Abstract
Consumption involves knowledge acquisition and act-ual usage—not simply shopping and purchasing—and therefore is intricately bound up with the practices, power relations, and discourses of everyday life. Widely accepted observations about the fluidity and multiple dimensions of identity do not adequately link situated practices with the repeated (re)constitution and destabilization of identity elements. Moreover, it is not only through the use of purchased goods to produce individual and collective difference that consumption and identity are connected. Circumstances in contemporary commodity societies demand that critical human geographical studies of consumption and identity unconventionally couple ethnography and political economy, that the practices of ‘safe’ geography and ‘safe’ representation be forsaken.

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