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Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2001. 27:125-52 Copyright © 2001 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved
Religious Nationalism and the Problem of Collective Representation
Roger Friedland
Departments of Religious Studies and Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California 93106-9430; e-mail: res028tp@gte.net
Key Words  institutional heterology, field, civil society
■ Abstract I first argue that religion partakes of the symbolic order of the nation-state and that contemporary nationalisms are suffused with the religious. I then suggest that religious nationalism calls into question the theoretical duality of the social and the cultural, a divide variously identified with the material and the symbolic, class and status, economy and civil society. Religious nationalism, 1 suggest, requires an institutional approach to the project of collective representation. Religious nationalism offers a particular ontology of power, an ontology revealed and affirmed through its politicized practices and the central object of its political concern, practices that locate collective solidarity in religious faith shared by embodied families, not in contract and consent enacted by abstract individual citizens. Understanding the institutional basis of religious nationalist discourse allows us to understand its affinities with socialist politics. If religious nationalism derives from religion's institutional heterology with the capitalist market and the democratic state, then it suggests the limits of a social theory that occludes that heterology. In the remainder of the paper, I argue that religious nationalism cannot be adequately understood either through Pierre Bourdieu's theory of habitus and field, nor through Jeffrey Alexander's theory of civil society. Bourdieu's theory of fields imports the logic of dominant institutions and thereby culturally homogenizes the institutional diversity of contemporary society, making the stake of politics a culturally empty space of domination. Alexander's theory of civil society, while rich in cultural substance, identifies civil society with democratic political culture and thereby makes unnecessarily restrictive assumptions about the institutional sources of collective representation in modern society.
INTRODUCTION
Once again God walks in history. As a century organized around the fear of a godless state comes to a close, we wake to a new terror: states armed with powers of the divine. We today confront the apparently premodem specter of religious nationalism. The territoriality and the historicity of the nation-state are being transformed into vessels of divine purpose, mechanisms by which to materialize a monist world.
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Religious nationalism not only shatters the presumptions of geopolitics, it reveals the limits of sociological theory. Religious nationalism is a particular form of collective representation. In this essay I first argue that religion partakes of the symbolic order of the nation-state and that contemporary nationalisms are suffused with the religious. I then suggest that religious nationalism calls into question the theoretical duality of the social and the cultural, a divide variously identified with the material and the symbolic, class and status, economy and civil society. Religious nationalism, I suggest, requires an institutional approach to the project of collective representation. Religious nationalism offers a particular ontology of power, an ontology revealed and affirmed through its politicized practices and the central object of its political concern, practices that locate collective solidarity in religious faith shared by embodied families, not in contract and consent enacted by abstract individual citizens. Understanding the institutional basis of religious nationalist discourse allows us to understand its affinities with socialist politics. If religious nationalism derives from religion's institutional heterology with the capitalist market and the democratic state, then it suggests the limits of a social theory that occludes that heterology.
In the remainder of the paper, I argue that religious nationalism cannot be adequately understood either through Pierre Bourdieu's theory of habitus and field, nor through Jeffrey Alexander's theory of civil society. Bourdieu's theory of fields imports the logic of dominant institutions and thereby culturally homogenizes the institutional diversity of contemporary society, making the stake of politics a culturally empty space of domination. Alexander's theory of civil society, while rich in cultural substance, identifies civil society with democratic political culture and thereby makes unnecessarily restrictive assumptions about the institutional sources of collective representation in modern society.
RELIGION'S SOVEREIGN POWERS
Cleric, rabbi, sadhu, and mullah mount the rostrum, occupy the public place, seeking to ordinate society according to a text originating outside of it. Religious nationalists make politics into a religious obligation. We are wont to view the religious nationalist project as a retreat from modernity. The Enlightenment philosophers made the separation of state authority from religion an essential condition for freedom, for "mankind's exit from its self-imposed maturity" as Kant (1996) put it. In place of religion, the person and the polity would now assume sacred status in the modem western world, nationalism donning the trappings of a religion. These are modernity's terms for the satanization of public religion. In the resulting formation, which for so long seemed modernity's necessary terminus, religion was to set up shop in the interior of the believer's soul, within the walls of the family, not in the public square and the state house. Religion, whose transcendence and absoluteness used to bolster the rule of state, to set states into conquest and war, to spark civil wars, and to establish the ethical habits conditioning the
accumulation of productive wealth, was sequestered, made safe and platitudinous. We have come to equate secularity, the disengagement and differentiation of the public sphere from religion, with modernity. This has led to its analytic neglect. Habermas, for example, who wants to construct a clean divide between citizenship and national identity, between the rights of man and the right to protect a particular national culture, neglects religion's role in establishing the cultural ground of that citizenship (Weiss 1999).
That religious groups, here religious nationalists, would want to seize the state is not unexpected. Both state and religion are models of authority, imaginations of an ordering power, and understandings of how one should relate to those who control forces upon which one depends, but over which one does not exercise control. Riesebrodt (2000) characterizes the distinctiveness of religious practices as those involving "superhuman or extraordinary personal or impersonal powers" that control human life and to which one can gain access.
Whereas secularization involves the breakdown of a religious cosmology in which all things, including the state, are subordinate to a divine order (Casanova 1994), religion can also be understood as immanent in the state itself. Derrida (1998) has argued that the state, like all forms of authority, indeed, of collectivity, depends on a faith that cannot be reduced to knowledge, on an unproducible and unnamable "other," an absolute, present-absent witness that guarantees all testimony, all witness, all nomination. Faith, beyond reason and proof, thus undergirds the performativity of authority, the saying so that makes it so.
God is a sovereign personality. It is difficult to recapture that understanding in our world where the institutional separation of church and state has transformed religion into a faith, a substance found in, and a regulatory principle operating on, an interior territory, a secret housed inside individual bodies, a basis for being good, sane, or secure. It is useful to look back at the moment when the modern state was stripped of its religious meaning, when this new discursive formation was put in place. Those who supported the ancien regime reacted as though it were a threat both to state and to religion. When the French Revolution ushered in the first European republic, its Catholic opponents understood the writings of the philosophes as its moral mandate and foundational ontology (McMahon 2001). Indeed, they understood la philosophie as Protestantism without God, leading inexorably to heretical division, a fissiparous force that would naturally issue in a chaos of sects. The two absolutisms were understood to be of a piece. It was no wonder that these abstract ideas, breaking with religious faith and historical experience, really illusionist's tricks, conjointly indicted religion and absolutist authority. The first European republic was understood as a usurpation of God's sovereignty.
Religions other than Christianity, which began as a stateless faith, have even greater political claim. Hinduism, Judaism, and Islam—to take a few examples— provide images and precepts for a society, indeed the foundations for a state, and thus presume that religion can and should have a role in the regulation of all of social life. They imagine political communities whose physical survival,
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territorial control, and material prosperity are all contingent upon their obedience to the revealed laws of God. The Torah, for instance, is understood as a covenant between a people and a God, a people whose capacity to occupy eretz yisrael, the Land of Israel, is dependent on following its laws (Friedland & Hecht 2000). The Qur'an, likewise, is not just about the relationship of the individual to God, but about a politically organized community of believers, the umma, called by their sovereign. The Qur'an spells out a political religion (Humphreys 1999).
