Boundaries of Consumption: Critical Perspectives on Race, Class, Gender, Citizenship and Space in Changing Markets

Posted by on February 19, 2012

Call for Abstracts for the 2012 AAA Annual Meeting:

Boundaries of Consumption: Critical Perspectives on Race, Class, Gender, Citizenship and Space in Changing Markets

Anthropologists are continuing to theorize and rethink the concept of consumption, examining the linkages between commodified and non-commodified relations of production and exchange of goods in the reproduction of capitalist society (e.g. Narotzky), consumption as a process of identity creation (e.g., Miller, Appadurai), and the dialectical construction of material and ideological constraints in determining modes of consumption. In a recent issue of Anthropology News, archaeologist Monica Smith wrote, “the stable-yet-fluid dynamic of both cultural and political boundaries indicates the long-term human propensity to create and break delineations.” She added that, “perceived ties of ethnicity, class, power, authority and legitimacy among members of a group all are signaled through the materialization of boundaries.”

In this session, we will explore different theoretical approaches to consumption with particular attention devoted to critical perspectives of race, class, gender, citizenship, and space to examine the intersections of materiality and boundaries. We seek to dialogue with other anthropologists and social scientists on themes of consumption emerging from current ethnographic research and around the following questions: What to consume, why, where, how? Is consumption ever a form of social control? How does surveillance in specific spatial contexts shape consumption through informing relations of power and demarcating distinctions of race, class, gender, and citizenship? Is consumption a useful proxy for examining power in particular spaces such as media space, public space, domestic space, etc.?

We are especially interested in tracing changes in consumer practices and to our understanding of consumption since recent world economic crises, including repercussions of the debt crisis in Europe and the US economic recession. Possible paper topics could include, but are not limited to:

-Social relations and meanings embedded in commodities as functions of new economic and/or political constraints;

-New modes of acquiring property and/or limits to property;

-Emerging spaces of exchange for conventional and alternative markets (e.g., online shopping and trading, the sharing economy);

-Consumption in social movements such as messages around consumption and consumer practices within the Occupy Movement;

-New consumer identities such as the emerging discourse on “good” or “ethical” consumption.

Existing paper topics include “Managing the Non-Citizen Body: Nutrition Education, Obesity Prevention, and Limits to the Reproductive Capacities of Migrant Women in the US” and “Wine Preference and Consumer Identity as a Function of Social Relations in Napa Valley Tasting Rooms”. We are also in the process of securing a discussant for this session.

Expressions of interest and formal paper abstracts should be sent to megcarney@gmail.com no later than March 15th, 2012. This is for a volunteered session and session proposals are due by April 15th. The conference will be held in San Francisco, CA from November 14-18 with the conference theme of “Borders and Crossings.”

Session Co-Chairs: Megan Carney and Rani McLean (UC Santa Barbara)