‘Mindfulness for modern life’: The blending of Orientalism and neoliberal self-care strategies in the branding of Rituals

Abstract

This article interrogates the conflation of neoliberal imperatives to self-care and Orientalist fascination with Eastern spirituality in the branding of Rituals, the Dutch self-care and cosmetics brand. Focusing on the brand’s online presence as well as its self-presentation through its flagship store, the article contextualises the Ritual’s calls for mindfulness, gratitude and positivity within the neoliberal ‘psychological turn’. At the same time, it demonstrates how the brand mobilises Orientalist and neocolonial discourses to incite its consumers to exercise emotional self-control and self-care. Neocolonial and neoliberal narratives in the branding of Rituals serve to portray the brand as the site of pleasure, quiet and calm, disguising its exigency for female labour and depoliticising the issue of global inequalities.

Introduction

On a bustling square, in the centre of Amsterdam, towers the four-storey House of Rituals, the flagship store of the eponymous Dutch self-care, beauty and cosmetics brand. The first two floors of its Art Deco mansion showcase self-care products from the brand’s lines Rituals of Karma, Rituals of Namaste and Rituals of Jing. The two upper floors are dedicated to a spa and beauty studio, only in addition to conventional manicures and massages, the House of Rituals offers Campfire Meditations, sessions in a Breathing Bubble and Brain Massages. Its spacious top-floor studio, titled Mind Oasis, is filled with a paraphernalia of screens, headsets, and audio equipment, propped against the backdrop of white walls, on which quotes from Rumi and Ram Dass are plastered, apparently meant to incite the reader to silence and introspection. The combination of decor, texts, and products at The House of Rituals present a remarkable mixture of Orientalism, commodity fetishism, and neoliberal demand for self-care, self-knowledge, and self-control. In this article, I would like to untangle these intertwining motifs and analyse what their combination means in the branding of a beauty brand like Rituals. Drawing on scholarship on Orientalism, neoliberalism, and branding, I will situate the branding of Rituals in relation to colonial readings of non-Western spirituality and the rise of ‘emotional capitalism’ (Illouz, 2007), inquiring into the meanings and contradictions within the branding of Rituals.

In its mingling of Orientalism with self-care, Rituals hardly presents a unique case – numerous beauty brands, big and small, use their social-media and marketing channels to broadcast calls for mindfulness and encourage customers to breathe, meditate and ‘be grateful’, in vague evocations of Buddhist and Hindu religious practices. However, Rituals presents a remarkable example for a number of reasons. First, it is an extremely popular and a highly successful brand, whose sales performance ¹ and substantial social-media following testify to the viability of its marketing strategy. Second, its branding allows to interrogate how notions of labour, humanitarianism, psychological well-being and spirituality overlap in contemporary marketing, creating a dynamic between neocolonial, neoliberal and postfeminist sensibilities. Thus, both on its social-media channels and in its flagship store, the brand merges not only contemporary hi-tech elements and colonial nostalgia, but also the contexts of a yoga studio, medical cabinet and a beauty salon, provoking questions about its negotiation of space, private and public, and time – of late-modernity and imaginary Oriental timelessness.

As Orientalist discourses and discourses of self-betterment are routinely employed in the branding of beauty products, there exists an urgent need for research to address this recurrent intertwining of neocolonial and neoliberal tropes. Admittedly, there exists a significant body of research on Orientalist tendencies in the marketing of beauty services. Notably, Nicki Falkof (2022) has written about the use of ‘safari aesthetics’ in the beauty industry of Johannesburg, and Nazrul Islam’s (2010) research explores how ayurvedic spas in India pander to Western consumers’ neo-Orientalist expectations of India. At the same time, focusing on the psychological turn in neoliberalism, Ana Sofia Elias and Rosalind Gill’s (2014) have exposed connections between the rise of emotional capitalism and proliferation of psychologising discourses on beauty. Similarly, a number of researchers have been addressing incursions of capitalist logic into the realm of feelings and emotions (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005; Gill and Orgad, 2017, 2018), noting, in particular, their gendered character (Favaro, 2017; Gill and Orgad, 2022; Rottenberg, 2014). However, what still remains dramatically under-researched is the particular combination of Orientalist discourses with a demand for introspective self-betterment, which has become a commonplace fixture in the branding of beauty brands. This article intends to begin filling this existing gap, while exposing the ways in which contemporary neoliberal culture draws on and mobilises discourses created and normalised by colonialism.

