A Possamai
Biographic Data
| ID | 6420 |
|---|---|
| NAME | A Possamai |
| GIVEN NAMES | A |
| FAMILY NAME | Possamai |
| SIGNATURE | POSSAMAI A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Western Sydney University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2825-936X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 81 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 136 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 80 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Religious Switching in Australia
Recent Australian census data (2006–2021) indicate that identification with religion continues to decline across Australia’s population. This is particularly seen among Christian adherents. To understand this phenomenon, religious switching needs to be considered in addition to migration, birth and mortality. This article uses the recently released Australian Census Longitudinal Dataset (ACLD) to provide important insights into religious switchin…
Complex Religion, Conspiracy Theories, Misinformation, and Covid-19 in NSW, Australia
This article explores contemporary empirical evidence of the extent of the uptake of misinformation and conspiracy theories about COVID-19 with regards to religion in the New South Wales population in Australia. The data were collected through an online survey conducted in 2022 (N=5,276). Religious respondents tend to follow conspiracy theories, distrusting the recommendations of scientists and for some, resourcing information from religious lead…
Involving the Salafi-Jihadist in Indonesia's democratic system
This research examines the securitisation of Muslims within the context of Indonesia's democratic system, focusing on the perceptions and experiences of Salafi groups. Applying a critical ethnographic methodology, the study amplifies the voices of a particular group of Muslim in Indonesia, particularly those who have distanced themselves from extremist actions, to understand how anti-terror policies impact their lives and principles. The research…
Being Muslim in an era of hyper-security
Post-secularism as the secularism of the exit of secularism
Data from western countries tells the narrative that religion is in decline in terms of both attendance and identification. Yet, drop of religious attendance and identification does not prove the end of religion. Noting the ever-return of the sacred, this article argues there is a growth of a newly perceived religious minority in the public sphere promoting their understanding of religious freedom. Their presence puts in question the hegemony of …
Muslim identities in an era of hypersecurity
More than two decades on, the shadow of 9/11 and the Bali bombings continues to linger over Australia and its small Muslim population. We posit this is due to an existential fear of both Islam and Muslims in the Australian imaginary, an imaginary that continues to be cast as Judeo-Christian. This has led to the hyper-securitisation of an entire religious community which has had several effects on the ways Muslims navigate a sense of belonging in …
Inger Furseth and Pål Repstad, Modern Sociologists on Society and Religion
Inger Furseth and Pål Repstad, Modern Sociologists on Society and Religion. London and New York: Routledge, 2022, pp. 262, ISBN: 9781-032-02007-5 (pbk). £28.79
Got sick of surveys or lack of social capital? An investigation on the effects of the Covid-19 lockdown on institutional surveying
Overseas Born ‘Religious Nones’ in Australia
Australia has witnessed a significant rise in people claiming ‘No-Religion’ in recent censuses with the percentage having more than doubled in the last two decades. Academic literature addressing Australian non-religion focuses on explaining this rise and/or investigating the inherent diversity of the substantial religious ‘none’ category. Existing research also tends to refer to two broad categories of non-religious people in Australia: those wh…
Digital exorcism and morality
Recent works have highlighted that exorcism is not an atavistic ritual but that it has a renewed place in our contemporary Western world. As religious institutions have become more secularized and rationalized, a vacuum has been left for religious professionals to deal with demons. While exorcists claim that there is a higher demand for exorcism, they grow as a profession and warn people of the devil's presence in games, popular culture and famil…
The Sociology of Shari’a
The diffused religious choice when applying for a university degree in Sydney
While the preference for university by school leavers has been researched extensively, this article seeks to explore if religious influence might also come to play when selecting a university, with particular reference to Australia, a country whose higher education environment is largely made up of public, secular universities. The data used is the first preference that students in High Schools in NSW make for an urban and public university in Sy…
Religion, the i-zation of society and Covid-19
