Philip A. Mellor

Cultures of embodied experience: technology, religion and body pedagogics

Two trends have dominated recent sociological analyses of embodiment. There has, on the one hand, been a proliferation of analyses identifying bodies as the experiential vehicles through which we exist and interact in the world. On the other hand, this has been accompanied by a large growth in studies suggesting that technological advances have both increased our exposure to instrumental rationality and radically weakened the boundaries between humans and machines. Considered together, these trends raise an important question which has, however, been marginalised in the literature: if bodies are increasingly shaped and even constituted by the performative demands and invasive capacities of technology, what implications does this have for our lived experience of ourselves and our social and natural environment? In addressing this issue, our paper revisits Heideggers discussion of the technological ‘enframing’ of humans and asks two questions. First, what have we lost experientially by being positioned as a ‘standing reserve’ for technologically driven demands for efficiency in contemporary society? Second, can the analysis of religious attempts to reframe human experience provide us with a perspective from outside this technological culture that enables us to appreciate the embodied experiences, dispositions and potentialities of humans in fresh ways? Our approach to these issues proceeds via a comparative study of the ‘body pedagogics’ of modern technological culture and two, very different, religious cultures.

Body pedagogics and the religious habitus: A new direction for the sociological study of religion

Abstract Sociological theory has been central to the modern study of religion. In the face of the global resurgence of religious phenomena, however, and the challenge this has presented for the assumptions that characterised much twentieth century sociology, there is a need for new theoretical models to make sense of religion today. This paper contributes to this task by building upon Durkheims suggestion that religious social facts become fully efficacious only when internalised, and Luhmanns interest in sociological manifestations of ‘transcendence’ and ‘immanence’, in order to analyse religion as a thoroughly embodied phenomenon that can be understood through the study of religious body pedagogics. Having outlined the key steps involved in the analysis of body pedagogics, we illustrate the utility of this realist framework through an ideal-typical representation of Christianity and Islam and reflect, via a consideration of several objections that could be directed towards it, upon how this approach can deal with the complexities and contingencies of contemporary religion. In conclusion, it is suggested that this systematic body pedagogic focus on embodied commonalities and differences across diverse religious contexts offers a valuable basis upon which to engage critically with religion today.

Retheorising Emile Durkheim on society and religion: embodiment, intoxication and collective life

In this paper we argue that Emile Durkheims sociology contains within it a theory of society and religion as a form of embodied intoxication that is implicit in his writings on effervescent assemblies but has not yet been explicated or developed fully by subsequent commentators. This holds that for social or religious collectivities to exist, the bodies of individuals must be both marked by insignia, customs and techniques that facilitate the possibility of culturally normative patterns of recognition, interaction and action, while also being excited, enthused or intoxicated sufficiently to be inhabited as collective rather than egoistic beings. Our paper begins by investigating the central features of Durkheims theory – including his interest in the ritual steering of these processes – as developed most fully in his last major study, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. We then develop our own analysis of Durkheims concern that modernity has stimulated a rise in ‘abnormal’ forms of embodied intoxication that fail to attach individuals to the wider societies in which they live, and demonstrate the utility of our analytical framework by employing it to assess the recent resurgence of charismatic Christian revivalism.

Reflexive Traditions: Anthony Giddens, High Modernity, and the Contours of Contemporary Religiosity

The following discussion is an attempt to make an initial assessment of the value to Religious Studies of certain aspects of the social theory of Anthony Giddens. I suggest that debates centred on the nature of ‘high’ or ‘late’ modernity have substantial implications for the study of contemporary religion. The theoretical work of Giddens encourages us to reconsider the nature of ‘tradition’ as it is expressed and deployed in modern religious contexts. He notes the centrality of ‘reflexivity’ in modernity and suggests that traditions which have passed through the reflexive filterings and critical questions of modernity should be called ‘sham traditions’. In the following discussion I explore this argument, and outline the potential value of a great deal of it to the scholar of contemporary religion. Nevertheless, I also suggest that we should talk not of ‘sham’ traditions but merely of ‘reflexive’ ones. I argue that the incorporation of modern reflexivity into religious traditions does not mean that they become false representations of traditions which have, in actuality, been discarded. On the contrary, I suggest that reflexive traditions can provide new, dynamic forms for the expression and development of religion within the context of high modernity. In the course of this discussion, I hope to establish the value of the term ‘reflexive traditions’ for scholars of modern religion.

Protestant Buddhism?: The cultural translation of Buddhism in England

Abstract The adoption of Buddhist religious forms by English people does not entail such a radical break with western structures and influences as has often been envisaged. Individuals may take personal decisions to become Buddhists, but Christian discourses and forms of life continue to have an observable influence on English Buddhism. The significance of the person is a useful point at which to begin assessing these continuities between English Buddhism and other cultural trends. Such continuities pose theoretical and methodological questions concerning the approach to Buddhism in religious studies. In studying its development in England ‘Buddhism’ becomes a problematic category for the analyst, rather than a label for a readily identifiable phenomenon of eastern origin which has merely been transferred into a western context.

