Status Consumption and Negotiation of Tastes: Anchoring on Ethnic Capital

Abstract

This study examines status consumption and socio-cultural tensions between wealthy Turkish indigenes and newly enriched Kurdish migrants in Şanlıurfa, an underdeveloped city in Turkey. The article focuses on ethnicity, which enables the construction and negotiation of consumer identities and (re)production of distinctions between competing groups under the conditions of marketization. Ethnic capital, a subcategory of social and cultural capital, refers to the dispositions, rituals, and skills of an ethnic group and its members and serves as a source of social power to reproduce group distinctions. The findings contribute to the literature by revealing that, in a context where modernity is not completely entrenched, ethnic capital can explain the scope of competitive status consumption and power struggles. Consumers can still remain attached to their ethnic capital, as they move between different competitive positions in the field of consumption. It has been found that ethnic groups see themselves as having superior qualities—and yet a need to improve—and try to reflect this not by emulating necessarily ‘the’ or ‘an’ other but by emulating lifestyle consumption.