I have shown how consumption reflects and makes meaning. Whether we intend it or not, whether we are conscious of it or not, what we know or are told of who consumes what serves to divide the people and things around us into different groups, which often carry evaluations and even moral loads. These groupings, meanings and associated evaluations are public, in the sense that they are what we see in movies and on television and what we read in the newspapers and on the web. They are, in a way, what everybody knows.

Of course, there is more to consumption than the expression and reproduction of public meanings. When we consume things, personal meanings and relationships also are important. They arise from our dealings with and use of different things in different contexts with different people. Economic anthropologists are some of those who have described these things and how they can be important for understanding consumption.

Consuming for social relations

Consumption routinely occurs in social relations, and it should be no surprise that it can affect and reflect those relations. This is the point that Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood pursue in The World of Goods. There they do battle with economists about why people consume the things that they do. Is it price? If so, why does the demand for some goods go down when the price goes up, while for others the demand does not change much and for yet a few others the demand goes up? Alternatively, is it the utility of things: how their properties mesh with people's wants and needs? Perhaps – but which wants and needs? Douglas and Isherwood have an answer. For them (1978: 111), “there is only one type of physical property of consumption goods that need be considered: the capacity of goods to increase personal availability”.

By that they mean that goods are valued to the degree that they allow people to interact with others. Those others can be members of the household, friends or casual acquaintances. They even can be strangers, to whom one wants to appear a proper or even desirable fellow being, a suitable candidate for interaction. The importance of this interaction intrudes on us regularly.