What Matters?: Ethnographies of Value in a (Not So) Secular Age

INTRODUCTION

Things of Value

ANN TAVES AND COURTNEY BENDER

What does it mean to pursue, inhabit, or lead a valuable, ethical life in a secular age? This question has gained renewed attention, and importance, as scholars in the last decade have challenged the way that we think about secularity and what some have termed our secular age. Long gone are the days when social scientists regarded religion as an anachronism, fading into our collective past or remaining on the margins of culture as a sideshow curiosity. Gone, too, are the days when scholars linked the language of spirits, haunting, and the spectral to investigations of the premodern and primitive: more and more frequently, enchanted language and ideas come alive in studies of modernity. The wholesale rethinking of what the secular means and how rethinking this category reframes our understanding of religion has been the driving engine of numerous recent investigations. At this point, however, we cannot help but notice that rethinking what the secular means opens up new ways of approaching the question, what does it mean to be secular? How do people in our secular (or not so secular) age decide what matters, what goals to pursue, and what things are of most value? When does the question of what matters come to be a question at all, and for whom?

This volume begins with two observations that orient its approach to these questions. First, we observe that processes of valuation and the making of meaning take place across a wide spectrum of settings, events, and organizations that could be considered religious, secular, or even spiritual. Second, we also observe that for many modern people the processes of experiencing things of value take shape in tandem with identifying their various projects and pursuits as secular, religious, or spiritual (or some combination thereof). Our first observation has led us to place an intentionally wide range of empirical studies into conversation with each other. Read individually, each essay presents a focused example of ways that modern people actively engage in something that matters to them, while drawing on (or confronting) a set of secular, religious, and spiritual frames to represent what they are doing. In considering disparate examples, such as transnational psytrance communities, Indian volunteer organizations, and American homeschooling settings, we find that that how people categorize their activity—whether as secular, religious, spiritual, or some variation thereof—is central to processes of valuation and meaning making. The question of what is religious, what is secular, and what is spiritual is not simply a matter for scholars. Although scholarly and lay engagements with these issues are not equivalent, we nonetheless find that paying close attention to processes of valuation adds a layer of analytical complexity to our understanding of modern life and heightens awareness of our own role as scholars in creating value.

Reading the chapters in this volume together highlights the extent to which modern processes of valuation take shape in tandem with practical and everyday actions that identify various institutions, ideas, or experiences as religious, secular, or spiritual. These determinations can take shape in various ways, but the chapters in this volume pay particular attention to the degree to which people reflexively consider the value of their activities and those of others. Thus, for example, we see that homeschooling parents seek to pursue or protect their children’s authentic childhoods with secular and spiritual language, even though they note that their desire for their children’s personal authenticity is a concept that also resonates within the neoliberal politics that homeschooling practices criticize. The language that parents use to work through these issues can be compared with that of volunteers in an Indian orphanage who value experiences of being present with children (in ways that echo earlier religious formulations) regardless of whether their actions successfully effect social change. When read together in this way, the chapters in What Matters? compel readers to consider the resonances between widely dispersed projects of valuation and appreciate the way people in practice complicate a simple secular-religious frame.

This introductory essay locates our focus on processes of valuation in relation to wider discussions of secularity, the secular-religious binary, and lived religion. We begin with a brief review of recent developments in the study of secularism, paying particular attention to the understanding of the secular and religious as co-constituted historical formations. Considering secularism and religion in this way provides scholars and laypeople alike with a different and arguably more empirically grounded view of the shape of religion. Yet as we also observe, the secular-religious binary has its limits. These limits are particularly evident if we consider how, in many secular spaces, terms and concepts (and experiences) people consider spiritual interact with and inflect either religion or secularity. As we argue, thinking about spirituality and spirits both breaks up the limitations of the binary and puts renewed emphasis on the ways that these terms work dynamically as part of processes of valuation. Our interest is not in the spiritual or spirits per se, but in the way these and other related terms are at work in the world. We seek to understand the dynamic processes that connect or differentiate their uses and the powers each of these terms take on or dispense in the multiple settings where people in the modern world encounter or employ them. In order to map out this territory we suggest a methodological approach to processes of valuation that is attentive to the articulation of meaning within networks of social relationships. We conclude with a discussion of key terms—spirituality, spirits, experience, authenticity, and authority—to guide the reader through this volume and, perhaps toward future study.

