Shopping in the Negev: Global flows and local contingencies

This article reacts against the dichotomy of global and local as it presents an ethnography of shopping practices in two consumer sites in the Israeli city of Beersheva. The study focuses on consumers and shopkeepers in the Old City and at the BIG outdoor shopping center-two seemingly opposite shopping and leisure zones. Israeli discourse couples the Old City with a failed local past while pointing positively at BIG as a progress-oriented manifestation of the global. Our ethnographic, historical and semiotic analyses at and of these sites suggest, however, that global and local are more slippery terms and overlapping social practices than everyday discourse and first visual impressions convey. The article concludes that seemingly opposite sorts of consumption spaces are rooted both in local contexts and the variability of globalization processes.