Sociology of Consumption: Markets, Meaning, and Material Culture

Harvard FAS

Why do we buy the things we buy? From the clothes we wear to the food we eat to the guilty pleasures we hide, where do our tastes come from and how do they become symbols of belonging or exclusion? This class examines consumption, the act of shopping, buying, and using material culture. Consumption, we will see, is more than just a simple economic transaction; it helps us construct identities, signal status, navigate relationships, and reproduce inequalities. Over the course of the semester,…