Current Anthropology 1998  Applbaum, Kalman. The Sweetness of
Salvation, Consumer Marketing and the Liberal-Bourgeois Theory
of Needs. Current Anthropology June, 1998 Vol. 39(3): 323-349.
Consumer marketing and the liberal-bourgeois theory of needs,
the subtitle of this article, becomes a complex for the
embedding of needs in everyday practice, and the perpetuation of
a “Western cosmological duality of suffering and salvation”
(Applbaum, 1998:324). Moreover, Applbaum claims, “the way in
which marketers change the conditions of consumer reality is
mainly by intensifying, rationalizing, and universalizing
existing tendencies, not by altering either extant culture
categories or the core cosmology of capitalism, to which
marketing itself perforce conforms.” (Applbaum, 1998:324).
Applbaum utilizes the theoretical framework of Bourdieu in order
to analyze consumer behavior. Although he argues that, “[t]he
social order being reproduced is less class structure than an
order that signifies itself in practical, ratio