Observant participant: carnal sociology and researcher identity in religious educational spaces

ABSTRACT

The ethnographer’s embodied action during research is a complex of habit, belief, social and institutional positioning, and intention. This article examines what urban anthropologist Wacqaunt calls ‘carnal sociology’ and considers its implications for ethnographers of religious educational spaces. Contemporary ethnographers of education have renewed their interest in religious educational spaces—religious schools, houses of worship, public festivals. In conducting research in the field of religious education, ethnographers often cross familiar and unfamiliar boundaries, engaging in forms of participant observation and practice beyond their own religious categories: we research in religious spaces and with religious communities different from our own commitments. Drawing on interactional data from a multi-year ethnography of an urban Catholic school and parish in Philadelphia (USA), I consider how my own embodied participation in the religious rituals of the school and parish led to a reflexivity on practice, and initiated institutional and youth-driven social positioning in response.

KEYWORDS:

• Embodiment
• reflexivity
• catholic schooling
• America
• ethnography

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Robert Jean LeBlanc http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7551-9286

Notes

1 All names are pseudonyms.

2 Bourdieu’s critical sociology draws clear parallels between religious institutions and practice and the function of schooling, what his translator Richard Nice (1976) calls ‘the structural homology between the school system and the Church’ (xxiii). Bourdieu and Passeron (1994) draw the metaphor tighter and expound on the teacher as ‘priest,’ the monopoly holder of the ‘goods of salvation’ who teaches/preaches to a ‘congregation of confirmed believers’ (63), and suggest the ‘Catholic tradition’ offers the ‘paradigmatic expression of the relation between the [religious] office-holder and the pedagogic office’ (64). Beyond Bourdieu’s obvious figurative deployment of religious imagery (‘the transubstantiation of power relations’, 15), he draws extensively on Weber’s classic triad of prophet, priest, and magician— ‘Weber’s political economy of religion’ (1990a, 36)—as the constitutive foundation of his expansive critical sociology of positioning within fields of power, expanding Weber’s notion of religious interests all cultural activity (1977, 1998). For Bourdieu’s articulation of his Weberian religious roots, see 1987, 1990a, 1991, 2000, 2010; for uptake in the sociology of religion, see Rey 2007; Swartz, 1996.

3 Wacquant’s academic trajectory holds these two concerns in vital tension, as he was a student of both French critical sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and American urbanist William Julius Wilson, wherein he was able to conjoin these two perspectives for an account of the production of the ‘urban underclass’ (Wacquant 2007) as both material and symbolic.

4 It is in these types of proclamations that Wacquant shows his Bourdieusian roots as a Durkheimian revisionist, centering ritual and practiced movement as a necessity for producing an intangible group solidarity.

5 The study of the materiality of religion—what Vasquez (2012) calls ‘insurgent materialist countercurrents … that have short-circuited the temptation toward idealism, subjectivism, essentialism, and transcendence in religious studies’ (4)—is obviously an ancient concern (one need only browse Augustine) which periodically resurfaces with vigor. Presently, Western religious scholars have turned their attention back to the body in light of postcolonial, feminist, and cognitive scientific (including cognitive linguistic) provocations, as well as a certain uncomfortableness with the claims of rational choice theorists and evolutionary biologists as to questions of human agency (cf., Smith 2003). However, unlike the phenomenological theologies and religious studies of the 1960s, which sought universalist understandings of ‘religious phenomena’, contemporary materialist conceptions of religion work toward the particular as a necessary corrective against narrow Western accounts claiming to speak for all. Scholars working in postcolonial, feminist, and African American theological traditions, for example, have simultaneously embraced a range of disciplinary tools and re-narrated their own theological accounts of practices, narratives, ritual, and politics (cf., Althaus-Reid 2000; Asad 1993; Jennings 2011).

6 For a robust anthropological account of modern issues of Protestant ‘sincerity’, see Keane 2002.

7 The contemporary Catholic Order of Mass, or liturgy (literally, ‘the work of the people’), is nearly identical to the high Lutheran liturgy (typically found in services of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, the largest Lutheran body in North America) in form: entrance procession, greetings, blessing, kyrie, gloria, opening prayer, scripture readings, Gospel acclamation, Gospel reading, homily, profession of faith (reciting the Creed), prayers of the faithful/people, presentation of the gifts/preparation of the altar, prayer over gifts, Eucharistic prayer, Lord’s Prayer, sign of peace, breaking of the bread, communion, prayer after communion, blessing, dismissal, recessional (USCCB 2011).