Cigarette abandonment and rituals: understading smoking cessation symbolism

Abstract

Giving up smoking benefits smokers’ health and increasing the smoking cessation rate can save many lives. Several advances have been made in understand the impact of pharmacotherapies and media campaigns on smoking cessation, however, most of these studies concentrate on the physical or cognitive aspects. In consumption studies, very little attention has been focused on investigating abandonment and, more specifically, its symbolic dimension. The present study aims to investigate meanings that motivate and arise from the abandonment of cigarettes. To do this, it uses rituals as a conceptual vehicle to understand the experience of smoking and giving up cigarettes. This study used a qualitative methodology to collect and analyze the data generated by one-on-one semistructured in-depth interviews with 15 Brazilian ex-smokers. The analysis suggests that rather than being a discrete event, an action or decision that is circumscribed by a given moment, abandonment is in fact a process. Results suggests that ex-smokers undertake a wide range of actions that serve as rituals capable of individually and socially creating and negotiating meanings of order, transformation and community, where abandonment the abandonment of cigarettes can be offered as a connection, gift, sacrifice that make relations special and even magical.