Page 92 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

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Asad cites Marxist theorist of language L.S. Vygotsky on how “symbols
organize practice,” and are intrinsic to “signifying and organizing practices”
of all kinds (1993: 31–2).
The translation of Pierre Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice
into English in 1977 became a touchstone for practice theory generally.
Sociologist Bourdieu inveighed against the reification of society as a series
of structures that overwhelmed actors, turning them into prisoners of a
previously ordained, always already written “script.” Accordingly, his sense
of practice emphasized the strategic, constantly changing ways in which
people seized a symbolic repertoire and constantly remade it. Emphasizing
embodiment itself as the site of discipline and practice, Bourdieu held out
the promise that his models could deliver us from that split between mind
and body. In terms of the study of religion, it could free us from the trap
of thinking that a theory of practice was reducible to its understanding as
“ritual” in the older sense of how “belief” leads to “practice,” which would
be tantamount to treating religious life as merely the expression of a timeless
set of cultural assumptions. This would still enshrine a split between belief-
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doctrine-text and action-ritual-performance, between thinking and doing.
Meanwhile, the last twenty years have seen a slow shift in religious
studies itself, which parallels the shift from meaning to practice in cultural
theory. Scholars have criticized the Enlightenment emphasis on cognitive
and intellectual aspects of religious life (belief in ideas and doctrine) and
moved toward an interest in wider applications. One of the primary figures
in this critique has been Donald Lopez, a scholar of Buddhism, whose essay
on “Belief” in the volume Critical Terms for Religious Studies (1998) makes
the point that the expectation that religion is based primarily in “belief” is
Christian. To be even more specific, it is Protestant, as Eric Reinders notes
in his article on Protestant missionary attitudes toward ritual and bowing in
China. Their criticisms of the Chinese reiterated their criticisms of Catholic
popery and ritual-obsessiveness (Reinders 1997).
Lopez’s series of “Religions in Practice” published by Princeton University
Press, whose first volume on Buddhism appeared in 1995, stands as a serious
corrective to the “belief” paradigm. These books act as emblems of the
trend in the study of religions of turning away from philosophy, with its
attention to scriptural sources of a literate elite and toward examining the
things that many different sorts of people did. Overwhelmingly historical
in scope, the collections present many sorts of text-media: hagiographies,
gazetteer stories, stele inscriptions, merit books, folk legends, fictions,
economic contracts, writings of spirit mediums, and ritual handbooks and
texts. Though Lopez led the editorial charge in promoting practice through
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Asian materials, David Morgan’s work on popular visual media as objects
and organizers of Christian devotion in the United States grows from similar
theoretical insights (Morgan 1998; Morgan and Promey 2001).