Advancing the Grounded Study of Religion and Society in Latin America: Concluding Comments

In rediscovering the interpenetration of popular culture and politics in Latin America, and thus the ways these realms mutually constitute one another, scholars have also witnessed the analytic irruption of one particular cultural field: religion. Close attention to grassroots political culture allows us to probe how people’s spiritual subjectivity and political subjectivity overlap and cross-fertilize one another. In the process, religion shapes political outcomes in ways often unintended. Two further analytic insights are discussed: First, analysis of lived religion must partially decenter religious institutions from the focus of analysis but also pay attention to how institutions shape spiritual and political subjectivities. Second, our theoretical frameworks—while rightly rejecting dominant Western forms of anti-body dualism—must preserve analytic place for a realm of human experience termed here “embodied dualism” or “experiential dualism.”