Geographies of material culture

Question 1

Baudrillard, 1988

Answer 1

Our consumer identities are themselves commodified, as when they are sold as TV audiences or mass marketing lists it seems plausible that objects possess us with characteristics as much as we possess them (

Question 2

Ritzer, 2004

Answer 2

The rest of the world is being colonised, or rather ‘McDonaldized’ as authentic ways of life are reduced to empty rituals of consumption (Ritzer, 2004).

Question 3

Commodity fetishism

Answer 3

Commodity fetishism - the process whereby the material origins of commodities are obscured and they are presented ‘innocent’ of the social and geographical relations of production that produced them.

Question 4

Baudrillard, 1988b

Answer 4

problematizes the concept of fetishism, showing how it reproduces a modernist conviction that form obscures substance, that truth lies beyond the surface of display, and reality behind the mask. He argues that Marx’s distinction between use-value and exchange-value is is elf a form of mysticism, that material function and economic worth are abstractions and merely part of ‘sign value’.

Question 5

Consumption

Answer 5

set of practices through which new cultural identities are formed and new places and networks take shape.

Question 6

Gabriel and Lang, 1996

Answer 6

Research shows that consumers are not manipulated dupes of forces of production, but are in many ways ‘unmanageable’

Question 7

Corrigan, 1997

Answer 7

Academics now argue that ‘consumption, and not production, is the central motor of society’ or ‘the vanguard of history’

Question 8

Bourdieu (1984)

Answer 8

onsumer choices are never merely personal judgements, but constitute ‘position-taking’ within a hierarchy of competencies distributed largely according to education.