In this research article, I connect the branding of Rituals to the colonial ideologies that contradictorily portray non-Western contexts both as realms of knowledge and purification as well as backwardness. I point to the long tradition of an instrumentalisation of non-Western spirituality and its lasting impact on contemporary industries, such as medical tourism and beauty industry. While non-Western contexts are viewed as repositories of resources, they also, in an evocation of colonial discourses, are presented as plagued with poverty and backwardness and thrown into stark contrast with Western progress and the privileged position of a Western consumer. In my analysis of Rituals, I intend to demonstrate how Orientalist views of non-Western spirituality are refurbished for the purpose of the neoliberal regime of self-betterment.

Methodology

In this article, I employ the critical-discursive analytic approach, relying on the method elaborated by Jonathan Potter and Margaret Wetherell (1987). Critical discourse analysis sees discourses as ‘semiotic ways of construing aspects of the world [. . .], which can generally be identified with different positions or perspectives of different groups of social actors’ (Fairclough, 2013: 179). Both a theory and a method, CDA approaches discourses as constructive and functional as they reflect and construe social relations and ideologies (Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 2010; Fairclough, 1992; Fairclough et al., 2004; Potter and Wetherell, 1987; Wetherell et al., 2001; Wodak and Meyer, 2015 (2001)). In this work, I rely on the notion of an interpretative repertoire, developed by Potter and Wetherell (1987) to establish and contextualise ‘recognisable themes, common places and tropes’ (Wetherell, 1998: n.d.) within the marketing discourses employed by Rituals. Drawing on a body of texts published on the brand’s website, its online magazine and social media channels, I look into the interpretative repertoires that pertain to how desirability is constructed around the brand and – more broadly – what is construed as desirable across the brand’s marketing channels.

For this research, I have analysed the brand’s English-language global Instagram account @ritualscosmetics and the postings that appeared there between April 2022 and May 2023. With 954,000 followers, this is the largest of the brand’s three accounts on the platform, the other two being French-language (251,000 followers) and Arabic-language (103,000 followers) accounts. On the brand’s global account, new content is posted daily with heightened frequency around Christmas, Easter and at the beginning of summer, thus, more than 400 posts were published within the analysed timespan. For my analysis, I randomly selected 100 posts, further eliminating repetitive content (for example, similarly-worded Instagram captions on the occasion of the World Mental Health Day), or short and generic posts containing information on the brand’s promotions. My final data sample included 58 Instagram posts.

The brand’s website rituals.com prominently features the brand’s current campaigns, a web-shop and the sections ‘Sustainability’ and ‘Magazine’. These two latter sections I examined more closely, as they present an insight into what Rituals itself calls a ‘holistic art of living’. The subsections of the brand’s Magazine include titles ‘Spirituality’, ‘Kindness’ for others and ‘Mindfulness for modern life’, while its reports on the ‘Sustainability’ page spell out Rituals’ commitments to ‘reducing our environmental impact’. From the brand’s website, I included in my sample 40 randomly selected publications, posted between April 2022 and May 2023.

The research is also informed by a visual analysis of the Rituals social-media channels and its website as well as by fieldwork, conducted at the brand’s flagship store in Amsterdam. Although unstructured interviews with both employees and clients of Rituals have enriched this research, they were not essential for my analysis, and the main focus of this research remains on the brand’s self-presentation through texts, and its own articulation of the desirability and uniqueness of Rituals. In the course of my analysis, through re-reading of sample data, I have established recurring patterns across analysed media, which I refer to here as interpretative repertoires. The first interpretative repertoire sees Rituals as a brand that promotes positive thinking helping its customers achieve happiness and well-being. The second positions Rituals as a transmitter of ancient sacred knowledge, which can be used to achieve well-being and mitigate the stress of contemporary life. And the third positions Rituals as a global benefactor. Even though, at times, these repertoires overlap, it is useful to interrogate the meanings of each one separately. But before I turn to an in-depth analysis of each interpretative repertoire, I would like to address the contexts they are part of – the history of the Orientalist representation of non-Western religiosity in the West, rise of brand activism and increasing insidiousness of self-care.

Religion is a tool, spirituality is a technique

Drawing on writings by Beck, Giddens and Bauman that highlight the hyper-individualisation of the late-modern society (or the emergence of, in the words of Giddens, the ‘reflexive project of the self’), Andrew Dawson (2011) elaborates how, in late modernity, religion and spirituality have come to be seen as a means to an end – tools for achieving a balanced, healthy life. Such observations on the instrumentalisation of religion are astute and relevant, but they cannot fully explain or account for the contemporary fascination with mindfulness, meditation or other manifestations of Buddhism and Hinduism, quite often simplified and refurbished for the Western consumer. However, referring to the history of colonial views on non-Western religiosity and Orientalism can be helpful in understanding the brands’ obsession with non-Western spirituality. Orientalism, in Edward Said’s (2003) interpretation, is a political and historical mode of representing non-Western contexts as backward and irrational. Initially pertaining to the region of Middle East and the domain of politics, the term ‘Orientalism’ has been since applied to describe phenomena occurring within various non-Western cultural contexts and realms from art to marketing (for some examples see Mazzarella, 2003; Nochlin, 1991).

