Anthropology Of Consumption

Consuming Morality

by Richard Wilk

Published as Wilk, Richard 2001 “”Consuming Morality.” Journal of Consumer Culture 1(2): 245-260.

This essay began as a set of exasperated notes while reading books about consumption, such as Lasch’s (1979) The... more This essay began as a set of exasperated notes while reading books about consumption, such as Lasch’s (1979) The Culture of Narcissism, a complaint about the shallowness of modern consumerism. Reading an early version of Miller’s piece, ‘The Poverty of Morality’ (this issue), prompted me to revise that essay. The result is neither a critical response to Miller’s work nor
a completely separate and distinctive essay.We share literatures and critical reactions,many field experiences and have exchanged many drafts, ideas and conversations about consumption. Despite, or maybe because of, this relationship, we do not agree about everything. Part of the difference is no doubt due to my American perspective. I live in a state where more than 40 percent of adults are clinically obese and the roads are crowded with mammoth sport-utility vehicles. On this side of the Atlantic it is easier to take concepts like ‘overconsumption’ and ‘affluenza’ seriously. I have also
been deeply engaged for several years with the issue of global climate change and I believe that consumption is the most urgent and fundamental environmental issue that we face (Wilk, 1998).

The Fatal Splitting. Symbolizing Anxiety in Post-Soviet Russia

by Serguei Alex. Oushakine (Сергей Ушакин)

in Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology. Vol. 66, No. 3 (2001): 291-319.

Crang, M. (2012). "Negative images of consumption: cast offs and casts of self and society." Environment and Planning A 44(4): 763-767.

by Michael Crang

commentary piece with free access

There has been a recent spate of artistic work focusing on (over)consumption using the lens of disposal and discard.... more There has been a recent spate of artistic work focusing on (over)consumption using the lens of disposal and discard. In this brief commentary I will try to sketch out a few common themes across some of this work, showing how it connects with and challenges social science work on consumption and which registers it uses for thinking about the waste our societies create. Much work on consumption has referenced the thought of Michel de Certeau around consuming as appropriation. The artworks highlighted here suggest we might reflect more on his via negativa and concern with opacity, occlusion, and indeed the shadows things castöthe negatives of objects. The art here suggests consumption is not just the obverse of production, but a photographic negative or its material imprint in a cast. Part of the force of these of works is the old but powerful and necessary trick of taking something unthought and unseen and rendering it visible in new ways. But moving beyond much work in consumption, they speak not to layering meaning onto things, but also how it can be stripped away.
These artworks connect a sense of dissipation and decay as temporality in the unravelling and unbecoming of things. In that unravelling the materiality becomes more evident as the form is lost. And their signification is precisely the connection of unbecoming as material process with its adjectival sense as being disreputable. These artworks ask us not to attend to the arts of memory and conservation through material culture, not to look at those autotopographies that are full of meaning and life, but instead to use wastes to show them as the empty casts and imprints of lives. The imprints of wastes are the indexical signs of, and materially linked to, worlds lived and things inevitably consumed and used up. These are the landscapes struck in the likeness of current society.

Migrating - Remitting -‘Building’- Dwelling: House-making as proxy presence in postsocialist Albania. in JRAI vol.16

by Dimitris Dalakoglou

This article examines the material culture of migration, focusing on migrants’ house-making projects in their... more This article examines the material culture of migration, focusing on migrants’ house-making projects in their countries of birth. In particular, it examines the houses built or refurbished by Albanians in their home-country, which is no longer their place of permanent residence. This is a widespread phenomenon in Albania, but it is also a frequently appearing practice amongst other international migrants. Why do migrants living outside their home-countries build houses there even though they do not plan to return? I seek to answer this question in the case of Albania by focusing empirically on the process of constructing these houses, rather than merely on the material entity of the house
as such. I propose that such ‘house-making’ by Albanian migrants is not only a simple house-building process; it also ensures a constant dwelling and dynamic ‘proxy’ presence for
migrants in their community of origin. These ethnographic observations have further significance for the anthropological study of both houses and international migration.

‘Samsaric Salvation: Prosperity Cults, Political Crisis, and Middle Class Aspirations in Bangkok’. Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity Working Paper Series, WP 10-14.

by Sophorntavy Vorng

MPI-MMG Working Paper

A lifestyle of consumption and the struggle for upward social mobility are central aspects of everyday life for Asia’s... more A lifestyle of consumption and the struggle for upward social mobility are central aspects of everyday life for Asia’s emergent new urban middle classes, not least in competitive Bangkok. In this paper, I argue that the transforming nature of Buddhist religiosity in urban Thai society cannot be considered outside of the overarching framework of social and political aspirations. Thus, while the merit-power nexus linking position in the social hierarchy with Buddhist merit accumulated from past lives is a pervasive ‘official’ discourse and continues to be deployed for legitimatory purposes by Thai political elites vying for power, religious commodification and the proliferation of a wide variety of prosperity cults suggests not only a declining belief in orthodox Buddhist concepts like merit and karma, but also a market-driven shift towards material wealth as the most important basis for power and status in Bangkok. Meanwhile, the emergence of middle class reformist Buddhist movements has provided ideological bases for challenges to the established political order.

