#021, I don’t study religion, so what am I doing in the study of religion?
RELIGION BITES PODCAST (RB021)
I am a student of religion who does not study religion. I study what people think and talk about as religion.
I study the spaces, places, things, objects, ideas, practices, and conflicts that can be found in particular discourses that get labelled and thought about as ‘religion’. I study the idea of religion.
A written text version of this episode can be found at:
Episode notes
I study the idea of religion.
Very often this can feel like I am not studying (or teaching) about religion at all.
To study the bits of peoples’ lives that slot into the bracket of ‘religion’, it is also necessary to try to understand the ‘bigger picture’ — the bits of their lives and cultures that appear to exist beyond the ‘religion’ tag.
For this, sometimes the boundaries are clear — people can often articulate clearly where they consider ‘religion to end’ and ‘culture to begin’. This is interesting in itself, since it gives us some insight into how the idea of religion is understood.
But it does not give us any definitive understanding of whether a certain action is either ‘religion’ or ‘culture’.
Most significantly, such statements are part of what the study of religion is considering:
That is, how the idea of religion is understood. And from there, how such an idea(s) is embedded and lived out in material and discursive ways.
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