Everyday Lived Islam in Europe

Nathal M. Dessing, Nadia Jeldtoft, Linda Woodhead

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317138365
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Islamic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book offers a new direction for the study of contemporary Islam by focusing on what being Muslim means in people's everyday lives. It complements existing studies by focusing not on mosque-going, activist Muslims, but on how people live out their faith in schools, workplaces and homes, and in dealing with problems of health, wellbeing and relationships. As well as offering fresh empirical studies of everyday lived Islam, the book offers a new approach which calls for the study of 'official' religion and everyday 'tactical' religion in relation to one another. It discusses what this involves, the methods it requires, and how it relates to existing work in Islamic Studies.

PART 1:
Studying Everyday Lived Islam in Theory and Practice

Chapter 1
Tactical and Strategic Religion

Linda Woodhead

Of all the things everyone does, how much gets written down?
Michel de Certeau (1984: 42)

As two pioneers of the concept of ‘everyday’ (Ammerman 2007) and ‘lived’ (McGuire 2008) religion make clear, the study of everyday lived religion is not intended as an alternative to existing approaches, but as complementary to them. In recognition of this, and because there is still openness and debate about exactly what is involved, this chapter elaborates on what is meant by everyday lived religion in this volume. It clarifies the concept by introducing the language of ‘tactical’ as opposed to ‘strategic’ religion, and showing how the former enhances current understandings—not least by introducing power into the equation, both power relations within religion, and issues of power in the study of religion.

Changing the Subject

There are vast parts of our lives which remain unarticulated and unexamined and, as such, below the level of full consciousness, articulation and intersubjective exchange. These are not unimportant areas. But it is only with the emergence of new genres, new approaches, new authors and new frameworks that some ‘come to light’. With the evolution of the novel, for example, aspects of life came to be represented which had lain silent before. To take a more personal example, it was not until I read Lavinia Greenlaw’s book The Importance of Music to Girls (2008) that I became aware of a swathe of intensely meaningful adolescent and early adult experience of which I had never before been consciously or communicably aware. Most people will be able to think of analogous examples, of contact with approaches and perspectives which made ‘scales fall from my eyes’.

The silent areas of human life are socially inflected; their fault lines often run along those of social stratification and inequality. The most powerful groups in society are also those whose life experience is most fully articulated, represented, celebrated and thus amplified. It is not just that the victors write the history books, but that ‘subalterns’ do so on their behalf. As Virginia Woolf put it in describing the historic relation between the sexes, women have served as ‘looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size’ (1984: 33). As such, there is an overrepresentation of elite experience, elements of which are made hypervisible. By contrast, subordinate groups have to swim against the tide to give expression to their own lived experience and to gain a hearing, let alone an amplification. For the least privileged groups in society, the task is hardest. As Beverley Skeggs shows in Formations of Class and Gender (1997), there is an important sense in which her white, working-class, British female informants do not have identities—for their lives are barely represented in the media of our times. Instead of comfortably inhabiting, performing or adjusting their identities, such women have the thankless task of struggling constantly against dominant representations of them as sexually disreputable and socially irresponsible (‘benefit scroungers’, ‘sluts’, ‘Essex girls’, ‘tarts’) by constantly asserting their respectability through cleanliness, care for others, sexual fidelity to a man and so on. Unlike working-class white men, whose narratives and struggles have long been the subject of movies, novels, pop music and other modes of representation, there is an important sense in which working-class women cannot fully own their own lives and experience. Like many members of ethnic minorities and nonheterosexuals (sic), they are constantly in danger of being defined by others in relation to standards and categories external to themselves, and being rendered semivisible or invisible not only to others, but to themselves. As a middle-aged woman in Janet Eccles’s study of church-leavers put it when reflecting on her life: ‘I feel that somebody has taken something from me which I didn’t know what it was and I hadn’t got it and I still haven’t got it and I don’t know what it is’ (Eccles 2010: 172).

Like the wider literature on everyday life (anthologised in Highmore 2002 and critically reviewed in Sheringham 2008), an interest in everyday lived religion takes its inspiration from an awareness of the skewed, partial and variable articulation of social experience. Above all, it recognises—as Michel Foucault has so decisively taught us—that our knowledges both represent and reinforce power. Without conscious effort and all sorts of reinforcements, we neither see nor know a great deal of the lives and experience of others or ourselves. Our gaze is usually drawn to that—or those—with most power over us, and social representations reinforce the bias.

