The Eccentricity of the Romantic Consumer: Campbell, Simmel and Plessner

Paper presented at the 4th International Plessner Conference, 16th to 18th September 2009, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, The Netherland

The Healthy Body as Religious Territory: Health Consumerism as New Religious Practice?

publication-status: PublishedPublished with the permission of Cambridge Scholars PublishingChapter from: Emerging geographies of belief edited by Catherine Brace, Adrian Bailey, Sean Carter, David Harvey and Nicola Thomas, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2011, pp.239-254N/

The Sufi ethics and the spirits of consumerism: A preliminary suggestion for further research

In this speculative comment I will suggest that, in analogy with Colin Campbell's argument regarding the Romantic Ethic and the spirit of modern consumerism, there is prima facie evidence that there is also an elective affinity between Sufi-infused Islamic religiosity and the emergent Muslim consumerisms, particularly in Turkey and among Turkish (and Kurdish) diasporas in Europe. The main relevant features of Sufi spirituality in this context are identified as continuous creation, creative imagination and longing

Fair Trade and Critical Research: What Role for Academic Comment

Talk given at a Great Western Research Sustainability Seminar, 2nd November 2009N/

Talcott Parsons, the Sick Role and Chronic Illness

Parsons’ sick role concept has become problematic in the face of the increased significance of chronic illnesses and the growing emphasis on life-style centred health promotion. Both developments de-limit the medical system so that it extends into the world of health, fundamentally changing the doctor-patient relationship. But as the sick role is firmly based on the reciprocities of a resiliently capitalist achievement society it still informs normative expectations in the field of health and illness. The precarious social position of chronic patients between being governed by and being consumers of medicine, I will argue, can only be adequately understood if one involves, as Parsons did, the moral economy surrounding health and illness

Consuming the campesino - Fair trade marketing between recognition and romantic commodification

publication-status: Publishedtypes: ArticleThis paper aims to reconstruct the everyday moral plausibility of fair trade consumerism by linking it back to an analysis of the moral grammar of capitalist consumer culture and understanding it as both an actualization and development of this moral grammar. Fair trade movements re-moralize global markets by insisting on a just price for Third-World produce. The paradigm for fair exchange is the equitability implied in ordinary practices of commodity exchange while such equitability is constantly negated by the fact of capitalist accumulation. Fair trade is also an attempt to tap into the recognition function of market exchange in order to move away from charity and its paternalistic implications. As this proves not entirely possible on a voluntary basis, the price gap between conventionally traded and fair trade products needs to be justified by non-altruistic motives such as increased material and symbolic use values. These include romanticized images of commodified agricultural and artisanal producers. In this romanticization, fair trade conjures up the ghost of colonialism-failing to deliver full equity and recognition, but thereby also insisting on the need for final de-colonization

Consumerism as Folk Religion?

Network for Religion in Public Life workshop "Critiques of Capitalism: Christian and Muslim Voices", Exeter, 2nd - 3rd Jun 2014"I will argue that consumerism can be understood as a contemporary folk religion as it shares a number of traits with most religions. In this talk I will focus on two: the thematic of transcendence and the dynamics of probation. Consumerism is at the heart of what Thomas Luckmann called “invisible religion”, i.e. the non-institutionalised and non-traditional cultural ways of dealing with the problems posed by the temporally and spatially transcendent nature of human existence. Modern consumerism is distinguished from traditional forms of consumption not so much by its materialism, but by the emphasis on the imagination, the way it instils dreamlike ideas of alternative realities beyond our immediate routines. Because of this connection to individual/personal transcendence, consumerism is highly identity relevant. Identity, nearly in all cultures, is expressed through material objects – but modern consumerism stands out as it, to a hitherto unknown extent, allows the individual to assemble their own identity expressions. This also means that it becomes a field in which individuals prove themselves as having an identity worth expressing in the first place. I will argue that, combined, these two traits justify the notion that consumerism is the folk-religious bedrock on which rests what Émile Durkheim has called the “cult of the individual” – the secular religion in which “man is simultaneously worshipper and god”, a civil religions whose “high-church” format is often understood to be the discourse of human rights.

Veblen in the (Inner) City: On the Normality of Looting

Drawing on Veblen’s concept of ‘pecuniary prowess’ I will argue that the August riots can be understood not so much in terms of protest but as an appropriation of the underlying acquisitive logic of capitalism. The violent realisation of that logic across class divides has become more likely due to an erosion in plausibility of discourses of meritocratic legitimacy. Recent denigrating discourses around “chavs” as dangerous and undeserving poor can be understood as attempts to reinstate meritocratic legitimacy rhetorically, but in an increasingly unequal society this becomes an ever more difficult enterprise. On the other hand, the assertion of the order of property through an effective police response may have eased the pressure by providing evidence that anxieties about a full scale insurgence are unfounded

Reciprocity, Recognition and Labor Value: Marx's Incidental Moral Anthropology of Capitalist Market Exchange

types: Article(No abstract