Bridging Boundaries in Consumption, Markets and Culture

Book excerpt: This book focuses on the bridges that connect the dynamic relations between consumer actions, the marketplace, and cultural meanings. Answering the challenge to do more than merely cross the boundaries between these fields, the authors in this volume also undertake the far harder work of bridging them. Consequently, this book is a rich and topical array of research projects which engage in a variety of theoretical and empirical boundary crossings. The authors’ diverse methodologies span archival research, visual content analysis, ethnography and phenomenological interviewing. Their research contexts are distinctly globally diverse, as reflected in the topics of their studies: aid in contemporary Syrian refugee camps in Germany; early twentieth-century Swedish advertisements for kitchens; family formation in twenty-first-century Sri Lanka; Brazilian book (de)collectors; and the signification of magazine covers in India. Overall, the book makes for compelling reading across and beyond conventional boundaries associated with the study of consumption, markets and culture. This book was originally published as a peer-reviewed special issue of Consumption Markets & Culture.