Ontology and circulation: towards an eco-economy of persons

ABSTRACT

Sustainability is a wicked social problem, one difficult to solve because market capitalism inevitably produces ecological precarity. Consequently, marketing requires a paradigm shift. To address this problem, this research investigates a renewal of resource circulation theory and offers a glimpse of a sustainable neo-animist system. Neo-animist theory suggests new perspectives towards a more sustainable eco-economy of persons. Neo-animism foregrounds an alternative subjectivity to that inscribed in the modern social imaginary. Neo-animism is defined by the relationality of persons, the contingent extension of the principle of sociality to other living beings, and the recognition that all living beings are in communicative relations with significant others. Further, in a neo-animism framework resources circulate through transitive value co-creation processes, gifting, reciprocal exchange, and predation. Neo-animism provides an alternative to the dominant social exchange paradigm in marketing and addresses the challenges to sustainability identified in marketing and consumer research.

KEYWORDS:

• Theory
• consumer culture
• sustainable marketing
• subjectivity
• animism
• naturalism

To conciliate economic development with the preservation of nature not only represents one of the greatest political challenges of our times, but also calls for a cultural revolution in the way we think about the environment. (Rival, 2015, p. 201)

Since the ‘free-market’ is an emergent property of the dance of multiple commodity values, exchanges and other influencing factors, there is nothing intrinsic to this system to uphold the values of environmental health relative to the unpredictably shifting values of other commodities. (Sullivan, 2009, p. 127)

The marketing discipline evinces a Romantic conception of the improvability of humanity and marketing’s ability to contribute to this progressive improvement (Campbell, 1987/2018; Doherty et al., 1998). Strategic initiatives like Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), sustainability marketing, Base of the Pyramid (BOP) marketing or FairTrade enshrine this Romantic drive to ethical progress (Belz & Peattie, 2010, p. 14), although each initiative inspires well-grounded critiques (Blowfield & Dolan, 2008; Huang, 2017; Kolk & Van Tulder, 2010). Set against this is the growing recognition among scientists that whatever its form, market capitalism inevitably produces ever greater ecological precarity (Cahen-Fourot, 2020; Kramer, 2021; De Sabata, 1995; Stoner, 2021; Trujillo, 2021); e.g. increasing GhG emissions, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, ocean acidification, climate change induced migration). Moreover, there is ‘nothing intrinsic’ in the marketing paradigm ‘to uphold the values of environmental health’ (Sullivan, 2009, p. 127), nor grounds for a ‘revolution in the way we think about the environment’ (Rival, 2015, p. 201). Implicit in these epigraphic remarks is the limitation of a Romantic marketing paradigm to address existential threats to humanity posed by environmental crisis. Consequently, this paper investigates an alternative vision of resource circulation via a critique of marketing’s prevailing ontology.

The paper suggests the possibility of a post-humanist, neo-animistic retooling of resource circulation and offers a glimpse of an eco-economy of persons. A neo-animist ontology helps address the challenges to sustainable human livelihoods and biotic communities imposed by the Dominant Social Paradigm (DSP) as identified in macromarketing or the ‘modern social imaginary’ (Taylor, 2002) more generally, the enduring attitude-behaviour gap identified in green consumer research, and the axiological partitioning of consumption found in practice research that frustrates holistic interventions. Fundamentally a neo-animist perspective critiques the social exchange paradigm which anchors the entire marketing episteme (Bagozzi, 1978; Brinberg & Wood, 1983; Drollinger, 2010; Pandya & Dholakia, 1992; Safari & Albaum, 2019; Sierra & McQuitty, 2005), as well as most approaches to the circular economy (Clark & Bonato, 2020; Temesgen et al., 2021). At a minimum, this neo-animist (and post-humanist perspective, as discussed below) offers an alternative to the Romantic perspective on marketing. The paper ‘acknowledges that it is only through an examination of what keeps society and consumption unsustainable that we can understand the ways to transition to a sustainable society’ (Kempera & Ballantine, 2019, p. 293).

The following first briefly reviews some of the literature on sustainable marketing and consumption. Then, the naturalist and neo-animist ontologies are contrasted. An empirical example is then offered that provides a glimpse of neo-animist principles of exchange in operation. The paper then returns to a critique of social exchange theory in marketing to illustrate the paradigmatic changes required to move to more sustainable resource circulation while preserving a role for market exchange in a future economy.

Research on marketing, consumption and sustainability

Business activists continue to report on companies’ increasing sustainability commitments.¹ Researchers continue to debate the credibility and effectiveness of these commitments (Borel-Saladin and Turok (2013, 2019, 2020). While Belz and Peattie (2010, p. 8) argue that macromarketing, social marketing, and sustainability marketing ‘challenge the dominant marketing paradigm’, I argue they cannot meet the sustainability challenge without a more profound paradigmatic change.

Sustainability marketing and green consumerism

Sustainability marketing and green consumerism approach sustainability via a focus on actions of individual firms’ or consumers’ choice making within the market economy. Recent treatments show that contemporary sustainability marketing offers many practical and strategic opportunities for organisations to change their marketing mixes and incorporate broader stakeholder perspectives (Belz & Peattie, 2010; Kempera & Ballantine, 2019). However, they retain the Romantic conception of marketing as a progressive social force. Companies recognised in case examples, and within the business world as leaders in sustainability, address some of the environmental and social costs of products and seek to eliminate waste during production and consumption. Sustainability practices incorporate extended producers’ liability, life-cycle analysis, reduced material use and closed loop resource flows, eco-efficient energy use and adopting social goals (Beattie & Pelz, 2012; Kempera & Ballantine, 2019; McDonagh & Prothero, 2014). They conform to self-imposed global sustainability reporting rubrics, the significance of which is nevertheless constrained by the measures voluntarily agreed (Press & Arnould, 2014). However, sustainable marketing relies on the ‘green’ consumer to demand change (Wymer & Polonsky, 2015). Consumers remain the arbiters of sustainability. Unsustainable products sell (Peattie & Crane, 2005), but marketing relies on ‘consumers to demand sustainable products’ (Kempera & Ballantine, 2019, p. 291). ‘Treating socio-ecological problems as a starting point of the marketing process, not as a set of externalities or constraints’ (Belz & Peattie, 2010, p. 10) is certainly not a regressive move. But without changing marketing’s governing paradigm, that is, its ontological and epistemological foundations, sustainable marketing cannot tackle the fundamental issue of how to address marketing’s relationships with the non-human environment (McDonagh & Prothero, 2014; Thomas, 2018).

