Study of Religion in a Global Context


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Religion as Relation

Studying Religion in Context

Edited by
Peter Berger [+–]
University of Groningen
Peter Berger (PhD 2004, FU Berlin) is Associate Professor of Indian Religions and the Anthropology of Religion at the University of Groningen. His areas of interest include the anthropology of religion, indigenous religions (esp. in India), theory and history of anthropology and the anthropology of India. His books include Feeding, Sharing and Devouring: Ritual and Society in Highland Odisha, India (De Gruyter, 2015), and he coedited Godroads: Modalities of Conversion in India (Cambridge UP, 2020), Ultimate Ambiguities: Investigating Death and Liminality (Berghahn, 2016), The Modern Anthropology of India (Routledge, 2013) and The Anthropology of Values (Pearson, 2010).
Marjo Buitelaar [+–]
University of Groningen
Marjo Buitelaar is Professor of Contemporary Islam from an anthropological perspective at the University of Groningen. Her research interests concern Islam in everyday life and narrative identity construction in a post-migration context. Buitelaar is presently programme-leader of a research project on ‘Modern Articulations of Pilgrimage to Mecca’ (NWO grant 360-25-150). Her most recent co-edited books in English are Religious Voices in Self-Narratives (2013); Hajj, Global Interactions through Pilgrimage (2015); and Muslim Women’s Pilgrimage to Mecca and Beyond. Reconfiguring gender, religion and mobility (2020).
Kim Knibbe [+–]
University of Groningen
Kim Knibbe is Associate Professor Anthropology and Sociology of Religion at Groningen University. She is currently directing the project “Sexuality, Religion and Secularism” with Rachel Spronk (funded by NWO). Previous research focused on Catholicism and spirituality in the Netherlands and on Nigerian Pentecostalism in Europe and the Netherlands. She has also published a series of theoretical and methodological reflections on studying religion. Her most recent co-edited books and special issues are Secular Societies, Spiritual Selves? (with Anna Fedele, 2020) and ‘Theorizing Lived Religion’ (with Helena Kupari, Journal of Contemporary Religion, 2020).

Religion is studied from a multitude of approaches and methodologies: history, anthropology, philosophy, sociology, psychology and the academic study of religion. This volume differs from most other introductions and handbooks in that it draws on ongoing research to show “how” researchers approach their topics. Its aim is to provide orientation in this multidisciplinary context without attempting to homogenize the field.

The introduction provides students with an overview of four key issues that are at stake when choosing an approach to studying religion in a multidisciplinary context:

• the ways scholars conceptualize and delineate “religion” as an object of study
• what theory is and what it is for
• at what level of analysis research may take place
• the “problem of belief” in the study of religion.

In subsequent chapters, each author discusses material from their own research to demonstrate the approach and methodology they apply and what kind of insights these yield.

Intended for undergraduate students of religion as well as broader audiences interested in the study of religion, this book will enable students to orient themselves with the various methodologies and perspectives that may be deployed to formulate and answer their own research questions.

Series: The Study of Religion in a Global Context

Table of Contents

Prelims

Acknowledgements vii
Peter Berger,Marjo Buitelaar,Kim Knibbe FREE
University of Groningen
Peter Berger (PhD 2004, FU Berlin) is Associate Professor of Indian Religions and the Anthropology of Religion at the University of Groningen. His areas of interest include the anthropology of religion, indigenous religions (esp. in India), theory and history of anthropology and the anthropology of India. His books include Feeding, Sharing and Devouring: Ritual and Society in Highland Odisha, India (De Gruyter, 2015), and he coedited Godroads: Modalities of Conversion in India (Cambridge UP, 2020), Ultimate Ambiguities: Investigating Death and Liminality (Berghahn, 2016), The Modern Anthropology of India (Routledge, 2013) and The Anthropology of Values (Pearson, 2010).
University of Groningen
Marjo Buitelaar is Professor of Contemporary Islam from an anthropological perspective at the University of Groningen. Her research interests concern Islam in everyday life and narrative identity construction in a post-migration context. Buitelaar is presently programme-leader of a research project on ‘Modern Articulations of Pilgrimage to Mecca’ (NWO grant 360-25-150). Her most recent co-edited books in English are Religious Voices in Self-Narratives (2013); Hajj, Global Interactions through Pilgrimage (2015); and Muslim Women’s Pilgrimage to Mecca and Beyond. Reconfiguring gender, religion and mobility (2020).
University of Groningen
Kim Knibbe is Associate Professor Anthropology and Sociology of Religion at Groningen University. She is currently directing the project “Sexuality, Religion and Secularism” with Rachel Spronk (funded by NWO). Previous research focused on Catholicism and spirituality in the Netherlands and on Nigerian Pentecostalism in Europe and the Netherlands. She has also published a series of theoretical and methodological reflections on studying religion. Her most recent co-edited books and special issues are Secular Societies, Spiritual Selves? (with Anna Fedele, 2020) and ‘Theorizing Lived Religion’ (with Helena Kupari, Journal of Contemporary Religion, 2020).