Orientalism figures as an attitude, a discourse and a mode of representation that produces the view of the non-West as exotic and strange, while inventing the difference between the Westerner and the Other. An ideological product of colonialism, Orientalism is born out of – and sustains – the colonial dichotomy of rationality and spirituality, progress and backwardness, civilisation and barbarity, seen as essential qualities of the West and non-West, respectively. As Anne McClintock (1995) argues, in the colonial worldview, characterised by the Enlightenment logic and influenced by the evolutionary theory, the colonial metropolis emerged as the realm of progress and knowledge – an adult in the imagined ‘family of Man’ –, whereas the colonial realms figured as primitive and childish and presented, incongruously, projects for ‘civilisational missions’, repositories of resources, terrains of sensuality, objects of spectacle and domains of the abject. Colonial realms were also cast as feminine and passive in opposition to the aggressive masculinity of the coloniser (McClintock, 1995). The colonial worldview thus established the general availability of non-Western domains to the gaze, knowledge and pleasure of the coloniser.

In the colonial project of knowledge production, religion played an important role, as it was seen as a source of information about what colonial sciences saw as ‘timeless and primitive’ cultures. In such a way, the ancient religious texts the Vedas were considered by the British colonial administration as a key to understanding and ruling India (Bayly, 1999). Religion was instrumentalised as a tool for colonial knowledge and governance, while colonial religious studies veered between romantic fascination with ancient beliefs and disdain for their perceived primitiveness (King, 1999). However, both derogatory and idealist accounts of non-Western religions tended to portray them in essentialising and exoticising ways, accentuating the principal role that religion supposedly played in shaping non-Western societies. Idealistic and romanticising readings of non-Western spirituality tended to focus on the authenticity and timelessness of non-Western realms that supposedly resulted from their devotion to ancient beliefs.

Therefore, within the Western interpretations of Eastern religiosity several dominant themes emerge. In accordance with the colonial views of non-Western cultures as primitive, non-Western religiosity is believed to manifest the strange and exotic but is also viewed as a site of authenticity and a repository of sacred knowledge. Non-Western spirituality is re-configured as a tool for the Westerner to use – whether for intruding and knowing cultures of the non-West, or for gaining access to the realms of authenticity, distancing oneself from the sullying influence of Western pragmatism and, thus, improving one’s life and spiritual well-being. This instrumentalisation of non-Western religiosity may be linked to the observation that Wendy Brown (2006) makes about ‘organicist’ (non-Western) and ‘liberal’ (Western) cultures:

For the organicist creature, considered to lack rationality and will, culture and religion (culture as religion, and religion as culture – equations that work only for this creature) are saturating and authoritative; for the liberal one, in contrast, culture and religion become ‘background’, can be ‘entered’ and ‘exited’, and are thus rendered extrinsic to rather than constitutive of the subject. (p. 153; emphasis in original)

Similarly, the surge of interest in Eastern religions in the United States between 1950s and 1970s was affected by romanticising Orientalist attitudes, as writes Jane Iwamura (2011). Amid the burgeoning Civil Rights movement, Hinduism and meditation entered the U.S. popular culture as methods to achieve enlightenment, authenticity and truth outside of the thralls of a capitalist society. The mid-century fascination with non-Western spirituality rendered it as an ancient repository of knowledge and techniques that the hyper-rational and ‘developed’ West could turn to in order to purify itself. The postwar soul-searching dovetailed with an emergence of a complex and multifaceted consumer culture, in which consumption offered possibilities for ‘self-realization through new ways of living’ (Binkley, 2003).

Examples of what Sam Binkley calls ‘deep consumption’ are evident in self-help memoirs of the late 2000s like ‘Eat, Pray, Love’, ‘Sita Sings the Blues’ or ‘Dreaming in Hindi’, in which non-Western territories and cultures appear as timeless and unchanging realms of calm, spirituality and regeneration, where consumers (hurt and wounded Western white women) can travel to heal and attain peace. In her analysis, Shefali Chandra (2015) demonstrates how such memoirs entwine themes of self-help and the entitlement of a Western middle-class consumer with Orientalist stereotypes about gender and class in the non-West, while completely ignoring the political circumstances of the post-9/11 world, in which religious difference acquires acutely political meanings.

