ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the constructions of the consumer in advertising for Fair-trade labelled products. It examines the translation of Fair Trade ethical philosophy into the practice of advertising Fair-trade labelled products. Advertising practices and knowledges geared towards the promotion of ethical consumption are resonant with Foucault's observations regarding the cultivation of the soul and the self-reflexive production of an ethical identity. The constructs of the consumer are as follows: the consuming subject as a postmodern political entity, the information processing consumer sovereign, the self-reflexive consumer citizen, and the ontologically ethically relational consumer. The chapter focuses on questions of how we should live our lives in emancipated social circumstances and thus incorporates into the agenda of self-actualization moral and existential concerns. Analytical parallels exist here linking the concept of the soul in the discourse of ethics evident in antiquity and the self-reflexive cultivation of identity in the advertising of Fair-trade labelled products.
