The present volume focuses intensively on the relation between consumption and culturally specific strategies for self-definition, both on an individual and a group basis. Many of the essays are explicit attempts to deal with the complex articulation of modern commodities and "non-modern" modes of appropriation.
The papers reflect and engage some very recent developments in anthropology such as the growing interest in personhood expressed in the numerous works of cultural psychology, and an increasing emphasis on the re-envisioning of culture as continually constructed in socially differentiated practice. As such, these papers can be said to deal with consumption as part of the practice of social identity and the construction of culturally specific forms of life.
"Consumption and Identity" is an attempt to locate the practice of consumption within more general strategies of social self-definition. While we have seen a growing literature on consumption in the social sciences, there has b

Consumption and the practice of identity, J. Friedman; western modernity and consumption - theoretical origins and cultural realities, C. Campbell and O. Lofgren; multiple identities, multiple strategies, D. Miller and R. Wilk; empowerment and the consumption of life-force, M. Rowlands, J. Friedman and E. Hirsch; disempowerment and the loss of life-force, I. Kopytoff, B. Orlove and A. Bauer.