Afterword. Issue 1 (1st September 2021)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Fader, Ayala
• Is Part Of: Religion and society. Volume 12:Issue 1(2021)
• Page Start: 203
• Page End: 208
• Publication Date: 2021-09-01
• Subjects: Religion and sociology -- Periodicals; 306.605
• DOI: 10.3167/arrs.2021.120116
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2150-9298

Abstract

Abstract : To share/sharing/shared/a share of/to share with. What do we create when we share objects, embodied experiences, languages, or ideas with others? Intimacy? Ties of obligation? A sense of belonging to something despite differences of investments and position? In this special section, Hillewaert and Tetreault experiment with reimagining the notion of 'sharedness'. They have assembled a set of articles that use the term when describing less hegemonically spiritual and religious communities from a variety of places, traditions, and social formations. Some contributors focus on communities marginalized by more dominantly recognized state or institutional religiosity (Riley, Cochrane, Tetreault). Others ask what constitutes the grounds for defining religious/spiritual communities at all (Hillewaert, Elisha). The majority of the communities discussed probably fit most comfortably in scholarship on new religious movements or New Age scholarship (Elisha). What links these contributions is a focus on processes by which participants' sharedness is achieved despite their differences of belief, practice, or both, which might seem to threaten their existence as a collectivity. That is, the authors consider how difference rather than sameness becomes the grounds for creating a sense of joint purpose. They also emphasize that sharedness is a jumping-off point, a category for ethnographic investigation specifically through attention to language, materiality, and embodiment. This contrasts to assumptions that community of any sort necessarily relies on or emerges from participants' sameness.