The Material and Symbolic Cultures of the Everyday: Religion in Maltese Primary Schools

Abstract

This chapter explores the ways in which, outside the formal religious education (RE) curriculum, children are socialized into a religious or philosophical culture. It asks whether the schools’ socialization process respects multiculturalism’s goals of ‘positive difference’, accommodation and substantive equality, or, rather, institutionalizes the assimilation of minimal tolerance (Dobbernack and Modood, 2012). It describes the everyday material and symbolic religious cultures of five Maltese primary schools. These cultures are constituted through the use of specific spaces and places; the times and gestures of formal worship and prayer; visual religious displays and symbols; the sounds of, and calls to, prayer; ritual assemblies and special events; and the embodiment of role-modelling that permeate primary school life, and in which all children, including those who opt out of formal RE, are daily immersed. In this ethnography of religious culture, a semiotic approach is adopted. Actors utilize the multi-modal means of language, sound, touch and movement, and engage with objects, as signifiers of their belief in, or belonging to, a faith (the signified). Together, the signifiers and the signified produce the ‘sign ‘of a religious culture. From a critical realist perspective, it will be argued that while both adults and children may appropriate some signs and reject others to performatively enact specific religious identities, in schools the signs themselves proscribe certain normative enactments and inhibit others.