Folk religion
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According to religious studies and folkloristics, folk religion, traditional religion, or vernacular religion comprises various forms and expressions of religion distinct from the official doctrines and practices of organized religion. The precise definition of folk religion varies among scholars. Sometimes also termed popular belief, it consists of ethnic or regional religious customs under the umbrella of religion but outside official doctrine and practices.
The term "folk religion" is generally held to encompass two related but separate subjects. The first is the religious dimension of folk culture (folklore), or the folk-cultural dimensions of religion. The second refers to the study of syncretism between two cultures with different stages of formal expression, such as the melange of African folk beliefs and Roman Catholicism that led to the development of Vodun and Santería, and similar mixtures of formal religions with folk cultures. In China, folk Protestantism had its origins in the Taiping Rebellion.
Chinese folk religion, folk Christianity, folk Hinduism, and folk Islam are examples of folk religions associated with major religions. The term is also used, especially by the clergy of the faiths involved, to describe the desire of people who otherwise infrequently attend religious worship, do not belong to a church or similar religious society, and have not made a formal profession of faith in a particular creed to have religious weddings or funerals or (among Christians) to have their children baptized.
Definition
In The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions, John Bowker characterized "folk religion" as either "religion which occurs in small, local communities which does not adhere to the norms of large systems" or "the appropriation of religious beliefs and practices at a popular level."
Don Yoder argued that there were five separate ways of defining folk religion. The first was a perspective rooted in a cultural evolutionary framework that understood folk religion as representing the survivals of older forms of religion; in this, it would constitute "the survivals, in an official religious context, of beliefs and behavior inherited from earlier stages of the culture's development." This definition would view folk religion in Catholic Europe as the survival of pre-Christian religion and the folk religion in Protestant Europe as the survival of Medieval Catholicism. The second definition identified by Yoder was the view that folk religion represented the mixture of an official religion with forms of ethnic religion; this was employed to explain the place of folk religion in the syncretic belief systems of the Americas, where Christianity had blended with the religions of indigenous American and African communities.
Yoder's third definition was often employed within folkloristics, which held that folk religion was "the interaction of belief, ritual, custom, and mythology in traditional societies," representing that often pejoratively characterized as superstition. The fourth definition provided by Yoder stated that folk religion represented the "folk interpretation and expression of religion." Noting that this definition would not encompass beliefs that were largely unconnected from organized religion, such as witchcraft, he, therefore, altered this definition by including the concept of "folk religiosity," thereby defining folk religion as "the deposit in the culture of folk religiosity, the full range of folk attitudes to religion." His fifth and final definition represented a "practical working definition" that combined elements from these various other definitions. Thus, he summarized folk religion as "the totality of all those views and practices of religion that exist among the people apart from and alongside the strictly theological and liturgical forms of the official religion."
Yoder described "folk religion" as existing "in a complex society concerning and in tension with the organized religion(s) of that society. Its relatively unorganized character differentiates it from organized religion."
Alternately, the sociologist of religion Matthias Zic Varul defined folk religion as "the relatively unreflective aspect of ordinary practices and beliefs that are oriented towards, or productive of, something beyond the immediate here-and-now: everyday transcendence."
In sociology, folk religion is often contrasted with elite religion. Folk religion refers to beliefs, practices, rituals, and symbols derived from sources other than the religion's leadership. The leadership often tolerates folk religion, although they may consider it an error. A similar concept is lived religion, the study of religion as practiced by believers.
Scholars seeking more precise terminology increasingly rejected folk religion in the 1990s and 2000s.
Problems with the term folk religion
Yoder noted that one problem with using the term folk religion was that it did not fit the work of scholars who used the term "religion" solely to refer to organized religion. He highlighted the example of the prominent sociologist of religion Émile Durkheim, who insisted that religion was organized to contrast it with magic. Yoder noted that scholars adopting these perspectives often preferred the term "folk belief" over "folk religion."
