Universitatsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg

Chapter 28: Embodiment, Emotion and Religious Experience: Religion,Culture and the Charismatic BodyPhilip A. MellorWhat does it mean to be ‘religious’? This is the most basic theoretical question that confrontsanyone attempting to study religious phenomena, and one that sociologists have sought to answerin various ways. They have stressed the relative importance of either beliefs or practices,established tight or loose boundaries between religions and other social or cultural phenomena,and diverged sharply over issues such as the degree to which religiosity shapes, or is shaped by,its social and cultural context. What has often been neglected, however, is the fact that religion isan embodied phenomenon: not only does its meaningfulness for individuals, and its various formsof social and cultural import, depend upon human bodies that are able to believe and act inparticular ways, but it can also be stated that all religions, though in different ways, consciouslyseek to shape bodily experiences, actions and ways of thinking.

Though there have been exceptions, the relative neglect of religious experience as an object ofsociological study is significant here, since this most obviously directs our attention toembodiment. What I shall suggest, in fact, is that a focus on experience can help illuminate theembodied nature of beliefs and practices too, as well as other issues to do with the specificcharacter, boundaries and cultural contexts of religious life. Although some religious formsemphasise the importance of experience more than others, just as some stress belief abovepractice or vice versa, the experiential aspects of being religious cannot ultimately be isolatedfrom, or subordinated to, beliefs and practices. All three aspects of being religious are intimately,and inextricably, related to the inherent capacities and potentialities of bodies, and the variedpatterns of social and cultural shaping to which they are necessarily subject. The purpose of thischapter is to make a contribution towards the development of the systematic analysis of theserelationships.

The arguments offered here are made possible by the burgeoning literature in the sociology of thebody over the last few decades. This has, of course, resulted in innumerable theoreticalapproaches to the subject, many of which are incommensurate, and of more or less usefulness forthe study of religion. After acknowledging continuing difficulties in approaches to the body and howthese relate to religion, however, I structure the rest of this chapter with regard to six models ofembodiment that, taken together, can offer a productive way forward for future studies. Thepresentation of each model involves a critical account of the key theoretical arguments, andsuggestions about how these can help illuminate the character and function of specifically religiousphenomena. These six models are focused on the following issues: (1) the primacy of theemotional dimensions of embodiment; (2) the permeability of bodies with regard to outside forces;(3) the learning capacities of bodies; (4) the power of mimetic models with regard to religiousexperience; (5) the mindful character of bodies in the sense that cognitive factors have to be seenas fully integrated into embodied experience; and (6) the global nature of bodies. In the latter case,I use the word ‘global’ in two senses: first, in the sense that all human beings share the sameembodied potentialities and properties; and second, in the sense that aspects of globalisation offernew opportunities for appreciating the complex relations between embodied potentialities andcultural processes.

Throughout these discussions I have elected to draw principally upon ‘charismatic’ forms ofChristianity, loosely understood, to illuminate the theoretical arguments associated with eachmodel. Experiences of ‘Spirit possession’, ‘trance’ and other altered states of consciousness havebeen traced not only to the ‘pente­costal’ Christian churches of the ‘Acts of the Apostles’ in theBible but also to Jesus himself (Davies, 1995). The late twentieth­century development of Christianforms centred on intense experiences of being filled with the Holy Spirit, however, manifest inspeaking in ‘tongues’, sacred ‘swoons’ and gifts of healing, are notable for a number of reasons.

First, they are of general sociological interest: such forms are growing so rapidly across the worldtoday, particularly in the Southern hemisphere, that there have been claims of a ‘new reformation’(Jenkins, 2002: 7; Cox, 1995). Second, although the models of embodiment developed in thischapter could, with modifications, be applied to any form of religion, charismatic forms are ofparticular interest in that they have an especially strong focus on the experiential dimensions ofChristianity, and can be seen as part of a broader resurgence of emotionally or experientiallycentred forms of community (McGuire, 1982; Hervieu­Léger, 1993; Hunt, 2001; Gumbel, 2002;Watling, 2005). A third factor that makes charismatic Christianity of particular interest, however, isthe fact that, as a global phenomenon, it offers valuable insights into embodiment, religion andculture that might not be possible otherwise. As Beckford (2003: 207) notes, in fact, one of the keypoints of interest about charismatic Christianity as a global phenomenon, which has not beendiscussed critically in the major studies of it, is that specific forms of embodiment recur across arange of otherwise very different cultures. Through the models outlined in this chapter, I shallattempt to fill the gap in this literature.

Initially, however, it is important to note how problematic the notion of the ‘body’ has been insociology, even within contemporary body studies. Indeed, the characteristic ambivalence showntowards religion by many mainstream sociologists has also been evident with regard to the body,in that it has often been defined by its relationship to other social and cultural phenomena ratherthan with regard to its own distinct properties. It is in this sense that we can talk of theabsent/present body.

The Absent/Present BodyThe latter decades of the twentieth century saw a remarkable growth in the sociological interest inthe body, though a significant feature of this interest has been the fact that, despite its apparentubiquity, the body has remained an elusive, indeterminate phenomenon (Leder, 1990; Shilling,1993, 2005). One way of accounting for this ‘absence/presence’ is by noting that the body'ssignificance was usually emphasised in relation to a range of other, more established, concerns.These included the commodification of the body in consumer culture, feminist analyses of genderand sex, and technological and governmental attempts to regulate and control bodies (Shilling,2005: 2; see Featherstone, 1991; Grosz, 1994; Turner, 1984, 1991). Although such studies didmuch to foster sociological interest in the body, the focus on representations or images of bodies,analysed in relation to determinative social, cultural or political processes, often meant that bodiesbecame strangely empty of any real material, sensual, emotional and cognitive characteristics.

More positively, however, despite these limitations, the body was seen as something centrallyimplicated in debates about modernity, post­modernity and, increasingly, globalisation processes.It is in this context that many of these body studies returned to classical sociological theories ofmodernity and found within them an attention to embodied factors that remained highly relevant tothe present, particularly with regard to the critique of the cognitivist and rationalist dimensions ofpost­Enlightenment Western thought (Turner, 1984; Shilling 1993; Grosz, 1994; Mellor and Shilling,1997).

This sociological interest in the ‘corporeal constituents’ of modernity mirrored similar developmentsin anthropological studies, where critiques of Western cognitivism combined fruitfully with data onnon­Western peoples, as well as fresh studies of pre­modern European cultures, to map out thevarious ways in which sense experiences and cultures have interacted across a huge range ofdifferent contexts (Howes, 1991; Classen, 1993). This renewed interest in the body also gave riseto new visions of the sociological importance of religion, focused especially upon the embodieddimensions of ritual, disciplinary regulations of the body by religious institutions, and the ways inwhich religious developments have served to reshape and reform the experience of embodimentacross Western history (Asad, 1983, 1988; McGuire, 1990; Turner, 1991; Bell, 1992; Mellor andShilling, 1997). The close relationship between the emergence of body studies and the resurgenceof sociological interest in religion was not accidental, however, but indicative of the fact that thesesubjects had been inextricably entwined for a number of the classical sociological theorists.