FROM SECULARIZATION TO SECULARISM: THE SECULAR-RELIGION BINARY AND THE CHALLENGE OF SPIRITUALITY

The turn to secularism from secularization represents an important transformation in the ways that scholars understand religion in modern life. Secularization, in classical versions, narrates the decline of religious authority over all aspects of social life and its withdrawal into the space of private belief and private life.¹ Secularization denotes the consequences of intellectual developments such as the experimental scientific method and modern reason (the Enlightenment) and identifies social, political, and economic developments such as growing industrialization and urbanization as the engines of these changes. In these theories the rise of reason, science, and industrial society leads to religion’s retreat. Secular society is what flourishes in the wake of this ceded territory. This robust narrative held sway in both the United States and Europe in the social sciences and in public understanding despite the fact that it did not fit the United States. Many sociologists noted the problem of American religious exceptionalism, but others in the discipline (and most outside it) continued to view the classical narrative as reflective of broad-scale social processes (Gorski and Altinordu 2009). In the late 1970s a number of world events (the public and powerful role of the Catholic Church in the Polish Solidarity movement, the political rise of the Moral Majority in the United States, and the Iranian revolution, among others) made clear that secularization theories provided little purchase on understanding religion in modern society, prompting scholarly rethinking of secularization tout court.

Key to this rethinking was a revived attention to the relational interactions between changing understandings of the religious and the secular, which invested new attention in the ways that particular actors and institutions framed these relations. Renewed attention to the historical and political dynamics in which such understandings took shape allowed scholars to observe that secularism was not merely an inert tabula rasa that emerged once the mystifications of religion were scrubbed away, but, rather, a formation in its own right that emerged and developed in response to, and in relation to, the religious. Secularism, and secularity as well, did not emerge as religion retreated, but rather stands alongside it with projects, ideals, and goals of its own. As Talal Asad writes in his essays on the subject of secular formations, the secular is neither continuous with the religious that supposedly preceded it (that is, it is not the latest phase of a sacred origin) nor a simple break from it (that is, it is not the opposite, an essence that excludes the sacred) (2003:25). It is instead an umbrella term that encompasses a range of formations that relate in various ways to diverse religious formations. Viewed in this way, we can identify multiple kinds of relations between religious and secular endeavors.

This is not the place to rehearse the full development of theories of secularism (which would be challenging given the number of disciplines now producing studies of the secular). Several elements of this turn are worth emphasizing, however, as they relate to our interests in this volume. First, this approach, which focuses on both religion and secularism as historical formations with content that takes shape in specific locations, draws scholarly attention to the question of how religion and secularism develop and interact rather than taking these interactions and their trajectories for granted. Secularism is viewed as an identifiable set of projects that takes place historically (and contemporarily) in relation to something called religion—a something that it has a large hand in defining and reframing secularism. In other words, not only are these processes historically and empirically observable, but they also take shape in relation to different understandings of religion and its powers.

Second, by emphasizing that historically developing secularism has content that is shaped within empirically analyzable discourses, practices, and actions (such as changes in law, social interactions and arrangements, economic structures and demands) we can also consider in a more focused and relational way how concepts of religion have developed in tandem. We take both local and global processes and actors into account, and, insofar as global and national political and social movements are involved in shaping religion and secularity both in daily life and in scholarly discussion,² scholars can understand religion and secularity as dynamically related discursive and institutional processes.

Third, these calls for stronger analytical and empirical analyses of secularity in various contexts have taken shape in tandem with (and have often been informed by) theoretical frames that focus on practice. While much of the turn to practice in religious studies and in anthropology developed in ways that do not directly impinge upon discussions of the secular (Bourdieu 1990; Bell 1992), the turn to practice has directed scholarly attention to action, habit, discipline, and powers that arise in the context of embodied actions in a way that has been quite fruitful. For scholars of religion, emphasis on structures, habits, and disciplines encouraged studies investigating practices and institutions that shaped or reproduced both symbols and meaning.³ In religious studies and sociology in particular, the turn to practice aligns the study of religion with other modes of cultural and social action.

These scholarly turns have had a profound effect on the questions asked by sociologists and scholars of religion while at the same time giving rise to new questions. To begin, we cannot help but notice that the studies of secularism and its related religious formations are frequently phrased in terms of a secular-religious binary. This binary is conceptualized as a dynamic set of relations between religious and secular claims, interests, and concepts: they relate to each other in different ways, depending on the national, state, or transnational contexts observed. The focus on interactions (that are not assumed to be unidirectional) and of the powers shaping their forms, their historical development and change, all have much to recommend them. Yet this formation, as we have noted, has limits once we consider the relationship of spirituality (and spirits or the the spiritual) to the binary.

