The (im)possibility of Critique in the study of lived religion : Anthropological and Feminist reflections

This article aims to theorize the dilemmas of taking seriously religious worlds at precisely those moments when they may be in tension with academic worldviews in terms of epistemology and ontology, based on the author’s fieldwork in a Catholic context. The lived religion approach has developed as a critical enterprise as a corrective to more text based or macro-sociological approaches, developing a form of radical non-reductionism and a preference for ethnographic approaches. This article aims to further explore this critical edge of the lived religion approach to address the modernist legacy in the study of religion. It will do so by bringing two anthropological approaches into the conversation that both in different ways challenge the modernist underpinnings of studying religion within anthropology: phenomenological anthropology and what is called ‘the ontological turn’. The second part of the article centres on the question whether critique is possible while pursuing a non-reductionist approach to studying lived religion. This article suggests some ways to take this impossibility of critique forward by taking up some suggestions within the anthropological approaches already presented and linking this with feminist thinking on the roles of academic knowledge