The divine, as Durkheim (1995 [1912]) long ago pointed out, provides an image of the governing principle of our collective body. For us moderns, the house of state is our sacred place, our machinery for collective representation. Collective political claims are immanent in the divine, in a society's imagination of supra-human powers and the practices that relate to them. We can see this, for example, by examining how Protestant colonialists related to the Africans whose lands they colonized. As Chidester (1996) has shown, the colonials who took possession of South Africa insisted that the Africans—Zulu, Bechuana, Xhosa— they confronted on the colonial frontiers had no religion so long as European rule of these Africans was uncertain and the Africans were able to maintain their polities and resist subjugation. Africans without religion, who were therefore considered not fully human, childlike and superstitious, had no right to rule, no inherent right to territorial possession. Once each African population was conquered and sequestered, they could be granted a religion, a degenerated version of a religion from elsewhere (hence without rights to possession), a fetishism, an animism, or even a primitive "theism" from which the world's monotheisms had moved on. Denying a collectivity's right to polity was of a piece with the original denial of their possession of something recognized as a religion. Without God, African territory could be understood as a blank, empty space.
Religion provides what Juergensmeyer (1993, 1999) calls a "language of ultimate order." Religious discourse is replete with martial metaphor, of battles and enemies, of position and siege. Religions' origlnary histories are filled with military conquest whether, for example, of the ancient Jewish kings; of Muhammad's warriors and the tradition of jihad; of Lord Krishna's sermon, the Bhagavad Gita, delivered on a battlefield; of the final Sikh master, Gum Gobind Singh, commander of a huge army facing the Mughal invaders in the Punjab in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Religion, a cosmology accomplished through violence, its cosmic war vicariously experienced and domesticated by rite, is thus inherently a natural competitor to the nationalism of the secular state. Juergensmeyer's comparative hermeneutics of religious terrorism (1999) follows politicized faith into the mayhem and pain imposed on innocent people. There are those who would argue that such vile conjunctions of spirit and cruelty, of religious belief and political violence, belie the religiosity of the terrorists, that religion is a mere wrapper. Authority rests on a metaphysics, an ontology of order, a moral and categorical system constituting the thinkable and actionable, and on an organization of violence that controls those who fail to think and act within its limits. Juergensmeyer argues that the desacralization of the modern nation-state, the return of religion to
the public sphere, and the explosion of religious terror are a linked set. Religious terrorists are almost all religious nationalists, those seeking an alternative order on which to ground state authority. Religious terrorism is only the most extreme form of this general movement, this reclaiming of religion's inherent political powers, its final judgments.
Religious terrorism is not primarily an instrument to transform government policy as much as it is a ritual drama designed to be noticed, typically targeted at symbolically charged sites, usually public places—nodes in the exchange of goods, the movement of people, sites of authority. Religious terrorism represents a symbolic order more than it produces a profanely practical result. It is a theatre of war. While its religious opponents and the larger public declare terrorism to be antithetical to religion's peaceful purposes, religion, Juergensmeyer argues, gravitates naturally to the language and the postures of war. For warfare is an occasion for the display and adjudication of absolute, non-negotiable differences, for the performance of the incommensurable divide Emile Durkheim located between the sacred and the profane. War affords a distinctive moral architecture, an absolute partitioning into good and evil mapped onto us and them, a narration of empowerment stitched into the nature of things. Terror signals the immorality of one's foe, a sign of the absoluteness, the essentialness, of the other's evil. Terror is not here normal politics by scandalous means but a declaration that normal politics are not possible. It is perhaps the capacity for violence that ultimately marks the sacred, the disordering element that stands as the exterior guarantor of order, of division and partition. To violently broach the public sphere is to declare the absence of state guarantee, a state without God being a profane state, a profanity demonstrated by violence against the state.
Religious nationalism is not alien to the formation of the modern nation-state. Even a cursory look suggests that the formation of many non-Western modern national identities and nationalist movements was suffused with religious narrative and myth, symbolism and ritual—Iran, Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Palestine, to take just a few examples. Given religion's cen-trality to nation-formation, it is not surprising that religion is a ready reservoir for nationalist critique. Within these cosmologies, secular nationalism is easily perceived as a form of Christian political culture, one many now perceive as a failure. Juergensmeyer (1993), who has heralded the birth of a "new cold war," argues that there has been a "loss of faith in secular nationalism," such that many political leaders in the world increasingly see the secularism of Western nationalism as the reason for the moral failures of their own societies in the midst of modernization.
The emergence and form of the Western secular nation-state has itself everything do with Christianity, and Protestantism in particular (Bendix 1978, Harrison 1998, McLoughlin 1978,Rokkan 1975, Tilly 1998). The American Revolution, for example, was prepared by a diffuse transformation in Protestant belief, known as "the Great Awakening" (1730-1760), that located the basis of religious authority in personal faith, not in ordination, the profession of doctrine, or a church hierarchy. This "new light," an emotional, indeed physical knowing, as opposed to a
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disembodied intellectual knowing, of God, was open to all, to those without formal education, to the poor, even to women and slaves. This postmiilennial religious transformation, in fact, helped create the inter-colonial unity, the solidarity and the democratic moral order that would forge the American nation-state (Heimert 1966, McLoughlin 1978, Walzer 1965). The French Revolution, which constituted the nation without respect to, indeed in opposition to, religion, has been the world historical exception.
RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM AND THE AUTONOMY OF CULTURE
Religious nationalism as discourse and social movement is often understood as an instance of culture's autonomy as a source of identity and critique, an autonomy manifested in the formation of politicized religious groups. It is a mistake to begin an analysis of religious nationalism through the social groups composing it, through the ascendant particularity of persons. From this vantage point, religious nationalism becomes a movement to defend a particular form of group identity, difference considered as attributes of persons, not unlike that of racial, gender, sexual or linguistic groups who launch movements to affirm or defend their particularity before or from the society's dominant group, here an instrument by which religious people secure membership in the political community or recognition in the public sphere.
Religious nationalism can be understood as one among the panoply of the apparently new social movements, defending identity as opposed to pursuing interest, a substitute or a stand-in for the redistributive material politics of class. Or it can be understood as a cultural refraction, or mediation, of underlying social grievances. These castings of politicized religion are both premised on distinguishing the social as an instrumental distributional system of things from the cultural as an expressive system of signs, on understanding the economy as a material institutional order, the paragon of the social, while civil society is a symbolic institutional order, the paragon of the cultural (see also Bonnell & Hunt 1999).
This duality of the social and the cultural suffuses interpretations of the rise of politicized religion. Barber's "Jihad vs. McWorld," particularistic tribalism as a reaction to universalistic globalism, is a good example (1992). The forces of glob-alism all issue from an economic hardscape—transnational markets, dependencies on foreign resources, technological revolution, and ecological process. In contrast, those of "Jihad," forces that fragment even modernity's nation-states, are about the soft stuff of symbol and myth. Religious nationalism has no political-economic import; it is an end in itself.
Others see politicized religion as an expression or medium of material interest. Lawrence (1998), for example, argues that it is brute matter, the stuff of existence, distributed ever more inequitably in the world, that not only exercises most Muslims but also explains Islamic politics. In the case of Islamic revivalism, as for instance in the cases of the Wahhabis or the Fulani-Qadiris in Nigeria, Islam
was "an emblem of protest" against the contraction of trade caused by European mercantilism. The struggle between Asad!s Baath regime and the Muslim Brothers in Syria was "not a religious struggle but a struggle for power in which religion was used by both sides as a mask for deeper grievances and more palpable stakes" (1998:73). The "real" reason, he argues, that Islamic traditionalists today exclude women from the public sphere is the job shortage for men (1998:39). Islam is here a medium through which other struggles find expression: group contests over power and income, national resistance to marginality and powerlessness in the world order.
