Item Detail
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12018
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0
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0
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English
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Learning to Shop in Zion : the Consumer Revolution in Great Basin Mormon Culture, 1847-1910
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Ithaca, NY
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Cornell University
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Ph.D. diss.
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Mormondom between 1847 and 1910 provides an ideal test case for examining consumerism's dynamics. Rapid changes in Zion meant Mormons experienced a chronologically and geographically condensed instance of the larger transformations in consumption attendant with the market economy's rise between 1815 and 1850. Prior to the railroad's 1869 arrival, weak commercial links with the East created a marketplace of limited choices, regardless of the carrying capacities of freighters and despite local demand. The railroad, however, fostered commercial connections that caused both the number and range of goods to explode. These changes, in turn, encouraged Mormons to revise their understandings of consumption. Before 1869, Mormons—recognizing the limited local choices—attached little social gravity to consumer selection. Value as such emerged more through the quantities of labor time a good's production required than from the social comprehension its consumption expressed. Moreover, the Saints interwove their materialist understanding of objects with strands of meaning grounded in their local experience. Goods reflected status, but did not reveal personhood. After 1869, swelling commodity choices invited Mormons to link consumer choice and self-definition. Set against the newly abundant options, each purchase embodied the decision to acquire a particular object and not others. The expanding web of contrasts enlarged the symbolic potential of consuming. But to make sense of imported goods that necessarily lacked local meanings, Mormons turned to a national symbolic system informed by the popular press. Mormons' use of this new sensibility, however, offered them fewer openings to shape commodity symbolism. In short, as Mormons increasingly reworked their understanding of consumption, the meaning of possessions became both less local and less participatory. Importantly, the new meanings Mormons applied to possessions emerged not from the rare promotional efforts of industrial manufacturers, but rather from the sentimental themes of popular literature. Accordingly, the Mormon experience argues that theories of consumption that credit mass advertising with the reorganization of identity around consumption err in both chronology and causality. Instead, the converging expansions of both commodity variation and cultural resources propelled the identification of consumer choice as the privileged vehicle for subjective expression and personal identification.