Marilyn Halter, Shopping for Identity: The Marketing of Ethnicity

In her conclusion, Marilyn Halter wrote: “Whereas participation in the emergent mass consumer culture of the early part of the century most often functioned as an effective mode of adaptation to mainstream America for new-immigrant arrivals, descendants of those same immigrants today often seek out consumer goods for the opposite purpose of accentuating their cultural distinctiveness.”??

Write a paper in which you address the following:

a. Explain this quote fully. ??

b. What is consumer culture? Why does it emerge at the beginning of the twentieth century? ??

c. What role did consumer culture play in the assimilation of immigrants during the 1920s and 1930s? Give one example. What other factors encouraged assimilation? Give one example.??

d. How do recent marketing trends reflect a change in American culture since the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s? What does Halter mean when she discusses “symbolic, or voluntary, ethnicity”? Why are well-educated, middle class Americans more likely then working class Americans to identify with an ethnic background?

Answer rating: 100% (QA)

a This quotation is about the originality and the problem of identity which every as Am... View the full answer