Jesus in Our Wombs: Embodying Modernity in a Mexican Convent
... The same is true of passions, which I believe are the pursuit, purposive or not, of embodied and cognitive pleasures related to learning, mastery, and discipline. Research on Olympic swimmers (Chambliss 1989) and nascent nuns (Lester 2005), for instance, reveals the pleasure actors get from mundane activities that require repetition, narrow attention, and the channeling of desire into practice and discipline that make them passionate agents attuned to their bodies and social spaces. Again, passions, like desires, translate into affective motives propelling action but fall under the general rubric of seeking. ...
... our passions [and make them our] ultimate goal to tame" (Winchester 2016:596). Nuns, for example, do not rid themselves of lust or desire but are compelled to channel these affects into the discipline found in their vows and in the quotidian work demanded by the convent (Lester 2005). ...
A central issue in sociology concerns motivation. Generally, sociologists have followed Mills’s lead in emphasizing motive-talk, or post hoc explanations, over the “springs” of action themselves. Drawing from the interdisciplinary science of motivation, this article argues that we can tease motives apart from motive-talk by incorporating the affective disposition to seek into a theory of motivation. Seeking involves three dissociable phases—wanting, liking, and learning—each of which is intrinsically pleasurable. This suggests three things. First, mundane activities related to anticipation or learning are affective in nature. Second, not only does each phase of seeking involve different motives, but also, any given phase contains sequences of activities, likely indicating mixed motives. And third, people commit to routines and roles not because of their habits or automatic cognition but because of the affective urgency and expectation they feel in their bodies. Implications for the sociological literature on pleasure and for a sociology of motivation are discussed.
... When we refer to embodiment, we have in mind what Rebecca Lester (2005: 45-46) has described as "the articulation between cultural processes concerned with the body and the subjective experience of that body as a source of personal meaning." That the body is a rich site for expressing and experiencing forms of devotion, labor, discipline, and divine power in Christian communities has been widely established (Csordas 2002;Griffith 2004;Lester 2005;Klassen 2011;Casselberry 2017). Embodiment in Christian communities concerns issues of race, gender, class, nationalism, sexuality, disability, postcolonialism, illness, and much more, or attention to how "control of the body is always already a site of struggle in social conflict and political negotiations" (Covington-Ward 2016: 9, original italics). ...
... A range of physical and material processes characterize reading, from the sensory dimensions of seeing and handling a text, through the way reading requires occupying space in a room alone or with others, to the influence of the reader's embodied subject position on how the text can be used. Reading's corporeality can also emerge as an explicit object of analysis, such as when Christian texts instruct readers about suffering bodies or bodies to be saved, worked upon, cared for, or made healthy, strong, or desirable (McDannell 1995;Griffith 2004;Lester 2005). These approaches demonstrate elements of what Thomas Csordas (2002: 244) has termed "somatic modes of attention," or a focus on "culturally elaborated ways of attending to and with one's body in surroundings that include the embodied presence of others." ...
What do Christians do when they read? How can Christian reading be understood anthropologically? Anthropologists of Christianity have offered many ethnographic descriptions of the interplay among people, words, and material objects across Christian groups, but descriptions of Christian reading have often posited an androgynous reader. In response to this we begin from the observation that while reading cannot be done without words, it also cannot be done without a body. We propose that an analytic approach of placing language and materiality (including bodies) together will help clarify that reading texts is an embodied practice, while not undermining the importance of working with words. We draw inspiration from the recent interest in bringing linguistic anthropology and materiality studies together into the same analytic frame of “language materiality.” We explore a language-materiality approach to reading by comparing how the biblical story of Mary and Martha was read by Protestant women in two historical situations: 1920s Norway and the 1950s United States. We argue that in these cases the readers’ gendered, raced, and classed bodies were central to the activity of reading texts, including their bodies’ material engagements with the world, such as carrying out women's work. We suggest that paying attention to embodied reading—that is, readers’ social entanglements with both language and materiality—yields a fuller analysis of what reading is in particular historical situations, and ultimately questions the notion of a singular Protestant semiotic ideology that works consistently toward purification.