At first blush, it would appear that spirituality and spirits would align unproblematically with the religious. Spirituality is after all a component of religion: we can speak of spiritual traditions within religious traditions and institutions; this has been the historical value and use of such terms. In this regard, spirituality is unambiguously a component of religion. Many who say that they are spiritual not religious within the United States and Europe, however, use spirituality to designate something that is not religious. Similarly, within a binary of religion-secular, scholars typically link spirits with a world of enchantment, distinct from the disenchanted space of the secular. Yet a closer look at the ways that people actually refer to spirits belies this easy distinction. Indeed, we observe that spirituality and spirits are often invoked as an aspect of secularity or are aligned with it. Insofar as people use these terms to describe experiences and denote positions and aspirations that are more than or move beyond either secularity or religion, it complicates a straightforward religious-secular binary. We offer a few examples to illustrate.

In some contexts spirituality denotes the underlying truths or spirit of religion. Popular literature directed to those people who are spiritual not religious describes the spiritual either as the truth of religion that is beyond the history of religious traditions (Bender 2010) or as the constant, ahistorical quality of human searching for the divine. Spirituality thus is a term that can be marshaled by atheists and secularists to mark their own pursuits and goals. Spirituality may, in other words, be compatible with secularism—and incompatible with religion. This is the argument made by many, including the critic of religion Sam Harris, who closes the End of Faith (2004)with a plea to his readers to develop their spiritual intuitions. In Harris’s view, spirituality divorced from religious fanaticism and irrationality is an important human pursuit. Spirituality is fully compatible with and indeed finds its ideal home within the secular.

Harris is not alone, nor is this view confined to the United States: the self-styled faithful atheist Andrew Comte-Sponville similarly notes, in The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality (2007), that people can do without religion and God, but they cannot do without spirituality. Harris, Comte-Sponville, and others, thus, rhetorically situate spirituality on the side of the secular, marshaling it against what they view as the fanaticism of religiosity. Spirituality, thus, is not a purely residual and ephemeral concept easily organized under the religious. It in fact is often used to critique religion. Historians of secularism and freethought will recognize this as a common refrain from the nineteenth century onward: nineteenth-century freethinkers argued for pantheistic morality and spirituality, infusing their claims to universal reason and moral righteousness with language that would challenge the sectarianism and narrowness of religious morality.

What is spirituality doing in these secular places? We can ask this question not just of popular culture but also of scholarly work that invokes the spiritual in avowedly secular contexts. Thus, Charles Taylor (2007) invokes the spiritual (or moral/spiritual) when he refers to various incommensurate projects of value and meaning that take place within what he calls the secular immanent frame. William Connolly, another scholar committed to secular plurality (1999, 2005a), invokes the spiritual to discuss the moods and dispositions of various religious and nonreligious groups in ways that allow him to highlight the connections (or resonances) between capitalist and evangelical spiritual dispositions and to raise questions about the emotional intensity of various cultural spiritualities (2005b). His invocation of the spiritual (unmarked or defined in any specific way) in his work on the evangelical capital resonance machine and on secularism provides another example of how spirituality is at work in scholarly discussions. In such contexts, it seems to mark relationships and dispositions for human action that lie outside of religious and secular formations. After linking spirituality to disposition, Connolly, for example, counterposes it to things he considers traditions. In so doing he precludes consideration of the kinds of traditions or trajectories in which spirituality develops.

We highlight this use of spirituality in scholarly work in order to note how, in such contexts, it is linked to religious-secular formations. In contrast to religion and secularism (both of which are frequently provided a history, a genealogy, or an indication of their historically changing uses and politics), spirituality typically receives little attention as a word with a history. Without a history or a tradition attached to it, it often enables scholars to gesture toward or indicate something that is more than or underlying the religious and secular. In this respect, the frequent invocation of spiritual and spirituality within both secular and religious contexts signals an interest in marking something as transcending the secular-religious binary. In this context, it is a discursive practice that, in marking value, participates in its creation and, at the same time, highlights the felt need of many—both scholars and nonscholars—to expand upon the secular-religious binary when seeking to designate what matters.