With the advancement of new technologies, instrumental rationality, as described by Weber and Ritzer, has been carried further towards the self in a process described as the i-zation of society. This is in elective affinity with the expansion of digital capitalism which is aligned with recent global and transnational developments. Religion has not been left untouched and has adapted itself, if not embraced, these changes brought by neoliberalism.…
Nothing to Declare… Apart from Holy Water
This article uses the case study of Fiji’s border restrictions on Holy Water to think about how even the supernational (like spiritual things) remains subject to international border regimes. In this case, we consider how Fiji’s borders have actually been sacralized in order to securitize Holy Water—inhibiting its importation into the country. Holy Water as a spiritual thing plays an important role in spiritual practices across the globe, and cer…
Ramadan
While Ramadan in Western societies has been studied extensively in relation to health issues, no research to date has explored its representation through social scientific lenses. This article uses the Greater Western Sydney region in New South Wales, Australia, as a case study. This agglomeration of suburbs from the outer western suburbs of Sydney to the Blue Mountains has the highest proportion of Muslims in the country. To understand the repre…
An Analysis of Australian Research Council’s Grants in Religion
In this article, we used the meta-metrics approach to analyse research grants in the Religion and Religious Studies field of research (FoR) in Australia, with respect to their metric properties, significance, similarity, and usage characterisation. Whilst comparing and contrasting various results from the dataset of the Australian Research Council (ARC) on the success of its grant capture, we found the following: an imbalance in the FoR between t…
La mondialisation, l’i-zation de la société et le Covid-19
S’il n’existe qu’une planète terre, le concept de mondialisation en revanche n’est pas monolithique et évolue en fonction de changements sociaux, culturels, et économiques. La mondialisation du XXI e siècle diffère du tout au tout de celle du XX e . Bien que l’interdépendance globale économique et numérique soit plus forte que dans le passé, de nouvelles fractures politiques et populistes s’opèrent au niveau national. Cet article mobilise le réce…
Freedom of Religion in post-secular Australia
Habermas coined the term post-secularism to reflect a time period in which religions are given a more central part in social and political life. Even if there is more openness to religion, many religious groups would claim that Western societies are nevertheless still dominated by secularism and want to ensure that freedom of religion and belief remain protected and promoted. This article explores the recent Australian Religious Freedom Review as…
Ai
Standardization
Cultural, Religious, and Spiritual Capital
Doomsday Cults
Late Modernity and Postmodernity
Wahhabism
Episcopal Church
Alternative Spiritualities and the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
Some practices in Alternative Spiritualities have been criticised by social commentators for their 'appropriation' of indigenous cultures. This article will argue that 'appropriation' is not limited to these cultures but is part of a larger phenomenon, that of cultural consumption of selective parts of history. Furthermore, this cultural consumption is not restricted to history alone, but is extended to contemporary popular culture, such as peopl…
Popular and lived religions
This article discusses the sociological understanding of popular religion by first exploring the theories of Gramsci. It then critiques this approach by arguing that the social construction of popular religion in contrast to institutionalized religion is not as clear cut in our late modern, multi-faith and global world as it was in the early modern period. Indeed, through consumer culture, some institutionalized religions are now reaching for the…
Post-secularism in multiple modernities
Post-secularism' is a term that has emerged in various disciplines, including sociology, to reflect religion's move back into the public sphere and the need to take into account the voice of religious actors in any contemporary analysis of society. This article argues that post-secularism is, in fact, a specific type of secularism that deals with the neoliberal management of religion in the public sphere. To unpack this argument, the article will…
Cultural Consumption of History and Popular Culture in Alternative Spiritualities
Some practices in alternative spiritualities - for example, New Age and neopaganism - have been criticized by social commentators and some indigenous people for their appropriation of indigenous cultures, such as those of Australian Aborigines and North American Indians. This article argues that appropriation is not limited to indigenous cultures but is part of a larger phenomenon, that of cultural consumption of selected parts of history. This c…
