Jeppe Dall Gregersen
Supervisor: Julie McBrien. Second reader: Mattijs van de Port
Master’s Thesis. Research Master’s Social Sciences
University of Amsterdam, Graduate School of Social Sciences
The Just
Place of Man
Materiality and Mediation
The Just
Place of Man
Materiality and Mediationin a Catholic Community
Jeppe Dall Gregersen 12272558
Supervisor: Julie McBrien
Second reader: Mattijs van de Port Master’s Thesis
Research Master’s Social Sciences University of Amsterdam, Graduate School of Social Sciences Design: Sissel Vejby Møller All photos by author June 22, 2020
Abstract
Drawing on interviews and apprenticeship-like participant observation, this study investigates how the residents of a Catholic community, living in a mountainside village in rural France, act on and are acted on by their material environment. It is argued that the community’s ethics of sobriety, the ambition to be unaffected by material things, should be understood as an inverted assertation of the positive value accorded to purity in human relations. In the devotional practices of the community, music, lighting, and landscape were employed as mediations and allowed to act on the assembly. Likewise, the village in which the community lived was experi-enced as possessing a force that affected residents and aided them in their project of moral and spiritual cultivation. These mediations were taken as indexes of the agency of the former inhabitants of the village, of the com-munity members themselves, and ultimately of the agency of God. It is argued that the residents of the community constituted material things and the larger landscape as actors by positioning themselves in relation to these objects and by actively accommodating them as mediations.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my interlocutors for welcoming me into the life of their community and for showing me a sincerity and sobriety that not only inspired my work but also marked me personally. For this I am profoundly grateful. I owe thanks to Julie, my supervisor, for her constructive criti-cism, patient guidance, and good advice. I thank Lotte for reading and commenting on a draft of this thesis and Mathias for his feedback and sug-gestions regarding the use of photos. Finally, I am very grateful to Sissel for doing the design of my thesis.
Content
Introduction 11
First Lessons 12
The Community of Les Béals 16
Intentional Community 18
Objectification and Mediation in Material Culture 20
The Problem Defined 27
Methodological Considerations 29
1 Moral Cultivation and the Ethics of Sobriété 35
Work and Prayer 36
Morality and Models of Reality 37 The Just Order of the World 39
The Ethics of Sobriety 41
A Sense of Worth 46
2 Mediation and Materiality 55
The Liturgy of the Hours as Sensational Form 56 The Priest and the Conductor 58
Aids for Prayer 61
The Semiotic Ideology 63
Mediation and Meaning 66
The Window and the Landscape 68
When the Lights Went Out 71
3 Construction of the Garden Vault 79
The Force of the Place 80
Constructing the Vault 87
Constructing an Index 91
Moving to the Winter Chapel 95
Conclusion 99 Bibliography 103
Introduction
I first came upon the Catholic community of Les Béals – coterminous with an ancient mountainside village of the same name – when searching for a commune in rural France in which I could conduct my thesis fieldwork. Although quite different from the “neo-rural” hippie communes that I ini-tially had in mind, the community’s anti-consumerist outlook readily sparked my interest.1 I thus set out to do fieldwork in the community of Les
Béals thinking that I was going to research the relationship between their political project and the aesthetic that governed their construction, craft, and use of material culture in general. Surprised, however, by the extent to which the residents of the community spoke of the village as having a pow-er that aided them in their spiritual growth, it soon appeared to me that what was interesting was not so much what objects were considered beauti-ful and why, but rather what things did to people and what people did to things. In more analytical terms my research question changed from one formulated it terms of evaluation to one formulated in terms of agency and practice.
While this shift of attention was guided by my experiences in the field, it was also, not least after the fact of fieldwork, supported by theoretical ques-tions raised in the anthropological and sociological literature on material culture. A broad debate in this literature is one between different argu-ments regarding the nature of relationships between people and things. As sociologist Antoine Hennion has argued, such arguments tend to follow ei-ther a circular model, in which the power of an object is related back to the
1 In French the term néoruralisme designates a movement, taking off during the late 1960s, in which
mostly young city dwellers relocated to the rural and depopulated areas of Southern France (Chevalier 1993, 179; Rouvière 2015, 17).
social, or a linear model that ascribes a force or aesthetic value to the object or artwork in itself (Hennion 2015, 153). As I will show, Hennion’s own the-ory, along with those of other theorists such as Alfred Gell, seek to chal-lenge these models by suggesting that there can be no universal causal rela-tionship between people and things. They take, instead, the attribution of agency as an object of study. This debate has parallels in the anthropology of religion and in the more recent literature on the anthropology of Chris-tianity. Authors such as Birgit Meyer, Saba Mahmood, and Webb Keane have argued that while all religion happens materially, the way that things enter into devotional practices can follow distinctly different logics. They emphasize that notions of what can be taken as signs and of how they work are constituted and sustained within specific religious traditions.
In the present thesis I take a cue from these literatures in considering the attribution of agency an object of study, and I ask what people do to be af-fected and aided by the material environment that they inhabit. Avoiding both circular and linear models of causality, I propose that the communi-ty’s engagement with material culture can best be understood as a position-ing in, or as an attunement to, their material surroundposition-ings. The residents of the community are not passive “patients” – instead they put themselves in a position to be touched by architecture, art, and the landscape that they in-habit. Before I lay out my argument and discuss the aforementioned litera-ture any further, let me begin by giving a vignette that caplitera-tures some of the most important aspects of how the community acted on and put them-selves in a position to be acted on by their material environment.
First Lessons
The morning after I had arrived at the community of Les Béals, I found my-self assigned to the work of reconstructing a dry stone wall that had col-lapsed. These curvy dry stone walls ran through the village separating gar-dens, terraces, and paths at different levels of elevation. The wall in question continued the length of a two-story building forming a level garden be-tween this building and the neighboring one. Work had already been un-derway for some days, and the job now was to continue laying successive rows of natural granite stones to achieve the desired height of the wall. In charge of the work was a tall man in colorful sportswear, Thomas, who was staying in the community with his wife for a few weeks during the summer.
