Regions and archipelagos of consumer culture

Representing and performing markets

As Marston (2000: 220) points out, “geographic scale refers to the spatial extent of a phenomenon or a study.” For example, “national culture” is a way of framing and representing culture that assumes a set of norms, behaviors, beliefs, and customs exists and is shared by the population of a sovereign nation. Simply put, scale refers to a level of representation. However, we use the phrase “scale of analysis” because it highlights the web of processes and mechanisms of a phenomenon, while “level of representation” highlights the outcome of composing processes and mechanisms. In addition, “scale” has both rhetorical and material connotations (Marston, 2000), while level of representation is linguistically more related to rhetoric (exceptions can be found in the neo-Marxist work of Henri Levebvre and Nigel Thrift and the poststructuralist work of Michel Foucault, as materiality is an important aspect of their analysis).

Once taken as static, ontologically given platforms of social relations, the majority of social scientists now understand scales of analysis as socially constructed, multilayered, and dynamic. Scales are constitutive dimensions of social relations, and as such they are “historically produced, reconfigured, and transformed” (Brenner, 1999: 40). For example, Europe is a scale of analysis that has been historically produced and is in continuous transformation. Understandings of what Europe is and means feed back into everyday practices, ideologies, public policies, and supranational and national laws that reconfigure the very meanings and borders of the European Union.

Some scholars argue that scales are “the embodiment of social relations of empowerment and disempowerment and the arena through and in which they operate” (Swyngedouw, 1997: 169). The recent conflicts in the Ukraine, Syria, and Israel are clear examples of how power and suppression is exercised through relationships between groups of actors and institutions, producing tangible consequences that can alter what it means to be a citizen and a consumer in these countries. Thus, understanding the Ukrainian market in these conditions is in itself an exercise of finding scales and framing markets and may have direct consequences for local populations, depending on who is included or excluded as marketplace actors. Similarly, Latin America cannot be understood as a passive container of market and consumer phenomenon. Rather, this region has been shaped by various social processes that also form its many markets and consumer cultures; it is therefore difficult to understand markets in Latin America without understanding their underlying historical processes.

Any given scale of analysis contains a number of assumptions about phenomena that help shape the way we understand and act in the world. These assumptions also inform how researchers determine the scale of studied phenomena and how these scales can alter the understanding of what the phenomenon is. Brenner (1999) identifies methodological territorialism as a key problem in assumptions about scales. Methodological territorialism considers “all spatial forms and scales as being self-enclosed and territorially bounded geographical units … in which territoriality operates as the static, timeless container of historicity” (p. 46). Its most common form is methodological nationalism, which refers to the “assumption that the nation/state/society is the natural social and political form of the modern world” (Wimmer and Schiller, 2002: 301).

Methodological nationalism underlies many key studies in marketing and consumer research. For example, Peñaloza and Barnhart (2011) introduce an excellent discussion of the cultural meanings that inform consumers’ credit practices in the United States. Their data were collected in a major Midwestern city and are cast as representing national US culture. The authors suggest that in using credit/debit, consumers reproduce the American cultural legacy of abundance (2011: 758). Alternatively, a critical regionalities approach would pose these particular credit practices as a problem to be investigated in terms of its relationship to specific places as well as the historical processes tied to values and systems of meaning. Such an approach may reveal that similar forms of normalized credit and debit can be found in other parts of the world (or not found in other parts of the United States), which may prompt researchers to reassess the scale of specific forms of normalized debit and credit and the assumed underlying social processes and institutions. Questioning the relationship between credit practices, places, and historical processes can provide rich insights and potential theoretical contributions to the scholarship generated by studies based on taken-for-granted geopolitical boundaries.

Another form of methodological territorialism happens when researchers universalize analytical discussions (i.e. methodological globalism). Anything that is not local is then assumed to have global or transnational proportions (Chernilo, 2006). For example, Alden et al. (1999) introduce the notion of global consumer culture positioning, and Cleveland and Laroche (2007) discuss acculturation to global consumer culture, based on assumptions that there is one (unified) global consumer culture. Critical regionalities approach focuses instead on the relationship between the ideas and conceptions of transnational cultures and the sociohistoric processes in and across different contexts.

