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Even though religion plays a central role in many people's lives, it is often omitted from citizenship education in secularized societies. Educational scholars have increasingly demanded that teaching about religion should be included in citizenship curricula to foster effective participation for all citizens. However, this is an enormous challenge, especially in societies like Israel where religion is politicized as an aspect of violent conflict. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with Palestinian Muslim educators in Israel, we explored how citizenship teachers refer to Islam in their citizenship lessons. The teachers in our study drew on Islam as an important resource to either resist predominant conceptions of citizenship education in Israel or to make the subject more meaningful and relevant to their students. We argue that incorporating religious epistemologies alongside critical pedagogies in the citizenship curriculum is a necessary educational task in diverse and conflict-affected societies like Israel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Efforts to address the logic of extraction, which arguably is at the core of our current environmental catastrophe, are examples for a non-reductive material turn in the study of religion and theology. These efforts are linked with the logics of property, possession, human/nature, and human/land relations. This emphasis on materiality and relationship creates welcome openings for another set of relationships that is still under-reflected in the material turn in religion and theology, namely the various connections between extraction and exploitation, specifically of labor, both productive and reproductive, human and other-than-human. In this article, the logic of extraction will be interpreted and reevaluated in its relation to exploitative relationships of labor, which in turn will be deepened in conversation with extraction. Relationships of extraction, production, and reproduction will further be investigated in terms of the notion of a religious surplus, which examines the multiple contributions of religion and theology as generated in broader surplus-producing relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If tattoos have a religious function, tattooists play a role in crafting a spiritual object. Hence, we explore the religious function of the tattooist and how tattooists deal with religion in their work. We used a "Lived Religion" approach that focuses on religious practices instead of religious organizations, because neither tattooists nor tattoo parlors are religiously legitimized figures or institutions. We collected data from tattooists from five different countries, with 23 semistructured interviews, 110 photos, and 4 video clips. After doing a content analysis of the interviews, and a denotative analysis of the photos and videos, we found that tattooists are aware of the religious overtones of their work. They understand themselves as figures that perform spiritual tasks. We also verified that tattoo parlors are spaces of religious negotiation, where tattooists, tattooed, and other actors exercise power. Finally, we established that a religious tattoo is the result of the negotiation among the actors involved, and that tattooists play a role as religious authorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although in late-modern societies the idea of a 'forever' relationship has lost its dominant status, it is consistently upheld by the Roman Catholic Church. The aim of the article is to analyse the practices of sustaining the durability of Catholic marriage, which we treat as ways of adapting to the tensions between late-modern models of intimacy and the rule of indissolubility of marriage. We refer to data collected in qualitative research among educated Roman Catholic women in Poland. Using the lived religion approach, we demonstrate how these women sacralise actions within marriage that have been secularised in the late-modern world, while also using late modernity as a reservoir of meanings, leading to hybridisation of religious practices. We argue that sustaining conservative religious rules is often based on actions in which religious aspects are negotiated and transformed. Religion operates 'non-autonomously' in these processes, entering a relationship with elements that are originally not religious. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Cahiers d'Études Africaines is the property of Editions EHESS and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Jewish Agrarian Movements (JAM hereafter) in North America express the many different shapes and iterations of Jewish farming on the continent, grounded in historical perspectives that influence current practices and activities. From within this diversity, common threads emerge with much to contribute to agrarian social movements and scholarship. Jewish values of returning (t'shuvah), releasing (shmitah), and repairing (tikkun), along with theories of doikayt (an anti-zionist movement around "hereness") and radical diasporism, animate JAM's critical engagement with agri-food systems. As researchers who have both studied and participated in Jewish agrarianism in a variety of U.S. and Canadian contexts, we solidify a series of themes and tensions that emerge from JAM: diaspora and indigeneity, modernity and tradition, Jewish agroecological knowledge production, and lived religion. We argue that, while JAM has not