Marching the devotional subject: The bodily-and-material cultures of religion

Two kinds of religious knowledge: Verbalized and procedural

We shall begin by calling on the cognitive neurosciences to establish a distinction between two kinds of human knowledge: verbalized and procedural – knowing that, and knowing how (Kosslyn and Koenig, 1995). The first one concerns verbal expressions, discourse and ideas that can only be expressed in so many words. The second one concerns our bodily techniques that may or may not be immediately identifiable as ‘religious’: knowing how to reach a state of trance (Romberg, this issue), how to drink the Qur’an (Nieber, this issue), and, more broadly, how an aggregation of bodily techniques might feed into domains not associated with religion, for instance, the value of Jain austerity in the informal economy of Indian emeralds (Brazeal, this issue). Procedural knowledge is always the result of an apprenticeship, whether to a person or process, often a protracted one, as in the use of a musical instrument.

This distinction is by no means a theoretical innovation. Head and Holmes (1911–1912), Schilder (1950[1935]) and many others had established this point in the early 20th century. More recent and spectacular developments in the cognitive neurosciences have validated this conceptual distinction (Berthoz, 2000; Berthoz and Petit, 2006) by demonstrating that verbalized and procedural knowledge do not rest on the same neuro-physiological processes although there is a fair amount of connection between the two. Yet, procedural knowledge is far more involved with the sensorium and with bodily-and-material culture. David Morgan (2010: 4) writes:

When (the devotee) says he believes in God, we must listen for the silent speech beneath his words, the habits and felt-life of old practices. We must learn to hear his sighs, his gritted teeth, the murmur of nostalgia, the distant gaze of eyes searching the memory of folded hands … He says he believes, but what he really does is feel, smell, hear, and see.

This dimension of religious practice clearly belongs with procedural knowledge.

The two kinds of human capabilities – verbalized and procedural – do not simply duplicate the Cartesian divide between body and mind. Verbalized knowledge depends on the brain no less than the action of driving a car or singing religious songs in a church. Both are equally human. Often, they are implemented simultaneously. Yet, all too often, scholars rely on verbalized descriptions to have access to the bodily-and-material cultures of the devotee, whereas direct participant observation and media such as photography and video are required to document actions and emotions (Romberg, this issue). Neither should it be assumed that the practice observed obeys the verbalized norms and codes of behaviour. The bodily-and-material culture of religion is not the same as its representation through verbal description, guidelines and norms. The actual practice and its representation should not be collapsed together, as we are reminded by the famous series of paintings by René Magritte representing a smoking pipe with the caption: ‘this is not a pipe’ (Foucault, 1973). The pipe and its representation are not the same by any means. Their affordance is not the same. One cannot stuff tobacco into the painting of the pipe, light it and smoke it. Neither can it be claimed that pipe-smoking, viewing the paintings (or, in some cases, setting fire to them) do the same thing to and for the subject, since they do not implement the same kinds of procedural knowledge. When it comes to bodily conducts, the body of the smoking subject, his or her handling of the pipe, tobacco and matches, the way he or she inhales the smoke and the pleasure he or she takes from it are of a different order from the contemplation of the picture of the pipe. The confusion between the smoking pipe and its representation, between the territory and the map, between the icon and its text is what Warnier (2007: 5–13) calls ‘the Magritte effect’.

In contrast with creeds and doctrine, procedural knowledge is ‘propped’ on material culture. By propping, we refer to the fact that practically all our sensori-motor conducts are geared to particular objects – statues, icons, temples, shrines, holy water, beads, offerings, musical instruments, reliquaries, etc. In the human species, there is hardly any technique of the body that takes place in a material vacuum (Warnier, 2007: 11–12). Moreover, as Paul Schilder (1950[1935]) underscored in his seminal work on the image of the body, the bodily schema does not stop at the limits of the human coetaneous envelope. It extends beyond it and includes the objects at hand. Through perception, motion and emotions they become an integral part of bodily synthesis and therefore of the subject.

