Religion and lived space: A geographical reading of La Religion de près

Abstract

Spatial approaches to religion have grown significantly in recent years and offer original perspectives for understanding new religious realities in the context of secularized countries. This article is an opportunity to show the richness of this “spatial turn” through an analysis of the theoretical tools developed by the French anthropologist Albert Piette in his work La religion de près: l’activité religieuse en train de se faire. Although this work, which has a connection to actor-network theory, does not deal directly with space, it exhibits a geographical sensibility that we will reveal. We show that these tools can be used to demonstrate a complex geography of contemporary religion—in particular the existence of a socio-spatial dialectic—and illustrate their fruitfulness with the case of an ethnographic study of two Quebec evangelical churches.