Consumerist Desire Research Articles

Spiritual Ecology: A Path to Ecological Existentialism

This article explores the distinctive opportunities arising from the concept of spiritual ecology, and intersects with religion and ecology, religion and nature, and religion and environmentalism. On one side, these opportunities encompass problematic trends within certain facets of existing ecological aspect entangled with capitalist enclosures and consumerist desires. Conversely, it holds the promise of fostering the commitment to harmony with nonhumans’ existence, and suggests for understanding that transcends the conventional confines of religion. Many works on spiritual ecology embrace a broad multiplicity, questioning how to discern between more favorable and less favorable expressions of spiritual ecology. As this, it upholds the value of diversity while differentiating between the anti-intellectual, individualistic, and capitalistic tendencies within spiritual ecology and those that align more closely with what can be characterized as ecological existentialism or co-existentialism. It emerges as a reaction to the ideals and socio-political frameworks of current periods, which have avoided an intimate connection with the world and its revered nature. Over the past century, it has evolved into an intellectual and practice-oriented discipline, addressing the need to reconnect with the sacred dimensions of the natural world. animism

Human Being, Desire, and Doing-Right

Beginning with The Automatic Society, where Stiegler, on the occasion of an analysis of the unification of the technical system by the digital, synthesizes his thought of the three stages of the process of "proletarianization," this paper comes first to a critical examination of the originary "prosthetic conditions" which, according to Technics and Time, made possible the ambivalence of the technical pharmakon and the "systemic stupidity" of today. This leads then to a development on the problem of the status of desire in the stieglerian pharmacology of mind, which makes it infinite and specific to humans. Finally, this development leads us to a confrontation between Stiegler’s mobilization of doing-right (faire-droit) to unify the domains of philosophy, and a redefinition of doing-right within a differently unified human ecology, whose archireflexive methodological questioning is translated secondarily in this redefinition in terms of suffering needs versus consumerist Desire.

TO GENERATE DATA AT ALL COSTS FOR TRAFFIC CELEBRITIES: THE REMAKING OF CHINESE NEW POOR THROUGH DATA-DRIVEN FAN CULTURE

Among Chinese fans of ‘traffic celebrities’ (liuliang mingxing, 流量明星), to generate excessive data either on digital platforms or in various sales charts so as to inflate certain entertainer’s popularity has become a normalized ritual to demonstrate one’s fan identity. The so-called fandom economy effectively mobilizes fans from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds to consume and participate, thus, generates tremendous revenues. However, when some fans could easily satisfy their consumerist desire for being economically powerful and socially successful, many more—who are seduced by the communitas of fan activism and agency as consumers —are unable or not yet fully prepared to afford this lifestyle. Depending on an eighteen-month ethnography, this study unpacks how these fans are seduced, to some extent included, but still exploited in the transitional Chinese consumer society as new poor (Bauman 2005), where digital platforms become new structuring nexus and transform existing power dynamics.

To Exaggerate Data at All Costs: Data-Driven Fan Culture, Platforms, and the Remaking of the New Poor in China

Abstract Among Chinese fans of ‘traffic celebrities’ (liuliang mingxing 流量明星), generating excessive data either on digital platforms or various sales charts to inflate a specific entertainer’s popularity has become a normalized ritual to demonstrate their fan identity. The so-called fandom economy effectively mobilizes fans from diverse socio-economic backgrounds to consume and participate, thus generating tremendous revenue. Although some fans can easily satisfy their consumerist desire for being economically powerful and socially successful, many others – who are seduced by the communitas of fan activism and agency as consumers – cannot or are not yet fully able to afford this lifestyle. Based on data from an eighteen-month ethnography, this study unpacks how these fans are seduced and, to some extent, included but still exploited in the transitional Chinese consumer society as what Bauman calls the ‘new poor’, for whom digital platforms have become a new structuring nexus and transform the existing power dynamics.

Burkert, Mattie. Speculative Enterprise: Public Theaters and Financial Markets in London: 1688–1763

Burkert, Mattie. <i>Speculative Enterprise: Public Theaters and Financial Markets in London: 1688–1763</i>

On Dankwa's Gift

On Dankwa's Gift

Desiring the indigenous: affective commodification of the Sámi

ABSTRACT This paper argues that the multimodal enactment of affect plays a key role in the commodification of indigenous cultures. Departing from an understanding of affect as integral to discourse, the paper investigates how indigenous cultures are construed as an object of consumerist desire by employing subject formation, strategic perspectivation and affordance as conceptual starting points. As a case in point, affective meaning-making is studied as it is semiotically materialized in the commodification of Sámi culture by the predominant actor in marketing indigenous experiences in Sweden. By pondering the social force of affective meaning-making from the perspective of the perceived consumer, the analysis reveals that consumers are invited to affectively encounter the Sámi through curiosity, tranquility and excitement. However, the paper contends that the representations not only enable positive emotions; they also work their social force by constraining engagement in any disturbing, conflicting or uncomfortable emotions that are associated with the post-colonial heritage of the Sámi.

