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ShoppingForIdentity
MeatballWiki | RecentChanges | Random Page | Indices | Categories- Marilyn Halter, Shopping for Identity--The Marketing of Ethnicity. ISBN 0-8052-1093-9 (alternate, search) (2000)
After reading CyberTypes, I began thinking a lot more about the PostHuman myth of monoculture, and more particularly what was indeed real. It was significant I was wandering the streets of New York City at the time, looking through shop windows and street food vendors, seeing the wide "ethnic" variety now for sale. This lead me to think about how ethicity was a purchasable commodity, a natural corporate reaction to the growing backlash against the mass market monoculture North Americans had been forced to consume until recently.
I also was thinking I needed a new book. I somehow found ShoppingForIdentity, a natural progression from the realization (or creation) of a heterogeneous, pluralistic, multi- culture to the immediate aftershock. And, hell, pop culture and corporate culture aren't separable.
Halter explores in this volume the vast new world of ethnic marketing, from its earliest beginnings, through its maturation, and into the philosophical immediate consequences of its arrival. We've come to live in a society where clothes really do make the man, where we feel a need to construct an identity by purchasing it in little coloured Lego blocks, but significantly we do this because our driving sense of identity is not constructable or even particularly malleable.
Finally, this book also demonstrates that a FreeMarket? economy really does have an intrinsic social value because it forces the profit motivated to reflect current social trends. To me, I feel this demonstrates a more effective liberalism than legislating values.
If you're interested in how society's consciousness is molded by corporations and vice versa, and if you're interested in how the new multi-culturalism is evolving in real terms, this book has the detail and the thinking that you want. -- SunirShah