Students of religion, from a variety of disciplines, have recognized the numerous ways religion is inscribed on the body. Most religious rituals are embodied and they, in turn, embody the sacred. These bodily practices including dress, diet, hairstyle, facial hair, and body modification are physical actions with underlying religious significance that are performed or avoided by group members to establish, demonstrate and maintain their belonging in the group. Through them, collective beliefs and meanings are embedded within, and accomplished by, the material bodies of members of religious communities. Embodiment practices serve the critical purpose of forging tight bonds between the individual and the community (Warner 1997) while also establishing strong boundaries between members and outsiders. Particular social groups set themselves apart from others by developing distinctive forms of bodily culture (Bartkowski 2004: 11). As agents of religious practice, the bodies of the faithful actively participate in the production and reproduction of religious culture, the fashioning of religious identities, and the preservation of religious individual and group identities. (Bartkowski 2004:13). Sociologists and anthropologists of religion have established the role of bodily practices in encouraging commitment among a religious group's new converts. They have not, however, looked at how religious disaffiliation necessarily involves dis-inscribing {that there is no word for these practices is telling!} the religion from the body. These transformations are especially dramatic when the religious community a person leaves involves numerous detailed physical rituals that continually, throughout the day, inscribe the religion on members' bodies.
This paper analyzes the disaffiliation narratives of former Haredi (Ultraorthodox) Jews in order to examine the process of religious "dis-inscription" and identity reconstruction.
[...] CONCLUSION Ritualized bodily practices inculcate religious beliefs and mark the religion on the bodies of its members. Theories of bodily practices define them as the quotidian activities, accomplishments, and interactions of social actors (Connell, Davis, and Bartkowski). Analyses of bodily practices reveal how bodies act and are acted upon, along with how cultural meanings are reinforced, resisted, and subverted by such actions. Bodily practices not only reveal group membership but create and maintain it. By ceasing to observe these practices demanded by the group, and substituting them with practices from the secular world, members not only change their internal identification but they actively create a new self with which to interact with the world. [...]
[...] Menachem's comments underscore how shaving—removing the mark of the community from his face—is a bodily practice that helped to effect and make visible his changed status in the Haredi community. Because his peyot was “something that was really my symbol of being Orthodox,” his removal of that bodily symbol publicly manifested his desire to separate himself from the community and to fashion an identity separate from that community. It was helpful that he married a woman who was also interested in distancing herself from their Haredi sect. [...]
[...] One goal of such research might be the development of broader typology that can group together different religious communities and show how the particularities of their various beliefs, norms and practices shape distinctive categories of religious dis-embodiment inscribed - written (by handwriting, printing, engraving, or carving) on or in a surface written - set down in writing in any of various ways; "written evidence" 2.inscribed - cut or impressed into a surface; "an incised design"; "engraved invitations" engraved, etched, graven, incised REFERENCES (just the beginning of the list) Bartkowski, John P “Faithfully Embodied: Religious Identity and the Body.” disClosure 14: 8-37. [...]
[...] These unexplored issues provide a fruitful ground for asking more general questions about the relationships between religion, embodiment, and identity, and how bodily practices change as religious practitioners transform their identities while moving in and out of their religious communities.[1] In this essay I focus particularly on the transformation of bodily practices that occur when a member leaves an enclave (isolated from the broader society) religious community. THE BODY, IDENTITY, AND RELIGIOUS RITUAL Recent sociological research has probed the many links between the body and identity. [...]
[...] Although there are many behavioral, emotional and cognitive changes involved in leaving Orthodoxy, here my focus is on how those changes in bodily practices that mark individuals as members of a particular religious community interact with the process of identity reconstruction. DIS-INSCRIBING HAREDI BODILY PRACTICES In my study of Israeli and American Haredim who left their communities, I heard many emotional stories of how my respondents engaged in a series of behaviors that removed the physical markers of the group from their bodies. [...]
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