Religion, Identity and Change

Perspectives on Global Transformations

Simon Coleman, Peter Collins, Peter Collins, Simon Coleman, Peter Collins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351904872
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Religion is of enduring importance in the lives of many people, yet the religious landscape has been dramatically transformed in recent decades. Established churches have been challenged by eastern faiths, revivals of Christian and Islamic fundamentalism, and the eclectic spiritualities of the New Age. Religion has long been regarded by social scientists and psychologists as a key source of identity formation, ranging from personal conversion experiences to collective association with fellow believers. This book addresses the need for a reassessment of issues relating to identity in the light of current transformations in society as a whole and religion in particular. Drawing together case-studies from many different expressions of faith and belief - Hindu, Muslim, Roman Catholic, Anglican, New Age - leading scholars ask how contemporary religions or spiritualities respond to the challenge of forming individual and collective identities in a nation context marked by secularisation and postmodern decentring of culture, as well as religious revitalisation. The book focuses on Britain as a context for religious change, but asks important questions that are of universal significance for those studying religion: How is personal and collective identity constructed in a world of multiple social and cultural influences? What role can religion play in creating, reinforcing or even transforming such identity?

Chapter 1
Introduction: Ambiguous Attachments

Religion, Identity and Nation

Simon Coleman and Peter Collins

All the Patels mix together like one family, but they would normally be Gujarati Patels not Bengali ones. It’s very tribal – a bit like the Irish.

The speaker is Shaunaka Rishi Das,¹ a member of the Oxford Centre for Vaishnava and Hindu studies. His depiction of the Patels as akin to a large family evokes images of community often associated with ethnic enclaves and religious collectives. But perhaps the most intriguing part of his statement is the nod towards the tribal Irish. Is Shaunaka revealing the sophisticated, reflexive awareness of self and remote other that is supposedly characteristic of identity in late modernity?²

Yes and no. In fact, Shaunaka originally had another name and another identity, as Timothy Kiernan from Wexford. Timothy had wanted to train for the Catholic priesthood before he became a member of Hare Krishna. As a ‘Hindu priest’, he now spends his time spreading his adopted religion’s principles of peace to the citizens of Belfast. He was speaking at the largest festival for young Hindus ever held outside India, an opportunity for some 15 000 people a day to descend on a park in north-west London in the summer of 2001. Not only did the festival bring together members of the 300 000-strong Hindu ‘community’ from all parts of Great Britain, it also attracted a host of religious and other dignitaries from India itself. Blessings were showered on the proceedings by the Archbishop of Canterbury as well as by Prince Charles, and a recording was made to be broadcast to Hindus in India, the US, South Africa and Australia. Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister, was quoted in the press as saying: ‘This event provides British Hindus with an important opportunity to explore their culture and their faith’, while the national newspaper the Guardian provided its own piece of (rather less sanguine) sociological commentary at the end of a news feature about the festival: ‘Although Hindus were not involved in recent riots in Bradford and Oldham, the questions of identity confronting them are similar to those in the Muslim community.’

What are we to make of this event, and what does it tell us about the subjects covered in this book? Note the multilayered levels of identity that the festival encapsulated and even celebrated – certainly religious, but also generational, ethnic, national and global. An expression of a specific faith was also the opportunity to claim more complex, ramifying sets of allegiances, bringing together Gujaratis and Bengalis, Hindus and Christians, British-based and Asian-based leaders. Religious and national identity could be seen as complementary (in Blair’s words), but ‘Hinduness’ was also associated with a transnational community that included both a homeland (India) and an extensive diaspora. Hindu identity could even be conflated with a more generic condition of ‘being religious’ in contemporary Britain – and thereby given the full approval of an archbishop.

It is a social scientific truism that identity is constructed, at whatever level (individual, cultural, social, national, transnational), through expressions of ‘difference’ (see especially Nesbitt, Chapter 11, this volume). Though commonplace, this insight is useful because it tells us that identity can never be created in a vacuum – it must always be produced in and through a set of relations with real or imagined others. Identifying the ‘in-group’ makes little sense from an analytical or lay point of view unless one also identifies the ‘out-group(s)’, and, similarly, minorities can only be understood in relation to majorities. Personality theorists might present identity in terms of personal distinctiveness and autonomy, as the result of ‘the individual’s self-construal’ (Jacobson 1998:9). However, processes of discrimination and boundary formation do not exist only as internal, psychological states; they are also expressed and constituted in behaviour (Mauss 1996:11). George Mead’s symbolic interactionism emphasised how the self emerged through social intercourse with others, with the notion of internalisation describing how society could determine individuality (Aronowitz 1995:114). As Jacobson notes (1998:9–10), sociology and social psychology have therefore tended to focus on how a sense of identity can be formed from a supposed dialectic between individual and society, as membership of social groups shapes the individual perception of self.³ Ethnic, national and many religious identities help define an ‘I’ by placing it against a background ‘we’ (Appiah and Gates 1995:3) as well as a ‘they’. In this sense, the allocation of identity in relation to the self is both an inevitable outcome of human interaction and – at times – a more self-consciously adopted stance in relation to others.