In relation to religion, what this means is not only that those forms of religion which have to do with social power are privileged in public discourse and academic study, but that ‘religion’ is actually construed in terms of those kinds of activity which reinforce or are reinforced by social power. Until recently, for example, ecclesiastical or ‘church’ history was construed in terms of the actions of powerful white men, particularly clergy, and the institutions dominated by them, particularly churches and states. The rise of new forms of Christian and religious history in the later twentieth century first took account of workingclass men’s lives, and then, much more recently, of women’s—despite the fact that women have outnumbered men in Christianity for as long as we have records. The very category of religion was restricted to that which those shaping the record considered legitimate, which in practice meant particular varieties of church Christianity, and then, by analogy, what came to be designated the ‘world religions’ (Smith 1988). Nonelite and nonauthorised practices were either ignored or placed in a category like ‘superstition’ or ‘magic’—not only by missionaries and church historians, but also by sociologists and anthropologists. Even today, vast areas of religious, sacred and ritual experience are routinely ignored or dismissed as ‘fuzzy’, insubstantial and lacking in salience because they do not conform to the lineaments of what a dominant consensus considers ‘real’ religion (Woodhead 2010).

What the concept of everyday lived religion does is to encourage a shift of perspective, an alteration of gaze, a change of subject, and a more critical approach. It does not dispute the importance of studying forms of religion which are intermeshed with social power and the socially powerful, but it demands a broadening of the agenda and a fresh look at what may be obscured when implicit models of ‘real’ religion are left unexamined. As a growing number of critiques demonstrate, the concept of ‘religion’ in normal scholarly use is unduly restrictive (for example Cantwell Smith 1962, Smith 1988, Asad 1993, Balangangadhara 1994). In the context of Western, colonial experience, it became identified with male-led, hierarchical, church-like institutions, characterised by congregational forms, hierarchical leadership, scriptural and priestly authority, dogmatic endeavour and charismatic male founders—and by alliances or disalliances with nation-states. Other cultural formations could either be squeezed into this straitjacket—the so-called ‘world religions’ (though inevitably found wanting)—or dismissed and ignored altogether. The disciplined knowledges of the academy enshrined such an understanding, particularly those which endorsed a model of scientific endeavour founded on the premise that an inevitable process of secularisation was taking place which necessitated and involved the removal of religion from science, state and public life.

Although widely critiqued, the impress of this agenda remains strong in the scientific study of religion, and continues to reveal itself in many of its continuing preoccupations—with church–state and religion–state relations, with churches and church-like or congregational institutions, with male priesthoods, male violence (‘extremism’) and male-led ‘sects’, with secularisation and desecularisation and with politically recognised and authorised religions and their associated forms of social action.

The perspective of everyday lived religion prompts the question of what more there is to religion: whose lives, experiences and associational forms are being overlooked by the dominant gaze; what configurations of power are obscured; what formations of identity (including masculinities) are not being examined—and what other forms of cultural, ritual, domestic, political and economic practice might be equally worthy of study under the rubric of religion. At this point the question inevitably arises of how far the term ‘religion’ should be stretched, and boundary skirmishes with other fields of study may occur. It may be asked whether the concept of religion is needed at all, or whether some broader term like ‘the sacred’, or some existing term like ‘culture’ may be more fruitful in helping expand horizons—or whether such substitution will simply imply a different restriction of outlook (Knott 2005, Lynch 2012).

In this volume such questions remain open. Since its focus is on everyday lived Islam, contributors largely confine their interest to institutions and individuals that self-identify as Muslim and Islamic, and which to that extent qualify within existing academic discourse as ‘religious’. But they nevertheless push our understanding of religion in new directions, and show how porous and overlapping its boundaries are with such concepts and areas and fields as health and health care, socialisation and education, leisure and recreation, politics and political action, gender and identity.

Alternative Methodology and Epistemology

The study of everyday lived religion poses a methodological challenge. How is it possible to see that which is invisible, to scan that which has been below the scholar’s horizon and to capture the unarticulated with words?

Feminist epistemologies continue to provide a key inspiration in addressing such questions. Several decades ago they pointed out the situatedness of knowing—the way in which our standpoint determines our perspective—and why the less powerful can see things which the more powerful cannot (for example, Smith 1990). Moreover, they exposed how the language and protocols of ‘objective’, ‘scientific’ study serve to privilege and legitimate a particular standpoint—and its ‘seers’—as having more access to the truth than others, whether that was the case or not. The way forward was not merely to expose the myth of objective knowledge derived from a ‘view from nowhere’, but to heed alternative knowledges, and give space, audience and methodological opportunity to other voices.

Such a shift entails not only listening to individuals and groups who have previously been ignored (for example, by way of interviews or surveys), but making existing instruments more open and responsive to informants (not ‘subjects’), such that they can question the questions, the questioner and even the entire theoretical agenda. This may involve something as simple as using more open questions on a survey, or holding interviews or focus groups before designing survey questions, and then trialling them extensively before use. A further step is taken when existing methods are revised more extensively. One example is the use of diaries and video diaries in order to probe minute-to-minute and everyday activities and thoughts, rather than delimited ‘lab time’ set by a researcher in an artificial space. Another is using narrative techniques to probe ‘life stories’, in which informants are free to set the agenda and identify issues for discussion themselves (for example, Furseth 2006, who, when she employed this method, found that men told stories in which they are the author of their lives, often with a self-determined plan they follow, whereas women had much less sense of authorship, and spoke more in terms of a series events which happened to them). Thomson (2007) goes a step further when she videos people talking about their lives, then shows them the video some years later, and invites them to reflect on their own earlier selves and stories.

