ABSTRACT
The renewed salience of religion in the politics of cases otherwise as distinct as Iran, Central America, southern Africa, Poland, and the United States has spurred an urgent search for information and understanding. The case of millenarian movements suggests that, when students of religion and politics abandon the confines of formal institutions and go beyond the relatively clear lines of systematic theology, doctrine, and law to the analysis of popular experience, they must be careful not to carry elite-focused categories with them. Research thus latches on to the apparent political result of religious action, with little sense of how or why religion may have stimulated or sustained action in the first place. Fields thus joins Ileto in making the rescue and reconstruction of popular religion a basic theoretical and methodological task. Ileto, Fields, and Comaroff together expand the search for political meaning into analysis of the ordinary language, routine, and structure of religion.