We need a specific tool kit for the analysis of bodily-and-material culture so as to grasp motions, the senses and the emotions that are attached to them, and what they do to/for the subject. The cognitive neurosciences have gone a long way in achieving this when addressing the procedural, non-verbalized knowledge that we acquire through bodily apprenticeship, applied to the use of material things and of bodily techniques.

On the topic of cognitive gaps

The issue of cognitive gaps is an important blind-spot that we wish to challenge in this special issue. We claim that the bodily-and-material cultures of religion do not duplicate or merely enact systems of beliefs and signs. They are something else, a different register of knowing and being. More than that, they may be at odds with beliefs and doctrines. In any given religion, there may be cognitive gaps and even outright contradictions between these two forms of knowledge.

We are aware that these are strong claims. They challenge one of the basic, if often hidden, tenets of most anthropological studies concerning the adequacy between practice and representation. Making these claims introduces a suspicion concerning the competence of the devotee and even the religious specialist when they tell us what their religion is all about. However, we would go one step further and claim the following. That to locate the study of religion exclusively in the consistency of belief and sign systems or the accordance between scripture and performance is to misunderstand the compelling potency of religious compliance. We argue that this compliance exists not in the enactment of an ideological adherence but in the tensions, deviations and potential contradictions between verbalized knowledge, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, embodied, procedural knowledge embedded in the material world. This approach encourages us to appreciate practice not just as orthopraxy but as something slippery, uncertain and inconsistent that requires constant social and cultural work on bodies-and-materials.

These are statements with important consequences. But, although they are seldom expressed with such boldness in anthropological literature, there is nothing new about them. Gregory Bateson (1972: 179–181) had put them at the heart of his theory of cognitive gaps, double binds and schismogenesis, following his analysis of the Naven ritual (1936, revisited in the ‘Epilogue 1958’) and his study of mother–child interactions conducted in Bali together with Margaret Mead (Bateson and Mead, 1942). In his view, the very fact that the interaction between two or more subjects could be conducted through two different media – speech, on the one hand, bodily conducts and material culture, on the other hand – provided the potential for gaps and contradictions between the two and the complex and compelling nature of such relationships. Since procedural knowledge specifically concerns the techniques of the body, let us now turn to the body of the subject and come back to the possibility of cognitive gaps later.

The ‘real’ in religious practice

To begin with, there is no single religion in the world that does not involve the implementation of ‘techniques of the body’. Religion is the very point of departure of the eponymous article published by Marcel Mauss in 1936. Religion is compelling, says Mauss (2006[1936]), because it is a technique, that is, an efficacious and traditional action on and by the body of the ‘total man’ as a bio-psycho-social entity. To translate: religion is an efficacious and traditional action on and by the subject. The next tools in our kit will be the notions of a body and a subject, and the double status of the body as a subject/object. The subject is a body and has a body.

Second, we shall collapse together the techniques of the body and the material culture of religion. All too often they are kept separate. Some academics deal with the body, others with material culture. This division of labour has adverse effects on our understanding of both. All the techniques of the devotee’s body are propped against specific material cultures such as those of the temple, shrine, musical instruments, food, drink, clothing, images, sacred objects and substances. We should never talk of material culture per se, except as a kind of shorthand for ‘bodily-and-material culture’ hyphenated together. This point has been stressed time and again by the team at the Material Religion journal. ‘The material study of religion concentrates on what bodies and things do, on the practices that put them to work, on the epistemological and aesthetic paradigms that organize the bodily experience of things (Meyer et al., 2010: 209).

What is ‘the bodily experience of things’? That is the question that the Matière à Penser network has also harped on since the mid-1990s (see Galliot, 2015; Gowlland, 2011; Naji and Douny, 2009) by drawing on the heritage of Schilder (1950[1935]) on the Körperschema, Merleau-Ponty (1945) on the phenomenology of perception, the cognitive neurosciences, and the post-Kantian philosophy of the subject.

