ABSTRACT
This book argues that, since more or less the late nineteenth century, “the West and the Rest” have tended to live in the same world and at the same time in history. Moreover, it argues that we can divide our shared history into two distinguishable constellations, periods, or moments, which I call “regimes”: the Nation-State and the Global-Market regime. The introduction sketches the theoretical framework of this book, insisting on the impact of the consumer and neoliberal revolutions. It shows how the characteristics of religion over the last century correspond to these regimes: nationalised and statised in the former, and marketised and globalised in the latter. The introduction also grounds this framework in two epistemological propositions. The first proposition is to consider religion as a three-level phenomenon (macro, meso, and micro). The second proposition is to apprehend religion not as a differentiated social sphere, as is usually done, but as a fundamental dimension of human societies understood as wholes, according to the social scientific principles laid down by Marcel Mauss.
