Liminal practice: Pierre Bourdieu,madness,and religion

Abstract

This article uses conceptions of liminality as found in the works of French social theorist and philosopher Georges Bataille and anthropologist Victor Turner to resolve limitations in Pierre Bourdieu’s functionalism. The concept of ‘liminal’ religious fields (e.g., charismatic effervescence) helps to account for the affective, irrational, heterogeneous, and/or sacred aspects of social life, while maintaining the explanatory power of Bourdieu’s theoretical framework. In particular, this critical revision to Bourdieu allows a better understanding of religious events that obscure the lines between religious practice and madness, such as the Toronto Blessing.

Introduction

In his article ‘Rites of Institution’ Pierre Bourdieu (1992) reviews Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner’s analysis of the ritual process. He states that van Gennep and Turner offer little more than a ‘more explicit and more systematic description of the phases of ritual’ (Bourdieu, 1992: 117, emphasis in original). Bourdieu (1992) continues to investigate the ‘social function’ of ritual; how ritual consecrates capital and legitimizes difference. In this discussion, however, he omits the very ‘phases’ that he suggests van Gennep and Turner describe so well. In particular, he avoids mentioning liminality – a stark and seemingly purposeful omission on Bourdieu’s part and one that pervades much of his work.

In this article, I confront the limitations of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s (1930–2002) functionalism through the concept of liminality as found in the works of French social theorist and philosopher Georges Bataille and anthropologist Victor Turner. In doing so, I develop the concept of ‘liminal’ religious fields. This concept helps to account for the affective, irrational, heterogeneous, and/or sacred aspects of social life, while maintaining key elements of Bourdieu’s theoretical framework and its explanatory power (see Turner, 2011: 241).

In particular, this critical revision of Bourdieu – which follows such examples of critical theoretical revision as Louis Althusser’s revision of Marx (Althusser, 1970; Althusser and Balibar, 1968) and Frank Pearce’s (2001) revision of Durkheim – allows one to account for certain religious events that obscure the lines between religious practice and madness, for which current Bourdieusian models are inadequate. ¹ To this end, I conduct a ‘symptomatic’ reading of Bourdieu (Althusser and Balibar, 1968: 28; Pearce, 2001: 5). I analyze Bourdieu with an ‘informed gaze’ from the new terrain that has followed his work (Althusser and Balibar, 1968: 27–28). Significantly, a revised Bourdieusian approach enables one to better analyze and explain the boundaries and intersections that exist between religious and liminal fields. This article aims to build a sociology of religion where individuals are motivated primarily by experiences of charisma and effervescence in addition to (and sometimes in spite of) a rational quest for social advancement as characterized by Bourdieu.

Bourdieu basics

Key concepts: field, habitus, capital, and symbolic violence

Bourdieu’s theoretical framework rests on the concepts: field, habitus, capital, and symbolic violence. I use Bourdieu’s definitions as follows. First, social space is multidimensional, composed of any number of fields, which intersect and overlap in different ways and in different spaces. A field ‘contains people who dominate and others who are dominated. Constant, permanent relationships of inequality operate inside this space, which at the same time becomes a space in which the various actors struggle for the transformation or preservation of the field’ (Bourdieu, 1996: 40). For every form of capital, a related field exists where agents and institutions jockey for position and the accumulation, consumption, and/or production of it (Rey, 2007: 45).

Second, habitus provides agents with the knowledge and the tools to participate in this struggle for capital – providing individuals with a ‘feel for the game’ (Bourdieu, 1998: 25). Habitus is a matrix of perceptions and bodily comportments that predispose an agent to act in a certain fashion (Rey, 2004: 335). The habitus positions agents within a field, which provides the agent with a certain amount of capital relative to that position (Bourdieu, 1998: 8). Habitus then enables the researcher to navigate any number of analytically treacherous dichotomies: ‘Habitus is the link not only between past, present and future, but also between the social and the individual, the objective and subjective, and structure and agency’ (Maton, 2008: 53).

Bourdieu understood capital as accumulated labor that enables social agents to ‘appropriate social energy in the form of reified or living labor’. Capital, for Bourdieu, gives the social world ‘inertia’ and changes this world from being a simple game of chance to one altered by ‘accumulation’ and ‘hereditary’ and ‘acquired properties’ (Bourdieu, 1986). Bourdieu divides capital into three ‘fundamental guises’ from which all forms of capital take their form. Economic capital is capital in the Marxist sense. People with more control over the means of production have greater amounts of economic capital (Bourdieu, 1986; Marx, 1965). Cultural capital exists in the form of tastes, values, education, and credentials of all sorts. It is about the ability of an agent to correctly understand and utilize the criteria for evaluating cultural productions (Bourdieu, 1986). Individuals derive social capital from their personal, intimate, and informal networks and bonds with others (Bourdieu, 1986; Putnam, 2000: 20; Wuthnow, 2000). Therefore, cultural capital involves what one knows, while social capital depends on whom one knows.

