Faith in Ethical Consumption

Abstract

This chapter traces significant interconnections between faith-motivated activists and the widening participation in fair-trade activities in and around the city of Bristol in the UK. Despite the attempts of institutionalised religion to demonstrate the contrary (see, for example, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Commission on Urban Priority Areas, 1985) ‘faith and ‘the city’ have often been awkward bedfellows within social science narratives. Disciplines such as human geography, for example, have developed rather uncontroversial geographies of religion, marking out both geographies of difference, in which religion poses as an aspect of ethnicity or political factionalism (Guelke 2006), and geographies of landscape and place involving both formal and informal spaces of the sacred (Kong 2001). Beyond safe havens such as these, however, human geography’s account of the groups and individuals identified with faith and/or religion has often been characterised by embarrassment, suspicion or hostility. ‘Faith’ has become easily essentialised as fundamentalist, proselytising, politically conformist and integrally immersed in the workings of the capitalist state and, as such, it has been framed as an object of critique rather than a legitimate source of explanation and understanding (Cloke 2002).