What could middle-class German supermarket shoppers buying eggs and impoverished coffee farmers in Guatemala possibly have in common? Both groups use the market in pursuit of the "good life." But what exactly is the good life? How do we define wellbeing beyond material standards of living? While we all may want to live the good life, we differ widely on just what that entails.
In The Good Life, Edward Fischer examines wellbeing in very different cultural contexts to uncover shared notions of the good life and how best to achieve it. With fascinating on-the-ground narratives of Germans' choices regarding the purchase of eggs and cars, and Guatemalans' trade in coffee and cocaine, Fischer presents a richly layered understanding of how aspiration, opportunity, dignity, and purpose comprise the good life.
What could middle-class German supermarket shoppers buying eggs and impoverished coffee farmers in Guatemala possibly have in common? Both groups use the market in pursuit of the "good life." But what exactly is the good life? How do we define wellbeing beyond material standards of living? While we all may want to live the good life, we differ widely on just what that entails.
In The Good Life, Edward Fischer examines wellbeing in very different cultural contexts to uncover shared notions of the good life and how best to achieve it. With fascinating on-the-ground narratives of Germans' choices regarding the purchase of eggs and cars, and Guatemalans' trade in coffee and cocaine, Fischer presents a richly layered understanding of how aspiration, opportunity, dignity, and purpose comprise the good life.
The Good Life: Aspiration, Dignity, and the Anthropology of Wellbeing
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The Good Life: Aspiration, Dignity, and the Anthropology of Wellbeing
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Overview
What could middle-class German supermarket shoppers buying eggs and impoverished coffee farmers in Guatemala possibly have in common? Both groups use the market in pursuit of the "good life." But what exactly is the good life? How do we define wellbeing beyond material standards of living? While we all may want to live the good life, we differ widely on just what that entails.
In The Good Life, Edward Fischer examines wellbeing in very different cultural contexts to uncover shared notions of the good life and how best to achieve it. With fascinating on-the-ground narratives of Germans' choices regarding the purchase of eggs and cars, and Guatemalans' trade in coffee and cocaine, Fischer presents a richly layered understanding of how aspiration, opportunity, dignity, and purpose comprise the good life.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804792615 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 280 |
| File size: | 11 MB |
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The Good Life
Aspiration, Dignity, and the Anthropology of Wellbeing
By Edward F. Fischer
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-9261-5
CHAPTER 1
Values and Prices
The Case of German Eggs
What price are we willing to pay to be virtuous? Can we put a dollars-and-cents price on specific acts of virtue? Are these two realms even compatible—or fungible, as they say in economics? Are folks willing to pay a premium to do the right thing? Or does material self-interest prevail when we are asked to put our money where our morals are? What does all of this mean for the good life?
Let's start with buying eggs. That might seem an odd place to begin a discussion of the good life, but a lot of wellbeing is linked to such small moments that fill our days. Buying eggs may be something most of us do without much thought beyond occasionally comparing prices. But egg shopping in Germany compels one to make an explicit moral decision with every purchase, to lay bare the price one puts on certain values. This presents us with an ideal natural experiment to answer the question, What price are German shoppers willing to pay to be virtuous?
Since 2004 the European Union (EU) has required all eggs (the packages and the individual eggs) to carry a numeric code. (This could be a set-up for one of the commonly heard jokes about the more absurd and intrusive EU regulations, such as the specifications for cucumber curvature.) The first in the string of digits denotes how the chicken was raised, followed by a two-letter code for the country of origin (DE for Deutschland), and then a unique identifying number for the farm and packing company. The designations for how the eggs were handled are 0 (organic and free- range), 1 (free-range), 2 (cage-free), and 3 (coop-raised, also sometimes pejoratively termed "KZ," or concentration camp, eggs—a strong analogy indeed for Germans, who tend not to joke about the Holocaust). These designations are posted over display shelves, putting front-and-center details on the conditions of production and forcing a morally laden decision about how much to pay for the social values embodied in different sorts of eggs. There is a price to pay for perceived virtue, and it is a decision one has to make every time one buys eggs.