The green consumerism literature focuses on identifying characteristics of consumers who may be inclined to consider social and environmental concerns in individual decision making (e.g. Ingenbleek et al., 2015). The literature shows that consumers often profess an essentially Romantic concern for something called ‘the environment’, or ‘nature’ as discussed by Nash (1967) in the North American context. However, these nebulous concerns translate into a hodge podge of behaviours that may or may not ‘protect’ the environment or some component thereof (Girod et al., 2017). Meta-analyses reveal a persistent weak predictive relationship between pro-environmental attitudes and behaviours mediated by a host of other variables (Bhuian et al., 2014; Tarfaoui & Salah Zkim, 2017; Zeng et al., 2017). In other words, this research suggests the deeply inculcated savvy consumer logic (Macdonald & Uncles, 2007) disincentivizes consumers to pay a ‘premium’ for sustainable products (Kempera & Ballantine, 2019, p. 298). Psychological literature adopting a stimulus response model shows that consumers may be ‘nudged’ into various ‘pro-environmental’ behaviours through incentives and devices that harness reference group effects for short-term behavioural change (Ferrari et al., 2019; Hards, 2013; Kallbekken & Sælen, 2013). However, not surprisingly these techniques are variable and context dependent (Ölander & Thøgersen, 2014).

From a critical sociological perspective, one may doubt whether consumers have the autonomy to identify sustainable from unsustainable behaviours or the knowledge and cognitive capacity to consistently practice the former. Consumption is fundamentally relational; consumers are embedded in social relations. Even if individual consumers find the necessary tools to reassess their behaviour and question unsustainable consumption standards, family and friends who incarnate prevailing consumer culture norms will surely exert regressive normative influence, not even necessarily by intention but through behaviour (Cherrier et al., 2012, pp. 414; Kemper & Ballantine, 2019). In any event, whether or not ‘consumer environmental attitude (CEA) and … green purchase intention (GPI)’ (e.g. Malik et al., 2017, p. 259) could translate into mass green consumerism, the positive effects of the latter on global sustainability are dubious, as shown by year on increases in global carbon emissions and accelerating global energy demand.² Macromarketing discussed next addresses additional institutional constraints to green consumerism and sustainability marketing.

Macromarketing

Unlike the managerial marketing literature that focuses on firm-level strategy and/or consumers decision factors in response to green marketing initiatives (e.g. Hult & Tomas, 2011), the macromarketing literature offers a critical perspective on marketing and consumption. Macromarketing attempts to address the grand challenge posed to all sustainability scientists – economic, social and environmental – and adopt systems thinking (Mittelstaedt et al., 2014). Its application is predominantly macroscopic in scale rather than applied. One branch of macromarketing adopts an avowedly moral, Romantic perspective, i.e. marketers should adopt a stakeholder perspective on their activities that considers the wellbeing not only of shareholders, but other parties affected by marketing (Crane, 2000; Laczniak & Murphy, 2006; Layton & Grossbart, 2006; Schulz & Holbrook, 1999). Authors in this stream accept the Romantic premise of marketing’s positive potential to address wicked problems like climate change.

Another macromarketing perspective challenges the Dominant Social Paradigm [DSP], that is, market capitalism’s normative system that organises the way marketers and consumers interpret the world and act within it. Developed in more historical detail under the rubric of the modern social imaginary, Taylor (2002) also shows how the DSP entails taken for granted presumptions that the economy is the normal organising principle of society with productivity as its guiding principle, and the historically unusual emphasis global market society places on individuals as rational moral agents. Consistent with Polanyi’s (1947/2001) analysis of the ‘great transformation’, macromarketing scholars contend the DSP entails a monetised market system; comprehensive emphasis upon ever more consumption to foster corporate profit maximisation; and a take-make-waste ecology, which is in turn reliant on an unsustainable demand for raw materials and energy (Borland & Lindgreen 2013; Kilbourne et al., 1997; Prothero et al., 2011; Slater & Tonkiss, 2001). This critique is consistent with that of other commentators on the current ecological crisis (O’Neil et al., 2018; Stiglitz, 2015; Tegemesen et al., 2021; Wallace-Wells, 2019). According to van den Bergh and Bruinsma (2008) among others (Goldman, 1997; Schulz & Holbrook, 1999), the DSP produces a ‘global commons effect’. The ‘global commons effect’ means that in the absence of a planetary-wide regulatory regime, valued resources are over-consumed, undervalued resources devastated, and the planet’s liveability reduced (Press & Arnould, 2009). In the DSP perspective and consistent with Taylor’s (2002) demonstration of the entrenched nature of the modern social imaginary, ‘micro managerialist’ approaches to sustainable marketing, however well-intentioned, cannot change these foundational axioms (Bradshaw & Zwick, 2016; McDonagh & Prothero, 2014, p. 1199). In other words, this second macromarketing perspective recognises that the problem of sustainability is not addressable primarily through firm or consumer choice because both are embedded in a materially and normatively constraining modernist imaginary (Cherrier et al., 2012; Shove, 2003a, 2003b; Slater & Tonkiss, 2001; Taylor, 2002). However, the DSP viewpoint is perhaps ‘oversimplified’ in Wilhite et al.’s terms (2000, p. 109) in the sense that it adopts a determinist model of marketing and consumption that pays insufficient attention to capitalist market exchange and consumer subjectivity feedback into the DSP. Moreover, an alternative paradigm is not elaborated. These points are further discussed in the critique of naturalist ontology and epistemology and the social exchange paradigm in marketing below.

Macromarketing frameworks provide important keys to the sustainability challenge. Both branches of macromarketing recognise that eco-economies are culturally instantiated; the consumer market economy is embedded in a foundational paradigm (Polanyi, 1947/2001; Sahlins, 1976, 1996; Slater & Tonkiss, 2001). Consequently, fundamental change in the consumer market economy necessitates change in the foundational paradigm. The practice theory framework provides a more specific rendering of this idea in the organisation of practices.

Practice theory

Practices are performances of know-that and how-to knowledge as well as teleo-affective engagements (Schau et al., 2009). Know-that refers to foundational, taken-for-granted understandings of what is, in other words, ontology. Know-how refers to foundational norms about what one can do and how one can know what’s what, roughly epistemology. Studies that adopt a practice theoretical approach to sustainable consumer behaviour show two things, first consumption behaviours that implicate sustainability are heterogeneous; that is, they do not comprise a single category either within or between cultures (Bartiaux, 2008). For example, buying home insulation in the US is not inscribed in the same cultural model as buying organic food. The former is associated with ideas of investment or frugality, the latter with risk and pastoral ideals (Press & Arnould, 2011; Wilk & Wilhite, 1985). And the counter-cultural logic of buying organic food in the US differs from that in Denmark where purity, pleasure, and holistic health inform purchase behaviour (Ditlevsen et al., 2019). This means that generic appeals to sustainability cannot translate into paradigmatic shifts in behaviour (Holt, 2012). However, a market-by-market approach to reforming sustainable consumption does not address the fundamentally toxic relationship between the market economy (Cahen-Fourot, 2020; Kramer, 2021; Stoner, 2021; Trujillo, 2021) and the environment rooted in the DSP, our modern social imaginary (Taylor, 2002).

