ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the development of consumer studies as a field of research in Brazil. Academic debates and intense media coverage of the emergence of a 'new middle class' in the middle of the first decade of the 2000s drew attention to Brazil as a consumer society. The chapter explores the emergence of consumer studies as a thematic area under the influence of a new generation of international authors who analyze consumption as a fundamental component of material culture and social reproduction. It examines the antecedents to current discussions of consumption in Brazil focusing on the transformations since the end of the dictatorship and the debates on the Brazilian industrialization model. The specific features of the new consumer studies in the first decade of the 2000s are then highlighted through two surveys of publications and papers presented to the main social science forums in Brazil.
