anthropology in which the sharing of goods and
meanings in consumption is fundamental to
moulding the material and cultural form of
households (for example, Bourdieu’s 1973 clas-
sic account of the Berber house), nation and eth-
nicity (including the media consumption that
helps constitute ‘imagined communities’: Ander-
son, 1986). Consumption may also be crucial in
our construction of spaces of which we have no
direct experience. Consider, for example, the
geographical knowledges that are constructed
out of our understandings of the origins of goods,
such as the ethnicity of spices and ‘exotic’ or
cosmopolitan cuisines (Cook and Crang, 1996;
Crang, 1996), or consider tourism as a construc-
tion of space through the consumption of place
(Urry, 1990). As Crang argues: ‘cultural lives
and economic processes are characterized not
only by the points in space where they take and
make place, but by the movements to, from and
between those points’ (1996: 47). In their mobil-
ity, goods make new spatial connections and spa-
tial knowledges. There is also a more specific set
of arguments that, under conditions of post-
Fordism or postmodernism or ‘new economy’,
consumption has become increasingly central to
the constitution of social spaces. This might be
specifically analysed in terms of the centrality of
retail spaces to the fate of cities (as discussed
below), either transforming them into centres
of consumption and leisure or exporting
these functions to exurban areas which now com-
pete with city spaces (for example, Soja, 1989;
1996; 2000).
Finally, we might add to these themes another
contribution from cultural geography to the
study of cultures of consumption: that of ‘scale’
and ‘scaling’, a very fruitful concept that was
completely missed by consumption scholars from
other disciplines. Bell and Valentine (1997: 12),
for example, drawing on Smith (1993), structure
their discussion of food consumption according
to the various scales of body, home, community,
city, region, nation and globe. Each level
involves different aspects, conditions and
processes of consumption; but equally each
level is partially constituted through different
consumption processes. It is easy to see both the
differences and connections between the con-
struction of specific family relationships through
different food practices, and vice versa; and the
construction of national or regional diets (and of
national cultures and identities through different
diets). We can also see that the production of a
certain kind of body through diet may be scaled
up to the national or global level (the productionof a Californian-style ‘hard-body look’ is one
way of imagining a global culture), while the
global organization of food chains equally scales
down to the structures within which everyday
body practices are carried out.
In the rest of this chapter we will try to draw
out some of these themes as they have developed
in the study of cultures of consumption. I will
first look at the relationships drawn between
culture and economy in older traditions of
thought on consumption, proceeding then to
consider the perspectives that underlie more
recent culturalist approaches to consumption.
The final two sections, on shopping and on glob-
alization, look at these themes in terms of the
two most dynamic and consequential conjunc-
tures of thinking about consumption: space and
economy.ECONOMY AND CULTUREToday, consumption has come to represent the
site on which culture and economy most dramati-
callyconverge. Historically, it has marked a
central point of division between them. For
conventional economics, for example, consump-
tion has always represented a process that takes
place outside the economy, for two reasons.
Firstly, economics is largely associated with the
production and distribution of goods, whereas
consumption is defined as the mere ‘using up’ of
things, their destruction in use. Secondly, in
conventional economics, actors enter the market-
place with their needs and wants already formed
outside it, through cultural or biological or ‘sub-
jective’ processes of taste formation that are not
considered part of the economists’ remit. Once
inside the market, consumers supposedly then
make price-rational calculations in relation to
‘utility’, which is not culture, but an abstraction
from culture which is manifested in the form of
variable quantities of demand at different prices.
Cultures of consumption are therefore the back-
drop to economic life, but play no role within it,
or in analysing it. Conversely, if consumption is a
cultural process that should take no part within
the economy, it is also the case that economic
processes should play no role within culture: con-
ventional economics relies on the autonomy of
supply and demand. For example, Galbraith
(1972) characterized the marketing mix, compris-
ing cultural interventions such as advertising and
design, as a ‘revised sequence’ which destroyed
markets by allowing the cultural control ofCULTURES OF CONSUMPTION 1493029-ch07.qxd 03-10-02 10:46 AM Page 149