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GLOBAL PROBLEMS
AND THE CULTURE OF CAPITALISM

Richard H, Robbins Rachel A, Dowty

 Contents vii

Some Examples of Religious Violence 343

11 Anti-Systemic Protest 301
Understanding Religious Violence 348
Protest as Anti-Systemic: The Two World Revolutions 302 Conclusion 349
The World Revolution of 1848 303
The World Revolution of 1968 305
The Protests of Labor: Coal Miners in Nineteenth-Century
13 Solving Global Problems: Some
Pennsylvania 306
Options and Courses of Action 351
The Coal Industry and the Worker 's Life 306 Rethinking Debt, Money, and Economic Growth 352
Worker Resistance and Protest 309 What Is the Necessary Rate of Growth? 353
Destroying Worker Resistance 311 If Economic Growth Is Slowing, How Can Investors
Global Peminist Resistance 312 Realize Their Continuing Income Streams
at the Historic 4 to 6 Percent? 355
Gender Relations in the Culture of Capitalism 314
The Sovereign Debt Crisis and The Austerity Myth 359
Strategies of Protest 316
Some Examples of Sovereign Debt Default 360
The World Revolution of 2018? 319
Direct Action and Occupy Wall Street 319 The Greek Debt Crisis 360
Puerto Rico, Argentina and "Vultures" 361
Anarchism and Direct Action 321
Extent of the "Austerity" Dilemma 363
Conclusion 324
Austerity and Inequality 363
Where Do We Stand ? 367
12 Religion and Anti-Systemic Debt and the Bargain of 1694 367
Protest 325
Things We Could Do 368
Indigenous Religious Movements as Anti-Systemic The Chicago Plan 369
Protest 327 The Public Bank Solution 370
The Ghost Dance 328 The Debt Strike 373
The Cargo Cults 328 Conclusion 375
Zionism in South Africa 330
The Global Challenge of Anti-Systemic Religious
Protest 333 References 377
Islamic Fundamentalism 334 Name Index 387
Islamic Fundamentalism in Iran 336
Place and Culture Index 393
Protestant Fundamentalism in North America 337
"Terror in the Mind of God" 341 Subject Index 397
This page is intentionally left blank
Preface
o ver the past 400 to 600 years, a culture and soci-
ety, originating for the most part in Europe and
dedicated to the idea of trade and consumption
as the ultimate source of well-being, began to expand to
all parts of the globe. In many ways it is the most success-
ful culture and society the world has ever seen, and its
technology, wealth, and power stand as monuments to its
success; however, accompanying its expansion have been
—
problems growing social and economic inequality, envi-
ronmental destruction, mass starvation, and social unrest.
Most members of this society and culture perceive these
problems as distant from themselves or as challenges for
them to meet . However, there is the possibility that these
problems, which threaten to negate everything this culture
has accomplished, are intrinsic to the culture itself . That is
the possibility to be explored in this book.
The outline of this book emerged when, a few years
ago, colleagues at the State University of New York at
Plattsburgh, James Armstrong and Mark Cohen, and the
senior author began developing a course on global prob-
lems. We wanted to create a course that would help stu-
dents understand the major global issues that they confront
—
in the mass media problems such as the so-called popu-
lation explosion, famine and hunger, global environmental
destruction, the emergence and spread of new diseases, so-
called ethnic conflict and genocides, terrorism, and social
protest. We learned quickly that to make the course success-
ful, we had to overcome the often-ethnocentric perspectives
of the students, perspectives that were often reinforced by
media coverage of global affairs. We needed also to com-
pensate for the students' lack of backgrounds in anthropol-
ogy, history, and economics, all crucial for understanding
the roots of the problems we were to examine. Finally, we
needed to illustrate that the problems we examined were
relevant to them, that the problems would affect them
either directly or indirectly, and that their actions now or in
the future would determine the extent to which the origins
of these problems could be acknowledged, let alone ever
addressed . The form of this book emerged from our efforts
at dealing with these pedagogical issues and the classroom
interactions that these efforts stimulated .
The Focus of this Book
We can summarize our approach in this book as follows:
There has emerged over the past five to six centuries a dis-
tinctive culture or way of life dominated by a belief in trade
and commodity consumption as the source of well-being.
This culture flowered in Western Europe, reached fruition
in the United States, and spread to much of the rest of the
world, creating what some anthropologists, sociologists,
and historians call the world system. People disagree on the
critical factors in the development of this system and even
whether it was unique historically, although most agree on
certain basic ideas. Among the most important are the as-
sumptions that the driving force behind the spread of the
contemporary world system was industrial and corporate
capitalism, and that the spread of the world system is re-
lated in some way to the resulting division of the world into
wealthy nations and poor nations or into wealthy core, de-
veloped, or industrialized areas and dependent peripheral,
undeveloped, or nonindustrialized areas.
The spread of the capitalist world system has been
accompanied by the creation of distinctive patterns of social
relations, ways of viewing the world, methods of food pro-
duction, distinctive diets, patterns of health and disease,
relationships to the environment, and so on. However, the
spread of this culture has not gone uncontested; there has
been resistance in the form of direct and indirect actions—
political, religious, and social protest and revolution. How
and why capitalist culture developed and the reasons why
some groups resisted and continue to resist its development
are among the questions posed in this book.
The answers to these questions are based on specific
assumptions. First, a central tenet of anthropology is that
personal, social, cultural, and historical factors determine
the point of view any person might have regarding a cer-
tain phenomenon. No less is true of those participating
in the culture of capitalism who have created a view of
global events that we share . Consequently, these views
tend to be, to one extent or another, ethnocentric; that is,
they describe, evaluate, and judge events solely from a
specific cultural perspective . Among the major purposes
of anthropology is to teach ways to avoid ethnocentrism
and appreciate the importance of understanding the
beliefs and behaviors of others from their perspectives
rather than from our own, a view anthropologists refer
to as cultural relativism . To some extent ethnocentrism is
unavoidable, and the job of the person who interprets
—
global events whether a journalist, economist, sociolo-
—
gist, or anthropologist is to make the event comprehen-
sible to those people for whom that person is writing. Our
assumption is that to minimize cultural bias we must rec-
ognize that our views of events are partially influenced
by our culture and , for that reason, we must make our
own culture an object of analysis.
ix
x Preface
Second, we assume that an understanding of global
events requires us to recognize that no contemporary cul-
ture or society exists independent of what anthropologists
refer to as the world system, and that each falls within
either the core or the periphery of that system. Using this
terminology to refer to different parts of the world permits
us to avoid the more value-laden distinctions implicit in
the use of terms such as developed or undeveloped , modern
or traditional , and First , Second , or Third World . World sys-
tem theorists often include a third category, semiperiphery,
to denote those nation-states or regions that are moving
toward the core or that have moved out of the core. These
distinctions recognize that countries can move from one
category to another. For example, the three nation-states
that world system theorists consider to have been dominant
—
in the past four centuries the Netherlands, the United
—
Kingdom, and the United States all began as semiperiph-
eral to the world system.
Third, we assume that global events and actions cannot
be adequately understood without considering the events
that preceded them; we must develop a historical perspec-
tive. For example, we live in a period of human history
largely defined by a sequence of events that began some
four to five hundred years ago, loosely termed the Industrial
Revolution . Because each of us has lived during only a par-
ticular phase of that history, we tend to take it for granted
that the world has always been as it is today. Yet the modern
industrial world order is, in historical terms, a very recent
event. We are deceived by our biology, by our limited life
span, into thinking of sixty, seventy, or eighty years as a long
time, but in the perspective of human history it is a fleeting
moment . Human beings have for most of their existence
lived as bands of gatherers and hunters, for a shorter time
as agriculturists and farmers, and only recently as industri-
alists and wage laborers. Yet the Industrial Revolution has
transformed the world and human societies as has no other
event in history. We cannot understand the events, issues,
and problems of today's world without understanding the
how's and why's of the Industrial Revolution.
It will be clear that the emergence of capitalism repre-
sents a culture that is in many ways the most successful that
has ever been developed in terms of accommodating large
numbers of individuals in relative and absolute comfort and
luxury. It has not been as successful, however, in integrating
all in equal measure, and its failure here remains one of its
major problems. It has solved the problems of feeding large
numbers of people (although certainly not all), and it has
provided unprecedented advances in health and medicine
(but, again, not for all). It has promoted the development of
amazingly complex technological instruments and fostered
a level of global communication without precedent. It has
united people in common pursuits as no other culture has.
Yet it remains to be seen when the balance sheet is tallied
whether capitalism represents the epitome of "progress"
that some claim.
New to this Edition
When preparing the sixth edition of this book Barak Obama
had just been elected to a second term as President of the
United States, Great Britain was a functioning member of the
European Union, democratic upheavals were reshaping coun-
tries in the Middle East while the world was still recovering
from the economic crisis of 2007. Global GDP stood at about
$78 trillion and at about $17 trillion in the United States. A lot
changed in five years. Authoritarian governments emerged in
places as diverse as Poland, the Philippines, Egypt, India, and
the United States. Citizens of Great Britain voted to leave the
European Union as part of a seeming protest of immigration.
In spite of international accords, carbon dioxide concentration
in the atmosphere has risen from 397 parts per million ( ppm)
to almost 407 ppm and the world continues to yearly break
old temperature records. New diseases, such as the Zika virus
pose threats as do anti-biotic resistant diseases. And Global
GDP has declined to about $75 trillion, while in the United
States it has climbed to about $18.5 trillion as sovereign debt
prompts counties, both poor and rich, to adopt so-called aus-
terity measures including reduction of government services,
pension plans, and assistance to the poor.
We have tried to address these concerns, as well as oth-
ers, in the revisions to the seventh edition. These include
the following:
• An expanded discussion of the nature of money and its
relationship to debt and economic growth.
• Introduction of content in Chapter 3 on the English
financial revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, specifically the establishment of the Bank of
England and the beginnings of the modern debt-based
financial system.
• An expansion in Chapter 6 of the role of debt in hunger,
and specifically a discussion of the debt / food insecu-
rity cycle.
• A discussion in Chapter 10 of how our economic sys-
tem relates to the occurrence, reaction and remediation
of large-scale disasters such as floods, hurricanes and
earthquakes.
• A completely revised final chapter (Chapter 13) trying
to make sense of the political and economic upheavals
of the past five years and the spread of so-called aus-
terity programs. We have discussed several measures
specifically involving finance and the creation of our
money supply, that could alleviate many of the prob-
lems that we discuss in this book.

As always, we welcome comments and commu-
nications from readers and can be reached by email at
richard .robbins@ plattsburgh.edu and RDowtyBeech@
newhaven.edu .
—
This text is available in a variety of formats digital and
print . To learn more about our programs, pricing options,
and customization, visit www.pearsonhighered.com.
Course material, including an online Global Problems
Reader to accompany the text is available at: https: / / courses.
lumenlearning.com / suny-plattsburgh-anthro /
Acknowledgments
Many people have contributed to the writing of this
book . We have already mentioned our colleagues James
Armstrong and Mark Cohen. Others include Alice Dowty,
Alfred Robbins, Michael Robbins, Tom Moran, Philip
Devita, Gloria Bobbie, Douglas Skopp, Vincent Carey, Larry
Soroka, Ellen Fitzpatrick, Ann Kimmage, Michael Miranda,
John Hess, Jan Rinaldi, Tina Charland, Tim Harnett, Daphne
Kutzer, Monica van Beusekom, Russell Kleinbach, Peggy
Lindsey, Dan and Mary Abel, Amy Weisz Predmore, Mark
White, Barbara Harris, Art Orme, Sam Baldwin, and Mary
Turner, along with the many students who helped us better
articulate important issues.
Preface xi
Reviewers of the first edition were John L. Aguilar, Charles
O. Ellenbaum, Cynthia Mahmood, Richard Moore, Jon Olson,
and Dave Winther. Reviewers of the second edition were Elliot
Fratkin, Smith College; James Loucky, Western Washington
University; Luis A. Vivanco, University of Vermont; and
Vaughn Bryant, Texas A&M University. Reviewers of the
third edition were Eric Mielants, Fairfield University; William
Leggett, Middle Tennessee; Nancy McDowell, Beloit College;
and Benjamin Brewer, James Madison University. Reviewers
of the fifth edition were George Esber, Miami University,
Middletown; Suzanne Scheld, California State University,
Northridge; James Sewastynowicz, Jacksonville State
University; and Miguel Vasquez, Northern Arizona University.
We owe a special debt of gratitude to Sylvia Shephard
for her initial support of the project; to Sarah Kelbaugh,
Dave Repetto, Nancy Roberts, and Barbara Reiley of Pearson
and Jennifer Jacobson and Dan Vest of Ohlinger Publishing
Services for guiding the project through to its present edi-
tion; as well as Kani Kapoor, Allison Campbell, Michelle
Hacker, Philip Alexander, Carly Czech and whoever else I
might have inadvertently omitted who helped bring this to
fruition. And special thanks go to Amy, Rebecca, and Evan
who tolerated with unusual understanding our periods of
self -imposed isolation. Needless to say, the final form of the
book, for better or worse, is the result of our own decisions.
This page is intentionally left blank
Part One
Introduction: The
Consumer, the
Laborer, the Capitalist,
and the Nation-State
in the Society of
Perpetual Growth
[WJhat difference it would make to our understanding if we looked at the world as
a whole, a totality, a system, instead of as a sum of self-contained societies and
cultures; if we understood better how this totality developed over time; if we took
seriously the admonition to think of human aggregates as “ inextricably involved
with other aggregates, near and far, in weblike, netlike, connections.”
ERIC WOLF , Europe and the People without History

On or about December 1910, wrote novelist Virginia Woolf, human character changed .1
On his repeated visits to the United States, Frenchman Andre Siegfried (1928; see
also Leach 1993:266) noted much the same thing: "A new society has come to life in
America," he said . "It was not clear in 1901 or 1904; it was noticeable in 1914, and pat-
ent in 1919 and 1925." Samuel Strauss (1924, 1927; see also Leach 1993:266), a journalist
and philosopher writing in the 1920s, suggested the term consumptionism to character-
ize this new way of life that, he said, created a person with a philosophy of life that
committed societies to produce more and more things, and required individuals to
buy more this year than last, and more next year than this, in perpetuity. It is obvious,
Strauss said, that Americans have become committed to consider their standard of liv-
ing as a "sacred acquisition." It means, also, that countries are committed to perpetual
economic growth, regardless of the moral or intellectual costs.
There is no question that in America, the half -century from 1880 to 1930 marked
a major transition in the rate and level of commodity consumption the purchase, —
use, and waste of what comedian George Carlin called "stuff ." Food production grew
by almost 40 percent from 1899 to 1905; the production of men's and women's ready-
made clothing, along with the production of costume jewelry, doubled between 1890
and 1900; and glassware and lamp production went from 84,000 tons in 1890 to 250,563