As far as the efficacy of the bodily-and-material culture on the religious subject and religion as a technique are concerned, we shall adopt the statement by Michel de Certeau (1987: 57) that, ‘It is always in the name of something real that one can “march” the believers and produce them.’ ¹ This quote underscores the compelling efficacy of religious practice as a technique. It should be remembered that Michel de Certeau was not one of those 20th-century radical, atheist, reductionist thinkers. He was a Catholic priest, a Jesuit – himself a believer – but also a critical historian and a psychoanalyst, close to Jacques Lacan. The expression ‘to march’ like a platoon of soldiers is somewhat derogatory. It implies some sort of artifice. ² De Certeau suggests that the religious subject is more or less compelled to comply. The devotee is produced, marched, directed and shaped almost against his or her better judgement, and becomes that particular kind of human being who walks with other devotees to the shrine, temple, church, ritual forest or stream. Walking is anyway a basic devotional practice almost all over the world.

De Certeau states that it is always in the name of something Real that people are transformed into believers and are marched forward. We have to deconstruct this notion. The Real, in his view, is not so from an ontological, universal, reified, point of view. It is constructed as such by and for the devotee. For the Catholic, the bread and wine are the real body and blood of Christ. For the Hindu, the deity image in the form of a statue is a murti or sentient manifestation of god and not a representation. The Catholic devotee in the church and the Hindu devotee in the temple bow in front of the bread and wine, and the idol, respectively. But neither of them bows in front of the other’s Real. They consider it spurious. For the unbeliever, they are real bread and wine, and real stone or metal but that is still no reason to bow.

When talking about the Real, De Certeau has in mind the contribution of Jacques Lacan (1974–1975) and of the philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis (1987[1975]). Nothing is considered real by the subject unless it is shaped as such by the ‘Imaginary’, that is, by institutionalized images. The Imaginary of the Catholic devotee turns bread and wine into the real body and blood of Christ. The unbeliever, who has a different Imaginary, will not see or feel anything divine in the Eucharist. He or she will perceive no more than real bread and wine. It cannot be said that the Catholic has an Imaginary and that the unbeliever has none. Both construct images to give shape to their experience and are equally shaped by them. But they are different ones.

The Imaginary is a state of indeterminacy between the Real and what is not real. The issue of religious reality as devotional or spiritual ‘truth’ is important precisely because its absence implies the threat of falsity and heresy. One could argue that the religious Imaginary is created as much by a fear of ambiguity, uncertainty and anxiety as by a clarity or attraction to the faith. To go further, the latter depends on the former. For the devotee, determining what is true or false, spurious or counterfeit is a critical issue. In order to produce anything real, one has not only to attract but also to repel, to stigmatize one’s opposite to the point of disgust, hatred and sometimes physical elimination. In contrast to an earlier concept of religion as a cosmotheistic ‘technique of translation’ (Assmann, 1997), today we find the boundaries between religions being hardened and consolidated with alacrity. The ‘faithful’ are clearly demarcated from the ‘faithless’ and often one must declare allegiance to one Imaginary or the other. The priests, devotees and doctrines of one religion are counterpoised against false gods, false prophets, counterfeit scriptures and even scientific ‘fallacies’. It is beyond the scope of this article to provide a description of what such dynamics have done during our lifetime but we do suggest that the credentials that are harnessed in these battles are of one’s own unmitigated Real attached to bodily-and-material culture.

So how is this reality to be produced? How are these images institutionalized and made all-encompassing? What are the best ingredients to produce something ‘Real’? To some extent, ideas, concepts, words and symbols are useful but only to the extent that they can be attached to the devotee’s body, emotions, practices and material culture. Things, objects and substances must be felt, touched, smelled and grasped by the sensorium, and then transformed into something Real through an imaginary. Then they must be legitimized by discourse, preferably one that disqualifies the false doctrines, practices, bodies and materials against the true ones. This is not a straightforward process. Sometimes, seemingly different imaginaries work together. Romberg’s study of spiritism in Puerto Rico (this issue) shows Catholicism existing side-by-side with animism. Guitard (this issue) mentions the conflicts of interpretation of the waste heaps by Muslims and non-Muslims. In Thorpe’s article (this issue), the multiple Imaginaries of the Catholic, the nostalgic of Soviet Russia, or the families of the partisans, turn the same vèlinès event into different kinds of Real for the different categories of believers.

