p.238 - 2/19/13 1:01 PM
bon-marche-miller
The biography then proceeded, in all but a few lines, to recount his life as one of benevolent deeds towards his employees and his community.
vi
p.238 - 2/19/13 1:02 PM
bon-marche-miller
\"It is one of the most beautiful creations of contemporary progress. And this creation, this marvel, is due to the genius i one man.\" Further on the notice remarked: \"One cannot repeat it too much: M. Boucicaut has not simply founded a powerful and steadfast commercial house; he fias founded a humanitarian work, a social institution.
vi vi holyoke
p.239 - 2/19/13 1:04 PM
bon-marche-miller
As on the internal plane, the House always retained a personal element—the idea of a Maison Boucicaut—even well after the passing of the founders. There was never a semblance of corporate anonymity. The Boucicaut image could be found nearly everywhere, and in later years directors made a point of picturing themselves as Boucicaut associates, and as the heirs and continuators of their predecessors' ideas. The structure of ownership and its family character were made public knowledge.
vi
p.241 - 2/19/13 1:08 PM
bon-marche-miller
Herein lay the significance of Bon Marche imagery: its ability to bring together in one comprehensive impression all the disjointed pieces of nineteenth-century French bourgeois culture. The Bon Marche was a machine, but it was also a family; it was change but it was also tradition; and there was no clearcut distinction between one sphere or the other. Bon Marche paternahsm in_the public realm thus took on the same~association as it did in the pnvate^one, the concept / of household now inseparable fromjts_new business setting.
vi vi
p.241 - 2/19/13 1:09 PM
bon-marche-miller
Bon Marche paternalism became the measure of Bon Marche success^ Vaunted-ior'Tts solidary and participatory effects, paternalism was presented as the organizational glue that made the^store work. Accounts of the House moved readily from a grande famille image to that of a beehive or an ant colony, as though the one were interchangeable with the other. They depicted a powerful organization that was enormously successful because each man performed his specialized task as best he could, linking his own destiny to that of the firm.
vi vi vi vi vi holyoke
p.242 - 2/19/13 1:11 PM
bon-marche-miller
It was House solidarity in the Bon Marche fashion that brought prosperity to those who worked and who managed the machine, and a consumer's paradise to those who shopped in it.
vi
p.242 - 2/19/13 1:11 PM
bon-marche-miller
In Bon Marche imagery the family traditions of the French business community had not only survived, but had become transformed into the central ingredient of a mass bureaucratic market.
vi
p.243 - 2/19/13 1:13 PM
bon-marche-miller
Ultimately, then, the Bon Marche turned employee socialization completely inside out, revealing the creation of organization men to be public virtues as well as private achievements.
vi vi
p.244 - 2/19/13 1:14 PM
bon-marche-miller
Indeed if the underlying current of the new stores was one of increasing rationalization, on the surface the practice of affairs remained personal and communal.
vi vi
p.245 - 2/19/13 1:16 PM
bon-marche-miller
And of still greater consequence was that all this pertained to a deeper side, a dimension beyond the proposal that a traditional way of life had not disappeared with the coming of the department store. At bottom the real goal of store public relations, as it had been of internal socialization, was to suggest a new concept of the bourgeois community, one that resided within, and was intrinsically a part of, a rationalized, mass, and dynamic context. In the end, if everything the Bon Marche represented was to be accepted, it was preciseljrbecause the Bon Marche itself was to be perceived as a model of a new world where the rational and the enchanting, the organizational and the familial, the efficient and the personal, and the concentrated and the integrated were all cut alikefrom the same fabric
vi vi
p.246 - 2/19/13 1:17 PM
bon-marche-miller
and in the-falLoL19J9 a strike occurred at the Bon Marche, the first since the creation ^Hfve new store fifty years previously. The strike lasted several weeks—at first it spread to four-fifths of the personnel—and in the end it turned violent before the last few thousand strikers capitulated with no immediate noticeable gains.2 Meanwhile other changes had occurred at the Bon Marche during the war years that were to have an even greater impact on the future of the store. One of these was the decision to expand into branch stores.
vi vi
p.247 - 2/19/13 1:19 PM
bon-marche-miller
This in turn raised the question of changing the organization of the firm to a societe anonyme or limited liability corporation
vi
p.247 - 2/19/13 1:19 PM
bon-marche-miller
Above all, 1910 remained a time when tradition was the final arbiter, when men like Fillot feared that any tampering with the organization as it presently stood would be a leap into the dark.
vi vi
p.248 - 2/19/13 1:20 PM
bon-marche-miller
By 1920 the forces for change were again ascendant, and in the summer of that year the final remnants of the familial form of ownership that Madame Boucicaut had set up in 1880 were abandoned, the Bon Marche converted into a societe anonyme.5
vi vi vi
p.250 - 2/19/13 1:23 PM
bon-marche-miller
bviously, if the faces were new, the spirit was the same. The corporation may have accentuated the separation of ownership and control, but it did not collide with the old ethos among management of belonging to an institution larger than oneself, one with traditions, and one to which the manager was expected to feel a sense of loyalty while pursuing dynamic and rationalized business policies.
vi
p.251 - 2/19/13 1:29 PM
bon-marche-miller
This book began with the premise that the department store was a creation of bourgeois culture, both capturing and threatening many things that culture stood for
vi
p.252 - 2/19/13 1:30 PM
bon-marche-miller
Throughout this narrative it has been my contention that bourgeois culture in France was dwide_cLwithin4tself, not so much befu^n^upper and-lower'bourgeoisie or the forces of progress and stagnation as between two sets of values and attitudes, one that drove^it^tocreate vyhat the--other was bound to regret. If it was^-a-etrlture that gave way to rationalized structures like the department store, it was also a culture that remained impregnated with strong relationships between family and business and one that believed in individual achievement. If it was a culture that carried within it a materialistic streak leading inexorably to a cult of consumption, it was also a culture whose sense of distinctions, selfrestraints, and standards saw in much of this reason for fear and for horror.
vi vi vi
p.252 - 2/19/13 1:31 PM
bon-marche-miller
There was ajricjgjn^he bourgeois personalityJhatj^as miTfrqfeaim^ a sideJ^iEvei±ed_bY^the bureaiKrafeationjof Jpusiness arid, middl^class careers, ancTByTKe emergence of a mass consumer societyrThis^ culture^acfcome to face by the end of the century
vi vi
p.252 - 2/19/13 1:32 PM
bon-marche-miller
The significance of the Bon Marche and its history lay in its ability to resolve this dilemma by redefiningiraditiens-to fitnew social contexts. rfrfnnrilmg-Ap^jj^gggt. strains . within bourgeoisj^ture.
vi
p.253 - 2/19/13 1:32 PM
bon-marche-miller
A sense of an internal House community was associated with the workings of a dynamic and rationalized system. All this was accomplished through innovative uses of paternalistic traditions, uses that eased owners, and later managers, into new business roles that they would now have to occupy. The method was systematic but almost elegant in its simplicity. Household relationships were redesigned to build an organizational work force of managers and clerks. The new relationships in turn provided the basis for the reorientation of the family firm. One followed from another just as tradition became imbedded in change
vi
p.253 - 2/19/13 1:34 PM
bon-marche-miller
It was a society that leaned in many directions. It was bureaucratic but it was also familial. It was a mass society, but it was also one that incorporated a sense of community and hierarchy. There was no gemeinschaftlichlgesellschaftlich shift, the modern carrying within it a strong element of traditionalism. There was no disenchantment in the Weberian sense, the world of rationality creating its own world of magical entrancement.
vi vi vi
p.254 - 2/19/13 1:35 PM
bon-marche-miller
It was a society where bourgeois ambitions and identities of the past were transmuted to fit an organizational setting. It was a society where public relations continued to picture a world in which things changed and yet time held still. It was a society sold to consumerism
vi vi
p.254 - 2/19/13 1:36 PM
bon-marche-miller
We have been told that French businessmen were inherently conservative and that the French family firm was an institution unsuitable for an era of expansion and innovation. We have also been told, in analyses that have built upon this perspective, that the French bourgeoisie entered this century hesitantly and reluctantly, that they were imprisoned by their past, and that it was only after two decades of crisis and collapse— largely resulting from a failure to accommodate to change— that they found within themselves the means to come to terms with their present. The arguments have been persuasive, but only so long as they have limited us to seeing one side of the picture. Once we draw back all the curtains, once we open up the world of the creative and the successful as well as the evasive and the obsolete, we stumble upon a bourgeoisie that was drawn to its new century, that was fascinated by the transformations occurring about it, and that was capable of committing itself to these changes precisely because it learned how to do so without undermining its traditions.
vi vi
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Uncondensed Notes
The aim of this book...
The aim of this book is to challenge notions of discrete sociocultural spaces and limited interactions that shape our understanding of the past and give rise to our wonder at a “globalized” present.
p.24 - 2/10/13 7:40 PM
The first chapter demonstrates the potency and limits of certain acts of self-representation in the spaces of global relation. It asks how the domestication of English symbols—a strategy of reflecting similarity that I call similitude—affected Mutsamudu’s (Comoros Islands) relationship with the British Empire in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Through a close reading of the adoption of English material culture, social etiquette, and the English language in Mutsamudu town, I show how some East Africans used things that signified Englishness to convince the British to provide them with special economic and military assistance. As a prelude to many of the themes discussed in later sections, the chapter focuses on the role of cultural practice in developing and maintaining material relationships. It also offers a view of East African relations with the British Empire that contrast with those I outline in later chapters.
Chapter 2 looks at Mombasa, the second largest city on the East African coast, during the 1840s and 1850s, when a great variety of imported consumer goods were becoming available.
p.25 - 2/10/13 7:40 PM
The third chapter mo...
The third chapter moves outward from the social spaces of interaction in East Africa to consider the effects of East African consumer demand elsewhere. It asks how East Africa’s new engagements with other parts of the world changed those distant locales
p.25 - 2/10/13 7:41 PM
Chapter 4 develops a...
Chapter 4 develops an image of East African cosmopolitanism and its relation to Western concepts of modernity. It asks how goods from and new engagements with distant locales affected Zanzibar. I show that Zanzibaris used consumer goods such as American clocks, British handkerchiefs, and Indian umbrellas to create as well as challenge new social and material sensibilities in the second half of the nineteenth century
p.25 - 2/10/13 7:41 PM
Chapter 5 examines h...
Chapter 5 examines how slaves of African, Indian, and European origin were used to represent the self-images of Zanzibaris and how enslaved people resisted resignification
p.28 - 2/10/13 7:43 PM
Through various stra...
Through various strategies of representation, Mutsamuduans claimed a moral proximity and similarity to the English that convinced Britons to view them differently, to imagine them as people in some way akin to themselves. For at least a century Mutsamuduans were largely successful at using things that signified Englishness to direct imperial means to local ends
p.28 - 2/10/13 7:45 PM
cross-cultural perfo...
cross-cultural performances of similarity—a strategy of appeal that I call similitude
p.29 - 2/10/13 7:45 PM
One of the most impo...
One of the most important questions that analysts of global integration have addressed is how people who are too easily labeled the victims of global cultural homogenization conceptually transform imported materials, symbols, and ideas.
D
p.29 - 2/10/13 7:46 PM
Domesticating the World
Expanding on Michel de Certeau’s insight that the masses always renegotiate the meanings offered them, many analysts of reception have convincingly shown that meanings are rarely as transferable as their objects
vi vi
p.29 - 2/10/13 7:47 PM
The strength of rece...
The strength of reception literature thus lies in its demonstration that symbols circulating beyond the boundaries of their places of origin are rarely simple copies
D
p.29 - 2/10/13 7:55 PM
Domesticating the World
cultural incorporations can be directed back at the source of their perceived fabrication and can even affect that perceived source, a phenomenon Michael Taussig referred to as the ability of the copy to influence that which it copies.6
p.31 - 2/10/13 8:00 PM
Domesticating the World
The letters also reveal that the prince’s command of English was superb. The form, word-choice, and tone were typical of British official correspondence. These letters give insight into why British government agents around the world had been so accommodating of the prince: he used British social etiquette and a command of the written and spoken language to fashion an utterly convincing persona.12
vi
p.32 - 2/10/13 8:02 PM
His multiple offers ...
His multiple offers of Nzwani to the British were, no doubt, a ploy to unseat the reigning sultan
D
p.32 - 2/10/13 8:03 PM
Domesticating the World
Instead, Abdullah’s successes were attributable to his ability to replicate English etiquette and convince British administrators across the globe that he deserved certain privileges. Colonel Rigby, the British consul at Zanzibar, described Abdullah’s success as the result of his mastery of three persuasive modes of self-representation: he spoke English “remarkably well,” had a very “plausible” manner, and dressed in richly embroidered clothes.
p.32 - 2/10/13 8:04 PM
Abdullah convinced m...
Abdullah convinced myriad British agents that he was a political leader and ambassador. This gave him access to the submarine cable, stipends, free transportation across the Indian Ocean, the Eastern Atlantic, and the Mediterranean, and several months stay in Europe, part of that time in one of Paris’ finest hotels
p.33 - 2/10/13 9:00 PM
Mutsamudu became par...
Mutsamudu became part of the English realm as neither a colony nor protectorate but as a sovereign state that aggressively appealed to the sensibilities of Britons
D
p.33 - 2/10/13 9:00 PM
Domesticating the World
While Prince Abdullah was particularly dexterous, his successes exemplify the long-practiced Nzwanian strategy of similitude: a conscious self-presentation in interpersonal and political relationships that stresses likeness. As strategic replication, similitude bears a close resemblance to Homi Bhabha’s notion of colonial mimesis
vi vi
p.33 - 2/10/13 9:01 PM
similitude need not ...
similitude need not be subversive, confrontational, or limited to the colonial environment. Similitude is more commonly employed in circumstances of asymmetrical power beyond the boundaries of colonialism, often as an attempt to manipulate imperial representatives without necessarily challenging broad hierarchies of global relation
p.34 - 2/10/13 9:02 PM
Many European travel...
Many European travel accounts relate that in the town of Mutsamudu a “curious” experiment in Anglo-global integration commenced in the seventeenth century. Actually, Nzwani’s particular cultural bricolage had much greater historical precedent
p.34 - 2/10/13 9:07 PM
Nzwani’s position be...
Nzwani’s position between markets in northwestern Madagascar and the East African coast meant that merchants not only transshipped goods, but they also created small emporiums where goods might be perused by visiting western Indian, southern Arabian, Persian Gulf, or East African merchants.21 Nzwanians depended on the sea, and they wrote their cultural relation to oceanic exchange into the local material environment.
p.35 - 2/10/13 9:10 PM
For nearly two hundr...
For nearly two hundred years, Nzwani-English relationships would hinge on two factors: convenience and similitude. For English captains, the island offered an ideal locale to refresh and collect provisions for their onward journeys.
p.35 - 2/10/13 9:11 PM
English vessel arriv...
English vessel arrived in Mutsamudu, it was greeted by Prince George, Lord Baltimore, Admiral Blankett, Lord Rodney, the Duke of Rottinberry, Lord Gloucester,
p.36 - 2/10/13 9:12 PM
English visitors wer...
English visitors were constantly told of their oneness with Mutsamuduans, so that the phrase’s use became an overt reminder of Nzwanian claims to similarity and alliance with the British
p.36 - 2/10/13 9:13 PM
The English traveler...
The English traveler J. Richards, for example, was disheartened when he arrived at Mutsamudu nearly seventy years after Jones and asked for Lords Rodney and Nelson, only to be informed that those names had gone out of fashion.30 At the height of their popularity near the end of the eighteenth century, English titles were a key means of fostering recognition
p.36 - 2/10/13 9:13 PM
usually businessmen ...
usually businessmen seeking clients among the crew of an English vessel. They acted as hoteliers or contractors, offering accommodation, provisions, meals, and laundry services.32
p.37 - 2/10/13 9:15 PM
Nzwanians depended o...
Nzwanians depended on such titles to convey a certain image to Europeans and to other Mutsamuduans, though the extent to which such titles were important in intra-Nzwani social relations is unclear
p.37 - 2/10/13 9:18 PM
Another essential st...
Another essential strategy for Mutsamuduan self-presentation was that each contractor kept numerous letters of recommendation written by previous visitors to the island. Though Mutsamuduans could not always read these, they usually pressured captains, crews, and ships’ passengers to write letters on their behalf
p.37 - 2/10/13 9:18 PM
Though the signers’ ...
Though the signers’ names are recorded similarly in the Arabic and English drafts, the author—possibly the famous Prince Abdullah—gave the titles of each signer in English and translated these as Minister, Member of Parliament, Chief Justice, Commissioner of Police, and Magistrate.3
p.37 - 2/10/13 9:18 PM
So important could t...
So important could these letters be to the livelihoods of Mutsamuduans that some Nzwanians insisted on them. Bombay Jack, who served as pilot and interpreter on many English vessels, refused gifts from the crew of an English vessel and instead wanted only, in addition to his fees, a written testimony of the services
p.38 - 2/10/13 9:21 PM
Nzwanian similitude ...
Nzwanian similitude was not haphazard replication. It was a strategy born of Mutsamudu’s particular political economy.
p.38 - 2/10/13 9:21 PM
Mutsamuduans regular...
Mutsamuduans regularly interjected requests for business relations or donations that played on sentiments of reciprocity and comraderie
D
p.39 - 2/10/13 9:22 PM
Domesticating the World
Moreover, he invited the crew to his house, wishing them to meet his wife and to serve them, “as good roast-beef as any in England.”41 Bakamadi used his cultural knowledge to create individual economic relationships with Englishmen, winning preference through his cultural faculty.
vi
p.39 - 2/10/13 9:30 PM
On his arrival in Mu...
On his arrival in Mutsamudu in the early nineteenth century, Prior was met by Nzwanians who hoped for peace in Europe, “abusing Bonaparte with as much cordiality as if they had been tutored by some of the London editors.” “
D
p.39 - 2/10/13 9:31 PM
Domesticating the World
In 1821, Prince Ali invited an English reverend to what the reverend described as an English-style dinner. The prince met him with his usual “urbanity of manners,” and the guest found the table set with knives, forks, plates, other English tableware, and roast beef. Though Nzwanians generally ate with their hands out of large, communal wooden trays, the prince, following British etiquette, took up the utensils.
vi
p.43 - 2/10/13 9:44 PM
Mutsamuduans across ...
Mutsamuduans across social status lines to ask for a great variety of things from visitors, like shoes and stockings, hats, a sword, a uniform coat, or other English signifiers. Prior claimed that such objects were “productive of no slight degree of envy to the possessors,” though he did not qualify this conclusion.66
p.43 - 2/10/13 9:45 PM
Mutsamuduan home dec...
Mutsamuduan home decor reflected, created, and reinforced a variety of socioeconomic relationships. When foreign visitors were invited into the homes of Nzwanians, they were generally only given access to the semipublic, male-only reception rooms.
p.44 - 2/10/13 9:47 PM
The walls were cover...
The walls were covered with Chinese plates, American-looking glasses, Arabian fans, flags of other nations, Chinese pictures, copper plates with inscriptions, and Egyptian “relics.”70
D
p.44 - 2/10/13 9:47 PM
Domesticating the World
Even though Britons often considered such decor gaudy, there was something about the accumulation of familiar exotic objects (British consumers likewise collected Chinese plates, Oriental “curios,” and Egyptian “relics”) that gave English visitors like Rev. Elliott “an air of comfort” in an unfamiliar locale
vi
p.44 - 2/10/13 9:49 PM
On visiting Prince A...
On visiting Prince Ali’s house, members of the Owen survey party were served refreshments with silver sugar-tongs, spoons, and a “handsome display” of cut-glass tumblers. While they enjoyed refreshments, the prince called in a man who sang “God Save the King” for the guests.71
p.45 - 2/10/13 9:50 PM
English arms, but al...
English arms, but also British soldier’s coats. The sultan soon had hundreds of men armed and clothed, according to the consul, “after the European fashion.”74 The sultan did not simply want to defend himself; he wanted symbols of British military power to represent his own ability. In the future, this mimesis of English military culture would duly impress English visitors
p.45 - 2/10/13 9:51 PM
He offered MT$ 5,000...
He offered MT$ 5,000 to the crew for the woman—nearly ten times the price of an expensive Ethiopian concubine—but was informed that, “she would fetch at least 20 times that sum in India.”75
D
p.46 - 2/10/13 9:55 PM
Domesticating the World
Do not leave us, and do not forget us, for if you abandon us, we perish; our lives, our families, our property
what was their concept of property before english?
p.46 - 2/10/13 9:56 PM
Domesticating the World
Either way, the simulation of likeness, and at times even clientage, was a significant strategy. For Mutsamuduans, minor investments in material culture, language, and etiquette paid vital dividends until the latter nineteenth century.
vi
p.46 - 2/10/13 9:57 PM
In order to symbolic...
In order to symbolically neutralize their significant religious, cultural, and social differences from English visitors, Mutsamuduans claimed to be like the English in limited ways.
p.47 - 2/10/13 9:57 PM
The small island, so...
The small island, so far from civilization in the mind of Britons, somehow became proximate for English visitors
p.47 - 2/10/13 9:57 PM
British policymakers...
British policymakers had no desire to claim a protectorate in Nzwani precisely because its political leadership already demonstrated an affinity for Britain
p.47 - 2/10/13 9:58 PM
Even Britons who vis...
Even Britons who visited the island were sometimes conflicted in their attitudes toward Nzwanians. The juxtaposition of the familiar and the exotic drew diverse responses.
pC.47 - 2/10/13 9:59 PM
What is important to...
What is important to recognize in these transactions is that most English representatives who assisted Nzwanians did not refer to the strategic or economic importance of Nzwani to Britain as a rationale for intervention. Instead, they justified their actions by recalling the long friendship between England and Nzwani.
p.48 - 2/10/13 9:59 PM
Even though Britons ...
Even though Britons were hesitant to accept Nzwanians as clients, they regularly allowed Nzwanians to claim them as patrons
p.48 - 2/10/13 10:01 PM
In eighteenth-centur...
In eighteenth-century Mutsamudu, cultural domestication was not reducible to simple coercion or cultural imperialism. Nzwanian desires for symbols of Englishness were in no way determined by the pressures of a colonial state
D
p.48 - 2/10/13 10:02 PM
Domesticating the World
This is the concealed potency of similitude in the spaces of global interrelation: an ability to affect the powerful by appealing to their self-image.
vi vi holyoke?
p.48 - 2/10/13 10:03 PM
By scrutinizing the ...
By scrutinizing the concept of desire in Mombasa at a time when diverse imported goods were becoming increasingly available, we can better understand the intimate dimensions of choice as well as the morality of desiring. It is to these social logics of consumer need in mid-nineteenth-century Mombasa that we now turn
p.49 - 2/10/13 10:24 PM
chapter 2
The Social...
chapter 2
The Social Logics of Need
Consumer Desire in Mombasa
p.49 - 2/10/13 10:26 PM
these desires were o...
these desires were often negotiated in majority Muslim towns, outlining local definitions of self and society through relationships to goods can shed light on the confluence of two spheres of relation: the world economy and a complex moral system shaped by Islamic tenets.
p.50 - 2/10/13 11:14 PM
My focus, then, is o...
My focus, then, is on the symbolic rhetoric of objects and the ability of commodities to shape personhood by representing the self publicly in reference to moral norms
p.50 - 2/10/13 11:37 PM
It was a period of p...
It was a period of passage from sovereignty to political control of the city by Sultan Seyyid Said al-Busaidi of Zanzibar and Mombasa’s more complete integration into the Zanzibari cultural-economic zone.
p.50 - 2/10/13 11:38 PM
The Busaidi governme...
The Busaidi government altered the conditions of business in Mombasa. They encouraged Zanzibari-based merchants to trade in Mombasa
by offering lenders better enforcement of creditors’ rights
p.51 - 2/10/13 11:39 PM
The Busaidis also di...
The Busaidis also diversified Mombasa’s monetary system. Mombasans continued to use the widely circulating Austrian dollar (MT$) and Spanish quarter-dollar, but after 1845 the copper East Indian pice replaced Mazrui-minted coins (which had been pegged to a measure of maize), and by the 1860s American dollars coming through Zanzibar served along with the Austrian dollar as a regional currency.7 Using these flexible global currencies, the Busaidi government encouraged the greater monetization of a variety of social transactions in Mombasa—even criminal punishments.
D
p.51 - 2/10/13 11:39 PM
Domesticating the World
The Busaidis instituted a fixed fine for murder: a kisasi, or standardized revenge-payment. A free person who killed another free person now had to pay between MT$600 and MT$1,200; if the murdered person was a slave, the free person paid MT$60.8
vi
p.51 - 2/10/13 11:40 PM
Domesticating the World
Credit enabled people to spend more immediately, regularly, and at higher levels. An expanding economy and access to credit opened for renegotiation the sign-qualities of goods by enabling some previously excluded people to engage more fully in the signifying system of public consumption.10
vi vi vi vi vi holyoke?
p.51 - 2/11/13 12:00 AM
For example, before ...
For example, before Busaidi subjugation, viti vya enzi, or chairs of “power” and “authority,” were common physical and figurative symbols of political authority in many coastal societies
p.52 - 2/11/13 12:43 AM
Instead of symbols o...
Instead of symbols of political position held by a few, they were now simply the chairs of the wealthy, symbols of “power or dignity,” imported from India, the United States, and Europe and owned by many. Viti vya enzi were no longer strictly part of the political iconography, but chairs of fashion—still exclusive, but no longer the possessions of only the most politically powerful.
p.52 - 2/11/13 12:51 AM
By the 1880s, two mo...
By the 1880s, two monumental projects
p.52 - 2/11/13 12:51 AM
The first project co...
The first project collected the verse of Mombasa’s most celebrated poet, Muyaka bin Haji, a propagandist, satirist, and humorist remembered for his penetrating insight.14
p.52 - 2/11/13 12:52 AM
His work constitutes...
His work constitutes the largest surviving body of poetry by a Swahili composer in the early nineteenth century, and his reflections on the themes of wealth, poverty, and materiality were important references in Mombasan public discourse from the 1830s until at least the 1880s. His verses were so important as both art and social commentary that many East Africans committed them to memory and repeated them for decades after Muyaka’s death.15
p.52 - 2/11/13 12:52 AM
The second project w...
The second project was the compilation of a monumental Swahili-English dictionary in the Mombasa dialect (Kimvita
p.53 - 2/11/13 12:53 AM
Mombasans conceptual...
Mombasans conceptualized desire as originating in the many overlapping agencies of the self. To understand how desire directed economy, we should begin with a consideration of Mombasan notions of desire’s psycho-social provenance
p.53 - 2/11/13 12:54 AM
Three overlapping me...
Three overlapping metaphysical agencies in particular—the moyo, nia, and roho
p.53 - 2/11/13 12:55 AM
The moyo was the epi...
The moyo was the epicenter of emotional longing, of love, both for people and objects. The poetry of Muyaka bin Haji outlined the place of the moyo in Mombasan concepts of desire
p.53 - 2/11/13 12:55 AM
one’s kijoyo produce...
one’s kijoyo produced acute wants.21 The kijoyo was covetous; it identified the things it wanted and forced the moyo into an emotional bond with those things
p.54 - 2/11/13 12:56 AM
the senses of mind o...
the senses of mind or will, the moyo could restrict desires. It could have agency over the kijoyo’s longings
p.54 - 2/11/13 12:57 AM
Because of the infin...
Because of the infinity of needs and the moyo’s affinity for extremes, many Mombasans believed that the moyo should be bridled. The drives of the heart could be dangerous if acted upon carelessly. For example, the heart craved ivory—an item of great exchange-value, a sign of wealth, prosperity, and success in trade—but taking it from the elephant was perilous.
p.54 - 2/11/13 12:58 AM
passúa moyo, or “tea...
passúa moyo, or “tearing of the heart.” Its exorbitant price of MT$3 per piece meant that its suitor was either wealthy, in debt, or willing to forgo other needs to purchase the fabric (D, 90
p.54 - 2/11/13 12:58 AM
into relief the emot...
into relief the emotional relationships among people, objects, and an agency that articulated material need. As
with love for a person, people felt in the moyo emotion for an object. If a thing was agreeable, like a gift or some purchased object, it pleased the moyo (D, 301)
p.55 - 2/11/13 12:59 AM
Like the moyo, the n...
Like the moyo, the nia had no existence outside of the body. The nia was the mind, or more precisely, the conscience.
D
p.55 - 2/11/13 1:00 AM
Domesticating the World
when the nia was corrupted by desire, the self could never be content; that is, when desire forced one to act against one’s conscience, the conscience became worthless and the self was no longer whole
vi
p.55 - 2/11/13 1:01 AM
A song of the 1840s ...
A song of the 1840s warned against over-indulgence in attempts to satiate longings. Like Muyaka’s verse, it proclaimed that the world deceives those who follow it as palm wine deceives the drunkard. Overindulgence, like total self-reliance in place of accepting the assistance and advice of others, was a deplorable personality trait because it removed the person from the realm of normal social relations. Moreover, Krapf wrote that in Mombasan philosophy self-reliance distanced a person from God since dependence on oneself was a reliance on materiality instead of God, what Mombasans termed an act of “loving the world more than God” (D, 251, 282)
p.56 - 2/11/13 1:02 AM
The moyo was primari...
The moyo was primarily a consolidator of thoughts and emotions, the nia acted as the agencies’ conscience, but the roho was the most significant engine of desire that dictated a person’s actions. In short, the roho created cravings and forced the person, consciously and unconsciously, to seek ways to satiate them
p.56 - 2/11/13 1:03 AM
Mombasans struggled ...
Mombasans struggled to control it. But, as evidenced by the phrase rokho ime-m-piga nia, “the roho defeated [the person’s] nia,” people were not always successful. The roho gave the conglomerate self direction (D, 316, 303
D
p.57 - 2/11/13 1:04 AM
Domesticating the World
The roho also had sensory capacities that went beyond the body. For example, if someone had heart palpitations with no known cause, they could assume that their roho sensed that they were the topic of someone else’s conversation (D, 197, 85). The roho stood as a signifier for the body’s material longings, exemplified by two entries from Krapf’s dictionary:
rokho yangu imekaúka, nadáka maji
My soul has dried up, I want water.
ni-pa maji kidogo, ni stiri rokhoyangu
Give me a little water so that I may take my soul out of distress. (D, 162, 345, 31
p.57 - 2/11/13 1:04 AM
The desire of the ro...
The desire of the roho was the most powerful force of longing, stronger, for instance, than that of the kijoyo. Mombasans said that to want with the roho, ku daka kua roho, was the greatest longing of all (D, 356). If not contained, the power of the roho could destroy a person, send them into poverty, or even kill them
p.57 - 2/11/13 1:05 AM
kijito, or “little e...
kijito, or “little eye” of the roho. Not everyone had a kijito, but for those who did, it made them want all they saw, like the beautiful clothing, fine furniture, or jewelry of a neighbor (D, 143).30
p.58 - 2/11/13 1:05 AM
Mombasans believed t...
Mombasans believed that when the roho was not restrained, the end was dissatisfaction and social alienation: lafúka, or gluttony
p.58 - 2/11/13 1:06 AM
, Muyaka expressed i...
, Muyaka expressed indignation toward the person with uncontrollable longings:
. . . you turned into a moth and ate all of your clothes with uncontrollable appetite, leaving nothing. Now you stink, the girls run from you. Go away, go with your wretchedness
D
p.58 - 2/11/13 1:06 AM
Domesticating the World
As we might imagine from the above, people who did not harness
their cravings lost respect
b
p.59 - 2/11/13 1:09 AM
In a searing indictm...
In a searing indictment of unbridled lust for consumer objects, Muyaka again criticized the glutton of objects:
You grasp for this and that, “that’s it,” “no, it’s not [that]”;
you can’t leave a single thing alone, how could we know what you want?
You’re not afraid of doing wrong, can’t you restrain your moyo?
The bad you chose to leave is gone, and the good has deserted you.36
D
p.60 - 2/11/13 1:12 AM
Domesticating the World
The body could not exist in a conscious state without the kifuli. When the shade of the soul was gone from a person, that person was like any other object: he or she had no self-recognition. By producing desire, the roho and its shade also attempted to assert the self’s existence by projecting cravings for things that might attract the attention of others. By generating desire for things that created relationships between people, the roho constantly reassured the self of its existence
vi holyoke
p.60 - 2/11/13 1:13 AM
Haja implied nonmate...
Haja implied nonmaterial wants, like the pressing need to do something, such as to urinate or get to a place. Yet it could also mean physical property, a thing that one would like to possess. Mapenzi, a word now commonly used to reference romantic love, had material connotations in mid-nineteenth-century Mombasa.
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Domesticating the World (Jeremy Prestholdt)
- Highlight on Page 63 | Loc. 964-65 | Added on Tuesday, February 12, 2013, 03:35 AM
Mombasans believed that when the roho was not restrained, the end was dissatisfaction and social alienation: lafúka, or gluttony.
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Domesticating the World (Jeremy Prestholdt)
- Highlight on Page 64 | Loc. 969-70 | Added on Tuesday, February 12, 2013, 03:37 AM
In Mombasan formulations, the glutton’s loss of control over his roho resulted not only in social ostracism but also in physical adversity.
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Domesticating the World (Jeremy Prestholdt)
- Highlight on Page 65 | Loc. 988-90 | Added on Tuesday, February 12, 2013, 03:39 AM
Muyaka both elucidated and lamented the perpetuity of desire.37 He often underscored the point that satiation is fleeting because there are never enough objects to satisfy people’s craving to represent and differentiate themselves publicly.
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Domesticating the World (Jeremy Prestholdt)
- Highlight on Page 66 | Loc. 1004-6 | Added on Tuesday, February 12, 2013, 03:48 AM
The relation of the roho to desire and consciousness reveals the interdependency of needs and the self. The roho fashioned desires and did so relationally, creating envy, jealousy, and greed as emotions of the moyo.
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Domesticating the World (Jeremy Prestholdt)
- Highlight on Page 66 | Loc. 1006-8 | Added on Tuesday, February 12, 2013, 03:49 AM
At the same time, the shade of the soul could both escape the body and inhabit the very objects it wanted. It could exist inside objects, though to stay within a thing was to jeopardize the body, and destruction of the object with the kifuli inside meant the death of the body and all its agencies, except for the subagency of the shade itself.
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Domesticating the World (Jeremy Prestholdt)
- Highlight on Page 66 | Loc. 1009-13 | Added on Tuesday, February 12, 2013, 03:49 AM
By producing desire, the roho and its shade also attempted to assert the self’s existence by projecting cravings for things that might attract the attention of others. By generating desire for things that created relationships between people, the roho constantly reassured the self of its existence. It would seem that the longing for material things was thus a critical component of personhood. To want was to imagine oneself socially, to aspire to the social position or cultural ideal that an object reflected.
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Domesticating the World (Jeremy Prestholdt)
- Highlight on Page 68 | Loc. 1030-33 | Added on Tuesday, February 12, 2013, 03:53 AM
t’amáa, meant an object of interest. This was, however, no regular object of demand, but a spectacle, a new, strange, or startling thing—something of great interest, like a new design of cloth or jewelry.47 To have resolute longing for a thing was to crave it with the roho, which, by emphasizing desire born of the roho, stressed the gravity of the longing. To long for a thing with one’s roho was not redundant but emphatic (D, 387).
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Domesticating the World (Jeremy Prestholdt)
- Highlight on Page 69 | Loc. 1052-55 | Added on Tuesday, February 12, 2013, 04:00 AM
Though some of the “respectability” of this condition could be inherited, it was proven by its accoutrements: fine adornments for the person and his environment, servants, and slaves. With strong Orientalist overtones, Johann Krapf described what he imagined to be the némsi ideal in material terms: fine dress, money, good food, two women who fan a man, “whilst he keeps a small stick in this hand, and sits cross-legged in his chair with a fine dagger on his side” (D, 277).
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Domesticating the World (Jeremy Prestholdt)
- Highlight on Page 70 | Loc. 1061-66 | Added on Tuesday, February 12, 2013, 04:02 AM
More broadly, uwézo could mean the process of interior design or the perceptual effect produced by configuring furniture and objects in a particular fashion. Aligned with this was the notion of mapambo ya niumba, or the furniture displayed in a room as well as the variety of things placed in wall niches: objects such as European porcelain, glasses, Indian brass, and English silver vessels. Krapf wrote that, “[t]he natives like to display all their finery by putting it up in their rooms, so that people may see their plates, coffee-cups, trinkets, baskets, and many other things” (D, 152).52
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Domesticating the World (Jeremy Prestholdt)
- Highlight on Page 71 | Loc. 1078-79 | Added on Tuesday, February 12, 2013, 04:06 AM
“This woman has caused me enormous loss. She’s finished off a lot of money/property for the wedding [in the form of] ornamentation, food, to buy the perfumes, and for the mattress and pillows” (D, 97, 390).
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Domesticating the World (Jeremy Prestholdt)
- Highlight on Page 71 | Loc. 1088-92 | Added on Tuesday, February 12, 2013, 04:08 AM
The proper social use of wealth was to consume it, not to store it up for future use. People who had wealth were expected to spend it, ku ji-lisha, to enjoy it, or to euphemistically “feed” themselves. Kujilisha maliyakwe, “to enjoy one’s property,” or “[lit.] to feed one’s self their own wealth,” was to transform money into objects and relationships.56 The practices of Hindu businesspeople in Mombasa were often stereotyped as examples of what respectable people should not do with their wealth. They were said to hoard their money.
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Domesticating the World (Jeremy Prestholdt)
- Highlight on Page 73 | Loc. 1106-8 | Added on Tuesday, February 12, 2013, 04:10 AM
Though the miser acted differently, Mombasans imagined him as akin to the gluttonous over-spender who became so obsessed with procuring that he too forgot about social conventions. Both were greedy, and in Mombasa there was a conflation of all forms of “excessive incorporation of value,” to borrow Alfred Gell’s phrase, whether they were evidenced in distended purses or distended bellies.59
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Domesticating the World (Jeremy Prestholdt)
- Highlight on Page 74 | Loc. 1128-29 | Added on Tuesday, February 12, 2013, 04:26 AM
Muyaka charged, “the real problem is dividing the catch.” To store wealth, Muyaka reminded those whom he satirized, is contemptible.61
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Domesticating the World (Jeremy Prestholdt)
- Highlight on Page 75 | Loc. 1142-43 | Added on Tuesday, February 12, 2013, 04:29 AM
The moral: Receiving comes with the burden of sharing, regardless of one’s social standing. Distribution was God’s intent, and all things given by God were to be shared.
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Domesticating the World (Jeremy Prestholdt)
- Highlight on Page 76 | Loc. 1160-62 | Added on Tuesday, February 12, 2013, 04:33 AM
Wealth gives confidence and puts one in the position to flaunt possessions, to curry envy. Because people were defined by what they possessed, objects given to the poor made them whole social beings.
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- Highlight on Page 77 | Loc. 1171-73 | Added on Tuesday, February 12, 2013, 04:34 AM
In desperation, he moved to Mombasa, where he was only able to sustain himself by hawking baskets in the market. Soon he was a failure even at this, since the only compensation he ever received was more of the strips used to make the baskets.63 By foolishly inviting a foreigner into Vumba, Mgwame was unseated, relegated to poverty, and hopelessly trapped within its cycle.
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At Ungama people freely reveled in the abundance of things. They washed themselves with milk. They cleaned their anuses with bread. Because of these transgressions, God destroyed Ungama; the town was swallowed by the sea, and its inhabitants drowned (D, 405).
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- Highlight on Page 78 | Loc. 1192-94 | Added on Tuesday, February 12, 2013, 07:08 PM
Stories like those about Pate and Ungama were moving moral tales, partly because they played on the fear of losing those possessions that signified certain kinds of personhood.69 Poverty, or the absence of valuable property, was the condition of a lack of respectability and its signifying objects.
