Religion and Economies

Abstract This chapter explores how anthropologists have debated and developed different tools to analyze the cultural articulation or interrelationship of religion and economies. It traces four cultural articulations around which considerable foundational work, or provocative discussions, have arisen: debt, credit, and possessions; neoliberalism and economic restructuring; value/values; and life forms, techno-scientific commodities, and bioprospecting. Among other connections, these four articulations exhibit a common concern with the moral critique of, and moral dimensions central to, market intensification, which has captured substantial anthropological attention. Examining the distinctive, culturally particular “articulations” of religious and economic phenomena, with careful focus on the heterogeneous elements of religion, has been key to a critical cultural analysis of the entanglement of religious practice with material and political forces.