Introduction
This chapter presents the theoretical and methodological foundations for the present study.
The first section examines the recent theoretical development in the field of sociology of religion, one that emphasizes the individual’s everyday practice as a means to investigate social change (Ammerman 2007; Shimazono 2007). American sociologist Nancy T.
Ammerman has suggested the ‘everyday religion’ approach in order to shift the emphasis from the role of religious institutions in society onto the individual’s everyday life and practices.
This stance enables researchers to explore the role of religiosity outside the religious institutions that inform the adherents.
The second section presents the theoretical toolkit adopted for exploring the process of identity formation occurring in the everyday practices of individuals in relation with religiosity, structural conditions and socio-economic settings. This study makes an eclectic use of
“practice theories” drawing upon Giddens’ theory of structuration (Giddens 1984, 1991a and 1991b), Bourdieu’s logic of practice (Bourdieu 1977 and [1980] 1990) and Butler’s idea of performativity (Butler 1990 and 1993).
The third section presents the methodology. This study is an example of qualitative research that sees individual action as always occurring within a framework of specific social relationships and cultural practices. Therefore, the research aims to portray women as central actors while giving due recognition to the conditions and structures enabling and constraining them. In order to do so, this study borrows a number of concepts from Actor Network Theory (ANT), which focuses on the actor’s trajectories and shifts, and the consequences of such shifts in the framework where the actor is located. Such investigation requires framing the social field and networks, and the specific context where individuals act.
The third section then discusses the research design by presenting the rationale for the targeted groups, the research process, sampling method, methods of data collection (questionnaire, interview and participant observation) and analysis.
The chapter concludes with a consideration of the role of the researcher in investigating women in faith-based volunteering, acknowledging the interplay between the researcher and the respondents in creating situated knowledge (Haraway 1991: 183).
1. Theoretical considerations
1.1 Religious belief and practice: the “everyday religion” approach
Japan has long been known for its syncretism and religious pluralism (Shimazono 2004: 2) and the phenomenon of Japanese New Religions appears as a contemporary form of religious traditions conveying culturally available symbols and rituals that have informed Japanese people’s life for centuries. However, those groups have also enhanced traditions and religious behaviours with more unofficial religious ideas raised by individuals’ new expectations, intersecting multiple settings in which people create a life: work, family, leisure, education, local communities and nation. As result of this inherent transformation, religiosity is not anymore something solely managed by religious specialists to whom lay people delegate their soteriological purposes. It has become a dynamic religious culture in which religious belief and practice are shaped into everyday strategies of actions (Shimazono 2007).
As such, although the elusive presence of religious culture in the contemporary world may not reveal its actual influence on the individual and on the collective level, the effect on the social and political level of what people do with religion in their everyday life cannot be ignored.
According to recent developments in social theory in the sociology of religion (Shimazono 2007; Ammerman 2007), social change emerges from the interstices which everyday practice goes through, and beyond, official doctrines and institutionalized religious roles, involving actors in movements between existing religious structures and emerging social practices occurring in a broader cultural and socio-economic setting where individuals are located (Ammerman 2009: 53). More often than not, actors are unaware of the change they are enacting and the effect that is newly produced, and ignore their potential power to modify the reality around them (Latour 2005: 58-62). This stance suggests that change involves many layers with intricate interactions and inter-dependences with non-religious actors and discourses that may play a heavier role than religiosity in individuals’ action.
In view of the above, an analysis of faith-based volunteering should first and foremost avoid taking for granted the normative expectations informing the individual social behaviour that religion may impart to their adherents. In fact, the “everyday religion” approach suggests that the researcher should examine the dynamics underpinning the encounter between the religious organization and society (Ammerman 2009: 49). As Ammerman (2003) suggests, if we remove the ‘radical functional differentiation between religious and nonreligious (or between “public” and “private”)’ (2003: 217), we may be able to ask important questions about the circumstances under which religious identity and other narratives come into play. The focus on the interplay and social interaction allows for an understanding of how identities are
initiated, situated, structured and constructed in the blurred area between religion and civil society of faith-based volunteering.
This approach acknowledges the role of religious organizations in providing individuals with what Somers calls ‘public narratives’ (Somers 1994: 619). That is, religious organizations supply structured religious biographical narratives, establishing the common cultural language adopted by people to share stories, in order to create a community where, in turn, the individual can define her or his (religious) identity. As such, religions are important sites where individuals can find reassurance concerning their essential role in the world, build relationships and construct a mode of identity: they are, therefore, places creating widespread social arenas in which action (both religious and social) can occur (Ammerman 2007: 12).