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- Highlight on Page 79 | Loc. 1198-1200 | Added on Tuesday, February 12, 2013, 10:15 PM
According to Krapf, the meaning of the word for poverty, uniónge, connoted both “weakness in point of property” and weakness in “influence among men.” The concept of becoming impoverished was synonymous with decay, dying away, wasting (D, 382, 337, 407, 388).
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- Highlight on Page 79 | Loc. 1201-6 | Added on Tuesday, February 12, 2013, 10:16 PM
A muhitaji, or poor person, was literally a “wanter,” someone without possessions. To make matters worse, the wanters of things, because of their weakness and social liminality, were tormented by others. To the poor person who wore tattered old clothes, children derisively sang: mtu mfifu awa mitambara yasiokua usima [or] misima, ya ku nianiuka, mikia kana ya puesa, “a lazy person wears bits of cloth, all tattered, in tails like the octopus” (D, 264, 392, 226). Clothing, while reflecting position, also signified health, well-being, abilities, all the conditions of the person. Being full, whole, healthy was reflected in nice clothing. To be without a constellation of objects—those attributes of the wealthy, like imported clothes and jewelry—was to be lazy, without ability.
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- Highlight on Page 80 | Loc. 1218-21 | Added on Tuesday, February 12, 2013, 10:17 PM
A respectable, comfortable bed had a canopy of imported fabric, usually red printed cloth called msudu (D, 250).72 To use straw matting—the cheapest material available—was laughable. Poverty negated the social self because its objects, like straw matting over a bed, attracted negative attention to the subject; instead of drawing the positive attention of others, poverty incited scorn.
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- Highlight on Page 81 | Loc. 1238-44 | Added on Tuesday, February 12, 2013, 10:19 PM
he offered this revelation: If you see them from afar with their bracelets and ringing jewelry, you would think they were real women able to satisfy men’s needs. Ah, but it’s all make-believe; they are no different from us. They are not women to concern us; it’s only that they have beautiful clothes.74 Here Muyaka directs his listeners to see through the signifying qualities of clothes in order to recognize what is being figuratively obscured by them. Clothes do not signify real respectability; they do not represent the reality of the women’s characters.
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- Highlight on Page 82 | Loc. 1245-46 | Added on Tuesday, February 12, 2013, 10:20 PM
For Muyaka, Mombasans gave far too much credence to the signifying qualities of things. Finery was the mask for a charade of respectability.
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- Highlight on Page 82 | Loc. 1247-58 | Added on Tuesday, February 12, 2013, 10:20 PM
Muyaka imagined what it might be like to occupy the position of the wealthy, to become the object of envy and admiration. By inverting his social position, he might demonstrate to the wealthy the absurdity of their pride and the deceitfulness of their clothing. If I could strut around in beautiful clothes [of] the latest fashions, you would all weep enviously as I pass, your moyos would admire me when I took up my folds [of clothing]. When you punch the wall, you only hurt your knuckles. What do I wait for, why shouldn’t I strut my fashions trailing my folds, so that they billow over the ground? So when I go out everybody knows, walking proudly at leisure with my eyes hardly open. When the fashionable of Mombasa pass by, they show their style. They come out [like they’re asleep with their eyes hardly open] not even deigning to recognize their friends. When they’re in the street, you would think the whole world belongs to them, and if the moyo were a book, I’d give it to you so that you might read.75
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- Highlight on Page 83 | Loc. 1272-73 | Added on Tuesday, February 12, 2013, 10:21 PM
Muyaka suggests that in the single act of changing clothes, he might become their social equal, even without modifying his character or genealogy.
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- Highlight on Page 84 | Loc. 1276-80 | Added on Tuesday, February 12, 2013, 10:23 PM
Muyaka believed that commodities had gained such symbolic power that Mombasans accepted the visual signs of respectability as the true representation of a person’s character, putting more emphasis on the projected self than the actual character of the person. Muyaka’s critique is poignant. Mombasans had invested enormous social capital in the signifying qualities of consumer goods. Thus, items of public consumption were essential to social relationships, and social relations were dependent on the representational abilities of objects.
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- Note on Page 84 | Loc. 1280 | Added on Tuesday, February 12, 2013, 10:23 PM
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- Highlight on Page 85 | Loc. 1293-94 | Added on Tuesday, February 12, 2013, 10:24 PM
This chapter has outlined attitudes toward and rationales for consumer demand in Mombasa at a time when Mombasans were drawing more deeply on flows of foreign consumer goods and becoming fully integrated into Zanzibari economic, political, and cultural spheres.
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This reflection has taken us first to the psychical agencies that generated, regulated, and articulated desires: the moyo, nia, and roho.
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- Highlight on Page 85 | Loc. 1296-99 | Added on Tuesday, February 12, 2013, 10:25 PM
In considering the social relations of consumption, I suggested ways in which concepts of personhood were configured in relation to objects. I argued that what was sought in Mombasan consumption was not any actual object by itself, but the imagined condition signified by the object (wealth, respectability, taste).78
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- Highlight on Page 86 | Loc. 1307-12 | Added on Tuesday, February 12, 2013, 10:28 PM
CHAPTER 3 THE GLOBAL REPERCUSSIONS OF CONSUMERISM EAST AFRICAN CONSUMERS AND INDUSTRIALIZATION
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- Highlight on Page 86 | Loc. 1315-16 | Added on Tuesday, February 12, 2013, 10:30 PM
analysts of globalizing processes have largely overlooked how quotidian acts such as consumer demand across the globe influence economic relations,
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- Highlight on Page 86 | Loc. 1317 | Added on Tuesday, February 12, 2013, 10:30 PM
this chapter recovers some of the ways that East African consumers shaped the global economy in the nineteenth century.
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- Highlight on Page 87 | Loc. 1320-21 | Added on Tuesday, February 12, 2013, 10:30 PM
this chapter contributes to an alternative genealogy of globalization that takes into account the local contingencies of intercontinental relationships and the interests of historically under-considered populations.
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- Highlight on Page 87 | Loc. 1327-29 | Added on Tuesday, February 12, 2013, 10:31 PM
Attention to “peripheral” cultures of demand, or any local interests that produce long-range reverberations, brings to historical analyses of global processes an appreciation of plural causality.
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- Highlight on Page 87 | Loc. 1332-34 | Added on Tuesday, February 12, 2013, 10:32 PM
This is particularly surprising considering that world-system theory,1 one of the most rigorous market-based models of global interaction, implies ways for thinking about the repercussions of “peripheral” interests in its basic
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- Highlight on Page 88 | Loc. 1336-37 | Added on Tuesday, February 12, 2013, 10:33 PM
suggests possibilities beyond the deterministic language of core/periphery relations, a language that is now frequently employed in analyses of globalization.3
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- Highlight on Page 88 | Loc. 1338-39 | Added on Tuesday, February 12, 2013, 10:33 PM
we should accept the possibility that seemingly marginal actors can, at times, significantly affect seemingly powerful
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- Highlight on Page 89 | Loc. 1351-54 | Added on Tuesday, February 12, 2013, 10:37 PM
For example, David Richardson’s work on West African consumption patterns challenged the notion that the West simply imposed its economic will on Africans by highlighting how West African demand shaped the parameters of African-British economic relations at the height of the Atlantic slave trade.8
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- Highlight on Page 89 | Loc. 1354-55 | Added on Tuesday, February 12, 2013, 10:37 PM
Richardson showed that consumer interests across West Africa were divergent and locally contingent, which suggested a complexity in Euro-African commercial relations unexplored in most accounts of precolonial exchange.
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- Note on Page 89 | Loc. 1355 | Added on Tuesday, February 12, 2013, 10:37 PM
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- Highlight on Page 89 | Loc. 1356-58 | Added on Tuesday, February 12, 2013, 10:38 PM
Africans negotiated the terms of trade by refusing all undesired goods, and the failure of British manufacturers to replicate the kinds of items in demand—certain Indian textiles, for instance—forced English merchants to depend on particular Indian manufacturers.9
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- Highlight on Page 90 | Loc. 1367-68 | Added on Tuesday, February 12, 2013, 10:41 PM
Through demand, as much as through production, East Africans leveraged nineteenth-century global commercial relationships.
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- Highlight on Page 90 | Loc. 1373-75 | Added on Tuesday, February 12, 2013, 10:42 PM
From the East African case, an image of global relation emerges that suggests that the shape of world markets has been determined not only by Western interests, but also through a matrix of shifting accommodation and, lest we forget, by the dynamics of non-Western exchanges.
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- Highlight on Page 90 | Loc. 1379-81 | Added on Tuesday, February 12, 2013, 10:44 PM
The profile of global relations that I present is one of reciprocal determination, inequitable in the long run, and increasingly so from beginning of the East African colonial era in the 1880s, but reciprocal nonetheless. This dialectic constricted possibility without foreclosing a variety of actions, choices, or
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- Highlight on Page 90 | Loc. 1379-81 | Added on Tuesday, February 12, 2013, 10:45 PM
The profile of global relations that I present is one of reciprocal determination, inequitable in the long run, and increasingly so from beginning of the East African colonial era in the 1880s, but reciprocal nonetheless. This dialectic constricted possibility without foreclosing a variety of actions, choices, or potentials.
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- Highlight on Page 91 | Loc. 1387 | Added on Tuesday, February 12, 2013, 10:45 PM
THE PLACES OF CONSUMER DESIRE
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I trace the repercussions of East African consumer demand to two distant locales: Salem, Massachusetts, and Bombay.
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- Highlight on Page 91 | Loc. 1395-96 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 01:48 AM
Along these chains of relation, we can see precisely how consumer demand came to drive the system, how demand was translated and relayed, and how, through such translation, the production of certain goods was organized and executed.
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- Highlight on Page 92 | Loc. 1400-1401 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 01:52 AM
Letters from American merchants in East Africa are replete with frustrated remarks about contaminated copal (a resin used for making furniture varnish),
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- Highlight on Page 92 | Loc. 1408-9 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 03:17 AM
Joseph Thomson, who fit out a caravan for Lake Tanganyika in the 1870s, wrote that, “fashion was as dominant among Central African tribes as among the belles of Paris or London.”
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- Highlight on Page 93 | Loc. 1420-22 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 03:19 AM
Thomson, for example, took the advice of a caravan leader who had visited the Lake Tanganyika region a full two years earlier and on his recommendation bought, “a great amount of beads of a certain size, composition, and color,” which he found to be out of fashion on his arrival. The beads, carefully chosen and carried halfway across the continent, were now of little value.19
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- Highlight on Page 93 | Loc. 1426 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 03:19 AM
“scarcely two villages concur in their canons of taste.”
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- Highlight on Page 94 | Loc. 1430-32 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 03:20 AM
To put the complex nature of demand into perspective, there were at least four hundred varieties of beads current during Burton’s sojourn across central East Africa in 1857, each with a different value, name, and particular locale of preference.
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- Highlight on Page 96 | Loc. 1459-60 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 03:24 AM
American manufacturers began making brass coils conforming exactly to East African specifications. One
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- Highlight on Page 96 | Loc. 1466-69 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 03:27 AM
a Hamburg firm tried to copy a popular, blue-checked turban cloth made in Muscat (Oman). The firm began to import a knockoff from Hamburg that they imagined to be equally attractive and sold it at a price lower than the Muscati-made variety. But Zanzibari consumers found the colors overly bright, and, accordingly, it was “gossamer to a beaver”: valueless.
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- Highlight on Page 97 | Loc. 1479-80 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 03:28 AM
What Bombay-based firms, like all those who would succeed in the East African market, recognized was that their success was dependent on their agents’ abilities to recognize African fashion trends and relay information about these trends to manufacturers at home.
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- Highlight on Page 99 | Loc. 1507-9 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 03:32 AM
Mandara, like his nephew Miriali, sought out the most unique or technologically sophisticated goods from traders in order to set himself off from his subjects—perhaps even to use such privileged access as a way of maintaining his authority—who were by the 1870s accessing a great variety of imports.
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- Highlight on Page 100 | Loc. 1521-24 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 03:34 AM
Teleki expedition produced nearly twelve hundred of these cloths. This remaking of cloth occupied the members of the caravan for several days, even with nearly one hundred people engaged in the task.42 Strings of beads also had to be reconfigured for Maasai consumers. Before entering Maasai country, caravan porters had to rethread beads in lengths of twenty-one or twenty-two inches because beads would not be accepted unless in this form.43
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- Highlight on Page 101 | Loc. 1545-47 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 03:46 AM
Without a fringe, three and a half yards of dewli cost around seven Maria Theresa dollars (MT$) in 1857; when any fringe was added, the price increased by almost 30 percent; when Zanzibari tailors added a gold fringe, the price reached as high as MT$80.
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- Highlight on Page 102 | Loc. 1561-64 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 03:48 AM
Until the U.S. Civil War, American trade with Zanzibar hinged on East African demand for New England cloth. This demand was initially met by the famous Lowell mills of Massachusetts. But increasing competition for Lowell cottons and the introduction of a rail system between the mills and Boston forced Salem merchants to invest in their own mill—the first entirely steam-powered textile factory in the Western Hemisphere.
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- Highlight on Page 103 | Loc. 1569-71 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 03:50 AM
sought new markets in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. They exchanged New England– made consumer goods for Chinese porcelain, Indian textiles, Mochan coffee, Muscati dates, and Sumatran pepper. By the end of the first decade of the nineteenth century, Salem and Boston monopolized American trade with Indian Ocean and Pacific ports.
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- Highlight on Page 103 | Loc. 1575-79 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 03:51 AM
Moreover, capital investment within New England was now shifting from mercantilism to industrial production. By the 1830s, American trade with many of the world’s most lucrative commercial ports—across the Atlantic, in India, China, and Southeast Asia— was controlled by firms based in the larger port cities. As a result, Salemites began to concentrate on a variety of alternative ports of trade outside the long-standing trade routes. Of the new markets Salemites entered in the Indian Ocean, Zanzibar would prove one of the most important.54
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- Highlight on Page 104 | Loc. 1580-81 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 03:51 AM
two commodities essential to New England industries: hides for regional leatherworks and high-quality gum copal, a resin necessary for the varnishes used in the regional furniture industry.55
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- Highlight on Page 104 | Loc. 1585-87 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 03:52 AM
Whipple Gum Copal Factory in Salem became one of the city’s largest employers as a result of its access to East African copal. Fortunately for American merchants, people in the copal-producing region and across East Africa took a great interest in Lowell’s unbleached calicos (called merekani; “American,” in Swahili).
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- Highlight on Page 105 | Loc. 1595-97 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 03:53 AM
The relation of East Africa to the vitality of Salem is even clearer if we consider that many of the merchants invested in the Zanzibar trade became key members of boards at Salem banks, insurance companies, and factories.
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- Highlight on Page 105 | Loc. 1609-10 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 03:55 AM
Other cargoes included things such as lumber (11,226 ft. in one shipment), clapboard, bread, ice, and even ham—a surprising import for Muslim Zanzibar.
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- Highlight on Page 106 | Loc. 1623-26 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 03:57 AM
From the 1830s until around 1847, the vast majority of unbleached shirting and sheeting that arrived East Africa was manufactured at the Lowell mills.64 Echoing his predecessor, the American consul wrote in 1851 that the demand for merekani in East Africa seemed infinite, since people across the region preferred them to all other imports.65
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- Highlight on Page 107 | Loc. 1628-31 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 03:57 AM
In some societies, even the stamps that the mills printed on the textiles became fashionable. James Grant wrote that at Ukuni (in southern Unyamwezi, Tanzania), when people acquired a piece of merekani bearing the blue stamp “Massachusetts Sheeting” they would wrap the cloth around their bodies in such a way as to ensure that the words appeared clearly across the front of the garment.
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- Highlight on Page 107 | Loc. 1637-38 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 03:58 AM
By the 1840s, it was no longer only the elite who could access imported goods but anyone with produce valued by passing caravans, or who were willing to carry produce to regional markets.
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- Highlight on Page 108 | Loc. 1645-48 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 04:37 AM
cottons was now raised above the projected returns from the East African trade.70 It was this crisis of the Salem trade, and the possibilities of increased profits from manufacturing in a moment of great consumer demand, that, as P. H. Northway first argued in his treatise on Zanzibar-Salem relations, encouraged Salemites to invest in the Naumkeag Steam Cotton Company.71
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Naumkeag Steam Cotton Company was both the first fully steam-powered textile mill in the United States and the largest mill in the hemisphere.
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- Highlight on Page 111 | Loc. 1694-96 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 04:44 AM
Salem’s most important industries were all linked to East Africa, and what was perhaps the largest industry for much of the 1840s—varnish making—was entirely dependent on African copal producers.
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- Highlight on Page 112 | Loc. 1707-10 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 08:49 AM
The role of Indian merchants, financiers, and small business operators in the nineteenth-century East African commercial boom cannot be underestimated. The majority of Zanzibar’s largest retailers at mid-century were either western Indian or of Indian descent.92 In fact, by 1863 at least four-fifths of the entire trade of Zanzibar passed through the hands of British Indian subjects, most of whom were either from Kutch or Bombay.93
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Two shifts in the Zanzibar market during the early 1860s drew East Africa and Bombay more closely together. First, the American Civil War took the popular merekani cloth out of circulation. Second, the total value of East African ivory exports increased dramatically.
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- Highlight on Page 113 | Loc. 1720-21 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 08:51 AM
by 1863 it had already become the second most important export destination for Bombay-made cloth.95 This trend continued, and in 1866–67 the number of Indian-made cloths exported to East Africa increased ninefold.96
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- Highlight on Page 113 | Loc. 1724-25 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 08:52 AM
it was unbleached English cloth, the closest match to the merekani available in sufficient quantities at the outbreak of the U.S. Civil War.
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- Highlight on Page 114 | Loc. 1739-40 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 08:55 AM
The changes in Bombay’s relationship to Zanzibar were, much like similar changes in Salem production forty years earlier, directly related to local production for the East African market.
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- Highlight on Page 114 | Loc. 1745-46 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 08:55 AM
What is particularly important about these mills from the perspective of the western Indian regional economy and colonial India’s history, is that they were founded almost entirely by investments of Indian, not British, capital.99
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- Highlight on Page 116 | Loc. 1778-80 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 08:58 AM
Reflecting the increasing buying power of East Africans, the decreasing costs of consumer goods, and the revolution in Bombay manufacturing, the volume of imported Indian unbleached cloth alone was now 30 percent higher than the American export trade had been at its apex.
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- Highlight on Page 117 | Loc. 1780-82 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 08:59 AM
East African consumers were also becoming essential to Bombay’s other manufacturing sectors. They were now buying Indian carriages and carts, cabinet-ware, furniture, boots, shoes, stationary, rice, ghee, and even fresh vegetables.106
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By the date of the Sultan of Zanzibar’s acquiescence to protectorate status, East Africa was importing 10 percent of the total of all Indian manufactured goods and produce exported from Bombay, which less than fifty years earlier had only accounted for 10–15 percent of Bombay’s trade, but now accounted for the vast majority of the commercial hub’s exports.108
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- Highlight on Page 118 | Loc. 1798-1800 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 09:02 AM
When the British government appropriated Zanzibar in 1890, East African consumers were crucial to both the export trade in Bombay-manufactured goods and the external commerce of South Asia’s commercial hub generally.109 This new relationship was clear in East Africa as well.
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- Highlight on Page 118 | Loc. 1805-7 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 09:02 AM
Bombay’s trajectory as the British empire’s second city and most important colonial capital, suggest the significance of East African consumer demand to Indian industrialization and British Indian interests.
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- Highlight on Page 119 | Loc. 1812-14 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 09:04 AM
English merchants flooded Indian markets with British cloth, and Indian merchants both remade this British cloth to meet African standards and cultivated a market for Bombay-manufactured textiles by replicating the American varieties popular in the western Indian Ocean region. In choosing to buy immense amounts of Indian cloth, East African consumers in turn stimulated Bombay’s industrialization.
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- Highlight on Page 119 | Loc. 1823-25 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 09:06 AM
Despite the complexities of East African trade, manufacturers in America and India produced inexpensive cloth that appealed to East African consumer interests. In the process, Salemites built the first steam-powered textile mill in the United States, while western Indian financiers and manufacturers made Bombay the industrial center of the Indian Ocean region.
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- Highlight on Page 120 | Loc. 1827-29 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 09:06 AM
negotiated transaction and consumer desire on the part of people considered marginal to global systems have, at times, been just as important to patterns of global integration as “peripheral” adjustments to the demands of international capital have been.
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- Highlight on Page 120 | Loc. 1831-33 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 09:07 AM
The direct reciprocities evident in these exchanges were not a function of equity or symmetry over the long term—Europeans colonized Africa after all— but they did entail a dialectic that reshaped extra-African locales at the same time that foreign interests, ideas, and strategies were transforming East Africa.
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- Highlight on Page 121 | Loc. 1847-50 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 09:09 AM
evidence I offered above suggests that seemingly marginal individuals have been able to affect larger frameworks. Thus, I believe that the frames of reference and strategies for self-definition that many people outside of the “core” employ in their everyday lives deserve greater attention in the development of an inclusive genealogy of globalization.
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- Note on Page 121 | Loc. 1850 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 09:09 AM
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- Highlight on Page 122 | Loc. 1856-60 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 09:10 AM
I suggested in chapter 1 that imported goods and symbols had translocal strategic utility: they could be used to shape foreigners’ interpretations of, and relationships with, Mutsamuduans. In chapter 2 I suggested that Mombasans formulated socially important relationships with consumer goods because their use was an important aspect of local public and private self-presentation. With the preeminence of Zanzibar as the region’s commercial hub from the 1840s through the imposition of a British Protectorate in 1890, consumer goods increasingly became essential means for staking claims to social position
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- Highlight on Page 122 | Loc. 1864-69 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 09:11 AM
CHAPTER 4 COSMOPOLITANISM AND CULTURAL DOMESTICATION CONSUMER IMPORTS IN ZANZIBAR The
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- Highlight on Page 122 | Loc. 1864-69 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 09:11 AM
CHAPTER 4 COSMOPOLITANISM AND CULTURAL DOMESTICATION CONSUMER IMPORTS IN ZANZIBAR
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- Highlight on Page 123 | Loc. 1871-75 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 09:15 AM
Western analysts tended to discredit other modes of self-perception, material relation, and economic change by theorizing modernity as a bounded temporal form dependent on exclusionary definitions of historical progression and essential difference. Through the tropes of progression and civilization, proponents of a quintessentially Western modernity denied “coevalness” in time and imagined global spatial distinctions as firm and immutable.1
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- Highlight on Page 123 | Loc. 1879-81 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 09:16 AM
By focusing on the domestication of imported consumer goods in urban Zanzibar, this chapter excavates visions of globality that mirrored modernity in some ways, but simultaneously cultivated their own singularities that, like Western concepts of modernity, inflected the experience of intense global interconnectivity.
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- Highlight on Page 124 | Loc. 1897-1901 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 09:18 AM
In effect, new Western subjectivities were formed in direct relation to confrontations with, and images of, others.5 In the early nineteenth century, the idea of “the modern” was no longer simply temporal but had become comparative, cultural, and exclusive. Elite ideologues of Anglophone modernity categorized and then ranked populations against the standards of western European upper classes, basing assessments on populations’ abilities, objects, and practices, summed up neatly by the words virtues and vices.6
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- Highlight on Page 125 | Loc. 1904-6 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 09:19 AM
Such reconceptualizations of modernity stress heterogeneity in place of the West’s singular historical narrative of generation and diffusion, recognizing that modernity was theorized in the West only through a diversity of global encounters.7
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- Highlight on Page 126 | Loc. 1921-23 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 09:21 AM
universalization of modernity has the potential to obscure the historical desires of those who did not share Western visions of globality by allowing only “multiple modernities,” not divergent, though interconnected, strategies of global
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- Highlight on Page 126 | Loc. 1921-23 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 09:21 AM
universalization of modernity has the potential to obscure the historical desires of those who did not share Western visions of globality by allowing only “multiple modernities,” not divergent, though interconnected, strategies of global relation.10
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- Highlight on Page 126 | Loc. 1931-33 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 09:24 AM
Zanzibaris incorporated European and American clocks into the cityscape, but did not regulate their day by the clock. Changes in Zanzibari material life, therefore, mirrored changes in the West, but Zanzibaris did not share the basic conceptual underpinnings of Western modernity.
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- Highlight on Page 128 | Loc. 1955-59 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 09:29 AM
In the years that followed the Sultana’s voyage, Seyyid Said sent several vessels to London and Marseilles—one with a cargo totaling MT$100,000, or about twice the value of the average cargo leaving Zanzibar on a European vessel—and they returned with an assortment of consumer goods for local sale.15 In New York, the sultan’s agents purchased diverse American consumer goods and, in accordance with Zanzibar’s 1833 commercial treaty with the United States, were given most-favored-nation treatment.16
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- Highlight on Page 128 | Loc. 1960-61 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 09:29 AM
New York laden with the western Indian Ocean’s export mainstays: cloves, gum copal, coffee, ivory, dates, hides, and Persian carpets.17
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- Highlight on Page 128 | Loc. 1961-65 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 09:29 AM
The return cargo included the following: 88,101 yards of American cloth, or merekani18 550 yards of red joho [broadcloth used for the making of overcoats, or joho] 2 boxes of red beads 4 barrels and one box of white beads; some additional blue beads 8004 large “china plates” 20 dozen boxes of gold leaf or leaf metal 300 muskets and powder
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- Highlight on Page 129 | Loc. 1966-68 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 09:30 AM
reflected the consumer tastes of a broad cross-section of East Africans: plates, gold leaf, and red broadcloth for ornamental and adornment purposes in Zanzibar, beads and American cloth for Zanzibari and mainland consumption, and firearms and powder for sale across the region.
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- Highlight on Page 129 | Loc. 1969-70 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 09:31 AM
Ahmad bin Na`aman was commissioned to search out special consumer objects, such as chandeliers, pineapple and orange syrup, confectionery almonds, glass plates, watches, shotguns, lamps, and mirrors, for some of Zanzibar’s wealthiest residents.19
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- Highlight on Page 129 | Loc. 1971-72 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 09:31 AM
most ships which traded at Zanzibar, is that only a very small proportion of the objects listed could be considered utilitarian.
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- Highlight on Page 129 | Loc. 1978-83 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 09:33 AM
So important had certain consumer goods become to Zanzibari merchants and consumers that dictums like, “It is always far more easy to dispose of a cargo at Zanzibar than to procure one,” appeared regularly in the correspondences of resident Western merchants.21 Zanzibari consumerism was a new engagement with global cultural flows, a deployment of global symbols in the service of local image-making practices, or what Jean and John Comaroff have summed up as the incorporation of diverse ways of seeing and being without negating one’s own.22
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- Note on Page 130 | Loc. 1983 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 09:33 AM
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- Highlight on Page 131 | Loc. 1994-98 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 09:36 AM
“dirtiest part of town,” whitewashed and “neat.” Written on the door were the words: “Rajab No. 1”. On entering the front room, Browne was “quite struck with the neatness and taste with which it was furnished. A rich carpet, a polished table, and the usual number of chairs, looking-glasses, &c., which make up the furniture of a snug Western log-cabin.” To Browne, these “evince[d] something of the civilized notions which Rajab had acquired in Salem [Massachusetts].”
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- Highlight on Page 132 | Loc. 2012-14 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 09:40 AM
Yet, despite Rajab’s communicative abilities, Browne’s denouement, placed as it is immediately following a suggestion of Rajab’s civility, privileges myths of African/“Oriental” aversion to change, a vein of analysis that would be canonized in later analyses of Zanzibaris as distinctly unmodern, prisoners of their static past. I return to this point in chapter 6.
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- Highlight on Page 132 | Loc. 2015-17 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 09:41 AM
Nonetheless, it would be wrong to assume that Rajab’s mother’s condemnation of the portrait was a rejection of symbols, goods, and technologies from abroad. In fact, not only was her house full of American objects, but soon after Browne’s arrival, she appealed to him for medical assistance.
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- Highlight on Page 133 | Loc. 2027-31 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 09:42 AM
Rebecca Wakefield wrote of her visit to Ali bin Suleiman’s house, where she “inspected . . . albums; in which were some of the most splendid cartes I ever saw; chiefly of the sovereigns of Europe, and their families,” as well as stereo-graphs, piles of which were spread across the table.28 Images, particularly of distant rulers and panoramic scenes, were by mid-century some of the most vivid examples of what Homi Bhabha termed “certain symbols of the elsewhere” that contributed to Zanzibar’s new global consciousness.29
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- Highlight on Page 134 | Loc. 2047-52 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 09:45 AM
descriptions of Zanzibar interior design evidence what cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard called the object system of consumer societies. By using the word system, Baudrillard suggested that individual objects do not function on their own but instead depend on a system that relates the larger meaning of the whole. In this logic, consumer objects can be incorporated as signs entirely divorced from the function intended by their manufacturers. Consumer choices need not respond to the demands of comfort or function as long as they address a social logic in which specific objects are desired for their abilities to contribute to a conglomerate social meaning.33
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- Highlight on Page 134 | Loc. 2054-56 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 09:45 AM
In Zanzibar, even the most seemingly functional object was at times valued for its sign qualities. Sayyida Salme described her father’s enormous collection of European furniture as including sofas, chairs, tables, even a wardrobe, that served “more as show-pieces than for real use.”35
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- Highlight on Page 135 | Loc. 2062-63 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 09:46 AM
Zanzibari consumerism was in constant dialogue with cultural trends in Muscat, Bombay, Paris, New York, and London.
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- Highlight on Page 136 | Loc. 2082-83 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 09:50 AM
Though I have perhaps not made the point forcefully enough, traveling cultures affected and were affected by Zanzibaris of all socioeconomic positions, not simply captains or diplomatic envoys.
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- Highlight on Page 136 | Loc. 2083-85 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 09:51 AM
For example, most Zanzibari travelers to Arabia, India, Europe, and within the East African region were not elites. Sailors, small-business owners, and slaves of all statuses constituted the vast majority of Zanzibar’s travelers.44
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- Highlight on Page 138 | Loc. 2106-9 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 09:54 AM
Muhammad even approached the Royal Geographical Society with his own proposal for the exploration of the lakes region of Central Africa. Though he was certainly more qualified than Richard Burton, who would later lead such an expedition, the Society did not select Muhammad as a member of its exploratory parties. He was too incongruous with the developing Victorian image of the explorer.52
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- Highlight on Page 138 | Loc. 2112-13 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 09:56 AM
At mid-century more than half of Zanzibar City’s population were slaves or freed slaves, and it is likely that most enslaved Zanzibaris were born on the African mainland.
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- Highlight on Page 139 | Loc. 2119-20 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 09:56 AM
In the acceleration of interconnectivity fueled by travel, forced migration, trade, and a polyglot population, a dynamic nexus of creole consumerism took shape in Zanzibar.
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- Note on Page 139 | Loc. 2120 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 09:56 AM
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- Highlight on Page 139 | Loc. 2121-24 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 09:57 AM
nineteenth-century analysts: Zanzibaris fetishized manufactured goods.55 A more lucrative analytical strategy is to think of consumerism as, following Clifford, a way of localizing “symbols of the elsewhere” for purposes of specific action. Desire and symbolic function should not be separated here.56
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- Highlight on Page 139 | Loc. 2124-29 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 09:58 AM
Wealth, master-slave relationships, and gender relations functioned as social barriers, but Zanzibaris of all backgrounds found themselves on two common planes of interaction: (1) language, or the use of Swahili as a lingua franca,57 and (2) consumerism, or an emphasis on objects to communicate social ideas. Consumer goods such as mirrors, watches, jewelry, porcelain, and clothes proved to be communication devices as important as the spoken word. Consumerism became a catalyst for sociocultural grounding, a strategy for representing the self in the social and cultural diversity of Zanzibar’s population.
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- Highlight on Page 139 | Loc. 2129-32 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 09:59 AM
Freedmen, for example, appropriated the kanzu (long shirt made of imported cloth) to mark local affiliation and a transcendence of slavery. In doing so, they laid claim to Zanzibar’s creole cultural forms. Imported cloth, when fashioned into kanzus, was a vehicle for the relocation and grounding of identity; it signified a cultural elsewhere distinct from freed slaves’ home societies and a social elsewhere beyond slavery.
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- Highlight on Page 140 | Loc. 2134-36 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 10:02 AM
“patina”—a mode of social relation anchored to notions of historical distinction, such as existed in Lamu and Pate—was in many ways undermined by “fashion”—a mode of social relation relatively unbound from sumptuary regulations and other historical restrictions.58
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- Highlight on Page 140 | Loc. 2142-44 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 11:18 AM
Yet, in relegating the old political elite to the periphery of the commercial capital—and in the process successfully undermining older status symbols like the Mwinyi Mkuu’s drums, horns, and other state regalia—the Busaidis were faced with the project of establishing new symbols of authority.
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- Highlight on Page 141 | Loc. 2151-52 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 11:19 AM
sultan released new consumer goods from their prior sumptuary restrictions. With the rapid dissolution of sumptuary regulations historically common in Swahili city-states, the centrality of consumerism to new social relations became a hallmark of Zanzibar’s cosmopolitanism.
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- Note on Page 141 | Loc. 2152 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 11:19 AM
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- Highlight on Page 141 | Loc. 2154-57 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 11:20 AM
Even a person of relatively meager means, like Rajab, could travel abroad and accumulate signs of distinction. In this conjuncture, social signs rendered by consumer objects were unstable; they were being continually negotiated in the public realm and in relationship to their own abundance.
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- Highlight on Page 142 | Loc. 2173-75 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 11:22 AM
pursued new strategies for material definition. What I am suggesting here is something rather more complicated than the poor’s aspiration to status, their appropriation of the symbols of the rich. What is equally important systemically is the wealthy’s social desire to distinguish themselves from others as a group, a phenomenon that sometimes led to ludicrous extremes.64
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- Highlight on Page 143 | Loc. 2178-81 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 11:23 AM
For example, around mid-century, freed slaves appropriated the term uungwana for themselves, though it had previously denoted historical prestige, an elite genealogy, and wealth. In response, by the end of the century the elite had championed a new word for themselves, a term that took on the nuances that uungwana had now lost: ustaarabu, or “culturedness” (lit. “Arabness”; see chapter 5).
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- Highlight on Page 143 | Loc. 2190-91 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 12:24 AM
Jewelry was so essential to appearances in Zanzibar that, according to Sayyida Salme, even beggar-women were found in the streets “decked out” in various ornaments.66
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- Highlight on Page 144 | Loc. 2198-2200 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 12:25 AM
majority of consumer goods that landed at Zanzibar found their way to the mainland. Most mirrors, however, did not. Indicative of a longer trend, statistics on Zanzibari imports for 1861–62 show that 80 percent of the mirrors imported to Zanzibar stayed on the island, probably in the city itself.68
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- Highlight on Page 144 | Loc. 2201-2 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 12:25 AM
Clocks placed between opposing mirrors, as Sayyida Salme described, created an infinity of clocks within a circumscribed space.
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- Highlight on Page 144 | Loc. 2208-9 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 12:26 AM
they became the foundation of interior design. In Custom Master Jairam Sewji’s house, mirrors “without number,” as one visitor put it, hung on the walls.71
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- Highlight on Page 145 | Loc. 2218-20 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 12:27 AM
It was a sign of the new Zanzibari cultural ideology that, where Barghash’s father, Seyyid Said, had once flanked his chair with paintings of sailing ships symbolic of the global integration that he had helped to facilitate in Zanzibar, Barghash now hung portraits of himself next to mirrors that reflected him, his visitors, slaves, and courtiers ad infinitum.75
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- Highlight on Page 146 | Loc. 2234-36 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 12:29 AM
Barghash both imagined a new role for Zanzibar’s government in local social services and encouraged the establishment of a new urban aesthetic. Perhaps more vigorously than before, during Barghash’s reign Zanzibaris consciously remade the city in relation to diverse materials and changing imaginations of Europe, India, and the wider
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- Highlight on Page 147 | Loc. 2244-45 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 12:30 AM
One of his rural residences, Chukwani, built in the 1870s and connected to the city by tram, showed particular British Indian influence in its wide verandah,
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- Highlight on Page 147 | Loc. 2244-47 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 12:32 AM
One of his rural residences, Chukwani, built in the 1870s and connected to the city by tram, showed particular British Indian influence in its wide verandah, massive columns, French doors, ornate overhangs, and bulbous colored glass lamps. Maruhubi palace, built a few years later, evidenced British Indian accents overlaying an Omani-style structure with a perimeter wall inspired by park walls he had seen in Britain.84
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- Highlight on Page 147 | Loc. 2250-53 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 12:32 AM
Also Indian in inspiration, the structure was monumental. With eight terraced stories capped by a glass pyramid reminiscent of London’s Crystal Palace, it towered over the city, fixing the attention of new arrivals. Fitted with electric lighting, it also functioned as a lighthouse. Even more symbolically, Barghash placed four massive clocks in the tower facing the city and harbor. The institution of state clocks complete with bells was a significant extension of the private amassing of clocks and watches that had begun in the
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- Highlight on Page 147 | Loc. 2250-53 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 12:33 AM
With eight terraced stories capped by a glass pyramid reminiscent of London’s Crystal Palace, it towered over the city, fixing the attention of new arrivals. Fitted with electric lighting, it also functioned as a lighthouse. Even more symbolically, Barghash placed four massive clocks in the tower facing the city and harbor. The institution of state clocks complete with bells was a significant extension of the private amassing of clocks and watches that had begun in the
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- Highlight on Page 147 | Loc. 2250-54 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 12:33 AM
With eight terraced stories capped by a glass pyramid reminiscent of London’s Crystal Palace, it towered over the city, fixing the attention of new arrivals. Fitted with electric lighting, it also functioned as a lighthouse. Even more symbolically, Barghash placed four massive clocks in the tower facing the city and harbor. The institution of state clocks complete with bells was a significant extension of the private amassing of clocks and watches that had begun in the 1830s.
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- Highlight on Page 148 | Loc. 2264-66 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 12:34 AM
the clocks were set to Zanzibari time: the day began with sunrise at one o’clock, or roughly seven a.m. in European time, and the clocks were readjusted every ten days to account for the changing length of the day.86 Barghash did not Europeanize time in Zanzibar; rather, he adapted the European timepiece to Zanzibari perceptions of time.
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- Highlight on Page 148 | Loc. 2268-69 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 12:36 AM
richly iconic Beit al Ajaib, “House of Wonders,” completed around 1883. The construction alone was unlike anything undertaken in nineteenth-century East Africa.
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- Highlight on Page 149 | Loc. 2275-80 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 12:37 AM
Unlike other buildings of state in Zanzibar, including large storage facilities, the customs house, and accommodations for family members, slaves, and visitors, the Beit al Ajaib was a symbolic space, as evidenced by its narrow rooms but cavernous central auditorium. The auditorium, reaching up three stories from the floor to roof, was covered, unlike the courtyards of many Zanzibari houses, thus allowing free use of the space in any weather. Adding to its versatility, Barghash installed electric lighting in 1886. Barghash laid the floors of the Beit al Ajaib with the same French black and white marble that had come into common use by wealthy Zanzibaris and filled the building with large chandeliers.
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- Highlight on Page 149 | Loc. 2281-83 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 12:38 AM
It boasted “fine” Persian carpets, red velvet and gilt wood furniture, kitchen clocks, ormolu timepieces, aneroid barometers, thermometers, anemometers, telescopes, opera-glasses, music-boxes, swords, spears, rifles, pistols, toys “of ingenious kinds,” photographic albums, portraits of world personalities, and sets of photographs of sites around the world.89
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vi vi francis bacon tower of knowledge
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- Highlight on Page 150 | Loc. 2286-87 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 12:38 AM
Crystal Palace, or London’s Hall of the Great Exhibition. Barghash had visited the Great Exhibition in 1875, so it was no coincidence that he similarly arranged an endless variety of objects in his House of Wonders.