‘Incendiary Central: The Spatial Politics of the May 2010 Street Demonstrations in Bangkok’. Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity Working Paper Series, WP 12-04.

by Sophorntavy Vorng

MPI-MMG Working Paper

In May 2010, anti-government demonstrators created a flaming inferno of Central-World Plaza – Thailand’s biggest, and... more In May 2010, anti-government demonstrators created a flaming inferno of Central-World Plaza – Thailand’s biggest, and Asia’s second largest shopping mall. It was the climactic close to the latest major chapter of the Thai political conflict, during which thousands of protestors swarmed Ratchaprasong, the commercial centre of Bangkok, in an ultimately failed attempt to oust Abhisit Vejjajiva’s regime from power. In this paper, I examine how downtown Bangkok and exclusive malls like Central-World represent physical and cultural spaces from which the marginalized working classes have been strikingly excluded. It is a configuration of space that maps onto the contours of a heavily uneven distribution of power, and articulates a vernacular of prestige, wherein which class relations are inscribed in urban space. The significance of the red-shirted movement’s occupation of Ratchaprasong lies in the subversion of this spatialisation of power and draws attention to the symbolic deployment of space in struggles for political supremacy.

'Bangkok's Two Centers: Status, Space, and Consumption in a Millennial Southeast Asian City'. City and Society (23)S1: 66-85.

by Sophorntavy Vorng

Journal Article

Despite Bangkok's current incarnation as a globalized city of shopping malls and skyscrapers, indigenous concepts of... more Despite Bangkok's current incarnation as a globalized city of shopping malls and skyscrapers, indigenous concepts of power and space emphasizing center and hierarchy continue to pervade status differentiation in everyday social life. This is evident in tensions in the spatial-symbolic relations between Bangkok's politico-religious “old city” in Rattanakosin and the newer downtown consumption hub which emerged around the locales of Siam and Ratchaprasong, and highlights how urban and social transformations engendered by neoliberal market forces and embodied in downtown Bangkok's modern, consumerist milieu have mapped onto and exacerbated cultural logics of hierarchy drawn from much older notions of urban power and privilege in Southeast Asia. This produced modes of inscribing socio-economic inequality into space and a striking culture of status display uniquely shaped by the intersection of modern capitalism and Bangkok's distinctive culture and history of indigenous urbanism and suggests that understandings of space, power, and consumption in today's cities may benefit from a less Western-centric and more regionally sensitive conceptual framework.

'Angst and Enlightenment in the City of Angels'

by Sophorntavy Vorng

MPI-MMG Blog Post

CONSUMER CULTURE AND ECONOMIC PERFORMANCE – THE ROLE OF THE INSTITUTION OF MARKETING

by Brendan Sheehan

A post-modernist view of global capitalism sees it divided into three systems. They are the system of scarcity... more A post-modernist view of global capitalism sees it divided into three systems. They are the system of scarcity populated by the people of poverty, the system of sufficiency experienced by those with just enough to make do, and the system of abundance experienced by, what Potter calls, the people of plenty.
This paper focuses on the system of abundance. The dominant economic problem in this system is not one of production or distribution but of demand. It is how to persuade the most affluent consumers of the globe – the people of plenty – to keep spending at ever higher levels.
The system of abundance spontaneously generates an institution of marketing that works to solve this problem. The mass messaging of the institution creates a consumer culture in which the people of plenty increasingly perceive themselves as consumer citizens with a shared morality of indulgence and a shared customer mindset. The institution is also the dominant driver of cultural change. The institution creates a “hot” culture of perpetual change to persuade affluent consumers to spend more.
When the work of the institution is successful is promoting ever higher consumer spending the performance of the system of abundance is good, and when it is less successful, as now, its performance is dire.

CONSUMPTION AND THE MASS MEDIA

by Richard Wilk

Oxford Commission on Sustainable Consumption Workshop  “The Media, A resource for sustainable consumption” Oxford, 8-9 January, 2001

The continuing growth of consumer culture among affluent groups poses long-term environmental challenges, and the... more The continuing growth of consumer culture among affluent groups poses long-term environmental challenges, and the magnitude of the problem can lead us to seek immediate and practical solutions, actions that can be taken immediately.2 Yet recent research offers multiple and often conflicting explanations for the continuing expansion of consumer culture, and provides few robust policy tools that have a strong empirical basis. Some may take this dissonance as an indication that more research is needed. But there has already been a great deal of research on media and consumer culture, built on the work of eminent theorists like Raymond Williams and Marshall McLuhan. Where are the robust generalizations, the strong consensus on which to base a plan of action?

