Bourdieu Religion, and Cultural Production.pdf

Cultural Studies

Critical Methodologies

November 2001

Dillon

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Bourdieu and Religious Production

Pierre Bourdieu, Religion,

and Cultural Production

Michele Dillon

University of New Hampshire

Recent years have seen increased emphasis on the autonomy of human

agency in creating meaning in everyday life. The institutional bias in sociol-

ogy, however, and its concomitant emphasis on social reproduction rather

than change favors hierarchical approaches to cultural production. This is

apparent in the theorizing even of sociologists such as Pierre Bourdieu who

emphasize the cultural dynamism of religion and other meaning systems.

This article critiques the mechanistic underpinnings of Bourdieu’s perspec-

tive on religious production and his categorical differentiation between reli-

gious producers and consumers. Using data gathered from American Cath-

olics, the author shows that interpretive autonomy allows them to recast the

official discourse of the church hierarchy in ways that advance alternative

interpretations. Interpretive autonomy is grounded in the Catholic tradition

or habitus and is reflexively used by Catholics both to maintain the vibrancy

of the church and expand the possibilities for institutional change.

An important contribution of cultural studies has been to enhance aware-

ness of the significance of ordinary, everyday lived practices in the production

of meaning. The early empirical work of the Birmingham School (e.g., Hall &

Jefferson, 1976) demonstrated that the production of meaning is multilayered

and diffuse. Contrary to a top-down analysis of cultural production that privi-

leges production as the determining influence on the “reception” of meaning,

several studies show that the content of any symbolic production (e.g., soap

operas, romance novels, news accounts) is open to multiple interpretations and

uses. These interpretations, moreover, can be quite autonomous of the “objec-

tive” content inscribed at the official point of production (see, for example,

Hall, 1973; Hall & Jefferson, 1976; Press, 1991; Radway, 1994). Interpretive

activity is thus an active, creative process that is socially, historically, and locally

contextualized. In this view, as Dorothy Smith (1990) observed, all “texts are

indexical” because their “meaning is not fully contained in them but com-

pleted in the setting of their reading” (p. 197). In making sense of the meanings

packaged by a producer, the interpreter creates new meanings. Accordingly, the

reception or interpretation of meaning is itself part of the meaning production

Author’s Note: I greatly appreciate Norman K. Denzin’s comments on an earlier draft of this article and

the administrative assistance of Mark Nimkoff.

Cultural Studies

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Critical Methodologies, Volume 1 Number 4, 2001 411-429

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Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies • November 2001

process (Thompson, 1990, pp. 316-317). Yet, this is an aspect of cultural pro-

duction that is often marginalized by sociologists who, because of their interest

in mechanisms of social reproduction (e.g., Bourdieu, 1984), tend to give short

shrift to the dynamic and open-ended nature of the production/consumption

process itself.

Recognition of the relative fluidity of interpretive/cultural production illu-

minates aspects of social life that otherwise may appear somewhat enigmatic.

One such puzzle is presented by the continuing significance of religious partici-

pation for many Americans in this time of late- or postmodernity. Observers of

a postmaterialist cultural shift see traditional religious symbols losing their rel-

evance outside of their original setting (e.g., Inglehart, 1990, p. 179). Yet, it is

evident that whereas in some contexts, religion serves culturally defensive pur-

poses (cf. Bauman, 1997, pp. 182-185; Castells, 1997), in other situations,

religion is used as an emancipatory resource in the creation of more

participative structures (Dillon, 1999). Even though sociologists see religion as

a symbolic system (e.g., Berger, 1967; Bourdieu, 1991a, 1991b, 1998) and

increasingly pay attention to its interpretive and cultural dimensions (e.g.,

Dillon, 1999; Kniss, 1997; Wuthnow, 1992), the insights derived from cul-

tural studies research have not been applied extensively to contemporary forms

of religion. There is still a tendency to treat religion as if it were not, in fact, a

cultural process. In other words, there is a reluctance to recognize that doctrinal

production occurs in multiple interpretive sites, and as such, the meanings and

lived practices of religion may be relatively independent of official church dis-

courses or of the meanings imputed to them by distant observers.

