Consumption,Lifestyle and Advertising in a State Socialist Dictatorship as a Factor in the Shaping of Czech Identity
Abstract
This paper attempts to show how studying the history of consumer culture can help to reveal identity- forming processes in Czech society. The author first outlines how this topic was highlighted in the German environment by the wave of 'ostalgia' to encourage, unlike the Czech milieu, systematic research into the everyday life under a Communist dictatorship.
Subsequently, this paper briefly introduces the differences between Communist and Capitalist consumer culture. In the third part of the text, the author offers a possible extension of the research identity-forming processes exploring the development of the distribution infrastructure, the concepts of lifestyle and consumer discursive structures, advertising images of the national community and ultimately, monitoring the production of symbolic meanings of nation-specific objects.