Anthropology Of Consumption

With an emphasis on everyday life, this respected text offers a lively and perceptive account of the key theories and ideas which dominate the field of consumption and consumer culture. Engaging case studies describe forms of consumption familiar to the student, provide some historical context, and illustrate how a range of theoretical perspectives – from theories of practice, to semiotics, to psychoanalysis – apply. Written by an experienced teacher, the book offers a comprehensive grounding drawing on the literature in sociology, geography, cultural studies, and anthropology. This new revised and expanded edition includes more extended discussion of gender, the senses, sustainability, globalization, and the environment, as well as a brand new chapter on the ethics of consumption.

In virtual worlds, consumption of digital, virtual commodities is apparently limitless. In game-oriented worlds like World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy XI the acquisition of desirable goods is limited only by skill, time and patience – but mostly patience. Given enough attempts to kill an enormously powerful monster, each player will receive the item she desires. What limits can be meaningfully placed on consumption in an economy of such apparent abundance that patience is the main obstacle to possession, a world in which everyone could eventually acquire everything given enough time?

This paper examines two limits of a spectrum of self-imposed limits to virtual consumption as explained by players of Final Fantasy XI with the moral limits of arbitrage at one end, and a focus on collective accumulation of wealth at the other. The moral constraints on arbitrage in FFXI are tied to a deeply rooted sense of economic fairplay and a strong – and surprisingly pervasive, given that this research was conducted before the financial crisis – ideology of “fair” rather than “free” markets. Some economic behaviour that is morally questionable, such as price gouging and supply manipulation, is understood not only as market manipulation that detracts from users’ game play experience, but also as a threat to players’ enjoyment of the virtual world of FFXI as a commodity, and their acquisition of digital virtual commodities. Players band together in linkshells (guilds) in FFXI to defeat powerful foes and acquire powerful and highly desirable equipment, or more baldly put, to increase their consumption capacity. Distribution of goods through these organisations can be a fraught affair, but generally, the spoils of conquest are distributed evenly. Though such rewards are individually held, the prestige and power of the organisation is increased as its members acquire increasingly sought-after goods, transforming individual accumulation and consumption into collective achievement.

ABSTRACT In the article, we make an attempt at discussing what it means that our reality is commodified, what the consequences of this are, how we commodify our bodies and what role in this process is played by cyborgization, as well as what the relation between commodification and disembodiment is. These issues seem to be significant, because when the consumptionist and neoliberal discourse is reconstructed, the aspect of commodification of a human through cyborgization is omitted or marginalized. And such a context of commodification seems to be especially important, as it constitutes the idea of radical questioning of a biological body as a commodity of high market value. Thus, it constitutes the paradox of the commodification of body, i.e. a situation when the most attractive (from the consumer’s point view) body is a body that is disembodied to the maximum.

Energy use is a very important question nowadays in the context of global warming and the cost of energy. "Energy conservation" is paradoxal: environmental awareness is increasing, but so is energy demand. Sociological knowledge concerning energy uses and energy savings remain important to understand the possible evolution of practices and values and thus possible future energy policies. Can the "consumer society" become a "less energyintensive" society? This paper's purpose was to understand how individuals, at each stage of life, in the context of historic events and intra-familial relationships, build a specific relationship to energy and "energy care" (paying attention to energy) and a specific appropriation of public policies, energyefficient technologies and environmental discourses. The notion of "logics of action" provides a way to combine the analysis of historical events and the analysis of daily practices, integrating the way people act, the justification of actions and the dynamics of life course stages. The social age approach has policy implications, for example, helping to segment people's profiles and to tailor the tools to age groups. The paper also questions the fact that some policies focus on children to transmit their messages. This paper is based on the analysis of several qualitative studies in various age groups of French people.

""Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century cross-cuts the ranks of important books on social history, consumerism, contemporary culture, the meaning of material culture, domestic architecture, and household ethnoarchaeology. Far richer in information and more incisive than America at Home (Smolan and Erwitt), it also moves well beyond Rick Smolan's Day in the Life series. It is a distant cousin of Material World and Hungry Planet in content and style, but represents a blend of rigorous science and photography that none of these books can claim. Using archaeological approaches to human material culture, this volume offers unprecedented access to the middle-class American home through the kaleidoscopic lens of no-limits photography and many kinds of never-before acquired data about how people actually live their lives at home. Media reactions to early findings from the nine-year project that spawned this book indicate that it will appeal not only to scientists but also to the book-buying public, people who share intense curiosity about what goes on at home in their neighborhoods. Many who read the book will see their own lives mirrored in these pages and can reflect on how other people cope with their mountains of possessions and other daily challenges. Readers abroad will be equally fascinated by the contrasts between their own kinds of materialism and the typical American experience, as a sample of Italians' and Swedes' responses to our corpus of photographs and our study's findings have demonstrated. The book will interest a range of designers, builders, and architects as well as scholars and students who research various facets of U.S. and global consumerism, cultural history, and economic history."