Transnationalism and global consumer cultures

In order to account for increasingly rapid globalization processes, “globalization researchers have begun to deploy a barrage of distinctively spatial prefixes (e.g. ‘sub-,’ ‘supra,’ ‘trans-,’ ‘meso-’ and ‘inter-’) to describe various emergent social processes that appear to operate below, above, beyond, or between entrenched geopolitical boundaries” (Brenner, 1999: 40). As we recognize the increasing interconnection of social relations at various scales, the spatial parameters and geographic context of those relations become more problematic. The concept of transnationalism (Levitt and Glick-Schiller, 2004; Vertovec, 1999) emerged in the late 1980s and grew in the 1990s as a way to counterbalance the problems of both methodological nationalism and globalism. Transnational studies emphasize the fluctuating nature of social life and the continuous flows of people, objects, and capital across nation-state borders, in settings where the state influences but does not contain such flows (Levitt and Glick-Schiller, 2004). The transnational paradigm can be seen in the use of Appadurai’s (1990) scapes to discuss translocal phenomena, in Hannerz’s (1996) suggestions for researching cosmopolitanism, and in Gupta and Ferguson’s (1997) and Burawoy et al.’s (2000) groundbreaking proposals to question the field of ethnographic work and to problematize the idea of cultural boundaries.

In marketing, transnationalism forms the basis for research on the movement of commodities, ideas, capital and people, such as nomadic lifestyles (Bardhi et al. 2012; Figueiredo and Uncles 2015). It underlies Craig and Douglas’s (2006: 338) discussion of cultural dynamics in consumer studies, calling for more research on cultural interpenetration, contamination, pluralism, hybridization, and deterritorialization. Taking up this call, postassimilationist acculturation literature analyzes dynamic processes of interpenetration and hybridization in the construction of consumer identity positions (Askegaard et al., 2005) and how they link to larger processes of globalization of consumer culture (Kjeldgaard and Askegaard, 2006). Other examples include Üstuner and Holt’s (2010) examination of how cultural capital deterritorializes and shifts the status consumption game in less industrialized countries and Cayla and Eckhart’s (2008: 216) account of how brand managers create transnational brands by constructing “a transnational, imagined Asian world.”

Another stream of research focuses on accounting for when and how global processes can promote global homogenization (usually understood as Westernization or Americanization) or bolster cultural heterogeneity, or even both simultaneously (e.g. Brewer and Trentmann, 1998; Costa and Bamossy, 1995). Wilk’s (1995) theory of global structures of common difference has also been hugely influential in this area (Askegaard et al., 2005; Thompson and Arsel, 2004). By requiring reflexive attention to historical processes and cultural scales, critical regionalities can extend much of the transnational and global consumer culture work with its focus on subglobal social, historical, and cultural processes and their interconnection at various scales.

Place

From cultural geography we borrow the analytical concept of “place,” defined as “a locale with a spatial dimension through and in which people’s cultural lives and identities are grounded—the lived world in physical form … place is space filled with people, practices, objects, and representations” (Gieryn, 2000: 465). Neither a territory nor a bounded geographical area, it is “terrain where basic social practices are lived out” (Merrifield, 1993: 522). Following Gieryn (2000), we characterize place as comprised of the following three elements: (1) a geographic location (latitude and longitude); (2) a material form (physical features of natural and built environments); and (3) the meanings and values people/communities invest in them. According to Soja (1996, cited in Gieryn, 2000: 465), “places are doubly constructed: most are built or in some way physically carved out. They are also interpreted, narrated, perceived, felt, understood, and imagined.” Implied in this view is the understanding that places are malleable, shaped, and molded in different ways by different people or groups of people and are subject to change over time.

While we argue for the utmost importance of place and cultural embeddedness, our approach recognizes the elastic nature of the culture–place relationship. We echo Sanabria (2007) who views culture areas as constantly shifting spaces with changing boundaries in which cultural/social interactions take place. So while we see cultural phenomena as embedded in places, we are by no means arguing for a stationary view of culture or practices. We argue instead that what is interesting is the ways in which people adopt and recontextualize material goods and cultural practices to fit their differently situated lives.

Operating from this conception of place, we define a region as a mesolevel cultural scale comprised of multiple places that share a specific set of practices, values, and/or norms. Our approach hinges on using the cultural phenomenon or phenomena under investigation to determine the specific shape and form of the region or the scale of analysis. A region can exist entirely within the borders of a nation-state or cut across many borders. In the critical regionalities approach, the patterns of cultural phenomena are analogous to the water in archipelagos; they form the fluid boundaries of a region.