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- Highlight on Page 150 | Loc. 2291-92 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 12:39 AM
The House of Wonders was, in effect, a museum of the contemporary world, designed to equate the power of new consumer objects with the person of the monarch and to awe anyone who visited it.
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- Highlight on Page 150 | Loc. 2291-92 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 12:40 AM
The House of Wonders was, in effect, a museum of the contemporary world, designed to equate the power of new consumer objects with the person of the monarch and to awe anyone who visited it.
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- Highlight on Page 150 | Loc. 2295-97 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 12:40 AM
Built just north of the palace complex, the hospital, when paired with the House of Wonders, evidences the materialization of what has been termed the zeitgeist of the Barghash court: opulence, display, and a new aesthetic sensibility.92 Just as the
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- Highlight on Page 151 | Loc. 2306-7 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 12:41 AM
As in the contemporaneous houses of Muscat’s commercial elite, Indian aesthetics in the built environment were everywhere evident in Barghash’s Zanzibar.
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- Highlight on Page 151 | Loc. 2314-15 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 12:44 AM
The architecture of religion now also included an Anglican Cathedral and distinctly Indian-inspired structures, including Hindu temples (earlier banned in Zanzibar and Mombasa) as well as Khoja and Bohra mosques.
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- Highlight on Page 153 | Loc. 2338-41 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 12:47 AM
he invested little in mechanisms of direct social control, the expanded police force notwithstanding. He put most of his resources into (1) services broadly beneficial to Zanzibaris, and (2) the cultural-symbolic: a House of Wonders, electricity, public clocks, publications, and music. In short, his reformation was focused on basic public services and image. His cosmopolitanism did not aspire to replicate Western mores, but instead borrowed from the West (and elsewhere) to service his interests.
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- Highlight on Page 154 | Loc. 2355-57 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 12:49 AM
As Jonathon Glassman and others have shown, on the nineteenth-century Swahili Coast umbrellas were particular symbols of the state and patrician identity.106 In early nineteenth-century Zanzibar, umbrellas of British, Indian, Chinese, and American manufacture were common accoutrements of Asian businessmen.
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- Highlight on Page 155 | Loc. 2366-67 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 12:51 AM
Through their appropriation, umbrellas were no longer simply elite objects, but common symbols of cosmopolitan Zanzibar.
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- Highlight on Page 155 | Loc. 2377-80 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 12:56 AM
If we wish to dismantle the concepts of progress and development so critical to Western definitions of essential difference, we should be wary of the self-assured terms born of nineteenth-century high imperialism. The notion of the modern, at least when projected onto people who did not claim it, is still accompanied by the specter of imperial taxonomy and still discounts the possibilities and divergent visions that coexisted in moments of heightened interconnectivity.111
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- Highlight on Page 156 | Loc. 2381-82 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 12:56 AM
modernizing impulse to liberate others from their traditions: practices that were often adaptations to a changing world.
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- Highlight on Page 158 | Loc. 2415-17 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 01:02 AM
I address (1) how some slaves in late nineteenth-century Zanzibar City were used in ways akin to objects of display, and (2) slaves’ strategies for projecting desirable images of themselves within the circumscribed spaces of subjection.
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- Highlight on Page 158 | Loc. 2417-20 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 01:02 AM
My focus is therefore narrow, on urban slaves and their symbolic uses as well as their rhetorical value to slave-owners and antislavery activists. The making of symbols out of people—a process that I call symbolic subjection—was essential to Zanzibari social life, and the notion of slaves as nothing more than blank slates onto which the interests of others could be written was a constant thread in British humanitarian discourse concerned with East Africa.
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- Note on Page 158 | Loc. 2420 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 01:02 AM
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- Highlight on Page 159 | Loc. 2438-40 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 01:05 AM
So closely were the symbolic uses of slaves and consumer goods aligned in slave-owning ideologies that Zanzibaris differentiated between slaves and objects with the simple distinction of those “things” that could speak (slaves) versus those that could not (inanimate objects).4
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- Highlight on Page 160 | Loc. 2444-45 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 01:06 AM
The value of domestic slaves lay, in part, in their capacity to represent their owners, to draw attention to and accumulate social capital for an owner,
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- Highlight on Page 163 | Loc. 2493-2500 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 01:17 AM
According to Hamerton, when a freed slave saved up enough money to buy his own slave, he “lounge[d] about from place to place with a sword under his arms, calling himself an Arab.”16 Hamerton’s picture is laden with standard stereotypes of Zanzibari men—idle, indolent, undirected— but the acquisition of a slave by an ex-slave did often facilitate a new social opportunity. Even for the poorest in urban Zanzibar, the ideal of slave-owners was not to put their slaves out to work, but to keep them in the house. According to Bartle Frere, slaves often spoke of investing windfalls of cash in a slave or two who, if possible, they would keep at home.17 Given the paternalism of Zanzibari myths of enslavement, it is not surprising that domestic slaves were publicly displayed in ways similar to children.18
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- Highlight on Page 164 | Loc. 2509-12 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 01:19 AM
The slave market thus became a horrible masquerade in which newly arrived slaves were forced to wear a profusion of gold, beads, expensive cloths, sometimes even flowers in their hair.20 Their bodies were smeared with coconut oil, and their eyes were highlighted with kohl. They were forced to represent something new, something that bore no relation to the people they once had been.
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- Note on Page 164 | Loc. 2512 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 01:19 AM
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- Highlight on Page 165 | Loc. 2518-19 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 01:20 AM
Naming was a profound act of the owner’s domination, for it evidenced an ability to deny the enslaved’s history and publicly constitute their identity anew.
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- Highlight on Page 166 | Loc. 2537-39 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 01:23 AM
Sayyida Shewane, of whom Sayyida Salme writes in her memoirs, always used her slaves to reflect her importance. According to Salme, Shewane sought out the most handsome slaves and weighted them with expensive weaponry and jewelry. When she went out, she was always accompanied by a large retinue of her bedecked slaves.27
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- Highlight on Page 169 | Loc. 2577-79 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 01:28 AM
These efforts laid the groundwork for imperial intervention and colonization by explicitly accepting the slave-owner’s image of the enslaved: the idea that the African was a blank slate onto which others’ interests could be written.
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- Highlight on Page 169 | Loc. 2584-86 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 01:29 AM
Zanzibaris called freed slaves entrusted to British redeemers watumwa wa wangereza, or the “slaves of the British,” because freed slaves were dressed and directed according to the interests of those who had custody over them and because the freed slaves’ greatest social ties were to the abolitionists.37
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- Highlight on Page 172 | Loc. 2631-32 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 01:36 AM
The Zanzibari white slave troubled the Manichaean equation of “black” physiognomies with slavery and “white” physiognomies with freedom.
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- Highlight on Page 173 | Loc. 2645-46 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 01:43 AM
He was attempting to “bring again to [the sultan’s] notice that this traffic in European and Asiatic slaves is to us much more revolting than the negro slave trade.”50
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- Highlight on Page 174 | Loc. 2661-63 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 01:45 AM
Whether or not they performed sexual labors similar to those of their female counterparts, the fact that Kirk was so deeply unsettled by the very thought of white boys as concubines of the “Arab” aristocracy reveals the gendered and racialized image of slavery in the redeeming consciousness. To control the bodies of “negro” women was one thing; to control those of white men was another.52
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- Highlight on Page 175 | Loc. 2675-76 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 01:46 AM
To Kirk, physiognomy defined the Indian in Africa as something more than a slave. Indians in Zanzibar represented imperial Britain; thus, enslaved Indians, as far as he was concerned, were an affront to the empire.
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- Highlight on Page 176 | Loc. 2699-2700 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 01:53 AM
Seward wrote that “from the arrest and relegation of some portion of its [the slave trade’s] ilicit [sic] outpour we can certainly stock the Sugar Plantations with Lawful Labour.”
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- Highlight on Page 177 | Loc. 2703-5 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 01:54 AM
Seward proposed to stop British planters from using slaves by delivering to them a contingent of newly “freed” slaves who would be compelled to work. His paternalistic ideology mirrored precisely the strategies of enslavers.
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- Highlight on Page 177 | Loc. 2706-8 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 01:54 AM
“obligation [should] be laid upon the quondam slave to discharge certain duties for a certain term as the price of his liberty and Civil rights and in return for adequate wages, quarters, clothing, food and Medical Care.”
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- Note on Page 177 | Loc. 2708 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 01:54 AM
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- Highlight on Page 179 | Loc. 2732-34 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 01:57 AM
Tozer refused to allow the ex-slaves to wear English clothes, even though the boys showed great interest in them. Much like a slave-owner, Tozer wanted the boys to represent, but not mimic, him. In this way, he ensured that the social distance between him and his charges remained significant.
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- Note on Page 179 | Loc. 2734 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 01:57 AM
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- Highlight on Page 180 | Loc. 2757-59 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 02:00 AM
When ex-slaves rejected this remaking—when they wore Western clothes or converted to Islam—they directly challenged the desires of their redeemers. To ensure this would not happen, redeemers attempted to build dependence from a young age, so that those in their charge came to see themselves in the image projected by the redeemers.
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- Highlight on Page 181 | Loc. 2769-73 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 02:01 AM
by socially redefining themselves through available objects, particularly those denied them by their owners. As many scholars have recognized, the idea of “freedom” did not carry the same meanings in most African societies as it did in Atlantic plantation societies. Leaving one’s master and total self-support were not necessarily ideal social conditions. In Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff’s formulation, slaves in African societies often recognized total autonomy as impractical and instead desired social belonging in their new societies.72
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- Highlight on Page 182 | Loc. 2778-79 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 02:02 AM
A direct response to the processes of subjection, self-definition often first took form through renaming and reclothing, taking on symbols that signified inclusion in a group other than the enslaved.
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- Note on Page 182 | Loc. 2779 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 02:03 AM
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- Highlight on Page 182 | Loc. 2791-93 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 02:05 AM
When slaves were manumitted, some relied on one ornament in particular as a material symbol of their new self-ownership: their deed of freedom, which was placed in a small silver box and worn around the neck.
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- Highlight on Page 183 | Loc. 2799-2801 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 02:06 AM
Women aspired to the styles popular in Zanzibar, which, as I suggested in chapter 4, included the ukaya (head covering), kisutu (English square cloth dyed in Bombay), leso (large, colorful cotton handkerchiefs sewn together in Zanzibar), and, by the end of the century, the kanga (dyed and printed Indian cloth).79
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- Highlight on Page 183 | Loc. 2802-5 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 02:06 AM
This consumption of what would come to be known as “Swahili” clothes at once symbolized integration into a stratum of Zanzibari society and announced distinction from both slavery and the denial of self-representation effected by enslavement. In this way, slaves seeking to remake themselves adopted and then manipulated, as Laura Fair has shown, the material codes of Zanzibar society for their own particular social ends.80
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- Highlight on Page 184 | Loc. 2812-16 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 02:07 AM
Once his owner recognized that he could do nothing with the man, he sent him to Sultan Seyyid Said. In the sultan’s court, the king delivered a speech that, reminiscent of the Mgwame parable in chapter 2, warned of the unpredictability of the world and how, like him, the sultan could one day be brought low. Soon thereafter Seyyid Said manumitted the king.83 By holding to the symbol of his former identity, the king forced his own self-image and a powerful material cultural symbol of his society on his owner.
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- Highlight on Page 185 | Loc. 2832-34 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 02:09 AM
Circassian self-distancing from other slaves—refusing to share certain social spaces with their African counterparts—suggests a competitive social reconstitution among slaves drawn from their owners’ values.86
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- Highlight on Page 188 | Loc. 2874-77 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 02:14 AM
Muana mke wa kiunguana, or a woman of uungwana status, was not simply free, but, according to Krapf, someone of a “free and noble kind, a ‘lady.’”96 This elite idea of uungwana was directly related to lineage and the social prestige that accrued to those with freeborn ancestors on both their maternal and paternal sides.
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- Highlight on Page 189 | Loc. 2887-90 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 02:17 AM
the word Swahili also came into common use among ex-slaves and their children as an identity marker, the term waungwana implied a cultural claim to Zanzibar and local status that Swahili did not. Freed slave caravan porters, for example, accepted the term Swahili but, according to Joseph Thomson, “rejoiced . . . in the proud title of Wangwana [sic].”
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- Highlight on Page 189 | Loc. 2898-2900 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 02:18 AM
As waungwana became a common term of self-definition among freed slaves in the second half of the nineteenth century, ustaarabu gained popularity as an elite cultural ideal.102
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- Highlight on Page 190 | Loc. 2901-4 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 02:20 AM
Freed people challenged elite identification and sought to form a more inclusive notion of urbaneness by taking the name waungwana, but elites imagined their social singularity in many of the same ways as they had before the rapid expansion of the Zanzibari slave population. Ustaarabu was fixed in a Zanzibari “Arab” sensibility, signified by local social and material concepts in reference to separate, sometimes fictive, origins.
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- Note on Page 190 | Loc. 2904 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 02:20 AM
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- Highlight on Page 190 | Loc. 2907-13 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 02:22 AM
Corporate identity was refashioned by slaves in myriad other ways— through dance groups, membership in turuq (Sufi orders, or “brotherhoods”), informal labor organization, and domestic congregation.104 For example, by the 1870s, the burgeoning population of freed slaves, slaves, poorer slave-owners, and immigrants congregated opposite the elite “Stone Town” in a nebulous area called simply Ng’ambo or, literally, the “other side.”105 The social and political constitution of Ng’ambo exemplifies other ways that slaves and ex-slaves sought to redefine themselves in the context of their objectification: through the creation of a community of their own and by purchasing slaves. In the social matrix of Ng’ambo, slaves and ex-slaves sought to reconstitute themselves by investing in their own slaves and exacting some measure of control over their charges.
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- Note on Page 190 | Loc. 2913 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 02:22 AM
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- Highlight on Page 192 | Loc. 2932-34 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 02:23 AM
For slaves in Zanzibar, “freedom” was reinscription, making a new self out of the objectifying parameters of slavery, creating a desirable social space within the structures of coastal social hierarchies.110
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- Highlight on Page 192 | Loc. 2943-44 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 02:24 AM
As I suggested earlier in this chapter, Western images of slavery in Africa bore a remarkable resemblance to slave-owner ideologies in the sense that they were bound to the conviction that slaves had no voice of their own.
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- Highlight on Page 193 | Loc. 2948-51 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 02:25 AM
the accumulation of antislavery rhetoric created an image of Africans as helpless children enslaved by debauched “Arabs” and in need of redemption.114 As evidence of the deep-seated humanitarian conviction of the redeemers, when direct British intervention in East Africa was first discussed as a possibility, it was imagined as a remedy for the slave trade, not a goal in itself.
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- Highlight on Page 193 | Loc. 2955-56 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 02:25 AM
Among some British analysts, annexation was a solution to African problems, a moral imperative. Humanitarians believed that “order” in East Africa would not be the legacy of “Arab” colonizers on the coast but would take both the resolve and abilities of Englishmen.
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- Highlight on Page 193 | Loc. 2958-60 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 02:26 AM
Colonial annexation, when imagined as an effort to bring order to a continent corrupted by perpetual slaving, was thus a moral crusade, one founded on the guiding logic of the slave-owner: that slaves, like children, must become something new under foreign tutelage.117
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- Highlight on Page 194 | Loc. 2963-64 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 02:26 AM
As we saw in chapter 3, few British businesses had direct experience in East Africa, and so British policymakers believed that the economic potential of the region was
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- Highlight on Page 194 | Loc. 2963-64 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 02:26 AM
As we saw in chapter 3, few British businesses had direct experience in East Africa, and so British policymakers believed that the economic potential of the region was unproven.
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- Highlight on Page 194 | Loc. 2968-69 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 02:27 AM
new attention paid to the East African region was born of the Foreign Office’s singular desire to insure the security of more profound nodes of British interest—principally Egypt and India—in an era of rapid European imperial expansionism.
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- Highlight on Page 194 | Loc. 2973-75 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 02:28 AM
Using humanitarian images to “clothe its African actions in the garb of philanthropy,” foreign policymakers, according to Ronald Robinson, John Gallagher, and Alice Denny, “took pleasure in supposing that in the pursuit of the national interest it was also putting down the slave trade and spreading sweetness and light.”119
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- Note on Page 194 | Loc. 2975 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 02:28 AM
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- Highlight on Page 195 | Loc. 2981-82 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 02:29 AM
“Hence,” he concluded, “all the twaddle and jargon about ‘inhuman traffic,’ with which every official paper is bespattered, is like doctored beer, manufactured to suit the taste of the British Public.”120
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- Highlight on Page 195 | Loc. 2978-81 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 02:29 AM
Tozer condemned “official persons” in Britain who concerned themselves with the slave trade but seemed to have no interest in slaves. Highlighting what seemed to him a horrible contradiction, he concurred with Steere that “Englishmen generally have a very much less kindly feeling towards a free negro than the Arabs have towards their slaves.”
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- Highlight on Page 196 | Loc. 2997-99 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 02:31 AM
Thus, analyses of East Africa rarely acknowledged the internal logics of regional cosmopolitanisms and instead saw in them little more than debased contradictions. These frames of vision and the resulting taxonomies of East Africa that shaped Western public opinion are the focus of the final chapter.
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- Highlight on Page 196 | Loc. 3000-3004 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 02:31 AM
CHAPTER 6 PICTURESQUE CONTRADICTIONS TAXONOMIES OF EAST AFRICA
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- Highlight on Page 197 | Loc. 3008-11 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 02:32 AM
Willoughby found neither the gems nor the incalculable value that he imagined. Instead, he found European chairs, chandeliers, Parisian mirrors, and colored prints from English Christmas periodicals. He was disgusted by the scene, despite the expense of the chandeliers and the opulence of much of the decor. The only things he found appealing were the “Turkish baths” and carpets—those
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- Note on Page 197 | Loc. 3011 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 02:32 AM
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- Highlight on Page 198 | Loc. 3021-23 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 02:34 AM
This chapter approaches imperial perceptions somewhat differently. It asks what happened when Europeans encountered their own material culture and technologies among those who were not subject to European rule and who gave new meanings to Western manufactures.
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- Note on Page 198 | Loc. 3023 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 02:34 AM
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- Highlight on Page 198 | Loc. 3029-31 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 02:35 AM
The internal contradiction that analysts came to see in East Africans, superficially evidenced by their mixing of “Oriental” and European furniture, umbrellas and nakedness, merry-go-rounds and veiled women, is an analytical invention born of nineteenth-century theories of difference, theories that continue to affect perceptions of Africa and much of the world.4
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- Note on Page 198 | Loc. 3031 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 02:35 AM
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- Highlight on Page 199 | Loc. 3040-42 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 02:36 AM
The region captured the Anglophone world’s fascination in the second half of the nineteenth century because it simultaneously presented the horrors of the slave trade and the romance of one of the world’s last “unexplored” regions.
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- Highlight on Page 199 | Loc. 3050-52 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 02:37 AM
Foreign Office chose to pursue its interests through the influence of the Sultanate of Zanzibar—a policy from which it did not waver until the end of the 1880s, when German annexation of much of Zanzibar’s hinterland forced policymakers to reconsider their strategy.
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- Highlight on Page 200 | Loc. 3057-59 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 02:39 AM
narratives of Africa shared at least one thread: that the entire continent was appallingly stunted in its evolutionary progress, that Africans were distanced from Europeans not only in space but, more importantly, in time.
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- Note on Page 200 | Loc. 3059 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 02:39 AM
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- Highlight on Page 200 | Loc. 3060-61 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 02:39 AM
Hegel had once famously described the African continent as “no Historical part of the world,” but in the latter nineteenth century,
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- Highlight on Page 200 | Loc. 3061-62 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 02:40 AM
anthropologist Edward Tylor believed that barbarous tribes represented civilization’s past, stages through which moderns had successfully, in an evolutionary sense, passed.9
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- Highlight on Page 200 | Loc. 3063-64 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 02:40 AM
Travel in Africa was like travel back in time; a contemporaneous past akin to civilization’s discarded history.10
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- Highlight on Page 201 | Loc. 3068-69 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 02:40 AM
Pickering wrote that a “Swahili,” for example, immediately understood the use of an ancient Egyptian amulet he carried.
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- Highlight on Page 201 | Loc. 3075-77 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 02:41 AM
Africa was “the great Nineteenth Century Island,” a metaphorical and physical development of the nineteenth century. The Suez Canal made Africa a physical island; its exploration wrenched it from its slumber and pitched it headlong into the contemporary world.14
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- Highlight on Page 201 | Loc. 3079-80 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 02:42 AM
Harry Johnston, a contemporary of Elton, was more explicit and historical: Africa was the “new World of the nineteenth century.”16
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- Highlight on Page 202 | Loc. 3088-91 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 02:43 AM
toward scientific quantification, comparison, and categorization—in short, a more complete taxonomy—is evident in otherwise sensational travel narratives. Richard Burton, who would write four volumes on East Africa, devoted whole chapters to such seeming mundanities as the flora, fauna, and rainfall of Zanzibar.
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- Highlight on Page 202 | Loc. 3097-99 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 02:44 AM
An overawed American arriving in Zanzibar in the early 1880s, for example, had already completely digested the image of Zanzibar in popular literature. “It’s Eastern. It’s Oriental. It’s Stanley,” exclaimed the future consul Edward Ropes Jr.21
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- Highlight on Page 203 | Loc. 3110-12 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 02:45 AM
The fascination with the sultan was so great that by the fall a new hat design swept high-end French, British, and American markets: the Zanzibar bonnet. A domestication of the Busaidi family turban, it was a woman’s felt hat wrapped in a brocaded scarf that approximated the blue, scarlet, and gold turban cloth (Swahili: kilemba) worn by Barghash.26
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- Note on Page 203 | Loc. 3112 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 02:45 AM
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- Highlight on Page 205 | Loc. 3133-36 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 02:48 AM
Since most East African travelogues were compilations of scientific knowledge, however fascinating in their allegories of adventure, the analyses they offered were underwritten by a concern with ordering the world, creating taxonomies of types, measuring progress, and defining concrete levels of advancement in relation to the West.32 “Discovery” was as much about the place of the West in relation to the rest of the world as it was about East Africa.33
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- Highlight on Page 205 | Loc. 3141-43 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 02:48 AM
Through images, East Africans became objects of Western knowledge in ways that were fundamentally distancing since, as a categorical form of knowledge, imaging was intently focused on difference, on the exotic nature of East Africans.34
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- Highlight on Page 206 | Loc. 3146-48 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 02:49 AM
reduction, enacted through constant reference to what analysts called the “picturesque” nature of East Africa, created an exotic, consumable world—a world-as-picture—that framed people not as actors but as backdrops, figures in dramatic tableaus drawn from literary imagery.35
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- Note on Page 206 | Loc. 3147 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 02:49 AM
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- Highlight on Page 207 | Loc. 3168-70 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 02:51 AM
I would like first to explore the modes of typologization that Western analysts applied to East Africans. By doing so, we can discern the rhetorical foundation on which descriptions of East African consumerism were constructed.
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- Highlight on Page 208 | Loc. 3181-84 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 04:46 PM
Where civilization became equated with purity, in the second half of the nineteenth century, degeneracy was equated with the semi-civilized, the hybrid.42 Hybridity was a mid-nineteenth-century invention closely connected to the idea of the semi-civilized.
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- Highlight on Page 209 | Loc. 3191-92 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 04:48 PM
Analysts did not assume that Zanzibaris were half-civilized, but that “half” was evidence of the inability of Zanzibaris to become civilized on their own.
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- Highlight on Page 209 | Loc. 3196-98 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 04:48 PM
The notion of the semi-civilized was also an attempt to make sense of the diverse histories of consumer desire, economy, marriage, and migration that were so clearly evident in East Africa. By the time G. F. Scott Eliot published his treatise on “the Suahili” in the early 1890s, the relation of purity to civilization, as well as purity’s distinction from cultural and/or racial mongrelity, had been heavily theorized.
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- Highlight on Page 209 | Loc. 3204-6 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 04:49 PM
some analysts to the conclusion, by the 1870s, that British humanitarian efforts should be trained on those “pure” Africans untouched by civilization, for it would seem they were the greatest hope for Africa’s progress.47
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- Highlight on Page 210 | Loc. 3211-16 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 04:50 PM
Thus, discussions of the semi-civilized Zanzibari were concerned with defining the shades of difference between Zanzibar and civilization, usually through the absence of one or another Western material or moral virtue.48 The American Consul Speer described Zanzibar in this way: there were “no actors, theatres, painters, no coopers, public mills, no cloth factories, no fancy gardeners, no steam machinery, no post office, no author, no lawyers, real estate agents, no (native) doctors [i.e., no “natives” trained in Western medicine], no speech makers, printing press, no taxes, politicians, banks and no proper money.”49
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- Note on Page 210 | Loc. 3215 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 04:50 PM
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- Highlight on Page 210 | Loc. 3216-17 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 04:51 PM
much of this is false—for example, Zanzibaris owned steam-powered sugar mills, and there were several standard currencies in the city
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- Highlight on Page 211 | Loc. 3224-26 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 04:52 PM
The entire scene breathes of horrible degeneracy; the rank meat, sour ghee, and decayed vegetables were matched by the villainous-looking “mongrel Arabs.” The superficiality of the material environment was imagined to evidence the character of Zanzibaris.
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- Note on Page 211 | Loc. 3226 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 04:52 PM
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- Highlight on Page 211 | Loc. 3228-29 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 04:52 PM
Rebecca Wakefield introduced the population of Zanzibar to her readers by describing it as a “strange mixture.”
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- Highlight on Page 211 | Loc. 3230-32 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 04:53 PM
The picture reveals an index of humanity that necessarily begins with lighter-skinned, clothed, free people and ends with the African as naked, enslaved, and neither dignified nor intelligent.
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- Highlight on Page 211 | Loc. 3233-37 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 04:53 PM
[t]he Banyans, with their tall red turbans; the Hindus, with their loose pantaloons and long black beards, the Parsees, with their square calico hats and tight coats; the Persians, few in number, but conspicuous, with their rich flowery costumes and flashy silk turbans; and here and there a dusky Belooche, gave a picturesque and animated appearance to the scene. For the most part, however, this heterogeneous concourse of people consisted of different tribes of Arabs, from the sultan and his officers down to the darkest Sowhelian or half-breed.52
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- Highlight on Page 212 | Loc. 3238-40 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 04:53 PM
taxonomic description reduced them to their material trappings. People were given internal coherency inferred from their clothing and then fitted into a racial structure.
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- Note on Page 212 | Loc. 3240 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 04:53 PM
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- Highlight on Page 213 | Loc. 3253-54 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 04:57 PM
What Devereux’s description points up is that images of Zanzibar were often taxonomic: human types could be easily recognized and defined, while race and materiality were intimately aligned.
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- Highlight on Page 213 | Loc. 3259-61 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 04:59 PM
a race of half-castes has arisen; hybrids, or creoles, widely differing from each other according to their various parentage, yet coming under the one designation, Wasuahili.” It is thus halfness, more than specific heritage, that defined the Swahili for New.
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- Highlight on Page 214 | Loc. 3275-77 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:00 PM
Victorian racio-cultural theories of semi-civilization had already written Zanzibar out of modernity. Africans, Indians, Arabs, Islam, Hinduism—all these categories were defined as antithetical to modern society.
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- Highlight on Page 214 | Loc. 3278-82 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:01 PM
Muhammadanism carries with it two essential concomitants enough to bear down any nation or people, viz., polygamy and slavery.Where such a system exists, progress is impossible. It lays an embargo upon all civilization. Sapping, as it does, the foundation of all morality, it destroys the physical energy, enervates the mental power, and hangs like a dead weight upon every people who are its victims.”58 In this rhetoric, Sultan Barghash himself—despite his cosmopolitan vision— became the object of parody, an example of the contradiction of Muslims and modernity.
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- Note on Page 214 | Loc. 3282 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:01 PM
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- Highlight on Page 215 | Loc. 3289-92 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:04 PM
In East Africa, Westerners faced the conceptual problem of mixedness in a population that was not only a confusing amalgamation of people from all over the world, but that enthusiastically incorporated objects from the West. By consuming Western goods, Zanzibaris seemed to both compress the cultural distance between themselves and Westerners and complicate material definitions of civilization.
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- Highlight on Page 216 | Loc. 3300-3301 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:04 PM
In their ostensibly European, Arab, and African clothing the crowd appeared discordant, neither like Europeans, Arabs, nor Africans.
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- Highlight on Page 216 | Loc. 3301-3 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:05 PM
Clelia Weeks wrote that semi-civilization was also exemplified in the way in which “the Arab enjoys music.” This consisted, she explained, of putting one music box on top of another and setting both to play at once.
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- Highlight on Page 216 | Loc. 3304-5 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:05 PM
African with an umbrella—a sign of Victorian, middle-class sensibility and taste—seemed an outrageous combination to Western visitors. A
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- Highlight on Page 216 | Loc. 3306-10 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:05 PM
“He kept it open the whole day,” Cameron wrote, “continually spinning it round and round in a most ludicrous fashion; and when we came to some jungle he added to the absurdity of his appearance by taking off his only article of clothing—his loin-cloth—and placing it on his head after having carefully folded it. The sight of a perfectly naked negro walking under an umbrella was,” he concluded, “too much for my gravity, and I fairly exploded with laughter.”64
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- Note on Page 216 | Loc. 3310 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:05 PM
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- Highlight on Page 217 | Loc. 3316-19 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:07 PM
Zanzibari consumption of umbrellas as an inversion of global hierarchies: “It strikes me rather queerly,” he wrote, “to see a half naked nigger carrying an umbrella.” A few days later, unable to come to terms with the use of umbrellas in the city, he again wrote, “[it] strikes me queerly” that “all the people[,] even negroes carry umbrellas.”
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- Note on Page 217 | Loc. 3318 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:07 PM
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- Highlight on Page 217 | Loc. 3320-21 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:08 PM
For Ropes, the umbrella in Zanzibar contradicted the “proper” place and use of such consumer objects. To accept the marginalized poor, and even
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- Highlight on Page 217 | Loc. 3320-22 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:09 PM
For Ropes, the umbrella in Zanzibar contradicted the “proper” place and use of such consumer objects. To accept the marginalized poor, and even slaves, into the category of metropolitan gentility was, for Ropes, anarchy. It was the opposite of Western imaginings of modernity; it was disorder.
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- Highlight on Page 217 | Loc. 3324-27 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:09 PM
[Sultan Barghash’s] splendor you would recognize a yellow painted chair or a piece of cheap German crockery alongside of something worth perhaps a thousand dollars.” Such poor taste was indicative of the incommensurability of semi-civilized sensibilities and civilization. “Arabs,” he concluded, “have no idea of things.”66
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- Note on Page 217 | Loc. 3327 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:09 PM
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- Highlight on Page 218 | Loc. 3332-38 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:10 PM
The author credited the Germans with understanding the importance of indulging the absurdities of semi-civilized desires, of the “necessity . . . to humour the tastes of semi-civilized consumers.” Though Germans seemed to understand Zanzibari tastes, Western imports in Zanzibar nonetheless appeared inauthentic among the semi-civilized. The author of the Gazette article singled out Barghash’s steam-powered merry-go-rounds for ridicule.68 By disparaging the sultan’s merry-go-rounds and the royal family’s enjoyment of them, the author reveals his inability to imagine Arabs appreciating an object so quintessentially Western. Like a “negro” with an umbrella, the scene of the sultan and his wives on a merry-go-round was out of place and thus comical.
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- Note on Page 218 | Loc. 3338 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:10 PM
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- Highlight on Page 219 | Loc. 3348-52 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:12 PM
He described Miriali, governor of the Kilimanjaro district, dressed in a scarlet “Arab bernouse” covered in gold tinsel. Over this he wore a red American general’s coat worked with gold lace, a collar of vulture’s feathers, and tied a Maasai colobus skin band just below each knee. To this Miriali added a broad-brimmed straw hat trimmed with bright red cloth and two long white ostrich feathers. Around his body he wore an additional eleven yards of red cloth (bendera).
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- Highlight on Page 219 | Loc. 3354-55 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:12 PM
Without the Western clothes—symbols of his cosmopolitanness and superior access to foreign consumer goods—Miriali was a simple black man again, no longer confusingly mixed or ridiculous in von Höhnel’s eyes.
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- Highlight on Page 220 | Loc. 3359-62 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:13 PM
There she encountered a man, who met her tricked out in a pair of German military trousers, with side stripes, a white knitted shirt with a brilliant pin on the bosom, a celluloid high collar, a cravat of the most flaming color, a striped woolen Scotch shooting-coat, a flamboyant pocket-handkerchief and a pair of Russia-leather shoes, exposing blue silk clocked socks.
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- Highlight on Page 220 | Loc. 3363-65 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:13 PM
He carried an English walking-stick with a huge silver knob, and held in his hands a pair of kid gloves. “This clown,” French-Sheldon told her readers, was Miriali. She continued that he had “ridiculously bedecked himself” in the finery to honor his extraordinary guest, the “Bibi Bwana,”
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Domesticating the World (Jeremy Prestholdt)
- Highlight on Page 220 | Loc. 3366-69 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:13 PM
“It is a shame a man like Mireali [sic],” she concluded, “should be so imposed upon by those [visitors who gave or sold him European clothes] who should have known better.” Such clothes were inappropriate for him. French-Sheldon could not bear the contradiction, the ludicrousness of the chief in sundry European fashions.
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- Note on Page 220 | Loc. 3368 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:13 PM
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Domesticating the World (Jeremy Prestholdt)
- Highlight on Page 221 | Loc. 3376-79 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:15 PM
for what French-Sheldon expected of an African chief was his picturesqueness, reminiscent of antiquity, not the trappings of civilization. Mongrelization, hybridity, and semi-civilized fashion were neither picturesque nor desirable. For von Höhnel and French-Sheldon, Africa needed to present itself as black, pure and simple.
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- Note on Page 221 | Loc. 3379 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:15 PM
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- Highlight on Page 221 | Loc. 3381-84 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:18 PM
He mocked Bishop Tozer for wearing his vestments of office in Zanzibar. “[T]his High Church . . . prelate in his crimson robe of office, and in the queerest of all head-dresses,” Stanley explained, “seen stalking through the streets of Zanzibar, or haggling over the price of a tin-pot at a tinker’s stall, is the most ridiculous sight I have seen anywhere outside of a clown show.”
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- Highlight on Page 222 | Loc. 3399-3402 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:20 PM
With no other reason than to impress upon East Africans the importance and ingenuity of Americans, the secretary of state arranged for the U.S. Navy to dispatch one of its most impressive, steam-powered warships, the Susquehanna, to Zanzibar. While in port, the commodore in charge of the vessel admitted anyone on board who was interested, showing them the mechanics of the engine and other spectacles of the ship.78
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- Highlight on Page 222 | Loc. 3403-4 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:20 PM
So while Western visitors felt conflicted about Africans consuming things like music boxes or hats, they nonetheless wished for positive recognition of Western goods, even African envy of such objects.
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- Highlight on Page 224 | Loc. 3422-24 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:21 PM
Real civilization had to be taught by those who inherited it, and this could be accomplished only under direct European control. In the British imagination there was no auto-civilization. By this logic, Western goods could only be used properly under the direction of those who produced or understood them.
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- Note on Page 224 | Loc. 3424 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:21 PM
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- Highlight on Page 224 | Loc. 3429-31 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:22 PM
drew on longer traditions of Orientalism and African travel narratives and also fashioned new tropes of Africa as evolutionarily stunted and in need of guidance.
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- Highlight on Page 225 | Loc. 3442-43 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:24 PM
By the 1880s, the idea of “Arab”-ruled Zanzibar’s unfitness for the modern age without proper tutelage had firmly taken root.84
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- Highlight on Page 226 | Loc. 3454-55 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:24 PM
Barghash’s efforts were no longer paying political dividends. More than a decade before the carving up of his realm began, Barghash had recognized the limits of his diplomatic abilities in an age of empire.
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- Highlight on Page 226 | Loc. 3458-60 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:25 PM
By interpreting European goods in East Africa as out of place, Europeans transposed their ideas of essential Africanness or Arabness onto East Africans. In disparaging East African uses of Western imports, Westerners reified their preconceived images of Europeanness and Africanness as different and incommensurate. Shoring
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- Highlight on Page 227 | Loc. 3467-68 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:25 PM
Western interpretations of Zanzibari consumerism became part of a taxonomical regime that would define the rhetoric and logics of colonialism in the region.
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- Highlight on Page 227 | Loc. 3470-74 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:26 PM
Western assumptions of contradiction in the mixing of “modern,” “Western,” “African,” and “Oriental” bodies and things are still evident in everyday reflections. The irony of a Zanzibari on a mobile phone, a Malaysian woman with her head covered using an ATM terminal, or Afghani men praying next to their motorcycles (the first a postcard and the other images published in the Economist)—even though the people pictured do not themselves perceive any contradiction— is the cognitive inheritance of Victorian theories of difference.
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- Highlight on Page 227 | Loc. 3477-78 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:27 PM
The notion that Western things in non-Western environments are contradictory or ironic reveals the desire of Westerners to assume a cultural and material tradition entirely distinct from (and superior to) the rest of the world.
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Domesticating the World (Jeremy Prestholdt)
- Highlight on Page 228 | Loc. 3486-89 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:31 PM
Mutsamuduans and Zanzibaris attempted to strategically manipulate outsiders’ perceptions of them, but changes in Western geopolitical concerns and worldviews in the latter nineteenth century made East African visions of global relationships increasingly irrelevant to the interests of the imperial powers that were rapidly colonizing much of the world.
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- Highlight on Page 228 | Loc. 3489-90 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:31 PM
By the 1880s, East African cosmopolitanisms faced Western competitive interests and moral discourses rooted in perceptions of difference and bound to projects of global domination that East Africans could not significantly alter.
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Domesticating the World (Jeremy Prestholdt)
- Highlight on Page 228 | Loc. 3492-94 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:31 PM
Colonization created new and shifting structures of interaction, but its processes were grafted onto routes of relation forged in the nineteenth century and continually reshaped in their shadow.1
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- Note on Page 228 | Loc. 3492 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:32 PM
vi colonize
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- Highlight on Page 229 | Loc. 3497-3500 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:37 PM
The first and most evident point is that contemporary globality has myriad forgotten antecedents. Not to be mindful of this is to dispossess “peripheries” of their global historical relevance. Tylor’s “civilized moderns” were not the only ones to travel the world, develop knowledges of it, and attempt to understand and characterize their place in it. East Africans too were cognizant of “events and their consequences far and wide over the world.”
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- Highlight on Page 229 | Loc. 3505-7 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:37 PM
Colonialism did not wrench East Africa from its isolation or introduce the benefits of the modern world. Instead, it superimposed a particular vision of universal interrelation over East Africa’s global relationships, while excluding Africans from many of the social, economic, and political rights championed by theorists of modernity.3
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- Highlight on Page 230 | Loc. 3513-15 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:38 PM
Our very way of seeing the world has changed, and this has had repercussions that transcend and shape the material and digital realities that more commonly gain our attention.4 But just as the past is not always what it seems, the present is not always as unprecedented as we tend to believe.
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Domesticating the World (Jeremy Prestholdt)
- Highlight on Page 230 | Loc. 3516-19 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:38 PM
change, be it in perception or relation, is relative. Has the Internet had as much impact on the world as the telegraph did? Comparatively, the time-space compression effected by the telegraph when it reduced the amount of time to communicate between London and Zanzibar from months to minutes was greater, though less democratized, than the advent of the Internet,
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Domesticating the World (Jeremy Prestholdt)
- Highlight on Page 230 | Loc. 3525-27 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:40 PM
But if, as Stuart Hall argues, the confidence that everything is destined to be sped up, displaced, transformed, and reshaped is a hallmark of modernity, then the shift in consciousness that has given birth to the discourse of “globalization” may represent a new manifestation of an older cognitive process rather than an epochal horizon.7
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- Highlight on Page 231 | Loc. 3531-32 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:42 PM
presuming the novelty of present border crossings reaffirms isolationist interpretations of human history. In the breaching of “traditional” boundaries, the historical boundedness of geographical, cultural, or biological entities is reconfirmed.