It is undoubtedly the case that, throughout the twentieth century, the secularisation thesis, in itsmany variants, constituted the dominant theoretical paradigm in the sociology of religion, and thatthis fostered the increasing marginality of religion to the core theoretical and substantive foci ofsociology in general. The arguments of Max Weber (1991), one of the major ‘founding figures’ ofsociology, concerning the increasing rationalisation and disenchantment of the modern world, weredecisive influences in this regard. None the less, re­reading Weber's work today, it is clear that hisarguments about the social and cultural effects of the Reformation are not simply to do with

transformations in ‘beliefs’, but with a ‘re­formation’ of embodiment involving the disciplining,regulation and individualisation of bodies markedly different to the Catholic engagement withhuman embodiment in the medieval period (Mellor and Shilling, 1997). It is also notable thatWeber's (1968) notion of ‘charisma’, which offers the counterpoint to rationalisation in his accountof social creativity and control, is expressive of specific experiences, power and authority thatcome through the body. Although he stressed the waning significance of charisma asrationalisation processes developed (Weber, 1968: 1146–9), this is now increasingly questioned,just as his account of the ‘disenchantment’ of the world is now considered problematic.

Lindholm (1990), for example, explores the continuing significance of charisma as a source ofsocial creativity in various contexts. He also notes that ‘charisma’, in Weber's work, and ‘collectiveeffervescence’, in that of Émile Durkheim, have similar roles in that both are embodied sources ofsocial creativity. The former locates this creativity within individuals, however, while the latterassociates it with groups. Weber took the notion of charisma from Christianity, where it hadreferred to ‘the gift of grace’. This could take various forms, though was associated particularlywith the charisma of ordination, conferred by a bishop through the laying on of hands. In thiscontext, contrary to Weber's understanding, the contagious features of charisma are notassociated only with specific individuals, but are embodied transformations of a more collectivenature, and make sense more in terms of Durkheim's (1995: 326) understanding of consecrationsas the diffusion of sacred contagion through physical contact. For Durkheim (1995: 328), the‘founding figure’ of French sociology and, along with Weber, a hugely important influence upon thesociological study of religion, the spreading of a pattern of emotional contagion that reconfiguresthe experience of the body is ‘the very process through which sacredness is acquired’.

Weber's account of the increasingly rationalised bodies of modernity continues to exercise aninfluence. In reassessing the role of the body in relation to religion, culture and society today,however, it is clear that the absence/presence of the body in recent sociological thought is not onlyintimately tied to the absence/presence of religion, but also that both forms of ‘absence’ mightreflect an over­estimation of the degree to which social and cultural changes can transform basichuman potentialities and characteristics. In this regard, it is worth noting that those sociologicalstudies of the body that have a constructionist orientation, where the body is seen as a site for theinterplay of social and cultural forces (Haraway, 1991; Butler, 1993; see Foucault, 1977), are nowincreasingly challenged by attempts to develop more substantial visions of embodiment, centredon phenomenological, realist or pragmatist accounts of the ‘lived body’ (Bourdieu, 1984; Leder,1990; Crossley, 1995; Archer, 1995; Mellor, 2004; Shilling, 2005). The amount of attention devotedto religion in such studies continues to vary a great deal, but their attempts to make sense of theembodied bases of society and culture are of potentially great value to students of religion, thoughthis is especially so with regard to the renewed interest in the work of Durkheim.

In this light, the idea that modernisation, and, by extension, globalising processes, necessarilyrender religion a phenomenon of marginal significance to contemporary social and cultural life, andtherefore to sociological analysis, looks increasingly problematic theoretically, even aside fromempirical factors. Indeed, two arguments can be suggested. First, if social and cultural life hassome sort of embodied basis, then however radical social and cultural changes might appear tobe, these can only be possible or sustainable in so far as they make sense in relation to theembodied potentialities and characteristics of human beings. Second, if these potentialities andcharacteristics are intimately tied to religious phenomena, as Durkheim suggests, then makingsense of society and culture necessarily involves the study of religion (see Maffesoli, 1996;Janssen and Verheggen, 1997; Mellor and Shilling, 1997; Shilling and Mellor, 2001; Rawls, 2001;Mellor, 2004).

These two arguments are, of course, of a generalised and contentious nature, and developingthem in more detail must involve the consideration of a number of models of religion andembodiment that might offer a productive basis for further reflection and study. In the followingsections, however, I outline the six models that are, I suggest, indicative of some of the mostuseful analyses of the embodied basis of religion and culture, and particularly helpful in terms ofproviding building blocks for further development.

(1) the Emotional Body

The notion of an emotional body is an important starting point, since all the other models I considercan be seen as developments of, or supplements to, it. Williams and Bendelow (1998) havesuggested that emotions have often enjoyed a somewhat ‘ethereal’ existence in sociologicalthought, despite the rise of body studies, but it has long been accepted that emotion plays a

particularly significant role in religious experience. In this regard, it is worth noting that, alongsidethe upsurge of interest in the embodied dimensions of the Durkheimian tradition, the work ofWilliam James, an immensely important figure at the turn of the twentieth century for the shaping ofthe modern study of psychology, has again begun to interest sociologists.

Like Durkheim, James (1907) emphasises the primacy of embodied experience in social andcultural life, and both can be said to offer arguments for ‘the authenticity and validity of religiousbelief premised on religious experience’ (Barbalet, 2004: 348). Both, furthermore, stress theemotional nature of this experience, and the embodied predispositions of human beings toexperience strong emotional states of various sorts. Where they differ is that, in contrast toDurkheim's focus on the collective stimulation and regulation of emotion through eitherunpredictable patterns of contagion or institutionalised forms of ritual (Mellor, 1998), James isconcerned with the emotional experiences of individuals and sees collective forms as secondaryto, and derivative of, these. His definition of religion as ‘the feelings, acts and experiences ofindividual men in their solitude’ is indicative of the apparent gulf between his position and that ofDurkheim (James, 1907: 30–1).

None the less, Barbalet's (2004) adoption of James as an important resource for the contemporarysociology of the emotions dismisses earlier accounts of the divergences between him andDurkheim (e.g. Lukes, 1974:460), and emphasises their fundamental similarity with regard to theidea that social phenomena, including religious beliefs and scientific arguments, have their basis inthe human capacities for emotional arousal. As Barbalet (2004: 341) suggests, for James, reason,volition and emotion are not only intimately related to each other, but emotion is the primary factor,since conceptual or sensual faculties are essentially meaningless to us without the ‘emotionalpertinency’ that allows us to care about anything or to act in a particular way (see James, 1897:117, 83). Referring us to Durkheim's (1995: 392ff.) discussion of piacular rites, Barbalet (2004:350) notes that his argument that bodily actions and gestures create the emotional statescharacteristic of these rites, rather than thoughts of the deceased, is entirely consistent withJames's social psychology of emotions, even if James is more interested in individual bodilyprocesses than collective engagements with these.

Looking at charismatic religiosity it is indeed clear that the apparent theoretical gulf between Jamesand Durkheim starts to looks bridgeable. It is generally acknowledged, for example, that thisreligiosity has a highly personalist character, in the sense that it is focused on the transformation ofindividuals through powerful religious experiences. Although it has been suggested thatcharismatic Christianity encourages individuals to find their way to God through all five senses(Poewe, 1994: 249; Coleman, 2000: 68), it is clear that the foundation for this experiential focus isan intensely emotional encounter with Christ and the Holy Spirit (Percy, 1996: 67). Here, it is worthnoting that James refers us to Jonathan Edwards's Treatise on Religious Affections, which notonly offered support for his emotionally and experientially centred view of religion, but also came toexercise a decisive influence upon modern evangelical, Pentecostal and charismatic churches(Noll, 2001: 262).

