Coconut Oil Reflects: A Comparative Commodity Ethnography In Two Sites

Abstract

<p>Coconut oil is a product saturated with multifaceted meaning. Coconut Oil Reflects examines the meanings coconut oil conveys to its consumers and explores what these meanings reveal about the different political and sociocultural contexts in which these consumers live. This comparative commodity ethnography investigates the spiritual, symbolic and material power coconut oil currently holds. In this thesis, I situate coconut oil in indigenous myths and rituals, and explore how it serves as a spiritual medium between diasporic Pacific Islander consumers now and the ancestors who came before us. I question the objectified value of the product in Pacific rituals and probe at intra-Pacific debates regarding what makes a ritual sacred. I explore how mythic representations of Pacific bodies are implicated in coconut oil marketing material and used to encourage majority non-Pacific consumers living in the industrialized West to reclaim their own senses of a ‘lost’ embodied indigenous self. This discussion prompts larger considerations of health, health authority, health autonomy, and symbolic anti-institutional capital. Finally, I explore how coconut oil acquisition binds Islanders to transregional indigenous systems of reciprocity, as well as how Western consumers use coconut oil as a way to acquire social status in alternative subcultural fields. Coconut oil is a product with boundless social lives (Appadurai, 1986); this thesis explores several through a multisited, mixed-methods approach. I draw on data collected from coconut oil-related discourse analysis, over five hundred online survey responses, and forty-four in-person interviews with Pacific Islander, Māori and non-Pacific participants living in the San Francisco Bay Area, United States and the Wellington Region, Aotearoa New Zealand. By employing a Pacific studies approach, this research project guides readers through complex worlds in which coconut oil holds different forms of political, spiritual and sociocultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986). Coconut Oil Reflects gives the product a voice to share the abundance of stories it tells.</p>