Second, many practices are part of taken for granted consumer habitus with the social imaginary, and hence resistant to change (Cherrier et al., 2012; Shove, 2003a, 2003b; Scheurenbrand et al., 2018; Taylor, 2002). Practice theoretical research may problematise consumption fields such as domestic heating (Shove, 2003a), energy use (Wilk & Wilhite, 1985), transport (Scheurenbrand et al., 2018), or mobile energy use (Robinson & Arnould, 2020) but does not problematise consumption as practiced within consumer culture itself. That is, practice theory treats consumers and their technologies as active agents, acting on or acting in reference to the environment via various conscious or habitual consumption practices. And practice theory treats nature at best as an undifferentiated, unconscious agent. As Connolly and Prothero (2003, p. 288) say, ‘Consumers, even when they are environmentally concerned, are still consuming … consumption is not identified as a problem’. Even in ecovillages where participants do identify consumerism as a problem, practices are often inscribed in a Romantic, utopian ethos of self-realisation through self-reliance, but remain tied to the dominant market economy for some share of resources (Brombin, 2015; Casey et al., 2020) and often make compromises with the dominant consumption ethic (Hong & Vicdan, 2016). The practice theoretician Schatzki (2003) encourages a progressive ontological perspective that rejects the dichotomy between human society and nature and the nature-artefact (i.e. technology) dichotomy, instead insisting on their co-constituting relationships. However, he does not envision nature as an intentional actor let alone as composed of acting non-human communities. Neo-animism, however, develops this theme.

Practice theoretical work moves beyond individual level attitude-behaviour models to show ‘that for a [sustainable] practice to survive and grow, it requires nourishing relationships with supporting practices. This creates a situation of critical mass, in which enough practices come together to support one another and create strong synergies; only then can a practice thrive’ (Sheurenbrand et al., 2018, p. 242). Such studies recognise that,

The changes our modern-day challenges require (global warming, limited resources, etc.) in terms of consumption should be the result of a strategy … a quasi-methodical construction of a new balance of powers capable of producing a change in the social imaginary. (Cherrier et al., 2012, p. 416)

From an institutional perspective, the emergence of a ‘critical mass’ of mutually supporting practices, and a ‘new balance of powers’ would imply changes in the DSP and the entire modern social imagery. The legitimacy of a different ontological order is needed (Humphreys, 2010; Press et al., 2014). Neo-animism provides such an alternative ontology.

Neo-animist ontology and epistemology

In this section, elements of naturalist and neo-animist ontology and epistemology are compared, followed by a contemporary case example of neo-animist resource circulation. To clarify the ontological differences between neo-animism (discussed below) and naturalism, the latter being the philosophical foundations of marketing thought embedded as it is in the modern social imaginary, a synopsis of Descola’s (2012) ontological arguments is useful. Descola is key. Many scholars have elaborated neo-animist theory (Causto & Fausto, 2010; Hill, 2011; Rival, 2012; Sprenger, 2017, forthcoming; Viveiros de Castro, 1998; Willerslev, 2013) and an ecofeminist critique of the ‘nature’ construct (Haraway, 2007; Koistinen & Karkulehto, 2018; Stevens et al., 2013). But only Descola (2012) has developed a systematic comparative theory of human ontologies. Descola’s ontological comparisons imply a paradigmatic critique in the Kuhnian (Kuhn, 1962) sense of dominant ways of thinking about sustainable marketing and consumption. Two of the ontological and epistemological contrasts Descola identifies are pertinent here: naturalism and animism.

Naturalism

Naturalism has been constitutive of Western ontology and epistemology since the Enlightenment (McGrath, 2019). Ontologically speaking, naturalism rigorously separates culture from nature, and attributes the former only to humans. Further, human culture is hierarchically counterposed to nature; it is superior to nature. Naturalism is ‘multicultural’ in the sense that naturalism emphasises rigid distinctions between biotic communities, i.e. species, but monadic in its specification of actants, i.e. lawlike operators that act mechanically upon biological entities. Classic Darwinian theory incorporates this perspective. Similarly, the relentless quest for mechanical laws in human affairs, including those in mainstream marketing science is predicated on this type of uniformitarianism.

Intransitive social relations define naturalist structuring of action, its epistemology. These include protection (for example, private property (Engels, 1843/1996)); the feudal system; patron/clientage relationships; patriarchy; messianic nationalism); production (‘the imposition of form upon [supposedly] inert matter’, Descola, 2012, p. 323; for example, raw material extraction through mining; primary forest harvesting; commodity agriculture); and transmission of rights (for example, contractual exchange; intergenerational testamentary inheritance; national patrimony; or capitalist philanthropy). In some cases, like feudalism or market capitalism, these relations organise all of economic, social, and political life. They are hierarchical and distinguish acting human subjects from acted upon objects, owners with rights in, to, or over things, whether the latter be capital, luxury automobiles, pet tigers, or other human beings as in slavery or serfdom (Descola, 2012, p. 334). The productionist relations reach their apotheosis in late market capitalism (McGrath, 2019): in creative destruction that follows rational critique (Schumpeter, 1942), in systemic control, and in totalising calculation, that is thoroughgoing instrumental reason (Horkheimer, 1947). A key implication of a neo-animist epistemology is replacing the dominance of nontransitive and hierarchical ordering relations with ‘nature’ characterised by protection, production, and transmission for particularising, transitive relations discussed below and in the further section on the matsutake eco-economy.

In terms of communicative doing, naturalist epistemology privileges symbolising over other beings’ semiotic relations (which rely primarily upon indexical and iconic signs), and hence human over non-human communications (Kohn, 2013). As ecofeminism argues Western naturalism generally denies, ignores, or marginalises these other communicative relations (Haraway, 2007). Descola argues the systematic failure to recognise the complexity of other semiotic systems stems from the nature-culture ontological dichotomy and the hierarchical structuring of naturalist epistemology. This results in an othering of other creatures that deprives them of their own subjectivities, as for example, the othering of animals in advertising (Stevens et al., 2013) or grotesque and inevitably unsuccessful efforts to induce great apes or dolphins to communicate like us (cf. Hebets et al., 2016). Nevertheless, we are increasingly confronted with evidence of complex transitive interspecies relations. A recent study reveals that bumble bees bite flowering plants to induce rapid flowering, perhaps through chemical signals in their saliva. Remarkably, given their short life cycles these flowers will benefit only the next generation of bees (Pashalidou et al., 2020). Even more dramatic is Simard’s (2021) research on transitive processes of resource circulation among and between tree species via the mediation of fungi in healthy forests. Resources flow to trees in need from those flush with resources via complex bio-chemical indexical sign signals. The rediscovery of transitive, inter-specific communicative relations is characteristic of animist ontology, as discussed in Kohn’s (2013) and Rival’s (2011, (2012) Amazonia research and in Haraway’s (2007) ecofeminism.

