Description:
- The volume looks at the experience of religion in the intersection of existential ends and grand schemes in everyday practice.
- Focussing on different religious traditions around the world, the volume offers a comparative and global perspective to living with greater powers that looks beyond the modernity-tradition and global-local dichotomies.
- The volume critically develops Michel de Certeau's notion of the everyday and of the tactics of 'making do' which are currently enjoying increasing interest in anthropology.
Brief description:
Samuli Schielke is a research fellow at the Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin. His research interests include Islam, festive culture, subjectivity and morality, and migration and aspiration in Egypt.
Review Quotes:
"The great merit of this book consists in taking the practices of the people "on the ground" into account. It thereby addresses a gap: the moments when grand schemes and daily practices come together, often in contradiction or in complex and open ways... a compelling and inspirational volume." - Allegra Laboratory
"Anthropologists will find many valuable references and many useful ideas and models for future research. As part of an expanding literature on the everyday, the collected essays suggest the advances still to be made by applying the notion of 'vernacular' or 'popular' to religion and to culture more generally." - Anthropology Review Database
"Composed of eight ethnographically rich essays... [this] important, trenchant edited volume... offers a decisive intervention into the study of religion in an 'unfixed' world by modifying the category of religion with the analytic field of the 'everyday'." - American Ethnologist
"This volume is very well put-together. The editors have done a good job to rein in the various authors to a single collective argument... It's an important volume on an important issue." - Jon Mitchell, University of Sussex
"The topic of everyday religion is becoming an increasingly attractive in the social sciences of religion, as an alternative to more orthodox and canonical accounts of religious phenomena... This volume sets out to debate the concept of 'everyday religion' in a very explicit and straightforward manner... The final result is a convincing volume with diverse and challenging case studies that open different paths for the discussion of the main theme." - Ruy Blanes, Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Lisbon