Anthropologist who studied the values that society applies in making decisions and climber in the first party to ascend the south-west face of Everest In his book Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value (1979), the anthropologist Michael Thompson, who has died aged 89, took an everyday example to show how people’s sense of value operates. How is it that the beaded curtains that hung in doorways across Britain in the 1970s – unremarkable, slightly naff, destined for the skip – can these days fetch real money in vintage shops? Nothing about the object has changed. What has changed is the social construction placed upon it. Thompson proposed that goods and services divide into three categories: durable objects, whose value rises over time; transient ones, whose value falls; and rubbish, which has none – but with the proviso that these categories are not fixed properties of things. They are assigned by societies, and they shift: in the case of beaded curtains, from transient to durable. Continue reading...