... As many anthropologists have shown, religious learning and identification often take place via communal bodily practices (Boddy 1994;Corwin 2012;Lester 2005;Luhrmann 2004;Masquelier 2019). Becoming a member of a new community often involves unlearning the interpretations and habitus acquired in previous communities as well as learning new "socio-culturally organized corporeal arrangements" (Ochs, Solomon, and Sterponi 2005, 556). ...
... If you are not the khatib, keep your comments brief and give others who have not spoken a chance to speak if you wish to contribute more than once." But including actual, literal voices-vocalization and hearing as bodily experience (Lester 2005)-is equally important, especially as linked to gender. Among moreconservative Muslims, a woman's voice is considered part of her 'awrah (nakedness), "that which should be concealed in public" (Hoel 2013, 31), treated similarly to her physical body. ...
In contemporary North American Muslim congregations involved in the “progressive Muslim movement,” prayer practices rework tradition in recognizably Muslim ways while nevertheless differing markedly from those of most mosques. Ethnographic description and participant narratives shed light on the process through which intercorporeality impacts interpretation of Islamic gender norms, outlining the connections among epicene prayer space, bodily proximity, multivocality, and multicorporeality in creating support for feminist and queer religious interpretations and solidarity with marginalized others. Interreligious critiques of such nonconformist approaches have tended to treat nonconformist Muslims as inappropriately concerned with individual liberties or as individual activists seeking media attention. Attention to alterity in context, however, demonstrates that alternative understandings develop not from individual beliefs, practices, or desires but rather through somatic practice within a community of like‐minded co‐religionists learning new habits through intercorporeality. [progressive Muslims, performativity, congregational prayer, intercorporeality and embodiment, sexual diversity and gender variance]
... Pitt-Rivers (2011). 9 Edwards and McIvor (2022); Lester (2005); Mahadev (2019); Tateo (2019). 10 ...
This article examines the involvement of Catholic missionaries in mediating the socio-environmental conflicts arising from oil extraction in the Northern Ecuadorian Amazon. Drawing on a 13-month ethnographic study and archival research, it investigates how missionaries navigate marginality areas where state practices are both constructed and deconstructed through informal and illegal practices. The analysis foregrounds the mediatory role of missionaries between local communities, the state, and oil corporations, dwelling on the theological drivers of their interventions in political arenas. Using the conceptual lens of theopolitics, my analysis of practices of missionisation argues for a de-secularisation of politics, highlighting the co-constitution of missionisation and state governance in marginal and contested regions.
... Both Lester (2005) and Naumescu (2012) focus on the formation of novices, whose training in prayer is linked to the cultivation of discipline in relation to a spiritual director. 14 We see self-scrutiny and sense awareness within the framework of institutional authority. ...
Though monastic life is often imagined to be a flight from the world, Benedictine monks take on the intense social commitment of life in close community. Drawing on long-term anthropological fieldwork in a Catholic English Benedictine monastery, this book traces the monks’ daily lives as they confront the eternal in the fabric of the everyday.
Bringing into focus the vow of stability – a lifelong commitment to the monastery and its community – this ethnography explores the rhythms and architecture that sustain shared life in a world of movement and fleeting interaction. At the same time, it analyses those social processes that damage and undermine the monastic institution and those in contact with it – in particular the harm caused by sexual abuse.
Engaging with the everyday dynamics of life in close community while paying close attention to the time-depth of monastic history, this is a study of how religious institutions endure and change through generations.
... While the examination of conscience makes a person feel her singularity, convent life also requires religious to subsume their individualities to a common purpose, which is scaffolded by a set of rules. A practice amongst PRR nuns, the examination of conscience also features in Rebecca Lester's (2005) moving account of postulants in a Mexican convent. Self-examination tears at them, as they realize how weak they are, how far from perfect. ...
