Materialism versus memory: Collecting football shirts in the age of consumerism

Abstract

While the connection between consumption and travel has been documented, there has been little work on how consumption can go beyond simple materialism and sometimes even represent a reaction to the dominant trends of late modern consumer society. I use Walter Benjamin’s essay “Unpacking My Library” as an inspiration to understand the emotive connection between collecting, consumption, and memory. This paper uses an auto-ethnographic method, showing how the goal of furthering a collection of football shirts serves as a way to give agency to the consumer. Since collecting is typically related to the collector’s memory, consuming in the context of a collection is not simple consumerism or materialism. In this case, the object being collected is a football shirt, a representation of a specific locality. Collecting as a motivation for consumption serves as a way for the individual to respond to the dominant trends of homogenization and mass culture in sport created by globalization.