[URBANTH-L]CFP/AAA 2008 Consumerism, Culture and the City

[Andrew Gardner - amgardner]

***CALL FOR PAPERS***

Consumerism, Culture and the City

2008 American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting
November 19-23, 2008
San Francisco, California

Co-Chairs: Andrew Gardner (Puget Sound) and Rylan Higgins (Arizona/CET)
 
This panel explores both emergent and established consumer cultures in urban
contexts outside Western Europe and North America. In general terms,
consumer culture is frequently portrayed as a significant congeries of
practices, meanings, and relations, forged in the ambit of western
modernism, and bound to that modernism¹s foundational notion of the free and
rational individual actor. This portrayal aligns itself with the colonial
and civilizing western discourse that, over the intervening decades, now
finds critical expression in the portrayal of consumer culture as a
homogenizing and western facet of globalization. In short, the tidiest logic
of this portrayal suggests that becoming a modern consumer means becoming
more western. Our session seeks papers that unpack and challenge the
premises of that argument or, put another way, that critically examine the
emergence of a consumer culture untethered from its purported western
mooring. We seek ethnographically informed papers attentive to the role of
gender, class and ethnicity within these consumer cultures. We also
encourage submissions that explore these issues in an urban context, and
particularly those that speak to the city as a site of consumption.

We hope to build a session around a geographically diverse set of papers.
Rylan¹s paper will examine the emergence of a consumerist ethic in
contemporary Vietnam, while Andrew¹s paper explores consumer culture in the
petroleum-rich states of the Arabian Peninsula.

Please send 250 word abstracts, ASAP, to Andrew Gardner at gardner at ups.edu.

Andrew Gardner
University of Puget Sound
gardner at ups.edu

Rylan Higgins
University of Arizona/CET Vietnam
rylan at email.arizona.edu


-- 
Andrew M. Gardner, PhD
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Department of Comparative Sociology
University of Puget Sound
1500 North Warner Street
Tacoma WA 98416-1092

(253) 879-3490