Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Part I:  Rethinking Religious Normativity

1. Introduction: The Mobile Religious Practitioner
1.1. The Mobile Practitioner
1.2. The Butinage Metaphor
1.3. The Structure of this Book

2. Religious Mobility: Current Debates
2.1. The Conceptual Limitations of Religious Conversion
2.2. Religious Combinations and Syncretism
2.3. ‘Lived Religion’ and Everyday Religion
2.4. Conclusion

Part II:  Case Studies

Introduction to Part II: Methodology

3. Neighborliness as a Driver for Mobility in Brazil
3.1. The Circularity of Practice
3.2. Territories and Bridges
3.3. Butinage and Neighborliness
3.4. Conclusion

4. The Kenyan Case: Dynamism and Precariousness
4.1. The Kenyan Religious Landscape
4.2. Hierarchy in Practice: Members Versus Visitors
4.3. Return Mobility
4.4. A Precarious Religious Landscape: Scandals, Schisms, and Sects
4.5. Conclusion

5. Mobility Intertwined: Migration, Kinship, and Education in Ghana
5.1. Religious Pluralism in Ghana
5.2. Religious Trajectories: Intertwined Kinship, Migration, and Educational Strategies
5.3. Additional Practices: Logics and Economies of Religious Mobility
5.4. Conclusion

6. Religion and Mobility in Switzerland: A Most Private Affair
6.1. Uneasiness with Religion: ‘Institutionalists’ Versus ‘Seculars’
6.2. Between Embrace and Suspicion: ‘Distanced’ Practitioners
6.3. Eastern Religions, Animism, and New Age: ‘Alternatives’
6.4. Butinage in Action
6.5. Between Religious Heritage and Religion as a Taboo
6.6. Conclusion

Part III:  Between a Metaphor and a Model
7. Between Bees and Flowers
7.1. A Typology of Butineurs
7.2. Territories
7.3. From ‘Motivation’ to ‘Logic’
7.4. Degrees of Practice and Their Complementarity
7.5. Conclusion

8. From Religious Mobility to Dynamic Religious Identities
8.1. Familiarity and Familiarization
8.2. Religious Repertoires
8.3. Religious Identity in Context and Motion
8.4. Conclusion 

9. Conclusion: The Peripatetic Practitioner

Annex: Interview Guide
Bibliography

About the Author

Yonatan N. Gez is a Humboldt Fellow at the Arnold Bergstraesser Institute and a research associate at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva.

Yvan Droz is a senior lecturer in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva.

Jeanne Rey is a professor at the University of Teacher Education in Fribourg and a research associate at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva.

Edio Soares is a Research Associate at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva.

Reviews

"In a world of dangerously fundamentalist extremes, this is a wonderfully sane exploration of the dynamism of the everyday enquiry, within interdenominational arenas of familiar religious practice, that areis for perhaps most people a more trustworthy part of their religious repertoire than doctrinal belief. Through The authors' fieldwork and shows, through lively personal narratives Butinage reveals , that even the bashful Swiss share this searching test of religious possibility with more boisterous Brazilians, mobile Ghanaians, and entrepreneurial Kenyans."--John Lonsdale, University of Cambridge
"In this ambitious book there is a whole new framework within which scholars and students can work. Here the study of religion is freed from its focus on institutions and theologies, and we as readers are enabled to follow people as they move through the religious world. This book allows us to see religion as people ordinarily experience it: as a set of options, not a destination." --Derek R. Peterson, University of Michigan
"In a world of dangerously fundamentalist extremes, this is a wonderfully sane exploration of the dynamism of the everyday enquiry within interdenominational arenas of familiar religious practice that are for perhaps most people a more trustworthy part of their religious repertoire than doctrinal belief. Through fieldwork and lively personal narratives Butinage reveals that even the bashful Swiss share this searching test of religious possibility with more boisterous Brazilians, mobile Ghanaians, and entrepreneurial Kenyans."--Rachel Riedel-Prabhakar, Towson University