MC Cracken
MC Cracken
onsumer goods have a significance that goes beyond their utilitarian character and commercial
value. This significance rests largely in their ability to
carry and communicate cultural meaning (Douglas and
Isherwood 1978; Sahlins 1976). During the last decade,
a diverse body of scholars has made the cultural significance of consumer goods the focus of renewed academic study (Belk 1982; Bronner 1983; Felson 1976;
Furby 1978; Graumann 1974-1975; Hirschman 1980;
Holman 1980; Leiss 1983; Levy 1978; McCracken
1985c; Prown 1982; Quimby 1978; Rodman and Philibert 1985; Schlereth 1982; Solomon 1983). These
scholars have established a subfield extending across
the social sciences that now devotes itself with increasing
clarity and thoroughness to the study of "person-object"
relations. In this article, I propose to contribute a theoretical perspective to this emerging subfield by showing
that the meaning carried by goods has a mobile quality
for which prevailing theories make no allowance.
A great limitation of present approaches to the study
of the cultural meaning of consumer goods is the failure
to observe that this meaning is constantly in transit.
Cultural meaning flows continually between its several
locations in the social world, aided by the collective
and individual efforts of designers, producers, advertisers, and consumers. There is a traditional trajectors- to
this movement. Usually, cultural meaning is drawn
from a culturally constituted world and transferred to
LOCATIONS OF CULTURAL
MEANING: THE CULTURALLY
CONSTITUTED WORLD
Grant McCracken is Assistant Professor, Depanment of Consumer Studies, University ofGuelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada NIG
2WI. The author thanks the following individuals for their contribution to the paper: Michael Ames, Duncan Joy, Mary Ellen RoachHiggins. K.O.L. Burridge, and the anonymous reviewers of this Journal.
72
Advertising/Fashion
System
Fashion
System
Consumer Goods
Possession
Ritual
Exchange
Ritual
Grooming
Ritual
Divestment
Ritual
Individual Consumer
KEY:
I
^
I Location of Meaning
Instrument of Meaning Transfer
constituted world. This is the world of everyday experience in which the phenomenal world presents itself
to the individual's senses fully shaped and constituted
by the beliefs and assumptions of his/her culture. Culture constitutes the phenomenal world in two ways.
First, culture is the "lens" through which the individual
views phenomena; as such, it determines how the phenomena will be apprehended and assimilated. Second,
culture is the "blueprint" ofhuman activity, determining the co-ordinates of social action and productive activity, and specifying the behaviors and objects that issue
from both. As a lens, culture determines how the world
is seen. As a blueprint, it determines how the world will
be fashioned by human effort. In short, culture constitutes the world by supplying it with meaning. This
meaning can be characterized in terms of two concepts:
cultural categories and cultural principles.
Cultural Categories
Cultural categories are the fundamental coordinates
of meaning (McCracken 1985a), representing the basic
distinctions that a culture uses to divide up the phenomenal world. For instance, all cultures specify categories of time. In our culture these categories include
an elaborate system that can discriminate units as fine
as a "second" and as vast as a "millennium." Our culture also makes less precise but no less significant distinctions between leisure and work time, sacred and
profane time, and so on. Cultures also specify categories
of space. In our culture these categories include measurement and "occasion." Cultures also segment the
flora, fauna, and landscape of natural and supernatural
worlds into categories. Perhaps the most important cat-
73
Cultural Principles
Cultural meaning also consists of cultural principles.
In the case of principles, meaning resides in the ideas
or values that determine how cultural phenomena are
organized, evaluated, and construed, tf cultural categories are the result of a culture's segmentation of the
world into discrete parcels, cultural principles are the
organizing ideas by which the segmentation is performed. Cultural principles are the charter assumptions
that allow all cultural phenomena to be distinguished,
ranked, and interrelated. As the orienting ideas for
thought and action, cultural principles find expression
in every aspect of social life, goods not least of all.
74
Culturat principles, like cultural categories, are substantiated by material culture in general and consumer
goods in particular. It is worth observing that cultural
categories and cultural principles are mutually presupposing, and their expression in goods is necessarily simultaneous. Therefore, goods are incapable of signifying one without signifying the other. When goods
show a distinction between two cultural categories, they
do so by encoding something of the principle according
to which the two categories have been distinguished.
