Identity, consumption and symbolic power; with a regional focus on Eastern Europe

Optional reading: Monograph: Daniel Miller (1994): Modernity. An Ethnographic Approach. Dualism and Mass Consumption in Trinidad.  Oxford: Berg

1. Introduction: Power, Class and Consumption

Bourdieu, Pierre (1984): Conclusion: Classes and Classifications. In: Distinction. A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste London: Routledge pp. 466-484

Veblen, Thorstein (1973). Conspicuous Consumption. In: The Theory of the Leisure Class. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company (Original 1899) pp. 60-80     

2. Identity and Postmodernism

Bauman, Zygmunt (2001):  Consuming life. In: Journal of consumer culture. Vol.1 (1) pp. 9-20

Featherstone, Mike (1991): Lifestyle and consumer culture. In: Consumer Culture and Postmodernism London, Sage pp. 83-94

3. Fashion and Desire

Simmel, George (1957): Fashion. In: American Journal of Sociology, 62 (May 1957); reprinted from International Quarterly 10 (1904). pp. 541-58

Campbell, Colin (1987): Traditional and Modern Hedonism. In: The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd. pp.58-76

4. Objects and Signs

Miller, Daniel (1987): The Humility of Objects. In: Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd pp. 85-108

Baudrillard, Jean (1998): Personalization or the Smallest Marginal Difference. In: The Consumer Society. Myths and Structures, London: Sage pp. 87-98

5. Global complexity and consumption

Wilk, Richard (1995): Learning to be local in Belize. Global Systems of Common Difference. In: Daniel Miller (ed.), Worlds Apart: Modernity through the Prism of the Local, London: Routledge pp. 110-132

Friedman, Jonathan (1992): Narcissism, roots and postmodernity: the constitution of selfhood in the global crisis. In: S. Lash and J. Friedman, Modernity and Identity. Oxford and Cambridge: Basil Blackwell Ltd pp. 331-366

6. Cultural Pedagogues

Featherstone, Mike (1992): Postmodernism and the aestheticization of everyday life. In: S. Lash and J. Friedman, Modernity and Identity. Oxford and Cambridge: Basil Blackwell Ltd pp. 265-290.

Lien, Marianne Elisabeth (1997): Articulating difference within a Global Format. In: M. Lien, Marketing and Modernity. Oxford: Berg pp. 235-258

7. Preperation Mini-fieldwork

8. Mini-fieldwork

PART II

EASTERN EUROPE AND CONSUMPTION

9. Introduction: Consumption in Eastern Europe

Verdery, Katherine 1995: Faith, Hope, and Caritas in the Land of the Pyramids: Romania 1990 to 1994.  In Comparative Studies in Society and History 37:625-69

Humphrey, Caroline 1995: Creating a Culture of Disillusionment: Consumption in Moscow, a Chronicle of Changing Times. In: Daniel Miller (ed.), Worlds Apart: Modernity through the Prism of the Local. London: Routledge pp.43-68

10. National Identity and Consumption

Rausing, Sigrid (1998): Signs of the new nation: gift exchange, consumption and aid on a former collective farm in north-west Estonia. In: Miller, Daniel ed. (1998), Material Cultures. Why some things matter. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pp. 189-213

Behrdahl, Daphne, 1999: "(N)ostalgie" for the present: Memory, Longing and East German Things. In Ethnos, 64(2):192-211

11. Presentation of Mini-fieldwork

12. New Relations of Power

Sampson, Steven L (1994): Money Without Culture, Culture Without Money. Eastern Europe's Nouveaux Riches. In Anthropological Journal on European Cultures, Vol. 3, No.1 p 7-29

Lindquist, Galina (2002): Spirits and Souls of Business. New Russians, Magic and the Esthetics of Kitsch. In: Journal of Material Culture. Vol. 7(3): 329-342

13. Identity and creation of new lives

Fehervary, Krisztina (2002): American Kitchens, Luxury Bathrooms, and the Search for a "normal" Life in Post socialist Hungary. In: Ethnos, Vol. 67:3 pp. 369-400

Veenis, Milena (2002): Consumption in East Germany. The Seduction and Betrayal of Things. In: Journal of Material Culture. Vol. 4(1) pp. 79-112

14. Presentation of Mini-fieldwork.

Wrapping up.