To elucidate the various ways of approaching the subject matter, this introductory chapter will first outline three different modes of defining religion. In some cultures and historical periods, the category of religion may be alien to the context that is studied. Nevertheless, the phenomenon in question is part of a body of thought and practices that is now identified as religious. How did these phenomena come to be studied as ‘religion’ in that tradition? What is the history of such definitions? We will then address the issue of theory: what is it, and why do you need it? We will also introduce some basic distinctions in levels of analysis that we think are useful to navigate our way through the conversations across disciplinary boundaries that often take place within religious studies. Another issue that will be addressed is the relationship of the researcher to the religious context: should one be a ‘believer’ to understand religion? Or is the category of belief itself problematic? This question is a variation of the ‘insider/outsider’ discussion in anthropology, and our discussion will thus draw heavily on these discussions. In closing, we give an outline of the book and how the chapters relate to the central question of how religion is studied.

Dennis Vanden Auweele (Chapter 2) addresses the question of how philosophers of religion approach the question what religion is, thus continuing the discussion in the first part of this chapter, but confining himself to the debates that have been taking place in philosophy. He focuses on the work of three influential scholars to give an overview of how philosophers of religion have been thinking about the universality and timelessness of religion since the eighteenth century. Vanden Auweele describes a development from thinking about what unites religions to appreciating what differentiates them. He first discusses Kant, who saw the essence of religion in its function to cultivate the mind and motivate people to act in a morally good way. He then moves on to Hegel, who argued that the essence of religion can only be grasped in its historical instantiation of progressive symbolic attempts to represent reason. Hegel compared religion with art and philosophy, which respectively represent the more sensuous and abstract dimensions of reason’s growing self-consciousness. Schelling, the third scholar that Vanden Auweele discusses, contended that all people are united in a latent memory of mythic consciousness of a first, all-encompassing God. Schelling explained the existence of diverging religions as emerging from the development of language, as a result of which groups speaking different languages gave different names to this first bond with God. In Schelling’s view, people may ultimately be united again in accepting Jesus Christ as the revelation of God. In the last section of the chapter, Vanden Auweele takes stock by discussing postmodern philosophy, which criticizes the Christian bias in previous thinking about religion and rejects the very possibility of “grand narratives” or comprehensive stories to explain reality or reveal truth. He concludes by noting that, contrary to what we might expect, deconstructing grand narratives does not mean that all postmodern philosophers deny an essence of religion; one strand in postmodern philosophy of religion acknowledges the experience of divine transcendence, but argues that this experience cannot be grasped by superimposing rational concepts on it.

The philosophy of religion is one of the oldest and therefore most classical approaches to the study of religion. Acknowledging that religious studies owe a lot to philosophy, Chapter 3 by Christoph Jedan is an attempt at reversing a long-standing trend of importing concepts and methods established in other disciplines. Jedan’s chapter embarks on the opposite reflection that religious studies actually have a lot to offer other disciplines. In this vein, Jedan suggests that the historiography of philosophy could profit immensely from taking its cue from the terminology and research interests of religious studies. Using Stoicism as a central case study, Jedan explores inter alia the analytical usefulness of Smartʼs early differentiation of six dimensions of religion and of the concept of lived religion (adding a seventh one only later on). Finally, the author reflects on what ASR stands to gain by engaging with the history of philosophy.

For theologians, as Henk van den Belt explains in Chapter 4, it is not enough to experience and believe in divine transcendence without rationally thinking it through (the strand within modern philosophy discussed by Vanden Auweele according to which no rational concepts should be superimposed on religious experiences): theologians continue where other religious studies scholars leave off, by aiming to arrive at a more satisfactory approximation of the ultimate knowledge of existence that they believe rests with God. In his chapter, Van den Belt reflects on the nature of a theological perspective in religious studies by drawing on his own study of the woodcut illustrations in Martin Luther’s catechisms. He argues that although the research question concerning the meaning of the woodcuts as such is not necessarily theological, several specific characteristics of a theological approach can be identified in his research project. Van den Belt distinguishes three levels of analysis of the woodcuts in which specific theological issues play a role. The first concerns the object of research: theological expertise in the history of Christian doctrines and practices is important for understanding the message of the pictures. On a second, methodological level, Van den Belt observes a tension between the perspectives of theology and religious studies: a theological interpretation assesses the sources from the perspective of a shared belief. This means that the research question concerning the woodcuts is no longer confined to an analysis of the pictures, but is subsequently related to the theological presuppositions of Christianity, or in this case of (Lutheran) Protestantism. Finally, on an epistemological level, theologians are critically aware of and acknowledge the worldview in which they connect all knowledge to their basic convictions and beliefs regarding God’s relationship to the world. Van den Belt concludes his contribution by arguing that although this third epistemological and confessional level should not influence the results of the academic study, it should not be denied or excluded either. Assuming a position that resembles the argument concerning “positionality” above, Van den Belt instead holds that theologians and other researchers alike should reflect on and account for their own presuppositions.

