LASA/EANLAS: Rethinking Trans-Pacific Ties: Asia and Latin America

Hygiene products, phones, cement, and insurance: Cultural repertoires of belonging and consumption in an unequal mega-city

• In Event: No Longer Poor, Not Yet Middle Class: new consumer cultures of Asia and the Americas

Abstract

Globalized economic growth and the transformation of lives among low- income urban communities as they become mass consumers have implications not only for material wellbeing, but also for belonging. Data for the present analysis come from key informant interviews with thirty Metro Manila residents–almost half of whom are “former urban poor ” or individuals who come from households with incomes classifying them as “low-income but neither poor nor middle class”; with the rest divided between being “poor” and “middle-class.” The interviews show that in the Philippines where the family is generally construed as the foundation of social life, consumption is strongly mediated by family dynamics. This analysis of consuming against the backdrop of the family brings the theory of belonging to the understanding of the contemporary consumption of personal and household hygiene products, phones, cement, and pre-need insurance as cultural repertoires of belonging that provide social commentaries on a wide range of social issues in the Philippines. An understanding of the consumption practices of the former urban poor, viewed as both biographic and family navigations or attempts to belong together in a hugely unequal megacity, will be useful in imagining deglobalized transformative consumption paths.

Authors

• Anna Cristina Pertierra, University of Technology Sydney

• Czarina A Saloma, Ateneo de Manila University