Body, Ritual and Religious Taste

The concept of ‘taste’ plays almost no role in sociology of religion. One cannot find any link between ‘taste’ and religion, neither in classical nor in modern sociological theory. The main reason is that sociology of religion, established under the viewpoint of Christian culture in the Occident, often overemphasizes the role of ‘belief’ and downplays ‘ritual.’ Ritual is, in a broader sense, the process of bodily manipulation, wherein habitus, taste, disposition and embodiment matter. In this paper I would like to discuss what religious taste is and explain why it matters by referring to the context of popular religion in Taiwan. Taiwanese popular religion is characterized by ritualism, which creates one other picture about ‘religion’ than those proposed in sociology of religion. Although the topics like ritual practice, embodiment etc. applied in religious issues, have been more discussed and developed in the discipline of anthropology, this paper aims to show why and how the issues of religious taste and embodiment are relevant in the sociological research of religion.