PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

This article is a summary of the book Shopping in China, by Marius Meinhof, which won the dissertation award of the German Association for Sociology in 2018. It highlights three of the key arguments of the book: firstly, that consumerist subjectivation occurs in everyday practices of shopping which utilize the non-verbal practices of gazing at and touching oneself as well as the objects consumed. This can and should therefore be analyzed using videographic approaches. Secondly, in China, these everyday practices of subjectivation do not add up to a whole dispositive; rather, they build a fragmented assemblage of microdispositives which are diverse in a way not considered in conventional concepts of “pluralization,” therefore requiring new concepts to describe them. Thirdly, discourses produced by state institutions as well as by people in interviews do not recognize these multiplicities, rather purifying them into clear-cut types of “modern” and “backward” practices based on a normative discourse of “colonial temporality” – a discourse of a backward China in need of modernization – an inheritance from the colonial era in China.