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Taking up the “problem of belief” discussed in this introduction, but now from a more practical perspective, Kim Knibbe (Chapter 10) reflects on the dilemmas of conducting participant observation in religious contexts. She asks how, as a researcher, one navigates the ways in which religious ways of explaining, interpreting and making sense of the world may compete or clash with academic ones. Traditionally, there seem to be roughly three options available to the researcher: methodological atheism, methodological theism or methodological agnosticism. Knibbe demonstrates that each of these positions create their own problems in ethnographic fieldwork, particularly in terms of the relationship between the researcher and the “researched”. Drawing on her fieldwork among people who call themselves “spiritual” in the Dutch context, she discusses how developing and maintaining rapport involves negotiating not only issues of differences in cognitive frameworks, but also differences in embodiment, emotion and affect. By summarizing some of the literature and drawing on her personal experiences, Knibbe explores how views on dealing with the dilemmas discussed relate to different ideas about what “research” entails. In a very concrete way, then, the chapter by Knibbe exemplifies the kind of reflection on their own positionality and presuppositions that Van den Belt in his contribution argues all researchers should engage in.

To elucidate the various ways of approaching the subject matter, this introductory chapter will first outline three different modes of defining religion. In some cultures and historical periods, the category of religion may be alien to the context that is studied. Nevertheless, the phenomenon in question is part of a body of thought and practices that is now identified as religious. How did these phenomena come to be studied as ‘religion’ in that tradition? What is the history of such definitions? We will then address the issue of theory: what is it, and why do you need it? We will also introduce some basic distinctions in levels of analysis that we think are useful to navigate our way through the conversations across disciplinary boundaries that often take place within religious studies. Another issue that will be addressed is the relationship of the researcher to the religious context: should one be a ‘believer’ to understand religion? Or is the category of belief itself problematic? This question is a variation of the ‘insider/outsider’ discussion in anthropology, and our discussion will thus draw heavily on these discussions. In closing, we give an outline of the book and how the chapters relate to the central question of how religion is studied.

Central to public debates about commonalities and differences between citizens of different religious and cultural backgrounds is the compatibility of cultural values and the norms through which these values are actualized. Values, and changes in value systems, are the central theme in Chapter 14 of this volume, in which Peter Berger discusses a specific strand of structural anthropology that he emphasizes can be useful in the analysis of both empirical and historical data: the theory of value as developed by Louis Dumont, which has its roots in Durkheim’s sociology of religion. Berger begins by contextualizing Dumont’s theory in the history of the discipline of anthropology by outlining the main features of Dumont’s analytical framework and how it has been developed by Joel Robbins. He sketches how Dumont, informed by his Indological and anthropological research on the Hindu caste system, developed a general theory of hierarchy, the latter being just the other side of the coin of value (as posing a value introduces hierarchy). While Lévi-Strauss was mainly concerned with binary oppositions in cultural structures, Dumont argued that relationships between ideas are hierarchical. Left and right, for instance, are not simply opposites but stand in a hierarchical relation. When taking an oath or shaking hands after making an agreement, only the right hand is appropriate because it stands for the whole person. Dumont discussed the various properties of value and added the concepts of “context” and “level” in order to account for a dynamic relationship between ideas and values within a certain framework he called ideology. Joel Robbins further developed the dynamic potential in Dumont’s theory in explaining processes of change and globalization. In line with Mason’s argument that the label of “religion” as a universal cultural category often obfuscates more than it illuminates outside the Western world, the author demonstrates that the theory of value as developed by Dumont and Robbins provides an important perspective from which to study religion, precisely because it does not depend on “religion” as a privileged analytical concept or domain.

The chapter attempts to reverse a long-standing trend. Academic religious studies have long been assimilators of concepts and methods established in other disciplines, so much so that the separate identity of religious studies has been questioned by leading practitioners. The present chapter proposes the contrary opinion that religious studies have much to offer other disciplines. In this vein it suggests that the historiography of philosophy, in particular, could profit by taking its cue from the terminology and research interests of religious studies. Using Stoicism as its central case study, the chapter explores inter alia the analytical usefulness of Ninian Smartʼs differentiation between seven dimensions of religion and also of the concept of ‘lived religion’. Finally, the chapter reflects on what the academic study of religion stands to gain by engaging with the history of philosophy.