This chapter is about doing it.

More specifically, this chapter is about what I, as an interpretive sociologist and ethnographer of religion, have learned from doing some of the things the people I study do – in particular, the practices they perform in, with, and through their bodies. Ultimately, it is an argument for how actively engaging with and performing the embodied practices of those we study can unearth layers of religious meaning that would otherwise remain hidden from view.

Borrowing a term from sociologist Loic Wacquant (2015), who himself adopts the concept from philosophers of embodied cognition and perception (Varela, Thompson and Rosch, 1991; Noe, 2004), I will call this an enactive approach to the ethnography of religion. Put simply, enaction refers to the process of knowing by doing: that is, generating or ‘bringing forth’ knowledge about the world in and through acting within it. As Wacquant, (2015, p. 5) puts it, enactive ethnography implies “immersive fieldwork through which the investigator acts out (elements of) the phenomenon [under study] in order to peel away the layers of its invisible properties and to test its operative mechanisms” (emphasis in the original).

As a methodological lens, I view enactive ethnography as a particularly useful approach for the sociological interpretation of religious practices, particularly their corporeal dimensions. Within the broader field of the sociology of religion, ‘practice’ has become a key term, even vying to supplant concepts such as ‘belief,’ ‘doctrine,’ ‘creeds,’ ‘texts,’ and ‘symbols’ as the central category around which to empirically and theoretically approach religion (see, for example: McGuire, 2008; Riesebrodt, 2010; Smith, 2017; Ammerman, 2020; Wuthnow, 2020 for recent theoretical treatments). Practices, in simple terms, are a culture's socially organized methods of going about things in the world, what the theorist of practice Theodore Schatzki (2002, p. 87) has called “a temporally-evolving, open-ended set of doings and sayings” or, elsewhere, “embodied, materially mediated arrays of human activity centrally organized around shared practical understanding” (Schatzki, 2001, p. 11).