Taken in by the numbers game: the globalization of a religious ‘illusio’ and ‘doxa’ in nineteenth-century evangelical missions to India

Abstract

While the Bourdieusian concepts of capital and relational configurations of positions and position‐takings have recently been fruitfully employed to theorize global fields, this paper argues that the concepts of illusio and doxa are especially conducive to analyzing the globalization of a field as an expansion into and transformation of formerly independent national arenas. In deploying the concept of illusio as a (quasi‐libidinous) investment in the game, globalization is here first and foremost framed as a process in which more and more actors in various contexts ‘succumb’ to specific field logics that orient them to transnational structures. By emphasizing the concept of doxa as the taken‐for‐granted fundamentals of a field, the paper furthermore calls attention to the mechanisms that help forge and globalize the tacit presuppositions and shared ontologies on which such logics build. Focusing on a field of global Christian missions that emerged during the nineteenth century, the paper illustrates how its competitive logic of proselytization was introduced into the religious arena of India. It highlights how Western notions of religion gained ground among local traditions and pulled them into a game in which numerical relations of adherents mattered.

Field theory beyond the nation state

“…They attend to the transnational diffusion and reproduction of religious or humanitarian virtues and values (Krause 2014, Dromi 2016, Petzke 2016, to the transnational orientation of professions like journalism (Christin 2016, Hussain 2017 or law (Dezalay and Garth 1996, Vauchez 2008, Vauchez and de Witte 2013, or to supranational relations in societal spheres like economy (Lebaron 2010, Mudge and Vauchez 2016, Maeße 2018) and culture (Casanova 2004, Kuipers 2011, Buchholz 2016. Two empirical foci are of particular importance in post-national field analysis.…”

“…One level of distinction concerns different approaches to geo-spatial scales. A large part of postnational field analyses focuses on the unilateral impact that transnational fields have on national fields, illustrating, for example, how national fields are structured by transnational influences (Hussain 2017), how national policy fields respond to transnational assessments (Stray and Wood 2020), how transnational fields intrude national fields (Petzke 2016), how transnational field effects realign fields and professions that have hitherto been oriented towards the national scale (Schmidt-Wellenburg 2017) and how national fields open up (Kuipers 2011) or even dissolve in the face of transnational influences (Mangez and Hilgers 2012). These studies are complemented by a second body of literature in which relations between transnational and national scales are conceptualized not as unilateral, but as bilateral.…”

“…Contributions to post-national field theory that pursue the first strategy of theorizing rescale theoretical concepts to be adequate to transnational or global phenomena but leave fundamental analytical architecture of said concepts unchanged. Rescaled for transnational or global fields, field theoretical concepts facilitate insights, for example, into the emergence of fields in terms of a differentiation of a social space from existing spaces (Buchholz 2016, Wilson 2016, into struggles, competition, and power relations within transnational fields (Krause 2016, Petzke 2016, into internal struggle or external disruption as sources for change in transnational fields (Go 2008), and into the effects transnational fields exert on different geo-spatial scales (Mudge andVauchez 2016, Stampnitzky 2016). It is telling to review these innovations in light of my previous diagnosis of the conceptual isolationism of post-national field analysis.…”

“There Is an Eye on Us”: International Imitation, Popular Representation, and the Regulation of Homosexuality in Senegal

“… 3. These works include studies of, for example, colonialism and imperialism (Steinmetz 2007, 2008, 2016; Wilson 2016); empire (Go 2008, 2011); global humanitarianism (Dromi 2016; Krause 2014; Petzke 2016); global professionals involved in the transnationalization of economics (Fourcade 2006); the literary field and the global market of translation (Sapiro 2008, 2010); global visual arts field (Buchholz 2016); international humanitarian and criminal law (Hagan and Levi 2005); internationalization of the social sciences (Gingras and Heilbron 2009; Guilhot 2016; Heilbron 2014; Heilbron, Guilhot, and Jeanpierre 2008); trends toward hyperscientization at the EU central bank (Mudge and Vauchez 2016); international security and diplomacy (Brundage 2018; Pouliot 2010, 2016); international market of expertise (Dezalay and Garth 1998, 2011); transnational lawyers who constructed a transnational legal field and international commercial arbitration (Dezalay and Garth 1995, 1996); Western exportation of economic policy and international human rights law (Dezalay and Garth 2010); and democracy promotion and human rights (Guilhot 2005; Savelsberg 2015). …”