Thus, the clothing that distinguishes between men and
women or b>etween high and low classes also reveals
something of the nature of the differences that are supposed to exist between these categories (McCracken
1985c). Clothing communicates both the supposed
"delicacy" of women and "strength" of men or both
the supposed "refinement" of a higher class and "vulgarity" of a lower one. Apparently, the categories of
class and sex are never communicated without this indication of how and why they are to be distinguished.
The world of goods, unlike that of language, never engages in a simple signalling of difference. In fact, goods
are always more forthcoming and more revealing. In
the world of goods, signs are always, in a sense, more
motivated and less arbitrary than in the world of language.
Cultural principles in contemporary North America
have the same indeterminate, changeable, elective
quality that cultural categories do. Such principles as
"naturalism" can fall into disrepute in one decade, only
to be rehabilitated and advanced to a new place of importance in another, as occurred in the 1960s. The
principle of "disharmony" that the punk aesthetic finds
so useful was once not a principle but merely the term
for phenomena that had somehow escaped the successful application of another principle. The ethnographic literature on the meaning of objects as principle
may be found in Adams (1973), Drewal (1983), Fernandez (1966), and McCracken (1982a). Substantive
literature that shows the presence and nature of the
meaning of objects as principle in contemporary North
American society is not abundant. Levy (1981) makes
passing reference to this question, as does Sahlins
(1976), and the idea is implicitly treated in the work of
Lohof (1969) on the meaning carried by the Marlboro
cigarette. The idea also surfaces in the attempt of sociologists to make objects an index of status and class.
For example, Laumann and House (1970) sought to
establish the meaning of household f^urniture and resorted to the principles of "modern" and "traditional."
Felson in his study of "material life styles" (1976) posited something called a "bric-a-brac factor" while Davis
(1958) coined the term "Bauhaus Japanesey" to characterize a certain principle of interior design. The principle of "science" (or, more exactly, the concern for
technical mastery of nature and the confidence that human affairs can be benignly transformed through tech-
INSTRUMENTS OF MEANING
TRANSFER: WORLD TO GOOD
Meaning first resides in the culturally constituted
world. To become resident in consumer goods, meaning
must be disengaged from this world and transferred to
goods. The present section proposes to examine two of
the institutions that are now used as instruments of
meaning transfer: advertising, and product design as
practiced in the fashion system.
Advertising
Advertising works as a potential method of meaning
transfer by bringing the consumer good and a representation of the culturally constituted world together
within the frame of a particular advertisement. The
creative director of an advertising agency seeks to conjoin these two elements in such a way that the viewer/
reader glimpses an essential similarity between them.
When this symbolic equivalence is successfully established, the viewer/reader attributes to the consumer
good certain properties s/he knows exist in the culturally
constituted world. The icnown properties of the culturally constituted world thus come to reside in the unknown properties of the consumer good and the transfer
of meaning from world to good is accomplished.
The mechanics of such a complicated process deserve
more detailed exposition. The creative director is concerned with effecting the successful conjunction of two
elements, one of which is specified by a client. In most
cases, the client gives the director a consumer good, the
physical properties and packaging of which are fixed
and not subject to manipulation. The second element.
75
In sum, the director must choose from among alternatives that have been created by the network of cultural
categories and principles that constitute a culture's
world. The chosen alternatives will reflect those categories and principles that a director decides most closely
approximate the meaning that the client seeks for the
product. Once these two choice processes are complete,
a third set of choices must be made. The director must
decide just how the culturally constituted world is to
be portrayed in the advertisement. This process consists
of reviewing all of the objects that substantiate the selected meaning and then deciding which of these objects
will be used to evoke this meaning in the advertisement.
Finally, the director must decide how to present the
product in its highly contrived context. Photographic
and visual conventions will be exploited to give the
viewer/reader the opportunity to glimpse an essential
equivalence between the two elements of world and object. The director must bring these two elements into a
conjunction that encourages a metaphoric identification
of sameness by the would-be consumer. World and good
must seem to enjoy a special harmonymust be seen
to go together. When the viewer/reader glimpses this
sameness (after one or many exposures to the stimuli),
the process of transfer has taken place. Meaning has
shifted from the culturally constituted world to the
consumer good. This good now stands for a cultural
meaning of which it was previously innocent.