An ontological critique of popular discourses in natural resource assessment and management is implicit in Descola’s characterisation of naturalism. The economic valuation of ecosystems through the concept of ecosystem services, is praised as a way of persuading policy makers and business to invest in biodiversity and ecosystem protection (Muraca, 2016; Sullivan, 2009). However, this instrumentalizing of ‘nature’ and interspecific relationships subjugates them to the protection, production, control and calculation logics characteristic of the naturalist epistemology within a market economy. Assigning an exchange value to single ecosystem services that provision, regulate, or support human ecosystems converts them into exchangeable units tradable in carbon, biodiversity or environmental asset markets, like any other substitutable commodities. It offers no guarantee of renewal should their asset value diminish. Instrumentalization and commodification in the ecosystems services perspective is inherently value reductive if not value destructive; value is extracted at the cost of holistic ecosystems systems reproduction. The financialization of nature as an approach to ‘sustainability’ is already well along (Sullivan, 2009).

Critique from the neo-animist perspective would maintain that the nature of nature itself, the nature of the services at stake, and the values to be realised are both relational and specific to the ecosystem in which they co-occur (Fox & Alldred, 2020). The narrow instrumentalizing in the ecosystem services framework ignores the interspecific value of resources that circulate in the ecosystem of beings other than humans but of no value to humans. It incentivises the conversion of common into private property from whence to extract these new environmental assert values.

Similarly, environmental protection as a protectionist regime is vulnerable to the critique of naturalist ontology. Environmental protectionism imagines active human agents controlling, managing, and ostensibly transmitting to ‘future generations’ nature as a passive object (Bradshaw & Zwick, 2016). Environmental protectionist policy,

Sustains an anthropocentric bias in policy, and opens the way to ‘green capitalist’ policies based on a market economy, while closing the door on no-growth approaches that recognise the environmental harm that capitalism’s endless search for growth and profit brings. (Argyrou, 2005; Fox & Alldred, 2020, p. 127)

Ontologically speaking the instrumentalization of nature in green capitalism or ecosystems services thinking and the aestheticization of nature in environmental protectionism are two sides of the same coin (Argyrou, 2005; Böhme, 1989; Muraca, 2016; Sullivan, 2009). Promoting the contemplation and admiration of nature instrumentalises nature’s amenity and recreation values. The valuing process varies only slightly between the view of non-human nature as a service resource and an aesthetic good. It’s the difference between a private zoo and a commercial safari.

Ecotourism is promoted as a sustainable marketing solution to the natural resource commons problem (Briassoulis, 2002) and a way to mobilise ecosystem services to benefit local people. However, ecotourism simply monetises and transmits some of the benefits of an objectified aspect of nature to local human populations. Ecotourism does not necessarily restore, replenish, or nourish ecosystems and offers no protection against overtourism. Ecotourism does not question the hierarchical structuring relationships that naturalises the commodification of nature, still less does it question the ontological nature-culture binary. According to some research, ecotourism even reinforces these relationships (Stronza, 2009).

Animism

I argue that a neo-animist perspective offers a foundational critique of dominant ways of thinking about sustainable marketing and consumption from the standpoints of ontology and epistemology. Neo-animism offers fresh perspectives towards a more existentially sustainable eco-centric economy of persons (Descola, 2012; Kohn, 2013; Tsing, 2015; Viveiros de Castro, 2007). These perspectives are broadly also post-humanist and eco-feminist (Åsberg & Braidotti, 2018; Campbell et al., 2013; Haraway, 2007). This means they represent a perspective that calls ‘into question the anthropocentric biases of [Romantic] humanist thought and human exceptionalism, the optimistic [gnostic] belief in technological progress, hierarchical categories of nature and culture … the human and the nonhuman, and the ethics of current human-nonhuman relations’ (Koistinen & Karkulehto, 2018).

Together with complementary (Brabec de Mori, 2016; Causta & Fauto, 2010; Feenberg, 2011; Gell, 1998; Kohn, 2013; Rival, 2011; Viveiros de Castro, 2007; Willerslev, 2013) and critical examinations (Halbmayer, 2012; Rival, 2012), Descola (2012) helps us develop a neo-animist ontology. Animist ontology is common among globally distributed human populations living primarily through gathering and hunting, that is, foraging, a way of life that dominated most of human history (Halbmayer, 2012; Rival, 2011; Sahlins, 1972). Foraging continues to be practiced in circumpolar, desert, and rainforest ecologies.

Animism does not imagine a nature-culture dichotomy. Animism asserts that all living beings have similar ‘souls’, or at least selves, even though radically different physical bodies house these selves. Some animals and plants are ‘social beings, endowed with interiority and faculties of understanding similar to those of humans’ (Descola, 2012, p. 352). Animists recognise an indeterminate, animating force shared among living things, leading philosophers to recognise parallels with Renaissance neo-Hermetic philosophy and the German Schilling’s Naturphilosofie (McGrath, 2019), traditions which lost out to naturalism in Western thought.

Consistent with Guattari’s (1989) observation, subjectivity in animism is destratified, meaning that unlike naturalists, animists may attribute personhood to humans or other beings. However, these attributions are contingent. Not all creatures are other-than-human persons; they, like humans, must display the capacity to ‘be with others, share a place with them, and responsibly engage with them’ (Bird-David, 2006, p. 43). Ascribed selfhood is both relational and situational in animist societies rather than axiomatic and individual as in naturalism (Descola, 2012; Kohn, 2013; Strathern, 1988; Strathern & Stewart, 1998). Social acts, such as the transitive resource circulation relationships discussed below, define an animate being as a person, via a social life emergent from these relationships (Ingold, 2006). As Guattari suggests for animists (Guattari, 1989, p. 36), ‘interiority [i.e. selfhood] establishes itself at the crossroads of multiple components, each relatively autonomous in relation to the other, and, if need be, in open conflict’. Animism is thus plural and multinatural rather than totalising. Animism recognises biological and psycho-cultural diversity in interests, powers and abilities, but is ontologically monadic in its specification of subjects. By these terms, entities that want only to destroy or reject co-existence might not qualify as persons in animist ontology.

In terms of epistemological know-that, Kohn (2013) explains that for his teachers in the Ecuadoran Amazon, all beings represent, produce, and interpret signs. Thus, the entire biome is necessarily semiotic. Knowing how to produce, interpret and even reproduce other beings’ signs, some of whom are allies, some prey and some predators, is essential to survival and well-being. Similarly, writing of circumpolar people Hill (2011, p. 408) suggests that in animist ontology, ‘Humans and other-than-human persons thus have no prediscursive existence; rather, they become themselves through experience, interaction and discourse’ (also Sprenger, 2017).

