Virtually every effort to understand anything about everyday life is a cross-cultural project. At a minimum, cultural differences manifest themselves in the differences between the researcher and her subjects. Paraphrasing the social theorist Albert Schultz, once the social scientist has visited questions about what it means to be social in the world, he never really comes home. Regardless of whether a research design is explicitly cross-cultural or not, it pays to be aware of these differences. The main subject of this session is the cross-cultural project, which explicitly aims to highlight cultural similarities and differences in one or another aspect of every day life, and to use them to open avenues of theoretical inquiry. The papers in the session explore ideas about culture, its uses in social science approaches and its role in consumption.

Hal Wilhite begins by discussing the problems and potential benefits of cross-cultural comparison. A comparison of household energy use in Japan and Norway is used to highlight cultural differences and show how consumption of heat, cooling and bathing relates to socio-culturally constructed notions of comfort. He points to analytically problematic issues associated with understanding the ways in which non-local ideas, goods and capital contribute to local cultural and consumption change.

Jan Selby is critical of the use of culture as an explanatory concept. Referring to Israeli and Palestinian water practices, he argues that the notion of cultural difference is often used in pejorative and slippery ways. He argues that dichotomous terminologies like those of ‘traditional’ (backwards) and ‘modern’ (rational) culture lead to stereotyping. In discussions of water demand, "culture" has, for instance, been invoked by way of explaining that Palestinians do not have the same need for water as Israelis and that their traditional ways of using water lead to low demand. According to Selby, differences in material and infrastructure have a greater explanatory power than ideology-based concepts of culture. In short, he argues that culture defined in terms of attitudes and ideas ought to be replaced by a view of culture as an ensemble of situated practices.

Taking a different view, Rick Wilk argues that culture matters in the ways people choose to consume energy. For him, culture is a medium through which ideas about comfort and convenience emerge. As Wilhite has already argued, these ideas have significant impacts on resource use and the environment. Wilk analyzes consumer culture and the escalating cycles of consumption in which ‘wants’ get converted into ‘needs’. He raises questions about ‘overconsumption’ and discusses the moral underpinnings of concepts like sustainability and fairness. He argues that energy consumption can only be understood in the local context. One consequence is that there are no generic solutions for sustainable energy policy. Instead, policy makers must design different strategies each applicable to the specific historical, economic, and political context in question.

Hal Wilhite

The uses of the cross-cultural research design have been called into question in a post-modern anthropology which has been occupied with the specificity of cultural meaning. Working under the assumption that a "culture" is uniquely understandable in its own terms, cross-cultural comparison can be viewed as a positivistic undertaking, generating findings which are inevitably unreliable. The challenge of neatly separating "cultures" in an increasingly interconnected world adds a further complication to cross-cultural designs. I argue that cross-cultural comparison can nonetheless contribute to the understanding of household consumption by highlighting differences and opening avenues of inquiry into the reasons which lie behind such variation.

These points are illustrated with reference to a cross cultural study of Japan and Norway. This is an interesting comparison for a number of reasons. They were both relatively poor (in relation to other European and North American countries) at the end of World War II and through the decade of the 1950’s. Both experienced rapid growth and wealth accumulation from the 1960’s. Today, they are two of the richest countries in the world, with relatively evenly distributed wealth and large middle classes. Energy prices are much higher in Japan than in Norway (about 3 times as high), but average income in the middle classes is also much higher, so that the average amount of household budget spent on energy is about the same in the two countries. For economic modelers, these similarities ought to provide a sufficient basis for predicting homogeneity in home energy consumption patterns; however, the cross-cultural study revealed significant differences in space comfort (heating and cooling), lighting and bathing. I relate a few of the findings.

In Norway, the convention is that the home should be heated in such a way that allows people to move from room to room in light-weight clothing. The entire living area, excluding the bedroom, is heated to an average of 21C. The definition of a "cozy" indoor aesthetic is strict and fairly uniform: the warm ambient temperature and a lighting pattern consisting of pools of light and shadow, these produced by small lamps placed around the room. In stark contrast, in Japan, living rooms are usually lit by a single florescent ceiling light (fluorescent light and ceiling lights are both abhorred by Norwegians for living areas). Heating is also quite different. Until recently, the idea of space heating was totally foreign. In most Japanese homes, the practice is still to heat the body, not the space. In the living area, this is accomplished with a ‘kotatsu’, which is a heater placed in a cavity in the floor. A table is placed above the ‘kotatsu’ with a heavy blanket attached to the table. People sit under the blanket with their feet and legs next to the heater. Other heat sources are the bath and the bed (where body(s) are the heat source). The intervening space between heat sources is very cool by Western standards (average 16 C).

