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Emulation, Imitation, and Global Consumerism
March, 1996Richard WilkDepartment of AnthropologyIndiana UniversityBloomington, IN 47405
Introduction
 There are good reasons for concern about the environmental impacts of five to ten billionpeople consuming at the presently high levels of the developed countries of Europe, Japan, andNorth America. With high economic growth rates in many parts of the developing world, and therapid spread of electronic media, advertising, and marketing, the next two decades are likely tosee a major transformation in the consumption styles of the majority of the world's population. The global environmental consequences will be dramatic; comparable to the impact of theindustrial revolution, which affected a much smaller part of the globe. The direction and magnitude of the impact of new levels of global consumerism dependson choices the people of the developing world will make about what constitutes the "good life,"and on the kinds of resources they have available to pursue it. This will shape their priorities inpurchasing different kinds of goods and services, their consequent demands for more energy,water, and raw materials, and the resulting emissions, waste, and pollution. If world income levelsrise rapidly, and if that income is spent pursuing the western high-consumption life-style, theconsequences may be severe. This paper will not address directly the first "if," the economic future of the areas whereconsumption is constrained by poverty. World Bank statistics show that growth rates in differentparts of the developing world are extremely uneven, with stagnation and recession in many areas,and rapid growth in others (1994). Even in countries with rapid growth rates, the increasedincome is not distributed evenly; small cosmopolitan elites may accumulate great wealth whileurban underemployed and rural people lag far behind. In general, however, the prospect seems tobe a gradual rise in disposable income among a huge number of people who have until recentlybeen isolated, who have produced basic commodities for the global marketplace for hundreds of years while consuming mostly basic goods they produce themselves or buy in local markets.
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 Their change in lifestyle is being promoted by improving infrastructure, including roads, watersystems, energy, communication and electrification, declining prices for many mass-marketcommodities (due to more open markets, more widespread manufacturing, greater competition,and advancing technology), higher levels of literacy and education, and the breakdown inautonomous subsistence economies and self-sufficient rural communities. At the same time, hugeincreases in travel, tourism, and international labor migration, and in the consequent (and largelyunrecorded) flow of remittances and personal goods, brings sophisticated technologies, tastes,and practices to even the most remote corners of the globe (Lyer 1989).Prognostication about the second "if," which concerns just
how
increased incomes in thedeveloping world will be spent can be summarized with three different basic scenarios for theconsumer future of the developing world.
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The first could be called
Modernization
; developingcountries go through the same stages of development of consumer demand in the same orderthat the Northern developed countries went through over the last century. We would expect asequence of waves of consumer innovations which typically start among an urban upper middle-class, and then spread rapidly through all sectors, starting with major consumer durablehousehold goods like refrigerators and stoves, then vehicles, and finally elaborate services,luxuries, tourism, and fashion items. Environmentally, we would expect energy and materialconsumption to increase rapidly and dramatically, but then to level off with the growth of aservice economy and an increased demand for a cleaner environment (Hammond 1995).A
Shortcut 
scenario says that developing countries do not have to follow a narrow historicalpath, but can reach the same end as the highly developed economies by different routes that skipintermediate stages. Instead of massive investments in communication infrastructure, for
 
example, they could jump straight into satellite dishes and cellular phones. Rather than build aservice economy on top of declining heavy industries, they could leapfrog right into low-impactdecentralized information services. The environmental impact of this scenario would be muchmore gradual and benign than modernization. The "dirtiest" phases of development and wastefulconsumption would be skipped in many areas, and people would move directly to the more stableand sustainable levels of consumption, based on clean technologies, which seem to be the futureof the developed countries. According to some optimistic projections, rapid improvement intechnology could make dramatic improvements possible in living standards, with very lowenvironmental impact (Ausubel 1996).Note that both modernization and shortcut scenarios depict
convergence
, that consumerbehavior in different areas, like their productive sectors and economic structures, will becomemore and more alike, that developed and developing worlds will eventually achieve some stablesimilarities. Whether this convergence is based on emulation, on evolution, diffusion, or any othertheoretical premise or mechanism, this convergence on a single point should be questioned andtested with empirical data. The alternatives are much more complex. The third possibility can be called
Divergence
. Each country, region, or ethnic group willdevelop different and diverse aspirations, definitions of living-standards, and consumer goals, anddifferent levels of income with which to pursue them. The complex mosaic of different paths wouldbe responsive to a variety of factors, including cultural difference, access to technology andcapital, political policies and ideologies, and the structure and development of internationalmarkets, commodity, and capital flows. Under this scenario, it is quite possible that a large part of the developing world will
never 
achieve the threshold income levels necessary to consume largeamounts of durables, luxuries, or services.While the concept of convergence has an appealing simplicity, what are it's theoreticalunderpinnings? The strongest theory of convergence is often labeled the
cultural imperialism
