Социология религии_общее (англ.) / Handbook of the Sociology of Religion

PART FOUR

Religion and Social Identity

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Religious Identities and Religious Institutions

Nancy T. Ammerman

For modern social theory, as well as for many ordinary people, religious identities have been a problem.1 Just what does it really mean to claim a Jewish or Christian identity? To think of oneself as Presbyterian or Baptist? What do we know of that new church down the road that simply calls itself “Fellowship Church”? And do any of those things have anything to do with how we might expect someone to perform their duties as a citizen or a worker? As modern people have loosened their ties to the families and places that (perhaps) formerly enveloped them in a cocoon of faith (or at least surrounded them with a predictable round of religious activity), they can choose how and whether to be religious, including choosing how central religion will be in their lives. Religious practices and affiliations change over a complicated lifetime, and the array of religious groups in a voluntary society shifts in equally complex ways. If religious identity ever was a given, it certainly is no longer.

In his influential work on religion and personal autonomy, Philip Hammond posits that, given the mobility and complexity of the modern situation, individual religious identities are of various sorts – either ascribed (collectivity-based) or achieved (individual) and either primary (a core or “master” role) or secondary (Hammond 1988). In the premodern situation, religion was presumably collective and core.2 In the modern situation, taking up a collective, core religious identity is a matter of (exceptional) choice, not determinism.3 We neither all share one religious identity nor know quite what to make of the many identities with which we are surrounded.

While social theory has taught us that maintaining a religious identity is a problem in the “mainstream” of culture, at the margins, religious identities seem still to play a role. Indeed, much of recent research on religious identity has focused on the margins and the interstices, on the times and places where religious identities clash and/or must be remade. Lively work is now underway, for instance, on the struggle to

1Classic theories predicting religion’s demise include Marx (1878/1964) and Weber (1904–5/ 1958), with Berger (1967) providing the most elegant theoretical formulation and Lechner

(1991) among the most cogent current defenders.

2 Mary Douglas (1983) debunks the notion that premodern people were thoroughly religious.

3John Hewitt (1989) uses the example of the totally dedicated fundamentalist or orthodox person to illustrate the uncommon modern identity strategy of “exclusivity.”

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maintain or recreate immigrant religious identities.4 Circumstances and demands in a new culture inevitably reshape the beliefs and practices that were taken for granted in a home country. Thrown together both with “anglo” hosts and with more proximal, yet often strange, ethnic compatriots, immigrants use religious gatherings as places to sustain old cultural ways, but also as places where new ways are hammered out (Warner and Wittner 1998). The clash of cultures is across generations, as well, as second and third generations arrive at their own relationships to ethnic and religious traditions.

Two earlier sets of immigrants now fuel another stream of writing about religious identity. Both American Catholics and American Jews have, in the last generation, passed into the mainstream of culture, have begun to experience high rates of intermarriage, and have consequently generated a good deal of identity anxiety among their leaders. Can religious institutions support distinct ways of life that are both ethnic and religious in American middle class society? Researchers have attempted to disentangle the beliefs, practices, relationships, institutions, and conscious self-identity that may or may not be essential to perpetuating community and tradition. Whether the object of study is independent-minded post–Vatican-II Catholics or intermarried nonreligious Jews, questions of religious identity have emerged in both practical and theoretical discussions.5

Another set of questions about religious identity is raised by seemingly incongruous religiosocial pairings (Warner 1997). Where significant collective identities stand in opposition to one another, individuals who find themselves in both warring camps at the same time must engage in active identity work. Thumma (1991) examines, for instance, the case of gays who are also evangelical. He demonstrates that special purpose organizations can engender both the rationale and the practices by which a “gay evangelical” identity can be built and sustained, but such practices take intentional work. By replicating much of evangelical culture, but within a gay environment, people create and try out new religious solidarities.

