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Ritual Revision During a Crisis: The Case of Indian Religious Rituals During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Abstract
Rituals, particularly religious rituals, may play a significant role in times of crises. Often, these rituals undergo revision in order to adapt to the changing needs of the time. In this paper, we investigate recent unofficially revised Hindu religious rituals as performed during the COVID-19 pandemic. The multifarious creative interplay between Hindu tradition and change is illustrated through four cases – the religious festival of Durga Puja, the devotional songs or bhajans, the ritual of lighting lamps or diyas, and the fire rituals or havans. We offer a systematic discourse analysis of online news articles and YouTube posts that illuminate several aspects of ritual revision during unsettled times. We focus on the changes that were made to ritual elements – who was in control of these alterations, how were these modifications made, and what potential benefits did these revisions offer to the community of ritual participants. Based on our findings, we highlight public policy implications regarding the involvement of diverse social actors, the creation of faith in science, the creation of feelings of unity and agency, and the amplification of local ritual modifications on a national scale.
Purpose
Once the domain of theologians, sociologists and (religion) anthropologists, we have seen more recently how consumer researchers have enriched the study of spirituality and religion. Researching the sacred can be fraught with challenges, in and out of the field. Russell Belk, Samuelson Appau and Diego Rinallo address key questions, issues and conceptualisations in the scholarship on sacred consumption, contemplating the past and mapping future research avenues. A reading list is also included for those interested in joining the authors in this collective discovery of the sacred.
Design/methodology/approach
Contributors answered the following four questions: How has the study of sacred consumption evolved since you started researching the field? What would be the critical methodological issues that researchers need to consider when approaching the “sacred”? What are some of the key authors that have influenced your thinking? What do you think will be the key questions that researchers will need to focus on?
Findings
Rinallo, Belk and Appau’s reflections on studying the sacred provide food for thought for both novice and weathered researchers alike. Researching the sacred both shapes and is shaped by our positionality: by our insider/outsider status, our gender and race and our cosmovisions as believers or sceptics. Researchers should be mindful and reflective of their subject positionings as they approach, enter and leave the field. Researching the sacred requires an open mind as we broaden our vision of what constitutes the sacred. Such research calls for scholarly as well as phenomenological curiosity. Reading widely and across disciplines to better familiarise ourselves with our sacred context helps to craft novel and meaningful research.
Originality/value
This paper provides a multivocal genealogy of consumer culture work on religion and spirituality, methodological advice and reading resources for researchers.
Churches in the United States closed their doors to in-person gatherings during the covid-19 lockdown in March of 2020. As conditions improved, churches began re-opening to indoor worship services, instituting safety measures to comply with cdc guidelines. Churches used social media to promote their re-opening to their congregations. With the goal of evaluating the video messages of churches promoting their re-opening, the study analyzes the content of Facebook videos from non-denominational megachurches between June and October 2020. This qualitative thematic analysis explores how the videos address the threat of covid-19, the risk of attending in-person services, and the efficacy of health and safety measures. The inductive analysis was sensitized by the extended parallel processing model, ritual communication theory, and the concept of security theater. The themes identified have potential implications for future religious and health communication research, especially concerning contentious safety protocols, managing fear and anxiety, liability concerns, livestreaming technology, and more digitally transient congregations.
This article explains the attitude of social groups who have been declared exposed to the Covid-19 virus and are undergoing isolation facilitated by the government for 6-10 days until they are declared cured. Because they undergo quarantine with strict controls, they leave their main obligations as family breadwinners or professional workers. In a situation that is completely restricted, they have no alternative but to accept and undergo all procedures and stages of quarantine until they are completed. The article data comes from several Covid-19 patients participating in quarantine in Banyumas district in February 2022. Using a sociological approach and religious interpretation, the attitude of accepting the quarantine situation points to two things, first, religion is present in people who experience powerlessness as a result of the dysfunction of science and technology. Second, in this situation of powerlessness, religion is present to offer solutions that are beyond reality or transcendental. From these two situations, the social groups participating in the Covid-19 quarantine gave rise to religious attitudes which in the perspective of religious interpretation are understood as the practice of the teachings of gratitude, patience, trustworthiness, prayer, wisdom, and ihtiyar.