‘Individual’, ‘actor’ or ‘subject’?

We have hopefully shown how a religious Imaginary is turned into a Real and how this would be impossible without the body, senses, emotions and materials. But having argued this, we must now raise the problem of reification in developing a theory of the body and material culture. We often read that one should not reify the body or material culture. However, if we choose to write or talk about the body and material culture without connecting them to the human element (the actor or the subject) we cannot avoid reifying them. We have to take into consideration something else to which the body and religious objects are related and that will prevent them from being reified. Three candidates apply for that difficult position: the individual, the actor and the subject.

The Western notion of the ‘individual’ has been constructed since the Reformation and the Enlightenment as that of a human being personally responsible for his or her salvation and actions. Utilitarian and Kantian philosophies as well as political economy have focused the notion of an individual on rational thought, the capacity for judgement and the pursuit of self-interest. The individual has become a decision-maker. This notion was carried all the way to contemporary neoclassic economic science and mainstream sociological theory. In that literature too enormous to be referenced, it would be difficult to find the body as an essential property of the individual.

Our next candidate is the ‘actor’. In the context of material culture studies, one of the most influential and frequently quoted authors is Bruno Latour (2005) who introduced technical objects and material culture as part of the collective of human and non-human actors found in R&D laboratories. These collectives operate as networks. In his earlier books (Latour, 1991, 1992), the network paradigm proved extremely efficient in advocating a symmetry between technical objects and human beings, both considered as ‘actors’ on an equal footing. At the same time, Latour (1999: 8–10) criticized phenomenology for intensifying German idealism’s focus on the subject/object distinction, a statement rejected by Morgan (2014: 87), and that would certainly not apply to the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty (1945), nor to more recent developments by Gallagher (2005) or Berthoz and Petit (2006) at the interface between phenomenology and the cognitive neurosciences.

Bruno Latour was initially recognized as highly successful in introducing a symmetrical approach when applied to human actors (e.g. in taking into consideration the religious affiliation of the Roman Catholic Louis Pasteur as against his creationist opponent Félix Pouchet (Latour, 1985). Similarly, the way he emphasized the crucial importance of technical objects in the process of scientific innovation as against the fantasy of the disincarnated genius was widely approved in his work with Steve Woolgar entitled ‘Laboratory Life’ (Latour and Woolgar, 1979). In contrast, qualifying objects as ‘actors’ in his work on ANT (see Pandora’s Hope, 1999) soon met with strong opposition by many, among whom his friend, the anthropologist Pierre Lemonnier (in Latour and Lemonnier, 1994) has been the most vocal. In response to the latter’s arguments, however, Latour would not budge, and never considered the candidacy of the ‘subject’ to carry the load of a theory of action. As a matter of fact, embodiment and the body are not essential elements in ANT. The ‘actor’, whether human or non-human, does not have a body. Indeed, if the body of the human actor (with his or her sensorium, motricity, agency, emotions and the like) was an essential requirement of the theory of action, then, for the sake of symmetry, Latour would have had to construct the notion of the organic body of technical objects – something that is clearly impossible. Since objects do not have the equivalent of a human body, then, it follows, the human actor should not have one either. In contrast, our approach is clearly grounded in the eponymous article by Marcel Mauss (2006[1936]) on bodily techniques, with their organic and social components. The body is an essential element in our paradigm of the bodily-and-material cultures of religious practice. The Latourian ‘actor’ cannot be a proper candidate for this role.

This is why we advocate the merits of our third candidate, that is, the ‘subject’, to encapsulate everything we need in a theory of religious compliance through verbalized and procedural knowledge, through the texts and creeds as well as bodily-and-material culture.

