In eleven original chapters, the contributors to Lived Experiences of Public Consumption take the experiences, practices and embodiments of everyday actors in public marketplaces as their points of departure. Drawing upon their ethnographic research, the authors situate themselves and their work in commercial marketplaces-on the streets and in the plazas, grocery stores and malls of five continents-offering the kind of rich description and analysis enabled by interpretive forms of inquiry. In so doing, they demonstrate a shared conviction that something irreducible occurs in the public, face-to-face encounters of buyers and sellers, of observers and participants, as they meet in the terrestrial marketplace-be it a bookstore in Sydney, a mall in Dubai, a fair trade shop in Philadelphia or a flea market in Santiago, Chile. Throughout the book the point is made with intimate detail that, in market-commercial contexts, economic value never stands alone but is always accompanied by and enfolded into exquisite human specificity.