CONSUMPTION, URBAN LIFE AND DIGITAL LIFE: DEVELOPMENTS BETWEEN EXPERIENCE AND CONSUME

Abstract

In another of our many wanderings around Santa Maria/RS, two anthropologists needed to go to a shopping mall in the city and returned to their academic roots and an ethnographic task for this study. The initial reflections arose from absences: why did consumption stop being a central focus in sociology and anthropology? Do our urban consumption practices still persist? What do the new dynamics of living online and the internet universe have to teach us? Consumption involves contact with materiality through perception and the senses, in an experience that is structured and guided by these senses. Through an anthropological observation, we turn our attention once again to consumption with new facets between the material and the immaterial. We propose a category called “experientiality” to think about new consumption processes mediated by networks and screens, moving between the immaterial and the material in contemporary consumption processes, composing a tangle of signs and meanings that, in turn, provides us with a new perspective on the act of consumption