Michael Thompson obituary (opens in new tab)

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 – ca...