- Debord , Guy . 1995 . The Society of the Spectacle , New York : Zone Books . (orig. 1967)
- 1997 . New York Times , 14 December : 12
- Zhao , Bin and Murdock , Graham . 1996 . 'Young pioneers: children and the making of Chinese consumerism' . Cultural Studies , 10 (2) : 201 – 217 . 203
- Sklair , Leslie . 1991 . Sociology of the Global System , 201 – 202 . Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press .
- Zhao and Murdock . “ 'Young pioneers' ” . 216
- Zhao and Murdock . “ 'Young pioneers' ” . 211 The following account is based on the discussion in Zhao and Murdock, 'Young pioneers', 1996. Quoted in
- Simmel , Georg . 1978 . The Philosophy of Money , London : Routledge & Kegan Paul . (1907)
- Spencer , J E . 1940 . 'Kueichou: an internal Chinese colony' . Pacific Affairs , 13 (2) : 162 – 172 .
- Cannon , Terry . 1989 . “ 'National minorities and the internal frontier' ” . In China's Regional Development , Edited by: Goodman , David S G . 164 – 179 . London : Routledge .
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- Hendrischke , Hans and Chongyi , Feng , eds. 1999 . The Political Economy of China's Provinces: Comparative and Competitive Advantage , London : Routledge . With the developments in the Chinese economy by the late 1990s, the coastal-inland dichotomy is somewhat of an overstatement, as there is much variation between and even within provinces alt over China. See, for a recent treatment of this complexity which takes up the issue of competitive advantages and disadvantages between regions.
- Cannon . “ 'National minorities' ” . 175 – 176 .
- Phillips , David R and Yeh , Anthony G O . 1989 . “ 'Special economic zones' ” . In China's Regional Development , Edited by: Goodman , David S G . 112 – 134 . London : Routledge .
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- Verdery , Katherine . 1996 . What was Socialism, and What Comes Next? , 28 – 29 . Princeton : Princeton University Press .
- Humphrey , Caroline . 1995 . “ 'Creating a culture of disillusionment: consumption in Moscow, a chronicle of changing times' ” . In Worlds Apart: Modernity through the Prism of the Local , Edited by: Miller , Daniel . 43 – 68 . 55 – 56 . London : Routledge . Verdery, 1992 in
- Humphrey . 1995 . “ 'Creating a culture of disillusionment' ” . 58
- Barme , Geremie . 1994 . 'Soft porn, packaged dissent, and nationalism: notes on Chinese culture in the 1990s' . Current History , September : 270 – 275 . 272
- 7 June 1999 . U.S. News and World Report 7 June , 33
- 7 June 1999 . U.S. News and World Report 7 June , 33
- Robison , Richard and Goodman , David S G . 1996 . “ The new rich in Asia: Economic development, social status and political consciousness' ” . In The New Rich in Asia: Mobile Phones. McDonald's, and Middle-Class Revolution , Edited by: Robison , Richard and Goodman , David S G . 1 – 16 . London : Routledge .
- Worsley , Peter . 1982 . 'Cargo cults' in Anthropology: Contemporary Perspectives, , Third edition , Edited by: Hunter , David E K and Whitten , Phillip . 241 – 248 . Boston : Little Brown . (1959),
- Lindstrom , Lamont . 1993 . Cargo Cult: Strange Stories of Desire from Melanesia and Beyond , 184 – 187 . Honolulu : University of Hawaii Press . The time-span of cargo cult activity is, of course, intimately dependent on how the designation 'cargo cult' is applied. There are accounts of related cult-type occurrences as early as the 1850s (Worsley, 'Cargo cults', 1982), and of cargo-type cults in vastly different regions of the world (cf
- Loeliger , Carl and Trompf , Garry . 1985 . New Religious Movements in Melanesia , xii University of the South Pacific and the University of Papua New Guinea . Critiques of the unitary designation 'cargo cult' as, among other things, an orientalist reduction or a projection of Western commodity fetishism, are reviewed by Lindstrom (1993, pp 6-10). Loeliger and Trompf discuss problems of classification in a collection on new religious movements in Melanesia that covers the scope of the last two centuries and chronicles many other types of religious movements that were not of the cargo type. My comparative undertaking here has required me to stabilise the phenomenon of cargos perhaps more than the critics would find justified. I do so, however, to draw out both their kinship with and their divergences from a later moment of consumerism. For this reason I focus on the cults that revolve around 'the miraculous acquisition of Western-style goods', see
- Lindstrom . 1993 . Cargo Cult
- Connolly , Bob and Anderson , Robin . 1982 . First Contact , 21 New York : Viking Penguin .
