ABSTRACT
Understanding religion requires us to take culture seriously. The study of religion cannot be separated from studies of culture, and so in this chapter I will be exploring the various ways in which the term culture can be understood. However, somewhat like the term ‘religion’, the term ‘culture’ is not straightforward. For the writer Raymond Williams (1976), ‘culture’ is one of the three most complicated terms in the English language, referring to a variety of ideas and things. In this respect, as well as many others, there is considerable overlap between the terms ‘culture’ and ‘religion’. This chapter will introduce a broad range of scholarly ideas and
approaches which are labelled as ‘cultural studies’. What we think of as ‘religious studies’ is, in many ways, a form of cultural studies, or at least there is much in cultural studies that those in the study of religion need to be aware of. This might seem to be obvious, since the broad area of cultural studies is relevant to most aspects of human life: for example, work, play, adulthood, youth, films, literature, and sport. In this regard, religion is no different, it is an aspect of cultural life, and the approaches of cultural studies make an important contribution to the study of religion. Over the next few pages I will introduce some of the key ideas
in the study of culture, using where possible ideas from both the study of culture and the study of religion. It is worth remembering,
however, that the academic field of cultural studies has largely developed outside of and separate to the study of religion, and so not all of the examples that I will use are explicitly concerned with religious aspects of culture. In many studies of culture, a particular point of importance is that (like the term religion) the term ‘culture’ does not refer to an entity in itself. Culture is something that is done, we have culture, and we do culture – it is something that is found in material products (such as books, clothes, buildings, and objects) but most importantly culture is what people do.
