Introduction

In the contemporary world, despite the increasing predominance of secularism and modernity, the resurgence of religion, particularly in the public sphere, calls for further scrutiny. This serves as a counterparadigm, one that challenges the Cartesian and Kantian simplifying belief that, in modern society, the mind is the principal factor in the Enlightenment's awakening; that religion (which is regarded by some ‘modern’ people as irrational and emotional) is seen as something obsolete (see, e.g., Asad 1993; Mahmood 2005). In fact, nowadays ‘religion’ is richer than this logical-illogical determinism suggests, since it involves myriads of experiences and complexities of human life, ranging from the individual to the communal, from the cultural to the economic, from the social to the political. As such, religion and its aspects still attract critical analyses in the field of academe.

As the most developed academic fields concerned with the roles of religion and society, anthropology and sociology begin the process of scrutinising the interesting phenomenon of mind-body unification, which creates ‘piety’. My understanding of the term piety follows Mahmood (2001a: 226), who states: ‘piety here refers to more than one’s practical (and thus ‘secular’) conduct, than to inward spiritual states the term connotes in the English Puritan tradition’. In other words, piety does not stem from ‘morality’. Rather, it is the result of outward behaviour; in Foucauldian terms it is the ‘technology of the self’, which requires the discipline of ‘certain modes of training and modification of each individual, not only in the obvious sense of acquiring certain skills but also in the sense of gaining certain attitudes’ (Foucault 1997: 225). Turner (2008b: 43) clarifies that ‘piety involves above all a set of bodily practices for defining social relations that involve some degree of intimacy’.

Taking this as a starting point, over the last decades, many prominent anthropologists and sociologists have paid attention to the significant nexus between social actors, structures, embodied religious demeanour and the cultivation of virtuous selfhood (Mahmood 2005; Asad 1993; Winchester 2008; Hirschkind 2006).