【１】消費者は、もはや特殊な有用性ゆえにあるモノと関わるのではなく、全体としての意味ゆえにモノのセットとかかわることになる。洗濯機、冷蔵庫、食器洗い機等は、道具としてのそれぞれの意味とは別の意味をもっている。【２】ショーウィンドウ、広告、企業、そしてとりわけここで主役を演じる商標は、鎖のように切り離し難い全体としてのモノの一貫した集合的な姿を押しつけてくる。【３】それらはもはや単なるひとつながりのモノではなくて、消費者をもっと多様な一連の動機へと誘う、より複雑な超モノとして互いに互いを意味づけあっているが、この限りにおいてはモノはひとつながりの意味するものなのである。（中略）
　【４】ある種の人々の見解からは、当惑が顔をのぞかせている。「欲求は、経済学が関与するあらゆる未知の要素のなかでも、最もしつこく未知なるものである」（ナイト）。【５】しかし、こうした当惑は、マルクスからガルブレイス、ロビンソン・クルーソーからションバール・ド・ローヴにいたる、人間学的学説の主張者たちが、欲求についての長ったらしいお説教をあきもせずに繰り返すことをさまたげはしない。【６】経済学者にとって、欲求とは「効用」のことである。それは消費を目的とした、すなわち財の効用を消滅させることを目的としたしかじかの特殊な財への欲求ということだ。【７】だから欲求は手に入る財によってそもそもの初めからすでに何らかの目標＝終りにふり向けられており、選好もまた市場で供給される生産物の選び抜きによって方向づけられているわけで、欲求とは結局支払い能力のある需要「有効需要」である。【８】心理学者たちはもう少し複雑な理論を作りあげ、それほど「モノ志向」的ではなくそれ以上に本能志向的で、いわば生得的で不明確な必然的性格をもった動機を欲求だとする。最後に登場する社会学者と社会心理学者にとっては、欲求は「社会＝文化的」性格をもっている。【９】学者たちは、個人は欲求を授けられ本性に従って欲求の充足に駆り立てられるものだという人間学的仮説や、消費者は自由で意識的であり自分が何を望んでいるか知っている存在だという見解を疑問視せずに（社会学者は深層心理的動機に疑問をもっている）、こうした観念論的仮定にもとづいて欲求の「社会的力学」の存在を認めようとし∵ている。【０】その上で、集団内の関係から引き出された順応と競争のモデル（「ジョーンズ一家に負けるな」）や、社会と歴史全体に結びついた大がかりな「文化モデル」を登場させるのだ。
　彼らのなかには、大雑把にいって三つの立場がある。
　マーシャルにとって、欲求は相互依存的で合理的である。
　ガルブレイスにとって（彼については後でまた触れることにしよう）、選択は説得によって押しつけられる。
　ジェルヴァジ（およびその他の人びと）にとって、欲求は相互依存的だが（合理的計算の結果である以上に）、見習い学習の結果である。
　ジェルヴァジはいう。「選択は偶然になされるのではなくて、社会的にコントロールされており、その内部で選択が行われる文化モデルを反映している。どんな財でもおかまいなしに生産されたり、消費されたりするわけではなく、財は価値の体系との関連において何らかの意味をもたなくてはならない。」この説は消費を社会統合の視点から見る立場へとわれわれを導く。「経済の目的は個人のために生産を最大にすることではなくて、社会の価値体系との関連において生産を最大にすることである」（パーソンズ）。同様に、デューゼンベリーも同じ意味あいで、ヒエラルキーにおける自分の位置に応じて財を選好することが結局唯一の選択であると述べるだろう。消費者の行動をわれわれが社会現象と見なすようになるのは、選択という行為がある社会と他の社会では異なっていて同じ社会の内部では類似しているという事実が存在するからである。これが経済学者の考え方と異なる点である。経済学者のいう「合理的」選択は、ここでは一様な選択、順応性の選択となった。欲求はもはやモノではなくて価値をめざすようになり、欲求の充足はなによりもまずこれらの価値への密着を意味するようになっている。消費者の無意識的で自動的な基本的選択とは、ある特定の社会の生活スタイルを受け入れることなのである。