In addition, Bourdieu suggests that capital can take both material and symbolic forms (Bourdieu, 1977; 1986). For Bourdieu, ‘Symbolic capital, that is to say, capital – in whatever form – insofar as it is represented, i.e., apprehended symbolically, in a relationship of knowledge or, more precisely, of misrecognition and recognition, presupposes the intervention of the habitus, as a socially constituted cognitive capacity’ (Bourdieu, 1986). Symbolic capital consists of symbolic goods, such as ‘honor and prestige’ (Bourdieu, 1977: 179). Nonetheless, he suggests that symbolic capital exists as a ‘transformed’ or ‘disguised’ form of ‘physical economic capital’ because it ‘conceals’ its connection to the material (Bourdieu, 1977: 183).

Fields and the rules that govern them develop in society to reproduce existing social relations. This reproduction is completed through the ‘double and obscure relation’ between one’s habitus and the various fields that structure it; the field structures the habitus and the habitus renders the field meaningful (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 127). Bourdieu ties the formation of an agent’s habitus intricately to their objective material existence; an agent’s habitus is an inevitably ‘class-ed habitus’ and, therefore, anchored by economic capital (Bourdieu, 1990: 58–59; Rey, 2007: 50). Thus, those who exist at a similar position within a field commonly share similar habits and tastes – a similar habitus (Rey, 2007: 50). Moreover, because the field structures one’s habitus, it obliquely reproduces the domination of elite classes.

This reproduction centers on the practice of symbolic violence. Bourdieu describes this concept as ‘a gentle violence, imperceptible and invisible even to its victims, exerted for the most part through the purely symbolic channels of communication and cognition (more precisely, misrecognition), recognition, or even feeling’ (Bourdieu, 2001: 1–2). Symbolic violence leads dominated persons to ‘misrecognize’ various social hierarchies as something natural (Rey, 2007: 54).

Bourdieu’s sociology of religion

Bourdieu develops much of his sociology of religion from Max Weber’s concept of charisma. ² Weber designates charisma as ‘a certain quality of a[n] individual personality by virtue of which he is considered extraordinary and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities’ (Weber, 1978[1922]: 241). Charisma is limited to individuals with specific ‘gifts of grace’ that cause others to surrender affectually to the charismatic individuals’ ‘magical capabilities, prophesies or heroism, spiritual power and oratorical powers’ (Weber, 2004: 138–139). While Weber’s understanding of charisma is highly individualistic, he does hint that some of the onus for the development of charismatic authority lies on those who follow the charismatic person (Weber, 2004[1922]: 141).

Bourdieu argued that Weber’s charisma concept ‘must be understood in relational terms’ (Engler, 2003: 446) – as a form of symbolic capital (Bourdieu, 1977). For Bourdieu, charisma is a social-historical force that produces change within the religious field, which is often represented by a single individual – a prophet. Through this relation, Bourdieu conceptualized religions as having two primary forces: the ‘priest’ and the ‘prophet’ (Bourdieu, 1987a, 1991). The priest represents the forces of orthodoxy that vie for control of ‘religious capital’ against the prophet and the forces of heterodoxy. For Bourdieu, Weber’s concept of the ‘routinization of charismatic authority’ represents the ‘consolidation of control over religious capital, as prophet becomes priest’ (Bourdieu, 1987a: 130). Bourdieu emphasizes that a charismatic prophet’s heresy gains followers in part from specific material conditions:

To do away once and for all with the representation of charisma as a property attached to the nature of a single individual, in each particular case one must again determine the sociologically pertinent characteristics that allow an individual to find himself socially predisposed to test and express, with particular force and coherence, ethical or political arrangements already present implicitly among all members of the class or group of its recipients (Bourdieu, 1991: 35, emphasis in original).

In other words, the prophecy exists amongst the laity before it leaves the mouth of the prophet. Bourdieu speaks of a ‘prophetic function’, describing heresy as a means of reproducing the religious field (Bourdieu, 1977: 170–171; 1991: 36).

Bourdieu theorizes religion’s role in the reproduction of classed social difference: ‘religion is predisposed to assume an ideological function, a practical and political function, an absolution of the relative and legitimation of the relative’ (Bourdieu, 1991: 14, emphasis in original). The religious field structures an agent’s habitus to the extent that it legitimates that person’s position in the religious and other fields. Moreover, an agent’s habitus renders the religious field meaningful. A person’s habitus is tied intricately to their material existence, which provides their initial location within the religious field.

