ABSTRACT
The study of religion is often preoccupied with texts. This is due to the fact that many religions centre around texts and to the philological-historical training of many students of religion. Whereas images and fi lms have received some interest, video has been hitherto rarely analyzed. Among religious actors, however, it has gained much interest, and it is also increasingly used in social scientifi c studies of religion. Video is an innovative technology of data collection to which an increasing number of studies are devoted. Within the last decades, video has been increasingly accepted as an instrument of data collection and analysis in the social sciences. To the degree that video is established as a kind of data on religion, the question of how to handle video is becoming a topic more and more urgently to be solved in the social scientifi c methodology. This chapter addresses this question of how to interpret and analyze video as data in the social sciences, particularly with respect to the study of religion.