Winner of the Jo Anne Stolaroff Cotsen Prize - 2012

The first edition (July 2012) sold out in late summer 2012.  The second printing is available on as of October 15, 2012.

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"When I Wear My Alligator Boots examines how the lives of dispossessed men and women are affected by the rise of narcotrafficking along the U.S.-Mexico border. In particular, the book explores a crucial tension at the heart of the “war on drugs”: despite the violence and suffering brought on by drug cartels, for the rural poor in Mexico’s north, narcotrafficking offers one of the few paths to upward mobility and is a powerful source of cultural meanings and local prestige.

In the borderlands, traces of the drug trade are everywhere: from gang violence in cities to drug addiction in rural villages, from the vibrant folklore popularized in the narco-corridos of Norteña music to the icon of Jesús Malverde, the “patron saint” of narcos, tucked beneath the shirts of local people. In When I Wear My Alligator Boots, the author explores the everyday reality of the drug trade by living alongside its low-level workers, who live at the edges of the violence generated by the militarization of the war on drugs. Rather than telling the story of the powerful cartel leaders, the book focuses on the women who occasionally make their sandwiches, the low-level businessmen who launder their money, the addicts who consume their products, the mules who carry their money and drugs across borders, and the men and women who serve out prison sentences when their bosses' operations go awry."

Focusing on car consumption and the middle class in urban China, this book examines various relationships explicitly connected to "car-oriented mobility" or "the automotive regime," defined as "a social and technical assemblage" of "humans, machines, roads and other spaces, representations, regulatory institutions and a host of related businesses and infrastructural features" (2). Jun Zhang aims to show how car-oriented mobility "is shaped by and in turn reconfigures di erent forms of social interaction, hierarchy, authority, and political engagement" in "the making of the middle class, the primary group of car owners" (10). The book's research relies on the methodology of ethnographic fieldwork in Guangzhou and surrounding urban areas from 2006 to 2016, including interviewing car owners, attending car license auctions, participating in driving tours, and a four-month internship at a local car dealer from 2006 to 2007. After a historical outline of the development of the car industry in China since the early twentieth century, the author produces a detailed account of topics explicitly related to the fieldwork: sociality (chapter 1), family (chapter 2), work at a car dealership (chapters 3 and 4), license plate auctions (chapter 5), and residential parking (chapter 6). This rich ethnography will be a benchmark for any forthcoming scholarly work on car consumption in China. It is in the context of car consumption that the book contributes to the scholarship on the middle class in urban China. Zhang's main interlocutors are potential and actual car buyers, owners, entrepreneurs, sales and maintenance people, and car-owning residents in a gated community. Mostly born between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, they tend to have a highereducation background, and most are salaried professionals, such as lawyers, college professors, and engineers, as well as government employees. Their estimated annual income ranges from US$17,970 to $150,000 (6). Zhang's interlocutors may appear to be representative of C. Wright Mills' "white collar" professional middle class. In Zhang's ethnographic account, this middle class has multiple meanings. Owning such things as apartments and cars, as a group they are among the "midpropertied" (zhongchan) but without the status of "class" (jieji) or "stratum" (jieceng). They use "in-betweenness" or "middleness" to characterize their social mobility. Additionally, they use suzhi (quality), a hybrid form of human capital and conduct, to delineate class boundaries between themselves and others. Thus, this Chinese middle class-characterized by property ownership, correlated mobility in social life worlds (rather than social projects or nonlife worlds), and a civilized conduct-is neither comfortably defined by Mills' "white collar" nor

In 2013 – the year when CO2 emissions hit the 400 ppm threshold for the first time in human history – the annual State of the World report (Worldwatch Institute 2013) was devoted to understanding whether achieving a sustainable society is still possible. Part two of the report, Getting to True Sustainability, opened with a call for the re-engineering of cultures to create a sustainable civilisation. In her contribution to it, anthropologist Melissa Leach reflects on the difficulty of achieving sustainability due to path dependencies in infrastructure (oil refineries, combine-harvesters, fridge-freezers, etc.) and social systems (corporations, governments, habits, etc.). Leach (2013: 236)
writes: ‘The challenge is … to open up understanding and action around sustainability to reveal and empower alternative pathways that might currently be hidden, including those that emerge from the experiences, knowledge, and creativity of … citizens … in particular places’. In this chapter I take up Leach’s challenge by offering an ethnographic understanding of ‘quiet sustainability’ (Smith and Jehlička 2013) in the form of organic food consumption. Looking at organic foods in Palermo, Italy from a ‘post-Pasteurian’ perspective (Paxson 2012), I pay particular attention to those aspects concerned with the cultural perception of environmental problems and the role of science and technology in food production (Lien and Nerlich 2004). By doing so, I argue that the beliefs and feelings of people who eat organic foods allow a glimpse of the values that stem from a rejection of excess, which has several points of contact with the most recent sustainability theories of the Anthropocene (Moore 2016) and planetary boundaries (Wijkman and Rockström 2012).

