Guido Sprenger: Commodification of ritual or ritualization of the market?

The term “commodification of ritual” suggests the intrusion of the laws and values of market enterprise, in particular capitalist markets, into a domain hitherto untouched by it, ritual and religion. Yet, some scholars have suggested that the trade in sacred objects and services may be viewed the other way around: as a ritualization of the market. This talk proposes a view that unites these two perspectives. Market and ritual reproduce by different rules and semantics and therefore provide different perspectives on social events. Thus, for the market, the ritual is perceivable as a site of consumption, but the internal differentiations of any ritual system can hardly be processed. On the other hand, the market may appear as a source of exchange items and a form of ritual exchange to the ritual system, without it being able to process the intricacies of profit making. An example are the relations between the ritual system of the Rmeet in northern Laos and local interethnic markets. The markets appear as sites of interaction with spirits and places where the spirits of the dead go to sell their coffins. There are two different types of values operating here. On the market, the quantitative value of money predominates, by which every item is valorized according to a single scale of amounts of money. In ritual exchanges, items are being exchanged mostly for their different qualitative value, that is, as representations of complementary values. The interaction of these two types of value can cause moral problems. Yet, qualitative values may operate both on the market and in ritual, providing bridging devices. In the Rmeet case, this is the qualitative value of different currencies. While French colonial silver coins are importantly used in ritual, the Laotian Kip plays only a minor role. The Thai Baht occupies an intermediate position. Although mostly used on the market, it is conceived as “the younger brother of the French Piaster”, due to the image of the living king on it. Thus, what is being related here are not exchange rates. The high exchange rate of Baht is seen as an indication of the qualitative difference between Lao and Thai society.