Paper short abstract:

The paper proposes an anthropological framework for the study of the church as a hegemonic institution in European countries with a history of Catholic Church dominating the religious field, based on a discussion of Gramsci's notion of hegemony and Bourdieu's approach to the sociology of religion.

Paper long abstract:

Catholicism offers itself as a classical - yet comparatively understudied - topic of a comparative Europeanist anthropology.My paper draws upon a theoretical framework designed as part of an ongoing research project on the role of the church as a social institution and the Catholic faith as an individual habitus in postsocialist Lithuania and proposes some general lines of inquiry for Catholic majority societies across Europe.

Key inspirations of my approach are (1) Gramsci's notion of hegemony, which serves to analyze how culture and consciousness are the product of power inequalities, class experiences and historically accumulated understandings of the social order; and (2) Bourdieu's theorizing of the 'paradox of the doxa', the fact that the established order of things perpetuates itself easily, rather than being challenged or subverted by those disadvantaged under the existing conditions. A church that dominates the religious field can thus be understood as a particularly effective means of promoting hegemony and the misrecognition of elite domination as the natural order of things, by supporting the reproduction of an individual religious habitus or a collusio shared by the members of a social group as their collective understanding of the doxa.

Based on such theoretical reflections, I propose to study the role of the Catholic Church with regard to four interrelated fields: sites of the production of hegemony; occasions of the expression of common-sense, 'popular' religiosity; the church as an institutional focus of belonging; and sites of contestation or religious indifference.

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