Religious act, public space: reflections on some Geertzian concepts

This paper examines theoretical and methodological implications of Clifford Geertz's approach to religion as he formulated it in 'Religion as a cultural system' (Geertz 1966), where religion and culture seem to be defined as functional equivalents. The paper considers religious symbols in the public space, using two examples from contemporary reality - one being a certain expression spoken by the copilot of Egypt Air Flight 990, the other being the headscarf controversy in France - in order to explore how the anthropologist relates the microsituations he observes to an all-embracing contex

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

The notion of the religious habitus has become increasingly prominent in studies of religion. While this prominence reflects a debt to Bourdieu’s particular account of it, his association of the habitus with regularised dispositions providing supernatural legitimations for status inequalities has nonetheless been much criticised. What has not been addressed with regard to religion, however, is the degree to which the pervasiveness of reflexivity in global modernity fatally undermines habitual schemas as conceived by Bourdieu. Here, moving beyond Bourdieu and utilizing the recent writings of Latour, we seek to elucidate the on-going value of the notion of habitus for articulating the complex relations between culture and religion today by reconceptualising it as something reflexively re-made, or instaured, through the active cultivation of a particular mode of embodied subjectivity; a reconceptualization we develop with reference to Christian Pentecostalism and the Islamic piety movement