If we understand charisma as a ‘social relation’ (Engler, 2003: 446; Pearce, 2001: 38), then charisma is a form of capital in certain fields. As I have explained, Bourdieu explained the prophet’s charisma as a form of symbolic religious capital (Bourdieu, 1987a, 1991). Religious capital, however useful in some analytical situations, is vulnerable to numerous theoretical criticisms, many of which penetrate the entirety of Bourdieu’s work. In other words, it is overly rationalistic and even functionalist at times. As religious studies scholar Manuel A Vásquez suggests (borrowing from Robert Orsi), Bourdieu’s theory of religious change overlooks ‘“everyday miracles”: how “religious ideas and impulses are of the moment, invented, taken, borrowed, and improvised at the intersections of life”’ (Vásquez, 2011: 247).

The limitations of Bourdieu’s functionalism

While Bourdieu’s theoretical work has significant analytical and explanatory power, it is problematic in several ways. Most notably, Bourdieu’s theory is limited to a world based on scarcity and necessity – stuck in what Bataille (1991: 25–26) called the ‘restricted economy’. In short, Bourdieu’s work is overly deterministic, and therefore ignores the affective and irrational aspects of social life. This shortcoming is observable at the intersection between religion and madness.

Jacques Rancière emphasizes that Bourdieu neglects a means to escape the cycle of ‘recognition’ and ‘misrecognition’. Therefore, he suggests that Bourdieu assumed ‘inequality’ in his work without space for forming a positive politics (Rancière and Roffe, 2006). Some authors describe aspects of Bourdieu’s theoretical work as overly institutional (Turner, 2011), and even structural-functionalist (Jenkins, 1992: 81, 109; Mouzelis, 1995: 100–126, 2007). Sociologist Richard Jenkins (1992: 81) suggests that Bourdieu’s theoretical perspective

bears more than a passing resemblance to structural functionalism, and not least the structural functionalism of Talcott Parsons: social stability is the product of the internalisation of shared values, beliefs and norms. In this model of the social world, the functions of action are read off from its consequences. The comparison is a crude one and does neither Bourdieu nor Parsons any favours; provided this is recognised, however, the comparison – limited as it is – is apt.

At times, Bourdieu certainly displays a sort of critical structural functionalism (critical only because of his concept of symbolic violence and astute attention to structural inequalities as a sociological problematic). Bourdieu presents a world in which capital is inexplicably produced and reproduced within fields and through one’s habitus, which continues to produce and reproduce social inequality in an almost mechanistic way (Bourdieu, 1986; 1998: 6–7; Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 139–140). Thus, while the practice that results from one’s habitus may lack predictability or rationality (which is why Bourdieu is not a rational choice theorist), it is determined – even predetermined – by an agent’s habitus. In Bourdieu’s world, individuals and institutions cannot escape their historical trajectories.

That said, Bourdieu uses religious terminology throughout his theoretical works, including ‘“orthodoxy”, “heresy”, “sacred”, “consecration”, “priest”, “prophet”, “sorcerer”, “heresiarch”, “dogma”, “doctrine”, “transubstantiation”, “sacraments”, “veneration”, and “theodicy”’ (Rey, 2007: 8). Bourdieu (1986, 1992, 1998: 54) uses the term ‘transubstantiation’ to explain how capital changed from material to immaterial forms and ‘consecration’ to describe the means through which institutions endow other institutions and individuals with various forms of capital. These formulations provide resources for re-theorizing the impasses of Bourdieu’s rationalism and functionalism. Many of the above terms imply a ritual process, which involves liminality – a concept that pushes the limits of Bourdieu’s theoretical underpinnings. In particular, Bourdieu used the terms ‘consecration’ and ‘transubstantiation’ to describe the means through which capital is reproduced within and transferred between fields (Bourdieu, 1986; Engler, 2003). His use of these terms almost directly implies a ritual element to the production and reproduction of various kinds of capital (see Bourdieu, 1992).

Moreover, Bourdieu’s concept of religious capital is hardly religious. Sociologist Emile Durkheim defines religion as ‘a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden – beliefs and practices which unite[,] into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them’ (Durkheim, 1995: 44, emphasis added). Bourdieu’s religious field overlooks any version of the sacred. Instead, it transforms those spaces, symbols, places, or things that a community could deem sacred into capital. All creative and productive aspects of the sacred are lost through this overly functionalist theoretical system. Therefore, religious capital neglects much of the liminality that his terminology often implies.