1The
quote, which has been widely used (see, e.g., Fjellman 1992:5; Lears 1983), appeared in an essay,
"Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown," in The Captain' s Death Bed and Other Essays, but was originally part of
a paper Woolf read to the Heretics, Cambridge, on May 18, 1924. "On or about December 1910 human
character changed . . . The change was not sudden and definite . .. But a change there was nevertheless,
and since one must be arbitrary, let us date it about the year 1910" (Woolf 1950).
1
2 Part I Introduction

tons in 1914. In 1890, 32,000 pianos were sold in the United States; by 1904, the number
sold increased to 374,000 ( Leach 1993:16).
During this period, the perfume industry became the country's tenth largest; at
one department store, sale of toiletries rose from $84,000 to $522,000 between 1914 and
1926. The manufacture of clocks and watches went from 34 million to 82 million in ten
years. By the late 1920s, one of every six Americans owned an automobile.
Of course, these figures are dwarfed by what Americans and others around the
world consume today. World and national consumption expanded at an unprece-
dented pace during the twentieth century, with household consumption expenditures
reaching over $40 trillion in 2015, three times the level of 1975 and six times that of
1950. In 1900, real consumption expenditure was barely $1.5 trillion ( United Nations
Development Programme 1997). Today there are as many cars in the United States as
the number of people with drivers' licenses, and the rest of the world is doing every-
thing that it can to catch up. China and India, alone, have added at least half -a-billion
middle-class consumers in the new century demanding everything that consumers in
the West desire .
However, although consumption rates were not nearly as high as they are today,
the early twentieth century is notable because it marked the early phase of what Ernest
Gellner (1983:24) called the society of perpetual growth and the creation of a new type of
culture: consumer capitalism.
Aside from a few notable periods of economic contraction, such as the periodic
depressions of the nineteenth century, the great worldwide depression of the 1930s, the
recession of the early 1980s, the Asian financial collapse of 1997, and the economic cri-
sis of 2007-2008, the global economy has grown reasonably well worldwide, although
some parts of the world have historically done a better job than others.
Economic growth is traditionally measured by the growth of gross domestic prod-
—
uct (GDP) a measure of the money value of all goods and services produced and
sold in a given time period . Table 1.1 and Figure 1.1 portray the yearly growth of global
GDP during the past two millennia up to the onset of the twenty-first century.
Over the long term, but particularly over the past two centuries, the growth of
GDP in the global economy, especially among European offshoots (e.g., the United
States and Australia ) and Japan, has been spectacular: a 300-fold increase in the
amount of goods consumed, the number of goods produced, and the fortunes that
have been made. A global citizen of today is almost nine times as wealthy as his or her
counterpart some 200 years ago; in some parts of the world, the average citizen has
increased his or her wealth almost twenty-five times over the same period.

Table 1.1 Level and Rate of Growth of GDP per Capita: World and Major
Regions, A. D . 1-1998

1 1000 1820 1998 - - -

1 1000 1000 1820 1820 1998

Level of Growth (1990 Annual Average Compound

Region International Dollars) Growth Rate
Western Europe 450 400 1,232 17,921 -0.01 0.14 1.51
Western Offshoots (e.g., United States, 400 400 1,201 26,146 0.00 0.13 1.75
Australia)
Japan 400 425 669 20,413 0.01 0.06 1.93
Latin America 400 400 665 5,795 0.00 0.06 1.22
Eastern Europe and Former USSR 400 400 667 4,354 0.00 0.06 1.06
Asia (excluding Japan) 450 450 575 2,936 0.00 0.03 0.92
Africa 425 416 418 1,368 -0.00 0.00 0.67
World 444 435 667 5,709 -0.00 0.03 0.95

SOURCE: Adapted from Maddison (2003:28).

 Part I Introduction 3

Figure 1.1 Rate of per Capita GDP Growth by Region: A. D. 1-1998

30,000 -|

25,000 Western Europe

Western Europe Offshoots
Japan
20 , 000
Latin America
Eastern Europe and Former USSR
15,000
Asia (excluding Japan)
Africa
10, 000 World

5,000

0
1 1000 1820

To put perpetual growth into perspective, imagine that in the year 2010 you earned
and spent $30,000 a year ( or that some corporation earned $300,000,000). A growth rate
of about 3 percent a year is necessary to maintain a healthy economy. Consequently,
by 2015, you ( or the corporation in this case) must have earned and spend $34,855 ( or
$348,550,000) and by 2035, earn and spend $63,507 (or $635,070,000 ). If we factor in
an inflation rate of 3 percent on top of our necessary growth rate, the figures are even
higher (see Table 1.2).
The emergence of the society of perpetual growth and the culture of capitalism
marked a new stage in an ongoing global historical process that began ( to the extent
that it can be said to have a beginning) anytime from the fifteenth to the early nine-
teenth centuries. The creation of the human type that characterizes this stage, the
consumer, followed soon after the emergence of two other historically unique catego-
ries of human types: the capitalist and the laborer. Merchants had existed, of course, for
thousands of years, and people had always labored to produce goods and liked to
consume what they'd produced . But never before in history has there existed a society
founded on three categories of people: the capitalist, whose sole purpose is to invest
money to earn more; the laborer, whose sole means of support comes from the sale of
his or her labor; and the consumer, whose sole purpose is to purchase and consume
ever-increasing quantities of goods and services.
At some point in their lives, virtually everyone plays the roles of consumer,
laborer, or capitalist: as consumers, they buy goods and services; as laborers, they
work for wages; and as capitalists, they invest money in banks, insurance policies,

Table 1.2 Required Growth in Income and Spending over a Twenty-Five Year Period

Required Income Growth at 6 Percent

Required Income Growth 3 Percent (with 0% inflation) or Income Growth
(with 0% inflation) at 3 Percent and Inflation at 3 Percent

Year Individual Corporate Individual Corporate

2010 $ 30,000 $ 300,000,000 $ 30,000 $ 300,000,000

2015 34 ,855 348,550,000 40,494 404 ,940,000
2020 40, 495 404,950,000 54,661 546,661,000
2025 47 ,048 470,048,000 73,783 737 ,830,000
2035 63,507 635,070,000 134,434 1,344 ,340,000
4 Part I Introduction
Figure 1.2 Patterns of Relations in the
Culture of Capitalism
Consumer
$ $
Nationstate
Laborer $ Capitalist
Alchemists believed that the philoso-
pher 's stone could convert something
worthless into something of value,
namely, worthless metal into gold . By
adopting paper money as a medium of
exchange, the culture of capitalism has
invented a new philosopher 's stone
one every bit as powerful as that
sought by magicians of another time.
SOURCE: Chronicle/Alamy Stock Photo
pension plans, stocks (slightly more than half of American families partic-
ipate in the stock market, either directly or through investment accounts ),
education, or other enterprises from which they expect to profit. What
ties together these roles, and indeed the entire culture, is money.
Thus, we can perhaps best conceptualize the working of the cul-
ture of capitalism as sets of relations between capitalists, laborers, and
consumers, tied together by the pursuit of money, each depending on
the other, yet each placing demands on, and often conflicting with,
the others. Regulating these relationships is the fourth element in our
scheme, the nation-state . In this cultural scheme, the nation-state serves
as, among its other functions, a mediator, controlling the creation and
flow of money and setting and enforcing the rules of interaction. But
>
most importantly, it must maintain economic growth. (Figure 1.2 is a
highly simplified model, but it serves to underline the key features and
unique style of the culture of capitalism.)
However, money is, obviously, the key to understanding this culture.
Jacob Needleman (1991:40-41) wrote that, in another time and place, not
everyone has wanted money above all else. People, he said,
have desired salvation, beauty, power, strength, pleasure, prosperity, expla-
nations, food, adventure, conquest, comfort. But now and here, money not —
—
necessarily even the things money can buy, but money is what everyone
wants .... Therefore, if one wished to understand life, one must understand
money in this present phase of history and civilization.
People require money as a means of exchange and, for the modern capitalist system
—
to function, money must constantly increase in supply that is, it must perpetually
grow. Why this is so is not immediately apparent, even to many economists, but
should the money supply fail to expand, the whole system could collapse in eco-
nomic, political, and social ruin. Thus, virtually all of the issues discussed in this book
relate in one way or the other to money and people's efforts to acquire it or compen-
sate for the lack of it.
But first, given its central role in the working of the entire society, let's begin with
— a brief primer on the nature of money and an exploration of how money has assumed
its importance and how it determines how we live our lives.
A Primer on Money:
The Philosopher 's Stone
Commonly we consider money primarily as a
—
standardized means of exchange that is, as a sub-
stance with which the value of goods and services
can be compared and traded, a tool, so to speak .
But to view money only in that way is to misunder-
stand its true importance. To better explain, think,
instead, of the philosopher 's stone . Magicians or
alchemists of the past sought the philosopher 's
stone because it was thought to have the magical
power to transmute base metals into gold, which
implies taking something that was considered
worthless and converting it into something of
value. Money is the modern-day equivalent of the
philosopher 's stone.
 Part I Introduction 5

Historically there is a very real connection between money and alchemy. In the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, at the birth of the European modern world, new
technologies produced new stuff . Ships brought new goods from the near and far
east; the steam engine produced new efficiencies in mining; innovations in farming
methods increased food production. The problem was money. There wasn't enough
of it, and without money, people couldn't buy what was being produced or purchase
services that were being offered.
Money at the time consisted largely of gold and silver coins. The use of precious
metals as a medium of exchange can be traced back 5,000 years to Mesopotamia and
coins to the seventh-century B.C. These are examples of commodity money , substances
that had value in themselves. However, there is just so much gold and silver, and if
their supply doesn't increase as fast as the production of commodities or services,
economies can't grow. That's where alchemy and the philosopher 's stone come in.
If enough gold and silver could not be discovered, mined, and turned into coins,
—
why not seek the method of turning lead or any base metal into gold alchemy. And
that's what people tried to do. Virtually every European ruler at the time had a court
alchemist working on discovering the secret of how to convert base metals into gold .
The main work of Sir Isaac Newton, the most famous scientist of the period , was
first and foremost alchemy and, later, as Warden of the English Mint, prosecuting
counterfeiters of the new paper money ( Dobbs 1975; Wennerlind 2011) . But when
alchemists failed to solve the gold problem, the next solution was credit-money, sub-
stituting paper for coins.
—
Precedent existed for paper money. "Exchange" or "demand" notes paper cer-
tificates that could be exchanged for a valuable commodity, generally gold or silver—
were first used in China in the twelfth century and became common in Europe in
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (Williams 1997). Thus, a trader in Milan might
buy textiles from someone in Bruges and pay with a paper note backed by gold that
the seller could retrieve from a third party. Generally, banks or governments issued
exchange notes or paper money, but virtually anyone could do it . Theoretically, these
—
notes represented a specific amount of some valuable metal usually gold or silver —
that could be retrieved on demand by the holder of the note.
The issuing of paper money was a huge step in helping to accelerate economic
growth because there was potentially no limit to the amount of money that could
be created. This was the first step in money magic: paper, which was essentially

The issuing of paper money was a

huge step in helping to accelerate
economic growth .
SOURCE: Rafael Ben-Ari/Fotolia
6 Part I Introduction

worthless, now had the same value as gold, silver, or other precious metals. In a wonder-
ful book, Money and Magic: A Critique of the Modern Economy in the Light of Goethe' s Faust ,
economist Hans Binswanger (1994) describes how Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who
served as finance minister at the Weimar court, used his classic work Faust ( published in
two parts in 1808 and 1832) for a commentary on the industrial economy, and, more spe-
cifically, on the nature of money The original Faust, on whom the story is based, was a
magician, an alchemist. In Goethe's book, Faust makes a bargain with Mephistopheles a —
—
devil and together they create a new society based on paper money. Binswanger sug-
gests the alchemist's attempts to convert lead into gold were abandoned
not because they were futile, but because alchemy in another form has proved so
successful that the arduous production of gold in the laboratory is no longer nec-
essary. It is not vital to alchemy's aim, in the sense of increasing wealth, that lead
actually be transmuted into gold. It will suffice if a substance of no value is trans-
formed into one of value: paper, for example, into money. ( Binswanger 1994:9)

There was, however, a couple of big loopholes with paper money that promised con-
vertibility into gold or silver. First, it required trust; people had to trust that the gold or
silver promised really existed and was accessible . Second, banks or other entities that
issued money were under no legal obligation to have on hand an amount of gold or
silver equivalent to the deposits they held or the amount of paper money they issued .
Banks were allowed to practice what is called fractional reserve banking; this means sim-
ply that they had to keep on hand only a fraction of gold deposited, lending the rest
and assuming that not everyone would demand their gold deposits all at once. Thus,
while the paper money was theoretically backed by gold or silver, the bulk of the paper
money issued was backed by nothing at all. Banks settled theoretically on about a 1:10
ratio; that is, for every dollar deposited, they could lend out ten paper dollars, even
though they did not have on hand the gold on which the money was based . This gave
to banks, and other private financial institutions, the power to literally create money
out of thin air. On the one hand, banks profited from the interest on the loans, and, on
the other, people had more money to spend. Problems occurred when, after an eco-
nomic boom, the economy slowed down and depositors demanded their gold . Unable
to pay all their depositors because they had issued notes in excess of the amount of
gold they had on hand, banks failed and people lost their savings.
In 1913, the U.S. government tried to address some of these problems by creat-
ing the Federal Reserve Bank to control and stabilize the money supply. The Federal
Reserve Bank, which is a private corporation, creates money buying stuff , usually U.S.
government bonds, although, theoretically it can buy anything. The money that it uses
to buy things, is simply created out of thin air. The debt represented by the bonds or
securities issued by the government becomes an asset (i.e., money owed to the Federal
Reserve) that the Federal Reserve then distributes to member banks who, allegedly
following the fractional reserve requirement, can lend it out or invest it at a 10:1 ratio
to earn interest and / or dividends. Money simply represents debt (see Brown 2010;
Hallsmith and Lietaer 2012). Paper money was still tied to gold, and a person could
retrieve paper for gold, but the Federal Reserve could ensure that banks had enough
on hand, or could quickly acquire it, to honor withdrawals. In that way, banks could
honor requests for gold but be able to create new money by lending it out as interest-
bearing debt. But the Federal Reserve could still not address the limitations imposed
on economic growth by tying money to a fixed commodity. Solving that problem
required another bit of magic in the form of another government decree.
The next stage in the evolution of modern money occurred in 1931 when the
United States stopped allowing people in the country to convert paper money into
gold. The value of money was still tied to the value of gold, and exchanges with for-
eign governments still occurred in gold. However, in the 1960s the United States had
flooded the world with so many dollars, partially because of spending on the war in
 Part I Introduction 7