Intimidad cultural en espacios de consumo: El Mall Plaza Vespucio y la imposibilidad de una cultura pública

by Ignacio Farías

(2009) publicado en Tironi y Perez SCL

Es posible y necesario desplazar el foco de atención hacia la pregunta por el mall como localidad. Para dar este giro... more Es posible y necesario desplazar el foco de atención hacia la pregunta por el mall como localidad. Para dar este giro propongo seguir a Doreen Massey (1994), quien sugiere estudiar los lugares como redes porosas de relaciones sociales locales y globales, y como portadores de identidades múltiples, incluso contradictorias. Al igual que las identidades personales y sociales, la identidad del lugar es siempre procesual y relacional, es decir, constituye una práctica social (Massey 1994). Si entendemos que el MPV está también dotado de un ‘unique sense of place’ (Morris 1999), su estudio requiere atender a los imbroglios de historias y practicas que lo constituye (Miller et al. 1998).
[...]
Tales perspectivas requieren investigación empírica diseñada explícitamente para atender a los sentidos y matices de las historias y prácticas asociadas al MPV por grupos especificos de usuarios. La investigación que da pie a este artículo, desarrollada en 2000, se basó en un conjunto técnicas cualitativas (observación participante, focus group y grupos de discusión) y tuvo un caracter marcadamente exploratorio. Nos concentramos en los grupos más populares del centro de La Florida asentados en villas y poblaciones levantadas en las décadas de 1960 y 1970, quienes no sólo han experimentado personalmente las transformaciones gatilladas y asociadas al MPV, sino que además han sido proclamados como figuras emblemáticas de una nueva ciudadanía constituida en el consumo.

Feasts in ‘transition’? An overview of feasting

by Luca Girella

Drinking and feasting are well known practices in Crete from the Early Bronze Age, but they become more intensive in... more Drinking and feasting are well known practices in Crete from the Early Bronze Age, but they become more intensive in the Protopalatial period, reaching their peak in the Neopalatial era. In the paper archaeological data are reviewed in order to elucidate aspects of feasting practices during the first stage of Neopalatial period (i.e. MM III). MM III is the transitional period that led the First Palaces of Crete, after a general destruction, to a new era. Although its ‘transitional’ nature, remarkable changes in feasting practices from MM IIIA onwards are investigated. The use of communal feasts, that was already part of the Pre and Protopalatial tradition, is analyzed as a marked political dimension from manipulating the banquet ideology through a common and codified language and a structured system of ceremonies, that involve both the palatial elites and the large community.
The paper will focus on the implication of food and drink preparation within a wide topographical and cultural framework which comprises the role of MM III feastings inside and outside the palaces and settlements, as well as in funerary and cultic places.
Particularly, the break of political institutions is assumed as the thread of the present analysis: the variety of feasting practices among different regions of the island, as well as those noticed also in single cultural areas, are the main clue of the transitional stage of this period that saw regional shifts after the destruction of the first Palaces and before the reconstruction of new centres of power. The archaeological evidence suggests that from MM III onwards a communal system of feasting etiquettes was promoted by palatial elites in order to strengthen the cohesion and solidarity between the community and the centres of power. Nevertheless, as it will be clarified, the analysis of single contexts displays a variety of feasting occasions.

Immaculate Consumption: A Critique of the “Shop Till You Drop” School of Human Behavior.

by Randall McGuire

Wurst, LouAnn and Randall H. McGuire
1999 Immaculate Consumption: A Critique of the “Shop Till You Drop” School of Human Behavior. International Journal of Historical Archaeology. 3(3):191-199

Consumer behavior and choice models have assumed a major role in historical archaeology. Recent interest in... more Consumer behavior and choice models have assumed a major role in historical archaeology. Recent interest in consumption is an honest attempt to move beyond an emphasis on production. Consumer models have clear material referents, making them useful in historical archaeology. These models, however, separate production from consumption, and privilege the autonomous individual as the preferred unit  of analysis. They also reinforce and validate ideologies that obscure inequalities
and power relations in modern society. For us the important issue is how people reproduce themselves as social beings. Focusing on social reproduction integrates both production and consumption.

Dancing through the Market Transition: Disco and Dance Hall Sociability in Shanghai

by James Farrer

James Farrer. 2000. “Dancing through the market transition: discotheque and dance hall sociability in Shanghai” in The Consumer Revolution in Urban China edited by Deborah Davis. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pp. 226-249.