Chapter 1

Introduction: Religion as Relation [+–] 1-50
Peter Berger,Marjo Buitelaar,Kim Knibbe £17.50
University of Groningen
Peter Berger (PhD 2004, FU Berlin) is Associate Professor of Indian Religions and the Anthropology of Religion at the University of Groningen. His areas of interest include the anthropology of religion, indigenous religions (esp. in India), theory and history of anthropology and the anthropology of India. His books include Feeding, Sharing and Devouring: Ritual and Society in Highland Odisha, India (De Gruyter, 2015), and he coedited Godroads: Modalities of Conversion in India (Cambridge UP, 2020), Ultimate Ambiguities: Investigating Death and Liminality (Berghahn, 2016), The Modern Anthropology of India (Routledge, 2013) and The Anthropology of Values (Pearson, 2010).
University of Groningen
Marjo Buitelaar is Professor of Contemporary Islam from an anthropological perspective at the University of Groningen. Her research interests concern Islam in everyday life and narrative identity construction in a post-migration context. Buitelaar is presently programme-leader of a research project on ‘Modern Articulations of Pilgrimage to Mecca’ (NWO grant 360-25-150). Her most recent co-edited books in English are Religious Voices in Self-Narratives (2013); Hajj, Global Interactions through Pilgrimage (2015); and Muslim Women’s Pilgrimage to Mecca and Beyond. Reconfiguring gender, religion and mobility (2020).
University of Groningen
Kim Knibbe is Associate Professor Anthropology and Sociology of Religion at Groningen University. She is currently directing the project “Sexuality, Religion and Secularism” with Rachel Spronk (funded by NWO). Previous research focused on Catholicism and spirituality in the Netherlands and on Nigerian Pentecostalism in Europe and the Netherlands. She has also published a series of theoretical and methodological reflections on studying religion. Her most recent co-edited books and special issues are Secular Societies, Spiritual Selves? (with Anna Fedele, 2020) and ‘Theorizing Lived Religion’ (with Helena Kupari, Journal of Contemporary Religion, 2020).
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.

Chapter 2

Philosophy of Religion: Is Religion Universal? [+–] 51-69
Dennis Vanden Auweele £17.50
University of Leuven
Dennis Vanden Auweele is lecturer in philosophy at KU Leuven (University of Leuven). His main research interest is in modern philosophy, with a focus on 19th-century German philosophy of religion. He has published the following monographs: Exceeding Reason: Freedom and Religion in Schelling and Nietzsche (de Gruyter, 2020); Pessimism in Kant’s Ethics and Rational Religion (Lexington, 2019); The Kantian Foundation of Schopenhauer’s Pessimism (Routledge, 2017).​ He has edited, among others, the following books: Past to Present of Political Theology. Edited with Miklos Vassanyi (Routledge, 2020); Thinking Metaxologically: William Desmond’s Philosophy between Metaphysics, Religion, Ethics and Aesthetics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
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.

