Religions / Worldviews / Ideologies

What is right and wrong? What is true and false? Where do we come from? Where do we go to? What are we to do here and now? Who am I?

Ethnographies of religious life showed how the respective answers people give to such questions are often affected by and embedded in religious traditions. We contribute to such work on religion(s) but also complement it with research on non-religious worldviews and ideologies. On the one hand we think that that ‘religion’ must always be conceptualized by taking into account its ‘others’ (such as magic, heresy, science, the secular, etc.). There is, on the other hand, an apparent growth in the number of people who explicitly or implicitly distance themselves in diverse ways from religious traditions and ways of life in different parts of the world. Such attempts to live secular lives, based on non-religious worldviews and ideologies deserve to be researched in their own right.