TERRY REY
OVERVIEW
Although the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu wrote relatively little about the subject, religion was one of the most fundamental influences on his understanding of how society works.1 Institutional religion, especially the Roman Catholic Church, provided Bourdieu with a most serviceable paradigm for identifying and critiquing all institutionalized “systems of meaning.” Such systems help create, legitimate, and reproduce social distinctions (for example, of race, class, gender, and sexuality) and all forms of social inequality predicated thereupon, which was Bourdieu’s chief preoccupation as a scholar. As such, religion was Bourdieu’s model par excellence of an institution that engenders in people a “practical sense” of the social world, of their positions therein, and of what they can expect from life. He thus affirms the awesome historical influence that religion has enjoyed in the creation and reproduction of the doxa, or “the pre-verbal taking-for-granted of the world that flows from practical sense.”2 For this reason it is for more than just a sarcastic effect when Bourdieu frequently uses religious language (for example, “orthodoxy,” “heresy,” “sacred,” “consecration,” “priest,” “prophet,” “sorcerer,” “heresiarch,” “dogma,” “doctrine,” “transubstantiation,” “sacraments,” “veneration,” and “theodicy”) in theorizing a whole range of “secular” social institutions and practices.
How is it that religion got to become the paradigmatic producer and reproducer of doxa in the first place? Bourdieu’s answer is that religions “impose” worldviews upon people by “inculcating” into them (into their habitus, to be precise)3 modes of perception and thought, as well as values and dispositions. Religions are thus prolific producers of people’s “misrecognition” that the social word is only unequal because of karma, God’s will, or some other “euphemistic” linguistic construct that “legitimizes” (by “naturalizing”)—an act of “consecration”—the order of things, the status quo: “religion conserves the social order by contributing … to the ‘legitmation’ of the power of ‘the dominant’ and to the ‘domestication of the dominated.’ ”4 Religion’s demonstrable capacity to inspire charity, compassion, and well-being, however, seemingly never struck Bourdieu as important. On a personal level, furthermore, though churched in his childhood, “Bourdieu himself was not religious” and he “manifested no inclination for religious activity.”5 On a scholarly level, meanwhile, Bourdieu argued that any meaning that we find in life, whether derived from religion, politics, the arts, or what have you, is socially produced and thus artificial.
In such an intrinsically meaningless world, one into which we are “born determined” with but “a small chance of ending up free,” religion is little more than a desperate attempt to create meaning: “religion is a systematic answer to the question of life and death … the death of people we love, the ‘ultimate’ questions, illness, human suffering.6 Questions to which humans never find answers on their own; religion provides them answers to such ultimate questions.”7 But the answers that religion provides are, for Bourdieu, entirely groundless because “man is a being without a reason for being. It is society, and society alone [and not religion], which dispenses, to different degrees, the justifications and the reasons for existing,” resulting in the “wretchedness of man without God or any hope of grace.”8 And so, any attempt “to save spiritual values from the threat of science” is, for Bourdieu, “ridiculous.”
Bourdieu’s own negative reading of and disposition toward religion notwithstanding, an increasing number of religion scholars and even a few theologians9 have been employing Bourdieusian theory with much profit, and generally in ways that are not negatively disposed to their subject. Basically they fall into two general categories, even if in some instances inevitably straddling them: (1) those concerned with religion and social class; and (2) those concerned with religion and human perception. I will summarize an example of each momentarily, but first a thumbnail sketch of Bourdieu’s trademark theory of practice is in order.
BOURDIEU’S THEORY OF PRACTICE
Bourdieu’s theory of practice is a highly complex yet subtle collectivity of “thinking tools,” a systematic network of concepts that is designed to provide us with a broadly applicable paradigm for the interpretation of human subjectivity’s relationship to social structures and of how practice (what people do) emerges out of that relationship. Toward understanding Bourdieusian theory, it is helpful to briefly define its three signature concepts and provide an explanatory sketch of what each one does and how they work together: (1) habitus; (2) field; and (3) capital.
