Abstract

PEREIRA ARENA, Valentina  and  MORELLO, S. J, Gustavo. From the Opium of the People to the Search for Salvation. Approaches to Lived Religion in Latin America. rev.estud.soc. [online]. 2022, n.82, pp.3-21.  Epub Oct 31, 2022. ISSN 0123-885X.  https://doi.org/10.7440/res82.2022.01.

In this special issue, we explore the concept of lived religion in order to construct categories for the study of religion that reflect the Latin American reality, where, despite modernization, studies do not observe secularization, but rather a transformation in the practices and social role of religion. Lived religion deals with understanding what ordinary people do when they practice religion in their daily lives. When we speak of lived religion, we take a serious approach to what the participants understand religion to be: it is the people who practice it who define what religion is and what function it fulfills in their lives. The authors of this issue understand lived religion as the practices that ordinary people perform in everyday life situations to connect with superhuman powers. These incorporate corporeality, materiality, and discourse, and are chosen by individuals from a religious cultural repertoire. The articles in this issue are based on empirical research on animitas, processions, domestic altars, spaces of commercialization of religious objects, interviews and surveys that collect religious practices, and cases of religious everyday life in Mexico, Colombia, Chile and Peru. On this basis, they expand, problematize and discuss the approach of lived religion, with alternatives such as hinge religoisity or lived spirituality. At the same time, they show the limits of the theories of secularization and the religious market to explain Latin American religious dynamics.

Keywords : corporality and religion; hinge religiosity; Latin America; lived religion; lived spirituality; materiality and religious objects; popular religiosity; religious consumption; religious market; religious practice; secularization.

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