- Hays , Terence E . 1993 . ' 'The New Guinea Highlands": region, culture area or fuzzy set?' . Current Anthropology , 34 : 141 – 164 . On the complicated referants implied in the use of the term 'Highlander', see
- Connolly and Anderson . First Contact 62
- Ibid, p 64.
- Buck-Morss , Susan . 1995 . 'Envisioning capital: political economy on display' . Critical Inquiry , 21 : 34 – 467 . 456
- Worsley . “ 'Cargo cults' ” . 241
- Ong , Aihwa . 1987 . Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline , Albany, NY : Suny Press . Here we might think comparatively of the instances of spirit possession analysed by
- Hodgson , Dorothy . 1997 . “ 'Embodying the contradictions of modernity: gender and spirit possession among Maasai in Tanzania' ” . In Gendered Encounters: Challenging Cultural Boundaries and Social Hierarchies in Africa , Edited by: Grosz-Ngate , Maria and Kokole , Omari . 111 – 129 . New York : Routledge . as resistance to labour discipline in the proletarianisation of peasant labour in Malaysia. See also
- Taussig , Michael T . 1980 . The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America , 28 Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press .
- Barrow , G . 1978 . The Story of Jonfrum , Western Pacific High Commission . typescript (cited in Lindstrom,
- Povinelli . 1997 . “ 'Sex acts and sovereignty: race and sexuality in the construction of the Australian Nation' ” . In The Gender Sexuality Reader , Edited by: Lancaster , Roger and diLeonardo , Micaela . 513 – 528 . New York : Routledge . I am indebted to Elizabeth A Povinelli and Purnima Mankekar for insisting on the urgency of this methodological conundrum. For more on this see
- Povinelli . 1997 . What the Fuck? The Nervous System of Liberal Capitalist Democracies, or, What if Fucking were a Lesser Form of Spitting? . Paper presented at the Annual Meetings of the American Anthropological Association . November 1997 .
- Lindstrom . Cargo Cult 22 Holtker, 1946, quoted in
- Christiansen , Falle . 1969 . The Melanesian Cargo Cult: Millenarianism as a Factor in Cultural Change , 17 Copenhagen : Akademisk Forlag .
- Burridge , Kenelm . 1960 . Mambu: A Melanesien Millennium , 200 Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press .
- Mead , Margaret . 1956 . New Lives for Old , 208 New York : William Morrow .
- Worsley , Peter . 1968 . The Trumpet Shall Sound: A Study of 'Cargo' Cults in Melanesia, , Second augmented edition , 87 New York : Schocken Books .
- Ibid, p 151.
- Burridge . Mambu 2 – 3 .
- Worsley . The Trumpet Shall Sound 23
- Burridge . Mambu 200
- Miller , J . 1948 . 'Naked cult in central West Santo' . Journal of Polynesian Society , 57 : 330 – 341 . 340
- Rubin , Gayle . 1975 . “ The traffic in women: notes on a political economy of sex' ” . In Toward an Anthropology of Women , Edited by: Reiter , Rayna . 157 – 210 . New York : Monthly Review Press .
- Lattas , Andrew . 1998 . Cultures of Secrecy: Reinventing Race in Bush Kaliai Cargo Cults , 187 Madison : University of Wisconsin Press .
- Lindstrom , Lament . 1978 . 'Cargo cults, sexual distance and melanesian social integration' . Canberra Anthropology , 1 (2) : 42 – 58 .
- Connolly and Anderson . First Contact 235 – 287 .
- Christiansen . The Melanesian Cargo Cult 69
- Burridge . Mambu 23 – 24 .
- Cochrane , Glynn . 1970 . Big Men and Cargo Cults , 160 Oxford : Clarendon Press .
- Kaplan , Martha . 1995 . Neither Cargo Nor Cult: Ritual and the Colonial Imagination in Fiji , Durham, NC : Duke University Press .
- Cochrane . 1970 . Big Men and Cargo Cults
- Farquhar , Judith . 1999 . 'Technologies of everyday life: the economy of impotence in Reform China,' . Cultural Anthropology , 14 (2) : 155 – 179 .
- Simmel . The Philosophy of Money 65 – 66 .
- Burridge, Mambu, 1960 and Lindstrom, Cargo Cult, 1993.
