Our paper aims to study the behavior of consumption of book collectors. Through ethnography we investigate the world of the bibliophiles that frequent two second-hand bookstores in the city of Porto Alegre. The fieldwork has revealed some aspects that go beyond a utilitarian approach of goods acquisition and usage. Our analysis is based on previous works in Consumer Behavior and Anthropology of Consumption. This framework has permitted us to access a universe of consumption, which include male sociability, obsessive consumption, and the building of an identity through the consumption. The main contribution of this paper lies in the analysis of one extreme way of consumption, which can help us to understand some aspects of consumption in contemporary society, especially the symbolic proprieties of goods and the process of appropriation of goods in their moving from production to consumption.
collectionism; consumption; ethnography; identity