For Edwards, as for contemporary charis­matics, true religion is a phenomenon of the heart ratherthan the mind, based on an experience that was close to an actual sensation (Schröder, 2000:194). This has led some commentators to associate charismatic Christianity with the modernprivatisation of religion (Wilson, 1988: 204; Percy, 1996: 145). Bruce (2002), in fact, argues that in‘giving a much higher place to personal experience than to shared doctrines’ it expresses a moreculturally pervasive ethic of ‘personal fulfilment’ (see also Davies, 1984: 144). Not only do thesehighly personal experiences offer the inductive basis for the affirmation of a community life,however, but the range of extreme physical and emotional symptoms individuals experience asthey encounter the power of the Holy Spirit are collectively nurtured (Percy, 1996: 100). Ratherthan simply endorsing James's view of religion, this nurturing of specific experiences in groupsettings, where powerful encounters with the Holy Spirit are both expected and collectivelyinterpreted, as well as the apparently ‘contagious’ circulation of phenomena such as speaking in‘tongues’, fainting, intense body heat and extreme exuberance, are more suggestive of Durkheim's(1995) account of the collective effervescence at the heart of religious life, and its recurrentstructuring and mediation through ritual processes.

Discussing the hugely successful ‘Alpha Course’, for example, which, after its initial developmentin London, has gone on to become a major evangelising and renewal programme across a rangeof churches in Europe and the US, Watling (2005: 92) notes that it has cognitive features, in thesense that it aims to educate individuals into the basic truths of Christianity, but that ‘its underlying

intention is to create an emotional experience which encourages personal identification withChristianity’. In this regard, the Alpha Course has much in common with other charismatic forms ofChristian evangelisation, such as the ‘Toronto Blessing’ associated with John Wimber and the‘Vineyard’ churches. The more extreme range of physical phenomena associated with the TorontoBlessing, which also became a worldwide form of Christian ‘renewal’, including hysterical ‘holylaughter’, roaring like animals, and other bizarre bodily gestures and expressions, suggest a muchmore chaotic and ‘spontaneous’ worship environment than that offered by Alpha. It is also clear,however, that, even in such extreme examples, certain experiences and expressions are onlypossible on the basis of subtly structured collective processes (Percy, 1996; Lyon, 2000).

In the light of these examples, it is clear that intensely personal religious experiences and patternsof collective emotional stimulation need not have the dichotomous relationship that a superficialreading of the arguments of James and Durkheim might imply. None the less, Barbalet'seagerness to resolve their theoretical differences obscures remaining questions about howindividuals come to experience forms of emotional intensity that have a religiously specificcharacter: James's (1907: 512) association of these with unconscious elements within the self isclearly unable to make much difference between, for example, distinctively Christian or Muslimreligious experiences. As Spickard (1993: 110) suggests, discussing sociological utilisations of aJamesian approach to charismatic Christianity (e.g. Poloma, 1989), this is a major weakness ofhis account of religious experience. More generally, it is a weakness in its understanding of humanembodiment. In contrast, the dominant model of embodiment within the Durkheimian tradition canbe characterised as one that emphasises the permeability of bodies, in the sense that they havean inherent susceptibility to transformation by social energies or forces in specific settings.

(2) the Permeable Body

Csordas (1994: 277) has argued that Marcel Mauss's essays on the ‘person’ (1950a) and on the‘body’ (1950b) are entirely independent of each other, reflecting a broader Western duality he wasunable to resolve, but this is misleading. The continuity between Mauss's views of the body andthe person rests on the fact that, in the Durkheimian tradition, of which Mauss became the leaderfollowing the death of Durkheim, both can be seen as ‘permeable’ rather than as bounded materialor existential totalities. While the immense power of social forces to permeate bodies is stronglyemphasised, it is also acknowledged that this is constrained by bodies' natural dispositions. Itmight be said that this tradition offers a vision of bodies that are socially constituted rather thansocially constructed.

Mauss's (1950b) discussion of ‘body techniques’ and Hertz's (1973) of the cross­cultural pre­eminence of the right hand offer anthropologically informed studies that can help clarify thisdistinction. The argument of Hertz (1973: 89), an early Durkheimian who died in World War I, isthat, despite the physical resemblance of left and right hands, in nearly all societies they aretreated with an astonishing inequality, which he analyses in relation to Durkheim's sacred/profanedualism. What Hertz is not doing is arguing that the distinction between right and left is eithersocially or biologically determined. What he argues is that most humans appear to have anembodied predisposition towards right­handedness: it is upon the basis of this that social forcesserve to sacralise all that is ‘right’ and denigrate all that is ‘left’. This embodied predispositioncannot be socially deconstructed entirely: musicians, for example, can retrain the left hand out ofits socially reinforced relative ‘uselessness’, but left­handed people living in societies that havestriven to coerce them into right­handedness continue to have a preference for the left. In short,even though the vast array of practices, beliefs, ideas and values attributed to right and left areclearly distinctively social phenomena, the distinction between right and left is not entirely sociallyconstructed: it is socially constituted through the societal engagement with real embodied humanpredispositions that constrain the constructions that can be developed upon them (Mellor, 2004:56).

Mauss's (1950b) discussion of body techniques, along with developments of similar ideas byBourdieu (1977) and Elias (1987, 1991), are of note in that this process of body constitution isarticulated with reference to the notion of a habitus. Techniques of the body refer to how peoplelearn to relate to and deploy their bodies, a process that is often unconscious but involves practiceand accomplishment, and results in bodies acquiring particular identities and histories. Elias'sanalysis of the transformations in manners and etiquette in Western history builds on this idea,emphasising how the embodied habitus of individuals is highly permeable with regard to large­scale social processes. Similarly, Bourdieu discusses the pre­cognitive, embodied predispositionswhich promote particular forms of orientation to the world, organise each generation's senses andbodily experiences into particular hierarchies, and predispose people towards particular ways of

knowing and acting (Mellor and Shilling, 1997: 20).

Csordas (1994: 7) has drawn upon Bourdieu's notion of the habitus, with its view of the body as‘the principle generating and unifying all practices’ (Bourdieu, 1977:124), to account for how thebodies of both Christian healers and patients are ‘socially informed’ by a broader charismaticculture (Csordas, 1994: 107). In a similar vein, he also defines the Catholic charismatic practice of‘resting in the Spirit’, a kind of ‘sacred swoon’ generally referred to as ‘slaying in the Spirit’ byProtestant charismatics, as a technique of the body in Mauss's sense (Csordas, 1994: 231–2).While both Elias and Bourdieu are attentive to transformations in the habitus over large stretchesof time, however, Bourdieu's (1977: 124) work, in particular, has a strong socially deterministcharacter and his vision of the ‘socially informed body’ offers little scope for a sensitivity to howactions and interactions can lead to the development of new orientations to the body. Csordas(1994: 108) attempts to circumvent this determinism by noting the possibilities for elaborating uponhabitual practices and experiences that can arise in ‘the performative flow of a healing event’, butthere are limits, perhaps, to how successful this can be within Bourdieu's framework.

A brief consideration of quite different, yet clearly related, examples of how Christianity hasengaged with the ‘permeability’ of bodies points towards greater creative possibilities. In a RomanCatholic context, the Eucharist incorporates the Body of Christ (body/bread, blood/wine) as foodinto the body of the individual, while incorporating the individual into the Body of Christ (i.e. theChurch) (Mellor and Shilling, 1997: 68). This re­formation of the body, in its two senses, linkshuman permeability to the transformative possibilities of the Incarnation. In broad terms, of course,Protestant forms of Christianity have tended to be less overtly ritualistic in their forms of religiousexpression. None the less, not only have most ‘mainline’ Protestant churches retained theEucharistic ritual in some form, but, as Sack's (2000) discussion of ‘Whitebread Protestants’ in theUS amply demonstrates, the highly ritualised construction of religious, political and ethical forms ofsolidarity through the bodily incorporation of food remains central to large areas of contemporaryAmerican culture.

