vienna

Rituals are not only practiced on few fixed dates during
the year, there are in fact rituals that are performed every day.
People in Christian Europe had to pray to God on their knees
everyday in acknowledgement of the final truth. 46 What kind of
everyday ritual was it that created consumer culture? For example,
there are rituals that are based on the preparation of daily food.
“Food is a medium for discriminating values, and the more
numerous the discriminated ranks, the more varieties of food will
be needed.” 47 Advertising plays an important role in introducing
such consumer rites: The sun has risen and is shining through
the window of a nice kitchen. Mother is preparing food for the
rest of the family. The children are not in a good mood because
they have had to wake up early for school. The ritual food is now
brought in. Beams of sunlight fall on a package of cornflakes.
Mother takes the package and pours a helping of it into the
children’s bowls. The children begin to smile and love their
mother instantaneously. Music swells up in the background and
the whole family is joyous. When we take a step back into reality,
we will probably find that the child’s mood does not improve by
eating corn flakes. But the mother has learned to show that she
is a good mother every day by buying a special brand of cereal. 48
The magic can only work when the ritual preparation of the food
is performed everyday. The preparation of the ritual meal has
to be distinguished from the consumption of food, which is not
quite as burdened with symbolic value and only expresses a
certain lifestyle. Another example for the shift of rituals from the
social dimension to consumption are the rites of purification.
Numerous rites are known from tribal societies. In this category
of rites, our modern, developed Western society is less inventive
when practicing the rite because the strength of these particular
consumer rites seems to lie in the invention of myths. Since we
produce a lot of filth in our commodity cosmos that renders us
unclean, we must purify ourselves regularly. The attributes pure,
fresh and clean are linked to the sacred in marketing literature:
“Our highly industrialised culture no longer has any notions
preformed by religion, yet certain phenomena exist that can
be compared to these concepts and they are also important for
the market because it is the products/brands that bear certain
46 Langer, in: Geertz (1973:100).
47 Douglas/Isherwood (2002:44).
48 As advertising is very sensitive to social developments, things now exist that are ritually prepared by the father.
Consumer Beliefs
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