Anthropology of Religion

This article examines five common misunderstandings about case-study research: (a) theoretical knowledge is more valuable than practical knowledge; (b) one cannot generalize from a single case, therefore, the single-case study cannot contribute to scientific development; (c) the case study is most useful for generating hypotheses, whereas other methods are more suitable for hypotheses testing and theory building; (d) the case study contains a bias toward verification; and (e) it is often difficult to summarize specific case studies. This article explains and corrects these misunderstandings one by one and concludes with the Kuhnian insight that a scientific discipline without a large number of thoroughly executed case studies is a discipline without systematic production of exemplars, and a discipline without exemplars is an ineffective one. Social science may be strengthened by the execution of a greater number of good case studies.

Back cover text: If the new fin de siècle marks a recurrence of the real, Bent Flyvbjerg’s Rationality and Power epitomizes that development and sets new standards for social and political inquiry. The Danish town of Aalborg is to Flyvbjerg what Florence was to Machiavelli: a laboratory for understanding the real workings of power, and for grasping what they mean to our more general concerns of social and political organization. Politics, administration, and planning are examined in ways that allow  a rare, in-depth understanding. The reader witnesses, firsthand, the classic and endless drama which defines what modernity and democracy are and can be.

This paper defines a new line of inquiry into when and how music obtained its capacity to express. Eleven principal expressive aspects of music each reserve specific structural patterns whose configuration signifies a certain affective state. This distinguishes the tonal organization of music from the phonetic and prosodic organization of natural languages and from animal communication. The question of music’s origin can therefore be answered by establishing the point in human history at which all eleven expressive aspects might have been abstracted from the instinct-driven vocalizations and used to express human psycho-emotional states. This most likely occurred through cross-specific communication between humans and domesticated animals during the Neolithic demographic explosion and cultural revolution. Changes in distance between the singing herder and the herd must have generated the basic musical grammar. The surviving tradition of Scandinavian pastoral music – kulning – provides the model of such transformation.

As the use of qualitative inquiry increases within the field of social work, researchers must consider the issue of establishing rigor in qualitative research. This article presents research procedures used in a study of autoethnographies that were written regarding the experience of being Jewish. In this project, the researchers utilized reflexivity, audit trail, triangulation by observer, peer debriefing, member check and prolonged engagement in order to manage the threats to trustworthiness as discussed by Padgett (1998). Implications of the project suggest that research procedures utilized by qualitative researchers to establish rigor are an important way to increase our confidence that the voice of the participants is heard, therefore fitting the mission of the social work profession.

■ Abstract Taking as a point of departure Fernandez's survey (1978), this review seeks to show how research on African Independent Churches (AICs) has been reconfigured by new approaches to the anthropology of Christianity in Africa, in general, and the recent salient popularity of Pentecostal-Charismatic Churches (PCCs) in particular. If the adjectives "African" and "Independent" were once employed as markers of authentic, indigenous interpretations of Christianity, these terms proved to be increasingly problematic to capture the rise, spread, and phenomenal appeal of PCCs in Africa. Identifying three discursive frames-Christianity and "traditional religion," Africa and "the wider world," religion and politics-which organize(d) research on AICs and PCCs in the course of the past 25 years, this chapter critically reviews discussions about "Africanization," globalization and modernity, and the role of religion in the public sphere in postcolonial African societies.

This article presents the theoretical and methodological considerations behind a research method which the author calls ‘phronetic planning research’. Such research sets out to answer four questions of power and values for specific instances of planning: (1) Where are we going with planning? (2) Who gains and who loses, and by which mechanisms of power? (3) Is this development desirable? (4) What, if anything, should we do about it? A central task of phronetic planning research is to provide concrete examples and detailed narratives of the ways in which power and values work in planning and with what consequences to whom, and to suggest how relations of power and values could be changed to work with other consequences. Insofar as planning situations become clear, they are clarified by detailed stories of who is doing what to whom. Clarifications of that kind are a principal concern for phronetic planning research and provide the main link to praxis.

Taken together, the works of Jurgen Habermas and Michel Foucault highlight an essential tension in modernity. This is the tension between the normative and the real, between what should be done and what is actually done. Understanding this tension is crucial to understanding modern democracy, what it is and what it could be. It has been argued that an effective way of making democracy stronger is to strengthen civil society. This article contains a comparative analysis of the central ideas of Habermas and Foucault as they pertain to the question of democracy and civil society. More specifically, the discourse ethics of Habermas is contrasted with the power analytics and ethics of Foucault evaluating their usefulness for those interested in understanding, and bringing about, democratic social change.

