Choosing a Vocation. Sociological Reflections on Agency and Piety

• In Event: 176 - Section on Sociology of Religion Paper Session. Innovations in the Sociology of Religion

Abstract

Vocation played a critical role in the development of social theory, and notably in the work of Max Weber, both in his account of individual action and its relationship to social transformation, as well in his understanding of secularization. In a well-known argument about the development of modern capitalist society, Weber elucidates how call (Ruf) shifted to profession (Beruf), i.e. how (religious) vocation came to refer to (wordly) profession, i.e. an occupation for which an individual is particularly well suited, trained, or qualified. This ‘secularizing transposition’, in which vocation is located in the inner depths of the individual, expresses the ‘turn inwards’ which Charles Taylor considers to be characteristic of modern subjectivity, and which is attained through turning inward, i.e. through exploring our inner structures, resources, or depths.
Despite its conceptual significance within the discipline of sociology, the empirical sociological study of vocation remains rather limited. This paper is based on ethnographic work on contemporary religious vocations in an Italian movement of Catholic Renewal, and explores how agency and subjectivity is conceptualized within those pious narratives. This ethnographic work provides the basis for a more conceptual discussion about (religious) agency, which relies on the work of Mahmood (2005) and which seeks to account for agency and piety in ways that understand that the subordination to particular discourses is part of what it means to become a subject, and hence a condition of the exercise of agency.

Author

• Sarah Bracke, Harvard University