NOT EVEN THE SKY IS THE LIMIT: THE MEANINGS OF CONSUMPTION AND THE DYNAMICS OF SOCIAL MOBILITY ON THE @blogueiradebaixarenda PROFILE ON INSTAGRAM AND YOUTUBE

Abstract

Conventional economic thinking in relation to poverty is situated within a wider field of representations that associates “resource scarcity” with “subsistence economies.” In this view, poor and indigenous people live in an eternal “fight for survival” in hostile environments governed by “material shortage.” An automatic association is made in this explanatory model between “basic needs,” “privations,” “scarcity” and “the fight for survival.” If the primordial characteristic of consumption is choice, then the presupposition is that economically less-favoured classes do not practice the act of choosing, being guided instead by a logic of lack and material shortage. Sahlins (1979) developed a powerful critique of utilitarianism, understood as the idea that individuals follow their own best interests through a logic of maximizing means/end relations, and that all human cultures are thus formed through practical activity and utilitarian interest. He rejects the notion that human cultures are formulated through practical activity, calling attention instead to how the cultural order is constituted within the field of meaning. The historical disinterest in the consumption of popular classes in the social sciences is partly due to the prevalence of this logic of “lack” and the “fight for survival,” which in practice removes the structuring symbolic and cultural dimension from the phenomenon. As Barbosa (2004: 62) observes, the study of consumption in Brazil appeared much more within a vision of “losses and absences” than one of “gains and positive changes”.