Abstract
This invited commentary reflects on the theoretical (and empirical) accomplishments of consumer culture theorizing a quarter into the twenty-first century as well as a reflection on paths forwards for the discipline. Consumer culture theorizing has contributed quite substantially to our joint understanding of the inner dynamics of consumer culture, its meanings, practices and materialities. These insights constitute a solid argument against Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. While this from an insider CCT and critical marketing perspective is akin to kicking in open doors, it is hardly ever represented as an explicit accomplishment: Maslow keeps being a central part of much marketing theory. It is time to claim that not just economic anthropology but also Consumer Culture Theory has refuted the hierarchy of needs. This reflection on the advances ends with a revisit to a former discussion in Marketing Theory of the “consumer/consumption” tropes and introduces the neologism “the consumerized.” Pointing forwards, the commentary suggests three extensions or rather realizations (since they were implied initially) of the context of context already discussed in Marketing Theory: Consumer culture theorizing and its missing dialogues with 1) The political economy and its value chains. 2) The role of the state in contemporary capitalism and consumer culture formation. And 3) the insertion of consumer culture in a post-anthropocentric ecological Earth-system.
Keywords
CCT - Theorizing the consumerized
The 25th anniversary of a journal that has established itself as a significant voice in the marketing field is something to celebrate. I thank the editorial team for inviting me to join the celebration with some reflections on the accomplishments and shortcomings of Consumer Culture Theory (CCT). In an interview published a few years back (Cronin and Fitchett 2022), I was given the chance to embark on such a reflexive process. This commentary can be seen as a continuation of these reflections.
The proliferating CCT research has effectively mapped a large part of the processes of acquisition, use and disposition of the material and immaterial commercial offerings though which consumers create meaningful lives. CCT scholars have analyzed the lived experiences, practices, institutional framings, assemblages and material and immaterial semiotics of both dominant and repressed consumer groups and the power structures that govern them (cf. the overview provided in Arnould et al. 2023).
At least in the context of many advanced economies. Arnould’s (1989) pioneering work on dynamics of consumption and distribution in Niger unfortunately did not create a wave of interest in Global South contexts. Maybe for reasons of difficulty of access (linguistic, geographical, cultural…) or—as some might argue and less flattering for the community—for lack of interest in less profitable consumer groups for marketing purposes, the Global South remains relatively unexplored even if Ger and Belk (1996) called for such an interest thirty years ago! Admittedly, the legacy of Güliz Ger has made Turkey the possibly most studied Global South context (e.g., Izberk-Bilgin 2012; Karababa and Ger 2011; Sandıkcı and Ger 2010; Üstüner and Holt 2010). CCT scholars originating in for example Brazil (e.g., Magalhães Lopes et al., 2026), India (Varman and Belk 2008) or Ghana (Bonsu and Belk 2003) to name a few (and cite even fewer works) have added, what is a best a bit of “exotic spice” to the CCT domain. For the substantial part of the global population that lives on the margins of but not unaffected by or outside consumer culture and its glocalized flow of goods and services, the encounters with and navigations of consumer culture logics deserve considerably more, and more critical, attention (Ger et al., 2018; Santana et al., 2026).
Maslow is dead
As it should be clear from the introduction, it is difficult to highlight specific researchers or streams of research from CCT scholars—however such a group may be defined—as representing the most significant advancements in the field. Not only is it difficult to do that as an overall exercise, but the ranking list would presumably also vary according to exactly which criteria of accomplishment are applied. Consequently, rather than participating in such an impossible ranking contest, I would like to highlight what I see as at least one of the most significant overall contributions of CCT. Furthermore, it is one that the field does not really claim, possibly because it is taken for a given. This contribution is the final eradication of Maslow’s (1943) hierarchy of needs.
Obviously, a critique of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is not new. Maslow’s theory has been accused of lack of spirituality from religious scholars rooted in Islam, also underlining its role in capitalist apology (Bouzanita and Boulanouar 2016), or in Christianity (McCleskey and Ruddell 2020). In a similar vein, its negligence of spirituality from the perspective of mental health (Papaleontiou–Louca et al., 2022) or its obliviousness to love (Oved, 2017) have been discussed as flaws and negligence.
