Everyday Consumption Practices Research Articles

From goats to Gold Stars: trajectories of consumption, bureaucracy and territory in the Nepal-China borderlands

ABSTRACT Post-colonial legacies of frontier making and border conflicts make the Himalayas a critical place for the study of territorial politics and the governance of space. Following recent calls to address how historical territorial structures shape contemporary experiences across the region, I aim to advance insights about the socio-cultural and political-economic implications of transforming colonial frontiers into post-colonial borders. In this paper, I historicise and assess how new scales of consumption articulate new spatialities of border regimes with respect to the Himalayan frontier in general, and more specifically in the case of distinct bureaucratic systems across sensitive borderland spaces between Nepal and China. To do this, I utilise a material-territorial analytic to demonstrate that modern trade patterns generate new government institutions. In turn, I argue that the administrative effects of everyday consumption practices show how the state operates and takes new shape in historically peripheral frontier and border regions.

Tibor Valuch. Everyday Life under Communism and After: Lifestyle and Consumption in Hungary, 1945–2000

Tibor Valuch. <i>Everyday Life under Communism and After: Lifestyle and Consumption in Hungary, 1945–2000</i>

Doing Family over Time: The Multilayered and Multitemporal Nature of Intergenerational Caring through Consumption

Abstract Care is a central dimension of family consumption. Previous studies have explored it as interpersonal, emotional work performed through everyday consumption practices. Most of these studies have investigated care as articulated in the present time and within nuclear families. This study sets out to explore the relations between grandparents and grandchildren, arguing that it provides an intriguing case for enriching the current understanding of care in family consumption and its multitemporal nature. To this aim, the study conducts qualitative interviews and employs a narrative version of the theory of generativity to conceptualize the multifaceted ways in which caring manifests through consumption in grandparent–grandchild relations. As a result, the study offers a processual framework of intergenerational caring through consumption (ICTC). The analysis identifies, first, the multilayered nature of ICTC, consisting of three layers of caring enacted through generative acts. Second, it identifies three temporal perspectives to ICTC, revealing its multitemporal nature. The framework provides novel insights into how familial caring is done from generation to generation, and how a desire to care is kept alive in today’s consumer society.

China’s extended urbanization driven by the “consumption city” in the context of financialized ecological civilization

This article seeks to address current debates on ongoing China’s urban development and makes a theoretical proposal that links financialization and ecological civilization through the perspective of the increasing role of consumption in today’s transition to an upgraded domestic economy. While both financialized land value capture and the role of quality are now fundamental to the construction of the built environment in Chinese cities, we argue that the “consumption city” refers to an economic and urban production process as well as to a societal transformation. First, the economic upgrading has gone along with a greater mobility of people travelling ever longer distances who spend their income or invest in the places they travel to rather than necessarily their places of residence or of work. To attract these consumers, whether they are residents, tourist or property investors, the quality of the living and consumption environments play a dominant role in the complex urban production and in governance, beyond the classic model of development based on the city as a production place. Simultaneously, the rising role of financialization by external households as investors raises the issue of how and to what extent the construction of consumption places has been a way for the state to further enhance the land value capture in (new or not) cities. Second, as the latest government strategy, ecological civilization is part of a social engineering process aiming to shape people’s lifestyles in terms of both their everyday consumption practices and their mindsets. The current transition aims to “civilize” citizens by enlarging the scope of urban consumers beyond the upper and middle classes to people from rural areas who are encouraged to become urban. Ecological civilization promotes a better quality of life for all, together with new outdoor and experiential activities, although this comes with a high ecological footprint.

Dirty food: racism and casteism in India

ABSTRACT This article traces how food cultures in India reiterate social hierarches and caste logics of cleanliness and purity. Religious, intellectual and aesthetics battles about food preferences underline how the upper caste sensibilities justify and regulate everyday consumption and dietary practices. An integral part of Brahminical power is based on regulating and upholding dietary taboos grounded on caste ideology. Drawing from my ethnographic research on racism, migration, impunity in India over the last two decades, I examine key debates on racism and casteism, and illustrate how the rise of food-based discrimination against migrants from Northeast India is founded on an upper caste practice and logic of contamination, filth, and hygiene. I offer the concept of ganda (dirty) food to highlight how casteism and racism are informed by an upper caste reasoning of superiority, contamination, and privilege in India.