What if we took trauma to be a fundamental aspect of human existence? Prominent in some strands of popular psychology, this is also the stance taken by an eastern Indonesian order of Catholic nuns who “dig up” their hearts as part of a continual process of self‐formation. Set against a backdrop of Christian theologies of discernment, state concerns for human development, and local resonances of ritual sacrifice, nuns learn to interpret their childhoods as harmed by emotional trauma sustained in the company of kin. Once excavated, this trauma must be addressed in the convent through conscious efforts of mutual care, making trauma a moral category that creates new forms of subjectivity. Through acts of acknowledgment and support, the idiom of trauma makes the company surrounding a nun directly responsible for her self‐formation. This article is about the ways Indonesian Catholic nuns conceptualize trauma as something that all humans sustain, how it grounds self‐becoming, and how its causes—and cures—are rooted in the company of other people. I suggest that their experiences highlight the sociality of trauma more broadly and argue that trauma is one articulation of how people become themselves in the company of others.
... Berliner and Sarró 2007), but is less often directly addressed. 5 Two classic anthropological research fields in which beginner learning is heavily involved are training for specialist roles such as a medium, witch, or religious, and initiation or recruitment into closed groups such as esoteric or extremist organizations (Cejvan 2023;Kenney 2017;Lester 2005;Luhr mann 1989;Merriam, Courtenay and Baum gartner 2003). Religious converts are another prototypical example of beginners. ...
In this article, we explore the learning of newcomers in a religious community through a micro-sociological approach, making use of Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger’s (1991) notion of “legitimate peripheral participation” to conceptualize initial stages of inclusion and involvement in social practice. Our case study concerns Orthodox Christianity and is based on material gathered through fieldwork in a course targeting potential new members organized by a Finnish Orthodox parish. In the analysis, we inquire into how beginners learn skilful participation in Orthodox liturgical life, and specifically embodied ritual conduct. This learning takes place primarily through participation in real-life divine services. The article highlights challenges faced by beginners in acquiring the embodied repertoire of Orthodox ritual, including adapting to the artistic use of ritual gestures, and negotiating the meanings produced through them. Furthermore, it also illustrates how nuanced dynamics between newcomers and old-timers influence the learning process.
... One may also point to the study by Lester (2005), however the topics of gender and sexuality are not central there. 2 For other articles that propose the lived-religion approach to the study of religious life, see (Sadlon and Jewdokimow 2021). ...
In late modernity both religion and sexuality are being elaborated in terms of reflexivity. In this article, we present findings from our research on the topic of constructions of gender, intimacy and sexuality by sisters and brothers in Catholic monasteries in Poland. The findings are based on the mixed-method transformative connection between qualitative (n = 92) and representative sample quantitative research (n = 1543) conducted in 2020. We studied reflexivity on gender, intimacy and sexuality within Catholic religious communities in Poland in order to understand how gender, intimacy and sexuality are presented in the institutionalized framework of religious life. Our study demonstrates that reflexivity on gender, intimacy and sexuality is highly institutionalised and deeply privatized within Catholic religious communities. The article shows that reflexivity of consecrated persons in Poland on gender, intimacy and sexuality is strongly shaped by religious norms (chastity) and subordinated to their religious roles.
... Indeed, while ethnographers of Christianity have provided us with rich accounts of diverse Christian communities' theologies of gender and sexuality (Chong 2009;Frederick 2003;Gerber 2011;Hackman 2016;Lester 2005;Thornton 2018), including disciplinary practices aimed at sublimating elements of personhood deemed "unchristian," less attention has been paid to state regulation of these religiously inflected categories. An approach that centers the specifically legal routes through which dominant models of sexuality are challenged offers new conceptual tools for ethnographers seeking to understand the regulation of identities deemed unpalatable by the liberal state. ...
The increasing visibility of sexualities beyond heterosexual, gay/lesbian, and bisexual is often associated with progressive politics and the questioning of heteronormativity. Yet non‐majoritarian sexualities can also include self‐identifications premised upon an opposition to LGBTQ+ equality and inclusion, including those who identify as “ex‐gay.” Drawing on fieldwork with evangelical Christian activists in London, UK, this paper uses a court case in which the “legality” of ex‐gay sexuality was contested to discuss the law's simultaneous desire and inability to render contested identities legally legible. In seeking recognition as a sexual minority, self‐described ex‐gay evangelicals reveal the inadequacy of modern law's efforts to regulate difference as either “innate” or “chosen,” thus upsetting the terms of the hetero‐secular legal gaze even as they embrace heterosexual supremacy. As such, this activism, which is typically analyzed in terms of evangelicalism's commitment to heteronormativity, works to denaturalize the concept of sexual orientation(s)—including, I argue, the heterosexuality ex‐gay Christians pursue.