Pandemia COVID-19 wymusiła zmiany w obszarze praktyk rodzinnych, w tym tych związanych z celebrowaniem świąt. Tradycyjne rytuały i utrwalone sposoby demonstrowania rodzinności musiały ulec natychmiastowym i często niechcianym modyfikacjom. Wyniki badania pokazują reakcje na te zmiany, które to objęły otwartość na nowe sposoby świętowania, ulgę związaną z pożegnaniem starych rytuałów, jak i negatywne oceny modyfikacji praktyk celebrowania. Analiza zmian rodzinnych praktyk związanych ze świętowaniem pozwoliła na stworzenie bardziej uniwersalnej typologii postaw wobec zmian praktyk rodzinnych w dobie kryzysów społecznych.
Social media constitutes a pervasive communication media that has had a prominent role during global crises. While crisis communication research suggests that individuals use social media differently during a crisis, little is known about what forms of engagement behavior may emerge and what drivers may lead to different forms of social media users’ engagement behavior toward a global crisis. This study uses netnography and in-depth interviews to explore social media users’ behavioral manifestations toward the COVID-19 crisis; thereby, we identify nine forms and six drivers and develop a framework of relationships between these forms and drivers. Those findings provide a better understanding of social media engagement toward the crisis from individual users’ perspectives, which helps commercial and non-commercial marketers to determine the users’ sentiments and reactions reflected in their engagement behaviors, hence, communicate more effectively and in a more engaging way during and beyond a global crisis.
In this brief note written during a global pandemic, we consider some of the important ways this historical moment is altering the religious landscape, aiming our investigative lens at how religious institutions, congregations, and individuals are affected by the social changes produced by COVID-19. This unprecedented time prompts scholars of religion to reflect on how to strategically approach the study of religion in the time of "social distancing," as well as moving forward. Particularly important considerations include developing heuristic, innovative approaches for revealing ongoing changes to religion , as well as how religion continues to structure social life across a wide range of contexts, from the most intimate and personal to the most public and global. Although our note can only be indicative rather than exhaustive, we do suggest that the initial groundwork for reconsiderations might productively focus on several key analytical themes, including: Epidemiology, Ideology, Religious Practice, Religious Organizations and Institutions, as well as Epistemology and Methodology. In offering these considerations as a starting point, we remain aware (and hopeful) that inventive and unanticipated approaches will also emerge.
As countries shore up existing safeguards to address the social and economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, India faces a humanitarian disaster of unprecedented proportions. Ninety per cent of the Indian workforce is employed in the unorganised sector; uncounted millions work in urban areas at great distances from rural homes. When the Government of India (GOI) announced the sudden ‘lockdown’ in March to contain the spread of the pandemic, migrant informal workers were mired in a survival crisis, through income loss, hunger, destitution and persecution from authorities policing containment and fearful communities maintaining ‘social distance’. In this context, the article analyses how poverty, informality and inequality are accentuated by the COVID-19 pandemic experiences of ‘locked down’ migrant workers. The article examines the nature and scope of existing social policy, designed under changing political regimes and a fluctuating economic climate, to protect this vulnerable group and mitigate dislocation, discrimination and destitution at this moment and in future.
As health professionals develop health communication for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), we implore that these communication approaches do not include fear appeals. Fear appeals, also known as scare tactics, have been widely used to promote recommended preventive behaviors. We contend that unintended negative outcomes can result from fear appeals that intensify the already complex pandemic and efforts to contain it. We encourage public health professionals to reevaluate their desire to use fear appeals in COVID-19 health communication and recommend that evidence-based health communication be utilized to address the needs of a specific community, help people understand what they are being asked to do, explain step-by-step how to complete preventative behaviors, and consider external factors needed to support the uptake of behaviors. To aid health professionals in redirecting away from the use of fear appeals, we offer a phased approach to creating health communication messages during the COVID-19 crisis.