Goods for the Smallest Citizens: Consumption, Spaces, and the Material World of Toys in Early Soviet Ukraine

ABSTRACT This paper investigates toys and their consumer spaces as a part of the history of early Soviet childhood in Ukraine. Particular consideration is paid to the influence of communist ideology on determining a toy's role in children's upbringing. The study highlights the various spaces established in Ukraine for children's collective consumption and the material world of play, such as the children's branch of the central department store and the Palace of Pioneers. However, it has been shown that the low purchasing power of households and the underdevelopment of light industry made hand-made play items an inseparable element of children's material culture, as well as an important part of children's everyday consumption practices. In the 1930s, the growing tensions inside Soviet society, Europe, and around the world caused the militarization of childhood and raised the role of war toys.

DIÁLOGOS COM DANIEL MILLER NO CAMPO DA COMUNICAÇÃO: REFLEXÕES A PARTIR DAS PESQUISAS DO GP CONSUMO E CULTURAS DIGITAIS

Abstract The article reflects the research practices of the research group Consumption and Digital Cultures (Consumo e Culturas Digitais, Brazil) in view of Daniel Miller’s theoretical legacy regarding consumption and material culture in interface with studies in the field of communication and in particular of digital cultures. Through the critical appraisal of four theses and six dissertations, it demonstrates how we have been working with digital anthropology through the interlacement of different field researches that animate and pose challenges to empirical research. Our affiliation with Miller’s ethnographic lineage makes us pursue the argument that it is possible to understand the everyday consumption practices of the internet, social media and mobile devices as cultural genres elaborated in the lived experience and in the particular contexts in which digital media are used.

Ethical consumption? There's an app for that. Digital technologies and everyday consumption practices

Ethical consumption mobile phone apps are increasingly popular. These apps allow consumers to scan the barcodes of products they are considering purchasing and determine whether or not they align with their ethics. App technologies are often applauded for their potential to provide consumers with targeted, crowd‐sourced information about products while shopping and to foster more political, and less individualistic, consumption practices by connecting users to one another and to campaigns. There is a growing field of scholarship conceptually examining the role of information and digital technologies in ethical consumption. However, there is little empirical research on how consumers engage with ethical consumption apps in everyday ways. Drawing on an in‐depth study with 21 participants, this paper explores how app use mediates people's experiences of ethical consumption. We contend that the app design structures and limits how individuals engage in ethically motivated consumption and influences their conceptualizations of ethical consumption as a political practice. We conclude by illustrating that critically examining what it means to be “ethical” in a digital world is a crucial area of research for geographers, particularly as these ethics play out through the everyday use of mobile technologies.

Mobile Phone Visual Ethnography (MpVE): Bridging Transformative Photography and Mobile Phone Ethnography

Mobile phone proliferation in developing economies has arguably affected the everyday lives of subsistence consumers and entrepreneurs like no other technology in recent times. This impact is evidenced by mobile phones’ embeddedness in everyday consumption and business practices. Surprisingly, mobile phones have only minimally been incorporated into bottom-up research approaches in subsistence marketplaces and/or ethnographic transformative research methodologies and methods. To begin addressing this important gap, the authors conducted a systematic review of the literature on mobile phones and ethnography and then gained practical experience with a new bottom-up methodology called mobile phone visual ethnography (MpVE). Using research experiences as data, the authors share micro-level details about African microentrepreneurial everyday life and highlight important methodological issues associated with conducting MpVE in subsistence marketplaces. They find that MpVE affords methodological naturalism, unpacks informant perspectives of everyday life, captures human mobility within marketplaces, and begins to democratize the research process. In doing so, this article offers a new way of giving voice to subsistence marketplace populations through more active and visible participation in research.

