With the development of Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic technology and the ability to produce surpluses, ca. 35,000 years ago, the door was open for aggrandizers to pursue a number of surplus-based strategies to benefit themselves and transform cultures into the competitive consumption arenas familiar to us today.

A theory developed from New Guinea ethnography that finds status competition to be a conflict-management system also appears to apply to medieval England, where the system was monopolized by elites, and to quotidian life in contemporary Britain, albeit with a reduced reach and through an additional, novel avenue to status. These findings are deployed to discuss viable policy options for moderating environmentally damaging consumption in the contemporary world.

Status consumption is a major threat to environmental sustainability. In this volume, anthropologists and archaeologists explore the implications of status consumption for environmental sustainability across time and space as well as how the current destructive arc might be bent.

Using feasting as a lens through which to view consumption, competition, and status, this chapter considers how “equality” can be destructive of collective values and sustainability.

Drawing on ethnographic material from Bangkok, I suggest that finding solutions for status-driven overconsumption is more complex than encouraging individuals to simply “consume less” and requires understanding how structural factors lead to heterogenous forms of consumption behavior. This leads to the question of what role inequality plays in overconsumption, and how these inequalities can be addressed in order to move closer toward our sustainability goals.

This chapter uses ethnohistorical information on prehispanic Andean kingdoms to illuminate how semiotic and material aspects of political economy are intertwined in premodern and modern approaches to various kinds of signs of social status. It argues that both anthropologists and mainstream economists tend to focus on semiotic aspects of human societies while largely ignoring their material conditions and repercussions, which are fundamental to grasping the role of identity and consumption in aggravating global inequalities and unsustainability.

Evidence of status competition in the US Southwest is subtle and often devoid of material excess, pushing archaeologists to challenge the ways in which they think about and search for social differences. Using data from the large Mimbres site of Galaz, we focus on the concept of antecedence, a form of social status derived from being viewed as a first-comer or the descendant of first-comers. Our results suggest that while archaeology can offer insights into status and consumption in the ancient past, broadening our views of what is possible, we must be cautious in applying those insights directly to the contemporary world.

Rich countries and their elites emit most of the greenhouse gases responsible for global climate change. Why should the poor and middle classes cut their emissions while privileged elites continue their irresponsible behavior toward the common good? This chapter draws on economic anthropology and treats the atmosphere as common property, suggesting some ways of controlling the free riding of the super wealthy.

This chapter explores the links between consumption and social status through an ethnographic study of how waste pickers, individuals and communities who reclaim and recycle the discards of elite and middle-class consumption, make claims to social status in the neoliberal city.It demonstrates how organizations representing waste pickers, who perform stigmatized work and are marginalized in urban environmental movements, effectively use ecological citizenship discourses to make successful claims to status, security, and urban inclusion. However, in the process, elite power over environmental imaginaries is reasserted in a manner that further exacerbates inequities in environmental status.

Across the prehispanic Mesoamerican world, governance, leadership, and the ways that power was funded varied at key cities and central places. Based on preliminary findings, the more autocratically ruled, unequal polities were less sustainable.