Put simply, practice takes place in any number of the interrelated and sometimes overlapping fields that together constitute society. In Bourdieu’s model, most of what we do as social agents boils down to perceivably self-interested pursuits of forms of capital, whether material or symbolic, relative to the respective fields in which our practice unfolds. Furthermore, the ways in which we perceive of and pursue capital are chiefly generated by the practical sense that resides in our habitus, which is that part of our personal subjectivity that filters our perceptions, molds our cultural tastes, and casts our inclinations, dispositions, and desires.
As a sustained exercise in “fieldwork in philosophy,” the most ambitious objective of Bourdieu’s theory of practice is to settle once and for all the entire free will versus determinism debate. Theological considerations have, for Bourdieu, no place in this debate because God’s supposed position therein is occupied by society itself: “God is never anything other than society. What is expected of God is only ever obtained from society, which alone has the power to justify you, to liberate you from facticity, contingency, and absurdity.”11 And so the fundamental question about human practice is whether our actions as “social agents” are in the main determined by social structures or by our own free will. Although he is often criticized for opting for the former and therefore being deterministic in his social thought, Bourdieu’s theory of practice in fact quite effectively answers that human subjects are both structured and structuring, for which reason he identifies his approach as a form of “generative structuralism.”12 Thus the key to understanding human practice lies in the intergenerative relationship between habitus and social structures, or fields: the world makes us, just as we make and remake the world through internalizing it and objectifying it and, as such, in (re)-creating it, naturalizing it, and believing it to be real. In other words, “the field structures the habitus” while “habitus contributes to constituting the field as a meaningful world.”13
Despite variations in the kinds of capital that they feature and in the interests, strategies, and positions that agents employ or occupy within them, all social fields are situated within the metafield of power and are thereby structurally “homologous.” By this, Bourdieu means that all fields are characterized by the same (homo) principle (logous), operating, in this sense, according to a uniform logic, and thus fields can be said to share certain “structural homologies.” As such, individual fields (for example, the economic field, the political field, the religious field) are only “relatively autonomous,” interpenetrating and influencing one another and interrelating through flows of power within and across them. The structural homology and relative autonomy of fields allow for the transferability of capital from one field to another, a process that Bourdieu refers to as “transubstantiation”!14 To illustrate with a specific example, if I succeed in obtaining an MBA from a prestigious university, which is clearly a highly coveted piece of academic capital (a form of symbolic capital), I will be in a position of greater potential (that is, empowered) to succeed in the economic field and augment my sum of economic capital (a form of material capital), namely, money. Furthermore, my MBA degree is a piece of symbolic capital that contributes to the “misrecognition” that we who hold such degrees are “smart,” “hard-working,” and “entrepreneurial,” and thus deservedly have high incomes, and that’s just the way it is; issues such as inheritance, privilege, and racial injustice that clearly play a role in access to quality education are thereby effectively masked, thus clearing the way for the injustices of the world to be reproduced.
We now proceed to take a closer look at some examples of how these and other Bourdieusian ideas have been put to work in the interpretation and analysis of religion.
TWO BOURDIEUSIAN INTERPRETATIONS OF RELIGION
As noted above, most Bourdieusian interpretations of religion fall into either one of two general categories: (1) those that are concerned with religion and social class; and (2) those that are concerned with religion and human perception. Exemplary of the former is Otto Maduro’s sociohistorical interpretation of Latin American religion, while exemplary of the later is Thomas Csordas’s “cultural phenomenology” of Catholic Charismatic ritual.
Maduro’s early work is an important precedent for scholars interested in understanding the sociopolitical role of religion in colonial and emergent postcolonial societies. Taking its cue from Bourdieu, it outlines how the arrival and establishment in the Americas of Spanish and Portuguese colonizers under Vatican sanction created a radically unequal division of labor (including religious labor) and distribution of capital, both material and symbolic. As a result of such divisions and the establishment of the hierarchical and increasingly monopolistic Church of the colonizer, “religion was no longer a product arising directly out of the interest of indigenous Latin American communities.”15 This occurred because the Church “dispossessed” colonized subjects of religious capital, forcing them in turn “to have recourse to the clergy to satisfy their religious interests,” their habitus having been inculcated with the belief in the Church as the unique purveyor of those paramount forms of religious capital called “sacraments,” which are of course requisite for salvation. A complementary part of the Church’s strategy was to also inculcate into the Native American religious habitus the misrecognition that indigenous religious traditions are not religious at all but are heretical and therefore illegitimate and unworthy of pursuit.
