The social sciences of religion could be transformed by taking seriously the fact that humans are embodied. A new conceptualization of a mindful body has the potential to lead to profound shifts in how we view our subjects and their worlds. Our research strategies need to take into account that believers (and nonbelievers) are not merely disembodied soul, but that they experience a material world in and through their bodies. Greater awareness of the social and political uses of human bodies should guide our research and theory.

Now that is a key question for us: What if people - the subjects of our research and theorizing - had material bodies? Present social science conceptions of our subjects are peculiarly disembodied. Whether we are analyzing individual believers or religious organizations or religious ideas, the relationship of humans to their own bodies and to the bodies of others is remote or altogether absent from most of our work.

How might our under­standing of religion be different if we proceeded as though the people involved had bodies?

This brief sketch of some connections between religion and the body is meant to make the body matter in two senses of the word. First, the body should be an important com­ponent of our consideration of the social aspects of religion. Bodies are important; they matter to the persons who inhabit them, and religions speak to many of these body-oriented human concerns. Part of the reason our bodies matter to us is that we strongly identify our very selves with our bodies. We experience things done to our bodies as done to our selves.

Our agency as active personae in society is accomplished through our bodies. Merleau­Ponty (1962:37) has reminded us, "Consciousness is in the first place not a matter of 'I think that' but of 'I can'." Thus, loss of that agency (for example, through disability, enslavement, or repression) is experienced as a fundamental assault upon our selves. Because of this intimate linkage, attention to how people's bodies matter to them can give social scientists valuable clues to the nature of the connection between individual and society.

Bodies are matter. The material reality of our bodies is part of the grounding of human experience in reality: The "lived" body is our vehicle for perceiving and inter­preting our world. As a material reality, human bodies also vividly experience the material conditions of social existence. Society inscribes itself upon the concrete bodies of its members. For example, it is not abstract lungs that are filled with fluid after years of working in a textile factory; nor is it merely an idea of a famine-stricken child who dies of malnutrition and dehydration.

Because bodies are matter in this second sense of the word, they are linked with other material realities. Let us remind ourselves that real bodies conceive, bear, and nurse children. Real bodies suffer an illness, pain, chronic disabilities, and death. Real bodies experience hunger and cold. Real bodies also experience pleasure - aesthetic pleasures, sexual pleasures, and sensuous pleasures, such as the embrace of a friend, a view of a breathtaking sunset, the sound of a lullaby, a gentle caress, the aroma of fresh bread. Real bodies labor and are shaped by their work, whether by the constraints of the mine shaft or the video display terminal, whether by toxic chemicals or the stressful workplace. In addition (and this is also relevant to an understanding of religion in the world today), let us remember that real bodies are victims of abuse, torture, and war. As social scien­tists of religion, we could greatly expand the depth of our understanding of society if we were to "re-materialize" the human body.

Our discipline has been impoverished by the fact that it has been so heavily influenced by an epistemological tradition, itself a cultural and historical construction, in which things of the spirit have been radically split from material things, and in which mind is considered separate from the body.
We have neatly divided our subdisciplines along the lines of this dualism: The "mind I spirit" part goes to the social scientists and religious studies scholars, while the "body" part (translated by some as "really real") goes to the biologists and medical scientists.

It is counterproductive for us, individually and professionally, to con­tinue to accept uncritically the assumptions of this mind I body dualism. Rather, let us assume that the human body is both a biological and a cultural product, simultaneously physical and symbolic, existing always in a specific social and environmental context in which the body is both active agents and yet shaped by each social moment and its history. To remind us of this unitary quality, Schepper-Hughes and Lock (1987) have referred to it as the "mindful body." We must reconceptualize mind, body, soul and society, not as merely connected, but indeed as deeply interpenetrating, meshed as a near­unitary phenomenon.

This essay is but a brief sketch of some suggested directions for how the social sciences of religion might come to a better appreciation of this mindful body. These suggestions are here organized along with three broad themes:

  1. the body's importance in self-experience and self's experience of others; 
  2. the body's role in the production and reflection of social meanings; 
  3. the body's significance as the subject and object of power relations. 

These three themes draw from various theoretical approaches, with diverse epistemological assumptions, but collectively they suggest both the importance of considering the mind­ful body and some possible directions for future inquiry.
This preliminary agenda indicates aspects of special importance for the scientific study of religion, for we are already keenly interested in religion's relationship to individual selves, to socio-cultural meanings, and to the theme of power.