Consumption and Material Culture

In this chapter I explore the relationship between ‘age imaginaries’ and media consumption in an English secondary school I have called Lakefield School. I argue that the concept of age imaginaries is valuable for understanding how both students and teachers negotiate multiple notions of age while in school. In the ethnographic examples presented here, age is imagined within the realms of youth, growing up and adulthood; but these categories emerge concurrently, rather than being necessarily mutually exclusive. This has significant implications for research into ‘youth cultures’ because it undermines the fixity that this term and other age-based markers of identity often imply. I also argue that media consumption is an important means for negotiating these multiple, concurrent imaginings of age. I begin by explaining the concept of ‘age imaginaries’ and then situate this concept, and my arguments about the role of media consumption in imagining age at school, within a broader ethnographic context. In the second part of this chapter I consider ethnographic vignettes from Year 11 (age 15–16) Media Studies lessons at Lakefield School. I conclude by arguing for the value of age imaginaries in understanding ‘youth’ culture and media consumption. The ethnographic vignettes presented here are particularly revealing in terms of what they show about how ‘youth’ culture and media consumption are negotiated in creative and surprising ways within the context of secondary education – a space normally imagined in the literature on youth culture as the restrictive institutional opposite to more romantic, supposedly ‘free’ locations for media consumption, such as the street, the club or the bedroom.

I denna handbok beskriver historiker, arkeologer, etnologer, konstvetare, vetenskapshistoriker, ekonomhistoriker, litteraturvetare och museiintendenter de många olika sätt man kan arbeta med materiell kultur på.

Människans historia är också föremålens historia. Vi har skapat allt från enkla bruksföremål till avancerade industritillverkade apparater. Föremålen är inte bara praktiska hjälpmedel utan även uttryck för status och identitet. Men det är inte bara vi människor som format föremålen, föremålen har också format oss. Under senare år har historiskt inriktade forskare blivit alltmer intresserade av materiell kultur – både på ett teoretiskt och empiriskt plan. Denna nya källkategori leder till nya utmaningar för forskaren. Vilka frågor kan man ställa med hjälp av föremål? Vad kan föremål berätta som inte en text kan? Var hittar man historiska föremål?

Boken behandlar mötet med det materiella, vilken roll föremål har spelat i konsumtionen, vilken logik som har styrt samlande av föremål samt hur föremål har varit del i att skapa vår verklighet. Dessutom innehåller den en praktisk vägledning till hur man undersöker föremål steg-för-steg och en presentation av Sveriges museer och deras samlingar.

Fråga föremålen är främst avsedd som kurslitteratur i humanistiska ämnen vid universitet och högskolor där man arbetar med materiell kultur. Boken är också användbar för alla som arbetar i museivärlden.

A phase II survey was conducted on the Cuba and Coyote ranger districts of the Santa Fe National Forest as part of the Rio Chama Prescribed Burn Project. During the course of field work, portions of the Rio Chama Wilderness, which had never before received archaeological survey, were examined. Over 60 unknown/unrecorded sites were located and recorded. This presentation will focus on the evidence of trade from these sites in the form of a foreign ceramic tradition. In addition, the settlement patterns and viewsheds of these new sites, which are predominately located on two inaccessible mesas, will be analyzed in the hopes of attaining a better understanding of how the people living on these mesas interacted with both their neighbors and the landscape.

Este artigo tem como proposta compreender o processo histórico da publicidade e do marketing, buscando entender as funções sociais que estes ocupam. A finalidade, com isso, é apreender como o marketing experiencial tem se tornado uma estratégia de investimento da publicidade contemporânea e quais foram as mudanças sociais que fundamentaram esta transformação social, tendo como objetivo analisar como a publicidade pedagogiza o consumidor sobre os modos de usar os objetos de consumo.

The ways in which people view and use time have very real material consequences that both shape and reflect the relationship between human society and the physical environment, thereby affecting sustainability transitions. More or less resource-intensive time cultures, that is, shared repertoires of time-related meanings and solutions to everyday problems, coexist both within and between countries. Moreover, they often cut across other socio-economic and cultural fault lines such as class, gender and rural-urban divisions. Having remained largely under-researched in the past, the recent ‘temporal turn’ in the social sciences has highlighted these time-cultural differences and their social and ecological impacts.

In 1822, a devastating town fire sealed a large ceramic assemblage from a store in the town of Oulu in northern Finland. Excavations of the merchant’s stock recovered over a hundred kilograms of ceramics that was almost entirely composed of undecorated creamware, a ware and decorative type whose popularity had faded significantly by the 1820’s. The assemblage reveals the global complexities in the international ceramics trade in the early nineteenth century, provides insight into some of the massproduced commodities reaching geographically peripheral markets, underscores distinctive European market influences, and illuminates marketing and social practices that shaped consumption in markets like Oulu.