As the Hindu festival illustrates, we should not assume that boundaries of identity must be permanent or exclusive. Shaunaka is an intriguing figure here: how does his Catholicism feed into his Hinduism, assuming that it does? Is the latter a reaction against, or does it encompass, the former? Does he identify himself more with Ireland or with India? To what extent does he see a distinction between an ethnic association of self with place of origin, and a chosen commitment to a universalistic religion with a global reach (cf. Jacobson 1998:10)? The chances are that none of these questions can be answered in simple terms. Similarly, the festival itself was a multidimensional combination of pilgrimage and conference: both an enactment of various identities and a self-conscious discussion of what these identities might consist of. Tony Blair’s use of the imagery of ‘exploration’ captures this sense of an open-endedness in cultural affiliation, of an unfinished project (and one that never can be finished).

The Guardian headline for the article – ‘Young Hindus in Festival Search for Modern Identity’ – also invokes the imagery of a quest, but significantly adds the qualifier ‘modern’ to the notion of religious identity. The paper apparently accepts that it is indeed possible to be modern and religious at the same time, and yet implies that previous Hindu religious formations have been premodern in their attitude. Perhaps the sub-text of the piece, which after all appeared in the most liberal of the mainstream British broadsheets, is actually that to be properly ‘modern’ in Britain is akin to adopting a kind of pluralism – even postmodernism – in attitude and affiliation. Furthermore, the ambiguity of the event, its celebration not of one identity but of many, seems to have made it a suitable candidate for endorsement by representatives of church, royalty and state. Religious identity, even a previously exotic or foreign one, can implicitly be deemed an acceptable part of the contemporary British public (civil) sphere provided it leavens its more spiritual aspects with other, cross-cutting ties to national and even global citizenship. As the anthropologist Anthony Cohen has pointed out (1986:2–3), it is in the nature of the symbolic to be imprecise. We see here an example of what M.G. Smith (1974) calls cultural pluralism, according to which ethnic identity is explicitly not used as a criterion of national citizenship.⁴ The festival supposedly acts to reconcile two ways through which group identity has traditionally been constructed (Boyarin and Boyarin 1995:305): common genealogy (in the sense of ethnic or religious continuity) does not fatally undermine a cultural heritage delimited by geography.

Nonetheless, a jarring note appears in the Guardian article, in the shape of the chilling reference to riots at the end of the piece. The article concludes by reminding the reader of forms of (religious) identity whose practices lead not towards tolerance and ambiguity, but towards violence in the heartlands of the nation. This reminder takes on extra resonance if we remember that the story was published in July 2001, just six weeks or so before the events of 11 September in New York and Washington, DC. If the Hindu festival illustrated the possible affinities between globalisation and multiple, overlapping identities, incidents in the US a few weeks later were to highlight a much more jagged and tragic juxtaposition of the assertion of religious faith on a global stage.

Locating Religion

Religion has long been regarded by social scientists and psychologists as a key source of identity formation and maintenance, ranging from personal conversion experiences to collective association with fellow believers. There are occasions when apparent religious affiliation seems to act largely as a powerful label for a sub-group. Jacobson (1998:120ff.) writes of how many young British Muslim males have little interest in engaging in arduous religious practice, but are nevertheless keen to proclaim their affiliation with pride (see David Herbert, Chapter 10, this volume). The religion’s connotations of faith and fervour in the UK resonate with a desire to be assertive in contexts of perceived racism (including for instance the debates surrounding the Rushdie affair): gender, generation and ethnicity are thus encompassed by the term ‘Islam’.⁵

However, we should not habitually conflate religion with identity, or assume that the latter acts as a totalising explanation for the former. In other words, we should avoid reductionist, crudely functionalist – and even fetishising – views of religion that account for its revival or persistence purely in terms of the identity it can bestow on its followers. Quite apart from the fact that, on the individual level, there may be many motivations for expressing commitment to a given religious group or ideology, religious practice itself can incorporate elements – belief, ritual, self-surveillance, aesthetics and so on – whose links to identity are evident but only partial.

Religions are likely to vary greatly in the kind of identity they might encompass, not only because of factors ‘internal’ to the religion, but also as a result of influences pertaining to any given surrounding context. The experience of being a Hindu in Delhi is not the same as being one in Durham. Even the salience of particular aspects of our identity can vary according to the situations we find ourselves in: at one moment our role as practising Jew or Muslim might be stressed, at another our role as parent, and so on. Akeel Bilgrami provides a vivid example of the malleability of identity consciousness in his article ‘What is a Muslim?’, where he talks (1995:199) of how, despite the fact that he is not a believer in Muslim doctrine, he found himself saying ‘I am a Muslim’ in a Hindu neighbourhood in India: ‘It was clear to me that I was, without strain or artificiality, a Muslim for about five minutes. That is how negotiable the concept of identity can be.’⁶

Processes of identity formation are not only malleable, they are also extremely promiscuous in their deployment of cultural resources. Religion, language, skin colour, class, occupation, lifestyle and so on can be used singly or in combination, and identity-related factors may be tightly or loosely integrated with each other (Toulis 1997:83). As Cohen notes (1986:17), a community can make virtually anything grist to the mill of cultural distance (or, one might add, proximity), though such fabrication is often more likely to occur as a partially unpredictable outcome of myriad social interactions than through consciously orchestrated, all-powerful leadership. Identity can also be ascribed to a person or group from without, since processes of labelling are clearly bound up with relations of authority and power.