Defining the conversation about Shari'a
Debates about Shari'a law and legal pluralism have come to the fore of political discourse in many western multicultural societies including Australia. The mass media, in particular newspapers, have been active in reporting on Shari'a related news items and in doing so, have made a significant contribution to shaping political debate across western nations from governmental to grassroots levels. Understanding how newspapers report on Shari'a will…
Religious Belief across ‘Post-secular’ Sydney
Cities were once thought to be crucibles of secularisation, where the retreat from religion and its expression would be most pronounced. This decline in faith was linked to the heightened levels of heterogeneity and cosmopolitanism within cities. However, there is recent evidence of both the continuation and of the recession of the secularisation process in contemporary Western societies, with the mix and pace of these trends being quite unique t…
New religious movements and the fear of crime
Anti-cult movements have had a significant influence on the creation of the 2001 Anti-Cult Law in France. For the first time, a state apparatus has been put into place against new forms of religion with the possible consequences of limiting religious freedom and tolerance in France. Even though the socio-political situation is different in Australia, the French case might serve as a platform for the anti-cult network to pursue a strict governance…
Authority and liquid religion in cyber-space
This article considers three case studies of forms of authority within new cyber-territories. We first deal with the example of a traditional religion, Islam, by exploring new social issues that this religious system encounters in cyber-space. Second, we turn to a social movement that is by definition less traditional and less established, namely neo-paganism; and finally, we examine the new phenomenon of hyper-real religion (Possamai 2005b, 2012…
A profile of New Agers
In the literature, New Agers are profiled as urban, educated, middle-class and middle-aged, the majority being women-a portrait mainly based on quantitative analyses. This article aims at providing a richer sociological description through a qualitative analysis of thirty-five interviews conducted in 1996-97 in Melbourne. This qualitative approach to New Agers will describe them as religious individualists, as technical mystics, and as people who…
Religious and spirituality diversity at a multi-campus suburban university
This article explores people's use of and need for religious and/or spiritual facilities, based on the findings from a survey sent to students and staff of a multi-campus suburban university. The results indicate that, in this context, people use facilities more for practising their faith/spirituality by themselves rather than to meet with others of similar beliefs. It also shows that a multi-faith pragmatic approach to religious diversity seems …
Freedom of Religion in post-secular Australia
Habermas coined the term post-secularism to reflect a time period in which religions are given a more central part in social and political life. Even if there is more openness to religion, many religious groups would claim that Western societies are nevertheless still dominated by secularism and want to ensure that freedom of religion and belief remain protected and promoted. This article explores the recent Australian Religious Freedom Review as…
The over-policing of the devil
Discussing the social construction of the phenomenon of exorcism, this article illustrates how it is located in contemporary culture and specifically in the religious field. Following the study done by Michel de Certeau on the mass possession of the Ursulines' convent of Loudun (France) in the 17th century, the authors differentiate between the 'possessed' and the 'possessionists', that is between those who are possessed by the devil and those wh…
Legal Pluralism, Family Personal Laws, and the Rejection of Shari'a in Australia
In some Western countries with Muslim minorities, there has been debate in the last few years about the role of Shari'a in the context of domestic family law. In Australia there has been a negative response to the adoption of Shari'a, as this form of law has been seen as divisive, patriarchal, and inconsistent with the notion of the rule of law. Underlying these responses to Shari'a has been the implication that Islamic law was/is backward and pa…
Shari’a and Everyday Life in Sydney
This article investigates how Shari’a is experienced in the everyday life of 57 Muslims from Western Sydney. It focuses on their opinions about its application in Australia, and on how they negotiate their lives around the necessity or non-necessity of adhering to Shari’a principles. The findings show that their observance of Islam tends to be negotiated in their everyday life within the framework of the Australian law, to which they show strong …
Mastering the devil
