Body

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Body

In recent years, numerous scholars of religion have focused their studies on the human body, asking questions such as: How do different religions understand the human body? In what ways does one's individual body reflect social and cultural religious understandings? How is the body used in religious practices, such as during rituals? In what ways do religious feelings and experiences become embodied? Along with these more practical research questions come theoretical and philosophical debates about the relationship between mind and body, the subjectivity or objectivity of the body, the embodiment of knowledge, and the use of the body to reflect and resist social power relations. In her 1989 Presidential Address to the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, Meredith B. McGuire asked her audience to consider how their work might change if they were to include their research subjects' physical bodies within their analytical scope. McGuire was referring to the historical tendency of religious study to concern itself more with religious institutions and ideas than with how people physically express and experience their religiosity. Thus scholars in many disciplines—sociology, anthropology, psychology, history, and theology—are now focusing on how human bodies act within and are shaped by their religiocultural social contexts.

One of the central problems in studying the human body is defining exactly what it is. Regardless of their seemingly obvious biological concreteness, bodies have no meaningful existence outside the social spheres within which they function; bodies are, in a sense, reflections or symbols of their cultures. The religious actor's body is a changeable site that is continuously being molded by one's religious community to reveal the group's beliefs and values about human existence. For example, according to anthropologist Mary Douglas, who was the first social scientist to pay close attention to ways in which the natural human body symbolizes the social body (Natural Symbols, 1973; Purity and Danger, 1966), religious communities that promote clearly defined social boundaries between themselves and the larger world tend to have strict regulations about individual members' bodily activities. Thus, among contemporary American Orthodox Jews, who live in close-knit communities to maintain social and religious purity, specific bodily practices—hair and clothing styles, food and sexual practices, and family and community religious rituals—define the group as separate from and different from the larger culture.

Human bodies are not only the objects of shaping or control by their religious cultures; they are also subjects embodying human agents who are empowered to reproduce and express the values of their religious social groups and to experience those values physically and emotionally in deeply meaningful ways. This distinction between the body as object or social construction and the body as subject or agent of religious expression, personal experience, and social change—a distinction often expressed in terms of power relations of domination and resistance—is a central issue in discussions about the human body. The debate has been clearly defined by feminist scholars, who, beginning in the 1970s, were some of the earliest and most influential theorists to articulate the importance of attending to corporeal experience, especially that of women. Many scholars are working to find ways to view the embodied human being as simultaneously a social construction and an individual agent. For ritual studies theorist Catherine Bell (Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, 1992), a religious ritual inscribes its particular schema on the body of a participant by regulating appropriate gestures, speech, or bodily adornment, and, in so doing, empowers the participants to act with mastery to experience and manipulate the ritual for their own purposes. What makes religious practices particularly powerful for these enactments of domination and resistance is that they affect the individual below the level of explicit social discourse; social schema are absorbed and reproduced in new ways by the body without necessarily reaching personal consciousness. During a Christian Pentecostal or charismatic worship service, for example, while participants understand their active physical expressions and intense emotional experiences as divinely inspired, their bodies have, in fact, through identification with the expectations of the particular religiocultural group, absorbed a corporeal knowledge about how to behave and feel in ways appropriate to that group. Some charismatic Christian women, having assumed personal mastery of these ritual activities, have empowered themselves to subvert traditional gender roles and act with authority both publicly within the social group and privately within their families.

The trend in academia is toward further analyses of the human body that locate specific bodies in particular, concrete social settings, to detail more clearly how religious cultures and human bodies interact and engender change in each other. Theoretically, scholars continue to struggle with how to define the human body and understand how human beings create religious meanings that are not merely conceptual but also grounded in immediate, embodied experiences and practices.

Bibliography

Coakley, Sarah, ed. Religion and the Body. 1997.

Hollywood, Amy. "Transcending Bodies." ReligiousStudies Review 25 (1999): 13–18.

LaFleur, William R. "Body." In Critical Terms forReligious Studies, edited by Mark C. Taylor. 1998.

McGuire, Meredith B. "Religion and the Body: Re-materializing the Human Body in the Social Sciences of Religion." Journal for the ScientificStudyofReligion 29 (1990): 283–296.

Martha L. Finch-Jewell

Contemporary American Religion