Practical Belief and the Experience of Context

Abstract

The ideas and values guiding these congregations, even as they are debated, internalized, or transformed, must also be legitimated and experienced to have an effect on the community. This happens through everyday action but is most evident in those practices that are set apart as religiously significant. These practices, more exotically known within anthropology as rituals, have long been a central focus of the anthropological gaze, and it would be absurd to explore any religious expression without considering how the abstract beliefs of individuals are experienced and reinforced in community. In framing the discussion in terms of “practice,” I move from studies of ritual per se onto a wider theoretical stage. Practice is most associated with the work of Pierre Bourdieu (1977, 1990; see also Ortner 2006), and I take his general framework as relevant here. But where he tended to view religion, in particular, as a hierarchically arranged field of power (Bourdieu 1991), I would lean toward a less centered view of power in corporate structures and individual action. Certainly the congregational context, doctrine, and history provide a structuring habitus in which the dynamics of context creation are carried out. However, whereas Bourdieu’s Catholic example centers on the hierarchical organization as stratifying these relationships and centering social capital into the hands of a few, the doctrine of equality and the recent history of these Philippine Baptists belies such a rigid structure.