Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them

"Again, this book comes out of conversations between anthropologists, sociologists, and historians. This author took to heart a turn that took place in anthropology in the 70s and 80s—this moment of reflection on the whole discipline and its epistemological underpinnings. What is knowledge in anthropology? How do we know what a fact is? There was deep concern, influenced by postmodernism and post-structuralism, especially amongst the cultural anthropologists in America, that the conditions and the circumstances in which the ethnographer, the observer, is doing the observing imposes, intervenes with, and has a kind of Othering or orientalising, contaminating effect on the subject matter. Robert Orsi has taken this on board and applied its lessons to a particular subject of ethnographic study. He is both observer of and participant in mid-20th century American Catholicism. He introduces the idea of ‘lived religion.’ Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . It’s a turn away from a set of assumptions that are based on structuralism, that the way to do the history of the church or of religious communities is to look at the institutions, and look at their texts, their authorities, and see how far the laity conform or not to the demands of the institutional church. There’s a confessional element to that too, are you critical or being an advocate for it? There’s a complicity. If you’re then becoming a spokesperson for a church—a church thought of both as an institution, of priests, but also in the wider sense of community of people—you’re, in some way, speaking on all of their collective behalves to an audience beyond that. Orsi breaks all of those barriers down and shows how the church is a multifarious, many-faceted intellectual but also emotional, socially mixed world with opportunities for different kinds of agencies and roles, different kinds of expertise to be developed, different kinds of imaginative initiatives to be pursued, risks to be taken. In that way, it’s a fascinatingly nuanced cross-sectional study of North American Catholicism. Some of his findings are quite startling and I think he might have upset a few people amongst his own community because of that. This world that he’s documenting is the world between heaven and earth and it’s occupied by saints and relics and devotional objects and spaces and rituals and also by people, real people who are trying to negotiate their lives, who are trying to make sense of that world. Children feature quite heavily. It’s quite disturbing, his chapter on children, because he talks about how in the Catholic community’s efforts to reproduce itself through the generations, children are seen as these very malleable and culturally loaded vehicles. He talks about all the different ways that children are introduced to, disciplined with, given roles (altar boys, girls being dressed up as the Virgin Mary) in, the annual cycles of seasonal rituals and festivals. And how their bodies are being disciplined. In many ways, the experience of a Catholic child in America is one of being worked upon and co-opted into this adult fantasy—largely male, because it’s often the priests pulling the strings, but also nuns because they’re very important educationally—of what a Catholic church should be. He almost says that it sometimes crosses over into abuse. Not sexual abuse—that’s a separate issue which he doesn’t raise—but psychological abuse or sociological coercion. The same applies to the disabled—what he says the community describes as being ‘shut-ins’ and ‘cripples’. His uncle Sal features as a kind of emblematic figure. There’s an incredibly heavy burden placed upon the disabled in these communities to do with the fundamental question of how you make sense of evil—the question of theodicy. How come, even when you do the right things, evil or undesirable or ill-fortuned consequences occur anyway? How do we explain the presence of evil in the world? He talks about the ways communities imagine the afflictions disabled people have as being in some way symptomatic of hidden sin or perhaps even evil within the community. How did the disabled get enlisted in the processing of anxieties about communal evil? Communities saw them as either scapegoat figures or else in roles akin to that of the saints, their logic being, ‘God has afflicted you because of his overwhelming love. He has given you a special role. Your life is going to be one of misery and pain and that means that you are specially blessed by him. He has given you a particular wonderful opportunity to imitate the suffering of the saints’—and so on and so forth. And this is the last thing that disabled people need. As well as dealing with the practicalities of their physical challenges, they are also lumbered with these cultural expectations. Saints dip in and out of what I think, for him, is what you might call a thick description of a traditional faith community entangled in that complicated phenomenon known as modernity. But when the saints do feature, they feature quite prominently because they’re important parts of this material, sacred world that’s being invented, constructed, and negotiated through these different communities imagining what Catholicism is about. Mary gets her own chapter as well. The saints are important props and hinge-figures and mediators between the subject of his book, which is heaven and earth."