Anthropologist teaches course examining consumerism in the U.S. and abroad

Postcards from the Classroom: Consumerism

"Simple living/complex thinking."

Miroslava (Mirka) Prazak, anthropologist and Bennington faculty member, is writing out a list on a chalkboard. Along with the phrase above--"simple living/complex thinking"--she has copied out others: "wealth," "happiness," "understanding," "living and acting responsibly."

If they sound like words that might appear in some kind of mission statement--well, in a sense, they are. One of Prazak's first assignments to the students in her Consumerism class was to write a short essay in which they wrestled with the question: "What are some of the values that inform your life, how you behave, and the choices you make?" The phrases she is writing on the board spring from those student reflections.

The question was not an idle one. Prazak is acutely interested in how her students see the world. It was, in fact, an observation about her students' values that first got her thinking about teaching a class on consumerism. "I've taught a course called Global Capitalism a few times, and one of the issues that the students were very disturbed by was the domination of America and the West in the world. I noticed the discomfort they had in thinking that other people's life-ways were disappearing--succumbing to the overriding presence of neo-liberal capitalism.

"The challenge of this course is to show that the expansion of global circuits of capital doesn't homogenize and replace any local culture--rather, it necessitates its reproduction in an altered form. That the western economic system has become so dominant doesn't mean that all the cultures of the world have been homogenized into a faceless mass."

Already interested in the ideas being grappled with in Bennington's Democracy Project, Prazak began to develop a course that would examine consumerism in a more complex light.

Seeking a more nuanced understanding of consumerism was exactly what drew Todd Weeks '07 to the class. A resident of Welling Town House, Bennington's co-op house (where students interested in sustainable culture share cooking and cleaning responsibilities), Weeks says that he has "always thought of consumerism as something to fight against." But as he delved into his studies at Bennington, "I started to feel like my reactionary understanding of it was inadequate. So I hoped to find something a little bit less superficial by taking this class."

Reading and thinking about how consumerism manifests in countries other than his own has compelled him to do exactly that. The course's path moves from continent to continent, looking at the impact of consumerism in American culture and abroad. So far, readings have covered the commercialization of childhood in the United States, the selling of Lifebuoy soap and ideas of cleanliness to colonial subjects in Zimbabwe in the early twentieth century, and the efforts to produce the Indian global consumer by a transnational advertising agency located in India in the 1990s. Upcoming is an exploration of the redefinition of gender in postsocialist Czech Republic.

Lively and participatory discussions of these readings--there are 22 students in the class, from a variety of backgrounds--are a pillar of the course, as are the students' ongoing "consumption journals." In these journals, students engage class readings and apply them to their own observations of consumer culture in everyday life.

For Dan Briggs '07, that meant examining his rural childhood in light of Juliet Schor's Born to Buy, and realizing that despite growing up nearly an hour away from the nearest shopping mall, with not a billboard in sight, the advertising he saw on TV still strongly influenced his "expectations of what a person should own or have." The journals of Hallie McNeill '08 incorporate both the personal (reflections on her experiences working in a Park Avenue chocolate shop) and the political (her own outside readings of political philosopher Hannah Arendt).

"The journals are fabulous," Prazak says. "I've engaged the students in a conversation about the possibility of taking the journals and editing a collection based on them, just to show the understandings and values of contemporary late adolescents and how they relate to the traditional ideals of American society: democracy, equality, competion, individual achievement, justice, and so on. Born in the mid to late 1980s, their lives have unfolded in the neo-liberal world, and their perspectives are distinct from the generations that went before.

"They're using the ideas presented in the texts to grapple with issues that arise in their lives, and those issues are really wide ranging. One that comes up often is the moral dimension of consumer choice. They perceive a connection between material experiences and their sense of identity and entitlement." 

That phrase on the blackboard--"simple living/complex thinking"--turns out to be not only a value that the students hold dear, but a common thread of the class. Weeks, Briggs, and McNeill all say that the class has complicated their understanding of issues they used to see in black and white. And for some, it has challenged them personally as well. Says McNeill: "Before colonialism in Zimbabwe, the people there didn't use soap, but they used many other things to enact that same process of cleansing. And yet soap has now evolved into this necessity; during the war, the second most requested necessity was soap. In the store I worked in, people came in and spent $300 on chocolate, which they justified for whatever reason. I myself can justify whatever amount I spend on shoes and say 'Well, they're needed.'

"How does that happen? Where does it end? I guess that's the question I'm left with."

From the Bennington College curriculum:

Consumerism
Miroslava Prazak
In a world marked by extremes of poverty and wealth, consumerism seems contagious in its power to incite social and individual yearning and discontent. This course explores the history of acquisition-finding, choosing-spending in Western societies and then examines the phenomenon in other parts of the world. Advertising not only sells cars and cigarettes, but also politicians as the consumer mentality spreads to politics and education. The illusion of choice permeates the market place, the ballot box and the classroom. What is the nature of choice when it may be the packaging and not the product that is the major difference among goods? We will look at how consumerism is fueled and the implications of its language and ideas outside the economic realm. Is democracy being built through the nurturance of reflectiveness, curiosity, imagination and "a passion for the possible" in schools? Or are classrooms increasingly mass media outlets for corporate marketing, image building, and ideological molding pitched to young minds?

More:

• Social Sciences at Bennington
• Postcards from the Classroom: Borges and Mathematics
• The Democracy Project at Bennington
• Applying to Bennington

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