The literature on consumption has grown

enormously over the past 15 years, now constitut-

ing a recognized subdiscipline within many

social sciences and humanities (Miller, 1995).

While consumption has featured significantly as

an issue in modern western thought since at least

the eighteenth century, it was rarely regarded as

a socially consequential object of study in its

own right. Consumption was widely considered

both too trivial and too eccentrically individual

to figure largely in social analysis. It appeared

rather as an object of moral-political judgement,

an index of either the growth of liberal freedoms

or the moral and cultural degeneration within

modern commercial society.

By contrast, the huge contemporary interest in

consumption rests on three broad premises, each

of which places culture at the centre of social

processes, and in ways that have made consump-

tion studies almost paradigmatic of the ‘cultural

turn’ in social thought. Firstly, notions such as

‘material culture’ or ‘common culture’ stress that

consumption is central to social and cultural

reproduction. All acts of consumption are pro-

foundly cultural. Even ostensibly ‘natural’ and

mundane processes such as eating invoke, medi-

ate and reproduce those structures of meaning

and practice through which social identities are

formed and through which social relations and

institutions are maintained and changed over

time. The consumption of a family meal requires

complex frameworks of meaning that adjudicate

just what counts as food, how it is properly pre-

pared and presented, and what is good or bad in

terms of such disparate issues as health, gender

roles and powers, ethical relations of care, the

identity of the family and its religion, social

status and so on. In the extended process of

consumption – shopping, buying, using – people

raiseand negotiate the most central questions as

to who they are and what they need.

The second premise has been a concern with

‘consumer culture’ as a characterization of

modern market society (Slater, 1997a; Slater and

Tonkiss, 2001), and more specifically as an

increasingly central feature of what came to be

known as the postmodern (Featherstone, 1991).

Consumption as cultural process may be central

to all human society, but only the modern west

came to define itself as a consumer culture or

consumer society. The underlying claim here is

that as a result of modernization processes such

as marketization, the decline of traditional status

systems and the rise of cultural and political

pluralism, private, market-based choice has

become increasingly central to social life. At the

extreme point, the neoliberal projects of the

1980s recognized and promoted this by seeking

to redefine all social processes (e.g. education,

health provision, democracy) according to the

paradigm of consumption such that in the field

of education, for example, students become

‘consumers’ and their ‘demand’ sovereign. In a

consumer culture, then, key social values, identi-

ties and processes are negotiated through the

figure of ‘the consumer’ (as opposed to, say, the

worker, the citizen or the devotee); central

modern values such as freedom, rationality and

progress are enacted and assessed through

consumerist criteria (range of choice, price

calculations and rising affluence, respectively);

and the cultural landscape seems to be domi-

nated by commercial signs (advertising, portray-

als of ‘lifestyle’ choices through the media,

obsessive concern with the changing meanings

of things).

7

Cultures of Consumption

Don Slater

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