Indo-China, that it could no longer back its money with gold. Consequently, in 1971,
when Great Britain asked to cash in its dollars for gold, the Nixon administration uni-
laterally severed the link between dollars and gold. This marked the final shift from
—
commodity to fiat or debt money paper that was used as evidence of a claim to eco-
nomic value but that, legally, was not redeemable for anything. As we'll see later when
we examine the history of global finance, war has frequently been intimately linked to
changes in the nature and amount of money.
As might be expected, with dollars backed by nothing, the money supply could
rapidly grow, and theoretically could then match or exceed the growth or potential
growth of the economy. More importantly, the Federal Reserve in the United States
( which serves as the U.S. central bank ) and central banks in other countries could
develop ways to control the money supply, ensuring that it grew fast enough to keep
up with economic growth but not so fast that inflation resulted . Inflation would occur
when the amount of money exceeded the value of goods and services that people
demanded, thus driving up the prices as buyers competed for scarce resources. If ,
however, the supply of goods and services exceeded the money supply, prices would
decline as sellers competed for limited dollars, which would lead to deflation. Thus,
balancing the amount of money in circulation with the goods and services that could
be purchased is a major challenge for central banks, such as the U.S. Federal Reserve.
When we think of money, we think of bills and coins. But that is only a small part
(5 percent to 10 percent) of the money supply. The rest exists only as figures on paper
( or in computers ) in banks and in the records of other financial institutions.
Figure 1.3 show the kinds of money, or money stocks, in circulation in the United
States along with their growth from 1959 to 2016. You'll note that money is categorized
by how easy it is to spend or the extent to which it serves as a store of value as opposed
to a means of exchange. Currency , the easiest to spend, consists of paper notes and
coins in circulation; Ml includes currency plus traveler 's checks, demand deposits,
and other checkable deposits; M2 includes Ml plus "near money" savings deposits, —
money market securities mutual funds, and other short time deposits. M3, which the
Federal Reserve ceased publishing in 2006, consists of large time deposits, institutional
money market funds, and other assets that serve largely as long-term stores of value.

Figure 1.3 U. S. Money Supply by Type: 1959-2016

SOURCE: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL; https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2 /series/M2 /; http://www
.federalreserve.gov/releases/h6/hist/h6histb.txt

14,000

12 , 000

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Years
Total Supply -M 3 M2 M1 Currency
8 Part I Introduction

In sum, the M2 money supply in 2016, over $13 trillion, was more than forty-three
times larger than it was in 1959, $300 billion. You can perhaps begin to see why money
represents a magical process. Because fiat or debt money is backed by nothing other
than the legal power of the nation-state, but can be converted into all kinds of goods
and services, we have further succeeded in the alchemist's goal of taking something
that is essentially worthless ( paper ) and turning it into objects of value (whatever we
can obtain with this paper ).
But, as Faust learned in his bargain with the devil, there is often a price to pay for
access to the philosopher 's stone .

-
1

The Consequences of a System of Debt Money

One of the obvious consequences of issuing money as interest-bearing debt, is that the
more money is issued, the more must be paid back . Put another way, the more money,
the more debt. Figure 1.4 shows the growth of total debt government, corporate, —
—
financial, and consumer in the United States from 1951 to 2015. It now exceeds more
than $60 trillion. Global debt is over $200 trillion, but we'll examine that in Chapter 13.
The key thing to remember about debt money is that it is lent into existence as
interest-bearing debt. Consequently every dollar, euro, or pound must earn interest
with money that doesn't yet exist. The interest it earns goes to the bank or the people
or institutions who own the debt . As we'll see, this has enormous implications for our
financial system and for the division of our societies into debtors and creditors. But
consider for now that everything you buy, every service you pay for, or every tax that
you pay, contains interest on someone's or something's debt .
—
Lending money into existence has advantages theoretically only people who are
capable of paying it back will get it; and, lending money with a requirement that it
be repaid with interest disciplines people to work. However, debt money also con-
centrates wealth in the hands of a few, and, perhaps most importantly, it also exerts
constant pressure for economic growth at any cost in order to maintain the interest
payments on the money lent. Put another way, the money supply can grow, and

FIGURE 1.4 Total U.S. Debt Liabilities: 1951-2015

SOURCE: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TCMDO

70 , 000

60 , 000

w 50 , 000
iS
D 40 , 000
•H

c 30 , 000
.2
m 20 ,000

10 , 000

T T T T T T T T T T T T T T

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1
We will be talking about big numbers in reference to money, so remember that a billion is a thousand
million and that a trillion is a thousand billion. For example, 60,000 billion can also be written as 60
trillion .
 Part I Introduction 9

continue to do so only if there is a corresponding amount of economic activity. That is,

when money is lent into existence it must earn itself and the interest. But, how does the
money continue to grow?
To answer this question economist Barbara Garson deposited $50,000 (a publish-
er 's advance on the book she was writing) in a small rural bank, the Bank of Millbrook,
New York, and asked them to help her trace what happened to her money. The bank
couldn't just hold it, because they had to pay interest on the deposit. The money had
to keep moving and growing. So while giving Garson 2Vi percent interest, they imme-
diately sold it to Chase Bank at W2 percent; but Chase, of course, had to move it out at
a still higher rate. As Garson said,

I thought of my money as the raw material that banks need and want in order
to make more money. But I was beginning to sense, however fuzzily, that it
could also be a hot potato that Millbrook passed to Chase and Chase had to
pass quickly to the next guy. Whoever held it , even for a second , had to pay interest .
Which means he had to be able to collect interest . If he coiddn' t , he got burned . (Garson
2001:39-40 emphasis added )

Thus Chase lent money to, among others, a Brooklyn fish company, which, Garson
discovered, got much of its fish from East Asia, and to an oil company in Malaysia
that was building a new refinery. Marveling at the power of money to mobilize people
and resources, Garson traveled to Malaysia to see how her money was at work and
discovered that thousands of people were getting jobs directly and indirectly through
the money invested in the refinery. She also spoke to the fishermen in the area, some of
whose catch may have been going to the Brooklyn fish market and discovered that the
oil refinery polluted coastal waters and forced the fishermen to go farther out to sea for
their catch. They talked to Garson about the good old days and the catches they used
to bring home and the amount of work they have to do today to succeed .
"Some fisherman are lazy," one of the fishermen commented, "If they caught a lot
today, they don't go out tomorrow. But I think differently. If we catch a lot today we go
out tomorrow, catch more."
But another man, says Garson, politely disagreed . "You're free to do what you
want. You can go out three day a week or twenty days a month. You stop when you have
enough."
While she says that she didn't realize it at the time, she later thought it was the
most subversive thing she heard in all her travels: "The one thing my money could not
do," she says, "was stop"(Garson 2001:105-106).
Thus for our economic system to work, the money that is lent into existence must
keep working, in perpetuity, to earn more. But, as Garson found out, it continues to
grow only at a cost, in this case to coastal environments. And this highlights another
—
problem with debt money the limit on things into which money can be converted .
Although the money supply might be unlimited, the goods and services that people
can buy with their money are not. But if economic growth (and the supply of money )
must increase every year (and, according to most economists, must increase at a rate of
at least 3 percent to maintain a healthy economy ), then so must the things that money
can buy. When money was tied to and limited by a commodity such as gold, the
money supply was constantly trying to keep up with the goods and services available.
However, once money was uncoupled from anything of value and could infinitely
grow, the situation was reversed and goods and services began to chase the money
supply. Thus, where we used to have a situation where we needed more and more
gold to grow, now we simply need more and more stuff . In other words, the money
supply must grow if the economy is to remain healthy , and for the money supply to grow, there
must be a steady increase in the goods or services that money can buy. It is from this simple
fact that many of the problems we discuss in this book derive.
10 Parti Introduction

Figure 1.5 The Conversion of Natural, Political, and Social Capital into Money

A
i 1 1 1 '! !1 * ' »\

iiili
mL -
JB * A
r
J;
- W
l ii[|in §
| ill : ::: ::: ::
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ii
Political Capital
• Access to Information
• Access to Government
• Freedom of Expression

Social Capital
\ Natural Capital

• Reciprocity • Forests
• Social Networks • Water
• Community and • Minerals
Family Functions • Air
( e.g., education, child
care , entertainment)

Economic Capital
(Money)

Consequently, for the economy to grow, there must be a constant conversion of

things that have no monetary value into things that do that is, there must be con- —
stant commodification, because money can only grow through a process whereby
nonmonetary wealth, goods, or values are converted into things of monetary worth
(see, e.g., Bourdieu 1986:243). In this conversion process lies the genius of capitalism.
In it also lies the secret of our Faustian bargain. Through the operation of a myriad
of rules, regulations, values, and laws, the culture of capitalism encourages the con-
version of items and activities that have no intrinsic monetary worth but that are —
nevertheless valuable and even necessary in other ways into items and activities that —
can be bought and sold in the marketplace . Thus, trees, lakes, and mountains must be
converted into things that can be sold in the marketplace; activities once associated
with family life and given freely, such as child care, food preparation, and education,
must be converted into monetary activities; and freedom itself can be exchanged for
money as powerful corporations use their money to gain political access and power
(see Figure 1.5).
In sum, then, our culture works largely on a magical principle in which money,
an item of no intrinsic value, perpetually increases in quantity by being lent into exis-
tence while we work to convert more and more nonmonetary capital into goods and
services that this money can buy. Of course, this is a simplification of everything that
must be done to keep the system working. In the next four chapters, we describe how
the consumer, the laborer, the capitalist, and the nation-state operate to maintain this
magic act. In Part II we'll examine what economists term the externalities of the work -
ing of the market , such as the environmental damage witnessed by Barbara Garson,
 Parti Introduction 11

and in Part III we'll explore the ways that groups of people have found to resist the
sometimes-negative consequences on their lives from these externalities. The final
chapter will propose some of the actions that are necessary to remedy the problems
we will explore.
This book does suggest that what we term capitalism has been distorted by a
financial system that requires perpetual growth, and that this growth is unsustain-
able. Not everyone agrees; some, including most mainstream economists, argue that
sustained economic growth can solve many of the problems that we'll be examining.
Consequently, much of this book is designed to explain how we got where we are and
weigh the evidence of whether the harms done by a commitment to perpetual eco-
nomic growth are greater or lesser than the good.
 Chapter 1
Constructing the
Consumer
Learning Objectives
1.1 Describe the role of the four factors in the creation of a consumer
economy.
1.2 Explain the role of childhood in consumer capitalism.
1.3 Describe the globalization of consumer capitalism.
1.4 Summarize the impact of a consumption-driven lifestyle
of capitalist culture.

The consumer revolution is a strange chapter in the ethnographic history of the

species. For what may have been the first time in its history , a human com -
munity willingly harbored a nonreligious agent of social change, and permitted
it to transform on a continual and systematic basis virtually every feature of
social life.
GRANT MCCRACKEN, Culture and Consumption

The .. . metamessage of our time is that the commodity form is natural and ines-
capable. Our lives can only be well lived (or lived at all) through the purchase of
particular commodities. Thus our major existential interest consists of maneuver-
ing for eligibility to buy such commodities in the market. Further, we have been
taught that it is right and just — ordained by history, human nature, and God — that
the means of life in all its forms be available only as commodities .... Americans
live in an overcommodified world, with needs that are generated in the interests of
the market and that can be met only through the market.
STEPHEN FJELLMAN, Vinyl Leaves

The culture of capitalism is devoted to encouraging the production and sale of com-
modities. For capitalists, the culture encourages the accumulation of money; for
laborers, it encourages the accumulation of wages; and for consumers, it encourages
the accumulation of goods. In other words, capitalism defines sets of people who,
behaving according to a set of learned rules, act as they must act .
There is nothing natural about this behavior. People are not naturally driven to
accumulate wealth. There are societies in which such accumulation is discouraged .
Human beings do not have an innate drive to accumulate commodities; again, there are
plenty of societies in which such accumulation is discouraged . People are not driven to
work; in fact, contrary to popular notions, members of capitalist culture work far more
than, say, people who live by gathering and hunting (see, e.g., Schor 1999 ). How does
culture, as anthropologists use the term , encourage people to behave in some ways and not in
others ? Specifically , how does the culture of capitalism encourage the accumulation of money ,

12
 Constructing the Consumer 13

wages , commodities , and debt ? How does it , in effect , encourage perpetual growth and what
amounts to perpetual change?
It is not easy to describe the effects of culture on people's lives; anthropologists
have noted that culture consists of all learned beliefs and behaviors, the rules by
which we order our lives, and the meanings that human beings construct to interpret
their universes and their places in them. Yet, using these abstract descriptions, it is
difficult to understand how pervasive our culture can be in determining our view
of the world . It may help, therefore, to provide a metaphor for culture in the form
of a practice of another culture: the sandpaintings of the Navajo of the American
Southwest.
Among the Navajo there is a healing practice in which a curer, using colored sand,
cornmeal, or other bits of material, draws on the ground a miniature representation of
the universe. Although there are perhaps a thousand versions of these drawings, each
contains vital elements of what, for the Navajo, define the general conditions of exis-
tence. Navajo conceptions of space are indicated by symbols of the world 's directions
and that of social life by the distribution of Navajo houses (,Hogans ) and mythic beings;
values are represented in the stories and chants associated with each sandpainting.
Material items critical to Navajo existence (e.g., horses or ritual items ) are also por-
trayed. Once the work is completed, the patient sits on or in the sandpainting, and a
curing ceremony, accompanied by chanting and prayer, proceeds. Illness, the Navajo
claim, is the result of persons' losing their proper place in the world; the aim of the
ceremony is to restore the patient to that place. When the ceremony is completed and
harmony restored, the sandpainter destroys the painting.
Navajo sandpainting contains all the elements of what anthropologists often mean
by the term culture. Like the sandpainting, a culture serves to define the universe as it is
supposed to exist for a people. The sandpainting contains the key elements and symbols

