ABSTRACT

This chapter examines the twentieth-century consumer society as an anthropological type and finds that the age-old function of goods as communicators is now combined with the special capabilities of the new technologies of mass communication, the immense productive resources of modern industry, and the diverse array of lifestyle models for personal satisfaction, to generate the discourse through and about objects. Importantly, this chapter contrasts twentieth-century consumer society with traditional (non-monetary) societies through concepts such as relative standing, satisfaction, and commodity fetishism.