The Archaeology of Consumer Culture

The Archaeology of Consumer Culture PDF Author: Paul R. Mullins
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780813044439
Category : Archaeology and history
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"Mullins has provided us a much-needed overview of the many ways that historical archaeologists in America have engaged the subject of consumption. He engages in a thoughtful conversation with a wide range of scholars--at once demonstrating historical archaeology's value to those outside of historical archaeology while also making connections, raising questions, and offering caveats for historical archaeologists to consider in future studies of the subject."--Hadley Kruczek-Aaron, coauthor of Investigations at a Nineteenth-Century Shaker Outfamily Farm in Ashburnham, Massachusetts Americans have long identified themselves with material goods. In this study, Paul Mullins sifts through this continent's historical archaeological record to trace the evolution of North American consumer culture. He explores the social and economic dynamics that have shaped American capitalism from the rise of mass production techniques of the eighteenth century to the unparalleled dominance of twentieth-century mass consumer culture. The last half-millennium has witnessed profound change in the face of a worldwide consumer revolution that has transformed labor relations, marketing, and household materialism. This pathbreaking research into consumption examines the concrete evidence of the transformation in individual households, across lines of difference, and over time. Mullins builds a case for how interdisciplinary scholarship and archaeology together provide a foundation for a rigorous, sophisticated, and challenging vision of consumption. Given that the material culture so often encountered by historical archaeologists speaks to the consumption patterns of past peoples, it is an essential and overdue addition to the historical archaeologist's canon. Paul R. Mullins, professor of anthropology at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, is the author of Race and Affluence: An Archaeology of African America and Consumer Culture and Glazed America: A History of the Doughnut.

The Archaeology of Consumer Culture

The Archaeology of Consumer Culture PDF Author: Paul R. Mullins
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780813044439
Category : Archaeology and history
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Mullins has provided us a much-needed overview of the many ways that historical archaeologists in America have engaged the subject of consumption. He engages in a thoughtful conversation with a wide range of scholars--at once demonstrating historical archaeology's value to those outside of historical archaeology while also making connections, raising questions, and offering caveats for historical archaeologists to consider in future studies of the subject."--Hadley Kruczek-Aaron, coauthor of Investigations at a Nineteenth-Century Shaker Outfamily Farm in Ashburnham, Massachusetts Americans have long identified themselves with material goods. In this study, Paul Mullins sifts through this continent's historical archaeological record to trace the evolution of North American consumer culture. He explores the social and economic dynamics that have shaped American capitalism from the rise of mass production techniques of the eighteenth century to the unparalleled dominance of twentieth-century mass consumer culture. The last half-millennium has witnessed profound change in the face of a worldwide consumer revolution that has transformed labor relations, marketing, and household materialism. This pathbreaking research into consumption examines the concrete evidence of the transformation in individual households, across lines of difference, and over time. Mullins builds a case for how interdisciplinary scholarship and archaeology together provide a foundation for a rigorous, sophisticated, and challenging vision of consumption. Given that the material culture so often encountered by historical archaeologists speaks to the consumption patterns of past peoples, it is an essential and overdue addition to the historical archaeologist's canon. Paul R. Mullins, professor of anthropology at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, is the author of Race and Affluence: An Archaeology of African America and Consumer Culture and Glazed America: A History of the Doughnut.

Race and Affluence

Race and Affluence PDF Author: Paul R. Mullins
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0306460890
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
An archaeological analysis of the centrality of race and racism in American culture. Using a broad range of material, historical, and ethnographic resources from Annapolis, Maryland, during the period 1850 to 1930, the author probes distinctive African-American consumption patterns and examines how those patterns resisted the racist assumptions of the dominant culture while also attempting to demonstrate African-Americans' suitability to full citizenship privileges.

Consumer Choice in Historical Archaeology

Consumer Choice in Historical Archaeology PDF Author: S.M. SpencerWood
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9780306423185
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
Historical archaeology has made great strides during the last two decades. Early archaeological reports were dominated by descriptions of features and artifacts, while research on artifacts was concentrated on studies of topology, technology, and chronology. Site reports from the 1960s and 1970s commonly expressed faith in the potential artifacts had for aiding in the identifying socioeconomic status differences and for understanding the relationships be tween the social classes in terms of their material culture. An emphasis was placed on the presence or absence of porcelain or teaware as an indication of social status. These were typical features in site reports written just a few years ago. During this same period, advances were being made in the study of food bone as archaeologists moved away from bone counts to minimal animal counts and then on to the costs of various cuts of meat. Within the last five years our ability to address questions of the rela tionship between material culture and socioeconomic status has greatly ex panded. The essays in this volume present efforts toward measuring expendi ture and consumption patterns represented by commonly recovered artifacts and food bone. These patterns of consumption are examined in conjunction with evidence from documentary sources that provide information on occupa tions, wealth levels, and ethnic affiliations of those that did the consuming. One of the refreshing aspects of these papers is that the authors are not afraid of documents, and their use of them is not limited to a role of confirmation.