... People also repeatedly remarked, however, that members of their communities were fat in such a context because they were too lazy to grow their own food or to prepare healthier meals that took time to create, and instead relied on premade foods purchased in shops (Hardin 2021). Significantly, this articulation that people are responsible for their own bodies and the subsequent connections drawn with self-blame was present in this study but not in Hardin's previous research in Apia among Pentecostals, which highlights the role that religion may play in shaping experiences of the body (Griffith 2004;Hardin 2019;Lester 2005). People with power were often singled out by interviewees in this study as examples of individuals who monopolized resources and in so doing, gained (inappropriate) weight (Hardin 2015a). ...
Norms valorizing not‐fat bodies appear to have spread around the world, combined with a globalizing belief that thinness is the result of individual management of self and hard work. We examine themes of blame and felt responsibility for weight and “fat” in four distinct geographic and cultural locations: peri‐urban Georgia, United States; suburban Osaka, Japan; urban Encarnación, Paraguay; and urban Apia, Samoa. Use of a novel metatheme approach that compares and contrasts these four distinct places characterized by different population‐level prevalences of obesity and by specific cultural histories relevant to body norms and ideals provides a flexible toolkit for comparative cross‐cultural/multi‐sited ethnographic research. We show that self‐blame, marked by an articulated sense of individual responsibility for weight and a sense of failing in this responsibility, is present in every field site, but to varying degrees and expressed in different ways. [fat, obesity, metatheme, stigma, self‐blame]
... First, when fat talk is directed at pastors, religiously-based criticisms show how body size discipline is a social process (cf. Griffith 2004;Lester 2005;Gerber 2012). Disciplining the body, particularly in terms of how thin, taut, and fit bodies have been theorized, suggests an orientation to individual self-control and self-realization in the global north (Griffith 2004;Bordo 1993;Giovanelli and Ostertag 2009;Guthman 2009). ...
Anthropology, public health, and epidemiology have long researched meanings of body size and factors that contribute to epi- demiological transition. The author draws attention to a dichoto- mous framework operating with these fields where fat-positive and fat-negative cultures are represented as oppositional. Drawing from fieldwork among Samoan evangelical Christians, the author argues that contextual analysis of fat reveals ambiguity and ambivalence. In Samoa, negative and positive meanings associ- ated with fat are dynamically engaged. In conclusion, she argues that representing fat in dichotomous terms is Othering because “the West” is represented as the fat-negative while “the rest” is represented as fat-positive.
... Anthropologists have applied technologies of the self to show how social actors fashion themselves in accordance with various ideologies and social structures while rejecting others. Rebecca Lester (2005), for example, in a study of Roman Catholic postulants in a Mexican convent, extends Foucault's theory to describe a routine of bodily practices that produce religious conviction combined with a perception of self-transformation. She focuses on a constructed dichotomy between "embodied" and "transcendental" selves that guides postulants' perception of their bodily regimes and intersubjective experiences (Lester 2005, 161). ...
Despite recent socioeconomic transformations, young adults in China construe local social norms as inhibiting their individualized selfhood. Based on a study of pedagogies of interpersonal “soft” skills, this article describes an apparatus of self‐improvement where self‐ and social critique play a pivotal role. Through comparison with Foucault’s “technologies of the self,” I illustrate that self‐improvement in China is largely oriented toward performative expressions that counteract the “local” rather than the habituation of virtues or skills.
... The same can be said of the sisters' relationships with God: there is substantial learning involved in the interaction. Luhrmann (2012) and Rebecca Lester (2005) make similar points in their work on American Evangelicals and Mexican Catholic postulants, respectively: the particular qualitative experience of individuals' experiences of the divine depends on the learned cultural practices in which they engage over a lifetime. ...