Nevertheless, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs continues to be much used, not least in managerial disciplines. It is hailed as a model that resonates immediately whenever presented in pedagogical or didactical contexts. As Abulof (2017, p. 508) underlines, “the continued resonance of Maslow’s theory in popular imagination, however unscientific it may seem, is possibly the single most telling evidence of its significance: it explains human nature as something that most humans immediately recognize in themselves and other.” The usage of and reference to Maslow in marketing teaching and research continues to be widespread. Hence, a fundamental refuting of the theory might merit a space in Marketing Theory.
Because there is another and more substantial stream of criticism which is more interesting in the context of CCT and its legacy. As underlined by psychological critical voices (Geller, 1982; Neher, 1991) Maslow’s basic conceptualization of human needs suffers from a set of psychological and ultimately biological reductionisms that ignore and—based on its own infrahuman logics—must ignore the constitutional role of everything which is meaningful, symbolic, interhuman and ultimately social. Indeed, the concept of need must “always exist in the context of a particular social-economic organization and series of institutions” (Soper, 1981, p. 9) and is therefore inherently political. Just like it does not make sense to claim that the blackbird must first satisfy its basic needs before it can start to act as blackbird, it makes no sense to claim that the human being, the zoon politicon, can separate its needs from the social and cultural organization underpinning their formulation. The insistence of the importance of apolitical needs therefore belongs to a certain, economistic and ideological tradition of individualization and utilitarianism, a point also underlined by Baudrillard (1969) in his insistence on the ideological genesis of needs. Hence, the concept of needs is already a dubious one that is hardly ever accepted by consumer culture scholars. By and large, we as a community subscribe to Sahlins’ point that “the human body is a cultural body, which also means that the mind is a cultural mind. The great selective pressure in hominid evolution has been the necessity to organize somatic dispositions by symbolic means. It is not that Homo sapiens is without bodily ‘needs’ and ‘drives’, but the critical discovery of anthropology has been that human needs and drives are indeterminate as regards their object because bodily satisfactions are specified in and through symbolic values—and variously so in different cultural-symbolic schemes” (Sahlins 1996, 403-04).
These observations challenge the wisdom of the “survivalist” logic inherent to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and point to Baudrillard’s (1970) provocative insistence that consumer society is not a society of abundance but of lack. The survivalist political-economic ideology permeating consumer capitalism’s insistence on maximizing of production for the satisfaction of needs (Soper, 1981) breaks down when confronted with anthropological evidence. “It quickly becomes obvious that the sort of activities that we would define as economic, particularly subsistence activities, are by no means that on which they spend the greater part of their time or ‘creative energies’, however defined,” Graeber (2001, p. 68) writes about “stateless societies,” where, furthermore, even the most basic agricultural practices are embedded in social meanings pertaining to taboos and rules of cosmological order.
CCT scholarship has likewise joined anthropology in the insistence on the symbolic and culturally affirmative and creative character of consumption activities. Indeed, “even the most workaday, least dramatic forms of social action […] are also forms of symbolic production: they play a main role in people’s most basic definitions of who humans are, the difference between men and women and so on.” (Graeber 2001, p. 82). In other words, anthropology underlines how the actualization of the self, a person’s social esteem, sense of social belonging and thus, feeling of safety insofar as one is an accepted member of a given social order permeates all kinds of mundane activities, consumptive and other. Most critiques, the ones listed above as well as many others, therefore point to the specific Western character of Maslow’s individualist perspective. Not coincidentally, the formulation of the hierarchy of needs is concurrent with the rise of consumer capitalism in the aftermath of WWII.
This is where I think consumer culture theorizing has made a significant contribution, albeit one that seems to be implicit, an axiomatic element, rather than an explicit point. In CCT’s scrutiny of consumption contexts in late-modern capitalism, it is obvious how the humans involved in the many types of consumption practices, CCT and adjacent scholarly communities study, are contributing to the “self-actualization” of “people-as-consumers,” as members of families, as ways of coping with risk and safety, as ways of building social and personal esteem and, indeed securing a (usually quite comfortable, especially compared to many people of the global South) decent level of satisfaction of physiological needs. Indeed, the human being is a being that is self-actualizing—in this, broader and considerably more accurate social sense of the word—no matter what it does. The plethora of CCT-oriented consumption studies collectively draw a portrayal of the modern consumer forging (and thereby actualizing) identities of age, gender, ethnicity, race, class of subculture. Consumers engage in consumption practices in a myriad of contexts, building communities around all sorts of market-related phenomena from brand support to all kinds of resistance (cf. Weijo, this volume). Consumers are morally and emotionally engaged in consumer culture’s responsibilization, dealing with risks, constructing different temporal and spatial arrangements for engaging with material culture and ritualized consumption. People as consumers live in and deal with a wide array of technological devices and digital realities, they are interchangeably trapped and empowered in relation to the economy of symbols characterizing marketing’s seductive universe.
