ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the major achievement of this research with regard to the methodological exploration: first, looking at Eastern Christians in their own terms and integrating Orthodox theology as field data to be analyzed with social scientific concepts; second, considering the interplay between discourses, practices and the theological ideal-types that inform the actors’ worldview, definition of religion and, correlatively, of secularization; third, applying the triple focus on discourses/practices/theological ideal-types to both ecclesiastical institutions and individual actors, whose interplay is rather strong in Eastern Christianity (as compared with Western Christianity) and, therefore, it needs to be addressed more systematically.
A shared notion of discourses, practices and theological ideal-types being that of the gift, I translated this theologically embedded notion into social scientific language with the help of the Mauss-inspired gift paradigm. The theoretical achievement of the book consists in the application of Tarot’s definition of religion as a triaxial system of the gift (vertical, horizontal and longitudinal), which helped overcome several dilemmas and dichotomies entrenched in social scientific analysis and allowed for grasping the specificities of Orthodoxy, without, however, falling into the pitfalls of essentializing, of orientalizing or exoticizing this religious tradition.