Historian Bradford Verter (2003: 158) attempts to resolve this problem by introducing a concept he calls ‘spiritual capital’, which he uses to negotiate the overly institutionalized nature of religious capital:

[I]f religious capital is conceived à la Bourdieu as something that is produced and accumulated within a hierocratic institutional framework, spiritual capital may be regarded as a more widely diffused commodity, governed by more complex patterns of production, distribution, exchange, and consumption.

In short, this revision amounts to a sort of solution by diffusion. Verter fails to account for the same parts of religious practice that Bourdieu does and provides little more than a more pliable version of Bourdieu’s religious capital.

Therefore, a more direct approach is required to develop a version of Bourdieu’s sociology of religion that accounts for the creative and collective aspects of religious life. Following Bourdieu’s own allusions to ritual processes in the development and exchange of capital, I use the concept of liminality to revise Bourdieu’s work.

A liminal turn: conceptualizing liminality

Turner (1969: 94) worked extensively to refine the concept of liminality, which he borrowed from Van Gennep’s analysis of ‘rites of passage’. Van Gennep (1960: 11) argues that rites of passage include three phases: preliminal rites, liminal rites, and postliminal rites. The first of these phases symbolizes an individual’s or group’s detachment from everyday social structures. The second phase, the liminal, is a transition phase in which the initiates undergo rituals and rites intended to transform them. Finally, the last phase consummates the changes made during the liminal phase as the ‘ritual subject’ returns to everyday life (Turner, 1969: 94–95).

Liminality implies a sacredness – a time/space/place set apart and/or forbidden, to paraphrase Durkheim (1995[1912]: 44). Liminality can include a period of ‘effervescence’, in which participants make new symbols meaningful (Durkheim, 1995: 218). Turner describes how liminal periods tend to form liminal communities, called ‘communitus’, which often exist long after the group leaves the liminal phase (Turner, 1969: 96). Liminal periods bind individuals together through shared experiences and symbols.

In addition, Bataille (1991: 25–26) suggests that liminality is an aspect of ‘general economy’, which is time reserved for luxurious consumption and excess. This economy offers a different ‘perspective’ from the ‘restrictive economy’, which is premised on a rationality of necessity and scarcity (Bataille, 1991: 25). Bataille challenges the general assumption of modern economics that necessity and scarcity should define social life with his realization that most societies produce enough to guarantee their own bare existence. In other words, most societies can keep their members alive. Beginning with the infinite energy of the sun and the biological life that humans consume, humanity produces a constant excess of energy that they must consume. Bataille (1991) calls this excess energy, which the reproduction of any natural or cultural system requires, the ‘accursed share’; sacrifice, sex, and the building of monuments are examples of the unproductive expenditure of excess energy. Liminal persons are a great example of unproductive expenditure because they are ‘between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial’ (Turner, 1969: 95); indeed they exist outside the profane, egoistic, and instrumental world of work.

Moreover, Turner (1969: 95) describes liminal individuals as ‘threshold people’. Fully liminal agents exist at the limits of the social and what is knowable. The idea of thresholds, limits, and transgression is of particular importance to Bataille, who states that transgression is a temporary escape from the profane world of work through the sacred (Bataille, 1957: 67). Therefore, the sacred, and vicariously liminality, depends on acts of transgression (Bataille, 1957). Moreover, Bataille regularly connects violence and death to acts of transgression (Bataille, 1957: 82–83, 101, 1979: 70, 1989: 51). Bataille describes humans as discontinuous beings – separated from nature through their consciousness. Moreover, he suggests that, as humans, we long to return to continuity and regain our ‘animality’ so that we can once again live like ‘water in water’ (1989: 19–25). Transgression enables people to challenge their rational being. It is a liminal space where one can approach death without dying and briefly experience some elements of continuity (Ramp, 2003: 125). Consequently, rituals and practices such as sacrifice and eroticism draw us in because they challenge our discontinuity; these moments allow us to experience some elements of ‘death’ and the unravelling of our subjection/subjugation to the restricted economy (see Bataille, 1991); ‘Death is the ultimate squandering of the excess produced by life, by life itself’ (Datta and MacDonald, 2011: 89).

Anthropologist Maurice Bloch (1992: 6–7) more directly connects liminality and ritual to violence through a process he calls ‘rebounding violence’, which links violence to both ends of the ritual process. He argues that symbolic killing of initiates begins ritual rites of passage (Bloch, 1992: 4). The initiates then enter the realm of the liminal and receive a transcendental part of their identity that transforms them from what they were prior to the ritual. Then, another violent act enables the initiates to return to the mundane. For Bloch, these violent acts aim to create the transcendental in religion and politics. Notably, violence in the religious world helps to legitimize violence in the political world (Bloch, 1992: 6–7).

