Following Mills, several prominent sociologists have encouraged researchers to analyze actors’ motive talk not as data on the subjective desires that move them to pursue particular ends but as post hoc accounts oriented toward justifying actions already undertaken. Combining insights from hermeneutic theories of the self and pragmatist theories of action, we develop a theoretical position that challenges dichotomous assumptions about whether motive accounts reflect either justifications or motivations for action, instead illustrating how they can migrate from one status to the other over time. We develop this perspective through a comparative analysis of actors’ involvements in two quite different careers of social action—religion and mixed martial arts—documenting both how and when justificatory talk about actors’ motives for initiating a course of action at one point in time became formative of their subjective motivations for sustaining these same courses of action at another.
While previous work has focused largely on discourse, contemporary sociological research has started to examine how the embodied, sensory dimensions of religious practice matter in the construction of religious experience. This paper contributes to this development by drawing sociological attention to the religious cultivation of a particular class of embodied experiences: somatic inversions. Somatic inversions, as we define them, are experiences in which dimensions of human embodiment that usually remain in the tacit background of action and perception are brought to the experiential foreground. We demonstrate how these kinds of practically cultivated experiences of inversion—while not religious in any essential way—enable and encourage attributions of religious significance, making purportedly religious phenomena present to the senses and open to further engagement, exploration, and elaboration. We develop our argument through empirical material from the authors’ respective studies of Eastern Orthodox fasting and Theravada Buddhist meditation practices.
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