Equally interesting has been the attempt to understand conversion. Especially at the height of sociology’s attention to new religious movements, we had opportunities to see actions and affiliations transformed in ways that brought identity construction visibly to the fore (e.g., Bromley and Hammond 1987; Robbins 1988). Here were people who chose, in a thoroughly modern way, a seemingly pre-modern absorption in a religious community, trading a multilayered and complicated modern identity for one organized around a single set of core religious beliefs, practices, and associations.6

Among the most helpful of the work on conversion that emerged from that era was Mary Jo Neitz’s portrayal of the process by which charismatic Catholics gained that new identity (Neitz 1987). She describes conversion as the gradual building up of a new “root reality” (Heirich 1977) at the same time that the old one is being discarded. The change is made as people engage in a kind of practical/rational process

4	See, for example, Chong 1998; Kim 2000; Lawson 1999; Pena˜ and Frehill 1998; Yang 1999.
5	Hoge (2000) has recently made this argument . Among the key recent studies of Jewish identity
	are Davidman (1990), Heilman (1996), and Goldstein and Goldstein (1996). For Catholics, see
	Dillon (1999a) and McNamara (1992).

6Even that construal is, of course, more “ideal typical” than real. Even the most tightly bounded new religious movement still retained complex layers of involvement and dissent and therefore complex versions of identity. See, for example, Barker (1984).

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of testing faith claims against their everyday experience to see what makes practical sense. She notes that conversion can take many forms, given that we all live with varying degrees of complexity in our worlds and begin from different degrees of religious salience. To move from a high-salience Catholic to a low-salience Catholic is a process to be explained no less than the move from a low-salience Catholic to a highsalience charismatic. And her insistence that we take practical reason into account moves us helpfully into questions of the social conditions under which religious actors, ideas, and relationships become salient within the complicated lives of modern persons.

Two things are striking to me about this literature. First, much of it proceeds with little attention to a definition or theory of identity. The assumption seems often to be that “we know it when we see it.” Even careful ethnographers charting the process by which identities are under siege or being remade, write a text between the lines that asserts identity (especially an authentically religious one) to be a singular guiding “core” that shapes how others respond to us and how we guide our own behavior. We either have it or we don’t. Other identities may be partial, but “real” religious ones surely must be total. The task in transitional and contradictory situations, this subtext reads, is to get the core back together again. In what follows I want to question and nuance that basic assumption.

The second thing that strikes me is that so little of our thinking about religious identity has taken the everyday world of ordinary people into account. In looking – understandably – at the places where identity work was obvious, we have perhaps avoided the basic questions about social life that ought to inform any attempt to understand the place of religion in it. How and why do people act as they do? What guides and constrains that action? Under what conditions do people orient themselves toward religious institutions and realities? By beginning with a look at recent thinking about social identity – both personal and collective – I hope to move our discussion of religious identity to include such questions.

CONSTRUCTING AND DECONSTRUCTING SOCIAL IDENTITY

Zygmunt Bauman (1996) posits that the very notion of identity is a modern preoccupation. Only when human beings begin to be disembedded from traditional spaces and relationships, long-accepted rhythms of time and well-established activities of survival, do we begin to ask such questions as “Who am I?” and “Where do I belong?” The notion of constructing a self makes sense, he argues, only when the materials for such construction have had to be gathered from far and wide, piled up out of the deconstruction of existing social worlds. Only then do we begin to worry – either existentially or theoretically – about the coherence of our biographical narratives or the bases for our group memberships (Giddens 1991).

John Hewitt (1989), by contrast, points out that the tenuousness of personal identity is simply part of the human condition. All identities include elements of continuity (being the same person over time), integration (being a whole person, not fragments), identification (being like others), and differentiation (being unique and bounded). And every human situation, not just modern ones, places identity in jeopardy. Most basically, no situation is every fully routine; there are always surprises. Every situation gives others the opportunity to evaluate whether we are who we have been believed

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to be, whether our actions fit the roles we have assumed. And every situation carries a tension between assuming those roles, fitting in, declaring our identification with the group, and, on the other hand, doing something that emphasizes our uniqueness, our differentiation. Whether because our actions arouse doubts in others or because we ourselves seek to declare our independence or because the situation challenges existing assumptions, human society has never allowed identity to be unproblematic. Modern society is different in the number of roles and communities available for the choosing, but not different in these basic dynamics of identification and differentiation.

