ABSTRACT
The anthropology of consumption starts here, with inquiry into how assembling, possessing, and using things produces cultural order, personhood, and power. “Consumption,” though, can mean even more than these activities. Contemporary studies of consumption span shopping, using a cell phone, visiting the mall, and crafting advertisements. Economic orthodoxy has long had it that consuming first is about meeting basic needs and then claiming social position; that objects can be appraised first for utility and then for status. One useful place to begin the anthropology of consumption has been to turn this conventional wisdom on its head. Breaking with the symbolic orientation, more economically minded anthropologists approach consumption as activities that regulate material flows within a socioeconomic system. The ethnographic study of consumption, marketing, and advertising is not implicitly biased toward an affirmation of capitalism’s material rewards. In fact, the accumulated weight of ethnographic studies suggests otherwise.
