Re-conceptualising the religious habitus: Reflexivity and embodied subjectivity in global modernity

The notion of the religious habitus has become increasingly prominent in studies of religion. While this prominence reflects a debt to Bourdieu’s particular account of it, his association of the habitus with regularised dispositions providing supernatural legitimations for status inequalities has nonetheless been much criticised. What has not been addressed with regard to religion, however, is the degree to which the pervasiveness of reflexivity in global modernity fatally undermines habitual schemas as conceived by Bourdieu. Here, moving beyond Bourdieu and utilizing the recent writings of Latour, we seek to elucidate the on-going value of the notion of habitus for articulating the complex relations between culture and religion today by reconceptualising it as something reflexively re-made, or instaured, through the active cultivation of a particular mode of embodied subjectivity; a reconceptualization we develop with reference to Christian Pentecostalism and the Islamic piety movement.