Retail Religion: Hinduism for a Neoliberal Age
A new discourse that both indigenizes and sacralizes mass consumption and corporate labor has emerged alongside the opening of India’s economy at the turn of the twenty-first century. To illustrate this argument, I take as my case study the so-named “retail religion” that leaders within India’s reta...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
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| Published: |
Oxford University Press
2021
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| In: |
Journal of the American Academy of Religion
Year: 2021, Volume: 89, Issue: 3, Pages: 863-884 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | A new discourse that both indigenizes and sacralizes mass consumption and corporate labor has emerged alongside the opening of India’s economy at the turn of the twenty-first century. To illustrate this argument, I take as my case study the so-named “retail religion” that leaders within India’s retail giant, Future Group, produced in the early 2000s to make buying more and working harder quintessentially Indian and specifically Hindu traits. Whereas the enchantment of corporate capitalism often draws on and produces notions of the spiritual, this religion rejects the universal resonances of that term. It employs mythology instead, referring to the epic and purāṇic genres of Hindu texts upon which it relies to produce the Future Group’s Indianness. As such, retail religion promises its adherents that their engagement in the neoliberal economic order does not signify their subjugation, but instead their freedom to truly be themselves. |
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| ISSN: | 1477-4585 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: American Academy of Religion, Journal of the American Academy of Religion
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1093/jaarel/lfab075 |