This book explores the sumptuary laws that regulated conspicuous consumption in respect to dress, ornaments, and food that were widespread in late medieval and early modern Europe. It argues that sumptuary laws were attempts to stabilize social recognizability in the urban world of strangers' and in the governance of cities. The gendered character of sumptuary laws are viewed as components of gender wars'.
This book explores the sumptuary laws that regulated conspicuous consumption in respect to dress, ornaments, and food that were widespread in late medieval and early modern Europe. It argues that sumptuary laws were attempts to stabilize social recognizability in the urban `world of strangers' and in the governance of cities. The gendered character of sumptuary laws are viewed as components of 'gender wars'. These laws are explored as projects directed at the reform of popular culture and in their links to the governance of vagrancy and of popular recreation. This study challenges the view that the sumptuary actually died and develops an argument that in the modern world the regulation of consumption persists, but becomes dispersed throughout a range of both public and private forms of governance. The conclusions stresses the persistence of projects of governance of personal appearance and of private consumption.
In virtually all the countries of the world, men, and to a lesser extent women, are today dressed in very similar clothing. This book gives a compelling account and analysis of the process by which this has come about. At the same time it takes seriously those places where, for whatever reason, this process has not occurred, or has been reversed, and provides explanations for these developments. The first part of this story recounts how the cultural, political and economic power of Europe and, from the later nineteenth century North America, has provided an impetus for the adoption of whatever was at that time standard Western dress. Set against this, Robert Ross shows how the adoption of European style dress, or its rejection, has always been a political act, performed most frequently in order to claim equality with colonial masters, more often a male option, or to stress distinction from them, which women, perhaps under male duress, more frequently did. The book takes a refreshing global perspective to its subject, with all continents and many countries being discussed. It investigates not merely the symbolic and message-bearing aspects of clothing, but also practical matters of production and, equally importantly, distribution.
What people ate used to be considered marginal and insignificant. CONSUMING PASSIONS shows how that picture is changing. This collection of essays reveals that historians, sociologists, psychiatrists, philosophers, along with ordinary people, are seriously studying the relationship between what we eat and how we live, behave, and think. 20 illustrations.
Reading through clothes reveals that the expression of female desire, so often effaced in courtly lyric and romance, can be registered in the poetic deployment of fabric and adornment, and that gender is often configured along a sartorial continuum, rather than in terms of naturally derived categories of woman and man.
In this engaging new book, Gerda Reith explores key theoretical concepts in the sociology of consumption. Drawing on the ideas of Foucault, Marx and Bataille, amongst others, she investigates the ways that understandings of ‘the problems of consumption’ change over time, and asks what these changes can tell us about their wider social and political contexts. Through this, she uses ideas about both consumption and addiction to explore issues around identity and desire, excess and control and reason and disorder. She also assesses how our concept of 'normal' consumption has grown out of efforts to regulate behaviour historically considered as disruptive or deviant, and how in the contemporary world the 'dark side' of consumption has been medicalised in terms of addiction, pathology and irrationality. By drawing on case studies of drugs, food and gambling, the volume demonstrates the ways in which modern practices of consumption are rooted in historical processes and embedded in geopolitical structures of power. It not only asks how modern consumer culture came to be in the form it is today, but also questions what its various manifestations can tell us about wider issues in capitalist modernity. Addictive Consumption offers a compelling new perspective on the origins, development and problems of consumption in modern society. The volume’s interdisciplinary profile will appeal to scholars and students in sociology, psychology, history, philosophy and anthropology.
This book examines the rights to expression and equality, and the restraints on government power, as they both limit and allow control of our personal choices.
This book examines the daily practices of men and women in the 17th through 19th centuries to budget succesfully and make ends meet. The author shows the many ways businesses worked, such as pawning, selling, and borrowing on a regular basis, as well as the strong role gender played in the division of responsibilities.
This book conceives the role of the modern town as a crucial place for material and cultural circulations of luxury. It concentrates on a critical period of historical change, the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that was marked by the passage from a society of scarcity to one of expenditure and accumulation, from ranks and orders to greater social mobility, from traditional aristocratic luxury to a new bourgeois and even democratic form of luxury. This volume recognizes the notion that luxury operated as a mechanism of social separation, but also that all classes aspired to engage in consumption at some level, thus extending the idea of what constituted luxury and blurring the boundaries of class and status, often in unsettling ways. It moves beyond the moral aspects of luxury and the luxury debates to analyze how the production, distribution, purchase or display of luxury goods could participate in the creation of autonomous selves and thus challenge gender roles.
