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Introduction
If anthropologists were commonly confused with archaeologists, and known for studying tribes in isolated places they are now known for their work in advertising and market research agencies. Studying the "others" became a matter of understanding ourselves as those others that consume and engage in relationships that are intrinsically linked with the culture that produces them. Anthropologists in marketing observe rather than look at the social phenomena as if they were making evident the obvious. "As academic ethnography has moved more towards the study of modern rather than primitive society, commercial organizations have been interested in its use" ([52] Wilson, 2006, p. 99). Anthropologists provide in depth information that will finally serve to built more adequate, accurate and efficient strategies to speak to consumers. The way people behave in daily life is rooted in the way they have been taught culture, that is, the cultural patterns they follow in order to make sense of reality. If consumption is a social process then it can be argued that it can be studied from an anthropological perspective. For more than two decades, anthropology has been increasing its participation in the field of marketing. If it was once a discipline considered only for the academy, it has transcended borders and moved towards the study of consumers not only in a critical way, but also in a theoretical and applied way:
She or he must seek to attain an essentially self-reflexive understanding wherein the ethnographer encounters the forces of his or her own culture, seeking to stand sufficiently distant to conceive its gestalt and sufficiently near to grasp the local minutiae of its detail ([46] Rosen, 1991, p. 14).
In the academic field, consumer culture theory has explained the phenomenon of consumption as a symbolic and real interchange of meanings that are transmitted and created in the relations between object-subject, subject-object, and subject-subject. The subject, understood as the consumer, entails a relation with an object based on the perceptions hold a-priori about it, while at the same time giving it new and different meanings that will later be interchanged with other consumers. The meanings however, can vary between social groups. People then choose a good or service not only based on the price but also "of the cultural...