Sandra Rubia da Silva

?Mistura tudo, música, foto, rádio?: a domesticação do telefone celular em um bairro de camadas populares

During twelve months of fieldwork in a low-income neighbourhood in the city of Florianopolis carried out for my PhD, in the Brazilian Southern state of Santa Catarina, I was able to notice the growing consumption of mobile phones, as well as its influence on the social life of the members of that community. In this paper, which finds its theorethical frame in the updating of the concept of domestication – now applied to mobile technologies – I analyze, through an ethnographic approach, the ways by which mobile phones are appropriated, not without difficulty, to the everyday life of the dwellers of Morro Sao Jorge. The paper, besides focusing on a theme that has not yet received much attention in the field of cyberculture studies – that is, the appropriation of technology among lowincome classes – not only draws attention to the consumption of technology among young people, but also among the elderly.

Consumption and Material Culture Studies in the Global South

This special issue of International Review of Social Research holds the challenge of representing a growing field of studies in the social sciences: that of consumption and material culture. In Brazilian academia, where most of the authors of the articles presented here come from, the study of consumption has experienced a boom in recent years, with an ever-increasing number of national and international meetings and congresses, as well as books and journals published. Despite the recent interest in the dynamics of consumption in complex societies, consumption is not, however, a completely new and unexamined theme in social sciences. In fact, consumption has been studied by anthropology the home discipline of the guest editors since its inception. Not only the consumption, but also the production and circulation of goods, have been examined by disciplinary sub-fields such as, for instance, economic anthropology or anthropology of food,