ABSTRACT
As well as paying insufficient attention to the historical specificity of much current research on consumption, geographers have also been surprisingly lax in acknowledging its geographical particularity. Most geographical research on consumption has been resolutely occidental in character. There is a remarkable paucity of work which extends beyond Anglo-American frames of meaning, such as that of Chua (1992) on women shopping for fashion in Singapore, or Clammer (1992) on shopping in Japan. Given the pace of cultural and economic change in the Pacific Rim and the Far East, and the rapid development of various forms of market economy in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the scope for research in these areas is vast and largely unexplored.
