#postmaterialism

[piavalesca]

#FridaysForFuture

this is my way to march on the streets for our future, fridays and everyday 🌿🚲

there are no #FridaysForFuture demonstrations here in china - and frankly, our expat life sometimes makes it hard to live as conscious, mindful and sustainable as i would like to. but there are always things one can do, and a conscious and sustainable life can be a better life, too!

➡️we decided to only own one car as a family here in shanghai, so i am riding my @thunderboltdynamics e-bike for two years straight now, bringing my little one to school, running errands, shopping groceries, biking to the metro - rain or shine. i have gotten so used to the benefits of riding my bike, using didi (china‘s uber) and the amazing metro system that i often don‘t even use my husband‘s car when he’s on business trips and it is outside our door for weeks. i love cars and driving them, but biking often is faster and more convenient in shanghai. the bike paths are really good and parking is way easier at all the little shops and at school.

➡️recycling. has finally, finally become a thing here in shanghai🌿❤️💪🏼. as an ordinarily environmentally conscious european it broke my heart for years to see how much waste accumulates here and how little is recycled. throwing all garbage in only one bin with no chance any of it can ever be recycled: this literally caused me physical heart- and stomach ache (isn’t it fascinating how only a few years of environmentally conscious education can do that?). we always had a two-way-recycling system in our compound (organic waste and landfill), but nobody seemed to care: both bins always ended up will all kinds of landfill. so we resorted to some kind of guerilla recycling💪🏼. through a wechat group we took part in a private garbage collecting and recycling service. we collected unsoiled paper, carton, plastic and glass in our basement and a chinese man came and took it all every few weeks - to make money out of the recycled goods and put it into a wonderful charity supporting schoolkids in need with school supplies. this felt sooo much better, despite the additional work of having to sort, store and bring the garbage out in time. 🤗 since july shanghai has installed a city-wide, mandatory, very strict recycling system as a pioneer for country-wide recycling programmes to come. the garbage has to be sorted into wet, dry, recycable and toxic. failing to recycle properly ends in paying high fines. such a quick change of pace naturally results in some teething problems: people are confused and see the new responsibility as a hassle. but i am sure recycling will become the new normal here, too, like it did in europe. with a popluation of 1,5 billion people (almost 20% of the world‘s inhabitants) china can make such a huge difference for our planet 🌿💪🏼❤️.

➡️re-using pre-loved goods/making second hand shopping hip and chic. 2018 we started communicating and marketing our Mom2Mom charity 2nd sales actively to the chinese community. we designed and hung flyers in mandarin around town and a friend in city marketing helped us spread the word by informing local kindergardens and schools, writing articles about Mom2Mom in the city magazine and awarding us with an „excellence in organizing“ trophy at an official ceremony at a huge city festival (thank you faye 😘). the mom2mom sales help a lot to take away the stigma 2nd hand shopping still has in materialistic, consumeristic china. expats/laowais have a high status in shanghai, this city is very open for and welcoming to international influences. therefore expat-run 2nd hand sales with high quality, international brand items help make sustainable and conscious consumption look hip and chic✌🏻. more and more local people are joining the beautiful mission to re-use pre-loved goods, to conserve resources and the environment🌿✨

➡️ if all these things make me look like a sustainability warrior, i can assure you, i am not. our ecologically consciousness is far from perfect. i eat meat again 🥩 (especially in pregnancy the lioness in me is demanding it), and our flights ✈️ make our families‘ carbon footprint go through the roof. i know that compensating our C02 emissions whenever we can and playing plane rides as the wild card of our expat life (we have to visit family, we have to flee the smoggy winter, we have to make the most of living in asia for a while...) is not enough, and there is much room to find more sustainable ways of travelling. but this part of an eco-conscious life frankly is the hardest right now. i am very sure my philosophy and postmaterialistic environmental stance “collect experiences, not things” is the right way to combine human wellbeing and sustainability, but i know we need to find more conscious, slower and mindful ways to realize this.

