Transreligiosity

Introducing and disseminating ´transreligiosity´, this open access book explores the term as a novel concept and tool in religious studies and the anthropological and social scientific study of contemporary religiosity. Through this Eugenia Roussou and Anastasios Panagiotopoulos provide academics and the wider public with an epistemological, analytic and ethnographic basis for a variety of religio-spiritual phenomena. ‘Transreligiosity’ has the ability to variably account for the elastic and transgressive quality of borders, between what may be considered as religious and spiritual, as well as among different religio-spiritual views, practices and ´traditions´.

Gathering a range of ethnographic cases, the book explores ways in which ´transreligiosity´ is exemplified, both in its contextual particularities and in its encompassing reach as a broader analytical term. While considering transreligious phenomena as occurring in a wide span of space and time, contributors also highlight its increasing presence in contemporary societies around the globe, importantly including ‘the West’. Framed in the contexts of crises and post-crises, including the pandemic of covid-19, case studies identify a ‘return’ to a more transgressive attitude towards religiosity, which seeks to bypass official institutions, especially religious and medical.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. This book is funded by national funds through the FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P., under the project ReSpell, Grant reference: 2022.01229.PTDC (doi.org/10.54499/2022.01229.PTDC)

Eugenia Roussou is Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Department of Social Anthropology and History, University of the Aegean, Greece, the author of Orthodox Christianity and Vernacular Religion: The Evil Eye in Greece (Bloomsbury, 2021), and the Principal Investigator of ‘ReSpell. Religion, Spirituality and Wellbeing: A Comparative Approach of Transreligiosity and Crisis in Southern Europe’ (FCT ref.: 2022.01229.PTDC).
Anastasios Panagiotopoulos is a senior researcher at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Seville. Holder of the research fund: EMERGIA, ref.: EMC21-00043, Consejeria de Universidades, Investigacion e Innovacion de la Junta de Andalucia. Co-editor of Articulate Necrographies: Comparative Perspectives on the Voices and Silences of the Dead (2019).