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MEDIA EN CONSUMPTIECULTUURCommunicatiewetenschappelijke uitgangspunt: media en mensen functioneren in
een sociale context, ofwel een gemeenschap.
Media maken deel uit van de cultuur en spelen een rol in maatschappelijke,
economische en politieke processen.
Consumer Culture
Essay deadline: 8-10-2021, 9:00 Brightspace
Herkansing essay: 27-10-2021, 9.00 Brightspace
Tentamen – Cirrus - 1e kans: 3-11-2021, 18:00-21:00 – Lokaal COM
Tentamen – Cirrus - 2e kans: 14-1-2022, 18:00-21:00 – Lokaal COM
1. Schriftelijk tentamen (50%) (Tentaminering: boek Lury, alle artikelen en
collegestof)
2. Essay (50%)
3. In-class groeps-opdrachtenportfolio (voldaan/niet voldaan)
4. (Ten Minste) zeven posts gerelateerd aan de conscious consumer challenge
(voldaan/niet voldaan)
5. Alle vier de onderdelen moeten voldoende (5.5 of hoger of voldaan zijn om de
cursus af te kunnen sluiten
BIJEENKOMST 1
HOOFDSTUK 1&2 LURY
What is Consumer Culture?
The availability of a large and increasing number and range of types of goods
for sale.
The tendency for more and more aspects of human life to be made available
through the market.
The expansion of shopping as a leisure pursuit.
A proliferation of spaces, platforms and modes of consuming.
An increase in sites for purchase and consumption.
The growth in size of retail chain stores.
The lifting in restrictions on borrowing money and the associated change in
meaning of being in debt.
The ethical and political organization of consumers by non-governmental
organizations, companies and the state.
The rise of brands, their increasing visibility inside and outside the economy.
The pervasiveness of advertising in everyday life.
The growing importance of packaging and promotion in the manufacture,
display and purchase of consumer goods.
The rise of the use of the barcode to monitor and manage the sales of
products.
The emergence of a range of so-called consumer crimes and forms of retail
therapy.
The difficulty of avoiding making choices in relation to goods and services, and
the associated celebration of self-fashioning or self-transformation and the
promotion of lifestyle as a way of life.
The increasing visibility of so-called consumer illnesses linked to ‘maladies of
agency’ and ‘maladies of will’.
,Most writers believe that there is not a single process at work in the emergence and
growth of consumer culture, but a variety, pulling in different directions. Most
significant processes are:
1. The organized interpenetration of economic and everyday life.
2. The increasing importance of the exchange of commodities (= objects and
services appropriated or produced for exchange on the market within an
increasingly global capitalist division of labour, driven by the pursuit of profit)
3. The development of a series of ongoing relationships between different
systems of exchange or regimes of value.
4. The growth of a range of different forms of consumer politics, which seek to
mobilize consumers to influence the state, producers and other consumers.
5. The active role of the state in organizing collective and individual forms of
consumption.
6. The use of goods in contemporary societies by specific social groups or
cultural intermediaries leading to forms of expertise and the creation of
subcultures or lifestyles.
7. The political identification of freedom with individual choice.
Consumer culture has contributed to the emergence and growth of object worlds that
encourage forms of reflexivity in individual and collective identity.
CHAPTER 1: MATERIAL CULTURE AND CONSUMER CULTURE
Material culture= culture of the use or appropriation of objects or things. Implies that
the material and culture are always combined in specific relations and that these
relations may be subject to study. Use of the term ‘material culture’ makes it clear
that consumption as ‘use’ is NOT always a ‘using up’.
Consumer culture is a type of material culture in which the consumer emerges as an
identity – “master category of collective and individual identity”.
Material refers not simply to objects of consumption, but also to the organization of
objects in environments, object worlds and spaces of consumer experiences. And it
includes immaterial culture = (material) products or services whose important
characteristics are the outcome of intellectual – or immaterial – labour.
Consumer culture, NOT consumption Not concerned with consumption practices
in and of themselves, but rather with the significance and character of the values,
norms and meanings produced in such practices.
By no means all consumption is consumption of commodities, but also
includes consumption of gifts, of self-produced objects, of freely given
services, and so on.
The relationships between economic wealth and participation in material
culture are highly complex and historically variable. While poverty restricts the
possibility of participating in the consumption of commodities, it does not
necessarily prevent participation in consumer culture.
The dominance of a culture in a society does not require all that society’s members
to be able to participate in the culture on the same terms.
The stuff of material culture.
How things play a role in the making of culture.
Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood Consumption is to do with meaning, value
and communication as much as it is to do with exchange and economic relations.
The utility of goods is always framed by a cultural context, even the use of the most
mundane and ordinary of objects in daily life has cultural meaning. It is in acquiring,
using and exchanging things that individuals come to have social lives.
, Possible to see continuities in the ways in which
individuals make social meanings through their use of material goods in
traditional and modern societies. There is nothing especially distinctive about the
expressive use of material goods in modern societies.