Speaking now of know-how, the key structuring relationships possible in an animist epistemology (not necessarily the only possible relations) are those that operate with potentially reversible positions. For Descola (2012, p. 334), these transitive relations include predation, exchange and gift giving. Understanding Descola’s terms is challenging because of our taken for granted understandings of them informed by individualist, dyadic, and utilitarian presumptions (Wilk, 2010). In animist society, through varied gift giving, exchange and predation relationships, each kind of subject ratifies and qualifies others, recognising the other as a self and as essential to its own identity. Through these diverse transitive relationships personhood is constituted, and subjectivity ‘establishes itself at the crossroads of multiple [heterogenous] components, each relatively autonomous in relation to the other’ (Guattari, 1989, p. 36).

Underlying these relationships is an ‘affective value that sustains reciprocity’ (Atran & Medin, 2008, p. 169). This affective value is rooted in animists’ foraging life. Foraging entails an epistemological imperative: knowing how other beings prosper is key to how humans may prosper. Expressed in ethical terminology, these transitive relationships reflect a recognition of subjects’ worth and rights to livelihood (Muraca, 2016), and not merely as entities’ fulfiling roles, functions, and values. Transitive relations are antithetical to a utilitarian market or consumerist logic, which is limited to the notion of the provision of superior market value (Hult & Tomas, 2011). This is why recognition of plural non-human subjectivities, recognition of other subjects’ worth and rights, and rejection of the ‘nature’ construct are crucial to an eco-economy of persons.

In animist collectivities, some gift giving happens in response to direct demands from others to share and therefore is based on ‘donor obligation’ and ‘recipient entitlement’, but not altruism of course, since altruism entails a relation between individual subjects (Woodburn, 1998, p. 49). The norm is not altruism or ‘generosity’ but access, specifically the recipient’s right to ‘demand’, which is why it can be characterised as ‘demand sharing’ (Petersen, 1993). Animist gift giving is not inconsistent with some contemporary readings of C2C gift systems (Giesler, 2006) and C2C sharing (Eckhardt et al., 2019; Figuereido & Scaraboto, 2016). Reflective of these social relations, anthropologists have often described animists’ relations with transcendent animating spirits also in terms of a ‘demand’ for offerings (Hubert & Mauss, 1964; Mauss, 1924/1990). In sum animist gift giving couples a norm of equity with a needs-based model of distribution (Wilk, 2010).

In contrast to the understanding of exchange in modern market economies (Taylor, 2002), exchange refers neither to the accumulation of exchange value or use values, but instead to the reciprocal circulation of resources (rights to, but not over persons and things) through which momentary concentrations achieved through adroit relationship management eventually give way to further circulation (Mauss, 1924/1990). In animist societies, reciprocal exchange organises kinship and authority. In practice, access and temporary control realised through transfer, and which convey both group and individual status and prestige, are privileged over ownership. Ownership is necessarily weakly developed in animist communities. Accumulation, notably of kin and embodied cultural knowledge (termed phronesis), is essentially collective (Migliano et al., 2020; Sahlins, 1972). Animist exchange couples a norm of procedural distribution (i.e. following the rules produces the rewards) with a scalar distribution of rewards (those exerting greater effort are more highly rewarded) (Wilk, 2010). In this way, neo-animism would leave a place for animal husbandry or market exchange in an eco-economy of persons.

Predation in Descola’s terms refers to the belief that for a being to exist it needs to assimilate elements of a complementary being. We might prefer the term symbiosis. In animist societies, predatory transitivity or complementarity is what gives rise to the widespread practices of asking and thanking prey for submitting to the hunters’ weapons, or to horticulturalists’ anthropomorphic nurturance of food crops (Rival, 2012). Parenthetically, it is also the logic behind various forms of ritualised adoption, cannibalism, and mortuary consumption practices among animists (Allard, 2003; Conklin, 1995; Traphagan, 2008). Predation couples a norm of equality of social responsibility with a rights-based distribution of rewards (Wilk, 2010). In this way, neo-animism would leave a place for hunting and fishing in an eco-economy of persons.

In the same way that neo-liberal market capitalism is a structuring governance mechanism (Burchell et al., 1991; Kilbourne et al., 1997; Marx, 1867/2011; Slater & Tonkiss, 2001), so too are Descola’s transitive relationships, gift giving, exchange and predation in animism. The web of transitive relationships between human and non-human subjects co-constitutes diverse subjects’ identities and the complexity of their arrangements manifests in distinctive community social organisations and ecologies.

Cultural differences that antedate market-mediated civilisation are in fact expressions of these ontologies. Further, these relationships embed people with, not in, their ‘environments’: ‘environment’ here being the ‘plane of Nature’ that is ‘a plane of proliferation, peopling and contagion’ – and of process, movement and participatory compositions – beyond the dualism of natural and artificial [cultural] (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1989, p. 258, 266–7, as cited in Sullivan, 2009). This is a perspective perfectly aligned with Heideggerian notions of our existential condition, a ‘dwelling in a world that is not an object to us, but a system (or context) of interdependent and interlinked relations, in which we already find ourselves and that constitute us’ (Muraca, 2016, p. 151). This perspective on transitive relationships is also consistent with the post-humanist philosophical perspectives of Haraway (2007) and other ecofeminists (Åsberg and Braidotti, 2018).

Neo-animist relationships and an eco-economy of persons

From animist ontology critical marketing and consumer research can find fresh insight and guidance for diagnosis of successful and flawed experiments in more sustainable resource circulation and consumption. Tsing’s (2015) account of the global matsutake economy gives glimpses of an eco-economy of persons structured by the transitive governance mechanisms that Descola identifies. Tsing defines a neo-animistic consumption system organised by matsutake, an aromatic mushroom symbolic of Japanese identity, and consequently prized as a gift. In the 20^th century, environmental degradation severely damaged Japan’s own matsutake ecology but did not inhibit matsutake from diffusing opportunistically to disturbed forests in the Pacific Northwest of the US, Yunnan, China, and northern Finland for example.

Reinterpreting Tsing’s (2015) ethnographic material slightly, I suggest structuring moments in the matsutake eco-economic system entail relations of predation between pine forests, pine forest soils, matsutake spores and hyphae, and the matsutake foraging communities. Tsing shows each of these biotic communities feeds off the other, allowing all to thrive together in degraded environmental conditions. Notably, humans cannot cultivate or control matsutake, only foster it (p. 259) much as Amazonian foragers nurture their rainforest environment (Kohn, 2013; Levis et al., 2017). In the US, matsutake foragers themselves are cast-offs from the market economy: the homeless, unemployed veterans, former hippies, out of work loggers, and refugees from Southeast Asian conflicts. Matsutake foragers predate the mushrooms they procure through public forest access. Importantly, these relationships between pine forests, pine forest soils, matsutake spores and hyphae, and the matsutake foraging communities neither protect, degrade, nor restore a mythic, pristine ecosystem.