In Foran's historical sociological analysis of Iran, Shiite Islam mediates between economic structure and oppositional, and particularly revolutionary, political action. Foran politicized Wallerstein's structuralist world systems theory by showing the ways in which the strategic political actions of domestic groups drawn from historically layered modes of production shape the development of a dependent nation (Foran 1993). In Foran's theory, the distinctive inequities and hardships—like displacement of the artisans and the bazaar merchants—generated by dependent development require a repressive personalistic state, the experience of whose exclusion generated a series of "political cultures of opposition"—Islam, republicanism, nationalism, Marxism, as well as their various syntheses. These oppositional cultures are the basis upon which urban multi-class coalitions repeatedly form as in the Constitutional revolution of 1905-1911, Mussadiq's nationalization of oil in the early 1950s, and the Islamic revolution of 1979. The distinctive quality of the 1979 revolution, as opposed to earlier junctures, was the simultaneous mobilization of both republican and Islamic discursive elements and the social bases who carried them, both the ulama and the organized white- and blue-collar workers. Foran argues that a social revolution can occur where there is a multi-class or populist oppositional culture, conditions of economic decline, or a world-system opening—generally an American failure to intervene decisively in Ihc internal politics of the country.
Political cultures mediate between "structural determinants of grievances" and regime critique (Foran 1997a). Political culture, not ideology, is the medium through which economic interests are given political form, through which objective economic conditions are lived and interpreted (Foran 1992). The question is whether political culture mediates or constructs the revolutionary project. Given the lack of class specificity in these oppositional political cultures, that it is the particularism of the state, not economic conditions per se, that galvanizes oppositional mobilization, that in the Boolean analyses Foran has conducted across many nation-states, neither economic downturn nor dependent development discriminate between revolutionary and nonrevolutionary action (1997b), it is as arguable that oppositional movements form not out of economics politically understood, but out of politics itself. Foran here understands religion as autonomous cultural materials, a frame deployed in reaction to societal conditions, subjective meanings constructed in response to objective conditions.
Foran's neo-Marxist insistence on culture's autonomy from the economy as a basis for agency is shared by Alexander's post-Durkheimian school, which has
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grounded the autonomy of the cultural in the linguistic order of signs and symbols, in semiotic structure. Alexander and his students have looked on culture as a code or language with its own internal logic, insisting on its autonomy from the materiality of the social world (Alexander 1998, Alexander & Smith 1993, Kane 1991). As for Foran, more is at stake in culture's autonomy than just good social theory. Alexander analytically distinguishes between three "environments of action": the social, the cultural, and the personality. The analytic autonomy of the cultural realm enables generalizable significations—both typifications and inventions— independent of the social conditions of their use. In Alexander's view, culture's analytic, as opposed to its empirical, autonomy establishes a presuppositional warrant not only for its study but, as for Foran, for individual human freedom itself, for the formation of collective will. Autonomous, structured cultural codes provide the tools through and by which actors can recode themselves and the world and thereby create new worlds.
If Alexander grounds the autonomy of culture in semiotic order, he identifies the social system with an order of distribution. Reviewing Touraine's theorization of new postindustrial social movements, Alexander describes Parsons' distinction between values and norms, the latter involving "historically specific forms of organization that focus, not on general values, but on the distribution of rewards and sanctions" (1996). Alexander approves of how Touraine, unlike Parsons, does not idealistically conflate "existing forms of social organization with the cultural ideals that informed them." It is the gap between value and norm, between the cultural and the social, between cultural ideals and social norms, in which Alexander locates the possibility for reflexive agency and hence for social movements.
In their work on public sphere crises, Alexander & Smith (1993) marry Durkheim's religious sociology to the dualities of structuralist linguistics, making the dominant cultural codes into instances of the binary of sacred and profane— honest, independent, and universal all lining up naturally with the sacred pole of this duality. The analytic autonomy of the cultural code derives from its systematically structured homologies, its internal associations. The code's referentiality, its application to the social world—what, after all, is made to count as just or democratic—is the contingent political domain where groups can seek to position one another on different sides of the multiple binaries. In this approach politics is cultural, but there is little politics of culture, that is, few struggles over the codes themselves.
In analyzing social movements' two moments, Alexander rests the social on the cultural, distribution on value. "Vis a vis potential supporters, social movements in civil societies must present themselves as typifying sacred values... as cultural innovators who can create new norms and new institutions that will allow resources to be channeled in different ways." Because the code itself is not at stake, this makes the telos of the social movement into a culturally contentless redistribution of resources, not a transformation of culture. In that the ideals themselves are not at stake, the material world stands outside as an objective landscape in which and for which symbolic warfare periodically rages.
This same identification of the social with an order of distribution characterizes the work of Fräser, the Marxist political philosopher. Seeking to wend a way between the new politics and the old, class and identity, Fraser (2001) argues that we need to distinguish analytically between the politics of redistribution rooted in the social relations of class and a politics of recognition rooted in the cultural relations of status. These politics are distinguished by the nature of the collectivities that carry them—classes and status groups, respectively. Fraser proposes a "bivalent" conception of justice drawing on both independent domains. For Fraser, "class is an artifact of an unjust political economy, which creates, and exploits a proletariat. The core injustice is exploitation, an especially deep form of maldistribution, as the proletariat shoulders an undue share of the system's burdens, while being denied its fair share of the system's rewards" (2001:7). By deriving class from distribution, Fraser instrumentalizes the economy, making its politics into a conflictual problem of group share. She thereby eviscerates the specificity of capitalism's institutional logic.
Exploitation does not, in Marxist theory and hence in much socialist ideology, derive from maldistribution but from the cultural materiality of property relations and the commodification of labor it makes possible. Marx's theory of exploitation is a cultural theory, a theory of valuation, the labor theory of value asserting a specific regime of temporality through which value is produced, expanded, and reproduced. Not only Marxists, but institutional theorists as well, have shown that property is not an objective material condition but a legal performative, a transrational substance known by how it is performed. Distributional conflicts drew their transformative possibilities from their origin in capitalism's contradictory logic of production. The institutional specificity of capitalism does not afford a culturally empty power contest between the dominant and the dominated but a struggle over commodification, over the production of capital. In Marxist theory, this is the source, the meaning, and the transformative end of distributional conflict.
In deculturaiizing capitalism, making it about distribution, Fraser thereby empties working class interest of cultural meaning. Eyerman & Jamison (1991), for example, have shown the ways in which successful social movements—from en-vironmentalism to socialism—create new public spaces in which new identities, new knowledges, and new organizational forms conjointly emerge. The socialist movement, not unlike the new social movements, sought to create a collective identity—the worker, the proletariat, a form of personhood that was sacralized, and whose value and inviolability were integral to mobilization. Socialist working class politics were premised on the assertion of an interested difference.
THE SOCIOLOGICAL FORCE OF LOVE: THE FAMILY POLITICS OF RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM
The historicist division between old, class-based materialist and new, identity-based cultural social movements cannot be sustained either theoretically or historically. Religious nationalism is both cultural and social. It is cultural in its
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promotion of a particular cosmology, a codex of values, a program of comportment, a way of life. But it is social in that its agents seek control over material resources, the machinery of state, territory, reproductive bodies, the law courts and the police, the schools. Religious nationalism is about both values and things, the one through the other. It is about both recognition of a new collective subjectivity and the redistribution of resources.
Religious nationalisms are animated by a family drama; they all center their fierce energies on the family, its erotic energies, its gendered order. This is because the institutional logic of religion centers on the order of creation, locating human-ness in the cosmos, replicating cosmology through ritual, a practical metaphysics that necessarily points before life and after death.1
Because the family is an order of creation, not merely an order of production or governance (Foucault 1990), religions all seek to stitch its transitions, its relations, into religious rite and discourse, as a template through which their trans-rational order is given concrete form. Modern religion has ceded its territories, its soldiers, its courts and sovereign powers; but everywhere it has held fiercely to birth and burial, marriage and divorce. Religious nationalism, unlike the capitalist market or the democratic state, has the organization of sexuality at its center. Religious nationalists give primacy to the family, not to democracy or the market, as the social space through which society should be conceived and composed. Familial discourse, with its particularistic and sexual logic of love and loyalty, is pervasive.
