Anthropology of Consumption
Study Course Implementer
Dzirciema street 16, Rīga, szf@rsu.lv
About Study Course
Objective
Preliminary Knowledge
Learning Outcomes
Knowledge
1.Knowledge of the main principles of consumer anthropology, understanding of everyday consumption habits and practices in a global society.
Skills
1.The ability to analyze and understand consumption as an integral part of daily economic and political life.
Competences
1.Critically evaluate the theoretical and empirical material covered in this course, use it in interpreting and analyzing other theoretical and empirical materials, as well as apply it in solving practical problems and research.
Assessment
Individual work
Examination
Study Course Theme Plan
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Introduction to Consumer Anthropology Issues. Consumption and Culture.
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Consumption and Popularity in the 21st Century.
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Directions and Methods of Consumption Research.
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Economic Processes and Consumption.
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Active and Conspicuous Consumption: The Individual and Materiality.
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Conspicuous Consumption in the 21st Century.
Bibliography
Required Reading
Visa literatūra pieejama angļu valodā, tapēc paredzēta gan latviešu, gan angļu plūsmas studentiem
Horvat, K. V. 2012. Memory, Citizenship, and Consumer Culture in Postsocialist Europe. In: U. Kockel, M. N. Craith, & J. Frykman (Eds.), A Companion to the Anthropology of Europe. P. 145–162.
Rausing, S. 2002. Re-constructing the ‘ Normal’: Identity and the Consumption of Western Goods in Estonia. In book: Markets and Moralities
Henrich, J., Boyd, R., Bowles, S., Camerer, C., Fehr, E., Gintis, H., & McElreath, R. 2001. In Search of Homo Economicus: Behavioral Experiments in 15 Small-Scale Societies. The American Economic Review, 91(2), 73-78.
Cohn, A., Fehr, E., & Maréchal, M.A. 2014. Business culture and dishonesty in the banking industry. Nature, 516, 86-89.
Xu, A. J., Schwarz, N., & Wyer, R. S. 2015. Hunger promotes acquisition of nonfood objects. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 112(9), 2688-2692.
Robert Shiller. 2019. Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Hearn, A. 2008. Meat, Mask, Burden: Probing the contours of the branded `self. Journal of Consumer Culture, 8(2), 197–217.
Lien, M. E. 2004. The Virtual Consumer: Constructions of Uncertainty in Marketing Discourse. 46–69.
Ashley Mears. 2020. Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit. Princeton : Princeton University Press.
Thompson, D. 2017. Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction (First Edition). Penguin Press.
Davenport, T., Guha, A., Grewal, D., & Bressgott, T. 2020. How artificialintelligence will change the future of marketing. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 48(1), 24–42.
Additional Reading
Appadurai, Arjun, ed. 1986. The social life of things. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Bloch, Maurice and Parry, Jonathan, eds. 1989. Money and the morality of exchange. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Howes, David, ed. 1996. Cross-cultural consumption. Global markets, local realities. London and New York: Routledge Mandel, Ruth and Humphrey, Caroline, eds. 2002.
Markets and moralities: Ethnographies of postsocialism. Oxford: Berg Miller, David, ed. 1996
Douglas, Mary, Isherwood, Baron 1996. The world of goods: Towards an anthropology of consumption. Oxford and New York: Routledge
Plattner, Stuart, ed. 1989. Economic anthropology. Stanford: Stanford University Press
Lange, A. 2022. Meet me by the fountain: An inside history of the mall. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Pridmore, J., & Zwick, D. 2011. Editorial—Marketing and the Rise of Commercial Consumer Surveillance. Surveillance & Society, 8(3), 269–277.
MacDonald, M., McDonald, M., & Wearing, S. 2013. Social psychology and theories of consumer culture: A political economy perspective. Routledge.
Skidelsky, R. J. A., & Skidelsky, E. 2013. How much is enough? The love of money, and the case for the good life (Published with a new preface). Penguin Books.
Acknowledging consumption. London and New York: Routledge