Taking care of the self: focus on the psychological and spiritual well-being

In the self-care memoirs analysed by Shefali Chandra, Orientalist depictions of Eastern terrains are mobilised as props in the narratives of the healing of middle-class women from the West. Eastern religiosity and spirituality are re-negotiated as tools to regain balance and properly take care of the self by exercising vigilance over one’s body and mind. Reminders to ‘breathe’, ‘meditate’ and ‘be grateful’, employed by self-help literature, lifestyle magazines and marketing, are ubiquitous in such memoirs. While promising benefits to the subject’s health and well-being, calls for constant introspection and control of one’s emotions and inner life evoke what researchers have deemed a pervasive neoliberal regimen of self-care (Gill and Orgad, 2022).

Conventionally, neoliberalism is understood as a political and macroeconomic rationality characterised by privatisation, deregulation, market freedom, and the retreat of the state from areas of social welfare. It has, however, transformed into an hegemonic socio-cultural sensibility, disseminating ‘the model of the market to all domains and activities—even where money is not at issue —and [configuring] human beings exhaustively as market actors, always, only, and everywhere as homo oeconomicus’ (Brown, 2015: 31). Ideas of choice, entrepreneurialism and meritocracy, associated with neoliberal ethics, underpin contemporary media discourses on the self, figuring prominently in politics, media and marketing (Binkley, 2009; Binkley and Littler, 2008; Littler, 2012; Mukherjee and Banet-Weiser, 2012), in which the self is reconfigured as a project, which requires continuous optimisation and improvement through techniques of care and regulation (Giddens, 1991).

The ideological hallmarks of neoliberalism are evident in the currently prominent self-care discourses, as they communicate the capitalist expectation of productivity, self-reliance and successful management of the self against the backdrop of a declining welfare state (Leonard and Negra, 2022). As Eva Illouz (2007) argues, the project of managing the self demands that one’s feelings and emotions be monitored and regulated, too, in order to ensure more productivity, ‘making the economic self emotional and emotions more closely harnessed to instrumental action’(p. 23). The entrepreneurial self thus emerges, whose psychological, emotional and spiritual well-being can be harnessed for professional success and stable and steady performance (Scharff, 2016). Paradoxically, the emotional toll and labour that go into managing one’s feelings and emotions in order to ensure the psychological being of the self are largely disavowed (Elias and Gill, 2018).

Remarkably, it is women who become the primary addressees of the exhortations for self-care and self-management, in which exigencies for emotional self-control and postfeminist calls for self-betterment dovetail. Emotional introspection and femininity have enjoyed a long-standing relationship – not only have women been historically expected to provide emotional labour within family and community, but, with the popularisation of psychoanalysis, women have also been positioned as primarily in need of psychological help (Illouz, 2007). Discourses of self-care predicated on requirements to monitor and control one’s emotions are closely tied to the postfeminist notion of achieving ‘empowerment’ by taking control (Banet-Weiser, 2018; Gill, 2008). Postfeminist sensibility, described by Rosalind Gill (2016) as ‘deeply enmeshed with neoliberalism’ (p. 613), emphasises the value of individualism, choice and agency. As it simultaneously borrows from feminist ideas and repudiates them (McRobbie, 2009), postfeminism promotes self-betterment and self-monitoring in terms indebted to therapy talk.

Notably, the neoliberal postfeminist imperatives of confidence, control and resilience are predominantly formulated in gendered terms, demanding that women take responsibility for their own success and well-being. While calling on women to exercise emotional vigilance and manage their feelings, such imperatives disavow the constricting effect of societal patriarchal structures.

Discourses of positivity and happiness: ‘train your brain to be optimistic’

Rituals positions itself as a brand that aims to create ‘holistic wellbeing’, with products and services that are purportedly useful for ‘body and soul’. The brand’s messages on social media and in its online magazine encourage customers to ‘choose joy every day’. ‘Positive feelings’ like joy, love or gratitude always seem to be within one’s reach, waiting to be ‘unlocked’: ‘Positivity anchors itself in everything we do and feel. Adopting a positive outlook on life is the key to unlocking feelings of gratitude, happiness and joy’, reads an article from the Rituals magazine.