Five heretical field researchers celebrate human subjectivity in a fractured journey toward St. Augustine Catholic Church in the heart of Tremé in September 2015. They populate their diverse pentagonal thoughts with Mary Douglas’ negotiated concepts of purity and pollution, rituals and symbols as a counterweight in their backpacks. Some are inspired by the theatrical mythologies of the guides who take them there, others are stopped in their track by the residual devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Some stop to wonder at Nicolas Cage’s future resting place, others line up at food-trucks to add smells and taste to Tremé’s mediated precreation. Some frame it as a battle ground of past and present injustice, others acknowledge the strife inside the dirty tourist. The thin-sliced meanings acquired on the boulevards to St. Augustine Catholic Church provide a touch of truthfulness, in the idiosyncratic segments, and the spirited spaces in between.
Saturation has attained widespread acceptance as a methodological principle in qualitative research. It is commonly taken to indicate that, on the basis of the data that have been collected or analysed hitherto, further data collection and/or analysis are unnecessary. However, there appears to be uncertainty as to how saturation should be conceptualized, and inconsistencies in its use. In this paper, we look to clarify the nature, purposes and uses of saturation, and in doing so add to theoretical debate on the role of saturation across different methodologies. We identify four distinct approaches to saturation, which differ in terms of the extent to which an inductive or a deductive logic is adopted, and the relative emphasis on data collection, data analysis, and theorizing. We explore the purposes saturation might serve in relation to these different approaches, and the implications for how and when saturation will be sought. In examining these issues, we highlight the uncertain logic underlying saturation—as essentially a predictive statement about the unobserved based on the observed, a judgement that, we argue, results in equivocation, and may in part explain the confusion surrounding its use. We conclude that saturation should be operationalized in a way that is consistent with the research question(s), and the theoretical position and analytic framework adopted, but also that there should be some limit to its scope, so as not to risk saturation losing its coherence and potency if its conceptualization and uses are stretched too widely.
While the relationship between clothing and the construction of identity has received considerable attention, less attention has been given to identity shifts through acts of consumption. This paper explores the role of dress in a ritual experience during which consumers temporarily shift from one identity mode to another. The qualitative study conducted at two heavy rock music festivals shows that consumers use dress to transform themselves physically which in turn facilitates escape from everyday life. Through this transformation participants gradually enter the ritual community where a leveling process occurs based on difference from the mainstream, but paradoxically, strict conformity and adherence to the codes of dress and behavior of the festival group. This uniformity acts as a collective 'disguise' which breaks down barriers and allows individuals to participate in expressive, more primal behaviors which act as a temporary release before a return to the mundane.
Using a semiotic square to study placeway rituals, we theorize one particular sanctuary, a secular ritual we term “vestaval”—and specifically, its manifestation in the form of tailgating—as a site of popular communion. Vestaval demonstrates the power of consumption to stimulate social and civic engagement. We employ an ethnographic team methodology to describe and analyze the phenomenon. We theorize the eversion mechanism that animates vestaval, and sets it apart from other social forms including spectacle, festival and carnival well-known to consumer research. We explore how vestaval turns the domestic world inside out, and offers a template both for the temporary suspension and potential remaking of the social relations of market and polity. We detail a set of practices within four themes, location, construction, customization, and inhabitation, which enables the conversion of private space to public place and the creation of community from a confederacy of consumption encampments. These dynamics are presented as a Mobius strip to emphasize not only the simultaneity of stages, but also the constant sharing of energy. By examining how Midwestern American tailgaters in a collegiate setting personalize public place and publicize personal place, we demonstrate how individuals negotiate two of the fundamental consumption ideologies of public space.
