Consuming Desires: Strategies of Selfhood and Appropriation

Author(s): Jonathan Friedman

Source: Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 6, No. 2 (May, 1991), pp. 154-163
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association
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 Consuming Desires:
Strategies of Selfhood and Appropriation
Jonathan Friedman
Department of Anthropology
Lund, Sweden

La Consommation a Outrance

If this isn't love, the whole world is crazy

-Dean Martin

In 1984 a young Japanese student completing a doctoral degree in Paris

a substantially larger young Dutch girl in Paris to study French literature. The
became good friends, but the Japanese man had more amorous designs on
young woman. Time and time again he tried to seduce his friend, but to no a
She insisted on a pure friendship relation. One evening he invited her to dinn
his place and wasted little time in murdering her and making love to her still l
warm corpse. Following this first taste of love, he, not without finesse, carv
her body, separating the inedible portions, the head and innards, from the
cacies such as breasts, thighs, sirloin, and filet. After enjoying a rather bru
meal of raw flesh, he packed the waste portions in heavy-duty garbage bags
deposited them in the Bois de Boulogne. He carefully packed the delicacies
his refrigerator and, in the ensuing weeks, indulged himself in lonely banque
steak saignant, stews, and other tasty morsels. Needless to say, he was soon
covered by the police, and like the proud witches and cannibals of old he c
fessed willingly to his deed.

I have always dreamed of being able to eat a pretty young girl. [Paris Match, 27
1983]

The unspeakable horror that gripped the witnesses to the texts of this heinous
crime belie a certain fascination as well. It has been said that cannibalism is so
frightening and horrible because it reduces the human being to mere meat, fat,
and protein, as some cultural materialists would have it. And while the latter are
at pains to overcome their own discomfort with such acts by reducing them to
purely practical acts of nutrition, just as culturalists might neutralize them by turn-
ing them into symbolic games, the imagination of the experience lingers on. Yet
our friend said that he desired a pretty young girl, one with whom, in fact, he was
in love. His consumption of her body was also the consummation of his love. In

154

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 CONSUMING DESIRES 155

any case this is not the ordinary run-of-the-mill consumption of steaks and
We do not often ask if the cow was pretty, if the sheep was sexy. We c
the transformed product of living creatures, transformed into pure "raw
tive product. In fact, in order to further convert it into food, we must rec
it by cooking, seasoning, decorating, and the like. It is said that we "dres
and anthropologists refer here to the movement from nature to culture.
more, we maintain the distinction between the dish as nourishment and
that is, as mere protein, etc., and as socially marked or elaborated pro
this is the homologue of our moder personhood, divided between o
halves: nature, desire, aggression, libido; and our higher selves: sublimat
tivated, controlled. The lower half is unmarked, socially undefined, yet t
of our life energy, our desire, and thus a focus of our fascination and at
Cannibalism, fascinating horror, has not gone unnoticed in moderni
ture. Freud located it in the remote corers of the id, and Melanie Klein
great lengths to demonstrate its existence in the active imagination of ve
children where she located it the pre-Oedipal world of partial objects-
Dismembered bodies, just as pornography, incite disgust at one level but
canny attraction at another forbidden level. Their common violence co
the destruction of the identity of the person and his or her reduction to m
gan, that is, an object controlled by the perpetrator of the act. But this is
ined experience of the victim and not necessarily of the cannibal. After
the modern Japanese subject was out to consume the whole person, iden
all, and not to simply ingest so many kilos of meat. But, one might ask,
got down to the eating, what did he experience when setting his teeth to th
thigh of his loved one?
This example, which is as far from the standard values of the Jap
from our own society, is meant to indicate the degree to which consum
always a total human phenomenon, even if it is not always a total social
enon. In the following we shall explore more systematically the contras
different forms of consumption and even production as encompassed as
more general strategies of identity.

