Political performance and religious identification

Identity tensions related to political praxis of membres of Jehovah’s Witnesses association (Buenos Aires, 2017-2018)

Abstract

The article describes the tensions between religious identification, as it forms the “believer” social type, and the political practice around the “citizen” social type of members of the Association of Jehovah's Witnesses in Argentina. It retrieves the data collected from an empirical investigation related to the Postdoctoral Programme of the Faculty of Social Sciences, at University of Buenos Aires.

The resolutions of the identity tensions of Jehovah's Witnesses, regarding their subjectivity, are expressed through “subjective negotiations” of social identification, which promote modes of internalization of the social categorizations applied to them, and lead to modalities of specific symbolic meanings and interaction. The Jehovah's Witnesses, subjectively, resolve such identity tensions between their condition of "believer" and "citizen" by "desubstantializing" political identification, which they convert into a mere instrument of validation of their own religious identification. Citizen identification, which involves certain commitments to concrete political action, is configured exclusively from the fulfillment of a role or "facade", a "dramatization" associated with a certain performativity of "the political" that allows them to be incorporated into the political state order without implying a deviant consideration on them as citizens. At the same time, this specific configuration of praxis is associated with certain ideological components that give a specific character to the practice: without "doing politics", an ideological and political commitment is assumed with enormous consequences for the identification and development of the daily life.