A related, though somewhat divergent, pattern of bodily incorporation is evident in certain forms ofcharismatic Christianity, though Christ (as food) is ingested not through the Eucharistic ritual or byimbibing ‘the Spirit’ but through reading the Bible. Here, Coleman (2000: 127–9) discusses howmembers of the Swedish ‘Word of Life’ church ‘describe the process of reading the Bible as a formof ingestion akin to eating’. Furthermore, the language used to describe religious experience is alsounderstood to cause and to constitute experience, since ‘eating’ the Word involves the physicalingestion of Christ into the materiality of the body and not just the acceptance of Christ in cognitiveor psychological terms (Coleman, 2000: 127–9). In contrast to the Catholic model, the charismaticfocus on the Bible reconfigures the religious meanings of bodily senses (Christ is ingested notthrough the mouth, but through the eyes or the ears), and downplays any notion of sacramentalefficacy, but in each case the reception of Christ is made possible by the permeability of bodies.

These creative engagements with the body are only possible in so far as people are in a particularhabitus that allows them to acquire specific skills, orientations and aptitudes, but the acquisition ofsuch things cannot be explained simply as a process whereby the indeterminate potentialities ofbodies are given specific shape by cultural norms, beliefs or concepts. The cultural shaping ofbodies is, of course, immensely important, but attention must also be paid to the properties ofbodies themselves, since this cultural shaping is both made possible and constrained by theinherent characteristics of bodies. In this regard, a focus on the learning body helps direct ourattention to the ways in which embodiment structures the acquisition of knowledge, as well asbeing structured by it.

(3) the Learning Body

Mauss's (2003) study of prayer defines it as a ritual: since speech is a social act, prayer is asocially structured form of action closely allied to collective regulations concerning the body, suchas posture, kneeling, sitting, and prostrating, which shape the consciousnesses and experiencesof individuals in specific ways. Thus, discussing the invocation at the beginning of the Lord'sPrayer, he argues that it is ‘not just the effusion of a soul, a cry which expresses a feeling’, but ‘thefruit of the work of centuries’, while Christians who ‘abandon themselves to the Spirit’ in anapparently free and individual manner are actually submitting themselves to the spirit of the church(Mauss, 2003: 33). In arguing this, he claims that he is not denying the felt authenticity of individualprayer, but emphasising the social reality that allows individual mental and bodily states to beshaped in particular ways (Mauss, 2003: 36). This view of prayer helps account for what Beckford(2003: 189) has called the ‘instrumental’ dimensions of charismatic religiosity. At the heart of the

Alpha Course, for example, is the experientially focused ‘Holy Spirit Weekend’, where individualshave the opportunity to ‘abandon themselves to the Spirit’ in the manner Mauss suggests, but this‘abandonment’ is very carefully prepared for in the earlier parts of the course, while the weekenditself is a structured pattern of prayers, videos and discussions helping individuals to becomesufficiently open to bodily, psychological and spiritual transformation that they can receive theoutpouring of the Holy Spirit that is the culmination of the course (Watling, 2005: 98).

Although she does not draw directly upon Mauss's study, Norris's (2005) discussion of theembodied basis of religious experience can be read as an extension of his arguments, revolvingaround the central question of how it is that intensely personal, often indescribable, religiousexperiences can be learned. Emphasising that religious phenomena such as states of prayer areprimarily ‘somatic states, transmitted and learned through the body’, she sees embodiment as themedium through which collectively sanctioned religious norms come to reshape individualconsciousness, the senses and the emotions (Norris, 2005: 182). Consequently, she claims thatthe development of particular emotions and experiences is one of the major ways in whichreligious tradition is transmitted, and, like Mauss, emphasises the primacy of ritual in this process,since repetition is one of the key ways in which certain kinds of knowledge become embedded inthe body (Norris, 2005: 187; Levin, 1985: 209–20). Through repetition, certain forms of knowledgebecome constitutive of the body; a process that may develop quite gradually, but also in suddenleaps as the body becomes attuned to achieving certain types of experiences. This latter pointsuggests that bodies have their own dynamics that to some extent structure the learningprocesses individuals subject them to.

Here, it is worth going back to James (1907: 206), who refers us to Starbuck's comparison of thealternation between periods of steady progress and sudden, rapid forms of development in thebodily awareness and knowledge of athletes with the pattern of conversion to religious life. Thiscaptures something about embodiment similar to Czikszentmihalyi's (1975) notion of ‘flow’, wherethe practitioners of various sports, medical procedures or religious disciplines are no longerconsciously deploying techniques, but experience a total immersion in what they are doing. Neitzand Spickard (1990), in fact, have used this notion of the ‘flow’ to capture the experiences of theloss of self, and the immersion in something transcendent, that characterises various forms ofreligious practices. It also implies, however, that the instrumental efficacy of culturally acquiredtechniques ultimately depends upon bodies able to achieve such ‘peak experiences’ (Spickard,1993: 113). In this regard, phenom­enologically oriented visions of the learning body tend to have amuch stronger emphasis on the inherent emotional and sensual characteristics of bodies than thatevident in the work of Mauss.

For Merleau­Ponty (1962, 1974), for example, the phenomenological analysis of the body explicitlyprioritises the natural over the cultural, in the sense that the sensory characteristics and practicalabilities of our bodies constitute the ground and the medium through which our experiences ofourselves, others and the world become possible (Archer, 2000: 128; see Crossley, 1994, 1995).This confronts directly the constructionist arguments of writers such as Proudfoot (1985), who notonly argues that all forms of experience are determined by linguistic, cultural and historical factors,but also goes so far as to claim that there is no ‘common humanity’ against which the plurality ofcultural constructions of experience can be measured (see also Neitz, 1987; Asad, 1993). It alsoilluminates the weaknesses in Yamane's (2000) argument that sociologists cannot study ‘religiousexperience’, only retrospective linguistic representations of it: what such studies do, in giving suchanalytical weight to language, is ignore the degree to which our bodies never cease to be themedia through which all experience, knowledge and meaning are constituted. As Archer (2000: 11)suggests,‘physiological embodiment does not sit well with social constructionism … socialconstructions may be placed upon it, but the body is stubbornly resistant to being dissolved intothe discursive’. This is so because the body adapts to natural and social environments evenbefore we have acquired language, and because physical responses related to pleasure, pain,desire and need continue throughout our lives to challenge the constructionist overemphasis onlanguage (Archer, 2000: 316).

Csordas's (1994) study of charismatic Christianity has drawn on Merleau­Ponty's notion of bodilybeing­in­the­world, combined with Bourdieu's account of the habitus, in order to account for theintimate relationship between embodied experience and its inevitable immersion in systems ofcultural meaning. Archer's discussion of religion goes beyond Merleau­Ponty, however. For her,religion arises on the basis of practice: it entails a ‘feel for’ the sacred rather than a prepositionalknowledge about it, an exercise of spiritual ‘know how’ rather than a cognitive acceptance ofabstract principles. This challenges the Enlightenment's logocentric view of human beings, in

cutting through the distinction between reason and emotions: as she expresses it, ‘unless we arealready affective beings, then no amount of knowledge could move us to anything’ (Archer, 2000:185).

