Ricerc@Sapienza

"God(s) and Wealth" draws inspiration from, and contributes to, a variety of academic fields and literatures. The research will be carried out in five different countries and in two continents: Ghana, Mali and Zambia (Africa); Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and South Korea (Asia). The adoption of this vast comparative perspective will permit us to tease out points of convergence and difference in religious experiences on a scale rarely attempted in the past.
The overarching questions that ¿God(s) and Wealth¿ proposes to address are:
In which ways do actors from different historical, geographical and confessional contexts conceptualize positive visions of individual enrichment in religious terms?
How do such understandings relate to, or challenge, religious discourses and practices valorizing redistribution (such as almsgiving, anti-witchcraft cults ascribing individual wealth to witchcraft, etc)?
To what extent has the involvement in the colonial and, more recently, in the neoliberal economy triggered comparable religious responses in such disparate contexts?
These changes in religious practices in Asia and Africa undoubtedly deserve in-depth analysis and observational work to better understand where this fast-paced part of the world is heading and the basis on which its future societies will be built.
The most innovative dimension of ¿God(s) and Wealth¿ lies in its effort to overcome traditional academic partitions.
By adopting an innovative comparative perspective that considers different religious and cultural contexts, the proposed research will allow us to explore the relationship between religion and wealth in an original fashion and from a variety of points of view. The aim of the comparisons is not to constrain the richness of individual case studies and trajectories within a totalizing interpretation of the phenomenon, but rather to tease out commonalities and the different ways in which this relationship has manifested itself through long and complex histories.