French social theorist Michel Foucault extends Bataille’s conception of transgression. Like Friedrich Nietzsche, Foucault (2003: 445) compares transgression to a ‘flash of lightning’. The limit that the transgressive act approaches appears only briefly before disappearing into the surrounding darkness: ‘The flash loses itself in this space it marks with its sovereignty and becomes silent now that it has given a name to obscurity’ (Foucault, 2003: 446). More importantly, the brevity of the ‘limit experience’ challenges Turner’s conceptualization that the liminal exists outside the everyday world, because liminal periods can take years (for example, post-secondary education). If transgressive actions cannot remain transgressive, then neither can the liminal exist entirely outside of the world of work; the liminal cannot fully escape the restricted economy.

Liminal practice: rethinking liminal fields, habitus, and capital

Bourdieu describes fields as social spaces where agents compete for various forms of capital (Rey, 2004: 332). Fields are homogeneous, stable, and relatively permanent, and lack space for the affective, effervescent, or sacred. Therefore, the existence of liminal fields allows Bourdieu’s work to account for practices that misalign with the logic of the fields he envisioned and the attributes of the general economy. Liminal fields are temporary, erratic, and heterogeneous social spaces, which violently explode into existence at particular socio-historical junctures. They are spaces where agents expend excess energy in unproductive ways, and thus part of a constitutive ‘general economy’. Liminal fields are places where the ‘rules of the game’ are unclear and/or are different from the fields from which they emerge.

Nonetheless, these spaces overlap and intersect with the banal fields of the working world – the focus of Bourdieu’s analytic. In these intersections and boundaries, the liminal influences and alters the various fields that compose social life. Liminal fields take on different shapes and arrangements. Similarly, Turner (1985: 205) explains that ‘thresholds’ can take on various forms. For instance, he suggests that some appear more like ‘corridors’ while others resemble ‘tunnels’. Some liminal fields (e.g. post-secondary education) act like tunnels that move agents to new locations within a field, while others (e.g. revolutionary periods) explode across various fields with the potential to alter numerous aspects of social life. Sociologist Edward Tiryakian argues that periods of revolution and collective effervescence are complementary. Moreover, he explains that during these periods people are able to destabilize old symbols and consecrate new ones (Tiryakian, 1995). By involving the effervescent, revolutions take on a liminal quality, and due to their scope, these periods vastly influence social life.

Liminal fields imply their own forms of liminal capital, which one’s liminal habitus determines. When agents enter a liminal field and are violently ripped from their ‘profane’ socio-historical context, they abandon part of their habitus on the profane side of the threshold and introduce new elements while moving through the liminal field. Bloch (1992: 6) labels these new features the ‘transcendental elements’ of one’s identity.

These ‘transcendental elements’ are the capital one receives via the ritual process. The agent takes on liminal capital in order to negotiate a liminal field, only to then abandon most of this capital when they exit the liminal field and reintegrate with everyday life, including the rest of their habitus and associated capitals. Liminal experiences are spaces where an agent can alter their socio-historical trajectory – a space where one can gain new capital in sacral ways. More importantly, the ritual process legitimates any capital gained and attaches subjects to it. In other words, the ritual becomes a credential or symbol of value and/or power.

The liminoid and the liminal field

Nonetheless, some liminal experiences do not generate capital and/or alter the rules of the game. Turner describes these experiences as the ‘liminoid’. He states that liminoid phenomena are symptomatic of ‘organic solidarity’; are usually individual in origin, but may ‘have collective or “mass” effects’; are connected to ‘“leisure” activities’; and are ‘plural, fragmentary and experimental in character’ (Turner, 1985: 212–215). Liminoid phenomena are social spaces that leave social life unchanged because they lack collective power (Carson, 1997: 52). Liminoid periods provide a temporary escape from the world of work, yet they have little chance of reproducing capital because they are isolated and individualized. They are incapable of inciting change or legitimizing anything as capital. My model suggests that because liminal fields intersect with other fields, they are only partly liminal and remain somewhat confined by the ‘rules’ of everyday life. An agent cannot fully disown their habitus for the liminal, which vicariously has some influence over the liminal capital they can receive and where they reside in the liminal field. Turner explains that, in modern societies, liminoid experiences are more common than the liminal (Turner, 1985). Indeed, people may demand the liminoid and simultaneously reject the liminal (Carson, 1997: 41). Religion has not been exempt from this process (see Himmelfarb, 1999; Orwin, 2004).

