Consumption is the meaningful use people make of the objects that are associated with them. The use can be mental or material; the objects can be things, ideas or relationships; the association can range from ownership to contemplation. This definition is broad and vague because anthropologists have been less concerned with defining their approach to consumption than with rejecting two previous approaches, those of conventional economics and Marxian political economy. Researchers criticize these approaches for ignoring the social and cultural processes that underlie needs, generate demand and are satisfied in consumption (Sahlins 1976; Douglas and Isherwood 1978). While anthropologists recognize that some needs have a material basis, they stress the fact that need and demand reflect the ways objects facilitate social relationships and define social identities (e.g. Douglas and Isherwood 1978: ch. 5).
Scholars have long reflected on the meaningful use of objects. Max Weber and Thorstein Veblen are two examples from around the beginning of the twentieth century. Despite this history, the systematic social study of consumption is relatively recent, being overshadowed by the study of social organization and production.
One key concern of students of consumption is the way that objects carry significant social meanings. Just about all objects have always carried such meanings to a degree. However, many argue that these meanings became especially pronounced in the West around the time of the rise of capitalism and mass production; so much so that the West became a consumer society. This period saw a change in the way that Westerners thought about objects, as the symbolic gratifications of consumption loomed larger in people’s minds (Campbell 1987). This change was facilitated and exploited by commercial firms, themselves growing larger and more aggressive (McKendrick et al. 1982). Prominent among these were retail merchants, who were beginning to place their wares in novel and exotic displays in order to generate sales. This was especially true of department stores, the retail merchants who have attracted the greatest scholarly attention (Williams 1982).
For individuals, the first step in consumption is appropriation, establishing a mental association with the objects to be consumed. In capitalist societies this means that individuals transform objects from being impersonal commodities into things with distinctive meanings for the consumers and distinct places in the consumers’ social lives (Miller 1987; Carrier 1990). Once appropriated, people can use the objects to define their place in different social units. For example, the clothes one wears can be important for defining one’s gender, social rank, ethnic identity and a host of other social attributes. Less obviously, when and how one eats can be important for defining social cycles of time, whether time of day, season of the year or ritual cycles (Douglas and Isher-wood 1978). The cumulative effect of these individual acts of definition is a common structure of consumption at the societal level. This structure of consumption in turn reflects and recreates the identities of social groups that consume in distinctive ways, as well as the differences between those groups (Bourdieu 1984).
Students of Western societies tend to focus on the way that consumption creates the distinction between different entities like classes or ethnic groups, probably because mass consumption is so established in the West. On the other hand, mass consumption in the Third World is relatively new, and research there tends to focus on the way that consumption creates novel social identities and entities. Many assert that the spread of Western consumables into Third World countries does not, as some had argued and feared, lead to homogeneous Westernization. Instead, it leads to the creation of national hybrids (Hannerz 1987; Foster 1991). These hybrids consist of interpretations and adaptations of Western products developed and shared by indigenous people themselves. Such hybrids can generate common national consumption communities that displace pre-existing sub-national or colonial patterns, and so are important in creating the nation itself as a social and cultural entity (Wilk 1995). Equally, those national patterns can become self-sustaining. This can happen when fringe groups within the country adopt national consumption patterns in order to assert their membership in the emerging nation (Hirsch 1990), a process which increases the importance of those national consumption patterns.
As the study of consumption matures it will need to address two issues. One is the denotation of ‘consumption’ itself, which seems at times to mean little more than ‘not production’. This broad, vague, implicit definition is fertile, but is unlikely to help scholars develop a coherent view of the subject. The other issue is more complex. At present researchers tend to investigate the ways that people impose meaning on the objects in their lives. However, many such objects come with complex structures of meaning already in them, such as song and television programmes, or already attached to them through advertising and global cultural imagery, such as soft drinks and sports goods. If they are to develop a rounded account of consumption, scholars will need to address ways that these pre-existing meanings affect those who consume the objects that carry them.
