Introduction to a Forum on Religion and Place

One of the defining contributions of the social scientific enterprise-perhaps the defining contribution as to what constitutes sociology-is that "context matters." Defining and specifying what counts as "context," however, is by no means settled. It can involve social factors such as institutional location or network embeddedness. Context can have symbolic content as well, as when culture is read syntactically from artifacts, or when we try to define and describe "the" culture of "a" people. Importantly, and central to this Forum, we are increasingly being pushed to think about physical context and geographical location. A number of subdisciplinary areas within sociology have been grappling recently with issues of place (see, for example, Gieryn 2000 or Miller 2000). However, many of our core social scientific methods, such as the survey, do not take place seriously theoretically. Surely, place is often considered as a variable-do residents of the South have different views than those in New England? Have Latinos become a "national" minority in the United States by settling in substantial numbers outside the three major metropolitan areas of New York, Los Angeles, and Miami? Do urban Democratic voters show different patterns of church membership than suburban Republican voters? But in other ways place is not well developed conceptually. At the simplest methodological level, the answers on the survey do not record whether the survey was done in the respondents' home, and if so, whether it was on the back deck or in the living room. Many ethnographic accounts, of course, do tell us these types of details, and are often successful in giving us the "feel" of the scene as it is lived. But that presents its own challenges-as we are often not sure what to think about that locational information, or how it affected the data gathered or the social processes that occurred. And the more located and local one's method is, the more questions there are regarding any generalizations from the data. Almost by definition, the located is too local to provide too much confidence in generalized conclusions. The reality and specificity of physical place may be inimical to one of the core tasks of social science-to extract and abstract from particular situations the patterns that we are theoretically and ontologically committed to believing exist in the social world. This call to a sociology of place reminds me of a similar challenge to take seriously a sociology of the body. Humans exist in bodies, and much social action is embodied in particular, varying, and patterned ways. Indeed, a sign of the centrality of the body is that a useful research program investigates just those times when interaction is not conducted by immediately co-present bodies; it is interesting precisely because it is different. In the same manner, most of social life is emplaced. It happens somewhere, and the somewhere should seem to matter. And when social life does not happen anywhere in particular-usually as the result of some technological mediation-that is a subject for investigation in its own right. And yet, calls for attention to place are much more common than systematic guidance on how one actually does this. What does it mean, in both the practice of research methods and in the theorizing we do about our empirical work, to "take place seriously"? How do we locate social life in a place, and understand how it is affected by that place? How do we make place more than just another added variable? In the study of religion, place may be integral. Sacred spaces, as literal locations, are at the center of many human religious and spiritual systems. And for many peoples, these locations are