The Idea of Luxury between the History of Consumption and Political Thought and Its Implications for the History of Southeastern Europe

<p>The paper insists on some methodological issues related to the use luxury as an analytical concept in historical studies. For many historians the luxury seems to be an easy and insignificant research topic, a simple history of frivolity and for others luxury represents any product other than mass consumption. It's difficult to define luxury in a broadly accepted definition, but it doesn't mean that we should not try to define it. It's very important to know what we looking for, in other words, what is and what is not luxury. The major obstacle was to find a safe method to analyze luxury and we should be very cautious, because in many works the concept of luxury is used in an empirical way. Actually, for South Eastern Europe before 18th century, it's very hard to talk about luxury, because it doesn't exist as a concept. Luxury is specifically to western thought, originated in the Latin word <em>luxuria</em>, which means everything who exceed the norm and which in Latin Christian tradition became one of the seven deadly sins, the sin of lechery. The languages from South-Eastern Europe have not the word luxury and they use different words for lechery and desire. Later, the luxury, good and evil in the same time, is completely transformed, being a product of western consumer society, most exactly a marketing product. That's one of the reasons why we propose a new concept, the cultural habitus of power, who cover the aspects related of positional goods for a traditional society, different by Western society. It's meaning to study luxury as an aspect of history of power, in a completely different view than that proposed by the history of consumption.