Chapter 3

Turning the Tables: The History of Philosophy as a Field of Enquiry for Religious Studies [+–] 70-93
Christoph Jedan £17.50
University of Groningen
Christoph Jedan is Professor of Ethics and Philosophy of Religion at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, University of Groningen. His research interests include Ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, the intersections of religion and philosophy today (religion and politics, postsecularism), and the history and continuing relevance of consolation for death and loss. He has (co)authored and (co)edited a dozen books and special journal issues, inter alia Stoic virtues: Chrysippus and the Religious Character of Stoic Ethics (Continuum, 2009) and (with Avril Maddrell and Eric Venbrux) Consolationscapes in the Face of Loss: Grief and Consolation in Space and Time (Routledge, 2019).
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.

Chapter 4

Normative Pictures: The History of Christianity from a Theological Perspective [+–] 94-112
Henk van den Belt £17.50
VU University, Amsterdam
Henk van den Belt  (PhD 2006, Leiden University) is Professor of Systematic Theology at the VU University, Amsterdam and director of the Herman Bavinck Center for Reformed and Evangelical Theology. He is currently working on a Research project concerning the development of the doctrine of divine providence in Reformed theology. He is the author of The Authority of Scripture in Reformed Theology: Truth and Trust (Brill, 2008) and of several articles on Reformed Orthodoxy and on neocalvinism; he edited Restoration through Redemption: John Calvin Revisited (Brill, 2013) and the second volume of the Synopsis of Purer Theology (Brill, 2016).
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.

Chapter 5

Relations of Religion in the Graeco-Roman World: Formative Judaism and Christianity [+–] 113-133
Steve Mason £17.50
University of Groningen
Steve Mason (BA, MA McMaster; PhD University of St Michael’s College, Toronto) is Professor of Ancient Mediterranean Religions and Cultures at the University of Groningen. He edits the international series, Flavius Josephus: Translation and Commentary (Brill, 2000–), to which he has also contributed Life of Josephus (2001) and Judean War 2 (2008); he is now working on Judean War 4. His first monograph was Flavius Josephus on the Pharisees (Brill, 1991); most recent are A History of the Jewish War, A.D. 66–74 (Cambridge UP, 2016) and Orientation to the History of Roman Judaea (Wipf & Stock, 2016).
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.

Chapter 6

Ancient Religious Texts and Intertextuality: Plato’s and Plutarch’s Myths of the Afterlife [+–] 134-149
Lautaro Roig Lanzillotta £17.50
University of Groningen
Lautaro Roig Lanzillotta (Dr. litt. 1997; theol. 2004) is Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies of the University of Groningen. He has published extensively on Plutarch of Chaeronea, Early Christian apocrypha, and the Nag Hammadi Library and Gnosticism. He is editor in Chief of Gnosis: Journal of Gnostic Studies and of the Nag Hammadi Bibliography Online. His most recent publications are A Man of Many Interests: Plutarch on Religion, Myth, and Magic (2019), edited with D.F. Leão; and Plutarch’s Religious Landscapes (Leiden 2020), edited with R. Hirsch-Luipold.
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.

Chapter 7

Religion as a Meaning System [+–] 150-167
Anja Visser £17.50
University of Groningen
Anja Visser is Assistant Professor Spiritual Care at the University of Groningen. She specializes in research on the organization and outcomes of spiritual care in healthcare settings. Currently she examines best practices for the integration of spiritual caregivers in primary care and the social domain in the Netherlands (for more information, see https://hdl.handle.net/10411/2P1T3B). She has published various articles on the role spirituality in coping with cancer, on spiritual care, and on research methods in chaplaincy.
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.

Chapter 8

Religion as Attachment: A Psychological Exploration of Relational Dynamics in God Representations [+–] 168-191
Hanneke Schaap-Jonker £17.50
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Hanneke Schaap-Jonker is endowed professor in clinical psychology of religion at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and rector of the Centre for Research and Innovation of Christian Mental Health Care in the Netherlands. As psychologist and theologian, her research interests include God representations and mental health, religion and suicidality, and the interactions between religious factors and psychotherapy. Her current research focuses on self-compassion, religion and mental health. Her second dissertation in 2018 focused on God representations and mental health. Her 2019 inaugural address outlined the contours of a contemporary clinical psychology of religion with a focus on recovery, hope and compassion.
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.

