Material Culture and Consumption

Economization processes of “culture” accompany the development of capitalism as the playground of modernity in both material and immaterial areas of society represented along axes of inequality. Technology, object use and advertising are three areas of everyday life that are prominently dealt with at different times in the subject and in which such processes can be exemplified.

Technology as a charismatic, male-represented aura of modernity is shown in artefacts and modes of use, in dynamics and processes, in hierarchies and power relations. From a critical cultural science perspective, an anthropologically expanded concept of technology emerges, which, in contrast to a narrow engineering science perspective, is able to fathom the relationship between technology and culture by emphasizing its fundamental gender specificity and emotionalisation and putting into perspective the span between construction and destruction.

A cultural analysis of advertising deciphers it both as a producer and as a reproducer of modern everyday perception. Using the example of the touristification of areas of everyday life such as food and luxury consumption or housing, her role as a central medium – as genre and ‘ambassador’ – in the late modern construction of touristified consumer landscapes such as typified regional cultures emerges. It serves itself in the economized formation of “everyday life” as a mode of experience and of “lifestyle” as a market.