Ammerman (2003) clearly points out that it has been common sense to assume that religion gives people a core identity that defines a person in all social settings (2003: 209).
Sociologists of religion have invested heavily in the study of the significance of beliefs, doctrines and rules, on the one hand, and family, education, friendship and social networking (summed up as “religious socialization”), on the other, considering them both as a source of influence and influences for agency (Sherkat 2003). Religious belief has been seen as a fundamental worldview that shapes what people do, sometimes as a basic status characteristic like ethnicity and gender (Sherkat 2003: 163). Following Ammerman’s (2007) theorizing, it is argued in this dissertation that religious identity alone cannot explain the action that is observed in the everyday practice, as in the case of women involved in faith-based volunteering. Women’s faith-based volunteer practice should be embedded in its context, thus examining the way women use the institutions and the resources related to religious identity.
The following sections discuss the components constituting identity and the ‘socio-culturally mediated capacity to act’ (Ahearn 2001: 112) that makes religion but one of the possible causal variables.
1.2 Theorizing identity formation: a matter of structuration, agency, practice and performativity The fact that a significant number of Japanese women choose to become engaged in volunteering sponsored by religious organizations they belong appears to be indicative of at least three key issues:
1. we are observing a group of women located in a specific place and living in a particular span of time, thus sharing a common socio-economic, historical and cultural environment;
2. those women have been similarly cultivating a religious attitude related to their everyday life concerns;
3. they have all been brought together by a similar need of, and predisposition towards, ethical behaviour entailing altruistic actions.
In order to examine the above arguments and highlight differences and singularities among identities within the field of faith-based volunteer practice, this study draws upon a constructionist perspective to knowledge (Berger and Luckmann 1966) and social reality (Giddens 1979 and 1984; Bourdieu 1977 and [1980] 1990).55 Accordingly, the analysis moves between subjectivities, with their individual narratives, and how they experience their identity by taking distance or approach available identities within the variety of social representations and expectations, and the institutional and state discourses available.56 Rather than as resistance to internalized social norms or responses to externalized constraints, such conceptualizations allow for a distinctive approach to Japanese women’s formation of identity:
one that couples identity with agency in a generative process, where subjects are both an effect and a stimulus for further development of their selves.
1.2.1 Theorizing identity as practice
According to Giddens (1991a and 1991b) what people are, in terms of the formation of identity in the post-traditional order of modernity (1991a: 5), should be approached as a
reflexive project of self, which consists in the sustaining coherent, yet continuously revised, biographical narratives, [which] takes place in the context of multiple choices as filtered through abstract systems.
(Giddens 1991a: 5) Giddens suggests that in such a process can be found many different connections between individual experience and abstract systems (1991a:7) and a trajectory of development from the past to the anticipated future, for which the individual is responsible (1991a: 75). Two dimensions characterize the dialectical process inherent in the individual’s reflexive project of self: structures, or rules and norms that shape people’s practices; and resources made of what is knowable and available to individuals (Giddens 1984). The duality of structure that recognizes the social structure as both the medium and a by-product of human actions is theorized by Giddens as the ‘duality of structuration’. The concept helps representing the social structure as a creative process where the individuals negotiate lifestyle choices among a diversity of options and contribute to innovating those structures that once have shaped them (1984: 28).57 Giddens’ theorizing focuses on the construction of self as the individual’s self-reflexive project where she or he chooses among opportunities that are homogeneously available to them. The individual’s ‘trajectory of the self’ (1991b: 70) entails a ‘reflexive project’
(1991b: 75) of ‘self-formation’ (1991b:76), which may not be fully ascribed to a deterministic or
structuralist approach. Individuals go through a journey of discovery that implies a cognitive anticipation of the state of affairs to be realized in the future in conjunction with the influence of large scale social systems, institutions, culture and abstract systems (1991b: 7). As Giddens (1991b) states
the self [is] seen as a reflexive project, for which the individual is responsible […]. We are not what we are, but what we make of ourselves.
(Giddens 1991b: 75) Therefore the theorist recognizes the transformative capacity of subjects in their constructing process of self-identity. The trajectory of self-formation is, of course, not linear or predictable:
in the case of religious voluntarism, for example, a woman may show a predisposition to such activity before affiliating with a certain religious group and vice versa; or she may develop her philanthropic attitude and practical life ethics along with her conversion story; or by devoting herself to the needy ‘other’ because of pre-existing narratives embedded in her contextualized environment.
