Studying Lived Religion

Nancy Ammerman, Studying Lived Religion: Contexts and Practices, New York: NYU Press, 2021

“Lived religion” has over the latest decade become a growing research field, as well as something of a buzz word among researchers who wish to steer away from studying religiosity through formal beliefs and participation in activities organised by religious congregations. A more developed analytical framework for how to study lived religion has, however, been largely missing. Nancy Ammerman’s recently published book Studying Lived Religion represent a much needed and ground breaking effort in this regard. Ammerman starts out from an understanding of religion as social practice. Religion as other forms of practice is composed of several dimensions including embodiment, materiality, emotion, aesthetics, moral judgement and narrative. What distinguishes religious practice is a “spiritual dimension” (2021: 51). However, religion as practice needs to be studied as enacted in often overlapping “fields of interaction” that make these practices meaningful and enable people to act. A challenge in the analytical framework proposed by Ammerman is how to locate the spiritual dimension that characterizes religion as social practice, and understand how this dimension is connected to and informs other dimensions of a practice (2021: 51). Ammerman here proposes four contexts – the entangled, the established, the institutional and the interstitial religious context – which present different conditions for religious practice. Ammerman furthermore notes the importance of studying lived religious practice as shaped by structures of power and difference, such as gender and class (2021: 68). The book Studying Lived Religion is written in an accessible way with several empirical examples from various religions and parts of the world. It will surely be a classic reading for students and scholars who wish to better understand how religion is practiced in contemporary everyday lives.

Mia Lövheim