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Excluded from reciprocity
Published in Helen Macdonald, Ian Harper, Understanding Tuberculosis and Its Control, 2019
In analysing the experience of TB patients, the phrase ‘conspicuous consumption’ is a play on words to describe a TB patient’s physical condition, an evocative way of describing the intense supervision of their treatment, and an apt theoretical concept to problematize free medical treatment and the ability of patients to participate in social exchange. Not to get hung up on fancy turns of phrase, the core issue is that reducing the problem of TB to the detection and elimination of the M. tuberculosis draws attention away from the socio-economic character of TB and amounts to the medicalization of poverty. With a reductionist focus on antimicrobial cure as opposed to socio-economic prevention (Paluzzi, 2004), the medical obligation to treat TB offers an excuse to co-opt the poorest classes into participating in global networks of medical consumerism. By accepting a diagnosis and undergoing treatment, TB patients inculcate and are inculcated into the sensibilities of a global biomedical enterprise. Co-opting poor patients living in collectivist cultures into medical consumerism is not without hurdles, because such patients can be ill-equipped to be thrown into an individualistic position. Dominant discourses in global TB control unjustly hold noncompliant patients as responsible for the rise of MDR-TB (Harper, 2010; Koch, 2013; McMillen, 2015). Holding accountable those least capable of completing TB treatment borders on the criminalization of poverty.
Confronting Policy Dilemmas
Published in Joyce D’Silva, John Webster, The Meat Crisis, 2017
Apart from much of today’s idiotic “conspicuous consumption”, there are only two facets of current human behaviour which simply cannot be squared with any reasonable scenario of a genuinely sustainable future for humankind as a whole. The first is the continuing growth in demand for air travel, and the second is the continuing growth in demand for meat consumption. However contested the transition from a carbon-intensive way of life to an ultra-low carbon way of life may prove to be (and the longer we delay, the more contested it will be), there are no other insuperable barriers from either a technological or a socio-economic point of view.
The obesity epidemic and American culture
Published in Anna Bellisari, The Anthropology Of Obesity in the United States, 2016
Americans have the largest houses, and the most cars, TVs, computers, and cell phones. They purchase vast quantities of goods, many of which are non-essential (Zukin 2003). Hyper-consumerism and conspicuous consumption are the norm, uninhibited by lack of funds. Self-restraint is considered to be anti-capitalist, a danger to national economic growth, and downright unpatriotic. It is even contrary to some versions of Christianity. Citing Biblical verses, evangelist Oral Roberts spread the Gospel of Prosperity which promised God’s blessings of earthly riches to the faithful. Today’s TV preachers of “health and wealth theology” promise material blessing to those who make appropriate donations to their churches, even when they risk impoverishing themselves (Luo 2006; Gorski 2007).
Contextualising tobacco use in the social, economic and political transformation of Punjab
Published in Journal of Ethnicity in Substance Abuse, 2022
Shaveta Menon, Ramila Bisht, Balakrishnan Nair
The short-term affluence and profitability generated by Green Revolution created conflicts between traditional values and the culture of conspicuous consumption. Two decades of transformation in society, economy and culture of Punjab had generated a moral and ethical crisis. Basically, the culture of cash and profitability deranged the old social order and disintegrated the moral norms that governed the Punjabi society. This circulation of new cash led to epidemics of social diseases like alcoholism, smoking, drug addiction, in addition to the spread of pornographic films and literature and violence against women. Green Revolution not only caused economic and political disturbance but also led to communal disruption because of the contingent overlapping of the farming community in Punjab with a Jat Sikh identity. Concurrently, it was possible to represent the conflicts related to Green Revolution as communal conflicts and treat them as only having a religious base remotely related to politics of technological changes and its socio-economic impact. Although Green Revolution failed to bring long lasting peace and prosperity in Punjab, there were of course cultural reasons which facilitated the communalizing of Punjab crisis. Green Revolution apart from being a technological and political plan was certainly a cultural strategy which substituted the traditional peasant values of cooperation with competition, of prudent living with obvious consumption and of soil and crop husbandry with figures of subsidies and profits (Shiva, 1991).
Rational Freedom and Six Mistakes of a Bioconservative
Published in The American Journal of Bioethics, 2019
Sparrow refers glowingly to the critiques of enhancement developed by Sandel and Habermas. After Sandel, he claims that “the pursuit of enhancement turns children into projects of their parents” (Sparrow 2019, 15) and that this is problematic because parents have to decide what is good for their child rather than leaving this open. This is puzzling in the context of life extension—Sparrow acknowledges that longer life is better. Indeed, he acknowledges that intelligence, better memory, and so on are good (as already described). Although some goods are reasonably contested, others aren’t (Savulescu and Kahane 2016). While some “improvements” may be driven by the market and “conspicuous consumption” (such as those listed by Garland Thomson [2019], from “tattooing and skin whitening creams to aesthetic surgery such as Anglicizing nose jobs, to facelifts and more recently vaginal rejuvenation surgery”), others such as longer, healthier life drive the market because they are genuinely good.
When Better Becomes Worse
Published in The American Journal of Bioethics, 2019
Rob Sparrow’s “novel argument” (Sparrow 2019) explicates the harms of genetic germline editing through an analogy between consumer products like Edsels and people that genetic editing produces. The term “genetic obsolescence” summons a comparison to the economic strategy of “planned obsolescence,” described in 1934 as economic benefit and condemned by cultural critic Vance Packard in 1960 as an enterprise of Wastemakers (Packard 1960). Genetic editing, Sparrow amply demonstrates, expands consumer capitalism’s established improvements on the human design to make a better product through body modification enhancements ranging from tattooing and skin-whitening creams to aesthetic surgery such as Anglicizing nose jobs, to facelifts and more recently vaginal rejuvenation surgery in the restless search for new flesh to remodel. The promotional language of getting your “first” tattoo or facelift registers the iterative dimension of obsolescence that moves consumption forward. This human remodeling is seldom marketed as vanity but rather as an investment in cultural capital. Redesigning human bodies merges consumer and product in what Jürgen Habermas (2003) calls “a liberal eugenics regulated by supply and demand” (14) and is the current version of what the sociologist Thorstein Veblen described in 1899 as the “conspicuous consumption” necessary to display social status in democratic orders purged of rigid class distinctions (Veblen 1899).