This Spanish/French documentary explores the industrial practice of planned obsolescence. Weaving together a narrative of historical cartel machinations, shifts in engineering ethics, and a surge of criticisms of consumption this film makes a strong argument that the current neo-liberal capitalist model based on the constant "consume and discard" philosophy of planned obsolescence is unsustainable on our finite planet.

Description

Pretty Modern is a riveting account of Brazil’s emergence as a global leader in plastic surgery. Intrigued by a Carnaval parade that mysteriously paid homage to a Rio de Janeiro plastic surgeon, anthropologist Alexander Edmonds conducted research that took him from Ipanema socialite circles to glitzy telenovela studios to the packed waiting rooms of public hospitals offering free cosmetic surgery. The result is provocative exploration of the erotic, commercial, and intimate aspects of beauty in a nation with extremes of wealth and poverty and a reputation for natural sensuality. Drawing on conversations with maids and their elite mistresses, divorced housewives, black celebrities, and favela residents aspiring to be fashion models, Edmonds analyzes what sexual desirability means and does for women in different social positions. He argues that beauty is a distinct realm of modern experience that does not simply reflect other inequalities. It mimics the ambiguous emancipatory potential of capital, challenging traditional hierarchies while luring consumers into a sexual culture that reduces the body to the brute biological criteria of attractiveness. Illustrated with color photographs, Pretty Modern offers a fresh theoretical perspective on the significance of female beauty in consumer capitalism.

The idea for this essay came to me while interviewing a Vietnamese journalist and small businessman in Oimachi, just off Tokyo's Yamanote line. He had been telling me, with resignation, that after more than a decade of activism for Vietnamese and other migrant community causes in Japan, he had finally given up in the face of official immovability and indifference. A little like a traditional Vietnamese mandarin in times of trouble, he had retreated into scholarly pursuits. After a pause, he brightened up as he began to describe the recent emergence of a Japanese craze for things Vietnamese, telling me with some pride how not long ago he had had a camera crew from NHK television in his tiny shop. Pulling a magazine out of his desk drawer, he bemusedly translated the text on the cover into Vietnamese. One of the bold headlines read "[Let's go] To 'cheap' 'cute' things paradise Vietnam." 1 positions 12:2

Since the turn of the century, a considerable body of work has developed in what is now known in English as " food studies. " While this body of work is largely interdis-ciplinary, exhibiting many fruitful overlaps across academic boundaries, disciplines still maintain their own particular trajectories in it, which have developed over time in relation to specific substantive issues. The new book by Alan Warde, professor of sociology at the University of Manchester, tries to articulate a specifically sociological approach to consumption, and particularly eating, by drawing on the most recent developments in practice theory. Forty-four years after the publication of Pierre Bourdieu's Outline of a Theory of Practice [1972], it seems that practice-theoretical approaches to social life are still alive and well (Warde is, after all, one of the foremost experts on Bourdieu).

In the article, we make an attempt at discussing what it means that our reality is commodified, what the consequences of this are, how we commodify our bodies and what role in this process is played by cyborgization, as well as what the relation between commodification and disembodiment is. These issues seem to be significant because when the consumptionist and neo-liberal discourse is reconstructed, the aspect of commodification of a human being through cyborgization is omitted or marginalized. Yet such a context of commodification seems to be especially important as it constitutes the idea of radical questioning of a biological body as a commodity of a high market value. Thus, it constitutes the paradox of the commodification of body, i.e. a situation when a body that is the most attractive from the consumer's viewpoint is a body that is disembodied to the maximum.

This article examines five common misunderstandings about case-study research: (a) theoretical knowledge is more valuable than practical knowledge; (b) one cannot generalize from a single case, therefore, the single-case study cannot contribute to scientific development; (c) the case study is most useful for generating hypotheses, whereas other methods are more suitable for hypotheses testing and theory building; (d) the case study contains a bias toward verification; and (e) it is often difficult to summarize specific case studies. This article explains and corrects these misunderstandings one by one and concludes with the Kuhnian insight that a scientific discipline without a large number of thoroughly executed case studies is a discipline without systematic production of exemplars, and a discipline without exemplars is an ineffective one. Social science may be strengthened by the execution of a greater number of good case studies.

