Intimate circles and mass meetings. The social forms of event-structured religion in the era of globalized markets and hyper-mediatization

Acknowledging a global shift?

My own empirical work has revolved around resolutely Western phenomena, namely the religious dimensions of subcultures and counter-cultures such as techno-rave and the Burning Man Festival. ¹ While our empirical studies are concerned with phenomena that religious studies and classical sociology of religion would believe to be a priori worlds apart because they are bound to very different territories, cultures, social realities and religions, I believe that taken together our respective analyses show remarkable similarities and point in the same direction. And that is precisely my main point – and what I want to begin by illustrating and to submit back to my colleagues for their appraisal.

There is a most important point that is brought up by Julia Howell, but that I also see being raised by Monika Salzbrunn: Are the shifts towards extraordinary, event-centred, emotional, experiential and personalized religiosity a specifically North Atlantic or Western trend, or do they correspond to a more global and profound tendency across the world, specifically in countries most affected by the globalization of markets, the spreading of consumerism as a desirable ethos and the rise of a cosmopolitan urbanized and mobile middle class, as well as access to communication technologies? In much the same way as Shmuel Eisenstadt (2000) pleaded for the recognition of variegated pathways of modernization while at the same time showing how modernization did involve a common set of structuring vectors, I would argue that the papers presented here ask us to recognize that we are witness to new developments. While globalization has variegated and locally specific effects and realities, the evolution of religious phenomena points towards a new type of regulation that is perceivable worldwide, with the effect that religious reconfigurations in countries as diverse as Indonesia, Senegal and the North Atlantic post-industrial countries share a common set of structuring characteristics. The intent behind such a bold (and perhaps too general, yet not more so than Eisenstadt’s) statement is to steer the sociology of religion away from the frameworks of the secularization paradigm’s limitations in assessing religious mutations occurring today, ² while at the same time challenging theories of religious change according to which the religious field is amorphous, fragmented, diffuse, nebulous and incoherent.

The social forms of religion in the global age

The president of the local organizing committee here in Turku and my close collaborator, Tuomas Martikainen, brought to my attention the fact that this was the first time in the ISSR’s history that the theme of the bi-annual conference has been devoted to ‘community’. This is interesting as this should really be a recurrent and ritual theme for the sociology of religion, which by definition should at least try to define and frame its object with respect to social bodies. Rather, the conference themes have generally revolved around the idea of secularization and related issues of boundaries, public space and pluralism. This is not surprising as it mirrors the fact that the sociology of religion has been structured by the secularization paradigm; hence the obsession with such issues as the disappearance and resurgence of religion understood within national contexts. Secularization also comes with what I like to call a ‘political bias’, with the effect that issues related to rapports between religion and politics are foremost (and perceived as most serious), especially when cast around Church–State relations (Gauthier, forthcoming). This is accompanied by a complementary focus on the institutional dimensions of the ‘world’s great religions’, with the effect that non-institutional, social and cultural dimensions have tended to be marginalized in the study of religion.

Secularization has also rested on the largely assumed theory of the individualization of religion, understood as the loss of the socially binding functions of religion and the concurrent rise of so-called ‘privatized’ and ‘narcissistic’ forms. While discussions in the last two decades have seriously challenged the privatization thesis, they have largely been relayed within the secularization paradigm and have been heavily tainted by these nationalistic and political inflections. Thus the discussion has revolved mostly around institutional issues (with the exception of religion’s potential for the integration of ethnic minorities ³ ), while very little attention has been paid by sociologists to the potential changes in the social forms of religion. ⁴

Within a sociological perspective, religion is a social fact that relates to social forms. It is in my view one of Emile Durkheim’s major legacies to have tied the analysis of religions to social morphologies, something which I think needs recalling. (No one today reads Durkheim, unfortunately, and the popular interpretations one finds currently on the market, especially outside the French academic tradition, are hopelessly flawed.) Religions, Durkheim argued, are totemic in totemic societies, clanic in clanic societies, imperial in the Great Civilizations, feudal in feudal societies, national in modern nation-states, etc. This is the idea behind Durkheim’s notion of the ‘religion of the individual’ ⁵ in modern individualistic societies, which he insisted is a socially determined type of religion that thrives in modern industrial societies with respect to specific social forms, in this case: the nation. And while the nation was the backdrop of religion, the parish was its embodiment at the local level (beyond the family, which can of course also be understood as a relevant social form with respect to religion). To make a long and complex story short, the parish was a product of the 19th century, and it rapidly found itself challenged by the increasing urbanizing, industrializing and de-traditionalizing forces of modernization (see Bobineau, 2005). If the times have indeed changed over the last century and if our modern times are noticeably different from those of Durkheim, how have the social forms of religion evolved? If the nation coupled with the parish were the social forms associated with late-19th/early 20th-century individualism, what are the corresponding social forms of our late/post-industrial/globalized/liquid, consumerism- and neoliberalism-infused, hyper-mediatized ultra-modernity?