This study takes the documented growth in the ministry of exorcism within the Catholic Church as a significant challenge to some accounts of secularization. After clarifying how, according to Catholic doctrine, the devil can operate in people's lives, this study offers a sociological interpretation of exorcism. This interpretation is illustrated and tested by a sociological analysis of data collected, over a period of 10 years, by a well-establis…
Muslim students’ cultural and religious experiences in city, suburban and regional university campuses in NSW, Australia
Although there has been much research about the growing ethnic and religious diversity on university campuses across the world, relatively little is known about the religious and cultural experiences of Muslim students on university campuses in Australia. We draw upon an analysis of a questionnaire that was completed by 323 Muslim students who were studying at universities in the state of New South Wales, Australia. While we argue that these plac…
Hyper-real religions
Census data from 2006 identified 133,800 Australians as being of 'inadequately described religion'. This aggregated category conceals the exponential growth of innovative late-modern religious faiths. For example, leaked 2001 Census data suggests that some 71,000 Australians identified Jediism, as appropriated from the Star Wars films, as their faith. For most respondents to the Census this was no doubt an ironic late-modern play with the Census …
Ramadan
While Ramadan in Western societies has been studied extensively in relation to health issues, no research to date has explored its representation through social scientific lenses. This article uses the Greater Western Sydney region in New South Wales, Australia, as a case study. This agglomeration of suburbs from the outer western suburbs of Sydney to the Blue Mountains has the highest proportion of Muslims in the country. To understand the repre…
Reassessing the bounded affinity theory of religion and the paranormal
Drawing on the bounded affinity theory – a theory emphasising the shared commonality of religious and paranormal experiences, data from a cross-section of Australian Facebook users were tested. Results reveal that religious Christian individuals who express a strong level of Christian religious practice display less paranormal belief and engage in less paranormal practice than Christian non-practitioners. Since the instrument used in a previous s…
Representations of Sharia in Three Global Cities
Drawing on methodologies used to analyse the negative portrayals of new religious movements in the press, this article analyses the way Sharia has been reported in key newspapers in Sydney, New York and Geneva from 2008 to 2013. It differentiates between perceptions of Islamic law as practised in these global cities, as well as in other countries, and examines the different levels of perception. The article also investigates portrayals and percep…
Muslim Students’ Religious and Cultural Experiences in the Micro-publics of University Campuses in NSW, Australia
Although there is much research about the growing ethnic and religious diversity on university campuses across the world, relatively little is known about the religious and cultural experiences of Muslim students on university campuses in Australia. We focus upon the micro-publics of university campuses to investigate these experiences. We draw upon an analysis of a survey that was completed by 324 Muslim students who were studying at universitie…
Chaplaincies in a “Post-Secular” Multicultural University
As universities in Australia are faced with a growth in diversity and intensity of religion and spirituality on campus, this article explores the work of chaplains and its reception by students on a multi-campus suburban university. It finds that the religious work of these professionals is not the primary emphasis in the university context; what is of greater significance to students and the university institution is the broader pastoral and wel…
The Diffusion of New Age Practices and Beliefs among Australian Church Attenders
The Baha'i faith and Caodaism
In Australia, new immigrant and ethnic communities constitute the largest segment of the phenomenon of increasing religious diversity and change. These groups celebrate and maintain a way of life and a religious culture from elsewhere, but they are also working in Australian society: not just resisting pressures for assimilation, but helping members to translate the norms and values of their land of origin into the new Australian context. In this…
A profile of New Agers
In the literature, New Agers are profiled as urban, educated, middle-class and middle-aged, the majority being women-a portrait mainly based on quantitative analyses. This article aims at providing a richer sociological description through a qualitative analysis of thirty-five interviews conducted in 1996-97 in Melbourne. This qualitative approach to New Agers will describe them as religious individualists, as technical mystics, and as people who…