Sustainable consumption is a central research topic in academic discourses of sustainable development and global environmental change. Informed by a number of disciplinary perspectives, this book is structured around four key themes in sustainable consumption research: Living, Moving, Dwelling and Futures. The collection successfully balances theoretical insights with grounded case studies, on mobility, heating, washing and eating practices, and concludes by exploring future sustainable consumption research pathways and policy recommendations. Theoretical frameworks are advanced throughout the volume, especially in relation to social practice theory, theories of behavioural change and innovative visioning and backcasting methodologies. This groundbreaking book draws on some conceptual approaches which move beyond the responsibility of the individual consumer to take into account wider social, economic and political structures and processes in order to highlight both possibilities for and challenges to sustainable consumption. This approach enables students and policy-makers alike to easily recognise the applicability of social science theories.

ste artigo dá conta de configurações de práticas culturais e de consumo e estilos de vida, tendo por referência o momento de contração das condições sociais e econômicas atuais, em Portugal. Um dos traços mais marcantes das transformações a que estamos a assistir está ligado com o aumento de desigualdades sociais no acesso a bens e a recursos característicos de uma sociedade do conhecimento e de uso mais intensificado de tecnologias de informação e comunicação. Contrariando algumas das visões sobre a irrelevância de uma conceção das classes sociais, pretende-se desenvolver uma perspetiva de “classe média”, através da identificação de princípios sociais padronizados de diferenciação estrutural de recursos e oportunidades. Esta aproximação teórica-analítica à classe média pretende ainda dar conta das repercussões de um contexto economicamente recessivo e de aprofundamento de desigualdades, situando esse segmento social. Esta proposta tem como base empírica os resultados de um estudo (online) aos rendimentos e consumos das famílias de classe média em Portugal, promovido no Centro deInvestigação e Estudos de Sociologia do Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (CIES-IUL) no último trimestre de
2012, e desenvolvido no quadro do Projeto Pensar o futuro e encontrar novas perspetivas para a promoção sustentada do bem-estar e qualidade de vida.

Previously, French consumers bought (and continue to buy, although with much less frequency) furniture sets: a bed to sleep on, a wardrobe to put one’s clothes in, a night table on which to put a reading lamp, a clock, and a glass of water. This was especially true for nonelite consumers in the nineteenth century, who would often purchase the all-in-one chambre complète: “a bed, a table, a bedside table, two chairs, a small rug, mattress, box spring, linen, and armoire—clearly intended for the poorest of couples setting up housekeeping in one room” (Aus- lander 1998: 330–31). The relation between the individual objects in a set was generally a nonessential one; they were all decorated with the same motif: “Napo- leon III,” “cottage style,” “pine,” and so on. Different themes occupied different places in a hierarchy of cost and taste (see Bourdieu 1979), but the meaning of the interactions between the different objects in the set was always a surface, aesthetic one. For those with the means to afford costlier furnishings, “the most expensive furniture was rarely sold in sets (although it was often displayed that way). Wealthier consumers appear to have wanted to believe that they were mak-
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On the Ikeaization of France


Public Culture
ing choices and assembling their rooms themselves, while the poor were not given that option” (Auslander 1998: 331).
What goes on at Ikea is this ostensible creation of agency through the democ- ratization of choice and self-assembly, although in reality what now constitutes a set is not completely dissimilar to the chambre complète. At Ikea, sets sup- port various areas in the home that are consecrated to specific, serious activities: writing, designing, or creating. Ikea products are presented in such a way so as to encourage the formation of an aesthetic that crystallizes around notions of simplicity, occupation, and achievement, rather than accumulation or leisure. The Ikea aesthetic is not content for its customer to be a Veblenian conspicuous con- sumer, or a mere bourgeois, at least, as that term is commonly understood.
Above all, this ideal, intelligent consumer does not waste time—an offense that has become again, as for Max Weber’s Protestant capitalist, the “first and in principle the deadliest of all sins” (1930 [1904]: 157). All his or her moments are geared toward productivity, toward the exponential accumulation of knowl- edge and results. Pretension, extravagance, and ornamentation must be banished. “Anyone who goes around in a velvet coat today is not an artist but a buffoon or a house painter,” writes the Viennese architect and great proponent of minimalism Adolph Loos in his “Ornament and Crime” (1970 [1908]: 24). Ornamentation for Loos was the hallmark of a decaying, senseless society, and minimalism cel- ebrated as the style of a new, triumphantly definitive modernity: “The evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament from utilitarian objects” (20).

Special issue of TAJA including the following pieces:
1. Bell, Joshua A. and Gesimar, Haidy. 2009 Materialising Oceania: New ethnographies of things in Melanesia and Polynesia (pages 3–27)

2. Bell, Joshua A. 2009. Documenting discontent: Struggles for recognition in the Purari Delta of Papua New Guinea (pages 28–47)

3. Geismar, Haidy 2009. The Photograph and the Malanggan: Rethinking images on Malakula, Vanuatu (pages 48–73)

4. Bonshek, Elizabeth 2009. A personal narrative of particular things: Tevau (feather money) from Santa Cruz, Solomon Islands (pages 74–92)

5. Coupaye, Ludovic 2009. What’s the matter with technology? Long (and short) yams, materialisation and technology in Nyamikum village, Maprik district, Papua New Guinea (pages 93–111)

6. Baker, Jade Tangiāhua 2009. Te Kupenga: Re-casting entangled networks (pages 112–130)

7. Wonu Veys, Fanny 2009. Materialising the king: The royal funeral of King Tāufa`āhau Tupou IV of Tonga (pages 131–149)