The nation was the backdrop and background for the Westphalian and post-Reformation type of congregational Christianity in the West. This model was then disseminated worldwide through European imperialism and colonization. It became the template for the ‘invention’ of religion in non-North Atlantic countries, as it was enforced and/or interiorized with variegated effects in the various cultural, societal and historical contexts (see Beyer, 2006). It gave way in the last decades of the 20th century to a new type of society: one increasingly enmeshed in a globalized and globalizing network in which economic forces under the guise of consumerism and neoliberalism, in tune with real-time communication technologies, dislodged political entities as the most effective social structuring vectors (see Beyer, 2012). Hence the ‘global’ has become, in place of the nation, the emerging social formation acting as a backdrop for transformations in religion. One immediately thinks of the importance of the ‘global ummah’ in Islam and corresponding notions of concrete universality we can observe all across the religious spectrum, from Pentecostalism to Catholicism to self-realization-aimed ‘holistic’ spiritualities. While the nation existed only as constructed within an inter-national framework, with nations forming with respect to one another, the current era differs from this earlier stage because of the growing worldwide perception that the global has a consistence of its own and that it is more than the sum of its parts. ⁶

Intimate circles and mass gatherings

So much for the backdrop, but what about community – in other words, the embodied social forms, those which individuals actually experience? What embodied social forms have replaced the territorially grounded and routine-structured parish or congregation? I believe that a survey of contemporary socio-anthropology supports the idea that these are twofold: (1) intimate circles, and (2) mass gatherings. Both are event-based in the sense formulated by Monika Salzbrunn: opposed to routine and territory-based communities. The best way to apprehend these social forms is to see them as forming a dynamic system, as working together rather being purely oppositional and exclusive. The de-traditionalizing movement that continues to reshape religion today tends to produce these social forms. As a hypothesis, I would argue that they are complementary to one another with respect to religious phenomena taken as a whole, worldwide, in those areas most affected by what we call globalization (Robertson, 1992; Beyer, 2006). They take form increasingly with respect to a global backdrop and in virtual spaces enabled by communication technologies.

Both papers exemplify how these social forms exist in reality, and how they relate to one another and to an individualized type of religion. The idea that these two forms are central to contemporary religious phenomena has been a subject of discussion with Linda Woodhead and Tuomas Martikainen in the process of our ongoing work towards a model for understanding the global changes affecting religion today. ⁷ I first observed these dynamics in the course of my research on techno and rave subcultures, which show very striking and sometimes explicit religious dimensions even though they do not constitute religions in the classic sense. This is also a configuration that is readily observable at the Burning Man Festival, a remarkable mass gathering in which intimate circles are prominent.

The Burning Man Festival

The Burning Man Festival is an annual extravaganza that occurs in the Nevada desert of Black Rock, 12 hours’ drive from the Californian West Coast. It attracts a growing number of participants each year (over 60,000 in 2013) in a gift economy-fuelled potlatch of exuberant self-expression and community. This social and cultural experiment attracts a spectrum of political affiliations, professional activities and age groups issuing essentially from the white educated middle class, including ‘ferals’, neo-pagans, neo-hippies, spiritual seekers, counter-culture promoters, Goths, hipsters, post-punks, libertarians, backpackers, folk musicians, vegans, Star Trek aficionados and circus artists, but also educational practitioners and day-job workers; there is also a massive representation of cyber-cultural creatives and other geeks from Silicon Valley and similar loci. ⁸

Neither a religious nor a political event by any explicit means, the Burning Man Festival shuns any attempt at definition. Far from being solely a week-long pyrotechnic arts party, the festival is in fact a temporary yet full-fledged polis, ‘Black Rock City’, which the organizers map out and coordinate but in which it is the participants themselves who are responsible for providing everything from water and food to entertainment, as the ‘No Spectators’ rule clearly suggests – the other ‘Ten Principles’ being: ‘Radical Inclusion’, ‘Radical Self-Reliance’, ‘Radical Self-Expression’, ‘Community’, ‘Decommodification’, ‘Gifting’ (monetary transactions and marketing are banned), the valuation of ‘Immediate Experience’, ‘Civic Responsibility’ and the ecological imperative to ‘Leave No Trace’.