A RECIPE FOR CONSUMER INSIGHT

Consumer insights are all around us. Yet it can be difficult for students to examine everyday consumption practices and see how this understanding has application. Using the simple premise of a favorite family recipe, students learn how insight can be hidden in plain sight. Beginning with conducting an in-depth interview, the assignment gives students the opportunity to discover connections to course concepts and apply consumer insights through in-class and independent exercises designed to facilitate critical and creative thinking. The assignment fosters inquisitiveness about common consumption practices and instills a discovery approach to marketing challenges.

Everyday Consumption of Russian Youth in Small Towns and Villages

AbstractThis article analyses the everyday consumption of young people who live in villages and small towns in modern‐day Russia. Based on 59 semi‐structured interviews conducted in three districts of the Leningrad region, the authors try to answer the following questions: How does everyday consumption fit in the biographical experience of rural youth? What consumption styles are implemented in small towns and villages? The conceptual framework of the analysis is the perspective of ‘the lifestyle’, which connects everyday consumption practices with the construction of youth identities. The authors come to the conclusion that the differentiation of the consumption styles of modern rural residents can be explained in the context of life strategies, construed on the basis of family capital, education, employment and orientation towards success. The article describes four basic styles that characterise the consumption of young rural residents, namely ‘family’, ‘status‐oriented’, ‘individualistic’ and ‘conformist’ styles.

Texturing Waste: Attachment and Identity in EveryDay Consumption and Waste Practices

Waste has often been a target of literature and policy promoting pro-environmental behaviour. However, little attention has been paid to how subjects interpret and construct waste in their daily lives. In this article we develop a synthesis of practice theory and psycho-social concepts of attachment and transitional space to explore how biographically patterned relationships and attachments to practice shape subjects’ understandings of resource consumption and disposal. Deploying biographical interview data produced by the Energy Biographies Project, we illustrate how tangible, intersubjective and interdependent experiences rub up against cultural and behavioural norms, reshaping the meanings and strategies through which subjects interpret and manage waste.

Coffee people in Tehran, Glasgow and Amsterdam

Despite the diversity of consumption and class practices of the new urban middle classes within and between societies, they share some qualities. Focusing on the lifestyles and mentalities of regulars of specialty coffee bars in Tehran, Glasgow and Amsterdam, this study explores common characteristics of this group. Our ethnography suggests that through their everyday consumption practices, coffee people share a set of ethical dispositions and cultural practices among which this article focuses on the metropolitan body, cosmopolitanism and environmentalism.

Toward an understanding of young consumers' daily consumption practices in post-Doi Moi Vietnam

More than 30years have passed since Doi Moi, the economic and political reforms that transformed Vietnam into a lower middle-income market from one of the world's poorest markets. This transformation brought about changes in the consumption practices of Vietnamese consumers. Despite several studies focusing on these changes, the impact of the government's politics on young Vietnamese consumers' consumption practices has been largely unexamined. This study explores how young Vietnamese consumers develop and express their self-identity through their everyday consumption practices. Our findings from in-depth interviews and participatory observation indicate that consumption fosters reflexive self-awareness concerning the young consumers' competences, body sensitivities, and distinctive tastes in response to the control exerted by the government. The findings also reveal that young Vietnamese consumers use their everyday consumption practices to achieve individualization through self-emancipation, self-enrichment, and self-actualization, and to achieve socialization through self-authentication and self-cultivation. In this way, young Vietnamese consumers reject the communist identity and lifestyles promoted by the government.

Convenience as care: Culinary antinomies in practice

This paper addresses the social and cultural significance of convenience food, often regarded as among the least healthy and most unsustainable of dietary options, subject to frequent moral disapprobation. The paper focuses, in particular, on the relationship between convenience and care, conventionally seen in oppositional terms as a culinary antinomy. Informed by a ‘theories of practice’ approach, the paper presents empirical evidence from ethnographically-informed research on everyday consumption practices in the UK to demonstrate how convenience foods can be used as an expression of care rather than as its antithesis. The paper uses Fisher and Tronto’s theorisation of caring about, taking care of, caregiving and care-receiving to draw out the dynamics of this morally contested social practice.

