Displacement, Consumption, and Identity

Abstract

Increasingly attention is being paid to the ways in which consumption is a geographically constituted process. In this paper the notion of ‘displacement’ is used to reflect on these constitutive geographies, and in particular as a way of understanding contemporary consumption neither as a homogenising nor a locally bounded social activity. Two aspects of the geographies of displacement within consuming worlds are highlighted: the representations of origins, travels, and destinations—or geographical knowledges—that surround and in part comprise commodities; and the juxtapositional character of the arenas in which consumption takes and makes place. These geographies are illustrated and critically analysed through examples of commodities that deploy representations of the ‘global’, the ‘ethnic’, and the ‘hospitable’.