Visual images and verbal material appear to assume
a very particular relationship in this transfer process.
It is chiefly the visual aspect of an advertisement that
conjoins the world and the object when a meaning
transfer is sought. Verbal material serves chiefly as a
kind of prompt that instructs the viewer/reader in the
salient properties that are supposed to be expressed by
the visual part of the advertisement. Text (especially
headlines) makes explicit what is already implicit in the
image. Text provides instructions on how the visual
part of the advertisement is to be read. The verbal component allows the director to direct the viewer/reader's
attention to exactly those meaningful properties that
are intended for transfer (cf., Barthes 1983, pp. 33-39;
Dyer 1982, pp. 139-182; Garfinkle 1978; Moeran
1985).
All of this must now be successfully decoded by the
viewer/reader. It is worth emphasizing that the viewer/
reader is the final author in the process of transfer. The
director brings the world and the consumer good into
conjunction and then suggests their essential similarity.
It is left to the viewer/reader to see this similarity and
effect the transfer of meaningful properties. To this extent, the viewer/reader is an essential participant in the
process of meaning transfer, as Williamson (1978, pp.
40-70) notes. The viewer/reader must complete the
work of the director.
Advertising is a conduit through which meaning
constantly pours from the culturally constituted world
76
for instance, originated the "preppie look" that has recently trickled down so widely and deeply. More recently, opinion leaders have come from a group of unashamedly nouveau riche characters who now dominate
television in evening soap operas such as "Dallas" and
"Dynasty" and who appear to have influenced the consumer and lifestyle habits of so many North Americans.
Motion picture and popular music stars, revered for
their status, their beauty, and sometimes their talent,
also form a relatively new group of opinion-leaders. All
of these new opinion leaders invent and deliver a species
of meaning that has been largely fashioned from the
prevailing cultural coordinates established by cultural
categories and cultural principles. These opinion leaders
are permeable to cultural innovations, changes in style,
value, and attitude, which they then pass along to the
subordinate parties who imitate them.
In a third capacity, the fashion system engages in the
radical reform of cultural meanings. Some part of the
cultural meaning of western industrial societies is always
subject to constant and thoroughgoing change. This
radical instability of meaning is due to the fact that
western societies are, in the language of Claude LeviStrauss (1966, pp. 233-234). "hot societies." Western
societies willingly accept, indeed encourage, the radical
changes that result from deliberate human effon and
the effect of anonymous social forces (Braudel 1973,
p. 323; Fox and Lears 1983; McCracken 1985d;
McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb 1982). As a result,
cultural meaning in a hot, western, industrial, complex
society is constantly undergoing systematic change. In
contradistinction to virtually all ethnographic precedent, members of such a society live in a world that
is deliberately and continually being transformed
(McCracken 1985b). Indeed, it is no exaggeration to
say that hot societies demand change and depend on it
to drive certain economic, social, and cultural sectors
in their world (cf.. Barber and Lobel 1953; Fallers 1961).
The fashion system serves as one of the conduits to
capture and move highly innovative cultural meaning.
The groups responsible for the radical reform of cultural meaning are those existing at the margins of society, e.g., hippies, punks, orgays(BIumberg 1974; Field
1970; Meyersohn and Katz 1957). Such groups invent
a much more radical, innovative kind of cultural
meaning than their high-standing partners in meaningdiffusion leadership. Indeed, such innovative groups
represent a departure from the culturally constituted
conventions of contemporary North American society.
They illustrate the peculiarly western tendency to tolerate dramatic violations of cultural norms. These
groups redefined cultural categories, if only through the
negative process of violating such cultural categories as
age and status (hippies and punks), or gender (gays).
