Backpaking lifestyle
as the politics of consumption are still mired in economic asymmetries. Nonetheless, Giddens
(1991) offers that the more post-traditional and fragmented the context, the more lifestyle
choice becomes critical in the (re)constitution of self-identity. Chaney (1996) thus sees
lifestyle as the consumption of sets of goods and services in response to a perceived loss of
meaning in everyday life.
In this latter sense, the aesthetic sign-value of lifestyle consumption becomes politically
mobilised and forms a basis for resisting dominant power structures, as seen in the
countercultural protests of the 1960s (Binkley, 2004). The ideal of ‘alternative lifestyle’ was
then extolled as a break from the past and the constraints of its collective structures. As
lifestyle was imbued in this period with a ‘controlled hedonism’ (ibid) focused on styling life
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