The rhythm is slow. The audience is bored to tears by the respectful abstraction of it all. Religion will end in boredom, and to offer boredom to the Lord is hardly a living sacrifice. (Yet as I write these lines, I wonder if I’m not making a crude mistake. Magic has always gone hand in hand with emotion, hope and terror, and still does. But are there such things as religious ’emotions’? Probably no more than there is a ‘psychological state’ – consciousness or thought without an object – that could be called ‘faith’. These are ideological fictions. Surely religion, like theology, metaphysics, ceremonies, academic literature and official poets, has always been boring. This has never been a hindrance, because one of the aims of ‘spiritual’ discipline and asceticism has always been precisely to disguise and to transfigure this living boredom…)

(Vol. 1, p. 220-21. English translation by John Moore, Verso, 1991.)

So the idea is: the boredom of a traditional Roman Catholic service, far from being detrimental to the theological project, is in fact an essential ingredient in it, because the essence of spiritual — or by analogy, academic — “discipline and asceticism” is to take this boredom and turn it into something profound. One might reason, by extension, that when people say that academic literature is deep and important, what’s happening is that an initially boring object is, precisely, being transmuted through spiritual discipline into something that appears powerful to its practitioners.

I’m not sure I would agree with that, because how can there really be a general fact of the matter about whether something is boring or not? People are different; I agree with Lefebvre’s healthy skepticism about imputing psychological states to institutional rituals. Psychological states like faith, as he puts it, are “ideological fictions.” I’m not sure, in fact, that it makes sense to criticize the very idea of a psychological state in an institution and then still talk about boredom, which is also a psychological state…

But I do think that the operation of academic consecration — whether or not it’s analogous to religious consecration — is always worth paying attention to. And we can thus add Lefebvre to the list of French writers who, even before Pierre Bourdieu, were already criticizing church, state and university in the same breath.

A further note on this data: The last question here deals with wearing religious signs (strongest among the Greek Orthodox, as you’ll see). I’d emphasize here that our analysis of these religious artifacts ought to be somewhat different from our analysis of the rates of evil-eye-belief. A worn artifact is a sign of external identification (or verification) of one’s social identity in a way that a mental acceptance of some phenomenon (e.g. djinn) need not be. Even religious signs that are worn under the clothing, it seems to me, still have this characteristic of identity marking, even if one is thereby only signaling to oneself one’s own identity. (It’s interesting to note that among these signs of identity, only one, the headscarf, seems to have become a major public controversy. But we won’t get into the French politics of the veil just now.)

So without further ado…

Table 2: Belief in the Evil Eye by religion

Table 3: Belief in djinn (spirits) by religion

Table 4: Belief in astrology by religion

Soulié comments:

Astrology concerns first of all the Buddhists, those who belong to other religions, the Catholics, and the Greek Orthodox. Leaving aside the Catholics, we observe that within this population women (35.5%) believe in astrology more than men (20.5%), and that believers who are moderately practicing believe in it more than others. (This fits with the results of other studies of this matter by Daniel Boy and Guy Michelat.) Globally, the Protestants subscribe the least to magical or paranormal beliefs, and bear the fewest religious signs. Inversely, while Catholics tend not to be practicing, they do tend to wear religious signs more frequently (along with the Greek Orthodox and Other Christians). Muslims tend not to wear religious signs; although wearing the veil does characterize Islam, it ultimately involves only a very small minority of respondents.

Table 5: Wearing religious signs by religion

Table 6: Type of religious signs worn by the students

(Table numbers come from Soulié’s original document, available on request.)

This report looks into the ways that undergraduates [étudiants de 1er cycle] at Paris-8 relate to religion, and into their opinions and practices about their customs and politics. It is based on a questionnaire and interview study conducted in 2004-5 with a group of undergraduate sociology students at Paris-8 (Vincennes-Saint Denis). The project looks at these students’ undergraduate classmates who were present in class across a selected sample of some ten disciplines. It was initially planned as a form of research training through research practice.

The framework of inquiry

Paris-8 has the greatest fraction of foreign students of any French university. In 2003-4, grouping all levels together, they formed 34.7% of enrollments. At the same time, as a result of its location in Seine Saint-Denis [a working-class suburb just north of Paris], this establishment has a high percentage of immigrants’ children. The high proportion of migrants, and of children of migrants, thus makes the establishment a privileged observatory of the processes of religious, moral and political acculturation.

(…)

1,280 students responded to the questionnaire and around thirty interviews were conducted. 65% of respondents were first years, and 67.6% were women, the percentage of women ranging from 85.6% in psychology to 19.4% in computer science [informatique]. 80% of the students were French, 10% came from the countries of North and Central Africa [des pays du Maghreb et d’Afrique noire], 5.6% from Europe, 2.9% from Asia and 2.1% from America or elsewhere. The majority of foreign students at Paris-8, therefore, come from the countries of North and Central Africa, which are largely Islamic.

The proportion of foreigners varies by discipline. It’s highest in French literature (57.9%) and computer science (45.8%), and lowest in history (7.8%), plastic arts (9.9%) and cinema (10.2%). The particular nationalities also vary by discipline: the Europeans are most present in French literature and communication, the North Africans [maghrébins] in computer science and economics, the Central Africans in economics, and the Asians in French literature and computer science. This distribution also generally corresponds with the observable tendencies on the national scale.