Modern mountain men form temporary consumption enclaves focused on reen‐acting the 1825–40 fur‐trade rendezvous held in the Rocky Mountain American West. In the process, they become part of a transient consumption community predicated on invented traditions and the invocation of a mythic past to create and consume fantastic time and space. Based on ethnographic methods employed over a five‐year period, we develop a historically contextualized understanding of this consumption fantasy. We analyze how modern mountain men enact fantasy experiences of a primitive alternative reality within the bounded ritual space of the modern rendezvous. We conclude that participation in this fantasy world offers a special opportunity for transformative play, while reinforcing a romanticized set of beliefs.
The megaphone effect refers to the fact that the web makes a mass audience potentially available to ordinary consumers. The article focuses on fashion bloggers who acquire an audience by iterated displays of aesthetic discrimination applied to the selection and combination of clothing. The authors offer a theoretical account of bloggers’ success in terms of the accumulation of cultural capital via public displays of taste and describe how the exercise of taste produces economic rewards and social capital for these bloggers. The article situates fashion blogging as one instance of a larger phenomenon that includes online reviews and user-generated content and extends to the consumption of food and home decor as well as clothing. In these instances of the megaphone effect, a select few ordinary consumers are able to acquire an audience without the institutional mediation historically required.
The domain of customer experience management (hereafter, CEM) includes every point of customer contact with products, services or businesses (Grewal, Levy, and Kumar 2009). In a recent special issue of the Journal of Retailing, Puccinelli et al. (2009) assert that a key atmospheric element of CEM that can shape customer satisfaction within the retail setting is the “interaction between the customer and employee” (p. 24). In this paper, we delve further into the social-interaction aspects of retail atmospherics, by focusing on how retailers and service providers use language to facilitate a specific type of provider/customer experience that we label the “marketplace ritual.” We use depth interviews and participant observation to: (1) analyze the structure and function of the specific utterances providers identify as salient when creating and executing marketplace rituals; (2) discuss the ways language contributes to perceived strategic CEM-related outcomes; and (3) examine providers’ perceptions of the potentially negative consequences of ritual language for CEM.
Since its birth on the Spanish island of Ibiza in the early 80s club culture has evolved from a countercultural hedonistic experience (rave) to a global, commodified sector of the tourism and leisure industries. Through a longitudinal, qualitative study of behavior at one of the major UK clubs we examine the nature of clubbing and propose the concept of ritual as an explanatory framework for understanding this neo-tribal co-created experience. Drawing on a cross disciplinary literature on ritual theory we suggest that clubbing has a quasi spiritual element to it based on the components of; mythology, formulism, sacredness, communitas and transformation. Further applications to the tourism experience are suggested.
In all the Indian legends, whether it is the Ramayana or Mahabharata,
one can find embedded elements of geological processes. Perhaps due to the lack of a sound scientific basis for recognizing geological processes in ancient Indian civilization, such processes were believed to be the acts of ‘Gods’ (Suras) and ‘Demons’ (Asuras) and hence they formed an integral part of these legends. Even in the present age where science is able to explain several geological processes, the Hindu faith is such that these myths and legends continue to be passed on to succeeding generations. The fact that these geological processes are contained in these epics helps to sustain truth (dharma) and maintain harmony. Ancient Indian civilization adopted this doctrine and its ontinuance will remain a fresh and vital part of future generations in India.
The white wedding does more than mark a life passage. It marries two of the most sacred tenets of American culture: romantic love and excessive consumption. For anyone who has ever wondered about the meanings behind a white dress, a diamond ring, rice, and traditions such as cake cutting, bouquet tossing, and honeymooning, this book offers a look at the historical, social, and psychological strains that come together to make the lavish wedding the most important cultural ritual in contemporary consumer culture. With an emphasis on North American society, it shows how the elaborate wedding means far more than a mere triumph for the bridal industry. Through interviews, media accounts, and wide-ranging research and analysis, the book exposes the wedding's reflection—or reproduction—of fundamental aspects of popular consumer culture: its link with romantic love, its promise of magical transformation, its engendering of memories, and its legitimization of consumption as an expression of perfection. As meaningful as any prospective bride might wish, the lavish wedding emerges here as a lens that at once reveals, magnifies, and reveres some of the dearest wishes and darkest impulses at the heart of our culture.