Navajo sandpaintings serve as

therapeutic stages on which a person's
place in the universe is defined and
ritually enacted .
SOURCE: Chuck Place/Alamy Stock Photo
14 Chapter 1

that people use to locate themselves in physical and social space. It affirms the place of
the person in the created world and the values that govern people's lives. Like the sand-
painting, particular cultural representations serve as therapeutic frames that communi-
cate to us who and what we are and how we figure in the larger order of things. These
representations are therapeutic because they help people resolve the contradictions and
ambiguities that are inherent in any cultural definition of reality and self .
Furthermore, every society has its sandpainters, those individuals who are given or
who take responsibility for representing the universe to others and who have the power
to define those elements that are essential for others in locating and defining their identi-
ties. In some societies, as among the Navajo, it is the curer, shaman, mythmaker, or sto-
ryteller; in others, it is the priest, poet, writer, artist, singer, or dancer. In capitalism, the
sandpainter works in churches, synagogues, or mosques; in theaters; through television
sets; at sporting events; or in the shopping malls that reaffirm the vision of abundance
central to the consumers' view of the world . Contemporary sandpainters, including
marketing specialists, advertisers, government agents, corporate public relations spe-
cialists, entertainers, and journalists, create a vision of the world designed to maximize
the production and consumption of goods. They have helped to create a culture in which
the prime elements are commodities and in which the consumer 's first duty is to buy (or
"Shop till you drop," as a popular bumper sticker advises). It is a culture in which virtu-
—
ally all our everyday activities work, leisure, the fulfillment of social responsibilities,
—
and so on take place in the context of commodities, and in which shopping, like the
sandpainting cure, serves as a therapeutic activity. These contemporary sandpainters
construct for us a culture in which at one time or another every individual assumes the
identity of consumer. The question we need to explore first is, Hozu zvas the universe of
the consumer and the consumer her- or himself created ?

Remaking Consumption
1.1 Describe the role of the four factors in the creation of a consumer economy.
The consumer did not, of course, appear full blown in the early twentieth-century
—
United States. Mass consumption of certain goods notably addictive substances
—
such as tobacco, opium, rum, gin, coffee, and tea arguably fueled the Industrial
Revolution and even Europe's colonial domination of Asia, Latin America, and Africa
(see, e.g., Trentmann 2016). This consumption also defined the methods by which later
commodities were produced, distributed, and consumed (see, e.g., Trocki 1999 ). But,
since these items were physically addictive and required little marketing, merchants
generally paid little attention to how these and other goods were marketed or dis-
played, assuming that when people needed their products, they would buy them.
It was this attitude in the United States of a century ago that was to undergo a pro-
found change .
The change did not occur naturally. In fact, the culture of nineteenth-century America
emphasized moderation and self -denial, not unlimited consumption. People, workers in
particular, were expected to be frugal and save their money; spending, particularly on
—
luxuries, was seen as "wasteful." People purchased only necessities basic foodstuffs,
—
clothing, household utensils, and appliances or shared basic items when they could . If
we look at a typical inventory of the possessions of an American family of 1870-1880, we
find a pattern very different from that of today. In 1870, 53 percent of the population lived
and worked on farms and produced much of what they consumed. One Vermont farm-
wife recorded making 421 pies, 152 cakes, 2,140 doughnuts, and 1,038 loaves of bread in
—
one year (Sutherland 1989:71). Household items were relatively simple a dinner table,
wooden chairs, beds, and perhaps a carpet or rug. There were a few appliances to aid
—
housework cookstoves, eggbeaters, apple parers, pea shellers, and coffee mills but —
 Constructing the Consumer 15

most other housework required muscle; even hand-cranked washing

machines were not available until the late 1870s. Although most peo-
ple, except the poorest or most isolated families, did buy some ready-
made clothing, most of the items people wore were made at home
and were largely functional. Furthermore, because the vast majority
of American families lived on farms, most of the family capital was
invested in farming tools and implements. There were, of course, ex-
ceptions. The wealthy members of society competed with each other
in the ostentatious display of wealth and luxury, as they had for cen-
turies. But they represented a small percentage of the population.
Of course, Americans did not yet have electricity, the automo-
bile had yet to be invented, and the money supply was far more
limited than it is today. Nevertheless, to transform buying habits, luxuries had to be
transformed into necessities. In America, this was accomplished largely in four ways:
a revolution in marketing and advertising, a restructuring of major societal institu-
- C A N A D A

1j
UNITED ST/
OF
tions, a revolution in spiritual and intellectual values, and a reconfiguration of space AMERICA

and class. u.s. \%

The United States

Marketing and Advertising
First, there was a major transformation of the meaning of goods and how they were
presented and displayed . For most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, retail-
ers paid little attention to how goods were displayed. The first department store —
—
Bon Marche opened in Paris in 1852, allowing people to wander through the store
with no expectations that they make a purchase. Enterprises such as Bon Marche were
devoted to "the arousal of free-floating desire," as Rosalind Williams put it (McCracken
1988:25). The display of commodities helped define bourgeois culture, converting the
culture, values, attitudes, tastes, and aspirations of the bourgeoisie into goods, thus
shaping and transforming them (Miller 1994).
But Bon Marche was an exception. In stores in the United States, most products
were displayed in bulk, and little care was taken to arrange them in any special way.
Prepackaged items with company labels did not even exist until the 1870s, when Ivory
Soap and Quaker Oats appeared (Carrier 1995:102 ). Shop windows, if they existed,
were simply filled with items that had been languishing in back rooms or warehouses
for years. Even the few large department stores of the mid-nineteenth century, such as
that of Alexander Turney Stewart, the Marble Palace in New York, paid little attention
to display. It was not until the 1890s and the emergence of the department store in the
United States as a major retail establishment that retailers began to pay attention to
how products were presented to the public.
The department store evolved into a place to display goods as objects in them-
selves. When Marshall Field's opened in Chicago in 1902, six string orchestras filled
the various floors with music, and American Beauty roses, along with other cut flow-
ers and potted palms, bedecked all the counters. Nothing was permitted to be sold on
the first day, and merchants in the district closed so that their employees could visit
Field's. Later, elaborate theatrical productions were put on in the stores, artworks were
exhibited, and some of the most creative minds in America designed displays that
were intended to present goods in ways that inspired people to buy them. The depart-
ment store became a cultural primer telling people how they should dress, furnish
their homes, and spend their leisure time (Leach 1993).
Advertising was another revolutionary development that influenced the creation
of the consumer. The goal of advertisers was to aggressively shape consumer desires
and create value in commodities by imbuing them with the power to transform the
consumer into a more desirable person. Before the late 1880s, advertising was looked
down on and associated with P. T. Barnum-style hokum. In 1880, only $30 million was
16 Chapter 1

invested in advertising in the United States; however, by 1910, new businesses, such as
oil, food, electricity, and rubber, were spending $600 million, or 4 percent of the national
income, on advertising. By 1929, advertising was an $11 billion enterprise, and by 1998,
the amount spent globally on advertising reached $437 billion. By 2016, global adver-
tising expenditures reached almost $500 billion (Handley 2016; Lee 2012 ), or more than
the GDP of Sweden.
By the early twentieth century, national advertising campaigns were being ini-
tiated and celebrities were being hired to offer testimonials to their favorite com-
modities. Advertising cards, catalogs, and newspaper ads became a regular feature
—
of American life . Outdoor advertising billboards, signs, and posters appeared —
— —
everywhere. Electrical advertising neon and flashing signs were marketed, and
Broadway became famous as the "Great White Way." Today, advertising plays such
a ubiquitous part in our lives that we scarcely notice it, even when it is engraved or
embroidered on our clothing.
Another boon to merchandising was the idea of fashion: the stirring up of anxiety
and restlessness over the possession of things that were not "new" or "up-to-date."
—
Fashion pressured people to buy not out of need but for style from a desire to con-
form to what others defined as "fashionable."
It is hardly surprising, then, that the garment industry in America led the way in
the creation of fashion; its growth in the early 1900s was two or three times as great as
any other industry. By 1915, it ranked only behind steel and oil in the United States.
Fashion output in 1915 was in excess of $1 billion; in New York alone, 15,000 estab-
—
lishments made women's clothes. New fashion magazines Vogue, Cosmopolitan , and
—
the Delineator set fashion standards and defined what the socially conscious woman
should wear, often using royalty, the wealthy, and celebrities as models. In 1903, the
fashion show was introduced in the United States by Ehrich Brothers in New York
City; by 1915, it was an event in virtually every U.S. city and town. Relying on this
popularity, the first modeling agency was founded in New York by John Powers in
1923 (Leach 1993:309 ). The entertainment industry contributed by making its own
major fashion statements as American women of the 1920s sought to imitate stars such
as Clara Bow.
The importance of fashion hasn't changed, and fashion magazines remain, as film
critic Manohla Dargis (2009 ) put it, "temples of consumption." Reviewing the docu-
mentary, The September Issue, about the creation of a single issue of Vogue, she notes
that the glossy images, expensive clothes, and accessories displayed in its pages are
about creating desires and transforming wants into needs. The magazine, of course,
wants to sell the stuff that adorns its pages; however, more than that, it wants to instill
in the reader sets of aspirations. It seeks to define tastes using attractive models and
celebrities to define what the well-dressed woman should wear.
Another addition to the marketing strategy was service, which included not only
consumer credit (charge accounts and installment buying) but also a workforce to
fawn over customers. Customers became guests.
William Leach suggested that service may have been one of the most important
features of the new consumer society. It helped, he said, mask the inequality, poverty,
and labor conflicts that were very much a part of the United States at this point in
its history. If one wanted to understand how consumer society developed, Leach said,
one could look at the rise of service. As economic inequality rose in America, and as
labor conflict increased, Americans associated service with the "promise of America."
Service conveyed to people the idea that everything was all right, that they had nothing
to worry about, and that security and service awaited them. Service expressed what
economists then and now would refer to as the "benevolent side" of capitalism that
exchanged a steady flow of profits for greater comfort. From this perspective capitalism
did not just seek profit, but satisfied people's needs by being more efficient. "Capital,"
said one turn-of -the-century economist, "reigns because it serves" ( Locke 1984:111).
 Constructing the Consumer 17

The Transformation of Institutions

The second way in which American buying habits were changed was through a trans-
formation of the major institutions of American society, each redefining its function to
include the promotion of consumption. Educational and cultural institutions, govern-
mental agencies, financial institutions, and even the family itself changed their mean-
ing and function to promote the creation of the ultimate consumer.
Before 1900, the contributions of universities to the capitalist economy largely
—
dealt with how to "make" things that is, with the production of commodities.
Virtually no attention was paid to selling or keeping track of what was sold . For exam-
ple, there was no systematic examination of mass retailing, credit systems, or banking
offered by America's schools or universities. In the twentieth century, however, that
began to change . For example, in New York City there was the good-design or arts-
in-industry movement; schools, such as the Pratt Institute and the New York School
of Fine and Applied Arts ( now Parsons School of Design ), developed and began to
prepare students to work in the emerging sales and design industries and in the large
department stores. The University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School for Business and
the Harvard School for Business introduced programs in accounting ( virtually non-
existent before then ), marketing, and sales. In 1919, New York University's School of
Retailing opened; in the mid-1920s, Harvard and Stanford established graduate busi-
ness schools as did such schools as Northwestern and other universities in Michigan,
California, and Wisconsin soon after. Today, there are virtually no two-year or four-
year colleges that do not offer some sort of business curriculum.
Museums also redefined their missions to accommodate the growth of the con-
sumer culture. The American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in Manhattan, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Newark Museum all —
—
heavily endowed by wealthy patrons such as J . P. Morgan began to make alliances
with business. Curators lectured to designers on Peruvian textiles or primitive dec-
orative art. The head of the American Museum of Natural History, Morris D'Camp
Crawford, assisted by the head of the anthropology department, Clark Wissler, urged
businesspeople and designers to visit the museum. Special exhibits on the history of
fashion and clothing were arranged, and Wissler even borrowed the window-display
techniques of New York department stores for his exhibits ( just as window-display
designers had borrowed the idea of the mannequin from anthropologist Franz Boas's
exhibit of foreign cultures at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago ). The
editor of Women' s Wear magazine praised the museum for being "the most progressive
force in the development of the designer" ( Feach 1993:166).
The second set of institutions to aid in the development of consumer culture
comprised agencies of the local and federal governments. The state, as an entity,
had long taken a lively interest in commerce within its borders ( as we'll see when
we examine the history of global capitalist expansion in Chapter 3) . But prior to
the twentieth century, the state's concerns focused largely on the manufacture of
commodities, the organization of business, the control of labor, and the movement
of goods. It wasn't until the twentieth century that state agencies began to concern
themselves with the consumption end of the business cycle . In fact, it may not be an
exaggeration to say that the government did more to create the consumer than did
any other institution.
Nothing better represents the increasing role of the federal government in the pro-
motion of consumption than the growth of the Commerce Department under Herbert
Hoover, who served as its head from 1921 until his election as president in 1928. When
the Commerce Building opened in Washington in 1932, it was the biggest office struc-
ture in the world (and was not surpassed in size until the Pentagon was built a decade
later ). At the time, it brought together in one building virtually all the government de-
partments that had anything to do with business, from the Patent Office to the Bureau
18 Chapter 1

