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Sacrifice, integral to gift giving, remains unexplored and undertheorized in marketing. This paper aims to address this shortfall by analyzing the dynamics of sacrifice and theorizing how it serves as an engine of the gift chimney.

The ethnographic investigation of public ceremonial gift giving in sectarian Northern Ireland describes and interprets the complex nature of the gift.

The authors show that sacrifice is a plausible mechanism of the gift chimney and that the co-occurrence of monadic, dyadic and systemic giving in the same ritual acts as an accelerant.

The authors analyze how public ceremonial gift giving induces sectarian communities to risk convocation, enabling them to exorcize trauma sustained at one another’s hands and to build a platform for future cross-community cohesion in a context of ineffective institutional efforts.

Sacrifice propels circulation of the gift, creating a social bond between antagonists whose ethos of mutuality depends upon ritualized reciprocal recognition of entangled loss.

The actual uses to which public art is put have been virtually ignored, leaving multifarious dynamics related to its esthetic encounters unexplored. Both audience agency in placemaking and sensemaking and the agentic role of place as more than a mere platform or stage dressing for transformation are routinely neglected. Such transformative dynamics are analyzed and interpreted in this study of the Derry–Londonderry Temple, a transient mega-installation orchestrated by bricoleur artist David Best and co-created by sectarian communities in 2015.

A range of ethnographic methods and supplemental netnography were employed in the investigation.

Participants inscribed expressions of their lived experience of trauma on the Temple's infrastructure, on wood scrap remnants or on personal artifacts dedicated for interment. These inscriptions and artifacts became objects of contemplation for all participants to consider and appreciate during visitation, affording sectarian citizens opportunity for empathic response to the plight of opposite numbers. Thousands engaged with the installation over the course of a week, registering sorrow, humility and awe in their interactions, experiencing powerful catharsis and creating temporary cross-community comity. The installation and the grief work animating it were introjected by co-creators as a virtual legacy of the engagement.

The originality of the study lies in its theorizing of the successful delivery of social systems therapy in an esthetic modality to communities traditionally hostile to one another. This sustained encounter is defined as traumaturgy. The sacrificial ritual of participatory public art becomes the medium through which temporary cross-community cohesion is achieved.

Collaboration is the norm in marketing and consumer research, yet the dynamics of academic cooperation are poorly understood. The aim of this paper is to probe the sociology of collaboration within marketing scholarship by means of a detailed case study of the seminal consumer odyssey.

The paper presents a history of the consumer odyssey based on a range of secondary sources.

The consumer odyssey, one of many collaborate circles in marketing thought, was a seminal moment in the development of marketing research.

This paper encourages reflection on the dynamics of collaboration and the collegial character of marketing scholarship. Also, the paper has implications for institutional policy, for example the RAE, which measures research as an individual endeavour.

This paper presents a rare reflection on the social dynamics of marketing scholarship. Although it focuses on the interpretive research tradition within consumer research, its findings are relevant to every marketing academic, regardless of their philosophical bent, empirical concern or methodological preference.

In this account of our long-term ethnographic investigation of the Burning Man Project, we examine the emergence of nomadic spirituality among the citizens of Black Rock City, Nevada. We describe this emergence as a reaction to consumers’ increasing dissatisfaction both with conventional religious denominations and with consumption as an existential ground of meaning. We provide an emic view of the pilgrimage experience at Black Rock City, from the perspective of participants in and organizers of the event. We propose a theory of the comedy of the commons to interpret the surface structure of the moment, and embed our deep structural interpretation of the nomadic spirituality of the phenomenon within the context of new religious movements (NRMs). In so doing, we shed new light on the topic of the sacred and profane in consumer experience.

This volume includes a selection from the papers, poems, and photo essays presented at the inaugural Conference on Consumer Culture Theory held in August 2006 on the campus of Notre Dame University. What we had hoped might become a regular conference to be held every two years, proved to be so popular that it is becoming an annual event. The second conference will take place in May 2007 at York University.

At both ACR 2004 and EACR 2005, Richard Elliott and Fuat Firat queried the need for CCT, and the thrust of their concerns seemed to be concerns with imposing CCT as a totalizing narrative. The major instigator of this totalizing concern is probably the singularizing semantics of CCT we adopted, which can be read – despite our original emphasis on the internal diversity of its constituent research traditions – as a call for a unified body of theory that is grounded in a vernacular of normal science and its epistemic goal of making incremental contributions to a system of verified propositions (Kuhn, 1962). It is worth noting that, for better or worse, this normal science orientation and its quest for a unified theory is taken as a normative goal (not a threat) by consumer researchers who work outside the CCT tradition. CCT, however, has emerged in the liberatory glow of the sociology of scientific knowledge (LaTour, 1988), reflexive critiques of power relations that are encoded in scientific narratives hailing from feminist, poststructural, and postcolonial critiques (see Bristor & Fischer, 1993; Haraway, 1994; Rosaldo, 1993; Thompson, Stern, & Arnould, 1998), and marketing's positivist–relativist debates (Anderson, 1986; Hudson & Ozanne, 1988). All have significantly problematized conventional notions of objectivity and the modernist project of totalizing theorizations.

Marketing‐driven consumer culture is often indicted in the degradation of the ecosphere. Futurists envision an ecological crisis in the new millennium. Marketing and consumer research can be enlisted in the aversion of this crisis. Political and philosophical regimes of environmental reclamation and redemption must be mobilized by conversion experiences in the individual’s soul. In this paper, I propose that marketers instigate millenarian activities to trigger a revitalization movement in the service of ecotheology. Such a provocative enterprise is well suited to the discipline’s posture of eminent domain at century’s end. I offer some suggestions for the shape that such a revitalization might take.