Cultural Consumption of History and Popular Culture in Alternative Spiritualities
Some practices in alternative spiritualities - for example, New Age and neopaganism - have been criticized by social commentators and some indigenous people for their appropriation of indigenous cultures, such as those of Australian Aborigines and North American Indians. This article argues that appropriation is not limited to indigenous cultures but is part of a larger phenomenon, that of cultural consumption of selected parts of history. This c…
Alternative Spiritualities and the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
Some practices in Alternative Spiritualities have been criticised by social commentators for their 'appropriation' of indigenous cultures. This article will argue that 'appropriation' is not limited to these cultures but is part of a larger phenomenon, that of cultural consumption of selective parts of history. Furthermore, this cultural consumption is not restricted to history alone, but is extended to contemporary popular culture, such as peopl…
New religious movements and the fear of crime
Anti-cult movements have had a significant influence on the creation of the 2001 Anti-Cult Law in France. For the first time, a state apparatus has been put into place against new forms of religion with the possible consequences of limiting religious freedom and tolerance in France. Even though the socio-political situation is different in Australia, the French case might serve as a platform for the anti-cult network to pursue a strict governance…
Karel Dobbelaere, Secularization
Karel Dobbelaere, Secularization: An Analysis at Three Levels. P.I.E.–Peter Lang, Brussels, 2002, pp. 214, ISBN 9052019851
Ways and Means for the Third Millennium
Exploring the results of the 2002 survey that was distributed among members of the Association and the information derived from the members’ directory, this Address argues that although the Association performs well overall, because of a few factors, including some structural changes within Australian society, the Association has lost members over the years. Moving to a discussion about the national context of our Association, this Address propos…
‘Secularisation’ and ‘Religion’ as Zombie Categories?
David Martin, On Secularization: Towards a Revised General Theory. Ashgate, Aldershot, UK, 2005, 206pp. Régis Debray, Les communions humaines. Pour en finir avec la ‘religion’ [Human communion. For an ending to ‘Religion’]. Fayard, Paris, 2005, 159pp. Kim Knott, The Location of Religion: A Spatial Analysis. Equinox, London, 2005, 264pp.
Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead, with Benjamin Seel, Bronislaw Szerszynski and Karin Tusting, The Spiritual Revolution
Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead, with Benjamin Seel, Bronislaw Szerszynski and Karin Tusting, The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion is Giving Way to Spirituality, Blackwell, Oxford, 2005, pp. 204, ISBN 1-4051-1958-6 (hbk); ISBN 1-4051-1959-4 (pbk)
Gary Bouma, Australian Soul
Gary Bouma, Australian Soul: Religion and Spirituality in the 21st Century. Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2006, pp. 236, ISBN 139780521673891/100521673895
Intellectuals of the other in religion
The analysis of the role of intellectuals in social life has been widely studied and theorized. However, little application has been made on the involvement of the intellectual in the study of religions. This paper analyses the different types of intellectuals, e.g. Bauman’s legislators and interpreters, and the role they take in researching and/or speaking for and/or against the other in religion.
The Diffusion of New Age Practices and Beliefs among Australian Church Attenders
Analysing the results of a 2001 survey of a random sample of churchgoers in Australia, this article discovers that if all churchgoers are analysed as one single category, Australian churchgoers do not have much affinity with the New Age, a result which fits with the current literature. However, when looking more closely at the sample, it is discovered that Catholics do have the highest affinity with the New Age among all Christian groups, and eva…
The Diffusion of New Age Practices and Beliefs among Australian Church Attenders
The Baha'i faith and Caodaism
In Australia, new immigrant and ethnic communities constitute the largest segment of the phenomenon of increasing religious diversity and change. These groups celebrate and maintain a way of life and a religious culture from elsewhere, but they are also working in Australian society: not just resisting pressures for assimilation, but helping members to translate the norms and values of their land of origin into the new Australian context. In this…
Peter Clarke, New Religions in Global Perspective.
Peter Clarke, New Religions in Global Perspective. Routledge, London and New York, 2006, pp. xx + 385, ISBN10: 0-415-25747-6 (hbk), ISBN10: 0-415-25748-4 (pbk).