Comparing the United States and Iran, Riesebrodt (1993) has argued that the defense of the patriarchal family is the core of fundamentalism (see also Apostolidis 2000). The American "fundamentalist" embrace of the family is a post-World War II phenomenon. As Bendroth (1993, 1999) has shown, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries concern with the family was at the center of mainline Protestantism, a preoccupation that earlier Christian fundamentalists understood as feminized and sentimental. The fundamentalists then viewed the veneration of the family as a diversion from the redemptive tasks at hand. It was only with the rise of middle class divorce that defense of the family became the central issue for the Christian right and the primal medium through which they sought to reconstruct the social order. The polemical series that today constitutes American fundamentalist discourse is organized almost completely around familial issues: divorce, birth control, abortion, feminism, homosexuality, and sex education.
Algeria's Islamic Salvation Front, which won national elections in 1991 but was prevented from taking power, has made the elimination of female employment part of its program. Since it was banned, fundamentalists have murdered hundreds of Algerian women for wearing Western clothes, for not wearing a headscarf, for
'Becker (1999) is quite right to reject Friedland & Alford's (1991) position that the institutional logic of religion, like science, is about truth.
working side by side with men. The Islamic Salvation Front promises to impose the death penalty on those who engage in sexual relations outside of marriage (Afary 1997).
The very first national religious mobilization of the Iranian Islamic forces took place in 1961 after Khomeini spoke at Qum on Ashura, the day of atonement, attacking the Shah for having transformed the legal status of women, allowing women into the army, the police, and the judiciary, giving them the vote, and overriding Islamic law such that divorce required mutual consent (Lawrence 1998, Riesebrodt 1993). Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution forbade co-education, closed down the childcare centers, and made the veil obligatory first in government offices and then in every public place. Women, of whatever age, had to obtain the permission of their fathers when they married for the first time (Nafisi 1999).
The Egyptian case suggests it was not the failures of secular nationalism that led to Islamic entry into the public sphere so much as the modern nationalists' commitments, incomplete as they were, to gender equality (Lawrence 1998). In 1952, Gamal Nasser, who had just come to power as a result of a coup by the Free Officers, vowed to mobilize women as full participants in the project to modernize the country. This decision led the Islamicists to break with him, eventuating in their repression. In 1954, Nasser supplanted the shari'a courts with a unitary secular state court, thereby expanding women's legal recourse, the immediate response to which was the first assassination attempt by the Muslim Brothers. Sadat's commitment to improving the legal, economic, and political status of women likewise galvanized massive Islamic opposition.
If one looks at the political programs of Islamic movements, there is no consistent economic policy nor form of government. The two pillars of contemporary Islamic politics involve, on the one side, a restrictive regulation of sexuality, eliminating it as a public presence and containing it within the family, and on the other side, the promotion of a welfare state that enables families to survive physically and to care for those—orphans and widows in particular as enjoined in the Qur'an—who cannot rely on families for support (Humphreys 1999). Although it might not be the kind we find compelling, Islamic politics is a politics of love.
Some analysts argue that religious regimes, like that of Iran or Pakistan, because they have failed to reduce unemployment or redistribute wealth, center their attention on familial relations, as though family politics were a substitute for, or sideshow from, the real business of state (Moghadam 1993). It is also tempting to interpret religious nationalism as sexist reaction, animated by interests in masculine privilege. In accounting for the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in North Africa, Mernissi (1992, 1987) has pointed to the rapidly increasing number of educated and employed women who not only compete with men for limited employment opportunities, but are able to choose when they will marry and to exert more influence within their families on account of the monies they bring home. For men, fundamentalism is then understood as a way to win back money and power; for potential rulers, to reduce unemployment. Reisebrodt (1993) interprets the emergence of
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fundamentalism in Iran and the United States as a defense of patriarchalism in a world where women have encroached steadily on male prerogatives, an encroachment whose weight falls forcefully on the father inside the family, particularly the sexual regulation of his daughters.
The evidence indicates, however, that women, too, find fundamentalism compelling. In the United States, for instance, both evangelicalism and fundamentalism draw disproportionately from women, not from men (Smith 1998). Women are attracted by the primacy that religious nationalists give to the family, its affirmation of male familial obligations as a religious duty, to the language of love. Although it is resolutely patriarchal, the religious nationalist community also offers a mechanism of social control of men, which becomes increasingly important as the eyes, the invitations, and the opprobrium that circulate in extended families and long-lived neighborhoods attenuate with geographic migration, the rising incidence of divorce, and the investment of social energy in friendship networks having nothing to do with kinship. Religious nationalists seek a return not to the pre-modern familial structure, with its extended networks of kin loyalties, but to the bourgeois nuclear family. As Abu-Lughod (1998) notes in the case of Egyptian Islamicists, it is their idealization of a nuclear family grounded in love, an imported Western middle class notion, which attracts so many Egyptian women to the movement. Women turn to fundamentalism in hopes of finding men who will be good fathers and good husbands, men who will provide for their families, remain with their wives, and contain their sexuality within the family (Enloe 1989, Ong 1990). In the United States, while fundamentalist Christians typically endorse the wife's submission to her husband, they also sacralize women's role as mothers who have the time to care for and the will to discipline their children, as well as the passion to keep their husbands. As Kintz (1997) discovered in her sojoum among America's fundamentalist women, the chance to occupy the sacred status of motherhood was, for many, a refuge from the uncertainty and constant threat of wormlessness they faced in the market. While men from the Christian right dominate the leadership of the anti-abortion movement in the United States, women have provided the bulk of its popular support. These women look to the movement as an integral part of their affirmation of a sexuality domesticated by monogamous marriage and gendered family roles (Luker 1984).
To make masculine interest the explanation of religious nationalism is to give primacy to an attribute of persons rather than the practices around which its discourse is organized or the institutional site in which it originates. Not only does it not distinguish religious nationalism from other social movements that are equally masculinist, it misses religious nationalism's distinct ontology of power, both its derivation of authority from divine sources and its constitution of society as a familial order. The elemental agents of religious nationalism are gendered and fleshy men and women, not the abstract individuals ordered through exchange and contract. Its space is the place of family, governed by relations of consubstantiality and caring, not the external, instrumental space of geopolitics, the public sphere, or the market. Religious nationalism is about home.
Religious nationalism thus has a kinship with socialism. Socialist politics were premised on the assertion of an interested difference, not just a redistribution of income, power, or respect. Marx theorized that difference as a contest between use value and exchange value, the former providing the cultural ground upon which resistance to the regime of the latter must proceed. Use value speaks of a specific institutional location; it refers to an individual's membership in human families, into which one is born and gives birth, has obligations not only to be fed but to feed and to care. While working class politics are typically fought on a distributional plane, as the share of wages versus the share of profits, they are animated by forces outside the economy.
The formation of the working class as a collective subject had to do not only with the extension of citizenship but with the defense of the family, not only with the demand for a "living wage," one that would support human life, but with protecting the family against capitalism, to put children—upon which the early stages of industrial capitalism massively depended, hence the fear of giving women the vote—outside the labor force, to protect the time upon which domesticity depended, to establish a wage upon which a family could survive not only when its members worked but when they no longer could. The assertion of human need, a term banished (as is power) both in the capitalist market and its theorization, is a familial discourse. The family's central institutional tendency involves the materiality of love, which, like property, is known by how it is practiced, by the conditions of access to fingers, nipples, milk, eggs and semen, mouths and eyes, beds and bowls of hot cereal, to the warmth and work of bodies.
