This part argues that embodiment is an independent dimension of religious practice: a practice can be religious in part because it has been incorporated into repeated bodily behavior, and this incorporation cannot be reduced to belief, community authority or tradition. I make the case through three bodies of evidence: religious formation, health behavior, and care.
5.1 Formation: practice precedes doctrine
Belief-centred accounts assume that doctrine comes first and practice follows from it. Developmentally, the reverse is usually true. A Hui child encounters practices before explanations: certain foods are not eaten, adults wash before prayer, relatives gather at festivals, certain words are spoken around illness and death. Theological understanding comes later, if at all.
This pattern is well documented in social theory. Marcel Mauss described “techniques of the body,” culturally specific ways of eating, sitting and moving that are learned but experienced as natural. Pierre Bourdieu called the resulting dispositions habitus: durable tendencies acquired through upbringing that generate action without conscious deliberation. Saba Mahmood’s study of a women’s piety movement in Cairo makes the point specifically for religion: bodily practices such as prayer do not merely express prior belief but are the means through which pious dispositions are formed.
If this is right, D from Part 4 is not an anomaly. D shows the normal endpoint of religious formation once the other dimensions have weakened. Ramadan fasting shows the same structure. Ethnographic research among Hui Muslims finds that piety is sustained through relationships, and a single person may fast out of belief, family obligation, the habit of a familiar yearly rhythm, and reluctance to stand apart from their community, all at once. The bodily rhythm can persist when any one of these motives weakens.
5.2 Health: functional differentiation, not competition
A common objection is that modern Hui life is secularizing, and that biomedicine is steadily displacing religious frameworks. The evidence does not support a simple displacement model. A study of urban Hui Muslims in Shenyang found that respondents trusted doctors and health organizations most for cardiovascular information, and religious leaders least.
This finding does not show that religion has retreated from the body. It shows that different systems perform different functions. Biomedicine explains physiological processes. Religion provides frameworks for enduring suffering. Dietary law governs what enters the body. Family structures assign responsibility for the vulnerable. A Hui patient can accept biomedical authority while remaining fully embedded in the others.
The analytic consequence is clearest in a hospital case. A Hui patient who refuses a non-qingzhen meal is simultaneously making a religious decision, a dietary choice, an ethnic accommodation and a health decision. The category “religious health behavior” assumes these can be separated. In practice they cannot, and the embodied dimension explains why: the refusal is held in the body before it is justified by any one of these frames.
5.3 Care: religion between bodies
Embodiment is not only individual. Recent ethnographic work on Hui Muslims describes “caring for piety,” the ways family members help one another perform, remember and preserve religious practices. Religious practice here is located not in the individual believer but in relationships of care between bodies.
My fieldwork supports this. Families I interviewed in Ningxia described cooking halal food at home to carry when traveling, including ways of preparing lamb so it would keep for days on the road. This practice is embodied (it concerns what enters the body), relational (it is performed for others) and practical (it requires transmitted skill). It also involves no explicit theology. A belief-centred account would call it a dietary habit. A polythetic account with an embodied dimension can recognize it as religious practice sustained through care.
5.4 Conclusion
Formation, health and care converge on the same conclusion. Religious practice can persist in the body independently of belief, authority or tradition. Embodiment is therefore not a subtype of the existing three dimensions but a fourth dimension in its own right. Part 6 states the revised model and defends it against objections.