This universe of consumption meanings, practices and materialities contains its own set of internal discrepancies, theoretical debates and methodological and conceptual debates. Consumer culture theory is far from all-encompassing and definitely heteroglossic (Thompson et al. 2013). But it is united in this one particular sense: It demonstrates that for people living under some kind of institutionalized social order, be it an Amazonian tribal community or a community of lesser civilization in a Danish suburb, it is practically impossible to distinguish Maslow’s levels of motivation from each other. To put it polemically, society and social order is there to prevent Maslow’ motivational hierarchy of survivalist needs to operate—this is true in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, in the Gabonese rainforest, and in central Odense.
Through the separation of the spheres of production and consumption, as emphasized by Marx, market economies are “constantly obscuring the fact that all ‘economic’ activity is ultimately a means to the creation of a certain kind of person.” (Graeber 2001. p. 211) CCT has most definitely not (yet?) succeeded in bringing back an integrated view on production and consumption, as I shall return to a bit later—but for CCT scholars and for consumers in general, many aspects and dimensions of the creation of a particular kind of person through consumption is not obscured. Granted, the process is far from transparent, and it cannot be, most certainly not in a complex global economy. That there is an illusion of freedom in a contemporary market economy is beyond any doubt, since, as Graeber notes, “we rely on other people for just about everything” (2001, p. 221). But there is considerable space between “freedom”—which in any case is always a relative concept in a social context—and a completely lack of agency warranted by the classical consumer dupe of most critical theory. This agency—and its deflation of the hierarchy of needs—is a central contribution of CCT.
CCT - Studying the consumerized
The question obviously remains: Exactly what kind of social agency can we attribute to the “consumer”? Graeber (2001) concludes his treatise on value with reflections on the theories of pleasure inherited from either Marx (unalienated labor) or Mauss (the generous artistic expenditure, the pleasure of hospitality in the private or public feast). He juxtaposes those with theories of pleasure as developed by what he calls “market theorists”:
“One need only to try to imagine a theory of pleasure that started from either of these [Marx or Mauss] in order to see how much the kind of pleasures market theorists have in mind when they create their models of human behavior are fundamentally solitary ones. When market theorists think about a pleasurable, awarding experience, the root image they to have in mind seems to be eating food (‘consumption’)—and not in the context of a private or public feast, either, but apparently, food eaten by oneself. The idea seems to be an almost furtive appropriation in which objects what had been parts of the outside world are completely incorporated into the consumer’s self.” (Graeber 2001, p. 260)
Now this was written before CCT entered the field of “market theorists,” at least under that name. CCT scholarship has profoundly articulated and unpacked consumption and its pleasures as practices that go far beyond the individual. Graeber, however, repeated and extended the “eating food” based critique of the notion of the consumer and consumption including CCT research some 10 years later (Graeber 2011). These arguments were repeated by my colleagues James Cronin and James Fitchett in the rewarding interview (Cronin and Fitchett 2022), underlining how the proliferation of the “consumer” notion confirms a neoliberal cosmology, potentially making CCT scholars “neoliberalism’s useful idiots” (Fitchett et al., 2014; Askegaard, 2014).
Graeber’s critique is primarily directed towards the consequences of the (alleged) reduction of most—indeed, for some almost all modern people’s activities to “consumption.” As stated by Graeber (2011 p. 491): “Why does the fact that manufactured goods are involved in an activity automatically come to define its very nature? It seems to me that this theoretical choice—the assumption that the main thing people do when they are not working is ‘consuming’ things—carries within it a tacit cosmology, a theory of human desire and fulfillment whose implications we would do well to think about.”
This obviously puts consumer culture researchers in a conundrum. While Graeber’s observation that consumptive activities are also productive is resonant with consumer culture theorization, undermining the qualification of activities in which people engage with, practically or symbolically, market-mediated commodities engenders a risk of turning back time to a period where consumption was understood and defined as acquisition, and consumer behavior therefore, by and large, was approached as buyer behavior.