The redefined cultural categories and a number of attendant cultural principles have now entered the cultural mainstream. The innovative groups become
77
When journalists have identified genuine innovations, product designers begin the task of drawing
meaning into the mainstream and investing it in consumer goods. The product designer differs from the advertising agency director in that s/he transforms not
only the symbolic properties of a consumer good but
also its physical properties. Apart from fashion and
trade shows (which reach only some potential consumers), the product designer does not have a meaninggiving context such as the advertisement where s/he
can display the consumer good. Instead, the consumer
good will leave the designer's hands and enter any context the consumer chooses. Product design is the means
a designer has to convince the consumer that a specific
object possesses a certain cultural meaning. The object
must leave the designer's hands with its new symbolic
properties plainly displayed in its new physical properties.
The designer, like the agency director, depends on
the consumer to supply the final act of association and
effect the meaning transfer from world to object. But
unlike the agency director, the product designer does
not have at his/her disposal the highly managed, rhetorical circumstances of"an advertisement to encourage
and direct this meaning transfer. The designer can not
inform the consumer of the qualities intended for the
object; these qualities must be self-evident in the object,
so the consumer can effect the meaning transfer for him/
herself. Therefore, it is necessary that the consumer
have access to the same sources of information about
new fashions in meaning that the designer has. The
journalist makes this information available to the consumer so that s/he can identify the cultural significance
of the physical properties of a new object. In short, the
designer relies on the journalist at the beginning and
then again at the very end of the meaning transfer process. The journalist supplies new meaning to the designer as well as to the recipient of the designer's work.
In this way, both advertising and the fashion system
are instruments for the transfer of meaning from the
culturally constituted world to consumer goods. They
are two of the means by which meaning is invested in
the object code. It is thanks to them that the objects of
our world carry such a richness, variety, and versatility
of meaning and can serve us so variously in acts of selfdefinition and social communication.
LOCATIONS OF CULTURAL
MEANING: CONSUMER GOODS
That consumer goods are the locus of cultural meaning is too well-established a fact to need elaborate demonstration here. This is what Sahlins has to say about
one product categoryclothing (1976, p. 179):
Considered as a whole, the system of American clothing
amounts to a very complex scheme of cultural categories
78
INSTRUMENTS OF MEANING
TRANSFER: GOOD TO CONSUMER
Thus far we have tracked the movement of cultural
meaning from the culturally constituted world to consumer goods and have considered the role of two instruments in this process. We must now address how
meaning, now resident in consumergoods, moves from
the consumer good into the life of the consumer. In
order to describe this process, a second set of instruments of meaning transfer must be discussed. These
instruments appear to qualify as special instances of
"symbolic action" or ritual (Munn 1973; Turner 1969).
Ritual is a kind of social action devoted to the manipulation of cultural meaning for purposes of collective
and individual communication and categorization.
Ritual is an opportunity to affirm, evoke, assign, or revise the conventional symbols and meanings of the cultural order. To this extent, ritual is a powerful and versatile tool for the manipulation of cultural meaning. In
Exchange Rituals
In contemporary North American exchange rituals
especially Christmas and birthday ritualsone party
chooses, purchases, and presents consumer goods to
another (Caplow 1982). This movement of goods is also
potentially a movement of meaningful properties. Often
the gift-giver chooses a gift because it possesses the
meaningful properties s/he wishes to see transferred to
the gift-receiver. Thus, the woman who receives a particular kind of dress is also made the recipient of a particular concept of herself as a woman (Schwartz 1967).
The dress contains this concept and the giver invites
the recipient to define herself in its terms. Similarly,
many of the continuous gifts that flow between parents
and children are motivated by precisely this notion. The
gifts to the child contain symbolic properties that the
parent would have the child absorb (Furby 1978, pp.
312-313).