A neoliberal transformation or the revival of ancient healing? A critical analysis of traditional Chinese medicine discourse on Chinese television

ABSTRACT Neoliberalism has profoundly shaped health discourse and promotion in Western countries, and scholars have also begun applying the hegemonic global ideology and framework of governance to study the non-Western world. This paper examines Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) discourse on China’s mainstream television through the theoretical lens of neoliberalism. A critical discourse analysis finds that the ‘actively responsible individual’, the central notion of neoliberal health promotion, is deeply embedded in the rhetoric of traditional medicine and interwoven with the entrenched cultural values and beliefs. Media exploit the ancient healing philosophy to cultivate consumerist desires and exhort people to engage in self-care and self-medicine. By imposing expert authority, emphasizing conventional expectations, and exerting traditional moralities, media imperceptibly installed the neoliberal value of self-regulation and shaped individual conduct without challenging, and even reinforcing, the predominant political ideology and mainstream culture. The findings contribute to the understanding of health promotion in contemporary China and provide some evidence for the academic debate on the validity of applying neoliberalism to study China.

Visibility, power and exclusion: The (un)shifting constructions of normativity in wedding tourism brochures

This article examines the trends in dominant representations of couples and places in wedding tourism promotional materials. It applies an eleven-category visibility framework to analyse 671 images from 16 years (2004–2019) of brochures from a UK-based tour operator. Content analysis shows that majority-centric imagery remains dominant throughout, with minority groups significantly under-represented, despite wider societal changes. Drawing on an intersectional approach, the article makes visible power asymmetries, omissions and inequalities in tourism representations. It argues that such exclusions and narrow portrayals of couples perpetuate not only the hegemonic messages of heteronormativity but also reinforce whiteness, age and body normativity, while maintaining gender stereotypes and intertwining traditional wedding ideals with consumerist desires for secular consumption.

Spiritual Ecology: On the Way to Ecological Existentialism

Spiritual ecology is closely related to inquiries into religion and ecology, religion and nature, and religious environmentalism. This article presents considerations of the unique possibilities afforded by the idea of spiritual ecology. On one hand, these possibilities include problematic tendencies in some strands of contemporary spirituality, including anti-intellectualism, a lack of sociopolitical engagement, and complicity in a sense of happiness that is captured by capitalist enclosures and consumerist desires. On the other hand, spiritual ecology promises to involve an existential commitment to solidarity with nonhumans, and it gestures toward ways of knowing and interacting that are more inclusive than what is typically conveyed by the term “religion.” Much work on spiritual ecology is broadly pluralistic, leaving open the question of how to discern the difference between better and worse forms of spiritual ecology. This article affirms that pluralism while also distinguishing between the anti-intellectual, individualistic, and capitalistic possibilities of spiritual ecology from varieties of spiritual ecology that are on the way to what can be described as ecological existentialism or coexistentialism.

Some ‘R’ points: Repression, repulsion, revelation and redemption in South Korean horror films

This article examines some of the formal properties, stylistic motifs and thematic preoccupations of classic and contemporary South Korean horror films. As a genre that has enormous box-office appeal and crossover potential for western audiences, horror might seem to be little more than a commercial platform for young filmmakers to exploit popular tastes and cash in on derivative stories offering scant insight into the social conditions faced by modern-day Koreans. However, even the most cliché-ridden, shock-filled slasher films and ghost tales reveal the often-contradictory cultural attitudes of a populace that, over the past three generations, has weathered literally divisive transformations at the national and ideological levels. As such, the genre deserves scrutiny as a repository of previously pent-up, suddenly unleashed libidinal energies, consumerist desires and historical traumas, as well as a barometer of public opinion about such issues as class warfare, gender inequality and sexual identity. Specifically, I explore some of the most salient features of Korean horror cinema, including filmmakers’ tendency to adopt narrative analepsis – typically rendered as flashbacks – in the course of plotting out scenarios that, though far-fetched, are rooted in unsettled (and unsettling) real-world problems. Historical return, I argue, truly is a horrifying prospect, especially for anyone old enough to remember, or to have experienced firsthand, the brutality of a military dictatorship or an ongoing abuse of presidential power resulting in severe rights violations (e.g. the Park Chung-hee [1961–79]) and Chun Doo-hwan [1980–88] administrations). But historical return simply must be dramatized as part of the regurgitative ‘purging’ for which the genre has been singled out by theorists who recognize horror’s socially productive function.