Contrary to presupposing a divine essence and cause, as scholars such as Van den Belt do in the theological approach, historian Steve Mason (Chapter 5) exemplifies a constructivist historical approach to religion. Mason analyses how people in the Graeco-Roman world (c.300 BCE to 300 CE) framed Jews and Christians. In line with Asad’s critique that much research in religious studies builds on conceptions that are specifically Christian rather than universal, Mason argues that the label “religion” obfuscates more than it illuminates when describing the ancient past of these two major traditions. To substantiate this claim, he begins by surveying what “shell categories” residents in the Graeco-Roman world used to communicate with each other and order their knowledge of the world. Informed by both ancient textual and material sources, Mason argues that a diverse and vibrant Judaean culture, with its own famed mother-city, law-giver and customs, temple, priesthood, sacrificial system, and a larger expatriate community was “freeze-dried” by later Christians and reduced to “Juda-ism” as a belief system. “Christianity” looked altogether different: Christians were small bands of men and women meeting secretly in members” houses to worship Christ. They refrained from animal sacrifices, and some expected imminent evacuation from the world. Mason concludes by considering how a historical understanding of these very different phenomena of a Judaean “ethnos” and what began as a kind of Christian “club” can help to explain such puzzles as the Christian polemic against and simultaneous attraction to “Judaism”, the “persecution” of Christians but not Jews, and “conversion” to Judaism or Christianity.

Like Mason, Lautaro Roig Lanzillotta (Chapter 6) takes a constructivist historical approach in his case to explain how the study of intertextuality can enhance our understanding of the continuous process of how texts are reread and rewritten in order to create new meanings, or to adapt old ones to their new, ever-changing contexts. The study of intertextuality is described as an approach that ponders the way texts live in other texts in order to determine if and how texts reflect, reshape, or transform one another. The author points out how, in recent decades, influenced by the work of Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes and Gérard Genette, the notion of intertext as a “new tissue of past citations,” or “dense web of allusion” has been applied beyond the literary world and extended to photography, movie, music, painting and even architecture. After providing an overview of intertextuality and its wide applicability when conceived in this comprehensive and encompassing way, Roig Lanzillotta exemplifies an intertextual approach to the study of the myths of the Afterlife as developed by Plato and Plutarch of Chaeronea. After comparing Plato’s myth of Er and Plutarch’s myths in On the Sign of Socrates, On the Delays of Divine Vengeance and Concerning the Face Which Appears in the Orb of the Moon, he applies Genette’s approach to intertextuality in order to both assess Plutarch’s textual transformations and show how they generate new meanings more suited to the expectations of authors and readers of the first centuries CE.

The wider field of psychology is primarily interested in cognitive approaches that study how people consciously or subconsciously process and interpret the information that reaches the nervous system through the senses. In her chapter, Visser discusses a strand of the cognitive approach that focuses on largely conscious, individual and cognitive (thought) processes – the study of religion as a meaning system. Approaching religion as a meaning system has gained popularity in the psychological study of religion during the past decade, particularly in studies on the relationship between religion and health or well-being. Visser explains how in this approach, a meaning system is conceived of as a personal collection of what the approach identifies as norms, values, beliefs and attitudes that each person develops through socialization in their sociocultural context and through their personal experiences. This meaning system influences a person’s identity, the meaning they ascribe to life and to life events, and their sense of certainty. The point of departure in this approach is that when confronted with new situations that do not fit within their existing meaning system, a person will experience emotional distress and search for ways to realign the two levels of meaning. Visser argues that approaching religion as a meaning system can help us to understand how religious beliefs, practices and experiences can be both a cause of and a solution to distress. She illustrates this approach by discussing her research project in which she combines quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis to study the relationship between religion and well-being in the context of cancer. Assessing the merits and limitations of such an approach to the study of religion, she points out that the main challenge in this line of research relates to the enormous variety in the content of religion and the meanings that individuals attach to religion in different domains, phases and situations in their lives. Visser concludes that while quantitative research into religion as a meaning system can produce important, measurable results that sketch overall patterns, there is a need for qualitative research to gain a better understanding of specific embodied experiences and meaning-making that these correlations refer to in the personal lives of the research participants.

