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Why Bodies Matter: A Sociological Reflection on Spirituality and Materiality
- Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 2003
- pp. 1-18
- 10.1353/scs.2003.0017
- Article
- Additional Information
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Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 3.1 (2003) 1-18
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Why Bodies Matter:
A Sociological Reflection on Spirituality and Materiality 1
Meredith B. McGuire
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Many of us were brought up thinking that the spiritual realm is completely set apart from the mundane material realm. Perhaps even opposed to it. Western societies, in recent centuries, have tended to view spirituality and materiality as dichotomous, in tidy binary opposition. Accordingly, those individuals who wanted to enhance their spirituality would have to overcome the burden of their materiality, deny their material urges and concerns, and transcend the limitations (perhaps, even the pollution) of the material body.
I argue, to the contrary, that spirituality fully involves people's material bodies, not just their minds or spirits. The key connection here is not ideas about the body, nor simply moral control of the body and its impulses. Rather, spirituality is closely linked with material human bodies—and not merely in the abstract. I mean real bodies—arthritic bodies, athletic bodies, pregnant bodies, malnourished bodies, healthy bodies, and suffering bodies. I mean human bodies that labor and rest, bodies that create and destroy, bodies that nurse babies and bodies that torture the bodies of others, bodies that eat, drink, fart, and sweat. With our real material bodies, we also touch, hear, see, and taste our material worlds.
So why do these real bodies matter? What do they have to do with spirituality or spiritual concerns? As a sociologist, my research has emphasized lived religion (i.e., religion as practiced and experienced by ordinary people in the context of their everyday lives). Religion, in this broad sociological sense, consists of how people make sense of their world—the stories out of which they live. Lived religion includes the myriad individual ways by which people put these stories into practice.
Sometimes, an individual's lived religion is closely linked with the teachings and practices of an official religion, such as a Christian denomination; that individual uses his or her church's stories and rituals to shape individual experience. There is no necessary connection with official religion, however, because lived religion consists of the actual practices and salient beliefs of people as they live their lives. Thus, many individuals choose to believe and practice elements selected from several different religious "packages," and they often use church-prescribed practices in ways completely unforeseen by the [End Page 1] official religion. We must remember that humans are creative agents, not merely over-socialized automatons.
I am using the term "spirituality" to describe the everyday ways those ordinary people attend to their spiritual lives. Some people describe themselves as deeply spiritual, and some devote considerable energy and discipline to their spiritual development. Others consider themselves not very spiritual and not very interested in their spiritual lives. Some find spiritual development and support as committed members of a congregation; others see no connection between their spiritual lives and any organized religious group. Some consciously choose practices to enhance their spirituality; others notice their spiritual practices only retrospectively or when asked to think consciously of them (for instance, in response to a sociologist-interviewer).
Lived religion is constituted by the practices by which people remember, share, enact, adapt, create and combine the stories out of which they live. And it comes into being through the often-mundane practices by which people transform these meaningful interpretations into everyday action. 2 Human bodies matter, because those practices—even interior ones, such as contemplation—involve people's bodies, as well as their minds and spirits.
Spirituality and Embodied Practice
If our conception of religion is too narrow, we fail to comprehend how central our material bodies are in the very practice and experience of religion. All religions engage individuals through concrete practices that involve bodies, as well as minds and spirits. It is easy for us to recognize those bodily practices when we think of, for example, Native American religious experience. 3 In that cultural context, intense bodily involvement in practices of drumming, dancing, vision quests, smoking, feasting, sweating, and...