Coziness for the Japanese is achieved in the bath. Japanese spend anywhere from 30 minutes to over an hour in the bath each evening, moving back and forth between the shower (located outside the tub) and the bath tub several times. The tub has a heating element which keeps the water temperature high through the entire period of the bath. Norwegians are more likely to shower than to bathe. While a hot shower is considered relaxing by most, the experience of the bath as a provider of comfort is not nearly as important, nor as energy intensive as for the Japanese.

While these practices have been relatively stable through periods of rapid economic development in both countries, there is evidence of change. Central heating is increasing in Japanese homes. Norwegians are building more baths per dwelling, with more and larger bath tubs. This raises important questions: What is responsible for both the stability and the change? Is culture the appropriate theoretical category for understanding differences or should more attention be paid to the social structures and physical infrastructures which both enable and limit choice?

This question draws us into debates about structure versus individual agency. Much of the discourse on sustainable consumption has been dominated by a model of individuals with absolute freedom to choose. Of course this is nonsense. Social relations have much to say about how we consume, whether it be to solidify relations, strive to demonstrate our conventionality or difference, and so on. Social relations also operate in the processes of production and delivery of the things we have to choose from. The social structures which shape production and delivery of energy choices are under-theorized in home consumption debates, both in research and in sustainable policy. The well-meaning separation of ‘demand’ from ‘supply’ in energy policy discourse, done in order to draw attention to policy opportunities at the point of consumption, has had the unfortunate consequence of analytically severing relationships among and between providers and choosers.

This discussion of where choices come from leads us back to the questions surrounding global interconnectedness. The contributions to social change by the movement of people, goods, capital and images is as yet poorly understood. Appadurai (1996:7) talks about these processes in terms of a "social colonisation of the imagination". Miller (1994) argues for a more subtle view in which there may be a reinforcement of some aspects of culture and changes in others. He shows that in Trinidad, outside impulses tend to be taken in and used by recipients in ways which reaffirm or manifest existing cultural practices. Embedded practices are not wiped over, but rather goods and images are recast to reflect existing cultural patterns. Returning to the Japan-Norway comparison, one can see instances of both ‘colonialization’ and ‘adaptation’. Japanese bathing traditions have been strengthened by new technologies which maintain high water temperature and extend the duration of the bath. However, space cooling and space heating practices have changed significantly, and the changes are suspiciously similar to early developments in North America.

Whatever theory of cultural change and globalization one subscribes to, the tendency for many consumption-related developments to require increasing use of resources and increasing emissions of pollutants and climate gases underlines the urgent need for social science to engage with questions of both consumption and sustainability.

Jan Selby

In accounts of the nature and causes of Israeli-Palestinian water conflict, one powerfully recurring explanatory trope has it that differences in patterns of water consumption and management are the result of deep-rooted cultural differences. ‘Culture’, in such accounts, is understood in primarily attitudinal and ideational terms.

My aim in this paper is to critique such accounts by arguing that the invocation of ‘culture’ as an explanatory category is problematic and dangerous, and that differences in patterns of water consumption and management – and by extension in many areas of social life – are not so much products or instantiations of attitudinal differences, as practical responses to material circumstance.

Within the Israeli-Palestinian water arena, allusions to ‘cultural’ factors tend to display a number of common characteristics: they are generally slippery and unspecified (‘culture’ typically refers to nothing more precise than ‘something in the way they are’); they are largely pejorative (‘culture’ is an auto-impediment to the rational use and management of water); they often link ‘culture’ and ‘tradition’ (the latter also being a barrier to ‘modern’ rational behaviour); and they commonly build upon superficial stereotypes, ones that, at least when Palestinian culture is being described, are frequently Orientalist. As a discursive object, ‘culture’ is typically a negative catch-all, and a source of polemics rather than reflective explanation.

This is not to say, of course, that cross-cultural analysis is always polemical and stereotypical, merely that the invocation of ‘culture’ as an explanatory trope always carries with it certain dangers. Cultural explanations are often persuasive and appealing, at least at first glance. Nonetheless, in the case of the Israeli-Palestinian water arena, I consider cultural explanations to be empirically misguided. With this argument in mind, this paper gives three examples of phenomena which could readily be explained in cultural terms (and indeed have been so explained, either in interviews or in written accounts), but which I would explain along much more practical, material and arguably Marxist lines.

The first of these examples relates to levels of Palestinian water demand. It is commonly argued by Palestinians, and indeed is universally accepted by international experts, that Palestinian water consumption in the West Bank and Gaza is suppressed as a result of supply shortages consequent upon Israeli control of the region’s water resources. However, and notwithstanding this, Israeli experts often argue that Palestinian culture is such that Palestinians do not have the same high level of demand for water as Israelis; and moreover, that in cases where modern water supply systems have been put in place, Palestinians have typically continued to rely on their traditional water use practices, again for supposedly cultural reasons. Is culture then a factor in determining Palestinian water needs?