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- Highlight on Page 231 | Loc. 3535-37 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:42 PM
new configurations of difference will replace the particular realms of isolation we inherited from nineteenth-century theorists, as the popular reception of Samuel Huntington’s thesis that civilizations and their cultures represent the defining differences among human societies suggests.
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- Highlight on Page 231 | Loc. 3540-41 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:43 PM
The second point I wish to make is that meaning is fragile and contingent.
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- Highlight on Page 231 | Loc. 3541-42 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:43 PM
The meanings we give objects are relative and can easily transcend spatial, social, and gendered boundaries.
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- Highlight on Page 231 | Loc. 3542-43 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:43 PM
British men’s handkerchiefs became part of women’s fashion in East Africa, while wealthy Parisian women wore bonnets that approximated the aesthetics of Sultan Barghash’s familial turban.
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- Highlight on Page 232 | Loc. 3544 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:44 PM
because these meanings affect demand and trade. The use of brass wire for personal adornment in East
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- Highlight on Page 232 | Loc. 3545-47 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:44 PM
East African demand for particular kinds of brass wire also determined the shape of trade, the success of Americans in the Zanzibari market, and even the production techniques and working lives of
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- Highlight on Page 232 | Loc. 3545-47 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:45 PM
East African demand for particular kinds of brass wire also determined the shape of trade, the success of Americans in the Zanzibari market, and even the production techniques and working lives of New Englanders.
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- Highlight on Page 232 | Loc. 3550-52 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:45 PM
In fact, Britons regularly protested that Mutsamuduans did not really understand the cultural significance of British objects. For Mutsamuduans, however, the meaning of English things was tied to political, social, and economic strategies, not to British ideals of class, status, or order.
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- Highlight on Page 232 | Loc. 3553-54 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:45 PM
The third point that I want to make is that globality is never uni-dimensional or unidirectional; thus, it cannot be understood as a single process called “globalization” that spreads from the West to “the rest.”
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- Highlight on Page 233 | Loc. 3564-67 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:49 PM
Contemporary globalization, like modernization, is no cure for the inequalities patently visible across the planet. My point in these pages has only been that because of their greater autonomy in setting the parameters of global relationships before colonization, East Africans developed certain advantageous positions of exchange and adjusted quickly to both new economic opportunities as well as new technologies.
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- Highlight on Page 233 | Loc. 3573-75 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:51 PM
Indeed, it is still commonly believed that only external intervention in the everyday lives of Africans, using principles in which many economists have dogmatic faith (e.g., liberalization, privatization, and openness to short-term, speculative capital), can pull Africans into the flow of “real time” and instill in them proper economic postures.
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- Highlight on Page 234 | Loc. 3580-82 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:52 PM
The demands for “trade, not aid” that have become the mantra of African trade representatives and their supporters seem to fall on deaf ears.
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- Highlight on Page 234 | Loc. 3585-89 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:53 PM
This history is, moreover, one on which Zanzibar has come to depend as a result of the economic benefits promised by tourism. Fictive pasts are reflected in the archaic Zouave jackets of hotel employees’ uniforms, the tour guide’s stories of harem intrigues, and the Anglican altar said to have been built on the site of the slave whipping post. These images both confirm and reenact nineteenth-century myths and bind Zanzibar to a history it never owned.
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- Highlight on Page 235 | Loc. 3590-91 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:53 PM
It is a hallmark of tourism in an age of globality that foreigners visit East Africa to experience a world subdued by its past, a world of strange difference largely disconnected from time.
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- Highlight on Page 235 | Loc. 3592-93 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:53 PM
“This is precisely what visitors love and want,” she continued, “to escape from the rushing Western world and its systems, and taste antiquity.”13
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- Highlight on Page 235 | Loc. 3594-95 | Added on Thursday, February 14, 2013, 05:54 PM
What we have lost is a world never as predictable as we imagine, never as disconnected, never as isolated as we commonly believe.
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HOLYOKE Condensed
\nvi holyoke
\nrefinements of culture. However, viewed through darker glasses, these refinements have the appearance of a towering froth burying and hiding the harsh economic and political realities that sustain it and made it possible in the first place. Covering up, distancing, escaping, makes it easy for us to forget the destructive preliminaries of almost all creative acts-even one as basic and necessary as cooking.
\nit was largely unknown to Europeans in the period from 400 to 1400. The Renaissance saw the rebirth of a sensibility, the reenchantment of land as landscape, that has persisted, with alterations and improvements, to our time. I am tempted to say that \"landscape\" is congenial to our spirit, that once it is pointed out to us, we not only nod in recognition but feel better, healthier, empowered.
\nI have two broad aims. One is to provide an unusual and, I believe, fruitful perspective on nature and culture. My other aim is to persuade readers, especially those who have fed too exclusively on the literature of despair, to recognize the good that has already been-though insecurely-achieved, and hence to look upon the idea, if not of heaven on earth, then of an earth periodically visited by heavenly bliss, in a less dismissive, more hopeful, light.
\nThe United States of America proclaims itself a land of immigrants. It would not want to be known as a \"land of escapists,\" yet many did just that: escape from the intolerable conditions of the Old World for the promises of the New.;vi
\nemperor was called Son of Heaven rather than Son of Earth. There is no doubt a heavenward tilt in Chinese high culture, as there is in all high cultures. What high culture offers is escape from bondage to earth.vi
\nLeonardo approached knowledge through art, technique, and technology, skills that would have been necessary to the making of the sort of surrogate heaven that Renaissance princes yearned
\nAlfred North Whitehead, an outstanding mathematician-philosopher of our time, famously designated the seventeenth century the Century of Genius. He gave twelve names: Bacon, Harvey, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Pascal, Huyghens, Boyle, Newton, Locke, Spinoza, and Leibnizvi
\nGenius in that century showed itself in celestial mechanics and physics rather than in biology or organic nature, to which humans belong and upon which they depend
\nOn earth, both nature and human affairs often seemed to verge on chaos; heaven, by contrast, ex hibited perfect order. Cosmic order gave the natural philosophers of the seventeenth century confidence, as it has given confidence to priest-kings throughout human history
\nI have given a brief and sweeping account of \"escape from nature,\" which has taken us from uncertain yields in village clearings to supermarket cornucopia
\nEscaping or returning to nature is a well-worn theme. I mention it to provide a counterpoint to the story of escaping from nature
\nThe extreme artificiality of a built environment is not itself an essential cause or inducement. Consider the Lele of Kasai in tropical Africa. They do not have cities, yet they know what it is like to yearn for nature
\n. At one end of the scale are such familiar and minor undertakings as the weekend camping trip to the forest and, more permanently, the return to a rural commune way of life. At the other end of the scale is the European settlement of North America itself. It too might be considered a type of \"escape to nature.\"
\nculturally delineated and endowed with value. What we wish to escape to is not \"nature\" but an alluring conception of it, and this conception is necessarily a product of a people's experience and history-their culture. Paradoxical as it may sound, \"escape to nature\" is a cultural undertaking, a covered-up attempt to \"escape from nature.\"
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\nbegan this chapter by noting that escapism has a somewhat negative meaning because of the common notion that what one escapes from is reality and what one escapes to is fantasy. People say, \"I am fed up with snow and slush and the hassles of my job, so I am going to Hawaii.\" Hawaii here stands for paradise and hence the unreal. In place of Hawaii, one can substitute any number of other things: from a good book and the movies to a tastefully decorated shopping mall and Disneyland, from a spell in the suburbs or the countryside to a weekend at a first-rate hotel in Manhattan or Paris. In other societies and times, the escape might be to a storyteller's world, a communal feast, a village fair, a ritual.\" What one escapes to is culture-not culture that has become daily life, not culture as a dense and inchoate environment and way of coping, but culture that exhibits lucidity, a quality that often comes out of a process of simplification.
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\nAcademics themselves see otherwise; it is their view that if they escape from certain entanglements of \"real life,\" it is only so that they may better engage with the real, and it is this engagement with the real that makes what they do so deeply rewarding... Yet nature lovers see otherwise. For them, the escape into nature is an escape into the real.
\nWhat academia and nature share-perhaps the only outstanding characteristic that they share-is simplicity.
\nBetween the big artificial city at one extreme and wild nature at the other, humans have created \"middle landscapes\" that, at various times and in different parts of the world, have been acclaimed the model human habitat. They are, of course, all works of culture, but not conspicuously or arrogantly so. They show how humans can escape nature's rawness without moving so far from it as to appear to deny roots in the organic world.23
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\nMany kinds of landscape qualify as \"middle\"-for example, farmland, suburbia, garden city and garden, model town, and theme parks that emphasize the good life. They all distance themselves from wild nature and the big city but otherwise have different values. The second problem is that the middle landscape, whatever the kind, proves unstable. It reverts to nature, or, more often, it moves step by step toward the artifices of the city even as it strives to maintain its position in the middle
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\n\"unbearable lightness of being\" was eventually to insinuate itself into the one area of human activity where people have felt-and many still feel-that they ought to be more bound than free
\ngarden is another middle landscape between wild nature and the city.
\nChina one speaks of \"building\" a garden, whereas in Europe one may speak of \"planting\" a garden. The difference suggests that the Chinese, unlike Europeans, are more ready to admit the garden's artifactual character.
\nIn the spectrum of middle landscapes, a countryside of villages and fields stands at the opposite pole to a Disney park. The one lies closest to nature; the other is as far removed from it as possible without becoming \"city.\"25
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\nThe human species uniquely confronts the dilemma of a powerful imagination that, while it makes escape to a better life possible, also makes possible lies and deception, solipsistic fantasy, madness, unspeakable cruelty, violence, and destructiveness-evil.vi
\nEmbarrassed by animality-my own as well as other people's-I and my fellow human conspirators cover it up, escape into a world of cultural creations that reassures us of our exceptionalism.The story of cover/escape shows an overall progression from less to more elaborate forms of art and artifice
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\nI shall tell this story of overcoming by exploring three prominent indices of our animality: food and eating, sex and procreation, and dying and death.
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\nEating, humans realize, is animal and must remain essentially private, a condition they ensure by creating a space for it and protecting it against the appraising eye.
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\nThe menus of the past surprise us by their inclusive ness. Yet this inclusiveness ought not to surprise us, for one reason why humans have spread successfully into so many geographical environments-one reason why they have become \"lords of the earth\"-is their ability to chew and digest almost anything. Most societies nevertheless have some kind of food taboo, and some have strict dietary laws, one purpose of which is to distinguish members of that society from others and to allow them to feel superior
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\nwhy has the consumption of meat, not only in the West but in other parts of the world as well, become a signature of status
\naspiring courtiers and the upper class took steps in that direction. They adopted new utensils that put a distance between the food and themselves-outstandingly, the fork (a metal claw), which substituted for the human hand in performing unseemly tasks. Old utensils were refined-for example, the knife, the sharp tip of which was rounded off in the sixteenth century so that it would seem less an instrument of violence.
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\nDelicacy of taste, aroma, and texture increasingly came to matter more than the sheer bulk or cost of the food. Cooking strove to become architecture and art, and as such it successfully hid from consumers the fact that the materials used had once been living animals
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\nLanguage might also be enlisted as a masking device. What are we eating? Not cattle, pig, or deer, but beef, pork, and venison, words of non-English origin (think of the menus of fancy restaurants, where what we eat is buried under a flourish of incomprehensible foreign words).
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\nThis choosing to \"act the noble beast\" is a variant form of \"returning to nature\"-a move prompted by the need to escape from society's debilitating and unmanning elegancies
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\nRwanda's population was made up mostly of Hutu farmers, a sizable minority of Tutsi pastoralists, and a small minority of Twa hunters, who supplemented their income by singing, dancing, and clowning. A strongly differentiated social hierarchy began to emerge during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, based on racial stereotyping and biases that already existed among native populations but were inflamed by the country's European overlords. The Tutsi were encouraged to see themselves as an aristocracy, tall and of slender build, and to see the Hutu as being shorter and stumpier, with the additional unflattering traits of woolly hair, broad flat nose, and thick lips; in time the oppressed Hutu came to see themselves that way as well. As for the Twa, both the Tutsi and the Hutu regarded them, half jokingly, as closer to monkeys than to human beings.Food habits further differentiated and distanced Rwanda's ethnic groups.
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\nThe Hutu ate more, though their food was less refined. Popular among them was a kind of porridge with beans, peas, or maize. The sweet potatoes they consumed in large quantities were considered by the Tutsi too common to eat.
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\nThe Tutsi behaved as if the need for nourishment was beneath their dignity. Eating should be done in private, they believed. Friends would be offered beer or milk, but they would not be asked to share a whole mealvi
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\nFertility cults were once widespread throughout the world. With their decline, the tumescent phallus must sooner or later lose its magical-symbolic role in the generation of life, accepted and even revered by society for that reason, to come to an ignoble end as crude pictures and graffiti on derelict walls, cries for attention and relief by thwarted, lonely individuals.
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\nWatching flickering images in the mind is a ready means of escape, and why not, if it relieves temporary distress? Daydreaming can, however, become addictive. One learns to be not just an occasional visitor but the habitue of a fantasy world. Of that world's many delusory assurances, perhaps the most cunning is the excision of finality from death, making it seem like mere suffering
\nTo anyone aware of the multitude of infamies and injustice which men have endured, of the broken bodies and tortured minds of the victims of these cruelties, of the multiple dimensions of pain in which millions live on mattress graves or with minds shrouded in darkness, death must sometimes appear as a beneficent release not an inconsolable affliction. It washes the earth clean of what cannot be cleansed in any other way
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\nkeen awareness of one's own finitude also produces at least one admirable negative virtue, namely, a certain indifference toward the pomp and circumstance of this world.
\nWesley, it seems to me, had something like this collapse of meaning in mind when he confessed, in a letter (1766) to his brother Charles, \"If I have any fear, it is not of falling into hell, but of falling into nothing.\"64
\nThe entire civilizing process may be seen as an effort to bury the fact of death and its premonitory signs-removing from genteel eyes and sensitive noses the necessary work of the butcher, the disposal of animal and human corpses, the care of the sick (not always a sightly undertaking), and all odors of decay, which were once believed to be a potent cause of death, whether as miasma from swamps packed with rotting organic matter, or from city burial grounds swollen with human corpses, or from the filthy, densely packed quarters of the poor
\nEscape is a response to both push and pull. In deciding to cross the ocean to live in the New World, migrants may well have been more pulled by its paradisiacal reputation than pushed by the miseries of home.
\nBy interpreting culture as escape, I have perforce given it a dynamic meaning
\nBut its most basic contribution to forgetfulness, to an individual's sense of ease, lies in the construction of a \"we.\" \"I\" may be feeble, but \"we\" are strong. Historically and all over the world, \"we\" is the preferred pronoun. \"I,\" by contrast, is seldom used. Only from the sixteenth century onward, in one part of the world (Europe), did \"I\" gain a certain cachet
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\nIn the United States no one wants to be treated as part of the woodwork. Most Americans like to be recognized for their distinctive quality, their importance to the group; they also like to be rewarded accordingly. In other societies, especially those called folk or traditional, people are less eager to stand above the crowd
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\nIn the Western world, even as the new scientific view of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries sought to reduce nature to extension and number, Romanticism rose to restore body, color, warmth, and sentience to it. Even as analysis-the idea that nature can best be understood by isolating its components from their natural context-became the scientific method, the doctrine of God's providence, with its message of nature's wholeness and integrative purposefulness, was gaining popularity.14
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\nEcology appears to favor connectedness. It is more disposed to search for interdependence than for separateness. And so even as a technical science, ecology can be a balm to modern men and women seeking escape from isolation.
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\nEven as I draw attention to disconnectedness and indifference, I show how both can be overcome-how people escape from both. It is difficult to speak of the one without the other, for disconnectedness implies connectedness, indifference implies attentiveness. Culture, as I have repeatedly noted, is the most common device for moving from one state to the other
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\nA ritual is \"invented\" and performed to ensure good harvests. That is its most public reason for being. Less public and official is the ritual's aesthetic potency-its existence as a work of art that engages and elevates a people's aesthetic sensibilities. Largely unacknowledged, except in critical social-science literature, is the power of ritual to legitimize the orders of society. Hidden almost wholly is ritual's efficacy in overcoming discreteness-in connecting and fusing individual and distinctive entities into larger wholes.
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\nConsider the suburban house. A proud owner, when she thinks of her house at all, is likely to think of its architectural good points, its prestige and value. The house's basic function as shelter is taken for granted. Even more taken for granted is its hidden power to integrate people and their activities. The hidden powers of human artifacts tend to remain hidden unless, for some reason, they are brought into the open. Why anyone would want to do so is an interesting question, for the consequence of such unveiling is almost always ambivalent, the gain in knowledge not fully compensating the loss of innocence
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\nAll sorts of group activities have the power to repress the self, especially when these require coordinated movements, as, for example, farmers working in the field, soldiers marching to the music of a military band, or people enacting their designated roles in a ceremony. An awareness of the Other-an indifferent or hostile reality out there-further intensifies group solidarity and weakens the feeling of individual separateness. To farmers laboring together, the fields to be plowed and the weeds to be uprooted constitute the Other. To soldiers, the Other is the sharply defined human enemy.
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\nMilitary training provides all the right ingredients for escaping the stresses of individualityvi
\nA little-noted effect of this moral posture is that it allows soldiers to retain, individually, a sense of personhood and dignity even while they are immersed in the larger whole. Other agonistic groups such as athletes contesting in the sports arena and political protesters pounding the pavement to a confrontation enjoy similar rewards
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\nTHE BUILT ENVIRONMENT AND ONENESS
\nCulture can be primarily an activity, as in etiquette, ritual, games of war. Culture is also the end product of an activity (skill)-a material artifact. Whereas we readily see that certain kinds of activity promote group cohesion, we less readily see the artifact as providing the same service. Consider the built environment. At the scale of a room, the effects on human behavior and solidarity are so omnipresent and subtle that people do not-or hardly ever-pause to marvel.26 In the family room, family members almost always do different things, live in separate, strikingly dissimilar worlds of awareness: the baby crawls on the floor, the teenager studies Latin, the mother balances the budget, the father dozes before the television set. Yet they do not feel this separateness. On the contrary, they feel themselves to be a close-knit family, and any observer of the scene would conclude the same. The enclosed space of the room, a cheerfully illuminated interior set against the darkness outside, encourages a sense of oneness. Likewise, the pictures on the wall, the coordinated pieces of furniture, all attest to a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. In this model modern family, there is little bodily contact. Perhaps little is needed because the constructed space and its furnishings already do much to convey a feeling of cohesion.
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\nIn the classroom all the chairs, neatly arranged in rows, are identical, which promotes the illusion that the students who sit in them are alikethat they all have much the same body shape and weight, much the same sensory equipment, much the same kind of mind and intellectual preparedness, absorbing professorial wisdom in much the same way. What a shock when the professor reads the blue books
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\nA town favored with architectural monuments enjoys the added advantage of symbolic resonancea resonance that is further heightened when ceremonies are conducted around them and stories are told about them.27The word \"ceremony\" takes us back to the idea of culture as gesture and activity; it points to worlds evoked by motions of the body rather than by the making of buildings and things. By motions of the body I mean everything from dining etiquette to rites of agriculture and of war. I discussed these gestures and activities earlier. What I have yet to address with any fullness is storytelling. Storytelling is of prime importance because language is at the core of human culture. Without language, the uniquely human ways of transforming, covering up, and escaping are inconceivable.\"
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\nIndeed, when we ask, What aspect of culture most sharply differentiates one group from another? the answer is, Not food, dress, housing, kinfolk network, and suchlike, but language
\nThe desire to retain or resuscitate one's unique cultural signature in an increasingly undifferentiated cosmopolitan (global) society has translated into surprisingly effective political programs. Localism or particularism is now widely and explicitly recognized as a good and attainable political goal.
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\nThe fact is, people seldom truly speak with or listen to one another; more often than they care to admit, they deliver soliloquies, with each individual using another's remark merely as a launching pad for his or her own performance.vi
\nHuman beings have not become more egotistical, only more aware of their egotism-of their disinclination to see or listen, thanks in part to works like those of Chekhov, Tolstoy, and numerous other writers.35
\nIf a small vocabulary and the frequent use of cliches promote understanding and communal solidarity, the achievement of verbal-intellectual sophistication can have the opposite effect. The more people know and the more subtle they are at expressing what they know, the fewer listeners there will be and the more isolated individuals will feel, not only at large but also among colleagues and co-workers.
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\nSocial scientists claim that a tenement building where people hang out the washing or sit on the stoop to socialize can be a warmly communal place. By contrast, a suburb with freestanding houses is cold and unfriendly. I am saying that the same may be true of intellectual life as one moves to larger houses of one's own design. Both types of move-socioeconomic and intellectualsignify success, and with both the cost to the mover can be an exacerbated feeling of isolation.
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\nHappy people have no reason to think; they live rather than question living. To Inuits, thinking signifies either craziness or the strength to have independent views. Both qualities are antisocial and to be deplored
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\nAmerica, thinking is suspect. It is something done by the idly curious or by discontented people; it is subversive of established values; it undermines communal coherence and promotes individualism. There is an element of truth in all these accusations. In an Updike novel, a working-class father thinks about his son reading. It makes him feel cut off from his son. \"He doesn't know why it makes him nervous to see the kid read. Like he's plotting something. They say you should encourage it, reading, but they never say why.\"39
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\nMonica Wilson asked the women of an African village why they set such store by their ceremonies.
\nTheir answer was always the same: Such ceremonies were conducted for inward rather than outward effect; they served \"to stop people going mad.\"42
\n\" To make some sense of life-to prevent ourselves from going mad-we have one ready means of escape, and that is to dance while we can 43vi
\nHe has been accused of reductionism
\nLevi-Strauss denies this as \"outrageous.\"
\nAs Levi-Strauss picturesquely puts it, \"disorder reigns\" in social life's \"vast empirical stew.\" He, for his part, chooses to study only its \"scattered small islands of organization.
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\nA strongly analytical and critical disposition of mind, sustained over time, can lead to cynicism and despair. In the West this has not yet happened to a pronounced degree, and one reason is ironic: The same hard questioning that has corroded traditional covers has enabled Westerners to build a new one-the dazzling technological world that has its own great powers to shield, entertain, and distract.
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\nGood thus translates into goods; so much of life turns out to be a struggle not for good but for goods.
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\nSecurity is obtained, not by losing oneself in the larger whole, but by wrapping the self in the trappings of power and prestige. Power and prestige being social, seeking them entails active participation in the group, but this time conspicuously-exhibitionistically-with the cunning help of imagination. Good then means far more than survival. Indeed, to the powerful and confident, physical survival as such is taken for granted and displaced to the lower realm of mere biological and animal life. Prestige is measured by how far one can rise above it.
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\nHuman vulnerability is not only subjection to physical pain, disablement, and death. It is also a corrosive sense of emptiness at the core of being, which one tries to overcome with the drowsing fumes of alcohol and drugs, and with socially approved work, projects, entertainments, but above all with human company, the hum of small talk that plugs every opening to ominous silence. We need other people, then, not just as a bulwark against external threat but as an effective diversion from having to confront this inner vacuity
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\nPeople want the \"good\" that is real, which is one reason why they latch on to material things. But material things, for all the direct satisfactions they provide, apparently cannot stand alone. To be truly valued, they need the support of imagined worth. The gap between palpable worth and imagined worth, with the latter backed by the power of society, is greatest in the art objects that are the pride of civilization. A city rich in art and architecture can, in a certain light, seem unreal, because such works boldly present themselves as products of a highly imaginative (even fanciful) mind and also because for all their materiality, they are wrapped in prestige, whose literal meaning is \"sleight of hand,\" and glamour, whose literal meaning is \"magic
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\nThe heated imagination that only yesterday gave us a haunted world may still do so in some dark age of the future. Reason and common sense are not a certain bulwark against lurid images, triggered by fear, that surge from primitive recesses of the mind. Childishly, when such images do not come unasked, we miss them and want to revive them for the thrill they provide. As a world made too dully safe by technology drives some people to the visceral excitement of the roller coaster, so modern life's pedestrian and even comely landscapes call for, as needed contrast, pockets of uncanniness and dread.
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\nBut destructiveness as such has an appeal to humans that is not evident in other animals.
\nFor many people destruction is the clearest evidence of their ability to change the world and hence the most convincing proof of their own existence-their own reality and worth.
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\nTheater of war\" itself suggests that when one's own life is not at risk-and even when it is-the battlefield can be an exhilarating spectacle.6
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\nStill, many-perhaps even most-human relationships contain a hostile element; suggestively, the words \"hospitality\" and \"hostility\" have the same root. 16Conflicts may be out in the open and violent. The Other is not just another human being with whom I have to rub along, but a deadly enemy, a longtime oppressor, the personification of evil. My response to him may then be extreme. Such an individual must be not just killed but utterly destroyed, turned inside out, exposed, so that no secret source of power remains
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\nAbuse of the weak is a deviant offshoot of the more general human domination of nature. \"Nature\" is whatever lacks, from the viewpoint of a powerful elite, their own dignity-their endowment of consciousness and will, their ability to create or acquire artifice. Judged by these criteria, animals clearly belong to nature. They may be figuratively elevated, treated as emblems of power and glory in sacred art, but in actuality they are almost always put in a subordinate or humiliating position, as beast of burden, producer of raw material (honey, silk), valuable property (nature's fanciful art), or pet
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\nIn the course of a grand tour of Europe, the Roosevelt family came upon a group of Italian beggars. Young Teddy happily reported, \"We tossed the cakes to them and fed them like chickens . . . and like chickens they ate it. Mr. Stevens [a traveling companion] kept guard with a whip with which he pretended to whip a small boy. We made them open their mouth and tossed cake into it. We made the crowds give us three cheers for U.S.A. before we gave them cakes.\"
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\ncaste system, patronage (a society of patrones and peons), and treating people openly as mere aesthetic objects and pets were once-and not so long ago-a blight on humankind. But we have left all that behind. The question is, Have we? Caste and feudalistic relationships, as institutions, no longer exist. But as practice they linger,
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\nThey take the benign form of a compassion ate and sensitive leader, a defender of justice, helping the less fortunate members of society
\nThe put-upon people, on their part, play the game for all its political worth. But their acquiescence in the subordinate role is not just strategy
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\nSpectatorship is the name of the game. In the theater, a spectator, even when deeply engaged, does not have to-indeed, must not-act. In real life, the same situation may demand action; simply looking can be profoundly immoral.30vi
\nTo escape this, to elevate oneself above the neediness, frailty, and insignificance of mortals, one can wrap oneself in the trappings of divinity. These trappings may be material-a big house and other forms of wealth that distance their owner from nature. To really feel godlike, however, more is called for than material possession. That \"more\" is the actual exercising of power-if possible, absolute power. Absolute power creates the illusion of a radical gap between myself and others.
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\nEvil imagination seeks to displace. More widely and diligently, it seeks to disconnect. It draws boundaries, an important purpose of which is to shield me from contamination by other people's misery and misfortune
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\nPeople learn to change behavior as they move from one room to another. They may be said to become different selves in different rooms; what is socially or morally proper in one may be socially and morally improper in another. But this shift of attitude and value is forgotten; change in setting makes it easy to forget.33
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\nNot all idols are material. Prestige, for example, is an idol only loosely tied to its material embodiment, which may be as fleeting and intangible as a gesture, a tone of voice, a fragrance, and as easily missed as the tiny insignia on a person's shirt. The acolyte of prestige needs to be constantly alert and of subtle mind
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\nThe golden calf conveniently stands for all the myriad objects, from Buddha's tooth and the true cross to great works of art and architecture, before which humans are inclined to worship, to treat not as emblems of the divine or win dows to transcendence but as ends in themselves or powers in their own right.
\nThe more people use their mind and freedom, the more they may be tempted by the bliss of nonexistence; the higher they fly, the more appealing can seem the peace and stability of the hole or bottom; the greater their power, the more they may yearn, if only temporarily, for powerlessness-total submission to the will of another
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\nRather than descend into dimmed states of consciousness or simply taking flight, imagination constructs glittering fantasies of the good. Such fantasy worlds may be just private daydreaming and go no further. They can also be embodied in writing, for example, fairy tales. And they can be embodied in architecture, from pristine suburbs to magic kingdoms inspired by Walt Disney. In any sober estimation, these are far from hell or hellish. They are indeed a type of the Good. Yet critics have attacked them as unreal or sinisterly real-hyperreal.sb
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\nThe most unfair criticism of fairy tales is that they are wish fulfillment-a bad, escapist habit. Wish fulfillment is, however, not at all characteristic of modern fairy tales. The criticism may be better leveled at their eighteenth-century precursors. These indeed contain elements of unabashed wish fulfillment and escapism. Escape from what? Invari ably it is escape from necessity, which at its most urgent is the struggle for food.
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\nAnd what is the essence of that fantasy? It is a world without crap, where \"crap\" stands for animality, earthiness, bondage to biological exigencies, death. Unlike the common people's dream, the bourgeois dream is expurgated; all that remain are material plenty in a lovely setting, good fellowship, and dignity for all but especially for oneself-that central figure around which all the delightful views, goods, and services seem arranged.
\nSuch, however, is the power of the bourgeoisie that its dream can be (and has been) turned into reality; and so the more affluent parts of the world now boast ranchhouse suburbs, mega-shopping malls, and theme parks filled with carefully designed and marketed comforts, wonders, and thrills.58 They are undoubtedly popular. Yet a small minority-usually those exceptionally privileged in education-do not want them. To this small minority the giddylands of modern consumerism are escapist fantasies because they deny the forces, which can be brutal, that have made them possible and also because they deny people's animal nature. Even if these places can be built without undue exploitation of either laborers or natural resources, they are unworthy-surface-deep and tendentious-unless they make allowance for filth. Of course, no one actually wants to be bogged down in filth, just to retain an awareness that it is irreducibly there. Even young radicals who disdain the picture-perfect suburb or mall cry \"Shit!\" when things miscarry, as though they had had enough of messy, unpredictable reality and would not mind being in a house where the coffee maker actually worked and the bedsheets smelled nice.
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\nFrancis Bacon, a century and a half later, went notably further in the direction of modern scien tific thought. He rejected magic, equating it with dreams, hallucinations, and fantasy.
\nBacon did, however, retain a theory of angels and spirits among the fundamentals of his \"primary philosophy.\" Notable in this philosophy-an early signal of the Enlightenment-is his turn toward a brighter world. The supernatural residuals of his thought consist of angels rather than demons, spirits rather than ghouls.
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\nIs it just possible that angels are more real, or have become more real, than demons? For it is a fact that monsters and ghouls, devils and witches, have faded in modern times. By contrast, God and spiritual beings have not altogether lost their respectability in serious thought, at least until late in the twentieth century.vi
\nImagination, after all, is not only a source of illusion and error, it is also the uniquely human path to knowledge.
\nIndeed, as one surveys the millennia, one has the irresistible impression of punctuated emergence-periodic eruptions of the new into history, rather than of anything steadily cumulative and progressive
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\nAlthough maturation is desired and desirable, not all of it is gain. There are also losses-losses of innocence and of wonder. Loss of innocence is acceptable if knowledge and wisdom take its place. But loss of wonder and creativity? Surprisingly, only Westerners from the seventeenth century onward have learned to esteem both. Other people tend to see wonder and creativity, or (more prosaically) curiosity and probing, as an immature phase that is best left behind.
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\nMost of us are not scientists, but we use technology, and we are well aware that technology is reductionist in regard to the human habitat; that is, it tends to thin and spread out its inchoate richness, flushing out nooks and corners in which mystery can flourish.
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\nBut the city is escapist par excellence, for a city is a citya real city!-to the degree that it has distanced itself (escaped) from nature and its rhythms.
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Part One: Liberal Formulations
Ch1- Social Processes and Spatial Form: The Conceptual Problems of Urban Planning
Ch2- Social Processes and Spatial Form: The Redistribution of Real Income in an Urban System
Ch3- Social Justice and Spatial Systems
Part Two : Socialist Formulations
Ch4- Revolutionary and Counterrevolutionary Theory in Geography and the Problem of Ghetto Formation
Ch5- Use Value, Exchange Value and the Theory of Urban Land Use
Ch6- Urbanism and the City—An Interpretive Essay
Part Three : Synthesis
Ch7- Conclusions and Reflections
The Right to the City (2008)
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\nThe distinction between social processes and spatial form is always regarded as artificial rather than real, but in the later chapters the distinction is regarded as unreal in rather a different sense. Spatial forms are there seen not as inanimate objects within which the social process unfolds, but as things which \"contain\" social processes in the same manner that social processes are spatial
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The property relationship, for example, creates absolute spaces within which monopoly control can operate. The movement of people, goods, services and information takes place in a relative space because it takes money, time, energy, and the like, to overcome the friction of distance. Parcels of land also capture benefits because they contain relationships with other parcels; the forces of demographic, market and retail potential are real enough within an urban system and in the form of rent relational space comes into its own as an important aspect of human social practice.
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I move from a predisposition to regard social justice as a matter of eternal justice and morality to regard it as something contingent upon the social processes operating in society as a whole.
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Any general theory of the city must somehow relate the social processes in the city to the spatial form which the city assumes. In disciplinary terms, this amounts to integrating two important research and educational traditions—I shall call it building a bridge between those possessed of the sociological imagination and those imbued with a spatial consciousness or a geographical imagination
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It is useful to contrast with this \"sociological imagination\" the rather more diffuse quality which I have called \"spatial
consciousness\" or the \"geographical imagination\". This imagination enables the individual to recognize the role of space and place in his own biography, to relate to the spaces he sees around him, and to recognize how transactions between individuals and between organizations are affected by the space that separates them
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There are plenty of those possessed with a powerful sociological imagination (C. Wright Mills among them) who nevertheless seem to live and work in a spaceless world. There are also those, possessed of a powerful geographical imagination or spatial consciousness, who fail to recognize that the way space is fashioned can have a profound effect upon social processes—hence the numerous examples of beautiful but unlivable designs in modern living
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Some have sought, for example, to modify the spatial form of a city and thereby to mould the social process (this has typically been the approach of physical planners from Howard on). Others have sought to place institutional constraints on social processes in the hope that this alone will be enough to achieve necessary social goals.
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The first, organic space, refers to the kind of spatial experience which appears to be genetically transmitted and, hence, biologically determined
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The second, perceptual space, is more complex. It involves the neurological synthesis of all kinds of sense experience—optical, tactual, acoustic and kinesthetic. This synthesis amounts to a spatial experience in which the evidence of various senses is reconciled. An instantaneous schema or impression may be formed and memory may lead to the retention of that schema over time. When memory and learning are involved, the schema may be subject to addition or subtraction by culturally learned modes of thought. Perceptual space is primarily experienced through the senses, but we do not yet know how far the performance of our senses is affected by cultural conditioning.
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third kind of spatial experience is abstract; Cassirer calls this symbolic space. Here, we are experiencing space vicariously through the interpretation of symbolic representations which have no spatial dimension. I can conjure up an impression of a triangle without seeing one simply by looking at the word \"triangle\". I can gain experience of spatial form by learning mathematics and in particular, of course, geometry. Geometry provides a convenient symbolic language for discussing and learning about spatial form, but it is not the spatial form itself.
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might appear from this that all we require for an analytic treatment of spatial form is some development out of Euclidean geometry. We do not yet have such a development; we have not yet devised adequate methods for generalizing about shape, pattern, and form on such Euclidean surfaces, for example. But, even given this development, our problems would be far from over simply because social space is not isomorphic with physical space
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Good architecture presumably incorporates two sets of principles of spatial organization—one set designed to prevent the structure created from violating physical constraints, and the other set designed to facilitate the transference of some aesthetic experience. The physical principles pose no problem—they are Euclidean and analytically tractable. The aesthetic principles are extremely difficult to deal with. Langer (1953, 72) provides, an interesting starting point for a theory of space in art. She hypothesizes that \"the space in which we live and act is not what is treated in art at all\", for the space in which we have our physical being is a system of relationships whereas the space of art is a created space built out of forms, colours, and so on. Thus the visual space defined by a painting is essentially an illusion . . .
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Architecture, suggests Langer, is an ethnic domain— \"a physically present human environment that expresses the characteristic rhythmic functional patterns which constitute a culture.\" In other words, the shaping of space which goes on in architecture and, therefore, in the city is symbolic of our culture, symbolic of the existing social order, symbolic of our aspirations, our needs, and our fears. If, therefore, we are to evaluate the spatial form of the city, we must, somehow or other, understand its creative meaning as well as its mere physical dimensions
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There is a growing literature on the psychological aspects of art and a growing realization that we need some understanding of how the man-made environment takes on meaning for its inhabitants. The interiors of buildings, for example, often signify much about the nature of the social order and the nature of the social processes which are supposed to go on inside it
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It is no accident that those in the choir somehow seemed closer to God (and hence more privileged) than those in the nave. Sommer (1969) has extended this principle and sought to show how different kinds of spatial
design in a wide variety of contexts can affect human behaviour and activity systems
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It is no accident that church and chapel spires dream over Oxford (a town created in the age of church power), whereas, in the age of monopoly capitalism, it is the Chrysler building and the Chase-Manhattan Bank building
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to gauge. If the city contains all manner of signals and symbols, then we can try to understand the meaning which people give to them. We must seek to understand the message which people receive from their constructed environment. To do this we need a very general methodology for the measurement of spatial and environment symbolism. Here, the techniques of psycholinguistics and psychology have much to recommend them. These techniques allow us to assess the significance of an object or event by examining the behavioural disposition to act with respect to it.
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Practical considerations make it almost impossible to use anything other than overt behaviour when large aggregates of population are involved as, for example, in the study of journey-to-work and journey-to-shop phenomena as they occur at the total city scale of analysis
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there is a growing (and very stimulating) literature on the behavioural responses to certain aspects of environmental design and on the way in which individuals react to and schematize various aspects of the spatial form that is the city (Proshansky and Ittelson, 1970)
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The evidence is far from being secure, but, at this stage, it seems reasonable to adopt as a working hypothesis the view that individuals possess some proportion (as yet undetermined) of \"common image\" derived from some group norms (and probably certain norms in acting with respect to that image), and a proportion of \"unique image\" which is highly idiosyncratic and unpredictable. It is the common part of the spatial image with which we must first concern ourselves, if we are to squeeze out some details of the real nature of social space
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But it is very suggestive. Lynch (i960), for example, indicates that individuals construct spatial schemas which hang together topologically—the typical Bostonian appears to move from one focal point (or node) to another along well-defined paths. This leaves vast areas of the physical space which are not touched and are indeed unknown as far as the individual is concerned
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Lynch also suggests that certain features in the physical environment create \"edges\" beyond which the individual does not typically penetrate. Both Lee (1968) and Steinitz (1968) confirm his finding that boundaries can be identified for some areas in a city, and these areas seem to form distinctive neighbourhoods
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In general, we have to conclude that social space is complex, non-homogeneous, perhaps discontinuous, and almost certainly different from the physical space in which the engineer and the planner typically work
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Social space is not only variable from individual to individual and from group to group; it is also variable over time.
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Typically the urban planner accepts a set of locational units (usually census tracts), measures variables in each tract, and may then group tracts according to similarity of properties while observing a contiguity constraint. I do not, however, want to discuss these strategiesin detail for I have made my main point: the process of individuation at the interface between the sociological and geographical imagination requires a thorough understanding of two rather different languages and an adequate methodology to govern their combination.