Durkheim (2003 [1893]: 67) theorizes the characteristically modern phenomenon of moving from a ‘mechanical’ to a more ‘organic’ form of solidarity, which includes religion. The emphasis on individuality resulting from this move to organic solidarity leads modern religious effervescence to resemble the liminoid more than the liminal, although exceptions exist. For instance, historian Gertrude Himmelfarb (1999) suggests that Evangelical Americans have become increasingly attracted to a ‘therapeutic’, ‘existential’, and ‘individualistic’ form of Christianity while more ‘classical’ forms of Evangelical spirituality, based on earlier ‘Protestant’ or ‘Puritan’ traditions, have become less important. Following Himmelfarb, political scientist Clifford Orwin (2004) describes these Christians as ‘Ev-bos’ or Evangelical bohemians; individuals who seek to combine belief and dogmatism with the rejection of conformity. Bourdieu draws similar conclusions, suggesting that the boundaries of the religious field have started to fade as alternative religions and therapies become more prominent (Bourdieu, 1987b; Rey, 2007: 64–65).

Bataille (1991: 87) perceptively describes this move away from the liminal in contemporary religious activity, including that found in charismatic traditions:

The world of mediation is essentially the world of works. One achieves one’s salvation in the same way that one spins wool; that is, one acts, not according to the intimate order, from violent impulse and putting calculations aside, but according to the principles of the world of production, with a view to a future result, which matters more than the satisfaction of desire in the moment.

Ironically, such Protestant Christians are denied their transcendence because of their rational desire for salvation. For Bataille (1957: 11), a truly ‘religious’ or liminal experience can be achieved only through luxurious consumption – an act of total excess, which enables one to ‘assent to life up to death’.

The liminal field, religion, and madness

Religious innovation and leadership has a long historical connection with madness. Many religious leaders and founders have exhibited characteristics that resemble contemporary mental illness. Diagnosing religious innovators as having a mental illness is certainly controversial. Psycho-biographies and neuropathology rely heavily on second-hand sources. Researchers often ‘diagnose’ on the basis of data within personal diaries, biographies, and various other secondary sources surrounding the religious leader (e.g., Anderson, 1999; Bradford, 1999; Lane and Kent, 2008). Nonetheless, these materials provide enough information to leave one suspicious of the leaders’ mental state. As a consequence, scholars suspect numerous religious innovators to have mental illnesses, including manic depression, narcissistic personality disorder, schizophrenia, antisocial personality disorder, delusional disorder, epilepsy, vascular disease, and histrionic personality disorder. Finally, some authors link religious innovation to psychological dysfunction in general. ³

A strong correlation exists between mental illness and charismatic prophets. Liminal capital gives these individuals their charisma and madness gives them their liminality. Liminal capital enables these leaders to avoid being positioned firmly in any field – the religious and psychological fields in particular. ⁴ In other words, religious institutions fail to delegitimize these individuals as heresiarchs and psychological institutions fail to label them as insane. Moreover, these individuals are never ‘mad’ in their own eyes. As Foucault (2009: 184) stated: ‘The madman therefore is never mad to his own way of thinking, but only in the eyes of a third person who can distinguish between reason and the exercise of reason’. Turner (1969: 128) described these individuals as ‘edgemen’:

Prophets and artists tend to be liminal and marginal people, ‘edgemen,’ who strive with a passionate sincerity to rid themselves of the clichés associated with status incumbency and role-playing and enter into vital relations with other men in fact or in imagination.

While Turner overemphasizes these agents’ separation from daily life, he explains how these people possess certain liminal characteristics, and thereby liminal capital.

Similarly, Bataille suggests that the ‘mad’ are ‘free’ in the sense that they only consume and are unconcerned with production: ‘I submit that madness itself gives a rarefied idea of the free “subject,” unsubordinated to the “real” order and occupied only with the present’ (Bataille, 1989: 58). Like Turner’s ‘edgemen’, the ‘mad’ possess permanent liminal capital that prevents them from being firmly positioned in the ‘real order’. Liminal capital could set Bourdieu’s charismatic prophets apart from the general populace and enable them to fill the niches that history presents them with; it could be the sacred component of charisma. Therefore, liminal capital is the element of charisma that, unlike cultural capital, allows these individuals to appear otherworldly.