yet been examined thoroughly within critical food scholarship, it has the potential to contribute to broader debates and frameworks within sub-fields such as radical food geographies, critical agrarianism, and decoloniality. Without consideration of JAM as a part the study of food and agriculture, there are risks of marginalization of farmers, activists and researchers of Jewish identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the UK, the vast majority of people accept abortion, whether or not they are religious. Holding an absolutist anti-abortion view is out of line with the general population. The overwhelming majority of anti-abortion activists are motivated by conservative Christian religious beliefs, not necessarily shared by others in their faith communities. Their minority position, and ageing population, poses issues for the continuance of the anti-abortion movement, creating a need for specific anti-abortion religious socialisation that is unavailable elsewhere. Drawing on data from a longitudinal ethnographic study of anti-abortion activism, this article highlights the ways in which anti-abortion activists seek to develop anti-abortion values among primary-aged children. It illustrates their conflict between the need to develop a strong anti-abortion identity and involving children in potentially controversial discussions on abortion. We use the framework of lived religion to argue that, while much attention has been given to the concerns about children in minority religions, this has resulted in a lack of attention to the diversity of practices within mainstream religious communities, and how controversial forms of socialisation are managed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most studies in the sociology of religion in the West ignored religious tattoos or understood them as marginal practices. However, people have been getting religious tattoos since the beginning of the common era. I investigate the lack of sociological studies on religious tattoos and explain the marginal location of tattoos for the discipline. I propose a lived religion approach to understand tattoos as a legitimate religious practice and explore the historical and contemporary record of religious tattooing in the West. Finally, I make the case for studying tattoos as religious practices in Western, Christian contexts, and as a way to assess contemporary religiousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses digital and lived religion perspectives to analyze the phenomenon of American Muslims using online tools to search for and rate-and-review mosques. Focusing on four mid-size U.S. cities – Boston, Indianapolis, Denver, and Seattle – it surveys three major online sources for mosque finding: the Muslim-focused Salatomatic, the review site Yelp, and Google's location-based search. By braiding together site content and user reviews, it shows how this phenomenon connects users' functional goal of finding a location for daily or community prayer with the goal of a high-quality user experience. User reviews' migration toward Google echo a broader shift from computer-based website engagement to mobile engagement and suggest the integration of U.S. mosques into the broader sphere of businesses and services. Overall, they point to the central role that online platforms play in contemporary United States Muslim religious life-worlds, extending review behaviors around consumer goods and services to religious ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an overview of the application of a performance criticism framework within scholarship on the Hebrew Bible. A natural progression from conversations concerning orality, performance studies allows for increased explication of the biblical texts, most notably pertaining to life, religion, and culture in ancient Israel. The addition of 'lived religion' through a performance studies lens advances the understanding of peoples and areas of life commonly deemed absent from the biblical record. Instead, they are present in the form of an audience witnessing or hearing the performances of, or contained within, these texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a biographical-reconstructive approach, we examine the interplay between the symbolic representation of spirit possession and healing forms of ritual purification in the context of the war-related trauma of former Lord's Resistance Army child soldiers in Uganda. We illustrate how these former child soldiers articulate their trauma and resilience and how their communities deal with forms of spirit possession, what the role of religious communities is, and how rituals function as a coping mechanism for war-related trauma. The narrative approach is used to analyze 12 digital reports of different nongovernmental organizations and five digital testimonies of former child soldiers. The results provide relevant knowledge for a successful reintegration of returnees into society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the relevance of Critical Religion to the sociology of religion. Critical Religion argues that the category of "religion" is a Western concept that through colonialism and imperialism has been superimposed over non-Western societies. In contrast, it offers a critical theory of or critical sociology of religion, which evaluates the positive and negatives aspects of what we call religion. The article provides a summary of key proponents of critical religion then uses it to discuss the secularization