Drawing on research about settings in South India and West Africa characterised by significant religious diversity, we reflect on the ways in which everyday religiosity among contemporary Muslims is constituted through difference and contestation. Our cases are from two ostensibly secular states – India and Nigeria – both former British colonies where secularism has been interrogated over the past few decades. In our focus on what we call ‘lived’ Islam, we pay attention not only to intra‐Muslim differences but also to how religiosity is formed and experienced through engagement and encounters with Others, whether religious, ethnic or political, both locally and globally. Everyday religiosity in such settings as South India and Nigeria emerges at the interstices of such encounters where Muslims often seek to draw boundaries at the same time as they fashion themselves – in lifestyle, sociality, aesthetics – in relation to various Others. As we argue, such ethnographic cases with their comparative angle underscore the importance of studying religiosity in heterogeneous settings so as to explode the flawed, idealised sense of wholeness that emerges in some of the literature on the anthropology of one religious tradition or another with such traditions sometimes represented as deriving from self‐contained theologies.
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Religiosity and its others
Lived Islam in West Africa and South India
Filippo Osella and Benjamin Soares
In Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale
- Published (Print):
- 01 May 2020
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 466–481 (15 total)
Russian Israelis and Religion
What Has Changed after Twenty Years in Israel?
Larissa Remennick and Anna Prashizky
Most former Soviet immigrants who arrived in Israel had a secular or atheistic outlook, with only a small minority leaning toward Orthodox Judaism or Christianity. To understand how 20 years of life in the ethno-religious polity of Israel have influenced their religious beliefs and practices, we conducted a survey of a national sample of post-1990 immigrants. The findings suggest that most immigrants have adopted the signs and symbols of the Jewish lifestyle. They celebrate the major religious holidays in some form, and many are interested in learning more about Jewish culture and history. We interpret these changes mainly as an adaptive response aiming at social inclusion in the Israeli Jewish mainstream rather than actually emerging religiosity. Few immigrants observe the demanding laws of kashrut and Shabbat, and even fewer attend synagogues and belong to religious communities. Their expressed attitudes toward state-religion matters reflect their ethno-nationalist stance, which is more typical for ethnic Jews than for partial or non-Jews.
In Israel Studies Review
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2012
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 55–77 (23 total)
Religiosities toward a Future
In Pursuit of the New Millennium
Bruce Kapferer, Annelin Eriksen, and Kari Telle
An approach is outlined toward imaginary projections upon presents and futures at the turn of the current millennium. The religiosity or the passionate intensity of commitment to imaginary projections is stressed, particularly the way that these may give rise to innovative social and political directions especially in current globalizing circumstances. While new religions of a millenarian character are referred to, the general concern is with the form of new conceptions of political and social processes that are by no means confined to what are usually defined as religions.
Gergely Rosta
This essay analyses the changing religiosity of the Hungarian youth population between the ages of 15 and 29 after the millennium. The basis for this empirical investigation is provided by the three waves (2000, 2004, 2008) of the National Youth Study. From their results, a similar picture emerges on the religiosity of the youth as from other nation-wide surveys, in relation to the whole adult population. Since the first Youth Study a slow but steady decline has been witnessed in different dimensions of religiosity (practice, faith, self-classification). It is especially salient for institutionalised religiosity. At the same time, the vast majority of the Hungarian youth confess to believing in some kind of supernatural instance, though not necessarily a traditional Christian one.
The socio-demographical background to the differences in religiosity can be partly explained by the secularisation theory, but the effects of an expanded religious education are present too. In contrast to the secularisation thesis, however, the transmission of traditional religious conviction is much more likely in families with better educational backgrounds than other parts of the society, a phenomenon which points to a more and more elite type of church religiosity in Hungary.
In Anthropological Journal of European Cultures
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2010
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 54–67 (13 total)
Gender and Religiosity among the Orthodox Christians in Romania
Continuity and Change, 1945–1989
Maria Bucur
This article questions the claim that in Romania, the post-1990 period was one of radically greater freedom in religious matters, as well as greater religiosity on the part of the population. Instead, it suggests that continuity be er encapsulates the development of religiosity—religious beliefs and their embodiment in specific practices— among Orthodox Christians in Romania in the twentieth century. It also makes visible important imbalances, gaps, and faulty assumptions about the importance of institutions in the daily religious practices and beliefs of most Orthodox populations in the historiography on Orthodoxy in Romania. Scholars have failed to see continuities and have embraced analytical frameworks that stress change, especially around the communist takeover period (1945–1949) and the fall of communism (1989–1990). Central to re-evaluating this trajectory are two aspects of Orthodoxy in Romania: (1) most believers live in the countryside; and (2) women have remained central to the development and maintenance of religious practices in ways that cannot be accounted for through any institutional analysis of the Orthodox Church, because of its both implicit and explicit misogyny.
Mary N. Hampton
This article analyzes the differences in U.S., EU, and German perceptions of threat. The secularist and cosmopolitan turns in EU European identity formation have had a tremendous impact on how security issues are interpreted, especially in Germany. The traditional conception of threat has been re-defined. Yet, recent events are threatening the success forged through a half century of EU elite-driven culture change. Renationalization and a return to defining threat as fear of strangers have emerged across the EU.
In German Politics and Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Sep 2011
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 73–96 (23 total)
Maya Mayblin
may not bring us any closer to agreeing on the substantive definition of religion as a category, but they can teach us much about our common religiosity, by which I mean the quality of attention a scholar must possess to participate in such debates
In Religion and Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Sep 2022
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 180–184 (5 total)
HAYDER AL‐MOHAMMAD
In Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale
- Published (Print):
- 01 May 2010
- Article Type:
- Review Article
- Pages:
- 235–236 (1 total)
From the Throes of Anguished Mourning
Shi‘i Ritual Lamentation and the Pious Publics of Lebanon
Fouad Gehad Marei
actors and pious publics cultivate pious selves and socialize subjects into this-worldly-oriented modes of Shi‘i religiosity. This article is an inquiry into how sensory-affective states of ritual lamentation serve as a medium for the cultivation of
In Religion and Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Sep 2020
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 133–147 (15 total)
Post-war Blood
Sacrifice, Anti-sacrifice, and the Rearticulations of Conflict in Sri Lanka
Neena Mahadev
shared spaces of Sinhala-Tamil religiosity at sites such as Munneswaram; and (b) Sinhala Buddhist politicians are widely rumored to participate in animal sacrifices at such sites, particularly to shore up their power to perform in the political realm
In Religion and Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Sep 2019
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 130–150 (21 total)