Consumption

Beginning in the 1980s, anthropologists began to be bombarded with endless—and often strangely moralistic—exhortations to acknowledge the importance of something referred to as “consumption.” The exhortations were effective; for the past 2 decades, the term has become a staple of theoretical discour...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Current anthropology 2011-08, Vol.52 (4), p.489-511
Main Author: Graeber, David
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Amusement
Anthropologists
Capitalism
Consumer economics
Consumer goods
Consumer research
Consumer society
Consumption
Cultural anthropology
Desire
Discourse
Economic anthropology
Ethnology
Europe
Food
Humans
Individualism
Marketing
Mass consumption
Material culture
Materialism
Pleasure
Self-expression
Social interaction
Sources and methods
Special Section: Keywords
Specific concepts
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Beginning in the 1980s, anthropologists began to be bombarded with endless—and often strangely moralistic—exhortations to acknowledge the importance of something referred to as “consumption.” The exhortations were effective; for the past 2 decades, the term has become a staple of theoretical discourse. Rarely, however, do anthropologists examine it: asking themselves why it is that almost all forms of human self-expression or enjoyment are now being seen as analogous to eating food. This essay seeks to investigate how this came about, beginning with medieval European theories of desire and culminating in the argument that the notion of consumption ultimately resolves certain conceptual problems in possessive individualism.
ISSN:0011-3204
1537-5382
DOI:10.1086/660166