Description
A follow-up to Grant McCracken’s groundbreaking Culture and Consumption, this new book trades the usual platitudes about the consumer society for a moredetailed, exacting anthropological treatment. Each section of the book pairs a briefessay with an academic article. The essay is designed for a quick, provocativeglimpse of the topic; the article provides a deeper anthropological treatment. Thebook opens with a broadside against the now thoroughly conventionalized attack onthe consumer culture. Essays follow on homes, cars, people, and social mobility;celebrities, consumerism, and self-invention; museums and the power of objects; theanthropology of advertising; and marketing, meaning management, and value. LikeMcCracken’s previous volume, this new book is an engaging, informative, andeye-opening foray into modern consumer culture. Contents Acknowledgments I. Introduction 1. Living in the Material World 2. On Oprah II. Homes 3. The Drew Bledsoe Paradox: The Mysterious Home Economics of Homo economicus 4. Homeyness: A Cultural Account of One Constellation of Consumer Goods and Meanings III. Automobiles 5. Calling Grease 6. When Cars Could Fly: Raymond Loewy, John Kenneth Galbraith, and the 1954 Buick IV. Celebrities 7. Marilyn Monroe, Inventor of Blondness 8. Who Is the Celebrity Endorser? Cultural Foundations of the Endorsement Process V. Museums 9. The Strange Power of Uncle Meyer’s Wallet 10. Culture and Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum: An Anthropological Approach to a Marketing Problem VI. Advertising 11. Taking Madison Avenue by Storm 12. Advertising: Meaning versus Information VII. Marketing 13. Sarah Zupko, Meet Mrs. Woolworth 14. Meaning-Management: An Anthropological Approach to the Creation of Value Bibliography Index
