KOREASCHOLAR

While consumer culture theory (CCT) has contributed to establishing the cultural grounding of consumer experience it has not emphasized to the same extent the role of embodiment in shaping experience. Indeed culture plays a significant role in shaping bodily habits, skills, practices and our interactions with the environment, but such embodied skills do not restrict and limit the range of meaning and experiences that we can experience. Taking this perspective, the present paper attempts to argue for the creative power of this embodied dimension. More specifically, consumer experience is viewed as a body-world interplay, as affordance-responsiveness in and to a social, cultural and material environment the outcome of which cannot be defined in advance. Whereas CCT has tended to regard the body as the target of culture and discourse, an embodied approach highlights how the body is also the locus of new expressions, meaning and new experiences. The paper ends with discussions, implications and suggestions for further studies.

• Ali Yakhlef(Stockholm University, Sweden)