Of course, taking a longer view of the developments of religion within secularism (and secularism in relation to religion) over the last several centuries presents numerous examples of other third terms that took on new shape and power in relation to the secular-religious binary, often enabling actors to place themselves in enlivened (if not enchanted) relations with the social worlds they produced. Peter van der Veer notes, for example, how cosmopolitan imaginations in British Commonwealth countries were inflected by an intricate interplay of rationalism and spirituality, universalism and nationalism, material science and spiritualism that shaped the engagement with the other in the colonial context (van der Veer 2002; 2009). Moral and political reformers such as Swami Vivekananda and Annie Besant worked within these intricate contexts, transposing practices and traditions into religious or secular registers and reshaping others into quasi-religion or nonreligion or occult magic (Viswanathan 2008; Aravamudan 2006). As Pamela Klassen (2012) and Christopher White (2008) demonstrate, North American Protestant missionaries, healers, and scientists invested medical practices and modern technologies with divine forces and in so doing enchanted biomedical practices in ways they presumed were entirely consistent with the sciences in which they participated.

These processes are not confined to the past, of course. We can see, for example, that in A Secular Age Charles Taylor frequently invokes the term spiritual to evoke a variety of concepts surrounding things of value. For example, he notes that the most important consequence of the shift to modern, secular life is the resituating of religion as one option among many, in other words, highlighting religious belief as a choice rather than something accepted or experienced: individuals experience religion as something external to their (bounded, buffered) selves, which they can seek to incorporate or adopt if they wish. Secularity, as he puts it, is a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged … to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace (2007:3). Where Taylor suggests that, in earlier periods (and other places), religion was unreflexively absorbed and practiced, its authority taken for granted or presented in ways that make religious concepts and authorities the background frame on which life proceeds, modern Western secularism makes unreflexive religion impossible. As a consequence, people in the world confront a plural world of religious (and secular) possibilities, given that they are situated within a world where the background position (shaped in practices and institutions) makes religious choice possible and necessary. In short, secularity has transformed religion so that its practices and its beliefs take shape in a world where their unreflexive acceptance—as part of the field of social practices—is no longer possible. The same, presumably, can be said for secular forms of belief. And it is at this juncture in his narrative, where belief in the traditional religious sense is no longer possible, that he invokes for the first time the spiritual, and spiritual life and refers to the spiritual/moral … condition of life (2007:7–8, 11).

Investigating how scholars and philosophers employ the term spiritual thus presents opportunities to consider the shifts in concepts of meaning that take shape in relation to the dominant religion-secular binary frame. With this in mind, our interest in this volume is not to offer a better definition of spirituality or make a claim that it should be studied in some particular way. On the contrary, we do not view spirituality as having any more autonomy or value than religion or secularity; it has not, in our view, been neglected or ignored. Rather, we are interested in how changing discourses around religion and secularity, and (increasingly) spirituality and other similar terms, create possibilities for marking, creating, and experiencing things of value, whether in our contemporary moment or in the past.

Our consideration of these issues has led us to focus our attention on the valuations that are made possible in and through these terms. Each of these terms and the discursive fields in which they resonate provide to their various users a sense of possibility and power, as well as limits, which are derived in part through their relations or comparisons with other terms. The chapters in this volume carefully consider how people (secular, religious, and otherwise) live within and through worlds they consider religious or secular and identify and/or create things of value in the process. In focusing on these processes, our aim is not to define or reinforce any particular set of relations between these forms but rather to observe what happens to processes of valuation in the context of historically developing secularisms. How do the historically contingent formulations of the religious and secular inform people’s efforts to identify or create things of value, as well as their abilities to apprehend, experience, or create such things?

THINGS OF VALUE: PROCESSES AND RELATIONS

In different ways spirituality, religion, and secular become markers of value, as much or more so than they are containers of distinct kinds of actions or ideas. Positively, these terms may mark things, ideas, and practices as self-evidently meaningful or link them with higher, more expansive aims. Negatively, as in the case of superstition, they mark something as overvalued or wrongly linked to higher aims. In this volume, anthropologists, religious studies scholars, sociologists, and historians explore the ways in which these terms are at work in a variety of settings, including international humanitarianism, psytrance festivals, the history of psychology and archaeology. Taken together, they provide a variety of sites and perspectives from which to consider what these terms make possible within the dynamics of modern secularity, while at the same time exposing the limits of current discussions that focus only on the religious-secular binary.