➡️i believe (and know, cause i studied sustainability marketing and this is backed up by empirical data:) the eco-movement only has a chance to change behaviour of the masses if we find ways to make people see and feel sustainability is not at odds with fulfillment and fun - but can actually be a catalyst of a better life. 

pressuring and shaming people into participating causes resistance and reactance, the opposite of the intended effect. before you shame and push others, ask yourself: to you want to look morally superior or to you really want to make things better? let people start where it comes easy and naturally to them, without demanding a sudden all-or-nothing change of pace. 

of course, everybody is responsible and we will all have to go where it hurts at some point, but it is on the government, on the economy, and on the ecological conscious pioneers too, to not only shame and push, enforce prohibitions and fines, but show and live alternatives, subsidize, facilitate and empower people to find more sustainable and fulfilling ways to live💪🏼🌿❤️.

[duhk-ha]

The Post Materialists and all their Wide-Eyed Lofty Plans

[gor21]

Erosion of life.

[busydictator-blog]

Postmaterialism and Dictatorship

[busydictator-blog]

Are Rich Countries More or Less Likely to be Dictatorships?

[constellations-soc]

All in all, then, everything would appear to indicate that the food space in contemporary Britain and its homology with the social space of classes are remarkably similar to those documented by Bourdieu for France fifty years ago. The light and exclusive are still opposed to the heavy, the cheap and the filling, and the rich and expensive are still opposed to the lean and the healthy – which is not to say that every meal or morsel eaten by the homologous class fractions exemplify these aesthetics, only that they tend to. Perhaps the main novelty, along with the addition of restaurant/cuisine tastes and re-specification of paradigmatic items (or symbols) in line with the different country and year (and data), is the increased importance attached to the ethical dimension of food consumption among those disproportionately endowed with cultural capital. Doubtless some might see this as a result of the steady rise of ‘post-materialist’ political issues and the switch from production to consumption as the main site of political action and power in the West (eg Inglehart, 1990; Giddens, 1991). Yet even if that were so – and there is evidence to say the picture is rather more complex than that, not only because of the empirical faults of the postmaterialism thesis (Majima and Savage, 2007) but because similar homologies can be found as far back as ancient Greece (Vandebroeck, 2013) – it would appear from our analysis that so-called post-material concerns, at least as they play out in relation to food, are more likely to be the preserve of those relatively distant from material necessity and in possession of legitimated ways of knowing and thinking, since they have the freedom and the symbolic mastery to fringe the most concrete practical act of buying food with awareness of global supply chains and abstract discourses of ‘animal rights’, ‘global poverty’, ‘global warming’ and so on (cf. Adams and Raisborough, 2008). "In this respect the concern for the ethical dimension may well stem from the same set of generic class dispositions as the concern for health – or more accurately for the lean, nutritious and low-fat since the dominated still perceive their diet as ‘healthy’ in its own contrasting way, that is, as keeping themselves fed rather than going without (Atkinson and Bradley, 2013). Like the orientation for the lean, it indicates a disposition to control, discipline or regulate consumption born of a capacity to project oneself and one’s doings into the longer-term future – taking the body or the environment etc. as ends in themselves rather than means to practical ends – in turn founded on a relative distance from the demands and urgencies of material necessity and mastery of, and thus interest in, specific symbolic discourses concerning the body and the world (itself developed in part thanks to relative distance from necessity) (cf. Wills et al., 2011). Working at multiple levels, this disposition guides unreflected bodily intentionality and ‘absorbed coping’, as Hubert Dreyfus calls it – the automatic checking of labels, for example – as well as projection – considerations on what to buy, making a shopping list, planning a meal – and pairs perceived food items with a greater or lesser sense of ‘I can have it’, ‘I want it’ or ‘that’s my kind of thing’.

Atkinson W and Deeming C (2015) Class and cuisine in contemporary Britain: the social space, the space of food and their homology. The Sociological Review 63(4): 892

[post-materialisms]