ABSTRACT
This book is concerned with religion as it is understood and lived in a variety of contemporary contexts in Sub-Saharan Africa and southern Asia. In this chapter, following a brief discussion of the basic conceptual building blocks (religion, culture and society), a framework for the analysis that follows is developed. This can be seen as a three-dimensional matrix that, in order to identify the links between religion, individual lives and social relationships, it is necessary to analyse different dimensions of the religious social field (the personal, social and organisational), at various levels (individual, small-scale, national and transnational), with respect to the domains of the religious social field. The starting point for the latter is Lincoln’s conceptualisation of the religious social field as being comprised of discourses, practices, a community and institutions, adapted for analytical purposes to distinguish between religious and social practices and between institutions and organisational arrangements. The chapter concludes with a review of the methodological implications of using this analytical approach in order to identify the potential contributions, pitfalls and shortcomings of the different types of quantitative and qualitative evidence available.