Here we see how the transubstantiative capacity of symbolic capital makes Bourdieusian theory so well suited for interpreting the relationship between religion, class, and power, especially in societies that are characterized by stark class divisions. Maduro answers Bourdieu’s call for a field analysis that focuses on the struggle over forms of religious capital that enable religious institutions to produce (and consecrate) “salvation goods,” such as sacraments and ecclesial sanction. Once transferred into other fields and transformed (that is, transubstantiated) into other forms of capital, “legitimate” religious capital of this kind furthermore enables elite agents or institutions to enhance or augment their holdings of economic and political capital and thereby solidify or improve their positions in the economic and political fields, and thus to dominate in the metafield of power. For Maduro, this has been precisely the case in Latin America. Power requires consecration, after all, and religion is the prototypical possessor of the authority to consecrate, having historically done so in ways that inform Bourdieu’s entire understanding of the very nature of society.
In addition to the rich use that scholars like Maduro have made of Bourdieusian theory in the analysis of religion and class, a number of equally impressive studies have emerged that explore the corporal implications of Bourdieu’s notion of habitus for the study of religion and perception. One’s habitus is perforce embodied in such a way that makes one’s body a “socially informed body.” Thomas Cordas rightly reads Bourdieu to mean that structures of the social world, including of course the structures of ritual, issue from and are reproduced by “ ‘a dialectic of objectification and embodiment’ that makes it the locus for the coordination of all levels of bodily, social, and cosmological experience.”16 Habitus is thus so useful for the analysis of religious ritual and practice “because it focuses on the psychologically internalized content of the behavioral environment” and because of its resolute “groundedness in the body.”17 Charismatic ritual, for example, features “somatic images” (for example, the laying on of hands, tongues of fire, and the like) that are “inculcated as techniques du corps that will embody dispositions characteristic of the religious milieu.”18 One such “technique du corps” that is common in Charismatic healing rituals is falling, which usually is caused by the laying on of hands during faith healing: “The act of falling is spontaneously coordinated in such a way that, following Bourdieu, it can be described as a disposition within the ritual habitus.”19
In the language of Csordas’s cultural phenomenology, the images of the Incarnation (God in flesh) and of Grace (God giving the gift of tongues) are embodied and reside in “the matrix of perception” of the Charismatic habitus. Thus when a believer perceives the person in the pew in front of her speaking in tongues, she perceives this to be a manifestation of divinity and not the gibberish of a madman. In this way is seen how the habitus is both the generator of this form of ritual behavior in the speaker and the matrix of perception in the hearer/viewer that makes sense of something that would otherwise be senseless.
In different ways, Maduro and Csordas demonstrate that Bourdieusian theory has great analytical power for the understanding of human perception and its function in religious belief and practice. Taken together, they suggest that, thanks to Bourdieu, we can finally say that religious belief has a home: the religious habitus, which is as much bodily as mentally constructed through the negotiation of the social. By carefully tracing the implications for the interpretation of religion of the dialectical relationship of habitus and field, Maduro and Csordas respectively demonstrate how incisive Bourdieusian theory is for the study of religion, whether for scholars seeking to understand the relationship between religion and politics or for scholars concerned with the place of the human body in religious experience and practice. They suggest, for one crucial example, that everything that one might observe people do in their religious practice is chiefly the manifestation of perceptions and dispositions that are embodied in the religious habitus of practitioners (of believers), which is itself (re)generatively structured by the religious field. This is perhaps the most important insight to emerge thus far out of the Bourdieusian interpretation of religion.