In times of crisis, humans have a tendency to turn to religion for comfort and explanation. The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic is no exception. Using daily and weekly data on Google searches for 107 countries, this research demonstrates that the COVID-19 crisis resulted in a massive rise in the intensity of prayer. During the early months of the pandemic, Google searches for prayer relative to all Google searches rose by 30%, reaching the highest level ever recorded. A back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that by April 1 2020, more than half of the world population had prayed to end the coronavirus. Prayer searches remained 10% higher than previously throughout 2020, particularly so in Europe and the Americas. Prayer searches rose more among the more religious, rose on all continents, at all levels of income, inequality, and insecurity, and for all types of religion, except Buddhism. The increase is not merely a substitute for services in the physical churches that closed down to limit the spread of the virus. Instead, the rise is due to an intensified demand for religion: People pray to cope with adversity. The results thus reveal that religiosity has risen globally due to the pandemic with potential direct long-term consequences for various socio-economic outcomes.
Atmospheres are experiences of place involving transformations of consumers’ behaviors and emotions. Existing marketing research reveals how atmospheric stimuli, service performances, and ritual place-making enhance place experiences and create value for firms. Yet it remains unclear how shared experiences of atmosphere emerge and intensify among groups of people during collective live events. Accordingly, this paper uses sociological interaction ritual theory to conceptualize ‘social atmospheres’: rapidly changing qualities of place created when a shared focus aligns consumers’ emotions and behavior, resulting in lively expressions of collective effervescence. With data from an ethnography of an English Premier League football stadium, the authors identify a four-stage process of creating atmospheres in interaction ritual chains. This framework goes beyond conventional retail and servicescape design by demonstrating that social atmospheres are mobile and co-created between firms and consumers before, during and after a main event. The study also reveals how interaction rituals can be disrupted, and offers insight as to how firms can balance key tensions in creating social atmospheres as a means to enhance customer experiences, customer loyalty, and communal place attachments.
A classic study of the beliefs and institutions of mankind, and the progress through magic and religion to scientific thought, The Golden Bough has a unique status in modern anthropology and literature. First published in 1890, The Golden Bough was eventually issued in a twelve-volume edition (1906–15) which was abridged in 1922 by the author and his wife. That abridgement has never been reconsidered for a modern audience. In it some of the more controversial passages were dropped, including Frazer’s daring speculations on the Crucifixion of Christ. For the first time this one-volume edition restores Frazer’s bolder theories and sets them within the framework of a valuable introduction and notes. A seminal work of modern anthropolgy, The Golden Bough also influenced many twentieth-century writers, including D H Lawrence, T S Eliot, and Wyndham Lewis. Its discussion of magical types, the sacrificial killing of kings, the dying god, and the scapegoat is given fresh pertinence in this new edition.
Long-term control of the COVID-19 pandemic hinges in part on the development and uptake of a preventive vaccine. In addition to a segment of population that refuses vaccines, the novelty of the disease and concerns over safety and efficacy of the vaccine have a sizable proportion of the U.S. indicating reluctance to getting vaccinated against COVID-19. Among various efforts to address vaccine hesitancy and foster vaccine confidence, evidence-based communication strategies are critical. There are opportunities to consider the role of emotion in communication efforts. In this commentary, we highlight several ways negative as well as positive emotions may be considered and leveraged. Examples include attending to negative emotions such as fear and anxiety, raising awareness of emotional manipulations by anti-vaccine disinformation efforts, and activating positive emotions such as altruism and hope as part of vaccine education endeavors.
