Metamorphoses of Religion and Spirituality in Central and Eastern Europe

Sławomir H. Zaręba, Maria Sroczyńska, Roberto Cipriani, Marcin Choczyński, Wojciech Klimski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000572797
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This book offers a range of contemporary sociological reflections on new manifestations of religion, religiosity, and spirituality in Central and Eastern Europe, a region that has seen significant social and political transformation. It explores the development of cultural and religious trends, including secularisation, new spiritualit, y and a resurgence of religiosity outside of traditional structures. The theoretical and empirical contributions by established and emerging scholars address topics including: the experiences and values of young people, the role and influence of media, the relationship between public and private religion, and the position of state and institutions. The book will be of particular interest to sociologists of religion and others focused on contemporary Central and Eastern European societies.

Part I The metatoretical dimension of social and religious metamorphoses

1 Cultural sociology of religion in the perspective of comparative religion

Andrzej Wójtowicz

DOI: 10.4324/9781003271994-3

Cultural sociology: sources, fields, research directions

At a quick glance, cultural sociology is an area of problematisation and thematisation of questions, methods, and theories that such philosophers as Georg Simmel, Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Raymond Williams, Turner Bryan, Stuart Hall, Daniel Bell, Jean Baudrillard, and Pierre Bourdieu undertook, prepared, and developed in their works. What connects their works is undoubtedly a community of specific sociological research attention in relation to art, literature, aesthetics, and cultural life in general. They wanted to describe and explain them outside their own dictionary of individual traditional sub-disciplines in sociology, asking about their importance for social life as a distinctive entirety. Among them, from the list of active, contemporary, high-profile, and influential sociologists, the first place is occupied by Jeffrey C. Alexander, author of several dozen independent works and in collaboration with others, which – starting from the study The Promise of a Cultural Sociology (1992) (not counting early dissertations since debut in 1977), The Meanings of Social Life: Cultural Sociology (2003), Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics and Ritual (2006), and Contemporary Introduction to Sociology: Culture and Society In Transition (2008), or The Performance of Politics Obama's Victory and the Democratic Struggle for Power (2010) – are a developed implementation of the idea of the Strong Programme in Sociology.

In addition, J.C. Alexander's work, the history, and the results of cultural sociology consist of dozens of studies in anthropology, social epistemology, sociology of art, religion, politics, and an abundant amount of specific sociological research. Among Polish sociologists, Piotr Sztompka both as a co-author, besides Jeffrey C. Alexander, Bernhard Giesen, and Neil Smelser, of Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, published in 2004, and as the author of studies on the issue of changes and transformation of Polish society, is an ardent supporter of this perspective. If it is worth asking about its significance, the concept of the sociological perspective is indeed better than any other category for the methodological and theoretical content of the work, which – in their central interests – is organised by research in the area promoted by the ideas of the Strong Programme. The notion of a Strong Programme found the brightest operationalisation in the field of cultural sociology.

Undoubtedly, from the beginning of sociology, the issues of aesthetics and cultural realities have not appeared as a permanent and self-evident subject or field of research. On the contrary, each time they have been located in the language of social theories in terms of particular and specific problems. While isolation of culture as a subject of research implied the need to distinguish between culture and society, its individual existential separateness was no longer firmly grounded. The lack of clarity as to the categories in which these distinctions were to be shown was intermingled with the multitude of answers to questions about individual forms and methods necessary for their sociological research. This difficulty did not have any local, accidental, or paradigmatic inheritance. In fact, for the general concepts of sociology that dominated in the 20th century, the research achieved its goals if the problems of culture had been taken up. Of course, the basic question was not in what sense and scope the study of social forms and processes revealed cultural and aesthetic phenomena, but rather the opposite, i.e. how critical and philosophical techniques of understanding and interpretation of works of art and aesthetics could be useful in the study of social life. There is a transition from culture as a sociological object to a specifically cultural or aesthetic form of sociological research. If their narrow accounts say that cultural sociology can explain culture through unlimited expansion of the field of its operations without transforming itself, their radicalised implications proclaim something much more eloquent, i.e. that sociology transforms itself according to its subject of study. It contaminates itself by the subject of its research interests and sociological insights with specific perspective of culture. In short, as Steven Connor remarkably notes, sociology as culture emerges from the critique of the old sociology of culture. Belonging to a specifically postmodern form of social organisation, characterised by the aestheticisation of social structures and their experience, is somewhat defined by the unstoppable expansion of culture into the areas of modern economy. This cultural and transformational moment in the history of modernity has changed the connections between social theories and their objects. “Cultured sociology” is, thus, a reliable response to the earlier effects of “cultured” social forms.