Nelle scienze sociali gli studi sul consumo sembrano essere attraversati da una tensione costante tra due poli interpretativi: quello che vede le merci alla base di un processo di alienazione nelle pratiche quotidiane e, all’opposto, quello che privilegia l’analisi degli scambi simbolici, che definiscono il consumo come costruzione di legami sociali e attività di tipo rituale. Gli oggetti ci rendono schiavi o, al contrario, ci liberano da numerose costrizioni? Attraverso gli oggetti ci isoliamo dal mondo o, diversamente, li usiamo per costruire relazioni sociali? Lo shopping è una pratica di tipo edonistico o un modo per manifestare l’amore verso i propri cari? Nel testo si insinua il dubbio che il consumo non si esaurisca nell’acquisto ma si configuri piuttosto come una relazione – una sorta di opening gift – dove diversi soggetti si vincolano tra di loro in un rapporto che assume forme sempre più complesse di definizione del sé.

Il volume illustra gli ambiti di ricerca, le teorie e i concetti dell’antropologia del consumo in una prospettiva etnografica.

This study examines a consumer trend involving branded novelty T-shirts which appropriate folk and official markers of being Filipino in their designs, such as maps, heroes, and food. By employing concepts about things and clothing drawn from material culture studies, this study assumes that T-shirts are vehicles of political content and therefore not only reflect but shape how people identify themselves and others. Using a multimodal approach comprised of desk research, cyberethnography, unstructured interviews, focus group discussions and a self administered questionnaire, this research explores how designers and consumers engage with T-shirts as they relate with those who are most influential to their everyday cultural projects. This study emphasizes how designers and consumers rely on various material qualities of the T-shirt to reproduce and resist dominant cultural categories. In doing so, this study highlights how T-shirts are imbued with agency, and just like human actors, they are able to further and frustrate daily intentions. All in all, this research is an attempt to write a theoretically-informed ethnography that demonstrates the virtues of understanding cultural processes by examining artefacts of fashion at the junction of business culture and the anthropology of consumption.

Keywords: fashion, identity, design, business, Material Culture Studies

Consumers today do not only seek to satisfy their needs any more, they also seek to create the experience and symbols. One of the most important aspects of consumption that allows individual expression is clothing. Since the clothing is able to provide the information of one's social status, personality, or attractiveness clothing can be defined as the medium of communication which provides the wide array of social information. Among all demographic segments teenagers are the most sensitive group when it comes to clothing. Since today's teenagers present themselves as the 'trend setters' who are going to accept 'new 'trends faster than anyone Authors assume that current cultural trends will be better illustrated by this group. Furthermore they represent experimental consumer who are 'fancy' to explore many new things. Therefore, the teenagers are very suitable marketing target group, but very hard to analyse and predict.

A survey of all the archaeological and museum collections of pipes in the country of Surrey, which lies immediately to the south of Greater London in England.  The paper describes the bowl forms, makers' marks and decorative styles found here and provides an important regional reference work for pipes from the South East of Britain.  The paper includes a provisional list of pipemakers and is illustrated with hundreds of drawings of the pipes produced and found in the county.

"The rich body of literature on the cultural legacies of East Germany has privileged white German perspectives on material culture at the expense of non- white and non-European encounters with socialist things. In shifting the spatial lens to the global South, and to the foreign students and workers who lived for extended periods in East Germany, I trouble the implicit whiteness in the study of GDR cultural memory. Popular identification with GDR goods extended beyond the borders of Germany to newly decolonized countries that were the beneficiaries of  the  GDR’s  solidarity  policies.  Using  the  example  of  Vietnam,  I  challenge formulations  of  Ostalgie  as  a  site  of  white  German  memory  production  only, highlighting consumption of East German products by racialized foreign Others. In  examining  the  objects  that  Vietnamese  migrants  amassed  and  transported back to Vietnam, and their subsequent use and circulation through today, I offer a  different  take  on  the  temporal  and  spatial  relationship  between  people  and commodities, one that assigns value and agency to imported socialist things. In contrast to reunified Germany, where socialist-era goods were deemed disposable and  obsolete,  in  Vietnam,  East  German  products  did  not  lose  their  utility  and associations with modernity. The essay argues for a more inclusive exploration of memory and approach to Ostalgie that takes seriously the alternative logics of time, space, and materiality that informed the circuits of consumption, trade, and
meaning of GDR things."

In this article we analyse Fair Trade as a form of non-state regulation, building on the literature on the internal politics and governance of Fair Trade International (FTI) certification. We focus on recent developments in the FTI certification system, including the split of Fair Trade USA from FTI and the emergence of the Small Producer’s Symbol (SPP) as an alternative to FTI certification. We highlight the role of the three regional Producer Networks, in particular the Latin American Producer Network, the CLAC, in the politics and governance of the FTI system. In order to analyse these issues we employ an alternative reading of Karl Polanyi’s work in relation to Fair Trade. We problematise the claim made by some in the literature that FTI certification is an example of Polanyi’s concept of re-embedding. Instead, we draw on Polanyi’s concept of oversight to analyse Fair Trade certification. We argue that the emergence of the SPP out of the CLAC shows promise for being a mechanism of oversight more reflective of Polanyian re-embedding than FTI certification. We also emphasise how the growth of the SPP and the pressure from the Producer Networks have prompted governance reform within the FTI system.

