Adventures in “belief”: Hearing an old concept in a new key

The well-worn critique of “belief” as inadequate for understanding ritual motivation and practice has become a truism in need of reevaluation. For groups who foreground the establishment of truth in ritual practice, “belief” is a useful analytic term that brings together propositions and commitment to the relationships and systems articulating those propositions. Spiritualism is a religious movement in which mediums attempt to communicate between the spirits of deceased people and their loved ones. As Spiritualist mediums see it, their main job is to provide “proof of survival”—evidence that they are really in touch with the spirit world. In doing so, they “serve Spirit,” working on behalf of those in the spirit world. Drawing on Bakhtin's treatment of dialogism and architectonics, I urge a rethinking of “belief” as a never-completed project worked on intersubjectively. This approach to belief not only makes sense for analysis of groups who insist on the importance of truth claims but also liberates the term for use outside of Christian and self-consciously modern contexts, as Bakhtinian dialogism is grounded in a model of the utterance and interactivity in general and not in any specific utterance or pattern of interaction.