Finally, it is partly through the study of
consumption that we have come to better under-
stand the role of culture in the constitution of
economic processes and institutions. Consumption
is not a cultural endpoint or addition to ‘truly’
economic processes of production or formally
modelled market exchange, nor can it be reduced
to quantitative measures of ‘demand’. To the
contrary, the study of consumption cultures leads
us to examine the construction of objects,
exchanges and relationships across a wide range
of interconnected sites and processes.
The specific conjuncture of cultures of con-
sumption with geographical perspectives moves
in two directions, each modifying the other in
exciting ways. On the one hand, geography has
been both influenced by and a major contributor
to several major themes that cut across the entire
consumption field. Firstly, a cultures of consump-
tion perspective regards consumption as an
active process of making and using meanings
and objects, and the consumer as a subject active
in the constitution of its own subjectivity and
world. For example, Miller, et al. (1998), as dis-
cussed further below, look at shopping spaces as
sites which refract gender, class and ethnicity
through the consumer’s active understanding,
use and negotiation of consumption landscapes.
Secondly, geographers along with other schol-
ars have largely come to reject the presumption
that production simply determines consumption
or that consumer choice transparently directs
production. The focus has instead been on the
complex and contradictory connections between
different moments in the making of material
cultures. Hence, for example, the idea of the
active consumer leads directly to the possibility
that consumers are themselves productive in
their appropriation of things – making new mean-
ings, uses and relationships – and that production
has therefore to be understood as a distributed
process, one that inhabits multiple sites (Suchman,
1999). A profoundly consequential result of this
is a concern to reconnect political economy with
cultural analysis in new and more complex ways
(for example, du Gay and Pryke, 2001; Wrigley
and Lowe, 1996).
Thirdly, consumption studies has promoted
new methodological concerns. Above all, there
has been a major ‘ethnographic turn’ that owes a
great deal to issues raised by cultures of con-
sumption: the focus on both the culturally active
consumer and the distributed nature of economic-
cultural processes requires us to probe deeply
into the detailed and particular conjunctures that
make up any act or process of consumption andthat relate it to broader social contexts (Jackson,
1995–96). This ethnographic turn was taken not
only as a corrective to older political economies
that pretended to derive consumption unprob-
lematically from structural determinants, but also
in response to semiotic and postmodern currents
for whom consumption could be derived from
readings of objects and spaces without examina-
tion of actual and particular consumers and
consumption practices.
At the same time, it is important to consider
geography’s specific contribution to this field in
attending to the connections between consump-
tion and space, a set of issues that have become
central to all studies of consumption cultures.
Crudely, we might think about the relationship
between these terms in two directions: on the one
hand, consumption is spatially constructed and
distributed; on the other hand, important social
spaces are constructed in relation to consump-
tion. The cases of retailing and globalization,
discussed below, indicate how intertwined these
two relationships can be, but it might be useful to
think about them separately for a moment. On
the one hand, modern consumption emerges
from a division between production and con-
sumption that is partly spatial: the spatial segre-
gation of labour and leisure, work and home,
public and private. Indeed, the central commodi-
ties of modern life – home and automobile – are
premised on this spatiality and the need to move
between production and consumption spaces
(Aglietta, 1979), while key social spaces such as
city and suburb are marked out accordingly. One
could also think about such notions as commod-
ity fetishism and the split between the politics of
production and consumption in spatial terms.
The market as a mediation seems to purify con-
sumer goods of any traces of their conditions of
production, which are only visible somewhere
else (see, for example, Ross’ 1997 account of
the problems faced by consumer campaigns
against commodities such as Nike that involve
sweated labour). Frameworks such as commo-
dity chain analysis aim at making these connec-
tions visible again (Fine and Leopold, 1993),
while much discussion of the so-called ‘new
economy’ is concerned with the possible break-
down of these older divisions in the confused
spatiality of the internet and the confused mate-
riality of information goods (Poster, 2001).
On the other hand, space is not an objective
container or structure that moulds consumption;
consumption is crucial (and perhaps increasingly
crucial) in constituting social spaces. This is
a long-term theme within much cultural148 THE CULTURE OF ECONOMY3029-ch07.qxd 03-10-02 10:46 AM Page 148