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It is possible to regard the spatial form of a city as a basic determinant of human behaviour. This \"spatial environmental determinism\" is a working hypothesis of those physical planners who seek to promote a new social order by manipulating the spatial environment of the city. It is also a convenient way to break into some of the complexities of the interaction between spatial form and social process for it sets up a simple causal framework in which spatial form affects social process
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Titmuss (1962,34) provides us with a more comprehensive definition:
\"No concept of income can be really equitable that stops short of the comprehensive definition which embraces all receipts which increase an individual's command over the use of a society's scarce resources—in other words his net accretion of economic power between two points of time.... Hence income is the algebraic sum of (1) the market value of rights exercised in consumption, and (2) the change in the value of the store of property rights between the beginning and the end of the period in question.\"
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o there are likely to be several ways in which an individual's income can change. The individual can earn more (less), he can receive positive (negative) benefits from a change in the value of his property, he can simply have more (less) resources made available to him at a lower (higher) price, or he can have any combination of these gains
and losses over a particular period.
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. The question then arises as to how changes in the spatial form of a city and changes in the social processes operating within the city bring about changes in an individual's income.
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I shall argue, for example, that the social process of wage determination is partly modified by changes in the location of employment opportunities (by categories) compared with changes in residential opportunities (by type). The failure of employment and residential opportunities to keep in balance with each other has imposed greater accessibility costs on some groups in the population relative to other groups. I shall also try to show how changes in the value of property rights and in the availability and price of resources can occur through the spatial dynamics of city growth. I shall argue that these changes together have a very substantial effect upon income distribution and that their effects become disproportionately important as the size of an urban system increases
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To give a simple example: it is clear that there has not been an equal response in the urban population to the potential of mobility associated with the automobile. The time lag is anything from 20 to 40 years between different groups in the population. It would be very surprising indeed if the better educated and more affluent groups had not taken advantage of this time lag to further their own interests and enhance their own income. The allocation of resources then takes place as an adjustment to this new income distribution and a cumulative process of increasing inequality of income distribution gets under way. This is a crude example, but I think it is very general. Certain groups, particularly those with financial resources and education, are able to adapt far more rapidly to a change in the urban system, and these differential abilities to respond to change are a major source in generating inequalities.
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Any discussion of accessibility, therefore, requires that we answer a fundamental question regarding the meaning of \"distance\" and \"space\" in an urban system—a problem which I have examined in chapter i (see also the excellent review by Buttimer, 1969
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It should be self-evident that as we change the spatial form of city (by relocating housing, transport routes, employment opportunities, sources of pollution, etc.) so we change the price of accessibility and the cost of proximity for any one household.
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It is useful to begin by dividing goods into purely private goods (which can be produced and consumed without any third-party effects being present) and purely public goods (which, once produced, are freely available to everyone). As Buchanan (1968, 56-7) points out, however, most of the interesting cases lie between these two extremes—i.e., goods which are partly private and partly public
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The political process has a profound influence over the location of external benefits and costs. Indeed, a case can be made for regarding local political activity as the basic mechanism for allocating the spatial externality fields in such a way as to reap indirect income advantages
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The changing location of economic activity in a city means a changing location of job opportunities
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Meanwhile most of the growth in new employment has been in the suburban ring and hence the low income groups have gradually been cut off
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They have had to resort to the local employment opportunities in the fairly stagnant industrial areas of the inner city or in the central business district (CBD), which in any case only offers a small proportion of its employment in the unskilled low-income category. By contrast, residents in the suburban communities have a far wider range of options open to them. They can make use of rapid transit facilities into the CBD, they can seek employment locally in growing suburban employment centres, or they can make use of the pattern of ring-roads and beltways to move around the suburban ring.
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The actions of individuals and organizations other than the owner can therefore affect property values. These external effects on the value of a property holder's rights are not under the property holder's control nor are they adequately catered for in the pricing system operating in a supposedly free market
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The logical outcome of this is a territorial organization of the city in which each territory contains a group with relatively homogeneous values and utility functions and behaviours (insofar as these relate to property). This amounts to a spatial organization designed in such a way as to share out externalities (and create externalities for others). At this juncture, it is interesting to employ that shadowy form of inference (beloved of economists) called by Buchanan (1968a, 3) \"inferential prediction\" to derive some kind of institutional order which would facilitate sharing externalities in the housing market.
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What this analysis of the housing market shows us is that a free market cannot give rise to prices conducive to a Pareto optimum and that the housing market, for reasons of its own spatial internal logic, must contain group action if it is to
function coherently. This explains, in turn, why the housing market is so peculiarly susceptible to economic and political pressures, since it is only by organizing and applying these pressures that individuals can defend or enhance the value of their property rights relative to those of other individuals. In this, as in most things, it is the economically and politically weak who probably suffer most, unless institutional controls exist to rectify a naturally arising but ethically unacceptable situation.
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The concept of a resource as a commodity which enters into production is no longer adequate and probably would have been abandoned long ago, were it not for the fact that this concept is basic to conventional forms of economic analysis. Recently, the concept has been extended to things like amenities and open space, but there is still an unfortunate tendency to think of resources as \"natural\". I think it far more satisfactory to regard the city as a gigantic resource system, most of which is man-made.
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The urban system thus contains a geographical distribution of created resources of great economic, social, psychological and symbolic significance. Unfortunately, when we get away from the simple production-based definition of resources to a definition linked to consumption, we increase the appropriateness of the concept for examining income inequalities and distribution effects, but decrease our ability to define quantitative measures for resource availability.
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Command over resources, which is our general definition of real income, is thus a function of locational accessibility and proximity. Therefore, the changing spatial form of the city and the continuous process of run-down, renewal and creation of resources within it, will affect the distribution of incomes and may form a major mechanism for the redistribution of real income. Consider, as an example, the resource of open space.
Let us assume that each person throughout a city system has an identical need for open space. The price of that open space is low if it is accessible and high if it is not. Assume also a complete inelasticity in the demand for open space and we can then treat the variation in access price within the city as a direct effect on income. The allocation of open space in and around the city will thus affect the distribution of income. Clawson writes:
\"Any use of rural open space, relatively close to the city, as a substitute for or supplement to open space within the city has unfortunate effects in terms of income class participation. Truly poor people have no chance to live in the country and commute to work, nor to play golf in the country. These uses of rural open space are limited to middle and upper income levels. Moreover, if the more articulate and politically most active parts of the total population see such use of rural open space as one major solution to the open space problem, they may neglect or oppose costly programs which would provide at least some open space in the city centres where it is most lacking and most urgently needed.\" (1969, 170.)
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Thus, in location theory we know that the forces governing location from the producer's point of view are not necessarily beneficial when analysed from the consumer's point of view—as Hotelling's classic example of the case of two ice-cream sellers on a beach demonstrates. Hence we also know that in any situation of monopoly, duopoly or oligopoly, the market process is unlikely to produce a location pattern which is the most beneficial for the consumer
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The fact that this occurs is not hard to document from most American cities, as a casual reading of the Kerner Commission report (1968) will show. Some of the local costs imposed upon a community by the differential availability and accessibility of resources are quantifiable (such as the real extent of overcharging for consumer goods), but there are many other costs (such as a high infant mortality rate, mental disturbance and nervous tension) which are real enough but extraordinarily difficult to measure.
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. We can likewise get some estimate of the impact of criminal activity in terms of the value of goods lost or damage inflicted, but the indirect costs of being cut off from normal physical and social activity on account of fear are incalculable
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This may appear an unanswerable question (since so few of the costs can be quantified), but it is nevertheless useful to ask it for doing so directs our attention to an important set of mechanisms generating inequalities in income.
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The smaller groups—the privileged and intermediate groups —can often defeat the large groups—the latent groups—which are normally supposed to prevail in democracy. The privileged and intermediate groups often triumph over the numerically superior forces in the latent or large groups because the former are generally organized and active while the latter are normally unorganized and inactive.\" (Olson, 1965, 128.
HOLYOKE
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Since small groups are likely to be more influential in the political decision making process, we can also infer that most of the decisions (both allocational and locational) will disproportionately reflect the desires of small pressure groups as opposed to the mass of the population
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If income redistribution is a \"predictable outcome of the political process\" it is not hard to predict the general flow of that redistribution. In the first place, we can expect a \"central business district imperialism\" in which the well-organized business interests of the central city (with their small-group oligopolistic structure) effectively dominate the looser and weaker coalitions found in the rest of the city. This thesis has recently been powerfully argued by Kotler (1969). In the second place, we can also anticipate a \"suburban exploitation of the central city\" hypothesis (Netzer, 1968, 438-48; Thompson, 1965, chapter 7). In other words, we can expect a \"pecking order\" among various groups in the population for the exploitation of the various resources which the city has to offer. Those at the bottom of this pecking order are the losers:
\"The slum is the catch-all for the losers, and in the competitive struggle for the cities' goods the slum areas are also the losers in terms of schools, jobs, garbage collection, street lighting, libraries, social services, and whatever else is communally available but always in short supply. The slum, then, is an area where the population lacks resources to compete successfully and where collectively it lacks control over the channels through which such resources are distributed or maintained. This may suggest some new approaches to metropolitan planning—recognizing the necessity for redistribution of power, broader access to resources, and expansion of individual choice to those who have been consistently denied.\" (Sherrard, 1968, 10.)
The prospects for equity or for a just redistribution of income in an urban system through a naturally arising political process (particularly one based on a philosophy of individual self-interest) are bleak indeed
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This work (summarized by Coombs, 1964 and Nunnaly, 1967) has not been integrated as well as it might into the main body of the theory of consumer choice even though good statements do exist (for instance, Fishburn, 1964). The second way out of the Arrow paradox, and one which is usually taken by theoretical economists, is to assume the problems away by stating a \"unanimity rule\" which conveniently assumes that everyone in the population has the same ranking of preferences over a set of alternatives (Buchanan, 1968). Only under this assumption is it possible to derive a Pareto optimum. When the unanimity rule applies, the alternatives are said to be \"Pareto-comparable\" and when it does not they are \"Paretononcomparable\" (Quirk and Saposnik, 1968, 117)
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Likewise, the whole question of compensation between parties takes on a new dimension. A transfer payment may be very significant to a poor man and
almost irrelevant to a rich man. By the same argument, the poor can less afford to lose an external benefit or incur an external cost. This leads us to an intriguing paradox in which the poor are willing to incur external losses for a far lower transfer payment than are the rich.
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heterogeneity in social and cultural values may make it impossible for groups to get into a \"valid\" negotiating position such as that which is specified in one of Isard's location games. From this it follows that an urban system will be unable to function smoothly (in the sense that conflicts between individuals and groups will not easily be resolved) if there is widespread heterogeneity in the social and cultural values of the population. It seems that the \"natural\" way for this sort of difficulty to be minimized is to seek out a pattern of territorial organization which minimizes both social contact between individuals holding different social and cultural values and also the probability of quarrels over externalities. Territorial and \"neighbourhood\" organization on ethnic, class, social status, religious and other lines thus has an important role to play in minimizing conflict in the urban system
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I find it hard to accept either Marcuse's thesis (1964) that there is a growing homogeneity in cultural values (and, therefore, no force for change in society) or the spatial form equivalent of it in which a \"one dimensional man\" dwells in what Melvin Webber (1964) calls \"an urban non-place realm\". There are strong forces working towards cultural heterogeneity and territorial differentiation in the urban system
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The physical spatial form of a city system is a construction in three dimensional Euclidean geometry. The phenomena within it can be conceptualized as points (retail stores, schools, hospitals), lines (transport links), areas (constituencies, territories) and volumes (buildings
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. Consider, for example, the location of supermarket facilities. The supermarket is itself an impure public good (although it is selling wholly private goods) and its location is presumably a function of balancing the need for economies of scale in operation against the effects of rising transport costs to the consumer as the market area is extended. Yet the Kerner Commission (1968, 277) comments on the general lack of these facilities in ghetto areas
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Impure public goods, once produced, are freely but not equally available (in terms of quantity or quality) to all individuals in the city system.
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But even in those areas of the private economy providing impure public goods (such as opportunities for shopping, recreation, and the like) there is no guarantee that, because a set of demand and supply curves can be determined, a locational pattern will automatically result which is anywhere near Pareto optimality
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But the problem of finding a solution is theoretically obscured by the quasi-monopolistic structure of public organization and the inability to find any realistic pricing mechanisms
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Since the government obviously cannot possess this information, how should it proceed? One answer is to bend to voting pressure but we have seen how this was likely to lead to inequity
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There are various natural forces making for territorial organization in an urban system: kinship and ethnic groupings, communities with shared value systems, individuals with similar ideas about quality of urban environment, are good examples. These forces do not remain static. Ethnic and kinship groupings are breaking down (Webber, 1963) and traditional notions of \"community\" and \"neighbourhood\" are being replaced by something rather different—a neighbourhood concept which is implicit rather than explicit with respect to social organization (Keller, 1969). There are also good logical reasons for arguing in favour of territorial organization. An \"appropriate\" organization can do much to minimize conflict and maximize group coherence and efficiency. Whether or not we can achieve such an organization of space and thereby facilitate the achievement of social objectives depends very much upon whether we can find out what is meant by \"appropriate\"
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is not normative modelling which is at fault but the kind of norms built into such models. In this chapter, therefore, I want to diverge from the usual mode of normative analysis and look at the possibility of constructing a normative theory of spatial or territorial allocation based on principles of social justice.
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The reasons for so doing are evident. If, in the short run, we simply pursue efficiency and ignore the social cost, then those individuals or groups who bear the brunt of that cost are likely to be a source of long-run inefficiency either through decline in what Liebenstein (1966) calls \"x-efficiency\" (those intangibles that motivate people to cooperate and participate in the social process of production) or through forms of antisocial behaviour (such as crime and drug addiction) which will necessitate the diversion of productive investment towards their correction
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That this is a sensible conclusion is attested by the fact that the socialist programmes of post-war Britain appear to have had little or no impact upon the distribution of real income in society, while the liberal anti-poverty programmes in the United States have been conspicuous for their lack of success. The reason should be obvious: programmes which seek to alter distribution without altering the capitalist market structure within which income and wealth are generated and distributed, are doomed to failure.
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Most of the evidence we have on group decision-making, bargaining, the control of central government, democracy, bureaucracy, and the like, also indicates that any social, economic and political organization which attains any permanence is liable to cooptation and subversion by special interest groups
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Exactly what arrangements are made for arbitrating among the demands of political territories (demands which do not necessarily reflect need) and for negotiating between a central authority and its constituent territories are obviously crucial for the prospect of achieving territorial justice
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Whatever the long term implications of this process are for growth, capital clearly will flow in a way which bears little relationship to need or to the condition of the least advantaged territory. The result will be the creation of localized pockets of high unfulfilled need, such as those now found in Appalachia or many inner city areas.
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From this, Burgess elaborated what came to be known as the concentric zone theory of the city
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And the finest part of the arrangement is this, that the members of the money aristocracy can take the shortest road through the middle of all the labouring districts without ever seeing that they are in the midst of the grimy misery that lurks to the right and left. For the thoroughfares leading from the Exchange in all directions out of the city are lined, on both sides, with an almost unbroken series of shops, and are so kept in the hands of the middle and lower bourgeoisie . . . [that] they suffice to conceal from the eyes of the wealthy men and women of strong stomachs and weak nerves the misery and grime which form the complement of their wealth.
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I know, too, that the retail dealers are forced by the nature of their business to take
possession of the great highways; I know that there are more good buildings than bad ones upon such streets everywhere, and that the value of land is greater near them than in remote districts, but at the same time I have never seen so systematic a shutting out of the working class from the thoroughfares, so tender a concealment of everything which might affront the eye and the nerves of the bourgeoisie, as in Manchester. And yet, in other respects, Manchester is less built according to plan, after official regulations, is more an outgrowth of accident, than any other city; and when I consider in this connection the eager assurances of the middle class, that the working class is doing famously, I cannot help feeling that the liberal manufacturers, the Big Wigs of Manchester, are not so innocent after all, in the matter of this sensitive method of construction.\"
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In fact with certain obvious modifications, Engels's description could easily be made to fit the contemporary American city (concentric zoning with good transport facilities for the affluent who live on the outskirts, sheltering of commuters into the city from seeing the grime and misery which is the complement of their wealth, etc.).
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The brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each in his private interest becomes the more repellent and offensive, the more these individuals are crowded together within a limited space. . . . The dissolution of mankind into monads, of which each
one has a separate principle, the world of atoms, is here carried out to its utmost extreme. . . . Hence it comes too, that the social war, the war of each against all, is here openly declared . . . people regard each other only as useful objects; each exploits the other, and the end of it all is, that the stronger treads the weaker under foot, and that the powerful few, the capitalists, seize everything for themselves, while to the weak many, the poor, scarcely a bare existence remains. . .
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If we cleaned up the language a bit (by eliminating the references to capitalism, for example), we would have a description worthy of the Kerner Commission Report (1968)
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The question which Engels posed, concerning the way in which such a system could evolve without guidance from the \"Big Wigs\" and yet be to their clear advantage, has subsequently been the subject of detailed economic analysis
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When put in competition with each other, we find the poor group forced to live in the centre of the city, and the rich group living outside (just as Engels described it). This means that the poor are forced to live on high rent land. The only way they can adjust to this, of course, is to save on the quantity of space they consume and crowd into a very small area.
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We have an enormous quantity of social capital locked up in the housing stock, but in a private market system for land and housing, the value of the housing is not always measured in terms of its use as shelter and residence, but in terms of the amount received in market exchange, which may be affected by external factors such as speculation
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The market system is a highly decentralized control device for the coordination and integration of economic action. The extension of this coordinative ability has historically allowed an immense increase in the production of wealth. We therefore find a paradox, namely that wealth is produced under a system which relies upon scarcity for its functioning. It follows that if scarcity is eliminated, the market economy, which is the source of productive wealth under capitalism, will collapse. Yet capitalism is forever increasing its productive capacity. To resolve this dilemma many institutions and mechanisms are formed to ensure that scarcity does not disappear
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There are some curious features about ghetto housing. One paradox is that the areas of greatest overcrowding are also the areas with the largest number of vacant houses. There are about 5,000 vacant structures in Baltimore—a good many of which are in reasonable condition—and they are all located in areas of greatest overcrowding
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places of all those epidemics which from time to time afflict our towns. . . . Capitalist rule cannot allow itself the pleasure of creating epidemic diseases among the working class with impunity; the consequences fall back on it and the angel of death rages in its ranks as ruthlessly as in the ranks of the workers. As soon as this fact had been scientifically established the philanthropic bourgeoisie began to compete with one another in noble efforts
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on behalf of the health of their workers. Societies were founded, books were written, proposals drawn up, laws debated and passed, in order to close the sources of the ever-recurring epidemics. The housing conditions of the workers were examined and attempts were made to remedy the most crying evils. . . . Government Commissions were appointed to inquire into the hygienic conditions of the working classes.\" (
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In reality the bourgeoisie has only one method of solving the housing question after its fashion—that is to say, of solving it in such a way that the solution continually reproduces the question anew. This method is called 'Haussmann'. ... By 'Haussmann' I mean the practice which has now become general of making breaches in the working class quarters of our big towns, and particularly in areas which are centrally situated, quite apart from whether this is done from considerations of public health and for beautifying the town, or owing to the demand for big centrally situated business premises, or owing to traffic requirements, such as the laying down of railways, streets (which sometimes appear to have the strategic aim of making barricade fighting more difficult). . . . No matter how different the reasons may be, the result is everywhere the same; the scandalous alleys disappear to the accompaniment of lavish self-praise from the bourgeoisie on account of this tremendous success, but they appear again immediately somewhere else and often in the immediate neighborhood! . . . The breeding places of disease, the infamous holes and cellars in which the capitalist mode of production confines our workers night after night, are not abolished; they are merely shifted elsewhere
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is therefore interesting to note that urban policy at the present time appears to involve a shift in emphasis from trying to save the inner cities (where programmes are doomed to failure) to trying to preserve the \"gray areas\" where the market system is still sufficiently vigorous to make it possible to achieve some degree of success
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Such discussions and solutions serve only to make us look foolish, since they eventually lead us to discover what Engels was only too aware of in 1872—that capitalist solutions provide no foundation for dealing with deteriorated social conditions. They are merely \"de-phlogisticated air\"
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Our task does not lie here. Nor does it lie in what can only be termed \"moral masturbation\" of the sort which accompanies the masochistic assemblage of some huge dossier on the daily injustices to the populace of the ghetto, over which we beat our breasts and commiserate with each other before retiring to our fireside comforts. This, too, is counter-revolutionary for it merely serves to expiate guilt without our ever being forced to face the fundamental issues,
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Empirical evidence, the already assembled dossiers, and the experiences gained in the community can and must be used here. But all of those experiences and all of that information means little unless we synthesize it into powerful patterns of thought
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Pareto optimality as it enters location theory is a counter-revolutionary concept, as is any formulation which calls for the maximization of any one of the partial manifestations of surplus value (such as rent or return on capital investment). Yet programming solutions are clearly extremely relevant devices for understanding how resources can best be mobilized for the production of surplus value.
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There is no necessary plot involved (although the control of the media, indoctrination and propaganda often suppress potentially revolutionary ideas). The \"hidden hand\" is fairly effective at ruling our thoughts as well as our economy
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This means that in general all knowledge is suffused with apologetics for the status quo and with counter-revolutionary formulations which function to frustrate the investigation of alternatives. It also means that the organization of knowledge (including the disciplinary divisions) has an inherently status quo or counterrevolutionary posture. The pursuit of knowledge and the organization and dissemination of it are inherently conservative
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In this it has first to be recognized that all disciplinary boundaries are themselves counter-revolutionary. The division of knowledge allows the body politic to divide and rule as far as the application of knowledge is concerned
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The difficulty arises because Marx uses words in a relational and dialectical way. Use value and exchange have no meaning in and of themselves
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For Marx, they take on meaning (come into existence if you will) through their relationship to each other (and to other concepts) and through their relationship to the situations and circumstances under discussion (Oilman, 1971, 179-89). The term \"use value\" can thus be applied to all manner of objects, activities and events in particular social and natural settings.
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He concludes that the creation of exchange value resides in the social process of applying socially necessary labour to objects of nature to yield up material objects (commodities) suitable for consumption (use) by man
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Marx there argues that human beings have, through history, become progressively more alienated (1) from the product of labour (from the world of objects and from nature), (2) from the activity of production (as control is lost over the means of production), (3) from their own inherent \"species being\" (which stems from the sense in which human beings are a part of nature and therefore have a human nature) and (4) from each other (as each individual assumes an identity and is forced to compete rather than to cooperate with others).
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Geographers, planners and sociologists, on the other hand, have treated of commodities in their use value aspects only or, if they sought for analytical enlightenment, have borrowed unquestioningly from the marginal analytics. Use value provides the conceptual underpinning of traditional geographical and sociological treatments of land-use problems, but it is used in such a way that land-use studies lie \"outside of the sphere of investigation of political economy
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The Marxist device for bringing use value and exchange value into a dialectical relationship with each other demands consideration for it offers the dual prospect of breathing new life into geographical and sociological studies of land use, and of building a bridge between spatial and economic approaches to urban land-use problems. The latter prospect may be as beneficial to contemporary economics as it is to contemporary spatial analysis.
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Geographers and sociologists, for example, have evolved a variety of land-use theories which focus on patterns of use. The concentric zone, multiple nuclei and sectoral \"theories\" are nothing more than generalized descriptions of patterns of use in the urban space economy
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It is also presumed that individuals bid for housing at a location up until the point where the extra amount of \"satisfaction\" gained from a move is exactly equal to the marginal utility of laying out an extra quantity of money. From this conceptualization it is possible to derive equilibrium conditions in the urban housing market—conditions which are held to be Pareto optimal
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The remarkable fact here is that although the theories derived analytically out of the micro-economic framework cannot be regarded as \"true\" in the sense that they have been subjected to rigorous empirical testing, these theories of urban land use (although normative) yield results which are not too much at variance with the realities of city structure
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What is a use value for one is an exchange value for another, and each conceives use value differently. The same house can take on a different meaning depending upon the social relationships which individuals, organizations and institutions express in it.
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This treatment of spatial uniqueness (or absolute space) plainly will not do. Spatial uniqueness cannot be reduced to mere immobility nor to a question merely of transport access.
To say that space has absolute properties is to say that structures, people and land parcels exist in a manner that is mutually exclusive each of the other in a three-dimensional, physical (Euclidean) space. This concept is not in itself an adequate conceptualization of space for formulating urban land-use theory. The distance between points is relative because it depends upon the means of transportation, on the perception of distance by actors in the urban scene, and so on (see chapter 1).
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But we cannot ever afford to forget that there cannot be more than one land parcel in exactly the same location. This means that all spatial problems have an inherent monopolistic quality to them. Monopoly in absolute space is a condition of existence not something experienced as a deviation from the spaceless world of perfect competition. In capitalist society this characteristic of absolute space is institutionalized through the private property relation, so that \"owners\" possess monopoly privileges over \"pieces\" of space.
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In the housing market with a fixed housing stock the process is analogous to filling up seats sequentially in an empty theatre. The first who enters has n choices, the second has n—i, and so on, with the last having no choice. If those who enter do so in order of their bidding power then those with money have more choices, while the poorest take up whatever is left after everyone else has exercised choice. This conceptualization is suggestive—
particularly if it is brought together with the concept of consumers' surplus
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Consumers' surplus is the difference between what an individual actually pays for a good and what he or she would be willing to pay rather than go without it
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As a consequence we may find the richest group in the United States paying on average say, $50,000 for houses that they would be prepared (on average) to bid 875,000 for rather than do without, while poorer groups may be paying $5,000 for housing that they might each be prepared to pay $6,000 for (yielding a consumer's surplus of $25,000 in the first case and a mere $1,000 in the second). Whether the rich groups gain more consumers' surplus per dollar of outlay on housing than do the poor is a matter for empirical investigation
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The phenomenon of class monopoly is very important in explaining urban structure and it therefore requires elucidation. There is a class of housing consumers who have no credit rating and who have no choice but to rent wherever they can. A class of landlords emerges to provide for the needs of those consumers but since the consumers have no choice the landlords, as a class, have monopoly power. Individual landlords compete with each other but as a class they exhibit a certain common patterning in behaviour—they will withdraw housing from the market, for example, if the rate of return on capital falls below a certain level. Arriving last in the market in an economic sense has to be differentiated from arriving last for other reasons
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The rich, who have plenty of economic choice, are more able to escape such consequences of monopoly, than are the poor whose choices are exceedingly limited. We therefore arrive at the fundamental conclusion that the rich can command space whereas the poor are trapped in it (see above
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Yet poor groups have a singular power (a power which many of them probably wish they were not blessed with) in that richer groups in contemporary society do not take easily to living in close geographical proximity to them. The poor therefore exert a social pressure which can vary in its form from a mere felt presence, through a gross exhibition of all those social pathologies associated with poverty, to a fully fledged riot. The latter helps to open up the housing market to the poor most marvellously.
Instead of a \"filter down\" theory, therefore, it might be more interesting to examine a \"blow out\" theory. Social and physical pressure is exerted at the bottom end of the housing market and this is transmitted up the socioeconomic scale until the richest are pressured to move (we are leaving out of the picture, of course, the problem of new household formation, in-migration and so on). This formulation is, however, clearly unrealistic for the rich possess the political and economic power to resist encroachment, while the socioeconomic group immediately below them is unlikely to be as unacceptable in its behaviour as is the poorest group
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In practice, the dynamics of the housing market can probably best be viewed as a combination of \"blow out\" and \"filter down\"
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Land is fixed in both location and aggregate supply, and the neo-classical fiction that it is neither (accepted completely by Muth, for example) is an innocent trap which can easily lead us into a misinterpretation of the forces determining urban land use. We neglect the realities of absolute, relative and relationally determined space and time at our peril. As Lösch (1954, 508) has it: \"particularity is the price of our existence\"
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Differential rent obviously cannot enter into the cost of production or the price of products for it merely arises out of excess profits to certain producers by virtue of their advantageous situation. These excess profits can be pocketed by landowners in the form of rent
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Capitalist production cannot afford, in Marx's view, to destroy the institution of private property (in the way it had destroyed many other feudal institutions) because its own existence is predicated on the private ownership of the means of production. Capitalism is therefore prepared to pay a tax on production (rent) as the price for perpetuating the legal basis for its own existence.
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It is intriguing to compare this analysis of the rental concept with views on the nature of space, for the two sets of ideas exist in a peculiar relationship to each other. The monopoly privileges of private property arise out of the absolute qualities of space which are institutionalized in a certain way. In the sphere of social activity absolute space emerges as the basis for monopoly rent.
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Monopoly rents can then be interpreted in the neoclassical tradition as arising through the artificial manipulation of scarcity through producers' manipulation of the supply of land
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eliminates a distinction which Marx and some subsequent analysts (such as Henry George) are unwilling to forget for obvious ethical reasons
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These costs impinge upon the user of land who is bound to be sensitive to them. In case the message is not clear, the property tax, assessed by convention against the highest and best use, soon lets the user know that his or her use is not consistent with potential exchange value. And filtering (stimulated by new sprawl) and blow-out pressures lead to falling house prices in the inner city. Hence arises the paradox of the American city; house prices are falling most rapidly in what are, from the relational point of view, the most valuable locations
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. The problem under these conditions is to discover (or generate) firms with production functions which can readily adjust to absorb these costs. It is not surprising to find, therefore, that the highest rent areas in the city are colonized by commercial activities whose productivity cannot be measured—government offices, banks, insurance companies, stockbrokers, travel agents and various forms of entertainment, are good examples. Hence arises the paradox that some of the most unproductive activity in society is found on land which is supposedly of the greatest marginal productivity by virtue of its location
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Among geographers, planners and sociologists, many of whom are not sympathetic towards or cognizant of the abstractions of the neo-classical economist, the models gain their currency and appeal because they appear empirically relevant devices for understanding the general structure of the urban system—a view which is fed further by the moderately successful testing of their models by Mills (1969) and Muth (1969)
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Competitive bidding is undoubtedly significant, but it assumes that land use determines value when in practice the reverse determination is more prevalent in most contemporary capitalist cities
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piecemeal that it is difficult to conclude anything of note save the obvious superficial generalities concerning such things as the significance of class and status, transport cost, political power, and so on, to the functioning of the urban system. Such observations as these accounts contain may be perceptive and, on occasion, enlightening as to the troubled nature of the human condition, but there is little real understanding of \"how it all hangs together\" or \"how it all comes about\"
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Much of what transpires in the urban land and property market is not susceptible to modelling by conventional techniques—it does not deserve to be ignored for this reason. Perhaps the most urgent task in contemporary circumstances is to understand how individual and class monopoly rents arise and to gain some insight into the processes whereby the creation of artificial scarcity, the growth of urban areas, and the ability to realize such rents are intimately related
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It is paradoxical, perhaps, that the neo-classical models, specified in their blurry fashion as outcomes of perfect and pure competition in a capitalist market exchange economy, can provide the basis for revolutionary advances with respect to the creation of socially efficient and humane urban structures. That this is the case testifies, however, to the fact that particular theories or models are not in themselves status quo, revolutionary or counter-revolutionary (see chapter 4). Theories and models only assume one or other of these statuses as they enter into social practice, either through shaping the consciousness of people with respect to the processes which operate around them, or through providing an analytical framework as a springboard for action.
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Hence, Marx argues (Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations; Capital, volume 3, 879) that a mode of production must create the conditions for its own perpetuation—the reproduction of these conditions becomes as important as production itself.
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The survival of an economic system requires, for example, the survival of the property relations upon which it is based. Marx therefore draws attention to the way in which a mode of production \"produces\" the conditions for its own existence
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There is, for instance, general agreement on the existence of a mode of production called \"feudal\" (Marx called it \"Germanic\"), but disagreement as to what exactly characterizes it and as to the societies to which it may validly be applied. In part, this contention arises because the specific attributes of feudalism were originally established by European historians working in a European context; these attributes have been much modified as scholars have extended their analyses to other contexts such as Japan (Hall, 1962) and early China (Wheatley, 1971).
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Some consider that capitalism is now qualitatively different from the mode of production which dominated the nineteenth century. Baran and Sweezy (1966), for example, argue that the monopoly form of capitalism is qualitatively different from the typical, nineteenth-century, individualistic capitalism
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Karl Polanyi (1968, 148-9) distinguishes between three distinctive modes of economic integration or coordinating mechanisms—reciprocity, redistribution and market exchange
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6vi-Strauss thus suggests that the science of the concrete was sufficiently sophisticated to provide the basis for the neolithic revolution in agriculture. Yet it was not sufficiently elaborate to embrace the rise of science which Childe (1942) saw as a
necessary concomitant of the urban revolution in Mesopotamia.
In general it is accepted by most scholars that egalitarian societies are incapable of supporting urbanism
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Rank societies are characterized by a redistributive mode of economic integration. Redistribution involves a flow of goods (or in some cases the establishment of rights over production) to support the activities of an elite.
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Integration through price-fixing markets is characteristic of the capitalist mode of production: it encourages the division of labour and the geographic specialization of production, and, through competition, it stimulates the drive towards the adoption of new technologies and the organization of a reasonably efficient space economy. Consequently, it increases enormously the prospect for the creation of material wealth in society as a whole. It tends always to bring about enlarged reproduction. But market exchange rests on scarcity, for without it price-fixing markets could not function. So scarcity leads to wealth via the market exchange system while the preservation of market exchange requires that scarcity be maintained.
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Max Weber (1904) and other writers (for example, Tawney, 1937) have recognized an essential connection between changes in religious ideology and the rise of European capitalism
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To summarize: reciprocity, redistribution and market exchange are three distinctive modes of economic integration. They are indicative of certain correlative features in the ideological superstructure of society: status, class, the projection of both into patterns of political power, definite supportive institutions and states of social consciousness are perhaps the most significant of these features.
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obviously be certain social needs depending upon the social conditions and relationships necessary to maintain production. Transformations in society inevitably bring about transformations in actual and perceived needs for, as Marx puts it in The Poverty of Philosophy (147; see also
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Part of the objection which Marx voiced against the capitalist mode of production was that the drive to maximize the capitalist forms of surplus value inevitably leads the capitalists as a class (even against their own individual wills) to drive down the levels of subsistence in the labouring population closer and closer to the subminimal requirement line. In the process labour is dehumanized and reduced to an \"animal\" existence. The performance of the early industrialists, in particular, does not seem to have been remarkably different from that of those early bureaucrats of the Chou dynasty who, as Wheatley infers, found it possible to \"wring from the most wretched of cultivators yet another exaction for the support of the central bureaucracy\".
In a capitalist economy, surplus value is a quantity measured in exchange value or money terms. In a redistributive economy
value is equated to moral worth.
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A portion of the labourer's day is devoted to producing surplus value and a portion of it is allocated to producing the equivalent of whatever it takes to maintain and reproduce labour power. Surplus labour is therefore that labour power expended by the labourer for the support of someone or something else. From this arises the connection between the Marxist concept of an alienated surplus and alienated labour.
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latter mode of economic integration therefore leads to a far more vigorous pursuit of surplus labour power than does the former. In other words, slave labour by itself tends to be less exploitive than wage labour.
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There is, however, a deeper economic problem to be resolved in the shift from reciprocity to redistribution and the ultimate emergence of market exchange. This is the problem of expanded production which leads in turn to the problem of primitive accumulation. Rosa Luxemburg puts it this way: \"simple reproduction as a mere continuous repetition of the process of production on the same scale as before can be observed over long periods of social history. . . . But simple reproduction is the source and unmistakable sign of general economic and cultural stagnation. No important forward step in production would be possible without expanding reproduction; for the basis and also the social incentive for a decisive advancement of civilization lies solely in the gradual expansion of production beyond immediate requirements.\" (1913, 41.
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Marx and Luxemburg both argue that this entails \"primitive accumulation\", which Marx defined as \"nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production\"—a process of expropriation \"written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire\" (Capital, volume 1, 714-15). Primitive accumulation means the exploitation of a certain section of the population—either through the appropriation of accumulated use values existing as fixed assets, or through the appropriation of labour power
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. Firstly, a part of the surplus has to be used to create new means of production. Insofar as this investment assumes a fixed form, it may contribute to the built form of the city. Secondly, primitive accumulation requires the concomitant growth of an effective demand for the surplus product produced. Under the capitalist mode of production this poses a peculiar difficulty in that the capitalist class is directly interested in expanding exchange value and in order to do this an effective demand—through the expansion of old or the creation of new uses—has to be created. In redistributive economies—which are bound to use values— this problem does not arise in the same way. But in both cases we find that the city functions as a locus for disposing of surplus product. Monumental architecture, lavish and conspicuous consumption, and need-creation in contemporary urban society, are all different manifestations of this same phenomenon. The city can thus partly be interpreted as a field for generating effective demand.
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If surplus value is regarded as a particular manifestation of surplus labour under capitalist (market exchange) conditions, then it follows that urbanism in capitalist societies can be analysed in terms of the creation, appropriation and circulation of surplus value. It is not sufficient, however, merely to assert such an important proposition a priori. The truth of it can be attested to only by a study of urbanism under the capitalist mode of production.
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The simplest form of spatial circulation arises when a city extracts surplus product from an agricultural hinterland. Internal differentiation in the economy of the city is associated with the circulation of surplus value within the city, and with the rise of industrialism the city becomes a locus for the production as well as the extraction of surplus value
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Castells (1970), for example, differentiates between the metropolitan forms of North America and Western Europe and the dependent urban forms of much of the rest of the world. Dependent urbanism arises in situations where the urban form exists as a channel for the extraction of quantities of surplus from a rural and resource hinterland for purposes of shipment to the major metropolitan centres. This colonial form of urbanism is currently characteristic, for example, in much of Latin America (Frank, 1969) but in the early nineteenth century it was, as Pred (1966) notes, dominant in the United States
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Hoselitz (i960, chapter 8) draws a useful if somewhat simplistic distinction between \"generative\" and \"parasitic\" cities. A generative city contributes to the economic growth of the region in which it is situated, whereas a parasitic city does not. A generative city will allocate a considerable amount of the surplus value accumulated within it to forms of investment that enlarge production. The investments may be in the city or in the surrounding rural area
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In this situation the city does return certain benefits to the rural area and hence arises the view, common to Adam Smith (1776, Book 3) and Jane Jacobs (1969), that the city is beneficial to the countryside because the city is the centre of technological innovation and the catalyst for general economic growth and economic advancement. From the city the country receives new products, new means of production, technological innovations, and the like. Adam Smith thus resolves to his own satisfaction what has the appearance of a serious moral dilemma—the fact that \"the town may very properly be said to gain its whole wealth and subsistence from the country.\"
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noticeable here that Smith ignores the problem of primitive accumulation and circumvents thereby the simple but unassailable fact that towns have historically been founded upon the extraction and concentration of a social surplus product.
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Urban centres have frequently been \"generative\" but the need to accomplish primitive accumulation militates against the process being naturally and reciprocally beneficial as both Adam Smith and Jane Jacobs envision it, for the processes of primitive accumulation are, in Marx's words, \"anything but idyllic\".
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Parasitic cities, on the other hand, are characterized by a form of social and economic organization which is dedicated to consuming the social surplus, often through enterprises that are conspicuously wasteful from an economic point of view (whatever their religious or military significance). Wolf (1959, 106-9) regards the theocratic centres of early Mexico as parasitic and C. T. Smith (1967, 329) indicates that many towns in eleventh-century Europe also exhibited parasitic qualities. A parasitic city is geared to simple reproduction rather than to that enlarged reproduction upon which advances in civilization and economy are based.
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Gramsci (Prison Notebooks, 90-102) perceptively distinguishes, for example, between the parasitic urbanism of the Italian South in the 1930s in which there was a \"literal subjugation of the city to the countryside\" (because the city was the home of a rentier class and a bureaucracy which lived off a surplus extracted from agriculture), and the generative urbanism of the Italian North in which there was a continual enlargement of production through industry and commerce, together with a concomitant creation of a large industrial urban proletariat.
