Abstract
How do consumer activities shape spaces and places of the global economy? How do space and place shape, in turn, worlds of consumption? How are the latter linked to worlds of production, both in the post-industrial North and the developing South? What is the import of such complex dynamics on current geographical theory? These are only some of the crucial issues that the contributors of this edited volume set out to explore, providing an interesting and confident, if somewhat varied, series of case studies. Given its scope, the volume would be of interest to a wide academic readership: human/cultural/economic geographers, social and cultural anthropologists, qualitative sociologists, cultural studies scholars, and also, although slightly less so, historical geographers and political ecologists. Readers will need to already be familiar with the relevant wider literature, as this is no introduction to current debates on consumption in the above disciplines, but rather a set of in-depth analyses. Final year undergraduates and postgraduates will find the book most useful.
Reviews of edited volumes can rarely, if ever, do justice to each single chapter in the book and this one will be no different: apologies to the contributors.
In a complexly written and tightly argued introduction, the editors map the theoretical grounds on which the case studies build. Their starting point is the renewed interest in commodities that surfaced in the social sciences in the late 1980s, epitomised by the ‘social life of things’ approach. While this focused largely on the cultural dimension of commodities, the editors make the case that the commodity’s geographical dimension is also central to understanding contemporary consumption practices. If claiming that ‘we are what we consume’ has become a cliché in the study of consumption, then we should also recognise that ‘we are where we consume’. This is true both in terms of economic spaces and of spaces that become lived places through consumption; both in material and symbolic terms. The editors argue that space and the material have been more often explored in geography: how objects move from one area of the global economy to another and economic value is extracted along the way. Yet the geography of consumption needs to include place and the symbolic as these are becoming increasingly central to how people engage with commodities and express themselves through such engagement. This is evident, for example, in contemporary attempts to build sustainable futures, such as the phenomena of ethical consumption and production. The linking of material and symbolic is indicative of a wider commitment that runs through the volume: one to overcome analytical dualities in favour of more integrative and relational approaches.
Numerous chapters exhibit this commitment, particularly those that explore the multifarious world of ‘alternatives’ to the dominant system of commodity production–consumption based on cheap labour, low prices and the exploitation of nature.
In chapter 6, Hughes et al.. offer an insightful analysis of the impact that ethical campaigning in the UK has had on the buying practices of large retailers. The authors show how this arena of contestation uncovers the connections between manufacturing in the global South and shopping in the affluent North. These connections are first of all material ones: between economic spaces characterised by the exploitation of workers and the accumulation of vast capital flows in retailer-led commodity chains. Yet as actors like NGOs, trade unions and ad hoc consumer campaigns enter these spaces, other connections are established that transform economic space into places with identifiable moral problems for those consumers willing (and able) to respond to them. Damaging buying practices have started to be redressed as a result of this reconfiguration. However, the possibility of upholding such change remains largely dependent on the retailers’ willingness to rein in their profit motives.
Jackson et al. also make use of a relational approach in chapter 8, moving back and forth between production and consumption, the economic and the cultural. They do so in a national (UK) rather than transnational context. They also focus on a specific food commodity—chicken—rather than looking at retail goods in general. Their reason for doing so is to highlight the ‘manufacturing of meaning’ along the commodity chain: the process through which cultural meanings of food are produced and contested. What this approach shows is that chicken, although deeply commodified, presents an ambivalent status because of its organic nature. This is true of consumers, and explains why industry actors feel the need to respond to shoppers’ anxieties by accentuating the positive (non-commodified) aspect of their work. Yet it is also true of producers, who themselves struggle with the status of chicken as a once-living commodity.
Chapter 9 is a timely reflection by Goodman on how the spaces and places of alternative food networks (AFNs) can be seen through the prism of class and inequality. Goodman notes that these issues have received comparatively little attention in the study of AFNs. He concentrates on two specific questions: rent-seeking behaviour in production and retail, and unequal social relations in consumption. The former, for example, is becoming a worrisome trend of the organic food sector. Such a trend questions AFNs’ promise for change, given that ‘quality food’, one of the networks’ keywords, is increasingly being defined by large retail corporations. On the consumption side, there is clear indication that many aspects of AFNs (prices, time–space commitments, levels of knowledge, etc.) all require significant amounts of economic and cultural capital. The chapter ends by showing how alternative food retail in London exemplifies many of these problematic issues.
In chapter 10, Gwynne develops a commodity chain analysis of the wine trade between Chile and the UK. He focuses on how Chilean wine growers and British retailers enter into a complex partnership in order to create international wines and market them successfully by grounding them, ironically, in a carefully constructed rhetoric of geographical territoriality. While in Europe the concept of terroir carries a temporal dimension that exalts the past, in the Chilean case terroir is a forward-looking claim aimed at attracting consumer attention. Gwynne argues that the game played by growers and retailers results in the development of ‘palate geographies’ that are recognisable by consumers. While this may be true, the chapter offers very little analysis of actual consumption practices to back this claim.
As with most edited compilations, this one also includes contributions of a very different nature. This is not so much a problem as an inevitable fact. While there are considerable strengths—for example, the use of history as a key analytical variable throughout most of the volume and particularly in the insightful chapter by Trentmann—there are also some limitations. Space and place are not really addressed in every chapter, which makes the connections between individual chapters and the themes laid out in the introduction sometimes fuzzy. This is the case, for example, with the chapters by Gwynne and Jackson et al. A limited empirical base should also have been justified in Jackson et al.’s chapter.
It is probably unavoidable that every reviewer will suggest something else that could have been included. What seems particularly lacking in this volume is a concluding chapter that brings together, even if only partially, the single contributions. Notwithstanding its absence, however, the collection remains a highly interesting and valuable one.