Abstrakt
This volume partly stems from a conference held by the SIEF Working Group in the Ethnology of Religion in Siena, 20-22 September 2018, partly from direct request to contribute to it sent afterwards. The two nouns that title both the conference and this volume, "religion" and "politics", have a stratified history and a problematic genealogy, which has resulted, in the last few decades, in oceans of ink being spilled to pen debates and opinions about them and their relation, an ocean in which this introduction is but a drop.
After all, the definitional and ontological recalcitrance of the notion of "religion" is as proverbial as manifest is the polysemy of the word "politics". Before venturing into a veritable introduction on the theme of the volume, it seems therefore appropriate to look briefly at what we mean when we say "religion" or "politics".
In so doing, we not only aim to clarify what we mean by the main concepts used in this introduction, but also intend to explain the theoretical foundations of the reflection about religion and politics in this volume, and in what sense our contribution to this classical topic of enquiry reflects - or departs from - previous formulations.