Following this line of thought, religion is ‘a codification of practice, and thus there is no such thingas a non­liturgical religion’ (Archer, 2000: 184). This codification gives rise to developments in art,music, architecture, artefacts and other cultural forms, while the institutionalisation of a ‘Church’ isusually connected to the development of a ‘priesthood’ to act as custodians of codified practice(Archer, 2000: 185). These developments impact back upon practical activity, elaborating newforms of embodied relations and new bodily practices, but the essence of religion remains fullyembodied. In this light, Archer (2000: 186) notes that the practice of Christian life as an embodiedcommitment of the whole person ‘is distorted if fragmented into a cognitive­propositional “grammarof assent” and a modern Decalogue of prescribed behaviour’. Rather, the real centre of Christianlife is in the bodily disciplines of prayer, pilgrimage and contemplation and, especially, in thecorporeal reception of the Body of Christ in the Eucharist.

This view of Christian life is, of course, implicitly Catholic, and charismatic Protestants woulddispute the idea that all religion is ‘liturgical’, even though their worship and healing services arehighly ritualised (Csordas, 1994). More broadly, however, the charismatic focus on the practical,existential and emotional aspects of bodily being, not only in ‘worship’ settings but also in all areasof life, is consistent with Archer's account. Furthermore, her particular concern for the importanceof ‘personal experience’ is also highly relevant to charismatic forms of religion.

Although Rawls (2001), amongst others, has identified an orientation towards practical action as akey feature of Durkheim's arguments, Archer's focus on the learning body is, to some extent,defined in opposition to what she sees as his overemphasis upon the social. Indeed, she assertsthe importance of allowing for the possibility of ‘authentic personal experience’ which, rather thansimply arising on the basis of social causes, facilitates an individual's ability to filter the socialpractices that are sought or shunned, and which thereby makes a significant difference to their‘chosen way of being in the social world’ (Archer, 1995: 292). For Archer, in fact, humanembodiment predisposes individuals towards a ‘fundamentally evaluative’ engagement with theworld, stimulating an ‘inner conversation’ constitutive of our ‘concrete singularity’ (Archer, 2000:318–19). Csordas's (1994) discussion of the thoroughly reflexive processes through whichcharismatic self­identities are established is indicative of the importance of Archer's point here.

As valuable as this interest in the ‘inner conversation’ of individuals is, however, there is thedanger that individuals can appear to be a little too self­contained: our ‘concrete singularity’ asindividuals is, as she would acknowledge, a ‘work in progress’ rather than a given fact, and, evenamongst those who have a highly developed sense of their own identity, the ability to ‘filter’ socialforces through a strong evaluative orientation is not always as evident as Archer seems to imply.In this regard, and building on the idea of a learning body and the fact that the body remainspermeable to social and cultural forces throughout our lives, the notion of the mimetic body offers afurther productive theoretical model for making sense of the relationships between religion,embodiment and culture.

(4) the Mimetic Body

It has been noted that the body learns to be religious through the imitation of others, particularly asthese mimetic actions become increasingly habitual through patterns of repetition that succeed in‘layering, compounding and shaping present experience’ (Norris, 2005: 191), but mimesis, ingeneral, has highly ambiguous social and cultural consequences. The foremost theorist of mimesisin this regard is René Girard (1977, 1987, 2001). For him, mimetic desire is a key aspect of what itis to be human, particularly with regard to the freedom to make choices about our preferences andactions since, if our desires were fixed upon predetermined objects, they would be merely aparticular form of instinct (Girard, 2001: 15). Consequently, the malleability of human desiresopens us up to collective patterns of contagion, just as it also allows for their religious re­formation.It is this that accounts for the embodied basis of both those harmonious and violent energies thatDurkheim (1995: 412) sees as part of the ‘ambiguity’ of the sacred.

For Girard, the objects of human desire are shaped collectively: we have an embodiedpredisposition to desire what others desire; something that can be immensely rewarding, but whichcan also lead to progressively more intense cycles of mimetic contagion (Girard, 1987: 26). It is onthis basis that he argues that, because mimetic contagion can threaten to overwhelm and destroya social group, it is often the case that the group protects itself through the sacrifice of a surrogate

victim or ‘scapegoat’, a sacrificial substitution that must be concealed in order for the sacrifice tohave its intended effect of restoring harmony and order (Girard, 1977: 4–5). None the less, Girardis also interested in a mimetic retraining of bodies that can have more harmonious, but equallydramatic, social and cultural consequences. In reference to the way in which the New Testamentpresents Jesus Christ as the primary mimetic model for all humans to follow, for example, he notesthat the text is acutely sensitive to the potentially dangerous consequences of the humanpredisposition towards mimesis. Discussing Jesus' treatment of the woman taken in adultery(John, 8: 3–11), in fact, he notes how Jesus breaks up the mob about to stone her to death bysaying ‘Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw the stone at her’. As hesuggests, that first stone is the most difficult to throw precisely because ‘it is the only one without amodel’ (Girard, 2001: 56). In broader terms, however, the New Testament urges the modelling ofhuman desire upon the desire of Jesus Christ to be the perfect image of God: we are invited to‘imitate his own imitation’ (Girard, 2001: 13).

This focus on mimesis adds a further dimension to the consideration of how individuals learn to bereligious. In the New Testament, as Longenecker (2003: 70) suggests, the Apostle Paul ‘paradesChrist­likeness as the essential characteristic of Christian living’, but he also attacks those wholive according to ‘the lusts of their hearts’, thereby ‘dishonouring’ their bodies (Romans, 1:24–26),since these are expressive of what Girard calls violent mimetic rivalry (see also Jewett, 2003: 93).Thus, Paul fiercely repudiates those early Christians who sought to accommodate the gospel to‘enlightened philosophical ideas about the transcendence of crass bodily existence’ (Hays, 2001:126; see 1 Corinthians, 15: 12–19), because, if Christ was God incarnate as an embodied, fullyhuman being, then human embodiment contains religious potentialities that can be developedthrough the imitation of him. None the less, these can only be achieved by a re­formation of thebody: humans must abandon their ‘old nature’ and become ‘imitators of God’ who talk, walk,desire, feel and think in a way that is entirely at odds with their previous modes of being(Ephesians, 4:22, 5:1).

Such attempts at bodily re­formation have been a key feature of Christian history: Bynum (1987,1991), for example, discusses the exploration of the religious potentialities of the body through theimitation of Christ in the medieval period, and the experiences of religious ‘ecstasy’ oftencharacteristic of them. In this perspective, Bruce's (2002: 180) claim that the charismaticemphasis on experience is ‘novel’ in Christian history is misleading: rather, this emphasismanifests new elaborations of a tradition of engaging with embodiment that is not only wellestablished but central to Christianity's incarnational focus. It is this focus, in fact, that explainswhy bodily states of health and illness, and not just psychological problems, as Bruce (2002: 182)suggests, continue to be so important for charismatic Christians, since the body is understood toexemplify divine favour (Coleman, 2000: 130). Again, it is possible to note continuities with themedieval Christian view that evil was manifest in sick bodies (Classen, 1993), as well as with theBiblical accounts of Jesus' healing miracles (e.g. Mark, 9: 24–29). More broadly, however, suchphenomena can be associated with a renewal of attempts at the ‘imitation of Christ’, whereindividuals commit themselves to the ‘re­forming’ of the constitution, experiences and conduct ofhuman bodies in the light of the incarnational revelation of Christ as the Word of God.