With this in mind, critical regionalities is a useful analytical alternative to the often default level of the nation or the notion of bounded, culturally homogenous regions. Regions can be, and often are, highly informed by the conventional and broadly accepted demarcations of world regions (i.e. Western Europe, South Asia, Latin America, etc.). But rather than using regional demarcations defined a priori, this inductive approach ensures sociocultural coherence regarding the phenomenon in question, without presuming to define a culture, in its totality, as adhering to a geographic region. Here our approach departs from other regional approaches in consumer research (Dion and Sitz, 2012).

In critical regionalities, regions do not need to be embedded in the national level; they can exist at any level below, above, or across the nation. This is where the archipelago metaphor becomes useful. A region, as an archipelago, may include places that are not physically contiguous. Murray et al. (2006: 222) note that the internal waters of archipelagos highlight “both distinctions and similarities, both continuities and disparities.” We push the metaphor further to view the internal waters of archipelagos as representing the social structures and historical events that account for the disparities and the similarities among the places that comprise a region. We are accustomed to focusing on the islands of an archipelago as the places in the present. But viewing an archipelago as a whole means including the water that connects these places. In other words, both emic understandings of a phenomenon and an etic view of the social processes that have shaped it are necessary to identify the area of a region.

Going further, the notion of archipelagos can also be used to explore cross-cultural phenomena. In this case, differently defined regions may nevertheless share an analytically interesting characteristic, and a comparative investigation could reveal theoretical insights that would otherwise be missed. For example, we can compare the widespread consumption of telenovelas in Latin America and in South East Asia, in which attention to a different set of sociohistorical processes reveals another archipelagic region that differs from one in which the research question focuses upon the common histories and structures confined to the Western hemisphere. In this regard, the external boundaries are framed by the researcher and the research problem.

History

Foucault’s analyses of the history of Western medical discourses and epistemologies emphasizes “the relationship between the inquirers present with the past which he is examining” and an awareness of how present modes of thought influence our understanding of the past (Roth, 1981: 32). Canniford and Karababa’s (2013) examination of changing discourses over three centuries of the notion of the “primitive” in relation to surfing is a prime example of a critical historical approach to discourse analysis in consumer culture research. We adapt critical histories to focus specifically on the sociohistorical processes related to a particular phenomenon.

Other characteristics of Foucault’s approach to histories of the present are helpful for addressing two interrelated issues. The first issue is a critical awareness of the politics, power and biases that inform the discourses of historical source material and individuals’ perspectives on these same processes and events. Especially in his genealogical approach, Foucault is concerned with power relations; and generally speaking, Foucault tackles contemporary ideas and practices that he finds especially dangerous or morally intolerable for society. We adopt elements of Foucault’s approach not because we necessarily see certain phenomena as “intolerable,” but in order to interrogate received wisdom and common assumptions about consumer culture and practices that may obscure alternative perspectives or serve hegemonic interests. Broadly speaking, Foucault’s emphasis on historical contingency is essential to resist casting present perspectives and modes of thinking as always already existing. As we will demonstrate, the critical regionalities approach allow us to go beyond common assumptions about the boundaries of Latin American consumer cultures to see diverse Latin American archipelagos that emerge from different historical processes. At the nexus of these historical processes are power relations that are critical for understanding market dynamics and consumer behavior in these regions.

The second issue is accounting for present cultural configurations as outcomes of events/processes and as constituting the overarching commonalities and connections among places within a region. Rather than attempt to give a full account of specific historical period or to fully reconstruct a past event, Foucault begins with a problem—contemporary modes of criminal incarceration (1995 [1977]), for example—and focuses on aspects of the past relevant for understanding the particular circumstances in the present. In this way, Foucault inspires us to question received wisdom regarding regions in general and leads us to track key historical events that shape a specific product, set of practices or values, or in a region (Ragin, 2014). For example, if we wanted to investigate Tango as a system of dance as well as discursive practices, we would begin with an investigation into the various present-day manifestations of Tango in all places, regardless of whether they align with common conceptions regarding its provenance. We should be able to locate areas of concentration and then trace these manifestations in a search of key events and common sociohistorical processes leading to the spread of Tango practices to specific places. In other words, it is an exercise in mapping the social processes, institutions, and systems of practices that sustain the current production and consumption of Tango in various places.

