HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
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The spaces of luxury in global cities: The consumption and appropriation of São Paulo’s upscale malls by the elite and the poor
No full textAccording to Arjun Appadurai (1996), global flows are both economic and cultural, forming what he calls “scapes”: financescapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, ethnoscapes, and ideoscapes. Within these scapes, spaces are created and reproduced to give visibility to luxury lifestyles, creating the idea of a cosmopolitan city with places accessible only to a specific group of people, the upper classes. But the visibility of luxury through mediascapes promotes awareness of and desire for global fashion symbols by all social classes. The lifestyles of the wealthy attract more attention because of their travels to well-known international tourist cities and their greater interaction with people from other cultures, which allows them to develop an aesthetic perspective of cosmopolitanism (Cicchelli 2016). Among São Paulo’s landscapes, the Marginal Pinheiros zone has been developed since the 1990s as a modern business center connected to the global market and an area with a high concentration of luxury spaces for the internationally sophisticated elite. In this article, I discuss how elites in São Paulo project an image of the city as a cosmopolitan, global urban center, embodied in certain luxury spaces—notably, shopping malls restricted to the wealthy—and how thousands of impoverished, marginalized youths recently poured into these malls en masse to appropriate these luxury spaces and claim membership in the global city
Reincarnation redux
No full textJarillo et al.’s attempted refutation of Malinowski’s claims as to Trobrianders’ “universally” shared belief in baloma reincarnation fails. Contrary to their claims, Malinowski’s “Baloma” article (1916) documented wide, often contradictory variation in Islanders’ opinions which his revolutionary methodology was explicitly aimed at resolving. Jarillo et al.’s multidisciplinary research has not produced an explanatory model sufficient to supersede Malinowski’s solution—the formulation of the culture as a functionally integrated totality. Methodologically, they incorporate ethnographic preconceptions arising from Euro-American assumptions about indigenous personhood, agency, exchange, hierarchy, and the afterlife which are incapable of shedding new light on beliefs and practices current in Malinowski’s time. Their claims as to Malinowski’s own Western preconceptions do not change the documented fact that reincarnation beliefs predate his arrival. Finally, Jarillo et al.’s Trobriand collaborators and survey participants have been selected through non-random procedures at variance with the standards of quantitative social science
Italy as a national luxury brand for Chinese consumers: Global promotion and identity discontent
No full textItaly has emerged as a leading producer of luxury goods on the international stage, while China has been asserting itself as a strategic market for luxury firms. Italy took advantage of the World Expos, in both Shanghai and Milan, to redefine its relationship with China. What do Chinese people consume when they buy an Italian product? They consume the images produced by Italian trade agencies and marketing services. This narrative, based on the image of consumption, is the product of a construction that has its roots in the Fascist era. The political implications of such nation branding are analyzed by confronting both the present and the past. An analysis of both the genealogy of the global Italian landscape promoted by commercial diplomacy and the protests that surrounded the opening of the Italian World Expo calls into question the transformation of nationalism in a global setting: Italy as it emerges in the Italian-Chinese interface is fetishized; a sense of inauthenticity is created among the Italians
The broken wave: Evangelicals and conservatism in the Brazilian crisis
No full textThe article examines the articulation between Evangelicals and conservatism in the Brazilian scenario since widespread street demonstrations erupted in June 2013; the most significant of these events was the election of Far-Right president Jair Messias Bolsonaro in 2018. A sizable share of this religious segment constitutes, in different ways and in varying degrees, the broader social process that in the national and international public conversation became known as the conservative wave. My argument is that this wave is shaped as the articulation of distinct lines of force at play in the fields of economy, security, morality, and society