Watling (2005: 101), for example, notes that the ultimate aim of Alpha is to enable individuals to‘embody the attitudes of Jesus’ and become Christ­like (Watling, 2005: 101), while an even moredistinctively contemporary example of the charismatic Christian engagement with embodiment,concerns a painting displayed amongst the Swedish Word of Life community that shows Christwith the physique of a body­builder (Coleman, 2000: 147). Coleman notes the prevalence insermons of the theme of the ‘spiritual body­builder’, exemplified in this depiction, and its notablevariance with regard to conventional images of the suffering Christ. Drawing upon Harré's (1989)account of body­building as a process wherein individual body parts can be isolated and workedon individually and rationally in pursuit of an aesthetic vision of the ideal body, Coleman (2000:149) notes that Word of Life members display a similar attempt to refashion the flesh through aform of mimesis where Christ's perfect body is the model for a form of spiritual ‘pumping iron’.

Such phenomena are not entirely novel, however: late nineteenth­century forms of ‘muscularChristianity’, as well as the links between sports and contemporary evangelical groups such asthe ‘Promise Keepers’, indicate the established potency of this model of Christian embodiment(Hall, 1994; Higgs, 1995; Clausen, 1999; Ladd and Mathisen, 2002). More broadly, attempts todepict charismatic churches as being radically at odds with traditional Christianity can bemisleading. Discussing Wimber's charismatic theology, for example, Percy (1996: 99) notes theemphasis on the Incarnation as the ‘embodiment of power’, and argues that it ignores the

weakness and suffering of Christ. Csordas (1994: 25) has interpreted Catholic charismatic healingrituals in a similar way: rather than ‘embracing suffering and self­mortification as an imitation ofChrist's passion’, charismatics have participated in a broader, late­twentieth­century shift towards‘the relief of suffering through divine healing as practiced by Jesus in the gospels’ (see alsoFavazza, 1982). None the less, the emotionally intense empowerment of individuals through theHoly Spirit, the much discussed ‘tongues of fire’ central to many contemporary forms ofPentecostal and charismatic Christianity (Martin, 1990), actually marks the birth of the post­crucifixion and resurrection church (Acts, 2:1–5). Furthermore, if a key feature of the charismaticmovement is its repudiation of the Enlightenment's mind/body dualism (Robeck, 2000), then thisarguably finds a warrant in the Pauline New Testament writings.

It is also worth noting that, even in the medieval period, where the mimetic power of Christ'ssuffering body for Christians was especially potent, the hardships, torture and violence thatChristians inflicted or had inflicted on their bodies were accompanied by miraculous signs andwonders, as well as an empowerment of individuals that made them immune to pain (Burke, 1983;Hamilton, 1986). Despite differences with earlier Christian models, then, charismatic Christianityalso exhibits continuities: the imitation of Christ through ‘spiritual body­building’ might look highlyunorthodox on first glance, but the mimetic power of Christ and the mimetic potentialities of bodiesare similarly evident in the asceticism of earlier Christian forms (see Brown, 1988: 442).

In Girard's terms, we might say that specifically Christian religious experience only becomespossible through the adoption of Christ as mimetic model in place of the endlessly variable modelsthat characterise human cultures. This extends and adds to the notions of the ‘permeable body’and the ‘learning body’ discussed earlier: bodies always remain permeable with regard to collectiveforces, in the sense that mimesis is an unavoidable feature of embodied being, but religious lifeinvolves the adoption of particular mimetic models that reconstitute human experience and actionin specific ways. This reconstitution is not simply the gradual accumulation of practical knowledgedeveloped through embodied action and the ‘internal conversation’, but a more radical reshaping ofthe embodied habitus.

A further implication of the notion of the mimetic body, indeed, is that the attempt to account forreligious experience simply with regard to emotional energies of various sorts is inadequate: thedesire to imitate a figure such as Jesus Christ, however emotionally intense and rich, is clearly anexperiential and practical phenomenon involving cognitive aspects of various sorts, includingtheological, conceptual and traditional elements as well as the existential challenges andassurances that this sort of religious commitment entails. In short, while the focus on embodimentnecessarily involves a rejection of the idea that religions can be explained primarily with regard to acognitive system of abstract beliefs, it is equally unsatisfactory to ignore the important role thatcognitive factors play within the embodied experience of religion. Further to this, the notion of themindful body can be a useful supplement to the models considered already.

(5) the Mindful Body

Across Western history, as in contemporary sociological and cultural theory, questions about thechanging role of embodied factors in religious life have been dealt with in different ways. The term‘carnal knowing’, for example, has been used by Miles (1992) to indicate the intimate links betweenthinking, sensing and understanding in early medieval Christianity. It expressed the idea that thebody was not experienced as something separate from the mind, let alone subordinate to it. Thisaccount of what can be called the ‘mindful’ body was focused on a very specific period of Westernhistory, however, and has since been contrasted with the ‘cognitive apprehension’ of theProtestant Reformation, where ritual became devalued, the body's emotions and senses wereoften seen as obstacles to the development of faith, and issues of belief became even morecentral to the general understanding of what constitutes Christian religious experience (Mellor andShilling, 1997: 25). In ideal typical terms, the shift from carnal knowing to cognitive apprehensioncan be taken as a useful indicator of real changes in how Western societies experienced andconceptualised human embodiment, but it is also a massive simplification in that it ignores thecomplex intertwining of ‘carnal’ and ‘cognitive’ factors in all cultures and across all times. In thisregard, current debates about the neurobiological aspects of religious experience and practice canbe helpful in establishing a more complex understanding of embodied experience.

The sociological engagement with neurobi­ology is not new, but goes back to Durkheim, whoargued that the ‘psychic life’ or ‘spirituality’ of the individual is an emergent totality, rather than asimple aggregation, of the biological and mental components of embodied life (Durkheim, 1974:34). It has been suggested that Durkheim's arguments are consistent with twenty­first century

philosophies of the mind (Sawyer, 2002), but, Norris, in common with a number of othercontemporary writers, has drawn upon the work of neurobiologists in a far more detailed way inorder to understand the biological processes inherent to religious experience. Damasio (1999: 79–80; 2003: 57–8), for example, is held to illuminate how a combination of the electrochemicalmessages conveyed via nerve pathways, chemicals conveyed by the blood, and the secretion ofcertain chemical substances in particular regions of the brain construct a ‘body landscape’ that ishighly responsive to specific forms of ‘emotion­triggering’, especially when repeated exposure tocertain stimuli is able to ‘amplify’ recollections of earlier chains of events within the brain's sensoryprocessing systems (Norris, 2005: 193–4). On the basis of such work, Norris (2005: 196) arguesthat, while emotions themselves and the religious ‘triggers’ for them are culturally specific, thebiological processes within the brain that allow bodies to be taught to have religious experiencesare common to all humans.

Such arguments help us to understand how it is that repeated exposure to, or immersion within,certain forms of religious practice can trigger experiential states unavailable to the novice, or tosomeone outside that particular religious tradition. The danger with them, however, is that they canrender specifically religious factors relatively insignificant in comparison with neurobiologicalprocesses. This is evident in Hammond's (2003) reassessment of Durkheim's notion of socialsolidarity in the light of developments in evolutionary neurophysiology. He discusses, for example,how religious experiences ‘piggyback’ upon reward mechanisms emergent from the evolutionarydevelopment of humans, stimulating certain types of hormone production, and activating ordampening different types of brain activity (Hammond, 2003: 360). Like Norris, Hammond (2003:373) claims to offer a ‘non­reductive’ approach, arguing that ‘sociological tradition and modernneuro­sciences can be fused into a new synthesis’, but neurobiological phenomena come to havethe determinative role in this analysis of religious experience, rather than seeing them ascomponent features of a more complex phenomenon that includes distinctively social phenomena,the highly variable contents of different forms of religious belief and practice, and the self­reflexivityof individuals. All of these render the reduction of religious feeling to neurobiological arousal andreward mechanisms highly problematic.

