Work, Performance, and the Social Ethic of Global Capitalism: Understanding Religious Practice in Contemporary India

Abstract

This ethnographic essay focuses on the relationship between religious performances and the "strong discourse" of contemporary global capitalism. It explores the subjective meaning and social significance of religious practice in the context of a rapidly expanding mass religious phenomenon in India. The narrative draws on Weber's insights on the intersections between religion and economy, phenomenological theory, performance studies, and Indian philosophy and popular culture. It shows that religion here is primarily a means of performing to and preparing for an informal economy. It gives the chance to live meaningful social lives while challenging the inequities and symbolic violence of an imposing global capitalist social ethic. Unlike exclusive formal institutions that are increasingly governed by neoliberal rationalities, the religious event provides an open and freely accessible yet challenging stage for participants to practice and prove their resolve, gifts, and sincerity. In contrast to the focus on social anomie and the reactionary characterization of contemporary religion in identity-based arguments, this essay demonstrates that religious practice here is simultaneously a way of performing to and performing against a totalizing capitalist social order.

Humanitarian Crisis as Everyday Life

“…Ethnographers have long stood witness as people created everyday life. We have studied people as they enliven or avoid politics (Eliasoph ; Kerkvliet ), create middle‐class life (Liechty ), perform capitalism (Singh ; Zelizer ), enact morality (Brown ), become American (de Casanova ), or experience music (Benzecry ). These studies of everyday life document shared moral orders—systems in which “individuals or social groups understand which behaviors are better than others, which goals are the most worthy, and what people should believe, feel, and do” (Hitlin and Vaisey :55).…”

Religious practice and the phenomenology of everyday violence in contemporary India

“…And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious. ' Economic marginalization goes hand-in-hand with discursive or symbolic domination, not only expressly by a statist order, or a global network of neoliberal structures, but also through the normative insinuations of academic representations exhibiting the certitude of objective knowledge, and often functioning in the guise of apparently 'progressive' and 'universal' standards and historical goals (see, e.g., Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1999;Singh, 2011Singh, , 2013.The complex, historicized reading of macro-economic structures and policies in the everyday labors, traumas, and performances of the marginalized masses, in the phenomenology of confined life courses and dead-end futures, is a novel and crucial sociological contribution of contemporary urban ethnography (see also Gaines, 1998). However, given the rather hermetic character of academic fields and sub-fields, few of these critical scholarly discourses and empirical choices of urban ethnography have been able to percolate into literature in the sociology of religion.…”

Beyond religious fundamentalisms: An analysis of resistance in the Kanwar pilgrimage in India

“…The majority of these participants are young adult or adolescent males from poor or lower middle-class backgrounds. Growing from a few thousand participants less than three decades ago, the Kanwar now attracts more than 10 million people every year (see Singh, 2013a).…”

“…I have shown elsewhere that these practices are simultaneously a way of performing to and performing against a totalizing capitalist social order (Singh, 2013a, b). The practices reflect embodied anticipation, mastering and opposition to oppressive and humiliating conditions in a highly hierarchical and impoverished social context, which is increasingly characterized by normative ego-centric social relations mediated by a neo-liberal ethos, and in terms that are simultaneously economic, cultural, moral and sexual (Singh, 2011(Singh, , 2013a. Although in these essays I have focused on other themes, here I draw on the psychoanalytic and phenomenological traditions to illustrate how the analytic of 'resistance' is vital to assess properly the significance of a contemporary phenomenon such as the Kanwar.…”