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Part I
Religion, spirituality and
consumer culture
Introduction
The Virtual Pooja website is a religious service provider for the digital age. Framed by adverts for horoscopes, on-line dating services, and holidays to South Asia, its web-pages allow consumers from anywhere in the world to order pooja ceremonies that can be performed in Hindu temples across India. Drop-down search menus allow the site's users to search for specific temples according to deity, city, or district, and another section of the site offers a range of pooja that can be performed for specific purposes, including for relief from loans and debts, success in court cases, relief of sins committed in previous lives, or achieving excellence in one's studies. Pooja packages, organized around a particular devotional focus, are also offered, with a pooja package for the five elements (air, earth, fire, sky, water) currently retailing at $35. Payment is made on-line through credit or debit card, and on completion of the payment the service user receives confirmation that the ceremony has been conducted, with the prasadam later being mailed back to them. The Virtual Pooja site exemplifies the potential of the internet to create new kinds of trans-national religious interactions and, more specifically, new kinds of economic interaction between consumers from the global Hindu diaspora, the local temples conducting the pooja, and of course the mediating commercial structure of the website itself (see Helland 2007).
The Virtual Pooja website is one contemporary example of the enduring relationship between religion and practices of economic production and consumption. The idea that religion is (or should be) distinct from the realm of economics is itself a particularly modern notion, reflecting the separation of religion into the private sphere of individual belief and conscience, and economics into the public sphere of political economy (Carrette 2007; Fitzgerald 2007). As the opening chapter in this part by Marion Bowman (Chapter 1) demonstrates, there is a long history of religious acts of economic production and consumption, and religious institutions have often been dependent on their economic activity for their survival. We should therefore not be surprised to find, in the chapters in Part I, that different kinds of economic and cultural consumption play an integral role in the development and persistence of various kinds of religious and spiritual activity in contemporary society.
Whilst there is a long history of the inter-section of religion and economic activity, a number of changes took place during the twentieth century that have arguably created particular conditions within which religious consumer cultures now operate. These include the rapid growth in the proportion of household income spent on non-essential commodities in the post-war period in many developed societies (partly facilitated by the increasing availability of consumer credit), and the shift from Fordist systems of mass-production to new production technologies that allowed smaller product lines to be produced cost-effectively. The rise of new digital technologies (particularly the microchip) also meant that the design of many everyday objects no longer needed to be defined quite so rigidly by the components required to make the object work. Niche product lines and new opportunities for product design also supported the growing importance of the “brand,” as a particular image or imagined lifestyle that could be marketed across a range of different product lines. The rise of the internet, and other new digital media, also transformed patterns of production and consumption.
Alongside the emergence of major global on-line retailers such as Amazon and iTunes, who re-defined their respective markets, digital products (including music, film, and audio clips) could now be produced far more cheaply and distributed to niche global markets through specialist websites. All this, it should also be remembered, has taken place against the backdrop of a new phase of global capitalism in which capital flows rapidly across national borders, multinational corporations become as economically powerful as nation-states, and the expansion of neo-liberalism opens up ever more societies (and areas of social life) to market forces. In this new context of economic production and consumption, religious groups now find themselves seeking to articulate their “brand,” develop products that reflect their particular identity, ethos and aesthetics, reap the possibilities of new technologies of production and distribution, and negotiate the challenges of bringing their products into a wider marketplace of goods and services (see, e.g., Clark 2007b; Einstein 2008).
The chapters in Part I attempt to make sense of religious production and consumption in this new context, offering three broadly different perspectives. In the first two chapters, Marion Bowman (Chapter 1) and Pete Ward (Chapter 2) explore how the logics of the marketplace have been assimilated into two very different forms of contemporary religiosity: the alternative spiritual milieu for which Glastonbury has become such an important centre and Charismatic Evangelical worship in Britain. In both of these cases, practices of production and consumption are inseparable from religious and spiritual practice, becoming a structure through which acts of healing, meditation, work on the self, and worship are made possible. Both cases demonstrate the economic logics on which these different forms of religion are based. In Glastonbury, the clustering of so many alternative spiritual providers is beneficial by continuing to sustain the Glastonbury “brand,” provides an incentive for visitors to make repeat visits to the town, and creates a network of economic relations in which spiritual service providers simultaneously act as consumers of each other's products. In the case of Charismatic worship, the larger audience and greater range of possible revenue streams meant that this kind of worship was able to establish itself far more successfully as a part of the British Evangelical sub-culture than Evangelical popular music was able to.