Another Foucauldian characteristic is the comparative search for structures not as formal and universal foundations but as systems of meanings to be uncovered through careful historical analysis (Flynn, 1991: 167). Hill and Santo-Granero (2002: 13), for example, observe that comparative historical approaches can at times be more useful than traditional cultural areas approaches to identify widely shared cultural practices, especially in contexts of diaspora. As critical regionalities accounts for structures and individual-level perspectives/agency, research using this lens ideally combines a critical historical analysis with ethnographic fieldwork focusing on practices and perspectives.

Figure 1 depicts a region defined by the places in which a particular consumer culture phenomenon has been identified. The archipelago metaphor articulates the idea that places in the critical region may traverse geopolitical borders. It also shows how the region is defined by the presence of the phenomenon under analysis. While the space of the region is not the same as the existing geopolitical areas of A and B, an analysis of the region must nevertheless take into consideration how it relates to A and B. Identifying the sociohistorical processes that have helped shape the phenomenon in each place is an essential step in the process of mapping the region. In the subsequent sections, we will show how critical regionalities can be applied to understand consumer research in Latin America.

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Figure 1.

Critical region archipelago.

Food practices: Rice and beans, beans and rice

In Rice and Beans, Wilk and Barbosa (2012) investigate and map out the distribution of this dish in the Atlantic world, with the Afro-Caribbean islands and adjacent areas of the mainland at its core, sharing the same general patterns, and the continental nations of Mexico, the United States, and Brazil forming the periphery (Figure 2).

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Figure 2.

Rice and beans culture complex (based on Wilk and Barbosa, 2012).

While both rice and beans are commonly consumed around the world, Wilk and Barbosa argue that it is a different thing to eat a culturally recognized dish called rice and beans. It is not enough to consume one, or the other, or both, even if they appear on the same plate for the same meal. To examine a dish called rice and beans is to examine a meal connected to cultural identities. What makes rice and beans an interesting case is that it has such strong locally specific meanings; in many cases, the dish is emically perceived as a symbol of national identity and evokes strong emotions (Wilk and Barbosa, 2012: 5). Therefore, the first step is to identify locales of the rice and beans ensemble. As the authors point out, these places include parts of the Caribbean, Central America, South and North America. In Jamaica, “rice and peas” is also referred to as the Jamaican coat of arms. In Cuba and parts of Mexico, rice and beans are also referred to as moros y cristianos, alluding to not only racial dynamics of blacks and whites in these areas but also the legacy of Spanish colonialism and the historical divide between Spanish Christians and North African Muslims (Wilk and Barbosa, 2012).

The next step involves tracing the critical histories of rice and beans in each place to identify key events, practices, and underlying social processes. In the locales that constitute the rice and beans cultural region, the dish has different historical trajectories in terms of preparation and how it came to be a culturally significant meal. Common sociohistorical processes inform the practices and meanings of rice and beans in all the places composing this region of “rice and beans culture.” This is not to say that the same processes affected every place in the same way. Rather, it is possible to establish a common ground for the region composed of key historical events and processes.

From a historical perspective, Wilk and Barbosa discuss three central systems and processes shaping the cultures of this dish. The first is the indigenous practice of cultivating beans. Throughout the Caribbean, Mesoamerica, and South America, archaeological evidence demonstrates that common varieties of beans (e.g. black, brown, kidney, and pinto) were cultivated and grown as crops of varying importance to indigenous diets. Black beans are thought to have come originally out of the Andean region, and in Mesoamerica the trinity of maize, beans, and squash are renowned as the most important staple crops (Twitty, 2012). The second key historical process is the introduction of rice to the New World by Europeans from the beginning of colonization at the start of the 16th century. In terms of dish preparation, we see a division between Anglo-Caribbean countries that use coconut milk for cooking the rice and beans in a single pot, while in the Hispanic Caribbean, New Orleans, Mexico, and Brazil, the rice and beans are cooked in water or in a broth, sometimes together, and sometimes separately (Wilk and Barbosa, 2012: 10).