Previous work has adopted a number of theoretical positions in assessing the formation of identity in general, and here we distinguish between two basic orientations. The ‘primordialist’ view emphasises the significance of historical continuities in creating attachments to territory and community (cf. Jacobson 1998).⁷ Jenkins (1997:44) argues that this model of identity, at least as it is expressed in ethnic terms, has historical roots in Romantic reactions to Enlightenment rationalism (cf. Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). It is certainly a perspective that is frequently adopted by political cultures as means of self-justification. For instance, Hickman states (1995:7), drawing on Hall (1992):

It has therefore been a main function of national cultures to represent what is in fact the ethnic mix of modern nationality as the primordial unity of ‘one people’. This has been achieved by centralized nation states with their incorporating cultures and national identities, implanting and securing strong cultural institutions, which tend to subsume all differences and diversity into themselves.

If primordialism stresses an internally homogenous justification for, and view of, identity, the situationalist perspective is more concerned with the dynamic formation of boundaries among social groups. The most prominent advocate of this latter view has been the anthropologist Fredrik Barth, for instance in Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (1969). In formulating his theory, Barth was himself forming intellectual boundaries in relation to those scholars who still maintained a structural functionalist view of the world as inherently made up of firmly bounded societies or groups (Jenkins 1997:12). He focused on how cultural differentiation was produced and reproduced out of interactions among actors, who were seen as choosing to highlight certain specific elements of culture as emblematic of cultural difference while ignoring others. Barth shifted attention away from the static, corporate group (often labelled as ‘the tribe’ by anthropologists) and towards strategising individuals; away from alleged historical continuity in the sharing of culture and towards contemporary processes of making distinctions. The cultural resources actors could deploy in building boundaries could be tangible or symbolic, visible or invisible. Boundaries were therefore to be seen as ‘legitimated’ rather than simply ‘legitimate’ (Cohen 1994:199–200), and allegiances needed to be regarded as ‘created out of cognitive and performative actions directed towards outsiders as well as insiders’ (Toulis 1997:170). Jenkins (1997:59) thus points out the homologies between a Goffmanesque view of social selfhood as staged and processual and a Barthian model of ethnicity as transactional.

Barth’s approach emphasises a view of identity, and culture in general, that is oriented towards action and the creation of shifting networks in human relations. On the level of the individual, membership of groups can change over time (as we saw above with Shaunaka), even though broader distinctions between such groups can be maintained, albeit with evolving criteria of difference (Wallman 1979:3). He provides a corrective to a ‘mosaic’ view of human groups, in which social and cultural formations seemingly possess an autonomy that is created for the descriptive convenience of the analyst rather than reflecting ‘reality’ on the ground.⁸ However, Barth has had his critics. Ironically, his theory might be said to have exaggerated consensus within ethnic groups (Jacobson 1998:17) at the same time as emphasising a rather a-sociological individualism (Jenkins 1997:22). Certainly, the depiction of strategising actors needs to be combined with an appreciation of the structural constraints on individuals and groups in their production of boundaries.

Barth suggests that his view of culture as variable and contingent anticipated postmodernist theoretical perspectives (see Jenkins 1997:12), and while this view may seem overstated he undoubtedly contributed to a more sophisticated understanding of the potential instabilities of identity. However, much recent work on ethnic groups has traced processes of migration of groups from single geographical contexts into numerous diasporic spheres, with the result that new questions are being asked of ethnicity and identity. For instance, Gardner (1995:7) writes of how studies of the encapsulation of groups are less salient than they were in the 1970s. Migrants engage in multiple cultural worlds that are dynamically intertwined and are thereby involved in complex processes of self-creation, while contemporary work is at least as interested in differences within groups as it is in relations between them. Furthermore, as Blair’s comments on the Hindu festival indicated, there is now the need to study ‘hyphenated’ cultures of British-Asians, British-Muslims and so on.

Postmodernist approaches generally identify essentialism (with its obvious resonances with primordialism) as a prime political and epistemological enemy. Appiah and Gates (1995:1) note that ‘the calls for a “post-essentialist” preconception of notions of identity have become increasingly common’, and the oft-invoked phrase ‘the politics of identity’ reveals the highly charged character of debates that can move from the pages of textbooks into the social relations of teachers and students themselves. Among the outdated ‘essentialisms’, Cohen (1994:205) includes the Marxist idea tha...