Let us take heed of a valid point that Latour makes in his critique of German idealism: the subject and the body cannot be conceptualized the way they were in the first half of the 20th century when being a subject was predicated on the cogito, on thinking, and on being conscious of oneself and the world. Once this was accepted, the philosophical difficulty was to catch up with all the complexities, contingencies and intricacies of human existence and its embodied condition. This is where Foucault (2001), De Certeau (1986), Žižek (2000) and many others come into the picture. They have rejected the Cartesian cogito as the ontological substance of the subject and put the body and action in its stead. We are ‘subjects’ for taking ourselves as the object of our actions and for being subjected to the network of other subjects acting on ourselves. The body is the first of our tools, the means of our action (Mauss 2006[1936]) and the focus of other people’s actions on ourselves. We are our bodies, with their emotions, perceptions, drives, affects, intelligence and unconscious as repressed. This is a philosophical question grounded in the history of the human and social sciences. De Certeau (1986, 1987), just as Foucault (1988), Žižek (2000) and several others belong to a philosophical tradition for which the notion of a subject is too useful and important to be dispensed with.

For these philosophers, if there is anything like a body, it can only be the body of a subject, not the body of an individual in the sense of the sociological tradition nor of an actor in the Latourian symmetrical approach. A subject is a body and has a body. It has the double status of a subject/object. Religious practice and techniques of the body belong with the technologies of the subject that produce and shape the subject through a process of subjectivation. Its study must focus on the subject as generated by his or her engagement in a compelling religious practice. This is where we depart from the views expressed by David Morgan (see his article in this special issue) who relies on Bruno Latour as regards networks, and on Peirce and analytical philosophy to connect religion on the one hand and bodily-and-material cultures on the other hand. ³ Simultaneously, we both share a common purpose and goal. Morgan introduces the embodied subject into the Latourian ANT by emphasizing the role of the phenomenological that has been turned down by Latour. By doing so, Morgan also addresses one of the chief criticisms of ANT, that its push for symmetry over-reaches and eliminates important distinctions between ‘humans’ and ‘non-humans’. In Morgan’s article, we see indications of his prior interest in the affective, sensory and non-discursive value of images and materials in religion (Morgan, 1998, 2008, 2010). However, our perspectives are inspired by different philosophical traditions. The next section will explain this further.

Ambiguities of the subject

We suggest that taking the ‘subject’ into consideration is one of the most effective means to avoid reifying bodily-and-material cultures, and help articulate them to affects, senses, relationships, fluidity and the processual and eventful nature of the body and of the material world. After having considered the praxeological and the phenomenological in the study of the subject, let us develop this point by turning to psychoanalysis and a point clearly made by Foucault (1981). The subject is the product of what Lacan, after Freud, called a division that gives access to the symbolic order, while articulating it to the ‘Real’ and the ‘Imaginary’ that give shape to its action. The subject is divided up between its Freudian unconscious as repressed and its consciousness of self and the world. However, in the life of any human being, the division may happen or fail to do so. The subject may come into being or not. It cannot be taken for granted. It is an event. It cannot be ontologized. Foucault, De Certeau, Žižek and several others have accepted the Freudian and Lacanian critique. They have discarded the Cartesian Cogito as the single substance of subjectivity. Accordingly, the subject is not transparent to himself or herself. The subject is fluid so to speak and never knows exactly where he or she stands. This process has two dimensions: one of subjection to a religious tradition and to something that exercises power on the one hand and, on the other hand, a dimension of autonomy where he or she is the object of his or her own actions to govern, shape one’s identity, experience with the technologies of the subject proposed or imposed by the society and engage in a quest for the ‘truth’ about oneself. In that context, ‘subjectivity’ does not pertain to the interiority of a given person, nor to individual idiosyncrasies, but to the simple fact of acting, and being or rather becoming a subject as defined above. Subjectivity is what results from other people’s actions and of one’s actions on oneself. It is the product of a process.

As a subject, the devotee needs the input of the religious community to be provisioned with all the bodily, material, emotional and cognitive resources of the religious traditions. Any religious subjectivation implies this double movement of self-government and of subjection – of techniques of the self, techniques of the body and technologies of power. The process of subjectivation takes place at the junction between the individual subject and the networks of actions that he or she belongs to, between the ‘micro’ and the ‘macro’, the devotee and the group. We previously stated that the religious subject is produced and marched in the name of something ‘real’. Let us go back to the Real.