The ritual of gift exchange establishes a potent means
of interpersonal influence. Gift exchange allows individuals to insinuate certain symbolic properties into
the lives of a gift recipient and to initiate possible
meaning transfer. In more general terms, consumers
acting as gift-givers are made agents of meaning transfer
to the extent that they selectively distribute goods with
specific properties to individuals who may or may not
have chosen them otherwise. The study of gift exchange,
well established in the social sciences (Davis 1972;
Mauss 1970; McCracken 1983; Sahlins 1972), is already
underway in the field of consumer research (Belk 1979)
and deserves further study. Attention must be given to
the choice process used by a giver to identify the gift
with the cultural meanings s/he seeks to pass along to
the recipient. Attention must also be given to the significance of gift wrapping and presentation as well as
the context (time and place) in which gift presentations
are made. These aspects of^ the domestic ritual of gift
79
Possession Rituals
Consumers spend a good deal of time cleaning, discussing, comparing, reflecting, showing off, and even
photographing many of their possessions. Housewarming parties sometimes provide an opportunity for display, while the process of home "personalization"
(Hirschman 1982, pp. 37-38; Kron 1983; Rapoport
1968, 1982) especially serves as the occasion for much
comparison, reflection, and discussion. Though these
activities have an overt functionality, they all appear
to have the additional effect of allowing the consumer
to claim possession as his/her own. This claiming process is not a simple assertion of territoriality through
ownership. Claiming is also an attempt to draw from
the object the qualities that it has been given by the
marketing forces of the world of goods. This process is
most conspicuous when it fails to take place. For example, occasionally a consumer will claim that a possessiona car, house, article of clothing, or other
meaning-carr>ing good"never really seemed to belong to me." There are certain goods that the consumer
neVer successfully claims because s/he never successfully claims their symbolic properties. The consumer
good becomes a paradox: the consumer owns it without
possessing it; its symbolic properties remain immovable.
Normally, however, the individual successfully deploys possession rituals and manages to extract the
meaningful properties that have been invested in the
consumer good. If the cultural meaning has been transferred, consumers are able to use goods as markers of
time, space, and occasion. Consumers draw on the ability oHhese goods to discriminate between such cultural
categories as class, status, gender, age, occupation, and
lifestyle. Since possession rituals allow the consumer to
take possession of the meaning of a consumer good,
these rituals help complete the second stage of the trajectory of the movement of cultural meaning. As we
have seen, advertising agencies and the fashion world
move cultural meaning from the culturally constituted
world into a consumer good. Using possession rituals,
individuals move cultural meaning out of their goods
and into their lives.
It is worth observing that possession rituals, especially
those devoted to personalizing the object, almost seem
to enact on a small scale, and for private purposes, the
activities of meaning transfer perf^ormed by the advertising agency. The act of personalizing is, in effect, an
attempt to transfer meaning from the individual's own
world to the newly obtained good. The new context in
this case is the individual's complement of consumer
goods, which has assumed a personal as well as public
meaning. Indeed, perhaps it is chiefly in this way that
an anonymous possessionmanifestly the creation of
Grooming Rituals
It is clear that some of the cultural meaning drawn
from goods has a perishable nature. As a result, the
consumer must draw cultural meaning out of his/her
possessions on a repeated basis. When a continual process of meaning transfer from goods to consumer is
necessary, the consumer will likely resort to a grooming
ritual. The purpose of this ritual is to take the special
pains necessary to insure that the special, perishable
properties resident in certain clothes, hair styles, and
looks are, as it were, "coaxed" out of their resident goods
and made to live, however briefly and precariously, in
the life of the individual consumer. The "going out"
rituals with which one prepares for an evening out are
good examples of this process. These rituals illustrate
the time, patience, and anxiety with which an individual
will prepare him/herself for the special public scrutiny
of a gala evening or dinner party. Grooming rituals arm
individuals who are "going out" with the particularly
glamorous, exalted, meaningful properties that exist in
their "best" consumer goods. Once captured and made
resident in an individual, these meaningful properties
give him/her new powers of confidence, aggression, and
defense. The language with which advertisements describe certain make-up, hair-styling goods, and clothing
tacitly acknowledge the meaningful properties available
in goods that special grooming rituals release.
Sometimes, however, it is not the consumer but the
good that must be groomed. This occurs when the consumer cultivates the meaningful properties ofan object
in the object rather than coaxing out the properties in
him/herself. The extraordinary amounts of largely redundant time and energy lavished on certain automobiles is perhaps the best case in point here (Myers 1985,
p. 562). This type of grooming ritual supercharges the
object so that it, in turn, may transfer special heightened
properties to an owner. Here again, the individual's role
in meaning investment is evident. The importance to
the consumer of cultivating consumer goods so that they
can release their meaningful qualities is most strikingly
highlighted by the behavior of aging individuals. Sherman and Newman report that the occupants of nursing
homes who regard themselves as being "at the end of
the line" engage in a process of "decathecting [removing
the emotional significance from] the significant objects
in their lives" (1977-1978, p. 188).