It so appears, first, in the attempts to interpret the meanings and experiences of modernity. This was the licensing reason for which the particular cultural works of sociologists included the individual works of Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno. Their analysis of forms of modernity provoked sociology to pose questions regarding the problematisation and thematisation of sociology, for which the culture of modernity established the field of its theoretical and methodological development. Its peculiar sign, as G. Simmel wrote in the Philosophische Kultur in 1911, is that the essence of modernity as such is psychologism, experiencing and interpreting the world in terms of internal life reactions. The task of sociology is not only to explain, but also to express modernity, i.e. to closely tie the intensity and relativity of the experience of modernity. According to this intuition, which was then transformed into a kind of sociological theory, life can be expressed and can realise its freedom only through forms (i.e. dimensions of culture [note: AW]); forms, however, must necessarily choke them and make freedom difficult.

Culture expresses itself in two fundamental ways. First and foremost, it is the form. Social potentials produce and articulate in dozens of ways: through work, structures, techniques, technologies, and traditions to achieve an objective status that crosses the borders and authorities of those who created them. The externalisation of forms also embraces art, religion, law codes, scientific forms, and moral systems. The history of culture and the fact that each culture has its own history absorbs in its motives and transformation factors that dynamise the chronically renewed conflict between the elements of “life” and “form,” between the culture's subjective and objective. And this is the second way to implement it. G. Simmel recognised this conflict as the basic source of changes in culture in all stages of its development. Modernity expressed its special form, advancement, and requirements. Walter Benjamin discovered the phenomenon of mass culture in it, including the inevitable pressure of mass culture, its paradoxes, indelible distortions, blunt and marginal achievements, and decay leading to some new form of integration, as if the material of culture was digested rather by natural elements than by its own actions. Hannah Arendt notes mercilessly that this kind of thinking is guided by the belief that what is alive is decaying over time; however, the process of decomposition is at the same time the process of crystallisation, i.e. that under the mantle of the sea – in a non-historical element, yet absorbing everything that has become historical – new forms and shapes are emerging and crystallising.

The radicalisation of this point of view in Jean Baudrillard's studies reveals the movement of modernity towards a total fusion, an amalgamation of signs, where all categories of goods are treated as a partial field in the universal consumption of signs. It is the source of a total exchange of once distinguished spheres of culture, art, and commerce. Cultural centres are becoming the centres of culture along the lines of retail chains; that is, they offer consumption as a style and content – sterile substances in a continuous consumerism movement. There is a conflict of values focused on the main idea of post-modernity captured in Daniel Bell's works as megalomania of auto-infinity. Equipped with the legacy of modernism in persistent calls for duration without boundaries, the absolutisation of the aesthetic value of desire and boundless self-multiplication, it criticises its lineage, its modernist rule of ordering desires and instincts in art forms. The postmodern element and this legacy turn upside down. In any case, it deprives them of the normative value in the movement of massification of mobility, change, and radicalisation of the hypertrophy of trading when- and wherever possible. There is no difference between art and life. Their promises are identical. This problem, which is themed in detail in Pierre Bourdieu's studies, will glue sociological analysis with economic and anthropological analysis; it will assign new tasks to it, give new concepts, a symbolic field, and a habitus, in particular. For at least one conclusion of cultural sociology, P. Bourdieu's dissertations were of fundamental importance; the painful separation of culture and society condemns them to new forms of integration without old, premodern foundations in the social structure.