At the same time, ‘unlocking’ positivity involves effort – one is expected to ‘train’, ‘nurture’ or ‘cultivate’ positivity (‘you can train your brain to be hopeful and optimistic’, ‘put some effort in [to achieving positivity]’, ‘re-train [your] brains to look for positivity’, and ‘[positivity] needs nurturing and continuous attention before it takes hold in your soul’). The existence of negative feelings, while acknowledged, is re-articulated as being in need of transformation, quite often through expert knowledge mediated by Rituals:

It can be difficult to look past negativity, and sometimes it feels like it is all stacking up. But today expert Mo Gawdat discusses how many of us are prone to a negativity bias, and how we can re-train our brains to look for positivity. [. . .] If you watched our third masterclass episode, you will know that Mo Gawdat’s top tip for happiness is by transforming the bad into good. With each negative thought, find a positive to counteract it. Comment a negative thought you had today, and the positive one you used to counteract it.

Here, both positivity and ‘negativity bias’ are presented as equal alternatives, making it one’s responsibility to opt for one instead of the other. Attaining a positive attitude has many benefits: ‘positive people always find a way out of the darkness’, ‘positivity is contagious, when you are joyful those around you feel it too’. ‘If you can train your brain to be hopeful and optimistic’, the branding of Rituals maintains, ‘you may genuinely have more success in life’. Echoing neoliberal self-help literature, the branding of Rituals conveys the idea that well-being, happiness and positivity are a matter of choice, but involve vigilance and effort to achieve them (Bull and Allen, 2018; Gill and Orgad, 2018).

Emotional transformation is associated with the use of Rituals products that ‘fill your body, mind & soul with positivity’, which is emphasised by product names like ‘Happiness collection’; it is also associated with the regimes of self-monitoring and self-care communicated through the brand’s online channels. The brand’s magazine and Instagram account present numerous examples of how ‘positivity’ can be done wrong, warning readers against ‘toxic positivity’ or lack of gratitude, which, eventually, may hinder one’s achievement of success and happiness. On one hand, ‘positivity’ is imbued with the promise of happiness, well-being and self-fulfilment, but on the other hand, it presents a complex and contradictory regime, almost impossible to navigate correctly without the guidance of Rituals.

As a mediator of positivity, the brand’s Instagram repeatedly prompts users to express joy, posing questions on what their ‘perfect Sunday’ looks like, what makes them ‘feel positive’ or what they love about themselves. Such questions compel users to spend time and effort on mediated interactions with the brand – contributing what Adam Arvidsson (2005) calls ‘immaterial labour’ to the process of brand building. These calls to interaction demand that users display their emotions and share their emotional experiences, but limit them to expressions of happy and joyful feelings. The brand’s Instagram account presents an ambivalent space, where sincerity and trust are elicited from followers, yet channelled in preordained ways creating an affective vacuum of positivity.

The primary subjects in the Rituals’ exigencies of positivity appear to be women. Both on the brand’s Instagram and website, texts on positivity are accompanied by pictures of women, and descriptions of products for women are paired with references to joy, happiness and positivity. At the same time, posts that target men evade references to feelings and emotions and do not seek to engage users in an interaction; instead, they are written in a more concise and matter-of-fact way and focus on specific descriptions of products. Reiterating the existing association between positivity and femininity (Negra and Tasker, 2014), the brand’s Instagram feed and its website show women exuding positivity. They are predominantly white, ranging between the ages of 20 to 60 and are shown in the luxury of their home, photographed in the process of using and visibly enjoying products by Rituals. The seeming effortlessness and pleasure accentuated in the portrayal of the brand’s female customer offsets the various types of labour that Rituals’ followers are expected to exercise, notably, the labour of feeling and demonstrating ‘happy thoughts’ and the labour of ‘authentic’ interaction (Duffy, 2013).

Ancient knowledge meets late modernity

Techniques to attain positivity, well-being and joyfulness are oftentimes inspired by a melange of Eastern spiritual and religious traditions. The pot-pourri of Eastern terms that the brand uses for its products – such as ‘Ritual of Karma’, ‘Ritual of Namaste’, ‘Ritual of Sakura’ or ‘Ritual of Jing’ – coincides with wide-ranging references to Eastern spirituality in the brand’s marketing messages. Social media posts and articles re-contextualise beliefs, ideas and rituals from different regions of Asia and Africa as suited for global use, re-purposing them for the pleasure and happiness of the Western consumer. Thus, ‘Sankalpa, the ancient art of setting intentions’ (Rituals, 2022) is described as ‘the secret to making your New Year resolutions stick’; an ‘onsen experience’ is suggested ‘for a heavenly relaxation of mind, body and soul’; and spring cleaning is described as ‘the ancient custom we should all embrace’, citing the cleaning rituals of Nowruz and ‘soji – or cleaning’ that ‘never ends’ for Buddhist monks.

