Consumption and Everyday Life Essay example -- Culture Cultural Essays

Consumption and Everyday Life This interdisciplinary volume portrays the variety and complexity of consuming practices that are embedded in the context of everyday life. The contributors cover a broad range of cultural consuming patterns drawing on material as well as symbolic resources with case studies from different parts of the world. Studied practices include shopping, personal narratives, music and performance, the imagination of identities and places, media and audiences as well as domestic communication technologies. These cases counter both traditional images of a passive, powerless consumer and the postmodern glorification of consumers as "creative artists", but rather illustrate the varying balance between constraint and creativity, and the role of consumption within the cycle of production, regulation, representation and identity. In the introduction, Hugh Mackay explains what is understood under the term cultural consumption, and gives an interdisciplinary and historical overview of the most significant approaches to consumption, their accomplishments and weaknesses. He outlines what contribution this book has to offer to the study of consumption and everyday life, summarizes each chapter briefly, and discusses what they have in common, and in which respect they are differentiated from each other. In his chapter, Daniel Miller explains the concept of appropriation and illustrates it with his own fieldwork on English kitchen furniture in state-provided housings, U.S. American soap operas and Coca-Cola in Trinidad. He traces back anthropological approaches to the relationship between persons and objects and problematizes the strict distinction between "gift-societies" and "commodity-societies", and the p... ... They provide the reader with approachable empirical studies rather than abstract theorizing, and thus narrow the broad field and theoretical of consumption to possible local sites of study. The book is written in an accessible language and style, with key-concepts set off and explained in a very comprehensive way. Each chapter is followed by selected readings and includes questions and activities to the readers, thus creating the perquisites for an active reading (supporting their angle on consumption as active rather than passive). I recommend this very useful book to everyone interested in the cultural dimension of consumption. It might be an excellent introductory textbook, but be also of interest to advanced students and researchers across a range of disciplines including sociology, anthropology, media studies, communication, cultural studies, and economy.