However, Europeans and Africans bringing rice to the New World did not automatically result in people combining rice and beans together to form a dish. The creation of rice and beans dishes required another historical process, that is, the African slave trade. The common thread uniting the places of the rice and beans culture complex is that they all incorporate cultural elements and food ways of African slaves, although again, in ways related to distinct historical trajectories (Wilk and Barbosa, 2012: 9). According to Twitty (2012), African rice varieties and legumes, particularly the cowpea (also known as “field pea” and “black-eyed pea”), formed the basis of protean rice and beans dishes in Senegal and Ghana. Twitty views rice and beans as “the dish of the African Diaspora,” a cultural form of expression that emerged from the colonial slave trade in a way similar to musical genres such as jazz, gospel, salsa, samba, and reggae.

The final key sociohistorical process is the elevation of rice and beans to the cultural status of national symbol. As a dish composed of native beans and imported rice created by Africans in the New World, rice and beans throughout the Caribbean and Latin America began as a humble meal of slaves and the poor. The point at which it became a staple dish for the masses in many of these places is hard to determine due to rare historical documentation, although probably at least by the 17th and 18th centuries it was a common meal throughout this region (Twitty, 2012). However, rice and beans appears to have emerged only in the 19th or even in the 20th century as nationally symbolic dishes throughout the Caribbean and Latin America. For example, it did not become a culturally recognized dish in Brazil until the early 19th century, with the arrival of the Portuguese royal court, when the Prince regent Dom João ordered rice and beans to become the standard meal fed to the soldiers of the Brazilian army (Barbosa, 2012). Although the specific formation and ascendance of rice and beans in each locale is different, the widespread consumption of the dish among the middle- and upper-classes in the 19th century was an important factor in many places (Figure 3).

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Figure 3.

“Rice and beans” in New Orleans (top, a Monday night meal), Brazil (middle, arroz com feijão, a lunch meal) and Costa Rica (bottom, gallopinto, a breakfast meal).

Critical regionalities allow us to see the rice and beans consumer cultures as archipelagos of non-contiguously situated phenomena—that is, every place has its own meanings and practices associated with rice and beans—which are interconnected by common sociohistorical processes. The rice and beans archipelago represents both the convergence of these processes and the diversity of their encounters with localized practices and values. It follows the emic manifestation of the cultural phenomenon with the etic understandings of critical histories that link them. What is interesting about the historical and cultural investigation into the archipelagic contours of rice and beans is the exclusion of geopolitical territories conventionally understood as Latin American and the inclusion of southern Louisiana in the United States. A national-level study would be an appropriate way to investigate the particular meanings and attachments to nationhood in any one of these places. However, an unreflexive approach glossing rice and beans as a part of a broadly homogenous “Latin American culture” and taking Mexico, for example, as representative of this world region would make fundamental errors in grasping the phenomenon and perpetuate common Euro-American misunderstandings and representations of other regions.

Dwellings: Gated communities

While the first case unearthed a specific set of historical events and processes resulting in the current contours of the Latin America of rice and beans, the second case reveals a different set of events and processes and consequently a different archipelago. Urban gated communities are restricted access residential developments where public spaces are privatized (Gooblar, 2002). They are groups of attached houses or tower blocks with common facilities. These range from sports arenas, landscape gardening, and community services to large cultural, educational, and commercial centers. According to Borsdorf and Hidalgo (2010), gated communities are a phenomenon of globalization, primarily generated by the intersection of neoliberalism, state policies, and the ideology of private property. Larger gated communities have more than 10,000 inhabitants and are so big that some argue they should be called gated cities “equipped with public and private schools, universities, shopping centers or malls, sports infrastructure including golf courses and swimming pools or artificial lakes with marinas” (Borsdorf et al., 2007: 366).