Explaining Marriage Payments

AbstractThe high amount of mahr paid by the groom to the bride, among other marriage payments, constitutes a real burden for young Omanis today. This article sheds light on the main factors and motives that determine the amount of the mahr. Paradoxically, new consumerist desires, more highly educated women, and “love marriages” seem to coincide inversely with rising marriage payments. Modernization variables, such as women’s education and exogamous marriages, are not decreasing the mahr as predicted by theories of modernization, nor is institutional regulation effectively decreasing the amount. Beyond its economic aspects, mahr needs to be situated in its social, political, and cultural dimensions to better understand the complexity and variability of this institution. This article answers fundamental questions about how the mahr amount is fixed and negotiated between families in Oman.The study was carried out in Oman in 2016. Thirty-nine semi-structured interviews were conducted in different areas of the country in order to give firsthand information on the evolution, motives, perceptions, experiences, attitudes, and mechanisms related to matrimonial decision-making and familial strategies during the mahr bargaining. In addition to ethnographic research, a general online survey was conducted to provide statistical data on the main economic and non-economic factors that determine the mahr amount.

Getting Inside the Skin of the Consumer: Race, Market Research and the Consumerist Project in Apartheid South Africa

This article engages questions of colonial intimacy in the context of the market – specifically, by white commercial sector in apartheid South Africa to lure black South Africans into burgeoning consumer markets. I focus on the 1960s, when the exercise in racial domination grew more ambitious and coercive, at the same time as buoyant economic growth efforts spurred consumerist desire. African consumers were largely invisible and incomprehensible to white businesspeople, who turned to advertisers and market researchers to bring ‘the African consumer’ to light. This was largely an epistemological challenge – the pursuit of new modes of knowledge about African people, and especially the material intimacies of their daily lives. This article examines this knowledge-making project, along with the anxieties, lapses and contradictions that inhered in it.

Selling Transracial Adoption: Families, Markets, and the Color Line by Elizabeth Raleigh

404 ADOPTION & CULTURE 62 Rev. of Selling Transracial Adoption: Families, Markets, and the Color Line. ELIZABETH RALEIGH. Temple University Press, 2018 250 pp. $34.95 (Paperback) ISBN: 9781-4399-1478-6. By Kimberly McKee International and domestic adoption require individuals to grapple with the complexities of what it means when children exist in a market economy. These adoption practices are further complicated when considering the role race operates in placing a monetary value on children. Selling Transracial Adoption: Families, Markets, and the Color Line by Elizabeth Raleigh offers a nuanced and compelling discussion of the consumerism of international and domestic adoption economies. She notes this is not a critique of individual adoptive parents’ actions; rather, the monograph seeks to delineate the contradictions and complexities in the ways transracial adoption is packaged to adoptive parents. Raleigh offers a firsthand account of adoption service providers’ understandings of adoption as a business and not as an altruistic endeavor, with the latter being the dominant trope whereby adoption is a humanitarian act of child-saving and rescue. She conducted in-person interviews with East Coast adoption professionals and phone interviews with adoption professionals from the Midwest, the South, and the West Coast. These interviews were complemented by participant observation. Raleigh attended over forty conferences and information sessions, either in-person or online, to see how adoption workers navigated the complexities of selling adoption to potential adopters and expressed the various services their agencies offer to prospective adoptive parents. Selling Transracial Adoption outlines multiple ways agencies strive to keep their doors open even as the pipeline of available, adoptable children declines. From intentionally designed promotional materials to the language deployed by adoption workers, adoption agencies empower parents to see themselves as customers. Raleigh recounts witnessing adoption workers performing emotional labor as they seek to balance portraying adoption as both social service and customer service. In doing so, these agency professionals remind parents that they are not buying children; rather, prospective adoptive parents are seeking a service in their desire to create a family. Agencies also discuss the exponential growth of new markets (e.g., Ethiopia) and emergence of new markets as ones close down to allow for survival during a time of overall decline in international adoptions). Raleigh crafts a compelling examination of how markets of children are created and how this shopping for children is packaged to become palatable for prospective adoptive parents as they select the children they wish to adopt. She is careful to underscore the ways in which adoption agency professionals reframe the selection process of children into notions of fit. An emphasis is placed on finding the right match for both parents and child. According to Raleigh, euphemisms abound that mask potentially contentious or controversial topics concerning transracial adoption, open adoption, or adopting children with special needs. Euphemisms facilitate the ability for parents not to engage in a deeper reflection on their REVIEWS 405 consumer desires or the biases attached to them. Raleigh notes, “the tone of the word ‘fit’ implies an innocuous individualized preference. In addition, the word is free from judgment and blame” (80). This language underscores the intentional work to accommodate prospective adoptive parents as clients. Such language reflects how adoption agency staff and social workers accommodate prospective adoptive parents’ requests, as these individuals are interested in having their consumerist desires met by adoption agencies. The emphasis on fit seeks to hide the messiness that arises when adoptable children are ranked by desirability. Not only does this account for prospective adoptive parents’ gender preferences but also their preferences concerning race and ability. Raleigh notes the emergence of hierarchies with White healthy children placed at the top and Black children placed at the bottom. Interspersed in between are healthy Asian and Hispanic children. Yet, most significant in this discussion is Raleigh’s attention to prospective adoptive parents’ acceptance of foreign-born African children and US-born biracial (i.e., part-White) Black children. And it is with these racial preferences that Raleigh argues parents negotiate their own personal color lines with what they can accept into their families. At the same time, adoption agency professionals facilitate adoptive parents’ pathways to contemplating transracial adoptions. Raleigh notes that social workers...

