Winner of Best Current Edited Collection Award in Anthropology & Reproduction from the American Anthropological Association

"Timely and often startlingly unexpected in their insight, these authors make the everyday economy of child-raising speak to some very large questions, like the changing accommodation in the West between kinship and the market, between persons and things, and between the fetishism of goods and the reproduction of human value itself."-Jean Comaroff, University of Chicago

"An intellectually courageous, fresh, and timely collection of essays. . . . This cutting-edge volume breathes new life into reproduction studies."-Lynn M. Morgan, Mount Holyoke College

"Brings together well-known and accomplished scholars to reveal and analyze the complexities of the collision between motherhood and consumption. . . . A well-integrated and surprisingly original volume."-Sarah Franklin, author of Embodied Progress: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception

Consuming Motherhood addresses the provocative question of how motherhood and consumption-as ideologies and as patterns of social action-mutually shape and constitute each other in contemporary North American and European social life. Ideologically, motherhood and consumption are often constructed in opposition to each other, with motherhood standing in as a naturalized social relation that is thought to be uniquely free of the calculating instrumentality that dominates commercial relations. Yet, in social life, motherhood and consumption are inseparable. Whether shopping for children's clothing or childbirth services, or making decisions about adopting children, becoming a mother (and maternal practice more generally) is deeply influenced by consumption. How can the relationship between motherhood and consumption be revealed, and critically analyzed? Consuming Motherhood brings together a group of sociologists, anthropologists, and religious studies scholars to address this question through carefully grounded ethnographic studies. This insightful book reveals how mothers negotiate the contradictory forces that position them as both immune from and the target of consumerist tendencies in contemporary global society.

Janelle S. Taylor is an assistant professor at the University of Washington. Linda L. Layne is Hale Professor of the Humanities and Social Sciences at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Danielle F. Wozniak is a research scientist and adjunct professor at the University of Connecticut.