Consumption Studies after the Cultural Turn
Consumption Studies after the Cultural Turn
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.