Transatlantic Translations: Surrealist Modes of Advertising in France and the United States of America

While Surrealism began as a European artistic movement with the power to defy bourgeois cultural norms, the movement's dissolution has frequently been blamed on commercialization. With its late 1930s arrival to the United States of America, the language of Surrealism was easily absorbed and reinvented as a vehicle to appeal to the unconscious consumerist desires of buyers. This article reconsiders the standard narrative of Surrealism's commerce-induced impotency through a comparison of advertisements in French and American fashion periodicals of the late 1920s. French advertisers during this time had little to no interest in American modes of psychologically infused advertising and moreover these advertisers saw the threat that Surrealism posed to the space of the magazine. When advertisements using Surrealist visual strategies did appear within French magazines, they acted not as empty signs of novelty but rather as vital disruptions that troubled the invisibility and naturalization of capitalist consumption.

The Ayurveda of Baba Ramdev: Biomoral Consumerism, National Duty and the Biopolitics of ‘Homegrown’ Medicine in India

ABSTRACTThis paper examines a cultural politics of nationalism and alternative medicine in India. It investigates the rhetoric of a popular guru, Ramdev, who criticises ‘the West’ and promotes ‘homegrown’ yoga and Ayurveda for strengthening individual bodies and the body of the nation. I argue that the expansion of the Ayurvedic market in India and Ramdev's personal success are both based on discourses that interweave a neo-liberal quest for health with nationalist sentiments and consumerist desires. I show how yoga and Ayurveda—situated within narratives of citizens’ duty to consume the homegrown—have become political tokens of national belonging and biomoral consumerism.

The tent versus lobola: marriage, monetary intimacies and the new face of responsibility in Botswana

While it has become common knowledge that in many parts of Africa — including Botswana — weddings and marital arrangements in general have increasingly become subject to consumerist desires of style and glamour, much less is known about how such expectations of public display intersect with changing ideas concerning the intimate. Weddings have not only become costlier than before, and much more crucial in the marking of class, status and prestige, they have also given way to shifts in the responsibilities concerning marital arrangements, in the provisioning of resources and in the taking charge of the glamorous styling of these events. Studying such marital arrangements in Molepolole, Botswana, reveals that these shifts are creating a new sense of joint responsibility among young couples in terms of their role in providing such (re)sources. They are also producing a new dimension in their formation of relational intimacies; that is, making their financial affairs part of the intimacy of their relationship not meant for scrutiny and inspection by family elders. Engaging an anthropological understanding of the ways in which money can be related to intimacies, this contribution aims to understand how taking responsibility for finances becomes an intimate matter in the wedding process.

Vertigo in the City: Urban Crime, Consumerism and the Theopolitical Act

This article explores some theological points of contact and development arising from an understanding of the city not yet receiving sustained attention in urban theologies—crime and punishment. It gives an account of the expressive criminality of late modern cities and the attendant sociology of vindictiveness that shapes practices of punishment. It demurs from an influential but highly pessimistic vision of the persistence of consumerist desire, the only escape from which comes in a largely unsustainable politics of renunciation (Steve Hall drawing on Slavoj Žižek). It begins to develop an account of non-consumerist desire and political subjectivity though a critical dialogue with Žižek’s exposition of Romans 7. It suggests that the fragmentary urban practices of Christian mercy (offender reintegration, education programmes, anti-gang social projects, youth work) enact a form of asceticism which more satisfactorily parallels the covenantal and participatory thrust of Romans 5–8.

