Pain, suffering and the consumption of spirituality: a toe story

ABSTRACT

The article addresses spiritual consumption from a corporal perspective, with a specific focus on pain and suffering as vehicles to a higher spiritual state. It applies a comparative auto-ethnography of the pain that people participating in two pilgrimages – the Camino de Santiago in France and Spain and the Quebec Compostela in Canada – feel in their toes and uses this to discuss how the experience and manifestation of pain actualises the spiritual experience. The results show that corporal pain transforms into a spiritual experience in the way that it connects to both the spiritual features associated with a particular context and the spiritual capital of the person experiencing the pain. They also reveal that displaying corporal pain during rituals – much like the sense of communion that is generated through the act of sharing – fosters further transformations leading to spiritual experiences.

KEYWORDS:

• Body
• Camino de Santiago
• Compostela
• consumption
• pain
• pilgrimage
• spiritual capital
• spiritual feature

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Véronique Cova

Vùronique Cova is Professor of marketing at the IAE- Graduate School of Management, Aix-Marseille University, France. Her research interests focus on servicescapes, consumer experience, and cultural consumption. She specializes in service design and the ways consumers re-appropriate the company’s offering through diversion tactics. She is currently working on pilgrimages and hospitableness. She has walked the Compostela Way and that has changed her perspective on marketing research and practice.

Bernard Cova

Bernard Cova is a Professor at Kedge Business School Marseille in France and a Visiting Professor at the Bocconi University in Milan, Italy. Since the early 1990s, he has participated in postmodernist streams of consumer research and marketing, focusing on a tribal approach. He is now toying with the notion of post-postmodernism. He is also a B-to-B marketing researcher, primarily in the field of project marketing.