Religious experience presupposes learned bodily techniques, making authority a bodily predisposition.

Evidence

It is the final paragraph of Mauss’s essay that carries what are perhaps the most far-reaching implications for an anthropological understanding of secularism. Beginning with a reference to Granet’s remarkable studies of Taoist body techniques, he goes on: “I believe precisely that at the bottom of all our mystical states there are body techniques which we have not studied, but which were studied fully in China and India, even in very remote periods. This socio-psycho-biological study should be made. I think that there are necessarily biological means of entering into ‘communion with God’.” Thus the possibility is opened up of inquiring into the ways in which embodied practices (including language-in-use) form a precondition for varieties of religious (and secular) experience. The inability to “enter into communion with God” not only becomes a function of untaught bodies but it shifts the direction in which the authority for conduct can be sought. And authority itself comes to be understood not as an ideologically justified coercion but as a predisposition of the embodied self. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 1214

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘untaught body cannot commune with God’ move dovetails with the reader’s silence-book thread on how embodied/listening discipline shapes experience; also connects to Bourdieu’s habitus as Asad is developing it here.
• SEED: Mauss’s claim that even mystical states have physiological techniques is a strong opening for an essay on how modern secular selfhood is itself a trained bodily accomplishment — practiced, not natural.