of Foreign and Domestic Commerce (BFDC), then the most important agency of the
department. From 1921 to 1930, the congressional appropriation for the BFDC rose
from $100,000 to more than $8 million, an increase of 8,000 percent. The number of
BFDC staff increased from 100 to 2,500.
Hoover clearly intended the Department of Commerce to serve as the hand-
maiden of American business, and its main goal was to help encourage consumption.
For example, between 1926 and 1928, the BFDC, under Hoover 's direction, initiated
the Census of Distribution ( or "Census of Consumption," as it was sometimes called )
to be carried out every ten years. (It was unique at that time; Britain and other coun-
tries did not initiate government-sponsored consumer research until the 1950s. ) It de-
tailed where the consumers were and what quantities of goods they would consume;
it pointed out areas where goods were "overdeveloped" and which goods were best
carried by which stores. The Commerce Department endorsed retail and cooperative
advertising and advised merchants on service devices, fashion, style, and display
methods of all kinds. The agency advised retail establishments on the best ways to
deliver goods to consumers, redevelop streets, build parking lots and underground
transportation systems to attract consumers, use colored lights, and display merchan-
dise in "tempting ways." The goal was to break down "all barriers between the con-
sumers and commodities" (Leach 1993:366 ).
Hoover also emphasized individual home ownership. In his memoirs, he wrote
that "a primary right of every American family is the right to build a new house of
its heart's desire at least once. Moreover, there is the instinct to own one's own house
with one's own arrangement of gadgets, rooms, and surroundings" (Nash 1988:7).
The Commerce Department flooded the country with public relations materials on
"homebuying" ideas, producing a leaflet entitled Own Your Own Home, along with
the film Home Sweet Home. They advocated single-dwelling homes over multiunit
dwellings and suburban over urban housing. The leaflet recommended a separate
bedroom for each child, saying it was "undesirable for two children to occupy the
—
same bed whatever their age." Regardless of the reasons for these recommendations,
the materials produced by the Commerce Department all promoted maximum con-
sumption. Thus, the government responded, as much as did educational institutions,
to the need to promote consumption.
Another step in creating a consumer economy was to give the worker more buy-
ing power. The advantage of this from an economic perspective is not easy to see.
From the point of view of an industrialist or an employer, the ideal situation would be
to pay as low a wage as possible to keep production costs down and increase profits.
However, each producer of goods would prefer other producers to pay high wages,
which would allow the other producers' workers to buy more of their own products.
The idea that higher wages would serve as an incentive for laborers to work harder or
that higher wages might allow the worker to become a consumer occurred relatively
late to factory owners and investors. The working class, they assumed, would work
only as hard as they needed to get their basic subsistence, and to pay them more would
only result in their working less. And when an occasional economic boom gave work-
ers the spending power to consume at a higher level, the middle and upper classes
would condemn them for their lack of thrift.
The economic power derived from turning workers into consumers was realized
almost by accident. As industry attempted to increase efficiency, it developed new
methods. Henry Ford introduced the assembly line, one of the apparently great in-
novations, to the manufacturing of automobiles. Workers occupied positions on the
line from which they did not move ("Walking," Ford said, "is not a remunerative activ-
ity") and from which they would perform a single task . It was a process that required
almost no training and that "the most stupid man could learn within two days," as
Ford said. In essence, each worker had to repeat the same motion every ten seconds in
a nine-hour workday.
 Constructing the Consumer 19

Workers resisted this mind-numbing process. When Ford introduced his

assembly line, absenteeism increased and worker turnover surged. In 1913, Ford
required 13,000 to 14,000 workers to operate his plant, and in that year 50,000 quit.
But Ford solved the problem: He raised wages from the industry standard of two to
three dollars per day to five dollars, and he reduced the working day to eight hours.
Soon labor turnover fell to 5 percent, and waiting lines appeared at Ford hiring offices.
Furthermore, production costs for Ford's Model T fell from $1,950 to $290, reducing
the price to consumers. Most importantly, the rise in wages made Ford workers con-
sumers of Ford automobiles, and, as other manufacturers followed suit, the automobile
industry prospered. By 1929, there were 23 million automobiles in the United States;
by 1950, there were more than 40 million. Today, including light trucks, there are 1.3 cars
for every individual.
In addition to the money coming from higher wages, buying power was increased
by the expansion of credit . Credit, of course, is essential for economic growth and con-
sumerism, because it means that people, corporations, and governments can purchase
goods and services with only a promise to pay for them at some future date. Buying
— —
things on credit that is, going into debt has not always been acceptable in the
United States. It was highly frowned upon in the nineteenth century. It was not fully
socially acceptable until the 1920s (Calder 1999 ), at which time it promoted the boom
in both automobile and home buying.
The increased ease of obtaining home mortgages was a key to the home-building
boom of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, a boom that in turn fueled subsidiary industries —
appliances, home furnishings, and road construction. By 1960, 62 percent of all
Americans could claim to own their own home up from 44 percent in 1940, a —
percentage that has increased only to 64 percent in 2014. By 2016, U.S. homeowners
owed more than $8 trillion in mortgages. Home mortgages had the further function
of disciplining the workforce by forcing it to work to make credit payments. At the
same time, homeowners gained a capital asset that served as a hedge against infla-
tion. Automobile loans also added to consumer debt and, similarly, fueled subsidiary
—
economic growth malls, highways, vacation travel, and so on. Credit cards gave
holders a revolving line of credit with which to finance purchases. U.S. household
debt, excluding mortgages, reached $3.1 trillion by 2016 (see Figure 1.1). This debt
represents enormous confidence in the future of the economy because this money does
not exist. Lenders in our economy simply assume that the money will exist when it
comes time for people to repay their debts.
None of this would have been possible without a government financial policy
that put limits on interest rates ("usury ceilings"), passed "truth-in-lending" laws,
made it easier for certain groups (women and minorities) to borrow, and offered

4000000
Figure 1.1 Revolving and
3500000 Non-Revolving Consumer
Debt in the U.S.: 1970-2016 in
3000000 Millions
2500000 SOURCE: Board of Governors of the Federal
Reserve, Consumer Credit Historical Data,
https://www.federalreserve.gov /releases/
2000000 g19/hist/cc _ hist _sa_ levels. html

1500000

1000000

500000

0
co in N 05 cn in N O) co in N o) co in N o CO LO CO
N N N N N CO CO C O O D C O O) 0 5 0) 0) CD o o o o o
ffi CD CD ffi ffl ® O 0) 0 0) 0) 0) 0 0) 0) o o o o o o o o o
C\J C\J C\J C\J C\J C\J C\I C\I C\J

Total Outstanding Debt Non-Revolving Debt Revolving Debt

20 Chapter 1

subsidized student loans. Thus, credit increased consumer debt while creating a "mass
market" for consumer goods, which served further to stimulate economic growth (see
Guttmann 1994).
In addition to changes in the way workers were viewed and the expansion of
credit, there had to be a change in the way retail establishments were organized . The
emergence of the consumer was accompanied by an enormous growth in retail chain
stores. Until this point, people shopped in small stores or large family-owned depart-
ment stores. The 1920s saw the rise of the large retail conglomerates. In 1886, only two
chains operated more than five stores; in 1912, 177 companies operated 2,235 stores; by
1929, nearly 1,500 companies were doing business in 70,000 outlets. In 2012, Wal-Mart
alone had over 8,500 stores worldwide, and, with over 2 million employees, is the larg-
est employer in the world (Copeland and Labuski 2013).

The Transformation of Spiritual and Intellectual

Values
In addition to changing marketing techniques and modifying societal institutions to
stimulate consumption, there had to be a change in spiritual and intellectual values
from an emphasis on such values as thrift, modesty, and moderation toward a value
system that encouraged spending and ostentatious display. T. J . Jackson Lears argued
that, from 1880 to 1930, the United States underwent a transformation of values from
those that emphasized frugality and self -denial to those that sanctioned periodic lei-
sure, compulsive spending, and individual fulfillment (Lears 1983). This shift in values,
said Lears, was facilitated in American life by a new therapeutic ethos, an emphasis
on physical and psychological health. This shift was promoted in part by the growth
of the health professions and the popularity of psychology, along with the increas-
ing autonomy and alienation felt by individuals as America ceased being a land of
small towns and became increasingly urban. Advertisers capitalized on these changes
by altering the way products were advertised; rather than emphasizing the nature of
the product itself , they began to emphasize the alleged effects of the product and its
promise of a richer, fuller life. Instead of simply being good soap, shoes, or deodorant,
a product would contribute to the buyer 's psychological, physical, or social well-being
(Lears 1983:19 ).
Clothing, perfumes, deodorant, and so on would provide the means of achiev-
ing love; alcoholic beverages would provide the route to friendship; and the proper
automobile tires or insurance policy would provide the means of meeting family
responsibilities. Commodities would be the source of satisfaction and a vital means
of self -expression. Ponder, for example, the following description by a forty-year-old
man of the relationship between himself and his expensive Porsche:
Sometimes I test myself . We have an ancient, battered Peugeot, and I drive it
for a week. It rarely breaks, and it gets great mileage. But when I pull up next
to a beautiful woman, I am still the geek with glasses. Then I get back into my
Porsche. It roars and tugs to get moving. It accelerates even going uphill at 80.
It leadeth trashy women ... to make pouting looks at me at stoplights. It makes
me feel like a tomcat on the prowl —
Nothing in my life compares except
driving along Sunset at night in the 928, with the sodium vapor lamps reflecting
off the wine-red finish, with the air inside reeking of tan glove-leather uphol-
stery and the . . . Blaupunkt playing the Shirelles so loud that it makes my hairs
vibrate. And with the girls I will never see again pulling up next to me, giving
the car a once-over and looking at me as if I was a cool guy, not worried, instead
of a 40-year-old schnook writer. ( Belk 1988:148)

In the late nineteenth century, a series of religious movements emerged that became
known as mind -cure religions. William James, in his classic 1902 book Varieties of
Religious Experience , drew attention to the mind-cure movements, although he was not
 Constructing the Consumer 21

—
the first to use the term. These movements New Thought, Unity, Christian Science,
—
and Theosophy, among others maintained that people could simply, by an act of will
and conviction, cure their own illnesses and create heaven on earth. These movements
were, as William Leach (1993:225) phrased it, "wish-oriented, optimistic, sunny, the
epitome of cheer and self -confidence." Absent were sin, darkness, and evil; it was all
sunshine and health.
These movements held that salvation would occur in this life and not in the af -
terlife. Mind cure dismissed the ideas of sin and guilt. God became a divine force, a
healing power. Proponents argued that Americans should banish ideas of duty and
self -denial. As one early twentieth-century advocate put it:
If you want to get the most out of life, just make up your mind that you were
made to be happy, that you are a happiness machine, as well as a work ma-
chine. Cut off the past, and do not touch the morrow until it comes, but extract
every possibility from the present . Think positive, creative, happy thoughts,
and your harvest of good things will be abundant. ( Success Magazine 1903)

These new religions made fashionable the idea that, in the world of goods, men and
women could find a paradise free from pain and suffering; they could find, as one his-
torian of religion put it, the "good" through "goods."
Popular culture also promoted the mind-cure ideology. As examples, there were
L . Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard ofOz , which Leach characterized as "perhaps
the best mind cure text ever written," and the Billikens doll, a squat Buddha-like
figure, sometimes male and sometimes female, that represented the "god of things as
they ought to be." Its success was without parallel in the toy trade and helped incite
the doll craze in America. Billikens, it was said, would drive away petty annoyances
and cares. One contemporary put it this way: "An atmosphere of gorged content
pervades Billikens. No one can look at him [or her ] and worry."
The popularity of the Billikens doll signaled change in spiritual values: It was
now permissible to seek self -fulfillment in this life and find elements of satisfaction in
manufactured commodities. The world was a good place: There was no misery; pov-
erty, injustice, and inequities were only in the mind. There was enough for everyone.
These changes were not unique to America. Many of the same changes occurred
in other nations, most notably Great Britain, Germany, and France (Carrier 1995), and Pillow Pets, the latest craze in stuffed
are occurring now all over the world. The consumer revolution of the early twentieth toys, are a direct descendent of the
—
century was not the first of its kind either but it evolved with great intensity and Billikens doll, a figure designed to
drive away worries and cares and
rapidity in America.
convince people that the world is a
Thus, by the 1930s, the "consumer" as a category of person had, as Lizabeth Cohen
good place with plenty for everyone.
(2003) points out, replaced the "citizen," adopting a spiritual and intellectual framework
SOURCE: Yumeto Yamazaki/AFLO/Newscom
that glorified the continued consumption of com-
modities as personally fulfilling and economically
—
desirable a moral imperative that would end
poverty and injustice.

