ABSTRACT
Capitalism has turned things into rituals, consumption into spirituality, even using the language of religion to sell its goods, and has created within us a compulsion to consume in order to mark our place in the world and declare our personhood to ourselves and others. When thinking about otherness and capitalism/globalization we made the deliberate decision to view the question through the lens of desire because this gives us a different trajectory into the issue and perhaps allows a way to understand something more about the desire for meaning through the consumption of 'things'. Sociological debate about consumerism is obviously less concerned with the development of a properly spiritual consciousness and how it gets threatened, and more concerned with the theme of political liberation through variants of cultural politics. One tradition in the sociological commentary on consumerism sees it as the way in which capitalism enforces ideology at the individual level.