As De Certeau (1987: 57) states, the religious subject is produced and marched in the name of a Real that is produced as such by an Imaginary giving shape to given discourses, bodies and material things. ‘Marching’ entails two things: some kind of devotional duty, and the fact that this duty is focused on the bodily-and-material culture of the subject. In order to be the ‘true’ subject of his or her religious commitment (if there is any such thing given the plasticity of the subject), the devotee has an obligation to make certain gestures, to relate to given substances and objects, to experience given perceptions and emotions: kneel, bathe in the stream, grow his or her hair or shave it, walk towards the sacred mountain or around the temple, dance to the point of reaching a state of trance, etc. If we take those practices as items on a list of obligations that suffice to define any religion, we reify them. If we take into account the subjectivity of the devotee as an event and the status of the subject as being a body (that incorporates material culture) and having a body, we cannot reify religious practice. It belongs with all the ambiguities and uncertainties of the subject.

In a nutshell, we include the notions of a subject and of subjectivation in our theoretical tool kit because we think they encapsulate all the ingredients we need to analyse religious practice, compliance and/or deviation. Let us shortlist those ingredients: the body of the devotee as a subject/object; the material things and substances geared to the bodily schema, to its motions, emotions and the sensorium; the Real that is needed to produce the devotee and march him or her; the Imaginary that is needed to transform bodies, objects and substances into something Real for the faithful while avoiding any kind of reification from a theoretical point of view; the society to which the believer belongs; and, finally, religion as a social practice that proceeds to and from the institutionalization of the Real. The subject is a social subject. Last, but not least, we also need the psychic drive that gives the impulse to the subject.

Religious subjectivation and its discontents

Freud’s book ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’ (1961[1930]) was published in Vienna at a time when the concept of civilization was generally uncritically accepted as something uniquely Western and the best example of its kind. Freud pointed out that instead ‘Civilization’ had its own internal drawbacks, contradictions and failures, and that it had a cost, indeed, a very heavy cost as was proven with World War I.

Now to return to the issue of gaps and contradictions that we consider to be essential to the process of religious subjectivation. We have already alluded to them when quoting Gregory Bateson. They can be underscored following three lines of thought. First, is the Bateson argument that inter-subjective relations are achieved through two different channels or media. One channel is verbalized, propositional knowledge consisting of words, speech, discourse, text and anything that can be expressed in so many words, including systems of signs that can be decoded and translated into words. For example, rules concerning polluting substances as matter out of place according to Mary Douglas (1966). The other channel is procedural knowledge that is incorporated in bodily conducts and material culture such as singing sacred songs, reciting mantras, or non-verbal bodily communication between devotees. This vocabulary is recent and Bateson did not use it. However, he clearly makes this distinction when he defines the double bind (Bateson, 1972: 178–183) as a deadlock experienced by an individual or a group subjected to two conflicting injunctions. The cases quoted by him show that the double bind is most efficient when the injunctions are conveyed through two different channels – verbal and bodily/non-verbal – producing a cognitive gap between them. Most of the examples that he quotes illustrate this point, such as that of Zen Buddhism that immediately follows his definition of the cognitive gap between the two media that may (or may not in certain cases) result in a double bind:

The Zen master attempts to bring about enlightenment in his pupil in various ways. One of the things he does is to hold a stick over the pupil’s head and say fiercely, ‘If you say this stick is real, I will strike you with it. If you say this stick is not real, I will strike you with it. If you don’t say anything, I will strike you with it.’ (p. 179)

The Zen master produces a cognitive gap by simultaneously using speech and a gesture-and-stick that are at odds with each other. But he does it to achieve enlightenment, writes Bateson, whereas, in other circumstances, this process is implemented – intentionally as in the practice of torture, or not – to produce a disturbance within the subject, reaching a climax with a painful double bind.

