Propositions and performativity: Relocating belief to the social

Abstract

Divergent disciplinary approaches are traced to effect an inter-disciplinary understanding of how scholars in both sociology and anthropology frame their discussions about belief. A preliminary ‘genealogy of belief’ is proposed, tracing epistemological and methodological approaches over the last 200 years showing how some debates presume individual and intellectualist orientations to belief while others favour the collective and emotional. Presenting recent empirical evidence from fieldwork in the UK, the author suggests a ‘performative’ understanding of belief arising from and shaped by social relations.

Keywords:

• belief
• performativity
• performance
• religion
• social

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Simon Coleman, Department of Anthropology, University of Sussex, for his helpful comments and suggestions and to the Economic and Social Research Council, UK, for funding my position and related research costs.

Notes

1. Although popularised by Davie, the term was first coined by Gallup and Jones (1989) to describe a gap between religious belief and practice.

2. Durkheim's insistence that beliefs were generated and reinforced by collective worship was later addressed by Bryan Wilson. Wilson argued there was a causal effect between the transfer of agency from the supernatural to the secular: religious beliefs would decline as religious practices declined, for they would not be reinforced or integrated into people's lives or consciousness. He assumed this was a global process, ‘in which the notion of a world order created by some supernatural agency has given considerable place to an understanding of a man-made and man-centred world’ (2001, 40). David Martin (1978), however, argued that secularisation was neither global nor inevitable.

3. Engelke (2002, 4) suggested that Evans-Pritchard's scientific integrity broke down and took on a theological tinge during his career, as he became increasingly involved in Catholicism.

4. Somewhat confusingly, in 1851, on the same day as the population census was taken, a separate exercise called the Accommodation and Attendance at Worship census was carried out. That census, popularly called ‘the religious census’ asked questions about church attendance, not affiliation.