Phronetic organizational research is an approach to the study of management and organizations focusing on ethics and power. It is based on a contemporary interpretation of the Aristotelian concept phronesis, usually as ‘prudence’. Phronesis is the ability to think and act in relation to values, to deliberate about ‘things that are good or bad for humans’ in the words of Aristotle (1976:1140a24–b12). Phronetic organizational research effectively provides answers to the following four value-rational questions, for specific problematics in management and organization studies: 1. Where are we going with this specific management problematic? 2. Who gains and who loses, and by which mechanisms of power? 3. Is this development desirable? 4. What, if anything, should we do about it?

A partir de uma discussão sobre materialidade, antropologia da arte e antropologia do consumo  argumento que as escolhas estéticas em torno dos cabelos femininos funk buscam simultaneamente desestabilizar representações fixas sobre a identidade negra e desfazer a arraigada sobreposição que se faz no Brasil entre classe social e raça.

The Aalborg Project may be interpreted as a metaphor of modern politics, modern administration and planning, and of modernity itself. The basic idea of the project was comprehensive, coherent, and innovative, and it was based on rational and democratic argument. During implementation, however, when idea met reality, the play of Machiavellian princes, Nietzschean will to power, and Foucauldian rationality-as-rationalization resulted in the fragmentation of the project.

At the same time that case studies are widely used and have produced canonical texts, it may be observed that the case study as a methodology is generally held in low regard, or is simply ignored, within the academy. For example, only 2 of the 30 top-ranked U.S. graduate programs in political science require a dedicated graduate course in case study or qualitative methods, and a full third of these programs do not even offer such a course. In contrast, all of the top 30 programs offer courses in quantitative methods and almost all of them require training in such methods, often several courses. In identifying this paradox of the case study’s wide use and low regard, Gerring rightly remarks that the case study survives in a “curious methodological limbo,” and that the reason is that the method is poorly understood. In what follows, we will try to resolve Gerring’s paradox and help case study research gain wider use and acceptance.

Abstract: The developmentalist gaze of the Fair Trade movement is on Global South producers. In this article we turn our analytic gaze toward North American fair traders to explore the racialized, neocolonial power relations in which these movement actors are implicated. Section One is a brief historical sketch of Fair Trade certification. We argue that the certification system is a multi-sited, global institution that is shaped by and shapes neocolonial power relations in Fair Trade by exploring the consolidation and more recent splintering of the international certification system. Section Two provides a postcolonial critique of developmentalism, with a focus on the timing of development, in order to lay a foundation for the remaining sections. In Section Three we analyze the spatiality of Fair Trade, with an emphasis on what and who are missing from or erased by the structural and conceptual frameworks of Fair Trade. In Section Four we explore the relationship between Fair Trade, commodity fetishism, and the developmentalist conception of space/time propagated by Fair Trade advocates. Section Five is a critical analysis of the neocolonialist and racist discourse of Fair Trade, with a focus on the “helping” discourse. We contend that as Global North fair traders strive to “help” Global South producers, they re-entrench neocolonial narratives of white supremacy and the desire to develop.

The focus of this conceptual paper is the Khan Shatyr mall in Astana, designed by British architect Sir Norman Foster and opened in 2010, and its implications for our understanding of the re-enchantment of consumption. A detailed discussion of the mall, which pays close attention to its architectural design, is followed by a conclusion in which I outline the need for a new approach to the re-enchantment of consumption. In particular, I call for: more research to be conducted on non-Western retail environments; consideration of mall architecture; and a fundamentally interdisciplinary approach to re-enchantment, which would lay greater emphasis on the political, geographical and socio-economic contexts of retail marketing and shopping mall design.

Unravelling Denim enthographically: materiality anD paraDoxical socio-environmental meshworks. This article combines the anthropology of commodities with the re-materialization of anthropological thought to examine the role played by denim jeans in the reconfiguration of social, economic and environmental processes in a small town in Tlaxcala, Mexico. The aim is to unravel the social and environmental meshwork woven by the local production of jeans and show how this dynamic and its material implications has profoundly permeated the townspeople lives. The jeans, together with the subjects that manipulate and transform them, as well as other objects and nonhuman subjects, all have co-produced an uncertain, uneven and alienating arena that is also a reflection of neoliberalism.