These ‘edgemen’ exist on the edge of absurdity and their lives are virtually void of productive activity. As such, following Bataille (1989), prophets appear to communicate a return to ‘immanence’ – a return to ‘animality’. They provide a venue for agents to jettison some of their ‘consciousness’ and become liminal. Furthermore, Bataille (1957: 226) describes numerous similarities between mystical and erotic experiences. He explains that both of these experiences (and prophets make ample and equal use of the erotic and mystical [see Stevens and Price, 2000: 116]) enable individuals to experience the ‘negation of ourselves’ – to experience death without dying (Bataille, 1989: 34). He suggests that life is ‘nothing but instability and disequilibrium’ and that humans ‘refuse to see that only death guarantees the fresh upsurging without which life would be blind’ (Bataille, 1957: 59).

For Foucault (2003: 444), the dominant understanding of madness and unreason, and its relationship to religion, shifts after the ‘death of God’. Nietzsche declared in The Gay Science (1974: 181) that ‘Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him’. By this declaration, Nietzsche did not mean literally that God was dead, but rather that the time when one could use religion as the primary means of legitimation, consecration, and existential orientation (a means of positioning oneself in the world and making judgments about how to live and why) had ended. He claimed to observe the emergence of a time when the definition of morality was no longer solely linked to God. Foucault returns this point to discuss limits and Bataille: ‘The death of God restores us not to a limited and positivistic world but to a world exposed by the experience of its limits, made and unmade by that excess which transgresses it’ (Foucault, 2003: 444). Foucault argues that after the death of God the limits of existence were redefined. Religion unraveled as the primary means through which to ‘know’ the world. Moreover, Foucault suggests that the death of God forces sexuality to emerge at the limits of existence, and therefore, in sexuality there remains a potential for transgression (Carrette, 2000: 79–82). In other words, through the socialization of individual human bodies, the sexual act becomes a means to threaten ‘the boundaries of personhood’, and ‘renders participants vulnerable’ (Ramp, 2010: 58).

Moreover, Nietzsche (1974: 167) argued that despite God’s death, ‘his shadow’ would linger. It is unsurprising that society has preserved religion as a place for individuals to legitimately act mad – a place where God’s shadow is still cast. Durkheim explains situations like those described above as collective effervescence. Collective effervescence is a ‘sacred’ and liminal time where the normal boundaries of society change; it is a time when ‘[p]eople are so far outside the ordinary conditions of life, and so conscious of the fact, that they feel a certain need to set themselves above and beyond normal morality’ (Durkheim, 1995: 218). Therefore, while effervescence is a destructive social force, breaking down many established boundaries and structures, it is also a productive one, permitting the re-combination/articulation of various aspects of social life (Datta, 2008, 2010) – a process that is often embodied in the rituals, language, and practices of individual participants (Csordas, 1990: 24–25).

Discussion: analyzing charismatic religious practices using liminal fields

The ‘Toronto Blessing’, the longest charismatic revival in North American history (1994–2006), exemplifies how effervescent moments can produce change within the religious field (Gunther Brown, 2012: 22). The Airport Vineyard Church in Toronto, Ontario, began to experience a renewal of the Spirit in January 1994 (Bowker, 1997). The beginnings of this movement are heavily intertwined with the efforts of the church’s charismatic leadership – and of Pastor John Arnott in particular – to renew his church community. In his quest for charismatic renewal, Arnott visited Argentina in 1993, where he witnessed a pastor who had grown his small church to a congregation of 4,000 through a manifestation of the Holy Spirit characterized by ecstatic ‘laughter’. Soon afterward, Arnott received a blessing from the charismatic faith healer Benny Hinn, who relied on similar ecstatic manifestations in his services. Arnott’s most important meeting, however, was with Randy Clark, whose St Louis church was also experiencing this ‘laughter’. Arnott invited Clark to attend his Toronto church, and Clark stayed for the initial 42 meetings of the Toronto Blessing (Hunt, 2009: 239–240).

This renewal – marked by what the church members called ‘holy laughter’ (Maxwell, 1994) – consisted of individuals ‘falling or resting in the Spirit, laughter, shaking, and crying’ (Bowker, 1997). Other members behave like dogs, cows, pigs, lions, roosters, or run ‘Jesus laps’ (Beverley, 1995: 68–69, Poloma, 2003). One female participant describes her experience:

We burst into uncontrollable laughter. It overwhelmed us and we just howled with laughter. No matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t stop—it was totally out of our control. … My girlfriend was lying across the seats and crawling along them like a worm, laughing hysterically and trying to get away from me. … To us it seemed that there was a wall of silence around us; we could see someone speaking, but we couldn’t hear him. It was as if we were at our very own little party. (cited in Beverley, 1995: 69)

Several commentators describe holy laughter practices in the inspired churches as ‘wild’, ‘chaotic’, ‘ecstatic’, and even ‘mad’ (Beverley, 1995: 14, 18; Carden, 1995: 5). According to participants, the God of the Blessing cannot be put in ‘human “boxes”’. God is beyond rationality; He is ‘super-rational’ (cited in Richter, 2004: 269).