In this chapter, I look at middle-class supermarket shoppers in the Südstadt neighborhood of Hannover, Germany, focusing on the eggs they buy and the reasons they give for their selections. Shoppers express a broad concern with the provenance of eggs, which is facilitated by the mandatory labeling. They often explain their choices in terms of a salient cultural notion of social "solidarity" and a broad commitment to environmental stewardship. Our focus here is on how such moral values affect even in mundane supermarket purchases.
In the chapters that follow I return to the example of shopping for eggs in Germany to illustrate the concept of moral provenance in value chains and to argue for a new way of looking at consumer desires and preferences. Chapter 2 looks at what German egg choices tell us about the difference between "stated" preferences (what people say they want) and "revealed" preferences (what people actually do). In the consumer realm, stated preferences are more likely to be concerned with what I call in Chapter 3 the "moral provenance" of goods—positive and negative externalities, the impact of commodity chains on the environment, social relations, and our views of a just world. Chapter 4 then shows how these themes relate to the larger structure of German political economy and the pursuit of the good life.
Economic choices are always laden with moral consequences. And as much as we may try to segregate the study of economic science from moral philosophy, the two are intimately interwoven in practice. Adam Smith and
Karl Marx, to name but two, saw themselves as moral philosophers as much as economic observers. Today the dominant model of economics is more about math than philosophy, and the allure of mathematical precision can easily divert us from the moral ambiguities of real life. At the same time, as consumers we are increasingly faced with explicit moral choices—whether to buy Fair Trade coffee, whether to shop at the corner grocery or the Walmart Super Center, whether to go local or global.
Prices are often assumed to condense all other values into a single number, but of course it is not that simple. Price certainly does signal an important aspect of value, but as Patrik Aspers and Jens Beckert (2011) point out, we rely on many cultural (and contextual) value systems in determining worth. Prices are important, but they are not everything: recall Oscar Wilde's quip about the sort who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. The case of German eggs is especially revealing because it explicitly brings different value frameworks—material thrift and social solidarity—into play.
Südstadt, Hannover
To the casual visitor, Hannover in many ways looks like an unexceptional German city. With a 2006 population of 520,000 (and 1.1 million in the metropolitan area), it is about the same size as my home town of Nashville, Tennessee. Indeed, I often describe Hannover as being a lot like Nashville in that both are pretty typical cities in their countries. Still, there are more churches in Nashville, and there is more overt religiosity; in Hannover, 37 percent of taxpayers are registered as Protestant (predominately Lutheran) and 14 percent as Catholic; the rest claim no religious affiliation. Hannover also has a longer history. The Electorate of Hannover (and then the Kingdom of Hannover) played an important role in 18th- and 19th-century regional politics, and starting with George I in 1714, the House of Hannover ruled Great Britain and Ireland until 1866, when Hannover was annexed by Prussia. (The Hannoverian line continues to rule the United Kingdom, although it has gone under different names since Queen Victoria's death in 1901). The gardens of the former palace are still a central attraction; the court was home for a while to the composer George Frideric Handel, and the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz served there as bibliographer and counsel. Even though he was always trying to escape the city, Leibniz has become Hannover's favorite son—the Hannover-based Bahlsen food company's most famous products are its Leibniz cookies, and the local university (which started as a technical college) changed its name to the more illustrious Leibniz Universität.
Today Hannover clearly bears the marks of the National Socialism (Nazi) period. A number of buildings reflect the architecture of the time; and the southern part of the city is dominated by the Maschsee, a lake built between 1934 and 1935. After 1937, the Nazis began regularly deporting the city's Jewish inhabitants to concentration camps, leaving just a handful of Jewish families by the time of the Allied liberation. Today, one is reminded of these victims of the Holocaust by the Stolpersteine (4" × 4" brass "stumbling blocks") placed in the sidewalk in front of former homes of people sent to concentration camps, reading "Here lived ..."
The city had an important manufacturing base and so was a prime target of British and American bombers during World War II. It was hit especially hard in the last two years of the war (1943–45), with thousands killed and 90 percent of the city razed. It was rebuilt quickly after the war, and today the predominant architectural style reflects an unfortunate postwar infatuation with concrete. Yet postwar public planners were intent on creating a very livable city, at least by the standard of the times, and Hannover is notable for its green space as well as its drab buildings. Close to 50 percent of the city's expanse is undeveloped, and it is possible to bicycle almost everywhere in town, including through forests and greenways, the remnants of royal hunting grounds.
