Foucault and the Study of Religion Seminar Unit.
The “Turn to the Body” or the emergence of “body studies” are among Foucault’s many legacies. Consistent with the general tendency to emphasize Foucault’s historical conclusions as “theory” body studies and the Turn to the Body both tend to engage the body as either an abstract theoretical construct of social science, or a material artifact as in history. This also reflects the nature of these disciplinary domains. Religious Studies scholarship that focuses on textual analysis and/or religious thought approaches the body similarly as either abstraction or artifact, sometimes as both. However, incorporating Foucault’s work into ritual studies –a subfield within religious studies— emphasizes Foucault’s concern with lived practice.
From my perspective as a ritual studies scholar, I understand that for Foucault –as for Merleau-Ponty before him—the body constitutes the substrate through which history plays out on both the personal micro-level and on communal macro-levels that expand in scope and complexity. Indeed, when sensing the cannon of his work through the lens of ritual studies, we can discern what we might call a ritual-gaze or sensibility in his treatment of personal bodily practices and the interactions of bodies with other bodies.
Arguably, Foucault came closer than other historians of his time to producing a template for histories of ritual practices. In my own work, Foucault’s genealogical method and his sweeping attention to how practices of Self reveal conceptual meta-patterns, led me to define an interdisciplinary framework for my own research on emergent changes in contemporary ritual praxis (thought and practice).
I integrate an embodied Ritual Studies (alternatively Performance Studies), Religious Studies (alternatively Philosophy), and History (alternatively Political Science, etc…) to produce what I call a ritual ecological analysis. This framework for ritual ecology centers on the bodily experience of ritual performance within the historical and conceptual context in which it is performed. Arguably, Foucault’s attention to how certain personal and interpersonal actions and generalized socio-political behaviors revealed more subtle patterns of historical thought was exactly this kind of ecological analysis.
Studies of The Body espousing a Foucauldian approach tend to engage the body as an abstract theoretical construct –as in social science; and/or a material artifact –as in history. However, incorporating Foucault’s work into ritual studies –a subfield within religious studies— brings forward that Foucault engaged the body –as Merleau Ponty before him— as the lived material substrate wherein culture and history play out. Indeed, centering of experience of bodily performances constituted the major continuity between Foucault’s earlier and later scholarship. This paper will present my interdisciplinary framework of ritual ecological analysis as a means of reframing how we view Foucault’s approach to the body as the reflexive expression of historically contingent cultural praxes. Further, I will argue that embodiment methodologies are similarly consistent with Foucault’s approach to the body and bodily experience.