Yoder highlighted a second problem with the term folk religion: Some scholars, particularly those in the sociology of religion, have used the term as a synonym for ethnic religion (alternately known as national religion or tribal religion). This means a religion closely tied to a particular ethnic or national group, thus contrasting with a "universal religion" that cuts across ethnic and national boundaries. E. Wilbur Bock is among the scholars who have adopted this terminology.
The folklorist Leonard Norman Primiano argued that the use of the term folk religion, as well as related terms like "popular religion" and "unofficial religion," by scholars does an extreme disservice to the forms of religiosity that scholars are examining because – in his opinion – such terms are "residualistic, [and] derogatory." He argued that using such terminology implies that there is "a pure element" to religion "which is in some way transformed, even contaminated, by its exposure to human communities." As a corrective, he suggested that scholars use "vernacular religion" as an alternative. Defining this term, Primiano stated that "vernacular religion" is, "by definition, religion as it is lived: as human beings encounter, understand, interpret, and practice it. Since religion inherently involves interpretation, it is impossible for the religion of an individual not to be vernacular."
Kapaló was critical of this approach, deeming it mistaken and arguing that switching from "folk religion" to "vernacular religion" results in the scholar "picking up a different selection of things from the world." He cautioned that both terms carried an "ideological and semantic load" and warned scholars to consider each word's associations.
Historical study
In Europe, the study of "folk religion" emerged from the religiöse Volkskunde survey. This German term refers to "the religious dimension of folk culture, or the folk-cultural dimension of religion." This term was first employed by a German Lutheran preacher, Paul Drews, in a 1901 article that he published titled "Religiöse Volkskunde, eine Aufgabe der praktischen Theologie." This article was designed to be read by young Lutheran preachers leaving the seminary to equip them for the popular variants of Lutheranism they would encounter among their congregations, which would differ from the official, doctrinal Lutheranism they had been accustomed to. Although developing within a religious environment, the term came to be adopted by German academics in folkloristics. During the 1920s and 1930s, theoretical studies of religiöse Volkskunde had been produced by the folklorists Josef Weigert, Werner Boette, and Max Rumpf, all of whom had focused on religiosity within German peasant communities. Over the coming decades, Georg Schreiber established an Institut für religiöse Volkskund in Munich, while a similar department was established in Salzburg by Hanns Koren. Other prominent academics involved in studying the phenomenon were Heinrich Schauert and Rudolf Kriss, the latter of whom collected one of the largest collections of folk-religious art and material culture in Europe, later housed in Munich's Bayerisches Nationalmuseum. Throughout the 20th century, many studies were conducted on folk religion in Europe, paying particular attention to subjects such as pilgrimage and the use of shrines.
In the Americas, the study of folk religion developed among cultural anthropologists studying the syncretistic cultures of the Caribbean and Latin America. The pioneer in this field was Robert Redfield, whose 1930 book Tepoztlán: A Mexican Village contrasted and examined the relationship between "folk religion" and "official religion" in a peasant community. Yoder later noted that although the earliest known usage of the term "folk religion" in English was unknown, it probably developed as a translation of the German Volksreligion. One of the earliest prominent usages of the term was in the title of Joshua Trachtenberg's 1939 work Jewish Magic and Superstition: A Study in Folk Religion. The term also gained increasing usage within the academic field of comparative religion, appearing in the titles of Ichiro Hori's Folk Religion in Japan, Martin Nilsson's Greek Folk Religion, and Charles Leslie's Reader, the Anthropology of Folk Religion. Courses on the study of folk religion came to be taught at various universities in the United States, such as John Messenger's at Indiana University and Don Yoder's at the University of Pennsylvania. Although the subject of folk religion fell within the remit of scholars operating in both folkloristics and religious studies, by 1974, Yoder noted that U.S.-based academics in the latter continued to largely ignore it, instead focusing on the study of theology and institutionalized religion; he contrasted this with the situation in Europe, where historians of religion had devoted much time to studying folk religiosity. He also lamented that many U.S.-based folklorists neglected the subject of religion because it did not fit within the standard genre-based system for cataloging folklore.
- More information is available at [ Wikipedia:Folk_religion ]
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