Consumption and Experience in the 21st Century: Strategies and Practices of Everyday Life

Abstract

This paper reviews the book “Consumption, ensembles, and Itineraries to be assembled” (2026), compiled by Andrea Dettano and Florencia Chahbenderian. Based on an analysis of its eight chapters, the book explores the complexity of consumption in the 21st century, viewing it not as a purely rational act, but as a practice shaped by relational, affective and normative logics. In dialogue with Adrián Scribano’s foreword, the review highlights the tension between subjects and objects in a capitalist system that organises consumption as a mechanism for social integration, even in contexts of precariousness, inflation and financialisation. The review summarises the book’s main arguments regarding strategies for survival, indebtedness and value maximisation in various Latin American and international contexts, as well as issues related to sustainable consumption and the contemporary production of subjectivities and sensibilities. Within this framework, it highlights the capacity of various sectors to adapt and reinvent themselves in the face of neoliberal imperatives, the logic of financial education and the transformations of contemporary consumption.