There are 65 million dogs in the US and 77 million cats. 

Seventy-six million households own a pet (roughly 3 in 4). 

We will spend $34 billion on pets in 2004 (up from $17 billion in 1994): $1.6 b. on the pets themselves, $14 b. for food, and $8 b. for veterinarian care.

There are some interesting patterns in these numbers:

There are slightly more male dogs than female dogs and slightly more female cats than male cats.  This suggests that we honor the cultural notion that dogs are "male"” and cats as "female.”"  What happens to the animals that do not fit this gender profiling?  You don’t want to know. 

Some owners of Vietnamese Pot-bellied pigs found their new pets too aggressive, and they did something surprising.  They took them to a slaughter house.  Then they did something really surprising.

In some cases, the owners took the meat from their pigs home, which certainly goes against our traditional thinking about what we do with our pets.”

Indeed, pets are animals of a special kind.  They have special rights and privileges.  Generally speaking, we don’’t slaughter them, and, specifically speaking, we don’’t eat them. 

Why not?  Animals are animals, and protein is protein, right? 

Hah, pets are not animals.  Let’’s be clear on that. Fifteen percent of Americans travel with their pets each year, apparently.  Why?  "More and more people consider their pets as members of the family.”"

Surely this is just a metaphor.  We don’’t really suppose that this animal, obtained from a pound, incapable of speech, inclined to acts of stupidity, is really somehow "related”" to us, do we? Well, yes, actually, we do:

According to a American Animal Hospital Association survey (1997), more than 60 percent of cat and dog owners include news about their pets in their holiday greetings, 27 percent take their pets along for family photographs and pictures with Santa, and 79 percent give their pets holiday or birthday presents.

We give them presents?  Birthday presents?  To an animal that does not know what day it is, and has a tough time the wrapping paper?

I have a suggestion: we are conferring something like personhood on our pets.  We are turning these animals into social creatures with special rights and privileges.  They have the right, most of them, to live in doors, to eat better than many people in the third world, to receive excellent health care, and we promise not to eat them when they die.  (There is a flourishing trade in pet cemeteries, and surely this is a good measure of their extra-animal status.  We see them off to a better place.)   

Those who fail these conditions are seen to be not merely callous.  They are seen to be morally culpable.  We are inclined to say things like, "There is something really wrong with those people.  They left their dog out all night.  Again!”"  This is a moral judgment of what we take to be a moral failing.  Why?  Because pets aren’’t animals.  They are something more.

But these are just the minor conditions of personhood.  We go a lot further.  We believe pets have special tastes and preferences, we agonize over their cuisine, we wonder if they are feeling a little "off”" today, and whether they want the blue or the red lined basket.  In the new regime, animals have a cultivated palate, a rich emotional life, and aesthetic preferences. 

There is still more.  Apparently, "89 percent of pet owners believe that their pet understands all or some of what they say."”  In this case, we are conferring a higher sentience upon them.  We are supposing that they are capable of speech.  We believe that we are talking to them and that they are talking to us. 

In a famous passage, Clifford Geertz had this to say about personhood:

The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background, is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s cultures.

We have taken our peculiar idea of the person and conferred it on our pets.  This is an exceedingly odd and interesting transformational exercise.  After all, these animals are, by human standards, deeply stupid.  When we treat them as persons, we engage in an astonishing act of metamorphosis.  But implausibility does not discourage us.  We are a nation of individuals and we have decided that our pets are going to be individuals, too.

References

Geertz, Clifford. 1974-1984. "From the native’s point of view" On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding.  Culture theory: essays on mind, self, and emotion. editors Robert Alan LeVine, and Richard A Shweder, 123-36.  New York: Cambridge University Press, p. 126.

Sahlins, Marshall. 1976.  Culture and Practical Reason.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Data on pets:

http://articles.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m4021/is_2000_August/ai_65300663

http://www.avma.org/membshp/marketstats/sourcebook.asp

http://exoticpets.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?zi=1/XJ&sdn=exoticpets&zu=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.appma.org%2F

http://www.hsus.org/ace/11831

http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/potpigs.htm

Yes, it’s come to that. I am reduced to posting pictures of attractive women. But, no, actually, there is a story here.