The Reconfiguration of Time,

Space, and Class
The creation of the consumer did not stop in
1930. Since that time, the institutions of our soci-
ety, particularly those of corporate America, have
become increasingly more adept at creating sand-
paintings in which people inhabit worlds whose
very nature requires the continuous consumption
of goods and services. The need to consume has
reordered our organization of time, reconstructed
22 Chapter 1

our living space, created new spaces for the encouragement of consumption, and al-
tered the ways that we view one another.
—
Into the early nineteenth century in the United States, holiday celebrations most
—
religious, but some secular marked each year. Washington's Birthday, for example,
was one of the most important (see, e.g., Schmidt 1995:47). But holidays were not generally
times for gift giving and consumption. In fact, most people, particularly merchants
and trades people, viewed holidays and festivities as impediments to work discipline,
and they made an effort to reduce their number.
By the late nineteenth century, however, retailers began to recognize the com-
mercial potential of holidays. In 1897, the trade journal Dry Goods Economist mocked
those who viewed holidays as "an interruption of business" instead of an opportu-
nity for "special sales and attractive displays." The modern retailer, they said, knew
that there was "never a holiday" that did not make for increased business. Thus,
as Leigh Eric Schmidt observes, "holidays, rather than being impediments to dis-
ciplined economic advancement, were seen as critical for consumption and profit"
(Schmidt 1995:37).
Valentine's Day is a good example. Until the fourteenth century, St . Valentine was
known largely for his "steadfastness in the face of torturous martyrdom." English
poet Geoffrey Chaucer is generally credited with laying the foundation for the pair-
ing of St. Valentine with lovers when, in his Parliament of Fowls , he wrote that birds
were said to choose their mates on St . Valentine's Day (Schmidt 1995:40ff .). Thus,
St. Valentine became the patron saint of lovers. On St. Valentine's Day in Scotland,
young women would try to divine their future mates, while among the elites it be-
came a day for romantic poetry and gift giving, gloves being a popular item. By the
1840s and 1850s in the United States, the practice of exchanging cards became wide-
spread . By the late nineteenth century, the meaning of the term valentine had changed .
Instead of referring to a person's sweetheart or betrothed, it came to refer to a com-
modity, a commercial product that could be consumed like any other. By the end
of the nineteenth century, department stores were filling their windows with love
missives, jewelry, and other suggestions for gifts. In 1910, a traveling salesman by the
name of Joyce C. Hall began a postcard business specializing in Valentine missives
that would evolve into Hallmark Cards. By the 1990s, Hallmark had 40 percent of the
American greeting card business (Schmidt 1995:100 ) . Of course, other holidays, such
as Christmas, soon followed Valentine's Day as occasions for mass consumption, and
by the early 1920s, flowers for Mother 's Day became firmly fixed in the holiday fir-
mament. Thus, our organization of time, our calendar of festivities, became redefined
to promote consumption.
The need to create consumers also redefined our conception of space. Home own-
ership, for example, particularly of the product-greedy single-family home, cast peo-
ple out from city centers into the sprawling suburbs, which necessitated new roads
and more cars, and, in the end, virtually destroyed public transportation. Retailers
and developers quickly realized the possibilities inherent in these new communities;
people, they reasoned, had an endless desire to consume. "Our economy," said Macy's
board chairman Jack Isodor Straus, "keeps on growing because our ability to consume
is endless. The consumer goes on spending regardless of how many possessions he or
she has. The luxuries of today are the necessities of tomorrow" (Cohen 2003:261). But it
was also believed that suburbanites were growing reluctant to travel to urban centers
to shop. The solution was to bring the market to the people, and retailers and devel-
opers relocated shopping areas from city centers to spacious shopping centers and
malls. Consumers gave various reasons for shifting their shopping from downtown to
shopping centers, but the most important issues seemed to involve convenience easy —
accessibility ( malls and shopping centers were always constructed adjacent to new
Another random document with
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 DANCE ON STILTS AT THE GIRLS’ UNYAGO, NIUCHI

Newala, too, suffers from the distance of its water-supply—at least

the Newala of to-day does; there was once another Newala in a lovely
valley at the foot of the plateau. I visited it and found scarcely a trace
of houses, only a Christian cemetery, with the graves of several
missionaries and their converts, remaining as a monument of its
former glories. But the surroundings are wonderfully beautiful. A
thick grove of splendid mango-trees closes in the weather-worn
crosses and headstones; behind them, combining the useful and the
agreeable, is a whole plantation of lemon-trees covered with ripe
fruit; not the small African kind, but a much larger and also juicier
imported variety, which drops into the hands of the passing traveller,
without calling for any exertion on his part. Old Newala is now under
the jurisdiction of the native pastor, Daudi, at Chingulungulu, who,
as I am on very friendly terms with him, allows me, as a matter of
course, the use of this lemon-grove during my stay at Newala.
 FEET MUTILATED BY THE RAVAGES OF THE “JIGGER”
(Sarcopsylla penetrans)

The water-supply of New Newala is in the bottom of the valley,

some 1,600 feet lower down. The way is not only long and fatiguing,
but the water, when we get it, is thoroughly bad. We are suffering not
only from this, but from the fact that the arrangements at Newala are
nothing short of luxurious. We have a separate kitchen—a hut built
against the boma palisade on the right of the baraza, the interior of
which is not visible from our usual position. Our two cooks were not
long in finding this out, and they consequently do—or rather neglect
to do—what they please. In any case they do not seem to be very
particular about the boiling of our drinking-water—at least I can
attribute to no other cause certain attacks of a dysenteric nature,
from which both Knudsen and I have suffered for some time. If a
man like Omari has to be left unwatched for a moment, he is capable
of anything. Besides this complaint, we are inconvenienced by the
state of our nails, which have become as hard as glass, and crack on
the slightest provocation, and I have the additional infliction of
pimples all over me. As if all this were not enough, we have also, for
the last week been waging war against the jigger, who has found his
Eldorado in the hot sand of the Makonde plateau. Our men are seen
all day long—whenever their chronic colds and the dysentery likewise
raging among them permit—occupied in removing this scourge of
Africa from their feet and trying to prevent the disastrous
consequences of its presence. It is quite common to see natives of
this place with one or two toes missing; many have lost all their toes,
or even the whole front part of the foot, so that a well-formed leg
ends in a shapeless stump. These ravages are caused by the female of
Sarcopsylla penetrans, which bores its way under the skin and there
develops an egg-sac the size of a pea. In all books on the subject, it is
stated that one’s attention is called to the presence of this parasite by
an intolerable itching. This agrees very well with my experience, so
far as the softer parts of the sole, the spaces between and under the
toes, and the side of the foot are concerned, but if the creature
penetrates through the harder parts of the heel or ball of the foot, it
may escape even the most careful search till it has reached maturity.
Then there is no time to be lost, if the horrible ulceration, of which
we see cases by the dozen every day, is to be prevented. It is much
easier, by the way, to discover the insect on the white skin of a
European than on that of a native, on which the dark speck scarcely
shows. The four or five jiggers which, in spite of the fact that I
constantly wore high laced boots, chose my feet to settle in, were
taken out for me by the all-accomplished Knudsen, after which I
thought it advisable to wash out the cavities with corrosive
sublimate. The natives have a different sort of disinfectant—they fill
the hole with scraped roots. In a tiny Makua village on the slope of
the plateau south of Newala, we saw an old woman who had filled all
the spaces under her toe-nails with powdered roots by way of
prophylactic treatment. What will be the result, if any, who can say?
The rest of the many trifling ills which trouble our existence are
really more comic than serious. In the absence of anything else to
smoke, Knudsen and I at last opened a box of cigars procured from
the Indian store-keeper at Lindi, and tried them, with the most
distressing results. Whether they contain opium or some other
narcotic, neither of us can say, but after the tenth puff we were both
“off,” three-quarters stupefied and unspeakably wretched. Slowly we
recovered—and what happened next? Half-an-hour later we were
once more smoking these poisonous concoctions—so insatiable is the
craving for tobacco in the tropics.
Even my present attacks of fever scarcely deserve to be taken
seriously. I have had no less than three here at Newala, all of which
have run their course in an incredibly short time. In the early
afternoon, I am busy with my old natives, asking questions and
making notes. The strong midday coffee has stimulated my spirits to
an extraordinary degree, the brain is active and vigorous, and work
progresses rapidly, while a pleasant warmth pervades the whole
body. Suddenly this gives place to a violent chill, forcing me to put on
my overcoat, though it is only half-past three and the afternoon sun
is at its hottest. Now the brain no longer works with such acuteness
and logical precision; more especially does it fail me in trying to
establish the syntax of the difficult Makua language on which I have
ventured, as if I had not enough to do without it. Under the
circumstances it seems advisable to take my temperature, and I do
so, to save trouble, without leaving my seat, and while going on with
my work. On examination, I find it to be 101·48°. My tutors are
abruptly dismissed and my bed set up in the baraza; a few minutes
later I am in it and treating myself internally with hot water and
lemon-juice.
Three hours later, the thermometer marks nearly 104°, and I make
them carry me back into the tent, bed and all, as I am now perspiring
heavily, and exposure to the cold wind just beginning to blow might
mean a fatal chill. I lie still for a little while, and then find, to my
great relief, that the temperature is not rising, but rather falling. This
is about 7.30 p.m. At 8 p.m. I find, to my unbounded astonishment,
that it has fallen below 98·6°, and I feel perfectly well. I read for an
hour or two, and could very well enjoy a smoke, if I had the
wherewithal—Indian cigars being out of the question.
Having no medical training, I am at a loss to account for this state
of things. It is impossible that these transitory attacks of high fever
should be malarial; it seems more probable that they are due to a
kind of sunstroke. On consulting my note-book, I become more and
more inclined to think this is the case, for these attacks regularly
follow extreme fatigue and long exposure to strong sunshine. They at
least have the advantage of being only short interruptions to my
work, as on the following morning I am always quite fresh and fit.
My treasure of a cook is suffering from an enormous hydrocele which
makes it difficult for him to get up, and Moritz is obliged to keep in
the dark on account of his inflamed eyes. Knudsen’s cook, a raw boy
from somewhere in the bush, knows still less of cooking than Omari;
consequently Nils Knudsen himself has been promoted to the vacant
post. Finding that we had come to the end of our supplies, he began
by sending to Chingulungulu for the four sucking-pigs which we had
bought from Matola and temporarily left in his charge; and when
they came up, neatly packed in a large crate, he callously slaughtered
the biggest of them. The first joint we were thoughtless enough to
entrust for roasting to Knudsen’s mshenzi cook, and it was
consequently uneatable; but we made the rest of the animal into a
jelly which we ate with great relish after weeks of underfeeding,
consuming incredible helpings of it at both midday and evening
meals. The only drawback is a certain want of variety in the tinned
vegetables. Dr. Jäger, to whom the Geographical Commission
entrusted the provisioning of the expeditions—mine as well as his
own—because he had more time on his hands than the rest of us,
seems to have laid in a huge stock of Teltow turnips,[46] an article of
food which is all very well for occasional use, but which quickly palls
when set before one every day; and we seem to have no other tins
left. There is no help for it—we must put up with the turnips; but I
am certain that, once I am home again, I shall not touch them for ten
years to come.
Amid all these minor evils, which, after all, go to make up the
genuine flavour of Africa, there is at least one cheering touch:
Knudsen has, with the dexterity of a skilled mechanic, repaired my 9
× 12 cm. camera, at least so far that I can use it with a little care.
How, in the absence of finger-nails, he was able to accomplish such a
ticklish piece of work, having no tool but a clumsy screw-driver for
taking to pieces and putting together again the complicated
mechanism of the instantaneous shutter, is still a mystery to me; but
he did it successfully. The loss of his finger-nails shows him in a light
contrasting curiously enough with the intelligence evinced by the
above operation; though, after all, it is scarcely surprising after his
ten years’ residence in the bush. One day, at Lindi, he had occasion
to wash a dog, which must have been in need of very thorough
cleansing, for the bottle handed to our friend for the purpose had an
extremely strong smell. Having performed his task in the most
conscientious manner, he perceived with some surprise that the dog
did not appear much the better for it, and was further surprised by
finding his own nails ulcerating away in the course of the next few
days. “How was I to know that carbolic acid has to be diluted?” he
mutters indignantly, from time to time, with a troubled gaze at his
mutilated finger-tips.
 Since we came to Newala we have been making excursions in all
directions through the surrounding country, in accordance with old
habit, and also because the akida Sefu did not get together the tribal
elders from whom I wanted information so speedily as he had
promised. There is, however, no harm done, as, even if seen only
from the outside, the country and people are interesting enough.
The Makonde plateau is like a large rectangular table rounded off
at the corners. Measured from the Indian Ocean to Newala, it is
about seventy-five miles long, and between the Rovuma and the
Lukuledi it averages fifty miles in breadth, so that its superficial area
is about two-thirds of that of the kingdom of Saxony. The surface,
however, is not level, but uniformly inclined from its south-western
edge to the ocean. From the upper edge, on which Newala lies, the
eye ranges for many miles east and north-east, without encountering
any obstacle, over the Makonde bush. It is a green sea, from which
here and there thick clouds of smoke rise, to show that it, too, is
inhabited by men who carry on their tillage like so many other
primitive peoples, by cutting down and burning the bush, and
manuring with the ashes. Even in the radiant light of a tropical day
such a fire is a grand sight.
Much less effective is the impression produced just now by the
great western plain as seen from the edge of the plateau. As often as
time permits, I stroll along this edge, sometimes in one direction,
sometimes in another, in the hope of finding the air clear enough to
let me enjoy the view; but I have always been disappointed.
Wherever one looks, clouds of smoke rise from the burning bush,
and the air is full of smoke and vapour. It is a pity, for under more
favourable circumstances the panorama of the whole country up to
the distant Majeje hills must be truly magnificent. It is of little use
taking photographs now, and an outline sketch gives a very poor idea
of the scenery. In one of these excursions I went out of my way to
make a personal attempt on the Makonde bush. The present edge of
the plateau is the result of a far-reaching process of destruction
through erosion and denudation. The Makonde strata are
everywhere cut into by ravines, which, though short, are hundreds of
yards in depth. In consequence of the loose stratification of these
beds, not only are the walls of these ravines nearly vertical, but their
upper end is closed by an equally steep escarpment, so that the
western edge of the Makonde plateau is hemmed in by a series of
deep, basin-like valleys. In order to get from one side of such a ravine
to the other, I cut my way through the bush with a dozen of my men.
It was a very open part, with more grass than scrub, but even so the
short stretch of less than two hundred yards was very hard work; at
the end of it the men’s calicoes were in rags and they themselves
bleeding from hundreds of scratches, while even our strong khaki
suits had not escaped scatheless.