McCracken different rituals: (1) possession [rituals involving the collecting,
cleaning, comparing, showing off and even photographing of possessions], (2) gift
[the choice and presentation of consumer goods by one person and their receipt by
another] and (3) divestment rituals [employed to empty a good of meaning when it is
transferred from one person to another. Two purposes: (1) when individual
purchases a good that has been previously owned, erased to remove the meanings
associated with the previous owner & (2) when individual is about to dispense with a
good, either giving it away or selling it]. Goods come to be used for making visible
and stable the basic categories of placing or classifying people in society. Goods act
as sources of social identity and carry or communicate social meaning.
Goods can act as markers or performers of social identity,
Goods can act as carriers of interpersonal influence.
Their meaning is movable: may be changed as goods circulate.
Totemism is the symbolic association of plants, animals or objects with individuals or
groups of people. Object is simultaneously natural and cultural object; its meaning is
closely tied to the ways in which it acts as a means of communicating the social
hierarchies of the group for whom it has cultural significance.
Sahlins modern societies: manufactured objects act as totems in the modern
world and consumer groups are like tribes in traditional societies.
Daniel Miller general list of ways (5) in which objects contribute to the organization
of social relations, the making of material culture. Shows how objects have the
capacity to integrate an individual into the normative order of the larger social group,
where they serve as a medium for social relations or sociality, without presuming how
they do so. It is inappropriate to understand mass consumption in modern societies
as a single thing. Mass consumption is the site at which a whole range of often self-
contradictory and unbalanced desires, constraints and possibilities come together in
a very incoherent process = practical kitsch. Inalienable culture = culture invested by
its users through a process of recontextualization of objects in specific sites with
meanings that ‘negate the abstraction of commodification’.
1. Function: we do things with objects; they have functions for us.
2. Self: importance in the creation of subject’s social identity.
3. Space: two-way relationship, objects can make a space and space can make
or define the meaning and value of objects.
4. Time: objectifying a sense of past.
5. Style: more or less stylized.
Material culture or consumer culture?
Leiss modern societies are characterized by the growth of what he calls a high-
intensity market setting in which individuals are trained to act as consumers. Two key
features of this growth: 1. Number and complexity of available goods in marketplace
grows enormously (2) Individuals tend to interpret feelings of well-being more and
more exclusively in terms of their relative success in gaining access to high levels of
consumption. Negative effects: logic or ethic of consumption.
Helga Dittmar modern consumer culture is characterized by the strongly rooted
belief that to have is to be. People are said to be coming to define themselves and
others in terms of that they possess. Consumer culture is then tied to the
development of the possessive individual. Consumer culture is a source of the
, contemporary belief that self-identity is a kind of cultural resource, asset or
possession.
The very understanding of choice as a positive value, rather than as an act that may
have positive or negative effects, is a sign of the dominance of consumer culture. If
consumer culture has elevated choice as a way of being in the world, it also raises
important ethical and political questions about the relation between the individual and
the collective, and how we inhabit that relation.
Reflexive relation to identity – through the provision of a knowledge-intensive
environment, consumer culture provides the individual with resources to inform
his/her choice and enhance his/her identity. Contributing to the practices of self-
fashioning. Even though objects still have a physical existence, the way in which we
relate to them is increasingly organized in terms of knowledge and imagination.
CHAPTER 2: EXCHANGING THINGS: THE ECONOMY AND CULTURE
Mauss the gift is central to values and organization of ‘archaic societies’. He
describes a process in which every gift produces a return or counter-gift in a chain of
events that may accomplish many things at once. ‘Total’ gift economy – most social
activities are structured by the exchange of gifts between groups.
Three inter-related moments in gift relationship: (1) obligation to give, (2) obligation to
receive, and (3) obligation to reciprocate.
On the one hand, gift decreases social distance between protagonists because it is a
form of sharing, and on the other it increases social distance because now one is
indebted to the other obligation to reciprocate.
In a total gift economy, not only do people identify with things (totemism) but things
are an extension of persons, that is, they are animated.
Lévi-Strauss It is the structure of the exchange relationship itself that must
constitute the primary phenomenon for anthropologists, and not the individual
operations into which social life breaks down: focus on symbolic exchange.
In contemporary consumer culture: what is to be a person is linked to the
accumulation of discrete, separable or alienable things, owned by individuals as
private property.
In a gift society: what is to be a person is not limited to the individual person and
his/her possessions but is created in the circulation of things and other people.
Maurice Godelier While the beliefs of Mauss have an important role in some
societies, they do not explain the true origin of the obligation to give in turn when one
has received. Through the belief in animism, a metamorphosis occurs – instead of
appearing to themselves as actors, humans appear to themselves as the target of
actions. Perspective provides a way of explaining the ideology of a society in terms of
relations of exchange.
Disenchantment process, part of it is the drawing of a clear distinction between
people and things.
Buying and selling
What is called material culture in this book is, for Karl Marx, the objectification of
social life. Marx makes distinction between producing something for own direct or
immediate use and producing something within an alienating division of labour for
exchange on the market [= commodities]. Marx argues that the cultural logic of
commodity exchange is characterized by calculability, universality and abstraction,
leading to the dominance of these values in capitalist societies. Unfortunate
consequences of this: the belief that things are not only separate from but also come
to stand in for and replace relationships between people.
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