A Trinket, a Trifle, and a Novel New Disciple: Fandoms and Consecrated Commodities

Religious commodification is an arena that has gained increasing interest among social scientists, especially where religious symbols and artefacts are being appropriated by both adherents and non-adherents in an attempt to capitalize on growing worldwide markets. In what Sophia Rose Arjana calls the “mystical marketplace,” these objects, many of which are distinctly associated with orientalist versions of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam, are stripped of their original contexts and then reimagined as representatives of a kind of timeless, exotic, spirituality to be consumed by economically dominant Westerners. But this short thought-piece is about those consecrated objects whose marketing and sale is what made them sacred in the first place (like the Tibetan Singing Bowls but drawn from Harry Potter and Star Wars rather than the Tripitaka and the Mahayana Sutras). This is about a growing link between religion and fandom and the “ritual objects” that the latter now produces.

Ep #75 The Anthropologists Perspective on Nomadland & Commodified Mothers: This Month of TFS

The Familiar Strange · Ep #75 The Anthropologists Perspective on Nomadland & Commodified Mothers: This Month of TFS This month familiar stranger Tim kicks us off by pondering the ethnographic and anthropological nature of the award winning film Nomadland directed by Chloé Zhao. The strangers discuss the almost anthropological origins of the film and other … Continue reading Ep #75 The Anthropologists Perspective on Nomadland & Commodified Mothers: This Month of TFS