Celebrations: Religious Events beyond the Dichotomy of Individualization and Communitization

Abstract

This contribution contrasts the dichotomization of individualization and communitization of religion, which is still prominent in the social sciences, with a religious phenomenon that shows that religion must be understood beyond the opposition of these spheres. Against the background of a corresponding concept of religion, the popular religion (Knoblauch 2009), which continues Thomas Luckmann’s theory of religion (1967), the concept of Celebrations will be presented. This empirically generated concept relies on self-recorded video data of Christian events in Europe. Celebrations are to be understood as religious events that are based on a specific affective order, which is able to merge the most diverse cultural communicative forms on the level of individual religiosity and community (cf. Haken 2020a, 2020b). Referring to web-based data on the Hindu Kumbh Mela in India, the transferability of the concept of Celebrations is exploratively applied to another religious event.