New Age Consumption

Definition

With the new conditions of spiritual and religious living in contemporary society, “new ager” consumption emerged in global and transnational scale, linked to the vast range of hybrid and syncretic religiosity/spirituality, post-traditional with diffuse contours – also called New Spirituality, Diffuse Spirituality, Spiritual Nebula, Age of Aquarius, Age of New Consciousness, among other categories used by sociologists, anthropologists, and scientists of religion. New Age consumption points out to a fundamental slip/shift: the change from identity (substantiation, affirmation of belonging and canons, the primacy of rules and contexts) to identification (nonsubstantiation, denial of canons and belonging, free trial).

Introduction

There is an extensive bibliography on New Age, and consequently, theoretically and empirically defining what would be the consumption resulting therefrom, especially in Latin America, turns into a complex task. Some researchers disagree that this...