Vernacular Religion and Contemporary Spiritualities. Tribute to Leonard Norman Primiano (1957-2021)

Abstract

It is now more than a quarter century since Leonard Primiano’s seminal article “Vernacular Religion and the Search for Method in Religious Folklife” launched the concept of Vernacular Religion to denote the study of “religion as it is lived: as human beings encounter, understand, interpret, and practice it” (Primiano 1995: 44). Vernacular Religion demands that scholars take seriously the minutiae of how people live their religion in particular contexts, their interaction with material culture, their often flexible attitude to and use of tradition, their frequently complex relationship and negotiations with institutional forms of religiosity, and above all their agency. This issue of Traditiones brings insights into how people deal with enormous issues such as our place in the universe, our relationship with-other-than human beings, death, apocalypse and afterlives using an ‘toolkit’ of institutional and vernacular knowledge.