Since 1965, the number of American Catholic nuns has declined sharply. Contemporary media have portrayed this demographic decline through the lens of moral failure yet the sisters consistently describe experiences of peace, awe, and hope. The present article draws on ethnographic data gathered in a Franciscan convent in the United States over the past 15 years to ask why Catholic sisters seem to be able to find peace despite an uncertain future while others experience distress. We find that a lifetime of religious training has taught the sisters to experience time and death in fundamentally different ways than mainstream Americans. We suggest that the sisters’ specific hope practices, which we call timeless hope , involve skills developed through religious practice that can be understood as a form of religious intelligence .
This special section reflects upon how divine-human relations are shaped by the socioeconomic and political circumstances in which they are cultivated. The four articles treat God not as a rigidly defined, unchanging being borne of ageless scripture and theology, but a figure who emerges during people's self-reflection and through their interactions with others in specific settings. The articles explore how human engagements with the divine manifest across a myriad of post–Arab Spring communities, from Syrian Sunni refugees in Jordan to Shi'i Iranians who feel forsaken by their government and God, and from Beiruti Orthodox Christians running a charity clinic to Sunni Muslim women taking Islamic lessons in Dubai. A framework of divine-human relations structures these distinct contributions, and this introduction lays out how the articles intervene in debates around politics, agency, and temporality. Together, the articles offer insight not only into what religiosity and selfhood look like among (dis)believers in the Middle East today, but also what notions of God drive different kinds of (ir)reverence. They also accord ethnographic attention to God, an otherwise marginal figure in much scholarship on religion.
This paper explores how the confessional politics of Catholic identification has been mobilised into religious callings, from the village to the city and from China to Overseas Chinese communities. Building on fieldwork conducted in Hangzhou and New York City in 2018, I show how a Chinese Catholic migrant priest authenticates the spiritual purity of his vocation by using the legality and ease of transnational travel to legitimise his moral and economic upward mobility.
The 'ethical turn' in anthropology has been one of the most vibrant fields in the discipline in the past quarter-century. It has fostered new dialogue between anthropology and philosophy, psychology, and theology and seen a wealth of theoretical innovation and influential ethnographic studies. This book brings together a global team of established and emerging leaders in the field and makes the results of this fast-growing body of diverse research available in one volume. Topics covered include: the philosophical and other intellectual sources of the ethical turn; inter-disciplinary dialogues; emerging conceptualizations of core aspects of ethical agency such as freedom, responsibility, and affect; and the diverse ways in which ethical thought and practice are institutionalized in social life, both intimate and institutional. Authoritative and cutting-edge, it is essential reading for researchers and students in anthropology, philosophy, psychology and theology, and will set the agenda for future research in the field.
This article explores contemporary Latter-day Saint conceptions of evil in northern Utah through considering both the lived experiences of spirits and the didactic tales of spirits that are a rich part of local folklore. Latter-day Saints are visited by both benevolent and malevolent spirits. These encounters with spirits are connected with local conceptions of “righteousness,” a moral framework that is centered on positive action. Malevolent spirit visits are typically understood as the consequence of “unrighteous” actions or as impediments to exceptionally righteous activity; indeed, the most righteous actions are perhaps the most spiritually dangerous. Negative visitations reflect a cultural framework of evil as a human phenomenon that results from the temptations and distractions of an aggressive, external cosmological force—Satan. Righteous and unrighteous actions both attract the interest of Satan, and therefore invite the possibility of evil to disrupt the moral order.
This article employs Oceanic epistemological theories to explore the body as a site of knowledge production among Samoan Pentecostal women as they dance in a church‐sponsored Zumba session, tracking foods, words, and feelings: I call these moving materialities. In their work together, these women contextualized health, sickness, and weight as generated from the circulation of these kinds of moving materialities. Their work theorizing health through material change is quite different from those imagined and circulated in the literatures on diabetes and obesity. The article orients critical studies of health toward an interrogation of the dynamic qualities of materiality, including both the moving body and materials that move between or within bodies. By expanding what might be considered material and movement in the context of health, this article offers an alternative to theories of metabolism that have come to dominate how we understand the body in terms energy expenditure. Ultimately, this approach calls for anthropologists to consider the circumstances in which theory is understood to be “culturally specific” or “generalizable.”
