Rethinking religious pluralism: a view from New Age Spirituality in Argentina

NICOLÁS VIOTTI

Barcelona

Congreso; Conference of The International Society for The Study of Religion (ISSR); 2019

International Society for The Study of Religion (ISSR)

The analysis of religious and spiritual diversity, in the context of the inequalities and diversities that characterize the contemporary world, implies, more than ever, to assume the research process as a situated practice, in which theories and concepts are put to the test from the particularities or from the intersectional perspectives that are revealed in the field work. In this thematic session, we propose to take up the commitment of the grounded theory to revisit concepts and theories of the social sciences and to give way to new keys of analysis on the religious phenomenon from the field works carried out in Latin America, Asia and Africa. In the global South, political crises and structural processes related to socio-economic vulnerability, discrimination, inter-ethnic conflicts and stigma often intersect with religious or spiritual beliefs and belongings, as embodied practices, that defy the investigative gaze inviting the generation of new theoretical categories, the redefinition of old theoretical frameworks and the updating of classic concepts. We invite researchers and undergraduate and graduate students to present papers that seek to rethink the link between research practice in the field and a theoretical construction from and for the South-South dialogue. We are particularly interested in researches that develop deep field works (ethnographies, analysis of statistical sources, interviews, analysis of discourses) that seek to understand, from the social sciences, the ways in wich the sacred is built and its anchorage in daily life, in political, economic and social life in the global South.