The privileging of content or representation (and especially of official sym-

bolic texts/discourses) over how that same symbolic content is understood in

daily practices mirrors a broader tension in cultural studies between analyses of

texts or symbolic codes themselves (e.g., Barthes, 1972; Baudrillard, 1988) and

approaches that seek to understand how individuals and groups use such cul-

tural schemas in everyday life. It also reflects a bias in sociology toward a struc-

tural, institutional approach to the production of ideology that underplays the

relative autonomy and cultural agency of ordinary people. Thus, for example,

in the case of the Catholic Church, the church hierarchy is seen as the producer

of ideology, whereas the laity are seen as “more acted on than they are actors”

(Burns, 1992, p. 29). Such top-down approaches to ideological production

understate the ways in which people actively construct meaning in their every-

day practices and how these new or reinterpreted cultural schemas may foster

social change.

This article offers a perspective on cultural production that emphasizes the

communally reflexive nature of interpretive activity. In doing so, I critique

Bourdieu’s analysis of religious production and specifically his representation

of contemporary Catholicism. Notwithstanding the many insights Bourdieu

provides for the understanding of social life, his analysis of religion is under-

pinned by a categorical, top-down model of cultural production, and one that

Dillon • Bourdieu and Religious Production

413

rests on and is reproduced by, what he calls, collective misrecognition (e.g.,

Bourdieu, 1998, p. 95). I argue that although misrecognition may indeed be

essential to the practical mastery of daily life (Calhoun, 2000, p. 711), the

“game” of religion/Catholicism is not as mechanistic as Bourdieu suggested.

The discontinuities within the objective tradition and the interpretive diver-

sity of Catholicism in everyday life point to how allegedly taken for granted or

“doxic” practices may, in fact, disrupt collective misrecognition. Greater

awareness of the subjective ways in which misrecognition is collectively sub-

verted illuminates a more culturally driven analysis of institutional processes.

In this view, reinterpreted scripts and cognitive schemas can play a significant

role, independent of objective structural conditions (e.g., the hierarchical

authority structure of the church) but not unrelated to them, in effecting social

action, institutional reproduction, and change.

Specifically, this article shows how the doctrinal autonomy of American

Catholics allows them to reinterpret or collectively recognize the official dis-

course of the church hierarchy excluding women from being priests. They do

so in ways that advance alternative interpretations favoring a more egalitarian

church. Interpretive autonomy is grounded in the Catholic tradition, or what

might be called the Catholic habitus, and, intertwined with Catholics’

prereflexive immersion in the lived tradition, is reflexively used by them both

to maintain the vibrancy of the tradition and expand the possibilities for insti-

tutional change.

Symbolic Production and

Collective Misrecognition

Bourdieu saw the process of collective misrecognition as key to maintaining

social relations. Based on his early study of Algerian society, Bourdieu (1962)

has argued that gift exchange, for example, is a negotiated social practice whose

rules are grounded in a shared implicit understanding of the meanings con-

veyed by giving and receiving (pp. 103-107). Although gift exchange can foster

solidarity among equals, more interesting for Bourdieu is the way in which

such exchange maintains a particular set of hierarchical social relations.

The successful reproduction of inequality is predicated on the fact that, as

Bourdieu (1998) has argued, “practices always have double truths, which are

difficult to hold together” (p. 95). Hence, a gift exchange could simply (or

objectively) be a disinterested gift exchange or it could be an act of credit. This

ambiguity enables relationships to continue over time. Consequently, it is criti-

cal that the logic underlying the gift exchange relation not be exposed because

to do so would precipitate a breakdown in communal cohesiveness. An explica-

tion of what the gift “really” is would violate the terms of the relationship and

the logic of honor (or exploitation) governing it. There is thus necessarily a

taboo against making things explicit, a silent collusion between the partici-

pants about the “truth” of the exchange (p. 96).

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Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies • November 2001

The continuing viability of social relations is made possible, according to

Bourdieu (1998), through self-deception or self-mystification. This self-

deception is not an idiosyncratic, psychological state but is socially institution-

alized. It is “sustained by a collective self-deception , a veritable collective

misrecognition inscribed in objective structures (the logic of honor which gov-

erns all exchanges—of words, of women, of murders etc.) and in mental struc-

tures, excluding the possibility of thinking or acting otherwise” (p. 95).

