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Once the domain of theologians, sociologists and (religion) anthropologists, we have seen more recently how consumer researchers have enriched the study of spirituality and religion. Researching the sacred can be fraught with challenges, in and out of the field. Russell Belk, Samuelson Appau and Diego Rinallo address key questions, issues and conceptualisations in the scholarship on sacred consumption, contemplating the past and mapping future research avenues. A reading list is also included for those interested in joining the authors in this collective discovery of the sacred.

Contributors answered the following four questions: How has the study of sacred consumption evolved since you started researching the field? What would be the critical methodological issues that researchers need to consider when approaching the “sacred”? What are some of the key authors that have influenced your thinking? What do you think will be the key questions that researchers will need to focus on?

Rinallo, Belk and Appau’s reflections on studying the sacred provide food for thought for both novice and weathered researchers alike. Researching the sacred both shapes and is shaped by our positionality: by our insider/outsider status, our gender and race and our cosmovisions as believers or sceptics. Researchers should be mindful and reflective of their subject positionings as they approach, enter and leave the field. Researching the sacred requires an open mind as we broaden our vision of what constitutes the sacred. Such research calls for scholarly as well as phenomenological curiosity. Reading widely and across disciplines to better familiarise ourselves with our sacred context helps to craft novel and meaningful research.

This paper provides a multivocal genealogy of consumer culture work on religion and spirituality, methodological advice and reading resources for researchers.

This research is positioned at the intersection of youth subculture consumption and religious affiliation, through the study of observant Muslim women involved in the highly engaging and codified activity of cosplay. Given authenticity is central to the cosplay visual impact and performance, this study aims to understand the way hijab cosplayers negotiate tensions between authentic body performativity and the observance of religious dressing codes.

A qualitative interpretive approach was used to address the research questions. In-depth semi-structured online interviews were conducted with 25 members of a hijab cosplayers from South East Asia.

The concept of authenticity emerged as multifaceted for hijab cosplayers, where they manage three different aspect of the authentic cosplay performance as follows: authenticity as a cosplayer (social dimension of authenticity), authenticity to the character (personal dimension of authenticity) and authenticity to their religious identity (religious dimension of authenticity). The subsequent malleable authenticity is used to legitimate cosplay as an acceptable performative practice from a religious and from subcultural view.

The research highlights how tensions between identity and performativity of the body are negotiated. More specifically, the study contributes to the understanding of the way hijab cosplayers reconcile tensions between religious identity and the performativity of the body. Given the role of the body as a site for negotiating identity, this study provides important insights in the tensions and strategies at the intersection of authenticity, embodiment and religious identity in youth cultures.

To date, a few studies have examined the use and circulation of votive materiality in religious pilgrimages. However, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, no study has explored the ritual reuse of votive materiality within pilgrimages. This paper aims to explore the (re)uses and circulations of votive materiality in the ritual process.

In the analysis, the authors adopt the cross-views of an anthropologist and a marketing researcher. Votive practices are examined through the anthropologist’s past ethnographies. Audiovisual data play a central role in this analysis. Moreover, the authors choose a comparative perspective by focusing on two not famed pilgrimage arenas, each mobilising Muslim pilgrims and food offerings.

Revisiting the thoughts of Weber (1978) on the religious field and those of Kotler (2019) on transformational experiences, the authors propose a graphic schematisation to trace the circulations of votive materiality (sugar) involving four interdependent ideal-typical actors: the merchant, the priest, the mystical operator and the pilgrim-consumer who, in her/his quest for the divine, is the target for the first three. Either pilgrims or mystical operators can ritually reuse votive materiality. However, such reuses are not performed for ecological purposes, but for practical reasons, mainly due to an overabundance of votive materiality.

It is often believed that a votive object is only for single use, used only once, for a single request or thanksgiving, by a single person. But the authors show that once used, certain votive objects – as vehicles for grace – can be reused, revealing an unexpected ritual reuse.

Pilgrimage brings humans and other-than-humans together through a dual process – movement across space and the transformation of space through the process of sacralisation. This paper aims to explore this dual process by outlining the development of qualitative research on contemporary pilgrimage where the dominant representational approach which focuses on human agency has been complemented by a relational perspective where statues, springs and rocks, for example, are seen as possessing their own agency that influences human action.

This paper describes the development of qualitative research on contemporary pilgrimage by bringing together both the representational and relational approach and drawing on the author’s experience of pilgrimage over many years and his reflections on that experience as a trained qualitative researcher.

This paper explores the ways in which the dominant representational approach in pilgrimage studies can be complemented by the relational approach by drawing on the author’s experience of pilgrimage in three different contexts

The paper is original by bringing together both the representational and relational perspectives, contextualising them through the author’s experience of different types of pilgrimage and linking pilgrimage to the wider issues of migration, space and agency.