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Perspectives on Women’S Everyday Religion ACTA UNIVERSITATIS STOCKHOLMIENSIS Stockholm Studies in Comparative Religion - 35 - Perspectives on Women’s Everyday Religion Marja-Liisa Keinänen (editor) Perspectives on Women’s Everyday Religion Papers read at the conference Religion on the Borders. New Challenges in the Academic Study of Religion at Södertörn University College, Sweden, April 19–22, 2007 Edited by Marja-Liisa Keinänen Cover design: Otso Helenius Cover photos by courtesy of Marja Tiilikainen, Helena Ruotsala, and Marja-Liisa Keinänen ©Authors and Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis, Stockholm 2010 ISBN 978-91-86071-35-6 ISSN 0562-1070 Printed in Sweden by US-AB universitetsservice, Stockholm 2010 Distributor: eddy.se ab, Visby, Sweden Contents Introduction 7 Marja‐Liisa Keinänen PART I: Contested Vocations and Gendered Boundaries Fredrika Bremer: A Preacher on the Borders of Religion 41 Ulla Manns Fredrika Ehrenborg and her Swedenborgian Thoughts on Inner Spiri‐ tuality, Transformation and the Marriage between Love and Wis‐ dom, Will and Intellect 51 Hanna Nyberg Women in Public: Preaching in Late Nineteenth Century Sweden 73 Gunilla Gunner “Let her own Works Praise her” (Proverbs 31:31): Christian Vocation Expressed in Everyday Toil among Schartauan Women 79 Katarina Lewis “Mother Mary Comes to Me” – An Essay in Constructive Feminist Theology 95 Cristina Grenholm PART II: Women’s Everyday Religion and Gendered Spaces in Ver‐ nacular Catholicisms The Home, the Sacred Order and Domestic Chores in Premodern Russian Orthodox Karelia 119 Marja‐Liisa Keinänen Gendered Religious Spaces among the Mari in Central Russia 155 Helena Ruotsala Roses and Chrysanthemums – Women and the Materiality of Religion in Portugal 173 Lena Gemzöe PART III: Women’s Everyday Religion and Gendered Spaces in Vernacular Islams The Spirituality of Work and the Work of Spirituality: Women Agri‐ culturalists in Tunisia 189 Katherine Platt Sitaat as Part of Somali Women’s Everyday Religion 203 Marja Tiilikainen Piety and Trade: A Somali Woman Trader in Dubai 219 Rannveig Jetne Haga Contributors 233 Introduction Marja-Liisa Keinänen During the past decades, the academic study of religion has been increas- ingly criticised for its one-sided focus on formal religious institutions and their textual and doctrinal traditions. According to critics, this narrow de- marcation of the subject matter of Religious Studies has led to a neglect of the study of both indigenous religions (Olupona 2004:xiv; Harvey 2000:6; Cox 2007:1), and the lived religion of ordinary people (Orsi 2002: xvi; King 2002:69–70). The recently published, Europäische Religionsgeschichte. Ein mehrfacher Pluralismus (2009) can be regarded as further evidence of the persistence of this research trend. As Ingvild Gilhus has pointed out, this important, pioneering work has failed to find space in all of its 854 pages for indigenous and popular religions in the European history of religious plural- ism (2010:109). Similar scholarly bias can be found in other disciplines con- cerned with the study of religion. Peter Berger draws attention to the fact that the Sociology of Religion has also had a certain predilection for the study of formal religious institutions, and, when investigating people’s re- ligiosity, has used quantitative methods which disregard religion as it is lived in the everyday lives of ordinary people (2007:v). We may find the reason for this scholarly preference in the “world relig- ions” paradigm and its theoretical underpinnings which have hitherto deline- ate the scope and limits of the academic study of religion. As critics of this paradigm have argued, it proceeds from an abstract, ahistorical and univer- salising notion of religion (Schopen 1991; King 2002:69; Masuzawa 2005), defining the actual beliefs and practices of the “folk” in such a way that they fall outside of its subject matter. Mircea Eliade’s treatment of “the customs and beliefs of European peasants” is a case in point. He writes: It is true that most of these rural European populations have been Christian- ized for over a thousand years. But they succeeded in incorporating into their Christianity a considerable part of their pre-Christian religious heritage, which was of immemorial antiquity. It would be wrong to suppose that for this reason European peasants are not Christians. But we must recognize that their religion is not confined to the historical forms of Christianity. /.../ We may speak of a primordial, ahistorical Christianity; becoming Christians, the European cultivators incorporated into their new faith the cosmic religion that they had preserved from prehistoric times. (Eliade 1959:164.) 