Drawing from notes taken during repeated visits from 1985 to 2002 to one multiethnic sugarplantation company compound in the Caribbean nation of the Dominican Republic and taking inspiration from the cultural theorist Georges Bataille, I present evidence that expenditure to excess is today a widespread human striving and an ethical battleground even among materially impoverished people who inhabit the far termini of global commodity chains. Expenditure (in the Bataillean sense of activities that gain their full meaning through loss, not gain) stands as a source of meaning in the domains of personally enhancing consumption, eros, and ritual. While certain plantation residents conceptually thread together phenomena in each of these activity domains as generators of treasured and celebrated brightness, rhythmic energy, ceaseless flow, and life-affirming spiritual animation, other residents, most prominently the community’s evangelical Christians, denounce the prodigality of customary payday-weekend binges and devotions to the gods of Vodou. I propose that cultural anthropologists may gain a fuller understanding of the motivations and impulses that stand behind recent massive increases in commodity consumption worldwide through study of the immanent, nonrational satisfactions of discretionary consumption and other acts of expenditure. Is excess the problem of the twenty-first century? Expenditure beyond sustainable limits stands behind crises of resource depletion, environmental degradation, and greenhouse gas emissions, which potentially threaten not only to destabilize advanced industrial ways of life but possibly render the planet as a whole unlivable. These crises, paired with growing material inequalities and food entitlement instability, are worsening geopolitical tensions, heightening militarized competition for control of natural resources, and raising new challenges to international governance. A common background to the crises of excess are runaway rates of consumption growth, which, far from slowing, seem destined to be amplified by the spread of the global consumption boom from the industrially advanced countries to newly industrializing states. Anthropology, through its multidisciplinary and holistic methods of study and modes of theorizing, would seem well prepared to speak to the causes and possible remedies for the global crises that make up the problem of excess. Our discipline is particularly well endowed in research questions and strategies relating to the massive growth in commodity consumption that fuels all the other problems. It goes beyond