Consumption Studies after the Cultural Turn

Szerkesztő:
Miklós Vörös, Vagyim Kemény

This issue brings together classic texts of the interdisciplinary study of consumption after the cultural turn. Each of the texts translated here addresses consumption from a different disciplinary angel, yet what they all share is an interest in consumption as a cultural rather than a mere economic phenomenon. Sahlins offers a critique of the economic concept of utility and develops an analysis of consumption as a system of meaning. Bourdieu highlights that this system corresponds to the division of objective conditions and shows how it reproduces and legitimizes social hierarchy by translating it into a symbolic hierarchy. De Certeau, in turn, focuses on the capacity of everyday practices in putting into question rigid structures of power. Finally, addressing consumption from a historical point of view, Lears traces the way consumption became understood as a space of self-expression and authenticity through the parallel cultural process associated with modernity and the rise of advertising in the United States.

Released: Replika 72, 5–135.