ABSTRACT
The word “living” encompasses embodied cultures, religions-on-the-ground, evolving and innovative practices. Such practices reinterpret tradition in contemporary, even novel, contexts. Living religious formations have been contrasted with so-called historical religions, but living religions too are historically situated. Being alive now, living religions are situated in the current time period, though related to what has come before, and they aim to persist in the future. The designation of folk and folk religions has been largely cast aside the last forty years, though the study of folk religions has carried on under other terms. Examining folk religions dislodges overemphasis on the usual clusters of well known religions and regions, and that turn resolves textual biases for its data are mostly non-textual; this shift disrupts sui generis theories of religion, the current, cutting-edge bugbear. Folk punk rock music is usually framed as a combination of folk music and punk music, but that does not capture the genre.