Let us underscore that Bateson’s example is taken from religious practice. The cognitive gaps between verbal statements and the sensory-motor experience may be far more widespread in religious practice than we think. The Catholic priest says that the Eucharist is the body and blood of Christ whilst the sensory experience clearly denies his statement. The cognitive gap must be bridged in order to avoid a painful double bind. This is achieved by resorting to the Imaginary that transforms the perception of the sensori-motor experience. In religion, this process achieves awe, consent, compliance and enlightenment. In ordinary life, says Bateson (1936), when it goes as far as the double bind, the cognitive gap may trigger a process of schismogenesis in the person (pp. 195–196), family (pp. 207–208), groups (pp. 183–185), and politics (p. 186). This is not the place to discuss how Bateson overhauled his theoretical approach under the influence of Freud and cybernetic theory, as expressed in the 1958 Epilogue of Naven (1936). Nor is it appropriate to attempt a translation of his theory in view of the considerable development of the cognitive neurosciences. Suffice it to say that the two media may (or may not) be at odds, and that gaps, double binds and schismogenesis rest on the dynamic contradictions between what is conveyed and achieved by their simultaneous implementation in inter-subjective relations, and that they were integrated in Bateson’s theory of religious practice as early as 1936.

Second, is the Foucauldian argument where subjectivation is a double process of: (1) production of given subjectivities, lifestyles, repertoires of bodily practice, and (2) at the same time a process of subjection to a sovereignty. Or, in other words, governmentalities are systems of action on oneself and on other people’s action. Yet governmentalities act on the subject precisely at the point where the subject governs itself, and takes himself or herself as the object of his or her own actions. One cannot assume that acting on other people is devoid of tensions and contradictions. Subjection/subjectivation is geared to an ambiguous exercise of power: power as a means of producing subjects and shaping them, and power as a means to control, exercise domination, and even punish. Subjectivation is not a smooth, peaceful and entirely positive process.

Third, the cognitive neurosciences have argued that, whereas any subject has a fairly good reflexive awareness of his or her speech and what it means, this is not the case with bodily conducts. We are not aware of the billions of nervous impulses needed to sing successfully while keeping in tune with the music and the other devotees. We are not conscious of all the stimuli that we receive through our highly complex sensorium. If we were conscious of them, we would be overwhelmed by a flood of (conscious) perceptions. We would be incapable of keeping control over such a flood. In order to avoid being stuck or overwhelmed, our nervous/cognitive system selects and brings to our awareness only those stimuli that are relevant to our present situation, that is, a minute fraction of what our sensory channels actually catch. It inhibits the awareness of irrelevant stimuli. Bodily conducts and the sensorium are buried in the cognitive unconscious (Buser, 2005; Parlebas, 1999: 170–176). Consequently, there is a fundamental imbalance between verbal self-awareness (and intentionality) in speech on the one hand and the bodily/sensory unconscious on the other hand. This peculiarity of our cognitive system provides the conditions for gaps, contradictions, conflicts between conscious verbalized knowledge and mostly unconscious, embodied, procedural knowledge, sensorium and emotions of which we have little awareness or control.

Several scholars such as Keane (2003, 2005: 185), Morgan (1998, 2010) and Knappett (2005) have tried to address similar issues within the tradition of analytical philosophy. We find it difficult to follow them on the issues raised above insofar as analytical philosophy takes language as its basic paradigm. Much has been done within this tradition to reach all the way to the body, emotions and the matter of things by resorting to phenomenology. David Morgan (2010: 4), for example, is quite explicit regarding the power of emotions and the reframing of belief as ‘felt-belief’. We are very close to such theoretical and descriptive propositions. What we attempt to do in this editorial is to shift the theoretical approach and, right from the start, bring it closer to the question of the production/marching of the devotee by framing the latter within the question of the subject and subjectivity. We propose both approaches in this special issue in the hope that it may trigger a debate. In the future, we shall discover whether this is a valuable proposition or not.

The three arguments presented so far disqualify any functionalist approach to religious subjectivation. The latter is fraught with tensions, contradictions and the ambiguities and complexities of power relationships. The arguments disqualify the confusion between practice and its verbal translation, between the thing and its representations, between the pipe and the picture of the pipe, and between religious practice and doctrine. If we are right in saying that religion necessarily involves the body of the subject and its material culture, then such contradictions may be essential to the religious experience, and they may contribute to explaining how religion may march the devotee and obtain his or her consent and compliance.