He had a wide smile and piercing, sincere eyes. We were, in addition, to be helped by two young men, university students from Paris, who had arrived with a group of friends. Guided by Thomas, who had acquired some skill in stone wall construction, we started wheeling additional stones from the outskirts of the village. It quickly turned physical as we had to navigate the loaded wheelbarrow through narrow passages and uneven steps to the ter-race below the wall. Once there, it was no less of a job to lift these large un-cut stones up to breast-height in order to place them on the rising wall. As we tried out various ways to go about the work, unfamiliar with each other and with dry stone wall construction, Thomas eagerly explained the basics: stones ideally had to be put in rows that left a fairly flat surface for the fol-lowing row, and the wall was to incline slightly inwards towards the hill. Stones were to rest firmly on the row below and the wall had to be support-ed with about a foot of gravel against the hillside, while still leaving ample space for a layer of garden topsoil at the top. The work involved trying out various stones, turning them around, gesturing for help with particular heavy ones, and demanding the more or less qualified opinions of team-mates. After a few hours, the priest Emmanuel, a short middle-aged man that moved with long confident strides, arrived to inspect the progression of the work. He talked about the heavy November rains that caused the soil to expand and gradually tipped over the most well-constructed stone walls. It was for this reason, he explained, that the wall was to be supported by gravel that allowed the water to sieve through the construction. He then jumped down and, with much concentration, inspected the newly laid rows of stone. He grabbed several stones and rocked them firmly from side to side to test their support and then began taking out, and throwing away, the small stones that we had put between the larger ones to support them: “This is a makeshift job. It is pointless!” The stones, we were told, had to rest securely on one another even without support of smaller ones. There was nothing to do but to remove the most unstable ones and start over. As Em-manuel would often repeat in the coming months, “The first stone you try is never the best. Don’t be afraid to try another one!” I had learned my first lesson in dry stone wall construction and I now knew what we were up against; the erratic mountain weather and the passing of time.
About a week later, the birthday of the community was to be celebrated. The evening before the celebration it had been announced that we were to
meet at six in the morning outside one of the largest houses in the village. I did not know what to expect from this celebration and had set my alarm early to be sure to be there on time. Waking up, I quickly washed my face before walking up to the meeting point. The darkness of the night had al-ready begun to give way to the first signs of dawn. In the village across the valley the streetlights were still on, but here there were none. When I ar-rived at the meeting place only Romain was there, ready in running shoes and a windbreaker. Romain had an intellectual disability and had arrived at Les Béals through a disability organization. He asked me to tie his run-ning shoes. As we waited for others to join us, three kids were still walking around the village waking up people with music. Emmanuel passed by hurriedly below us, presumably busy with last-minute preparations. Lifting his hands towards the sky, he sent us a satisfied smile; it had rained during the night, but the sky was now clear. Only a handful of people had arrived before we started mounting a small path behind the village. Romain seemed eager to get going. After a short walk we arrived at a saddle between two hills. A large wooden cross had been raised on the smaller hill that faced towards the valley. We set down some plastic boxes with breakfast and, while still only a few, continued walking up the hill towards the cross. There was hardly any path to follow in the bushy terrain and Romain was stumbling in the twilight. When we arrived at the top of the rocky hill, we sat down in silence to admire the landscape. Below us two large valleys came together. A river ran along the bottom of the largest valley and a few distant cars could be seen passing slowly along a road that followed the riv-er. The mountainsides around us were dotted, here and there, by villages and small hamlets. Eastwards, where successive mountainsides in grada-tions of faint blue framed a view to the distant horizon, the sky was still painted in dark nuances of orange and purple. Below us, small white clouds seemed to be evaporating for the coming of day. Before long, as the first contrasts revealed themselves, the clouds above us took shape as a band of watercolors across the sky. Now more people had arrived and sat scattered silently on the hillside. As Emmanuel arrived, he told a boy that he was sit-ting on the altar and the boy quickly jumped down from his seat. The altar, for now, was apparently a large stone. Across from the altar, Emmanuel then rested a golden icon of Jesus on a stone in such a way that the sun would rise directly behind it. Emmanuel and Noël, both priests, were
dressed in white albs and their bright dresses stood out on the backdrop of the moss-green hillside. Someone, seemingly in awe, exclaimed a surprised “Lord!” as the first beams of sunlight now revealed themselves as a golden fan just above the mountainside across from us. Romain, who was sitting next to me, patted me on the shoulder and pointed excitedly towards the rising sun, making sure I had seen it. Emmanuel now got up and covered the altar stone with a small white cloth. He then took out a small piece of raw wood on which had been mounted a small gold-like figure of Jesus on the cross. He gently turned the figure with two fingers to make it face to-wards us – away from himself, the icon, and the rising sun. Finally, he brought out a small wooden bowl and blew in it, as to purify it, before put-ting in a pile of thin white wafers. Now a bright white nail, the first fine line of the sun disc, became visible across from us, and in this very moment the priest started the Mass. While he spoke, the clouds below us rose still high-er and soon our magnificent view of valleys and mountainsides had been completely erased. Left was only what seemed like a soft white carpet, hanging as the backdrop to the priest and the gathering around him. I had tears in my eyes.
Unlike the construction of the dry stone wall, the early morning Mass had little to do with the questions of evaluation that had first guided my in-quiry. With time, however, I came to see this Mass as a crystallization of the themes that were developing in my fieldnotes and in my head. In a con-crete sense the morning Mass revealed the careful, but never frozen, or-chestration of a multitude of devices, both predictable and unpredictable, that enabled the experience of a divine presence. Moreover, it made me re-alize that the objects and material surroundings with which the communi-ty engaged were not meant for passive contemplation or distanced evalua-tion. What they did was first and foremost to act on the community. In this sense the early morning Mass and my lesson in dry wall construction had more in common than was first apparent to me. They spoke of the ways in which the community acted on the landscape, and of how, in turn, the landscape acted on the community. Not only did the residents of the com-munity imprint the landscape with marks of the sober and peaceful life that they were promoting, they were also fundamentally touched, affected, and aided by the landscape and the ancient village in which they had estab-lished themselves.
In the course of my fieldwork, then, it occurred to me that the question to be asked was not simply what the community considered beautiful and val-uable or how they engaged with their material surroundings, but essentially who and what was allowed to act on whom. As I will argue, residents of the community featured both as agents and patients in relation to their sur-roundings. This relationship cannot be understood within a linear model of causality, allocating agency and power to the objects themselves, nor can it be understood within a circular model of causality ultimately referring the force of things back to the force of the social. Instead, I will argue that the residents of Les Béals positioned themselves in relation to the village that they inhabited and the landscape that surrounded them, constituting them as actors in the process. Before I turn to a literature review, let me introduce the community of Les Béals in more detail.
The Community of Les Béals
The village in which I had arrived has been the home of a Christian commu-nity since the late 1960s when, abandoned and overgrown, it was discovered and acquired by a Belgian priest. This priest was working with education in a school for well-off urban kids and, disappointed with his results, had found it necessary to rethink his approach to religious teaching. This story was recounted to me by another priest, Gilles, who had been involved in the community for decades:
And one day while hiking – as he took walks in the afternoon – he looked. He found the village here, which was empty. There was just one inhabited house, which is the lowest house in the village. And so he had the intuition: “What if I establish a way of life here, not only which could lead to religion, but which directly proposes some religious attitude [démarche]?” So, he came here with four or five young people, and they decided to do it a bit like the monks. They prayed at night, in the morning, at noon, for the Mass, in the evening. They had five prayer times. They prayed at night. And so, he saw that it was completely, it was another atmosphere. It immedi-ately created another climate. And so, he came to spend thirty days alone here to pray and reflect a little.
