Living with Two Cultural Turns: The Case of the Study of Religion

Abstract

As this book demonstrates, the notion of a cultural turn in social research refers to a range of ways in which culture has become significant for theorising and researching social life. The notion of a ‘cultural turn’ also has distinctive meanings in the context of specific disciplines or fields of study. In this chapter I will explore the significance of the ‘cultural turn’ in recent scholarship in the study of religion, arguing that this field is increasingly shaped by two forms of cultural turn that have developed largely independently of each other, but which will need to be integrated if the field is to develop constructively in the future. These two forms of cultural turn are the critical reflexivity developed in relation to academic discourses of ‘religion’ and ‘religious studies’ (McCutcheon, 1997), and the turn to the study of the everyday cultural practices and structures of religious life that embraces the study of both ‘lived religion’ (McGuire, 2008) and that of religion, media and popular culture (Lynch, 2009). Through the course of this chapter I will trace both the roots and key concepts of these two different forms, before exploring the role of both for articulating a cultural approach to the study of religion.

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