In this article, I propose that symbolic healing has a universal structure in which the healer helps the patient particularize a general cultural mythic world and manipulate healing symbols in it. Problems currently existing in the explanation of symbolic healing are examined. The relationship between Western psychotherapy and magical healing is explained, the function of shamanic ecstasy is discussed, and symbolic healing is explained in terms of a theory of living systems.

Integrating historical, anthropological and sociological scholarship, The Religious Question in Modern China highlights the parallels and contrasts between historical periods, political regimes, religious traditions and cultural movements, bringing all the strands into a single narrative of how religion has challenged and responded to Chinese secular modernity, from 1898 to 2008. From the moment it appeared as a distinct category in early 20th century China, “religion” became a “question”, an anomaly whose definition and place in a new secular order has always been contested, and which has consistently resurfaced in a bewildering variety of old and new forms. Polities ranging from the late Qing imperium to the contemporary Peoples’ Republic, and colonial and post-colonial regimes in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia have each attempted to structure the Chinese religious field. Cultural traditions ranging from Confucianism to the martial arts, Chinese medicine, communal temple cults, and revivalist redemptive societies and qigong movements, have been at the centre of fierce polemics and sometimes violent confrontations over their positioning within the modern categories of “religion”, “science”, “superstition” or “cultural heritage,” while Christianity, Islam and Tibetan Buddhism have played key roles in the shaping of China’s international relations and discourse on religion and national identity. Today, China is a de-centred religious universe, expanding centrifugally in all directions.

In this paper we argue that the use of the communicative theory of Jürgen Habermas in planning theory is problematic because it hampers an understanding of how power shapes planning. We posit an alternative approach based on the power analytics of Michel Foucault which focuses on ‘what is actually done’, as opposed to Habermas’s focus on ‘what should be done’. We discuss how the Foucauldian stance problematises planning, asking difficult questions about the treatment of legitimacy, rationality, knowledge and spatiality. We conclude that Foucault offers a type of analytic planning theory which offers better prospects than does Habermas for those interested in understanding and bringing about democratic social change through planning.

For much of the past two centuries, religion has been understood as a universal phenomenon, a part of the “natural” human experience that is essentially the same across cultures and throughout history. Individual religions may vary through time and geographically, but there is an element, religion, that is to be found in all cultures during all time periods. Taking apart this assumption, Brent Nongbri shows that the idea of religion as a sphere of life distinct from politics, economics, or science is a recent development in European history—a development that has been projected outward in space and backward in time with the result that religion now appears to be a natural and necessary part of our world.

Examining a wide array of ancient writings, Nongbri demonstrates that in antiquity, there was no conceptual arena that could be designated as “religious” as opposed to “secular.” Surveying representative episodes from a two-thousand-year period, while constantly attending to the concrete social, political, and colonial contexts that shaped relevant works of philosophers, legal theorists, missionaries, and others, Nongbri offers a concise and readable account of the emergence of the concept of religion.

The scale and nature of early cultivation are topics that have received relatively limited attention in research on the origins of agriculture. In Southwest Asia, one the earliest centers of origin worldwide, the transition to food production is commonly portrayed as a macroevolutionary process from hunter-gatherer through to cultivator-forager and farming stages. Climate change, resource intensification, sedentism, rising population densities, and increasing social complexity are widely considered by prehistorians as pivotal to the emergence of protoagricultural village life. In this paper we revisit these narratives that have been influenced by culture-history and social evolution, together forming the dominant theoretical paradigms in the prehistory of Southwest Asia. We propose a complementary contextual approach seeking to reconstruct the historical development of Early Holocene plant-food production and its manifold sociocultural environments by intersecting multiple lines of evidence on the biology of plant domestication, resource strategies, settlement patterns, cultivation and harvesting technologies, food storage, processing and consumption, ritual practices and symbolic behaviors. Furthermore, we propose that early plant-food production in Southwest Asia should be dissociated from ethnographically derived notions of sedentary village life. Plants emerge as important components of community interactions and ritual performances involving suprahousehold groups that were mediated through communal food consumption.

