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# Can you buy salvation? #

## Can you buy salvation? ##

Ryan Schram

Mills 169 (A26)

ryan.schram@sydney.edu.au

4 May 2016

Available at http://anthro.rschram.org/2667/9

### Readings ###

Jones, Carla. 2010. “Materializing Piety: Gendered Anxieties about Faithful Consumption in Contemporary Urban Indonesia.” American Ethnologist 37 (4): 617–37. doi:10.1111/j.1548-1425.2010.01275.x.

Brenner, Suzanne. 1996. “Reconstructing Self and Society: Javanese Muslim Women and ‘the Veil.’” American Ethnologist 23 (4): 673–97. doi:10.1525/ae.1996.23.4.02a00010.

Meyer, Birgit. 1998. “Commodities and the Power of Prayer: Pentecostalist Attitudes Towards Consumption in Contemporary Ghana.” Development and Change 29 (4): 751–76. doi:10.1111/1467-7660.00098.


### Other media ###

“Kosher Dining.” 2016. Cornell Center for Jewish Living, Cornell University. Accessed May 3. http://cornellcjl.com/kosher-dining/.

Medina, Jennifer. 2016. “A Few Miles From San Bernardino, a Muslim Prom Queen Reigns.” The New York Times, April 29. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/30/us/a-few-miles-from-san-bernardino-a-muslim-prom-queen-reigns.html.

## What is (in) fashion? ## 

* How would you describe fashion among students at this university? 

* What do these trends or styles tell you about the people who wear them? 

## Are your friends fashion followers? ## 

* How many of you think that your friends follow what is in fashion? 

* How many of you think that your friends do not follow what is in fashion? 

## Dress as communication and dress as consumption ##

A theory of clothing: 

* Let's assume that everyone has a choice of what to wear. 
* Let's also assume that people make judgements about what other people wear. 
* Dress is a social action - it sends a message, even if that message is not intended. 
* The message of dress is also implicitly a message about the person. 

## Weber and hipsters ##

* Weber's theory of social action is relevant here: To understand social action, we must look at the meaning the actors puts in their action. 

* There are many levels of meaning in any one action: emotional (affective), (instrumentally) rational, and symbolic. 

* There is also another level of meaning, in which the action expresses a value. 

## Remember ANTH 1002 ##

* Think back to Terry Woronov's lecture in ANTH 1002 about baby food and niche marketing. What was her main point? 

## Social identity and mass consumption ##

A simplified theory of identity in mass societies: 

* Communication involves using codes. We express ourselves by encoding our thoughts in terms of symbols. 
* Living in a mass society means being a consumer of codes. 
* The choices presented by the mass market are linked to discrete, bounded categories of identity. 

## Religious identity in a mass society ##

* If religion is a kind of social action, how does one practice one's religion in a mass society? 
* How does one express a religious identity as one's social identity in a mass society? 

## Religion and economy ## 

* Religious prohibitions on consumption 
* Religious critiques of wealth
* Blessing of commodity consumption
* Aimee Semple Macpherson and televangelism
* Fundraising in Auhelawa churches


## A guide to the unit ##

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