Out of Africa: Consumption of Otherness and the Production of Se

The modern Western vision of cannibalism is based on a strongly in

alist experience of self, one that divides consumption into a vulgar, nat
nutritive base and a culturally elaborated social form which, in itself, is
most to the physical sensation of taste, but primarily to the constitution
relations. Our horror-fascination of cannibalism can be said to lie in this dualistic
experience or our own selves. Yet cannibalism-to some extent here-and even
more so in other parts of the world, is a quintessentially holistic act. What is con-
sumed is the soul, the life-force of the other. But where in our kind of society this
kind of act is only clearly represented in our psychoanalytic imagination, in the
identity-less strivings of the pre-Oedipal child, in a society where the individual
subject is always dependent for his very definition on the significant others of his

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156 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

kin group, both cannibalism and witchcraft are logical properties of inter
relations. The subject's existence depends on the continuous flow of life f
cosmos via the network of ancestors and kin, and his life project is cent
within himself but is vested in the authority of the group, its symbols and
sentatives. To be consumed in such a context is not to be reduced but to be ele-
vated, to be absorbed into the life of a superior.

It is a remarkable fact in the history of this people [the Kongo], that any who are tired
of life, or wish to prove themselves brave and courageous esteem it a great honour to
expose themselves to death by an act which shall show their contempt for life. Thus
they offer themselves for slaughter and as the faithful vassals of the princes, wishing
to do them service, not only give themselves to be eaten, but their slaves also, when
fattened, are killed and eaten. [Pigafetta 1970:28]

Ekholm (1991) provides a penetrating analysis of the way in which a partic-

ular logic of consumption takes on varying expressions in the wake of the collapse
of the ancient Kongo kingdom and the ensuing slave trade.
What is most significant in the above representation is the act of self-sacrifice
on the part of the vassal, the honor of literally becoming part of one's superior.
Whether such cannibalism actually occurred in this period, and its mention is in-
deed rare, except in reference to the behavior of neighboring enemies, the logic
of the image is double: powerful princes who regulate the flow of life-force to
their dependents whom they nevertheless may consume on occasion. The full
force of this logic is only realized in the wake of the dissolution of Kongo policy
(Ekholm 1991).
The network of cosmological connections that guaranteed this flow disinte-
grated with the decentralization of wealth accumulation, the warfare and political
anarchy that succeeded the fall of the Kongo kingdom, and the ensuing slave trade
and colonial intervention. Power, in the sense of any form of social superiority,
became increasingly associated with other sources of life-force more closely cor-
related with the world of insecurity and disaster that became the fate of the region.
The delegitimation of power could but only take on an ambivalent quality, since
force remained force, no matter how obtained. The fact that a powerful person
was a witch did not detract from his power, that is, his ability to destroy his ene-
mies. The fact that the current Congolese president is said to eat the hearts of
children and to bathe in human blood is a characterization of the source of his
power, and it implies a healthy respect for supernatural proficiency. Witches were
not ashamed of their power. Quite the contrary! At the end of the last century in
the northern regions of the Congo basin, renowned Bangala cannibals confounded
the sensibilities of their European guests. "When the son of the great Bangala
chief, Mata Buike, was asked if he had eaten human flesh, he said: 'Ah! I wish I
could eat everybody on earth!' " (Johnston 1908:399, cited in Ekholm
1991:192).
Ekholm has argued that the violent upheavals of the mid and late 19th cen-
turies which featured both rampant witchcraft in the southern Congo and canni-
balism in the north can be accounted for by variations of a unitary strategy whose