Chapter 9

Bridging Inner and Outer Worlds: A Psychodynamic Approach to Meaningful Mourning [+–] 192-213
Hanneke Muthert £17.50
University of Groningen
Hanneke Muthert is Associate Professor Psychology of Religion and Spiritual Care at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, University of Groningen. Her current research projects focus on 1) disaster chaplaincy;2) meaningful work and 3) psychopathology, religion and good spiritual care practices. The overarching theme is characterized by how to support people in diverse care contexts (home, healthcare, work) to live their daily lives coping with significant losses and longings. In relation to an observed lack of common language sharing existential issues, she elaborates on the idea of concrete practice places in the near future. For publications see: https://www.rug.nl/staff/j.k.muthert/research
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.

Chapter 10

Dilemmas in Participant Observation in Religious Contexts [+–] 214-227
Kim Knibbe £17.50
University of Groningen
Kim Knibbe is Associate Professor Anthropology and Sociology of Religion at Groningen University. She is currently directing the project “Sexuality, Religion and Secularism” with Rachel Spronk (funded by NWO). Previous research focused on Catholicism and spirituality in the Netherlands and on Nigerian Pentecostalism in Europe and the Netherlands. She has also published a series of theoretical and methodological reflections on studying religion. Her most recent co-edited books and special issues are Secular Societies, Spiritual Selves? (with Anna Fedele, 2020) and ‘Theorizing Lived Religion’ (with Helena Kupari, Journal of Contemporary Religion, 2020).
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.

Chapter 11

Away from the Centre: On the Edges and Adjacencies of Religious Forms [+–] 228-241
Simon Coleman £17.50
University of Toronto
Simon Coleman is Chancellor Jackman Professor at the Department for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto. His research interests include pilgrimage, Pentecostalism, cathedrals, ritual, and religious infrastructures. He has carried out fieldwork in Sweden, the UK, and Nigeria. Recent books include The Anthropology of Global Pentecostalism and Evangelicalism (NYU Press, 2015, co-edited with Rosalind Hackett) and Pilgrimage and Political Economy (Berghahn, 2018, co-edited with John Eade). He is co-editor of the journal Religion and Society. Simon is currently completing a comparative book on pilgrimage as a field of study.
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.

Chapter 12

The Importation and Generation of the Religious and the Sacred in Political Song [+–] 242-260
Joram Tarusarira £17.50
University of Groningen
Joram Tarusarira is Assistant Professor of Religion, Conflict and Peacebuilding and the Director of the Centre for Religion, Conflict and Globalisation at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. He has expertise in Religion, Conflict, Peacebuilding and Reconciliation; Religion and Politics; and Religion and Climate Conflicts. His recent publications include Religion and Human Security in Africa (2020, co-edited with E. Chitando). 
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.

Chapter 13

Comparing Notes: The Anthropological Approach to the Study of Islam in Europe [+–] 261-274
Marjo Buitelaar £17.50
University of Groningen
Marjo Buitelaar is Professor of Contemporary Islam from an anthropological perspective at the University of Groningen. Her research interests concern Islam in everyday life and narrative identity construction in a post-migration context. Buitelaar is presently programme-leader of a research project on ‘Modern Articulations of Pilgrimage to Mecca’ (NWO grant 360-25-150). Her most recent co-edited books in English are Religious Voices in Self-Narratives (2013); Hajj, Global Interactions through Pilgrimage (2015); and Muslim Women’s Pilgrimage to Mecca and Beyond. Reconfiguring gender, religion and mobility (2020).
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.

Chapter 14

Configurations of Values [+–] 275-295
Peter Berger £17.50
University of Groningen
Peter Berger (PhD 2004, FU Berlin) is Associate Professor of Indian Religions and the Anthropology of Religion at the University of Groningen. His areas of interest include the anthropology of religion, indigenous religions (esp. in India), theory and history of anthropology and the anthropology of India. His books include Feeding, Sharing and Devouring: Ritual and Society in Highland Odisha, India (De Gruyter, 2015), and he coedited Godroads: Modalities of Conversion in India (Cambridge UP, 2020), Ultimate Ambiguities: Investigating Death and Liminality (Berghahn, 2016), The Modern Anthropology of India (Routledge, 2013) and The Anthropology of Values (Pearson, 2010).
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.

