A lot of people in our field now advocate approaches that find religion either in unexpected or overlooked places. What once might have been called the implicit religion movement, at least as once associated with the work of the late Ed Bailey, has now been joined by the more-or-less related lived religion, material religion, religion on the ground, as well as the embodied religion approaches, all of which aim to identify religion in places where scholars, who have long been […]
Tag: Naomi Goldenberg
The Relevance of Research: Religions as Vestigial States
[By Naomi Goldenberg] My work at present is focused on developing the hypothesis that religions can be productively thought of as vestigial states. I consider this to be one way of de-essentializing, demystifying and deconstructing the category of religion. In general, the concept directs theory along two trajectories: one is the analysis of particular histories in which ‘religions’ are formed or solidified in distinction to ‘states’; another is a focus on classifications which current governments use to delineate spheres of […]
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