To advance our understanding of how people employ these markers to identify and/or create things of value, we suggest a focus on processes of valuation in the context of events and interactions (Taves 2011). By value, we simply mean the claims that people make regarding the importance of something (anything), regardless of whether the importance carries a positive or negative valence. Various academic disciplines, including ethics, law, linguistics, and economics, define and measure value in different ways. Anthropological theories of value understand the concept of value as a social-cultural construct closely tied to processes of meaning making (Graeber 2001; Werner and Bell 2003). In referring to ethnographies of value, we signal our interest in the ways that people in various contexts decide (or experience or identify) what is of value as well as the processes that allow them (and us) to assign or apprehend such things. In considering value as ethnographically relevant, we thus focus on the processes through which people mark things as special or singular both through discourse and behaviors (Kopytoff 1986).

A focus on things people value highly enough to set them apart as special casts a wide net that captures most of what scholars have designated by terms such as religious, spiritual, sacred, magical, superstitious, and so on (Taves 2009). In contrast to a project such as Peter Van Ness’s analysis of secular spiritualities, which is premised on a scholarly definition of spiritual significance as "activities that bear the special meaning of relating their practitioners to the world as a cosmic whole and thereby transforming them in the direction of enhanced vitality" (Van Ness 1996:5; emphasis added), we are interested in the way that subjects identify things of value. By identifying that which interests us simply as things to which people grant special meaning, we are free to examine the ways people locate the things they most value in relation to various formations of the secular and religious as well as other third terms, such as spirituality, that flourish in this web of meaning and practices.

We approach and query how things—actions, objects, experiences, institutions, rituals, and the like—acquire meaning in events and interactions. An understanding of processes of valuation requires that we pay close attention not only to events and interactions but also to the various resources, processes, and structures that enable the articulation of value. This enlarged focus allows us to examine the way people mobilize various terms (spiritual, religious, or secular) in specific contexts, as part of the process of marking things of particular value or coming to experience them as such.

The idea that things acquire value in the context of relationships, events, and interactions is consistent with relational theories that view things as the result of ongoing social processes rather than conceiving social processes as the outcome of things that act (Elias 1998; Emirbayer 1997). Emirbayer argues that the very terms or units involved in a transaction derive their meaning, significance and identity from the (changing) functional roles they play within that transaction. Transactions, understood as dynamic, unfolding processes built upon events, become the primary unit of analysis rather than the constituent elements (1997:287). To take up Ernest Cassirer’s prose, things are not assumed as independent existences present anterior to any relation. . . . Such ‘things’ are terms of relations, and as such can never be ‘given’ in isolation (1953:36). Relationally developing things include not just categories or discourses but likewise the subject, the will, and the person (Bakhtin 1981; Lambek 2003). We also find that patterns in transactions, utterances, and practices carry resonances of prior interactions, making possible certain types of actors, emotions, and relations. As a consequence, different questions about the role of histories, memory, translation, and transmission also come into focus.

Drawing upon processual and relational methods expands our inquiry beyond the boundaries that have, in prior generations, considered questions of meaning and value within distinct secular and religious spheres. If nothing else, these theories allow us to recognize that the processes of distinguishing things, as distinct, as in relations of various kinds, is elemental: what appears to be naturally in one domain or another (or what appears to naturally span those domains) is better understood, for our purposes, as the result of processes in which people identify and mark things as valuable in identifiable and powerful ways. It is with these perspectives that we can ask a different kind of question about how things—secular things, religious things, spiritual things—come to be deemed as such (by scholars as well as nonscholars) and draw those processes into the center of our inquiry.

THE VALUE OF VALUING: PRACTICE AND BELIEF

The analytical questions we raise here share much with already well-established scholarly discussions and projects, including ethnographic and historical work undertaken under the rubric of lived religion (Hall 1997). Lived religion is a set of approaches and methods in the field of religious studies, with uncertain boundaries and much argumentation, which developed in the same time frame as the study of secular formations. This scholarly approach emphasizes practice as a key node through which to investigate the structuring force of religious traditions. It developed in response to scholarly practices that continued to distinguish between orthodox and heterodox religious forms and authorities without investigating the practices (scholarly and religious, among others) that shaped and formed those distinctions. Drawing from a variety of theoretical insights in anthropology, history, and literary studies, the key frame of practice took shape, understanding the power dynamics shaping religious forms without building in or around a structure of opposition. Nor [does the study of lived religion] displace the institutional or normative perspectives on practice. A focus on practice helps us see that clergy were complicitous in the ways of thinking and doing that [lived religious studies] map, complicitous because they, too, were caught up in the same dilemmas (Hall 1997:ix). This means, as Robert Orsi argues, "Rethinking religion as a form of cultural work, the study of lived religion directs attention to institutions and persons, texts and rituals, practice and theology, things and ideas—all as media of making and unmaking worlds" (2003:172).