debate which runs through the classics and the old and new paradigms in the sociology of religion. It discusses the lived religion methodology and problematizes that through its lack of distinction between the religious and the secular, it overemphasizes the role of religion. Finally, the article offers a more scientific and neutral redefinition of the category of religion as a solution to the problems with the category raised by critical religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the experiences of Dutch women who became Jewish via a giyur process. While the past decade has seen an increased interest in the ethnographic study of women's conversion, little is known about the process of giyur from a gender and everyday perspective, which is what this article focuses on. This is based on ethnographic research and interviews with 20 (Orthodox and non-Orthodox) converts. The main focus of this article is on the negotiations of gender and power in the process of giyur. The role of gender difference seemed to be one of the most important experienced differences between Orthodox and Liberal/Progressive forms of Jewish life. Not only is there an impact in the decision to join one or another community, but notions of gender and sexuality also influence the whole process of giyur, from first attraction to continued learning, implementation, and practicing of a "Jewish life." Women have to deal with the power of the rabbinic court, who eventually can decide whether a candidate is allowed to become Jewish. However, questions of authority and individual choice played a role in different gendered areas as well: the position of women in the synagogue, reflections on the impact of relationships and the implementation of certain commandments in their everyday lives. Analysing these dynamics offers insight into the intersections of gender, power and conversion, as well as the role of gender in contemporary Jewry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The South African Constitution and the law have ensured noticeable progress in acknowledging the LGBTQI community's rights. Consequently, there is now a legal framework that protects LGBTQI people, and any discriminatory behaviour and utterances can be prosecuted by law. The struggle now lies within the religious sector, where limited progress has been made. This paper focuses on the progress made within the Christian religion in terms of creating policies and regulations to protect LGBTQI community members' safety. We focus on same-sex relationships by arguing that even today, such relationships are not openly accepted by the Church. Using lived religion theory, we revisit Ntombana et al.'s (2020) findings and argue that queer people are closer to God and more spiritual than the homophobic Christians who attend daily Christian fellowship meetings. As queer people are in the minority and oppressed by the church system, we use Tutu and Boesak's theology to argue that they are closer to God than homophobic Christians. We highlight that during the COVID-19 lockdown, the Christian community suffered, while the queer community flourished because their spirituality is not based on the Church's orthodox tradition but on their relationship with God. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to contribute to the body of scholarship on lived religion by using intimate relationships as a lens in order to examine religiosity. Based on ethnographic research carried out among practicing Catholic women in Belgium, I unpack Catholic women's understanding of the entanglement between religiosity and relationships by showing the ways in which these women perceive intimate relationships to enable—and at times hinder—their performance of religiosity. I draw on the study of lived religion in a twofold manner. Firstly, I mobilize it as an ethnographic tool to capture the experiences and practices of the women with respect to intimate relationships. Secondly, I contribute to the further theorization of the field by investigating religiosity and how religion is practiced in a non-religious setting, i.e. coupledom in a secular society. Hence, in this article I propose a novel road of inquiry that utilizes intimate relationships as a lens to understand how religion is enacted on an everyday basis. In doing so, we may come to see intimate relationships as a site where religiosity is constructed and performed, in particular against the background of a secularizing society in which Catholicism is no longer the default option as it once was. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing number of studies on religion and spirituality in the workplace point towards religious functions of work and the importance of spirituality for managing employees. Yet, religion remains a blind spot for the sociology of personal development in the workplace. Based on two years of qualitative research on Slovak employees, CEOs and other professionals, this article explores how work engagement via personal development narratives is a source of meaningfulness in the respondents' lives to the point that their relation to work has become sacralised. Moreover, personal development at work implies the mobilisation of religious selves, either theistic or holistic. The study thus highlights the role of religion in the context of work while shedding light on transformations of religion in the capitalist context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how Christian practices of prayer are being reconfigured