‘Orthodoxy’ and ‘orthopraxy’

The arguments mentioned above may also explain why art, science, warfare, medicine, politics, sports and sex merge easily with religion and with one another, producing a compelling, strange and sometimes explosive mix. We may ask, why and how? If we emphasize the doctrinal contents of religion, we would achieve a kind of ‘domaining’ and bring to the fore the differences between different religions. We would also underscore the differences between religion on the one hand and politics, sports, arts, warfare, sex, etc. on the other hand because their discourses and their explicit purposes are quite different. Nieber’s discussion (this issue) of how a practice might be both ‘religious’ and ‘medicinal’ indicates both how practices must increasingly conform to one or the other domain, and how people might choose to respond to more doctrinally oriented faiths such as Wahhabism.

By contrast, if we stress the bodily-and-material cultures of religious subjectivation and the tensions that inhere in them, we will bring to the fore what they have in common with sports, warfare and politics, i.e. bodies, subjectivities, motions, emotions, drives, material culture, etc. In that respect, fascism has been convincingly equated to a religion by Emilio Gentile (1996). In the context of this special issue, the trash heaps collected by Chadic kingdoms and taken over by Muslim Fulani rulers in Africa combine religious compliance with political subjection (Guitard, this issue), as do the Vèlinès visits to Lithuanian cemeteries in memory of the politically tormented history of that ‘Bloodland’ (Thorpe, this issue). These are not isolated cases.

The bodily-and-material cultures smuggle elements of subjectivation into a subject who is often unaware of the process and, hence, uncritical about it. They obfuscate the cognitive gaps and contradictions. They combine to produce a religious subject who will comply not only because of the attractiveness of the beliefs and creeds, but also because he or she feels, experiences and engages in bodily-and-material cultures together with its Imaginary that may help cover up the cognitive gaps, contradictions and discontents of religious subjectivation. A Kalashnikov rifle may acquire the same sacred aura as a reliquary or a sacred icon provided a group of subjects validates the doctrine–praxis complex and overcomes the cognitive gaps and contradictions by resorting to a common Imaginary. This very process may explain to a large extent the production of compliance and, conversely, of rejection. It may well explain by what means you can or cannot create believers and march them.

The five papers published in this special issue enter in dialectical interaction with the points developed in the Editorial, with cases from quite different religious and cultural backgrounds. From Puerto Rico, Raquel Romberg studies how spiritists provide divination, healing and possession rituals as a means of summoning transformative processes in the devotees’ subjectivities. In northern Cameroon, Emilie Guitard explores the trash heaps piled up next to the royal palaces of the Chadic kingdoms as a means of totalizing the waste disembodied by subjects in all the hamlets. In a study that differs from the contemporary nature of the other four papers by using a historical lens, Guitard describes how these trash heaps, as sacred embodiments of the kingdoms, were taken over by the Fulani (Muslim) conquerors and endowed with a new layer of religious significance and practice. From Lithuania, Denise Thorpe writes of how people of different religious backgrounds get together in cemeteries on All Souls’ Day to light candles and share in the painful remembrance of their tormented past. In India, the Jain emerald traders studied by Brian Brazeal practise exacting ascetic bodily mortifications in a religious context as proof of their personal trustworthiness in a totally informal market. And from Zanzibar, Hanna Nieber discusses how the kombe healing practice for devotees of different religious backgrounds (Muslims and Christians alike) consists of drinking water that has been used to wash Qur’anic writing.

This special issue includes quite different religious traditions: spiritism in Puerto Rico (Romberg), African sacred kingship (Guitard), European Christianity (Thorpe), Jainism (Brazeal), and Islam (Nieber). This is admittedly a restricted sample, and we regret the absence of a number of important religious traditions. However, we expect it is diversified enough to substantiate the workings of the bodily-and-material cultures in producing the religious subject and in marching the devotee.