The bulking and exporting processes translate the matsutake foragers’ unalienated ‘freedom trophies’, as some North American foragers call them, into commodities with exchange value. However, money serves here primarily as a means of exchange. Moreover, gifting structures each of the human links in the value chain. One cannot buy oneself into the system. For example, Tsing (2015) argues North American foragers ‘make’ bulkers buy ‘baby’ matsutake with no market value down the value chain, but which cement relations between foragers and bulkers (p. 130). In rural Yunnan, small town bosses and foragers do not negotiate prices; reciprocal social entanglements mean bosses give pickers ‘their best price’ and foragers ‘trust’ the buyers (p. 275).

In Japan, wholesaler buyers and retailers translate the matsutake commodity definitively back into the gift economy. Through ‘matchmaking’, they pair specific customers with specific mushrooms. Importantly, almost no one buys a fine matsutake to sell or eat (Tsing, 2015, p. 124). Instead, wholesalers, retailers, and final customers gift mushrooms to specific partners to build relational ties; commodification diminishes and singularisation increases with each successive transfer (Kopytoff, 1986). While there are many fascinating details in Tsing’s (2015) study, the predatory or symbiotic relationship between pine forest and matsutake hyphae, the necessity for foragers to attend to the subtle indexical signs of the presence of matsutake in the forest, the predominance of predation and gifting in the circulation of matsutake among humans and the accessory role of exchange are critical.

A multispecies partnership, in which human and nonhumans associate primarily through transitive relations in ‘patterns of unintentional coordination’ (Tsing, 2015, p. 23), is thus instrumental to the emergence of the global matsutake trade, supplying the Japanese gift economy. Tsing (2015, p. 4) says, ‘To follow matsutake guides us to possibilities of coexistence with environmental disturbance’, which has become, the general condition of existence today. The matsutake system offers a glimpse of a neo-animist eco-economy amid the increasing precarity a naturalist ontology harnessed to consumer capitalism inevitably reproduces. It does not, however, entail a Romantic reconstitution of pristine nature and it finds a place for market exchange.

Returning to marketing

The paper began with a brief discussion of several approaches to the problem of sustainability in marketing and consumer research. To address the issues of ‘worldviews’ (Kempera & Ballantine, 2019, p. 293), that is the dominant paradigm constraining solutions to the question of what makes marketing paradigmatically unsustainable, I return to those issues, via a critique of the social exchange paradigm in marketing. For it is this paradigm rooted in naturalist ontology and epistemology that is the obstacle to sustainable marketing. Even a holistic systems theory of marketing will not deliver a more sustainable eco-economy if it does not reject the social exchange paradigm, however much ecosystemic thinking is a necessary precondition (Thomas, 2018).

What is the status of this paradigm? Students are familiar with chapter 1 of introductory marketing texts that assert that marketing is about exchange relations between commercial entities and customers. B2B marketing builds relationships up and down marketing channels in a value chain (Lambe et al., 2001). B2C marketing builds exchange relationships between commercial entities and end consumers of commercial resources (Brinberg & Wood, 1983; Safari & Albaum, 2019). The idealised aim is that such exchanges should be mutually beneficial, a mutual uplifting. This dyadic and essentially Romantic social exchange paradigm in marketing has been extended to incorporate dyadic gift giving and philanthropy and incorporate multiple stakeholders.

The neo-animist perspective provides a critical vantage point on the social exchange paradigm that marketing adopts as its foundational axiomatic nexus. This exchange paradigm is closely wedded to Adam Smith’s idealised model of capitalism (Clarke, n.d.) and therefore of the Dominant Social Paradigm identified in macromarketing. This assertion derives from reading both foundational texts in marketing on exchange (Bagozzi, 1978; Hunt, 1976; Lambe et al., 2001; Pandya & Dholakia, 1992) and Adam Smith himself (Smith, 1776/2003). One principle is that parties must benefit from every exchange into which they enter. Thus, each transaction could be self-liquidating, and a dyadic exchange model is presumed. It is presumed actors transact exchange of their own free will, on the assumption that if they did not benefit, they would not engage in exchange. Thus, it presumes a subject with the freedom to act, while avoiding the specification of the resources (i.e. money) that are a precondition to action. A second principle is that any individual will choose the alternatives from those available that brings them the greatest benefit. Social, future, or other utilities are thus excluded or at least relegated to a subsidiary role. Third, Adam Smith’s model, like modern marketing, rests on a radical separation of exchange from both production and disposition (e.g. waste). Exchange is considered a purely allocative mechanism between (magically) already existing alternatives. Fourth, money plays a neutral, technical role in Smith’s model (as do other resources like knowledge or cultural capital that we now recognise as structuring market formation (Miller, 2002)). The model envisions neither money’s role as capital on the firm side or as a differentiated moral instrument on the consumer side. Finally, defects in the market system derive not from the system, but from human and institutional inadequacies. Moral transgression lies only in failures to realise the system’s progressive, essentially Romantic potential.

Implicit in this model is a naturalist ontology and epistemology. Parties to transactions are pre-given human subjects (or their surrogates). Their actions are calculative and employ instrumental reason; they control their passions. They exhibit persuasion knowledge, which defends them from opportunism (MacDonald & Uncles, 2007). They exert full control over resources considered as possessions, which they may transmit as they wish, and their ends should be ‘productive’. In mainstream marketing, decision-making biases (Bienenstock, 2018) or inadequate responsibilization (Giesler & Veresiu, 2014) on the consumer side, or poor marketing intelligence and inadequate application of customer orientation (e.g. Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2004) on the marketers’ side, respectively, impede Romantic self-realisation on the consumer side (Campbell, 1987/2018) or the realisation of firm goals. Arguing for systemic consideration of stakeholders needs, rather than shareholders or customers as in some sustainability marketing reforms, does not offer an alternative to the social exchange paradigm (Kempera & Ballantine, 2019).

Marxian critique of Adam Smith and consumer capitalism sheds light on the workings of the naturalist epistemology and especially the subjectivity it induces (Kramer, 2021; Stoner, 2021; Trujillo, 2021). Marx argued that market exchange is an alienated form of circulation in which both capitalist and worker are subjected to the anonymous power of capital. Both are subject to the market’s calculative judgements. Weber also recognised that markets were loci of competitive struggle, of power relations both between sellers (competition), and between buyers and sellers, for market success (Swedberg, 2000). Appealing to their exchange partners’ calculative reason, the capitalist must persuade some buyers (investors) to invest and some buyers (consumers) to buy. The competition for capital forces every capitalist constantly to develop the forces of production to demonstrate differential profitability. In aggregate, this leads to the general tendency for capital, in every branch of production, to develop the forces of production without limit and without regard to the limits either of the current market or of the biosphere. Further, the necessity to develop the forces of production incites capitalists to ascribe money value to more and more things, and devise ever more ways of exerting private ownership over things, so that their money value can be realised in exchange. The commodification of nature via the logic of ecosystem services is just one recent instance. As Marx argued and as the logic of contemporary finance shows (Lagoarde-Segot & Paranque, 2018), the purpose of the capitalist is not to meet social need, but to accumulate capital. However, as Polanyi (1947/2001) and later Bataille (1967/1991) argued, a system of endless ‘growth’ is impossible. It only works through periodic wasteful purges of resources that catastrophically reduce productivity and allow a cycle of accumulation to begin again.

