Lived religion and the religious field

ABSTRACT

In the study of lived religion, the focus on laypeople as religious agents can result in the simplistic juxtaposition of religion-as-practised by individuals and religion-as-prescribed by institutions. This perspective leads to analyses that over-emphasize agency and overlook the embeddedness of religious persons in intricate power relations that expand beyond the institution(s) closest to them. I propose that Pierre Bourdieu’s social theory, particularly as related to the religious field, offers tools for tackling this issue. While Bourdieu’s work has been criticized for relegating the laity to the status of passive consumers of religious goods, his theorizations can also be employed to produce nuanced micro-level accounts that prioritize laypeople’s practical knowledge of the field and the positions they take within it. Based on my case study of older Finnish women’s normative assessments related to religion, I demonstrate how scholars can investigate the role which their informants’ histories and investments within the religious field play in their religion-as-lived. The women in my study, lifelong members of Orthodox or Lutheran churches, defended their positions in the increasingly individualistic Finnish religious field through an emphasis on childhood socialization as the foundation of ‘proper’ religion.

KEYWORDS:

• habitus
• capital
• generation
• normativity
• tradition
• Finland

Acknowledgments

The author warmly thanks the anonymous referees of the Journal of Contemporary Religion, the editor Dr Elisabeth Arweck as well as Associate Professor Kim Knibbe for their valuable insights and comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In constructing his concept of field, Bourdieu relied heavily on Max Weber’s sociology of religion, particularly his theorization of the relations between priests, prophets, and magicians (Dianteill 2003, 530, 535–536).

2. Generally speaking, fields can relate to each other both horizontally and vertically and have varying degrees of autonomy (Krause 2018, 8–13). For example, in applications of Bourdieu’s concept of field to research on religion, scholars sometimes postulate the existence of several intertwining religious fields: national religious fields, transnational tradition-specific religious fields, and tradition-specific sub-fields of national fields (e.g. McKinnon, Trzebiatowska, and Brittain 2011). In addition, religious fields are connected in different ways to other fields such as those of economy, politics, and cultural production (e.g. Verter 2003). According to Bourdieu, however, the relations between fields vary too much, depending on the historical context to be translated into universal principles (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 109–110).

3. Both the recorded interviews and the written submissions are archived in the Folklore Archives of the Finnish Literature Society.

4. To protect the interviewees’ anonymity, their names have been changed. All interview extracts have been translated from the Finnish by the author.

5. While, during the first post-war decades, the trend of conversion was from Orthodoxy to Lutheranism, since the late 1970s, the number of individuals joining the Orthodox Church of Finland has exceeded that of those leaving it (Martikainen and Laitila 2014, 163). Many converts have Orthodox ancestry, as would have been the case of Toini’s daughter.

6. Nevertheless, when conversion to Orthodoxy first became a noticeable phenomenon in the Finnish religious field, leading Orthodox clergy issued statements emphasizing the equal worth of the convictions of converts compared to those of the ‘cradle’ Orthodox (e.g. Archbishop Paavali 1980). From this perspective, my interviewees’ comments can also be read as a departure from the public discourse of the church.

Additional information

Funding

The writing of this article was supported by the Academy of Finland.

Notes on contributors

Helena Kupari

Helena Kupari is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Cultures in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Her research interests include Orthodox Christianity in Finland, gender, ethnicity, embodiment, social memory, and theories of practice. She is the author of Lifelong Religion as Habitus: Religious Practice among Displaced Karelian Orthodox Women in Finland (2016). CORRESPONDENCE: Study of Religions, University of Helsinki, Finland, PO Box 59, Unioninkatu 38, FI-00014 Helsinki, Finland.