The list of sources, fields, and inspirations of contemporary cultural sociology would be incomplete without considering the study of the dependence of culture on the processes of colonisation and post-colonisation. The question arises about the importance of ethnographic studies of different societies carried out to understand their own culture. Indeed, troublesome mutual services among the two types of research practice constitute exceptional evidence. It is more than just a historical case that Edward Burnett Tylor's Primitive Culture, with the famous inclusive definition of culture (i.e. culture is “a complex whole involving knowledge, beliefs, art, morality, law, customs, and other skills and habits of man as a member of society”) that appeared in 1871, 2 years after the study of Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, to defend the narrow, endogenously understood ideal of culture against its commercialisation and political radicalisation. This point of view indicated that any attempt to describe or promote the self-sufficiency of the unity of culture or to define it as a principle of unity must be seen as a defence against the inevitable connection of different cultures and definitions of culture in the colonial and postcolonial world. No one devoted more research or critical attention to this issue than Edward Said. His Orientalism published in 1978 is a comprehensive study of the dependence of forms of knowledge and cultural representations by means of which colonising Western societies studied and understood other cultures, in particular Islamic cultures from the Middle East. This practice, called a cultural construction, is performed according to the requirements of its own culture and the requirements of power, which supports the former. Said's Culture and Imperialism looks even further, recognising the deep links between cultural forms and colonial power on a global scale. Said captures culture as, first of all, a practice of the art of description, communication, and representation, with relative autonomy in relation to economic, social, and political reality; and, second of all, as a concept incorporating sophisticated and highly valued elements that constitute the social repertoire of what is best in knowledge and thought.

Both approaches, although the second one more clearly, treat culture as a source of collective identity, class, religious, ethnic, or national identity. Like Bourdieu, Said refuses to give humanistic illusions to the separateness of culture from everyday life. The point is, therefore, to analyse the links between cultural forms, such as common narratives and intercultural dominance, that they achieved by defining the world for over the last 250 years. Its purpose is not only to unmask or to report on their cooperation with racism and imperialism. It is a much more ambitious task, i.e. to read great canonical texts and to critically study the entire archives of modernity and post-modernity with an attempt to release and authorise voices hitherto suppressed, omitted, and marginalised. This position is made possible by the programme of an alternative cultural history of sociology; the one that directs attention towards the analysis of culture as “other” experience rather than as a commitment to self-understanding. Its aspiration is to unmask the arbitrariness and peculiarities usually taken for granted in the cultural life of the nation. Thus, the elementary education in this tradition would certainly include the reading of Émile Durkheim's Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), Marcel Mauss's Gift (1923), and Documentationes (1930) – the work written by Georges Bataille and a group of co-authors, or the completely free dissertations of the Collège de Sociologie, which Bataille established in 1937. The contemporary outgrowth of this initiative was British Mass Observation, a movement linking journalistic, filmographic, and anthropological initiatives with the task focused on a special kind of anthropology in the life of Britons. According to a certain approach, Mass Observation was a technique for recording the subliminal desires and meanings of the collective mind of the nation by means of analysing images systematically found in everyday surroundings, i.e. in commercials, popular music, cinema, and everyday press themes.

A theme that is countably dominant in modern social theory and the promoted analysis is a kind of fundamental disagreement or incongruity of culture and society since the modern times. This problem is different for the sociology of culture and different for cultural sociology. The cultural and the social intersect and intertwine, sometimes in subtle forms, unpredictable by the sociology of culture. This process is usually unavailable for observations of the sociology of culture. Since then, more than ever, the desire to cover some general or universal principle of culture, its nature, or the conditions of possibility has been an illusion. Cultural sociology gives up the illusion of explaining the role of culture in society and reserves the field of perceiving the future of its objects in the perspective of de...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Transmutation of spiritual and religious mentality: introduction
• PART I: The metatoretical dimension of social and religious metamorphoses
• PART II: Transformations of religiosity and spirituality in a society at risk – an attempt at diagnosis
• Index