More than a generation ago, Goffman (1959; 1967), Garfinkel (1967), and Berger and Luckmann (1966) began the task of theorizing how persons construct, present, and conspire to protect the fragile stability of each other’s selves. Their work began to lay out the ways in which each social situation calls for the creative work of its participants, each picking up the strands of the drama as it unfolds. Players take roles that make sense to and of themselves and others (Mead 1934), aligning their actions with scripts and categories that will be recognized and can be responded to by the other players. More recently, Hall, among others, has pointed to the ways in which we identify with and “perform” the positions to which we are assigned, talking our way into ongoing stories that are always partial and incomplete (Hall 1996). The ability to align our actions with the actions of others, mutually defining and working within a recognized script, marks us as sane and competent members of our society. To break character or to challenge the basic story line of the script, these theorists taught us, is to risk insanity or to incite revolution. Although scripts and characters are constantly remade by the small dramas of everyday life, those dramas are also the agents that keep existing social structures in place.7

In the generation since, the “postmodern” fragmentation of everyday life has prompted many to speculate about the increasing complexity of identity construction, emphasizing the incoherence of the scripts, rather than their solidity. Even before adding relationships built in cyberspace to the mix, many have posited a fluidity of identity that makes coherence seem obsolete.8 Bauman and others argue that the notion of any “core” self is impossible, that we are tourists and vagabonds, rather than pilgrims with a sense of destination (Bauman 1996). We have no core itinerary guiding our movement through the world. A tentative step in the direction of order is taken by the French theorist Michel Maffesoli, who describes our postmodern situation as a new “time of tribes” (Maffesoli 1995). He argues that “we [social scientists] have dwelled so often on the dehumanization and the disenchantment with the modern world and the solitude it induces that we are no longer capable of seeing the networks of solidarity that exist within” (p. 72). Leaving aside the traditional institutions that are presumed to hold society together and define its citizens, he turns his focus to the solidarity created in everyday gatherings. Sounding often like Durkheim (1912/1976), he looks for the affective force of sociality and custom (a “religion of humanity”) that binds people together in ever-shifting gatherings. Local face-to-face groups, as seemingly anonymous as the passengers on a bus, constitute, he proposes, a “neo-tribalism characterized by

7Their insistence on the power of the scripts is echoed in Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of “habitus,” a set of practical dispositions or master patterns into which we are socialized so that our

actions in any situation are exactly suited to our position in that field of interaction. See Swartz (1998).

8This is a form of community and identity that needs much more attention. See Cerulo and associates (1992) for an excellent treatment of the subject.

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fluidity, occasional gatherings and dispersal” (p. 76). Faced with the fluidity of boundaries that brings ever-changing arrays of people together, we use theatrical displays of clothing and body art to found and reconfirm communities and recognize ourselves in them.

His is an attempt to find a new way of understanding the order that still exists in the midst of the seeming chaos, a chaos that appears to leave each of us to invent a new self for each new situation and each group to an arbitrarily defined fight for recognition. While not everyone is so sure that emerging “tribes” are potentially benign, Maffesoli is not alone in pointing to fluidity of boundaries and to the strength of sociality and custom. Neither selves nor groups are utterly reconstituted with each new encounter. Some continuity clearly prevails at the same time that a complex society continually challenges that continuity.

The tension between order and chaos, between continuity and revision, is reflected in differing emphases in thinking about identity.9 Some focus on fluidity and agency, on the ways in which each new encounter leaves the world or the identity slightly (or radically) changed. Others, following especially in the footsteps of Bourdieu (e.g. 1987), focus on the ways in which every interaction is structured by and reinforces patterns of difference, hierarchy, and domination, especially through categories of class, race, and gender (Lamont and Fournier 1992).

But either such view of identity seems to me inadequate. I am unwilling to discard the possibility that persons seek some sense of congruence within the complexity of their lives. Nor do I believe that structured categories exist untouched by the actions and resistance of the actors who inhabit them. What seems essential is to move beyond the notion that any single category of experience – even race, class, or gender – defines identity or action. Identity is not an essential, core, category, nor is it well-conceived in binary either/or terms.10 To be feminine does not preclude being also masculine, nor does being “American” preclude being also “Irish” or “Hispanic.” What we need is a way to talk about who we are and how we behave without reducing ourselves either to a single determining structural essence or to complete chaotic indeterminacy. While the realities of the late modern situation make analysis (and life itself) immensely complex, any adequate account of identity needs an account of the ongoing coherence that is constructed by human consciousness and the solidarity that is created by social gatherings, however temporary. In Giddens’s words, “The reflexive project of the self . . . consists in the sustaining of coherent, yet continuously revised, biographical narratives” (Giddens 1991: 5). Both the coherence and the revision are central to the process. This task is made challenging by the pluralization of our life contexts and the diversity of authorities and power present in any society, but neither the life project nor the analytical task can be set aside in the face of complexity.