The COVID-19 pandemic and the accompanying economic downturn have dramatically impacted the lives of consumers around the world. From a conceptual perspective, such health and economic threats can severely disrupt consumers’ sense of ontological security and elicit adaptive responses by both consumers and marketers. Given the opportune timing, this issue of the Journal of Consumer Research is focused on articles that address questions of consumers’ responses
to external threats. The purpose of this introduction is to provide an organizing “conceptual tapestry” to connect the articles appearing in the issue. This framework is provided as a tool to help researchers structure their particular projects within the broader landscape of consumer threat response and to present some potential directions for future research. In conjunction with these articles, we hope that this conceptual framework will provide a point of departure for researchers seeking to enhance the understanding of how consumers and markets collectively respond over the short term and long term to threats that disrupt consumers’ routines, lives, or even the fabric of society.
Keywords: threat, pandemic, COVID-19, economic, health, consumer insecurity, disruption, consumer response
Following the format put forth by Imber-Black and Roberts (Rituals for our times: Celebrating, healing and changing our lives and our relationships. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1998), I examine daily rituals, family traditions, holidays, and life cycle rituals during the pandemic of COVID-19. Marked by symbols capable of carrying multiple meanings, symbolic actions, special time and special place, and newly invented and adapted rituals are illustrated through stories of couples, families, and communities.
This paper investigates the different relationships consumers build with anthropomorphised devices and how these relationships affect actual and intended future usage. An exploratory, three-week empirical study of 39 informants using voice controls on their smartphone uncovered a diversity of relationships that the informants built with such devices. We complement anthropomorphism theory by drawing on extended-self theorising to identify three primary roles that emerge from consumers’ interactions with these devices. Our findings theorise the distinct ways in which consumers perceive the object agency of anthropomorphised smart devices and how these perceptions impact the consumers’ engagement and future use intentions.
To begin building an understanding of how thoughts about God influence consumer persuasion processes and outcomes, the current research explores how reminders of God affect consumer compliance with fear-based advertising. Results across seven studies demonstrate that when the concept of God is salient, consumer compliance and persuasion in response to fear appeals is dampened. Importantly, the results suggest that one reason for this persuasion-dampening effect of God salience is the fact that consumers associate the concept of God with the idea of unlimited support. Consistent with this, the results reveal that when God is not associated with the idea of support, the dampening effect of God salience on fear appeal compliance is eliminated.
Thanksgiving in the U.S. is a ritual with shared meanings. This research evaluates the meanings of symbolic representations in advertising to understand the role of the media in the construction, maintenance, and evolution of ritual celebration. Thanksgiving advertisements published over a 99-year period are analyzed using a methodological mixture of semiotic analysis, historical analysis and context-driven periodization. The result is a multi-layered understanding of inter-related aspects of advertising history and the role of the media in the evolution of consumption ritual-making. Media are seen as agents for creating and legitimizing cultural norms, adding to our appreciation of normative and cultural-cognitive practices in supporting evolving social institutions. Findings show that marketers create and maintain the norms associated with Thanksgiving celebrations, while reflecting and gradually shifting them, moving us to the next stage in the evolutionary process. This research also highlights how cultural mythmaking strategies are employed and develop into historical brand narratives.
Our research reveals how people employ shared material resources to socially construct their stories and collective identity in times of cultural trauma and recovery. Analysis of a documentary series, interviews, books, songs, and visual images chronicling the recovery of a community following a devastating tornado reveals three themes: (1) a vulnerability narrative about suffering, lost capacity, and responsibility, (2) a resiliency narrative about opportunity, collaboration, and abundant capacity, and (3) a bounce narrative about the power of shared material resources to shift collective identity within the cultural landscape of trauma and recovery. We draw on cultural trauma theory from cultural sociology that explains how a traumatic event shapes collective identity. Our findings extend cultural trauma theory by revealing that vulnerability and resiliency are intertwined processes that are informative when studied together, particularly with respect to the role of shared material resources in empowering shifts in collective identity trajectories.
