Culture Swapping: Consumption and the Ethnogenesis of Middle-Class Haitian Immigrants

Abstract

By means of an ethnographic study of a Haitian family in the midwestern United States, this article demonstrates how ethnic consumers “culture swap,” using goods to move between one cultural identity and another as they negotiate relations between home and host cultures. This interpretation of consumer behavior is grounded in a semiotics of performance, emphasizing the dynamic and mutable nature of self, social identity, and cultural identification in global consumer culture.