hypothesis. This contends that the combination of western control of mass media and improvedadvertising, along with human "natural impulses" to improve their lives by seeking leisure andluxury, will lead new consumers to emulate or directly imitate those of the developed North(Tomlinson 1991). There are various moral positions on cultural imperialism and the globalexpansion of consumer society; some see it leading to economic freedom and the realization of human potentials (Lebergott 1993), while others consider it a malign and socially destructive formof brainwashing that destroys authentic values and the social fabric of civil society (Ewen 1976,1988, Lasch 1979). Whether stressing the coercive power of the North, or the imitative desires of the South, those who predict cultural imperialism see the homogenization and convergence of global culture as a consequence. The new global culture will be consumer culture, mass-mediatedthrough advertising by large multinational corporations who will promote the same goods in everymarket, changing only the language of the labels and advertisements (Barnett & Muller 1974). The alternatives to cultural imperialism are less clear cut. Many social scientists who rejectcultural imperialism, contend that instead of increasing centralization and homogenization, thenext century will be dominated by new and revitalized forms of nationalism, localism, and culturalfundamentalism that will challenge both the economic and cultural hegemony of the developedNorth (Foster 1991). Some suggest that resistance to and rebellion against Northern models of consumer culture, and the values they express, will be the major force shaping new nationalcultures in the South (Kahn 1995). Some recent debates over the issue of global homogenizationor fragmentation and diversification have tended to see them as non-exclusive trends that mayeven be linked to each other. Some forms of localization may be concurrent with other kinds of globalization; heterogeneity and homogeneity both seem to be increasing in different sectors andat different scales (Friedman 1990, Hannerz 1992, Featherstone 1990, Wilk 1995). One possiblescenario is Hannerz' concept of global "creolization," where instead of all cultures emulating aNorthern model, there is instead an intercultural process of mixing and hybridization, which leadsto many local adaptations and translations of international and global models, which may then bereincorporated or reappropriated in the Northern Metropolitan centers (Hannerz 1987, 1990,Appadurai 1990). It is very hard to predict what kinds of levels of consumption, emissions, andwaste we would find in such a hybridized, fragmented, yet interconnected world. The clearest and simplest alternative to cultural imperialism and homogeneity is that eachcountry, region, or ethnic group will develop along its own unique path. In other words, there
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would be a world of many different consumer and on-consumer cultures. We would then expect ahigh degree of diversity in consumer demand, and perhaps much more moderate long-term levelsof consumption, though it is also possible that some of the new consumer cultures would be evenmore wasteful of energy and materials than those of the present Northern societies. Certainlythere is already a good deal of diversity among Northern high-consumption societies, both in theway they spend money, and the resulting levels of consumption, emission, and waste (e.g. Krebill-Prather and Rosa, Lutzenhiser, this volume), though others detect converging trends (Schipper,this volume).Our choice of different scenarios for the consumption trajectories of the developing world istherefore complex and difficult, but the ramifications are enormous. The alternative paths in thedevelopment of global consumer culture (or cultures) will make the difference between asustainable long-term future, or one with continually declining stocks of renewable and non-renewable resources, runaway pollution, and potentially disastrous global climatic change,
regardless
of the trajectory of population growth.
Imitation and Emulation
 The cultural imperialism hypothesis and other theories of convergence depend on the ideaof emulation or imitation of the North by the South, of the rich by the poor, whether throughcoercion or other ideological means. The appeal of such a theory is quite clear-cut; we can usedata on the historical development of the North as a quantitative guide for predicting growth inthe developing South. Furthermore, there are social science theories that provide justification fortreating western consumerism as an easily transferable set of practices, values, and knowledge. These range from sociological theories of 
acculturation
(Desieux 1981, Hoffman 1964), togeographic models of 
diffusion
(Rogers 1983, Gatignon and Robertson 1985), and then toDawkin's recent concept of cultural practices as a set of transmissible self-replicating particles or"
memes
" which is grounded ultimately in epidemiology and evolutionary genetics (199X). There are a number of reasons for great caution, however, in choosing an imitation oremulation model to predict the future of global consumerism. The concepts of emulation andcultural imperialism are too broad; they are not precise enough to specify exactly what aspects of Northern developed country lifestyles are going to be copied, implanted, or emulated. From anenvironmental standpoint, there is a tremendous difference between Javanese seeking to emulate"the west" by listening to Michael Jackson CDs, and those same Javanese following the Americancustom of air-conditioning the whole house. Any kind of copying, emulation, diffusion or marketingis going to be selective; the entire corpus of Northern culture and consumption cannot be copiedentirely, because that corpus is itself so richly varied and changeable.Emulation models also make many untested assumptions about human culture; they donot explain the relationship between culture and consumption, and fail to explain or account formany historical developments and current trends. For a number of reasons, as I will argue below,we are not yet in a position to either provisionally accept, or completely reject theimperialism/emulation model,
or the alternatives that have been offered 
. It is also quite possiblethat the developing world could change to resemble the developed countries because of as yetundefined phenomena completely different from emulation or imitation. The goal of this paper isto assess the areas where knowledge is more complete, and to point to other critical problems intheory and empirical data where more work is urgently required.
Restating the Problem
 The problem of predicting and understanding the future trajectory of consumption indeveloping countries has many aspects. The broadest and most fundamental are the ethicalissues raised by the way the issue is defined and framed. Then there are theoretical problems thatstem from the many different approaches to understanding consumer behavior in differentdisciplines and research traditions. Finally there are a series of practical problems that arise inconducting cross-cultural and cross-national research on consumption, including problems of measurement and data collection.Ethical Issues.When the many nations of the developing world began to achieve political independence
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