Project Thoughts

Her are a few of the ideas I’ve been throwing around while researching my project. I thought I would post in case anyone had any other thoughts/comments/suggestions/etc…

Is consumerism the inevitable consequence of the acquisition of new wealth and the seemingly inherent human desire to display status? Is it feasible to base an argument on the assumption of such “inherent” human values? Is there anyway of proving it, and would it be necessary to prove it for the purposes of this project? In thinking and reading about the emergence of consumerism in China in conjunction with my theoretical readings of consumerism in general I began to wonder whether consumerism in China wasn’t just another example of a world wide phenomenon. South America has exhibited similar trends towards a consumerist culture during development stages and from my experiences it seems to be almost entirely associated with an intense albeit often unconscious necessity to display status. It seems not too far out of the realm to slightly refocus this project to look at how and to what extent Chinese consumerism is focused around the issues of status, and furthermore how this desire for status and the urge to consume reflects personal identity as a whole.

Continuing this thought, and my efforts to find the why of Chinese consumerism, I keep coming back to a question posed by Cochran. He asks, “Have Western-based transnational corporations been homogenizing the world’s cultures, or have individual consumers in local cultures been diversifying the world’s culture?” (p. 2) I haven’t fully parsed out all the implications of this question, but I like the shift in focus away from the ‘pushing’ of the corporations and instead to the ‘pulling’ of the individual (or mass) consumer. Complicating that idea, and perhaps, although not necessarily, refuting my thought of a universal human urge toward consumerism Ciarlante and Hellmut argue that “culture ensures that consumers are not that same. They are fundamentally different in their tastes and preferences, perceptions, ordering of needs and motivations to consume.” They state a divergence in the Western and Asian consumer so large that it is necessary to create a wholly new consumer behavior theory (p.195). However, while these differences are interesting and help to answer many of my questions about the specifics of the Chinese consumer, I do not think that they necessarily negate the idea that the overall why of consumption is the same world over. Or does it?

On another theoretical note but following the same general theme, how do the products consumed and the desire to consume them affect/shape personal identity? Bourdieu argues in his introduction that, “art and cultural consumption are predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfill a social function of legitimating social differences” (p.7). Could we extend that to product consumption and say that the desire to consume culturally esteemed products is an effort to legitimize a status claim? The concept of identity is complicated however, by the particularities of a case study. Such generalizations may or may not necessarily apply to the Chinese sense of identity. Do the specific cultural dynamics of 20^th century (or maybe even pre-communist era) China play into this model of consumption as defining social class? Perhaps, as Barmé interestingly noted, “under the party’s aegis, comrades have become consumers without necessarily also developing into citizens” (xiv). Could it be argued therefore that communism itself bred a sort of state-dependent, conformist social system that lends itself perfectly to a consumerist culture?