For the first years the priest brought young students to the village during summer vacation as well as for Christmas, Easter, and other holidays. In the following decades, the community grew in step with the reconstruction of the village, and for many years a small and ever-changing group of peo-ple – the “permanents” – has now been living in the village year-round. The community, however, is not only made up of this core of more or less perma-nent residents, but has as its prime purpose to welcome and aid mostly young people in their personal and spiritual growth by integrating them in its communal life for a few days, weeks, or months at the time. It is not only students (many of whom are from French-speaking Belgium) that are wel-comed, however, but also families with kids, seminarists from Paris who study to become priests, and a good amount of single adults who often come for specific spiritual or personal reasons. These temporary residents gener-ally pay a daily fee to cover the costs of food and other provisions. In addi-tion to these groups, the community sometimes welcomes one or two inter-nationals who come on a working holiday type contract. The size of the community thus grows and decreases continually as seasons change and holidays and celebrations come and go. When we were most numerous, in August and during the time around the Feast of All Saints, fifty people could be packed into the chapel and when, in early October, the community was at its smallest, we were just a handful of people to fill the benches. With such a changing group of residents one would be right to ask if Les Béals is in fact a community at all. This question of definition was not unfa-miliar to the residents of Les Béals. I was told by one priest, for instance, that it was neither a monastery, an eco-community, nor a social center. The com-munity was instead often described as a spiritual “retreat” in the tradition of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, or simply as a “welcoming place” (lieu d’acceuil). “When you are hosted by the community, the same day you become some-one who host,” as I was told by the old priest who recounted the birth of the community above. Often, however, people did speak of Les Béals as a com-munity or as “communion” and most of my interlocutors experienced a strong sense of continuity in the social life of Les Béals. There was an organ-izational hierarchy in place and especially two permanent residents man-aged the practicalities of the constant flow of people and decided when the community temporarily would be closed to new guests. The substantive and unpaid contribution of these members was also crucial to the daily working
of the community, including the arrangement of work and the conduction of prayers. The flat organization of communal life, however, meant that there was little difference between permanent and merely temporary resi-dents of the community, and that in practice it was often hard to draw a clear distinction. For this reason, I will also speak of the “residents” of the community without always specifying the degree of their involvement or making distinctions between long-term and temporary residents.
Intentional Community
I turn now to a discussion of some literatures relevant to the scope of this thesis, but before I consider theories of material culture, I want to consider what sort of anthropological object we can take intentional communities like Les Béals to be, and how this might inform an analysis. In an overview of anthropological literature on communes, Terence Evens points to the common theme of understanding intentional communities as a response to, or as an opposition to dominant society. He notes that the relatively few studies that have been carried out mostly question how these alternative so-cial orders are reproduced, how they manage to maintain communitarian-ism in face of internal disagreement, and how they withstand the pressure of the surrounding social order (Evens 2015, 266). This is a line of thought that can be traced back at least to Anthony Wallace’s influential discussion of revitalization movements, a category which he took to include cargo cults, utopian communities, and religious revivals, and which he described as conscious and organized responses to what is experienced as the intolera-ble conditions of an existing cultural system (Wallace 1956, 267). Later, Benjamin Zablocki, who undertook a large, partly quantitative study of American communes in the 1970s, argued that intentional communities appear as a response to cultural change in the dominant society. Whereas Wallace argued that intentional communities were a response to “stress” – an outcome of a discordance between the workings of society and the conceptual schemas by which people navigate society – Zablocki argued that intentional communities came about as a response to a loss of consen-sus in decision making processes resulting from a “proliferation of choice alternatives” and the loss of unambiguous sources of meaning (Zablocki 1980, 40). More recently this line of thought has been taken up by Susan Brown who argues that intentional communities constitute a form of
non-elitist cultural critique – a “critiquing with one’s feet” – of those state societies in which they appear (Brown 2002, 153). Finally, in the last decade, authors have stressed the ability of intentional communities to challenge patterns of social and environmental injustice in capitalist societies. Lockyer and Veteto, for instance, define eco-villages as intentional commu-nities that use integrative design, participatory decision making, and com-munal property structures to provide necessary amenities in a sustainable manner, and Burke and Arjona speak of eco-villages as “laboratories for al-ternative political ecologies” (Burke and Arjona 2013, 235; Lockyer and Veteto 2013, 16).
All these perspectives seem in one way or the other to present intentional communities as products of a process in which culture, values, and morality are criticized, debated, and changed at a conscious level. Within the anthro-pology of morality such situations have been described by Jarrett Zigon as states of moral breakdown (Zigon 2007, 133). Drawing on Heidegger’s con-cept of being-in-the-world, Zigon argues that morality usually operates as dispositions that are enacted unreflectively and that it only becomes neces-sary to reflect critically on one’s actions in ethical dilemmas. To Zigon, such a moral breakdown can occur to the individual, but also to social groups at large, such as the Upramin of Joel Robbins’ study who, caught between their traditional lifestyle and a new Pentecostal Christian culture, live in a per-manent state of societal-wide moral breakdown (Zigon 2007, 140). This ar-gument is paralleled by Joel Robbins’ own distinction between a “morality of reproduction” and a “morality of freedom,” the latter which he takes to be prevalent in times of value conflict such as the one described in his study of the Urapmin (Robbins 2007, 302). Zigon and Robbins’ arguments echo dis-tinctions made by other anthropologists and sociologists who have attempt-ed to come to terms with the observations that values and morality are at once passive enactments of embodied dispositions and objects of intense re-flection and critical scrutiny. I am thinking here, for instance, of Ann Swidler’s argument that culture, which she defines as symbolic vehicles of meaning, shapes action in distinct manners in settled and unsettled cultur-al periods. Only in unsettled periods, she argues, are culturcultur-al meanings made explicit because they support actions that are not habitual and there-fore require a higher degree of articulation (Swidler 1986, 284). One could also think of Omar Lizardo’s distinction between “declarative” and
“non-declarative” modes of culture, or of Boltanski and Thévenot’s pragmatist argument that, beyond “natural situations” of perfect agreement, people need to justify their actions by making explicit reference to common prin-ciples (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006, 36–37).
