Everyday religion and embodied practice

Sociology of religion has uncritically accepted, for its conception of “religion,” definitional boundaries that were the historical results of centuries-long political struggles in both the Catholic and Protestant churches over profoundly contested meanings. Notions of sacred space and sacred time, miracle, magic, and religious power  were hotly contested, yet many of those notions still hold some salience for religious individuals, long after authorities have denounced them as error.  One of the key definitional changes distinguishing “official religion” (in Western Christianity) was giving primacy to belief (over practice). A concomitant change was to make sacred and profane dichotomous, privileging the spiritual realm (as sacred) over the material (denigrated as profane), and treating the human body as profane and an obstacle to the spiritual. Sociology should find ways to understand religion without adopting such a culturally and historical narrow (indeed theologically biased) definitional starting point.

 If we want to understand the full range of religion as practiced and experienced by ordinary people in the context of their everyday lives, we need to be aware of how people’s religious and spiritual expressions engage their material bodies and address their material concerns. We need to take seriously not merely the packages of religious narratives supplied by institutions but –more important—the myriad individual ways by which people remember, share, enact, adapt, create and combine the “stories” out of which they live.  I use the concept of “embodied practices” to emphasize those ritual and expressive activities through which spiritual meanings and understandings are embedded in and accomplished through the body (e.g., bodily senses, postures, gestures, and movements).   I illustrate using two sets of examples of embodied religious/spiritual practices:  practices around growing, preparing, and eating food, and practices of dancing and singing together.