Media should deal with ideas not commodities can you please answer this s question
it's a topic of speaking skills
Answers
In The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption, Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood argue for anthropology’s need to see "goods as an information system." "Instead of supposing that goods are primarily needed for subsistence plus competitive display," they argue, "let us assume that they are needed for making visible and stable the categories of culture." (59) "This approach to goods," they continue, "emphasizing their double roles in providing subsistence and in drawing lines of social relationships [is]… the way to a proper understanding of why people need goods."
Over the course of the 20th century, anthropology has developed a sophisticated mode of inquiry into the deep structures of traditional societies: their kinship networks, totems and taboos, and foodways. Douglas and Isherwood want to use that methodology to examine our complex consumer culture. In order to begin that exercise, they invoke Claude Levi-Strauss’s work on the nature and purpose of food restrictions among the [?people?]. It was not dietary or gastronomic criteria that allowed and disallowed certain foods, Levi-Strauss argued in Totemism. On the contrary, Douglas and Isherwood remind us, "animals which are tabooed are chosen…because they are good to think, not because they are good to eat." Animals that are good to think. What exactly does this mean? The anthropologists explain:
If it is said that the essential function of language is its capacity for poetry, we shall assume that the essential function of consumption is its capacity to make sense… Forget that commodities are good for eating, clothing, and shelter; forget their usefulness and try instead the idea that commodities are good for thinking; treat them as a nonverbal medium for the human creative faculty. (62)
Douglas and Isherwood ask us to consider commodities from the wrong end round: to think of them not for their use value, for what we do with them, but for the spaces and hierarchies, the rituals and relationships, that their very existence makes possible in a culture. My paper today is an attempt to consider the twentieth-century book in light of Douglas and Isherwood’s injunctions. That is to say that for today, I want to forget for a moment that books are good for reading, and consider instead the way they are good for thinking. I want to put aside books as texts, and to think structurally, of books as books.
Separate (yet inseparable) from their lives as texts, books live for us as commodities, as a specific kind of for-profit media form within a saturated communications environment. Yet thinking about the book as a commodity, as a good that is good for thinking, does not come naturally. It is difficult, and not merely for a literary critic trained to think of the book as a TEXT. Our typical mode of encounter with animals is to eat them, hence the pre-Levi-Straussian anthropologists’ assumption that the way to understand their meanings is through eating practices-- through diet, nutrition, gastronomy, taste. Just so with books: typically, we read them, and in so doing take them into ourselves. Our varying decoding practices are our traditional focus of study, and the act of internalizing texts has been naturalized to the point that it is difficult to think of books in any other way. Attempts, for instance, to get my students, or even my grandmother, to describe the book they’re reading almost invariably yield a description of story, or of the point where the story interacts with individual interpretive experience-- the "theme." But if we want to think about books as a communications medium, we need to inquire less into what ideas books are about, and more into what ideas books enable. The first step in this process of figuring out how books are good to think is determining why it is so difficult to do so.
One could make an argument that the book’s own history mitigates against seeing it as a commodity. For centuries, after all, the book’s primary place was at the center of religious practice. It is historically associated, as a result, with the evanescent, spiritual, not-for-profit world. But printed books, as Elizabeth Eisenstein and Raymond Williams have shown, have always had as much of a secular as a spiritual existence. Their history in the modern west is synonymous with the development of industrial production and the rise of consumer culture that went with it. If the book has maintained some sort of transcendent identity, it has done so despite its position at the center of the world of goods, not because of some privileged position outside it.
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