The Burning Man Festival is a religious socio-anthropologist’s dream, starting with the city’s layout in which the Man, a 20m-high wood, metal and neon figure standing on a pedestal set to be consumed by fire on the penultimate day, stands high at the centre of the city in a place called the ‘Axis Mundi’. A variety of temples and shrines dedicated half-jokingly yet half-seriously to invented or exotic deities, cosmic forces, love or intimacies of the Self abound all over what Burners call ‘the Playa’. This includes a yearly changing Grand Temple set at the city’s border with what is called the ‘Wholly Other’. Burners engage in a myriad of planned or spontaneous rituals including meditation, yoga, monkey chanting, energy work, marriages, rites of passages, personal rites of all sorts (confessions, prayers, expiations), initiations, celebrations and even funerals. Moreover, one of the main narratives of the Burning Man Festival is that of personal transformation: participants more often than not experience a revelation and an ensuing change in their life path in one way or another. There is a before and an after Burning Man, and Burners tend to come back year after year while remaining involved in the growing global Burning Man community through regional associations and events worldwide, and of course the internet, to whose invention some Burners contributed. Along with its gift economy, one of the event’s most interesting characteristics is that the Man and the fact that he is set on fire have no official meaning: such is left to individual interpretation. Here, the indeterminacy of meaning acts as a powerful vector for the creation of a very strong sense of community and belonging. While the event itself constitutes a mass gathering, the more personal rituals occur within more intimate circles, which cater to more interiorized practices and favour the exploration and expression of intimacy. In this specific case, it is the mass gathering that provides the canvas and the opportunity for more intimate circles to form.

Religion in blurred social boundaries and the blurring boundaries of religion

Zygmunt Bauman’s idea of ‘liquid modernity’ has been evoked in the preceding papers. What is perhaps essential behind the idea of ‘liquid modernity’ is the blurring of the boundaries of what seemed, even not so long ago, to be the solid constituencies of social spheres, namely politics, religion, economics, aesthetics, law and so forth. Such blurring should inform us of the contingency of our models and perhaps the overstatement of the differentiation of social spheres theory, which has been foundational for many of our social sciences and for the secularization paradigm. It should also question the sociology of religion’s tendency to favour institutional and restrictive definitions of religion. A consequence of this blurring of boundaries is that much of religion today is to be found outside institutionally assigned loci, be it in the streets, popular culture, business, tourism and other social and cultural spaces.

A classical sociology of religion perspective could admit that an event such as the Burning Man Festival has religious dimensions, perhaps even that this religiosity is central to the very dynamics of the event. Yet the Burning Man Festival would still be considered a marginal occurrence of religion: marginal in significance, and marginal with respect to the core of the differentiated religious sphere. In my view, this perspective needs to be challenged if we take the blurring of boundaries seriously. What I would like to suggest here is that far from being marginal, the Burning Man Festival is central to the current religious reconfigurations we need to apprehend, that the changes we are witnessing within religious institutions and ‘world religions’ are likely to be understood in the light of what is happening at the Burning Man Festival and other ‘boundary blurring’ phenomena.

Similarly, a classical perspective might deem the festivals and cultural events studied by Monika Salzbrunn, as well as Julia Howell’s mass gatherings and Islamic televangelism, to be marginal expressions of religion. I would argue rather that they vividly illustrate the very nature and dynamics of Islam today in a country like Indonesia and in Senegalese diasporas: being founded on community events, mass rallies, television programmes and the internet, they are dislodged from its traditional and modernist-statist moorings. Islam is profoundly redefined within a new configuration in which consumerism, market ideologies and communication technologies are most determining. One of the effects of this new regulation is illustrated by the ways in which traditional religious authorities have been sidelined in a remarkably short period by non-ulema-trained charismatic entertainers and business types such as Aa Gym in Indonesia, or Amr Khaled in Egypt. ⁹

Events such as these have become important for the very reason that they are, following Marcel Mauss (1950; see also Karsenti, 1994), ‘total social facts’, in the sense that they articulate at once the different dimensions of the social: political, legal, religious, cultural and so on. They are nodes in which various networks meet and are recognized. It is not surprising that such phenomena should thrive in times of boundary blurring, as their very nature is to provide indeterminate contexts for the expression of different social logics, different identities and different power claims. They are also embodied spaces that allow for both individual expression and collective belonging. Essential to these social forms are real-time communication technologies, which support, publicize, relay and continue the event community. Events are therefore privileged social forms in globalized consumer and hyper-mediatized societies. What is important to stress is that, contrary to many assumptions, these forms of community must not be understood as superficial and degraded social forms with respect to ‘purer’ and more ‘solid’ traditional, routine- and territory-based communities of old. This would be replacing sociological analysis with a value judgement that does not correspond to empirical findings. The parish was the privileged social form at the crux between traditional community and national modern States. Contemporary communities do not completely dissolve those of the past, yet they introduce new logics and new dynamics: they are increasingly de-territorialized, combine real and virtual spaces, are effectively transnational, and occur with respect to a global backdrop which is rapidly gaining consistence through the compression of time and space of globalization. They are also founded on ‘new’ means of socialization such as mass gatherings and intimate circles, which are coextensive to a corresponding individualism. ¹⁰