“Consuming” national identity in Western Ukraine

This paper represents an attempt to study national identity in the post-Soviet context through the lens of everyday life practices. Building on ideas of banal nationalism and consumer citizenship, and with support of empirical evidence collected in l'viv, Ukraine, this paper demonstrates how national identity becomes materialized in everyday life through consumption practices and objects of consumption. While exploring objects and practices that are not originally national in scope but infused with national meanings by ordinary people, it will be shown how consumption becomes an arena for the expression and renegotiation of national self-portraits. Differences in national meanings among residents of l'viv belonging to two different language groups will highlight the diversity of ways and means by which people express their national sensibilities. By exploring national meanings in everyday consumption practices of Ukrainian citizens, this study aims to provide an alternative perspective on post-Soviet nation-building and contribute to the current debate on the position and identity of the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine.

Elderly consumers’ sensitivity to corporate social performance

Purpose This paper aims to examine the Japanese elderly consumer sensitivity to corporate social performance (CSP) and how this sensitivity influences their everyday consumption. Design/methodology/approach The authors used a mixed method research approach, which was organised into two sequential stages: a survey (N = 199) and two focus group investigations (N = 16). Findings The study found that married, aged and high-income-earning consumers who have a higher media exposure to CSP information show high sensitivity towards CSP. The focus groups revealed that the elderly consumers have a myopic view of CSP which is subjected to context-specific factors relating to CSP of Japanese firms. Showing a high level of tolerance towards the firms with adverse CSP records, the elderly consumers tend to make their consumption decisions based on personal benefits, as opposed to CSP records of the firms. The focus groups’ findings are organised into four thematic categories. Practical implications The study highlights the predictability of consumer sensitivity to CSP using demographic factors. The practitioners targeting elderly consumers using CSP programmes should design them with a focus on social issues, including gender equality, employment opportunities for the disabled and new employment opportunities, as they constitute CSP sensitivities among elderly consumers. Originality/value Studies on consumers’ perceptions towards CSP in Japan are scarce. Specifically, studies aimed at the elderly consumer segment of the Japanese society are limited. Therefore, this study endeavours to bridge this gap by exploring the Japanese elderly consumer sensitivity to CSP and its role in everyday consumption practices.

Growing a lifestyle movement? Exploring identity‐work and lifestyle politics in urban food cultivation

AbstractThis article elaborates how consumers engage with global socioecological issues on an everyday basis through adopting local lifestyles that comprise both consumption and production activities. Using urban food cultivation as an illustrative case, we highlight how devotion to co‐production can work as a counter‐hegemonic strategy of the political consumer. Building on qualitative data generated through 28 problem‐centred interviews with urban farmers and regular volunteers from a total of 12 different urban agriculture projects in New York City, the study discerns the motivational mechanisms and ascribed meanings underlying people's propensity to grow food in the city. Findings show that urban food cultivation is driven by entangled, nonprioritized motives that include personal desires as well as socioecological concerns. Moreover, urban food cultivation supports processes of reflexive identity‐formation while it allows its adherents to indulge in a shared ethos of re‐engagement with nature, meaningful work and authenticity. While not engaging in conventional protests or political processes, urban agriculture advocates are assured that by reorienting their everyday consumption practices and participating in local food cultivation, they collectively can induce social change.