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As Lefebvre puts it: \"the same problems [of urbanism] may be found under socialism and under capitalism with the same absence of response\" (1970, 220). In China the situation appears to be different. The socialist revolution here was rural-based and the historical tension in Chinese life between town and country had to be dealt with directly
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Russian policy appears to be devoted to perpetuating the historical cleavage between town and country; Chinese policy seems aimed to resolve it. This contrast within \"socialist\" countries takes on an even deeper significance when it is set against the naturally evolving progress of urbanization in the advanced capitalist nations where town-country distinctions are fast being obliterated through a megalopolitan form of spatial organization
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It is more realistic therefore, to model an urbanized space economy as a surplus-creating, -extracting and -concentrating device. Liberal policy suggestions of the sort advocated by John Friedmann (1966; 1969) envisage generating economic growth in underdeveloped nations through the creation of an \"effective space\" within which products and people can be mobilized in a hierarchical form of urbanism: clearly this policy would create a form of spatial organization which would serve merely to increase the rate of exploitation and to create the necessary conditions for the efficient and irresistible extraction of even greater quantities of surplus for the ultimate benefit of the imperial powers (see Frank, 1969)
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A distinction must be made between an alienated surplus fashioned out of alienated labour and the unalienated form which the surplus can assume in certain societies.
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The pattern of flows in a predominantly redistributive economy can also vary a great deal. The particular structural characteristics of the rank society will be reflected in the built form of the city. Wheatley (1969; 1971) provides some excellent examples of this in his discussion of the symbolic qualities of various city forms. To demonstrate the general point at issue, however, we will examine very briefly the variety of forms assumed by market exchange
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Groups may form which compete with other groups. Monopolies in consumption and production may arise. All kinds of combinations can arise with monopolistic production flowing to individual consumers, oligopolistic producers dealing with monopoly consumers and so on.
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Trade and commerce therefore appear as the first sectors of activity to be penetrated by market exchange. The extraordinary thing is that market exchange took so long to penetrate other aspects of social life and activity. Even in England, both land and labour remained, by and large, outside of the self-regulating market economy until 1750 or thereabouts: though there were markets for land and labour much earlier, these were not self-regulating. The penetration of land (with the help of the enclosure acts) meant the penetration of agriculture. This generated a pressure to maximize agricultural output for profit. At the same time large numbers of rural dwellers were deprived (by the combination of enclosure and market forces) of control over the means of production and were forced off the land and into the cities.
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Subsequently, market exchange penetrated and integrated new territories into a global capitalist economy throughout which surplus value freely and restlessly roamed in search of expanded reproduction and primitive accumulation
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One of the problems that plagues capitalist production is the failure of the price mechanism to transmit the right signals under certain conditions. In this case, the majority of participants in the market exchange process will make the wrong decisions and an economic breakdown inevitably occurs. Marx argued that this condition was endemic to capitalism and that it was bound to become more and more serious as capital accumulation proceeded, while Keynes thought of it as a serious blemish which could be overcome by government intervention (Mattick, 1969). Keynesian policies are designed to cure what is viewed as a structural
weakness in the price mechanism. But for Marx the defects in the price mechanism were but a symptom of a deep structural malaise inherent in the circulation of surplus value to create more surplus value. If Marx is correct, then localized breakdowns in the price mechanism (as frequently exhibited, for example, in housing markets) cannot be attributed to mere deficiencies in price information. They are more likely to indicate deep-seated problems in the process of capitalist circulation itself
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The contemporary metropolis in capitalist countries is a veritable palimpsest of social forms constructed in the images of reciprocity, redistribution and market exchange
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It is the central thesis of this essay that by bringing together the conceptual frameworks surrounding (i) the surplus concept, (2) the mode of economic integration concept and (3) concepts of spatial organization, we will
arrive at an overall framework for interpreting urbanism and its tangible expression, the city.
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Disruption in the geographical circulation of the surplus can occur for a variety of reasons, accidents, natural calamities and natural processes. The decline of many a medieval European port, for example, has been attributed, sometimes erroneously,
to the silting up of channels (Bruges being the most debated example). The exhaustion of a key resource and the opening up of new resources (through technology or the opening up of new trade routes) can bring about rapid shifts in the circulation of surplus and powerful and important cities into being, and can just as quickly destroy them. Nuremburg, Augsburg and numerous other Bavarian towns were central to the circulation of surplus in medieval Europe because they controlled access to the much valued silver supply. But the importation of large quantities of gold and silver through the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century relegated the area to a quiet backwater of the European economy
vi vi
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Pirenne (1925) notes how the towns of southern France declined during the Carolingian era as the Muslims came to dominate Mediterranean trade: the towns, deprived of long distance trade, then reverted to local redistributive functions focused on the Catholic Church and the local nobility
vi vi
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adaptation and substitution in surplus circulation allow new geographical configurations to emerge in order to replace the old. In other cases, the quantity of surplus in motion increases and urbanization exhibits an overall growth within which individual cities may die, stagnate or expand
vi vi vi
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The basic source of power of the priesthood that ruled the holy towns was apparently power over men's minds and power over goods gained in the service of the gods. But there is an inherent limitation to purely ideological power
vi vi
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This sort of structural weakness has been endemic among all redistributive economies. It was, for example, the crux of the problem for the survival of the Roman Empire and many lesser urbanized societies have ultimately collapsed because of the inability to cope with an inherent structural weakness in their mode of economic integration (cf. Johnson, 1970).
vi vi
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Any mode of economic integration contains within itself the power to undermine the conditions for its own self-perpetuation. This capacity indicates a structural weakness in both redistribution and market exchange potentially able to inflict a severe and perhaps total disruption in the circulation of the surplus upon which urbanism relies
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Other redistributive societies have sought to perpetuate ideological control within a fairly stable space economy by a mixture of military action and ideological persuasion. Capitalism, however, has shown itself to be an inherently expansionary force; insofar as its existence is predicted on putting surplus value into circulation to increase surplus value, it has to expand in order to survive. Hence arises a process of generating and subsequently overcoming contradictions through expansion (see above, p
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The surplus for the support of the various elements in the rank society was extracted as tithe, work-days and slave labour while privilege was attached to land-ownership (held through laws of heredity) and to position within the church hierarchy. Military power andideological control were the twin controls which served to maintain society. The urban centres that did exist were, for the most part, fortresses or religious centres; sometimes church and fortress could combine to form a centre of considerable significance
vi vi
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In terms of the prevailing sense of value in catholic and feudal society, it was both immoral and dehumanizing to trade for profit and to take advantage of scarcity. The prevailing ethic of the rank society was anti-capitalist in most respects (the laws governing usury being the most conspicuous example)
vi vi
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merchants in medieval society were not capitalistic in any fundamental sense, however. For the most
part, they did not seek or desire to control production and labour, nor actively to replace a social and economic system which yielded great profit for their ventures and to whose social norms they generally subscribed.
vi vi vi
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Seen in this light, merchant capital and the urbanism to which it gave rise, must be regarded as a conservative rather than a revolutionary force. The prevention of spatial integration in production, the establishment of monopolies through which the terms of trade could be dictated to producers, the emergence of \"urban colonialism\" with respect to the surrounding countryside (Dobb, 1947, 95), were all important aspects to the conservatism of merchant capital.
vi vi vi
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Whatever the exact relationship, however, it was clear the commerce of the towns was to be regulated politically by the rank society. This regulation relied initially upon articles of incorporation which gave the city a legal structure and conferred rights and duties on its inhabitants which were markedly different from those which regulated the feudal economy. The city thus assumed the form of a territorial corporation. This corporation was designed to facilitate commerce, but it also sought to promote monopolistic advantages vis-à-vis other cities, as well as to regulate internal conflict.
vi vi iv
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Authority and power derived from the institutions of the rank society (and here the catholic church played an even more important supportive role) were used to legitimize trade and commerce as well as various acts of primitive accumulation through piracy and war. This redistributive activity was designed to distribute wealth in a manner commensurate with the social ordering of the prestige-conscious rank society.
vi vi
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The industrialization that ultimately subdued merchant capital was not an urban phenomenon, but one which led to the creation of a new form of urbanism—a process in which Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham were transformed from insignificant villages or minor trading centres, to industrial cities of great productive might. In this process, it must be added, the once dominant trading centres, fashioned as they were by the peculiar ethic of merchant capitalism as well as by an economic function which was basically parasitic, diminished in economic and political significance. Amsterdam bowed to London and Bristol bowed to Birmingham.
vi vi
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Marx's characterization of modern history as \"the urbanization of the countryside\"
vi
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Contemporary metropolitanism\" is embedded in a global economy of great complexity. That economy is hierarchically ordered with local centres dominating local hinterlands, more important metropolitan centres dominating lesser centres, and all centres outside of the communist nations being ultimately subordinate to the central metropolitan areas in North America and Western Europe
vi vi vi
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The settler's town is a strongly built town, all made of stone and steel. It is a brightly-lit town; the streets are covered with asphalt, and the garbage-cans swallow all the leavings, unseen, unknown and hardly thought about. . . . The settler's town is a well-fed town, an easy-going town; its belly is always full of good things. The settler's town is a town of white people, of foreigners. The town belonging to the colonized people . . . is a place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil repute. They are born there, it matters little where or how; they die there, it matters not where, nor how. It is a world without spaciousness; men live there on top of each other, and their huts are built one on top of the other. The native town is a hungry town, starved of bread, of shoes, of meat, of coal, of light. The native town is a crouching village, a town on its knees, a town wallowing in the mire. It is a town of niggers and dirty arabs.\" (ibid
vi vi
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The historical struggle between town and country in China, Algeria and Vietnam has to be interpreted in these terms, and our conception of urbanism has to be modified accordingly
vi vi
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Surplus value may be extracted at every transaction point whether it be in the primary, secondary (manufacturing), tertiary (distribution and services) or what may be designated quaternary (financial and money manipulating activities) sectors of the economy
vi
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But as metropolitan areas have increased in size and significance, so the proportion of surplus value extracted through socially unnecessary and unproductive transactions has increased. The contemporary metropolis therefore appears vulnerable, for if the rate at which surplus value is being appropriated at the centre (if profit levels are to be maintained) exceeds the rate at which social product is being created, then financial and economic collapse is inevitable
vi
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All activity must ultimately be supported by that simple conversion of naturally occurring materials into objects of utility to man—appropriation has to relate to the production of socially needed goods and services, otherwise the rate of profit is bound to fall
vi vi what about service economy, information tech?
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Polanyi (1944) puts it this way:
\"To allow the market mechanism to be the sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment, indeed, even of the amount and use of purchasing power, would result in the demolition of society. For the alleged commodity \"labour power\" cannot be shoved about, used indiscriminately, or even left unused, without affecting also the human individual who happens to be the bearer of this peculiar commodity.
vi vu
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the market exchange system is so organized as to contain certain checks which in themselves serve to stave off (at least for a time) its most destructive aspects. The
two most important features here are the various forms of monopoly control (monopoly, oligopoly, cartel arrangements, informal non-competitive arrangements, etc.) and a rapid rate of technological innovation.
vi vi
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Veblen (1923) argues that the country towns in nineteenth century America functioned basically as centres of monopoly control over wholesaling, retailing and the shipment of agricultural products
vi vi vu
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The self-regulating market has always operated under legal and institutional restraints; but it now frequently appears as if market prices are determined and dominated by a few powerful vested interest groups, who use their power in much the same way that the patrician clans in Venice of old expressed their moral and social norms through market exchange activity
vi vi vi
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The geographical concentration of people and productive activity in the large metropolitan centres in the advanced capitalist nations would not be possible without the enormous concentrations of surplus value in superordinate institutions such as large corporations and national government. Nor would this concentration be possible without an elaborate apparatus to protect the hierarchical structure of the global space economy in order to ensure the maintenance of flows from hinterlands to urban
centres, from lesser centres to larger centres and from all regional centres into the centres of capitalist activity
vi vi
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Chinitz (1958) details some of these. He suggests that an oligopolistically organized metropolitan economy, such as that of Pittsburgh, is less likely to breed entrepreneurial skills and to be less receptive to the in-migration of capitalist entrepreneurs
vi vi
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apply only those innovations which aid in the relentless drive to cut costs, to improve efficiency and to differentiate product in existing lines of activity. Jane Jacobs (1969) is undoubtedly correct in complaining that large and efficient corporate enterprise (and government activity) create city environments that inhibit a vigorous generative urbanism out of which new work and technological innovation can grow
vi vi vi
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few banks control much of the investment capital available within particular metropolitan areas. The circulation of surplus value from large financial institutions to large industrial corporations and back again—often symbolized by interlocking directorships within a fairly closed economic power structure— implies a relatively restricted flow of funds into new forms of production or into sectors of the economy which cannot, for technical reasons, be organized on a large scale. Sectors organized atomistically or on a small scale are usually serviced through some intermediary (a real estate corporation, a mortgage agency, a large landlord operation, a small business loan corporation, etc.).
vi vi vi
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The corporation must therefore create, maintain and expand the effective demand for its products. There are various strategems available. Perhaps the most successful is to create a need while eliminating the possibility for that need to be met by a substitution of product. The effective demand for automobiles (as well as oil products, highway construction, suburban construction, etc.) has been created and expanded through the total reorganization of the metropolitan built form so that it is all but impossible to live a \"normal\" social life without a car (except in areas where congestion is so great as to make automobile access expensive and difficult). A need has been created out of a luxury. And it is essential that this effective demand for automobiles—the linch-pin of the contemporary capitalist economies—be maintained and expanded. Otherwise there will be severe economic and financial disruption throughout the whole economy. On this basis it may be predicted, for example, that public transit systems can be built only insofar as they do not cut into (or effectively expand) the effective demand for transportation equipment. If the United States were suddenly covered by public transit systems, there would be massive unemployment in Detroit and an economic recession far more serious than the collapse of the 1930s.
vi vi vi holyoke
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But it is now necessary for urbanism to generate expanding consumption if the capitalist economy is to be maintained. Much of the expansion of GNP in capitalist societies is in fact bound up in the whole suburbanization process.
vi vi vi vi
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Planned obsolescence provides another means for maintaining effective demand and is particularly significant when it comes to expanding the rate of circulation of surplus value. In the redistributive city it was the physical life of buildings which mattered and many buildings were built to last. In the contemporary capitalist city it is the economic life which matters and this economic life-span is contracting as it becomes necessary to increase the rate of circulation of surplus value. Good buildings are torn down to make way for new buildings which will have an even shorter economic life span
vi vi
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Effective demand depends ultimately upon consumption. If we reject the view that mankind possesses a natural and insatiable appetite for consumer goods (as opposed to a culturally instilled commodity fetishism), then we are forced to consider the origins of effective demand. Within the global economy there is an obvious answer—the unfulfilled and real needs are everywhere apparent. Internally, within the metropolitan economy, there also exists a large potential effective demand in the unfulfilled needs of a poverty population. In the United States this population is substantial—five million or so families were officially defined as living in poverty in 1968 and half of these lived in metropolitan areas (the numbers close to, at or below the poverty line are even more substantial). Such poverty populations have a dual function. They can be viewed as an industrial reserve army (to use Marx's phrase) which can be either used as a threat to organized labour in wage disputes or as a surplus labour force to be drawn upon in times of expansion and relinquished in times of contraction
vi vi vi
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But much of the poverty in advanced metropolitan economies is found in populations who are incapable of joining the work force—the aged, female heads of households, and the like. These elements, which Marx called the stagnant group in the industrial reserve army, typically depend upon welfare for survival and therefore can be viewed as a tool for the manipulation of effective demand through government policies
vi vi vi vi hoyoke
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Since the self-regulating market leads different income groups to occupy different locations we can view the geographical patterns in urban residential structure as a tangible geographical expression of a structural condition in the capitalist economy. Residential segregation in the contemporary metropolis is therefore fundamentally different from the residential segregation exhibited in typical redistributive cities which was largely symbolic
vi vi
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growing scale of capitalist enterprise and the increasing quantities of product to which it has given rise, the creation of large-scale as opposed to localized monopolies, the generation of new needs to ensure an effective demand for product, planned obsolescence to facilitate an increasing rate of circulation of surplus value, elaborate mechanisms to ensure the structural maintenance of scarcity—these are but a few of the adaptations which have occurred in capitalism to resolve the difficulties it generates within itself
vi vi vi
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Asa Briggs (1963) describes, for example, how city governments during the first wave of industrialization in Britain took on a redistributive function to provide those public goods and services (such as sewers and sanitation facilities) that private entrepreneurs did not find profitable, as well as to alleviate to some degree the worst impacts of the wage system on the poorest groups in society (through the regulation of work conditions, housing conditions, and the like). These government interventions, minor at first, have become more and more significant over time. The public provision of public (and sometimes private) goods, together with private and public planning of the urban community \"in the public interest\", are now of major significance in shaping the geography of the contemporary city.
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Within nations state policies have considerable consequences for the built form of the contemporary metropolis. The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) legislation in the United States, for example, was set up to support mortgage financing of housing in the 1930s, but its main effect was to support financial institutions which were deeply troubled by the reverberations of the depression. The consequence has been, however, to stimulate suburbanization, because FHA loans are mostly geared to financing purchase of new rather than old stock (Douglas Commission, 1968).
vi vi Holyoke
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The changing distribution of disposable income among the various groups in society is reflected in the appearance of contemporary urbanism. This impact is most clearly evident in those countries, such as Britain and in Scandinavia, which have pursued welfare state policies with some persistency. In these countries society has achieved a dual structure in which a private sector is strongly differentiated from a public sector. This dualism is reflected in physical design
vi vi vi
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Market exchange reduces every human being to the status of a commodity. Few individuals find this an adequate measure of their own value or an adequate criterion by which to establish their own self-identity. Nor do many find it entirely satisfying to locate their total identity in a commodity fetishism which proclaims that \"I am what I can buy\" or \"I am what I
possess.\" Other measures of value are therefore very important. Here the criteria of moral worth inherent in the older rank societies provide an apparent relief to counter the impersonal and dehumanizing criteria of the market place. Status, rank, prestige and privilege provide more appealing ways of identifying self than that provided through commodity relationships in the market place. .Organizations are thus organized hierarchically, governmental and corporate bureaucracies are internally ordered, professional groups exhibit official or unofficial prestige orderings, each division of labour in society is organized like a mini-rank society, while certain occupations are designated \"high status\" by different ethnic, racial and religious groupings.
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The prevailing concern with the trappings of the rank society is real enough and produces tangible results in the urban space economy. Dominant organizations and institutions make use of space hierarchically and symbolically. Sacred and profane spaces are created, focal points emphasized, and space is generally manipulated to reflect status and prestige. The contemporary city therefore exhibits many similar features to those found in redistributive cities which Wheatley (1969 1971) interprets as symbolic constructs reflecting the mores of the rank society. It is usually held, for example, that western cities exhibit a focusing of activity at their centre for it is here that maximum accessibility exists to all market activity. In the contemporary city this is scarcely true any longer (the centres are maximally congested). The centre is still a prestigious location, however, and firms bid with prestige and status in mind. It may seem strange to think that what firms are bidding for in the heartless and cold analytics of the von Thünen-Alonso-Muth models is prestige, status and perhaps even divinity at the axis mundi of the capitalist city
vi vi vi holyoke
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Although the basic lineaments of residential structure in the contemporary metropolis are determined by competitive bidding power, its many nuances can be interpreted only as the result of individuals turning to the criteria of a rank society to differentiate themselves in the face of an homogenizing market exchange process
vi vi
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People attempt by all manner of means, to differentiate what the market place has in fact rendered homogeneous. Hence the urban space economy is replete with all manner of pseudo-hierarchical spatial orderings to reflect prestige and status in residential location. These orderings are very important to the self-respect of people, but are irrelevant to the basic economic structure of society
vi
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In the same way that redistribution and the rank society have been reconstituted in capitalist society, so reciprocity has also emerged in a new
vi
sense of community has been significant as a protective device in the industrial city ever since. In the early stages of industrial urbanization reciprocity was typically based on extended kinship relations, ethnic or religious identifications, or on the coming together of particular population groups under some threat (the sense of community is very strong in mining areas for example). Increased mobility and rapid changes in social
structure have done much to loosen these bonds. The former has also meant a lessening of attachment to any one particular locale. Spatial propinquity, geographical immobility and reciprocity in the community are undoubtedly related.
The decline of this traditional form of reciprocity in urban communities (much lamented by writers such as Jane Jacobs) has changed the functioning of the urban community. In the American city, ethnic bonds and a close-knit community structure have done much in the past to help resist the penetration of market exchange relationships into the daily life and hence of human relationships within the community.
vivi vi holyoke
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. Under these conditions reciprocity becomes a mode of economic integration in the economic basis of society. It operates under limited but very important conditions— whenever it is apparent to competitors that antagonistic competition will lead to the destruction of all concerned
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Reciprocity and redistribution are ancient and well-tried modes of economic integration. Far from being abandoned with the penetration of market exchange into all aspects of life, these older modes of economic integration and the social forms with which they are associated, have adapted to take on new and very significant roles.
vi vi
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Class and rank differentiation and patterns of mutual respect and support, are carefully intertwined in the life of the contemporary metropolis. Similarly the physical structure of the city reflects the peculiar combination of each with each
vi vi vi
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Leibniz and Spinoza
provide relational modes of thought and a concept of totality which Marx broadly accepted. Hegel provides a version of the dialectic, Kant provides innumerable dualisms to be resolved, the English political economists provide practical methods for investigating the material activities of production in society. Marx brought together all of these diffuse elements (and more) and constituted a method which, by the fusion of abstract theory and concrete practice, allowed the creation of a theoretical practice through which man could fashion history rather than be fashioned by it.
vi vi
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The totality seeks to shape the parts so that each part functions to preserve the existence and general structure of the whole. Capitalism, for example, seeks to shape the elements and relationships within itself in such a way that capitalism is reproduced as an ongoing system. Consequently, we can interpret the relationships within the totality according to the way in which they function to preserve and reproduce it
vi vi vi vi
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. They are frequently in contradiction and out of this contradiction flows conflict. Transformations occur through the resolution of these conflicts and with each transformation the totality is restructured and this restructuring in turn alters the definition, meaning and function of the elements and relationships within the whole. New conflicts and contradictions emerge to replace the old.
vi vi
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. Marx thus directs our attention to the processes of inner transformation in society. He does not speak of causes in the ordinary sense of the word, nor does he propose an historicist evolutionary schema as some seem to think he did.
vi vi
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contradictions which Marx exposed were of the internal variety, but that some of the more fundamental ones are to be interpreted as contradictions between structures. For example, the structure of the forces of production comes into conflict with the structure of the relations of production—a conflict that is expressed in the increasingly social character of capitalist production and the enduringly private character of capitalist control and consumption
vi vi i
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evolution of society as a totality must therefore be interpreted as the result of contradictions established both within and between structures. This theme flows throughout Marx's work and flows naturally from his basic ontology.
These questions of ontology are difficult to grapple with when posed in abstraction. But they are quite fundamental to understanding many of the issues raised in this book. Should we regard urbanism as a structure which can be derived from the economic basis of society (or from superstructural elements) by way of a transformation? Or should we regard urbanism as a separate structure in interaction with other structures?
vi vi vi vi
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It is irrelevant to ask whether concepts, categories and relationships are \"true\" or \"false\". We have to ask, rather, what it is that produces them and what is it that they serve to produce? Hence arises the distinction, hit upon in chapter 4, between revolutionary theories which are productive of change, status quo theories which are derived out of and help to preserve an existing situation, and counterrevolutionary theories which produce only confusion, obfuscation and frustration. Hence also arises the view that these theories in turn cannot be made use of in abstraction from an existing situation, but have to be applied through a study of the ways in which theories become a \"material force\" in society through their impact upon social action
vi vi vi vi
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Piaget points out has become standard method in logic and mathematics (1970, 124)—namely, construction by negation. Marx is thus prepared to turn problems into solutions and solutions into problems. This strategy is the foundation for the investigation in chapter 4 of this volume
vi vi vi
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The epistemological position of Marx gradually comes to affect the analyses presented in this book. Concepts and categories are subjected to critical scrutiny in the light of the relationships they express to the reality of which they are a part. In chapter 5, for example, the basic concepts inherent in urban land-use theory are examined in critical fashion. Rent, it is shown, has been accorded a position of great importance in that theory and has come to be treated in the neo-classical models as a universal category with a fixed meaning. Returning to Marx's analyses we can see that rent is not a universal category, but is a concept which takes on specific meaning only in specific social situations. Rent is nothing outside of the particular set of relationships in production and it can arise in a variety of ways depending on how these relationships are structured. From this position it is possible to forge a critique of contemporary urban land-use theory
vi vi vi
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Likewise the concept of space which presents such great philosophical difficulties in chapter 1 (and which degenerates as a consequence into a formless relativism) is rescued in chapter 5 by recognizing that the philosophical problems it presents have solutions only through the study and creation of human practice. Concepts of social justice also have to be considered as being both produced by and producers of social conditions. The abstracted analysis of social justice in chapter 3 is tacitly transformed in chapter 6 into an examination of how the sense of value which underlies the sense of social justice arises under the conditions of egalitarian, rank and stratified societies and how these conceptions can, when transformed into a dominant ideology, contribute to the support and maintenance of the social relationships within a mode of production
vi vi vi
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Under the domination of market exchange, redistribution (in the form of the state in particular) becomes a developed form of its former self, while reciprocity is reduced to a mere travesty. In this fashion the concepts, properly transformed, can be used to reflect, as in a mirror, the transformations that have occurred in society
vivi
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have already indicated that a radical transformation of method occurs between Part 1 and Part 2 of this book. This transformation in method does not negate the formulations of Part 1. It enriches them by assimilating them to higher order concepts.
vi
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necessity of the transformation and consequent convergence if the dilemmas that beset Part 1 are to be resolved. These dilemmas did not arise out of thin air of course. They arose out of a social situation in which the thoughts and intellectual efforts of
innumerable people were being devoted to what were perceived as pressing and serious problems. The issues which dominated in the late 1960s were those of urbanization, environment and economic development. These issues plainly could not be regarded as separate from each other and each appeared to demand an \"interdisciplinary\" approach if it was to be tackled effectively.
vi vi
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In other words, and this conclusion will be unpalatable to many, the only method capable of uniting disciplines in such a fashion that they can grapple with issues such as urbanization, economic development and the environment, is that founded in a properly constituted version of dialectical materialism as it operates within a structured totality in the sense that Marx conceived of it.
vi vi vi
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what insights and revelations do we gain through the use of Marx's method in the investigation of urban phenomena?
A preliminary answer to this question is attempted in chapter 6.
vi
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We cannot answer that urbanism is a \"thing\" in the ordinary sense of the word. The city as a built form can, it is true, be regarded as a set of objects arranged according to some pattern in space. But there are few who would argue that cities are just that. Most writers seem to agree that the city has to be regarded as a functioning totality within which everything is related to everything else. Various strategies have been advanced to deal with this totality. They fall, for the most part, in the two categories of atomistic association and emergent evolution that we have explicitly rejected. An example of the former is Wilson's (1970) entropy formulation while the spectacular design-mysticism of Doxiadis (1968) is surely an excellent example of the latter
vi
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Urbanism has to be regarded as a set of social relationships which reflects the relationships established throughout society as a whole. Further, these relationships have to express the laws whereby urban phenomena are structured, regulated and constructed. We then have to consider whether urbanism is (i) a separate structure with its own laws of inner transformation and construction, or (2) the expression of a set of relationships embedded in some broader structure (such as the social relations of production). If we assert the former, then we are obliged to identify the transformation laws internal to urbanism and the semi-autonomous processes that structure it as well as the relationship which urbanism bears to other structures in the totality. If we take the second view then we have to establish the process through which urbanism is derived out of other structures
vi vi vi
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The transformation from reciprocity to redistribution (examined in chapter 6) involved the creation of hierarchical self-sustaining set of social relationships. Marx regarded this as the crystallization of the first great class struggle in the form of the antagonism between town and country.
vi
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Max Weber's defining characteristics for occidental cities (a fortification; a market; a court of its own and partially autonomous law; a distinct form of association and partial autonomy and autocephaly) indicate this superstructural quality of early urbanism.
vi
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Lefebvre contrasts this first stage of urbanism—the political city—with two later stages—the commercial city and the industrial city
vi vi
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The urban transformation that occurred with the industrial revolution cannot be interpreted as a transformation from within. The new form of urbanism generally arose outside of the older cities and subsequently came to absorb the older more traditional functions of the political and commercial city
vi holyoke
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Lefebvre makes use of the traditional Marxist method of construction by negation and inversion—he seeks to interpret industrial society as a precursor of what he calls the \"urban revolution\":
\"when we use the words 'urban revolution' we designate the total ensemble of transformations which run throughout contemporary society and which serve to being about the change from a period in which questions of economic growth and industrialization predominate to the period in which the urban problematic becomes decisive, when research into the solutions and forms appropriate to urban society takes precedence
vi vi
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Industrialization, once the producer of urbanism, is now being produced by it. This subordination of industrial society to urban society entails certain further changes which, in turn, contain the seeds of further conflict
vi vi
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world becomes urbanized so there occurs a counter-movement interior to the urbanization process which leads to greater internal differentiation through the creation of distinctively local habitats. (1970, 1935.) It is at this local level that new and distinctive qualities of urbanism begin to emerge to compensate the homogeneity achieved at the global scale.
vi vi lefebvre
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Lefebvre's thesis
vi
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We both accept the same conception of the totality as inner-relatedness. We also both accept that urbanism has to be understood as a self-sustaining entity which expresses and fashions relationships with other structures in the totality. Neither of us regard urbanism as something simply derived out of other structures. Lefebvre also attempts to incorporate adequate concepts of space into his analysis. He notes the conflict between the dialectics of the social process and the static geometry of the spatial form and he arrives at a conceptualization of the social-process-spatial-form theme which is not too dissimilar from that which underlies the analyses in this volume. Urbanism, insofar as it possesses its own transformation laws, is at least partly moulded out of basic principles of spatial organization. The distinctive role which space plays in both the organization of production and patterning social relationships is consequently expressed in urban structure. But urbanism is not merely a structure fashioned out of a spatial logic. It has attached to it distinctive ideologies (urban versus rural images for example) and therefore has a certain autonomous function in fashioning the way of life of a people. And urban structure, once created, affects the future development of social relationships and the organization of production. I therefore like Lefebvre's analogy between urbanism and scientific knowledge. Both possess distinctive structures with their own inner dynamic. Both can alter the structure of the economic basis on occasion in fundamental ways. Yet both are channelled and constrained by the forces and influences emanating from the economic basis and ultimately have to be related to the production and reproduction of material existence if they are to be understood.
vi
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But as the old antagonisms between town and country come to play a much reduced role, so new antagonisms emerge in the heart of the urbanization process itself. At the global level there is the conflict between the metropolitan centres of the world and the underdeveloped nations (see chapter 6). At the local level we see the import of rural problems into the city—in the United States the migrations of rural Blacks and Appalachian Whites to inner city areas, in much of the Third World the precipitation out of the rural areas of large numbers of people who form an unstable \"lumpenproletariat\" (as Fanon calls them), usually in shanty towns around the edges of the major cities.
vi vi
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It becomes increasingly difficult to maintain the distinction between public and private particularly through the operation of those externalities discussed in detail in chapter 2. Traditional conceptions of property rights no longer appear adequate and have to be supplemented by the creation of collective property rights through the political organization of space. The antagonism between central city and suburb emerges as a major theme in American politics (again, see chapter 2).
vi vi
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As Lefebvre argues, industrial society homogenizes and urban society differentiates (1970, 169). The strong forces working towards cultural heterogeneity and territorial differentiation in the urban system were subject to detailed analysis in chapter 2. The notion of a \"one-dimensional man\" (Marcuse) living in an \"urban non-place realm\" (Melvin Webber) was explicitly rejected in that chapter and in this I am in entire agreement with Lefebvre.
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nature. Industrialization created the power to alter all that. The urbanization of the countryside implies the elimination of regional life-styles through the forces of the world market. The products and objects available for consumption and use become more standardized, more numerous and less tied to the local base. And the once vibrant life-styles of distinctive geographical regions, together with the distinctive landscapes they fashioned, are transformed into something preserved out of the past for tourists to look at. On this dimension we see increasing uniformity. Yet the urban system has also to be viewed, in the manner of chapter 2, as a giant man-made resource system \"of great economic, social, psychological and symbolic significance\". The growth of this man-made resource system involves the structuring and differentiation of space through the distribution of fixed capital investments. A new spatial structure is created and some of the old lines of regional differentiation are revived to accentuate the structure
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In the ancient city the organization of space was a symbolic re-creation of a supposed cosmic order. It had an ideological purpose. Created space in the modern city has an equivalent ideological purpose. In part it reflects the prevailing ideology of the ruling groups and institutions in society. In part it is fashioned by the dynamics of market forces which can easily produce results which nobody in particular wants (see chapter 5). Created space is an \"ethnic domain\" in only a very limited sense (see chapter 1). Yet created space is an integral part of an intricate sign-process that gives direction and meaning to daily life within the urban culture. The signs, symbols and signals that surround us in the urban environment are powerful influences (particularly among the young). We fashion our sensibilities, extract our sense of wants and needs, and locate our aspirations with respect to a geographical environment that is in large part created
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We scarcely know how to grapple, either in reality or in the mind, with the implications of created space. For example, we still tend to analyse urban phenomena as if effective space (largely understood as efficiency of movement) were the only appropriate concept
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(ii) Need creation and the maintenance of an effective demand are produced through the processes governing the evolution of industrial capitalism. Urbanization provides the opportunity for industrial capital to dispose of the products it creates. In this sense the urbanization process is still being propelled by the requirements of industrial capitalism
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In chapter 6 the relationship between urbanism and the circulation of surplus value is explored. Urbanism is there viewed as a product of the circulation of surplus value. This is a critical and important issue-and one which is probably the most important source of disagreement between Lefebvre and myself. I regard the channels through which surplus value circulates as the arteries through which course all of the relationships and interactions which define the totality of society. To understand the circulation of surplus value is in fact to understand the way in which society works.
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Lefebvre makes a simplistic but quite useful distinction between two circuits in the circulation of surplus value. The first circuit arises out of industrial activity and involves that simple conversion of naturally occurring materials and forces into objects and powers of utility to man. The second circuit involves the creation and extraction of surplus value out of speculation in property rights (of all sorts) and out of returns gained from the disbursement of fixed capital investments. Lefebvre argues \"Whereas the proportion of global surplus value formed and realized in industry declines, the proportion realized in speculation and in construction and real estate development grows. The secondary circuit comes to supplant the principal circuit\"
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Speculative activity has grown in proportion as fixed capital investment has grown and since urbanism is in part the product of the latter it is hardly surprising that urbanism and the circuit of speculative capital are intimately related to each other. The relevance of this idea is demonstrated in chapters 2 and 5 in this volume. But it is premature to argue that the second circuit has replaced the first
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So where does this leave us with respect to Lefebvre's thesis? To say that the thesis is not true at this juncture in history is not to say that it is not in the process of becoming true or that it cannot become true in the future. The evidence suggests that the forces of urbanization are emerging strongly and moving to dominate the centre stage of world history
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We have the opportunity to create space, to harness creatively the forces making for urban differentiation. But in order to seize these opportunities we have to confront the forces that create cities as alien environments, that push urbanization in directions alien to our individual or collective purpose. To confront these forces we have first to understand them. The old structure of industrial capitalism, once such a force for revolutionary change in society, now appears as a stumbling block. The growing concentration of fixed capital investment, the creation of new needs and effective demands, and a pattern of circulation of surplus value that rests upon appropriation and exploitation, all emanate from the internal dynamic of industrial capitalism.
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An urbanism founded upon exploitation is a legacy of history. A genuinely humanizing urbanism has yet to be brought into being. It remains for revolutionary theory to chart the path from an urbanism based in exploitation to an urbanism appropriate for the human species
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We live, after all, in a world in which the rights of private property and the profit rate trump all other notions of rights. I here want to explore another type of human right, that of the right to the city
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The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights
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Capitalists have to produce a surplus product in order to produce surplus value; this in turn must be reinvested in order to generate more surplus value. The result of continued reinvestment is the expansion of surplus production at a compound rate—hence the logistic curves (money, output, and population) attached to the history of capital accumulation, paralleled by the growth path of urbanization under capitalism.
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argue here that urbanization has played a particularly active role, alongside such phenomena as military expenditures, in absorbing the surplus product that capitalists perpetually produce in their search for profits.
URBAN REVOLUTIONS
Consider, first, the case of Second Empire Paris. The year 1848 brought one of the first clear, and European-wide, crises of both unemployed surplus capital and surplus labor. It struck Paris particularly hard and issued in an abortive revolution by unemployed workers and those bourgeois Utopians who saw a social republic as the antidote to the greed and inequality that had characterized the July Monarchy
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To survive politically, he resorted to widespread repression of alternative political movements. The economic situation he dealt with by means of a vast program of infrastructural investment both at home and abroad. In the latter case, this meant the construction of railroads throughout Europe and into the Orient, as well as support for grand works such as the Suez Canal
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Above all, it entailed the reconfiguration of the urban infrastructure of Paris. Bonaparte brought in Georges-Eugene Haussmann to take charge of the city's public works in 1853.
Haussmann clearly understood that his mission was to help solve the surplus-capital and unemployment problem through urbanization. Rebuilding Paris absorbed huge quantities of labor and capital by the standards of the time and, coupled with suppressing the aspirations of the Parisian workforce, was a primary vehicle of social stabilization.
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, Haussmann threw them back at him saying: \"Not wide enough . . . You have it 40 metres wide and I want it 120.\" He annexed the suburbs and redesigned whole neighborhoods such as Les Halles. To do this Haussmann needed new financial institutions and debt instruments, the Credit Mobilier and Credit Immobilier, which were constructed on Saint-Simonian lines. In effect, he helped resolve the capital-surplus disposal problem by setting up a proto-Keynesian system of debt-financed infrastructural urban improvements
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The system worked very well for some fifteen years, and it involved not only a transformation of urban infrastructures but also the construction of a new way of life and urban persona. Paris became \"the city of light,\" the great center of consumption, tourism, and pleasure; the cafes, department stores, fashion industry, and grand expositions all changed urban living so that it could absorb vast surpluses through consumerism. But then the overextended and speculative financial system and credit structures crashed in 1868. Haussmann was dismissed; Napoleon III in desperation went to war against Bismarck's Germany and lost
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Fast forward now to the 1940s in the United States. The huge mobilization for the war effort temporarily resolved the capital-surplus disposal problem that had seemed so intractable in the 1930s and the unemployment that went with it. But everyone was fearful about what would happen after the war. Politically the situation was dangerous: the federal government was in effect running a nationalized economy and was in alliance with the Communist Soviet Union, while strong social movements with socialist inclinations had emerged in the 1930s. As in Louis Bonaparte's era, a hefty dose of political repression was evidently called for by the ruling classes of the time; the subsequent history of McCarthyism and Cold War politics, of which there were already abundant signs in the early forties, is all too familiar. On the economic front, there remained the question of how surplus capital could be absorbed
vi
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In 1942, a lengthy evaluation of Haussmann's efforts appeared in Architectural Forum. It documented in detail what he had done and attempted an analysis of his mistakes but sought to recuperate his reputation as one of the greatest urbanists of all time. The article was by none other than Robert Moses, who after the Second World War did to New York what Haussmann had done to Paris.3 That is, Moses changed the scale of thinking about the urban process. Through a system of highways and infrastructural transformations, suburbanization, and the total reengineering of not just the city but also the whole metropolitan region, he helped resolve the capital-surplus absorption problem. To do this, he tapped into new financial institutions and tax arrangements that liberated the credit to debt-finance urban expansion. When taken nationwide to all the major metropolitan centers of the United States—yet another transformation of scale — this process played a crucial role in stabilizing global capitalism after 1945, a period in which the United States could afford to power the whole global noncommunist economy by running trade deficits.
vi vi HOLYOKE
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As in Second Empire Paris, it entailed a radical transformation in lifestyles, bringing new products from housing to refrigerators and air conditioners, as well as two cars in the driveway and an enormous increase in the consumption of oil. It also altered the political landscape, as subsidized home ownership for the middle classes changed the focus of community action towards the defense of property values and individualized identities, turning the suburban vote towards conservative republicanism. Debt-encumbered home owners, it was argued, were less likely to go on strike. This project successfully absorbed the surplus and assured social stability, albeit at the cost of hollowing out the inner cities and generating urban unrest amongst those, chiefly African Americans, who were denied access to the new prosperity.
