Excess

The Struggle for Expenditure on a Caribbean Sugar Plantation

Bibliographic Data

ID2221969
AuthorsSamuel Martínez (0000-0002-6441-3010, corresponding author)
Year2010
Volume51
Issue5
Pages609-628
Publication date2010-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueCurrent Anthropology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0011-3204 • E-ISSN: 1537-5382
PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1086/655863
OpenAlexW1975025643
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited50

Drawing from notes taken during repeated visits from 1985 to 2002 to one multiethnic sugar-plantation company compound in the Caribbean nation of the Dominican Republic and taking inspiration from the cultural theorist Georges Bataille, I present evidence that expenditure to excess is today a widespread human striving and an ethical battleground even among materially impoverished people who inhabit the far termini of global commodity chains. Expenditure (in the Bataillean sense of activities that gain their full meaning through loss, not gain) stands as a source of meaning in the domains of personally enhancing consumption, eros, and ritual. While certain plantation residents conceptually thread together phenomena in each of these activity domains as generators of treasured and celebrated brightness, rhythmic energy, ceaseless flow, and life-affirming spiritual animation, other residents, most prominently the community's evangelical Christians, denounce the prodigality of customary payday-weekend binges and devotions to the gods of Vodou. I propose that cultural anthropologists may gain a fuller understanding of the motivations and impulses that stand behind recent massive increases in commodity consumption worldwide through study of the immanent, nonrational satisfactions of discretionary consumption and other acts of expenditure

Aesthetics · Commodity · Consumption (sociology · Economics · Epistemology · Market economy · Meaning (existential · Social science · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Caribbean and African Literature and Culture · French Urban and Social Studies · History · Philosophy

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