through digital media in Singapore. Although digital technologies are an area of burgeoning interest amongst social and cultural geographers, the ways in which these technologies reconfigure the space-times of religious praxis and engender new affective relations or subjectivities of religion have not yet been embraced. This paper fills the lacuna by bringing existing studies on religion, technology and affect into constructive conversation with each other. By elaborating on digital prayer as an affective assemblage of religious practice, we show how digital technologies blur institutional boundaries and create new affordances for lived religious subjectivities beyond the 'officially sacred'. Then, we consider how digital media may produce new atmospheres that shape the affective formation of religious subjects. We outline four dimensions of affect that constitute the digitally-mediated affective atmospheres, which structure how prayer is felt and performed. Altogether, this article contributes an understanding of 'digital prayer' as a form of religious practice that enables an integrative, if at times ambiguous and politically-charged, experience for connecting religious belief with the rhythms of everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Evangelical Christian communities, the responsibility for maintaining the home is taken up primarily by women (Bartkowski, 1999 ; Gallagher & Smith, 1999). The discursive construction of the home as a sacred space free from toxic influences emerged during the Cold War, when the global turmoil seemed to demand the delineation of a matriarchal safe space (Shively, 2017; Neumann, 2019 ; Anagnost 2013). More recently, restrictions concerning COVID-19 have initiated a further shift from the public to the private sphere. Women who were accustomed to conducting housework while their husbands were at work have abruptly come to the foreground as life primarily took place at home. This article explores the intersection of daily activities with religious beliefs as reflected in the practice of blogging. Central to this study is the assumption that ordinary, daily activities provide a unique lens into the way people 'in the pews' live their lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This final article in a three-part series exploring the contemporary significance of the theologian and philosopher of religion Don Cupitt examines the extent to which he might be considered a 'theological pioneer'. There are three possible areas of innovation: Cupitt's work on non-realism, his adoption of postmodern philosophy and his advocacy of a religion of everyday speech. In each of these, Cupitt carried out ground-breaking work, but it is less clear whether his ideas have exercised a significant and lasting influence. While the Sea of Faith television series (1984) generated a substantial popular following, his work has not been widely adopted or developed by successive generations of theologians or scholars of religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last fifty years a plethora of new spiritual practices has emerged in the Church of Sweden. Many fall within a category of holistic practices, aimed at engaging body, soul, and spirit. Among these, two categories are dominant: meditations and movement-based bodily practices. Some of these practices are contested by other Christians on a theological basis. The article asks: Who are the new ritual specialists teaching these practices? Why do they teach these practices? Why in the church? By using a bottom-up perspective and studying practices which lie outside the traditional Christian religious rites, which has been the focus in research on the Church of Sweden, we find that the holistic practices are framed in a culture of care, focusing on bodily and spiritual wellbeing. We suggest that the predominance of women in body-movement practices should be understood as a generational feature rather than as an expression of the feminization of the church. Many of the leaders are women who were part of new spiritual movements as well as body-mind practices and various forms of dance in gyms and yoga studios in the 1990s and early 2000s, finding an openness to bringing their knowledge into the church.

The South African Constitution and the law have ensured noticeable progress in acknowledging the LGBTQI community’s rights. Consequently, there is now a legal framework that protects LGBTQI people, and any discriminatory behaviour and utterances can be prosecuted by law. The struggle now lies within the religious sector, where limited progress has been made. This paper focuses on the progress made within the Christian religion in terms of creating policies and regulations to protect LGBTQI community members’ safety. We focus on same-sex relationships by arguing that even today, such relationships are not openly accepted by the Church. Using lived religion theory, we revisit Ntombana et al.’s (2020) findings and argue that queer people are closer to God and more spiritual than the homophobic Christians who attend daily Christian fellowship meetings. As queer people are in the minority and oppressed by the church system, we use Tutu and Boesak’s theology to argue that they are closer to God than homophobic Christians. We highlight that during the COVID-19 lockdown, the Christian community suffered, while the queer community flourished because their spirituality is not based on the Church’s orthodox tradition but on their relationship with God.