Doing Gender Justice as a Mission Imperative

Announcement of the kingdom of God The gospel of Luke describes John the Baptist going throughout Jordon, proclaiming a baptism of repentance: "The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: 'Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight'" (Luke 3: 4-5). When the people ask John, "What then should we do?" John doesn't moralize, but responds proactively: "Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise." Even tax collectors came to be baptized, and they asked him, "Teacher, what should we do?" He said to them, "Collect no more than the amount prescribed for you." Soldiers also asked him, "And we, what should we do?" He said to them, "Do not extort money from anyone by threats or false accusation, and be satisfied with your wages." (Luke 3: 11-14) In other words, to prepare the path for God's kingdom is to actively do justice and destroy the consequences of the sin. What we have in the words of John the Baptist is an expression of Christological eschatology, i.e. the kingdom of God is going to be given to us as a gift, but at the same time we have been called to "make the path smooth" in our acceptance of the gift. In that sense, eschaton is God-human endeavour, the kingdom that we're awaiting from God is anticipated and expressed in history through the praxis of human beings that should iconize the new eon. In Gustavo Gutierrez's words, "The hope which overcomes death must be rooted in the heart of historical praxis; if this hope doesn't take shape in the present to lead it forward, it will be only an evasion, a futuristic illusion." (1) Christological eschatology means one important thing: it is divine-human synergy, just as Christ has divine-human nature as defined by the ecumenical council of Chalcedon. It isn't a communist utopia in which heaven on earth will be brought about by the proletariat, or a utopia of Zealots during the time of Jesus that human will is capable of bringing kingdom of God. We sometimes forget this truth and make ourselves passive in history through the expectation that God will do everything exclusively. We forget sometimes that "from the very beginning Christianity was socially minded. The whole fabric of Christian existence is social and corporate. All Christian sacraments are intrinsically 'social sacraments,' i.e., sacraments of incorporation ... To build up the church of Christ means, therefore, to build up a new society and, by implication, to re-build human society on a new basis." (2) The New Testament reveals the kingdom of God as a new mode of relationship, a new quality of life. The kingdom is proclaimed when the sick and the poor are healed, when the dead are resurrected, when the disenfranchised are accepted, when abundance of food is offered to many, when justice, love, peace, harmony, and solidarity rule (Matt. 4:23, 5:10, 25:34; Luke 9:2, 9:12-18; Rom. 14:17; 1 Cor. 6:9). Let's look at the words from the beginning of the liturgy in the Orthodox Church: "Blessed is the kingdom of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit." Through these opening words, the liturgy is supposed to open up toward the eschatological kingdom, "a progressive movement towards the fullness of the kingdom of Christ, toward His cosmic and historical triumph." (3) The kingdom of God should be manifested in all of its social implications through historical limitations. It means that the liturgy should not reflect a patriarchal mode of relationship, the degradation of women,4 * disregard of lay people/ and inaccessibility for the sick and elderly. Primacy should be given to these issues that collide with the values of God's kingdom. Genesis 3:16 argues that man should rule over woman, but this verse comes as a consequence of the sin--the fall. This verse only expresses how the male-female relationship has been lived or conducted in our communities where the ideology of men rules, and not God's given/original order. …

Spaces of Desire: Consumer Bound and Unbound

This essay explores the relation between space—real and imaginary— and consumerist desire. Any process of modernization implies, on the one hand, social and geographical mobility that makes it possible for the individual to opt to change his or her condition and, on the other hand, a growing transparency of the world, where life of faraway people fascinates and attracts. Such a spatial disposition, where the object of desire always slips away into a different space, at the same time accessible and out of reach for now, supplies the fuel for the capitalist machine. It seems that such a disposition would be irrelevant in the case of socialism, known for its ideology of productivism and its practice of consumer shortage. I will argue that, in fact, Soviet-style societies were based on a similar logic, even if the “elsewheres” generating desire were castigated by propaganda and considered temporary phenomena by socioeconomic science. In fact, the explosion of consumerism after the fall of the Berlin Wall might show that the strategies of seduction under what we could call state capitalism were even more radical. Desire suddenly unbound could also account for the disappearance of critical thinking in Eastern Europe during the first decade of transition.