Lived Religion

Abstract

Abstract Research on “lived religion” focuses on the everyday practices of ordinary people, in contrast to the study of official texts, organizations, and experts. It includes attention to rituals and stories and spiritual experiences that may draw on official religious traditions, but may also extend beyond them. Lived religion is closely related to “popular religion”, but is a more encompassing category. As with the study of popular religion, the focus is on ordinary people and often includes festivals and shrines and healing practices that may happen without the approval of religious authorities. Lived religion research pays special attention to the lives of women, of populations of color, and of people in the Global South. Both approved traditional practices and new innovations may be “lived”. Being “lived” points especially to the material, embodied aspects of religion as they occur in everyday life. The study of lived religion includes attention to how and what people eat, how they dress, how they deal with birth and death and sexuality and nature, even how they modify hair and body through tattoos or dreadlocks, for instance. The study of lived religion includes everyday sacralized spaces and the physical and artistic things people do together, such as singing, dancing, and other folk or community traditions that enact a spiritual sense of solidarity and transcendence. The focus on lived religion has enriched and complicated the efforts of social scientists to understand the place and role of religion in society.