Consuming bodies: Mall walking and the possibilities of consumption
Megan Warin
Department of Anthropology, Durham University, United Kingdom
Vivienne Moore
Discipline of Public Health, University of Adelaide, SA
Michael Davies
Discipline of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, University of Adelaide, SA
Karen Turner
School of Social and Environmental Enquiry (SSEE), University of Melbourne, VIC
PP: 187 - 198
Abstract
In popular, academic and policy discourses it is taken for granted that consumption plays a vital role in the obesity epidemic. Mass consumption, associated changes to 'lifestyle' and the emergence of 'obesogenic' environments are viewed as underpinning the dramatic rise in the prevalence of overweight and obesity. As a result, excess body weight has transitioned from risk factor to 'disease' status, with overconsumption identified as the principal culprit.
Using mall walking as a case study, this paper aims to critique the way in which consumption is understood within the obesity literature. Rather than view consumption within a dualist framework of either 'neoliberal choice' or 'modern evil', we seek to establish a theoretical foundation for consumption in obesity literature. Mall walking provides a unique opportunity to examine the multiple, complex and contradictory facets of consumption, of how bodies and spaces are reappropriated and transformed by people who are located in an environment that is characterised as 'obesogenic'.
In addition to the generation of identities and social relations, mall walking highlights the inherent paradoxes of consumption: of how consumption is positioned as the problem, and at the same time, as the solution to excess. It is via the ethnographic examination of bodies engaged in consumer spaces that new possibilities for thinking about the analytical relationship between obesity and consumption are opened up.
Keywords
consumption, paradox, obesity discourses, mall walking, sociology
Article Text
If one considers, as do Henderson and Petersen (2002: 2), that 'consumerism has become a way of thinking and a way of life, and provides the very basis for our concept of self, or identity', then it is no surprise that the literature on consumption studies has continued to grow. As anything in social life can become an object of consumption (Baudrillard 1988), a number of disciplines are now viewing consumerism and (and its complex interrelationships with the social and economic aspects of commodification and consumption) through many different kind of social processes and relations, including gender, kinship, ethnicity, age, sexuality and locality. Consumption is a thoroughly multi-disciplinary topic, and this has led, as Edwards (2000) notes, to 'a contested terrain of definitions' (2000: 13), where differences in theoretical and empirical foundations of perspectives remain fundamental to debates concerning questions of consumption and consumer societies.
The heterogeneity (and history) of consumption theory is important to the following discussion of obesity, for we are immediately led to multiple and complex meanings of consumption, rather than a singular understanding. At its simplest and taken-for-granted level (as it is currently used in much clinical literature), consumption refers to the process of consuming, of 'using up, devouring or even eating' (Edwards 2000: 10). But from this semantic representation consumption can then branch out into multiple analyses. In acts of desire to consume, people can be 'unconstrained rational actors seeking to maximise positive personal outcomes' (Edwards 2000: 11), or, taking a political economy approach, can be seen to fall victim to the lures of packaging and advertising and the negative consequences of consumption. While it is not our intention in this paper to describe the historical antecedents of consumption (as this has already been well documented by, for example, Miller 1995; Edwards 2000; Clarke et al 2003), we aim to highlight a key feature of consumption: that is, its inherent paradox. Consumers can, on the one hand, construct and display their own sovereignty through what they consume, but at the same time cannot escape the fact that consumption plays an ideological role in actually controlling the character of everyday life (Miles 1998; Edwards 2000).
Rather than 'buy into' and reproduce dualist discourses of 'good' or ‘bad' consumerism, this paper takes as its starting point contemporary theoretical insights that acknowledge the 'fulcrum of dialectical contradiction' (Miller 1995: 33) that surrounds consumption. It is through the case study of mall walking in the northern suburbs of Adelaide, Australia (an area with high prevalence rates of obesity and related diseases) that we problematise the taken-for-granted and causative aspects of consumption. As the name suggests, mall walking is organised exercise in shopping malls, in which people do 'circuits' of the complex before the shops open to trade with the public. This is not Walter Benjamin's 19th century solitary flaneur (or Friedberg's flaneuse (1993), the stroller (usually male) who seeks to bathe in the crowd, and immerse [himself] in the sensations of the shopping arcades and city. Rather, these are organised (and often fast paced) routes that take place at very specific times of day and with the specific goal of exercising and removing the excess flesh of consumption.
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