Religious and spirituality diversity at a multi-campus suburban university
This article explores people's use of and need for religious and/or spiritual facilities, based on the findings from a survey sent to students and staff of a multi-campus suburban university. The results indicate that, in this context, people use facilities more for practising their faith/spirituality by themselves rather than to meet with others of similar beliefs. It also shows that a multi-faith pragmatic approach to religious diversity seems …
Religious Belief across ‘Post-secular’ Sydney
Cities were once thought to be crucibles of secularisation, where the retreat from religion and its expression would be most pronounced. This decline in faith was linked to the heightened levels of heterogeneity and cosmopolitanism within cities. However, there is recent evidence of both the continuation and of the recession of the secularisation process in contemporary Western societies, with the mix and pace of these trends being quite unique t…
Legal Pluralism, Family Personal Laws, and the Rejection of Shari'a in Australia
In some Western countries with Muslim minorities, there has been debate in the last few years about the role of Shari'a in the context of domestic family law. In Australia there has been a negative response to the adoption of Shari'a, as this form of law has been seen as divisive, patriarchal, and inconsistent with the notion of the rule of law. Underlying these responses to Shari'a has been the implication that Islamic law was/is backward and pa…
Possession, Power and the New Age
Hyper-real religions
Census data from 2006 identified 133,800 Australians as being of 'inadequately described religion'. This aggregated category conceals the exponential growth of innovative late-modern religious faiths. For example, leaked 2001 Census data suggests that some 71,000 Australians identified Jediism, as appropriated from the Star Wars films, as their faith. For most respondents to the Census this was no doubt an ironic late-modern play with the Census …
Authority and liquid religion in cyber-space
This article considers three case studies of forms of authority within new cyber-territories. We first deal with the example of a traditional religion, Islam, by exploring new social issues that this religious system encounters in cyber-space. Second, we turn to a social movement that is by definition less traditional and less established, namely neo-paganism; and finally, we examine the new phenomenon of hyper-real religion (Possamai 2005b, 2012…
The Nimatullahiya and Naqshbandiya Sufi Orders on the Internet
This article is an exploration of the level of integration of Nimatullahi and Naqshbandi Sufi orders in the consumer culture of the West. One reason for comparing and contrasting these two orders is that they have originated in similar socio-political and religio-cultural climates within fourteenth century Iran, and have been affected by similar changes in their historical extension, persecution and migration. Notwithstanding, their relations to …
Australian Aboriginal Muslims in Prison
Australian Aboriginal Muslims in prison are a minority population that has provoked public and political concerns due to its conversion to Islam. In the past decade, Muslims across the globe have become all but synonymous with terror in the global debate, and have frequently suffered forms of social exclusion. Aboriginal Muslim prisoners, having survived on the margins of Australian society, now find themselves branded through the impact of globa…
Defining the conversation about Shari'a
Debates about Shari'a law and legal pluralism have come to the fore of political discourse in many western multicultural societies including Australia. The mass media, in particular newspapers, have been active in reporting on Shari'a related news items and in doing so, have made a significant contribution to shaping political debate across western nations from governmental to grassroots levels. Understanding how newspapers report on Shari'a will…
Cultural Framing of Risk and Religion within Science Fiction Narratives
This article explores some case studies of science fiction narratives concerning human-made worldwide catastrophes (i.e. The Day the Earth Stood Still, I Am Legend, Dawn of the Dead) that have been made and re-made since World War II. It analyses how the notion of risk has changed over this period of time, the degree of human responsibility for these post-World War II catastrophes and how religion, which has not been their root cause, is now bein…
Religion, “Non-Religion” and Indigenous Peoples on the 2011 Australian National Census
The 2011 Australian National Census revealed trends in the religious identities and affiliations of Australians that demonstrated wide cultural and religious diversity amongst the population, including a dramatic growth in the percentage of respondents who ticked the “no religion” box. This might suggest an increasingly secularised population, although this conclusion is not as straightforward as it may seem, particularly in light of the growth o…
Sociology (64 works) · Political science (43 works) · Philosophy (38 works) · Law (36 works) · Religion and Society Interactions (33 works) · Social science (23 works) · Religion, Society, and Development (22 works) · Politics (21 works) · Epistemology (20 works) · Religious studies (20 works)