Ramadan is a time when Muslims experience an increased connection to God and an increased sense of belonging through communal acts of worship, but Muslim women are often excluded from many acts of worship due to religious restrictions while they are menstruating. This study innovatively applies concepts of "religious citizenship" and women's "triple roles" drawn from lived religion and feminist literature to a new context of Muslim women and their everyday practices. Based on research with more than 60 culturally diverse Melbourne Muslims who kept anonymous diaries before, during, and after Ramadan 2021, this analysis shows how Muslim women's understandings of religious belonging and connection in Ramadan are shaped by their own reconfigured approaches to worship and socialization alongside their everyday workload. It provides a unique opportunity to investigate the invisible challenges faced by Muslim women in worship and devotion during Ramadan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much knowledge production, both academic and non‐academic, is driven by a need to simplify the world in order to enable people to navigate the complexities of everyday life. Such simplifications not only risk offering less reliable representations of the world, they can also turn into disruptive and harmful images of the world. In this article, students and teachers in the field of religion and theology are encouraged to value scientific research as a form of knowledge production that complicates things. In an age in which scientific knowledge is constantly contested and in which it competes with other forms of knowledge production (including problematic ones such as fake news, conspiracy theories, stereotyped representations of religion and religious others, and poorly executed journalism), it is important for students to understand that complicating things is a key step in developing reliable knowledge on religion and the (ir)religious other. This article, written for students starting out in the field of theology and religion and for those who teach them, explains how complicating things takes shape in scientific research by discussing three basic elements: (1) not taking things at face value, (2) understanding science as knowledge production and reflecting on science as production, (3) and realizing that there is no absolute certainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In feminist research on religion, women and gender, the concepts of "lived religion" as well as "agency as doing religion" take a prominent place. Both include an intersubjective and mostly partial perspective. However, against the background of current developments concerning a global religious right, the paper argues for the inclusion of a critical perspective through the methodology of a double critique that includes both an analysis of power relations that marginalize women in religious groups and an analysis of women's reproduction of gendered as well as racialized power relations. This argument is embedded in the complexity of post-secular feminist research including research on women, gender and religion, feminist critiques of secularism (and of anti-Muslim discourses), feminist, queer and trans theologies, and research on the religious right and their anti-feminist politics. The paper suggests to take feminist theologies and feminist spiritualities/religious practices as reference point for such an analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how Michael Jackson's 1984 stretcher photo and Tupac Shakur's 1994 stretcher photo scrambles the disciplinary boundaries surrounding the academic study of religion. Drawing inspiration from Manning Marable's concept of Blackwater, this study explores the complexities of black iconicity's relationship to black suffering in the modern world. Through a critical analysis of the production and circulation of Jackson and Shakur's respective stretcher photos, the following account highlights the disruptive force of black iconicity in modern society, unraveling its implications for religious meaning. By tarrying with these haunting photographic representations, this article prompts a reevaluation of the relation between (anti)blackness, visual culture, religion, and popular culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Universum is the property of Instituto de Estudios Humanisticos Juan Ignacio Molina, Universidad de Talca and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article presents selected aspects of Marian pilgrimages in the context of lived Catholicism in Poland. Lived Catholic Mariology is a concept introduced in this paper and discussed in terms of the intimate as well as communal relationships people establish with Mary through and in various rituals (e.g., pilgrimages), sites (e.g., shrines) and objects (e.g., images). Links between materializing Mary through images; affective, sensual and corporeal religious experiences; and community bonding are presented. They are discussed by drawing on approaches that refer to material religion, religion as mediation, concepts of sensational forms, and aesthetic formations. When examining the centrality of Marian images in Polish pilgrimage practices, this paper focuses on earlier developments, especially (1) those connected with the growth of Marian shrines during the Counter Reformation period and (2) the role played by traditional and innovative Marian pilgrimages during the Communist period in Poland (1945–1989). The final part of the paper refers to the recent changes connected with political polarization of Polish society, the process of radicalization through right-wing discourses that embrace Marian imagery and pilgrimages, the decline of Roman Catholicism and Catholic practices among Poles, and emerging alternative currents relating to Mary and pilgrimages in religious and secular contexts. Referring to various historical and current examples, this paper proposes seeing pilgrimages through the lived religion approach with a focus on materiality and mediatory dimension of religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the role played by religion in humanitarian aid for refugees and migrants of various faiths in predominantly Catholic Poland. Although the country has accepted small numbers of refugees for years, the discussion about their presence as well as the state of the asylum system has captured the attention of the general public in 2015. The European 'refugee crisis' sparked a fierce debate, further aggravated by the parliamentary and presidential elections that took place that year. The Roman Catholic Church was quite vocal in the debate, with representatives' attitudes ranging from supportive to ambiguous and outright hostile. In this article, we focus on the grassroots initiatives at the margins of the Church that challenged the negative narratives and helped refugees and migrants. Based on empirical research we analyze the proclamations and activities of these actors. We show how the 'refugee crisis' became a "moment of ethics" (Zigon 2008) that encouraged people to help others in need. We explore how the diverse support for the refugees established a space to conceive of religion and moral values as they are lived (McGuire 2008) and translated into activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been twenty years since Jonathan S. Walters sought to dislodge the ingrained understanding of karma as a purely individual phenomenon. Since then, interesting work has been done on this issue, but less than one might hope and much of it siloed, addressing either texts or ethnography, either this region or that one. One of the most exciting aspects of a recent symposium on lived karma was the opportunity to explore these issues with scholars of widely varied expertise. One theme that emerged is what I will term “interpersonal karma.” Across the Buddhist world, we find not only that our relationships are constituted by karmic affinities, but also that in many contexts those relationships are seen as the media through which karma unfolds. These understandings not only provide frameworks for interpreting relationships but underwrite ritual technologies through which people can form, maintain, or disperse these affinities.