There are at least two ways of framing a response to Graeber. Firstly, along with Miller (1987) we can consider consumption ontologically as a Hegelian practice of engaging in and—as we have seen—realizing ourselves through an engagement with material and non-material resources, regardless of economic organization of the society and the prevalence or not of market capitalism. 1 However, as pointed out by many since Marx (1953) underlined how capitalism does not only create a product for the consumer but also a consumer for the product, the category of consumer and consumption gets a special meaning under capitalism. Hence, we can treat consumption and the consumer not just as ontological categories but also from the application of a particular epistemology, namely, the assertion that under contemporary consumer capitalism, most activities involve some kind of market mediation of the resources mobilized. I usually invite my students to reflect on whether they can locate some object in the classroom that is not market-mediated and therefore not really part of consumer culture according to the definition provided by Arnould and Thompson (2005). Only the occasional home-grown carrot seems to provide an exception that defines the rule: that we collectively “consume” the classroom facilities, electrical and other infrastructures, wall coverings, electronics, chairs and tables, white- and blackboards etc. In other words, speaking about consumers and consumption is not speaking about the nature of these people and phenomena, as Graeber expresses it. It is a perspective that we can apply in order to underline exactly that very dependency on the world of commodities and the market mediation of late-modern capitalism so prevalent in contemporary life. The categories of consumption and consumer are thus contemporary, but far from innocent, conceptualizations of processes of engagement with material and immaterial resources that must always be applied observing their socio-historical contingency.
As we know from research on alternative consumption communities and lifestyles, it is connected to considerable difficulties and requires tremendous effort to live mostly or fully outside the realm of market mediation. Since the role of consumer is therefore embedded in the standard way of organizing contemporary lives, we might therefore talk about the contemporary citizen in modern market economies as the consumerized—with the important addition that this enforced role is not just inflicted from the outside but also an outcome of auto-consumerization. The pursuit of fantasies, feelings and fun (Holbrook and Hirschman 1982) mobilizes souls all over the world—and has done so throughout the existence of the human species. Contemporary consumer culture - captured by capitalism's usurpation of our fantasies, feelings and fun and thus of some of that which is most fundamental to the definition of the anthropos - thrives from proliferating and reinforcing meanings pertaining to commodities and brands. But even if the origin of many such meanings are rooted in commercial communication, the consumer culture logic and the proliferation of stylized universes, taste regimes and personalized brands, not least on social media, takes such meaning formation way beyond classical advertising contexts.
If on the one hand, we can defend the proliferation and the application of the categories of consumer and consumption by referring to the dominant social and economic logics of capitalism as a contingent socio-historical reality, we must, ipso facto, also constantly remind ourselves of this contingency and avoid naturalization of said categories. In simpler terms—let us remain critical of the consequences of contemporary consumer culture and its discontents. As a journal, Marketing Theory has accomplished the task of becoming arguably the most respected outlet for critical voices inside marketing addressing the darker, indeed some of the darkest sides of contemporary societies’ entanglement with marketing and consumer culture logics. However, critical impact has remained “residual” as underlined by Ahlberg and colleagues (2022). Let me turn to this issue now.
The context(s) of context(s) revisited
The trope of the context of context (Askegaard and Linnet 2011) has been adopted by many colleagues with considerable enthusiasm. Most commonly, the trope is used to indicate the role of underlying ideological features and patterns of practices and meanings in the shaping of consumption. These ideological foundations are typically summarized in terms of “neoliberalism” or “capitalist market economy.” These are, indeed, the context of context insofar as they do not necessarily emanate directly from consumer experiences accounted for in the empirical basis for the discussions. Such ideological underpinnings have obviously contributed to the abovementioned, meticulous investigation of the inner dynamics of contemporary consumer culture, which CCT and adjacent scholars have unfolded over the last many years.
However, when the basic idea behind the context of context was first presented at the Interpretive Consumer Research workshop in Oxford in 1997 (!), I remember exemplifying the idea by saying something like the following: “It is all good and fine that we are analyzing and understanding the many meanings and practices pertaining to, for example, owning a Porsche. We are very good at that! But we are missing an important part of consumer culture if we do not ask ourselves: Where did the Porsche come from in the first place?” An increasing number of contemporary consumers demonstrate a growing interest in the value chains and production and distribution processes underlying the presence of the goods they encounter in the marketplace.
