The chapter introduces and elaborates the ritual construct as a vehicle for interpreting consumer behavioural patterns by illustrating multifaceted manipulation of an everyday product with the attendant generation of communal imaginaries. It draws on a mundane material (kola-nut) to elucidate the characters and meanings of the transactions among individuals, groups, and deities in the context of the Nigerian multi-ethnic society. The kola-nut, through its consumption, becomes ritualised and generates varied sensitivities that encapsulates forms of restrictions which prevent full inclusion in the society. The chapter employs frameworks of Foucault and Bourdieu to assist in highlighting how the social life might be ordered within multiple realities, how the realities are socially constructed through practises, and the reflexivity of interpretations of social settings, realities, and consumptions. Implications for marketing is revealed in how metaphysical relationships could be incorporated into consumption praxes.
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This chapter is interested in meaning formation and the power dynamics embedded in consumption. This interest is informed by the understanding that consumers’ exchange relationships are constructed through meaning and identity formations (e.g., Thompson & Hirschman, 1995; Murray, 2002). Some objects possess the ability to symbolise and signify meanings, identities, values, mythologies, and relationships (Ojo, 2017; Holt, 2004; Bonsu & Belk, 2003; Belk, 1988; Solomon, 1983). Anthropologists of consumption (e.g., Miller, 1987; Appadurai, 1986) recognise that objects and artefacts represent taken-for-granted part of our environment, and as such the consumption of Kola-nut (a caffeine-containing fruit of the Kola tree) is consciously chosen to generate meaning and a particular self-identity. It was Levy (1959) who originally emphasised the significance of the consumer's self-concept in marketing literature by suggesting that the enactment of consumption as symbolic behaviour is more valuable to the consumer than the functional benefits derived from the product. Also documented in consumer research is the idea that several products have symbolic attributes (Goffman, 1951; Hall & Trager, 1953) and that consumption of products could vary based on their social meaning rather than their functional utility (Zaltman & Wallendorf, 1979). Invariably, it is suggested that product symbolism is often consumed by the social actor for the purpose of describing and explaining behaviour patterns linked to social roles. For example, Solomon (1983: 326) argues that ‘the symbolism embedded in many products is the primary reason for their purchase and use’.
This chapter taps into the problematic of how consumer society is constituted and sustained along the tradition pioneered by studies of the processes by which consumption choices and behaviours are moulded by ethnicity (e.g., Belk, 1992); gender (e.g., Dobscha & Ozanne, 2001); social class hierarchies (e.g., Allen, 2002); families, households, and other formal groups (e.g., Moore-Shay, Wilkie, & Lutz, 2002; Wallendorf & Arnould, 1991). Moreover, erstwhile researches have recognised that “structures of feeling” (Williams, 1977: 133) and shared emotional dispositions (Gopaldas, 2014) affect consumption choices and practices and produce the basis of consumption communities (Thompson, 2005). This study elaborates on how such structures are formulated and dispersed among different groups and entities. Thus, it combines the ritualistic (e.g., Belk, Ger, & Askegaard 2003; Fournier, 1998), disposition (e.g., Bonsu & Belk, 2003; Price, Arnould, & Curasi, 2000), and relationships (Hinde, 1995; Kelly, 1986) dimensions of consumption and possession practices. Besides, the articulation of power relations between and among people could be unpicked from consumption patterns of everyday products. This will enable the illumination of the sociocultural dynamics that drive the consumption cycle and advance a theoretical conversation that has arisen around the complexities of interrelated research domains of sociocultural exchange behaviours and relationships (Belk, Sherry, & Wallendorf, 1988).