Exploring religion from the perspective of attachment theory, Schaap-Jonker addresses how people’s conceptions of God are informed by early attachment processes (i.e. the development of a close emotional bond between a child and an attachment figure, usually the parents). This relational psychological approach therefore examines religion in the context of experiences in early interactions and their mental representations, conscious and subconscious relational dynamics, and attachment styles. Schaap-Jonker first presents attachment theory. Starting with the development of infants, she explains the concepts of attachment styles, internal working models and the mentalizing process. She then discusses the theory of God representations as core aspects of religiousness from an attachment approach. She does so by building on the work of Lee Kirkpatrick, one of the first researchers in this field. Stating that a God representation can function as an attachment figure, Kirkpatrick formulated two hypotheses – correspondence and compensation – to explain the psychological function of religion in a person’s life. Schaap-Jonker illustrates the relation between attachment processes and God representations by discussing the results of quantitative and qualitative research on God representations. She concludes by discussing the strengths and weaknesses of conceptualizing religion as attachment, the most important limitation being that attachment theory alone can obviously not explain the function of all God representations.

To understand what different functions God representations and other dimensions of religion may have is further elaborated in the chapter by Hanneke Muthert, who, like Schaap-Jonker, adopts a relational approach to the psychology of religion to discuss how religion may feature for people in precarious situations who have to cope with loss. For psychologists of religion and spiritual counsellors, such an exploration of “relational space” is valuable because it is precisely in the space where a person’s inner world and the outside world overlap that religious meaning can be experienced. In order to clarify the added value of concentrating on this relational space in studying bereavement, Muthert suggests combining various theories that all proceed, each with their own focus, from the assumption that mourning is essentially relational, and which understand mourning as making sense of loss; a good match between the social context and individual mourning capacities appears to be crucial for “healthy” or effective mourning. Central to the theoretical framework Muthert presents is a psychodynamic theory model that distinguishes three different psychological structures, “modes of being” that each have their own specific mourning capabilities. She argues that religion has the potential to fit well with all three modes of being, but that good matches are not always obvious. The chapter ends with a discussion in which the author reflects on the implementation and limitations of the theoretical framework presented in her chapter in counselling practices. Despite certain limitations, the theoretical framework developed by Muthert constitutes an important contribution to current mourning theories and practices by bridging people’s inner and outer worlds, and taking into account different modes of being that grieving people may find themselves in.

Taking up the “problem of belief” discussed in this introduction, but now from a more practical perspective, Kim Knibbe (Chapter 10) reflects on the dilemmas of conducting participant observation in religious contexts. She asks how, as a researcher, one navigates the ways in which religious ways of explaining, interpreting and making sense of the world may compete or clash with academic ones. Traditionally, there seem to be roughly three options available to the researcher: methodological atheism, methodological theism or methodological agnosticism. Knibbe demonstrates that each of these positions create their own problems in ethnographic fieldwork, particularly in terms of the relationship between the researcher and the “researched”. Drawing on her fieldwork among people who call themselves “spiritual” in the Dutch context, she discusses how developing and maintaining rapport involves negotiating not only issues of differences in cognitive frameworks, but also differences in embodiment, emotion and affect. By summarizing some of the literature and drawing on her personal experiences, Knibbe explores how views on dealing with the dilemmas discussed relate to different ideas about what “research” entails. In a very concrete way, then, the chapter by Knibbe exemplifies the kind of reflection on their own positionality and presuppositions that Van den Belt in his contribution argues all researchers should engage in.

Like Knibbe, Simon Coleman (Chapter 11) addresses in his contribution the issue of how to study religion in the field. Rather than contemplating the method of participant observation as such, Coleman focuses on the question of where the researcher should look for religion when conducting participant observation. His chapter opens with the paradoxical observation that despite their commitment to focusing on everyday social relations, anthropologists studying ritual tend to focus on sites and contexts of ritual density and commitment – fieldwork situations occupied by more engaged believers and religious specialists. Drawing on his work among Pentecostals in Sweden, shrine pilgrims in England, and the numerous and unpredictable visitors to English cathedrals, Coleman explores the methodological and theoretical issues involved in studying ritual peripheries, penumbras and edges. He explores both the difficulties and opportunities in carrying out such work, and considers the usefulness of a number of different metaphorical and analytical frames for analysing ritual action and engagement that take place away from the centres of performance, including ideas of “vicarious”, “lateral”, “adjacent” and “alienated” participation. He points out that ritual and religion emerge as deeply relational in such analyses, but often also as inchoate and under-determined.