The current Land (state) of Niedersachsen (Lower Saxony) was founded by the British in 1946, uniting the province of Hannover with three surrounding states. In 2006, Niedersachsen's population was 8 million, with a GNP per head slightly lower than the national average. Over 14 percent of the city's population were foreign-born (almost 4 percent Turkish), and at the time I started my fieldwork in 2005 the unemployment rate exceeded 16 percent, just as the national average dropped to around 10 percent. (Since then, unemployment rates have dropped dramatically in Hannover—to 8.4 percent in 2014, and in Germany as a whole to almost 5 percent.)
In rural Niedersachsen, farming reigns, but Hannover is a manufacturing and government city: home to a Volkswagen plant (15,000 employees in their commercial vehicle division, VW Nutzfahrzeuge), Continental tires (with over 25,000 employees), as well as Pelikan (stationery and office supplies), BREE (bags and purses), TUI (tourism and logistics), and the regional bank, Norddeutsche Landesbank (NordLB), among others. Arriving passengers are warmly welcomed at the Hauptbahnhof (main railway station) to the Messestadt Hannover, or the Fair City of Hannover—"fair" in this case meaning "market." Hannover has for centuries been home to important commercial fairs, the most famous today being CeBIT, Europe's largest technology exposition, and it hosted the Word's Fair in 2000.
Here, as across Germany, the rate of home ownership (42 percent) is the lowest among member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Living in Hannover during the mid-2000s boom years, it struck me as odd that there were few mortgage companies. Much more common were Bausparen, a form of mutual trust to help one save up to buy a house (in cash)—the exact opposite of the mortgage brokers flourishing in the U.S. at the time.
Südstadt is a working-class neighborhood, although it was rapidly gentrifying. One German friend characterizes the area as clearly kleinbürgerlich (petit bourgeois), but I found it remarkably diverse in socioeconomic terms. There were tradesmen (recognizable by their guild dress, such as the distinctive flared corduroy pants and vests of carpenters) as well as government workers (Beamter), doctors, teachers, factory workers, and small-business owners. My family and I lived in the Südstadt section of Hannover in 2005–06 as I conducted the initial fieldwork for this book.
Shopping in Südstadt
It is important to remember that while we often speak of "capitalism" (or "globalization") in the singular, there are in fact multiple capitalisms, or varieties of capitalism. Germany's version—called, variously, the soziale Marktwirtschaft (social market economy), the Rhenish model, ordoliberalism, or the stakeholding model—differs in important ways from Anglo-American capitalism (see Streeck 2009; also Becker 2009; Thelen 2001; Turner 1998; Hall and Soskice 2001). The German model tends to be more "coordinated" than the "liberal" Anglo-Saxon market economies; it is marked by strong unions and workers' rights in corporate governance; and the capital market structure favors long-term horizons (as detailed in Chapter 4).
For shoppers, this means much more regulation, with numerous laws governing store opening hours and the terms of sales. Not only carpenters, plumbers, and other craft tradespeople, but also butchers, bakers, and even clerks in bookstores have to be trained and certified by their trade guilds. That training, apprenticeships, and licensing—as well as high wages—give a sense of professionalism to trade crafts (reinforced by formal forms of address).
In a number of categories, items (such as books) must be sold by law at their suggested retail price, a regulation that favors small operations. Most of the stationery and supply stores in Hannover carry only the sturdy and pricey (German) Hansa brand paper clips (&8364;0.89 for a box of 100 small paper clips) rather than the cheap imports I am used to. Typical of the city's districts, our Südstadt neighborhood had three bakeries, a pharmacy, a drug store, a bookstore, a bottled drinks store (a Trinkhalle, which sells and delivers cases), and a small stationery and school supply store. The subjective experience of neighborhood shopping in Südstadt was far removed from my Nashville norms. Most noticeably, there seemed to be less eagerness to sell, almost an aversion to the subservience of waiting on others. One bike shop often refuses to serve customers and has exacting standards for those they will do business with: the purchaser must feel an emotional attachment to the bike she is buying and meet a moral standard that is implicitly acknowledged by the owner and staff.
