The countries that I know best have societies of mass consumption, and at its simplest this means that its members have a lot of stuff. They have so much that, as I noted previously, some people make a living telling them that they ought to have less, that they ought to declutter their lives and that they ought to give and value experiences rather than things. Seeing consumption as stuff accords with the economistic view of people in the market, which says that (a) people have desires, (b) if they have the money to do so they buy things that will satisfy those desires and (c) that is pretty much the end of the story.

Economic anthropologists interested in consumption view things differently, and for them the story does not end when people buy things. The buying is important, but they approach it in terms of the origin and nature of the desires and of the social and cultural context of what happens after our consumer brings the stuff home. Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood (1978: 66– 7) say that ignoring those desires and that context means that we would find it hard to distinguish the gourmet's meal from “solitary feeding, where the person wolfs or bolts his food, probably standing by his refrigerator in his overcoat”.

“What happens after our consumer brings the stuff home” covers a vast range of activity. Indeed, some have complained that the term covers so much that it is effectively meaningless; for a long time my working definition of “consumption” was “not production”. This means that what I say of work on consumption by economic anthropologists has to be very selective. One could invoke Douglas and Isherwood's (1978: 57) definition: “[A] use of material possessions that is beyond commerce and free within the law.” That has the authority of Douglas's stature in anthropology, but it is remarkably vague and its use of “material” and “possessions” is more restrictive than many would like. After all, a person at a concert can reasonably be said to be consuming music, even though the music is neither material nor the listener's possession.