ABSTRACT
Not so long ago, consumption was an academic outcast, rarely mentioned except in passing by any but a few authors who had usually stumbled across the work of writers such as Simmel and Veblen. Then came a period of expansion which, not entirely accidentally, coincided with a major consumer boom in many countries around the world. This period of expansion produced a number of canonical studies – works such as Douglas and Isherwood's The World of Goods (1979), McKendrick, Brewer and Plumb's The Birth of a Consumer Society (1982), Appadurai's The Social Life of Things (1986), Miller's Mass Consumption and Material Culture (1987), and Campbell's The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (1987) – which became the intellectual basis of the study of consumption. Diverse as these works were in Character and style, they all agreed on three things: first, the paucity of theoretical or empirical research on consumption; second, the diversity of the social relations involved in consumption which made the category into, at best, a catch-all and, at worst, a confusion; and third, the need to consider consumption through many different kinds of social relations: gender, kinship, ethnicity, age, locality, and so on.