Like gift exchange, religion is a symbolic system that is simultaneously

“structured and structuring” (Bourdieu, 1991a, p. 2). Bourdieu (1991a) saw

religion as having its own relatively autonomous field, and he emphasized the

fluidity and dynamism of what composes its structure and content. He stressed

the plurality of meanings in and functions of religion and emphasized the

importance of its contextual understanding (p. 19). Bourdieu argued for a rela-

tional analysis of the religious, as of other fields. He observed that what passes

for religious beliefs and practices in any given context

can be quite different from the original content of the message and it can be com-

pletely understood only in reference to the complete structure of the relations of

production, reproduction, circulation, and appropriation of the message and to

the history of this structure. (p. 18)

But despite this deep sensitivity to the relational dynamism of religion,

Bourdieu nevertheless embraced a categorical view of the production of reli-

gious capital. He saw the interpretive process in strongly dichotomous terms,

as one between “producers” (specialists) and “consumers” (laity). In

Bourdieu’s framework, “religious specialists ,” or church officials, are the

“exclusive holders of the specific competence necessary for the production and

reproduction of a deliberately organized corpus of secret (and therefore rare)

knowledge,” and he contrasted these specialists with the laity who are objec-

tively “dispossessed of religious capital ” (1991a, p. 9). For Bourdieu, the

authentic religious producers are the official institutional specialists who “con-

sciously” reinterpret religion, as opposed to the “dispossessed” consumers/

laity, who can merely “demand” but not “supply” religious meanings and

goods.

Bourdieu’s hierarchical distinction between religious specialists and the dis-

possessed laity is a tightly structured model of structuring that seems more

foreclosed than one might expect from Bourdieu’s general emphasis on the

relational nature of cultural production. The clarity of the boundaries of

Bourdieu’s categories derives from his economistic approach to religious pro-

duction. Bourdieu (1991a) argued that

religious capital depends, at a given moment in time, on the state of the structure

of objective relations between religious demand (i.e., the religious interests of

various groups or classes of laity) and religious supply (i.e., religious services,

Dillon • Bourdieu and Religious Production

415

whether orthodox or heretical) that the various claimants are brought to pro-

duce. (p. 22)

In Bourdieu’s (1991a) religious field, laypeople are confined to the position

of consumers of religious goods and services, cultural commodities that are

produced by either priests or, at times, prophets (p. 23). In short, “the relation-

ship of seller to buyer” is the “objective truth of any relationship between reli-

gious specialists and laypeople” (p. 25). Thus, in the market for religious

goods, the laity are “consumers endowed with the minimum religious compe-

tence (religious habitus) necessary to demonstrate the specific need for [the

church’s] products” (pp. 23-24). The superiority in the competence of special-

ists over laity is further underscored by Bourdieu’s explication of the laity’s

“practical mastery” of religious capital deriving from a “prereflexive” mode in

contrast to the “knowledgeable mastery” deliberately and systematically

achieved by institutionally mandated specialists (p. 10).

For Bourdieu (1998), the relevance of the religious enterprise is equated

with and reduced to its objective economic worth. He argued, for example, that

to measure the church’s influence one should conduct a “census of positions

whose raison d’etre is the Church’s existence and Christian belief,” an account-

ing that would include all those who directly or indirectly rely on the church to

make a living (p. 125). Using this method, according to Bourdieu, “everything

seems to indicate that we are moving toward a Church without a faithful whose

strength...rests on the ensemble of posts or jobs it holds” (p. 125). In this

logic, it is “ ‘Catholic’ jobs which are the primary condition of [the church’s]

perpetuation” (p. 126) and not the evidence demonstrating that many people

continue to invest in the tradition and find relevant meanings that are quite

independent in many cases of the “religious capital” produced by church

officials.

Euphemization

The inequality between religious specialists and the dispossessed laity is

maintained by the ability of church officials to make the laity “misrecognize the

arbitrariness” of the church hierarchy’s power. The laity, moreover, recognize

the legitimacy of their dispossession “from the mere fact that they misrecognize

it as such” (Bourdieu, 1991a, p. 9). As Bourdieu argued, much of the institu-

tional apparatus and discourse of the church is structured to convince the laity

that they need special qualifications or special grace to allow them access to the

religious capital monopolized by church officials. Bourdieu incisively pointed

out that the “word games” that accompany church practices are an integral part

of the church’s symbolic economy (1991a, p. 9; 1998, p. 114). Church officials

use language that innoculates the church from acknowledgment of the “real”

truth of the logic of its practices. As such, “religious institutions work perma-

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