There is then a way in which the institutional sources of religious nationalism parallel those of working class socialism, which had its own "fundamentalist" forms. Just as working class socialist politics can be understood as an effort to defend the family—its children, its time, its capacity to care—from the capitalist economy, so religious nationalists seek to defend the materiality of the family, not only its sexual codes but its capacity to cohere across time, from the logic of the capitalist market, which has commodified sexuality, transformed love into a consumption good, and made mothering materially impossible for an increasing proportion of women. By investing it with transcendent status, religious nationalists seek to restore the loving family, not the autonomous individual, as the elemental unit of which the social is composed. If socialism works the institutional logic of democracy and family against the capitalist market, religious nationalism constructs its oppositional cosmology from the codes of religion and family.
THE INSTITUTIONAL LOGIC OF COLLECTIVE REPRESENTATION
To interpret religious nationalism, we must specify the meaning of nationalism. Nationalism is a state-centered form of collective subject formation, a form of state representation, one grounding the identity and legitimacy of the state in a
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population of individuals who inhabit a territory bounded by that state. The cultural commonalities of that population do not, in themselves, constitute the basis for the formation of a nation. Nationality is a contingent and contested claim, not a social fact (Brubaker 2000, Smith 1991). Nationalism, the political processes organized through the state in the name of the nation, creates the nation, not the reverse (Calhoun 1998). Nationalism is a program for the co-constitution of the state and the territorially bounded population in whose name it speaks.
Nationalism is not ideology. It is a discursive practice by which the territorial identity of a state and the cultural identity of the people whose collective representation it claims are constituted as a singular institutional fact. The state is central in the process in that it is the direct relation between the state and individual through the organization of markets, armies, schools, and families that composes this national identity (Rokkan 1975). The abstract citizen is then a prerequisite to the formation of a culturally specific national subject. That abstract citizen is institutionally premised on an abstract collective subject, the nation-state, which relates as an equivalent "actor" to other states, relations organized through a variety of inter-state institutions (Giddens 1984).
Nationalism offers a form of representation—the joining of state, territoriality, and culture. It has nothing to say about the content of representation, the identity of that collective subject, or its values. Religion offers an institutionally specific way to organize this modern form of collective representation, how a collectivity represents itself to itself, the symbols, signs, and practices through which it is and knows itself to be. Religious nationalism is only a viable option when the collectivity has a religious basis in common. Thus, religious nationalism was possible in India, Israel, Iran, Turkey, and the United States, in part, because of the existence of a hegemonic religion—Hinduism, Judaism, Shiite Islam, Sunni Islam, and Protestantism, respectively. Religious nationalism has not developed very far in those countries, such as Iraq and Syria, which are divided between Shi'ite and Sunni branches of Islam. Where it does develop among nonhegemonic religious communities, it develops as a form of territorial separatism—the Sikhs in the Punjab, Tamils in Sri Lanka.
Religious nationalism does not change the form of collective representation, only its content, privileging a basis of identity and a criterion of judgment which cannot not be chosen. The religious criterion of judgment is, like human rights, racial purity, or technical rationality, beyond the reach of popular voice or the compelling interests of the state. Religion, with its universal claims, is not inherently inconsistent with nationalism; religious nationalism is not, as Lawrence (1998) argues, an oxymoron. Religious nationalists always center their energies on the nation-states in which they live. Even militant Islamicists, who have a historic transnational territorial ambit, indeed a universal ideal, and the actual tradition of the caliphate upon which to draw, almost all seek to create an Islamic order within the existent nation-states (Humphreys 1999). Extending the institutional logic of religion does not necessarily mean a reversal of the differentiation of religion and state, a theocratic installation. In his comparative analysis
of Spain, the United States, Brazil, and Poland, Casanova (1994) has pointed out that the de-privatization of religion, its entry into civil society, does not imply a de-differentiation of religion and the state. Religious nationalism simply makes religion the basis for the nation's collective identity and the source of its ultimate values and purpose on this earth. Religious nationalism fills existent state forms with new cultural contents, new sources of authority; it does not displace them.
If nationalism does not provide a determinate basis of collective identity, neither do particular forms of religion provide a determinate basis of politics. Religious nationalism is a form of politicized religion, one in which religion is the basis of political judgment and identity, indeed in which politics take on the quality of a religious obligation. Religious nationalism is sometimes called "fundamentalist," an identification of which I have also made use above. The term refers back to those American Christians who proclaimed early in this century the inerrancy of the Biblical text, the "fundamentals." The term has now, of course, taken on general analytic significance. Martin Marty, for example, in his worldwide project to track the rise of "fundamentalism," identifies it with its absolutism and a Manichean world-view (Marty 1988). Arguing from early twentieth century American fundamentalism and the Iranian Shi'ite movement in Iran from 1961-1979, Riesebrodt argues that these fundamentalisms engage in a "traditionalistic literalism" in that they cleave to a mythical ideal order as identified in the sacred text or that they have "rationalistic, literalist-orthodox interpretations of religion" (1993:15-17,31).
Religious nationalists all read religious texts politically. While it is decidedly textual, religious nationalism is not inherently more literalist in its application of its sacred texts, nor more absolutist in its ontologies and moral imperatives, that is, than its secular equivalents—socialism, democracy, nationalism, and modern science, to take four examples—each of which produce their own sacred texts, their own inviolable values. To speak of religion's entry into the public sphere simply as a form of "fundamentalism" is to deflect attention from the cultural specificity of its institutional commitments. In the American Protestant context, for example, Roof (1999) has recently studied the first post-World War II generation of Christians. He distinguishes between those who cleave to an evangelicalism oriented toward the spiritual needs of the self and those who are religiously drawn to fundamentalism with its paternal and monarchical sovereign God who sets down strict moral codes. While one might expect religious nationalists to derive overwhelmingly from the second as opposed to the first community, the Christian right, those who believe that America was founded as a Christian nation and should, by law, remain that way, draws from both evangelicals and traditionally pre-millenarian fundamentalists. A majority of both communities actively participate in conservative Christian politics (Roof 1999, Smith 1998).
Some analysts seek to distance religious nationalism from this vexed category of fundamentalism. Keddie has distinguished between two types of what she calls "new religious politics," one, the "fundamentalists," who seek lo make the government conform to religious dictates and the other, which she terms "religious
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nationalism," which is targeted against some minoritarian religious group and has a communitarian and territorial logic at its core (1999). Keddie includes Gush Emunim and the Hindu nationalists, for example, in this second grouping. Keddie wants to distinguish the religious use of government authority from the religious control of territory. Keddie writes: "Religionationalist movements usually do not stress scripture or particular religious practices, while movements that want to increase religion in government do." This polarity will not hold. The territorial practices of religious Zionist Gush Emunim in Israel and the Hindu nationalist BJP and RSS in India are both understood and justified in terms of religious narratives (Friedland & Hecht 1998). Both make politicized use of ritual spaces and religious ritual practices as devices for mobilization. Every religious community, not just politicized ones, makes selective use of their textual tradition, tailor their interpretations to the tasks at hand. It is not possible to distinguish politicized religious movements from non-politicized ones based on the extent to which they follow the "fundamentals," themselves just a selective construction. The religious difference between attempts by Hindus or Jews to control particular pieces of contested territory and equivalent attempts by Muslims or American Christians, whom she includes in the fundamentalist category, to control the territories they already inhabit eludes me. Both of these "fundamentalists" seek to use state power to control elements of territorial choreography—work hours, cinema, food consumption,-dress—basing their rights to do so in religious cosmology. Keddie's distinction is, I suspect, a crypto-Christian classification that makes individual orthopraxis the basis of a textually inspired politics and collective organization the basis of a territorially inspired politics.
RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM AS INSTITUTIONAL POLITICS
To understand religious nationalism we must begin not with groups but with an institutional architecture of the social, not with cultural, but with institutional, autonomy. An institutional approach not only necessarily creates an analytic space for the subject, it refuses the dualities of social theory. Modem society is composed of distinct, culturally laden institutional fields, each of which operates as if it were organized around transrational substances—power, love, faith, property, knowledge—ontologies whose reality is performed as much as revealed through routinized procedures enacted by culturally specific agents whose agency and interest are tied to those substances and the real relations which they make possible and which conjure them into existence.
Institutions are at once social and cultural. They are transrational ways of organizing bodies and objects in space and time (Friedland & Afford 1991). And they are themselves spaces and times, locations in which those bodies and objects carry particular meanings. Institutions form both values, in the sense of stakes, and the means by which such values are signified. Institutions constitute both ends and means. Ends are known, made accountable and actionable, through the techniques,
the procedures, through which they are produced and distributed. One "makes" love through practices of kinship and its sensuous solidarities and exclusions; democracy through electoral practices, regular plebiscites understood as democratic practices; profit through monetized networks of exchange between holders of different properties, themselves known only through the rights regulating these exchanges. Love, democratic representation, and profit are ontological substances, constructed things, never truly had, but done.
The organizations of bodies and things in space and time become material sig-nifiers for categories and values (see also Mohr & Duquenne 1997). This choreography of practice is not properly speaking a form of social signage. The material practices through which those categories and values, as well as the subjects they imply—voting, democracy and citizen, for example—are symbolizations, in that they have an inherent and nonarbitrary relation to the signified, democracy or representation in this case. Institutional analysis, with its profusion of performatives, requires us to move beyond the linguistic model in which the referent does not signify. Social practice is both referent and signifier; it is an ontological performance. Institutions have logics that must be made material in order to signify.
Moral cartography is produced by the distribution of material practices. Resources—guns or butter, bodies or things, territory or time—have little efficacy independent of the institutional codes that are a condition of their deployment. This is as true for the investment banker as it is for the mullah, each of whom must neutralize the efficacy of resources freighted with other institutional meanings. Things don't matter without meaning. And meanings—symbols and signs, narratives and metaphors—do not signify independently of their reference, and the history of that reference, in material practices. Institutional theory is not about the leftovers of rational action, the ways in which cultural conventions rush in where means-ends relations are opaque. Rather, institutional logics constitute the cosmology within which means are meaningful, where means-ends couplets make sense, are thought appropriate, and become the naturalized, unthought conditions of social action, performing the substance of the interests that are at stake within them. Resources are referents that signify; materiality is always meaningful.
If resources are bound to institutions, useful because meaningful, then interests in resources cannot be dissociated from the institutional conditions that establish their value. There is no political economy that is not simultaneously a cultural sociology, and vice versa. Every resource allocation is a process of signification, in which the categories, instruments, and agencies through which some object is produced or distributed are made real. Struggles over resources always contain the possibility of struggle over discourse/classification because they expand the materiality, the efficacy of those agents and languages that thereby organize those resources.
Religion, then, is not just a doctrine, a set of myths, a culture; it is an institutional space according to whose logic religious nationalists wish to remake the world. Religion is a network of sacred sites and ritual spaces, as well as community centers, associations, schools, hospitals, courts, and charities. In the face of failures, limits,
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and retrenchments of the welfare state, for instance, religious communities seek to fill the gap. Religious nationalist movements not only provide an alternative welfare-state to their members, its services are offered and consumed as a condition of and within a context of community, unlike the distant, bureaucratic, and often officious state. Islamic, Jewish, and Hindu nationalists all built their movements by offering things as simple as cooking oil and well-water, places to sleep and learn, as community acts of care, not the governmental management of a social problem. Religion offers a concrete cosmos within which an alternative vision of the social can be imagined and prefigured.
Religious nationalism grows out of modernity's institutional heterologies. Religious nationalism extends the institutional logic of religion into the domain of the democratic nation-state, deriving authority from an absolute divine writ, not the subjective aggregations of the demos; pushing toward redemption, not progress; locating agency in a disciplined self bound to God, not a sacralized, self-interested monad; constituting society not through the abstract, disembodied individual of the market but through the erotic and gendered flesh of the family. Religious nationalism posits an institutionally specific substance of the social, neither the procedures of reason nor the play of self-interest, but rather the communal solidarities of faith.
Religious nationalism can be understood as a heterologous project to promote a particular logic of collective representation. Institutional logic and collective representation are linked phenomena because groups form through particular institutional configurations and because institutions defend and extend themselves through group conflicts. Groups know themselves through their institutional projects, and through those projects they reshape the logic of collective representation, not just who is represented but the nature of the representation. Social movements are not just about inclusion and exclusion, domination and subordination, of social groups. The empirical question is the extent to which groups derive from and target particular institutional sites, and to which they draw on different institutional languages, and their success in making those particular languages primary. The invocation of a particular institutional logic is a political act, a performative claim that the institution to which it has most reference should have primacy, and hence that the groups/agents who politically intervene from it should have power.
RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM AND THE HOMOLOGOUS WORLDS OF PIERRE BOURDIEU
Religious nationalism requires a cultural sociological approach. In this and the following section, I examine the adequacy of Pierre Bourdieu's theory of the field and Jeffrey Alexander's theory of civil society, for the project of understanding contemporary religious nationalism.
Although I have been influenced by Pierre Bourdieu's insistence on the materiality and embodied quality of categorical knowledge, religious nationalism is
difficult to apprehend within his habitus/field theory. Bourdieu conceives of society as a structure of domination, a structure for which one is prepared from birth through the inculcation of knowledges that are predominantly acquired not by design, but by living, a disciplining of the body through the choreography of life. Bourdieu calls this knowledge habitus, a knowledge that goes without saying because it came without saying. Habitus, the foundation stone of Bourdieu's theory, is an embodied categorical structure that simultaneously structures the object world and the subject's orientation within that world. One's position in the structure of domination is given by the resources to which one has access—money, power, cultural knowledge, technical expertise, social connections. Habitus translates this position into disposition. One knows one's place, one's chances, the moves and investments and their likely pay-offs.
Habitus is the tacit knowledge that is the condition of possibility of institutional life. Bourdieu looks upon institutional "fields" as relatively autonomous games, arenas each with its own gravitational logic, zones in which particular forms of capital have efficacy in the pursuit of that which is at stake in the game (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992:97-101). Bourdieu derives the invariant laws of modernity's multiple fields from their homologous logics (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992). Habitus binds unconsciously and efficiently because of the homologous distributions of resources across distinct institutional fields. Each field is polarized between those few who control its most important resources and those who have very few, if any, of those resources.
Homology, however, depends on a cultural homogenization. In Bourdieu's early work, every resource—economic, social, cultural, information—became another form of capital, every field another "market." Bourdieu economized all realms of social life in which one invests, develops credit, and reaps profits. Through the concept of several capitals, Bourdieu sought to convert Weber's distinct spheres of class, status, and power to a common conceptual metric. Thus, for example, the contest over control of legitimate violence—Weber's criterion for state power— became the "struggle to accumulate symbolic capital" (Bourdieu 1977:41, 60-61), that is, the capacity to impose one's categorical order on the social world, a monopoly on the violence of legitimation. More recently, Bourdieu has become indifferent in using the term power or capital (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992:97).
