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Consumption Practices and Middle-Class Consciousness among Socially Aware Shoppers in Atlanta

With the postmodern prevalence of shopping as both a recreational and subsistence activity, social class identity is increasingly constituted around access to the landscape of consumption. U.S. middle-class identity is normalized in commercial spaces and the exclusion of the lower-class from these spaces perpetuates wider social disparities. For socially aware members of the middle-class, distinction may be achieved by selectively shopping throughout the metropolitan area with the goal of influencing corporate practices. Yet this distinction is not without cost as middle-class shoppers are prime targets of identity marketing schemes and of the neoliberal regime’s construction of consent. Through 15 self-proclaimed middle-class shoppers’ reported use of Atlanta’s postmodern landscape of consumption, this study focuses on performances of middle-classness and representations of commercialized spaces with the goal of furthering the anthropological understanding of class identity and urban space as heterogeneous.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:GEORGIA/oai:digitalarchive.gsu.edu:anthro_theses-1012
Date09 June 2006
CreatorsTabor, Desiree Lynn
PublisherDigital Archive @ GSU
Source SetsGeorgia State University
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
SourceAnthropology Theses

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