Ordinary Lives and Grand Schemes An Anthropology of Everyday Religion [Hardcover]

Everyday practice of religion is complex in its nature, ambivalent and at times contradictory. The task of an anthropology of religious practice is therefore precisely to see how people navigate and make sense of that complexity, and what the significance of religious beliefs and practices in a given setting can be. Rather than putting everyday practice and normative doctrine on different analytical planes, the authors argue that the articulation of religious doctrine is also an everyday practice and must be understood as such.

Samuli Schielkeis 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.

Liza Debevecis a research fellow at the Scientific Research Centre of the Slovene Academy of Sciences and Arts. Her research focuses on the anthropology of everyday life practices in urban Burkina Faso.

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 EthnologlÓf