From this point of view, Bourdieu’s (1977) notion of habitus helps to illustrate the logic of practice inherent in a process of identity formation. Bourdieu defines habitus as temporally durable structures defined by a ‘social trajectory’ (Bourdieu 1977: 86). Habitus is a subjective but ‘not individual system of internalized structures, schemes of perception, conception, and action common to all members of the same group or class’ (ibid.). Bourdieu views the subject as engaged in practical action with and within the social in a ‘doxic experience of the social world’ (Bourdieu 1998: 22): the course of a mutually constitutive process between individuals and social fields endow subjects with particular sorts of knowledge and dispositions. The social is insinuated in the subjective not in random idiosyncratic ways, but in ways that are socially structured and carry a history with them (Bourdieu [1980] 1990: 54). Socialized subjectivity, or habitus (1977: 72 and [1980] 1990: 52), is a sort of generative structure and embodies ways of being, which includes orientations, values and ways of behaving that are formed in interaction and dynamic relation with specific ‘games’ or social fields of practice (Bourdieu [1980] 1990: 67). Bourdieu describes fields as structured contexts that shape and produce interactions and practices (Bourdieu [1980] 1990: 67); and subjects’ interactions with the fields as a matter of learning ‘the rules of the game’ (ibid.). Habitus, therefore, is not a matter of conscious learning or of ideological imposition, but is acquired through practice and is composed by a set of dispositions that incline subjects to act and react in certain ways.
What is central here is the relationality of habitus, in that it makes sense only in specific local
contexts or fields, the “games” for which ‘the rules of the game’ equip individuals (Bourdieu [1980] 1990: 67).
Using Bourdieu’s idea of habitus to explain volunteering, we may suggest that individuals acquire the habit of volunteering when they are routinely placed in social situations and relationships where they can develop social skills and dispositions needed for the volunteer work (Janoski, Musick and Wilson 1998: 498). Here lies the importance of a social practice perspective: it downplays the role of individual’s values and attitudes (e.g. the normative role of belief), in order to emphasize the binding role of practice. This view entails two interesting implications: firstly, that women who volunteer in a faith-based group may not have predisposition, or attraction, or faith-fostered philanthropic attitudes before engaging in social work, but some favourable individual and social circumstance might develop once they find themselves in the setting. Secondly, it suggests that women might ignore their potential power to modify the reality around them and might be unaware of the effects of their volunteering on their social identity.
Both Giddens and Bourdieu emphasize the importance of everyday practice through which individuals learn to signify themselves according to biographical experiences, occurrences and the dispositions that enable socialized subjectivities. The ongoing process of identity formation conveys the idea of self-actualization (Giddens 1991b: 78). This may be understood in terms of an individual’s ability to balance between the opportunity of potential new ways of being and the risk of breaking away from established patterns of behaviour (ibid.). This process implies the individuals’ ability to enact decisions that they favour among an indefinite range of possible different behaviour patterns (1984: 14-15). By doing so, people, as
‘knowledgeable agents’ (Giddens 1984: 281), show a degree of control of their own lives, a fact that, according to Giddens’ theory, accounts for both structural influences and the different levels and contexts in which power operates (Giddens 1984: 282). The power of putting forth new images of self, and expanding their behavioural choices, shows the agents’
transformative capacity (Giddens 1984: 15).
1.2.2 Theorizing identity as narrated and performative
The above discussion emphasizes the fluidity of identity, constructed upon the basis of an individual’s agency, and ‘the ways in which each encounter leaves the individual identity slightly (or radically) changed’ (Ammerman 2003: 211). However, in order to avoid the risk of over-emphasizing the individual capacity of action vis-à-vis the role of collective interventions, such as government policies and acts, and collective struggles informing the production and
reproduction of structure (Mouzelis 1989: 625), this dissertation suggests examining identities as both narrated (Somers 1994) and performative (Butler 1990 and 1993).