TARGET ARTICLE:  CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY

Most social scientists endorse some version of the claim that participating in collective rituals promotes social cohesion. The systematic testing and evaluation of this claim, however, has been prevented by a lack of precision regarding the nature of both “ritual” and “social cohesion” as well as a lack of integration between the theories and findings of the social and evolutionary sciences. By directly addressing these challenges, we argue that a systematic investigation and evaluation of the claim that ritual promotes social cohesion is achievable. We present a general and testable theory of the relationship between ritual, cohesion, and cooperation that more precisely connects particular elements of “ritual,” such as causal opacity and emotional arousal, to two particular forms of “social cohesion”: group identification and identity fusion. Further, we ground this theory in an evolutionary account of why particular modes of ritual practice would be adaptive for societies with particular resource-acquisition strategies. In setting out our conceptual framework, we report numerous ongoing investigations that test our hypotheses against data from controlled psychological experiments as well as from the ethnographic, archaeological, and historical records.

Since the origins of agriculture, the scale of human cooperation and societal complexity has dramatically expanded. This fact challenges standard evolutionary explanations of prosociality because well-studied mechanisms of cooperation based on genetic relatedness, reciprocity and partner choice falter as people increasingly engage in fleeting transactions with genetically unrelated strangers in large anonymous groups. To explain this rapid expansion of prosociality, researchers have proposed several mechanisms. Here we focus on one key hypothesis: cognitive representations of gods as increasingly knowledgeable and punitive, and who sanction violators of interpersonal social norms, foster and sustain the expansion of cooperation, trust and fairness towards co-religionist strangers. We tested this hypothesis using extensive ethnographic interviews and two behavioural games designed to measure impartial rule-following among people (n = 591, observations = 35,400) from eight diverse communities from around the world: (1) inland Tanna, Vanuatu; (2) coastal Tanna, Vanuatu; (3) Yasawa, Fiji; (4) Lovu, Fiji; (5) Pesqueiro, Brazil; (6) Pointe aux Piments, Mauritius; (7) the Tyva Republic (Siberia), Russia; and (8) Hadzaland, Tanzania. Participants reported adherence to a wide array of world religious traditions including Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism, as well as notably diverse local traditions, including animism and ancestor worship. Holding a range of relevant variables constant, the higher participants rated their moralistic gods as punitive and knowledgeable about human thoughts and actions, the more coins they allocated to geographically distant co-religionist strangers relative to both themselves and local co-religionists. Our results support the hypothesis that beliefs in moralistic, punitive and knowing gods increase impartial behaviour towards distant co-religionists, and therefore can contribute to the expansion of prosociality.

A spiritual revolution is transforming the religious landscape of Latin America. Evangelical Protestantism, particularly Pentecostalism, has replaced Catholicism as the leading religion in thousands of barrios on the urban periphery. But in few Latin American nations have Protestants multiplied as rapidly as in Brazil. What accounts for this rise? Combining historical, political, and ethnographic research, R. Andrew Chestnut shows that the relationship between faith healing and illness in the conversion process is integral to the popularity of Pentecostalism among Brazil's poor. He augments his analysis of the economic and political factors with extensive interview material to capture his informants' conversion experience. In doing so, he presents both a historical framework for a broad understanding of Pentecostalism in Latin America and insight into the personal motivations and beliefs of the crentes themselves.

This article provides an answer to what has been called the biggest problem in theorizing and understanding planning: the ambivalence about power found among planning researchers, theorists, and students. The author narrates how he came to work with issues of power and gives an example of how the methodology he developed for power studies—phronetic planning research—may be employed in practice. Phronetic planning research follows the tradition of power studies running from Machiavelli and Nietzsche to Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu. It focuses on four value-rational questions: (1) Where are we going with planning? (2) Who gains and who loses, and by which mechanisms of power? (3) Is this development desirable? (4) What should be done? These questions are exemplified for a specific instance of Scandinavian urban planning. The author finds that the questions, and their answers, make a difference to planning in practice. They make planning research matter.

The Aalborg Project may be interpreted as a metaphor of modern politics, modern administration and planning, and of modernity itself. The basic idea of the project was comprehensive, coherent, and innovative, and it was based on rational and democratic argument. During implementation, however, when idea met reality, the play of Machiavellian princes, Nietzschean will to power, and Foucauldian rationality-as-rationalization resulted in the fragmentation of the project.