The relevance of studying the “edges” or “adjacencies” of religion is further demonstrated in Chapter 12 by Joram Tarusarisa, who investigates the impact of religious resonances in “Nora”, a Zimbabwean political song. His analysis demonstrates that what is said to be religious and/or sacred is not cast in stone but is the result of practices, discourses and narratives woven around what gets defined as such. He discusses how the song sets apart the ruling party, the Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF), and its former leader Robert Mugabe and turns them into representations of the religious and/or sacred. Tarusarira’s analysis casts light on how the song’s narratives and discourses created a numinous vision and version of Zimbabwe that was to be delivered by the then President Mugabe, who was said to be “anointed” to guide his followers and deliver them from the land of Egypt (coloniality) to the Promised Land (independence and sovereignty). He demonstrates that the song has an explanatory dimension by which it claims to provide answers to questions of ultimate meaning in times of political instability and conflict that characterized Zimbabwe at the time when the song was composed. In doing so, it provides a theodicy, a narrative that answers ultimate questions concerning life and people’s (Zimbabweans’) place in the universe. Tarusarira’s analysis of the song and its performances is thus a concrete example of how the study of “religion” does not involve the study of a “thing” in itself, but an enquiry into how particular actors and institutions weave particular ideas, discourses and narratives, using a particular language which reflects their subjectivities and interests, to create the religious and/or sacred. The author concludes by stating that the proffered definitions of religion tell us more about those offering them than what they claim to be telling us about religion.

The political implications of framing religion in specific ways, as addressed by Tarusarira, and the need to also look for religion in places other than situations of ritual density, as argued by Coleman, are the two main themes addressed by Marjo Buitelaar in Chapter 13, who focuses in her contribution on the study of Islam. The author starts by observing that, in response to the present situation in which “Islam” and “the West” are increasingly pitted against each other in public discourse and violent attacks are carried out in the name of Islam, there is a trend in academic research projects and educational programmes of focusing increasingly on the relation between religion, politics and conflict. Buitelaar argues that by singling out situations in which Islam is a foreground presence, particularly ones in which conflicts are framed in terms of existing between Muslims and non-Muslims, we run the risk of reducing Muslims to their “Muslimness” and producing too one-sided a knowledge about the meaning of Islam in the daily lives of Muslims. To demonstrate how this one-sidedness can be avoided by looking at instances in which Islam is only a background presence, the author discusses, for example, images circulating in social media of the ritualized expressions of grief shared by Muslim and non-Muslim fans at the fate of Ajax footballer Abdelhaq Nouri, who was in a coma for years after collapsing during a game. She points to the “normalizing” effect of the casual or background presence of Islam in these images in which the Muslim identification of the Nouri family is neither highlighted nor neglected. Buitelaar argues that the collective expressions of grief demonstrate the power of shared, immediate experiences to acknowledge both commonalities and differences between actors of different cultural and religious backgrounds. In turn this acknowledgement enables productive communication and interaction that cuts across diverse ways of being in the world; it is concrete, shared experiences that create common ground and space for “comparing notes” in the sense of opening up to the perspectives of others and scrutinizing our own in order to recognize, assess and learn from both commonalities and specificities. Buitelaar concludes by stating that taking an intersectionality approach allows anthropologists to compare notes more effectively and thus produce richer insights into the meaning of religion in the lives of individuals. In turn, sharing stories with the larger public that demonstrate both commonalities and specificities between Muslims and non-Muslims in a certain cultural context can contribute to de-exceptionalizing Muslims and creating a platform for a more productive comparing of notes between citizens of different cultural backgrounds.

Central to public debates about commonalities and differences between citizens of different religious and cultural backgrounds is the compatibility of cultural values and the norms through which these values are actualized. Values, and changes in value systems, are the central theme in Chapter 14 of this volume, in which Peter Berger discusses a specific strand of structural anthropology that he emphasizes can be useful in the analysis of both empirical and historical data: the theory of value as developed by Louis Dumont, which has its roots in Durkheim’s sociology of religion. Berger begins by contextualizing Dumont’s theory in the history of the discipline of anthropology by outlining the main features of Dumont’s analytical framework and how it has been developed by Joel Robbins. He sketches how Dumont, informed by his Indological and anthropological research on the Hindu caste system, developed a general theory of hierarchy, the latter being just the other side of the coin of value (as posing a value introduces hierarchy). While Lévi-Strauss was mainly concerned with binary oppositions in cultural structures, Dumont argued that relationships between ideas are hierarchical. Left and right, for instance, are not simply opposites but stand in a hierarchical relation. When taking an oath or shaking hands after making an agreement, only the right hand is appropriate because it stands for the whole person. Dumont discussed the various properties of value and added the concepts of “context” and “level” in order to account for a dynamic relationship between ideas and values within a certain framework he called ideology. Joel Robbins further developed the dynamic potential in Dumont’s theory in explaining processes of change and globalization. In line with Mason’s argument that the label of “religion” as a universal cultural category often obfuscates more than it illuminates outside the Western world, the author demonstrates that the theory of value as developed by Dumont and Robbins provides an important perspective from which to study religion, precisely because it does not depend on “religion” as a privileged analytical concept or domain.

The book closes with an epilogue discussing some of the commonalities and specificities of the various approaches presented in the book.