- Marcus , George . 1996 . Connected: Engagements with Media , Chicago : University of Chicago . This article concerns sites, such as the interior of China, that have become media-saturated but are as yet little influenced by the more two-way, communicative, or connected functions offered by the internet; see
- Huang , Yu and Yu , Xu . 1997 . 'Broadcasting and politics: Chinese television in the Mao era, 1958-1976' . Historical Journal of Film. Radio and Television , 17 (4) : 63 – 574 .
- Lull , James . 1991 . China Turned On: Television. Reform and Resistance , 19 – 24 . London : Routledge . The above figures were taken from
- Junhao , Hong . 1995 . The evolution of China's satellite policy' . Telecommunications Policy , 19 (2) : 117 – 133 . 128
- Yang , Mayfair Mei-hui . 1997 . “ 'Mass media and transnational subjectivity in Shanghai: notes on (re)cosmopolitanism in a Chinese metropolis' ” . In Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism , Edited by: Ong , Aihwa and Nonini , Donald . 287 – 319 . 294 – 295 . New York : Routledge .
- Liu , Yu-Ii . 1994 . The growth of cable television in China: tensions between local and central government' . Telecommunications Policy , 18 (3) : 216 – 228 . 224
- Kaye , Lincoln . 1993 . 'Shooting Star' . Far Eastern Economic Review , 156 October 21 : 73 – 74 .
- Tad Ballew, personal communication, 11 January 1998.
- Chan , Joseph Man . 1994 . 'National responses and accessibility to STAR TV in Asia' . Journal of Communication , 44 (3) : 112 – 131 . see p 118
- Buck-Morss . 1995 . “ 'Envisioning capital' ” .
- Andersen , Benedict . 1983 . Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism , 6 – 7 . London : Verso .
- Robbins , Bruce . 1993 . “ 'Comparative cosmopolitanisms' ” . In Secular Vocations , 180 – 211 . London : Verso . This sense of cosmopolitanism as an outcome of an imagining that quests to overcome or circumvent global inequalities mediates debates on the deployment of the notion of cosmopolitanism in social analysis. These debates usually divide into (1) the critique that cosmopolitanism is an overly homogenising concept versus (2) the critique that cosmopolitanism cannot but be aligned with and therefore implicitly celebrate the mobility of elite privilege and of capital. For more on these debates see and many of the essays in the volume Cosmopolites: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, by Bruce Robbins and Pheng Cheah, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1998
- Anderson . Imagined Communities 54
- Harvey , David . 1989 . The Condition of Postmodernity , Oxford : Basil Blackwell .
- Morley , David and Robins , Kevin . 1995 . Spaces of Identity: Global Media. Electronic Landscapes and Cultural Boundaries , 32 London : Routledge .
- Shohat , Ella and Stam , Robert . 1996 . “ 'From the imperial family to the transnational imaginary: media spectatorship in the age of globalization ” . In Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary , Edited by: Wilson , Rob and Dissanayake , Wimal . 145 – 170 . 145 Durham, NC : Duke University Press .
- Appadurai , Arjun . 1996 . Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization , 54 Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press .
- Appadurai . Modernity at Large 7 The tension between imagination and fantasy is intended here, and invokes Appadurai's distinction in which imagination is thought of as a potential 'staging ground for action' while fantasy connotes 'thought divorced from projects and actions' My modification, however, is a blurring of Appadurai's distinction in order to emphasise that, for those with restricted possibilities, potential social actions--mobilities and redistributions--may not ultimately be realisable, may be phantasmatic, even when they are actively imagined. See
- Yang . “ 'Mass media and transnational subjectivity' ” . 288
- ibid, pp 301-303; 309-310.
- Schein , Louisa . 1994 . 'The consumption of color and the politics of white skin in post-Mao China' . Social Text , 41 : 141 – 164 . 156
- Yan , Yuang xiang . 1997 . “ 'McDonald's in Beijing: the localization of Americana ” . In Golden Arches East: McDonald's in East Asia , Edited by: Watson , James L . 65 Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press . Another kind of consumption, distinct from that of media and of more durable goods, needs to be taken into account here. That is the consumption of more ephemeral commodities such as foods. Here the imagining of cosmopolitanism works in related ways but with slightly different particulars. A Beijing mother who was routinely taking her daughter to MacDonald's saw it as a programme in skills acquisition 'to expose her daughter to American culture. In other words, she wants her daughter to learn … to eat modern food so she will grow up to be a successful person who knows how to enjoy a modern way of life' Even more pertinent to the cosmopolitan impulse was the establishment in Beijing of a 'theme' MacDonald's, decorated like a large ship with staff in sailor uniforms. The restaurant 'encourages children to imagine that they are traveling around the world on a big ship guided by Uncle MacDonald. The basic idea, according to the manager, is to increase children's knowledge of world geography and encourage them to create an imagined world by and for themselves'.
