Content area
Full Text
The Shopping Experience. Pasi Falk and Colin Campbell, eds. London: Sage, 1997. 212 pp.
A Theory of Shopping. Daniel Miller. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998. 180 pp.
Shopping, Place and Identity. Daniel Miller, Peter Jackson, Nigel Thrift, Beverly Holbrook and Michael Rowlands. London: Routledge, 1998. 214 pp.
As the artist Barbara Kruger provocatively asserts, shopping is not an inconsequential instrumental act but rather can be an expressive and even constitutive existential act. The task that the authors and editors of these three books have set for themselves is to demonstrate this thesis, and in so doing legitimize the study of shopping as a serious scholarly pursuit. The three volumes together succeed in demonstrating the significance of shopping to various identities in northern Europe and the Americas. Moreover, these books convincingly show that understanding such shopping is important in informing issues involving gender, class, race, culture, family, leisure, community, and social relations. At the same time, it is too much to expect that these authors have completely explored, interpreted, and theorized the meanings of shopping. Such an expectation would be similar to imagining that the meanings of an activity like eating or travel could be fully analyzed in a comparable number of pages.
The analogy between shopping and eating-another act related to identity and issues of gender, class, and so forth-is also useful for framing a further limitation in the contribution of these works. While it is undeniably useful to study the meanings of supermarket food shopping, as several of the present authors have done, to study food shopping without examining subsequent meal preparation and eating rituals can offer only a thin trace of the meanings of food consumption. It is in preparing and eating foods that we derive much of their symbolic value. To study food consumption by focusing only on food shopping is a bit like studying international tourism by focusing only on the selection and purchase of airline tickets, travel packages, and reservations. Potentially, this might capture the experience of "shopping" for travel, but it misses altogether the integrally related "consuming" experience of the travel itself. Or consider the acquisition and subsequent "consumption" of a household pet (companion animal). How much of this animal's meaning in our lives is transacted during the...