Rather than hold these elements apart or view them as differing instantiations of the same tradition (and with more or less authority and relevance), lived religion investigates their co-construction. Numerous studies have presented genealogies of religious practices, using the space of particular practices to investigate any number of issues: the intersecting relations and struggles of correct practice, orthodoxy, popular interpretation, the expression of religious agency and the disciplinary formation of various practices, the slip between religious and secular practice, and so on. As Orsi notes, the cultural work that takes place under the sign of religion includes scholarly disciplines and practices as well. Practice approaches must always be informed by a clear and critical understanding of the political, social, and intellectual history of the discipline of religious studies so that those of us who do this kind of work can understand what we are setting ourselves against, what we are contending with in the nomenclature and theoretical apparatuses of the discipline, and what projects we are resisting (2003:171–2).

Two elements of this approach are worth highlighting: first, the emphasis on practice as processes, where focus on a practice is not oriented toward isolating an object for study but rather calls attention to its embeddedness and relations within a range of settings and concepts. Attention to the emergence of meaning within a complex set of interactions and settings demonstrates a set of interests, where concepts of human agency and possibility of acting are being coordinated at the same time as the objects being acted upon (Bender 2012). This attention to practices means, more aptly put, a focus on practicing and the dynamic social processes wherein experience, authority, and creativity are reproduced in ritual, actions, strategies, and habits in both embodied and discursive senses.⁴

In addition, lived religion’s emphasis on practice engages religious actions and activities that move well beyond the clearly marked religious contexts on which generations of scholars focused their attention. Studying practice has opened up a framework where scholars can observe the multisitedness of religious production including various secular or nonreligious institutions and settings. Thus, in the last decade, the study of American religion outside religious institutions has led to stronger and more focused analysis of how people in secular institutional contexts such as schools, voluntary organizations, courts, and prisons produce concepts and practices of religion (Sullivan 2007; Dubler forthcoming). Other studies have analyzed the generative and sometimes less obvious interactions among secular and religious bodily practices and cultural constructs and have done so with a close eye to the diachronic and historical trajectories of various secular and religious actions and identities (Griffith 2004; Lofton 2011; Klassen 2012; Goldschmidt 2006), further establishing and expanding the conceptual and methodological space wherein scholars of religion approach their topic.⁵

Lived religion’s emphases on studying religion as practiced in multiple settings has clear connections and links with scholars who are interested in understanding the power and force of secular-religious relations taking shape in practice in modern societies. As a review essay notes, recent ethnographies of secularism focus primarily on postcolonial or colonial contexts (Keane 2007) or on Islam and the interaction between European secularism and Islam (Cannell 2010). Here, the question of the secular is intimately linked to the state and the construction of liberal selves. The issues of agency, practice, and structure also resonate clearly within these studies, however (see in particular Hirschkind 2009; Mittermaier 2010). While these two scholarly frames engage different subject matter, disciplines, and (frequently) levels or scales of research, both are, to a surprisingly similar degree, engaged in investigating the fields of religious and secular production through practice.

When we highlight these striking overlapping questions and issues, we can also see another shared theoretical and epistemological frame, namely, a set of studied moves away from focus on religious belief or even a focus on the practice of belief. The move away from belief as a central focus of investigation was prompted and reinforced by several intersecting views and evaluations. Primarily, religious studies and anthropology scholars both recognized the degree to which identification of belief (particularly, individual subjective belief) as the defining feature of religion is a reflection of a particular historical context, that of an Enlightenment-era infused with tacit Protestant presuppositions. The development of a universal definition of religion based on individual belief and (as many have since argued) the autonomous liberal subject who can have belief is, thus, a historically emergent one. Critical genealogies of commonplace definitions that frame religion as belief have prompted the turn to practice and, in some cases, a focus on religious practice as habit and discipline, as structure and power, that have little to say in return about the kinds of spaces in which belief actually takes shape.

Concurrently, sociologists of culture