Religious Identities and Religious Institutions 215
including the specific institutional context of rules and practices in which it is located
(Lewin 1996). And it proceeds from the individual (but socially constructed) autobio-
graphical narratives of the actors. Action takes place in a relational setting, which is
composed of institutions (recognized, patterned structural relations), public narratives,
and social practices, all of which are both patterned and contested – constructed and
constrained.
Somers and other narrative theorists go a long way toward providing the sort of
dynamic and layered mode of analysis needed in understanding identities, but at least
one more layer remains. While they acknowledge the way in which narratives are
situated in particular places and times, they often forget that they are also enacted
by actual physical bodies in material environments. The metaphor of narrative runs
the risk of allowing us to reduce social action to texts and words, when the habits
that guide us, as well as the experiences that disrupt those habits, are often carried by
affect more than thought, by deeply sensual memories and impulses as much as by plot
lines. I am convinced that embodied practices are crucial. Gestures, postures, music,
and movements tell the story and signal our location in it. There has been a good deal
of attention to the way social situations define bodily meaning and experience (Collins
1992; Giddens 1991; Young 1989), but less attention to the physical self as agent in
defining identity and membership. Here students of ritual may have something to
contribute to the analysis of other forms of social interaction (Comaroff 1985; Soeffner
1997).
INGREDIENTS FOR UNDERSTANDING IDENTITY
We may understand identities as emerging, then, at the everyday intersections of au-
tobiographical and public narratives. We tell stories about ourselves (both literally and
through our behavior) that signal both our uniqueness and our membership, that ex-
hibit the consistent themes that characterize us and the unfolding improvisation of the
given situation. Each situation, in turn, has its own story, a public narrative shaped by
the culture and institutions of which it is a part, with powerful persons and prescribed
roles establishing the plot, but surprises and dilemmas that may create gaps in the script
or cast doubt on the proffered identity narratives of the participants. Both the individ-
ual and the collectivity are structured and remade in those everyday interactions.
We are situating the study of identity, then, in the socially structured arenas of inter-
action present in everyday life.^15 Those everyday arenas have two key characteristics we
must recognize. First, they areboth structured and constructed. Our mutual storytelling is
both patterned and improvised. Entrenched habits and powerful actors may maintain
existing templates for action, reinforcing the reality of social categories that define us.
Nevertheless, stories and characters are constantly being revised. An adequate under-
standing of both personal and communal identity requires attention to the reality of
both agency and structure, both revolution and hegemony.
It also requires attention to theintersectionalityof the situations out of which iden-
tities are constructed. Actions arise out of the multiplicity of public narratives available
to modern actors. Because no situation is rigidly bounded, multiple public narratives
(^15) These are Marx’s “social relations of production,” the occasions for socially constructed actions
and ideas that constitute the basis for society (Marx 1844/1964).