CLOSING THOUGHTS AND NEW DIRECTIONS
The foregoing brief discussion of the landmark work of Maduro and Csordas is not intended to suggest that Bourdieu has had the same resounding impact on the study of religion as he has on other human sciences. In two of the leading academic fields concerned with religion, Religious Studies and the sociology of religion, his influence has in fact been relatively marginal, though this is beginning to change, and the theoretical dialogues that are emerging hold tremendous promise. One such emergent dialogue places Bourdieusian thought in conversation with rational choice theory of religion, a model taken from economics that is a dominant approach in the sociology of religion today. In reading its leading proponents, such as Rodney Stark and Roger Finke, I’ve often wondered why rational choice theorists of religion pay virtually no attention to the most widely cited social scientist of our time, Pierre Bourdieu, who himself also used economic logic and terminology to investigate religion. It may very well be that such proponents of the microeconomic interpretation of religion have not engaged Bourdieu because they consider him to be emblematic of what R. Stephen Warner identifies as “the old paradigm metanarrative of religion”: “There was only one provider of religious meaning and religious services, only one place to approach God and only one institution to confer legitimacy on rites of passage. Since the church was a protected monopoly, assent was assured by the fact that there were no ideological alternatives, and the church’s viewpoint, it is said, was unquestionably taken for granted.”20
Alternatively, or additionally, the aversion to Bourdieu in most sociology of religion might be a reaction to Bourdieu’s own explicit criticisms of rational choice theory. For Bourdieu clearly opposes the thoroughgoing subjectivity and freedom of individual choice upon which rational choice theory and the new paradigm are predicated: “Thus, against the scholastic illusion which tends to see every action as springing from an intentional aim … the theory of habitus has the primordial function of stressing that the principle of our actions is more often practical sense than rational calculation.”21 One among a small but growing cadre of sociologists of religion who are beginning to notice this perplexing rift,22 Roland Robertson23 helpfully suggests how Bourdieu’s theory of practice, despite some measure of structuralist rigidity that many scholars have assailed,24 can help counter the “complete absence of constraint on consumers” in rational choice theory of religion, thereby affirming that “choices are formed by circumstances”—by the dialectic of habitus and field, as it were.25
In closing, I would like to suggest that there is abundant potential for synthesizing aspects of Bourdieu’s theory of practice with rational choice theory and other leading scholarly interpretations of religion. Though tempted to demonstrate by explaining in detail how habitus could help elucidate Mircea Eliade’s notion of “hierophany” or the “moods and motivations” in Clifford Geertz’s influential definition of religion, I’ll end here with a brief Bourdieusian word on William James instead.26 James understands religion ultimately to be about “pure ideas” of “remoter fact”: “in general our whole higher prudential and moral life is based on the fact that material sensations actually present may have a weaker influence on our action than ideas of remoter fact.… The whole force of … religion, therefore, … is in general exerted by the instrumentality of pure ideas.”27 By “pure ideas” James means notions that are unmitigated by “sense impressions,” to use the language of the seventeenth-century British Empiricists, or ideas that are rooted purely in intuition, “sixth sense,” mystical experience, imagination, and the like, which of course are often understood and transmitted to be the essence of religious tradition. Pure ideas of remoter facts thus largely make up that which Bourdieu calls the “religious habitus”: “a lasting, generalized and transposable disposition to act and think in conformity with the principles of a (quasi) systematic view of the world and human existence,” and “the principal generator of all thoughts, perceptions and actions consistent with the norms of a religious representation of the natural and supernatural worlds.”28 As the subjective site of belief, or the repository of our pure ideas of remoter facts, and the “principal generator” of practice, so much about the nature and function of religion can be explained via consideration of the religious habitus and its inter-(re)generative relationship with the social.
NOTES
1. Bourdieu’s most important essays on religion are: Pierre Bourdieu, “Genèse et structure du champ religieux,” Revue française de sociologie 12, no. 2 (1971): 295–334; Pierre Bourdieu, “Une interprétation de la théorie de la religion selon Max Weber,” Archives européenne de sociologie 12, no. 1 (1971): 3–21. For a review of all of Bourdieu’s essays on religion, see Terry Rey, Bourdieu on Religion: Imposing Faith and Legitimacy (London: Equinox, 2007). For a discussion of the foundational influence of religion on Bourdieu’s social theory, see Erwan Dianteill, “Pierre Bourdieu and the Sociology of Religion: A Central and Peripheral Concern,” in After Bourdieu: Influence, Critique, Elaboration, ed. David L. Swartz and Vera L. Zolberg (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer, 2004), 65–85.
2. Pierre Bourdieu, In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology, trans. Matthew Adamson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 68.
3. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 82–83.
4. Pierre Bourdieu, “Genesis and Structure of the Religious Field,” trans. Jenny B. Burnside, Craig Calhoun, and Leah Florence, Comparative Social Research 13 (1991): 1–44, 4.
5. David Swartz and Vera L. Zolberg, eds., “Introduction,” in After Bourdieu: Influence, Critique, Elaboration (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer, 2004), 5; Dianteill, “Pierre Bourdieu and the Sociology of Religion,” 84.
6. Anne-Marie Lesourret, Bourdieu (Paris: Flammarion, 2008), 455.
7. Pierre Bourdieu, Das religiöse Feld: Texte zur Ökonomie des Heilsgeshehens, trans. Andreas Pfeffer (Konstanz, Germany: Universitätsverlag Konstanz, 2000), 123. I gratefully acknowledge help in translating this passage from the German from my good friends Gereon Kopf, Claudia Schippert, and Alfons Teipen.
8. Pierre Bourdieu, In Other Words, 196, 15.
9. For a discussion of recent Bourdieusian studies of religion, see Terry Rey, “Pierre Bourdieu and the Study of Religion: Recent Developments, Directions, and Departures,” in The Oxford Handbook of Pierre Bourdieu, ed. Jeffrey J. Sallaz and Thomas Medvetz (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
10. Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 170. Symbolic Violence is another key concept in Bourdieu’s social thought, which he defines as “the coercion which is set up only through the consent that the dominated cannot fail to give to the dominator (and therefore to the domination) when their understanding of the situation and the relation can only use instruments of knowledge that they have in common with the dominator, which, being merely the incorporated form of the structure of domination, makes this relation appear as natural.”
11. Bourdieu, In Other Words, 196.
12. Cheleen Mahar, Richard Harker, and Chris Wilkes, An Introduction to the Work of Pierre Bourdieu: The Practice of Theory (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1990), 33–34.
13. Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc J. D. Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 127.
14. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. J. Richardson (New York: Greenwood, 1986), 242.
15. Otto Maduro, Religion and Social Conflicts (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1982), 86.
16. Thomas J. Csordas, The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 97.
17. Ibid., 66. El-Sayed el-Aswad makes similar use of Bourdieu’s notion of corporal-hexis (without using the term itself) in theorizing popular cosmology in contemporary rural Egypt. El-Sayed el-Aswad, Religion and Folk Cosmology: Scenarios of the Visible and the Invisible in Rural Egypt (London: Praeger, 2002), 91–92.
18. Csordas, The Sacred Self, 70.
19. Ibid., 233.
20. R. Stephen Warren, “More Progress on the New Paradigm,” in Sacred Markets, Sacred Canopies: Essays on Religious Markets and Religious Pluralism, ed. Ted G. Jelen (Lanham, Md.: Rowan and Littlefield, 2002), 2.
21. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 63–64.
22. For more recent considerations of this disconnect in the sociology of religion, see Jean-Pierre Bastian, “La nouvelle économie religieuse de L’Amérique latine,” Social Compass 53, no. 1 (2006): 65–80; and Jörg Stoltz, ed., Salvation Goods and Religious Markets: Theory and Applications (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008).
23. Roland Robertson, “The Economization of Religion? Reflections on the Promise and Limitations of the Economic Approach,” Social Compass 39, no. 1 (1992): 151.
24. For a review of stated limitations of Bourdieusian theory and their specific relevance to the study of religion, see Rey, Bourdieu on Religion, 120–31.
25. Robertson, “The Economization of Religion,” 155.
26. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (San Diego: Harvest, 1957), 11; Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (London: Hutchinson, 1975), 90. Eliade defines hierophany as “the act of manifestation of the sacred.… that something sacred shows itself to us.” Geertz defines religion as “a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.”
27. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Penguin, 1952), 63.
28. Pierre Bourdieu, “Legitimation and Structured Interest in Weber’s Sociology of Religion,” in Max Weber, Rationality, and Modernity, ed. Scott Lash and Sam Whimster, trans. Chris Turner (London: Allen and Unwin, 1987), 124; Bourdieu, “Genèse et structure du champ religieux,” 319.