ABSTRACT

During the past few years there has been an increasing interest in consumption among anthropologists. This contribution takes as its point of departure, the discussions that have already been underway in this relatively new field. It’s focus, however, is not upon consumption as an autonomous social phenomenon, but precisely on the ways in which consumption can and must be understood in a wider context of life strategies, of the constitution of meaningful existences. Thus, as the title suggests, this is a volume about the relation between consumption and broader cultural strategies. The papers are the product of a workshop organized in Denmark under the aegis of the Center for Research in the Humanities which took place in 1989. While the majority of participants were anthropologists, there were also sociologists and historians present and an issue of the journal Culture and History (7:1990) was devoted to an early version of some of the papers contained in the present volume.