Indeed, it should be noted that, while sociologists and other scholars of religion have drawn uponneurobiological studies to make strong claims about the embodied basis of religion, neurobiologiststhemselves tend to be much more cautious. Thus, Azari et al. (2001: 1649) point out that ‘For morethan a century, the nature of religious experience has been a topic of considerable scholarship anddebate, yet virtually nothing is known about its biological foundations’. Developed on the basis of adetailed empirical study of neuroimaging patterns in the brains of a group of German evangelicals,their own, modest, though significant, conclusion is that cognitive processes play a very importantpart in religious experience, reinforcing earlier claims in the psychology of religion that the authorityand ‘force’ of religious experience is determined not simply by felt immediacy, but by a causalclaim regarding the religious source of the experience. Building upon this study, Azari andBirnbacher (2004) have argued that religious experience is a complex phenomenon embracingcognitive and emotional aspects.

The major problem with non­cognitive theories of religious experience, according to them, is thatthey fail to explain why some forms of stimuli produce emotional responses while others do not: ifhuman emotions have a non­cognitive core, then certain types of arousal should be automatic, butthis is clearly not the case (Azari and Birnbacher, 2004: 904). Cognitive theories, however, whichclaim that the specificity of emotional experiences is determined solely by a cognitive appraisal ofvarious forms of bodily arousal, ignore the degree to which certain affective dimensions ofembodied experience remain resistant to cognitive control (Azari and Birnbacher, 2004: 907).Drawing upon Kutschera's (1990) argument that ‘believing in’ God is different from ‘believing that’God exists, Azari and Birnbacher (2004: 909–10) emphasise that ‘religious belief differs fromfactual belief by its emotional quality’, but also stress that the ‘belief that’ God exists necessarilyforms a key component of the ‘belief in’ Him: this allows them to reject James's (1907) associationof religious experience with ‘pure’ feelings, while also establishing the centrality of emotion todiverse forms of religious experience.

In the light of these arguments, it is clear that religious experiences cannot be located in aparticular set of brain functions, or in ‘emotion’ or ‘cognition’ exclusively, since they are emergentphenomena constituted through the complex interrelations between biological, social and religiousphenomena. Further to this, the meanings given to states of bodily arousal by individual subjectsare crucial in the shaping of religious experiences (Azari and Birnbacher, 2004: 911). This helps toaccount for how it is that certain mimetic models, such as Christ, can come to have such a

powerful role in reshaping human experience: the highly emotional character of the charismaticengagement with Christ as mimetic model cannot be separated from the cognitive dimensions ofembodiment that allow an experience to be meaningful as Christian religious experience. It is forthis reason that a study of the embodied character of religious experience must be as attentive tothe textual, doctrinal, and conceptual aspects of religious life as its practical, ritualistic orperformative dimensions.

For Christians of different periods the primary authoritative source for models of how to be religioushas, of course, been the Bible. In the light of a theoretical account of embodiment that was doubtfulof the significance of cognitive in relation to emotional elements of religion, it might be expected thatBiblical authority would be weaker amongst Christians forms with a strong experiential focus, butthis is not so. Just as seventeenth and eighteenth­century Pietism, with its strong focus onreligious experience, developed out the Lutheran emphasis on sola scriptura, and analogousattempts to realise the experiential power of the early church emerged in biblically centredReformed and Methodist contexts (Enger, 2000), so too contemporary charismatic Christianity isvery strongly centred on the Bible. Bruce (2002: 179), for one, has questioned whether this isreally as meaningful as it appears to be, arguing that the prioritisation of experience rendersdoctrinal and scriptural sources open to such diverse interpretations that charismatic Christianitymarks a decisive break with the biblical focus of Protestantism, but this argument rests on anunsustainably sharp distinction between cognitive and emotional engagements with the Bible. Inthe Bible itself, Paul refers to how Christ ‘will change our lowly body to be like his glorious body’(Philippians, 3: 21), and charismatics understand the Bible, since it contains the Word of God, tohave the power to bring about this transformation. As Coleman (2000: 118) suggests, for theseChristians, the words of the Bible and an experience of ‘spiritually charged physicality’ are notopposed to each other, but are mutually constitutive: the words of the Bible have to be embodied,in a ‘dramatisation’ of the power of the Word to reshape human life and experience (see Peacock,1984: 108).

Rather than polarising ‘minds’ and ‘bodies’, then, the notion of a ‘mindful body’ draws attention totheir interconnectedness: religious experience is a complex, emergent phenomenon wherein bothemotion and cognition have important, interconnected roles to play. The permeable, learning andmimetic potentialities of bodies are also key parts of this pattern of emergence, however, sincethey help us account for how it is that the emotional and cognitive aspects of religious experienceare not simply expressions of biological predispositions, but are constituted within, and constitutiveof, a particular religious habitus. Furthermore, understanding the embodied basis of religiousexperience in these terms might go some way towards accounting for the question that, as,Beckford (2003:207) has suggested, has been notable by its absence in the major studies ofcharismatic Christianity, namely, how is it that specifically charismatic forms of embodiment ‘occurin virtually all of the culturally different regions of the world where charismatic Christianity ispractised’? It is to this question that I now turn.

(6) the Global Body

Several writers have claimed charismatic Christianity for ‘post­modernity’, suggesting that theembodied basis of the religious transformations it manifests directly confronts a modernepistemological focus on the cognitive character of knowledge, and can therefore be seen as partof a broader ‘resacralisation’ of the contemporary world (e.g. McGuire, 1982). Such claims are notentirely satisfactory, however, not least because many theories of post­modernity tend toperpetuate modern ambiguities about religion and embodiment. Indeed, the ‘absence/presence’ ofboth religion and the body continues to be evident in many theories of post­modernity, where aneo­Nietzschean fascination with the ‘Death of God’, rather than religious practice in the worldtoday, coexists with notions of ‘bodies without organs’ or ‘mutant’ hyper­real simulations of thehuman (see Deleuze, 1977; Baudrillard, 1988; Braidotti, 1994).

The rejection of a ‘species­specific’ model of globalisation by Urry (2000), in favour of a focus onhuman/technological ‘hybrids’ constituted through information flows, manifests the same sort oftendency, in that the dissipation of bodies into global information flows is matched by themarginalisation and virtualisation of religion. Even in studies that take religion and embodimentmore seriously, however, there is still a sense that, even if they are not entirely empty categoriesto be filled by culture, they are essentially reactive to, rather than productive of, cultural changes.In an interesting account of the Toronto Blessing, for example, Lyon (2000: 109–110) associatesits experiential theology with the way postmodern culture has encouraged ‘fitness’ to supersedehealth in a commodification of bodies that allows them to becomes sites for the dramas ofconstructing and reconstructing self­identity; in this respect, the extravagant emotionality and

physicality of charismatic worship is part of a broader reconstruction of the body as a culturalartifact.

Such arguments clearly have merits, in the sense that the charismatic focus on the body mayindeed have features in common with broader contemporary cultural engagements withembodiment, but the danger is that bodies, and religion, lose any substantive reality of their ownand become defined largely through the degree to which they fit, or can be made to fit, into broadercategories developed by social and cultural theorists. This is relevant not only to the notion of‘post­modernity’, or in Mestrovic's (1997) case, ‘postemotional society’, but to that of ‘modernity’too. Beckford (2003: 189), for example, has argued that charismatic Christianity is actually‘resolutely modern’ in its serious­mindedness, its assertion of absolute truth, and, in particular, itsimplicit instrumental rationality, but, again, this looks problematic. All three of these characteristicsare to be found in various ‘non­modern’ contexts: for example, the medieval exploration of thereligious potentialities of the body through the imitation of the suffering of Christ was, arguably, asthoroughly instru­mentalised as the body techniques employed by contemporary charismatics.

