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209 16 The Transformation of Bodily Practices among Religious Defectors Lynn Davidman Sima rebelled by resisting and transforming the bodily practices of Ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) norms for women’s attire.1 She explained: For me, putting on pants was the equivalent of taking off your kipa [the skullcap worn by observant Jewish men], or stopping to put on tefillin [leather boxes containing Torah passages worn by male Orthodox Jews] for boys. It was like the, the most. And really when I went with pants for the first time, first of all, I felt . . . I felt lots of things. First, I felt like I was sort of naked, like I was really exposed. But on the other hand I was very, very happy. Religions are inscribed on the bodies of their members. Religious communities require members to engage in a variety of bodily practices—rituals performed by and enacted on the body—that create, maintain, and display membership in the group. As children are socialized into a religious community, they come to embody the group’s rituals and corporeal rites by internalizing its norms, beliefs, practices, and values. Within strict, enclave religious communities, such as some Muslim and Haredi Jewish groups,2 numerous rituals and laws involve bodily practices that occupy members throughout the day and are central to the display, presentation, and ongoing construction of religious identity. But what happens when those who grew up in an enclave community defect from their religious group?3 Studies of conversion (e.g., Greil 1977; Greil and Rudy 1984) have documented the ways converts take on new bodily practices to establish, mark, and perform membership in their new religious communities. Is there a similar process in shedding religion? There are few recent studies on defection and little attention has been paid to the processes through which the exiting is accomplished, including changing bodily practices and, for example, among Haredi Jews, divesting oneself of the bodily markers of Haredi identity. 210 Embodied Resistance Religion and the Body Students of religion have intermittently analyzed the role of the body in religious rituals, often focusing on how particular social groups set themselves apart by cultivating distinctive bodily practices (Bartkowski 2005, 11; Kanter 1972). In Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity, R. Marie Griffith (2004) shows the ways women in evangelical Christian groups practice strict diet and exercise routines to shape female bodies that are ideally suited for servants of Christ. Carol Laderman (1994) outlines the belief of many Malay cultures that certain foods have the power to upset bodily harmony and balance. The Shakers, whose celibate way of life Meredith B. McGuire (2008), Rosabeth Moss Kanter (1972), and others have studied, had prescribed routines guiding members’ physical practices and routines of everyday life, including the exact order for getting out of bed and dressing each morning. Regulations concerning diet, comportment, appropriate dress, and other rituals of embodiment are central to building and maintaining commitment in utopian communities; relinquishing individual freedom is often visually performed by adopting and conforming to the rules of behavior of the group (Kanter 1972). Within the frame of commitment mechanisms, bodily practices aid in forging tight communal bonds (see, e.g., Davidman 1990; Warner 1997) even as they establish strong boundaries between members and outsiders. Rituals involving the body, however, such as those illustrated so powerfully in Saba Mahmood’s (2005) study of the women’s Mosque Movement in Cairo, are more than just symbolic commitment mechanisms. The repetition of quotidian bodily practices also contributes to the constitution and cultivation of long-term religious beliefs and identities within religious communities. These embodied practices built a particular type of ethical orientation and were central in shaping religious identities. Religious representations of selves not only symbolize pious individuals, they also perform the work of creating them. Mahmood’s analysis helps shed light on Haredi Jewish life, where cosmic significance resides in the precise performance of every detail of daily life and repeated observance of commandments is viewed as a means of building belief (Fader 2006). In discussing strictly controlled religious enclaves, social theorists such as Bryan S. Turner (1984) and Anthony Giddens (1991) have described these communities as “traditional” or “pre-modern” in their organization of bodily life, in that they appeal to transcendent authorities to reinforce the groups’ regimes of bodily discipline. Haredi Jewish lives are built on a fundamental belief in a transcendent being whose commandments are practiced and guarded within enclave communities that seek to maintain a sacred...

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