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Based on comparative ethnographic research in four countries and three continents,
Butinage: The Art of Religious Mobility explores the notion of "religious butinage" as a conceptual framework intended to shed light on the dynamics of everyday religious practice. Derived from the French word
butiner, which refers to the foraging activity of bees and other pollinating insects, this term is employed by the authors metaphorically to refer to the "to-ing and fro-ing" of believers between religious institutions.
Focused on urban, predominantly Christian settings in Brazil, Kenya, Ghana, and Switzerland,
Butinage examines commonalities and differences across the four case studies and identifies religious mobility as existing at the meeting points of religious-institutional rules and narratives, social norms, and individual agency and practice. Drawing on anglophone, francophone, and lusophone academic traditions,
Butinage is dedicated to a dialogue between ethnographic findings and theoretical ideas, and explores how we may rethink common conceptions of religious normativity.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
Acknowledgements
Part I: Rethinking Religious Normativity
1. Introduction: The Mobile Religious Practitioner
1.1. The Mobile Practitioner
1.2. The Butinage Metaphor
1.3. The Structure of this Book
2. Religious Mobility: Current Debates
2.1. The Conceptual Limitations of Religious Conversion
2.2. Religious Combinations and Syncretism
2.3. ‘Lived Religion’ and Everyday Religion
2.4. Conclusion
Part II: Case Studies
Introduction to Part II: Methodology
3. Neighborliness as a Driver for Mobility in Brazil
3.1. The Circularity of Practice
3.2. Territories and Bridges
3.3. Butinage and Neighborliness
3.4. Conclusion
4. The Kenyan Case: Dynamism and Precariousness
4.1. The Kenyan Religious Landscape
4.2. Hierarchy in Practice: Members Versus Visitors
4.3. Return Mobility
4.4. A Precarious Religious Landscape: Scandals, Schisms, and Sects
4.5. Conclusion
5. Mobility Intertwined: Migration, Kinship, and Education in Ghana
5.1. Religious Pluralism in Ghana
5.2. Religious Trajectories: Intertwined Kinship, Migration, and Educational Strategies
5.3. Additional Practices: Logics and Economies of Religious Mobility
5.4. Conclusion
6. Religion and Mobility in Switzerland: A Most Private Affair
6.1. Uneasiness with Religion: ‘Institutionalists’ Versus ‘Seculars’
6.2. Between Embrace and Suspicion: ‘Distanced’ Practitioners
6.3. Eastern Religions, Animism, and New Age: ‘Alternatives’
6.4. Butinage in Action
6.5. Between Religious Heritage and Religion as a Taboo
6.6. Conclusion
Part III: Between a Metaphor and a Model
7. Between Bees and Flowers
7.1. A Typology of Butineurs
7.2. Territories
7.3. From ‘Motivation’ to ‘Logic’
7.4. Degrees of Practice and Their Complementarity
7.5. Conclusion
8. From Religious Mobility to Dynamic Religious Identities
8.1. Familiarity and Familiarization
8.2. Religious Repertoires
8.3. Religious Identity in Context and Motion
8.4. Conclusion
9. Conclusion: The Peripatetic Practitioner
Annex: Interview Guide
Bibliography
Über den Autor / die Autorin
Yonatan N. Gez is a Humboldt Fellow at the Arnold Bergstraesser Institute and a research associate at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva.
Yvan Droz is a senior lecturer in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva.
Jeanne Rey is a professor at the University of Teacher Education in Fribourg and a research associate at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva.
Edio Soares is a Research Associate at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva.
Zusammenfassung
Using the metaphor of "religious butinage," this book explores the idea of religious practices as predominantly mobile, eschewing rigid frameworks oriented around exclusive categories of membership and conversion.