Consumerism in the Ancient World

Consumerism in the Ancient World PDF Author: Justin St. P. Walsh
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317812840
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
Greek pottery was exported around the ancient world in vast quantities over a period of several centuries. This book focuses on the Greek pottery consumed by people in the western Mediterranean and trans-Alpine Europe from 800-300 BCE, attempting to understand the distribution of vases, and particularly the reasons why people who were not Greek decided to acquire them. This new approach includes discussion of the ways in which objects take on different meanings in new contexts, the linkages between the consumption of goods and identity construction, and the utility of objects for signaling positive information about their owners to their community. The study includes a database of almost 24,000 artifacts from more than 230 sites in Portugal, Spain, France, Switzerland, and Germany. This data was mapped and analyzed using geostatistical techniques to reveal different patterns of consumption in different places and at different times. The development of the new approaches explored in this book has resulted in a shift away from reliance on the preserved fragments of ancient Greek authors’ descriptions of western Europe, remains of monumental buildings, and major artworks, and toward investigation of social life and more prosaic forms of material culture. ADDITIONAL E-RESOURCES FOR THIS BOOK ARE AVAILABLE: https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/art_data/1/

Material Culture and Mass Consumerism

Material Culture and Mass Consumerism PDF Author: Daniel Miller
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0631156054
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
Exploring materialism and social relationships in modern culture Material Culture and Mass Consumption offers an in-depth exploration of objects, objectification, ideology, and materialism in modern society. Drawing from Hegel, Marx, Munn, and Simmel, the discussion delves into the physicality of the material world and attempts to understand materialism as a form of cultural expression. Targeting mass production as the root of mass consumption, rather than the result, this book positions material goods at odds with genuine social interaction and questions these relationships from the abstract to the intensely specific.

Consumer Culture and Modernity

Consumer Culture and Modernity PDF Author: Don Slater
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 9780745603049
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the issues, concepts and theories through which people have tried to understand consumer culture throughout the modern period, and puts the current state of thinking into a broader context. Thematically organized, the book shows how the central aspects of consumer culture - such as needs, choice, identity, status, alienation, objects, culture - have been debated within modern theories, from those of earlier thinkers such as Marx and Simmel to contemporary forms of post-structuralism and postmodernism. This approach introduces consumer culture as a subject which - far from being of narrow or recent interest - is intimately tied to the central issues of modern times and modern social thought. With its reviews of major theorists set within a full account of the development of the subject, this book should be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students in the many disciplines which now study consumer culture, including communications and cultural studies, anthropology and history.

Modern Material Culture

Modern Material Culture PDF Author: Richard A. Gould
Publisher: Elsevier
ISBN: 1483299201
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
Modern Material Culture

Studies in Culture Contact

Studies in Culture Contact PDF Author: James G. Cusick
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 0809334097
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 513

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Book Description
People have long been fascinated about times in human history when different cultures and societies first came into contact with each other, how they reacted to that contact, and why it sometimes occurred peacefully and at other times was violent or catastrophic. Studies in Culture Contact: Interaction, Culture Change, and Archaeology, edited by James G. Cusick,seeks to define the role of culture contact in human history, to identify issues in the study of culture contact in archaeology, and to provide a critical overview of the major theoretical approaches to the study of culture and contact. In this collection of essays, anthropologists and archaeologists working in Europe and the Americas consider three forms of culture contact—colonization, cultural entanglement, and symmetrical exchange. Part I provides a critical overview of theoretical approaches to the study of culture contact, offering assessments of older concepts in anthropology, such as acculturation, as well as more recently formed concepts, including world systems and center-periphery models of contact. Part II contains eleven case studies of specific contact situations and their relationships to the archaeological record, with times and places as varied as pre- and post-Hispanic Mexico, Iron Age France, Jamaican sugar plantations, European provinces in the Roman Empire, and the missions of Spanish Florida. Studies in Culture Contact provides an extensive review of the history of culture contact in anthropological studies and develops a broad framework for studying culture contact’s role, moving beyond a simple formulation of contact and change to a more complex understanding of the amalgam of change and continuity in contact situations.

The Archaeology of Smoking and Tobacco

The Archaeology of Smoking and Tobacco PDF Author: Georgia Lynne Fox
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780813060415
Category : Archaeology and history
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This book discusses how historical archaeology is well positioned to explore the role that tobacco and smoking played in the formation of American identities and cultural practices over a span of three centuries.

The SAGE Handbook of Consumer Culture

The SAGE Handbook of Consumer Culture PDF Author: Olga Kravets
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 1473998778
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 748

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Book Description
The question of consumption emerged as a major focus of research and scholarship in the 1990s but the breadth and diversity of consumer culture has not been fully enough explored. The meanings of consumption, particularly in relation to lifestyle and identity, are of great importance to academic areas including business studies, sociology, cultural and media studies, psychology, geography and politics. The SAGE Handbook of Consumer Culture is a one-stop resource for scholars and students of consumption, where the key dimensions of consumer culture are critically discussed and articulated. The editors have organised contributions from a global and interdisciplinary team of scholars into six key sections: Part 1: Sociology of Consumption Part 2: Geographies of Consumer Culture Part 3: Consumer Culture Studies in Marketing Part 4: Consumer Culture in Media and Cultural Studies Part 5: Material Cultures of Consumption Part 6: The Politics of Consumer Culture