Abstract
This article develops the concept of experiential careers, drawing theoretical attention to the routinization and de-routinization of specific experiences as they unfold over social career trajectories. Based on interviews and ethnographic fieldwork in two religious communities, we compare the social-temporal patterning of religious experience among newly religious Orthodox Jews and converted Muslims in two cities in the United States. In both cases, we find that as newly religious people work to transform their previous bodily habits and take on newly prescribed religious acts, the beginning of their religious careers becomes marked by what practitioners describe as potent religious experiences in situations of religious practice. However, over time, these once novel practices become routinized and religious experiences in these situations diminish, thus provoking actors and institutions in both fields to work to re-enchant religious life. Through this ethnographic comparison, we demonstrate the utility of focusing on experiential careers as a sociological unit of analysis. Doing so allows sociologists to use a non-reductive phenomenological approach to chart the shifting manifestations of experiences people deeply care about, along with the patterned enchantments, disenchantments, and possible re-enchantments these social careers entail. As such, this approach contributes to the analysis of social careers and experiences of “becoming” across both religious and non-religious domains.
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Notes
We do not, however, make claims regarding the content of a “religious province of meaning.” Instead, as we emphasize below, we note that actors spoke about these experience as falling beyond the natural attitude, and practically cordoned off these moments in action.
This focus on routinization also echoes Weber’s discussion of the vicissitudes of charisma. Indeed, Weber’s Veralltaglichung is not only translatable as “routinization,” but, more literally, as “everydayization” (see Berger and Zijderveld 2009, pp. 80–81). This use makes “charisma” a seemingly compelling way to speak of un-routinized (and de-routinized) situations. Indeed, this echoes Weber’s (1978, p. 1134) own comments, where he points out that “every event transcending the routines of everyday life releases charismatic forces” (see also Shils 1965). But where Weber assumed that such “charismatic forces” are immediately attached to a relatively stable charismatic identity, the moments we write of are far more fleeting. Thus, although this paper could be read as a foray into a specific form of the routinization of charisma, such a reading would force us to radically re-work the notion of charisma, specifying it as something characterizing particular situations rather than fixed identities.
Michael Polanyi (1983) makes a similar observation, when he talks about every experience having a “from-to” structure.
A majority of Muslims in the community, however, identified as Sunnis, meaning that the mosque did tend to have more of a “Sunni flavor” as one of the Shia members of the community put it. When asked, however, about their identification with a specific theological tradition, most converts felt uncomfortable aligning themselves exclusively with one or another, preferring to identify as “just Muslim.” However, six of the converts did tell the author that they “leaned more toward Sunni interpretations” of Islam, while one said he leaned more toward Shia interpretations and theology. Such complex identifications (and refusals of identification) themselves raise interesting questions about the contours of Muslim identity in the US context, but such a discussion would require another paper.
The temporal logic of interviewing and observing actors who were either born religious or converted a long time before observations began parallels the logic of temporality used by demographers when they construct “synthetic cohorts” (see, for example, Preston et al. 2001). We thank Bruce Western for this insight.
Orthodox Jews similarly talked about how they had to strive constantly to do something more, to constantly add to their religious fervor. One famous rabbinical interpretation of the bible makes this point in relation to the stone incline men had to climb to reach the tabernacle, an incline that had no stairs. This was a metaphor for religious life, members explained. You can never stop complacently at any given point (as there are no stairs), and if you do not strive to move up, towards greater and greater observance, you will slide downwards.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Courtney Bender, Penny Edgell, Kyle Green, Nahoko Kameo, Hazem Kandil, Jack Katz, Kevin McElmurry, Omar McRoberts, John O’Brien, Michal Pagis, Ann Swidler, Stefan Timmermans, and the Editors and reviewers at Theory & Society for their careful reading of previous versions of this manuscript, as well as participants in an ASR panel, the UCLA ethnography reading group, and the Columbia Jewish Studies Colloquia, where previous versions of this article were presented.
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Tavory, I., Winchester, D. Experiential careers: the routinization and de-routinization of religious life. Theor Soc 41, 351–373 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-012-9170-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-012-9170-z