Search

This paper is intended as a follow-up to Marshall Sahlins's "The Sadness of Sweetness: The Native Anthropology of Western Cosmology" (1996). It isolates one field of practical action—marketing and consumer behavior—to explore the ways in which the implicit theory of needs that Sahlins elucidates is embedded in marketplace behavior, broadly defined, in the United States. Supported by an ethnographic illustration, it hypothesizes the process whereby professional marketers and consumers, via their practical disposition toward each other in the mutually constituted sociocultural field of the "market," help perpetuate the Western cosmological duality of suffering and salvation. A critique of three writers on the subject of marketing and consumer behavior, Lefebvre, Baudrillard, and Bourdieu, forms the basis for a theory of cultural construction of the market and of consumer identities within it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]