In the article on spring cleaning, the rituals of Nowruz, Passover and the ‘Chinese custom da sao chu’ are associated with mystical ideas of ‘attracting good luck’ and ‘keeping evil away’. The article also cites Western cleaning traditions; however, they are said to be ‘more associated with drudgery and servitude than joy and gratitude’, reiterating the dichotomy between the West as hyper-rational and the East as a realm of sacred knowledge and tradition. The article suggests that the reader embrace the spiritual benefits of non-Western spring-cleaning traditions:

Vicky Silverthorn, professional organiser at YouNeedAVicky.com with former clients including singer Lily Allen and author of Start With Your Sock Drawer, says that a good clean or declutter can ‘help you feel in control of your home, which is especially important at a time when we don’t always feel in control of what is happening outside it’ (Rituals, 2023a).

As Rituals focuses on the practical use of non-Western rituals by Western consumers, it promotes what Laurie Ouellette (2019) calls ‘a selective engagement with Eastern spiritual traditions [which] is deracialized, secularized and shorn of history’.

Suggested as solutions to contemporary problems and conundrums, non-Western ideas and spiritual beliefs are presented as ahistorical, frozen in time and unchanging. Significantly, in their descriptions of Eastern terms and beliefs, the articles use present tense, creating an illusion of ongoing and unchanging ancient traditions that convey sacred knowledge. Yet, evoking Anne McClintock’s (1995) idea of the colonial ‘panoptical time’, which renders non-Western cultures available as commodity spectacles, ‘ancient’ customs and beliefs are also malleable and adaptable to the pressures of contemporary Western societies:

Although you can’t eliminate all distractions from your life, you can learn to direct your attention where you want it to go. Zen Buddhists have been doing it for thousands of years. In ancient times, Zen monks devotedly strengthened their ‘attention muscle’ through carefully prescribed ceremonies. Some of those ceremonies, such as the traditional Japanese tea ceremony known as chadō, are still widely practiced today as a way to cultivate the art of attention. (Rituals, 2023b)

Here, a perceived absence of change within Zen Buddhism and Japanese culture is re-configured as a method for optimising one’s life to make it more productive and devoid of ‘distractions’. The article establishes a relationship between the active Western consumer and the passive spiritual realm of the East, which is conveniently repackaged by the brand as a repository of useful knowledge. This optimisation of non-Western spirituality is most evident in the brand’s descriptions of meditation, as a fast and convenient route to well-being (‘[l]et us help you become the master of your own mind with a simple 10 minute meditation that will help bring more joy in your life’, ‘[h]appiness is within reach with this quick and easy meditation’). Rituals’ communicative practices continuously re-configure the brand as a savvy expert, repurposing ‘other’ cultures for the pleasure and benefit of its consumers (Ouellette, 2019; Valdivia, 2017).

Perhaps, the attempts to marry Orientalist readings of Eastern traditionality to neoliberal notions of self-care are nowhere as starkly expressed as in the Rituals’ flagship store in Amsterdam. The first three floors of the four-storey mansion feature the brand’s products, displayed among a paraphernalia of lavish objects, evoking Eastern cultures. The store area is decorated with blue Chinese porcelain vases, velvet chairs with velvet cushions, Afghan rugs, prayer beads and embellished wooden furniture. Illustrated tomes of ‘Beyond Extravagance’, dedicated to the history of Indian jewellery, are sold along with the brand’s coffee table book ‘The Art of Soulful Living’, and the brand’s collection of foldable umbrellas sit next to lush bathing robes and silk pyjama sets. Luxurious and picturesque, the decor of the store evokes two major colonial spectacles: the Orientalist cabinet of curiosities and the colonial commodity display (McClintock, 1995). Its seemingly disparate collection of objects, brought together, convey an unmistakable association with the East and a history of colonial trade and plunder – from heavy perfumes to lush fabrics, to umbrellas that evoke colonial anxieties about the sun, climate, whiteness and difference.

A winding staircase leads upstairs to the second and third floors, where a beauty studio and the space called Mind Oasis are located. The beauty studio presents a rather standard space for beauty procedures, whereas Mind Oasis feels like a blend between a yoga studio, spa and a futuristic medical cabinet. The quotes from poet Rumi and yoga guru Ram Dass are splattered over the whitewashed walls, urging the visitor to embrace silence and quiet. The light and spacious room has a reception desk, a long table with rows of screens and headphones, and a row of rounded and veiled grey chairs resembling cocoons (these are called ‘Breathing Bubbles’); the room opens on to semi-separated spaces – a darker room with several capsule-like beds for Brain Massage and a space with yoga mats and large windows, separated from the rest of the room by a glass wall. Here, one can take part in a collective or individual breathing meditation with the help of an instructive video with Niraj Naik, whom Rituals (2023c) presents as a ‘pharmacist turned holistic coach and breathwork expert’.