In the next two chapters, the focus turns to religious and spiritual forms of consumer culture which are being intentionally developed in opposition to different aspects of late modern society. In his chapter on new forms of Islamic production and consumption, Nabil Echchaibi (Chapter 3) traces the rise of a cultural Islamism that seeks to take existing consumer and media products and re-work these in a way that is understood as being more consistent with Islamic commitments. By contrast, Monica Emerich (Chapter 4) provides an introduction to the growing industry of lifestyles of health and sustainability (LOHAS), which embrace various forms of slow living, organic produce, and commitment to principles of personal, social, and environmental sustainability. Whilst very different in the content and meanings of their products, these two different movements can also be seen as reflecting an attempt to construct a form of identity and lifestyle politics that challenges a dominant, mainstream “other.” For Echchaibi's Islamic cultural producers and consumers, this “other” is a morally vacuous and spiritually bankrupt Western culture which threatens to over-run Islamic societies in a new era of cultural and economic globalization. For Emerich's participants in LOHAS culture, the “other” is the mainstream consumer culture that alienates people from the stuff of their everyday life and threatens ever-greater environmental destruction. Both movements, however, reflect a belief that economic production and consumption can be used to develop an alternative religious identity politics that resists that which is perceived as threatening in the contemporary world.
Although these earlier chapters often note some of the limitations of such religious and spiritual forms of consumer culture, the final two chapters turn to more explicitly critical approaches to thinking about religion and spirituality in the context of late capitalism. In her chapter on the Reverend Billy and the Burning Man festival, Lee Gilmore (Chapter 5) provides an account of particular kinds of cultural activity which seek to disrupt traditional patterns of consumption and the spread of corporate capitalism, as well as offering alternative models of economic and material consumption. Whilst providing an explicit critique of important elements of late capitalist society, Gilmore's account is also striking for the ways in which the ironic and playful appropriation of religious tradition (arguably itself a sign of late modern consumption; see also Clark, Chapter 10) run through these activities. Yet, even in the ironic re-appropriation of religion in an anti-capitalist spirit, some form of religious ethos appears to persist. In the final chapter, an extract from Jeremy Carrette and Richard King's book Selling Spirituality (Chapter 6), it is argued that much of what passes as “spirituality” in contemporary culture is a symptom of the colonization of religion by capitalism. Carrette and King locate this process in a longer cultural history of the privatization, and then commodification, of religion, and provide a typology of different ways in which religion and spirituality intersect with late capitalism, ranging from anti-capitalist critique, attempts to re-work consumer culture in particular ways, religions of prosperity and the use of religion and spirituality to perpetuate capitalist structures and processes. As their argument suggests, the study of contemporary religion needs not only to think about how religion is performed through consumer culture, but, in a more normative vein, to think critically about the implications of this in terms of wider questions of individual flourishing and social well-being.
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1 Understanding Glastonbury as a site of
consumption
Marion Bowman
Introduction
Commodification is one aspect of contemporary spirituality which frequently attracts critical attention and negative comment. “Spiritually shopping around” and the business of “selling spirituality” are often portrayed popularly as proofs of the essential superficiality, gullibility, and narcissism of the clients and the cynically capitalist, exploitative tendencies of the providers of such goods and services. Academic critiques of such phenomena display a range of attitudes and analyses, from a hermeneutic of suspicion to more sympathetic accounts (e.g. Lau 2000; Ezzy 2001; Possamai 2002, 2003: York 2004; Carrette and King 2005; Redden 2005).
My intention is to ground some aspects of the debate in a specific context which, while not typical, is indicative of broader trends. I aim also to foster further understanding of the role of material culture in the contemporary spiritual milieu, by presenting the ways in which those involved in such transactions perceive and narrate spiritual consumption.
In this chapter, some of the prevailing perceptions of commodification and marketization in the contemporary spiritual milieu, and phenomena related to them, are explored in the context of Glastonbury. Drawing upon both field-work data and the results of a small scale pilot survey on Glastonbury's spiritual economy conducted in 2007, Glastonbury is examined as an example of a specialized site of religious and spiritual consumption where (in common with other pilgrimage sites) commercial transactions can have sacralized meanings and value. The significance of this for the construction of religious identities and communities is explored, alongside the issue of whether countercultural spiritual practices have been co-opted by capitalism, or whether, conversely, spiritual entrepreneurs challenge, disrupt, or reappraise existing commercial and organizational practices.
