Religion, at the Intersection

In the essays collected in this volume, Gustavo Benavides explores the phenomenon of religion. He regards it neither as a reified entity, nor as an imagined, invented or even manufactured western construct whose ideological foundations must be denounced, but rather as a process of uncertain boundaries, which arises at the intersection of further social, cognitive and biological processes. The research involves the examination from several disciplinary perspectives of phenomena such as magic, syncretism, mysticism and religion in general in a variety of historical contexts. Since it is one of the theses of the volume that the processes that underlie the generation of religion underlie also the generation of theories of religion, several of the essays are devoted to the examination of episodes in the history of the study of religion in the 20th and 21st centuries.