Rituals’ Mind Oasis claims to ‘offer science-based techniques for mental stress relief and relaxation by combining ancient wisdom with the power of science’. Its hi-tech contraptions are meant to provide ‘mental relaxation’ through ‘breathwork, meditation and deep rest’. The Mind Oasis claims to offer the benefits of ‘ancient wisdom’ without the necessity of travelling to remote lands, or gaining knowledge about ‘other’ cultures, or putting effort into training your mind and body. Instead, it offers the spiritual benefits of Eastern cultures conveniently re-packaged into glossy and hip-looking gadgets available for purchase. Simultaneously, the futuristic space of the Mind Oasis seems to reinstate the West as a realm of progress, reconfiguring Eastern traditions as available to intrusion, upgrading and refurbishment by the West.

Helping as empowerment

Non-Western realms reappear in Rituals’ discussions of helping and changing the world for the better, that present a drastic contrast to the discourse of non-Western realms as a domain of sacred knowledge. Whereas the latter position non-Western regions as sanctuaries, the former present them as domains in trouble, in urgent need of help and intervention from the West and, in particular, the Western consumer. The brand’s Instagram account and its magazine champion two initiatives – replanting mangroves in Kenya and Southeast Asia, and supporting women in Mumbai. Both these initiatives are enabled through consumption and are directly tied to Rituals’ sales. The re-forestation and planting of trees in Kenya is associated with the brand’s refill line – ‘for every refill you buy, we will plant, protect or restore a tree in return’ announces an Instagram post. Supporting women in Mumbai is done through the sale of Goodie Bags: ‘created in partnership with @tinymiracles_official, these bags provide 3,000 women in India with an income, helping them break out of the poverty cycle’. The Tiny Miracles foundation is an Amsterdam-based initiative that engages communities in India to produce goods that are later sold by a number of Dutch companies. According to their website, they aim to help 1 million people to stay out of poverty by 2030.

Rituals’ initiatives present an example of what Andreas Chatzidakis and Jo Littler (2022) have called ‘carewashing’ – an amplification of aspects of care in brands’ marketing messages during a time of acute crises. An effect of ‘compassionate’ capitalism (Benioff, 2009), ‘carewashing’ repositions ‘a particular corporate product [as]… a way of mediating and facilitating care for ourselves and others’ (Chatzidakis and Littler, 2022: 274). ‘Carewashing’ also repositions the consumer as the agent of positive change. In the initiatives promoted by Rituals, the responsibility for the success of reforestation or breaking ‘the poverty cycle’ for Indian women is placed on the consumer, and the outcome of the initiatives depends on how consciously, but more importantly, how much and how frequently Western consumers shop. The brand thus situates the consumer as a benefactor and enabler of change, recalling what Melissa Brough (2020 (2012)) has called ‘glamorised or playful representations of the humanitarian donor-as-consumer’ (p. 176). As Brough argues, a purchased product reflects one’s philanthropic identity, making the act of helping through buying empowering for the buyer.

Notably, in its representations of humanitarian initiatives, Rituals foregrounds ‘you’ as a consumer: ‘thanks to you, we have planted, protected, or restored almost 4 million trees’, the brand’s Instagram announces. Doing good through consumption is portrayed as beneficial for the consumer, as it is associated with positivity and happiness:

Happy World Ocean Day! The ocean gives us many mental, physical, and emotional benefits. It is a source of joy and life, which is one of the reasons why we need to do our best to conserve marine resources. What benefits do you feel from being in the ocean?

Comments on the company’s humanitarian achievements accentuate the feeling of pride – ‘we are proud to be B Corp’ Rituals repeats across its website and on social media, referring to its certification by B Corp, which ensures that for-profit companies adhere to certain ethical and social standards.