This article explores the notion of the "magic of a place" and the way a space attracts groups and individuals who follow various forms of vernacular or lived religion and spirituality. The space is Sintra, an "enchanted" mountain facing the westernmost point of Europe, the Roca Cape. Classified by UNESCO as Cultural Landscape, Sintra is a unique place, a "sensuous sacred geography"; its sacredness comes from its natural setting, combined with historical layers of religious use and the way these are nowadays interpreted by individuals who live spirituality as "sensational forms" (configurations of imaginations and sensations in a context of religious and spiritual traditions). Thought of as an encapsulated magical place where innumerous groups perform their ceremonies, meditations, and spiritual retreats, Sintra is a scenario where Tweed's discussion on the sacredness of a place is highly suitable and transreligiosity and spiritual elasticity are the norm. Furthermore, through the ethnographic data presented, we will see how, within this "spiritual elasticity" directly relating to the astonishing nature of the Sintra mountain, individuals find relief for their personal crises or their collective eco-anxiety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the fourth century, Christianity developed from a persecuted religion to the only official religion of the Roman Empire. Written sources suggest that this came at the expense of religious tolerance. Egypt and Syria play an important role in this narrative. In this article, I argue that the practice of religious life was much more nuanced than the writings suggest at first glance. This argument is illustrated by means of several case studies pertaining to Egypt and Syria during the third and fourth centuries, using traditional literary sources, papyri as well as remains of material culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on two Babylonian incantation bowls in Jewish Aramaic today preserved in the Musée des explorations du monde (previously, Musée de la Castre) in Cannes and first published at the fin de siècle. The incantation texts inscribed on the two bowls are re-edited here for the first time after more than a century, translated in English, and accompanied by new high resolution images and drawings. The two objects are interrogated for what they can reveal about communal self-definition and the cultural boundaries between Jews and non-Jews in Sasanian Babylonia. Specifically, the article analyzes the sacred names quoted in the incantations, as well as the interplay between image, text, and materiality, reflecting on dynamics of religious-cultural dissemination, differentiation, and appropriation, and on the role of a shared local sensitivity. The multilayered re-examination of the two bowls from an historical, artistic, interreligious and everyday life perspective aims at better understanding the many nuances of the lived religion of Jews and other minorities in Sasanian Babylonia, in between the two main interpretative poles proposed in scholarship, that of a shared magical culture and that of an arena of negotiated identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been twenty years since Jonathan S. Walters sought to dislodge the ingrained understanding of karma as a purely individual phenomenon. Since then, interesting work has been done on this issue, but less than one might hope and much of it siloed, addressing either texts or ethnography, either this region or that one. One of the most exciting aspects of the recent symposium on lived karma was the opportunity to explore these issues with scholars of widely varied expertise. One theme that emerged is what I will term "interpersonal karma." Across the Buddhist world, we find not only that our relationships are constituted by karmic affinities, but also that in many contexts those relationships are seen as the media through which karma unfolds. These understandings not only provide frameworks for interpreting relationships but underwrite ritual technologies through which people can form, maintain, or disperse these affinities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through interviews and personal observation, this essay introduces the photographer Ogano Minoru, exploring his particular take on the practice of matsuri photography. In his photos, Ogano tries to visually capture the affective aspects of matsuri as experienced by participants. He suggests that even when matsuri are not organized through religious institutions, they emerge from deeply held beliefs and everyday life concerns in the local community. The concluding part of the article is a brief photo essay about mushi-okuri and related matsuri in the Tsugaru region (Aomori Prefecture).