In this exciting new volume from the Society for Economic Anthropology, Cynthia Werner and Duran Bell bring together a group of distinguished anthropologists and economists to discuss the complex ways in which different cultures imbue material objects with symbolic qualities whose value cannot be reduced to material or monetary equivalents. Objects with sacred or symbolic qualities are valued quite differently than mundane objects, and the contributors to this volume set out to unravel how...

How would first contact—on earth, in space, on another planet—transform our understandings of technology, philosophy, and what it means to be human? What kind of cognitive dissonance would society experience, if we discovered a previously unrecognized sentience on Earth?What would life be like if it originated in a frigid ocean beneath an impenetrable shell of ice? Or on a world whose haze obscures any view of the universe beyond? Or on an unfathomable scale in the...

Les êtres humains modifient, aménagent et « artificialisent » les milieux géographiques au point de se demander si la nature y a encore une place. L’intitulé même de cette question qui sert de titre à l’ouvrage fait peser l’hypothèse du déclin de cette nature. Ce ne sont pourtant pas tant les impacts des interventions humaines sur celle-ci qui occupent nos réflexions. Plus nous avons tenté de répondre à cette interrogation, plus notre attention s’est tournée vers les relations que les soci...

*NOW FULLY UPDATED AND EXPANDED WITH SIX NEW CHAPTERS*Over the past forty years, Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) has emerged as a distinctive field of study that synthesizes diverse subjects such as anthropology, cultural studies, marketing, political theory and sociology to provide new insights into consumers’ relationships to the marketplace and the influence of commercial action on culture.This book, edited by leading scholars in CCT, contains contribution...