Rituals’ discourses on philanthropy position the non-West and its subjects as projects for the Western consumer to work on in order to achieve a sense of emotional fulfilment and empowerment. In fact, the problem and trouble of a non-Western realm might even be necessary for the Western consumer to accomplish their self-empowering philanthropic mission. The poverty of Indian women and dwindling mangroves emerge as perpetually troubled sites that present worthy causes for neoliberal ‘wokeness’ (Kanai and Gill, 2020), and call for highly visible displays of philanthropic action. Indeed, in Rituals’ presentation, the trouble of the non-West is shown as perpetual and constant. The shrinking mangroves of Kenya are divorced from larger political factors, climate change and the harming effects of global capitalism. Similarly, the continuous references to ‘women in Mumbai’ as stuck in poverty suggests a problematic vision of Mumbai’s women as one monolithic, depoliticised, ahistorical group, associating them with poverty and disenfranchisement, which can only be battled through the intervention of the Western consumer. On the brand’s social media, images of ‘women in Mumbai’ starkly contrast with representations of Rituals’ consumers, who appear to be predominantly Western, mostly white, women. Indian women are portrayed in a group or at work, whereas photographs of Rituals’ consumers show them in the luxury of their homes, lounging on sofas, lighting candles or using the brand’s products. The contrast between the labour of Indian women and leisure of Western women seems to convey that the women of India are hard-working and therefore their suffering is worthy of compassion and should be alleviated (Boltanski, 1999; Brough, 2012; Chouliaraki, 2021). Rituals is thus engaging in what Luc Boltanski has termed a ‘politics of pity’– a politics that creates a hierarchical dynamic between a sufferer and a benefactor, raising questions about the worthiness of the sufferer and the duty of the benefactor. The ‘duty’ of the benefactor, however, also evokes colonial notions of the ‘white man’s burden’ (Barron, 2009). Helping, for Western consumers, is associated with pleasure and convenience, while for non-Western subjects, receiving help is described as life-changing:

What’s better than a Rituals beach bag? One with an inspiring story! Made in collaboration with Tiny Miracles, a foundation that helps underserved [sic] communities in Mumbai, India become more self-sustainable, you can bring this portable ray of sunshine to the beach with a minimum spend.

These contrasting representations of Indian and Western women on Rituals’ Instagram and website also reinforce the dichotomy between the West and non-West, upholding the association of the West with well-being and comfort, and of the non-West with poverty.

Conclusion

This article has attempted to untangle closely enmeshed narratives within the branding of Rituals, suggesting that the Dutch brand relies on Orientalist narratives as well as neoliberal discourses of self-care and consumer activism to appeal to its consumers. Rituals’ marketing messages reinforce the Orientalist dichotomy between the West and the East, portraying the West as a realm of progress and rationality and offering a melange of vaguely non-Western spiritual references for the use of its customers. The brand’s depictions of non-Western spirituality engage with the legacy of colonial science, ensconcing Orientalist narratives within neoliberal exhortations for emotional self-management and self-care. The brand not only relies on the visual cues of lushness and luxury, evocative of colonial worldviews, for the design of its headquarters and in its social-media curation; it also technologises and modernises the idea of non-Western spirituality. The high-tech gadgets at its Mind Oasis and continuous references to ‘fast and easy’ meditation techniques on its website exemplify attempts to refurbish the spiritual wealth of non-Western cultures for the needs and challenges of the contemporary Western consumer. Such attempts mobilise the dated colonial view of the non-West as a realm of spirituality and conceal the expectation of emotional labour inherent within Rituals’ essentially neoliberal marketing discourses.

While Rituals’ exigencies for self-care and emotional self-vigilance address women, they position Western women consumers ambivalently. On one hand, they are postfeminist subjects in a constant need of self-improvement, navigating the many mental constraints of contemporary existence – the oft-mentioned anxieties, stress or ‘negativity bias’. On the contrary, they are empowered consumers, able to ameliorate the dire misfortunes of the far-flung regions of the global South – the capacity exacerbated through direct social-media appeals to ‘you’, the consumer. These calls to help offer a simplistic association between poverty, trouble and regions located elsewhere – outside the West. They also allude to the pleasure of consumers, suggesting that an enjoyable pastime for Western consumers is capable of improving continuously problematic regions.

Although the branding of Rituals activates a plethora of familiar themes and narratives, which span the repertoires of Orientalism, commodity activism and self-help literature, their juxtaposition produces striking effects. A conjunction with contemporary tropes of commodity activism serves to further normalise and entrench Orientalist stereotypes, whereas allusions to ancient knowledge impart the effect of continuity to contemporary discourses on self-care, making Rituals a spiritual heir to and expert in what is discussed as sacred knowledge. Augmented by the promise of happiness, positivity and well-being, Rituals’ branding serves as a useful example of the persistent appeal of neoliberal and Orientalist discourses alike – but also of their adaptability and continuous evolution. In this sense, this article serves as a timely reminder not only of the all-permeating impact of neoliberalism, but also the ongoing desire for the exotic, which flattens and naturalises economic disparities and cultural hierarchies.