NATIVE PATH THROUGH THE MAKONDE BUSH, NEAR

MAHUTA

I see increasing reason to believe that the view formed some time
back as to the origin of the Makonde bush is the correct one. I have
no doubt that it is not a natural product, but the result of human
occupation. Those parts of the high country where man—as a very
slight amount of practice enables the eye to perceive at once—has not
yet penetrated with axe and hoe, are still occupied by a splendid
timber forest quite able to sustain a comparison with our mixed
forests in Germany. But wherever man has once built his hut or tilled
his field, this horrible bush springs up. Every phase of this process
may be seen in the course of a couple of hours’ walk along the main
road. From the bush to right or left, one hears the sound of the axe—
not from one spot only, but from several directions at once. A few
steps further on, we can see what is taking place. The brush has been
cut down and piled up in heaps to the height of a yard or more,
between which the trunks of the large trees stand up like the last
pillars of a magnificent ruined building. These, too, present a
melancholy spectacle: the destructive Makonde have ringed them—
cut a broad strip of bark all round to ensure their dying off—and also
piled up pyramids of brush round them. Father and son, mother and
son-in-law, are chopping away perseveringly in the background—too
busy, almost, to look round at the white stranger, who usually excites
so much interest. If you pass by the same place a week later, the piles
of brushwood have disappeared and a thick layer of ashes has taken
the place of the green forest. The large trees stretch their
smouldering trunks and branches in dumb accusation to heaven—if
they have not already fallen and been more or less reduced to ashes,
perhaps only showing as a white stripe on the dark ground.
This work of destruction is carried out by the Makonde alike on the
virgin forest and on the bush which has sprung up on sites already
cultivated and deserted. In the second case they are saved the trouble
of burning the large trees, these being entirely absent in the
secondary bush.
After burning this piece of forest ground and loosening it with the
hoe, the native sows his corn and plants his vegetables. All over the
country, he goes in for bed-culture, which requires, and, in fact,
receives, the most careful attention. Weeds are nowhere tolerated in
the south of German East Africa. The crops may fail on the plains,
where droughts are frequent, but never on the plateau with its
abundant rains and heavy dews. Its fortunate inhabitants even have
the satisfaction of seeing the proud Wayao and Wamakua working
for them as labourers, driven by hunger to serve where they were
accustomed to rule.
But the light, sandy soil is soon exhausted, and would yield no
harvest the second year if cultivated twice running. This fact has
been familiar to the native for ages; consequently he provides in
time, and, while his crop is growing, prepares the next plot with axe
and firebrand. Next year he plants this with his various crops and
lets the first piece lie fallow. For a short time it remains waste and
desolate; then nature steps in to repair the destruction wrought by
man; a thousand new growths spring out of the exhausted soil, and
even the old stumps put forth fresh shoots. Next year the new growth
is up to one’s knees, and in a few years more it is that terrible,
impenetrable bush, which maintains its position till the black
occupier of the land has made the round of all the available sites and
come back to his starting point.
The Makonde are, body and soul, so to speak, one with this bush.
According to my Yao informants, indeed, their name means nothing
else but “bush people.” Their own tradition says that they have been
settled up here for a very long time, but to my surprise they laid great
stress on an original immigration. Their old homes were in the
south-east, near Mikindani and the mouth of the Rovuma, whence
their peaceful forefathers were driven by the continual raids of the
Sakalavas from Madagascar and the warlike Shirazis[47] of the coast,
to take refuge on the almost inaccessible plateau. I have studied
African ethnology for twenty years, but the fact that changes of
population in this apparently quiet and peaceable corner of the earth
could have been occasioned by outside enterprises taking place on
the high seas, was completely new to me. It is, no doubt, however,
correct.
The charming tribal legend of the Makonde—besides informing us
of other interesting matters—explains why they have to live in the
thickest of the bush and a long way from the edge of the plateau,
instead of making their permanent homes beside the purling brooks
and springs of the low country.
“The place where the tribe originated is Mahuta, on the southern
side of the plateau towards the Rovuma, where of old time there was
nothing but thick bush. Out of this bush came a man who never
washed himself or shaved his head, and who ate and drank but little.
He went out and made a human figure from the wood of a tree
growing in the open country, which he took home to his abode in the
bush and there set it upright. In the night this image came to life and
was a woman. The man and woman went down together to the
Rovuma to wash themselves. Here the woman gave birth to a still-
born child. They left that place and passed over the high land into the
valley of the Mbemkuru, where the woman had another child, which
was also born dead. Then they returned to the high bush country of
Mahuta, where the third child was born, which lived and grew up. In
course of time, the couple had many more children, and called
themselves Wamatanda. These were the ancestral stock of the
Makonde, also called Wamakonde,[48] i.e., aborigines. Their
forefather, the man from the bush, gave his children the command to
bury their dead upright, in memory of the mother of their race who
was cut out of wood and awoke to life when standing upright. He also
warned them against settling in the valleys and near large streams,
for sickness and death dwelt there. They were to make it a rule to
have their huts at least an hour’s walk from the nearest watering-
place; then their children would thrive and escape illness.”
The explanation of the name Makonde given by my informants is
somewhat different from that contained in the above legend, which I
extract from a little book (small, but packed with information), by
Pater Adams, entitled Lindi und sein Hinterland. Otherwise, my
results agree exactly with the statements of the legend. Washing?
Hapana—there is no such thing. Why should they do so? As it is, the
supply of water scarcely suffices for cooking and drinking; other
people do not wash, so why should the Makonde distinguish himself
by such needless eccentricity? As for shaving the head, the short,
woolly crop scarcely needs it,[49] so the second ancestral precept is
likewise easy enough to follow. Beyond this, however, there is
nothing ridiculous in the ancestor’s advice. I have obtained from
various local artists a fairly large number of figures carved in wood,
ranging from fifteen to twenty-three inches in height, and
representing women belonging to the great group of the Mavia,
Makonde, and Matambwe tribes. The carving is remarkably well
done and renders the female type with great accuracy, especially the
keloid ornamentation, to be described later on. As to the object and
meaning of their works the sculptors either could or (more probably)
would tell me nothing, and I was forced to content myself with the
scanty information vouchsafed by one man, who said that the figures
were merely intended to represent the nembo—the artificial
deformations of pelele, ear-discs, and keloids. The legend recorded
by Pater Adams places these figures in a new light. They must surely
be more than mere dolls; and we may even venture to assume that
they are—though the majority of present-day Makonde are probably
unaware of the fact—representations of the tribal ancestress.
 The references in the legend to the descent from Mahuta to the
Rovuma, and to a journey across the highlands into the Mbekuru
valley, undoubtedly indicate the previous history of the tribe, the
travels of the ancestral pair typifying the migrations of their
descendants. The descent to the neighbouring Rovuma valley, with
its extraordinary fertility and great abundance of game, is intelligible
at a glance—but the crossing of the Lukuledi depression, the ascent
to the Rondo Plateau and the descent to the Mbemkuru, also lie
within the bounds of probability, for all these districts have exactly
the same character as the extreme south. Now, however, comes a
point of especial interest for our bacteriological age. The primitive
Makonde did not enjoy their lives in the marshy river-valleys.
Disease raged among them, and many died. It was only after they
had returned to their original home near Mahuta, that the health
conditions of these people improved. We are very apt to think of the
African as a stupid person whose ignorance of nature is only equalled
by his fear of it, and who looks on all mishaps as caused by evil
spirits and malignant natural powers. It is much more correct to
assume in this case that the people very early learnt to distinguish
districts infested with malaria from those where it is absent.
This knowledge is crystallized in the
ancestral warning against settling in the
valleys and near the great waters, the
dwelling-places of disease and death. At the
same time, for security against the hostile
Mavia south of the Rovuma, it was enacted
that every settlement must be not less than a
certain distance from the southern edge of the
plateau. Such in fact is their mode of life at the
present day. It is not such a bad one, and
certainly they are both safer and more
comfortable than the Makua, the recent
intruders from the south, who have made USUAL METHOD OF
good their footing on the western edge of the CLOSING HUT-DOOR
plateau, extending over a fairly wide belt of
country. Neither Makua nor Makonde show in their dwellings
anything of the size and comeliness of the Yao houses in the plain,
especially at Masasi, Chingulungulu and Zuza’s. Jumbe Chauro, a
Makonde hamlet not far from Newala, on the road to Mahuta, is the
most important settlement of the tribe I have yet seen, and has fairly
spacious huts. But how slovenly is their construction compared with
the palatial residences of the elephant-hunters living in the plain.
The roofs are still more untidy than in the general run of huts during
the dry season, the walls show here and there the scanty beginnings
or the lamentable remains of the mud plastering, and the interior is a
veritable dog-kennel; dirt, dust and disorder everywhere. A few huts
only show any attempt at division into rooms, and this consists
merely of very roughly-made bamboo partitions. In one point alone
have I noticed any indication of progress—in the method of fastening
the door. Houses all over the south are secured in a simple but
ingenious manner. The door consists of a set of stout pieces of wood
or bamboo, tied with bark-string to two cross-pieces, and moving in
two grooves round one of the door-posts, so as to open inwards. If
the owner wishes to leave home, he takes two logs as thick as a man’s
upper arm and about a yard long. One of these is placed obliquely
against the middle of the door from the inside, so as to form an angle
of from 60° to 75° with the ground. He then places the second piece
horizontally across the first, pressing it downward with all his might.
It is kept in place by two strong posts planted in the ground a few
inches inside the door. This fastening is absolutely safe, but of course
cannot be applied to both doors at once, otherwise how could the
owner leave or enter his house? I have not yet succeeded in finding
out how the back door is fastened.

MAKONDE LOCK AND KEY AT JUMBE CHAURO

 This is the general way of closing a house. The Makonde at Jumbe
Chauro, however, have a much more complicated, solid and original
one. Here, too, the door is as already described, except that there is
only one post on the inside, standing by itself about six inches from
one side of the doorway. Opposite this post is a hole in the wall just
large enough to admit a man’s arm. The door is closed inside by a
large wooden bolt passing through a hole in this post and pressing
with its free end against the door. The other end has three holes into
which fit three pegs running in vertical grooves inside the post. The
door is opened with a wooden key about a foot long, somewhat
curved and sloped off at the butt; the other end has three pegs
corresponding to the holes, in the bolt, so that, when it is thrust
through the hole in the wall and inserted into the rectangular
opening in the post, the pegs can be lifted and the bolt drawn out.[50]

MODE OF INSERTING THE KEY

With no small pride first one householder and then a second

showed me on the spot the action of this greatest invention of the
Makonde Highlands. To both with an admiring exclamation of
“Vizuri sana!” (“Very fine!”). I expressed the wish to take back these
marvels with me to Ulaya, to show the Wazungu what clever fellows
the Makonde are. Scarcely five minutes after my return to camp at
Newala, the two men came up sweating under the weight of two
heavy logs which they laid down at my feet, handing over at the same
time the keys of the fallen fortress. Arguing, logically enough, that if
the key was wanted, the lock would be wanted with it, they had taken
their axes and chopped down the posts—as it never occurred to them
to dig them out of the ground and so bring them intact. Thus I have
two badly damaged specimens, and the owners, instead of praise,
come in for a blowing-up.
The Makua huts in the environs of Newala are especially
miserable; their more than slovenly construction reminds one of the
temporary erections of the Makua at Hatia’s, though the people here
have not been concerned in a war. It must therefore be due to
congenital idleness, or else to the absence of a powerful chief. Even
the baraza at Mlipa’s, a short hour’s walk south-east of Newala,
shares in this general neglect. While public buildings in this country
are usually looked after more or less carefully, this is in evident
danger of being blown over by the first strong easterly gale. The only
attractive object in this whole district is the grave of the late chief
Mlipa. I visited it in the morning, while the sun was still trying with
partial success to break through the rolling mists, and the circular
grove of tall euphorbias, which, with a broken pot, is all that marks
the old king’s resting-place, impressed one with a touch of pathos.
Even my very materially-minded carriers seemed to feel something
of the sort, for instead of their usual ribald songs, they chanted
solemnly, as we marched on through the dense green of the Makonde
bush:—
 “We shall arrive with the great master; we stand in a row and have
no fear about getting our food and our money from the Serkali (the
Government). We are not afraid; we are going along with the great
master, the lion; we are going down to the coast and back.”
With regard to the characteristic features of the various tribes here
on the western edge of the plateau, I can arrive at no other
conclusion than the one already come to in the plain, viz., that it is
impossible for anyone but a trained anthropologist to assign any
given individual at once to his proper tribe. In fact, I think that even
an anthropological specialist, after the most careful examination,
might find it a difficult task to decide. The whole congeries of peoples
collected in the region bounded on the west by the great Central
African rift, Tanganyika and Nyasa, and on the east by the Indian
Ocean, are closely related to each other—some of their languages are
only distinguished from one another as dialects of the same speech,
and no doubt all the tribes present the same shape of skull and
structure of skeleton. Thus, surely, there can be no very striking
differences in outward appearance.
 Even did such exist, I should have no time
to concern myself with them, for day after day,
I have to see or hear, as the case may be—in
any case to grasp and record—an
extraordinary number of ethnographic
phenomena. I am almost disposed to think it
fortunate that some departments of inquiry, at
least, are barred by external circumstances.
Chief among these is the subject of iron-
working. We are apt to think of Africa as a
country where iron ore is everywhere, so to
speak, to be picked up by the roadside, and
where it would be quite surprising if the
inhabitants had not learnt to smelt the
material ready to their hand. In fact, the
knowledge of this art ranges all over the
continent, from the Kabyles in the north to the
Kafirs in the south. Here between the Rovuma
and the Lukuledi the conditions are not so
favourable. According to the statements of the
Makonde, neither ironstone nor any other
form of iron ore is known to them. They have
not therefore advanced to the art of smelting
the metal, but have hitherto bought all their
THE ANCESTRESS OF
THE MAKONDE
iron implements from neighbouring tribes.
Even in the plain the inhabitants are not much
better off. Only one man now living is said to
understand the art of smelting iron. This old fundi lives close to
Huwe, that isolated, steep-sided block of granite which rises out of
the green solitude between Masasi and Chingulungulu, and whose
jagged and splintered top meets the traveller’s eye everywhere. While
still at Masasi I wished to see this man at work, but was told that,
frightened by the rising, he had retired across the Rovuma, though
he would soon return. All subsequent inquiries as to whether the
fundi had come back met with the genuine African answer, “Bado”
(“Not yet”).
 BRAZIER