More radical still is the use of methods which do not rely as heavily as existing ones on articulate knowledges. To some extent this is true even of good interviewing, which does not merely invite an informant to reflect on things they already know—to simply convey their existing ‘attitudes’ in the manner of most survey research—but which allows them to articulate and ‘see’ things which they themselves had not been aware of before. In that sense, the questioning and reinforcements of a skilful researcher using a variety of methods can produce new knowledges. Even when individuals are articulate and are being truthful and completely honest (rare in itself, but nevertheless assumed by traditional methods like surveys and interviews), much of our knowledge lies below consciousness and outside of articulation, though it may lie ‘in the body’ and our emotional responses. New and revised methods are called for to take account of such deep knowing. Similarly, new techniques of photoelicitation encourage informants to capture images of scenes, events, objects and so on which are emotionally meaningful to them in relation to a particular topic, and which they can they try to explain to the researcher (for example, Rose 2012). Ethnographers have long realised the importance of entering into the informants’ own spaces and societies in order to understand their structuring better, and in doing so have also acknowledged the importance of a long-term relationship between researcher and researched which involves sharing everyday life.

None of these methods give researchers direct access to ‘the truth’, and all shape the material they elicit in some ways (for example, diaries encourage an articulate self-reflection which might not otherwise occur). There is no neutral access to ‘data’, untouched by the instruments which elicit it and the spaces and relationships within which it is produced. But by using a variety of approaches which are designed to work with the grain of everyday life, and to allow informants to set the agenda and change the subject, research may be better able to overhear topics, themes, hints and suggestions about areas of life—including religion—which have not previously been noticed or listened to as attentively. Thus methodological innovation and sensitivity to power issues may give rise to the design and application of methods which tell us more not just about ‘known unknowns’, but even uncover ‘unknown unknowns’—themes and topics which have previously fallen below the radar of enquiry.

Pursuing methodologies for researching everyday life therefore pushes into the territory of epistemology—of how we know, and how we make our worlds. Pre-feminist positivistic and representational epistemologies tended to assume that the knower is an objective tabula rasa who organises and makes sense of sensations by containing them within appropriate—or mistaken—categories. On this account, scientific experiment helps refine the categories and test the theories. But the knower remains a ‘brain’ who takes in the world through his or her senses. This representational theory of knowing has been increasingly exposed and undermined by alternative epistemologies—from Merleau Ponty onwards—which stress our embodied situatedness in the world as the basis of cognition. They remind us that we are not detached receivers of outside impressions, but active, ‘interested’ agents in the world who are propelled by our interests, attachments and avoidances. We are relational, embodied, social beings who constantly negotiate our way through the world, and do so first and foremost by ‘feeling’ our way. In other words, we first know at the level of body and emotion; most of our cognition takes place at a subconscious or preconscious level which, though it may be brought to conscious awareness, needs time, effort, opportunity and social support to be articulated (for example, Thrift 2007, Johnson 1987, 2007).

Research into everyday life may therefore be not so much a matter of getting people to articulate what they already know, but of helping bring to birth things which have not yet been put into words—and which in some cases could never be put into words, but might be captured in a picture, a dance or an object. Academics, with their love of words and concepts and their obsession with ‘discourse’, are often ill-equipped to take this step. Yet a gesture, a kiss, a tear, a material symbol, a set of clothes or a song are all modes of communication which can convey as much as or more than words. Research on everyday life prompts us to pay more attention to such things—something which ethnographers have often been much better at than those who favour more word-based techniques of research. This requires an approach which takes the body, material objects, symbols and spaces much more seriously, and forges new ways of doing so (Knott 2005, Riis and Woodhead 2010).

But more still is implied in taking everyday lived religion seriously, something which some have tried to capture through the word ‘experience’ (classically, William James [1902] 1981; for a more recent example see the work of Ann Taves 2009). Hugging closely to the model of scientific knowledge as that which is empirically observable by neutral and detached spectators, the study of religion has often been shy of attending to what lies within the ‘black box’ of human consciousness. There have always been notable exceptions, not only the psychological approaches deriving from William James, but also later phenomenological approaches. The study of everyday lived religion can build on these, and needs to do so precisely because it so often has to do with the noninstitutionalised, nonritualised, nonobjectified and personal dimensions of religion or ‘spirituality’. These include prayer, continuing bonds with the dead and relations with spiritual beings, including angels, gods, demons and a high God. The study of everyday religion is pioneering in trying to recover these as legitimate subjects of study (for example, Orsi 2003, 2005), and one effective ‘way in’, utilised by several chapters in this volume, is methodological engagement with participants’ emotional lives.

These are just a few examples of ways in which interest in everyday life is drawing out existing methods and inspiring new ones, as well as new ways of performing research relationships. Much more extensive discussion is offered by Nathal Dessing in Chapter 3. The very idea that there is a limited set of meth...