ABSTRACT
Shopping is a complex social activity that involves looking at goods on public display, judging quality, estimating value and, in some contexts, negotiating their price, before decisions are made on their purchase. The consumer shops not only for things to satisfy material needs, but also to make social meanings and metaphysical connections. Identity is more than keeping up with the Joneses, however, and shopping is also a means to individual self-actualization. Even with the help of cultural intermediaries, nations of shoppers did not emerge simply from the operation of social envy and desire for self-actualization, and historical studies reveal how states long promoted regimes of consumption. If shopping as people experience it today was born in the profane spaces of the department stores of the nineteenth century, it was rapidly articulated to popular religion, most obviously in the carnivalesque celebration of Christmas.