80
Divestment Rituals
Individuals who draw meaning out of goods come to
view these meaning sources in personal terms, associating goods with their own personal properties. The
possible confusion between consumer and consumer
good encourages the use of the divestment ritual. Divestment rituals are employed for two purposes. When
the individual purchases a good that has been previously
owned, such as a house or a car, the ritual is used to
erase the meaning associated with the previous owner.
The cleaning and redecorating of a newly purchased
home, for instance, may be seen as an effort to remove
the meaning created by the previous owner. Divestment
allows the new owner to avoid contact with the meaningful properties of the previous owner and to free up
the meaning properties of the possession, claiming them
for him/herself. The second divestment ritual takes
place when the individual is about to dispense with a
good, either by giving it away or selling it. The consumer
will attempt to erase the meaning that has been invested
in the good by association. In moments of candor, individuals suggest that they feel "a little strange about
someone else wearing my old coat." In moments of still
greater candor, they will confess that they fear the dispossession of personal meaning, a phenomenon that
resembles the "merging of identities" that sometimes
takes place between transplant donors and recipients
(Simmons, Klein, and Simmons 1977, p. 68). Both rituals suggest a concern that the meaning of goods can
be transferred, obscured, confused, or even lost when
goods change hands (Douglas 1966). Therefore, goods
must be emptied of meaning before being passed along
and cleared of meaning when taken on. What looks like
simple superstition is, in fact, an implicit acknowledgement of the moveable quality of the meaning with
which goods are invested.
In sum, personal rituals are variously used to transfer
the meaning contained in goods to individual consumers. Exchange rituals are used to direct goods charged
with certain meaningful properties to those individuals
the gift-giver supposes are needful of these properties.
In an exchange ritual, the giver invites the receiver to
partake of the properties possessed by the good. Possession rituals are practiced by an owner in order to
retrieve a good's meaningful properties. Possession rituals are designed to transfer a good's properties to its
owner. Grooming rituals are used to effect the continual
transfer of perishable propertiesproperties likely to
fade when possessed by the consumer. Grooming rituals
allow the consumer to "freshen" the properties s/he
draws from goods. These rituals can also be used to
maintain and "brighten" certain of the meaningful
properties resident in goods. Finally, divestment rituals
are used to empty goods of meaning so that meaningloss or meaning-contagion cannot take place. All of
these rituals are a kind of microcosmic version of the
instruments of meaning transfer that move meaning
from world to goods, since these rituals move meaning
from goods to consumer.
LOCATIONS OF CULTURAL
MEANING: INDIVIDUAL CONSUMERS
Cultural meaning is used to define and orient the
individual in ways that we are only beginning to appreciate. It is clear that individuals living in a contemporary Western industrial culture enjoy a wide range
of choice in the meaning they may draw from goods.
It was observed at the start of this article that contemporary North American culture leaves a great deal of
the individual undefined. One of the ways individuals
satisfy the freedom and fulfill responsibility of self-definition is through the systematic appropriation of the
meaningful properties of goods. Plainly this task is not
an easy one, nor is it always successful. Many individuals seek kinds of meaning from goods that do not exist
there. Others seek to appropriate kinds of meaning
to which they are not, by some sober sociological reckoning, entitled. Still others attempt to constitute their
lives only in terms of the meaning of goods. All of these
consumer pathologies are evident in modern consumption behavior and all of them illustrate how the process
of meaning transfer can go wrong, to the cost of the
individual and society. In normal situations, however,
the individual uses goods in an unproblematical manner
to constitute crucial parts of the self and the world. The
logic, imperatives, and details of this process of selfand world construction through goods are enormously
understudied and are only now attracting rigorous
study. Our culture has studied its own beliefs and practices with a thoroughness and enthusiasm unheralded
in the ethnographic record. With the same thoroughness
and enthusiasm it has also made material possessions
one of its most compelling preoccupations. It is therefore doubly odd and unfortunate that the study of the
use of goods in the construction of self and world should
have suffered such prolonged and profound neglect.
SUMMARY
Only recently has the field of "person-object" relations escaped the limitations imposed upon it by its
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