El presente texto se propone poner de relieve el significado que adquiere el papel ritual que desempeñan las actividades de consumo en las presentes sociedades capitalistas, en cuanto expresión de un género de sociabilidad posmoderna, dentro del cual actividades en principio profanas destinadas a satisfacer estrictas necesidades de subsistencia económica cumplen sin embargo la citada función ritual como trasunto de su dimensión neo-sacramental, enfatizando de este modo la intrascendencia definitoria, en el sentido literal del término, que caracteriza a tales sociedades. El artículo concluye argumentando cómo la inmanencia que así es propia de la ritualidad posmoderna abre la vía hacia un nuevo género de religación social ya no basada en la adhesión individual y colectiva a una verdad trascendente de cualquier tipo, poniendo así las condiciones para la eventual emergencia de las sociedades autónomas con las que han soñado los reformadores sociales de todas las épocas.

Alcohol is a ubiquitous part of everyday life, particularly in rural communities where its production and distribution are closely intertwined with consumption. As a medium for communication with the ancestors, it has always had a central place in African religious belief. And in urban and rural areas alike, drinking provides a focal point for relaxation and socializing. Alcohol’s stimulating effect on social exchange has long been appreciated, with the oral cultural inheritance of agrarian societies throughout the continent putting a premium on face-to-face social exchange. Indeed, the range of human emotions kindled by alcohol, from celebratory happiness to dark despair, and from bonhomie to violent revenge imparts drama and enigma to the comparative study of alcohol usage. And to this alluring cocktail can be added the calculating maneuvres of the alcohol industry and state officials maximizing sales and fiscal revenue from alcohol. 
The study of alcohol usage strategically situates the analyst in a broad concourse of religious, political, economic, psychological, social and physiological phenomena, raising a myriad of methodological possibilities and problems. Nonetheless, academic research on alcohol in Africa until recently has been restricted primarily to anthropologists. Their interest was sparked by a material culture perspective, or as a by-product of general ethnographic studies. The notion of alcohol usage as a reflection of society in general emanates from these studies.

In this paper we argue that the use of the communicative theory of Jürgen Habermas in planning theory is problematic because it hampers an understanding of how power shapes planning. We posit an alternative approach based on the power analytics of Michel Foucault which focuses on ‘what is actually done’, as opposed to Habermas’s focus on ‘what should be done’. We discuss how the Foucauldian stance problematises planning, asking difficult questions about the treatment of legitimacy, rationality, knowledge and spatiality. We conclude that Foucault offers a type of analytic planning theory which offers better prospects than does Habermas for those interested in understanding and bringing about democratic social change through planning.

Tanto na literatura científica disponível sobre pessoas trans quanto no senso comum, é frequente a referência a um corpo que mescla características convencionalmente masculinas e femininas como um corpo prototravesti ou pretransexual. Este trabalho, que tem o propósito de pôr em revista tal premissa, consiste em um estudo etnográfico com um jovem negro de classe popular cuja apresentação visual se enquadra nesse perfil (de inconformidade de gênero). No curso da pesquisa foi possível observar, a partir da compreensão do corpo como um capital, um processo de desfeminilização levado a cabo por meu interlocutor, orientado pela necessidade de inserção no mercado de trabalho e por um ávido desejo de ascender socialmente. Esta etnografia, ao complicar a linearidade do chamado modelo progressivo ou etapista de identidade trans, termina por lançar luz para as possíveis condições de emergência da identidade gay em um contexto periférico. Enquanto uma atribuição respeitável, esta é acionada em oposição às vexatórias categorias de bicha e viado, e reclama um expediente de afastamento moral de seus vizinhos da favela por parte do sujeito etnográfico. Articula-se nessa laboriosa fabricação de identidade sexual não apenas o gênero como também a classe e o poder de consumo. Por fim, argumento que o projeto de mobilidade ascendente é a chave para a mediação e compreensão da transformação corporal operada. Através de um roteiro por vezes claudicante, meu colaborador de pesquisa busca recursos para perseguir o sonho de um diploma universitário, apostando em um poderoso encontro entre capital corporal e cultural.

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Both in the available scientific literature regarding transgender persons and in common sense, we find reference to a body, which mixes conventionally masculine and feminine characteristics like a pre-transsexual. The present research, which aims to reconsider such a premise, consists in an ethnographic study of a black working class young whose visual self-presentation fits this profile (of gender nonconforming). In the course of the research, it was possible to observe, based on an understanding of the body as capital, a process of defeminization undertaken by my interlocutor, aimed to fulfill a need to integrate themselves into the labor market and from an avid desire for social ascension. This ethnography, by complicating the linearity of the so-called progressive or step-by-step model of transgender identity, ends up shedding light on the possible conditions of emergence of gay identity on the urban outskirts. As a respectable attribution, it is used in opposition to the derogatory categories of faggot/queer (“bicha”, “viado”), and claims an imperative of moral withdrawal from his neighbors in the shantytown  (“favela”) on the part of the ethnographic subject. Not only gender but also class and buying power are articulated in this laborious fabrication of sexual identity. Finally, I argue that the project of ascendant mobility is the key to the mediation and understanding of the bodily transformation operated. Through an at times uneven script, my research partner seeks the resource to pursue the dream of a university diploma, betting on the powerful meeting point between bodily and cultural capital.