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 CONSUMING DESIRES 157

goal is the appropriation of life-force in a situation in which the usua

have broken down. And cannibalism appears to be a satisfying if not p
isfactory means of solving the problem. "I never saw natives exhibit
fondling and affection for each other as was shown among these erst
nibals" (Weeks 1913:78).
Eating in the current framework is not consumption, as we know it,
or animal protein, not even of a tasty meal, but the ingestion of the
animates the living universe, that is the source of health and of well-
which is constantly in danger of vanishing.
What we have described is not peculiar to cannibalism but is an e
quality of all consumption in the Congo and other areas where a parti
archical order generates a particular kind of personhood which in its turn
render a particular form to the practice of consumption. This is evide
of the more extreme contemporary practices that have emerged in the
European dominance. Les sapeurs of the Congo and other parts of Af
lower class youth groups organized into social-age classes whose status
by the acquisition of a rank order of clothing that takes them to Paris, t
as they call it, where, by hook and crook, they accumulate a wardrob
name apparel. Without describing in more detail the organization of t
ties (Friedman 1990a,b; Gandoulou 1984, 1989), it can be noted that t
not mere flaneurs for whom dress represents something that they the
not. On the contrary, to clothe the self is to define the self. To achieve t
age class is to become un grand. No copy of a griffe2 will do, only the
The religious nature of the "cult" is evident in interviews with its m
Clothing is, as we have suggested elsewhere (Friedman 1990a,b, 1991)
the Melanesian notion of Cargo. It is not a symbol of wealth or status
derstand the terms, nor is it power or life-force in itself. Rather it is th
the embodiment of the flow of life-force from its cosmic sources. This f
dinkolo in kikongo, like mana in Eastern Polynesia, does not represent
It is! Dressing elegantly is hooking into the cosmic scheme. Similarly,
known as maquillage d outrance, where a concoction of bleach, s
creams, and salves are placed on the skin and covered with heavy clo
several unbearably sweaty days, destroys the outer layers of the epide
exposes a lighter, yellowish, and dangerously unprotected dermis. Th
jaunir, to become yellow (or white), meaning both the above practice
gaining of wealth and, by definition, status expresses, again, the same
egy of cosmic mobility. The "makeup" is called kilongo, "medicine,"
as a source of well-being and imbued with the force of God.

Modernity: Consumption as Alterity

What we began to discuss at the start of the article was a situation

ferent than that described above. Our own experience of consumption
ferent order, an order that might be defined as modernity and I take thi
its structural rather than a cultural, that is, European, sense. While th

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158 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

has been discussed at length by Simmel, Dumont, and others we might summa
it ever so briefly in terms of the following parameters and tendencies. The de
opment of commercial capitalism is related to the dissolution of a cosmologic
based system of social positions and involves a series of separations: wealth fr
fixed status, individual from role, private from public, nature from cosmos. S
nett (1974) and, especially, Campbell (1987) have done much to lay bare the
lations between social context and the emergence of individuality as they rel
to the practice of consumption.
In terms of the separations listed above, we might say that the crucial ch
acteristic affecting consumption in relation to selfhood is the split between t
inner, private, natural self (the real me) and the social, public self which beco
defined as an arbitrary role in opposition to the former who thus becomes a k
of actor. It is noteworthy that the breakdown of fixed status hierarchies, the co
feehouse as a public experimental meeting place and an explosive interest in t
theater, all emerge simultaneously (Agnew 1987; Sennett 1974). Campbell argu
that the fundamental principle of moder consumerism is the realization of th
private fantasy driven by a desire that can, by definition, never be satisfied. C
sumption is about the creation of a life world, an identity space, an imagined
istence. It expresses a romantic longing to become an other in an existential s
uation where whatever one becomes must eventually be disenchanted by th
knowledge that all identity is an arrangement of man-made products, thus an
tifice. No authentic identity is possible, so consumption must go on in quest o
fulfillment that can never be attained. The structure of this dynamic might be r
ferred to as the Walter Mitty principle (Thurber 1945).3 Even anticonsumption
is a consumption of sorts, as an appropriation of a part of the world in an act
creating a life space and style of existence. And it faces the same dilemmas o
inauthenticity. This kind of consumption is the expression of a self-directed stra
egy in which the free floating subject attempts to create a world in which to anch
his identity, within which he can realize his fantasies and consummate his des
Campbell also deals substantially with the range of phenomena to which V
blen (1925) and more recently Bourdieu (1979) devoted so much attention. A
opposed to the self-directed strategy, this latter is referred to as other-directed.
is descended from the dissolution of the aristocratic order where position was
delibly marked on the body and its movements. As a normal aspect of mod
consumption it refers to the symbolic practice of making and maintaining so
distinctions, symbolic because the distinctions are already present in society. B
surely, even the most fashion conscious of cultural elites get more out of the
consumption than social recognition. They also enjoy their distinctive life spa
in themselves and find a sense of fulfillment in the realization of their fantasies
themselves. My Jaguar is more than a show for others, it is a world of pleasur
itself. The self-directed strategy penetrates the self to the very core of other
rectedness.
The historical examples of other-directed strategies, both extreme and in-
structive, developed first in the flaneur and then in varying forms of conspicuous
dandyism and aestheticism (Campbell 1987:161-172). At first this dressing for

