Consumption in the web of local and global relations of dominance and belonging

Abstract

This chapter focuses on how consumption serves to build and resolve tensions amplified by globalization and, its escort, neoliberal marketization, in the so-called emerging markets, in particular in Turkey. It examines how the consumers in a locality experience their encounters with people, things, ideologies, and images global, within the structural enablers and disablers, and if and how their ways and patterns of consumption change or not; how they define and differentiate themselves from internal Others that emerge or become amplified with globalization. The chapter discusses the main approaches in the literature and offers directions for future research on consumption. It reviews the diverse consumer experiences of and responses to their global encounters embedded in asymmetrical global flows. The chapter presents criticisms of hybridity and 'flow speak'. It also focuses on the Others within the local as it navigates the global: the rural other, class-based Others, and multiple Others of the faithful or the Islamists in Turkey.