There are communities in which hearing voices frequently is common and expected, and in which participants are not expected to have a need for care. This paper compares the ideas and practices of these communities. We observe that these communities utilize cultural models to identify and to explain voice-like events—and that there are some common features to these models across communities. All communities teach participants to “discern,” or identify accurately, the legitimate voice of the spirit or being who speaks. We also observe that there are roughly two methods taught to participants to enable them to experience spirits (or other invisible beings): trained attention to inner experience, and repeated speech to the invisible other. We also observe that all of these communities model a learning process in which the ability to hear spirit (or invisible others) becomes more skilled with practice, and in which what they hear becomes clearer over time. Practice—including the practice of discernment—is presumed to change experience. We also note that despite these shared cultural ideas and practices, there is considerable individual variation in experience—some of which may reflect psychotic process, and some perhaps not. We suggest that voice-like events in this context may be shaped by cognitive expectation and trained practice as well as an experiential pathway. We also suggest that researchers could explore these common features both as a way to help those struggling with psychosis, and to consider the possibility that expectations and practice may affect the voice-hearing experience.
The literature emphasizes institutional formation in the process of a young woman becoming a nun or sees her motivations as stemming from expectations of social and economic mobility. This article focuses on the nun’s call as event ( Badiou 2001 ; Humphrey 2008 ), revealing its truth to the subject and reconstituting her by her fidelity to it. However, its validation and realization are only accomplished within the structured formation and discipline of congregational life. Through an ethnographic analysis of the lives of nuns in two indigenous Catholic convents in Kerala, South India, the article shows that they often have to struggle against their families to embrace their call. The congregation endorses the authenticity of a young woman’s call while requiring its constant reexamination through prayer and meditation. Thus, a nun’s call is encoded in formulaic structures through institutional formation, but its sensory and imaginary experiences are uniquely hers. Analytically distinguishing the calling event from the narrated event, the article integrates a Foucauldian understanding of disciplinary practices with Alain Badiou’s idea of the singular event for a grounded ethnographic grasp of the subject formation of a nun within her calling.
This chapter grapples with what the Apostle John wrote in his Gospel: “The Word became flesh and made his home among us. We have seen his glory, glory like that of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth” (John 1: 14). In light of the controversy about the Novel Azazeel and the assassination attempt on Egyptian Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz following his novel Children of Alley and the accusation that he was humanising God, I touch on the danger of God’s decision to dwell and die among (and like) us. With an ethnographic eye on the Christian Miracle of the Incarnation that both attends to present affairs as well as to historical scenes of the rise of Christianity, I show some of the unresolved ordeals, confusions, and questions that come into being when humans and God attempt to further know and come closer to each other. Building on my argument in the previous chapter, I opt for an anthropology of vernacular theological practice (of ‘athara) that does not merely challenge the minority positioning of Copts in Egypt or the Western orientalist stereotypes about the East.
In contemporary Transylvania, there is a vibrant state-funded educational system for the Hungarian ethnic minority, and schools receive additional support from the Hungarian government; but upon arriving in the area, I also found a number of thriving NGOs that provide pedagogical assistance to rural Transylvanian Hungarians. The teachers I worked with the thought of “serving the people” (népszolgálat), or volunteering to educate the rural populace, as the hallmark of a distinctively Transylvanian Hungarian intellectual tradition, and also the foremost sign of their ethical self-consciousness. With this cohort of volunteer rural intellectuals as my primary research subjects, this book is about a generation of teachers, their ethical and theological beliefs about intellectual service, and the opportunities and challenges they face as they reconstitute and expand these ideas to reach new audiences of volunteers.
