A Sense of Belonging: Religious Ritual in Sensory Narrative

What roles do the senses play in participant understandings of experience? Beyer (2016), McGuire (2016), and notable others have called for a more thorough investigation of the senses in religious lives. Examining narratives from interviews, this paper investigates ways often inchoate moments of sensory experience impacted feelings of membership or solitude. Examining sound, sight, and the haptic moments where individuals talk about sensations that are “off” or “wrong” emerged as key clues to points where ritual and individual failed to connect. In this paper, I argue that sensory experiences are strongly shaped through experience and play a major role in the efficacy of ritual experience. I also examine the ways in which the physical and bodily engagement of the individual in co-production of these sensory moments impacts their efficacy. Additionally, I raise questions about the manner in which individuals address these sensory moments, and the role of the less addressed senses such as perioperception in narratives of experience.