　（ジャン・ボードリヤール著『消費社会の神話と構造』より抜粋編集）

There's a funny story that anthropologists tell to demonstrate how many different ways the same things can be named and classified, depending on the culture doing the naming. A group of anthropologists were giving a sort of IQ test to a band of tribesmen. The purpose of the test (and there really is such a test) is to see how someone will group a collection of twenty different objects drawn from four classes: food, tools, cooking implements, and clothes. The test predicts that the more intelligent individual will, for example, group apples and oranges under "foods" and knives and forks under "cooking implements."
In this particular test, the tribesmen consistently chose the "less intelligent" classification, however, grouping knives with oranges rather than with forks. After each classification, they would chant together a phrase in their own language that in translation might run, "This is how a wise man would do this." The anthropologists administering the test finally became irritated and asked the tribesmen "how a damned fool would do it." They immediately regrouped the knives with the forks and the apples with the oranges.
The moral of the story has partly to do with the different ways that various cultures classify the same things and partly with a sense of cultural superiority that causes one culture -- ours -- to judge the intelligence of other cultures by its own standards. It happens to be the case that our western approach to classification is an abstract one; we tend to group things together as concepts rather than as things. A knife, for instance, is a very concrete object and so is a fork, but an "eating implement" is a conceptual abstraction, a generalization rather than a thing. Our understanding of the actual knife and fork, in other words, is shaped by a cultural code that groups things conceptually and abstractly, and we expect all other "intelligent" people to understand such things in the same way.
But can't we look at knives and forks differently? After all, you use a knife, not a fork, to cut an orange, and so there would seem to be a perfectly good -- and intelligent -- reason for grouping the knife with the orange rather than with the fork. This, in fact, is precisely what the tribesmen in the story did: they classified the objects placed before them according to their concrete relations to each other. A knife, in other words, is concretely related to an orange because it is used for the physical act of cutting. Within the terms of a cultural code made up of concrete rather than abstract ideas, it is perfectly reasonable, and only common sense, to group the knife with the orange.
Even the most trivial of classifications can be seen sometimes to conceal a particular point of view. Several years ago, for example, the U.S. government created something of a sensation when it decided to classify tomato ketchup as a "vegetable" in order to save money on school lunch programs. At the time, a feeble attempt was made to defend this reclassification of ketchup from "table sauce" to "vegetable" on the grounds that since ketchup is made from tomatoes (which means, of course, that it is really derived from "fruit," but that's another issue) it could be seen as belonging to one of the four major food groups (which, if you're old enough to remember, were once the seven major food groups: meat, fish, dairy products, grains, green vegetables, yellow vegetables, and fruit). This attempt to change a classification was quickly abandoned, however, in the face of protests from parents and sneers from administration critics.
In the ketchup case, we find the conflict of two political interests. One believes that it is not the role of government to aid nutritional programs, and one believes that it is. From the former perspective, there may be a need to reclassify ketchup, but the decision to do so is determined by political rather than natural reasons. Conversely, keeping ketchup in its place as a "sauce" can also be seen to be a political decision because there is nothing to prevent us from viewing it as "food." It does have some nutritional value. The question is simply where we draw the line, and where that line is drawn will be determined by our interests, not by some "natural" power outside those interests.
In fact, all the most basic distinctions represent some human interest. Is a one-minute pause in a school classroom a "moment of silence" or a constitutionally forbidden "prayer"? Is a fifteen-year-old killer an "adult" or a "juvenile"? Are nuclear arms "offensive weapons" or "peace-keepers"? In each of these controversies you will find two sides equally certain that their designation is the right one, that they alone have drawn the line strictly according to the "truth." It would be nice if the truth were that easy to come upon, but in each of these cases the line we draw is only ideologically true.
The interests served by a classification scheme can sometimes be harmlessly personal. I was once told the story of a certain retired Harvard professor who, somewhat against his own more idle inclinations, had been persuaded by his wife to take up the fashionable hobby of bird watching. Wishing to avoid the labor of having to distinguish among, and remember the names of, too many species, he radically simplified the usual scheme by employing only four basic names for the classes of birds he was able (or willing) to recognize. These four classes included "crows," "gulls and robins," "small brown birds," and "other." That simplified things. Crows, gulls, and robins are easy to spot. So are small brown birds. Anything more complicated -- say, a scarlet ibis can be effortlessly put into the class of "other." But even this harmless approach to classifying animals contains ideological implications. As long as we are only talking about recreational bird-watchers, there's no problem at all. But if the question of where to draw the line appears in the context of a controversy over environmental protection, it can be quite another matter.
In the mid-1970's, for instance, the Tennessee Valley Authority's plan to build a dam on the Little Tennessee River was halted when it was discovered that the dam would threaten the survival of several local species such as the snail darter. Proponents of the dam argued that the snail darter was not an endangered species since there were plenty of closely related darter species scattered throughout the region. Opponents of the dam argued conversely that the snail darter was an irreplaceable component of the biological diversity of the earth and was accordingly covered by the Endangered Species Act of 1973'. The differing political interests of each camp were reflected in the way each chose to classify the darter. The pro-dam forces took a more general approach -- once you've seen one darter you've seen them all -- while the anti-dam forces insisted on detail. The whole issue depended on where you chose to draw the line. The line was finally drawn, and the snail darter was saved.
One reason we disagree so often on where to draw the line is because there are so many different ways to categorize objects and images. Thus, we usually classify them in terms of how they affect and serve our individual or cultural interest. An individual horse, for example, can be classified in quite a number of ways that are not all necessarily biologically based. There's nothing to stop us from seeing a horse as a rather oversized, short-eared donkey -- after all, with a little help from a breeder, horses and donkeys can interbreed -- but that would decrease the value of horseflesh, which would hardly be in the interest of the horse-breeding industry.
But what about the horse's potential to end up on your dinner plate? We eat cattle, after all, and horses, like cattle, are grazing animals generally classed as fit for the table within the terms of our code of cooking. This is the way the French draw the line to include the horse in the class of meats suitable for eating, and if you were a horsemeat butcher with an interest in opening up the U.S. market with fillet de cheval, you'd want to get Americans to think this way too.
How we choose to classify things may seem to be a trivial matter, but its implications can be very serious. For when one powerful group of people classifies another less powerful group as either inferior, or, even worse, not quite human at all, the result can be deadly. We only need to look at what happened to the American Indians in the nineteenth century, or to the European Jews in the twentieth century to see what horrible disasters can result from classifying human beings into groups.

anthropologist 人類学者
ibis トキ科の鳥
Tennessee Valley Authority テネシー渓谷開発公社（TVA）
snail darter タニシを常食とするスズキ科の小魚
Endangered Species Act of 1973 1973年の絶滅の危機にある種の法
fillet de cheval ［フランス語］馬のヒレ肉