| Abstrakt: |
In a recent article, ‘Religion: Official, Popular and Otherwise’, Paul Vanderwood argued that there is as much angst amongst academics over the terms ‘popular’ and ‘official religion’ as there is about the concept of culture.2 This situation is reflected in Charles Long's entry in the Encyclopedia of Religion. Long notes that popular religion has been defined variously as: (1) ‘identical with the organic (usually rural and peasant) form of a society, the religion of folk and peasant culture’; (2) ‘the religion of the laity in a religious community in contrast to that of the clergy’; (3) ‘the pervasive beliefs, rituals and values of a society, a kind of civil religion of the public’; (4) ‘an amalgam of esoteric beliefs and practices differing from the common or civil religion but usually located in the lower strata of society’; it includes esoteric forms of healing, predictions, phrenology, palm reading, astrology, newspaper and magazines astrological forecasts; (5) ‘the religion of a subclass or minority group in a culture’; (6) ‘the religion of the masses in opposition to the religion of sophisticated, discriminatory, and learned within a society’; and (7) ‘the creation of an ideology of religion by the elite levels of society’, best represented in folkloric societies, museums and historical research.3 [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER] |
