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On Learning from the Margins: Jewish Nonreligious Grammars within a Secular-Protestant Landscape
Author(s): Sheldon, Ruth
Date: 2019
Topics: Jewish Neighbourhoods, Religion, Religious Observance and Practice, Secularity, Main Topic: Other, Haredi / Strictly Orthodox Jews, Ethnography
Abstract: This contribution to the special issue draws on ethnographic fieldwork exploring pluralities of Jewish life across adjacent urban neighbourhoods in London in order to engage with the conceptual questions and empirical omissions that are currently of concern to scholars of nonreligion. Learning from some illustrative moments in my fieldwork in which articulations of non-belief in God serendipitously arose, I first consider how marginal Jewish perspectives trouble the conceptual framing of ‘religion/nonreligion’ within (post)Protestant cultures. I then show how an ethnographic approach focused on the specific contexts in which piety or belief in God is othered can deepen understanding of the heterogeneous formations of ‘nonreligion’, even within relatively well-researched settings such as contemporary London.