WiseWomen SIGNED

Project "WiseWomen" data sheet

The following table provides information about the project.

 Partnership

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 Project objective

The cultural, political and economic changes have reshaped Central European societies in the early 1990s and they also brought religious pluralism. New religions and New Age phenomena from the West have blended with traditional folk belief and mainstream religions which resulted in a heterogeneous religious culture. Previous scholarship has already pointed at the importance of female actors in this eclectic religious / spiritual field, but this has not been systematically explored so far. The WiseWomen project aims to investigate the roles of women in creating meanings and innovations through religious beliefs and practices in Central European communities. The main objectives of the research are 1. to understand the creation and the expressions of individual belief systems; 2. to explore the ways how religious experience is born and communicated; 3. and to investigate interactions through which religious expressions are negotiated. To highlight these processes from women’s perspective the project focuses on wise women, female experts of magic, medicine and religion as specific figures in contemporary urban and rural societies. During the inquiry multi-site ethnographic fieldwork will be carried out in multi-ethnic and multi-confessional communities in South Western Hungary, Northern Croatia, and Slovenia. To obtain knowledge on the subjective and inter-subjective processes creating religious thought and utterances, ethnographic fieldwork combined with historical research provides the most appropriate methodology. Furthermore vernacular religion, a concept elaborated by Primiano, will serve both as a category of analysis and a practical model, because its bottom-up perspective highlights the individual actors. By integrating folklore studies, anthropology, ethnology of religion, religious history and sociology into an interdisciplinary approach, it enables the fellow to bring the creation and re-creation of religion by and among individuals into the spotlight.