In line with such approaches it is my argument that we might think of intentional communities as contexts in which questions of morality and value emerge as explicit objects of debate and discussion – in which culture, in other words, becomes an intentional project. As I have argued, Les Béals was established with a particular educational or formational ambition and continues to welcome groups of students, families and other individuals for whom the social and spiritual life of the community represents a stark con-trast to their everyday lives beyond the community. Such a perspective, of course, should not rule out the possibility that intentional communities like Les Béals over time can develop their own settled practices and schemes of evaluation, nor should it be taken to mean that these practices and evaluations can be understood without reference to the traditions – re-ligious or not – that they develop and draw upon. Indeed, I will show that the ways in which residents of the community of Les Béals engage with ob-jects of material culture, that is how they act on and are acted upon by their material surroundings, must be understood within a particular articula-tion of the relaarticula-tionship between people and things that draws on specific Catholic traditions of worship. Let me turn, now, to a discussion of some theoretical perspectives on material culture that have been invaluable in the development of my research question and that have informed the ana-lytical vocabulary that I will employ in the chapters to follow.
Objectification and Mediation in Material Culture
As argued by Daniel Miller, the anthropological and sociological literature on material culture can be read as so many attempts at going beyond the distinction between people and things. Writing in 2005, he argued that our task no longer is to establish the general philosophical truth that things and people are “mutually constituted,” but to betray such generalizations in en-gaging with the messy realities of the world (Miller 2005, 45). This senti-ment was shared, among others, by Webb Keane who, in a similar manner, proposed that we must break down the “monolithic concept of ‘objectifica-tion’” to specify the many forms it takes across historical and cultural
con-texts (Keane 2003, 422). In discussing a number of theoretical approaches to material culture, as I will do here, my aim is thus not to bring us back to the philosophical mountaintop, but rather to draw out some productive disagreements (and some points of agreement) that will inform the ques-tions discussed in the analysis I am to present. Particularly I will focus on the causal directionality of these arguments, that is the question of who (or what) acts on whom. As I will show, a common thread in recent literature on material culture is exactly an emphasis on the diversity of ways that peo-ple and things can act on and affect each other. Before presenting Antoine Hennion and Alfred Gell’s theories of mediation and the “material reli-gion” approach to material culture, it will be useful to revisit Bourdieu’s theory of practice, inasmuch as it provides one of the most ambitious at-tempts at theorizing the social world as a whole and because it often consti-tutes a backdrop, if sometimes only as an object of critique, for later theori-zations. It might be noted that Bourdieu’s theory of practice hardly can be considered a theory about material culture, but if we regard “material cul-ture” not as a subset or domain of social life, but as a fundamental condi-tion for its unfolding, then it is clear that there can be no theory of material culture which is not also, at least implicitly, a theory of meaning, of the body, and of culture as such.
As is well-known, Bourdieu’s theory of practice centers on his concept of the habitus. The habitus is an acquired system of dispositions that generates practices that appear, without any conscious intention, to be adapted to the objective conditions of the subject, because the habitus itself is structured by the opportunities, necessities, and impossibilities inherent in these ob-jective conditions (Bourdieu 1990, 52). The habitus, in other words, is pre-adapted to the objective conditions (material necessities, institutions) in which it has been produced because they are both objectifications of his-tory – they are forms of capital “objectified and incorporated” (Bourdieu 1990, 57). While Bourdieu’s theory of practice is indeed not about material culture, it has several strong implications for how we might think of the re-lationship between people and things. Most crucially, it is through a practi-cal engagement with the concrete material arrangements of the physipracti-cal world that the dispositions and schemes of perception that make up the habitus are embodied. Likewise, it is through these material arrangements that the life-style of a group becomes discernible, even if unconsciously.
As Bourdieu argues in the context of French society, the “social relations objectified in familiar objects, in their luxury or poverty, their ‘distinction’ or ‘vulgarity’, their ‘beauty’ or ‘ugliness’, impress themselves through bodi-ly experiences which may be as profoundbodi-ly unconscious as the quiet caress of beige carpets or the thin clamminess of tattered, garish linoleum” (Bourdieu 1984, 77). Finally, for Bourdieu, material culture, such as a work of art or the spatial layout of a house, does not contain any “meaning” like the anthropologist would assume if taking it like a text to be decoded, but is meaningful only because it facilitates one’s doings and sayings in a lived practical relation to the world. Since the symbolic systems and schemes of perception that are embodied as habitus always serve a practical end, they obey an economic and approximate logic (Bourdieu 1990, 86–87).
In The Passion for Music, originally published in French in 1993, Antoine Hennion proposed a “sociology of mediation” which can be read as an argument against the sociological inclination to demystify cultural objects such as art works by showing their force to stem, in the last in-stance, from the collective or social.2 Unsatisfied, as well, with the
aestheti-cism of linear models that take artworks to be inert and unconstituted, Hennion proposes the concept of “mediation” to capture an oscillation be-tween different modes of causality that are the product of a social work by which objects are constantly established and questioned (Hennion 2015, 38). To Hennion the workings of social worlds are thus not given in ad-vance, but rather emerge, like the artwork and the audience themselves, from a world of hybrid constructs (Hennion 2015, 290). Mediation, for Hennion, does not just signify the breath of technical or social “devic-es” – like instruments, musical notation, or even the floorboards of a con-cert hall that make a musical object appear – but rather an ontology in which there ultimately are neither objects nor audiences without an
un-2 Hennion makes the precise observation that in contrast to Durkheim, who saw the attribution of pow-er to objects as a natural confusion of the sign for what it represents, Bourdieu made this misattribu-tion, by which the world becomes naturalized, the center of his theory (Hennion 2015, 33). Webb Keane makes a similar observation with regards to Bourdieu’s theory when, with terms borrowed from Peirce, he describes the social value of competences as stemming from a naturalization process that trans-forms what is merely an index of social position into an icon of “purportedly actual character” (Keane
ceasing process of mediation. In this argument it is not too difficult to see the affinity with the actor-network theory of Latour, or with the new mate-rialism of writers like Haraway and Barad for whom relations are the small-est unit of analysis (Haraway 2003; Barad 2007). Hennion thus emphasizes the fragility of the ongoing making and remaking of objects and audiences in the here-and-now. In this theory explanatory power is not located in the quiet pressures of “objective” material conditions, but in the “coherence” of arguments and mediations brought forward in concrete situations in favor of particular positions (Hennion 2015, 188). As argued by Alex van Ven-rooij, the rejection of exterior social structures is Hennion’s most radical argument, but also the weak point in his theory, since it makes it difficult to construct any convincing explanatory narratives of concrete cultural de-velopments (van Venrooij 2018, 411).