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Moses, like Haussmann, fell from grace, and his solutions came to be seen as inappropriate and unacceptable. Traditionalists rallied around Jane Jacobs and sought to counter the brutal modernism of Moses's projects with a localized neighborhood aesthetic. But the suburbs had been built, and the radical change in lifestyle that this betokened had many social consequences, leading feminists, for example, to proclaim the suburb as the locus of all their primary discontents. If Haussmannization had a part in the dynamics of the Paris Commune, the soulless qualities of suburban living also played a critical role in the dramatic events of 1968 in the United States
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In Paris, the campaign to stop the Left Bank Expressway and the destruction of traditional neighborhoods by the invading \"high-rise giants\" such as the Place d'ltalie and Tour Montparnasse helped animate the larger dynamics of the 1968 uprising. It was in this context that Henri Lefebvre wrote The Urban Revolution,
vi
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In the United States, it is accepted wisdom that the housing sector was an important stabilizer of the economy, particularly after the high-tech crash of the late 1990s, although it was an active component of expansion in the earlier part of that decade. The property market directly absorbed a great deal of surplus capital through the construction of city-center and suburban homes and office spaces, while the rapid inflation of housing asset prices—backed by a profligate wave of mortgage refinancing at historically low rates of interest—boosted the U.S. domestic market for consumer goods and services. American urban expansion partially steadied the global economy, as the United States ran huge trade deficits with the rest of the world, borrowing around $2 billion a day to fuel its insatiable consumerism and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq
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The urbanization of China over the last twenty years has been of a different character, with its heavy focus on infrastructural development, but it is even more important than that of the United States. Its pace picked up enormously after a brief recession in 1997, to the extent that China has taken in nearly half the world's cement supplies since 2000. More than a hundred cities have passed the one million population mark in this period, and previously small villages, such as Shenzhen, have become huge metropolises of six to ten million people. Vast infrastructural projects, including dams and highways—again, all debt-financed—are transforming the landscape. The consequences for the global economy and the absorption of surplus capital have been significant: Chile booms thanks to the high price of copper, Australia thrives, and even Brazil and Argentina have recovered in part because of the strength of Chinese demand for raw materials.
Is the urbanization of China, then, the primary stabilizer of global capitalism today? The answer has to be a qualified yes. For China is only the epicenter of an urbanization process that has now become genuinely global, partly through the astonishing integration of financial markets that have used their flexibility to debt-finance urban development around the world.
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Astonishing if not criminally absurd megaurbanization projects have emerged in the Middle East in places such as Dubai and Abu Dhabi, mopping up the surplus arising from oil wealth in the most conspicuous, socially unjust, and environmentally wasteful ways possible.
This global scale makes it hard to grasp that what is happening is in principle similar to the transformations that Haussmann oversaw in Paris.
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But spreading risk does not eliminate it. Furthermore, the fact that it can be distributed so widely encourages even riskier local behaviors because liability can be transferred elsewhere. Without adequate risk-assessment controls, this wave of financialization has now turned into the so-called subprime mortgage and housing asset-value crisis. The fallout was concentrated in the first instance in and around U.S. cities, with particularly serious implications for low-income, inner-city African Americans and households headed by single women. It also has affected those who, unable to afford the skyrocketing house prices in urban centers, especially in the Southwest, were forced into the metropolitan semiperiphery; here they took up speculatively built tract housing at initially easy rates but now face escalating commuting costs as oil prices rise and soaring mortgage payments as market rates come into effect
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As in all the preceding phases, this most recent radical expansion of the urban process has brought with it incredible transformations of lifestyle. Quality of urban life has become a commodity, as has the city itself, in a world where consumerism, tourism, and cultural and knowledge-based industries have become major aspects of the urban political economy
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We now have, as urban sociologist Sharon Zukin puts it, \"pacification by cappuccino
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This is a world in which the neoliberal ethic of intense possessive individualism and its cognate of political withdrawal from collective forms of action become the template for human socialization.7 The defense of property values becomes of such paramount political interest that, as Mike Davis points out, the home owner associations in the state of California become bastions of political reaction, if not of fragmented neighborhood fascisms.8
We increasingly live in divided and conflict-prone urban areas.
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He created an urban form where it was believed—incorrectly, as it turned out in 1871—that sufficient levels of surveillance and military control could be attained to ensure that revolutionary movements would easily be brought to heel. Nevertheless, as Engels pointed out in 1872:
In reality, the bourgeoisie has only one method of solving the housing question after its fashion — that is to say, of solving it in such a way that the solution continually reproduces the question anew. This method is called \"Haussmann.\" . . . No matter how different the reasons may be, the result is always the same; the scandalous alleys and lanes disappear to the accompaniment of lavish self-praise from the bourgeoisie on account of this tremendous success, but they appear again immediately somewhere else. . . . The same economic necessity which produced them in the first place, produces them in the next place.10
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Though this description was written in 1872, it applies directly to contemporary urban development in much of Asia—Delhi, Seoul, Mumbai—as well as gentrification in New York. A process of displacement and what I call \"accumulation by dispossession\" lie at the core of urbanization under capitalism
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In Mumbai, meanwhile, six million people officially considered as slum dwellers are settled on land without legal title; all maps of the city leave these places blank. With the attempt to turn Mumbai into a global financial center to rival Shanghai, the property-development boom has gathered pace, and the land that squatters occupy appears increasingly valuable. Dharavi, one of the most prominent slums in Mumbai, is estimated to be worth $2 billion. The pressure to clear it—for environmental and social reasons that mask the land grab—is mounting daily.
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Since slum dwellers are illegal occupants and many cannot definitively prove their long-term residence, they have no right to compensation. To
concede that right, says the Indian Supreme Court, would be tantamount to rewarding pickpockets for their actions. So the squatters either resist and fight or move with their few belongings to camp out on the sides of highways or wherever they can find a tiny space.13 Examples of dispossession can also be found in the United States, though these tend to be less brutal and more legalistic: the government's right of eminent domain has been abused in order to displace established residents in reasonable housing in favor of higher-order land uses, such as condominiums and box stores. When this was challenged in the U.S. Supreme Court, the justices ruled that it was constitutional for local jurisdictions to behave in this way in order to increase their property tax base.
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What of the seemingly progressive proposal to award private-property rights to squatter populations, providing them with assets that will permit them to leave poverty behind?15 Such a scheme is now being mooted for Rio's favelas, for example. The problem is that the poor, beset with income insecurity and frequent financial
difficulties, can easily be persuaded to trade in that asset for a relatively low cash payment. The rich typically refuse to give up their valued assets at any price, which is why Moses could take a meat axe to the low-income Bronx but not to affluent Park Avenue.
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Urbanization, we may conclude, has played a crucial role in the absorption of capital surpluses, at ever increasing geographical scales but at the price of burgeoning processes of creative destruction that have dispossessed the masses of any right to the city whatsoever. The planet as building site collides with the \"planet of slums.\"16
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If, as seems likely, fiscal difficulties mount and the hitherto successful neoliberal, postmodernist, and consumerist phase of capitalist surplus absorption through urbanization is at an end and a broader crisis ensues, then the question arises: where is our 1968 or, even more dramatically, our version of the Commune? As with the financial system, the answer is bound to be much more complex precisely because the urban process is now global in scope. Signs of rebellion are everywhere: the unrest in China and India is chronic, civil wars rage in Africa, Latin America is in ferment. Any of these revolts could become contagious. Unlike the fiscal system, however, the urban and peri-urban social movements of opposition, of which there are many around the world, are not tightly coupled; indeed, most have no connection to each other. If they somehow did come together, what should they demand
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The main achievement of the neoliberal assault, then, has been to prevent the public share from expanding as it did in the 1960s. Neoliberalism has also created new systems of governance that integrate state and corporate interests, and through the application of money power, it has ensured that the disbursement of the surplus through the state apparatus favors corporate capital and the upper classes in shaping the urban process.
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Increasingly, we see the right to the city falling into the hands of private or quasi-private interests. In New York City, for example, the billionaire mayor, Michael Bloomberg, is reshaping the city along lines favorable to developers, Wall Street, and transnational capitalist-class elements and promoting the city as an optimal location for high-value businesses and a fantastic destination for tourists. He is, in effect, turning Manhattan into one vast gated community for the rich. In Mexico City, Carlos Slim had the downtown streets recobbled to suit the tourist gaze
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Every January, the Office of the New York State Comptroller publishes an estimate of the total Wall Street bonuses for the previous twelve months. In 2007, a disastrous year for financial markets by any measure, these added up to $33.2 billion, only 2 percent less than the year before.
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A \"financial Katrina\" is unfolding, which conveniently (for the developers) threatens to wipe out low-income neighborhoods on potentially high-value land in many inner-city areas far more effectively and speedily than could be achieved through eminent domain
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One step towards unifying these struggles is to adopt the right to the city as both working slogan and political ideal, precisely because it focuses on the question of who commands the necessary connection between urbanization and surplus production and use. The democratization of that right, and the construction of a broad social movement to enforce its will, is imperative if the dispossessed are to take back the control that they have for so long been denied, and if they are to institute new modes of urbanization. Lefebvre was right to insist that the revolution has to be urban, in the broadest sense of that term, or nothing at all
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Externalities
\nPareto optimum
\nIn a Pareto efficient economic allocation, no one can be made better off without making at least one individual worse off. Given an initial allocation of goods among a set of individuals, a change to a different allocation that makes at least one individual better off without making any other individual worse off is called a Pareto improvement. An allocation is defined as \"Pareto efficient\" or \"Pareto optimal\" when no further Pareto improvements can be made.
\nImpure Public Goods
\nImpure public goods, once produced, are freely but not equally available (in terms of quantity or quality) to all individuals in the city system.
\nPublic / Private Goods
\nConcentric Zone Theory (Burgess)
\nAnd the finest part of the arrangement is this, that the members of the money aristocracy can take the shortest road through the middle of all the labouring districts without ever seeing that they are in the midst of the grimy misery that lurks to the right and left. For the thoroughfares leading from the Exchange in all directions out of the city are lined, on both sides, with an almost unbroken series of shops, and are so kept in the hands of the middle and lower bourgeoisie . . . [that] they suffice to conceal from the eyes of the wealthy men and women of strong stomachs and weak nerves the misery and grime which form the complement of their wealth
\nKerner Commission Report
\nConsumers' Surplus
Consumers' surplus is the difference between what an individual actually pays for a good and what he or she would be willing to pay rather than go without it
\nParasitic vs. Generative Urbanism
\nGramsci (Prison Notebooks, 90-102) perceptively distinguishes, for example, between the parasitic urbanism of the Italian South in the 1930s in which there was a \"literal subjugation of the city to the countryside\" (because the city was the home of a rentier class and a bureaucracy which lived off a surplus extracted from agriculture), and the generative urbanism of the Italian North in which there was a continual enlargement of production through industry and commerce, together with a concomitant creation of a large industrial urban proletariat.
\n\n
Preface xi
1 EARTH / Nature and Culture 2
It started to rain, and I escaped into my room. My room-my house-is a haven, a little world that is created to protect me from threatening nature.
Thinking along this line soon made me wonder, What is there in culture-from house to religion-that is not a form of escape?
2 ANIMALITY /Its Covers and Transcendence 29
My body too is nature. I meddle with it, and much of my meddling comes out of a conscious desire to escape from or cover up my animality.
An animal eats, has sexual drives, and sooner or later dies. I? Well, I dine, love, and aspire to immortality.
Culture is how I escape my animal state of being.
3 PEOPLE / Disconnectedness and Indifference 78
Every \"I\"-the author of this book, for instance-is special.
We all like to be special. Yet at a deep level, being special or unique is intolerable. It makes for disconnectedness, loneliness, and vulnerability.
Submerging the self in a group, thus escaping from one's singularity, frailty, and openness to change, is a compelling human need.
Much good, but also much sorrow and evil, arises out of the need to connect.
4 Hell / Imagination's Distortions and Limitations i i i
Culture is a product of imagination and is driven by imagination.
We humans are proud to have it.
Yet it frequently leads us astray-into solipsistic fantasy, the unreal, and the grotesque
5 Heaven / The Real and the Good 151
Nevertheless, historically, imagination in its highest flights has led some bold spirits into genuine encounters with the sublimities of the universe.
At a more modest level, imagination is constantly at work, enchanting and reenchanting the world, a remarkable example of which is the conversion of land into landscape.
A world, however pleasing, is in the end frivolous without moral weight.
Notes 205
Suppose I move down the ladder. What comes after theme park? Shopping mall? It has been attacked as an escapist Eden for mindless consumers. Suburb? Academic detractors have not hesitated to dismiss it as a dull, middle-class playground. They prefer the city. But the city is escapist par excellence, for a city is a citya real city!-to the degree that it has distanced itself (escaped) from nature and its rhythms.
\nvi
\n-------------------
\nIt is good to escape from raw and threatening nature into the refinements of culture. However, viewed through darker glasses, these refinements have the appearance of a towering froth burying and hiding the harsh economic and political realities that sustain it and made it possible in the first place. Covering up, distancing, escaping, makes it easy for us to forget the destructive preliminaries of almost all creative acts-even one as basic and necessary as cooking. Few cookbooks bear the title Butchering and Cooking or Evisceration and Cooking, and yet how is the one possible without the other? And if the project is not food but a monument, a city, an empire, the amount of prior destruction, the exploitation of labor both animal and human, the sweat, pain, and death, add up to a picture closer to hell than heaven
\nvi vi
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\nOne rather striking example is \"landscape.\" Regarded fondly by wealthy Romans in antiquity and by practically everyone nowadays, it was largely unknown to Europeans in the period from 400 to 1400. The Renaissance saw the rebirth of a sensibility, the reenchantment of land as landscape, that has persisted, with alterations and improvements, to our time. I am tempted to say that \"landscape\" is congenial to our spirit, that once it is pointed out to us, we not only nod in recognition but feel better, healthier, empowered.
\nvi vi
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\nIn writing this book, I have two broad aims. One is to provide an unusual and, I believe, fruitful perspective on nature and culture. My other aim is to persuade readers, especially those who have fed too exclusively on the literature of despair, to recognize the good that has already been-though insecurely-achieved, and hence to look upon the idea, if not of heaven on earth, then of an earth periodically visited by heavenly bliss, in a less dismissive, more hopeful, light.
\nvi
\nvi
\nvi holyoke
\n-------------------
\nSo another meaning of \"real\" emerges: the real as impact. It is not just nature; it is whatever in nature or in society imposes itself on a human being or group, doing so either suddenly or as a consistently felt pressure. \"Reality\" in this sense is intractable, and it is indifferent to the needs and desires of particular individuals and groups. Facing reality, then, implies accepting one's essential powerlessness, yielding or adjusting to circumambient forces, taking solace in some local pattern or order that one has created and to which one has become habituated.
\nvi
\nvi vi
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\nMigration is clearly a type of escape. Animals move out when their home ground starts to deteriorate.vi
\n-------------------
\nTo what extent does the need to believe in a better world at the horizon overrule or distort the \"hard facts\" that people know? Is reality so constraining and unbearable at home that it becomes the seedbed for wild longings and images? And do these images, by virtue of their simplicity and vividness, seem not a dream but more \"real\" than the familiar world? A great modern epic of migration is the spread of Europeans to the New World. The United States of America proclaims itself a land of immigrants. It would not want to be known as a \"land of escapists,\" yet many did just that: escape from the intolerable conditions of the Old World for the promises of the New.;vi
\n-------------------
\nThe emperor was called Son of Heaven rather than Son of Earth. There is no doubt a heavenward tilt in Chinese high culture, as there is in all high cultures. What high culture offers is escape from bondage to earth.vi
\n-------------------
\nBy means of the art at their command they produced an alternative heaven: the palace itself and, even more overtly, the theatrical stage of floating clouds, flying chariots, pastures and billowing fields of surpassing fertility.\"What was the nature of this art? Shakespeare hinted at it in the magic powers of Prospero. A Renaissance prince was a Prospero-a magician. A magician was not the marginal entertainer we now see him to be. Rather, he was considered a person of deep knowledge-someone who knew how things worked below the surface and so could do wonders. Whereas a prince only pur chased such power, a genius like Leonardo da Vinci possessed it in his own person to a remarkable degree. It doesn't seem to me far-fetched to call Leonardo a magician. Indeed, a much later figure, Isaac Newton, has been called a magician, the last one. An important difference, however, separates a Renaissance figure like Leonardo and the outstanding genius of a later time, Newton: Leonardo approached knowledge through art, technique, and technology, skills that would have been necessary to the making of the sort of surrogate heaven that Renaissance princes yearned for.vi
\n-------------------
\nAlfred North Whitehead, an outstanding mathematician-philosopher of our time, famously designated the seventeenth century the Century of Genius. He gave twelve names: Bacon, Harvey, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Pascal, Huyghens, Boyle, Newton, Locke, Spinoza, and Leibnizvi
\n-------------------
\nonly one biologist on the list: Harvey.12 Genius in that century showed itself in celestial mechanics and physics rather than in biology or organic nature, to which humans belong and upon which they depend
\nvi vi
\n-------------------
\nOn earth, both nature and human affairs often seemed to verge on chaos; heaven, by contrast, ex hibited perfect order. Cosmic order gave the natural philosophers of the seventeenth century confidence, as it has given confidence to priest-kings throughout human history. In premodern times, rulers believed that the regularities discernible above could somehow be brought down below. In early modern Europe, natural philosophers had grounds for hoping that the rigorous method that opened the secrets of heaven could work similar wonders on earth.vi
\n-------------------
\nTo this observation a critic may say, \"Well, what do you expect? The challenges of agriculture can be met only by close attention to the intricacies and interdependencies of land and life, to what is happening at our feet and before our eyes rather than in a scientist's playpen (the laboratory), or by seeking models of analysis and conceptualization suited to the world of astronomy and physics. In short, to live well, one needs more down-to-earth realism, not escapism.\"vi
\n-------------------
\nNATURE
\nI have given a brief and sweeping account of \"escape from nature,\" which has taken us from uncertain yields in village clearings to supermarket cornucopia
\nvi vi
\n-------------------
\nEscaping or returning to nature is a well-worn theme. I mention it to provide a counterpoint to the story of escaping from nature,vi
\n-------------------
\nOne is the antiquity of this sentiment. A yearning for the natural and the wild goes back almost to the beginning of city building in ancient Sumer. A hint of it can already be found in the epic of Gilgamesh, which tells of the natural man Enkidu, who was seduced by gradual steps to embrace the refinements of civilization, only to regret on his deathbed what he had left behind: a free life cavorting with gazelles.'vi
\n-------------------
\nThe extreme artificiality of a built environment is not itself an essential cause or inducement. Consider the Lele of Kasai in tropical Africa. They do not have cities, yet they know what it is like to yearn for nature
\nvi vi
\n-------------------
\nThe third point is that \"back to nature\" varies enormously in scale. At one end of the scale are such familiar and minor undertakings as the weekend camping trip to the forest and, more permanently, the return to a rural commune way of life. At the other end of the scale is the European settlement of North America itself. It too might be considered a type of \"escape to nature.\" Old Europe was the city; the New World was naturevi
\n-------------------
\nculturally delineated and endowed with value. What we wish to escape to is not \"nature\" but an alluring conception of it, and this conception is necessarily a product of a people's experience and history-their culture. Paradoxical as it may sound, \"escape to nature\" is a cultural undertaking, a covered-up attempt to \"escape from nature.\"
\nvi
\nvi holyoke
\n-------------------
\nNature with a capital N.\" Now, in this chapter I myself have been using the word \"nature\" in a restricted sense-nature with a small n. What do I mean by it? What is the culture that has influenced me? It is the culture of academic geography. The meaning that I give the word is traditional among geographers: Nature is that layer of the earth's surface and the air above it that have been unaffected, or minimally affected, by humans; hence, the farther back we reach in time, the greater will be the extent of nature. Another way of putting it is this: Nature is what remains or what can recuperate over time when all humans and their works are removed
\nvi vi
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\nwhenever and wherever humans have managed to create a material world of their own, even if this be no more than a rough clearing in which are located a few untidy fields and huts. I have already referred to the Lele in Africa. Their appreciation of a pure nature away from womenfolk, society, and culture is as romantic (and sexist) as that of modern American males.
\nvi vi
\n-------------------
\nbegan this chapter by noting that escapism has a somewhat negative meaning because of the common notion that what one escapes from is reality and what one escapes to is fantasy. People say, \"I am fed up with snow and slush and the hassles of my job, so I am going to Hawaii.\" Hawaii here stands for paradise and hence the unreal. In place of Hawaii, one can substitute any number of other things: from a good book and the movies to a tastefully decorated shopping mall and Disneyland, from a spell in the suburbs or the countryside to a weekend at a first-rate hotel in Manhattan or Paris. In other societies and times, the escape might be to a storyteller's world, a communal feast, a village fair, a ritual.\" What one escapes to is culture-not culture that has become daily life, not culture as a dense and inchoate environment and way of coping, but culture that exhibits lucidity, a quality that often comes out of a process of simplification.
\nvi
\nvi
\nvi
\nvi holyoke
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\nSociety at large has often called academia \"an ivory tower,\" implying that life there is not quite real. Academics themselves see otherwise; it is their view that if they escape from certain entanglements of \"real life,\" it is only so that they may better engage with the real, and it is this engagement with the real that makes what they do so deeply rewarding... Yet nature lovers see otherwise. For them, the escape into nature is an escape into the real. One reason for this feeling certainly does not apply to academia. It is that the real is the natural, the fundament that has not been disturbed or covered up by human excrescences. What academia and nature share-perhaps the only outstanding characteristic that they share-is simplicity. Academic life is selfevidently a simpler organization than the greater society in which it is embedded
\nvi
\n-------------------
\nBetween the big artificial city at one extreme and wild nature at the other, humans have created \"middle landscapes\" that, at various times and in different parts of the world, have been acclaimed the model human habitat. They are, of course, all works of culture, but not conspicuously or arrogantly so. They show how humans can escape nature's rawness without moving so far from it as to appear to deny roots in the organic world.23
\nvi
\nvi
\nvi holyoke
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\nMany kinds of landscape qualify as \"middle\"-for example, farmland, suburbia, garden city and garden, model town, and theme parks that emphasize the good life. They all distance themselves from wild nature and the big city but otherwise have different values. The second problem is that the middle landscape, whatever the kind, proves unstable. It reverts to nature, or, more often, it moves step by step toward the artifices of the city even as it strives to maintain its position in the middle
\nvi
\nvi
\nvi
\nvi
\nvi holyoke
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\nThere, science in the broad sense of the systematic application of useful knowledge enabled agriculture to move from triumph to triumph in the next two hundred years, with far-ranging consequences, including one of psychological unease. An \"unbearable lightness of being\" was eventually to insinuate itself into the one area of human activity where people have felt-and many still feel-that they ought to be more bound than free
\nvi agriculture
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\nThe garden is another middle landscape between wild nature and the city.
\nvi
\n-------------------
\nIn China one speaks of \"building\" a garden, whereas in Europe one may speak of \"planting\" a garden. The difference suggests that the Chinese, unlike Europeans, are more ready to admit the garden's artifactual character.
\nvi vi
\n-------------------
\nart. Progressively, however, the gardens of the potentates moved in the direction of aesthetics and architecture. From the sixteenth century onward, first in Renaissance Italy, then in Baroque France, gardens were proudly built to project an air of power and artifice. The technical prowess that made playful fountains and mechani cal animals possible, together with the garden's traditional link to the phantasms of theater, resulted in the creation of an illusionary world remote indeed from its humble beginnings close to the soil and livelihood.24
\nvi vi
\n-------------------
\nA striking example of the pleasure garden in our century is the Disney theme park-a unique American creation that, thanks to modern technology, is able to produce wonder and illusion far beyond that which could be achieved in earlier times. Unique too is the theme park's erasure of the present in favor of not only a mythic past but also a starry future-in favor, moreover, of a frankly designed Fantasyland peopled by characters from fairy tales and from Disney's own fertile imagination. What is more escapist than that? In the spectrum of middle landscapes, a countryside of villages and fields stands at the opposite pole to a Disney park. The one lies closest to nature; the other is as far removed from it as possible without becoming \"city.\"25
\nvi vi
\n-------------------
\nWhat if culture is, in a fundamental sense, a mechanism of escape? To see culture as escape or escapism is to share a disposition common to all who have had some experience in exercising power-a disposition that is unwilling to accept \"what is the case\" (reality) when it seems to them unjust or too severely constrainingvi
\n-------------------
\nThe human species uniquely confronts the dilemma of a powerful imagination that, while it makes escape to a better life possible, also makes possible lies and deception, solipsistic fantasy, madness, unspeakable cruelty, violence, and destructiveness-evil.vi
\n-------------------
\na deeper level, dissatisfaction may be directed at the body simply because it is an animal body, with offensive odors and fluids, humors and imperious biological demands. No matter how comely in its own way, the body can still be an embarrassment, a reminder that our reach toward some more elevated status called \"human\" or \"spiritual\" is tenuous-hostage to the sewer odor of flatus.z
\nvi vi
\n-------------------
\nEmbarrassed by animality-my own as well as other people's-I and my fellow human conspirators cover it up, escape into a world of cultural creations that reassures us of our exceptionalism.The story of cover/escape shows an overall progression from less to more elaborate forms of art and artifice
\nvi Holyoke
\n-------------------
\nI shall tell this story of overcoming by exploring three prominent indices of our animality: food and eating, sex and procreation, and dying and death.
\nvi
\nvi vi
\n-------------------
\nPerhaps the most common is when we watch others eat or are watched as we eat. Eating may be a joyous public occasion in which many people participate, it may be accompanied by much ceremony, but it is not itself a public performance. Eating, humans realize, is animal and must remain essentially private, a condition they ensure by creating a space for it and protecting it against the appraising eye. Animals at the zoo cannot have such privacy; indeed, they are assumed to need none.
\nvi
\n-------------------
\nA few other examples of Eskimo food will indicate his lack of squeamishness: raw intestines of birds and fish, swallowed like oysters; live fish gulped down whole, head first; slime scraped from a walrus hide together with some of the human urine used in the tanning process ... fat, maggoty larvae of the caribou fly, served raw; the contents of the caribou's paunch, left in the body so long that the whole mass has become tainted; deer droppings, munched like berries, or feces taken from the rectum of this animal.;Did the Eskimos like being watched while they ate? I doubt they did, for it must have made them feel self-conscious.vi
\n-------------------
\nWielding only a spear, a Pygmy hunter can bring down an elephant, thus demonstrating admirable courage and skill. What follows is less inspiring and is certainly not Edenic. Tropical heat triggers rapid decay. The beast's belly starts to swell. A hunter climbs up it and dances in triumph. Someone plunges a knife into the belly, letting out an explosion of foul-smelling liquid and gas. Pygmies swarm over the carcass in an orgy of butchering. Within a couple of days a patch of forest becomes a bloodspattered field of skin, bone, and intestines. Celebration may continue for weeks. People gorge themselves with meat and sing and dance with mounting erotic fervor.4vi
\n-------------------
\nReading anthropologist Colin Turnbull's account of the Mbuti Pygmies of the Congo rain forest provides much innocent pleasure, for here is a people who until recently seem to have lived in Eden, a benign natural environment that is the polar opposite of the Eskimos', supporting a way of life in which there is no recognition of evilvi
\n-------------------
\nThe menus of the past surprise us by their inclusive ness. Yet this inclusiveness ought not to surprise us, for one reason why humans have spread successfully into so many geographical environments-one reason why they have become \"lords of the earth\"-is their ability to chew and digest almost anything. Most societies nevertheless have some kind of food taboo, and some have strict dietary laws, one purpose of which is to distinguish members of that society from others and to allow them to feel superior
\nvi
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\nvi holyoke eating habits
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\nwhy has the consumption of meat, not only in the West but in other parts of the world as well, become a signature of status
\nvi
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\nIndeed, manners did not show real finesse until the eighteenth century. Movie scenes that depict England's Henry VIII chomping on a leg of mutton held up by a bejeweled hand are probably fairly accurate.vi
\n-------------------
\nThe sheer quantity of food made for prestige, but what really counted was the amount of animal flesh. At a Twelfth Night feast in mid-seventeenth-century England, each guest was expected to guzzle his way through seven to eight pounds of beef, mutton, and veal.' Meat remained supreme in the West's hierarchy of gustatory values till the last quarter of the twentieth century, when, increasingly for health reasons, it lost its former eminence.
\nvi holyoke
\n-------------------
\nMoreover, unlike women's work in the village fields, hunting is a story with a plot climaxing in a dramatic kill, a story the telling of which back home yields extra prestige. To put it a little differently, hunting is an exhilarating escape from the constraints of rooted life. Men in preliterate communities appreciated it, as many men in modern society still do. Game meat too tends to be more highly regarded than the meat of livestock, as though the freedom of wild animals to roam gave their flesh a virtue that confined domesticated animals do not and cannot have.9
\nvi vi
\n-------------------
\nIn Europe from the late Middle Ages onward, aspiring courtiers and the upper class took steps in that direction. They adopted new utensils that put a distance between the food and themselves-outstandingly, the fork (a metal claw), which substituted for the human hand in performing unseemly tasks. Old utensils were refined-for example, the knife, the sharp tip of which was rounded off in the sixteenth century so that it would seem less an instrument of violence. The more elegant eaters stopped spitting bones onto the floor, and they learned to masticate with the mouth closed, noiselessly.
\nvi
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\nDelicacy of taste, aroma, and texture increasingly came to matter more than the sheer bulk or cost of the food. Cooking strove to become architecture and art, and as such it successfully hid from consumers the fact that the materials used had once been living animals
\nvi
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\nLanguage might also be enlisted as a masking device. What are we eating? Not cattle, pig, or deer, but beef, pork, and venison, words of non-English origin (think of the menus of fancy restaurants, where what we eat is buried under a flourish of incomprehensible foreign words).
\nvi
\nvi
\nvi holyoke
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\nBut a Thomas Aquinas, no doubt abstemious sexually, could openly enjoy his food and be proudly wide of girth. A religious woman, by contrast, had to be both virgin and sparing in diet.vi
\n-------------------
\nHunting culture and a warrior ethos-the two often overlapped or fused-promoted gender difference. They did so in Europe until early modern times-indeed, as we have seen, in our own time. They also did so in medieval Japan, with its stereotypically silent, gruff males and porcelain-delicate females. China was a notable exception, for despite being an empire, it lacked a warrior class. Near the top of its social hierarchy was the scholar-official, his weapon the brushvi
\n-------------------
\nWhat has happened? What has become of my thesis that escapism is a human universal? My answer is that even in societies where the hunter-warrior ethos dominates or lingers, the men are as committed to escape as are the women; they differ only in the means.vi
\n-------------------
\nThis choosing to \"act the noble beast\" is a variant form of \"returning to nature\"-a move prompted by the need to escape from society's debilitating and unmanning elegancies
\nvi
\nvi vi
\n-------------------
\nRwanda's population was made up mostly of Hutu farmers, a sizable minority of Tutsi pastoralists, and a small minority of Twa hunters, who supplemented their income by singing, dancing, and clowning. A strongly differentiated social hierarchy began to emerge during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, based on racial stereotyping and biases that already existed among native populations but were inflamed by the country's European overlords. The Tutsi were encouraged to see themselves as an aristocracy, tall and of slender build, and to see the Hutu as being shorter and stumpier, with the additional unflattering traits of woolly hair, broad flat nose, and thick lips; in time the oppressed Hutu came to see themselves that way as well. As for the Twa, both the Tutsi and the Hutu regarded them, half jokingly, as closer to monkeys than to human beings.Food habits further differentiated and distanced Rwanda's ethnic groups.
\nvi vi
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\nThe Hutu ate more, though their food was less refined. Popular among them was a kind of porridge with beans, peas, or maize. The sweet potatoes they consumed in large quantities were considered by the Tutsi too common to eat.
\nvi vi
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\nThe Tutsi behaved as if the need for nourishment was beneath their dignity. Eating should be done in private, they believed. Friends would be offered beer or milk, but they would not be asked to share a whole mealvi
\n-------------------
\nAdam and Eve were vegetarians before the Fall. In the Taoist paradise, people didn't even have to eat plants; when they felt tired and hungry, they would drink the water in the rivers and find their vitality restored. A much later account of an unspoiled world, written during the T'ang dynasty, presents a people of childlike exuberance who lived presumably on fish but not, heaven forbid, four-footed mammals: \"They swarm to the tops of trees, and run to the water to catch bream and trout.\"22 The Olympian gods were vegetarians, feeding gloriously on ambrosia and nectar.vi
\n-------------------
\n. Visit a professional craftsman's workshop; it can seem a slaughterhouse, except that here the broken and torn viscera of nature-pieces of marble, stone, and wood, bent metal and filings-are mostly inanimate.25 If, generally speaking, even the crafts and fine arts require some degree of violence, the scope of the destruction involved in the raising of humankind's larger cultural works-farms, towns, and cities-boggles the mind; more, it can ignite feelings of moral revulsion. Some people, including ecologists of our day, have wished a return to simpler ways of life. But how far back should human beings go? And how simple must a way of life be before it can be considered innocent? The dilemma in its extreme form revolves around the human body, which too is a construction, built up with plant and animal partsvi
\n-------------------
\nIn eating, a bloated feeling must sooner or later be relieved by the expulsion of odorous waste; in contrast, the postcoital exhaustion that follows orgasmic union is a reminder that, for all the sense of fulfillment, effort has been expended, some vitality given up, the result of which is the possible birth of a new life.vi
\n-------------------
\nmonkey cages are also popular; they seem to exert a particular fascination for adolescents, yet who other than infants can claim total indifference? Here are our primate cousins, similar to us in so many ways, yet radically alien in their unselfconscious sexual exploration of each other.vi
\n-------------------
\nThe mating instinct and its physiological manifestations, which humans find embarrassingly and inconveniently forceful in themselves, seem inordinately exaggerated in nonhuman primates. Human tumescence is chaste indeed compared with the flamboyant genital swelling of the female chimpanzee in the peak stage of her readiness for male mounting. Large, protuberant, and pink, chimpanzee genitalia advertise with a blatancy found among humans only in their pornographic art. As for prose, the explicit accounts of sexual congress that are pornography's specialty appear matter-of-factly in animal-behavior literaturevi
\n-------------------
\nEscapismyhand,\" \"nose,\" and \"shoulder\" designate body parts without strong emotional coloring, other parts resist plain utterance. The sex vocabulary available to the middle class is limited to four types, according to C. S. Lewis: \"a nursery word, an archaism, a word from the gutter, or a scientific word.\" Hard as one tries at mere description, one produces willy-nilly baby talk, arch speech, coarseness, or technical jargon. Certain common words have become \"obscene\" because they have long been \"consecrated (or desecrated) to insult, derision, and buffoonery.\" To speak them at all is to evoke the randy-machismo atmosphere of the slum, the barracks room, and the all-male school.29
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\nObscenity is an effect of distancing, made possible by a picture or word that turns anyone who uses it into a salacious voyeur, who then redirects that salacious feeling away from himself by saying indignantly, \"Look at these groaning, sweaty animals and buffoons!\"Words such as \"obscenity\" and \"pornography\" may be objected to on the grounds that they are judgments of the puritanical West, inapplicable to other times and cultures. I wonder whether this is indeed the case. To the extent that any society has a norm of polite behavior, it has a norm of what lies beyond the pale-the risque, the outrageous, the subhuman, and the obscene. Moreover, I am suspicious of the modern scholar's tendency to regard any sign of disapprobation as Victorian prudery and, at the other extreme, to commend sexual display in art, no matter how extreme, as healthy and frank. To me this attitude suggests an overcompensation for past excesses of moralism that cannot bear critical review. It may also be a device for avoiding frankness where frankness can really hurt. \"Be true!\" declaimed Nathaniel Hawthorne, not once but three times. \"Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait by which the worst may be inferred.\"30
\nvi
\nvi ruin porn
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\nWhat is a man? To judge by popular Japanese prints of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, he is a lascivious beast peeking through refined culture, a penis the size of a bludgeon and the color of a blood sausage exposed under the half-raised silk kimono.
\nvi
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\nFertility cults were once widespread throughout the world. With their decline, the tumescent phallus must sooner or later lose its magical-symbolic role in the generation of life, accepted and even revered by society for that reason, to come to an ignoble end as crude pictures and graffiti on derelict walls, cries for attention and relief by thwarted, lonely individuals.
\nvi
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\nSexual insatiability, cruelty, and inordinate violence are uniquely human. So are eroticism and love in all their subtle and passionate forms. They are uniquely human because, for good or ill, imagination is at work, guiding, moderating, or intensifying animal proclivities and impulsesvi
\n-------------------
\nDuring periods of religious fervor, outstandingly the sixteenth century, the line between sacred and profane ecstasy was exceedingly fine. Saints, daringly uncovered, turned their eyes to heaven in bliss. Michelangelo's drawing of the risen Christ (housed at Windsor) shows him completely nude, with exposed genitals. To the art historian Kenneth Clark it is \"perhaps the most beautiful nude in ecstasy in the whole of art. ,45vi
\n-------------------
\nClearly, Paul deemed married life second best. However, as his frustration over human frailty increased, he went further. He took to substituting the derogatory word \"flesh\" for \"body\" and then spoke of \"flesh\" as the opposite of \"spirit.\"47 Paul's shift of attitude had major consequences for Christian moral teaching. If, for Paul, the shift contained an element of inadvertence, there was no such inadvertence in the carefully weighed judgments of the young church's three towering leaders, who in prestige and influence came immediately after Paul: Ambrose, Augustine, and Jerome. Together they managed to bind sex firmly with sin, sin with corruption and death, and, conversely, virginity with heroic virtue and eternal life .41
\nvi vi
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\nMoreover, suffering, because it is, after all, life and even a rather intense form of it, does not prevent-indeed, it actively encourages-daydreaming. Watching flickering images in the mind is a ready means of escape, and why not, if it relieves temporary distress? Daydreaming can, however, become addictive. One learns to be not just an occasional visitor but the habitue of a fantasy world. Of that world's many delusory assurances, perhaps the most cunning is the excision of finality from death, making it seem like mere suffering
\nvi
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\nDeath consoles if one thinks of it as the portal to heaven-a familiar route of escape to many in the Christian and Islamic faiths. Death also consoles because it is the endpoint. Jorge Luis Borges said of his aged and sick mother that she would wake up in the morning and cry because, contrary to her fond wish, she was still alive; escape had once again eluded her.55
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\nTo anyone aware of the multitude of infamies and injustice which men have endured, of the broken bodies and tortured minds of the victims of these cruelties, of the multiple dimensions of pain in which millions live on mattress graves or with minds shrouded in darkness, death must sometimes appear as a beneficent release not an inconsolable affliction. It washes the earth clean of what cannot be cleansed in any other way
\nvi
\nvi holyoke
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\nKarl Popper. \"v
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\nDeath, he believed, \"gives value, and in a sense almost infinite value, to our lives, and makes more urgent and attractive the task of using our lives to achieve something for others, and to be co-workers in World 3 [that is, the world of knowledge and art], which apparently embodies more or less what is called the meaning of life.\"58vi
\n-------------------
\nkeen awareness of one's own finitude also produces at least one admirable negative virtue, namely, a certain indifference toward the pomp and circumstance of this world. Malcolm Muggeridge in his old age wrote, \"Now the prospect of death overshadows all others. I am like a man on a sea voyage nearing his destination. When I embarked I worried about having a cabin with a porthole, whether I should be asked to sit at the captain's table, who were the more attractive and important passengers. All such considerations become pointless when I shall soon be disembarking.\"61vi
\n-------------------
\nWesley, it seems to me, had something like this collapse of meaning in mind when he confessed, in a letter (1766) to his brother Charles, \"If I have any fear, it is not of falling into hell, but of falling into nothing.\"64
\nvi
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\nThe human mind cannot come to grips with \"nothing.\" Therefore, even when people imagine the afterlife negatively, they do not see it as nothing but as something-a shadow of this lifevi
\n-------------------
\nDeath is quickly followed by the indignity of corruption. But rotting can occur long before death. Freud's cancer of the larynx produced an evil odor that offended even his faithful dog. He and others around him could smell the approach of the endpoint before it arrived. The entire civilizing process may be seen as an effort to bury the fact of death and its premonitory signs-removing from genteel eyes and sensitive noses the necessary work of the butcher, the disposal of animal and human corpses, the care of the sick (not always a sightly undertaking), and all odors of decay, which were once believed to be a potent cause of death, whether as miasma from swamps packed with rotting organic matter, or from city burial grounds swollen with human corpses, or from the filthy, densely packed quarters of the poor
\nvi
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\nEthnographic and historical evidence suggests that the vast majority of human beings were too humble-too beaten by life's recurrent insults and injuries, and too habituated to living in dire need surrounded by filth-to postulate living in heaven in bodily splendor.68vi
\n-------------------
\nEscape is a response to both push and pull. In deciding to cross the ocean to live in the New World, migrants may well have been more pulled by its paradisiacal reputation than pushed by the miseries of home. The paradise promised beyond death, however, can never have been a serious pull. People of sound mind do not commit suicide because they have conjured an afterlife of irresistible allure.vi
\n-------------------
\nStoics in classical antiquity embraced an austere outlook on life that included a dignified way to bring it to a close. Well known for their love of fate (with its implied passivity), they nevertheless believed in control over the self. Virtuous living here and now was to them the proper aim, for it alone confers dignity and honor.vi
\n-------------------
\nmodern men and women's undoubted antipathy to the Stoic idea of fate, especially when this \"passivity\" is paradoxically combined with the demand to exercise heroic control over the self-the body and its passions, the mind and its wayward imaginings. Fate to modern men and women is an outmoded idea even though they continue to experience it under the name of \"accident.\" As for control, they fully endorse it, but to them, in contrast to Stoics, control means keeping the body perpetually fit rather than keeping desire and will temperate and wise. The body attracts more and more attention now because for the first time there is reason to believe that medical science can maintain it far beyond the \"normal\" span.