7 Gregory Schopen, who is critical of this kind of essentialising approach, criticises Eliade: Eliade separates what Christians actually did or do, their “customs and be- liefs,” from “historical forms of Christianity.” What European Christian peasants do or believe is excluded from the history of their own religion and is assigned to something called “ahistorical Christianity.” Once again the im- plications are clear: “the historical forms of Christianity” – whatever they are, and that is assumed to be self-evident – have little to do with actual Chris- tians. (Schopen 1991:18.) According to Schopen, approaches of this kind proceed from texts which are assumed to be binding and which therefore should reflect the actual behav- iour of the adherents of the religion under study (1991:19). The texts and the behaviour which was thought to accord with these texts were regarded as religion proper, while religious behaviour deviating from these expectations fell outside the category ‘religion’. The consequence of the “world religion” approach has been that popular practices, depending on the research context, have been relegated to a resid- ual category “popular religion”, “folk religion” or “folk belief”. These classi- fications in turn have had concrete consequences for the study of religion since they have led to the fragmentation of the scholarly field, serving as they have done as a basis for the division of academic labour. One result of this division has been that the study of Christianity has become the exclusive domain of Christian theologians, while historians of religion have primarily focussed on the remaining “world religions”. Indigenous religions, “popular” or “folk” religions, which are often closely interwoven with local traditions, have by and large become the province of social or cultural anthropologists.1 In Lutheran North of Europe, church historians and, to certain extent, eth- nologists and folklorists, have devoted themselves to the study of vernacular Christianity, called “folk piety”, whereas “folk belief” – the pre-Christian beliefs and practices which now more or less belong to history – were allot- ted to ethnologists and/or folklorists (Keinänen 2003:47). As this disciplinary division of labour between the Christian West and “the rest” implies, the “world religion” paradigm with its classifications pro- ceeds from the hegemonic Christian perspective and has furthered the other- ing of non-Christian “world religions” on the one hand, and the “primitive” religions of “the savages” or the religion of the peasantry and uneducated masses, on the other (Orsi 2002:xvi; Masuzawa 2005:18; Cox 2007:45). Because women tend to be the other of the others, these ethnocentric and, as we shall see, androcentric scholarly paradigms have had particular repercus- sions on the study of the religious lives of women. Since women have more 1 The dividing line is not sharp, because there are anthropologically trained historians of religion who have studied indigenous religions. 8 often been involved in practices which were outside the formal religious institutions or – seen from the perspective of these institutions – at their margins, their activity has fallen outside the scope of religious studies. The purpose of this book is to shed light on women’s everyday religion which, in spite of the progress made during the past decades, is still a ne- glected area in the academic study of religion. In like manner to the sociolo- gist of religion Nancy T. Ammerman, I have chosen to use the term ‘every- day religion’ in order to privilege the everyday practices of the non- professionals (2007:5), contrary to the aforementioned trend which has privi- leged the texts, doctrines and ceremonies of the professionals in formal, offi- cial institutions. But unlike Ammerman, I do not limit the scope of the no- tion ‘everyday religion’ to the unofficial sphere, since many of the women described in this book are/were involved in the daily activities of the formal institutions. This means that everyday religion takes place both in the private and in the public sphere. Moreover, following Ammerman, I do not limit everyday to mundane, quotidian routines, but include also “the crises and special events that punctuate those routines” (Ammerman 2007:5). Because of the aforementioned fragmentary nature of the scholarly field, this book approaches the issue from a multidisciplinary perspective in order to give as multifaceted a picture of the field as possible. The authors repre- sent history of religions, social/cultural anthropology, ethnology, theology and intellectual history. Although the articles are centred on women and their religious ideas and practices, primarily in various Christian contexts but also in some Muslim settings, most of the authors place women within a wider framework of gender relations. Besides gender, the papers also ac- knowledge the significance
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