FROM THE SACRED TO THE PROFANE: COMMODITIZATION AND THE CHANGING STATUS OF MMONWU IN IGBOLAND THROUGH THE PERSPECTIVES OF KOPYTOFF AND ELIADE
The Mmonwu Sacred institution in Igboland is fastly undergoing some changes that would completely render it unrecognizable. Its acceptance of the market forces of commoditization are gradually weakening its traditional symbolic boundaries making it vulnerable to desacralization. With the religious mode of experiencing and interpreting reality gone, the empirical and secular perspectives take control. Mmonwu loses its ritual significance as the hierophany of ancestral spirits, and acquires the new identity of a cultural artifact circulating as goods in exchange for financial power. Participation in political campaigns, appearances in social events like wedding anniversaries, birthday parties, traffic generating appearances on social media handles in the form of content creation, are some of the evidence of the changing status of Mmonwu under the control of economic forces. Though these give Mmonwu a form of visibility, its ritual significance is greatly diminished. Rather than relying on ethnographic fieldwork, the article employs the complimentary theoretical perspectives of Igor Kopytoff’s theory of commoditization and Mircea Eliade’s phenomenology of the sacred. These two enable us to introduce a theoretical process model of commoditization - weakening of boundary - desacralization, which will be made manifest in the course of the article.
Keywords: Mmonwu, sacred, commoditization, desacralization, ritual , religious