Habitus and the storied self: Religious faith and practice as a dynamic means of consolidating identities

Abstract

It is increasingly argued that individuals comprise multiple selves, and from this it follows that they manifest many identities. During my research among British Quakers, I found that there is, furthermore, an implicit tendency to articulate these several selves in order to promote, consciously and/or unconsciously, a measure of coherence, of unity, and of harmony. Newcomers to meeting on Sunday mornings came with identities that they presented either overtly or covertly as disjointed or lacking coherence, because of their experience of other faiths or perhaps because of the absence of ‘religion’ in their lives. It is possible that their participation in the Quaker meeting provided a means by which their several identities might be brought into consonance. We might say that the storied selves that individuals plotted separately came increasingly under the rubric of a single, overarching narrative, signified for example in the expression ‘coming home’. Switching metaphors, the Quaker meeting as habitus provided the several scales from which individuals constructed or improvised their own score. Although I would not claim that this is a neat, linear process open to precise analysis and theoretical closure, it does seem suggestive of a dynamism in identity formation prompted by the re‐discovery of religious faith and practice that may be pervasive in late modern societies.