Some consolation was afforded me by a brassfounder, whom I

came across in the bush near Akundonde’s. This man is the favourite
of women, and therefore no doubt of the gods; he welds the glittering
brass rods purchased at the coast into those massive, heavy rings
which, on the wrists and ankles of the local fair ones, continually give
me fresh food for admiration. Like every decent master-craftsman he
had all his tools with him, consisting of a pair of bellows, three
crucibles and a hammer—nothing more, apparently. He was quite
willing to show his skill, and in a twinkling had fixed his bellows on
the ground. They are simply two goat-skins, taken off whole, the four
legs being closed by knots, while the upper opening, intended to
admit the air, is kept stretched by two pieces of wood. At the lower
end of the skin a smaller opening is left into which a wooden tube is
stuck. The fundi has quickly borrowed a heap of wood-embers from
the nearest hut; he then fixes the free ends of the two tubes into an
earthen pipe, and clamps them to the ground by means of a bent
piece of wood. Now he fills one of his small clay crucibles, the dross
on which shows that they have been long in use, with the yellow
material, places it in the midst of the embers, which, at present are
only faintly glimmering, and begins his work. In quick alternation
the smith’s two hands move up and down with the open ends of the
bellows; as he raises his hand he holds the slit wide open, so as to let
the air enter the skin bag unhindered. In pressing it down he closes
the bag, and the air puffs through the bamboo tube and clay pipe into
the fire, which quickly burns up. The smith, however, does not keep
on with this work, but beckons to another man, who relieves him at
the bellows, while he takes some more tools out of a large skin pouch
carried on his back. I look on in wonder as, with a smooth round
stick about the thickness of a finger, he bores a few vertical holes into
the clean sand of the soil. This should not be difficult, yet the man
seems to be taking great pains over it. Then he fastens down to the
ground, with a couple of wooden clamps, a neat little trough made by
splitting a joint of bamboo in half, so that the ends are closed by the
two knots. At last the yellow metal has attained the right consistency,
and the fundi lifts the crucible from the fire by means of two sticks
split at the end to serve as tongs. A short swift turn to the left—a
tilting of the crucible—and the molten brass, hissing and giving forth
clouds of smoke, flows first into the bamboo mould and then into the
holes in the ground.
The technique of this backwoods craftsman may not be very far
advanced, but it cannot be denied that he knows how to obtain an
adequate result by the simplest means. The ladies of highest rank in
this country—that is to say, those who can afford it, wear two kinds
of these massive brass rings, one cylindrical, the other semicircular
in section. The latter are cast in the most ingenious way in the
bamboo mould, the former in the circular hole in the sand. It is quite
a simple matter for the fundi to fit these bars to the limbs of his fair
customers; with a few light strokes of his hammer he bends the
pliable brass round arm or ankle without further inconvenience to
the wearer.
SHAPING THE POT

SMOOTHING WITH MAIZE-COB

CUTTING THE EDGE

 FINISHING THE BOTTOM

LAST SMOOTHING BEFORE

BURNING

FIRING THE BRUSH-PILE

 LIGHTING THE FARTHER SIDE OF
THE PILE

TURNING THE RED-HOT VESSEL

NYASA WOMAN MAKING POTS AT MASASI

Pottery is an art which must always and everywhere excite the
interest of the student, just because it is so intimately connected with
the development of human culture, and because its relics are one of
the principal factors in the reconstruction of our own condition in
prehistoric times. I shall always remember with pleasure the two or
three afternoons at Masasi when Salim Matola’s mother, a slightly-
built, graceful, pleasant-looking woman, explained to me with
touching patience, by means of concrete illustrations, the ceramic art
of her people. The only implements for this primitive process were a
lump of clay in her left hand, and in the right a calabash containing
the following valuables: the fragment of a maize-cob stripped of all
its grains, a smooth, oval pebble, about the size of a pigeon’s egg, a
few chips of gourd-shell, a bamboo splinter about the length of one’s
hand, a small shell, and a bunch of some herb resembling spinach.
 Nothing more. The woman scraped with the
shell a round, shallow hole in the soft, fine
sand of the soil, and, when an active young
girl had filled the calabash with water for her,
she began to knead the clay. As if by magic it
gradually assumed the shape of a rough but
already well-shaped vessel, which only wanted
a little touching up with the instruments
before mentioned. I looked out with the
MAKUA WOMAN closest attention for any indication of the use
MAKING A POT. of the potter’s wheel, in however rudimentary
SHOWS THE a form, but no—hapana (there is none). The
BEGINNINGS OF THE embryo pot stood firmly in its little
POTTER’S WHEEL
depression, and the woman walked round it in
a stooping posture, whether she was removing
small stones or similar foreign bodies with the maize-cob, smoothing
the inner or outer surface with the splinter of bamboo, or later, after
letting it dry for a day, pricking in the ornamentation with a pointed
bit of gourd-shell, or working out the bottom, or cutting the edge
with a sharp bamboo knife, or giving the last touches to the finished
vessel. This occupation of the women is infinitely toilsome, but it is
without doubt an accurate reproduction of the process in use among
our ancestors of the Neolithic and Bronze ages.
There is no doubt that the invention of pottery, an item in human
progress whose importance cannot be over-estimated, is due to
women. Rough, coarse and unfeeling, the men of the horde range
over the countryside. When the united cunning of the hunters has
succeeded in killing the game; not one of them thinks of carrying
home the spoil. A bright fire, kindled by a vigorous wielding of the
drill, is crackling beside them; the animal has been cleaned and cut
up secundum artem, and, after a slight singeing, will soon disappear
under their sharp teeth; no one all this time giving a single thought
to wife or child.
To what shifts, on the other hand, the primitive wife, and still more
the primitive mother, was put! Not even prehistoric stomachs could
endure an unvarying diet of raw food. Something or other suggested
the beneficial effect of hot water on the majority of approved but
indigestible dishes. Perhaps a neighbour had tried holding the hard
roots or tubers over the fire in a calabash filled with water—or maybe
an ostrich-egg-shell, or a hastily improvised vessel of bark. They
became much softer and more palatable than they had previously
been; but, unfortunately, the vessel could not stand the fire and got
charred on the outside. That can be remedied, thought our
ancestress, and plastered a layer of wet clay round a similar vessel.
This is an improvement; the cooking utensil remains uninjured, but
the heat of the fire has shrunk it, so that it is loose in its shell. The
next step is to detach it, so, with a firm grip and a jerk, shell and
kernel are separated, and pottery is invented. Perhaps, however, the
discovery which led to an intelligent use of the burnt-clay shell, was
made in a slightly different way. Ostrich-eggs and calabashes are not
to be found in every part of the world, but everywhere mankind has
arrived at the art of making baskets out of pliant materials, such as
bark, bast, strips of palm-leaf, supple twigs, etc. Our inventor has no
water-tight vessel provided by nature. “Never mind, let us line the
basket with clay.” This answers the purpose, but alas! the basket gets
burnt over the blazing fire, the woman watches the process of
cooking with increasing uneasiness, fearing a leak, but no leak
appears. The food, done to a turn, is eaten with peculiar relish; and
the cooking-vessel is examined, half in curiosity, half in satisfaction
at the result. The plastic clay is now hard as stone, and at the same
time looks exceedingly well, for the neat plaiting of the burnt basket
is traced all over it in a pretty pattern. Thus, simultaneously with
pottery, its ornamentation was invented.
Primitive woman has another claim to respect. It was the man,
roving abroad, who invented the art of producing fire at will, but the
woman, unable to imitate him in this, has been a Vestal from the
earliest times. Nothing gives so much trouble as the keeping alight of
the smouldering brand, and, above all, when all the men are absent
from the camp. Heavy rain-clouds gather, already the first large
drops are falling, the first gusts of the storm rage over the plain. The
little flame, a greater anxiety to the woman than her own children,
flickers unsteadily in the blast. What is to be done? A sudden thought
occurs to her, and in an instant she has constructed a primitive hut
out of strips of bark, to protect the flame against rain and wind.
This, or something very like it, was the way in which the principle
of the house was discovered; and even the most hardened misogynist
cannot fairly refuse a woman the credit of it. The protection of the
hearth-fire from the weather is the germ from which the human
dwelling was evolved. Men had little, if any share, in this forward
step, and that only at a late stage. Even at the present day, the
plastering of the housewall with clay and the manufacture of pottery
are exclusively the women’s business. These are two very significant
survivals. Our European kitchen-garden, too, is originally a woman’s
invention, and the hoe, the primitive instrument of agriculture, is,
characteristically enough, still used in this department. But the
noblest achievement which we owe to the other sex is unquestionably
the art of cookery. Roasting alone—the oldest process—is one for
which men took the hint (a very obvious one) from nature. It must
have been suggested by the scorched carcase of some animal
overtaken by the destructive forest-fires. But boiling—the process of
improving organic substances by the help of water heated to boiling-
point—is a much later discovery. It is so recent that it has not even
yet penetrated to all parts of the world. The Polynesians understand
how to steam food, that is, to cook it, neatly wrapped in leaves, in a
hole in the earth between hot stones, the air being excluded, and
(sometimes) a few drops of water sprinkled on the stones; but they
do not understand boiling.
To come back from this digression, we find that the slender Nyasa
woman has, after once more carefully examining the finished pot,
put it aside in the shade to dry. On the following day she sends me
word by her son, Salim Matola, who is always on hand, that she is
going to do the burning, and, on coming out of my house, I find her
already hard at work. She has spread on the ground a layer of very
dry sticks, about as thick as one’s thumb, has laid the pot (now of a
yellowish-grey colour) on them, and is piling brushwood round it.
My faithful Pesa mbili, the mnyampara, who has been standing by,
most obligingly, with a lighted stick, now hands it to her. Both of
them, blowing steadily, light the pile on the lee side, and, when the
flame begins to catch, on the weather side also. Soon the whole is in a
blaze, but the dry fuel is quickly consumed and the fire dies down, so
that we see the red-hot vessel rising from the ashes. The woman
turns it continually with a long stick, sometimes one way and
sometimes another, so that it may be evenly heated all over. In
twenty minutes she rolls it out of the ash-heap, takes up the bundle
of spinach, which has been lying for two days in a jar of water, and
sprinkles the red-hot clay with it. The places where the drops fall are
marked by black spots on the uniform reddish-brown surface. With a
sigh of relief, and with visible satisfaction, the woman rises to an
erect position; she is standing just in a line between me and the fire,
from which a cloud of smoke is just rising: I press the ball of my
camera, the shutter clicks—the apotheosis is achieved! Like a
priestess, representative of her inventive sex, the graceful woman
stands: at her feet the hearth-fire she has given us beside her the
invention she has devised for us, in the background the home she has
built for us.
At Newala, also, I have had the manufacture of pottery carried on
in my presence. Technically the process is better than that already
described, for here we find the beginnings of the potter’s wheel,
which does not seem to exist in the plains; at least I have seen
nothing of the sort. The artist, a frightfully stupid Makua woman, did
not make a depression in the ground to receive the pot she was about
to shape, but used instead a large potsherd. Otherwise, she went to
work in much the same way as Salim’s mother, except that she saved
herself the trouble of walking round and round her work by squatting
at her ease and letting the pot and potsherd rotate round her; this is
surely the first step towards a machine. But it does not follow that
the pot was improved by the process. It is true that it was beautifully
rounded and presented a very creditable appearance when finished,
but the numerous large and small vessels which I have seen, and, in
part, collected, in the “less advanced” districts, are no less so. We
moderns imagine that instruments of precision are necessary to
produce excellent results. Go to the prehistoric collections of our
museums and look at the pots, urns and bowls of our ancestors in the
dim ages of the past, and you will at once perceive your error.
MAKING LONGITUDINAL CUT IN
BARK

DRAWING THE BARK OFF THE LOG

REMOVING THE OUTER BARK

 BEATING THE BARK

WORKING THE BARK-CLOTH AFTER BEATING, TO MAKE IT

SOFT

MANUFACTURE OF BARK-CLOTH AT NEWALA

To-day, nearly the whole population of German East Africa is
clothed in imported calico. This was not always the case; even now in
some parts of the north dressed skins are still the prevailing wear,
and in the north-western districts—east and north of Lake
Tanganyika—lies a zone where bark-cloth has not yet been
superseded. Probably not many generations have passed since such
bark fabrics and kilts of skins were the only clothing even in the
south. Even to-day, large quantities of this bright-red or drab
material are still to be found; but if we wish to see it, we must look in
the granaries and on the drying stages inside the native huts, where
it serves less ambitious uses as wrappings for those seeds and fruits
which require to be packed with special care. The salt produced at
Masasi, too, is packed for transport to a distance in large sheets of
bark-cloth. Wherever I found it in any degree possible, I studied the
process of making this cloth. The native requisitioned for the
purpose arrived, carrying a log between two and three yards long and
as thick as his thigh, and nothing else except a curiously-shaped
mallet and the usual long, sharp and pointed knife which all men and
boys wear in a belt at their backs without a sheath—horribile dictu!
[51]
Silently he squats down before me, and with two rapid cuts has
drawn a couple of circles round the log some two yards apart, and
slits the bark lengthwise between them with the point of his knife.
With evident care, he then scrapes off the outer rind all round the
log, so that in a quarter of an hour the inner red layer of the bark
shows up brightly-coloured between the two untouched ends. With
some trouble and much caution, he now loosens the bark at one end,
and opens the cylinder. He then stands up, takes hold of the free
edge with both hands, and turning it inside out, slowly but steadily
pulls it off in one piece. Now comes the troublesome work of
scraping all superfluous particles of outer bark from the outside of
the long, narrow piece of material, while the inner side is carefully
scrutinised for defective spots. At last it is ready for beating. Having
signalled to a friend, who immediately places a bowl of water beside
him, the artificer damps his sheet of bark all over, seizes his mallet,
lays one end of the stuff on the smoothest spot of the log, and
hammers away slowly but continuously. “Very simple!” I think to
myself. “Why, I could do that, too!”—but I am forced to change my
opinions a little later on; for the beating is quite an art, if the fabric is
not to be beaten to pieces. To prevent the breaking of the fibres, the
stuff is several times folded across, so as to interpose several
thicknesses between the mallet and the block. At last the required
state is reached, and the fundi seizes the sheet, still folded, by both
ends, and wrings it out, or calls an assistant to take one end while he
holds the other. The cloth produced in this way is not nearly so fine
and uniform in texture as the famous Uganda bark-cloth, but it is
quite soft, and, above all, cheap.
Now, too, I examine the mallet. My craftsman has been using the
simpler but better form of this implement, a conical block of some
hard wood, its base—the striking surface—being scored across and
across with more or less deeply-cut grooves, and the handle stuck
into a hole in the middle. The other and earlier form of mallet is
shaped in the same way, but the head is fastened by an ingenious
network of bark strips into the split bamboo serving as a handle. The
observation so often made, that ancient customs persist longest in
connection with religious ceremonies and in the life of children, here
finds confirmation. As we shall soon see, bark-cloth is still worn
during the unyago,[52] having been prepared with special solemn
ceremonies; and many a mother, if she has no other garment handy,
will still put her little one into a kilt of bark-cloth, which, after all,
looks better, besides being more in keeping with its African
surroundings, than the ridiculous bit of print from Ulaya.
MAKUA WOMEN