A second issue is both less analytically complex and less politically sensitive, but interesting nonetheless. Since 1998, a great deal of water infrastructure development work has been carried out in the West Bank, among this work two very similar projects in the northern district of Jenin and the southern districts of Bethlehem and Hebron. The problems faced by the contractors to these projects have, however, been quite different. In Jenin district, the engineering work has been generally smooth, with little friction between local people and the contractors. In Hebron and Bethlehem, by contrast, there have been recurring arguments over compensation claims, and even attempts to physically impede and in some cases actually attack contractors. Several Palestinian experts sought to explain these differences to me in cultural terms, alluding with a grin to the stereotypically dim-witted and tradition-bound Hebronites (Khalilis). But can these different experiences really be explained in such cultural terms?

A third and final example pertains to Israeli water use. Israel, as both Palestinian experts and international commentators often observe, has a highly developed economy in which agriculture now plays a minimal part, accounting for only 3-4% of GDP and workforce. Yet the agricultural sector still receives the lion’s share of the country’s scarce water resources, and at highly subsidised rates, such that the overall economic value of Israel’s agricultural sector is minimal, and even perhaps negative. Given this, many have raised the question of why Israeli water policy is so oriented towards agriculture, and while some have emphasised political-institutional factors, another strong line of argument has been what one might call ‘cultural’. From this perspective, Israel’s water use patterns still bear the marks of the founding myths of Zionist ‘ideology’ and its emphasis on the redemptive character of agrarian labour (interesting that the word ‘ideology’ is generally used in this context rather than the word ‘culture’: ideology, presumably, is the modern equivalent of ‘culture’, one that is just as much an impediment to rational organisation). But does it make sense to explain Israeli water policy as a product of ideological commitments?

To each of these three questions my answer is no – that culture, at least if understood in attitudinal and ideational terms, is not a useful explanatory category. In each case I offer a counter argument (or at least pointers to such an argument), which might more plausibly explain the puzzle in hand. And I conclude by returning to the first of these puzzles, regarding patterns of Palestinian water use. Drawing upon research in Dheisheh refugee camp in Bethlehem, I offer a description of Palestinian water use (within this specific context) which emphasises the massive variability in consumption patterns and practices; the materiality of the constraints on water users; the flexible, adaptive and creative quality of people’s coping practices when faced with water shortages; and the implausibility of distinguishing between ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ cultures. One might want to take these emphases as illustrative of the nature of Palestinian (or at least Dheisheh) culture; be that as it may, this is not culture understood as a homogenous set of attitudes and ideas, but as a heterogeneous ensemble of situated practices.

Richard Wilk

Culture underlies human energy use at many different levels, and it drives and contextualizes consumption in modern society. Energy consumption must be placed in a broad cultural context, which includes systems of meaning and communication.

The papers grouped together in this session all deal with "culture" but do so in very different ways. Hal Wilhite considers the practicalities of cross cultural comparison as an analytic method. In this case, cultures like those of Japan and Norway constitute the units of investigation. But is "culture" also useful as an explanatory concept? Is talk of cultural difference simply tautological or is it, as Jan Selby suggests, a potentially – if not inevitably – misleading discourse that strips ideas from context and practice. Taking yet another turn, Rick Wilk considers the characteristics of a distinctive phenomenon which he terms consumer "culture".

The session raises a number of key questions:

• What do we really mean by "culture" and what are the risks and dangers of using it as an explanatory concept?
• What do "cultural" explanations of needs and wants mean in the light of global interconnectedness, and of global inequality?
• What can cross-cultural comparison bring to our efforts to understand consumption?
• Is there such a thing as ’consumer culture’, where does it come from, is it "escalating", and if so, how does this work?

Online papers

Wilhite, H., 1995, Cultural aspects of consumption

Appadurai, A. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press.

Miller, D.1994. Modernity: An Ethnographic Approach: Dualism and Mass Consumption in Trinidad. Oxford & NY: Berg.

Nichter, Mark and Mimi Nichter 1991 Hype and Weight. Medical Anthropology 13:249-284.

Schor, J., 1998: The Overspent American, Basic Books, New York.

Wilhite, H., H. Nakagami, T. Masuda and Y. Yamaga. 1996. A cross-cultural analysis of household energy use behavior in Japan and Norway. Energy Policy 24(9): 795-803.

Wilk, R., 1999, "Towards a Useful Multigenic Theory of Consumption", Proceedings of the ECEEE Summer Study, Energy Efficiency and CO2 reduction: the dimensions of the social challenge, ADEME, Paris.