Society, culture, and the state profoundly impact the body; bodily practices also play active roles in combating social ills and (re)constituting heterodox cultural mores. This paper analyzes the unorthodox bodily rituals of the followers of the famed “mystic minstrel,” Fakir Lalon Shah, in contemporary Bangladesh. This ethnographic research with the prominent Fakirs—participant observation, in-depth interview, and textual analysis of Lalon’s songs—shows how the body acts as the means of spiritual cultivation and socio-cultural transformations. I conceptualize three features of Fakirs’ body pedagogics as somatic divinity, selfless subjectivity, and ethical sociality. Identifying the practical implications of the praxis, this paper shows a way of addressing the symptomatic “lack of clarity” of qualitative social research (Aspers and Corte 2019). In explaining why the educated body plays an insufficient but important role to combat social malaise, e.g., religious insularity, I underscore that the expected outcome of Fakirs’ training of the body is both uncertain and reversible. Instead of being an underside, that inherent uncertainty of the body is its strength.
On the Need for Anthropological Study of the Organizational Dimension of Religion
Qualitative research on religion often overlooks its organizational aspect, even though most of religious life takes place within an organizational framework. Religious organizations are active on many levels: they educate and control religious specialists, shape religious materiality, and in many other ways influence how relationships with the sacred are conceptualized and lived out. The organization of religious life has implications that should be studied by researchers interested in lived religion, especially when they deal with such issues as religious experience, the integrative role of religion, ritual efficacy, and the transmission of practices and beliefs.
The Routledge International Handbook of Charisma provides an unprecedented multidimensional and multidisciplinary comparative analysis of the phenomenon of charisma – first defined by Max Weber as the irrational bond between deified leader and submissive follower. It includes broad overviews of foundational theories and experiences of charisma and of associated key issues and themes. Contributors include 45 influential international scholars who approach the topic from different disciplinary perspectives and utilize examples from an array of historical and cultural settings. The Handbook presents up-to-date, concise, thought-provoking, innovative, and informative perspectives on charisma as it has been expressed in the past and as it continues to be manifested in the contemporary world by leaders ranging from shamans to presidents. It is designed to be essential reading for all students, researchers, and general readers interested in achieving a comprehensive understanding of the power and potential of charismatic authority in all its varieties, subtleties, dynamics, and current and potential directions.
Catholic priests and advanced seminarians in Sri Lanka often describe their entrance to the seminary as the response to a strong spiritual calling that they could not ignore. Young seminarians offer more ambiguous narratives, where a combination of material anxieties, local cultural traditions and individual aspirations, encourage them to consider joining the clergy. This article examines how seminaries highlight aspects of religious formation where vocational discernment and the authenticity of one's calling are left for later stages of formation. Emphasizing aspects of career mobility, graduate studies overseas and missionary work, seminaries provide an attractive alternative for prospective priests in Sri Lanka. I argue that there is no contradiction between the spiritual dimensions of religious vocation and the material aspirations of seminarians. Although ethical dispositions emerge and replace the mundane impulses that initially attract young men to the seminary, material incentives are never completely eliminated from the vocational map of seminarians.
Starting from the triumvirate of Durkheim, Marx, and Weber, this chapter examines the various ways the category of “experience” operates in classical theoretical understandings and explanations of religion. Despite important differences, we argue that what the classical forebearers share is an understanding of “religious experience” as a product of a sociocultural mediation between situated subjectivities and transcendent meaning structures. We then take these early proto-theorizations of religious experience and connect them to more contemporary studies, illustrating how the passage between subjectivity and symbolism is itself mediated via complex configurations of interpretive forms, bodily practices and techniques, and material artifacts. Religious experience, in this view, is neither completely individualistic nor culturally universal, but can be theorized as socially and culturally assembled via its passage through various material, corporeal, and interpretive media. Building from but also extending the classics, we advocate for a revived sociology of religious experience that approaches the phenomena in medias res. We argue that such an approach not only helps reclaim the category of “religious experience” for sociological analysis, but also opens up new questions and lines of inquiry for the sociology of religion more generally.
The aim of this article is to present the results of a sociological study on everyday life within a female cloistered monastery. This is a radical form of religious life, highly routinised, distanced from the outside world and conducted in community yet in almost total silence. By elaborating upon the concepts of everyday and lived religion, the scope of our examination complements dominant sociological approaches to the study of this religious phenomenon. By addressing the following research question: ‘Do cloistered monasteries de-individualise and totally regulate the life of nuns?’, we discuss selected aspects of everyday life in the institution and its contemporary transformations related to, among other things, new communication technologies and new generations of nuns. We show that in this highly institutionalised place nuns remain reflexive individuals.