Alfred Gell, in Art and Agency (1998), provided another theory of objects that centers on the concept of mediation, but which, in contrast to Henn-ion, has the advantage of conceptual clarity. Gell begins with a deceptively simple definition of the anthropology of art as the study of “social relations in the vicinity of objects mediating social agency” (Gell 1998, 7). At the base of this definition is the argument that art and art-like objects are things that allow for an “abduction of agency,” meaning that we experience these objects as the outcome or instrument of social agency (Gell 1998, 15). In Gell’s terminology works of art are indexes of agency through which agents act on patients (Gell, like Keane, draws on a Peircean vocabulary). Gell, however, does not provide a general argument about the causal tionality of agency mediated through an index, but rather takes this direc-tionality to be context-dependent – in this regard in line with Hennion. An artist can be an agent with respect to the index, but the index can also be experienced as mediating the agency of the recipient (as in the case of a pa-tron commissioning a work) or the prototype, the person or thing repre-sented in the index. Likewise, the index can be an agent to the recipient (when the spectator is affected by the artwork) but also with respect to the artist or to the prototype (as in the case of image sorcery in which the ma-nipulation of the index affects the entity represented in the index) (Gell 1998, 28). Art, for Gell, is thus not about symbolic communication but about affecting a change in the world: Asmat shields, for instance, are above all devices for inducing fear in opposing warriors (Gell 1998, 6). Gell
grad-ually expands the scope of his analysis and ends with the argument that an artist’s collected works and even cultural traditions can be understood as “distributed objects structurally isomorphous to consciousness as a tempo-ral process” (Gell 1998, 251). Maori houses, Gell argues, are analogous to the oeuvre of an artist, with each work embodying its predecessors and at the same time pointing into the future as an outcome of intentional action directed at anticipated ends (Gell 1998, 256). At this point it is difficult not to notice a strange affinity between Gell’s argument of the isomorphic rela-tionship between the mind and the distributed object (“to enter a house is to enter a mind”) and Bourdieu’s description of the habitus as mirrored in the world of objects (“The habitus is a metaphor of the world of objects”) (Bourdieu 1990, 77; Gell 1998, 253). The principle by which this isomor-phism comes about could, however, hardly be any more different in these theories. For Bourdieu, the habitus and the world of objects are both objec-tifications of history – for Gell, the world of objects is an objectification of agency, part of an extended mind. A Kula operator must possess an “ inter-nal model of the exterinter-nal field,” but this does not allow him to perform “actions objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a con-scious aiming at ends” as Bourdieu puts it, but rather allow him to engage in strategic action and to construct hypothetical scenarios that “anticipate the future with precision” (Bourdieu 1990, 53; Gell 1998, 231). While Gell, like Hennion, takes the attribution of causality as an object of study rather than as a given, it is thus clear that art works, for Gell, in the final instance are devices through which people act on others and on the world.
Several ideas present in Gell and Hennion’s theories of mediation reap-pear in the more recent literature on “material religion” (associated with the journal of the same name) and in the literature on Christianity of the last few decades, in which materiality has emerged as one of several key topics (Robbins 2014, 167). Authors within this material approach to reli-gion begin from the argument that studies in relireli-gion until recently have been heirs to a distinction between things and ideas that has been inherited uncritically from Tylor’s idealism, from Saussure’s structuralism, and from liberal Protestantism itself (Engelke 2011, 211; Keane 2003, 410; Meyer 2012, 10). As argued by Engelke, the very concept of religion has proven to be a “Protestant idealism masquerading as a neutral analytic” (Engelke 2011, 210). Particularly Birgit Meyer and Webb Keane have been productive
in formulating the theoretical apparatus employed within the material reli-gion approach, and together their concepts of sensational form and semiotic ideology provide a framework for studies of the material aspects of religion and, one could argue, of material culture in general. Meyer argues that bod-ily gestures and material artefacts are indispensable as mediators in reli-gious practice, that is as devices for transcending or gesturing towards a re-ality beyond the ordinary, of generating a sense of “presence” (Meyer 2012, 24; 2010, 750). She employs the concept of sensational form to denote these configurations of religious media, sensations, and bodily practices that, au-thorized and authenticated within a tradition, provide a format or proce-dure for mediation (Meyer 2012, 26). The crucial point here is that religious traditions employ distinct sensational forms such as particular prayers or liturgies that tune a participant’s sensorium and define the appropriate means of mediation that allows one to reach the divine (Meyer 2012, 28). Webb Keane shares Meyer’s concern with sensational form (what he calls “representational economies”) and the critique of structuralist lan-guage-based models of signification that separate the sign from the material world. Keane, in other words, is interested in the materiality of signification and turns to the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce for inspiration. Peirce’s distinction between icon, index, and symbol, Keane argues, opens the possi-bility for causality and the effects of material qualities on processes of signi-fication (Keane 2003, 417). Whereas a symbol stands for its objects by way of convention, an icon stands for its object by way of resemblance and an index stands for its object by way of a causal logic (e.g. smoke can be an index of fire) (Keane 2003, 413). In the cases of the index and the icon, in other words, the materiality of the signifier is not trivial, but productive of meaning. To Keane it is particularly the causal material logic of the index that is promis-ing for social analyses of material thpromis-ings, but since it relies on some sort of ad hoc hypothesis (the appearance of smoke is not always the result of fire) it must be understood in the context of a set of assumptions about what signs are, how they function in the world, and how they relate to the kinds of agentive subjects that inhabit it. Such assumptions, that interpret and ra-tionalize sensational forms, are what Keane calls semiotic ideologies (Keane 2003, 419).
Together, Meyer and Keane’s concepts of sensational form and semiotic ideology provide a conceptual framework for ethnographies of material
re-ligion that stress both the historicity of bodily and material practices and the variability of logics of signification and representation at play within different traditions.3 In contrast to Bourdieu’s emphasis on necessity and
on Hennion and Gell’s attention to concrete interaction and human agency, Meyer and Keane essentially attribute explanatory power to the discursive and “sensational” traditions that govern people’s engagement with material culture. Such a theory echoes the arguments presented by several anthro-pologists who have studied the role of material culture in religion through ethnographic fieldwork. In her study of the piety movement in Cairo, Saba Mahmood argued that bodily behavior, like the donning of the veil, was experienced by the women in the mosque movement not simply as an ex-pression of interiority, but as a means of acquiring particular emotions and sensibilities (Mahmood 2005, 145). Further, Mahmood argued that such practices must be seen as a particular modality of agency that is made pos-sible within a specific historical context and which requires bodily capaci-ties that are different to those required in other forms of ethical formation (Mahmood 2005, 188). As she puts it, “very different configurations of per-sonhood can cohabit the same cultural and historical space, with each con-figuration the product of a specific discursive formation” (Mahmood 2005, 120). Charles Hirschkind, in his study of young Egyptian men’s use of cas-sette sermons, arrived at a similar conclusion. For these men, he argued, cassette sermons were a self-reflexively undertaken technology of self-im-provement – but a technology that at once relied on and reproduced par-ticular bodily dispositions and sensory skills constitutive of a religious tra-dition (Hirschkind 2001, 624).4 With Gell it would be possible to describe
3 It should be noted that there is a limit to the relativism implied in this approach, namely the assertation that materiality is inescapable in all religious practices and in acts of representation and signification more generally. Matter is intrinsic to all religions even when the semiotic ideology denies this material-ity and even “commitment to immaterialmaterial-ity has to be expressed through some thing” as Engelke put it
(Moberg 2016, 382; Meyer 2011, 37; Engelke 2011, 223).
