Place, Technology, and Representation

Abstract

Three challenges of intellectual, political, and moral significance confront our discipline in the new millennium. First, a thorough understanding of sense of place must be harnessed in the service of ecolate dwelling. Second, our inquiry into materiality must expand to encompass the numinous dimension of technology. Finally, we must resolve the crisis of representation that limits our ability to express the insights we achieve in our research into consumer behavior. In this essay, these challenges are framed and responses imagined in light of a set of literatures from disciplines contiguous to our own. If this essay seems a bit disjointed, it reflects more than my characteristically eclectic (even indiscriminate) reading habits. Like many of you at midcareer, I struggle with strategies for representing the interests of a multiphrenic self (Gergen 1991) that the postmodern era has encouraged to flourish. The struggle is both energizing and enervating; it is solemn as well as festive. I find the empirical and the critical commingling increasingly in my writing. Perhaps under the influence of the new millennium, more of my armchair time is devoted to the issues of ontology, epistemology, and axiology that have exercised our discipline a bit over the past decades. The sandy soil into which we seek to sink our interdisciplinary roots seems sometimes to shift fast enough to thwart our purchase. Or mine, at least. I have spent a good portion of my professional life contributing to the construction of a cultural poetics of desire (Halperin, Winkler, and Zeitlin 1990) by exploring how consumers generate, transact, transform, and transmute meaning at the levels of subjective experience and social practice. Along with my ethnographically inclined companions, I have helped instigate some of the disciplinary disruptions we are weathering today. As Geertz (1997, p. 22) has observed, “Bringing so large and misshapen a camel as anthropology into psychology’s tent is going to do more to toss things around than to arrange them in order.” Following Geertz (1984), I have sought to be a “merchant of astonishment, ” whose office is to “unsettle, ” to “hawk *John F. Sherry, Jr., is professor of marketing at the Kellogg School, Northwestern University, Evanston IL 60208 (jfs306

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