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Conclusion The end is important in all things.¹ Whether or not we like the idea, all academic humanities research in some way relates to the author’s biography. The religion scholar Thomas Tweed has recently reminded us that “theories are positioned sightings.”² This is because academics—like all humans—are socially located. The spot where they “stand” and the places in which they have previously sat enable and constrain their perceptions. Social class has always played a significant role in my life’s trajectory. It has constricted my perceptions and prospects in ways that I will only ever be partly aware of. But it has also provided me a vista from which to examine the world. It is from that place that I conceived this book and argued that class is a neglected yet important variable in religious studies. I am certain that readers socially positioned both far and near to me will see things I have neglected. If this work stimulates some discussion about class in the academic study of religion, I will consider it successful. To conclude, I briefly do two things. First, I address a vexing unanswered question. Specifically, how does one understand, weigh, and discuss social class in relation to other variables such as race, place, and gender? Second, what are the implications for our research and teaching if we put class back into the study of religion? Duct-Taping a Loose End In the first chapter, I argued that class matters in the study of religion, and I hope this book has offered evidence to support that broad thesis. But I also noted that other things such as race, gender, place, and age also mattered. How does one weigh, or even discuss, how these things affect one’s religious preferences? As someone trained in the humanities, I will leave the weighing and measuring to others more qualified. But I do want to suggest an idiom. One’s physical location (rural versus urban, for example), racial identifica- 168 Conclusion tion, gender, and age can influence one’s social networks and opportunities in a manner similar to social class. We need an idiom with which to discuss their interplay, a term to mark how these components combine and conflict in peoples’ life trajectories and thus enable and constrain them in their religious affiliations and preferences. In chapter 1, I noted that my notion of class as availability and constraint closely mirrored the social theorist Pierre Bourdieu’s “habitus” concept. At the same time, the ambiguities, silences, and scholarly debates that surround the concept of habitus weigh down its usage. Because of this I suggest an alternative that mines from Bourdieu’s term but also elaborates and discards aspects of it. The term I propose is “socially habituated subjectivities.” I define socially habituated subjectivities as the repertoire of beliefs, practices , attitudes, assumptions, and gestures that have been inculcated by our social locations. The term refers to our enabling and constraining habits of mind and body. Breaking it down, “subjectivity” refers to our sense of being, identity, and embodied knowledge. That these things are “socially habituated” alludes to the process by which our social locations inscribe particular—and often corporately shared—conventions of being and acting. By “social location ” I mean the demographical positions of social class (income, occupation, education, wealth), race, gender, age, place, and region. I see the influence of socially habituated subjectivities—similar to Bourdieu’s habitus—as mostly unacknowledged (i.e., semidoxic). But the term I proffer differs from habitus in at least three ways. First, I acknowledge the possibility of conscious habituation. In other words, individuals may deliberately and actively engage in various disciplinary routines in order to cultivate particular habits or extinguish existing ones.³ Second, I view socially habituated subjectivities as multiple and at times conflicted within a single individual. This means that the different social locations that individuals exist within may influence them in contradictory ways.⁴ Third, and related closely to the first two, socially habituated subjectivities are not necessarily static throughout one’s lifespan. People may move in and out of various material and social circumstances throughout their lives. Like bell hooks—whose location shifted from rural working-class to best-selling author and academic—or like workers who are impelled to migrate and look for new types of employment because of deteriorating economic conditions in their locality, people sometimes experience situations (personal and...

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