In this article I examine emergent acts that can be identified as forms of mumming or related to ritual house assaults and rough music. I question the nature of this linkage in terms of traditionality. I further suggest many events and symbolic social actions involve an intent to transform some aspect of public life, whether it be attitudes, conditions, or opinions. As instrumental symbolic actions, such events may be termed "ritualesque."
Through collective enactment of consumption rituals, group members reinforce intragroup relationships and the boundaries of the group. Yet, paradoxically, as intragroup diversity increases, dominant rituals deployed for this relational work at times run counter to the ideologically rooted identities of some members. Using a sociological lens, this article focuses on the complexities of not celebrating a dominant collective consumption ritual by focusing on people who do not celebrate Christmas in America. The qualitative data analysis finds that non-celebrants use a set of ritual strategies that are grounded in their conflicting goals of protecting their ideologically rooted identities but also doing relational work with celebrators. It shows how non-celebrants deploy consumptive elements of the dominant ritual as symbolic resources to enact each strategy, foregrounding or backgrounding the symbolic boundary between themselves and celebrators. Beyond the context, contributions to the study of symbolic boundaries, identity politics, and collective consumption rituals are discussed.
A wedding serves as the beginning marker of a marriage; if a couple is to manage cultural differences throughout their relationship, they must first pass the hurdle of designing a wedding ceremony that accommodates those differences. This book documents the weddings of 112 couples from across the United States, studied over a 10-year period. The focus is on intercultural weddings--interracial, interethnic, interfaith, international, and interclass--looking at how real people are coping with cultural differences in their lives.
Through detailed case studies, the book explores how couples display different identities simultaneously. The concepts of community, ritual, identity, and meaning are given extensive consideration. Because material culture plays a particularly important role in weddings as in other examples of ritual, food, clothing, and objects are given special attention here.
Wedding as Text investigates those who have accepted cultural difference into their daily lives and how they have managed to do so successfully.
In this article I make a plea for human geographers to make use of the rapidly growing collection of video materials that can be found on YouTube and other online collections. My tiny atlas of YouTube picks out three videos in order to exhibit the richness of audio-visual materials that can be found and to offer one potential form of video analysis. The three videos are common amateur genres on YouTube: home movies of family occasions, a video-blog and the counter-surveillance of the police. Against understanding these videos as ‘personal’, I argue that they are open to their ‘any-misation’ for the purposes of studying shared practices. In turning toward video, human geography gains a source of data on the temporal, embodied, bodily, material and mobile aspects of spatial practices. Brief analyses of the three videos are provided in order to show how we can investigate video practices as both documenting and reflexively constituting practices of gift-giving, caring for others and surveilling the police. Finally, I present a case for selecting ‘badly produced’ videos for good analytic reasons.
This research examines the relationship between consumer anthropomorphism and personal value. A hierarchical linear regression analysis revealed that after marketplace variables (purchase price, frequency of use, and self-acquisition) were considered, the sole second-level factor, anthropomorphism, had a positive and significant influence on personal value for four products. Results demonstrate that anthropomorphism can account for the personal value of a product beyond the influence of common marketplace factors. Additionally, a series of paired t-tests found that the magnitude of anthropomorphism is related to product complexity. This finding suggests that the effectiveness of product managers to prime or otherwise influence consumer anthropomorphism may depend upon what product is being anthropomorphised. Implications of these findings for marketers are provided.
Although our culture struggles to understand the origins and nature of good and evil behavior, the disciplines of psychology and psychoanalysis contribute to the discourse primarily indirectly. By examining early Judaism and Christianity, the authors seek to clarify the foundation of contemporary understanding of good and evil in Western society. Looking through the multiple filters of religion, philosophy, psychoanalysis and psychology, groundwork is laid for definitions of good and evil, which can be understood subjectively and measured objectively. As we investigate morality, will, and choice in the varied “ologies” and across time, we note how much emotion and volition are secondary in modern thinking about evil. Moreover, the place of will as a positive force in development is largely ignored, except by prescient thinkers like Otto Rank. To grasp evil's nature we need to integrate past with present, contrast conscious to unconscious desires, and allow that being bad is not necessarily unnatural or pathological, but can be a transitional stage in the growth of one's conscience.
