Consumption, Sustainability and Variegated Consumer Societies: Development and Distinction in Late-Socialist China and Vietnam
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.60923/issn.1971-8853/23738Keywords:
Consumer society, Consumption, Social practices, Capitalism, Sustainability, Food, AsiaAbstract
Contemporary accounts of consumption and sustainability are often criticized both for ignoring the non-Western world and for not paying sufficient attention to the structuring effects of capitalist political economy. This paper suggests a way to do both through a variegated consumer societies framework. Such a framework involves a multi-scalar approach to production-consumption complexes, including attention to both everyday life and consumption environments, as well as governance, production networks, and broader consumer-cultural frames. A central point is that capitalist consumer societies always take similar but varied shapes, depending on local institutions and cultures as well as the multi-scalar connections behind goods, trends and fashion. In this article, I use this framework to study changing consumption in China and Vietnam, two countries that have been among the fastest-growing economies and home to some of the fastest-expanding consumer-class populations globally over the past decades. I study the emergence of capitalist consumer cultures in these nominally socialist countries, zooming in on sustainable consumption and new forms of distinction through two core consumption domains: mobility and food.References
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