Download Free The Politics Of Domestic Consumption Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online The Politics Of Domestic Consumption and write the review.

This Reader brings together a broad range of critical work on on the everday practices and power relations of domestic consumption -drawing on material from sociology, women's studies and media and cultural studies. The book is divided into five main sections - on economics, food and clothing, leisure and media reception, household technologies, and the construction of home - and its selected contributions examine the social dynamics of gender: generation, class and ethnicity.
Objects and commodities have frequently been studied to assess their position within consumer - or material - culture, but all too rarely have scholars examined the politics that lie behind that culture. This book fills the gap and explores the political and state structures that have shaped the consumer and the nature of his or her consumption. From medieval sumptuary laws to recent debates in governments about consumer protection, consumption has always been seen as a highly political act that must be regulated, directed or organized according to the political agendas of various groups. An internationally renowned group of experts looks at the emergence of the rational consuming individual in modern economic thought, the moral and ideological values consumers have attached to their relationships with commodities, and how the practices and theories of consumer citizenship have developed alongside and within the expanding state. How does consumer identity become available to people and how do they use it? How is consumption negotiated in a dictatorship? Are material politics about state politics, consumer politics, or the relationship between these and consumer practices?From the specifics of the politics of consumption in the French Revolution - what was the status of rum? How complicated did a vinegar recipe have to be before the resultant product qualified as 'luxury'? - to the highly contentious twentieth-century debates over American political economy, this original book traces the relationships among political cultures, consumers and citizenship from the eighteenth century to the present.
Luxurious Citizens traces the ways in which Americans tied consumer desire to the national interest between 1789 and 1865 and reveals how the nation transformed individual desires for goods into an index of civic worth, placing unbridled consumption at the heart of their modern political economy.
In this signal work of history, Bancroft Prize winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist Lizabeth Cohen shows how the pursuit of prosperity after World War II fueled our pervasive consumer mentality and transformed American life. Trumpeted as a means to promote the general welfare, mass consumption quickly outgrew its economic objectives and became synonymous with patriotism, social equality, and the American Dream. Material goods came to embody the promise of America, and the power of consumers to purchase everything from vacuum cleaners to convertibles gave rise to the power of citizens to purchase political influence and effect social change. Yet despite undeniable successes and unprecedented affluence, mass consumption also fostered economic inequality and the fracturing of society along gender, class, and racial lines. In charting the complex legacy of our “Consumers’ Republic” Lizabeth Cohen has written a bold, encompassing, and profoundly influential book.
In October 2006, an international conference titled "The Politics of Consumption/The Consumption of Politics" drew leading scholars from Europe and North America. Using theory and research, the conference spurred lively discussion as well as the insightful papers included in this special volume of The ANNALS. Drawing from a myriad of disciplines, including political science, sociology, communication, media studies, and economics, this volume is a must-have for scholars, professionals, and policymakers who want to better understand modern consumer society and its implications for the political and civic arena.
'Roberta Sassatelli has written a thorough and wide-ranging synthetic account of social scientific research on consumption which will set the standard for the second generation of textbooks on cultures of consumption. Consumer Culture is an appealing and lucid introduction to the major themes - historical and contemporary, theoretical and empirical - surrounding the growth, nature and consequences of consumer culture. It will be of professional interest as well as serving a student audience' - Alan Warde, University of Manchester Showing the cultural and institutional processes that have brought the notion of the 'consumer' to life, this book guides the reader on a comprehensive journey through the history of how we have come to understand ourselves as consumers in a consumer society and reveals the profound ambiguities and ambivalences inherent within. While rooted in sociology, Sassatelli draws on the traditions of history, anthropology, geography and economics to give: - A history of the rise of consumer culture around the world; - A richly illustrated analysis of theory from neo-classical economics, to critical theory, to theories of practice and ritual de-commoditization; and - A compelling discussion of the politics underlying our consumption practices. An exemplary introduction to the history and theory of consumer culture, this book provides nuanced answers to some of the most central questions of our time.
Although ‘home’ is central to most people’s experience of everyday life, the meaning of home is often taken for granted. In this accessible and student-friendly introduction to domestic cultures, Joanne Hollows surveys current thinking and approaches to demonstrate why home is so central to our lives. Domestic Cultures examines which meanings and values have been associated with home and demonstrates how these have been transformed and reworked in different historical contexts. The book shows that while certain meanings of domestic culture are frequently produced ‘for us’, these can be negotiated and resisted through everyday home-making practices. She demonstrates how elements of domesticity have been dislocated and mobilized within public life. This wide-ranging text challenges a range of ideas about domestic culture. It examines how the meanings of domestic life are produced across a range of discourses and practices, from architecture, lifestyle media and advertising to home decoration, cooking and watching television. The book demonstrates how domestic cultures are not only linked to particular ideas about gendered identities, but how they are also differentiated by class, race and sexuality. Domestic Cultures is a key introductory text for media, sociology and cultural studies students.
Discussing multiple aspects of material culture and domestic consumption, this book tackles the relationship between the trajectories and biographies of people, families, houses and objects and how they intertwine and produce each other. Focusing on the life stories of a group of European and Catholic Brahmin Goan families of the colonial elite who left Mozambique after the country's independence in 1975, the book shows how material culture interferes with structuring dimensions of migratory experiences, in the management of family memories, ties and networks of belonging, as well as in the social dynamics of positioning, hierarchy and distinction.
This age of austerity comes on the back of a lengthened period of apparently rampant consumer excess: that was a party for which we are all now having to pay. A spectacular period of unsustainably funded over-indulgence, it seems, has now given rise to a sobering period of barely fundable mere-subsistence. Consumption, narrated along such lines, is a sin which has to be paid for. Beyond the deceptive theology of consumption, however, lies actual politics. In May 2012, we hosted a conference at Dublin's Royal Society of the Antiquaries of Ireland in order to analyse and debate the politics of consumption. This special issue is the outcome of the discussions which took place during that event. It features conceptual and empirical investigations into the politics of consumption, a head-to-head debate on the idea of consumer citizenship, a series of notes on the relationship between art, politics, and consumption, and reviews of two recent books. Taken together, these diverse pieces underline the need for a politically-oriented analysis of consumption, not only for the sake of informing academic debates but also for the sake of informing contemporary consumption practices. Consumption, we argue, is political: to approach it otherwise is to dogmatically seek refuge in a world of fantasy. Issue editors: Alan Bradshaw, Norah Campbell and Stephen Dunne. Contributors: Ben Fine, Kate Soper, Peter Armstrong, Matthias Zick Varul, Eleftheria Lekakis, Isleide Fontenelle, Adam Arvidsson, Detlev Zwick, Olga Kravets, Stevphen Shukaitis, David Mabb, Antigoni Memou, Femke Kaulingfreks, Ruud Kaulingfreks, Andreas Chatzidakis, Georgios Patsiaouras, Gavin Brown and Angus Cameron.