Although Bourdieu has alerted us to the dangers of reproducing doxa by relying on folk categories in the construction of our theoretical objects, he himself imports the dominant fields—capitalism and the bureaucratic state—into the analytic categories—capital and power—by which we understand all fields. Bourdieu thus reproduces the dominance of the dominant institutions. To homologize institutionally, Bourdieu reduces all field relations to the power binary of dominant and dominated. It is only because Bourdieu has homogenized the principle of practice across fields—the binary of domination—that he can so easily homologize groups across fields (Bourdieu 1990). The several capitals are ultimately convertible in the "division in the labor of domination" (Bourdieu 1996, Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992). Accumulation of capital is a trans-historical mode of reproducing
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domination within a field, this "will to power" being the cultural content of interest within every field. The "field of power" is the "gaming space" in which holders of these diverse forms of power, the dominant groups within each field, struggle over which will be the dominant form of power, the exchange rate between them, and hence the "dominant principle of domination" (Bourdieu 1996). By making economic practice a trans-institutional instrument in the service of domination, Bourdieu makes the social into a general political economy, a significant theoretical achievement, but he thereby undercuts the transformative possibilities inherent in classificatory systems, both in their singularity and their plurality. The cultural constitution of groups is derived from this political economy, the stakes of the game are homogenized, and the group structure is homologized.
Religious nationalism is a break in modern doxa, our common sense of things, a failure in the modem state's capacity to produce a habitus that makes submission not into choice, but common sense, a natural attitude. Bourdieu writes that it is the modern state:
... which possesses the means of imposition and inculcation of the durable principles of vision and division that conform to its own structure, is the site par excellence of the concentration of symbolic power. (1998:47)
Because he locates the origin of the dominant vision in the political victories of dominant groups, whose domination rests on their constitution of the state, the modern state becomes an instrument for the institution of categorical knowledge, a monopoly medium for universalizing and naturalizing knowledge, a cognitive machine that plays a particular role in the "division of labor of domination" (Bourdieu 1998:58). Here, the substantive content of the universal is not of sociological import.
Bourdieu's theoretical apparatus does apply to religious nationalism in that it is a classification struggle over the dominant principle of domination, a struggle animated by a principle which could be denned by its distance from that of the liberal capitalist state. Religious nationalism, like the modern state itself, originates as a symbolic disordering out of the interested plays of agents who are particularly positioned. The position of religious agents is important in explaining the rise of religious nationalism. Specifically, religion's institutional autonomy from the state is a critical variable in accounting for the ability of its agents to promote their state vision. Religious nationalism developed earliest in those places where religion was not controlled by the state: in Iran, where the Sh'ite clergy, with their tradition of the imam, a non-political religious authority, had been able to maintain their autonomy from the Shahs; in Israel, where the rabbinate, although partially incorporated within the state was not subordinate to it; in the United States where the state was constitutionally prevented from controlling the religious domain; and in India where the state did not regulate Hindu religious institutions. Religious nationalism has not developed in those countries where religion is not allowed an independent institutional space such as China, Japan, and Korea, all places where the state actually controls religious finances and appointments (Rudolph 1997a).
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However, even states that have sought to control religious institutions have not necessarily been able to prevent the politicization of religion as the cases of Turkey, Algeria, and Egypt all make clear (Humphreys 1999).
One could also point to the distinctive social composition of religious nationalism's carriers—its urban support, and specifically the way clerics marginalized by the modernized institutes of religious training often play such a critical role, making religious nationalism into a medium for distributional struggles for those lacking in symbolic capital or political power (Arjomand 1995, Riesebrodt 1993). Religious nationalism draws overwhelmingly from the middle class, precisely that class to which political sociologists have always looked as a bastion of support for democracy. However, there is no consistent pattern of support within that vast and variegated urban middle class. The adherents of religious nationalism come from declining sectors like the bazaar merchants, as well as from rising sectors like the professionals and state bureaucrats (Lawrence 1998, Riesebrodt 1993, Humphreys 1992). In the United States, the Christian right, those who believe that America was founded as a Christian nation and should, by law, remain that way, draws from both evangelicals and traditionally premillenarian fundamentalists. A majority of both communities actively participate in conservative Christian politics. American evangelicals and fundamentalists are smack dab in the middle class, less likely to be poor than the nonreligious (Hunter 1987, Roof 1999, Smith 1998). Indeed, a majority of the Christian right base communities report that their economic situation has improved over the last decade (Smith 1998).
Islamic radicalism likewise appeals to the urban middle class, not to the poor, the working class, or the rural peasantry. However, this still leaves a lot of social space and there is no consistent pattern across the cases. In Pakistan, it appeals to state employees and not to urban, under-employed young professionals. In Egypt and Tunisia, in contrast, it appeals predominantly to upwardly mobile middle classes, particularly the professionals. In Syria the merchants and landlords are key (Lawrence 1998). The only thing these disparate groups have in common is that they can read, which is no small thing.
Religious nationalism represents the return to text, to the fixity of signs, the renarrativization of the nation in a cosmic context. It returns us to bodies and souls, a zone to be defended against things on the one side and beasts on the other. Religious nationalism is literally about reading, the collective plumbing of a text for its timeless truths, as a basis for the narration of contemporary history. Islamic fundamentalists look to the Quranic history of the community founded by Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century as a template by which to gauge and goad the present order. Their Jewish counterparts locate their foundation and telos in the ancient Temple-centered kingdom that was the culmination of God's territorial promise to Abraham, Moses, and David documented in the Torah. Christian fundamentalists read the prophetic books of the Bible as a road-map by which they interpret contemporary social realities. Hindu nationalists derive their reading of the Indian state from the Hindi Ramayana, a narration of the foundational kingship of Ram, the avatar of Vishnu.
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Religious nationalists read these books and commentaries on them together. This collective reading is the core of their communitas. The middle class is a class of the word. It owes its life, its earnings, to its ability to read books, to words and numbers that have a clear meaning and a certain use. That those who live off the book should seek to live by the book as a foundation for a new social trust, is, as Bourdieu might say, part of the middle class habitus, an unconscious disposition, an autonomic routine. In the Islamic world, the newly educated youth read and discuss a popular Islamic literature written in colloquial Arabic rather than the classical Arabic of the traditional scholarly Islamic elites. Protestant evangelicals and fundamentalists understand how God wants them to live by their reading of the Bible, not by what the Church teaches them (Smith 1998). Latin American Catholicism moved into Liberation Theory, not only because of the message of social justice contained in Vatican Council II, but also because of the post-WWII translation of the liturgy into local languages and the encouragement of lay Bible reading (Levine & Stoll 1997). In a pattern that replicates Protestantism's birth process, this collective interpretation of words by the people themselves feeds a diffuse associational network, a popular religious civil society, that is very difficult for the state or organized religious hierarchies to control (Rudolph 1997b).
While Bourdieu's schema captures part of its process, it misses the institutional substances at stake that make those struggles possible. Religious nationalism does not derive from the dominated groups within the dominant institutions—capitalism and state, but from an alternative institutional space altogether. By stripping means of their institutional meaning, by homogenizing the logic of practice as a generalized political economy, Bourdieu eliminates the institutional zones upon which alternative projects can be mounted. It is institutional heterology, not conflicts over the distributions of several capitals so central in Bourdieu's theory, nor an unspeakable outside as in some poststructuralist accounts, that is the critical source of human freedom.
RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM AND THE CIVIL CENTER
If religious nationalism is difficult to theorize within Pierre Bourdieu's culturally homogenous instrumentalized world, it is no less easy within the sacralized, normative world of Jeffrey Alexander. If that of Bourdieu is animated by instrumental, misrecognized struggles for power and capital mediated through the state, in Alexander, these struggles are not only refracted but constituted through the democratic culture of civil society, powered by struggles over membership and recognition. If the meaning of Bourdieu's universal is reduced to the bleak binary logic of domination, categories driven by distribution, in Alexander, its meanings are polysemous and efflorescent, moral dualities charged with sacrality (Alexander 1995).