Historical research on the work of Émile Durkheim often is confined to textual analysis and aims to reconstruct his research in the context of anthropological discourses at the turn of the 20th century. As radical changes in the visual culture of the late 19th century shaped the formation of anthropology as an academic discipline, the ambition of this paper is to elaborate the ways Durkheim’s use of ethnographic data and visual material formed the foundation of the theoretical and methodological design of his approach to religion. By tracing features in his Elementary Forms that emphasize visual material and prioritize religious practice, I submit that the photographic evidence given in Spencer and Gillen’s account of Aboriginal religion allowed Durkheim to theorize religion primarily through ritual; photography, as a visual means of representation, enhanced the study of religion by focusing on ritual without necessarily demanding the consideration of its mythical narratives and cosmological accounts. Based on a thorough analysis of his Elementary Forms, this paper argues that Durkheim systematically used the photographs of the Aborigines of Central Australia and that this use of photographs consequently guided his ethnographic depiction and his selection of theoretical concepts and methodological procedures.

THIS 2002 ARTICLE IS ONLY THE FIRST VERSION OF THE MODEL OF ANTAGONISTIC TOLERANCE.  IT HAS BEEN RENDERED OBSOLETE BY THE 2016 BOOK  Antagonistic Tolerance: Competitive Sharing of Religious Sites and Spaces. London: Routledge, 2016.  (co-authored with Tuğba Tanyeri-Erdemir, Timothy D. Walker, Aykan Erdemir, Devika Rangachari, Manuel Aguilar-Moreno, Enrique López-Hurtado, and Milica Bakić-Hayden), CONTAINS THE MOST HIGHLY DEVELOPED FORMS OF THE ARGUMENT AND MODEL, RESPONDING TO CRITICISMS OF THIS ARTICLE. THE LINK FOR THIS BOOK IS ON MY ACADEMIA PAGE, UNDER BOOKS.
ALSO, THE 2013 ARTICLE I PUBLISHED WITH TIMOTHY WALKER, “Intersecting Religioscapes: A Comparative Approach to Trajectories of Change, Scale, and Competitive Sharing of Religious Spaces.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 81(#2) June 2013, HAS A MUCH MORE DEVELOPED FORM OF THE ARGUMENT AND MODEL THAN THIS 2002 ARTICLE FROM CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY.

Archaeologists traditionally assumed that rituals were understood best in light of religious doctrines, beliefs, and myths. Given the material focus of archaeology, archaeologists believed that ritual was a particularly unsuitable area for archaeological inquiry. In the past 25 years, archaeologists have increasingly started to address ritual in their research. Some archaeologists with access to extensive historical or ethnohistorical sources continue to see rituals as the enactment of religious principles or myths. Other archaeologists have adopted a more practice-oriented understanding of ritual, arguing that ritual is a form of human action. In emphasizing ritual practice, archaeologists reject a clear dichotomy between religious and nonreligious action or artifacts, focusing instead on the ways that the experience of ritual and ritual symbolism promotes social orders and dominant ideologies. 55 Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2007.36:55-71. Downloaded from arjournals.annualreviews.org by ALBION COLLEGE on 11/28/07. For personal use only. www.annualreviews.org • The Archaeology of Religious Ritual 57 Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2007.36:55-71. Downloaded from arjournals.annualreviews.org by ALBION COLLEGE on 11/28/07. For personal use only. Bradley R. 2005. Ritual and Domestic Life in Prehistoric Europe. London: Routledge Bradley R, Williams H, eds. 1998. The past in the past. World Archaeol. Vol. 30 Brady JE, Prufer KM, eds. 2005. In the Maw of the Earth Monster: Mesoamerican Ritual Cave Use. Austin: Univ. Tex. Press Brown JA. 1997. The archaeology of ancient religion in the eastern woodlands. Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 26:465-85 Brown JA. 2003. The Cahokia mound 72-sub 1 burials as collective representations. Wis. Archaeol. 84:83-99 Brück J. 1999. Ritual and rationality: some problems of interpretation in European archaeology.