4 In making these arguments, both Mahmood and Hirschkind argue against Bourdieu’s theory of prac-tice by suggesting that the role of bodily pracprac-tices (and thus also of material objects like the veil or cas-sette players) in subject formation is at once more self-reflexive and historically contingent than is im-plied in Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus which privileges the unconscious reproduction of bodily
capacities within an ultimately economically defined social structure (Mahmood 2005, 139; Hirschkind 2001, 625).
the veils of the women in Mahmood’s study or the cassette sermons of Hirschkind’s ethnography as indexes acting (as agents) on their recipients (who, momentarily, are patients), but the take-away from the material reli-gion approach is that such attributions of agency are embedded in particu-lar sensational forms and sustained discursively by semiotic ideologies. Meyer and Keane’s framework can also be transposed to studies of mate-rial culture that do not deal explicitly with religion and with the problem of presence. For instance, one could read Victor Buchli’s study of the chang-ing meanchang-ings of the architecture of a socialist houschang-ing block as a concrete example of conflict between different semiotic ideologies. Expressed in contrasting perspectives on hygiene, ornamentation, and the exterioriza-tion of social life, the Lenininst byt-reforms of the 1920s and the politics of the Stalinist era aimed at constructing altogether different sensational forms underlined by conflicting semiotic ideologies (Buchli 1999). Similar-ly, conservation practices, as Siân Jones and Thomas Yarrow have shown, are sites of conflict between different conceptions of authenticity. Whether authenticity is tied up with the concrete materiality of the individual stones of a cathedral or located in the continued tradition of stonemasonry has important consequences for how one approaches the task of conservation (Jones and Yarrow 2013, 23). Such conflicting notions of authenticity, inas-much as they are arguments for what objects are and for how they matter, might also be considered semiotic ideologies.
The Problem Defined
What, then, might we learn from these theoretical perspectives on material culture? As I have argued, they present us with distinctly different causal logics. Bourdieu, in the last instance, attributes an explanatory power to the enduring pressures of economic necessity by which schemes of perception, embodied in the habitus, and the material arrangements of the world come to be objectively adjusted. In contrast, Gell, Hennion, and writers in the material religion approach all propose to regard the attribution of causality as a social process and thus to take it as an object of study. That does not mean that their theories are without analytical directionality. Gell stresses the use of art works as intentional devices for affecting a change in the world, and Meyer and Keane ultimately turn to tradition as an explanatory logic. It would be counterproductive, however, to overstate the differences
of the theories I have outlined above, since they also share several funda-mental arguments. Firstly, they all (at least to some extent) relate questions of meaning and mediation in material culture to the question of subject for-mation. Not only does one’s ability to grasp the “meaning” of an artwork or to be moved by a ritual performance presume a particular set of sensibilities and bodily capacities, such practices also affect a change in, or produce such interior capacities. Secondly, they all share a dissatisfaction with lan-guage-based models of material culture that posit an arbitrary relation be-tween sign and signified and take objects and bodily practices as containers of meaning to be extracted – as “the garb of meaning” as Keane puts it (Keane 2005, 182). These arguments encourage us to take the material prop-erties of things as intrinsic to their social significance and asking, ultimate-ly, not what objects “mean” or “communicate,” but for what ends they are used, how they affect us, and how they facilitate our doings and sayings in the world. What remains disputed, in other words, is whether we can un-derstand these material engagements within a practical logic that is struc-tured by the necessities of embodied and objectified history or whether all sensational forms, even when authorized within a tradition, also are active projects of subject formation or distributed forms of agency. What I would like to suggest, then, is that we might do well by arriving at an understand-ing of material culture that is capable of takunderstand-ing into account the extent to which material culture and its workings can become an intentional project without losing sight of the quiet persuasiveness of objects, what Miller calls the “humility of things” (Miller 2005, 5). With such a conception we can re-gard what Meyer describes as the “minutiae of instrumentally-mediated techniques” in devotional practices as neither inherently intentional and creative, nor the passive outcome of historical processes of authorization and authentication. Consequently, I shall not take causal directionality for given, but ask who and what affects whom in the community of Les Béals. I thus side with Gell who provides us with an invaluable perspective on and vocabulary to speak about relations between people and things and, also, with those authors in the material religion approach that take the delinea-tion of these reladelinea-tions to be an object of study rather than a given fact. I shall ask, then, how, permanent and temporary residents of the commu-nity of Les Béals act on, are affected by, and attribute agency to the material environment in which they live. This entails asking if and how the material
engagements of the community are implicated in their project of moral and spiritual cultivation and how, as a sensational form, these engagements are sustained with reference to a specific Christian tradition and its articulation of the relationship between people and things. Finally, it means asking to what ends the village is constructed and how, as an index, it is taken to act on the community.
Methodological Considerations
When I set out for fieldwork my research was guided, broadly speaking, by the ambition of understanding how residents of the community of Les Béals used and evaluated objects of material culture. While this formulation grad-ually changed as I came to be more interested in what material objects do rather than in questions of aesthetic evaluation, my aim was still to grasp both the practices and verbalized meaning-making of a community within a spatially well-defined context. To this end I conducted three months of fieldwork during which I lived and participated in the life of the community on terms not too different from other temporary residents. This included participating in daily work and prayer and taking on various responsibili-ties necessary to the daily functioning of the community. It also meant spending leisure time and festive occasions with other residents and partici-pating in occasional semi-secret evening gatherings with the younger resi-dents of the community. Although I had come to the community with the primary objective of conducting anthropological fieldwork in order to ob-tain an academic degree, my situation was in some ways also analogous to many of the younger residents of the community, whether students or not. They, as I, came to the community to ask questions about the world and about their position in it, and this common ground came to be reflected in my positionality as a somewhat peculiar yet understandable resident. Apart from my participation in everyday life which – although not always experi-enced as such in the moment – can be described as a form of participant ob-servation, I also conducted semi-structured interviews aimed directly at grasping the experiences, motives, and judgements of residents. I wish here to discuss some of the methodological and epistemological strengths and challenges of these methods.