This approach implies that individuals constitute their identities through narratives constructed in the context of the discourses by which they are framed and formed (Somers 1994). Simultaneously, individuals are active agents enacting their subjectivities in the everyday practice constituting the narratives they are embedding (Butler 1993). Examining individuals as both narrated and performative enables the researcher to highlight the constitutive normative and generative aspects through which individuals appropriate and create meanings for their identity as well as their reality. From this point of view, giving a more varied and precise account of women’s identity formation in terms of appropriated narratives, and the agency inherent in that process in terms of performatives should, therefore, more cogently elucidate the motivations and the ways in which they seize and transform structural and cultural meanings into resources for new modes of identity.
a. Narrated subjects
Narratives may be viewed as existentially and critically useful modes individuals employ to understanding selves and the world (Somers 1994: 617): they allow constituting experience in terms of rules and resources (Giddens 1984); construct subjectivities informing them of ways of being in specific fields of practice (Bourdieu [1980] 1990: 67); and assure historicity that determines their formation and portrays the passing of time as well as the changing of cultural beliefs, their interpretation and use (Bourdieu [1980] 1990: 56).
Narratives show the interrelations of events, ideas and individuals. Therefore, they provide an important framework for the organization of disparate experiences into relatively coherent structures (Bourdieu 1977: 86). These often invoke symbols and metaphors (or ‘symbolic capital’ in Bourdieu’s terms; [1980] 1990: 112-21) for the explanatory or justifying purposes of the prevalence of some narratives over others. Thus narratives exist within discourses or fields of ‘collective practice’ (Bourdieu [1980] 1990: 141) produced by institutions that allow styles and stories that operate and determine social roles. For this reason certain narratives are granted greater social power and status than others. For example, a narrative of a new religious movement created within the religious tradition is likely to be seen as more acceptable and credited with more value than one produced as new from a non-indigenous religion. This observation may explain the relative success of many Japanese new religious movements that share a lineage with traditional doctrines vis-à-vis Christianity that still
struggles to reach a membership enabling it to compete with others in the Japanese religious market.
Somers (1994) points out four types of narratives at play in identity constructions: ontological, public, conceptual and metanarratives (1994: 617). For the purpose of this study, only the first two will be discussed here.58 Ontological narratives are the socially constructed stories that individuals carry as a way of orienting and emplotting their own life. They may be called personal narratives, in that people will fit stories to their own identities and will tailor reality according to their stories. In these terms, ontological narratives are social and interpersonal in that they exist only in the course of structural and social interactions. Ammerman (2003) calls them ‘autobiographical narratives’ that enable individuals to respond to each other and impart a certain trustworthiness and integrity to their action (1994: 213). Interpersonal relations sustain and transform these narratives into what may be called a sort of historicized narrative or, in Somers terms, ‘public narratives’ (1994: 619). These are cultural and institutional narratives attached to groups (e.g. “volunteers”; “full-time housewife”, “working mothers”) or categories (e.g. “religion”; “gender”). In order to gain understanding of their identities and their lives and to communicate that understanding to others, individuals narrate themselves and are narrated by others as subjects located within certain narratives of particular discourses that become mainstream narratives.
According to Calhoun, a crucial aspect of the project of identity formation is ‘recognition’
(Calhoun 1994: 20), that is, the interrelated problem of self-recognition and recognition by others. Recognition implies individuals’ reflexivity, that is ‘any capacity to look at oneself, to choose one’s actions and see their consequences, and to hope to make oneself something more or better than one is’ (Calhoun 1994: 20), an activity that is integrally related to issues of recognition or non-recognition by others.59
Religious organizations are suppliers of public narratives as they create social spaces in which action can occur and provide individuals with ‘religious biographical narratives within which the actor’s own autobiographical narrative can be experienced’ (Ammerman 2003: 217).
Specific to the religious identity, however, is that enacting it implies a social interaction taking of a religious character which ‘directly or indirectly invokes the co-participation of the transcendence or the Sacred Other’ (Ammerman 2003: 216). In this parlance, faith-based volunteering could be counted as a religious action if the doer expresses the expectation of spiritual achievement related to their philanthropic action. Moreover, such expectation should be validated by the recognition of it by those interacting with the doer. Such a dynamic is not always demonstrable and quantifiable, thus suggesting that there is no a priori reason for
assuming that because of its philanthropic component, religious identity should be regarded as the driving narrative representing women’s agency in faith-based volunteering. Following Ammerman’s theorizing, it is necessary to account for religious identity as ‘potentially part and
assuming that because of its philanthropic component, religious identity should be regarded as the driving narrative representing women’s agency in faith-based volunteering. Following Ammerman’s theorizing, it is necessary to account for religious identity as ‘potentially part and