Sociology of consumption culture

This thesis contains an attempt to make an analysis of the consumption culture through garbage via a sociological focus on the conceptualization of the consumption culture. Transformation process of the manufacturing methods, historical and theoretical roots of consumption and the consumption culture were examined to interpret the sociology of the consumption culture. Also, starting with the Ottoman Empire, answers were sought for the question how the consumption culture expanded throughout Turkey, and then the effects of lifestyles and consumption with regard to the cities were discussed in terms of concepts of the indicator pointed out in the firsts section and the modern consumption. In the light of the concepts of place, habitus and symbolic capital by Pierre Bourdieu, the idea that the address has become a symbolic capital was adopted. Following the second section, the elements providing the symbolic capital stock of Beşiktaş, which was chosen as the population, were discussed by means of historical, economic and cultural divisions, and the idea that Beşiktaş is a place of symbolic capital was based on the research "Research on Life Quality in Istanbul" which was most recently completed in 2015. In the last section of the study, the method of garbology/garbage archeology, which hasn't been included in Turkish literature yet and considered to make methodologically significant contribution to the analysis of the garbage, was addressed. The garbage analysis of the Türkali neighborhood in Beşiktaş returned results in compliance with the idea that "norms were replaced by strategies" as indicated by Bourdieu, for the residents in the area. It has been concluded that particularly the symbolic capital stock enhanced by the high level of education in the area served at tendencies of differentiation in social life for the residents in Beşiktaş. Keywords: Consumption Culture, Symbolic Capital, Garbage Analysis, Life Styles, Garbology, Archaelogy of Garbage, Pierre Bourdieu