A powerful myth tells of the naga, a serpentine spirit or deity, which came to destroy the town known as Yonok after its ruler became unrighteous. Despite this divine retribution, the people of the town chose to rebuild. In many Buddhist traditions, the naga is seen as the guardian of the land and the creator and protector of rivers, lands, villages, and towns. The naga myth is used to understand the changing landscapes. Moreover, it frequently gives people the agency to act, feel, and reflect on their self-embodiment. This paper argues that the myth is an agentive element for people to initiate action. The myth is used as a referential knowledge by the people to interact as well as modify the physical landscapes. It is also seen as a source of knowledge for people to negotiate individual and communal identity within the larger social space.
By overlooking the history of Catholic thought, anthropologists have made contemporary processes for negotiating intellectual authority in the Catholic Church into a lacuna in the anthropology of Christianity. I develop this claim by examining an ethnographic memoir called The Secret of Csíksomlyó by Árpád Daczó, a widely known contemporary Transylvanian Hungarian Catholic intellectual. Daczó blends autobiography and ethnography to argue that the Hungarian Virgin Mary is a Christianized pagan moon goddess. Halfway through, Daczó switches genres to propositional theology and defends himself to the magisterium, the Church's institutional guarantor of orthodoxy. I situate Daczó's effort to anticipate his critics in the history of Catholic-Protestant theological polemics, which helped make propositional theology into the Catholic Church's privileged language for investigating heresy. By placing Daczó's use of propositional theology against the backdrop of contemporary Catholic theologians’ debates about the magisterium's authority, I challenge anthropological assumptions about the social significance of propositional belief.
We combine Hofstadter's description of mutual interior access between persons with theories of interiority presented in ethnographic contexts and in anthropological literature on Sufi rituals. The intersection of these theories with Hofstadter's concepts is applied to three Sufi rituals: an annual village festival presided over by a Maulana (descendant of the Prophet); the devotional dhikr circles that meet weekly at the mosque; and a major Sufi festival held in a remote, mountainous area of Sri Lanka where living Sufi virtuosi come as well as thousands of pilgrims. Each ritual is posited to represent increasingly substantial degrees of interior alignment between participants. By intentionally expanding their senses of self through engagement in ritual practice and appreciation of religious dogma, participants approximate an overlapping of their separate interiorities. The article contributes to anthropological discussions of interiority, Muslim identity, and the sacred.
In this article, we investigate how an increasingly popular therapeutic modality, family constellation therapy (FCT), functions simultaneously as a technology of the self (Foucault, Technologies of the self: a seminar with Michel Foucault, University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, 1988) as well as what we here call a “technology of the social.” In FCT, the self is understood as an assemblage of ancestral relationships that often creates problems in the present day. Healing this multi-generational self involves identifying and correcting hidden family dynamics in high-intensity group sessions where other participants represent the focus client and his/her family members, both alive and deceased. Drawing on ethnographic data collected in multiple FCT workshops in Beijing, China and Oaxaca City, Mexico, we show how FCT ritually reorganizes boundaries between self and other in novel ways, creating a collective space for shared moral reflection on troubling social, historical, and cultural patterns. By demonstrating the ways in which FCT unfolds as both a personal and social technology, this article contributes to ongoing conversations about how to effectively theorize sociality in therapeutic practice, and problematizes critical approaches emphasizing governmentality and commensuration (Mattingly, Moral laboratories family peril and the struggle for a good life, University of California Press, Oakland, 2014; Duncan, Transforming therapy: mental health practice and cultural change in Mexico, Vanderbilt University Press, Nashville, 2018; Matza, Shock therapy: psychology, precarity, and well-being in postsocialist Russia, Duke University Press, Durham, 2018; Pritzker, Presented at “Living Well in China” Conference, Irvine, CA, 2018; Mattingly, Anthropol Theory, 2019; Zigon, “HIV is God’s Blessing”: rehabilitating morality in neoliberal Russia, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2011).
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