Alexander, who pioneered the cultural sociological agenda and whose insistence on cultural constitution I share, locates the cultural in a specific institutional
field—civil society, a sphere separated from both the economy and the state, as well as from religion, family, science, and primordial communities. Civil society is roughly equivalent to the public sphere, a zone where individual rights are protected, political participation organized, and societal membership defined. He writes:
Such an independent civil sphere can exist only insofar as the privacy of individual interaction is protected, institutional independence is guaranteed for the creation of law and public opinion, and normative symbolic patterns make honesty, rationality, individual autonomy, cooperation and impersonal trust the basic criteria for membership in the binding community that defines 'society'. (Alexander 1996:225)
In contrast to Bourdieu's "field of power" as modern society's institutional center, Alexander accords this role to civil society, the source of the symbols out of which we define our collective identity and its terms of membership. Alexander derives the possibility of modem social movements from "an imagined community" whose content derives from this civil society's codes—honesty, rationality, individual autonomy, cooperation, and impersonal trust. It is these codes, this culture, of civil society that defines the "criteria for membership in the binding community that defines 'society.'"
Civil society, and civil society alone, provides the platform for collective and individual agency. Alexander writes:
... the most significant idioms, codes and narratives employed by strong social movements, new and old, positive and negative, are independent of their structural position in particular spheres. Indeed, when one examines these tropes, one can plainly see that it is their very distance from particular institutional arenas that allows them to offer social movements leverage, that creates the possibility of an escape from immediate institutional demands, that encourages the very exercise of agency vis a vis institutional constraints that the very existence of a social movement implies. (1996:226)
Social movements pose their demands, derive their possibility from, and depend for their success upon the "Utopian notion of community" immanent in civil society, "according to which rational actors spontaneously forge ties that are at once self-regulating, solidaristic, and emancipatory, which are independent of market rewards, religious faith, family love, state coercion and scientific truth" (1996:227, 229). Agency depends on difference from every other institutional domain.
Alexander makes civil society, which he equates with the universatistic rights of democracy—not science, religion, economy, or family—into culture's central domain, the sacred's modern locus. Here Alexander follows Talcott Parsons' notion of "societal community," a zone of universalistic solidarity through which the social system is integrated (Mouzelis 1999). To equate society with its universalistic, rational civil zone deprives us of the absolute unreason, the erotic, ecstatic, kinetic "effervescence" of the social upon which Emile Dürkheim insisted, an
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unreason taken up in the 1930s by the College de Sociologie. Alexander also, by fiat, negates the Marxist civil society tradition that understood civil society as a bourgeois order standing outside the state. If Bourdieu capitalizes the social, eliminating by concept the contradiction between institutional spheres, Alexander hives off the capitalist economy altogether, reducing the place modern society is defined to the public sphere and the content of its identity to democracy's moral codes. Alexander's civil society is suffused with political substance, but devoid of economic content, even though our categories of the person and his rights are historically suffused with property and its exchange. Alexander is, of course, correct to argue that democratic civil society is the most important medium through which groups reach for power not only within the polity, but within other particular institutional spheres. That, however, does not exhaust the sociological significance of many social movements, nor is the civil society the only site through which society is imagined, its values redistributed and/orreconstituted. While civil society may be a critical locus of will formation, it is not the only source of its content. Alexander mistakes a medium of political participation for the meaning of membership. And he reduces the meaning of political participation to membership in the demos, social movements being understood as media for groups carrying particular "social problems" into the public arena. T. H. Marshall has been mated with Emile Dürkheim.
The problem was not that Parsons concretely conflated the cultural and the social, as a problem of observability, but that he analytically separated them, failing to articulate the cultural mediations by which production and distribution were systematically linked, and that he assumes a unitary cultural order, not just in the sense that differently positioned individuals have different interests in that order, [the dominant distributional critique of Parsons (Alexander & Colomy 1990)], but that different institutions, more than serving different systemic functions, produce and distribute different potentially contradictory values.
Alexander has relocated the sacred to the public sphere, distilled its ideal voice, the tropes of reasoned consensus. But each institutional sphere has its own sacrality, a capacity to organize social life and the collectivity in its own language, linked to its own techniques of production and distribution. Each provides its own distinctive collective imaginary, its own universals which movements and organizations try to socially concretize. Democracy's institutional distinctiveness lies not in its universality, but in the sacrality with which it invests the person, the primacy it accords the individual's voice. Capitalist markets, bureaucratic states, domestic families, scientific fields, religion—each generates a heterologous language, each produces and distributes specific values—money, rationality, love, truth, faith. While there are symmetries and interdependencies between institutional codes, there are also critical gaps and contradictions, incommensurabilities that provide polities' passionate energies, that afford the space for social movements like those of socialist workers, ecologists, feminists, or religious nationalists. It is these contradictions— not, as Alexander insists, the gap between value and norm that Talcott Parsons left unproblematic between the cultural and the social—that are also critical in
making space for agency. It is the contradiction between democracy and society's two dominant institutions—capitalism and the state—that gives civil society much of its energizing power, and that between religion and the capitalist state that makes religious nationalism possible and provides its hermeneutic codes.
Alexander assumes what needs to be treated as historically variable, that successful social movements must convert their claims into the democratic language of civil society. Religious nationalisms are strong social movements, yet they violate civil society's codes, counterposing transrational belief to rationality, the communal solidarities of faith to impersonal trust, the revealed text to a compact founded on reasoned consent, involuntary subordination to divine dictates as opposed to individual autonomy. Religious nationalism, like socialism, indicates not only that civil society's moral codes need not have primacy in the formation of successful social movements, but that democracy cannot easily manage the heterologous logics of rationality, scientific truth, allocative efficiency, familial need, or religious faith.
CONCLUSION
Religious nationalism challenges the sociological imagination. It requires that we think anew. It forces us to rethink the duality of social and cultural, to move away from the group as the elemental constituent of social organization, to recognize the heterology of institutions as the basis of politics and collective agency, and through the institution to make the cultural content of power part of our understanding of the politics of culture.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for his comments and Karen Cook for her editorial suggestions.
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Antra. Rev. Sociol.2001. 27:153-85 Copyright © 2001 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved
Socioeconomic Status and Class in Studies of Fertility and Health in Developing Countries
Kenneth A. Bollen1, Jennifer L. Glanville2, and Guy Stecklov3
'Department of Sociology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27599-3210: e-mail: bollen@unc.edu
1'Department of Sociology, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa 52242-1401; e-mail: j^glanville@unc.edu
3Department of Sociology, Mount Scopus Campus, Hebrew University, Jerusalem 91905, Israel; e-mail: stecklov@mscc.huji.ac.it
Key Words measurement of socioeconomic status, dimensions of socioeconomic status, socioeconomic status and demography, socioeconomic status and population studies, permanent income, class, fertility, health
■ Abstract The concepts of socioeconomic status (SES) and class are pervasive in sociological studies, yet an examination of the sociological and social science literature suggests a lack of consensus on their conceptual meaning and measurement. Our review focuses on the use of SES and class in a specific substantive field, studies of child health and fertility in developing countries. We discuss the mechanisms that underlie the relationship between SES and fertility and child health and the divergent results found in this field. We then provide a brief review of the theoretical literature on SES and class, contrasting unitary and component views. Following this is a section on the use of SES and class in empirical studies of child health and fertility in developing countries. We investigate the relationship between the conceptual and empirical literature, highlighting the inconsistencies we find. In addition, we discuss the variety of meanings and measures of SES that researchers use in these studies. Next, we address a series of methodological issues that arise from the review. Finally, we make recommendations for the treatment of SES and class in these and related areas.
INTRODUCTION
Few concepts are as central to sociology as those of socioeconomic status (SES) and class. Whether in theories of the class structures conducive to democratic development at the macro level (e.g., Therborn 1977) or micro studies of social capital (e.g., Parcel & Menaghan 1994) or depression (e.g., Link et al 1993), SES
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