“[Koguem] described how the desire for clothes was causing a number of young people to leave the country. Every year, he said, the Government deplores, here in the cliffs just as elsewhere, the mass emigration of workers in the prime of life, who go to the Gold Coast to earn money and often live there for years and sometimes die there.
These young people, he said, who go off to the Gold Coast or Bamako or elsewhere, go mainly for clothes. They make money there and spend it all, the day before they come back, on gewgaws, turbans or umbrellas, and peacock about in them on market days or at funerals. Dress helps them to get married. The more clothes a man has, the more elegant he is, and the more women go after him” (Griaule 1965:82).
In the 60s, young Dogon workers from Sudan headed to foreign lands to work hard, earn money, and buy clothes. They did this, because in their culture, clothes are valuable and will help them gain a wife. This goes to show that although many cultures across the world pursue money, this does not mean that everybody spends it in the same way. Globalization and the cash economy has allowed many people to access new commodities, but how they spend their money and what they do with purchased commodities often depends on their cultural backgrounds. In this example of the Dogon, we see consumer choices that are fueled by a strong cultural value – well dressed men are prestigious and catch the eyes of more women. Interested in this idea? I suggest reading works by Richard Wilk (see references for two articles), or perhaps Marshall Sahlins’s (1992) “The Economics of Develop-Man in the Pacific.”
References:
Griaule, M. 1965. Conversations with Ogotemmêli: An Introduction to Dogon Religious Ideas. Oxford, UK: Oxford University press.
Sahlins, M. 1992. The Economics of Develop-Man in the Pacific. Anthropology and Aesthetics, 21, pp. 12-25.
Wilk, R. (2006). ‘But the Young Men Don’t Want to Farm Any More’: Political Ecology and Consumer Culture in Belize. In Biersack, A & J.B. Greenberg, Reimagining political ecology (pp. 149-170). Durham: Duke Univ. Press.
Wilk, R. (2002). “It’s Destroying a Whole Generation”: Television and Moral Discourse in Belize. In K. Askew & R.R. Wilk (eds.), The Anthropology of Media: A reader (pp. 286-298). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
The Edited Jottings of an Amateur Anthropologist 