Introduction: consumption and its works

Abstract

Though fairly recent as a research topic in the Portuguese anthropology context, contemporary material culture and consumption practices have been intensely scrutinized since the 1980s by all social sciences in many academic contexts, generating a plurality of debates that necessarily inspired and influenced the four papers presented in this collection.1 Despite this legacy, they however challenged us to reflect on a classical discussion that, even if always present in the field of contemporary material culture, did not gain primacy or much visibility in the empirical approaches to the field. Through their particular themes and specific approaches, and tough primarily focused on consumption practices, all four papers in this collection come across, and therefore make visible, instances of bridging, of encounter and of juxtaposition between consumption and what is sometimes identified as its opposite practice: work and production.