Art/Don Nelson

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Read the third article about possessions

Notre Dame Department of Sociology

One morning several years ago on my way to work, a silver Mercedes shot in front of me from a parking lot. The driver was talking on a cell phone -- a rare sight at the time -- and he seemed oblivious to traffic. His merging technique forced me to hit my brakes and gave me an unobstructed view of his bumper sticker. The strip of plastic read: "The kid with the most toys at the end wins."

The message came as no surprise. One look at his stuff and I knew all about him. His Mercedes, cell phone and bumper sticker told me he was rich, had a lot of "toys" and probably thought he was better than me because of it. In short, just the sort of person who would proclaim his materialist credo on a bumper sticker -- and cut me off. Rightly or wrongly that was the image he projected, or at least the one I read.

Stuff, as social scientists have long pointed out, is more than just "stuff." Our possessions form a complex language of symbols beyond their utilitarian function. We write messages about ourselves with the things we own and read other people through their possessions. Our stuff communicates our beliefs, attitudes and personality. The anthropologist Nigel Barley points out that we "express an identity through exercising choice in the things one buys."

Unarguably we do invest ourselves in our things. "Our sense of identity, our self definition are established, maintained, reproduced and transformed in our relation with our possessions," Helga Ditmar of the University of Sussex observes. The fact that people universally report a sensation of "being violated"after a burglary shows how tightly self-identity and possessions are intertwined. In a survey of English adults, most agreed with the statement "If I lost all my possessions I would feel stripped of a sense of self."

It's a fact of life also that we judge people by what they have. No matter what we say, studies insist that down deep we really do believe that the more a person has, the better a person is. In one classic experiment, researchers found that people were less likely to yell angrily at an expensive car stopped at a green light than at a more modest auto. In another study, people were given luggage that was "found" at an airport and bus terminal and asked to describe the person based on the luggage. Consistently, the air traveler, whose luggage looked more expensive, was judged to be more likeable, more generous, responsible, attractive and aggressive than the bus rider.

The prominent role possessions have come to play in projecting self-image is a relatively recent historical phenomenon, fallout from the Industrial Revolution. Conspicuous consumption, fueled by the rise of colonialism, was the rage among the nobility in the 16th and 17th centuries. It wasn't until the Industrial Revolution that it trickled down to the lower classes. "From then on, the consumer revolution unfolded steadily and consumption increasingly served the symbolic needs of the individual over and above the practical, utilitarian requirements of family or local community," Ditmer says.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution social identity was -- and in many Eastern and primitive societies still is -- ascribed on the basis of kinship. You are who you are based on who your father is. However, the rise of consumerism in the West gave rise to individualism and social mobility. With the easy availability of goods, people became more inclined to define themselves by what they possessed and the elusive merry-go-round quest for status accelerated. Conspicuous consumption and materialism have been on an insatiable juggernaut ever since.

The concept of the displaced ideal explains why people are never satisfied. "Before one buys a new possession, there is the anticipation [it] will provide access to certain ideal circumstances. But then the ideal still eludes and we need the next piece," Ditmer explains. A young boy, for instance, who would like to play basketball like Michael Jordan purchases an expensive pair of Nike basketball shoes so he can "be just like Mike." Then Michael retires, so the boy now needs shoes like Kobe Bryant.

Robert A. Wicklund and Peter M. Gollwitzer, meanwhile, argue that people use possessions to compensate for their own inadequacies. For example, they found that mediocre business students were more apt to carry a fancy brief case and otherwise dress the part of a successful business executive than students who were doing well in their studies.

Status symbol objects are especially elusive because they lose value as they trickle down from higher to lower groups. Twenty-five years ago the first digital watches cost $500 and were a mark of affluence; today they're on sale for $9.95 at Wal-Mart and they impress no one. Like Sisyphus, status-conscious consumers never accomplish their goal. In time, they're always back at the beginning, searching for the next new rare thing. The bumper sticker battle cry "I Live to Shop" really may be more a cry of anguish than a shout for joy.

Conspicuous consumption is not entirely a modern invention. Examples of a sort exist in primitive cultures, though in at least two instances it is oddly anti-materialist. The "potlach" feasts of the Kwakiutl Indians of British Columbia are huge celebrations in which massive amounts of food and other goods are consumed or destroyed to impress the honored guest. In effect, the host says, "I value you so much that I destroy all of this good stuff in your honor. If you and I can't enjoy it directly, then no one will."

Another primitive group, the Trobriand Islanders of Melanesian New Guinea, engage in a ritualized exchange of possessions that is decidedly nonmaterialist. In the famous "kula exchange" the point is not to possess the possessions. It's the giving, not the having, that counts. The colored necklaces and shells are highly valued by everyone, but no one keeps them. The objects continually circulate among individuals and villages, often eventually making the rounds back to the original giver. The exchange is a goodwill gesture that helps to maintain social order.

Possessions perennially play an important role in establishing and maintaining social relationships. A young man, for instance, hopes to win the heart of a young woman so he gives her an expensive bottle of perfume or piece of jewelry. He hopes the object is something she likes, but it also is a symbol of how much he values her, a symbol of his affection: He would spend so much of his hard-earned money just to make her happy.

But what if she is not happy? There's a certain hidden terror involved in gift giving. Grant McCraken explains that we reveal ourselves through the gift we choose. We publicly announce a certain view of the recipient and invite them to confirm our view. That's why we feel so bad if someone doesn't care for the gift we have given. The rejection stings because we realize we don't know the person as well as we thought we did.

Perhaps even more important than the social symbolism of possessions is the personal symbolism they hold for their owners. In a landmark study published as The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self, sociologists Eugene Halton of Notre Dame and Mihaly Csikszentimihalyi of the University of Chicago surveyed 80 Chicago families to learn which objects in their homes they valued most and why. Halton found that possessions had different meaning based on age and gender. Women and older adults tended to value things as symbols of personal relationships and family ties. Younger people and men, on the other hand, were more utilitarian. They valued objects for their "kinetic" qualities, what the object could do. A typical cherished object for older adults and women was a photograph of a loved one, while the favorite possession of teenagers was their stereos.

As one might expect, the more a person owns, the more important possessions become to them. In a cross-cultural study comparing attitudes of American city dwellers to Nigerian peasants, researchers found that the Americans were substantially more materialistic and possessive than the Nigerians. While Americans were caught up in the "shop till you drop" mentality, the Nigerians were most concerned about putting food on the table.

. The economist Staffan Linder points out that in our materialist society acquiring and maintaining possessions can absorb all of a person's time and energy. Like a bad Stephen King novel, we sometimes get the queasy feeling that our possessions actually possess us. Then, Halton and Csikszentmihalyi say, "the adaptive value of objects is reversed; instead of liberating psychic activity, the things bind us to useless tasks. The former tool turns its master into its slave."

It just may be that the kid with the most toys at the end loses.

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