In other words, the context of context is not exhausted by concluding something general on the capitalist logics of commodification, market expansion, post-colonialization and coca-colonization etc. It could and should also address the specific value chains, elements and ingredients that go into production, chemical components added for product longevity or to secure various conveniences (for producers, distributors and/or consumers). As of this writing and with parliamentary elections upcoming, a strong political movement in Denmark is calling for a “pork election,” pointing to the devastating consequences both in terms of environment and animal welfare of an industry producing 30 million pigs annually (more than 90% for export), the overall social and environmental costs largely exceeding the industry’s income. Costs which are, as always, socialized while income (bolstered by EU subsidiaries!) is privatized. However, consumers in ever larger numbers are questioning the legitimacy of this industry and the alleged necessity (given the farming industry’s special mythologized local status) of Denmark being “the hot dog stand of the World.”
However, such industrial policy debates are absent from most of our discussions of consumer culture, maybe with the exception of an interest in CSA (e.g., Press and Arnould 2011; Thompson and Coskuner-Balli 2007). If papers unpack the atrocities of the global production and value chains for cotton for the fast fashion industry, it is usually done in critical management or critical sociology. If such issues are discussed closer to home ground, it may be in macromarketing or in TCR contexts—but only rarely in consumer culture theorizing (see, e.g., Baskin and Weinberger 2022; Varman et al., 2024 for propitious exceptions), where we are usually content to scrutinize the circulation of meanings and matter post-production and post-acquisition.
Such endeavors are not least significant when it comes to disentangling the coming into being of the ultra-processed foods dominating so much of the contemporary food market. This is therefore an open invitation to follow in the footsteps of Stephen Ettlinger (2007) in his deconstruction of one of America’s most beloved treats, the Twinkie. But nearly all our consumer goods are the result of very elaborate and complex value chains, as we were reminded by the global supply chains crisis post-covid and the later Russian invasion of Ukraine and US/Israeli/Iranian war testify. Needless to say, this unpacking is just as important in the digital as in the material world, as clearly demonstrated by Zuboff (2019) and others. And finally, one of the consequences of the concentration of capital and the dominance and control of a restricted number of global economic agents over these value chains is a galloping increase in global and local inequalities (e.g., Milanovic 2016; Piketty 2021). So, the first context of context that we need to investigate to a larger extent is the infrastructure of energy, matter, meanings and people that provide the immense collection of commodities that Marx tried to unpack over three volumes in the 19th century.
The second context of context that I invite us to address is the role of the state in this infrastructure. While we are used to thinking of state and market as opposing institutions, the picture in the neoliberalist and neo-nationalist global economies dominating in the 21th century is very different. But whether it is as an opponent or a collaborator—and the truth is obviously a complex matter of conflicting and convergent interests in a myriad of contexts—the state as an actor is by and large absent from consumer culture theorizing. This both pertains to the state’s indirect role as legislator but also to more direct roles as intervening agent in market and consumption contexts. Consumer culture theory should not conceal that we study in a consumer society structured by systems of class and power structures. Such an increased role of the state in the constitution of consumer culture should address the melding of public and private power so brilliantly analyzed by Grace Blakeley (2024). However, if this neglect is true for traditional human politics, it is becoming increasingly evident that politics go far beyond the human.
As asserted by Bettany and Coffin, “it may be said that the growing representations of nonhumans in theory (e.g., assemblage approaches) do not come with a full representation of the politics of nonhumanity. The nonhumans amongst us […] may require a move beyond ontological speculation, moving towards more public roles shaping the ethical contours of marketing systems and consumer society.” (Bettany and Coffin 2024, 596). Beyond the global political economy and its (destruction-of-) value chains and the state’s role in it, the third and maybe most important context of context that consumer culture theorizing should consider is the insertion of it all in an Earthly ecosystem which is by and large finite and closed except for the influx of solar energy and the outflux of heat loss. The impact of humanity and its economic activities of production and consumption—of extraction, conversion of energy and matter and waste production—and its consequences for biospheres, hydrosphere, atmosphere, cryosphere and geosphere is arguably the most important challenge for humanity. And consumer culture and its consequences play a central role in the generation of these, so-called Anthropocene consequences (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2017). Needless to say, these processes are not independent from the political and economic contexts of context that were discussed prior to this one. Consequently, it is a valid discussion whether to apply the notion of Anthropocene with its broad and inclusive causation of the contemporary state of the planet. Or whether it would not be better to qualify the current era as the Capitalocene (for a summary of the critiques of the Anthropocene see e.g., Moore 2016).