Consuming people: from political economy to theaters of consumption

by Nik Dholakia

Responsabilidade socioambiental e politização do consumo: o engajamento mediado pelo mercado

by Lucia Santa Cruz

Co-authored with Fernanda Martineli

Following Ships of rubbish value: A photographic essay

by Michael Crang

This essay is based on the following articles: Gregson N, Crang M, Ahamed F, Akter N & Ferdous R (2010) Following things of rubbish value: end-of-life ships, ‘chock-chocky’ furniture and the bangladesh middle class consumer, Geoforum 41: 846 - 54
Gregson N, Crang M, Ahamed F, Akter N, Ferdous R, Foisal, S & Hudson R (2012) territorial agglomeration and industrial symbiosis: sitakunda-bhatiary as a secondary processing complex, Economic Geography 88 (1): 37–58

Eko-logiskt: Eko-märken som meningsskapande för konsumenter

by Matilda Marshall

MA dissertation in ethnology at Lund University 2009

The aim of this thesis is to, through a consumer perspective, study how organic labelling and trademarks can be seen... more The aim of this thesis is to, through a consumer perspective, study how organic labelling and trademarks can be seen as meaningful in everyday life. Besides interviews the research is
based on nethnography, which includes researching consumer stories revealed on interactive blogs on the Internet.

The Swedish organisation for organic certification, KRAV, has been the dominant actor on the food market since 1985. However, recently the European Union introduced a label to
which standards KRAV complies with and in some aspects is stricter. The EU-label is perceived as more doubtful than KRAV, which most Swedish consumers have high confidence in. Eco-trademarks, such as the food chain ICA:s I love eco, enables the consumers to buy more green labelled food in the same supermarket where they usually do their shopping. The expansion of the brand also makes it possible to buy more eco-items to a price that is perceived as cheaper than eco-products of other brands.

Consumers’ perception of organic labels is closely connected to nature and thetraditional rural production before the green revolution. This interpretation, I claim, is a significant part of the consumer’s eco-logic which determines whether an aspect is reasonable or not. A locally – but conventionally – produced grocery is seen as more environmentally friendly than an organic imported equivalent.

The Jinn and the Computer: Consumption and Identity in Arabic Children’s Magazines

by Mark Peterson

2005.  “The Jinn and the Computer: Consumption and Identity in Arabic Children’s Magazines.” Childhood 12(2): 177 – 200.

One of the fundamental problems facing middle class Egyptian parents is the problem of how to ensure that their... more One of the fundamental problems facing middle class Egyptian parents is the problem of how to ensure that their children are simultaneously modern and Egyptian. Arabic children’s magazines offer a window into the processes by which consumption links childhood and modernity in the social imaginations of children and their parents as they construct social futures. Arabic children’s magazines offer Egyptian children and their families models of the modern Arab child as someone who is familiar with the history of Islamic heroes, is computer-literate and knowledgeable about technology, and is familiar with worldwide popular children’s fads. Above all, these magazines construct children as consumers. Buying the magazine offers, through both advertising and articles, a world of other things to imagine buying, from technological gadgets to trips to theme parks. Through such media, Egyptian children may enter into an imagined community of other children like themselves playing and consuming, both elsewhere in the Middle East and in the wider worlds of America, Europe and Japan. In the process, children develop tools for generating hybrid identities as simultaneously Muslim and modern, Arab and cosmopolitan, child and consumer.

Agents of Hybridity: Class, Culture Brokers, and the Entrepreneurial Imagination in Cosmopolitan Cairo.

by Mark Peterson

2010. “Agents of Hybridity: Class, Culture Brokers, and the Entrepreneurial Imagination in Cosmopolitan Cairo.” Research in Economic Anthropology 30: 225-256.

Flows of transnational popular culture into Egypt are not so much cases of foreign imperialism imposing itself on... more Flows of transnational popular culture into Egypt are not so much cases of foreign imperialism imposing itself on helpless Egyptians as they are processes managed by Cairene entrepreneurs whose accomplishments present them as successful agents of modernization, locating the cosmopolitan balance between global brands and goods and local markets and infrastructures. This chapter explores the links between these entrepreneurs, the state’s “culture of development,” and class reproduction. Egyptian transnational entrepreneurialism—speculative, profit-oriented enterprises engaged with transnational flows of brands, commodities and capital—has become yoked to the state’s goal of national development through economic liberalization. Upper class cosmopolitan entrepreneurs are increasingly positioned as agents of hybridity, culture brokers who can creatively forge links between supposedly rational and universal economic practices of market capital and local cultural beliefs and values. Successful entrepreneurs are construed as possessing an “entrepreneurial imagination” by means of which they can overcome structural and cultural obstacles and contribute to the development of an Egyptian “enterprise culture”.