We must also add that the notion of a foreign student, beneath its apparent bureaucratic simplicity (being a foreigner means having a foreign nationality), is a complex and ambiguous one. For some have lived for a very long time in France, or were even born here, while others are in positions of mobility; and this varies greatly according to nationality. 37% of North African students have a father who lives in France, against 20.8% for European students and 12.5% for those from Central Africa. These students’ family roots, and hence also their social, economic and cultural roots, thus differ strongly.

To the question about methodology, this was a survey administered in class across the disciplines. I don’t know the exact criteria for which disciplines were chosen. I do know that, in 2005, there were some 10,049 students enrolled in the first two years of the undergrad program (formerly called the DEUG), so it would seem that this survey reached more than 10% of its target population. (I might point out that Soulié, in the first paragraph above, is tacitly emphasizing that this is a survey of the fraction of the student body that actually comes to class. It doesn’t claim to represent the large absentee population.) I’d imagine that most of the students who got a survey would have filled it out, since it was administered collectively in a classroom setting.

On a more substantive level, the interesting thing here is that, again, foreign students from relatively poorer regions of the world (mainly North and Central Africa in this case) seem to tend towards more professionally, vocationally oriented fields. The case of French Literature, however, seems to be an interesting one in terms of this question of professional motivation, since it’s almost 60% foreign students but leads to no obvious professional future. I’m wondering what motivates people to come from abroad to study French literature, especially if we’re talking about undergraduate degrees. It makes more sense for graduate degrees, since France would presumably be the best place to write a dissertation on the national literature. But the professional stakes of a doctorate are quite different from an undergrad degree. All I can really imagine is that students who are becoming fluent in the French language might be drawn toward a field where they can keep immersing themselves in increasingly high-status language registers. (More “orthodox” French students of French literature, by the way, most likely don’t go to Paris-8, but more often to more traditional institutions like the Sorbonne.)

The extreme feminization of psychology and masculinization of computer science is worth noting too, in passing. I can only say it doesn’t seem too shocking.

Charles Soulié, of the Paris-8 sociology department, kindly shared with me some unpublished results of a survey project on campus religious belief that he conducted in 2004-2005. I’m going to post my translation of it in three segments: first the basic figures, then his comments on foreign students, and finally some very interesting results about campus beliefs in magical phenomena like the Evil Eye (beliefs which, moreover, aren’t as extinct as one might expect in our supposedly postmodern era).

Here’s what the figures look like, broken down by discipline. (I’ll post some details about the survey later; for now let me just note that it’s a survey of undergrads.)

* None designates no religion, atheist or no response.

Soulié’s commentary on this goes as follows:

50.1% of students are religious believers, the Muslims (19.8%) being more numerous than the Catholics (11.4%) or the other Christians (9.4%). The believers, in other words, are a majority at Paris-8, which is at the very least surprising in view of the history of this university. For it was created in 1968 by academics at odds with authority, academics who often claimed the banners of Marxism, Nietzscheanism and psychoanalysis, and who cast themselves, in some cases anyway, as the apostles of a way of life liberated from all constraints, especially sexual ones.

This said, the rate of religious believers varies strongly by discipline, seeing as it runs from 77% in economics to 28.6% in cinema. The Nietzscheans and Freudians are certainly more numerous in cinema, plastic arts, or philosophy than in economics, computer science or law, which moreover holds true for teachers as much as for students.

In addition to the historical irony that Soulié notes, I’m amazed to see that economics students are the most religious on campus. My amazement emerges, I guess, from my own American cultural prototype of economics students as the least spiritual people imaginable, as embodiments of sheer economic practicality. And conversely, it’s a general symbolic surprise to see that some of the most impractical humanities are simultaneously the least religious disciplines. The American stereotype, it seems to me, would be that religion and religious studies are more closely linked to the humanities than to any other disciplines, sharing with the humanities a common concern with moral, cosmological and existential issues. It makes me wonder if people who go into philosophy, anthropology or the arts are finding in these fields more a substitute for religious worldviews than a complement to some prior religiosity. It’s almost as if the humanities were competing with religion to offer students a symbolic relationship to the world. (I’m probably biased here by personal experience: I feel like anthropology does for me pretty much what religion does for many others, i.e., offers a meaningful way to interpret and inhabit the social universe.)

At the same time, one gets the sense that the more religious people are tending to go into practically oriented fields, as if their interest in higher education tended to be oriented more towards the economic and material than the philosophical. Of course, the figures (the disciplines are ordered from least to most religious, by the way) don’t give a completely clear picture; French Literature for instance is a relatively religious field, while something like Psychology is the third least religious while being a fairly “practical” field (in the sense that you can get jobs with a psych degree, like social work I guess). But even more importantly, it needs to be said too that religion can have a class correlate, such that an apparent correlation between being religious and choosing a more practical, job-oriented field may actually just reflect the fact that people from working-class backgrounds tend to choose practical, job-oriented fields. In particular, being Muslim (the biggest religious group) probably correlates with being working-class or at least not from the haute bourgeoisie, while some of the students who go into vocationally futile fields like, say, cinema are from wealthy Parisian backgrounds and not needing immediate economic returns from their education.

Soulié doesn’t give us figures on class background, but in the next installment we’ll look at the Paris-8 immigrant population, a social group that itself has fairly definite class trajectories.