ABSTRACT
The central theme of this collection is religious commodifications in Asia. It contains essays that share common goals in assessing and determining the cultural mediations that affect the convergence and divergence of religion and market forces, and the socio-economic and cultural impacts they have produced in contemporary East and South-East Asia. Many contri butors to this volume have employed an ethnographic approach to understanding and portraying the wide range of market-oriented changes in the Asian religious landscape, ranging from the worship of Chinese gods and goddesses to vegetarian festivals, tourist pilgrimages, Buddhist-and Catholic-based amulet trading, Islamic stickers and sermons, spirit medium cults and a selection of popular films. This volume argues that ‘commodifying the sacred’ does not lead to a critical decline of religiosity as argued by secularization theorists (see Hammond 1985; Wilson 1996). Rather, it characterizes the variable ways that relationships between religion and the market are configured. We highlight the significant continuation of religious influences in Asia amidst the powerful trends of modern or even postmodern market cultural upheavals. Religious commodifications are complex historical and cultural constructions, notwithstanding their obvious commercial features. They are produced in specific cultural contexts, and thus, require an understanding of cultural frameworks in order to unlock their symbolic and socio-economic significance. Commodifying processes are highly invent ive and specifically embedded in the local-global trajectories of the market economy and postmodern religious explosions. Religious commodifications do not necessarily lead to religious malaise or produce new religious forms and movements that oppose the institutionalized beliefs and practices of religious organizations.