Sociology and the Problem of Eroticism

Sociology has traditionally been concerned with problems of social order and meaning, and with how modern societies confronted these challenges when religion was in apparent decline, yet classical sociologists struggled to reconcile within their analyses the (dis)ordering and meaningful potentialities of eroticism. This ar ticle examines how eroticism has been viewed as a source of life-affirming meanings and as personally and socially destructive. Utilizing the contrasting theories of Weber and Bataille, we explore sociology’s ambivalence towards eroticism, and criticize contemporary sociological approaches to the subject, before turning to the writings of Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva for alternative models of the religiously informed eroticization of daily life. The perspectives these French theorists bring to the subject, and the issues that remain unresolved in their work, identify new lines of inquiry and re-emphasize the importance of building a sociology of eroticism that can address adequately its relationship to questions of order and meaning.

Orientalism, representation and religion: The reality behind the myth

Abstract Saids Orientalism has been called an ‘epoch-making’ and ‘paradigm constitutive’ book. While it undoubtedly caused a stir on its appearance and proved an important influence upon post-colonial studies and other developments in literary and cultural theory, a careful re-reading of it reveals a deeply flawed work that offers a confused analysis of human representations and realities, a highly selective and partial engagement with Western and Middle Eastern history and scholarship, and a particularly unhelpful approach to religion. The argument offered here is that Saids claims about ‘Orientalism’ are actually incoherent, veering between Foucauldian social constructionism and references to trans-cultural human realities; that the theoretical approaches to religion are inconsistent and highly selective; that the account of human agency is entirely inadequate; and that, although Said condemns entire generations of Orientalist scholars as racist, imperialist and ethnocentric, he is insufficiently reflective about his own scholarly position and the implications of its inconsistencies. Although Orientalism has been hailed as a book that ‘breathed insurgency’, it actually offers a vision of human beings as remarkably powerless in the face of arbitrary and abstract discourses that define their lives as oppressors or oppressed. Said sought to demonstrate that the reality behind the myth of scholarly impartiality was a racist and ethnocentric exercise of control and authority over the Orient, but the reality behind the myth of Orientalism is a theoretically flawed work offering a reductive account of religion and an impoverished view of human beings.

Rational Choice or Sacred Contagion? “Rationality”, “Non-rationality” and Religion

Drawing from the utilitarian tradition of economics to propose the leanest formal theoretical models for sociology, “rational choice theory” rejects the Durkheimian interest in society as a reality transcendent of the individual in favour of a revitalization of individualist and rationalist conceptualizations of social order. This theory has, arguably, had one of its strongest substantive applications within the sociology of religion, though Durkheims focus on the idea that religion is an elementary part of the collective constitution of societies is rejected in favour of the view that religion is just one of many products that can be consumed by individuals as they seek to satisfy their self-interests. In this paper, the fundamentally non-social character of the rational choice approach is examined. Through an examination of the difficulties surrounding the notion of “rationality” and the residual category of the “non-rational” in rational choice models, it will be suggested that it is a reassessment of the Durkheimian tradition rather than a revival of rationalistic utilitarianism that provides a more valuable theoretical direction for the future development of the sociology of religion.

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

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.

Self and Suffering: Deconstruction and Reflexive Definition in Buddhism and Christianity

In a study of the religious significance of food to medieval woman, Caroline Walker Bynum argues that the ascetic practices embraced by these women are signs of a commitment to explore the religious potentialities of the body rather than being indications of a hostile attitude to the flesh. She comments that belief in the ‘salvific potential of suffering flesh (both ours and Gods)’ differentiates Christianity from other world religions, since it is a ‘characteristically Christian idea that the bodily suffering of one person can be substituted for the suffering of another through prayer, purgatory, vicarious communion etc….’ In the discussion which follows I shall attempt to draw out this differentiating characteristic in a comparative study of Christian and Buddhist concepts of, and attitudes to, suffering. I shall suggest that the divergent orientations which structure the religious treatment of this issue are related not only to radically opposing conceptions of the religious ‘path’, but also to different understandings of ‘self’. Although the categories ‘self’ and ‘suffering’ are intimately related in each context, it is my contention that in the Christian context the religious meaning of life becomes apparent to the individual in so far as the content of self is defined progressively in the reflexive encounter with the ‘Other’ (God), an encounter which can be facilitated through suffering. In a Buddhist context, on the other hand, it is precisely such a reflexivity (between self and ‘others’ if not the ‘Other’) which is understood to create and reproduce both self and suffering, and from which the Buddhist desires liberation.