Appropriation

Appropriation, in its most basic sense, is the process of taking possession. Its potential meanings within the study of consumption are therefore diverse: from the first principles of production, where the economy appropriates natural resources; through the appropriation of labor by capital; and through uses of “exotic” cultural resources to sell commodities; to the processes through which generic commodities and advanced technologies are actively assimilated to specific locales, frameworks of meaning, and patterns of everyday life.

Because it is about taking possession, the concept of appropriation can illuminate relationships throughout the processes that converge in moments of consumption. The relations of production that result in consumer products and services can be seen to have their roots first in the appropriation of natural resources. The concept has long been applied to processes of bringing unowned resources, particularly of land or minerals, into private ownership for the purposes of exploitation. Today, this understanding of appropriation finds fresh resonance in the fundamental definition of ecological footprint as “appropriated carrying capacity.” Appropriation has also long been deployed in relation to the labor relations through which products and services are produced. For Karl Marx, the appropriation by capital of surplus labor forms the groundwork for the system of capitalism.

These conceptualizations of appropriation as part of the foundational processes of production establish the inextricability of appropriation from relations of power. Appropriation here is both an expression of and means to power on the part of the entity that is taking possession. This sense of appropriation being part of an unequal relationship extends to classic accounts of cultural appropriation. Edward Said's account of Orientalism and the uses made of the “other” provides a ready frame for critique of Western corporations' appropriation of the “exotic” to produce, market, and sell products, from ethnic fashions to jars of curry sauce. The corporate appropriation of cultural resources can be framed as a continuation of colonial power.

Such uses of appropriation maintain a strong negative charge for the concept, aligning acts of appropriation with the acts of the relatively powerful over the relatively powerless. However, the dominant uses of the term in contemporary studies of consumer culture contest any such straightforward alignment of appropriation with simple attributions of power and powerlessness. Rather, the concept of appropriation has become a framing through which more subtle expressions of power and agency in acts of consumption can be explored. The reformulation of concepts of appropriation in relation to consumption happened from the 1980s, simultaneously as part of the development of material culture approaches to consumption and in the emergent field of social shaping of technology (SST).

From material culture, Danny Miller's work was instrumental in the reworking of appropriation. For example, his 1987 study of tenants on a London council estate presents appropriation as the process of de-alienation, or resocialization, of the industrial artifactual environment. As tenants in state-provided flats, Miller's respondents clearly had limited ability to create the spaces of their home environment. To turn these generic spaces into homes therefore required material and semiotic acts of appropriation. Thus, the study was about the ways in which tenants took possession of their state-owned flats, from superficial decoration to wholesale replacement of the provided fitted kitchens. This study signals a fundamental reworking of the concept of appropriation as a means for people, including the relatively disadvantaged, to express and build power at the level of lived experience in relation to the power of the state and the market.

...