For the focus on the cultural shaping of bodies to be genuinely illuminating it must becontextualised within an attention to the fact that it is a common human species that populatesdifferent cultural contexts. Where the analytical import of this fact is denied (e.g. Proudfoot, 1985),we can have no basis upon which to analyse the various commonalities, as well as thedifferences, that mark particular cultural engagements with bodies, nor can we assess the relativefruitfulness of these diverse engagements. Here, it is not simply a question of acknowledgingvarious ‘basic emotions’ that appear to have a trans­cultural character (Lindholm, 2004), but alsoof attempting to make sense of the cognitive and mimetic dimensions of embodiment that allowreligious models, theologies and concepts, along with specific body techniques, to constitute highlyspecific forms of religious experience. In this context, the charismatic engagement with the Bible isparticularly notable, not least because it directs our attention to the productive, rather than reactive,dimensions of embodied religious experience in relation to existing cultural forms.

Noll's (2001: 87) study of evangelical Christianity treats Pentecostal and charismatic forms asparts of the broader evangelical movement, which he defines as ‘culturally adaptive biblicalexperientialism’ (see also Lehmann, 1996). Not only is the Bible the source of the authoritativemodels that shape Christian life, and that have to be engaged with experientially to the degree thatthe individual is ‘born­again’ (Noll, 2001: 2), but it also facilitates the emergence of a Christianhabitus that can be thoroughly immersed in and yet transcendent of particular cultures. In otherwords, the fact that this Biblical experientialism is ‘culturally adaptive’ does not signal an uncriticalassimilation to broader cultural patterns. Indeed, as Noll (2001: 269) suggests, in terms of itsgeneral attitude towards prevailing cultural norms, the ‘history of modern evangelicalism could bewritten as a chronicle of calculated offense’. For Noll, rather, its adaptive qualities have aninstrumental character, signalling its readiness to use all available means, such as satellitetechnology, to spread its biblical experientialism. For Cox (1995: 147), on the other hand, itsadaptive characteristics are far more substantial, containing a ‘phenomenal power to embrace andtransform anything it meets in the cultures to which it travels’ (see also Coleman, 2000: 68).

Contrary perspectives, which emphasise the culturally reactive character of religious phenomena,remain influential. For Castells (1998: 382–6), for example, ‘culturally adaptive Biblicalexperimentalism’ amounts to little more than the emergence of ‘resistance identities’ that take upthe Bible as ‘a banner of despair’ in the face of uncontrollable global changes, expressing anultimately futile attempt to ‘opt out’ of global society. Two things can be noted, however. First, thereappears to be little ‘despair’ amongst these charismatic Christians: their experiential focus ismanifest in feelings of joy, empowerment and personal transformation (Percy, 1996). Second, theyare hardly ‘opting out’ of globalisation; they exhibit a particularly powerful manifestation of how areligious movement can constitute itself as a global phenomenon (Poewe, 1994). Here, morecomplex models of globalisation, which exhibit a greater sensitivity to its creative possibilities forreligions, are of much more value.

Robertson (1992) and Beyer (1994, 2003), for example, have analysed globalisation as aphenomenon that transcends the logic of either ‘modernity’ or ‘post­modernity’, focusing instead onthe diverse patterns of universality and particularity manifest in forms of ‘glocalisation’. Here, thenature of religion in the contemporary world cannot be accounted for with regard to eitheruniversal, hegemonic cultural models and institutional structures, or to the endlessly diversepatterns of pluralism valorised in much post­modern theorising: on the contrary, as Beyer (2003:361) suggests, the global success of religious forms such as Pentecostal and charismatic forms

of Christianity is expressive of the way in which globalisation now facilitates the ‘multiple par­ticularisation’ of universal religious practices, texts, models, and structures. Neither Robertson norBeyer has explicitly addressed the significance of the body in relation to globalisation processes:Coleman (2000: 51), in fact, has criticised Robertson for having an overly cognitive focus thatignores the broader embodied dimensions of globalisation. None the less, the notion of‘glocalisation’ seems particularly pertinent to the subject of embodiment, since bodies are universalin the sense that all humans have them, yet they are inevitably ‘particularised’ not only in that theyare individual, but also in terms of the fact that embodied experience is shaped within a specifichabitus.

The idea that we now live in a world where the global and the local are simultaneously constitutiveof each other can, therefore, offer a potentially fruitful way of extending existing models ofembodiment in sociology, particularly in terms of accounting for the cross­cultural success offorms such as charismatic Christianity, which are highly flexible in terms of their interaction withparticular cultures, yet are also expressive of an engagement with universal embodiedpotentialities that is able to generate common religious experiences. It is in this sense that Poewe(1994: 249) has identified charismatic Christianity as an inherently global phenomenon preciselybecause it is ‘iconic’; that is, this form of religion engages with, and is able to shape actively,common embodied characteristics (see also Coleman, 2000: 68). Thus, rather than simplyreacting to, let alone ‘resisting’, globalisation processes, charismatic Christianity is representativeof the potentially productive and creative ways in which religions can engage not only with socialand cultural processes, but with the inherent properties of bodies: it is the fruitful combination ofthese two patterns of engagement which accounts for the global spread of the same charismaticexperience of the body.

ConclusionCharismatic Christianity clearly has a specific character, as do the globalising processescharacteristic of the contemporary world, but reflection upon the embodied bases of theirinterrelationships can help illuminate broader problems concerning the complex connectionsbetween religion, culture and the body. The immense importance of emotional factors is ofparticular note here, not only with regard to the ‘permeability’ of individuals in terms of patterns of‘sacred contagion’, but also in relation to the cultivation of certain emotional experiences throughspecific body techniques. These, along with the mimetic models that shape patterns of religiousidentification, and the mutually reinforcing role of cognition and emotion in religious experience,point to the centrality of embodied issues in the constitution of religious belief, practice andexperience, and the complexity of their relationships with other social and cultural phenomena.

Further to this, a key feature of the focus on religion as an embodied phenomenon is that, in itsbest forms, it resists the logic of social or cultural constructionism, and not only moves beyond thepeculiarly ‘absent/present’ body of certain forms of social and cultural theory, but also rescuesreligion from a similar state. The suggestion that charismatic Christianity manifests a type of‘resistance identity’ is merely one example of a broader theoretical tendency to identify religion assomething of only secondary significance in relation to other social or cultural phenomena. Incontrast, analysing religion as a phenomenon that can engage with common human potentialities,and thereby embrace and transform all sorts of existing cultural forms, enables us to identify anembodied basis for religious creativity and its relative independence with regard to the large­scalesocial and cultural transformations that habitually preoccupy sociologists.

Despite recognising the common human potentialities and properties of bodies, however, a furtherkey feature of this embodied focus is that it helps account for the ways in which very particular,often very different, religious experiences and identities are able to emerge. The fact that some ofthese can have a global character, and that all of them can be understood as engaging withcommon human features, does not justify ignoring their differences. The models of embodimentoutlined in this chapter offer a basis for accounting for these differences as well as for commonfeatures, and, therefore, in broader terms, point towards the immense value of focusing upon thenature and consequences of human embodiment for the sociological analysis of religion.

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