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 CONSUMING DESIRES 159

the other was a strategy of social mobility of passing into the highe
ciety by representing oneself in a correctly cultivated manner. But
the 19th century, the cultivation of appearance had, literally, bec
itself, human existence as a work of art. For Oscar Wilde, the Bloo
and others, appearance and life-style defined its own social superior
tive of background (Featherstone 1991:8). But as all such claims it w
dependent on the gaze of the other, of the rest of society, and it was,
doomed to failure. And for this latter-day dandyism, the image th
for oneself could never become the whole of the self. Even here, ch
ing for the new played their romantic role. And while there is certa
sistic tendency in this, it never achieves the kind of other-depende
described for les sapeurs. In modernity the latter strategy is closer
designate as clinical narcissism, clinical because there is no ontolog
moder society to fill the vacuum left by a vanishing ego.
The ontology of modernity is organized to desacralize and neutr
by reducing it to human production. No fixed selfhood can be found
of arbitrary human constructions.

Reality becomes artificial, a phantasmagoria of commodities and arch

struction made possible by the new industrial processes. The moder cit
but the proliferation of such objects, the density of which created an a
scape of buildings and consumer items as totally encompassing as the e
one. [Buck-Morss 1983:213]

The consciousness of the artificial and therefore arbitrary natu

structed world deprives that world of its immediate force, of a pot
capacity to intervene in the course of human affairs. As human produ
the moment of its inception, something that may be left behind in
something "better." Western fascination with urban life is construe
ing of oneself in the milieu of high civilization, a spectator sport
search of the excitement of being in the center of things. But it is
acutely inescapable distance to the products with which one mingle

The Production of Self for Others

The Congolese strategy that we have depicted consists in the consumption

of life-force in a cosmos where positions are hierarchically defined. Appropriation
of superior, more powerful, goods increases the well-being, thus the power and
the status, of the consumer. To become a Parisien is an essential Congolese strat-
egy, not in the sense of becoming what one is not, but becoming more than one
is, by ascending a cosmological scale of sacred power. Moders consume in order
to create alternative existences for themselves, identities that are always separate
and separable from their "real" selves.
Other populations, such as the Hawaiians but especially the Ainu, produce
themselves for others to see. While many Ainu, who are classified by the Japanese
as a class or outcast rather than an ethnic group, attempt to pass into Japanese

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160 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

society by speaking, living, and consuming Japanese, a growing ethnic m

ment has sought instead to produce Ainu identity.

My personal opinion is that the Ainu people have come to realize that in or
become a complete human being, an "Ainu," one cannot repress one's origi
stead one has to let it come into the open and that is exactly what is happening
the Ainu people today. They are eager to know about olden times, values, t
everything. They have been starving, mentally for so many years now. [S
1991:169]

The Ainu movement has made efforts to reestablish the Ainu langua
schools that also teach Ainu traditions. They are also engaged in a strugg
regain their lands for their own use and more generally for a recognition o
existence as a separate people within the larger Japanese realm, Nihon. S
provides an excellent analysis of the reemergence of Ainu identity. Of u
significance in this process is the production of Ainu artifacts for demons
and sale to Japanese tourists. Tourist villages appear to be of strategic imp
in the constitution of Ainu selfhood.

