Understanding Consumer Culture in Latin America: An Introduction

Abstract

This collection brings together recent work from across the humanities and social sciences on consumption, consumers, and consumer culture in Latin America. It presents original research by sociologists, anthropologists, media and cultural studies scholars, geographers, and historians; contributors range from the most senior scholars working on these topics today, to emerging early career researchers, and includes academics based in Latin American institutions as well as others working in North America, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Although the strength of the volume derives from this diversity of contributors and that of the approaches and topics they cover, it can make understanding the relationship between the various papers, and even understanding what “consumer culture” might be, whether in Latin America or in any other region of the world, a challenge. Chapters in this book consider consumption practices and consumer culture in places as diverse as Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, the Andean region, Brazil, and Chile, covering topics such as media, cultural production and creative industries, household consumption, tourism, shopping, and environmental and economic consequences of globalization among other things. The goal of this introductory chapter, then, is to explain how such varied studies of consumption might be relevant to scholars and students of Latin America, as well as to demonstrate and explain the particular importance occupied by Latin American societies, and the Latin American region as a whole, in the growing world scholarship on consumption and consumers.