Needs, Desires and the Experience of Scarcity: Representations of recreational shopping in post-Soviet Estonia.

Abstract. This article contributes to the new field of post-Soviet consumer culture studies by exploring the meanings of recreational shopping carried by the Estonian notion of sˇoppamine,adapted from the English word ‘shopping’.It draws on empirical data derived from 71 original interviews with Estonian-speaking consumers. Underlying these respondents’normative judgements of their own and others’ shopping behaviour is a system of moral concepts in which ‘need’and ‘restraint’are continually juxtaposed against ‘desire’,‘pleasure’and ‘excess’.This opposition,while common to a range of consumer contexts,takes a specific form in the post-Soviet conditions of Estonia,marked by a shift from a collectively experienced absence of consumer goods in general to an individually perceived scarcity – either material,in the form of the money to buy available goods,or symbolic,based on an opinion that the new commodities are insufficiently sophisticated