On the consumer side, Marx argued that the worker, who is alienated from their labour in a calculative exchange of labour for wages with the capitalist, then finds themself in a calculative pursuit to recapture that labour in the alienated form of consumer goods for which they must now pay. The co-productive consumer is the latest iteration of the dynamic in which the worker pays for the products of their labour (Cova et al., 2011). The critique of chronically unfulfilled consumer desire illustrates (Belk et al., 2003; Campbell, 1987/2018; Sahlins, 1976, 1996) that capitalist production is not marked by its subordination to social need, even as that is expressed in ‘effective demand’. Nor is the pragmatic conception of resource integration theorised in SDL merely the derivation of ‘use-values’ as these values are tied inextricably to culturally determined desires (Sahlins, 1976, 1996). Instead, the endless proliferation of commodities on the producer side meets the endless proliferation of differential sign values on the consumer side whether things, experiences, or likes and shares, and through which consumers compete to produce a desired lifestyle (Baudrillard, 1972/2019; Eckhardt et al., 2015; Lambert, 2019; Slater & Tonkiss, 2001). Consumption under capitalism ‘is not a passive enjoyment or even active experiencing, but crucially a form of labor; work that produces distinctions between consumers … [as] distinct from S-D logic’s implicitly pragmatist notions of consumption’ (Hietanen et al., 2018, p. 108). The atomised, onanistic consumer self who is ‘extended’ into all manner of consumer goods in lieu of relationships is the apotheosis of this fetishising figure (Belk, 1988). Thus, as Honneth (2008, pp. 75 quoted in Lambeth, 2019) describes the alienated consumer subject,

As soon as subjects … conduct their social interactions primarily in the form of commodity exchange, they will necessarily perceive their partners in interaction, the goods to be exchanged, and finally themselves as thing-like objects.

Consumption in capitalism is a creature of a sign system, detaching subjects from a stable system of symbols (Baudrillard, 1972/2019) including the indexical and iconic signs that inform the biome (Kohn, 2013). As (Hietanen et al., 2018, p. 109) write, ‘Every object (or market offering) is a distinction in the [sign] system, and thus we never simply consume an object in isolation – rather, we consume its signification in relation to the whole commodity market’. Consumer capitalism drives and is driven by the endless labour of manifesting distinction through market-mediated resources (Slater & Tonkiss, 2001).

Consumers are inculcated with a naturalist epistemology that prioritises agency, productivity and creativity. Conspicuous consumption may assume inconspicuous forms, but it has merely migrated from the 19^th century drawing room (Veblen, 1899/2009) through the suburb, and to 21^st century online platforms (Thal, 2020; Naylor et al., 2012). The competition to control consumer sign values to assert status and prestige is little changed. Consumer striving produces an alienated subjectivity, which faces an ever-changing, disordered set of commodities consumers seek to order in forming selves (Lambert, 2019).

This is not a critique of marketing, which performs perfectly well within market capitalism, but of the possibility to transcend market capitalism. It is not a proposal to abolish market exchange nor many functions marketing accomplishes as market exchange predates capitalism. It is a critique of the social exchange paradigm in marketing that engenders a perverse subjectivity. It produces an alienation between persons whether human or non-human. The point is that truly transformative sustainability must transcend a marketing system built on neoliberal social exchange theory and the naturalist ontology upon which this system is built. The criticism does not reject the idea of the economy in what Polanyi called the substantive sense (Polanyi, 1947/2001). Every society including animist societies are based upon a circulation of valued resources (Descola, 2012, p. 257). Economic history has been rewritten in terms of resource circulation rather than the productionist model of social relations characteristic of a naturalist ontoloy (Collins, 1990; Graeber, 2011; Karatani, 2010/2014). Thus, there is no reason why in the future economic circulation re-embedded in a global eco-economy of persons could not replace our disembedded one.

The proposal emphasises recognition and extension of the animist principal of sociality both to human and non-human actors (Arnould & Rose, 2016). Phrased otherwise, it is a rejection of transaction and contract as the only basis of freedom and sociality (Polanyi 1947/2001, p. 266). It does imply for example, that basic wages should no longer be determined by market power, nor the value of land (i.e. nature) in terms of its extractive potential, but via an extension of the principles of ecosystem reproductive viability as found in animist collectivities.

Like Campbell et al. (2013, p. 318), I endorse Vargo and Lusch’s call (2016, p. 9) for a broader approach to service that has ‘the potential of taking the perspective of value cocreation and exchange beyond the [capitalist] market by providing a systems-orientation that takes the issues out of the economic arena and re-contextualizing them’ (see also Thomas, 2018). But the neo-animist perspective de-centres the implicit anthropocentric bias in value creation and exchange (Muraca, 2016; Sullivan, 2009), and reattaches value to a set of transitive exchange relationships, gifting, reciprocal exchange, predation, and underlying norms of rights and ‘fairness’ as Wilk (2010) discusses. This neo-animist proposal fundamentally rejects the hierarchical culture-nature dichotomy. Such a paradigm shift would profoundly ‘reorder the modalities of group being … not only through “communicational” interventions but through existential mutations driven by the motor of subjectivity’, as the latter becomes fundamentally relational and contingent within such an ontology (Guattari, 1989, p. 34; Strathern, 1988; Strathern & Stewart, 1998).

The matsutake example shows that these proposals are not far-fetched. Within the marketing literature, we also find innovative systems of circulation that illustrate principles of gifting and reciprocal exchange. Two exemplary C2C cases are the music file sharing system Giesler (2006, 2008) examined and the geo-caching network Figueriedo and Scaraboto (2016) analysed. Both systems eschewed ownership, control, transmission subject to ownership rights, productivity, and systemic hierarchy. In these collectivities both use values and prestige value was co-created through circulation of objects of hedonic worth. These material and immaterial non-commodities circulate through transitive relationships; they have no exchange value (Figuereido & Scaraboto, 2016; Giesler, 2006). They are not constrained to the commodity sphere (Kopytoff, 1986) or at least not primarily so. Atanasova (2021) describes a number of utopian experiments that mobilise analogous principles. Similarly, embedded in the ecovillage system Casey et al. (2020) describe are practices that include limited market exchange, but not the pursuit of money profits. Also, in this case via things like car sharing, recycling, reusing, and composting, human participants co-create value with other entities in the biome.