Recent years have seen not just a revival, but a rebirth of the analogue record. More than merely a nostalgic craze, vinyl has become a cultural icon. As music consumption migrated to digital and online, this seemingly obsolete medium became the fastest-growing format in music sales. Whilst vinyl never ceased to be the favorite amongst many music lovers and DJs, from the late 1980s the recording industry regarded it as an outdated relic, consigned to dusty domestic corners and obscure record shops. So why is vinyl now experiencing a 'rebirth of its cool'?

Dominik Bartmanski and Ian Woodward explore this question by combining a cultural sociological approach with insights from material culture studies. Presenting vinyl as a multifaceted cultural object, they investigate the reasons behind its persistence within our technologically accelerated culture. Informed by media analysis, urban ethnography and the authors' interviews with musicians, DJs, sound engineers, record store owners, collectors and cutting-edge label chiefs from a range of metropolitan centres renowned for thriving music scenes including London, New York, Tokyo, Melbourne, and especially Berlin, what emerges is a story of a modern icon.

Endorsements & Reviews:

“Vinyl is a state-of-the-art treatment of an unforgettable object and medium that raises many of the issues central to contemporary anthropology. Its subject-matter should make it appealing to students and general audiences, while its theoretical sophistication makes it relevant to scholars of music, technology, popular culture, and cultural objects.” –  Jack David Eller, Anthropology Review Database

“Bartmanski and Woodward have created a masterpiece that any record lover should have on their shelves” –  Record Collector magazine

“Bartmanski and Woodward … provide meticulous detail as to how materiality matters … Bartmanski and Woodward divide their book into chapters that fervently trace various aspects of vinyl: its history, its functionality and use as a medium, its production and physical properties, and its consumption. In each chapter, they attend to the materially mediated cultural meanings within which vinyl is entangled.” –  Robin Bartram, Northwestern University, Qualitative Sociology

“Vinyl culture is back, and it’s even more vibrant than it was in its heyday, before digitalization. Bartmanski and Woodward take us to the epicentres of this revolution, and let those who are behind it tell us about their passions for this iconic medium. This is an exemplary study of the social and sensory life of things." - David Howes, Professor of Anthropology, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada

“In the age of the digital, with the ubiquitous smart phone and MP3 technologies providing consumers with instant access to global sounds irrespective of where they are, Vinyl explores the persistence of an old technology within the production and consumption of music. In doing so it demonstrates the complex ways in which material objects form a meaningful part of our everyday lives – not just through the sounds of vinyl but by how it feels and looks. The text is beautifully written, impassioned, yet critical. Welcome to the world of the post-digital.” –  Michael Bull, Professor of Sound Studies, University of Sussex, UK.

“A passionate ode to the analogue record, and testament to how vinyl embodies the content it mediates, with each record's unique journey etched into the material” –  Hillegonda C. Rietveld, The Times Higher Education

In a radical departure from previous ethnographies of food, this book asks how and why food is pivotal to social relations and forms of identity that emerge as normal and not-normal. It does so by describing the production, consumption, distribution, and disposal of ‘normal Bengali food’ in middle-class households that employ cooks from poor classes, and in Bengali restaurants, in contemporary Calcutta (India) and Dhaka (Bangladesh). In a rare comparative foray into Bengali Hindu and Muslim food-ways on both sides of the border, the book includes addas (‘idle-talk’) and interviews with both men and women. It initiates a dialogue that links issues of agency, place, hospitality, and ownership with a new field that places food as an ‘artefact’ at the centre of its inquiry. It invites the reader throughout to approach food afresh, as the key that unlocks the complexities of what is mundane yet profound — the everyday.

The book thus analyses the constant and fraught negotiations that feed into definitions of normality, class and identity through networks of human and non-human interactions – persons, places, and things - in the deeply intimate yet intensely public domain of food. Food transactions here provide a window into shifting configurations of trust, power, and conflict integral to social relationships, shaped by events such as the 1943–44 Bengal famine, the 1947 partition of India, and the 1971 Bangladesh War.

