‘Standing Upright Before the Heavens’: Metamorphoses of Customary Christianity

Abstract

In what sense can we call western European societies ‘Christian’ when for two centuries, at admittedly very uneven rates and with more or less violent conflicts, a general process of secularization has been moving their citizens away from confessional allegiance or non-allegiance, institutionalizing pluralism of religious or philosophical ‘opinions’ and defining legitimate forms for their expression in the public space? By emphasizing the cultural dimension of Christianity rather than its aspect as a dogmatic institution divided into rival confessions and churches, structuralist anthropology revealed the prominence, within local rural or urban societies, of symbolic logics in which it was possible to identify the working of a thinking and mode of transmission - a ‘Christian custom’ - adapted to the changes in the hierarchical relations between clerical competences and civil society. Creating and ordering the world, constructing the person and imagining a destiny after death, mobilizing a number of supernatural mediators in an economy of incarnation and redemption: all these subjects of dogmatic pronouncement and theological speculation are being tested, not only in the teaching, rites and acts of devotion prescribed or tolerated by the church but equally through naturalist or technical knowledge and social practices which are a priori alien to the domain of ‘religion’. In the same way practices ensuring regular exchanges between living and dead as social beings are not restricted to funeral customs and their political ramifications. Narrative traditions and votive practices that are part of the homage paid to patron saints, bonds of spiritual kinship, dream experiences and games of chance: ethnographic exploration of these heterogeneous areas of social life has become necessary in order to restore the coherence, not so much of a salvation religion as of a system of reciprocal obligations that gives substance, in its own way, to the doctrinal inventions of Christian eschatology.