- Baudrillard , Jean . 1983 . “ 'The ecstasy of communication' ” . In The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture , Edited by: Foster , Hal . 126 – 134 . Port Townsend, W A : Bay Press .
- Sklair . Sociology of the Global System 200
- Schell , Orville . 1989 . Discos and Democracy: China in the Throes of Reform , 344 New York : Anchor .
- Sklair . Sociology of the Global System 201
- Chu , Leonard . 1979-1980 . 'Advertising returns to China' . The Asian Messenger , 4 (2-3) : 56
- Horkheimer , Max and Adorno , Theodor W . 1972 . “ 'The culture industry: enlightenment as mass deception' ” . In The Dialectic of Enlightenment , 120 – 167 . New York : Continuum . (orig. 1944),
- Debord . The Society of the Spectacle 29
- Anderson , Michael H . 1984 . Madison Avenue in Asia: Politics and Transnational Advertising , 275 Cranbury, NJ : Associated University Presses .
- Haug , W F . 1986 . Critique of Commodity Aesthetics: Appearance. Sexuality and Advertising in Capitalist Society , 19 Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press .
- Williamson , Judith . 1986 . “ 'Woman is an island: femininity and colonization' ” . In Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture , Edited by: Modleski , Tania . 99 – 118 . Bloomington and Indianapolis : University of Indiana Press .
- Modleski , Tania . 1982 . Loving with a Vengeance , New York : Methuen .
- Willis , Susan . 1991 . A Primer for Daily Life , 6 London : Routledge .
- Barme . 1994 . 'Soft porn, packaged dissent, and nationalism', 1994 and Orville Schell, To get rich is glorious' . New Yorker , LXX (22) : 26 – 35 .
- Jianying , Zha . 1995 . China Pop: How Soap Operas, Tabloids, and Bestsellers are Transforming a Culture , 105 New York : The New Press .
- Notar , Beth . 1994 . Of labor and liberation: images of women in current Chinese television advertising . Visual Anthropology Review , 10 (2) : 29 – 44 . 32
- Baudrillard . “ 'The ecstasy of communication' ” . 130 – 131 .
- Lindstrom . Cargo Cult 183 – 184 .
- Lattas . Cultures of Secrecy 192
- Mbembe , Achille . 1992 . The banality of power and the aesthetics of vulgarity in the postcolony' . Public Culture , 4 (2) : 1 – 30 .
- Lindstrom . Cargo Cult 209
- Benjamin , Walter . 1973 . Charles Baudelaire, A lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism , 55 London : Verso . In a well-known essay, The Flaneur, Walter Benjamin elaborated the sensibility of the urbanite, strolling on foot through an anonymous crowd, encountering commodities with the same impersonality as the metropolitan strangers' indifference: The flaneur is someone abandoned in the crowd. In this he shares the situation of the commodity. He is not aware of this special situation, but this does not diminish its effect on him and it permeates him blissfully like a narcotic that can compensate him for many humiliations. The intoxication to which the flaneur surrenders is the intoxication of the commodity around which surges the stream of customers … Empathy is the nature of the intoxication to which the flaneur abandons himself in the crowd … [but] the commodity whispers to a poor wretch who passes a shop-window containing beautiful and expensive things. These objects are not interested in this person; they do not empathize with him.
- Farquhar . Technologies of everyday life', 1999 166 – 167 .
- Schein , Louisa . 1996 . The Other goes to market: the nation, the State and unruliness in contemporary China . Identities , 2 (3) : 197 – 222 .
- Angus , Ian H . “ 'Circumbscribing postmodern culture' ” . In Cultural Politics in Contemporary America , Edited by: lan Angus , H and Jhally , Sut . 96 – 107 . 100 – 101 . New York : Routledge .