McMath (2105) argues that while a child’s interest in future autonomy should generally be respected in relation to his own interests, the well-being of other parties may require that his autonomy be overridden in the interests of public health. At the same time, McMath seems conflicted about whether the seriousness of the threat of HIV, especially in developed countries, can in fact justify the sacrifice of individual freedom that is entailed by circumcision in infancy or early childhood (that is, the freedom to make one’s own decision about whether to undergo an elective genital surgery at an age of understanding). In this context, McMath’s discussion about the child’s interest in making decisions that reflect his mature preferences and values when he is older is compelling. But when considering arguments for paternalism in the name of public health, we suggest that McMath moves too quickly from certain empirical premises to associated policy proposals, skipping over gaps in evidence as well as important questions of value.

Despite the late date and dubious veracity of the Deuteronomistic history, and despite the Bible’s status as the only Bronze or Iron Age text which indisputably refers to Dagon in a southern Canaanite geographical context, scholars have traditionally accepted 1 Samuel 5:1–8’s portrayal of Philistine cult in the Iron Age I as being centered on this deity and his temple at Ashdod.

This study marshals archaeological and historical evidence to assess the level of support for the presence of Dagon in Iron I Philistia, and for a temple at Ashdod  as described in the biblical account.

Also considered, through comparison with the materially analogous situation in the Bronze Age Aegean, is the critical role that a textual complement to physical evidence (or, in the case of the Philistines, the lack thereof) plays in cultic analysis and pantheonic reconstruction.

Abstract. Purpose of review: To survey recent arguments in favor of preserving the genital autonomy of children—female, male, and intersex—by protecting them from medically unnecessary genital cutting practices. Recent findings: Nontherapeutic female, male, and intersex genital cutting practices each fall on a wide spectrum, with far more in common than is generally understood. When looking across cultures and comparing like cases, one finds physical, psychosexual, and symbolic overlaps among the three types of cutting, suggesting that a shared ethical framework may be needed. Summary: All children have an interest in genital autonomy, regardless of their sex or gender.

An anthropological approach to religion is characterised by engagement with the people studied through participant observation in the field. Although the ethnographer might be changed by this experience, the majority of anthropologists are constrained by academic and cultural conventions that prevent them from fully engaging with it. The challenge for anthropologists is to find a language that moves beyond the security of phenomenological or scientific approaches to religion, without becoming apologists for any one theological perspective.

Different theoretical frameworks have played a major role in interpretations of ethnographic material collected among the Aborigines of Central Australia. This article explores the theoretical frameworks that anthropologists, scholars of religion, and missionaries used to interpret the material that was collected in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries among the Western Aranda people of the Ntaria/Hermannsburg area of the Upper Finke River in Central Australia. Though the religious backgrounds and convictions of researchers influenced how the Intichiuma ceremonies were interpreted and how notions of the Eucharist were employed or implicated, I argue that the ethnographic material on the Intichiuma ceremonies also reshaped the ways in which early anthropologists of religion defined concepts of sacrifice and ritual, and demarcated the study of magic and religion. As the uses of different research methods and anthropological theories show, the discovery of the Intichiuma ceremonies—however accurate the ethnographic accounts might be—and resulting interpretations that considered them to be a sacrament of communion, had a lasting impact on the formation of theoretical approaches to the study of ritual and religion. This article aims to examine how different frameworks guided the interpretation of ethnographic material in a way that distorted the meaning of the Intichiuma ceremonies as a sacrificial ritual in Central Australia, refracting broader theoretical assumptions about the study of religion and reframing it as a sacrament of communion. The objective is to demonstrate how these frameworks—anthropological, theological, and cosmological—impacted the methods in which ethnographic data were conceptualized within different frames of reference. Special attention is placed on the Intichiuma ceremonies, as their interpretation became a point of contention in the debate encompassing theoretical and methodological foundations in the study of religion.

Research on concealed deposits with ritual significance has been conducted by scholars in continental Europe, the British Isles, and Australia. Similar evidence of the material culture of magic and folk belief in the United States is presented, focusing on ritual deposits hidden within and around domestic structures associated with European American populations. Comparative analysis of three artifact types—witch bottles, concealed footwear, and cats—highlights discrepancies between ethnohistorical and archaeological evidence, and demonstrates temporal, geographical, and spatial patterns in ritual concealments. An overview of other important artifact types illustrates the wide variety of material culture employed in folk rituals in European America. The article concludes with a discussion of regional variation in ritual concealments and the importance of family and household structure, geographic and cultural origin, and cosmology and worldview in private domestic ritual.

