Paper short abstract:

This paper explores ethical consumption in the city of Palermo, and engages with shopping as a means to explore local perceptions of this site. It shows how some citizens exhibited a belief that consuming fairtrade and organic made their polity – which they thought of in negative terms – a better place.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores ethical consumption (or 'critical', as it is known locally) in the city of Palermo, Italy. It engages with fairtrade and organic shopping as a means through which explore local perceptions of this particular site. The paper thus elaborates on some of the common characteristics in shoppers' views of these ethical commodities, and on why they are sometimes bought by the same citizens in town. Although both fairtrade and organic agriculture can be seen as dealing with somewhat distant domains (the developing countries and sites where food is grown away from the cities), the paper shows how some of Palermo's citizens exhibited a belief that consuming 'critically' made their polity - largely conceived of as 'the city', which they thought of in strong negative terms - a better place. Their shopping was seen as a tool to advance positive social change, consumer power being one of the last powers left today to people To adopt a Maussian approach, one can say that circulating certain goods made them feel they widened the circle of their desired society. This engagement with the local milieu can be interpreted as a particular instance, with broadly 'political' overtones, of a process by which consumers subsume shopping from the realm of far-away ethics within that of close-by morality. Such morality was framed by a perception of the city at the imaginary scale of community. This case study is based on original data from a fifteen-month ESRC-funded study of new moral economies in Sicily.