Date Thesis Awarded
12-2009
Access Type
Honors Thesis -- Access Restricted On-Campus Only
Degree Name
Bachelors of Arts (BA)
Department
Anthropology
Advisor
Brad Weiss
Committee Members
Jonathan Glasser
Kathleen E. Jenkins
Abstract
This paper is the result of 14 months of research at St. Bede Parish in Williamsburg, Virginia. Though metaphors are used frequently by pious parishioners, it is the church hierarchy who holds the keys to their meanings. In fact, parishioners employ this coded religious discourse for the precise reason that, through it, church voices dominate and authorize their everyday experience. Chunks of discourse, such as "body of Christ" metaphors, act as flexible authority, passed around the community. Parishioners are subject to a moral framework authorized by the clergy. This authority is ultimately grounded in the sacrament of transubstantiation, a ritual with a decidedly constructed history. Reproductive decision-making provides an arena for the deployment of the most powerful food/body discourse. Moral imperatives against reproductive technologies uphold the theological duality of female/body and male/soul, and transubstantiation. The church exercises power through language ideology on the very bodies of parishioners.
Recommended Citation
Knappenberger, Jonna, "Religious Mouths and Religious Bodies: Speaking the Body of Christ at St. Bede Parish" (2009). Undergraduate Honors Theses. William & Mary. Paper 457.
https://scholarworks.wm.edu/honorstheses/457
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Comments
Thesis is part of Honors ETD pilot project, 2008-2013. Migrated from Dspace in 2016.