Repairing Cultural Tools: How Pentecostal Congregants Used Shared Expectations to Overcome Problems with Prayer

• In Event: 20420 - Section on Sociology of Culture Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 4: Investigating Cultural Ideas

Abstract

Cultural tools are socially acquired skills, styles, and habits individuals master through practice which can be used to solve problems across a range of situations. Researchers have described individuals whose cultural tools fail when applied to new situations and individuals who switch cultural tools when one does not prove effective. Drawing on data collected through participant observation, I argue that congregants at a Pentecostal church in Orange County, California, held a set of shared expectations about how prayer should be performed. Ordinarily, these expectations remained in the background. However, when problems occurred, congregants moved these expectations into the foreground to improve their prayer practice. The findings in this paper suggest that cultural tools are more flexible than previously supposed. When individuals encounter problems using a tool, they do not have to abandon it, but can repair the tool so that it can be used more effectively. Researchers should continue examining the problems actors commonly face using particular cultural tools and the solutions they have developed to overcome those problems, searching for patterns across social groups.

Author

• Spencer Paine, University of California-Merced