Religious Symbols in Italian Advertising: Symbolic Appropriation and the Management of Consent

Abstract

The increasing presence of religious symbols in commercial advertising shows that the boundaries between two worlds, which are traditionally considered to be well defined, have blurred. This article explores how religious symbolism has been represented in Italian magazine advertising over the last two decades. The content of a large sample of advertisements is analysed and the results are organised in a typology. Combining theoretical insights from Alfred Schutz and Pierre Bourdieu, the article proposes the existence of an advertising field that appropriates a system of specialised meanings from the religious field.

Notes

1. Donna Moderna replaces Gioia from 1997. The survey on Io Donna and D la Repubblica delle donne—both founded in 1996—starts from 1997.

2. Although the term ‘supernatural’ has been justly criticised on a number of grounds by historians of religion and cultural anthropologists, Berger points out that in its everyday usage, this term “denotes a fundamental category of religion, namely the assertion or belief that there is an other reality, and one of ultimate significance for man” (2, emphasis in original). In sociology this ‘otherness’ which is typical of the religious experience is called ‘sacred’, understood as totally other from ordinary human phenomena and, in this sense, opposite to the ‘profane’.