| Popis: |
The last five decades have seen waves of immigration to the west. In recent times the emerging second and subsequent generations of immigrants, especially within the Muslim communities have started to redefine and contest their religious and ethnic identities. In light of these changing realities, scholars are urging to explore religion and ethnicity in conjunction. A review of contemporary literature highlights the need to re-examine the prevailing assumptions on religion and ethnicity with emphasis on how these two dimensions materialise in everyday life through consumption practices. There is a particularly growing interest in exploring the impact and role of religion and ethnicity on the complex dynamics of consumer acculturation. Scholars assert that although consumer acculturation is assumed to happen after geographical movement, in fact, it never stops. There have been increasing calls to understand how the changing social, ethnic, religious, and cultural dynamics inform and shape the consumer acculturation process in the different generations of these communities. Researchers also question whether the results from studies on the first generation of immigrants are equally applicable to the second and later generations and whether these groups can be theoretically considered similar to and coalesced with the host society. Recent studies suggest that religion will supersede ethnicity as the most prominent marker of identity for the second and later generations of ethnic Muslim communities. Several scholars are of the opinion that due to the rise in religious temperament and fervour consumer culture and Islamic ways of life are often incompatible and at a crossroads. This study, contrary to seeing Islam as resistance or a buffer against consumer culture adopts a more co-constitutive, critical cultural view of Islam and consumption. Moreover, instead of considering Muslim consumers as a separate, homogenous segment and the Muslim identity as fixed, universal, and context-independent, this research adopts a culturally embedded approach. This perspective allows an understanding of the dynamic, constructed, and situated role of consumption, religion, and ethnicity in acculturation and consumption. This study explores the role of religion and ethnicity in consumption in the context of British Pakistani Muslims in the U.K. This study adopts an interpretive, qualitative approach. By conducting in-depth, semi-structured interviews with different generations of this ethnic community, this research explores the role and significance of religious, ethnic, and host cultural identities on the consumption rituals, choices, and practices of these individuals. This research also explores how these identities may be contested and change over time and how particular ethnic and religious identities affect and influence their consumption behaviour. By exploring how these different identities are implicated in ritual, mundane, conspicuous, and luxurious consumption, this study contributes to the existing literature on consumer acculturation by delineating the attenuating role of ethnicity and the paradoxical influence of religion in consumption. Findings show that the second and subsequent generations, in particular, have become more inclined towards religion and that Islam has evolved as the most significant marker of identity for them. In the second and third generations of this community, the vacuum resulting from attenuating bonds with the homeland (Pakistan) is compensated by identifying with universal or global Islam, a phenomenon that is free and unadulterated from the ethnic culture of the parental, first, generation. The study finds that the second and third generations serve as religious influencers prompting their elders to embrace their religious values and assertions. As a result, for most of the participants, religious identity takes ascendancy over identities associated with ethnicity and the local British culture. These religious and ethnic identity shifts are found to have implications for ritual consumption. Several aspects pertaining to the rituals of marriage, death, birthdays, milads (Prophet’s birth celebration), Quran Khawani (Communal reading of the Quran) that are practised in Pakistan have been deemed religiously unacceptable. Findings demonstrate that participants felt that such ritualistic consumption clashed with the pure, universal, and acultural Muslim mode of practice derived from the modern interpretations of religious texts. Nevertheless, a major finding of the study was the limited influence of religion and religiosity on consumption choices and practices, apart from eating halal and observing the basic conventions of Islam such as refraining from alcohol, pork, and interest. This finding highlights that secularity and plurality are also deeply ingrained in Muslims’ interpretation of Islam in the realm of consumption. Analysing the ritual, mundane, conspicuous, and luxury consumption of this community has shown that they do not abide by a strict code of religiosity which calls upon Muslims to avoid extravagant spending and consumption. Findings indicate that participants individually interpret Islamic injunctions and justified their consumption choices and practices through this. These findings demonstrate that Islamic consumption practices are highly contested, dynamic and context-dependent. These findings contradict the stance that Islamic societies are exceptional in the sense they resist or lack consumerist culture. Contemporary research has mostly portrayed the second and third generations as passive victims of their circumstances when it came to making lifestyle choices such as marriages, divorces, and educational pursuits. Scholars note that these individuals tend to live ambivalent conflicted lifestyles and can do little but suffer their parent’s imposition of alien cultural values. They have been ascribed the term “torn self” and “fragmented selves” and lives are seen to continually oscillate between their desire to preserve their ancestral origin and embrace Western culture. This study, by documenting the significant role of the younger generation in influencing religious and consumption norms for all generations, highlights the emancipated and independent nature of consumption choices and practices. In addition, this study finds that participants have the ability to actively choose the extent of their affiliation with ethnic culture thus an alternative view is offered that suggests the second and later generations are not passive victims of their circumstances but are active in shaping their religious and ethnic identities and those of their family members. Moreover, this study demonstrates that it is too simplistic to posit a division or clash between the first and later generations when it comes to religious and ethnic practices. On the contrary, members of the first generation are receptive to these changes, exhibiting a confluence in the religious and ethnic practices of the different generations. These insights will aid in the further development of religio-ethnic marketing literature. |
