Product Code Database
Lived religion is the Ethnography and Holism framework in the sociology of religion and religious studies more broadly for understanding the religion as it is practiced by ordinary people in the contexts of everyday life, including domestic, work, commercial, community, and institutional religious settings. The term comes from the French tradition of sociology of religion, or " la religion vécue" though it has followed its own trajectory among scholars with backgrounds in anthropology, cultural studies, history, and sociology or religion as well as religious studies and theology. It is also referred to as "everyday religion" and "living religion."
The concept of lived religion was popularized in the late 20th century by religious study scholars like Nancy Ammerman, David D. Hall, Meredith McGuire, and Robert A. Orsi. The study of lived religion has come to include a wide range of subject areas as a means of exploring and emphasizing 1) ordinary people as religious subjects over against the traditional focus in religious studies on élite practitioners of religion; 2) religious practices and material resources, including human bodies, over against a traditional focus on religious doctrine, dogma, and ideologies primarily engaged in written texts; 3) sites of religious practice outside of institutional religious settings; and 4) ways of understanding religion as particular, local, variable, and otherwise shaped by the specific cultural, social, political, material, and other contexts of human experience rather than as a sui generis universal phenomenon focused on beliefs, sacred texts, and notions of the sacred as separate from the ordinary.
Orsi defines lived religion as including "the work of social agents/actors themselves as narrators and interpreters (and reinterpreters) of their own experiences and histories, recognizing that the stories we tell about others exist alongside the many and varied story they tell of themselves". Orsi understands lived religion to be centered on the actions and interpretations of religious persons. He is less attentive to the uses of religion by people who may not identify as "religious" or who are not affiliated with institutional religious traditions.
In "Everyday Miracles: The Study of Lived Religion," Orsi identifies four basic elements of living religion: 1) idiomatic expressions of religion, what limits are placed on then and what possibilities are open for their use in specific cultural settings; 2) knowledges of the body cultivated through religious practices; 3) structures of social experience created and reinforced through religious experience; and 4) characteristic tensions in everyday life that emerge within religious contexts. To this basic framework, 5) the role of religion in the cultivation of place as sacred or hold, secular or profane may be added as well as 60 the functions of religious discourse in everyday life can be added.
In order to study and write about lived religion, Orsi suggests a broad field of study in terms of topic matter and methodology. Orsi describes his own process of studying lived religion for Madonna On 115th Street as wide in scope. "I came to realize that I was learning as much from how people were to me as from what they were telling me, as much as what was going on around the stories as from the stories themselves." Rather than a narrow archival study, Orsi’s focus on non-traditional forms of research demands that scholars give attention to institutions and persons, texts and rituals, practices and theology, things and ideas. In order to study lived religion, Orsi advocates for a complex academic lens where almost anything can hold meaning and serve as a source or "text" for study.
In The Madonna Of 115th Street, Orsi studies the lived religion of Catholic Italian immigrants in Harlem New York. Orsi focuses on a particular religious celebration known as the Feast day for The Madonna and the social structures that create and layer the event. Through observations, story telling, conversations and research Orsi weaves a picture of life for this immigrant community. In his book, Orsi explores and explains various internal traditions, cultures, and power and social dynamics in order to illustrate the various religious meanings and significance for community in Italian Harlem.
Orsi talks about the importance of dynamic subject matter covered by the study of lived religion. "The study of lived religion is shaped by and shapes the way family life is organized, for instance; how the dead are buried, children disciplined, the past and present imagined, moral boundaries established and challenged, home constructed, maintained and destroyed, the gods and spirits worshiped and importuned and so on."
Hall defines lived religion as "rooted less in sociology than cultural and ethnographical approaches to the study of religion and American religious history". He instead sees lived religion as the study of the context and content about the practices of religious laity and their "everyday thinking". Hall believes that using lived religion as an approach to the study of religion allows for a wider interpretation of meaning and also provides an opportunity for historians to examine the past and present from many angles. For Hall, lived religion "does not depend on any single method or discipline".
Hall also acknowledges the limitations of lived religion. Hall suggests that as a field, lived religion is "fluid, mobile, and incompletely structured". Hall calls lived religion an "imperfect tool" noting that even with a dynamic study of laity it is impossible to fully understand any one person’s religious practices, especially when summarizing from a single location be it time or place.
|
|
