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611 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 6 (2007)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0611 and id is 1 raw text is: INTRODUCTION The Politics of Consumption/ The Consumption of Politics By DHAVAN V. SHAH, DOUGLAS M. McLEOD, LEWIS FRIEDLAND, and MICHELLE R. NELSON As consumer culture pervades the social life of citizens in America and Europe, it becomes increasingly important to clarify the relationship between consumption and cit- izenship. With this in mind, faculty and students at the University of Wisconsin organized a conference titled The Politics of Consumption/The Consumption of Politics. Held in October 2006, the meeting provided a forum for leading scholars to discuss the interplay of markets, media, politics, and the citizen-consumer. Revised and expanded versions of the papers they pre- sented are collected in this volume with the goal of advancing this emerging area of inquiry. It is our hope that the essays and research papers we have collected here help define the next wave of theory building and research inquiry on the intersections of consumer cul- ture, civic culture, and mass culture. Keywords: citizen-consumers; competitive consump- tion; civic engagement; lifestyle politics; materialism; political branding; socially conscious consumption; taste cultures Nearly a half century before Thorstein Veblen published The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899/1994), his now-classic refu- tation of neoclassical notions of consumption as utility maximization, another writer was cri- tiquing American society's materialistic values. Henry David Thoreau's call to simplify, simplify in Walden (1854/1995), his chronicle of more than two years of austere living on the shores of Walden Pond, still resonates with contempo- rary readers struggling to find ways to exist in ecological and social harmony. Thoreau's pre- scient question-What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?-demands concerted attention in the political and environmental climate of the early twenty-first century. Likewise, Veblen's (1899/1994) assertions, echoed and expanded by Bourdieu (1979/1984), that consumers' preferences are determined socially, a consequence not of need but of indi- viduals' positions in social hierarchies, continue DOJ: 10.1177/0002716207299647 ANNALS, AAPSS, 611, May 2007 6

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