ABSTRACT
The first communion offers the child's family an opportunity to convey a sense of its identity and worth to the local community through the ritual display it constructs using goods understood as carriers of shared meaning. On the day of first communion, the key symbolical carriers of the non-ecclesial discourses are consumer goods- the clothes that the first communicants and their families wear, the gifts the children are given, and the food and drink that they consume. According to the 'A Team', expense was incurred on two main elements of the first communion event: the child's-especially the girl's- dress, and the party that followed. The parish clergy and their associates may have corralled the first communicants into a ritual that in structure and spoken texts conforms to an ecclesial norm. Consumer goods function across this ritual continuum, serving as testing and tested markers of cultural categories.