The sociology of religion has, by and large, treated religious experiences as personal, having in themselves little social
relevance. To this line of thought, experiences become social only when they are so defined by beliefs and/or institutions.
This article outlines a sociology of religious experience that erodes the experience-is-private/belief-is-social dichotomy.
It is based on the work of Alfred Schutz, who argues, in brief, that there are several kinds of sociality, of which sharing
ideas and sharing institutions are only two. Sharing ideas and institutions do indeed distance one from experience, as the
standard paradigm suggests. But in certain “life-worlds” experiences themselves may be social, not private. There, social
actors share “inner time”: a vivid present in which they “tune-in” to one another. The world of musical performance, to use
Schutz's example, involves a polythetic sharing of consciousness that unites composers, musicians, and audiences across the
generations. Religious experience, I argue, parallels making music: it is, in its nature, a social act. The second half of
this paper applies this perspective to traditional Navajo religion. It shows how Navajo “chants” reorient their participants'
inner time to create the experience of the harmony between self, society, and world that lies at the core of Navajo philosophy.
Although the study of consumer rituals is increasing, the relationship between advertising and consumer rituals has not been explored. The authors offer a framework for examining the influence of those cultural institutions, articulating the ways advertising can influence consumption during rituals, as well as the ways advertising employs ritual symbolism to create messages about products and services not designed for use during such occasions. They provide examples of ads employing symbols associated with the wedding—a sociologically and economically significant ritual in our culture. The authors argue that advertising not only influences ritual, but is often a form of secular ritual itself. They propose several areas for future research.
We explore the phenomenon of gift registry as a specific ritual within a larger set of wedding rituals to understand interactions between consumers and retailers. We find that roles for retailers in family based rituals are expanding, given how consumers employ brands to negotiate meaning, experiences of identity, and the dispersion of social systems. These changes allow retailers, as ritual orchestrators, an opportunity to participate more fully in the gift registry ritual by shaping the experience for each type of ritual participant—bride, groom, and gift-giver. Our research contributes an interpretation of how consumers negotiate brand meaning within a temporary gift system, as they perform gift giving rituals situated squarely within the marketplace. We explore the implications these rituals have for the construction of identity, consumer-to-consumer and consumer-to-brand relationships. We provide suggestions for managers and directions for future research.
The paper uses a case study of the COCEI movement of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, a left coalition that has achieved power at the municipal level despite repressive intervention by the national government, to critique theoretical approaches to new social movements and the "invention-of-tradition' literature. It offers as an alternative a combination of Marxist and post-modernist approaches that synthesizes a focus on class-based militancy with a cultural analysis. This indigenous movement is based on a class struggle among Zapotecs, with wealthy Zapotecs supporting the government while the movement defines itself in terms of historic Zapotec rebellions. While some aspects of the COCEI reflect the radicalization of Mexican grass-roots movements after 1968, Zapotec intellectuals have combined revolutionary socialist thought and avant-garde artistic styles with ethnic mobilization to create a movement that is linked to regional and indigenous traditions. -from Author
The urgent need for a dialogue about concepts Social movements matter the constructive ones, the dangerous ones, and the confused ones. Their study has taken on considerable life over the past 20–25 years, beginning with the ‘‘resource mobilization/rational actor’’ and the ‘‘New Social Movements’’ schools, and continuing on with the current ‘‘Contentious Politics’’ network, along with studies of solidarity movements (Giugni & Passy, 2001), social networks and movements (Diani & McAdam, 2003), and transnational social movements (Keck & Sikkink, 1998). The journals Social Movement Studies and Mobilization are significant though not exclusive fora for debate on these issues. The global social justice movement and religious revival movements have been two major contemporary spurs to these analyses.