Consumption in China: How China’s New Consumer Ideology Is Shaping the Nation by LiAnne Yu (review)

Reviewed by: Consumption in China: How China’s New Consumer Ideology Is Shaping the Nation by LiAnne Yu Doris Duangboudda LiAnne Yu, Consumption in China: How China’s New Consumer Ideology Is Shaping the Nation. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014. 176 pp. China has experienced profound political and socioeconomic changes in the last few decades. Within the past few years, however, consumption has dominated the frenzied pace of change, impacting social life immensely. LiAnne Yu’s insightful book, Consumption in China: How China’s New Consumer Ideology is Shaping the Nation, is an engaging account of everyday consumption practices currently taking shape in the country. Through interviews and home visits, as well as drawing from more than 20 years of visits to and extended time spent in the country as an independent anthropologist and consumer insights strategist, Yu focuses on consumers mainly in the cosmopolitan cities of Shanghai and Beijing who are considered symbols of the country’s growing wealth. Having gone through decades of dearth under Mao, and then decades more of transition to a market economy after reforms began in the late 1970s, people now have considerable expendable income and myriad goods from which to choose. Long gone are the austerity and anti-bourgeois ideas of Maoism. The state now encourages domestic consumption and, along with it, promotes very different values that are transforming multiple dimensions of social life. Consumption in China examines these transformations, with each chapter centered around a theme: “Spaces,” “Status,” “Lifestyles,” “Commodification,” and “Awareness.” These five chapters, along with an introduction and conclusion, can be read in any order. This book complements Karl Gerth’s 2011 book on consumption, As China Goes, So Goes the World, and the author notes she is inspired by Thorstein Veblen (1899), Michel de Certeau (1984), and Mark Liechty (2003), especially the latter’s [End Page 841] ideas of treating class as a set of processes that are continually renegotiated. The ends of the five core chapters each contain a section called “Theoretical Considerations,” which summarizes the main points of the chapter and draws out key lines of conceptual inquiry. “Spaces” examines the experiences people have in physical spaces specific to consumption, such as restaurants and malls, as well as virtual spaces, and shows how these spaces allow for both individuals and families to express social distinction. Because grandparents and parents have had very different experiences with consumption in previous decades, young people learn how to be good consumers from spaces outside the family. Yu distances herself from those who study the Internet as what it could be, often in the frame of economic development and political freedom. Instead, she focuses on what it is, namely, “a dynamic space of consumer experimentation, discovery, and sharing” (50) that “has become the center of China’s consumer revolution” (59). Understanding the Internet’s role in consumer experience is critical, as China has nearly 200 million online shoppers (compared to the 170 million in the US) (50). She coins the term “virtu-real” to signify consumer behavior that moves seamlessly between virtual and physical spaces. In one salient example, a young office worker relates to Yu how she planned an outing with coworkers over social media: the group agreed on the restaurant over QQ (a form of social media), downloaded coupons onto their phones, followed map directions, posted food photos, and received friends’ comments on their profiles about the pictures. Since virtual spaces like QQ and other social media, and the Internet in general, are so critical to the consumer experience in China today, it seems Taobao (an online marketplace) could have received much more attention as it is one of the main venues for online shopping. Yu spends little time on this and other Internet sites, which is unfortunate given her claim in the introduction that online services in China are in many ways more advanced than online services in the West (16). I would agree with her statement, and have my own ideas for why they might be more advanced, but explicating these processes would help readers better understand how dominant the Internet is in consumers’ lives in China. In “Status,” Yu shows how Chinese consumers communicate social distinction through conspicuous...

Gendering Low-Carbon Life among Retirees in Urban China

The aim of this article is to examine how questions related to age and gender become articulated in a climate change mitigation campaign based in an urban residential community in Hangzhou in eastern China. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the community, the article presents a case study of this campaign. A group of community officials and retired residents are promoting ‘low-carbon life’, their aim being to alter a range of everyday consumption practices. During the campaign, a handful of retired women emerged as campaign role models and leaders of campaign activities, as well as producing ‘low-carbon handicrafts’ made from reused materials. The campaigners are approaching low-carbon life as a set of enjoyable hobby-like activities where women in particular reactivate skills acquired during the Mao era, thus coming to be seen as role models by local officials and journalists. The study contributes to the emerging field of climate ethnography by illustrating how a group of Chinese citizens make sense of climate politics by recasting climate-related issues, connecting these to their everyday life concerns and engaging in practical campaign work anchored in local material culture.