Brand New Consumers: A Social Practice Approach to Young Immigrants Coping with Material Culture in Italy

Abstract

While the role of material culture in reproducing everyday routines and representations has been widely studied, only specific social groups – most of which are based in the US or Europe – have been studied qua ‘consumers’. This article draws on the heuristic potential of materiality for the analysis of consumption practices, and on Bourdieu’s theory of practice and notions of habitus and hysteresis, to explore what happens when immigrants bring their earlier dispositions to new social and material settings. Adopting the Bourdieusian notion of hysteresis, the article investigates the extent of creative adaptations enabled by the lagging of habitus. Findings from a two-year research project are presented, focusing on both verbal and visual representations of taste of a sample of young men and women of different national origins who have recently arrived in Italy. The article also discusses the potential of the photoelicitation technique in analysing social consumption practices and its overall contribution to studying the relationship between consumption practices and ethnic identification.