\nvi
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\nNature has come to mean almost solely organic life-a thin and frail mantle that has been abused and that now needs human protection. So, if we want a glaring example of Western hubris in the twentieth centuryWestern in the larger civilizational sense-we must look eastward to the former Soviet Union, where \"conquest of nature\" remained the official doctrine until the ig8os
\nvi vi
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\nAn optimistic view sees vast tracts of sterile land turned into unending fields of corn through feats of river diversion and irrigation; and, more recently, it sees genetic technology gaining direct control over the forces of life. Such a rosy prospect, challenged in the Atlantic West, is fully conformable to Leninist-Marxist ideology and so continued to be upheld by the Soviet government until its collapse
\n-------------------
\nBy interpreting culture as escape, I have perforce given it a dynamic meaning
\nvi
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\nBut its most basic contribution to forgetfulness, to an individual's sense of ease, lies in the construction of a \"we.\" \"I\" may be feeble, but \"we\" are strong. Historically and all over the world, \"we\" is the preferred pronoun. \"I,\" by contrast, is seldom used. Only from the sixteenth century onward, in one part of the world (Europe), did \"I\" gain a certain cachet
\nvi
\nvi holyoke
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\n. Still, the moral odor of \"I\" is suspect. It carries undertones of selfishness and aggression. Contrariwise, \"we,\" as in we Americans, we environmentalists, or we the people, is confidently righteous.'vi
\n-------------------
\nUniqueness is problematic everywhere. It is a state of being that a person both wants and does not want, although the degree of desire either way varies with culture and individual temperament. In the United States no one wants to be treated as part of the woodwork. Most Americans like to be recognized for their distinctive quality, their importance to the group; they also like to be rewarded accordingly. In other societies, especially those called folk or traditional, people are less eager to stand above the crowd
\nvi
\nvi holyoke
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\nOne feels that human relations are ultimately what matters, yet this feeling is combined with the chilling knowledge that, as Albert Camus puts it, \"it is only our will that keeps these people attached to us (not that they wish us ill but simply because they don't care) and that the others are always able to be interested in something else.\"\"
\nvi
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\nThe English diplomat Harold Nicolson noted in a diary entry of 1939, \"Nature. Even when someone dies, one is amazed that the poplars should still be standing quite unaware of one's own disaster, so when I walked down to the lake to bathe, I could scarcely believe that the swans were being sincere in their indifference to the Second German War.
\nvi vi
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\nConsidering the matter historically, one may well wonder at the extent to which the balance has shifted in steady progression toward disenchantment. In the Western world, even as the new scientific view of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries sought to reduce nature to extension and number, Romanticism rose to restore body, color, warmth, and sentience to it. Even as analysis-the idea that nature can best be understood by isolating its components from their natural context-became the scientific method, the doctrine of God's providence, with its message of nature's wholeness and integrative purposefulness, was gaining popularity.14
\nvi
\nvi vi
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\nEcology appears to favor connectedness. It is more disposed to search for interdependence than for separateness. And so even as a technical science, ecology can be a balm to modern men and women seeking escape from isolation.
\nvi
\nvi holyoke
\n-------------------
\nThe web of life, then, is not just the impersonal working out of various kinds of interdependence; it is activeeven intentional-cooperation. To a naturalist and lover of nature, if the world out there seems indifferent, we have only our own egotism and obtuseness to blame.16vi
\n-------------------
\nEven as I draw attention to disconnectedness and indifference, I show how both can be overcome-how people escape from both. It is difficult to speak of the one without the other, for disconnectedness implies connectedness, indifference implies attentiveness. Culture, as I have repeatedly noted, is the most common device for moving from one state to the other
\nvi
\nvi
\nvi
\nvi holyoke
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\nA ritual is \"invented\" and performed to ensure good harvests. That is its most public reason for being. Less public and official is the ritual's aesthetic potency-its existence as a work of art that engages and elevates a people's aesthetic sensibilities. Largely unacknowledged, except in critical social-science literature, is the power of ritual to legitimize the orders of society. Hidden almost wholly is ritual's efficacy in overcoming discreteness-in connecting and fusing individual and distinctive entities into larger wholes.
\nvi
\nvi
\nvi holyoke
\n-------------------
\nConsider the suburban house. A proud owner, when she thinks of her house at all, is likely to think of its architectural good points, its prestige and value. The house's basic function as shelter is taken for granted. Even more taken for granted is its hidden power to integrate people and their activities. The hidden powers of human artifacts tend to remain hidden unless, for some reason, they are brought into the open. Why anyone would want to do so is an interesting question, for the consequence of such unveiling is almost always ambivalent, the gain in knowledge not fully compensating the loss of innocence
\nvi
\nvi holyoke
\n-------------------
\nmusicologist Victor Zuckerkandl. In preliterate and folk communities, people gather to sing and so make a reassuring bubble of sound around themselves.\" There are singers, but no listeners-no outsiders to evaluate the performance and so make the singers self-conscious. Because looking tends to create distance, eyes may be closed in communal singing to enhance the sensation of blissful immersion in sound.
\nvi vi
\n-------------------
\nAll sorts of group activities have the power to repress the self, especially when these require coordinated movements, as, for example, farmers working in the field, soldiers marching to the music of a military band, or people enacting their designated roles in a ceremony. An awareness of the Other-an indifferent or hostile reality out there-further intensifies group solidarity and weakens the feeling of individual separateness. To farmers laboring together, the fields to be plowed and the weeds to be uprooted constitute the Other. To soldiers, the Other is the sharply defined human enemy.
\nvi
\nvi holyoke
\n-------------------
\nWar is the bane of humankind. Like other group activities, it offers the psychological reward of belongingness. But it does so more effectively than most, which is one reason why it perdures. Military training provides all the right ingredients for escaping the stresses of individualityvi
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\nOther psychological rewards include a sense of being on the right side and, hence, being in the right. A little-noted effect of this moral posture is that it allows soldiers to retain, individually, a sense of personhood and dignity even while they are immersed in the larger whole. Other agonistic groups such as athletes contesting in the sports arena and political protesters pounding the pavement to a confrontation enjoy similar rewards
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\nTHE BUILT ENVIRONMENT AND ONENESS
\nCulture can be primarily an activity, as in etiquette, ritual, games of war. Culture is also the end product of an activity (skill)-a material artifact. Whereas we readily see that certain kinds of activity promote group cohesion, we less readily see the artifact as providing the same service. Consider the built environment. At the scale of a room, the effects on human behavior and solidarity are so omnipresent and subtle that people do not-or hardly ever-pause to marvel.26 In the family room, family members almost always do different things, live in separate, strikingly dissimilar worlds of awareness: the baby crawls on the floor, the teenager studies Latin, the mother balances the budget, the father dozes before the television set. Yet they do not feel this separateness. On the contrary, they feel themselves to be a close-knit family, and any observer of the scene would conclude the same. The enclosed space of the room, a cheerfully illuminated interior set against the darkness outside, encourages a sense of oneness. Likewise, the pictures on the wall, the coordinated pieces of furniture, all attest to a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. In this model modern family, there is little bodily contact. Perhaps little is needed because the constructed space and its furnishings already do much to convey a feeling of cohesion.
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\nIn the classroom all the chairs, neatly arranged in rows, are identical, which promotes the illusion that the students who sit in them are alikethat they all have much the same body shape and weight, much the same sensory equipment, much the same kind of mind and intellectual preparedness, absorbing professorial wisdom in much the same way. What a shock when the professor reads the blue books
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\nAnd beyond the scale of a room? What can we say about the impact of house, neighborhood, and town or city on the feeling of oneness? I would say that the impact is certainly there, but it is more intricately layered and more a product of visual perception and conscious awareness. A house-say, a modern middle-class home-is made up of rooms, each of which may be designed for a different kind of activity. Such a house not only promotes separate spheres of life but also imparts greater coherence to each sphere, if only because people within it are aware of other kinds of activity in other rooms. The house itself is an architectural whole, evident especially when viewed from outside; its perceptual integ rity is a subtle yet powerful reminder to inmates that they are not isolated beings but members of a group
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\nA town favored with architectural monuments enjoys the added advantage of symbolic resonancea resonance that is further heightened when ceremonies are conducted around them and stories are told about them.27The word \"ceremony\" takes us back to the idea of culture as gesture and activity; it points to worlds evoked by motions of the body rather than by the making of buildings and things. By motions of the body I mean everything from dining etiquette to rites of agriculture and of war. I discussed these gestures and activities earlier. What I have yet to address with any fullness is storytelling. Storytelling is of prime importance because language is at the core of human culture. Without language, the uniquely human ways of transforming, covering up, and escaping are inconceivable.\"
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\nIn modern society, even when men and women chatter away, they seldom venture beyond a small set of different words-not much more than a hundred-in the course of a day. Bonding among members of a group is further strengthened if they develop a distinctive pronunciation, a jargon; and linguists assert that every close-knit human group has its own manner of speech that sets it off from others. Indeed, when we ask, What aspect of culture most sharply differentiates one group from another? the answer is, Not food, dress, housing, kinfolk network, and suchlike, but language
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\nThe desire to retain or resuscitate one's unique cultural signature in an increasingly undifferentiated cosmopolitan (global) society has translated into surprisingly effective political programs. Localism or particularism is now widely and explicitly recognized as a good and attainable political goal.
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\nIn a well-coordinated and well-designed room it can seem as though the armchair and its ottoman, a standing lamp and the adjoining side cabinet, are \"conversing\" with one another, such that a polite person would hesitate to disrupt the exchange by passing between them. When human beings stand side by side talking, is there a similar sense of coordination, of souls in deep and sympathetic converse that should not be lightly disrupted? I would say yes, but even more often no, at least on social occasions, which means on most occasions. The fact is, people seldom truly speak with or listen to one another; more often than they care to admit, they deliver soliloquies, with each individual using another's remark merely as a launching pad for his or her own performance.vi
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\nHuman beings have not become more egotistical, only more aware of their egotism-of their disinclination to see or listen, thanks in part to works like those of Chekhov, Tolstoy, and numerous other writers.35
\nIf a small vocabulary and the frequent use of cliches promote understanding and communal solidarity, the achievement of verbal-intellectual sophistication can have the opposite effect. The more people know and the more subtle they are at expressing what they know, the fewer listeners there will be and the more isolated individuals will feel, not only at large but also among colleagues and co-workers.
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\nLet me use an architectural metaphor to show how this can come about in academic life. Graduate students live in sparsely furnished rooms but share a house-the intellectual house of Marx, Gramschi, Foucault, or whoever the favored thinker happens to be.36 A warm sense of community prevails as the students encounter one another in the hallway and speak a common language, with passwords such as \"capital formation,\" \"hegemony,\" and \"the theater of power\" to establish firmly their corporate membership
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\nSocial scientists claim that a tenement building where people hang out the washing or sit on the stoop to socialize can be a warmly communal place. By contrast, a suburb with freestanding houses is cold and unfriendly. I am saying that the same may be true of intellectual life as one moves to larger houses of one's own design. Both types of move-socioeconomic and intellectualsignify success, and with both the cost to the mover can be an exacerbated feeling of isolation.
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\nMany societies, however, recognize that thinking without some immediate, practical end in mind can cause unhappiness and that, indeed, it is itself evidence of unhappiness. Happy people have no reason to think; they live rather than question living. To Inuits, thinking signifies either craziness or the strength to have independent views. Both qualities are antisocial and to be deplored
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\nmodern America, thinking is suspect. It is something done by the idly curious or by discontented people; it is subversive of established values; it undermines communal coherence and promotes individualism. There is an element of truth in all these accusations. In an Updike novel, a working-class father thinks about his son reading. It makes him feel cut off from his son. \"He doesn't know why it makes him nervous to see the kid read. Like he's plotting something. They say you should encourage it, reading, but they never say why.\"39
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\nThe anthropologist Monica Wilson asked the women of an African village why they set such store by their ceremonies. Was it because they exerted real power on the external world? Their answer was always the same: Such ceremonies were conducted for inward rather than outward effect; they served \"to stop people going mad.\"42 I am reminded of W. H. Auden's gloomy poem \"Death's Echo,\" in which he says, echoing the ancient Greeks, that not to be born may well be the best, but there is always a second best, which is formal order, the \"dance's pattern.\" To make some sense of life-to prevent ourselves from going mad-we have one ready means of escape, and that is to dance while we can 43vi
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\nHe has been accused of reductionism, of suggesting that structural analysis has the power to illuminate human experience and social reality. Levi-Strauss denies this as \"outrageous.\" The possibility, he says, has \"never occurred to me. On the contrary, it seems to me that social life and the empirical reality surrounding it unfold mostly at random.\" As Levi-Strauss picturesquely puts it, \"disorder reigns\" in social life's \"vast empirical stew.\" He, for his part, chooses to study only its \"scattered small islands of organization.
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\nA strongly analytical and critical disposition of mind, sustained over time, can lead to cynicism and despair. In the West this has not yet happened to a pronounced degree, and one reason is ironic: The same hard questioning that has corroded traditional covers has enabled Westerners to build a new one-the dazzling technological world that has its own great powers to shield, entertain, and distract.
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\nWould not these foundation-shaking queries be another reason, maybe the deepest one, for the vehemence with which the West is sometimes attacked? Besides its egregious faults of imperialism, racism, and speciesism that are generic to civilization, the West has allowed a way of thought to develop that is uniquely destructive of cultural covers and escape routes, not only other people's but also its own.vi
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\nBut haven't people always found it pleasing to stand on an eminence to look at a composition of hills and valleys, woods and meadows? Apparently not. Aesthetic appreciation of a panoramic scene appears to be an acquired tastea rare taste. Rarer still is the desire to capture the scene in a work of art. Rarest of all is the desire to depict accurately what the eyes see, as distinct from what the mind knows. Only Europeans have wanted it badly enough to spend some four centuries perfecting the art, which they also considered a science, for the realism they aimed at-the conformity to actual visual experience-could only be achieved through a sophisticated understanding of perspective, the properties of color under different lighting, and the actual shape and structure of (say) mountains, as well as how such shape and structure would change at various intervals of distance.41
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\nCulture is the product of imagination. Whatever we do or make, beyond the instinctual and the routine, is preceded by the kernel of an idea or image. Imagination is our unique way of escaping. Escaping to what and where? To something called \"good\"-a better life and a better placevi
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\nGood thus translates into goods; so much of life turns out to be a struggle not for good but for goods.
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\nOn the other hand, the opposite and more risky path also works. Security is obtained, not by losing oneself in the larger whole, but by wrapping the self in the trappings of power and prestige. Power and prestige being social, seeking them entails active participation in the group, but this time conspicuously-exhibitionistically-with the cunning help of imagination. Good then means far more than survival. Indeed, to the powerful and confident, physical survival as such is taken for granted and displaced to the lower realm of mere biological and animal life. Prestige is measured by how far one can rise above it.
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\nHuman vulnerability is not only subjection to physical pain, disablement, and death. It is also a corrosive sense of emptiness at the core of being, which one tries to overcome with the drowsing fumes of alcohol and drugs, and with socially approved work, projects, entertainments, but above all with human company, the hum of small talk that plugs every opening to ominous silence. We need other people, then, not just as a bulwark against external threat but as an effective diversion from having to confront this inner vacuity
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\nPeople want the \"good\" that is real, which is one reason why they latch on to material things. But material things, for all the direct satisfactions they provide, apparently cannot stand alone. To be truly valued, they need the support of imagined worth. The gap between palpable worth and imagined worth, with the latter backed by the power of society, is greatest in the art objects that are the pride of civilization. A city rich in art and architecture can, in a certain light, seem unreal, because such works boldly present themselves as products of a highly imaginative (even fanciful) mind and also because for all their materiality, they are wrapped in prestige, whose literal meaning is \"sleight of hand,\" and glamour, whose literal meaning is \"magic
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\nThe heated imagination that only yesterday gave us a haunted world may still do so in some dark age of the future. Reason and common sense are not a certain bulwark against lurid images, triggered by fear, that surge from primitive recesses of the mind. Childishly, when such images do not come unasked, we miss them and want to revive them for the thrill they provide. As a world made too dully safe by technology drives some people to the visceral excitement of the roller coaster, so modern life's pedestrian and even comely landscapes call for, as needed contrast, pockets of uncanniness and dread.
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\neggs broken to make omelettes, forests cleared to make books and houses, earth disemboweled to raise monuments of landscape architecture, and so on. But destructiveness as such has an appeal to humans that is not evident in other animals. What is the nature of the appeal? Power. Power is the beginning of an answer. For many people destruction is the clearest evidence of their ability to change the world and hence the most convincing proof of their own existence-their own reality and worth.
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\nTheater of war\" itself suggests that when one's own life is not at risk-and even when it is-the battlefield can be an exhilarating spectacle.6
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\nHuman beings, even young ones, are another matter. How innocence in the human young can combine with satanic inventiveness is shown in Joseph Czap- ski's story of Russian children splashing water on the corpses of German soldiers they found in the snow so that next morning they could use the frozen bodies as sledges.9vi
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\n. John Updike notes that as a child he tortured his toys, \"talking aloud to them, fascinating and horrifying [himself].\" The toys were a Donald Duck, a Mickey Mouse, and a Ferdinand the bull, a \"proto-flower-child\" with a \"drugged smile.\" Updike recalls, \"I would line them up, these smiling anthropoid animals, and bowl a softball at them as in tenpins, knocking them down again and again, and all the while taunting them in my mind, like some Nazi interrogating Resistance prisoners.\"10vi
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\nDocumented accounts of capricious evil exert a snakelike fascination: Splash prisoners with water in winter so that they freeze into solid blocks of ice and the corpses then have to be chipped or thawed out for disposal. Push a water hose into a prisoner's mouth, then turn on the faucet full blast so that the pressure explodes the victim's innards; onlookers find the explosion greatly entertaining. Pack prisoners into a closet so that they are wedged in tight, with absolutely no room to move, close the door, lock it, stuff paper into the keyhole, and then go for a cup of coffee-that is, forget about it, except for the awareness that the prisoners will suffocate and kill one another with body heat, in their desperate competition for air and in the crush of their writhing bodies.\"vi
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\nIn \"civilized\" societies the same sort of disciplined imagination that creates wonders of intellectual and spiritual uplift is able to create unspeakable horrors of degradation-literal hells. In disgust, we look to earlier times and simpler (more primitive) societies for reassurance. Can it be found there?vi
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\n. Still, many-perhaps even most-human relationships contain a hostile element; suggestively, the words \"hospitality\" and \"hostility\" have the same root. 16Conflicts may be out in the open and violent. The Other is not just another human being with whom I have to rub along, but a deadly enemy, a longtime oppressor, the personification of evil. My response to him may then be extreme. Such an individual must be not just killed but utterly destroyed, turned inside out, exposed, so that no secret source of power remains
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\nThe strong urge to penetrate, take over, subdue, and explode is almost exclusively male. It is bound up with the desire to know in both an intellectual and a sexual sense. A scientist is driven to penetrate his subject, break it down, expose its core, and, in a curious way, assume its \"subjectivity.\"
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\nA really good scientist can expropriate, so to speak, a molecule's \"soul.\" While the procedure that leads to such total scientific understanding is admirable, it is also highly intrusive and indeed bears a distant, though still disturbing, similarity to another arena of human behavior. I have in mind the psychological drive and behavior of the New Warriors of the post-Vietnam era, as described by James William Gibson. In old movies, Gibson notes, gunfights end with the victim collapsing, his death indicated by a small red clot on his chest. In the new movies of the 197os and I98os, the victim disintegrates in an explosion of blood and phlegm. The warrior opens up his enemy so that nothing is hidden. His own body, sheathed in glistening skin, black leather, or metal, remains not only intact but uncontaminated by the effluvia of another's decompositionvi
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\nAbuse of the weak is a deviant offshoot of the more general human domination of nature. \"Nature\" is whatever lacks, from the viewpoint of a powerful elite, their own dignity-their endowment of consciousness and will, their ability to create or acquire artifice. Judged by these criteria, animals clearly belong to nature. They may be figuratively elevated, treated as emblems of power and glory in sacred art, but in actuality they are almost always put in a subordinate or humiliating position, as beast of burden, producer of raw material (honey, silk), valuable property (nature's fanciful art), or pet
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\nEarly in the twentieth century, pedestrians passing over Hungerford Bridge tossed coins onto the mud banks of the Thames. What for? Well, for the pleasure of watching slum children, known as mudlarks, dive into the fetid paste as though mud were their natural habitat. A more benign variation of this game is for passengers on luxury liners to throw money into the clear and shallow waters near tropical islands and watch the natives, nearly naked and lithe like porpoises, plunge in for their paltry reward.
\nClose to sadistic taunt is the following story as told by the eleven-year-old Theodore Roosevelt. In the course of a grand tour of Europe, the Roosevelt family came upon a group of Italian beggars. Young Teddy happily reported, \"We tossed the cakes to them and fed them like chickens . . . and like chickens they ate it. Mr. Stevens [a traveling companion] kept guard with a whip with which he pretended to whip a small boy. We made them open their mouth and tossed cake into it. We made the crowds give us three cheers for U.S.A. before we gave them cakes.\"
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\nMoralists say that we are enormously complex, multidimensional beings and that we resent being reduced to some simpler entity. While this sounds plausible,
\nin actuality most of us need to be so reduced--to be known and to know ourselves as father, mother-in-law, teacher, janitor, or whatever. Indeed, each of these roles, though already a reduction, can still offer too much freedom, for it still leaves open the question (not completely settled by society's rules), What sort of father? What sort of teacher
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\nThese examples appear to have come from some dark age. We may reassure ourselves by saying that yes, the caste system, patronage (a society of patrones and peons), and treating people openly as mere aesthetic objects and pets were once-and not so long ago-a blight on humankind. But we have left all that behind. The question is, Have we? Caste and feudalistic relationships, as institutions, no longer exist. But as practice they linger,
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\nThey take the benign form of a compassion ate and sensitive leader, a defender of justice, helping the less fortunate members of society, who are seen-and this is where the attitude and behavior assume a darker shade-as his people, put upon, struggling, but also ignorant, fundamentally incapable of protecting themselves or having long-range plans of their own. The put-upon people, on their part, play the game for all its political worth. But their acquiescence in the subordinate role is not just strategy
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\nAcceptance of one's place would seem to argue against the urge to escape that I see as fundamental to being human. The contradiction is more apparent than real. Consider again escape from nature. When it rains, we dash into a house-into a haven of our own making; the move is from \"space\" to \"place,\" from uncertainty to the known.vi
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\nHistory provides countless examples, especially in the area of crime and punishment. In Europe, the torturing and hanging of felons were carnivalesque occasions that consistently drew gawking multitudes. As though these gruesome events in real life were not enough, France's popular theater of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries offered simulations that lasted even longer.28vi
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\nMoreover, one must believe that the fates, having already found a victim, will somehow leave oneself alone. And one must be in a state of mind that can, contradictorily, both identify with and dissociate from what happens \"out there.\" Spectatorship is the name of the game. In the theater, a spectator, even when deeply engaged, does not have to-indeed, must not-act. In real life, the same situation may demand action; simply looking can be profoundly immoral.30vi
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\nTo escape this, to elevate oneself above the neediness, frailty, and insignificance of mortals, one can wrap oneself in the trappings of divinity. These trappings may be material-a big house and other forms of wealth that distance their owner from nature. To really feel godlike, however, more is called for than material possession. That \"more\" is the actual exercising of power-if possible, absolute power. Absolute power creates the illusion of a radical gap between myself and others.
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\nEvil imagination seeks to displace. More widely and diligently, it seeks to disconnect. It draws boundaries, an important purpose of which is to shield me from contamination by other people's misery and misfortune
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\nPeople learn to change behavior as they move from one room to another. They may be said to become different selves in different rooms; what is socially or morally proper in one may be socially and morally improper in another. But this shift of attitude and value is forgotten; change in setting makes it easy to forget.33
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\nIn premodern villages and towns, turning a blind eye on needful strangers is quite acceptable, even commendable. A man's obligation is to his family first, neighbors next, and strangers last; altering the priorities would be unnatural. Such was the Chinese view under Confucian influence. Confucians deserve credit for at least saying that strangers should have the left- overs.14
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\nThis is one of the advantages of specialization. C. P. Snow was right about the morality of the man of science within his profession. This is because a scientist would be a fool to commit a scientific fraud when he can commit fraud every day on his wife, his associates, the president of the university, and the grocer.\"39
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\nThe need for idols is a sign of imaginative exhaustion. A golden calf is so much more manageable than God. A human idol makes even fewer demands on the imagination, for he or she can issue orders, promulgate rules of behavior, insist on adulation, whereas a golden calf does so only by proxy or through the idolater's own overheated imagination. Human beings-Napoleon, Elvis Presley-are among the most popular idols. Wealth too, for it requires little imagination to see it as the fount of well-being. Wealth takes different forms. A house represents wealth, as does also, more abstractly, a bank account. An idolater wants both to growvi
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\nNot all idols are material. Prestige, for example, is an idol only loosely tied to its material embodiment, which may be as fleeting and intangible as a gesture, a tone of voice, a fragrance, and as easily missed as the tiny insignia on a person's shirt. The acolyte of prestige needs to be constantly alert and of subtle mind
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\nThe golden calf conveniently stands for all the myriad objects, from Buddha's tooth and the true cross to great works of art and architecture, before which humans are inclined to worship, to treat not as emblems of the divine or win dows to transcendence but as ends in themselves or powers in their own right. Material objects are one part of the paraphernalia of religion. As important are the gestures, rules, and taboos. Circumambulating a shrine the wrong way, eating the wrong sort of food, can seem the utmost impiety. It is as though the majesty of God, the salvation of souls, and the harmony of the universe all hinged on and could be reduced to correct performance. Idol worship, as distinct from true religion, is nearly irresistible. We can see why. It is easy to do, and this despite-and even on account of-the rigid rules that have to be followed. It is also easy to do because its sacred objects are tangible, as God in his other- ness-\"not this, not that\"-is not. Furthermore, obeying injunctions to the letter provides two great psychological rewards: selfrighteousness and security.
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\nThe more people use their mind and freedom, the more they may be tempted by the bliss of nonexistence; the higher they fly, the more appealing can seem the peace and stability of the hole or bottom; the greater their power, the more they may yearn, if only temporarily, for powerlessness-total submission to the will of another
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\nI will present one that is popular in modern times and that is strangely ambivalent, arousing both strong approval and disapproval. It is this: Rather than descend into dimmed states of consciousness or simply taking flight, imagination constructs glittering fantasies of the good. Such fantasy worlds may be just private daydreaming and go no further. They can also be embodied in writing, for example, fairy tales. And they can be embodied in architecture, from pristine suburbs to magic kingdoms inspired by Walt Disney. In any sober estimation, these are far from hell or hellish. They are indeed a type of the Good. Yet critics have attacked them as unreal or sinisterly real-hyperreal.sb
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\nFor instance, withdrawing into the ivory tower-a university, a research laboratory-may be the only way to engage with difficult truths concerning the nature of the universe. The most unfair criticism of fairy tales is that they are wish fulfillment-a bad, escapist habit. Wish fulfillment is, however, not at all characteristic of modern fairy tales. The criticism may be better leveled at their eighteenth-century precursors. These indeed contain elements of unabashed wish fulfillment and escapism. Escape from what? Invari ably it is escape from necessity, which at its most urgent is the struggle for food. Typically, once the peasant-hero gets hold of a magic wand or ring, his first thought is of food, and, if he is ambitious, not just any food but meat
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\nIn our time the old fairy tale's piquant mix of extravagant fantasy and reductionist realism-humans reduced to the status of cunning animals-is much admired among literary pundits influenced by a Marxian distaste for bourgeois fantasy. And what is the essence of that fantasy? It is a world without crap, where \"crap\" stands for animality, earthiness, bondage to biological exigencies, death. Unlike the common people's dream, the bourgeois dream is expurgated; all that remain are material plenty in a lovely setting, good fellowship, and dignity for all but especially for oneself-that central figure around which all the delightful views, goods, and services seem arranged.
\nSuch, however, is the power of the bourgeoisie that its dream can be (and has been) turned into reality; and so the more affluent parts of the world now boast ranchhouse suburbs, mega-shopping malls, and theme parks filled with carefully designed and marketed comforts, wonders, and thrills.58 They are undoubtedly popular. Yet a small minority-usually those exceptionally privileged in education-do not want them. To this small minority the giddylands of modern consumerism are escapist fantasies because they deny the forces, which can be brutal, that have made them possible and also because they deny people's animal nature. Even if these places can be built without undue exploitation of either laborers or natural resources, they are unworthy-surface-deep and tendentious-unless they make allowance for filth. Of course, no one actually wants to be bogged down in filth, just to retain an awareness that it is irreducibly there. Even young radicals who disdain the picture-perfect suburb or mall cry \"Shit!\" when things miscarry, as though they had had enough of messy, unpredictable reality and would not mind being in a house where the coffee maker actually worked and the bedsheets smelled nice.
\nI am led to conclude that the one element that is critically lacking in these places is a certain moral and intellectual seriousness. But isn't this just a personal or cultural bias? Is it realistic, or compatible, to call for moral and intellectual seriousness on top of the comforts and entertainments that such good middle-class places already provide? Straining after an image of the ideal place-utopia or heaven-is undone by two glaring contradictions: the necessity for crap (else how can any place be real?) and the necessity for some sort of continuous spiritual/intellectual aspiration and development that is at odds with who we humans really are
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\nIn the fifteenth century, Nicholas of Cusa, while discoursing on the fundamentals of science, could still admit magic and the kinship of humans with spirits. Francis Bacon, a century and a half later, went notably further in the direction of modern scien tific thought. He rejected magic, equating it with dreams, hallucinations, and fantasy. He also rejected astrology and alchemy, for to him these depended too heavily on imagination and faith and were too remote from the experiences of everyday life. Bacon did, however, retain a theory of angels and spirits among the fundamentals of his \"primary philosophy.\" Notable in this philosophy-an early signal of the Enlightenment-is his turn toward a brighter world. The supernatural residuals of his thought consist of angels rather than demons, spirits rather than ghouls.
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\nIs it just possible that angels are more real, or have become more real, than demons? For it is a fact that monsters and ghouls, devils and witches, have faded in modern times. By contrast, God and spiritual beings have not altogether lost their respectability in serious thought, at least until late in the twentieth century.vi
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\nEscapism
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\nImagination, after all, is not only a source of illusion and error, it is also the uniquely human path to knowledge. If in modern times one kind of knowledge-scientific-enjoys exceptional prestige, a reason more basic than usefulness is that it appears to present the truest picture yet of reality, as distinct from some fear-driven or wishful image of it. Surprisingly, this picture is not pedestrian, close to what common sense would offer, but full of wonder
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\nIn other cultures and civilizations as well, not least the American Indian nations, one can discern the circle's gri
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\nNewton's first law states that a body in motion tends to remain in motion at a constant speed in a straight linevi
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\nhistorian of science Lynn White Jr. He writes:In 1733, as intellectual sport the Jesuit Girolamo Sacchari challenged Euclid's axiom of parallels, and substituting the \"nonsensical\" axiom that through a given point two lines may be drawn parallel to a given line, he constructed a self-consistent non-Euclidean geometry. Unfortunately, he laughed it off as ajeu d'esprit. Not until four generations later did mathematicians realize that he had made a great discovery. Then a whole constellation of contrasting geometries burst forth, and it was with the light of Riemannian geometry that Einstein found the mathematical key for the release of atomic energy. The most astonishing part of the new canon of symbols is the discovery that we human beings can deal with facts only in terms of fantasies.5vi
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\n\"In my entire scientific life, extending over forty-five years, the most shattering experience has been the realization that an exact solution of Einstein's equations of general relativity ... provides the absolutely exact representation of untold numbers of massive black holes that populate the universe. This `shuddering before the beautiful,' this incredible fact that a discovery motivated by a search after the beautiful in mathematics should find its exact replica in Nature, persuades me to say that beauty is that to which the human mind responds at its deepest and most profound.\"8vi
\n-------------------
\nYet to attain truth, they must be humble; indeed, a scientific genius is often one who to an unusual degree shows charity to ideas and facts that others disdain to consider. Again, like religious aspirants, scientists are austere. Their workplace is austere, their schedule is unrelenting, their language is the dry bone of symbols and numbers. Yet the reality they discover is as splendid and strange as that of religious visionaries. It is this combination of extremes-austerity and splendor, the very small and the very large-that makes the scientific picture plausibly one that God may draw, and can give rise to the feeling in scientists that as they find their way into this reality they approach something that may as well be called God
\nvi vi
\n-------------------
\nAt the scale of humankind, \"learning\" becomes more a figure of speech than a precise psychological process. Indeed, as one surveys the millennia, one has the irresistible impression of punctuated emergence-periodic eruptions of the new into history, rather than of anything steadily cumulative and progressive
\nvi vi
\n-------------------
\nAlthough maturation is desired and desirable, not all of it is gain. There are also losses-losses of innocence and of wonder. Loss of innocence is acceptable if knowledge and wisdom take its place. But loss of wonder and creativity? Surprisingly, only Westerners from the seventeenth century onward have learned to esteem both. Other people tend to see wonder and creativity, or (more prosaically) curiosity and probing, as an immature phase that is best left behind.
\nvi
\nvi vi
\n-------------------
\nIn premodern societies, childhood may be filled with strange happenings, but so is adulthood; after the initiation rite, one simply moves from one kind of enchanted world to another. In modern societies, by contrast, the child's magic kingdom is left behind when one reaches a certain age. Adults, understandably, look back to it with a sense of lossvi
\n-------------------
\nAt about the age of seven or eight, children begin to abandon pretense and fantasy in favor of realismvi
\n-------------------
\nMost of us are not scientists, but we use technology, and we are well aware that technology is reductionist in regard to the human habitat; that is, it tends to thin and spread out its inchoate richness, flushing out nooks and corners in which mystery can flourish.
\nvi
\nvi
\nvi
\nvi holyoke
\n-------------------
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Tauris", "place": "London; New York", "originalDate": "", "originalPublisher": "", "originalPlace": "", "format": "", "numPages": "", "ISBN": "1429418567 9781429418560 1845111370 9781845111373", "DOI": "", "citationKey": "", "url": "http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=167045", "accessDate": "2013-02-05T21:54:16Z", "ISSN": "", "archive": "", "archiveLocation": "", "shortTitle": "", "language": "English", "libraryCatalog": "Open WorldCat", "callNumber": "", "rights": "", "extra": "", "tags": [], "collections": [ "SFSS32DA", "XWSSAX3P" ], "relations": {}, "dateAdded": "2013-02-05T22:00:21Z", "dateModified": "2013-02-05T22:00:21Z" } }, { "key": "BG38MXKQ", "version": 331, "library": { "type": "group", "id": 145173, "name": "Global-Consumption", "links": { "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/groups/global-consumption", "type": "text/html" } } }, "links": { "self": { "href": "https://api.zotero.org/groups/145173/items/BG38MXKQ", "type": "application/json" }, "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/groups/global-consumption/items/BG38MXKQ", "type": "text/html" } }, "meta": { "createdByUser": { "id": 73838, "username": "haeber", "name": "Jonathan Haeber", "links": { "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/haeber", "type": "text/html" } } }, "creatorSummary": "Prakash and Kruse", "parsedDate": "2008", "numChildren": 0 }, "data": { "key": "BG38MXKQ", "version": 331, "itemType": "book", "title": "The spaces of the modern city : imaginaries, politics, and everyday life", "creators": [ { "creatorType": "author", "firstName": "Gyan", "lastName": "Prakash" }, { "creatorType": "author", "firstName": "Kevin Michael", "lastName": "Kruse" } ], "abstractNote": "By United Nations estimates, 60 percent of the world's population will be urban by 2030. With the increasing speed of urbanization, especially in the developing world, scholars are now rethinking standard concepts and histories of modern cities. \"The Spaces of the Modern City\" historicizes the contemporary discussion of urbanism, highlighting the local and global breadth of the city landscape. This interdisciplinary collection examines how the city develops in the interactions of space and imagination. The essays focus on issues such as street design in Vienna, the motion picture industry in Los Angeles, architecture in Marseilles and Algiers, and the kaleidoscopic paradox of post-apartheid Johannesburg. They explore the nature of spatial politics, examining the disparate worlds of eighteenth-century Baghdad, nineteenth-century Morelia, Cold War-era West Berlin, and postwar Los Angeles. 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In exploring the public meaning of ingeniously defended private meanings, de Certeau draws on an immense theoretical literature in analytic philosophy, linguistics, sociology, semiology, and anthropology--to speak of an apposite use of imaginative literature.", "series": "", "seriesNumber": "", "volume": "", "numberOfVolumes": "", "edition": "", "date": "1984", "publisher": "University of California Press", "place": "Berkeley", "originalDate": "", "originalPublisher": "", "originalPlace": "", "format": "", "numPages": "", "ISBN": "0520047508 9780520047501 0520236998 9780520236998 0520061683 9780520061682 9780520271456 0520271459", "DOI": "", "citationKey": "", "url": "", "accessDate": "", "ISSN": "", "archive": "", "archiveLocation": "", "shortTitle": "", "language": "English", "libraryCatalog": "Open WorldCat", "callNumber": "", "rights": "", "extra": "", "tags": [], "collections": [ "SFSS32DA", "XWSSAX3P" ], "relations": {}, "dateAdded": "2013-02-05T22:00:21Z", "dateModified": "2013-02-05T22:00:21Z" } } ]