Our Südstadt neighborhood had two Reformhäuser and a small öko supermarket, in addition to the growing selection of bio and öko products (organic, "green," environmentally friendly) in the four regular supermarkets. In Germany the market for bio and öko goods grew at well over 15 percent per year in the early 2000s. In 2007, sales reached &8364;5.45 billion; although this is still only less than 5 percent of the total German food market, it is the largest organic market by far in Europe. Reuter and Dienel Consulting found that 10 percent of Germans are "Lohas" (people with a "lifestyle of health and sustainability") who buy products with a "bio" designation for about 25 percent of the items they use regularly. Another 40 percent of consumers are interested in organic but buy more selectively, making decisions more closely linked to price (see also Wilk 2006).
In June and July 2008, assistants and I conducted 114 interviews on the sidewalk in front of an Edeka supermarket on Stefansplatz in Südstadt. The store is located next door to the neighborhood post office and Postbank, which draws a wide range of the area's socioeconomic groups. There is a park half a block away, frequented by groups of unemployed men drinking beer or schnapps, as well as kids playing soccer and scrambling on the monkey bars. On Fridays the park is taken over by the weekly market, with farmers, butchers, and other vendors from the surrounding countryside filling the Stefansplatz. Within a few blocks, there are a public school, a library, businesses, and apartment houses. Our sample reflects the range of standard income categories for Germany, tilted slightly toward the lower end of national averages (a majority of our sample earned less than &8364;21,600 per year).
Respondents were asked to characterize themselves as shoppers, rating a number of traits on a scale of 1 (least important) to 5 (most important). The categories and average rankings are shown in Figure 1.1.
The top three characterizations—being a targeted shopper, price-conscious, and frugal—likely reinforce one another. Price-conscious consumers tend to be more targeted in their buying, seeking out just what they need. In our survey, it is significant that frugality barely edges out social/ecological consciousness for third place. Germans have a deserved reputation for prudence and frugality ("Frugality is Hot" was one large retailer's successful tagline for a while), and one might expect price-conscious consumers to be frugal. But the German case offers an odd twist predicated on a valuation of quality.
Respondents were also asked to rank the overall importance of several factors in their buying decisions on a 1–5 scale. Average responses are shown in Figure 1.2.
The conventional wisdom of U.S. marketing holds that price, quality, and convenience are the most important elements in consumer decisions (usually in that order). While price and quality remain the top two criteria for consumers, environmental and social considerations now compete with convenience as the third. Significantly, 90 percent of U.S. consumers identify with the label "conscious consumer" according to BBMG's Conscious Consumer Report (Bemporad and Baranowski 2007).
For our Hannover sample, quality clearly trumped price; and price only just barely edged out environmental friendliness as the second most important factor. Price is clearly important to many consumers, and decisions usually rest on a delicate and subtle balance among price, quality, and other factors. Nonetheless, the preponderance of preferences for quality over price is remarkable. Furthermore, quality was the single most important factor for all income groups, save those who earned &8364;23,000–&8364;30,000 (who ranked it second). As Wolfgang Streeck (1997: 40) notes, in Germany "price competition is mitigated by socially established preferences for quality." Such a preference for quality may, in fact, be consistent with prudent frugality—as in buying small amounts of high-quality products (e.g., cured meats measured in grams) or investing for the long term (in a BMW, say, which could be expected to last longer than an Opel).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Good Life by Edward F. Fischer. Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Preface,Introduction: The Good Life: Values, Markets, and Wellbeing,
PART I: GERMAN EGGS, CARS, AND VALUES,
1. Values and Prices: The Case of German Eggs,
2. Word, Deed, and Preferences,
3. Moral Provenance and Larger Purposes,
4. Solidarity, Dignity, and Opportunity,
PART II: GUATEMALAN COFFEE, COCAINE, AND CAPABILITIES,
5. Provenance and Values: The Case of Guatemalan Coffee,
6. Agency, Opportunity, and Frustrated Freedom,
7. Experiments in Fairness and Dignity,
8. Narco-Violence, Security, and Development,
Conclusion: The Good Life and Positive Anthropology,
Notes,
Works Cited,
Index,
Plates, Figures and Tables,
Acknowledgments,