In the course of my fieldwork I participated in a broad range of activities that were not directly relevant to the scope of my research. I also, however,
employed the method of participant observation in a more strategic sense. Most crucially I made use of what can be called a method of apprentice-ship-like participant observation in which I subjected myself to training in some of the crafts and forms of work regularly undertaken at the commu-nity. This included learning the crafts of bread-baking and dry stone wall construction, and also training in playing guitar for the musical accompa-niment for prayers and Mass. Through this direct engagement I aimed at getting a situated understanding of the ways in which residents of the com-munity acted on their material environment and of how, in these activities, they reflected on the techniques and materials employed. This method has been discussed, for instance, by Downey et al. who argue that the appren-ticeship provides the researcher with a meaningful cultural role, allows one to gain access to emic forms of knowledge, and enables one to under-stand what cultural learning is (Downey, Dalidowicz, and Mason 2015, 184). One ethnographer who has made use of this method is Helle Bundgaard who became an apprentice in an artist’s workshop in her re-search on evaluations of a traditional form of Indian painting. Bundgaard found that it was through the apprenticeship that she learned to distin-guish between paintings deemed of low and high quality (Bundgaard 2012, 51). Another anthropologist that has used the apprentice-style method is Trevor Marchand who obtained detailed knowledge of construction tech-niques and consumer tastes by laboring as a building team member with local masons in Mali (Marchand 2009, 8). In my experience the apprentice-ship-like approach to participant observation not only proved valuable in understanding the concrete ways by which residents of the community en-gaged with their material environment – manual work also proved to be a great occasion for conversations on a diverse range of topics. It has often been argued that there is something inherently contradictory about partic-ipant observation. For instance, Karen O’Reilly has described the notion as an oxymoron with its opposing imperatives of engaged participation and objective observation (O’Reilly 2005, 101; see also Bourdieu 1990, 34). In contrast to this epistemological position, I experienced apprenticeship-like participant observation as an essentially formative practice in which learn-ing was predicated on involvement. This is in line with Tim Ingold’s argu-ment that observation must involve a correspondence – it is to attend to people and things and to learn through practice (Ingold 2014, 388).
An important part of my fieldwork consisted in participating in the devo-tional life of the community, and it was partly through this participation that I came to ask new questions of the relationship between people and things in the context of the community’s project of moral and spiritual cul-tivation. This participation raised some particular methodological prob-lems but also had certain advantages. Raised in Denmark, I am baptized and confirmed in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Denmark and thus possessed a good understanding of Protestant Christianity, despite not be-ing a regular churchgoer. Participatbe-ing in Catholic Mass and the practice of fixed-hour prayer was however a fundamentally new experience for me, and since I did not possess the knowledge, language skills, and bodily capacities to fully comprehend these practices, I can hardly claim to have experienced these prayers as someone who had grown up as a practicing Catholic. On the other hand, this unfamiliarity with the devotional forms of the commu-nity also made me keenly aware of ways in which they departed from my experiences of protestant Church service and lead me to ask new question of the ways in which material objects, music, lighting, and landscape figured in these prayers.
These forms of participant observation did not alone enable me to answer my research question as I wanted to understand why individual residents had come to the community, how they experienced social and devotional life in the community, and how they made sense of the ways in which they acted on and were acted on by their material environment. To this end I conducted thirteen semi-structured interviews with residents of which five were women and eight were men. Among these interviewees six were students or had recently completed their studies, three were priests, and four were retired or had other occupations. Four interviewees were living in the community permanently or long-term and two visited the community for the first time. When conducting interviews, I made use of an inter-view-guide that was adapted for each interview and which went through several iterations as my questions changed and my thinking evolved. Usual topics touched upon in interviews were motivations for coming to the com-munity, experiences of everyday life and devotional practice, and thoughts on the architecture and material culture of the village. To elicit detailed re-sponses from my interlocutors I often invited them to reflect or comment on specific architectural details present in the immediate physical environment
where the interview was conducted. With one interlocutor I conducted a life story interview in which I did little to direct the topic of conversation. An important methodological consideration applying not only to inter-viewing, but to the method of participant observation too, was the limits of my language capabilities. It hardly needs to be demonstrated that adequate language skills are fundamental to anthropological fieldwork, and it should be remembered, as argued by O’Reilly, that the researcher ideally should not only speak the local language, but also be able to understand slang ter-minology and to identify subtle differences in dialect (O’Reilly 2005, 95). Before commencing fieldwork I had taken evening classes to improve my French and had passed a test to CEFR level B2.1. Despite this preparation I cannot say that I had reached the level of language proficiency recom-mended by O’Reilly when I arrived at the community of Les Béals. My lan-guage skills, however, did improve much in the course of fieldwork and in general posed no great obstacle in everyday interaction and in interview situations. Except for two initial interviews that were conducted in English, all of my interviews were conducted in French. I did however experience the limit of my language skills clearly during prayer and Mass and espe-cially in the daily chanting of the psalms of the old testament.
Due to the participatory nature of my fieldwork and the frequent arrival of new temporary residents and visitors to the community, it was not al-ways possible to inform everyone of my research project. When first reach-ing out to the community via a web portal, I had made my research aims clear and obtained consent from representatives of the community. Once arrived at Les Béals I also discussed my project at various occasions with interested residents. In practice it was not always possible to present my re-search project and to ask for consent when introducing myself to individu-als who had just arrived at the community, but it was my impression that everyone with whom I had any considerable interaction quickly learned of my project in one way or the other. When conducting interviews, I made it clear to interviewees that they were free not to answer questions that they did not want to discuss, and that their names would be changed in my the-sis. In order to protect the confidentiality of my interlocutors, I have also used a pseudonym for the name of the village and have avoided references to places and organizations that could identify the community. It should also be noted that I have made use of several photos to illustrate my
ethno-graphic descriptions and to give the reader another view to the material things that are so important to my argument in this thesis. In selecting photos for this purpose, I have likewise avoided images from which resi-dents can readily be identified.
Having introduced the analytical aim, theories, and ethnographic mate-rial that guide this thesis, what remains to be given is a short outline of the structure of the chapters to follow. In the first chapter I present the commu-nity’s project of moral cultivation, and I argue that one aspect of the resi-dents’ engagement with material culture was the ambition to rid objects of their agential capacities as signs. Material things, they held, should not come between people. In the second chapter I zoom in on the chapel, the heart of the devotional life of the community, and discuss the use of mate-rial devices in prayers and masses. I argue that residents of the community actively positioned themselves to be moved by such mediations. Moving from the ora to the labora of the semimonastic life of the community I turn, in the third chapter, to the work by which residents constructed the village and their material environment. I discuss the construction of a stone vault and argue that the residents of Les Béals featured both as pa-tients in relation to the landscape that they inhabited, but also as agents seeking to inscribe it with indexes of their own agency.