Chapter 15

Epilogue: Studying Religion in Context – Diversity and Commonalities in Approaches [+–] 296-304
Peter Berger,Marjo Buitelaar,Kim Knibbe £17.50
University of Groningen
Peter Berger (PhD 2004, FU Berlin) is Associate Professor of Indian Religions and the Anthropology of Religion at the University of Groningen. His areas of interest include the anthropology of religion, indigenous religions (esp. in India), theory and history of anthropology and the anthropology of India. His books include Feeding, Sharing and Devouring: Ritual and Society in Highland Odisha, India (De Gruyter, 2015), and he coedited Godroads: Modalities of Conversion in India (Cambridge UP, 2020), Ultimate Ambiguities: Investigating Death and Liminality (Berghahn, 2016), The Modern Anthropology of India (Routledge, 2013) and The Anthropology of Values (Pearson, 2010).
University of Groningen
Marjo Buitelaar is Professor of Contemporary Islam from an anthropological perspective at the University of Groningen. Her research interests concern Islam in everyday life and narrative identity construction in a post-migration context. Buitelaar is presently programme-leader of a research project on ‘Modern Articulations of Pilgrimage to Mecca’ (NWO grant 360-25-150). Her most recent co-edited books in English are Religious Voices in Self-Narratives (2013); Hajj, Global Interactions through Pilgrimage (2015); and Muslim Women’s Pilgrimage to Mecca and Beyond. Reconfiguring gender, religion and mobility (2020).
University of Groningen
Kim Knibbe is Associate Professor Anthropology and Sociology of Religion at Groningen University. She is currently directing the project “Sexuality, Religion and Secularism” with Rachel Spronk (funded by NWO). Previous research focused on Catholicism and spirituality in the Netherlands and on Nigerian Pentecostalism in Europe and the Netherlands. She has also published a series of theoretical and methodological reflections on studying religion. Her most recent co-edited books and special issues are Secular Societies, Spiritual Selves? (with Anna Fedele, 2020) and ‘Theorizing Lived Religion’ (with Helena Kupari, Journal of Contemporary Religion, 2020).
The book closes with an epilogue discussing some of the commonalities and specificities of the various approaches presented in the book.

End Matter

Index 305-327
Peter Berger,Marjo Buitelaar,Kim Knibbe FREE
University of Groningen
Peter Berger (PhD 2004, FU Berlin) is Associate Professor of Indian Religions and the Anthropology of Religion at the University of Groningen. His areas of interest include the anthropology of religion, indigenous religions (esp. in India), theory and history of anthropology and the anthropology of India. His books include Feeding, Sharing and Devouring: Ritual and Society in Highland Odisha, India (De Gruyter, 2015), and he coedited Godroads: Modalities of Conversion in India (Cambridge UP, 2020), Ultimate Ambiguities: Investigating Death and Liminality (Berghahn, 2016), The Modern Anthropology of India (Routledge, 2013) and The Anthropology of Values (Pearson, 2010).
University of Groningen
Marjo Buitelaar is Professor of Contemporary Islam from an anthropological perspective at the University of Groningen. Her research interests concern Islam in everyday life and narrative identity construction in a post-migration context. Buitelaar is presently programme-leader of a research project on ‘Modern Articulations of Pilgrimage to Mecca’ (NWO grant 360-25-150). Her most recent co-edited books in English are Religious Voices in Self-Narratives (2013); Hajj, Global Interactions through Pilgrimage (2015); and Muslim Women’s Pilgrimage to Mecca and Beyond. Reconfiguring gender, religion and mobility (2020).
University of Groningen
Kim Knibbe is Associate Professor Anthropology and Sociology of Religion at Groningen University. She is currently directing the project “Sexuality, Religion and Secularism” with Rachel Spronk (funded by NWO). Previous research focused on Catholicism and spirituality in the Netherlands and on Nigerian Pentecostalism in Europe and the Netherlands. She has also published a series of theoretical and methodological reflections on studying religion. Her most recent co-edited books and special issues are Secular Societies, Spiritual Selves? (with Anna Fedele, 2020) and ‘Theorizing Lived Religion’ (with Helena Kupari, Journal of Contemporary Religion, 2020).

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Publication
24/10/2021
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