Re-conceptualising the religious habitus: Reflexivity and embodied subjectivity in global modernity

Abstract

The utility of the notion of the religious habitus rests on its capacity to illuminate how embodied dispositions emergent from routinised practices come to be socially and culturally significant. This has been called into question, however, by global changes that undermine the societal stability and personal habits on which it is often understood to rely, stimulating instead reflexive engagements with change. After assessing conventional conceptions of the religious habitus vulnerable to such criticism, we utilise the writings of Latour in developing a new understanding of the term. Re-conceptualising the religious habitus as something reflexively re-made or instaured, through the cultivation of a subjectivity that locates human action, feeling and thought at the embodied intersection of worldly and other-worldly realities, we illustrate the value of this approach with reference to contemporary Pentecostalism and Islam.

Keywords::

• habitus
• reflexivity
• embodiment
• Pentecostalism
• Islamic piety

Notes

^1. What is at question here is not the viability of forms of habitus relative to processes of ‘reflexive modernisation’, wherein individualism becomes more prominent as religious traditions (and socio-cultural structures more broadly) dissolve into ‘liquidity’, but their viability in a context where mutually reinforcing cultural and socio-structural changes continually confront individuals with novel circumstances, necessitating highly reflexive internal conversations about alternative courses of action (Archer 2012, 1–5; see Giddens 1991; Beck 1992).

^2. Bourdieu's (1999) The Weight of the World maps empirically the self-consciousness and internal struggles experienced by his respondents, but these features are never incorporated analytically in the form of causal mechanisms into the heart of his core theoretical framework.

^3. Bourdieu (1987, 1991) developed the concept of field through a creative engagement with Weber's sociology of religion. Fields, in religion or elsewhere in society, constitute a set of organising principles, maintained by social groups and their representatives (with priests and prophets key to the religious field), that identify, delineate and bestow value upon particular categories of social practices. Forms of habitus are developed, deployed and recognised as possessing value within these fields, while struggles internal to fields provide Bourdieu's framework with a degree of dynamism (Bourdieu 1984; Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). Nevertheless, while Bourdieu asserts the facts of change in his analysis, the close fit that exists in his theoretical formulations between habitus and field render problematic the existence of motivations for struggle and other mechanisms that would actually accomplish this.

^4. It was Aristotle's (2000) notion of hexis, referring to an acquired moral character able to direct an individual's feelings, desires and actions as a result of habituation, that was first translated into Latin as ‘habitus’. Aquinas' later utilisation of it in Christian theology conceived it in similar terms and thus, contrary to Bourdieu's later account, as a medium for overcoming ‘unthinking habit’ by placing ‘one's activity under more control than it might otherwise be’, ensuring that deliberative choices for the good become dispositions towards the good (Davies 2003, 124–5). This utilisation was mirrored in medieval Islamic thought, from the eleventh century, by such figures as Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, al-Miskawayh, Ibn Rush and Ibn Khaldun, who explored the importance of regularised habits in Muslim life (Mahmood 2005). For Muslim writers, the malaka approximated to the habitus in building within the individual a faith affirming quality and character, deriving from scrutiny, disciplined practices and the emotions and experiences that follow from these (Lapidus 1984, 55–6; Mahmood 2005, 137).

^5. Bourdieu's general conception of the habitus also recognises reflexivity as the particular dispositions developed within the scientific and academic fields, but these are procedural requirements limited to those operating within these occupational milieu (Adams 2006).

^6. The roots of these changes are deeply embedded. In the Christian West, for example, there were from the early modern era challenges to the ecclesiastical authority of the Catholic Church from the growth of Protestant sects as individuals could, at least in principle, choose between competing paths to religious truth. Nevertheless, recent issues regarding the proliferation and credibility of religious authority have moved centre stage at a time when political changes, new technologies and modes of intervening in and extending the life and reproductive capacities of human bodies have flourished like never before. In the case of Islam, for example, Turner, Possamai, and Barbarlet (2009, 14) suggest that contemporary social media have created a situation in which ‘almost any local teacher or mullah can issue a fatwa to guide a local community by setting himself up with his own blog' (see also Herbert 2011).

^7. Archer's (1995, 285; 2012) validation of reflexivity does not suggest there is a single, neutral mode of engaging in contemplative deliberation about one's priorities and place in the world. In order to place her analysis on firm foundations, however, she builds on Kant's presumption that there exists a continuity of consciousness among humans, whereby the embodied self is aware of being the same person over time and exists as a locus wherein experience is registered and becomes a focus for expectations. Not all philosophers share this position, but neither is it hostile to the recognition of cultural or religious differences between people. Mauss' (1985, 3) anthropological investigations into the widely contrasting conceptions of personhood formed cross-culturally over time, for example, were underpinned by the insistence that humans have always had an awareness of possessing an embodied existence and self that was irreducible to the community or tribe of which they were members. As Archer (1995) explains, such awareness is in fact a precondition of being able to fulfill roles in even the most traditional collectivity, but also underpins the reflexivity that has become an essential element to surviving and prospering within a contemporary milieu characterised by fast-paced change.

^8. Such arguments are reinforced by analyses of the spread of Pentecostalism in Africa in which a focus on individuals scrutinising their lives and cultivating habits of success, righteousness and the avoidance of secular entertainments has been conjoined to the building of religious communities that have mediated the production and circulation of wealth (e.g. Maxwell 1998; Haynes 2012). Similar points have also been made for Pentecostalism in milieu as different as the USA, Sweden and Brazil, providing evidence for the existence of a Protestant habitus wherein individuals are drawn out of society into a transcendence-oriented, moral community, but also one in which body, economy and religion become intimately related, since the disciplined body becomes a moral exemplar for society at large (Comaroff and Comaroff 1999, 2000; Coleman 2000; Martin 2005; Haynes 2012).

^9. The piety movement forms part of the larger Islamic Revival or Islamic Awakening that has pervaded the Muslim world since the 1970s. Those active in it seek to inform their actions and society ‘with a regulative sensibility that takes its cue from the Islamic theological corpus rather than from modern secular ethics’ (Mahmood 2005, 2, 42–3, 47). This is not a matter of following traditional habits, but of ‘honing one's rational and emotional capacities so as to approximate the exemplary model of the pious self’ based upon the conduct of the Prophet and his Companions (Mahmood 2005, 31).