Consumption and Everyday Life This interdisciplinary volume portrays the variety and complexity of consuming practices that are embedded in the context of everyday life. The contributors cover a broad range of cultural consuming patterns drawing on material as well as symbolic resources with case studies from different parts of the world. Studied practices include shopping, personal narratives, music and performance, the imagination of identities and places, media and audiences as well as domestic communication technologies. These cases counter both traditional images of a passive, powerless consumer and the postmodern glorification of consumers as "creative artists", but rather illustrate the varying balance between constraint and creativity, and the role of consumption within the cycle of production, regulation, representation and identity. In the introduction, Hugh Mackay explains what is understood under the term cultural consumption, and gives an interdisciplinary and historical overview of the most significant approaches to consumption, their accomplishments and weaknesses. He outlines what contribution this book has to offer to the study of consumption and everyday life, summarizes each chapter briefly, and discusses what they have in common, and in which respect they are differentiated from each other. In his chapter, Daniel Miller explains the concept of appropriation and illustrates it with his own fieldwork on English kitchen furniture in state-provided housings, U.S. American soap operas and Coca-Cola in Trinidad. He traces back anthropological approaches to the relationship between persons and objects and problematizes the strict distinction between "gift-societies" and "commodity-societies", and the p... ... They provide the reader with approachable empirical studies rather than abstract theorizing, and thus narrow the broad field and theoretical of consumption to possible local sites of study. The book is written in an accessible language and style, with key-concepts set off and explained in a very comprehensive way. Each chapter is followed by selected readings and includes questions and activities to the readers, thus creating the perquisites for an active reading (supporting their angle on consumption as active rather than passive). I recommend this very useful book to everyone interested in the cultural dimension of consumption. It might be an excellent introductory textbook, but be also of interest to advanced students and researchers across a range of disciplines including sociology, anthropology, media studies, communication, cultural studies, and economy.
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1/9/2020 0 Comments The Evolution of International Tourism Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3000 wordsThe Evolution of International Tourism - Essay Example hough it is prone to be unbalanced as the issue of price is less considered in long-duration tours but of importance in the shorter route destinations hence the aspect price elasticity (Rosselló, 2003). International tourism however has always performed better than other economic sectors as evidenced by past records that reveal that, ‘In the last fifty years, for every 1% rise in the per capita income of the world’s inhabitants, the number of travellers has risen by over 3%’ (Manera and Taberner, 2007, pg.4). In the period between 1950 and 2001, global per capita GDP grew by an average of 2.1 percent while the number of tourists within the same period grew by seven percent hence the UNWTO forecasted growth was a modest 1561 million or an average 1.6 billion ITAs by 2020 dependent on a steady upsurge in per-capita income and population growth patterns (Manera and Taberner, 2007). The UNWTO World Tourism Barometer 2009, all the major tourist designations recorded declines with only Africa depicting a growth of three percent. The world tourist arrivals suffered a sharp decline of negative eight percent in 2009, a downturn that started in the second half of 2008. This have inevitably attributed to the impact of the worldwide economic recession that has spelt doom for the international travellers as most tightened on their budgets. The international tourist arrivals (ITA) had by 2008 reached 922 million which was 1.9 percent appreciation from that of 2007, while the international tourism receipts (ITR) rose to US$944 or Euro 642 billion within the same period a 1.8 percent upsurge. The UNWTO (2009) indicated that approximately US$165 billion was generated from the international passenger transport for the combined total tourism expenditure to US$1.1 trillion that more than US$3 billion daily. The expansionist growth has mirrored the explosion of mass tourism stimulated by the era of packaged tours and the growth of the low-cost flights mainly in short haul
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