Lived Experiences of Public Consumption: Encounters with Value in Marketplaces on Five Continents(Consumption and Public Life)

In eleven original chapters, the contributors to Lived Experiences of Public Consumption take the experiences, practices and embodiments of everyday actors in public marketplaces as their points of departure. Drawing upon their ethnographic research, the authors situate themselves and their work in commercial marketplaces-on the streets and in the plazas, grocery stores and malls of five continents-offering the kind of rich description and analysis enabled by interpretive forms of inquiry. In so doing, they demonstrate a shared conviction that something irreducible occurs in the public, face-to-face encounters of buyers and sellers, of observers and participants, as they meet in the terrestrial marketplace-be it a bookstore in Sydney, a mall in Dubai, a fair trade shop in Philadelphia or a flea market in Santiago, Chile. Throughout the book the point is made with intimate detail that, in market-commercial contexts, economic value never stands alone but is always accompanied by and enfolded into exquisite human specificity.

Table of Contents:
Notes on Contributors Introduction: Dramaturgies of Value in Market Places; D.T.Cook PART 1: PLAYING IN AND WITH MARKET PLACES The Play of Authenticity in Thai Handicraft Markets; F.F.Wherry Tradition, Adventure, and Pleasure in Santiago, Chile's Informal Markets; J.Stillerman Shopping for People, or Shopping for People? Deciphering the Object of Consumption among Tourists in Banaras; J.Huberman PART 2: BLURRED BOUNDARIES BETWEEN MARKET AND HOME 'Pleasure from Bitterness': Shopping and Leisure in the Everyday Lives of Taiwanese Mothers; Y.Chen Grocery Shopping and the Accomplishment of Family; J.Phillips PART 3:TRANSGRESSIONS AND INTERSTITIAL SPACES Spreading Like a Dis/ease? Afro-Jamaican Higglers and The Dynamics of Race/Color, Class and Gender; W.Brown-Glaude 'The Flow of Words and the Flow of Value': Illegal Behaviour, Social Identity and Marketplace Experiences in Turin, Italy; G.Semi PART 4: GLOBAL PATRONS, GLOBALIZING MARKETS Beyond Borders: The Global Shop in Australia; K.Humphery Framing a Fair Trade Life: Tensions in the Fair Trade Marketplace; K.Brown The Mall and the Street: Practices of Public Consumption in Mumbai; J.S.Anjaria 'They Come, and They Are Happy': A Gender Topography of Consumer Space in Dubai; A.Baldauf Index

About the Author :
DANIEL THOMAS COOK is Associate Professor of Childhood Studies and Sociology at Rutgers University, USA. He is editor of Symbolic Childhood and author of The Commodification of Childhood. He has written on consumer society, childhood, leisure and urban culture.

Review :
Shattering the image of an impersonal market governed by the intersection of price and quality, Dan Cook and his talented collaborators demonstrate that shopping and buying involve rich social experience all the way down. What's more, they uncover that richness in distinctive places across most of the world. - Viviana A. Zelizer, Lloyd Cotsen '50 Professor of Sociology, Princeton University, USA, and author of The Purchase of Intimacy This book is one of most encouraging signs that a rich, productive and fully integrated approach to economic life is finally in the making. Avoiding the dead-ends of both culturalism and economism, and with a seriously internationalist perspective, the contributors have genuinely fulfilled their promise to treat market, shopping and consumption practices as 'lived experiences'. - Don Slater, Reader in Sociology, London School of Economics, UK, and author of Consumer Culture and Modernity