Dialogues with the artefacts: a case study of manners and morals in consumption in the historical context of modern Thailand

Juthamas Tangsantikul

Chapter 38 in Research Handbook on the Sociology of Consumption, 2026, pp 436-447 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: The chapter discusses methodological issues arising from a 2015–2020 study of the history of manners in modern Thailand, specifically how cultural artefacts, manners and consumption interacted in the 1940s and 1950s. The study focused on how manners and morality helped mediate tension between growing consumerism and traditional Thai values. Framed by Bourdieu's concept of ‘cultural capital’ and Lefebvre's theory of ‘the bureaucratic society of controlled consumption’, the research deployed a novel combination of comparative analysis of textual and visual sources to interrogate four related cultural artefacts. The methodology, drawn from literary and cinema studies, allows access to aspects of the past imbued in material things that can be regarded as ‘mute’, leading to the illumination of otherwise obscured interplays of manners, morality and consumption in Thailand. In so doing, the chapter aims to contribute to discourse on research methodology that widens the potential of past consumption studies through cultural artefacts.

Keywords: Manners; Morality; Consumption; Cultural artefacts; Cultural capital; Thai values (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781035310500
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