ABSTRACT
Beginning in the later decades of the twentieth century a new subfield developed in the study of religion, aiming to correct what was seen as a traditional over-emphasis on the interpretation of texts and a preoccupation with studying elites. Although the word “religion” will be examined in detail as the subject of its own entry, its qualifier, “lived,” entered English from earlier Germanic languages, with variants of the now prominent modern verb “live” dating to Old English, going as far back as the early Middle Ages. The American historian, Joan Wallach Scott, wrote in an essay entitled “The Evidence of Experience” that grounding scholarship on the category of experience is itself a problematic move. Instead, it is complicit scholarship, though sometimes complicit with systems of governance with which scholars may agree or, perhaps, unknowingly inhabit themselves.
