People often adapt rituals to fit new circumstances or new groups of people. This panel explores the notion of “bespoke” rituals in which rituals are created to reflect special places or moments. The first paper explores a blended Hindu-Buddhist ritual practice adapted for a Buddhist community in Chiang Mai, drawing on notions of lived religion as it describes a novel ritual creation. The second paper examines the tension between the secular and religious in the bespoke memorialization contexts of the COVID-19 memorial named ‘Sanctuary.’ The third paper offers a perspective on bespoke capitalistic ritual in the form of the destruction of luxury goods, arguing that the destructive act is a sacrificial one to reaffirm social power.
In contemporary Thailand, wish making rituals are becoming more popular, and attract many visitors to temples. These rituals stand out because there is no monastic intervention needed. A case study in Chiang Mai city highlights the significance of such lay-led aspirational rituals. The Ganesh ritual at Wat Pa Daed is complex and intricate, requiring participants to follow multiple steps across the temple. For Thai Buddhists, the ritual offers a means to fulfill personal desires through the intervention of an unseen being in the Buddhist cosmos. By translating and analyzing the ritual’s detailed steps, interviewing the senior monk who designed it, and applying ritual theory and perspectives on popular religion, this presentation demonstrates how such practices hold value within the Buddhist landscape and adapt to modern, personalized religious environments.
On 28 May 2022, a reported 10,000 people gathered at the Miners Welfare Park in the small English town of Bedworth for the ceremonial burning of a vast wooden COVID-19 memorial named ‘Sanctuary’. The project borrowed directly from practices at the vast Burning Man Festival in Nevada, but were transplanted into a very different cultural and social location. This paper explores how this ritual came to take place, noting the extent to which its creators stressed that its meaning should be weighed up by those in the crowd rather than imposed by the event’s organisers. It will be suggested that factors shaping this event are the decline of church influence in Britain, the transnational nature of memory cultures, and the extent to which the pandemic has produced no single mode of publicly ritualising bereavement.
In contemporary luxury markets, overstock destruction emerges as a form of ritual suppression that conceals surplus while performing a bespoke act of power and distinction. Building on Mauss’s insights into gift exchange and Bataille’s theory of expenditure, my paper reinterprets unsold luxury goods' obliteration as a sacrificial act that expunges excess and reaffirms exclusivity. By engaging with the sociology of ritual, I demonstrate that this deliberate practice creates a unique symbolic order, simultaneously suppressing visible overabundance and challenging market norms. Through a comparative analysis grounded in ritual theory, I argue that the notion of expenditure is not merely economic but also ritualistic, serving as a critical commentary on contemporary luxury consumption. This study offers a nuanced perspective on how bespoke ritual practices in luxury not only resist commodification but also reconfigure distinction and symbolic power in modern economic life.
| Joshua Urich, Colby College | joshurich@gmail.com | View |