Introduction: Religion as Historical Experience

Abstract

In this introductory chapter Katajala-Peltomaa & Toivo analyse historiographical changes from the history of popular religion to the history of religion as lived. They lay out the framework and discuss the tradition of studying the history of experience and religion as a cultural and time-bound phenomenon. The chapter introduces three analytical levels, namely everyday experience, experience as a process and experience as a social and societal structure arguing for a situational nature of experience. The three levels of experience are approached via the concepts of cultural scripts, communities, embodiment, materiality and agency. Finally, the introduction explains the structure of the rest of the volume.