This summer, women are covering up. The NYT says they are “exposing less skin [and] ditching the micro-minis, cropped tops and thong-baring jeans of previous summers.”

We must take this news bravely. The work of anthropology and economics will have to carry on. In this post, I want to use the two fields together to think about this new trend. (I am counting on help from my economics readers.)

An economics explanation suggests itself:

When women begin to wear less, they start a competition for male attention. In this matter, men are not the most subtle creatures. Advantage goes to women wearing less. What is attention-getting at T+0 (time right now) is merely ordinary at T+1. So women wear still less…and so it goes. Eventually, women are looking ‘trashy,” in the words of Jane Rinzler Buckingham of Youth Intelligence. At this moment, the competition is, in a sense, “maxed out.” There is no competitive place to go.

There is presumably a “stall” moment. Women know they have a problem, but they do not have a solution.

Then there is a “reset” moment. Women move back to modesty. In a sense, they have to do this merely to start the game again. But what about those outliers, women who continue to wear less and reap the benefits of doing so? “More clothing” women now suffer a competitive disadvantage.

An anthropology-economics suggests itself:

In order for women to move back to “more,” the community of women (and the marketplace) must respond more or less collectively but without the benefit of explicit decision making or communication. They must move together and at roughly the same moment. How does a consensus like this emerge without the benefit of a presidential commission? This is a problem for complexity theory, the place that economics and anthropology meet, in my opinion. How and when women undertook this latest “emergent” move would make a great case study. (Selflessly, I volunteer my services as the ethnographer.)

Furthermore, women must find a way to bring in the outliers, those women who refuse the new terms and reap considerable benefits from doing so. There must be some kind of moral suasion going on here, as women police the behavior of other women. Chances this are this happens through the distribution of scorn and accusations of ‘trashiness.” We might think of this as a process by which the “more” women withdraw the social capital possessed by the “less” women. The “less” women are now admired by men but mocked by women.

In this case, there is an economy of social capital that we do not understand. This is a great place for economists to help out in the anthropological domain.

Some additional, purely anthropological considerations:

Some of this turns on cultural tectonics. There are cultural ideas at work, moving beneath, and inflecting, the surface of the marketplace. A very brief sketch:

1) In the 1960s: women present themselves in a more or less sexual manner. The counter-cultural has set new standards of candor.

2) In the 1970s: women begin to think that male reaction to this sexuality is offensive. As one of them told me, ‘they are not reacting to me, they are reacting to my body.” . Feminism is ignited. Wolf whistles and other reactions were now greeted with hostility

3) In the 1980s: women wear more. The preppie trend is a “cover up” look and relatively asexual.

4) 1985: Madonna, in her famous boy-toy video of 1985, gives the “all-clear” signal. She argues that women should reembrace their sexuality…as long as they can choose the outcome of this sexuality. Women wear less.

5) Summer of 2004: women start to wear more.

Some of this comes is due to the “max out” problem. But some of it may be a reflection of a deeper tectonic shift.

It may be that women are unhappy with what the “wearing less” did to men. Almost certainly, it was one of the things that encouraged men to think of themselves as “dogs.” (See several posts on this blog on this topic.) In short, a change in women provoked a change in men that women did not like and would now like to change.

If this is so, we are looking at the start of a new stage in the “gender wars.” Men, consider this an early warning. It’s not just the clothing that’s going to change.

As to the larger question, how we think about the interactions of anthropological considerations and economic ones, clearly there is lots to do. How do actors compete when this competition is informed by cultural considerations? How are the cultural considerations shaped and inflected by the competition? You’re asking me?

References

La Ferla, Ruth. 2004. What Stylish Young Women are Wearing: More. New York Times. June 8, 2004.

Thanks to actress Rebecca Budiq for the use of her photo.