IDENTITY AS A PROBLEM OF AGENCY AND STRUCTURE

At its root, differences over fluidity and constraint in the formation of identity grow out of different understandings of agency and structure. To what extent and in what ways

9 Cerulo (1997) calls these two camps the “constructionists” and the “postmodernists.”

10Minow (1997) is especially helpful in examining the political difficulties of insisting on this middle ground between essentialism and constructionism.

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do we understand the human person to be an agent in the creation of her or his own persona? Are groups free to define themselves, or are they defined by powerful others? The answer to those questions begins with the recognition that social action is guided by patterned regularities, social-constructed categories that organize our experience and thinking. We simply respond to the world in terms of what we think we already know about it. There are cognitive and psychological reasons, as much as social ones, for the fundamental way in which human thinking depends on socially constructed categories (DiMaggio 1997).

Agency is located, then, not in freedom from patterned constraint but in our ability to invoke those patterns in nonprescribed ways, enabled in large measure by the very multiplicity of solidarities in which we participate. Sewell (1992) locates agency in the fact that actors always occupy multiple structures and can import resources and schemas (“rules” or categories of understanding) from one to another – what he calls transposability. The rules that tell me who I am at work are not the same rules that guide my behavior at home or at church. Minow observes similarly that all identities are “intersectional,” that we are always many things as once – female, white, Catholic, disabled, daughter, and the like (Minow 1997: 38ff). Indeed, part of the experience of education is to gain access to the schemas of cultures in distant times and places, adding other voices to the conversation about how life should proceed.

Emirbayer and Mische (1998) locate agency in the play of structures across time, as well as across institutions and space. They point to the human ability to bring past, present, and future into play at any given moment and to choose which “past” is the relevant one. They call this the “iterational element” of action. It is located in our ability to categorize (if this is an X, then I do Y) and in our necessary formation of habits, which are not automatic but are shaped into “settled dispositions.” These theorists take very seriously, then, the real power of existing schemas and their ability to produce predictable “strategies of action” (Swidler 1986), but the equally real ability of actors to invoke those strategies in unpredictable ways.

The movement across institutions and time is not, of course, done on a perfectly level playing field. Some actors have a disproportionate ability to mobilize human, symbolic, and material resources in the service of perpetuating or altering patterns of interaction. Sewell, like Bourdieu, points out that some actors can simply manipulate situations and conversations to their own symbolic and material advantage (Sewell 1992). Still, because we do not live in an enclosed world with only one pattern of resource allocation, no single situation is fully determined by itself. We constantly import rules from one situation into another new or unfamiliar one. Identities, then, need to be understood as structured by existing rules and schemas, constrained by existing distributions of resources and power, but also malleable in the everyday reality of moving across institutional contexts and among symbolic worlds.

What each of these theorists has provided is explication for the dynamic nature of each social encounter. We never arrive on the scene as a single identity, but always carry with us the multiple entanglements of our past and present. The very multiplicity of our identities makes agency possible (cf. Coser 1991). Acting within and between structures, across time and space, we cumulatively build up a persona and collectively shape the solidarities of which we are a part. Those personas and solidarities are themselves, then, both structures that constrain future action and sites for continuous revision and improvisation.

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IDENTITY AS A NARRATIVE CONSTRUCTION

What is already implied in these discussions of action and agency is the way in which “narrative” may prove a helpful metaphor for understanding the nature of identities. Studies of identity have long taken conversation and language as key sites for analysis. Indeed, the ability to use a group’s language is basic to what we mean by membership and identity. To participate in the “discourse” of the group is to enter the social world that the group has constructed (Brown 1993). Our understanding of ourselves, including our incorporation of categories that keep us in dominated positions, is worked out in communication and language. As George Herbert Mead (1934) suggested, identity construction can be viewed in terms of the words we use – words that categorize, words that imply relationships (and often the unequal power inherent in them).

It is, however, critical to move past the words themselves. What narrative analysis offers us is attention to the relationships and actions that give words their meaning. If we are to understand the nature of identity in a complex world that involves multiple solidarities that both constrain and are continually reconstructed, we need a dynamic mode of analysis that moves beyond categorizing words and analyzing syntax. “(A)ll of us come to be who we are (however ephemeral, multiple, and changing) by being located or locating ourselves (usually unconsciously) in social narratives . . . ,” claims Margaret Somers (1994: 606). Narrative, she goes on, renders an event understandable by connecting it to a set of relationships and practices – historically and spatially, particular people doing socially patterned things.

