Response paper to Everyday Religion in Chapter of Embodied practice: Negotiation and Resistance (Academic study of Religion )

McGuire tends to divide the practice of religion between official religion teaching and common people practices. She argues that official religion has limited the meaning and practice of religion merely by their interpretation. This interpretation will make another interpretation as out of the official interpretation. Therefore, many unofficial interpretations will be excluded by their autorotation of official teaching of religion. So, religious and un-religious are defined only by official teaching which is held by religious institution.

Embodied practices as McGuire wrote contain many ambiguous explanations. First, it comes from her explanation about the examples. When gardening is out of the religious acts because it has no relationship with official teaching of religion, it simply limited the meaning of religiosity itself. What is actually the religious action or thing?? Is it only a practice which is held by official institution such as Church or MUI? I do not think so. Every practice is religious. For instance, Islam teaches us that doing worldly things are religious as said by Muhammad in his hadith/speech. So, gardening is also religious practice according to the official teaching of religion, in this case is Islam.

Second, McGuire tends to encounter the religious teaching as a different practice from common people do. This is ambiguous because she does not give the clear difference between both of them. She just writes that all of the practices of people will be denied or allowed by official institution of religion so that why she writes about Negotiation and Resistance. Negotiation occurs when institutional religion allows that practice as religious practice, and there is Resistance when they ban the practice. It will be confusing when we compare it at Tahlilan case between NU and Muhammadiyah. NU allows it and Muhammadiyah bans it. This is not enough to say that Tahlilan is one of the embodied practices because there are many different interpretations in the society itself.

Everyday Religion is an interesting topic to be discussed. As modern type of religious practices, this is not properly just a phenomena purely comes from modern people acts. Questioning between the position of people and religious institution is important for underlining that this term, everyday religion (and also embodied practice) contains with many ambiguous thing itself.