Religion has been profoundly reconfigured in the age of development. Over the past half century, we can trace broad transformations in the understandings and experiences of religion across traditions in communities in many parts of the world. In this paper, we delineate some of the specific ways in which 'religion' and 'development' interact and mutually inform each other with reference to case studies from Buddhist Thailand and Muslim Indonesia. These non-Christian cases from traditions outside contexts of major western nations provide windows on a complex, global history that considerably complicates what have come to be established narratives privileging the agency of major institutional players in the United States and the United Kingdom. In this way we seek to move discussions toward more conceptual and comparative reflections that can facilitate better understandings of the implications of contemporary entanglements of religion and development. A Sarvodaya Shramadana work camp has proved to be the most effective means of destroying the inertia of any moribund village community and of evoking appreciation of its own inherent strength and directing it towards the objective of improving its own conditions.

This review addresses recent work on media practices in situations of religious diversity. I hereby distinguish three approaches in this literature: the media politics of diversity, religious diversity and the public sphere, and the diversity of religious mediations. Whereas the first focuses on the control of representations of religious diversity and difference, the second strand of research looks at the interaction of religious difference and the public circulation of discourse and images. The third approach takes built-in links between media and religious practices as a starting point to investigate the diversity of modes of interaction between religious practitioners and religious otherworlds and the consequences these modes have for sociocultural life. This article argues that a perspective mindful of the intrinsic relationships of religion and media is best positioned to do justice to the questions provoked by the intersection of media practices and religious difference.

Understanding the expansion of human sociality and cooperation beyond kith and kin remains an important evolutionary puzzle. There is likely a complex web of processes including institutions, norms, and practices that contributes to this phenomenon. Considerable evidence suggests that one such process involves certain components of religious systems that may have fostered the expansion of human cooperation in a variety of ways, including both certain forms of rituals and commitment to particular types of gods. Using an experimental economic game, our team specifically tested whether or not individually held mental models of moralistic, punishing, and knowledgeable gods curb biases in favor of the self and the local community, and increase impartiality toward geographically distant anonymous co-religionists. Our sample includes 591 participants from eight diverse societies – iTaukei (indigenous) Fijians who practice both Christianity and ancestor worship, the animist Hadza of Tanzania, Hindu Indo-Fijians, Hindu Mauritians, shamanist-Buddhist Tyvans of southern Siberia, traditional Inland and Christian Coastal Vanuatuans from Tanna, and Christian Brazilians from Pesqueiro. In this article, we present cross-cultural evidence that addresses this question and discuss the implications and limitations of our project. This volume also offers detailed, site-specific reports to provide further contextualization at the local level.

"Corruption has become one of the most popular topics in the social scientific disciplines. However, there is a lack of interdisciplinary communication about corruption. Models developed by different
academic disciplines are often isolated from each other. The purpose of this paper is to review several major approaches to corruption and draw them closer to each other. Most studies of corruption fall
into three major categories: (i) rational-actor models where corruption is viewed as resulting from cost/benefit analysis of individual actors; (ii) structural models that focus on external forces that determine corruption; and (iii) relational models that emphasize social interactions and networks among corrupt actors. Focusing on actors’ behavior and the social context, this article explains corruption concepts taken from sociology, economics, organization studies, political science, social anthropology, and social psychology."

This article critically reviews recent contributions to religious research in Latin America. Social scientists have long considered religion to be a struc-turing feature of culture and local society. Owing to the centrality of Catholicism in Latin America, early studies privileged the political influences of the Catholic Church with respect to the state and society at large. The " other-ness " of native folk religions received less attention, with scholars undervalu-ing the presence of indigenous and African religiosities. In Latin America, religions are currently experiencing a diversification and reconfiguration, owing in part to the growing influence of different Christian denominations , particularly Evangelical and Pentecostal churches. Religious change is also occurring at the margins of institutional churches through New Age, neo-pagan, neo-Indian, neo-esoteric, and self-styled religiosities, as well as through popular religious syncretisms, indicating new experiments with what is considered sacred. This dynamism poses theoretical and conceptual challenges to scholars analyzing religious diversity and the renewed role that religions play in contemporary societies with respect to secularization, syn-cretism, and hybridization as well as the emergence of alternative identities (gender, sexual, ideological and political). 473