10‐ISENHOUR‐FINAL 234 CINDY ISENHOUR ON THE CHALLENGES OF SIGNALLING ETHICS WITHOUT THE STUFF: TALES OF CONSPICUOUS GREEN ANTI‐ CONSUMPTION Intimately embedded in the global economy and bound up with ideologies of growth, consumer culture is a powerful force. 1 Humans are consuming more per capita each year, more products, more energy, more resources. In many ways our identities have become inextricably linked to consumption, and alternatives to consumer‐based ways of life are difficult for many to imagine in a world seemingly dependent on growing consumer demand. Many scholars have set out to explain why consumption has become so central to contemporary societies. Some draw on social theories of consumption, connecting the importance of material culture to a heightened need for communication in increasingly complex, postmodern, global and mobile societies (Crew 2003; Holt and Schor 2000; Leach 1993). As more people become alienated from productive resources and move into urban centres and wage work, they find themselves without hometowns, relatives or the products of their labour to anchor their identities. Many, thus, have little choice but to build their identities around symbolic objects that strangers can easily understand, their possessions. Anthropologists have long studied material goods as tools for communication, a way that we signal our social status, our membership in a group and our understanding of shared norms and values. Mary Douglas (2004: 145) wrote, ‘a consumer knows that he is expected to play some part or he will not get any income. Everything that he chooses to do or to buy is part of a project to choose other people’, and she continues, ‘the forms of consumption which he prefers are those that maintain the kind of collectivity he likes to be in’. If this theory is correct, then it seems that Swedes have become much