Our position is consistent with Garfinkel’s argument that the detailed and
recognizable features of embodied action are essential to intelligibility and
elaborates his idea that in order to be witnessably recognizable, action must
also be instructable, that is, it must be learned as recognizably reproducible
details of practices in-situ. It also underscores the relevance of local orders of
practice to Marx’s treatment of religion as ideology, demonstrating the reliance
of systems of belief (ideology) on underlying systems of witnessably enacted
practice (praxis). Praxis ultimately must come first. As Durkheim argued
(1912), it is practices that first produce the beliefs. We examine the details of
praxis/practice, not only in relations of labor, but also in the labor of con-
structing beliefs.
Social practices were the focus at each step of the research process. Instead
of analyzing social practices as expressions of belief we treated expressed
belief as practices to be analyzed. Motivation, faith in this case, is a feature
of situated interactions and their expectations in details. Failing to enact the
practice correctly leads to a different attribution of motive than a correct enact-
ment. Thus, the primary motivation must be to enact the practice correctly.
Thus, we do not treat motivation as a value or belief belonging to individu-
als, organizations or institutions. When, in more conventional research, the
focus is removed from situated action and situated social actors, and con-
ceived of as values and beliefs and variables related to them, social structure
becomes an abstract concept devoid of lived details. Structures appear deter-
ministic, lacking room for agency. Attempts to account for agency then seem
to require the interpretation of abstract structures and abstractions of indi-
vidual motives. Attempts to account for structure seem to require the aggre-
gation of individual motives.
All abstractions – beliefs, narratives, rules – invoke this dialectic. It is not
peculiar to studies of religion. It is a problem for the analysis of all social
orders that their theorized appearances come to be treated as the realthing,
obscuring actual social processes and relations from view. Both Durkheim
and Marx recognized this problem and argued that the truth of social prac-
tices of various sorts lies in the actual concrete relationships between persons
that they enact – or make possible – not in their end products.
The general practice of taking the end product – beliefs and narrative
accounts – and treating them as the motivational and organizing principles
of religion and other social orders, constitutes a dialectic of belief and prac-
tice: a contradiction that substitutes belief for practice and obscures both the
Speaking in Tongues: A Dialectic of Faith and Practice • 281