Reflection on Lury and Galeano - 1/16/20

Lury begins by introducing the term “material culture” by which she means the material goods or things which are valued and used in everyday life. In using this phrase and combining the words material and culture, Lury is defining the relationship between cultural norms and everyday goods. The term material  culture seems to be similar to the word consumption, and I believe this is that point Lury tries to make, in that in the 21^stcentury especially, humans have been consumed by this idea of having the next big item and working hard to get that big promotion. Lury make sure to make this point by noting that consumption can include the “spaces of consumer experience” or immaterial – in a sense intellectual - labor. Yet, Douglas and Isherwood differed slightly in their understanding of consumption claiming that it is the value and communication with/of possessions. Essentially, consumption seems to be an exchange of values, ideas, and production. While, Douglas and Isherwood focus on the seen exchange of communication, Sahlins describes consumption in yet a different way – the symbolic connection between goods and people. In doing so, Sahlins argues that different goods symbolize different consumer groups in society; how one consumes and uses commodities, like a pair of shoes for example, shows not only their individual identity, such as how they wear the shoes and what color the shoes are, but also the level of wealth they have – how expensive the shoes were - and the type of consumer they are. 

It struck me that throughout the argument, Lury continually referred to “Euro-American” societies. This seemed odd as material culture exists throughout the world. It may be beneficial to stop and ask why Lury continually makes this distinction throughout the chapter. Coupled with the section regarding production-consumption, it seems as if Lury does this purposely to separate and categorize those who mainly consume and those who mainly produce – in relative terms to LAS 470 that would be the USA / Europe and Latin America respectively. Not only that, Lury discusses the price tag which adds a new level of separation to the market for each good, dividing those who consume by the impoverished, the middle class, and the wealthy. Page 12 states “while poverty restricts the possibility of participating in the consumption of commodities, it does not necessarily prevent participation in consumer culture” which is important to remember as we discuss consumption throughout this class. Latin Americans, while laborers, also participate in a level of consumption of material culture, albeit a different level than we are used to here at Furman. 

I was fascinated by the idea of ritual that Douglas and Isherwood bring up as it relates to everyday items. Their description reminds me of the article, Nacerima, that I’ve read in other classes. In Nacerima, the article describes everyday ritualistic tasks from an outsider perspective – describing doctors as magicians who give people potions that heal them and depicting hair dryers as ovens for the head. This idea of the “visible part of culture” brings up many questions about seen and unseen culture, or that which is secret or unknown and that which is known. These rituals establish identity and create lines of communication and relationship building.  

Overall Galeano uses flowery language to depict statistics and paint the picture of the story of Latin Americans. The first sentence hits the heart of the argument – there are winners and losers which come from the division of labor amongst both people and nations. As I read the introduction questions like how do we determine winners and losers? how do we change the system of service to others’ needs; and what needs to be true for the reality that “[Latin America] exists at the service to others’ needs” to be false? And is it on developed nations, the nations that “won” through colonialism and imperialism to enact policies that will help the “losers” succeed in this world order?

On the second page, Galeano gets into a brief discussion regarding what it means to be American and who is American. I thought this was an important part to be made, in part because we discussed this idea as a class on the first day, as well as because it touches on the idea of identity and history. The powerful line, “For the world today, America is just the United States, the region we inhabit is a sub-America, a second-class America of nebulous identity.” This line is powerful because it shows the essence of neocolonialism and the value of identity in the Western Hemisphere. Those in Latin America are just as “American” as people from the United States so why is the idea that they are different perpetuated across the globe? 

I am not sure I completely understand the hurricane metaphor simply because the paragraph describes the population growth of Latin America and how that will have negative consequences for the future because of disease, unemployment, and poverty. However, Galeano continues on in the chapter to discuss that there is no “surplus” of people in Latin America. In describing the economic consequences of overpopulation, I thought it might be beneficial to compare the growth of India to the growth of population in Latin America, however there are fewer inhabitants in Latin American countries than their developed counterparts. Despite not fully grasping the hurricane analogy, the chapter seems to be saying that as labor has been forced in Latin America, or as the consumption of Latin American labor has grown, the eye of the hurricane has grown and grown, trapping children – the future generation- in its destructive path.