The growth of this form of dwelling has significant implications for consumer researchers and marketers. Borsdorf et al. (2007) argue that in Latin American megacities, basic human needs are often realized in either a gated or a ghetto form. Elites living in gated communities receive their education in private schools and universities, shop for personal supplies in malls, have club holidays for recreation and private clubs for their social life, and drive on private highways and work in industrial estates. This growth is closely associated with the perception of insecurity and violence in Latin American cities tied to the state’s long-standing inability to organize urban services and social infrastructure. Elites resort to gated communities to make up for the poor management of “public” space. By making social, educational, and commercial places part of their gated communities, they create a separate, privately managed, material reality; one that replicates and deepens existing class divisions in Latin American urban spaces (Caldeira, 1996). Borsdorf and Hidalgo (2010: 34) argue that the increasing popularity of gated communities in Latin America is leading to “the loss of community consciousness, social responsibility, and socio-spatial coherence”; this has huge impacts on the ways public policies and markets shape consumer citizens. Although there have been many studies on particular gated communities such as those near São Paulo’s favelas (Caldeira, 1996) and gated cities in Buenos Aires (Janoschka and Borsdorf, 2006), there is a lack of understanding of how the various manifestations of gated communities in Latin America are related and how they constitute the basis of a new form consumer culture. Critical regionalities help the researcher find the “water” that links the islands of this regional archipelago.

First, we must recognize the manifestations of gated communities in Latin America. They are found in all large cities; however, secondary research shows they are concentrated around megacities such as Mexico City, Lima, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, and Santiago de Chile (Glasze et al., 2006). In these cities, meanings and practices of gated communities are highly associated with issues of security, stigma, large socioeconomic disparities, and disorganized growth (Caldeira, 1996).

As we move from an emic perspective that recognizes the meanings of gated communities in each place to an etic vantage point, we identify the major sociohistorical processes that have created the manifestations of gated communities in these places. In search for common roots, some events can be misleading. The rapidly expanding European metropolis of the 19th century is often assumed to be the blueprint for gated communities and private neighborhoods in other parts of the world (Glasze et al., 2006). However, further investigation revealed much earlier common events and processes. According to Janoschka and Borsdorf (2006), gated communities in Latin America are a result of social divisions deeply inscribed in colonial social spaces.

The first historical process is the implementation of socioeconomic systems by the Spanish and Portuguese during the colonial period. Haciendas and plantations were large, landholding agricultural regimes that were important status markers for landowners. Clearly distinct social classes were based primarily on racial identities, namely, White colonizers, African slaves, and indigenous peoples. These hierarchical divisions were mapped onto social environments, for example, Whites owned the land and lived in the master house, while African slaves lived separately in dwelling complexes known as the “Senzala” (Freyre, 1992). Indigenous groups existed on the periphery and were not considered part of the agricultural system. The long lasting spatial inscription of social hierarchies imprinted deep class division and segregation in the imagination and in the practices of Latin American consumer citizens.

The second sociohistorical process occurred much later from 1950 to circa 1980. Mass urbanization, strong population growth, and agricultural modernization resulted in reduced job opportunities for farm workers and the subsequent rural exodus (Kay, 2010). All of these factors are directly related to import substitution industrialization (ISI) policies adopted in countries such Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and Chile (Borsdorf and Hidalgo, 2010). The rapid pace of growth and the inability of city administrations to cope with it, associated with lack of planning from the state, transposed rural social divisions into urban spaces. Rings of poverty composed of peasant migrants looking for opportunities offered by ISI formed around the big industrial cities of this region.

The adoption of neoliberal economic policies from the 1980s to the present integrated many Latin American economies into world markets. This is a third historical process that has deeply shaped the formation of gated communities in Latin America. Newly available foreign direct investments facilitated the development of new types of residential compounds (Glasze et al., 2006). City suburbs, areas primarily associated with poor migrants, became new targets of the real estate market in order to cater to the demands of the growing upper middle and upper classes. Newly well-off consumers demanded protection from increasing urban insecurity and violence (Caldeira, 1996). Home and real estate businesses endeavored to create secure private areas to allow their clients to move, shop, and live freely without exposure to potential social dangers stemming from proximity to suburban slums. The images in Figure 4 illustrate how socioeconomic inequality is mapped out in urban São Paulo, gaining material contours in the concrete boundaries of the high walls of gated communities.

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Figure 4.

Above, urban favelas and gated communities in São Paulo; below, gated community near Favela da Rocinha in Rio de Janeiro.

In different places, gated communities are formed “under different sets of influences in different forms and with different effects” (Glasze et al., 2006: 3) and therefore their actual structure, location, and size may vary considerably (Borsdorf and Hidalgo, 2010). Nevertheless, gated communities have exploded in most Latin American megacities such as Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Santiago, and São Paulo over the past two decades. Brazil’s recent census data show that almost 2% of Brazilian dwellings are gated communities and in Buenos Aires they account for 3% of the total city housing (Borsdorf et al., 2007).