Every Ainu man is a "Kibori man." We make carvings because we cannot sto
in our blood. If we can make a profit, well we do not think there is anything
with this. [Sjoberg 1991:164]

The production and sale of traditional Ainu objects is part of the estab
ment of Ainu identity as a concrete physically realized existence. The J
consumption of Ainu products is, by implication, the recognition of their
tive being. The gaze of the other is thus systematically invoked in the cre
the self.
Modem intellectuals, not least anthropologists, who are astounded by
appears to them as the commercial deauthentification of Ainu culture are
expressing the same dualism of the subject who experiences all commodi
false in relation to the "real" self. Ainu do not experience the world in th

They are arranging Ainu food festivals, where people can taste our food. We h
own specialties you know. The food is cooked in a traditional way and the peo
traditional cooking utensils when they prepare the food. Now to be able to ea
food we cannot use our land to cultivate imported crops only. We have to hav
where we can cultivate our own cereal .... Our food festivals are very popu
people come from all over Nihon to visit and eat. They say our food is very ta
they will recommend their friends to come here and eat. As a matter offact we a
have restaurants in Sapporo, Asahikawa and Hakodate. [Sjoberg 1991:169; em
in original]

In the tourist villages, Japanese visitors can come and witness traditional ac-
tivities as well as purchase traditional goods. It is in these villages, replicas of
traditional Ainu villages, that courses are offered for Ainu and where great efforts
are made to reestablish Ainu values and life-style. From the point of view of strat-

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 CONSUMING DESIRES 161

egies of identity, production and consumption are equivalent, even if t

they establish are quite different.

Things Are Not What They Seem

Congolese internalize what is outside of themselves in order to b

than what they are. Ainu externalize what is inside of themselves for
by others (hopefully not cannibals) in order to become what they
westerners appropriate what is outside of themselves in order to becom
are not. If we label the first strategy as holistic, the second as ethnic,
as individualist we might begin to gain an insight into the conditions o
of such strategies, but this lies beyond the scope of the present artic
man 1990b). At any rate, we have not contented ourselves with a pr
different structures of selfhood as they relate to strategies of ident
tried to suggest the kinds of relations that might connect social co
formation of the person, and emergent strategies of consumption.
posed that consumption and even production are encompassed by s
strategies of identification of self and world.
Arjun Appadurai, in his elaborate introduction to the excellent
Life of Things, proposes a composite approach to "things" in circula
lates a sphere of objects that are endowed with meaning and value c
another, sociocultural, sphere. Thus, things can become commodit
properties of exchangeability become dominant. This might imply
bought on the market, the object then enters another sphere and lo
modity character. We have argued that the commodity form itself is a
property of social relations in commercial capitalism, an integral asp
personhood, that is, much more than the fact of exchangeability of
padurai, who often refers to Simmel's The Philosophy of Money wo
gree, but his point of departure is the things themselves rather than t
within which they are embedded. It is in this way that he can speak
life of things," that is, the movement of meaning-endowed objects.
gestion here is the converse, that it is in the strategies of selfhood and
"things" take on their social life. Things do not have social lives. R
lives have things.

Notes

'Ekholm (1991) demonstrates how both witchcraft as it is known to moder ethnography

and cannibalism as described in the 19th-century travel literature are products of a specific
kind of transformation of Kongolese culture that occurs as the centralized flows of life-
force dissolve along with the political structure throughout the period from the 16th to the
20th centuries.

2La griffe or "label" refers, of course, to the fashion house's label, but is used metonym-
ically to refer to the entire garment, whose only value to the sapeur is its origin.

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162 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

3This principle, taken from the well-known short story by James Thurber, refer
imagination of the principle character that enjoys fabulous adventures in the day
that accompany his paltry existence. See the discussion in Campbell (1987:78).

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