The monastic product’s biography, a sacralization wave

Abstract

Between its monastic origin and its merchant destination, the monastic product is moving from clergy to laity. What happens to this movement during the purchasing act? Imbued with work on the biography of things, this contextualized question is framed by Kopytoff’s theory, and extends it by focusing on the purchase, when clerical marketers meet secular consumers. We mobilize the literature about the sacralization process in consumption, enriched by the concept of communitas. An ethnographic methodology is deployed in the French monastic context and its various sales outlets. Findings show that the purchaser, when buying, is (re)joining communities which possess the sacred communitas characteristics. Incremented to previous work on gift-giving in such a purchase, they enable to show the re-sacralization process of the product. We conclude by replacing the usually linear continuum between sacred and profane statuses by a sinusoidal sacralization wave.

Keywords:

• Product’s biography
• monastic product
• purchasing
• sacralization
• communitas
• ethnography

Notes

1. Cistercian abbeys such as Aiguebelle, La Trappe, Campénéac, Hauterive, Timadeuc, and Tamié, Benedictine abbeys such as Chantelle, Tournay, Saint Wandrille, Bouzy-la-Forêt and Bec Hellouin.

2. This tool (Alceste®), founded on the proximity between the words used, creates the corpus lexis, cuts into individual units, matrices of presence/an absence for each word in each unit, maps out a factor analysis of the correspondences and a top down hierarchical classification, the whole without any a priori on the classes to discover. Each sense unit is allocated exclusively to one or other of the body of recorded exchanges.

3. In the Rule of Saint Benedict, Chap 31 titled “The cellarer of the monastery as he should be,” concerning the tools of work and about the cellarer: “All the objects and all the goods of the monastery will be in his eyes as sacred vases of the altar” (RSB, 31, 10).