Using a critical regionalities perspective, we view manifestations of gated cities in Latin America as an archipelagic cultural phenomenon predicated on common sociohistorical processes and events. This region includes not only the main megacities in geopolitical Latin America but also rural areas where colonial hacienda and plantation practices were implemented and the spaces of migration. By tracing this phenomenon to specific sociohistorical processes we are able to demarcate the Latin America of gated communities, which take different shapes and forms in each specific locale. Some are urban, inserted in the middle of large slum areas in order to isolate the middle classes from the social problems of the slums, such as the gated communities of São Conrado near Rocinha Favela in Rio. Others are megaprojects in suburban areas that operate like mini private cities, for example, Nordelta (Figure 5) near Buenos Aires (Janoschka and Borsdorf, 2006). We can see how similar processes result in different instantiations of the phenomenon of gated communities.

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Figure 5.

Nordelta, a large gated city in Buenos Aires.

Investigating the common roots as well as local variations of these phenomena allows us to better understand the expansion and transformation of gated communities in Latin America. Mapping the Latin American archipelago of gated communities provides an epistemology with which we derive new and meaningful regional patterns. These patterns highlight the links between new types of housing in urban areas and politicoideological forms that shaped the massive growth of postcolonial urban Latin America, namely, neoliberalism, nationalist state policies, and the colonial evolution of private property and land use. This epistemology also informs how we think about marketing practices and consumer needs related to gated communities.

Archipelagos, operationalization, and boundaries

We have used two examples drawn from secondary research to demonstrate how the critical regionalities approach can be operationalized. We began by examining the presence of rice and beans in many different places and the strongly national meanings in each locale as described by Wilk and Barbosa (2012). We then identified the broad historical processes that shaped this region. Instead of homogenizing cultures, investigating these common processes highlights differences among places within the region, allowing us to understand the meaning of rice and beans in each place and to inquire about localized aspects that have resulted in different outcomes. The brief analysis of historical processes provides points of comparison while recognizing situated differences.

Our second case reveals another Latin American archipelago that emerges from examining the proliferation of gated communities in megacities of Latin America. Identifying the key processes of colonial use of space, mass urbanization, and ISI policies that have shaped this region improves our understanding of why gated communities exist in certain places and not in others. The situatedness of these social processes helps us understand the specific forms (megaprojects, urban communities, and suburban communities) gated communities take, while tracing the overarching processes and events establishes the contours of this region.

The flexibility of the framework allows researchers to follow manifestations of a consumer phenomenon while questioning its boundaries. For instance, the historical processes in which African slaves brought together New and Old World food ways leads us to include Louisiana, United States as an “island” within the Latin American rice and beans archipelago. This inclusion has the potential to create a new set of research questions that investigate the overlap of the Latin American archipelago with American (national and local) practices. For example, researchers can investigate the integration of rice and beans practices with US health and tourism policies; what does being part of a rice and beans culture mean for the New Orleans hospitality industry? One could also examine other cultural practices that may have accompanying rice and beans in New Orleans, such as manners of eating, drinking, and celebrating that were consequences of the same or other sociohistorical processes. Or one could investigate regional differences, such as why is rice and beans a Monday evening meal in New Orleans and a breakfast meal in Costa Rica?

An advantage of this approach is the triangulation of scales that results from moving between multiple contextual levels. We discussed two cases in order to illustrate how the boundaries of a regional archipelago will vary depending on the phenomenon. This variation has the potential to combat methodological territorialisms by enhancing researchers’ reflexivity and generating further interesting questions.

Both cases also show how the interplay between the geopolitical region and the cultural–phenomenal region can lead to further meso- and macrolevel insights about consumer cultures. The different Latin American archipelagos resulting from eating rice and beans and dwelling in gated communities illustrate the problematization of boundaries and scales via attention to emplacement and historicity, although limited space here precludes a fully developed investigation. While the case of rice and beans would be enhanced by additional research into social processes and historical events, the example of gated communities would benefit from a more detailed examination of the broad political, social, and historical processes it follows or a comparative analysis of micro practices across the region. For example, researchers can go further by asking, how are commonalities and differences of homemaking practices in the archipelago of gated communities? How are gated communities linked among themselves? What kind of power relations connects the islands in these archipelagos?

