CONSUMER CULTURE

Consumer Culture

Consumer Culture

Introduction

One prominent feature of globalization is embodied within the pursuit of goods, a social phenomenon often referred to as the “consumer culture.” Broadly defined, consumer culture refers to an actual culture within a society that is actively invested in purchasing and/or venerating material possessions. As networks of transnational commerce have maintained and strengthened this culture of consumption, religious beliefs and practices within the global community have adjusted to accommodate for this type of commodity-centered activity. Although this vast web of commodity production and acquisition has certainly been seen as a threat to religious principles geared toward the attenuation of personal pleasures, individuation, and vice, the marketing of religious events and products has complemented consumer culture. Where Émile Durkheim's conceptual theory of religion advanced the notion of the distinctions between the sacred and profane, the world of commodity production has provided ample material for the sacralizing of any product as well as its process of consumption.

Discussion

Theories of Consumer Culture

Classical theories of consumer culture stem from the works of the economist Karl Marx. Marx delineated consumption by demonstrating how consumers within the parameters of capitalism become alienated or detached from the use value of a given commodity, while curiously privileging its exchange value. As the exchange value gradually erases any traces of the use value, marketing strategies become free to create myths about the qualities of a given product (Ewen, 2001, pp. 250-255).

Thorstein Veblen's late-19th-century book The Theory of the Leisure Class advances some of Marx's themes about privileging exchange value over use value by illustrating how certain classes enact processes of consumption in an attempt to display financial superiority over others. Veblen denounced this form of consumption as a type of irrational economic behavior, emphasizing a political tenor that runs through what he termed “conspicuous consumption,” whereby the leisure class was capable of maintaining and improving its status based on the accumulation of goods (de Certeau, 1984, pp. 110).

In this critical tradition, more contemporary works by Stuart Ewen have drawn on the admiration for and acquisition of goods believed to embody attributes indicative of certain statusbuilding characteristics. This commodity fetishism, as it is known, refers to a process of pursuing goods that will signify a certain ideal status for the consumer. Where the motivation for acquiring goods can be linked to an affinity with unnecessary consumption, the method by which one acquires such goods may also be driven by a symbolic adoration of the goods themselves (de Certeau, 1984, pp. 110).

Perhaps the most popular example of this type of consumer culture and religion is found within the celebration of Christmas. This event demonstrates how the economy of consumption and gift giving undermines the principles of this symbolic celebration. Although consumer culture appears to challenge sacred religious principles, it also provides publicity, serving to institutionalize Christmas as a widely recognized celebration regardless of one's religious conviction.

Resistance has been conceptualized in two ways in relation to consumer culture. First, as symbolically subversive does practice that are largely autonomous from consumer culture ...