The social forms of contemporary individualism

A major flaw in many theories of religious individualization has been the equation of this personal and subjective turn with solipsism, atomism, narcissism and self-centeredness. Research shows that the personalization of religiosity and the emphasis on experience (be it in autonomy-driven self-realization spiritualities or conservative born again movements) is inseparable from a concern for others and the bettering of society and humanity. For example, healing practices are often all about healing yourself through the healing of others, and vice versa (Gauthier, 2011). As Monika Salzbrunn’s and Julia Howell’s papers suggest, this type of outward overture constitutive of contemporary individualism can be found in Western, but also to a surprising and increasing extent – local variations notwithstanding – in many non-Western countries. From a sociological perspective, it should not come as a surprise that heightened individualism is not only socially determined, as Durkheim stressed, but also coextensive to new social forms born out of newly and intensified demands for social interaction and experiences of community, be they extraordinary, virtually mediated or event-based.

Blinded by our misconceptions of modern individualism shaped by utilitarian and therefore atomistic, self-interested and rationalist conceptions of the individual, we have not been attentive enough to the social forms integral to the expression of individuality. In this respect, intimate circles and mass collective events provide support for individual expression and recognition while at the same time nourishing experiences of belonging which attest to the authenticity and value of personal religiosity.

Furthering the analysis, one reason why television talk shows (be it Oprah Winfrey’s spiritual catering ¹¹ or the aforementioned Aa Gym’s and Amr Khaled’s) are so popular might be that this medium combines a personal, even intimate, rapport between the host and the viewer, while also conveying the collective feeling of mass audience. In all of these cases, religion is reconfigured with respect to the telos of ‘life change’ and personal realization. The underlying change in the regulation of religion explains why Sufism, which was marginalized and discredited by the earlier modernist, rationalized forms of religion that became dominant within the nation-state type of religion (Beyer, 2012; Howell, 2007), has made a comeback in the new consumerism-driven, cosmopolitan, hyper-mediatized and globalized environment, as it serves as an effective vehicle for both personal, experiential religiosity and collective expressions of effervescent community. Similarly, it seems that the religious movements that are catering to these characteristics are faring best worldwide (self-realization and holistic spiritualities; Evangelical-Pentecostal types of religion, be they Christian, Muslim or otherwise; and fundamentalisms), while other forms of religion, namely within Christianity or modernist Islam, are either forced to conform to this new normative model or suffer continuing decline and marginalization (see Woodhead, 2012).

Conclusion

To sum up the discussion, my points are essentially the following: (1) Religious phenomena across the globe are increasingly structured by the vectors of consumerism, market ideologies and hyper-mediatization; (2) Religious phenomena are not as amorphous, fragmented and diffused as they seem, but rather obey certain characteristics typical of this new regulation, albeit of course with variegated local realities tied to specific histories, contexts and cultures; (3) Religious individualization is not narcissistic but intrinsically tied to corresponding social forms, i.e. social interactions and communities; (4) These social forms are increasingly event-based experiences of community; (5) Event-based, non-institutional and extraordinary religiosity occurring across the blurred boundaries of social spheres are highly important loci, which the social sciences should consider in order to better understand religion today; (6) The social forms of religion today are ideal-typically intimate circles and mass gatherings, both being complementary to each other and (7) cast against a global backdrop.

As it stands, the suggestion that contemporary religion tends to manifest itself in mass gatherings and intimate circles needs to be developed in a wider frame than is possible here. What I do hope, though, is that contemporary individualism should be understood as requiring such social forms for subjectivation, belonging, authentification, expression and recognition to occur, as this is of considerable importance for the sociology of religion. Interestingly, these means of community can be found worldwide in countries and social classes affected by the globalization of consumerism as a desirable social ethos. Yet much research is needed to better understand how mass gatherings and intimate circles relate to each other depending on the type of religiosity and cultural area, among other variables. The promotion of such research is the hope and objective of the present contribution.