This document delves deeper into the meaning of anthropology in business. It explores a few more key thinkers, as well as different examples in how meanings are important in the world of business and how anthropology helps to understand this.
Lecture 3: Persons, Products and Meaning
Key points:
Individuals are not simply passive consumers of objects, but are active creators
and producers of meaning
You must understand what people care about to do business
Key Word Definition
Material The study of things and artefacts
Culture
Things and relationships:
Humans use things, therefore buy things for a variety of reasons
Relationships and culture are concerned with the cultural meaning of specific
things
How people use them to make their lives meaningful in relation to other people
What is material culture?
The study of things and artefacts
Become more important – interested in issues and questions around
consumption
Increasingly interested in studying cultures in Western and mass market
societies
Consumption practices and meaning of things – important in globalisation
Key Thinkers
Daniel Miller Grant McCracken
1980s culture of capitalism in American anthropologist
Trinidad How the material dimension
Study - people interacted of culture is important
with soft drink manufacturer Consumption of certain
Consumption and Capitalism things can be about
– not directly opposed to projection, not about ideal
social values of kinship and relationships/roles – but how
community a person wants their life to
UK shopping – shopping is be
used as a way of making Consumer goods in US
relations with others ‘bridge to hopes and ideals’
Men and women – shopping People buy things which
for other person becomes a represent what they would
practice – idea about gender like, but won’t attain –
behaviour – also what’s people buying things they
proper for children to want can’t afford
Consumption is a way of Exceptional one off
making relationships – also a purchases are ‘Consumption
way in which expectations in training’
about proper kinship “Who we wish we were”
behaviour and conformity to
expectations are enacted
Individual must be
acknowledged as an
important category of
relationships – people make
purchases for their idealised
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