ABSTRACT

This chapter shows how researchers are using new topographies, technologies, and technocultural rituals and routines in order to reconceptualize what market actors are and do, and most especially, how they should be studied. Consumers, communications and consumption are all swept up in an anthropocenic streaming and scaping of various sorts, but particularly in our current time as regards the technological. The chapter focuses on an ethnographic present for ethnography which, just recently, seemed like a distant future. A human understanding of consumption must focus on the nature of humanity and its relation to the non-human, however it might be changing. The materiality of consumption on the one hand, and on the other ethnographies that investigate the relationship between various modes of circulation, mutuality, gifting, access, purchase, and lateral cycling, are powerful enough topics for human beings to consider and ponder in such dynamic and heady times as these.