- Benjamin , Walter . 1936 . The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', in Illuminations , 217 – 251 . New York : Schocken Books . Angus derives this position out of reading beyondand the cultural criticism of Theodor Adorno. Benjamin, he suggests, emphasised mechanical reproduction and the loss of 'aura' as bringing about a transformation in how the audience received cultural products. Adorno pushed beyond this position to stress not mechanical reproduction of culture per se, but a form of massification in which alt cultural products were subsumed in a logic of commodity exchange that saturated society to such an extent that alt culture was homogenised. Angus's project is to move beyond this Adomian critique of the homogenisation of mass culture
- Strathern , Marilyn . 1991 . 'Partners and consumers: making relations visible' . New Literary History , 22 : 581 – 601 . 596
- Miller , Daniel , ed. Worlds Apart: Modernity through the Prism of the Local , London : Routledge . Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, 1973 and
- Foster , Robert J . 1996-1997 . 'Commercial mass media in Papua New Guinea: notes on agency, bodies and commodity consumption' . Visual Anthropology Review , 12 (2) : 1 – 17 . 4
- Dutton , Michael . 1998 . Streetlife China , 274 Cambridge : Cambridge University Press . In a discussion of fashion, Dutton takes issue with the notion that reform in China heralds individualism: … Many consumers in China do not operate with the notion of individuality that underpins even the most mass-produced of fashion products in the West. For these Chinese, fashion is not constructed to mark out one's individuality, but to mark out one's success. Success is made verifiable through the notion of correct choice. Success means choosing a coat that everyone else is wearing for, to see others in the same coat, dress, trousers or shirt is not a sign of social disgrace, but a mark of wisdom and affluence … The Chinese, in this one crucial respect, have never really changed out of their Mao suits … The Mao suit, like Maoism itself may well be simply a more recent refashioning of much deeper, unconscious commitments to a notion of a collective whole
- Friedman , Jonathan . 1990 . “ 'Being in the world: globalization and localization' ” . In Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity , Edited by: Featherstone , Mike . 311 – 328 . London : Sage .
- Bar-Haim , Gabriel . 1987 . The meaning of Western commercial artifacts for Eastern European youth' . Journal of Contemporary Ethnography , 16 (2) : 205 – 226 . Barme, 'Soft porn, packaged dissent, an nationalism', 1994; Humphrey, 'Creating a culture of disillusionment', 1995; Verdery, What was Socialism, 1996
- Yang . “ 'Mass media and transnational subjectivity' ” . 303
- Angus . “ 'Circumbscribing postmodern culture' ” . 101
- Worsley . “ 'Cargo cults' ” . 241
- Schein . “ 'The Consumption of Color' ” . 148 The notion of exchanging skins in a context of highly marked racial difference is very significant here, as this corporal transformation in effect re-instantiates race binaries. Elsewhere I have analysed contemporary Chinese use of cosmetic surgery to effect actual corporal transformations in the form of heightened noses, widened eyes and enlarged breasts (see
- Mercer , Kobena . 1990 . “ 'Black hair/style polities' ” . In Out There: Marginalisation and Contemporary Culture , Edited by: Ferguson , Russell . 247 – 264 . Cambridge, MA : MIT Press . and Schell, Discos and Democracy 1989). I suggest that in the context of the imagining of cosmopolitanism, these practices defy the usual reading of them as modes of iterating the superiority of corporeal whiteness. Rather, unlike the cargoists' total exchange of skins, these alterations produce hybrid bodies that transgress the impermeability of racial boundaries through a kind of creolizing artifice, see
- Fowkes , Ben , ed. 1990 . “ 'The fetishism of the commodity and its secret' ” . In Capital , Volume One , London : Penguin Books . This passage is, of course, intended to evoke Marx's original treatment of commodity fetishism in (orig 1867)
- de Certeau , Michel . 1984 . The Practice of Everyday Life , Berkeley : University of California . This discussion of homogeneity should not be confused with an earlier discussion that has been carried out on the homogenising effects of global capitalism and culture versus production of difference and individuality through local consumption styles. This discussion, especially in anthropology, inspired by notions of productive consumption, (see
- Friedman . 1990 . “ 'Being in the world' ” . In Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity , Edited by: Featherstone , Mike . London : Sage . and distinction (Bourdieu, Distinction, 1984), has firmly established the need to attend to processes of localising and indigenising of globally mobile cultural and economic forms (seeMiller, Worlds Apart, 1995, for a review of the issues see the 'Introduction' in Miller, 1995). What I am proposing here goes a step beyond this debate. I am suggesting that we scrutinise our own analytical practice as potentially producing the homogenising formula that assumes that all consumption practice tends towards individuation of persons or groups
Postcolonial Studies
Volume 2, 1999 - Issue 3