Table of Contents:

List of Photographs

Foreword by Marilyn Strathern

Preface and Acknowledgements

Note on Language, Translation, and Transliteration of Bengali Words

1. Food as Agency: Introducing Normality

2. The Actants of a Normal Foodscape

3. 'Like Everyday’: Creating Normality

4. The Everyday Normal Sacred Kitchen

5. Of Seducing and Respectable, Hospitable and Stingy Foods: Subjectivities of Normal Food

6. Cha (tea), Gan (song), aar (and) Adda (‘idle’/’care-less’ talk): Making and Consuming Normal Food Identities

7. Normal Food and Ownership

8. Postprandial Ruminations

Bibliography

Index

Since the 1980s, shops have elbowed their way into more and more museums and taken up increasing space within them. But I want to assert that even when the shop is or was not physically present in the museum, it is or was there all the same. It is there as part of a cultural dialogue with and about things – a dialogue played out through the sameness and difference of shops and museums; that is, through shops being like museums and at the same time not being like them.
Like the museum, the shop is concerned with objects. Both museums and shops are special ›thing places‹, where objects are clustered together, out of everyday use. Both take care with how they select, store and arrange things, with how they record and create information about them, with how they position some things in relation to others, with the lighting they do or do not shine on them, with the colour and design of the surroundings. Both employ some kind of labeling. Both have expert people – ›staff‹ – whose role is to know about, organize and care for them. Both are places where other people – ›the public‹, ›consumers‹ – are invited to come and behave in preferred ways, paying some kind of homage to the things on display.

A ‘rites of passage’ movie set in the USSR of the 1950s, Valery Todorovsky’s film Stilyagi (2008) tells the story of the transformation of the hero Mels from loyal member of the Komsomol to stilyaga. For many critics, Todorovsky’s stilyagi are the very embodiment of anti-conformism. And yet to read the film in this way is to overlook one of its key elements - consumption. For in order to acquire their clothes and other accessories, the stilyagi need money. Zooming in (literally) on the financial transactions that these young people engage in with such astonishing regularity, Todorovsky reminds us that without money, there can be no ‘style’, and consequently, no stilyagi. Seen in this light, the stilyagi are not at all subversive, but in fact highly conformist precursors of today’s post-soviet shoppers. It is this paradox at the heart of the stilyagi and their ‘revolt’ as presented by Todorovsky which will be the subject of our article.

"This essay focuses on the Informal Economy with special reference to India. It draws from the author's previous paper and research on the Informal Economy in the paper "The Drivers of Economic Growth and Development in Nicaragua".

The essay traces the origin of the informal sector with the author proposing a theory for the origin of the informal sector. A brief insight is given into the authority exerted by the Government over the informal sector. The essay then examines a few theories regarding the informal sector, which the author puts forth, such as the conditions which influence people in the informal sector, relationship between the informal and formal sector and informal sector and high  consumption among others. The author follows this by giving policy suggestions which include the modification of a scheme undertaken in Nicaragua to improve the lives of the individuals in the Nicaraguan Informal Sector. The author then discusses the Case Study which forms the basis of the author's essay and that helped the author reach conclusions. The author ends the essay with a Conclusion which focuses on the lessons learnt and a concluding remark on how economies should react to their informal sectors.

Doctoral thesis examining archaeological approaches to the recording and interpretation of clay tobacco pipes, with particular reference to the Broseley area industry of Shropshire, England.  The thesis looks at a variety of attributes that can be explored from pipe fragments, such as stem length, mould types and social status as well how pipes can be reassembled.  A study of museum and archaeological collections across a wide area of the West Midlands resulted in a corpus of well over 1,000 drawings, which are included in the thesis, together with a new list of Shropshire pipemakers.

In this article, the style of social interaction known as hygge is analyzed as being related to cultural values that idealize the notion of 'inner space' and to other egalitarian norms of everyday life in Scandinavian societies. While commonly experienced as a pleasurable involvement in a social and spatial interior, hygge is also examined as a mode of withdrawal from alienating conditions of modernity. In spite of its egalitarian features, hygge acts as a vehicle for social control, establishes its own hierarchy of attitudes, and implies a negative stereotyping of social groups who are perceived as unable to create hygge. The idea of hygge as a trait of Scandinavian culture is developed in the course of the interpretation, and its limitations are also discussed against ethnographic evidence that comparable spatial and social dynamics unfold in other cultural contexts.

E-waste management is a serious challenge across developed, transition, and developing countries because of the consumer society and the globalization process. E-waste is a fast-growing waste stream which needs more attention of international organizations, governments, and local authorities in order to improve the current waste management practices. The book reveals the pollution side of this waste stream with critical implications on the environment and public health, and also it points out the resource side which must be further developed under the circular economy framework with respect to safety regulations. In this context, complicated patterns at the global scale emerge under legal and illegal e-waste trades. The linkages between developed and developing countries and key issues of e-waste management sector are further examined in the book.