Narrative takes an event and makes it part of a plot, that is, an action-account. The event cannot do this for itself, but must be “emplotted” by the actors who must evaluate the various possible scenarios available to them.11 The events that become part of a narrative are selected from all that we know of the world. They are placed in a temporal order that implies causation and provides closure. And they are placed in a structure of relationships. As Ewick and Silbey (1995) point out, the process of emplotment is an inherently moral exercise, giving meaning at the same time that it creates explanation and order. This process of emplotment need rarely be conscious; internalized narratives guide most action through habit. Nor are narratives grand stories that explain the world. They need only be unspoken accounts that take an event and give it meaning by making it part of an implied episode or chapter, accounts that identify the characters in the event as part of a larger cast and that situate the event in a meaningful setting.

Among the narratives at play in identity construction are, according to Somers (1994), four types. What she calls “ontological narratives” are the socially constructed stories that are carried by the individual actor as a way of orienting and emplotting the actor’s own life. This is her way of reinstating some notion of “core” or “coherence” in the face of arguments about the self as vagabond. To avoid the presumptions of immutability contained in the notion of an “ontological” self, however, I would prefer to capture this idea as “autobiographical narratives,” instead. Choices about how to act

11Emirbayer and Mische’s (1998) notion of agency is very compatible with a narrative analysis. Every action, they claim, contains, in addition to the “iterative” (past patterns), an imagined future, and an improvised present; and creative selection is involved in all three dimensions. The “imaginative element” in agency is the human ability to generate future trajectories of action (plots), to imagine what may happen as a result of my action.

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depend as much on the internal themes and plots of this autobiographical narrative as on the situation and cultural plots we imagine to be in play. The core self is constantly being negotiated in the various social contexts of a life, but it retains certain themes against which new events and episodes are weighed. Persons understand themselves as certain sorts of characters who are capable of acting in certain ways and incapable or unwilling to act in others.12 An autobiographical narrative makes possible the predictability with which we respond to each other and imparts a certain trustworthiness and integrity to our action.13

It is important to note here that individual internal narratives may be at odds with the story projected to others. Persons are quite capable of acting strategically and/or without sincerity, creating a narrative more suited to what they think others will reward than to their own conscious autobiographical narrative. Likewise, those internal narratives may include characters and episodes that are never recognized by others as “real.” Whether the voices heard by a schizophrenic or the visions of a mystic or the body images that tell an anorexic she is fat, autobiographical narratives may guide behavior in ways that do not include the “rational” assessment and critique of the larger community.

But much of identity is guided by those community assessments. In addition to autobiographical narratives, Somers posits the “public narratives” which are attached to groups and categories, cultures and institutions.14 Whether it is the court system or shopping malls, ethnic group or gender, these social institutions and categories provide recognized “accounts” one can give of one’s behavior, accounts that identify where one belongs, what one is doing and why (Mills 1940; Scott and Lyman 1968). These are publicly constructed and shared, existing beyond the agency and consciousness of any single individual. Some have enormous strength and widespread recognition; others seem more malleable and/or more narrowly recognized. The strength of an institution can, in fact, be measured by the degree to which its narratives are available in the culture, the extent to which its stories are used to emplot actions across many settings.

Finally, Somers lists metanarratives, which are overarching cultural paradigms for how stories go – a narrative of progress or Enlightenment, for instance – and “conceptual narratives,” that is, those constructed by scientists for the sake of explanation. In making the determination about how to emplot an event, then, we evaluate possible story lines according to whether they fit with existing themes – both internal and external – that guide those plots. That process is not utterly free, of course, and is often constrained by the power of certain actors to keep dominating stories in place.

Narrative theories posit that action proceeds, then, from the specific place and time in which it is situated, including thereby all of the available culturally constructed stories in that place. It proceeds, as well, from the relationships embedded in the situation,

12Teske’s (1997) work on the construction of activist identities makes clear that it is possible for individuals to construct a schema to describe themselves that can then shape the action they perceive as inevitable and necessary.

13The moral dimensions of the human construction of a self are taken up by Shotter (1984), Niebuhr (1963), and others. Much of “virtue” or “character” ethics has these issues as a central concern.

14These public narratives reside in what Bourdieu would call “fields,” the operative arena that determines which forms of cultural capital and which habitus will come into play. See Swartz (1998).