Folk Religion in Discourse and Practice

Activity: Talk or presentationOral presentation

Description

This paper encourages a new critical engagement with “folk religion” as both a category of analysis and as a field of practice. I argue for a renewed attentiveness to the ideological dimensions of categories deployed by scholars and to the relationship they bear to the field of practice they seek to signify. Firstly, I will briefly explore the discursive nature of the construction of folk religion as a category of analysis and how it’s semantic loading functions to “pick up” distinctive “contested” practices from the religious field. Secondly, drawing on the work of Bourdieu and Riesebrodt, I characterise the “folk religious field of practice” as relational, a shifting site, both gendered and political, of competing agencies.
Period3 Sep 20136 Sep 2013
Event title12th European Association for the Study of Religions Annual Conference: Religion, Migration, Mutation
Event typeConference
LocationLiverpool, United KingdomShow on map