As these cases illustrate, a system of transitive exchange constrains alienation because values are tied to particular relationships and particular relations manifest values. Were such systems fully linked to an animist ontology, then the human subject would cease to be ‘a seat of awareness, bounded by the skin, and set over against the world’, with the subject’s ‘environment’ conceived as a background pool of alienable resources available to human and social activity. Instead, embodied inhabitants would be brought into being through communication, the exchange of signifying sensory and material resources (Descola, 2012, 254–256).

Neo-animist exchange relations are embedded in systems of communication that rely heavily on indexical and iconic signs, rather than arbitrary signs. This limits the exchange of commoditized sign values that act autonomously of their production within a web of signification as arbitrary markers of distinction in a sign economy (Baudrillard, 1972/2019) Linked indexical and iconic signs ideally ‘constitute discursive chains directly in touch with the referent’ (Guattari, 1989, p. 60). This means that a transformative eco-economy would attend to the indexical and iconic communicative signals animals and plants send to one another and to us, as in the matsutake example or as demonstrated in Simard’s (2021) research on arboreal species. Via the transitive principles of circulation outlined earlier, resources would circulate more sustainably between plants, animals, and humans.

Discussion and conclusion

A more relational and pluralistic understanding of what we call ‘nature’ based on a radical animistic re-reading of ecosystem relationships might foster a ‘decolonial nature’ (Escobar, 2008), or an ecosophical (Guattari, 1989) understanding of the pluralities of nature-culture regimes that foster collectivities between and among living subjects and non-living agents (Muraca, 2016). A neo-animist ontology is not a panacea for all the world’s ills as both local and global evolutionary pressures continue to favor some and disfavour other biological beings but could break the headlong rush towards biodiversity collapse we currently experience.

A full-on return to an animist eco-economy after centuries of social experience of naturalist science and economies underwritten by a naturalist ontology seems unrealistic. However, a neo-animist ontology that recognises ecosystems and the species within them as evolutionary units and all biological entities as communicative agents between whom circulate an immense variety of resources is consistent with contemporary biological science. A neo-animistic consumer subjectivity could recognise the mutual dependence of all these entities in the global biome and attend to their communicative intentions. Neo-animism could sanction predation but insist on preserving the conditions that make it possible. Neo-animism could sanction market exchange but recognise the sterile futility of private hoarding. Neo-animism could sanction gift giving but recognise that the biome is the source and destiny of all value. Neo-animist consumption is not anti-materialist because it rejects both nature-culture and culture-technology dichotomies (Schatzki, 2003). Consequently, it could foster enriched material relationships between people and other entities. As an eco-economic system, neo-animism would challenge the DSP, build attitude behaviour gaps out of sustainable consumption because the ecosystem costs would be built into economic relationships, and through foregrounding gifting, exchange, and predation enhance reciprocally fruitful practice between human and non-human communities. Moreover, a neo-animist eco-economy which foregrounds the principles of predation, gift, and exchange and regulates commodity markets via a neo-animist ontology removes the Romantic market mythology that plagues arguments for a circular economy (Clark & Bonato, 2020). By extending and elaborating on our communicative experiences with non-human entities, a new social imaginary replacing scientific modernity (Taylor, 2002), that is, an ‘ecological ontology [of persons] is a possible outcome’ (Åsberg & Braidotti, 2018; Feenberg, 2011, p. 6).

This paper is consistent with a transformative approach to sustainability in marketing (Belz & Peattie, 2010; Kempera & Ballantine, 2019). That macro, relational view treats socioecological problems as the start of the marketing process instead of as externalities, reconfigures the marketing mix and focuses on the transformational potential of marketing in creating favourable institutional change for sustainable consumption, production, distribution, and reproduction (Belz & Peattie, 2010; Kemper & Ballantine, 2019). However, this paper argues that a necessary condition of a transformational sustainable eco-economy is replacement of the indefensible construct of nature with a recognition of the rights in, and contributions of diverse, multiplicities of living beings to all eco-economic processes in which human beings also engage. Only in this way can systems of circulation ‘meet the full environmental costs of production and consumption to create a sustainable economy’ (Peattie, 2001, p. 129).

Central to success is dethroning the sovereign, responsibilized consumer, whose Romantic onanistic project of self-realisation and betterment provides the warrant for marketing (Lambert, 2019; Stoner, 2021), and who thus becomes a convenient excuse for perpetuating unsustainable marketing processes (Yngfalk, 2019). Research suggests the real precarity of this alienated actor (Lambert, 2019). Marketing theory and practice should replace the consumer fetish (Arnould & Cayla, 2015) with a broader collectivity of stakeholders in value creation processes as illustrated in the matsutake example (Tsing, 2015) and those collectivities Atanasova (2021), Casey et al. (2020), Giesler (2006, 2008) and Figueiredo and Scaraboto (2016) examine. Stated another way, ‘it is imperative to consider the (im)possibility of both sustainable consumption and consumption practices, and not just amongst voluntary simplifiers or anti-consumers, but at a broader societal level’ (McDonagh & Prothero, 2014, p. 1196) without replacing the consumer construct with that of unalienated subjects party to eco-economic processes. We can learn from those who engage in bartering, sharing, gifting, and semiotic consumption processes (Belk, 2014; Wei, et al. 2021) and turn attention to what organisations can do to mainstream such value co-creating activities.

The knee-jerk criticism that these proposals infringe on a Romantic neo-liberal idea of personal freedom, is easily turned aside by noting that,

The liberal idea of freedom degenerates into a mere advocacy of free enterprise—which is today reduced to a fiction by the hard reality of giant trusts and princely monopolies. This means the fullness of freedom for those whose income, leisure and security need no enhancing and a mere pittance of liberty for the people [and other beings], who may in vain attempt to make use of their democratic rights to gain shelter from the power of the owners of property (Polanyi 1947/2001, p. 265).

Written more than 60 years ago, the deleterious effects of global concentrations of money wealth both on human and non-human subjects are even more true today.

Acknowledgments

The author thanks sincerely the editors and three reviewers who provided excellent, constructive critique and suggestions that helped improve the manuscript without hijacking it to ends other than those intended. Remaining weaknesses are my own, my apologies for any misrepresentation of cited authors’ work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eric J. Arnould

Dr. Eric J. Arnould is Senior Fellow of Marketing at the Aalto University Business School. He continues a long career in applied social science. Before entering academia, he focused on development anthropology consulting in West Africa. He received a PhD in anthropology from The University of Arizona and was awarded honorary doctorates in business by Aalto University in 2016 and University of Southern Denmark in 2020. Eric’s foundational research on consumer culture, cultural marketing strategy, qualitative research methods, services, and development appears in major social science and management journals and books earning him a Google H-index of 61. Recently, he co-edited Consumer Culture Theory, a text summarizing major contributions in this subfield and a special issue of the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research focused on consumption collectivities.

Notes

1. https://www.corporateknights.com/reports/2020-global-100/

2. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=41433