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Rudy Koshar
of Eastern Europe, it is in the history of leisure practices (the desire for them, the
perceived need to have more of them, and the disgruntlement felt at being denied
them) that we find some of the sources of opposition to Communist rule that finally
brought 1989 into the historical pantheon. 40
The contributors to this volume are less given to the kind of anxiousness that
once characterized so much scholarly opinion about the relationship between
leisure and consumption. But this does not mean that the authors regard processes
of commercialization or commodification as unproblematic. Nor should it imply
that the march of consumer society through contemporary history was a foregone
conclusion. Rather, the growing authority of a culture of commodity purchase and
display within leisure activities was the result of specific decisions taken in the
past by a variety of actors, whether travel entrepreneurs in provincial France, the
organizers of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century circus, or consumers themselves.
To study the history of leisure is in some respects to ask the same questions
that historians of consumption have asked: what degree of agency should be
attributed to shoppers, travelers, or spectators? What is more, scholars who focus
on relations between the commodity form and leisure have a rather mixed bag with
which to work if they turn to the research on consumer societies. The historiography
of consumption is quite uneven, with areas of rather bright illumination
and impressive detail, but also with many time periods, subjects, and historical
processes very much underdeveloped. The United States and early modern Britain
have received much attention, for instance, while mainland Europe is much less
richly researched. As with the history of leisure travel, socialist consumerism is
still very much terra incognita. Finally, whereas there is considerable correspondence
between the historical map of leisure and that of consumption, there are
also disparities. For example, in the social history of continental Europe, the
history of nutrition and working-class household budgets, which is to say the
history of certain necessary forms of social reproduction, is much more thoroughly
worked out than is the history of the purchase and use of “non-essential” goods
and practices. 41
The historiography of consumption has been dominated by either the process
of mediation (as in advertising) or by the study of the act of purchase itself. 42
The actual social use of material objects has come in for much less historical
scholarship. This disparity exists across a range of cognate areas, for example, the
history of technology, which has been dominated until recently by narratives of
invention and production rather than of use. 43 This is by no means a logical
consequence of the focus on objects since, as Hannah Arendt once noted, consumption
connotes not only the act of buying but also the process of “using up.” 44
How commodities are deployed in daily life, how they come to be embedded in
the complex interstices of the family or the workplace, and how they may be
discarded or passed on to future generations are topics that need much more
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