Recently researchers in religious studies have been increasingly critical of earlier generations of scholars’ tendency to study only those religions that had a strong textual tradition, and then to treat these “textual” religions as monolithic in nature. Spiritual practices and beliefs that fell outside such textually defined creeds and rituals, or which were related to these traditions but differed considerably from expected practices as set forth by “accepted” texts have often been dubbed as “deviant”, “popular,” “heretical”, or “magical”, sometimes by practitioners’ contemporaries and sometimes by scholars of religion themselves.
This workshop seeks to focus specifically on religious customs or beliefs that are or were outside conventional definitions of “religion.” Specifically, participants will explore the practices of co-opting, transfer, resistance, or transformation within these various forms of “religions outside religions” and, where relevant, the reactions to them.