In addition, the critical regionalities perspective becomes a constructive means of addressing the problems of methodological territorialism, as it transforms assumptions of national or global scales into tools of inquiry. The nation is never assumed and the globe is never an intended outcome. Instead, both the nation and the globe become possible scales to contrast with regional archipelagos and enhance researchers’ attention to the how’s and why’s of consumer phenomena.

Ways forward

Broadly speaking, the following are the two main ways in which the critical regionalism perspective can be used: (1) as an inductive approach, in which a norm, value, or practice guides the researcher in determining the shape of a particular region and (2) a comparative approach in which the researcher compares two or more places in order to view “a particular social situation in a new light or from a different perspective or vantage point” (Johnson et al., 2000: 366). For example, the case of gated communities could be expanded to include other places in the world with analogous patterns, such as Johannesburg (Gnad, 2002). This would follow the comparative approach and result in a different consumer culture archipelago and region. Contrasting regions may serve as a basis for discussing the degree to which historical processes are similar, at what points they diverge, and how these differences correspond to emic meanings and values related to forms of dwelling.

Critical regionalities call to Venkatesh’s (1995) paradigm of ethnoconsumerism, which is based on the argument that the analytical concepts and categories social scientists use (e.g. kinship, sacred, individuality, materialism, etc.) are embedded in a specifically Western ontology and epistemology and therefore are often inappropriate tools for non-Anglo-American contexts. Ethnoconsumerism argues that we should study consumers through theoretical categories originating within their cultures. Therefore, researchers need to undertake, or have access to, in-depth, qualitative inquiries into the worldviews and epistemologies of the people they study in order to perform the appropriate analysis. Critical regionalism allows researchers to build on ethnoconsumerism, providing the means to study and link consumption practices and habits that are not circumscribed by a specific geographic location and are often multisited. As such, this approach has the potential to offer alternative views to hegemonic understandings of non-Western phenomenon. It can also work as a tool for scholars in emerging countries to discuss regional phenomenon without falling prey to exoticism or stereotyped views from the Western academic centers.

Methodologically, critical regionalism can take a variety of forms. In most cases, a review of already existing research will be the starting point. It can also begin with a microlevel, descriptive case study, and from there lead to hypotheses concerning the scope of the phenomenon. Some combination of single- or multisited studies and secondary research is best suited for this approach because the researcher needs to move back and forth from micro to macro and from emic to etic understandings. The same applies to situating a phenomenon in time and history; researchers can either rely primarily on already existing historiography or conduct original historical research with primary materials available in digital or physical archives or use any combination of methods. However, these options also bring some challenges and opportunities. For example, physical archives contain data that tend to be aggregated at the local or national levels, which push inattentive researchers toward assumptions of methodological territorialism. Collecting data on regional archipelagos must face these challenges by actively questioning whether data collected by government agencies indeed provide the most accurate accounts of the phenomenon.

The external boundaries of archipelagos are not innate properties but are socially agreed upon just as cultural boundaries are defined, contested, and shifting (Murray et al., 2006: 222). In this regard, researchers must “feel out” the edges of the particular archipelagic region he/she investigates through the course of both ethnographic and historical research, as “the scope of the phenomenon emerges empirically from the analysis and can be inferred from the density, direction, and vitality of the relations among actors” (Martin and Schouten, 2014: 857). Boundaries are not arbitrary but are outcomes of decisions. As the researcher reflexively selects and draws the boundaries according to the scope and frame of the research questions, he/she must acknowledge the consequences of boundary drawing and be ready to use this knowledge to remain open to other possible scales and their consequences.

Critical regionalities offer many possibilities to researchers interested in transnational/global consumer cultures, glocalization and ethnoconsumerism, and for those focusing on non-Western contexts. A particularly interesting topic of focus for this approach is one of the most important instruments of globalization, for example, communication technologies, such as mobile telephones (e.g. Hahn, 2012), Internet connectivity (e.g. Wheeler, 2006), and social media (e.g. Miller, 2011), as they are embedded, through ongoing processes, in regional sociocultural contexts. Archipelagos of consumer culture can be a powerful metaphor to understand the role of technology in linking places and sustaining cultural practices across distances.