That said, there are rules and controls even in the most ecstatic of services (Wood, 2003). These rules are intended to prevent inappropriate actions or ‘touching of others’ (Beverley, 1995: 16), to reduce noise to allow the ‘Spirit to speak’ (Murphy, 1995: 69), and avoid false prophecy (Beverley, 1995: 16; Poloma, 2003: 146–147). Like other liminal fields, these services are partly liminal. Aspects of the rational world persist to prevent actions that remain taboo even within a space as ‘transgressive’ as an Airport Vineyard service.

Although Toronto was not the first church to experience Holy Laughter, Airport Vineyard became an epicentre – a pilgrimage point – that transformed localized ecstatic moments into a globalized movement (Carden, 1995: 5; Hunt, 1995: 267, 2009: 242; Poloma, 2003: 17; Richter, 2004: 257). ⁵ This transformation happened for a number of reasons. First, the movement spread via new communications technologies and resulting new Evangelical networks (Gunther Brown, 2012: 26; Richter, 2004: 265). Second, the church’s proximity to the airport and access to international flights facilitated its development as a pilgrimage point (Richter, 2004: 258). Finally and most importantly, the Blessing started and spread because of a pent-up psychological desire for charismatic renewal within North American Evangelicalism. Particularly, it relied on the eschatological desire for the Second Coming of Christ and the Rapture (Hunt, 1995: 267). Moreover, scholar Philip Richter suggests that the Blessing represented a reaction to the rationalist demands of a capitalist lifestyle. For Richter (2004: 266), the Blessing marked a return to our ‘animal’ desires, which capitalism forces us to deny; it marks a desire for the liminal in a world that only provides the liminoid.

Eventually, the liminal experiences of those within this church came to influence Charismatic Christian worship practices worldwide (Beverley, 1995: 1; Maxwell, 1994). The Toronto Blessing exemplifies how the development of a liminal field in one church can engender change in the religious field through the intersections and boundaries that religious organizations share. More importantly, it reveals how ‘renewal’ can result from the liminal nature of madness (Beverley, 1995: 13; Carson, 1997: 26; Shorto, 1999: 231). As a Christian commentator notes, the Toronto Blessing bore the mark of a true ‘revival’ involving the key features of ‘mass repentance and conversion of non-believers’ (cited in Carden, 1995: 6). Many Evangelicals interpret ‘laughing’ as a mark of one’s godliness. In fact, one Evangelical theologian worries that ‘laughing’ may become ‘the hallmark of the truly spiritual among us’ (cited in Carden, 1995: 6). In this sense, laughing could become (and likely has in some places) a ‘credential’ that signifies a certain amount of religious capital, which invariably positions a person within the religious field.

Some ecstatic displays, however, fail to display godliness. Some participants noted that many individuals’ ‘laughing’ appeared ‘forced’ and/or inappropriate (Beverley, 1995: 16; Carden, 1995: 43). One researcher observed a young woman at a Toronto service walking with a drink in hand as if ‘drunk’ (Carden, 1995: 20). Instances such as this have led some churches to provide directions on how to laugh properly (Beverley, 1995: 50). Therefore, only appropriate laughter becomes a mark of godliness and only certain individuals can translate their charismatic performance in the liminal field into capital in the religious field.

Conclusion

Combining Bourdieu’s work with the concept of liminality breaks his work out of his functionalist tendencies, enabling social scientists to account for the affective and illogical aspects of social life – to account for ‘everyday miracles’ (Vásquez, 2011: 247). In particular, it provides a means through which to understand the complex connection between religion, madness, and the displacement of the mundane hegemony of reason. One can begin to see how liminal capital enables seemingly ‘mad’ religious leaders to gain massive followings as gurus, prophets, and messiahs. Moreover, it enables us to understand how aspects of the religious field, and various other fields, are renewed through periods of liminality.

Liminal and sacred spaces allow us to conceive of a place for positive politics (Datta, 2008, 2010; Ramp, 2010: 56); they provide a space where an agent or a group can potentially alter their socio-historical trajectories – their positions within various fields. Liminality is also the way social systems, including religions, renew themselves (Carson, 1997: 1). More importantly, if we consider Bourdieu’s contribution, it serves the double purpose of being one place where capital is ‘consecrated’ and ‘transubstantiated’ and thus an important means through which society legitimizes an agent’s social position.