Sicilian Culture: The News & Views: Rise of Ethnicity Shopping Spawned by Ethnic Revival

Sicilian Culture

The People, The History, The Culture

The News & Views
(December 2000)
Rise of Ethnicity Shopping Spawned by Ethnic Revival
The Sunday Book Review Section of the Los Angeles Times, Sunday December 24, 2000, ran an article, " A Garden of Earthly Delights" that discusses from three books, how Consumerism was a "silent revolution", that was an important unrecognized influence on America.
The Three books are "An All Consuming Society", "The Consumer Society Reader", " Shopping for Identity".
" Shopping for Identity" is the one of greater concern to me, because it writes about Consumerism is assisting Ethnicities to better identify with their ancestry, either remembered, or never before enjoyed. The following is excerpted from the latter:
"By 1985," Cross tells us, advertisers had divided...consumer clusters, up from four in the early 1980s... to some 40 lifestyle groups...
In the context of such "fragmentation" (which was also a strengthening) of marketplace society, the shadows of older communal ties and pasts--from which Americans had once been in flight--suddenly became yet another way to personalize goods and create IDENTITY -COMMUNITIES through spending. This is the subject of Marilyn Halter's "SHOPPING FOR IDENTITY," which, despite its edgy title, represents a more celebratory strain in recent scholarly work, a consumer studies lite. Halter enthusiastically takes up a fascinating topic largely ignored by Cross, "ETHNICITY BY ACQUISTION," describing how, from the 1970s on, marketeers and advertisers re-conceived a term meant for IMMIGRANT communities and once largely anathema to an Americanizing marketplace. In an era in which all "sacred spaces and times," as Cross indicates, were being commercialized, an "ETHNIC REVIVAL" involving a A ROMANTIC SEARCH FOR A PAST IDENTITY proved capable of spurring remarkable sales while creating NEW SUB NATIONAL senses of belonging. The 12% annual growth of kosher food sales, including kosher imported artesian spring water and He'Brew, the Chosen Beer, for example, became part and parcel of a new Judaism....
The Garden of Earthly Delights
www.latimes.com/print/books/20001224/t000122341.html

HOME

News & Views || People || History || Region || Language || Food || Cinema || Links || Contact Info