ABSTRACT
The main argument of this chapter is that new forms of religious expression are breathing new life into magical or popular practices which, according to 'scientistic' opinion, should have disappeared by the middle of the last century. This chapter argues the case for a new, post-Western approach to the sociology of religion. It also argues that Troeltsch, Weber, Durkheim and Mauss worked with definitions of religion and magic that displayed an institutional bias historically rooted in the Catholic and Protestant Churches of Europe as the normative types of religious organisation in Western culture. The chapter considers a category of communal or collective mysticism that characterises popular pilgrimages, Pentecostal and African-American cults and many indigenous shamanistic rituals as well as the collective rituals of certain esoteric groups among other communal manifestations of 'neomagic'. The paradigm that has dominated the sociology of religion since the mid-twentieth century is changing.
