The Diversity of Religious Diversity. Using Census and NCS Methodology in Order to Map and Assess the Religious Diversity of a Whole Country

Religious diversity is often captured in “mapping studies” that use mostly qualitative methods in order to map and assess the religious communities in a given area. While these studies are useful, they often present weaknesses in that they treat only limited geographic regions, provide limited possibilities for comparing across religious groups and cannot test theories. In this article, we show how a census and a quantitative national congregations study (NCS) methodology can be combined in order to map and assess the religious diversity of a whole country (Switzerland), overcoming the problems mentioned above. We outline the methodological steps and selected results concerning organizational, geographic, structural, and cultural diversity

The aesthetics of ritual--contested identities and conflicting performances in the Iraqi Shi’a diaspora: Ritual, performance and identity change

What are the processes through which identity change takes place at the individual and collective level? How might a focus on embodied religious performance and ritual contribute to understandings of such identity change? Through an ethnographic analysis of the Muharram rituals of Iraqi Shi’is in London, I take religious rites as a starting point from which to theorise a performative theory of identity change to highlight the role of ritual and performance in shaping changing notions of identity at both the individual and collective level. Such a project necessarily engages both with processes of identity change and with the paradox of identity/difference, particularly the ways in which articulations of subjective identity are ontologically dependent on an external ‘other’. Ultimately, I argue that paying close critical attention to the performative and (re)iterative processes of micro-level identificatory practices allows a more nuanced understanding of the mechanisms through which identity change comes to take effect, both at the level of individual subjectivity and that of collective social belonging