Since the early 1990s I have been conducting research in Glastonbury within the broad framework of vernacular religion, that is, “an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the religious lives of individuals with special attention to the process of religious belief, the verbal, behavioral, and material expressions of religious belief, and the ultimate object of religious belief” (Primiano 1995: 44). In using the term vernacular religion in relation to the sorts of religiosity and ritual, concepts and consumerism to be found in Glastonbury, I am not referring to carefully crafted, internally coherent worldviews but instead to the possibly conflicting mixture of belief and praxis; institutional, cultural, and temporal conditioning; personal experience; interactions with the material and non-material world; and perceptions of efficacy that constitute “religion as it is lived: as humans encounter, understand, interpret and practice it” (ibid.). This vernacular religiosity is observable in traditional as well as newer forms of religious life and, in studying it, instead of “reify[ing] the authenticity of religious institutions as the exemplar of human religiosity” (ibid.: 39), attention is shifted to individual meanings, experiential impact, and expressive forms.
Locating Glastonbury
It is helpful to start by locating Glastonbury, for often when I say I am working on Glastonbury people assume I mean the Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts, which is actually held on Worthy Farm in the nearby village of Pilton. While Glastonbury Festival does cater for consumption of diverse kinds, including religion, in fact I am referring here to the small town of Glastonbury (population c.9000) situated in an area of drained marshland known as the Somerset Levels, in the south west of England. There has been settlement in the area since prehistoric times, and before the marshes were drained Glastonbury was in effect an island, accessible only by boat. The town contains a variety of striking natural features, including the Tor, a curiously contoured hill which can be seen for miles around, the chalybeate spring at Chalice Well, whose water stains red, and a thorn tree that flowers both in spring and in December. Physically at the center of the town are the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey.
Glastonbury's economy was negatively affected during the twentieth century by declining agricultural activity and most significantly by the shrinkage of the area's significant leather related industries from the 1970s, although there is still building and engineering, and light industry, including the manufacture of plastics, wetsuits, and digital model railway control systems, in addition to a weekly street market. The Glastonbury Carnival (part of the network of West Country Carnivals, derived from 5 November celebrations) attracts many visitors, and ventures such as the Frost Fayre in December (with Christmas carols, street stalls, and so on) are designed to boost interest in the town.
However, very obviously in relation to the High Street, and pervading the town, Glastonbury has developed a unique spiritual service industry on account of its distinctive religious and sacred status.
Glastonbury is one of the most popular and multivalent pilgrimage sites in the UK, exerting an attraction for a variety of spiritual seekers (and scholars) on account of the many myths that surround it and the myriad claims made for it (see, for example, Hexham 1983; Bowman 1993, 2005, 2008; Carley 1996; Prince and Riches 2000; Ivakhiv 2001). Some believe that Glastonbury was a significant prehistoric center of Goddess worship, while others regard it primarily as a Druidic site where, it is claimed, there was a great European center of learning. For numerous Christians, Glastonbury's status rests on it being the “cradle of English Christianity,” where Christianity took root in England, allegedly brought there by Joseph of Arimathea. Even more significantly, many believe that Jesus himself came to Glastonbury, and some are convinced that it is to Glastonbury that Jesus will return at the time of the second coming (see Bowman 2003–4). Glastonbury is regarded by some as an exemplary site of Celtic Christianity, and it has been identified with the Isle of Avalon, the place where, in Arthurian legend, King Arthur was taken for healing after his last battle. Now perceived by many as the “heart chakra” of planet earth, Glastonbury is also regarded as a center of earth energies, a node where leylines converge and generate powerful forces for healing and personal transformation. Many people on varied “spiritual paths” narrate how they feel “drawn” to Glastonbury (Bowman 1993, 2008).
It is in response to this hugely varied interest in Glastonbury that a unique spiritual service industry has arisen, which includes the Glastonbury Pilgrim Reception Centre, “open to all people on all paths;” “alternative” bookshops; spiritually oriented workshops, conferences, and courses; a huge variety of healing; “psychic services” such as tarot reading and clairvoyance; bed and breakfasts offering meditation and assorted therapies; and shops selling goods intended to enhance and expand people's spiritual lifestyles and practices. All that in turn generates more visitors, for part of Glastonbury's importance and value to a variety of people is as a site of spiritual consumption. One important reason for visiting Glastonbury is that it is, quite literally, a place for spiritually shopping around.
Material culture, pilgrimage, and Glastonbury
To gain a more nuanced understanding of Glastonbury currently as a specialized site of religious and spiritual consumption, it is helpful to consider briefly the role of material culture in religion and ways in which commercial transactions can acquire sacralized meanings, particularly in relation to pilgrimage sites.
David Morgan contends that
If culture is the full range of thoughts, feelings, objects, words, and practices that human beings use to construct and maintain the life-worlds in which they exist, material culture is any aspect of that world-makin...