The role of capitalism and globalizing consumer culture in contemporary planetary destruction and, consequently of bringing the state of planet Earth beyond (so far!) six out of nine planetary boundaries (Richardson et al., 2023) need no further scientific evidence. What we do need on the one hand are painstaking critical and revelatory explorations of the paths of becoming of the many goods and services that we take for granted and which conveniences we enjoy (?) in consumer culture. Such unpacking is important in reshaping public imaginaries about the commodities whose mere existence in the marketplace a large majority of consumers apparently and incorrectly take as a sign of not overly destructive production processes. And what we need on the other hand are explorations of alternative hedonisms (Soper 2020), models of plenitude (Schor, 2010; Schor and Thompson, 2014) and other alternative positive imaginaries that may be used to provide new models for the good life. One idea that imposes itself is the unsustainable policy that in order to be a legitimate member of society, one needs to serve capital accumulation in the labor market either by being active in capitalist production (best), in public regulation of the political economy (tolerated—if capital friendly) or in regeneration of labor force (least valorized and often non-remunerated). However, the planet cannot sustain such continued productivism. The idea of regenerative remuneration (a better term than citizen wage) and an interrogation of the imaginary that establishes capitalist work as the standard are thus called for (White and Williams 2016). Such alternative imaginaries are plentiful in indigenous knowledge and principles (e.g., Ewuoso and Hall 2019; Kimmerer, 2013; Krenak 2024, to name just a few from different parts of the world).
The good news is that this is happening. Marketing Theory itself brought post-growth to the foreground in its last issue of 2025 with several contributions inviting us to think beyond the current features of consumer culture. Neo-animist principles for the generation and circulation of resources are explored and developed (Arnould, 2022; Arnould and Helkkula 2024; Helkkula and Arnould 2022) attempts are made to think such principles together with principles of alternative hedonism and a post-anthropocentric conceptualization of nature and culture (Askegaard et al., 2024). Finally, Arnould and Thompson (2026) map various streams of research for consumer culture theory on its way beyond the capitalocene and point to four ways in which CCT scholars are investigating alternative modes of resource circulation: Gift giving, complementary reciprocal interdependence, mobilizing commons and biosystemic symbiosis. The extensive list presented by Arnould and Thompson cannot be given due justice here but some featured examples of such research going beyond individualized market agencies on gift systems and reciprocity are studies by Atanasova et al. (2025) and Weinberger et al. (2025) and examples of alternative modes of social organization are Casey et al. (2020) and Marchais et al. (2024, see also Üçok-Hughes et al., 2024)).
Conclusion: Some key scholars to (re-)read
Consumer culture can be considered the biggest party the world has ever seen and as all good parties, it is wildly transgressive and leaves a scene of waste and destruction to be dealt with in the aftermath. Like so many other parties that are coming to an end, some (a lot of) participants are not ready to let the party be over just yet. However, there is no shortage of voices telling us that it must be so, that it is the end of the era of economic Growth as the general political leitmotif whose limitations was pointed out already over 50 years ago (Meadows et al., 1972) but extended and reflected on by more and more economists (e.g., Jackson, 2009, 2019, 2025; Parrique, 2025; Raworth, 2017), anthropologists (Descola 2013; Hickel 2022), sociologists (e.g., Latour, 2018) and philosophers (Guattari 1989; Stengers 2015; Stiegler 2021)
“Le monde est trop plein” (the world is too full), Norwegian anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen quoted his famous French colleague Clause Lévi-Strauss for stating in an interview shortly before his death at the considerable age of 101 years in 2009. That is also how I feel. There is too much to read, especially if you are of the sound belief that it is important to read also what adversaries say and stand for. So how to go about suggesting anything, singling out some works over others that might merit similar attention?
Beyond the already mentioned sources I would like to suggest a few supplementary titles, all of them in one way or the other reflecting on the nature-culture relationships which, as Descola (2013) points out, will be the central issue for humanity in the 21st century. In chronological order, Bateson’s (1980) systems-based underlining of the significance of the relational, Soper’s (1995) meticulous account of the many—conflicting, paradoxical—ways in which we as humans understand “nature,” Rosa’s (2019) ambitious theory of resonance as a way of understanding the human relation-building with the world, and last but not least, the substantial selection of texts introducing the recently deceased Edgar Morin’s theorization of complexity as a foundational epistemological approach to nature, humanity and beyond, to the English speaking world (Morin 2023).
Footnotes
Author’s Note
The author would like to thank so many..., but notably Eric Arnould, Güliz Ger and Dannie Kjeldgaard for conversations inspirational to the arguments presented here.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. However, the thoughts presented here are in part inspired from the SDU Climate Cluster Reseach Project Post_Anthropocentric Climate Action (PACA) of which the authoer is a co-PI.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.