Moral Cultivation and the Ethics of Sobriété
To understand how temporary and permanent residents of the community of Les Béals act on and are acted on by their material environment, it is my argument that we must look to the community’s project of moral and spiritual cultivation. This project, which is sustained through daily prayers and manual work, aims at establishing uncluttered and true relationships between people and between people and things. Through the cultivation of such relationships, community members seek to construct or discover their profound identity and attain a state of inner peace (paix intérieure). If one was, in Dumontian fashion, to speak of a “paramount value” of the community of Les Béals, it would without doubt be purity in human rela-tions, but, as I will show, the moral and spiritual cultivation directed at this end also has important implications for the relationship between people and their material environment, including the physical constructions of the village and the landscape at large. This is most evident in the ethics of sobriety (sobriété) in relations between people and things that was under-stood as an ambition to remove everything that could clutter the purity of relations between people. What I present in this chapter is then the argu-ment that residents of Les Béals strove to rid objects for their capacities to function as signs indexing wealth or social status. Because material things like clothing and food could come between people, it was important that they were not constituted as actors. It is thus only, I argue, by understand-ing the community’s project of moral and spiritual cultivation that we can account for the, at first, contradictory fact that material culture was accord-ed much attention and simultaneously deniaccord-ed importance all together: it was, to put it crudely, very important that it was not important. Before I be-gin this discussion, let me give some general context by describing the rhythm of daily life in the community.Work and Prayer
After a few weeks at Les Béals I was used to the daily rhythm of communal life and started to listen out for the sound of the bell that divided each day into familiar segments of prayer, work, and communal meals. At 7:25 the bell rang for the morning prayer and five minutes later everyone was gathered in the chapel. After the morning prayer, breakfast was taken outdoors while the weather still allowed. It consisted, without exception, of bread, butter, vari-ous home-made jams, coffee, and a chocolate powder drink popular with teenagers. A few people were assigned to the job of preparing the breakfast, usually for a week at the time. This involved setting the table, fetching bread from the bakery, and preparing coffee. Milk cartons were warmed by being immersed in a large pot of hot water heated on an open fireplace. At some point breakfast was usually interrupted by Christiane, a woman with a friendly and resolute smile, who tapping a glass, demanded a few minutes of quiet to distribute the daily tasks. Volunteers were needed for cooking, for entertaining the kids if there were any, perhaps for cleaning and chopping firewood, watering specific segments of the gardens, and otherwise for the many projects and garden-jobs that were underway depending on the num-ber of residents.
After breakfast we often set out to collect firewood. We followed one of the many small paths leading out in the surrounding landscape and after a time began passing pieces up the small and steep paths from one person to the next. The following hours everyone was engaged in some kind of manual work. It continued until shortly before one in the afternoon when the bell rang for the midday prayer. Afterwards, lunch was served in the smaller kitchen-communities to which people were assigned. It was mostly vegetable based dishes, often with pasta, and usually pizza or lasagna on days when the large bread stone oven was lit. Meat was only served on Sundays. Lunch al-most always seemed to be much enjoyed, and it was rather the rule than the exception that the cooks were complimented sincerely. In the afternoon peo-ple did what they wanted, though it was often stressed that the village should be kept peaceful in the afternoon hours. In August, this often meant that a large group of teenagers and adults descended to a nearby river to swim and cool off and only came back hours later in time for Mass. Others stayed in the village, read, or took lone walks in the surrounding landscape. I often found time to read and to write fieldnotes. Frequently someone suggested to
have a choir-practice in the late afternoon so that those most fond of singing could learn a few songs and prepare the musical accompaniment for the Mass that was celebrated at half past six. It lasted between an hour and an hour and a half depending on the length of the sermon. People then dis-persed for dinner in the kitchen-communities. It consisted of soup, bread, and cheese. At ten o’clock the church bell rang for the last time, and everyone returned to the chapel for the evening prayer. When we were numerous, the priest often reminded the community that we now entered the “big silence of the night,” and that people should keep conversations for the coming day. Quietly we then left the chapel and with headlamps in hand, sometimes whispering a “goodnight,” dispersed to our own chambers in the dark village.
Morality and Models of Reality
How can we speak of the community and its lifestyle as a project of moral and spiritual cultivation? I have already argued, with reference to the litera-ture on intentional communities, that Les Béals can be understood as a com-munity in which questions of value, identity, and morality are brought up for critical discussion. Having compared this state to what Zigon has described as “moral breakdown,” we can note another part of his argument, namely that people in moral breakdowns use ethics as a tactic in order to return to the workings of habituated moral dispositions (Zigon 2007, 139). In a more positive sense this process could be described as a form of moral or spiritual formation or cultivation. I am thinking here of Mahmood’s study of the Egyptian piety movement in which she argued that the women involved in this movement engaged in prayer and other bodily practices in order to en-dow themselves with pious dispositions. Drawing on Foucault and the Aris-totelian tradition of ethics, she argued that piousness is something that is ac-quired through discipline and practice and which ultimately becomes embodied (Mahmood 2005, 136). In a similar way I suggest that we should speak of Les Béals not as a community of people living in a state marked by constant moral questioning, but rather as a community explicitly and inten-tionally undertaking a project of moral and spiritual cultivation. My em-ployment of the word cultivation points to the fact that residents of the com-munity of Les Béals did not think of the moral and spiritual self as something to be constructed from scratch, but as something already present within the individual.
I have already suggested that this project of moral and spiritual cultiva-tion in more concrete terms might be thought of as an endeavor to establish and maintain uncluttered and pure relations between people and between people and things. In order to find inner peace, residents of Les Béals strive to maintain uncluttered relations to others and to come to terms with what they regard as the just order of the world. In using the word just here I am hinting at its double quality of meaning both good and accurate – it carries with it both an ontological and ethical significance. Spiritual and moral cultivation is not only about how one acts in the world but also about com-ing to know the order of the world. To the residents of Les Béals, moral cul-tivation was an adjustment to the forces of nature, to the almightiness of God, and to the inviolability of human relations.
My claim, then, is that moral and spiritual cultivation also is a question of ontology, or at least that how one thinks of moral being in the world is intrinsically related to how one imagines the world to be constituted. This argument is nothing new and has perhaps been formulated clearest by Clifford Geertz in Religion as a Cultural System. Geertz argued that reli-gious symbols synthesize a people’s ethos and their world view, that is that they provide both a model for reality and a model of reality (Geertz [1966] 2008, 58). Let me present one example of how abstract ontological notions can come to have concrete implications for how one acts in the world. Gell argued that in Polynesian cosmology the world came into existence not as an act of creation, but as an act of differentiation in a continuum of undif-ferentiated matter (Gell [1995] 2008, 268). Since the world was thought of as being constantly in danger of collapsing back into this undifferentiated matter, ritual action was aimed at maintaining the separation of different forms of matter through strategies of what Gell calls “closure” and “multi-plication” (Gell 2008, 270). Tattooing was such a strategy of “closure” by which the body was given integrity by being wrapped, and just like they were necessary for worldly existence, they also had to be removed upon death so that the differentiation of matter could be undone (Gell 2008, 279). In this case we see how moral action in the world might be linked to ab-stract ontological assumptions – tattooing synthesizes an ethos of how one should act in the world with a proposition of how the world is ordered. What I will argue in this chapter, then, is that the community’s project of moral and spiritual cultivation, encapsulated in the ethics of sobriety,
