Kim Knibbe
Biographic Data
| ID | 597779 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kim Knibbe |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kim |
| FAMILY NAME | Knibbe |
| SIGNATURE | KNIBBE K |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Groningen |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1921-0871 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 122 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
The missing link between sex and kinship: Unintended pregnancy as a period of pressured social gestation
What processes are set in motion when someone discovers they are pregnant unintentionally, and what is the role of culture in these processes? This question is explored through narratives of women in the Philippines and Kenya on their first pregnancy carried to term. We show how an unintended pregnancy provides a window onto making kin and delineating the implied responsibilities towards the future child and its mother. As participants accounts d…
How To Deal with the Dutch’ The Local and the Global in the Habitus of the Saved Soul
Religion as Relation: Studying Religion in Context
Religion is studied from a multitude of approaches and methodologies: history, anthropology, philosophy, sociology, psychology and the academic study of religion. This volume differs from most other introductions and handbooks in that it draws on ongoing research to show “how” researchers approach their topics. Its aim is to provide orientation in this multidisciplinary context without attempting to homogenize the field. The introduction provides…
‘A merely private activity’
This contribution explores how women, and some men, reshape the ways they relate to both religious and secular authorities through their engagements of the spiritual domain and their development as spiritual practitioners. It will also discuss how the often maligned ‘consumerism’ is an integral part of this reshaping of the ways individuals relate to authority. This is based on several years of ethnographic fieldwork among people who identify as …
Secular Societies, Spiritual Selves: The Gendered Triangle of Religion, Secularity and Spirituality
Secular Societies, Spiritual Selves? is the first volume to address the gendered intersections of religion, spirituality and the secular through an ethnographic approach. The book examines how 'spirituality' has emerged as a relatively 'silent' category with which people often signal that they are looking for a way to navigate between the categories of the religious and the secular, and considers how this is related to gendered ways of being and …
Theorizing lived religion: Introduction
The introduction to this special issue describes the emergence of the lived religion approach in relation to other approaches within the study of religion and sociology of religion as a way of going beyond the emphasis on texts and institutions, on the one hand, and the focus on the fate of religion in modern times, on the other hand. It also introduces the aim of this special issue, namely ‘theorizing’ lived religion. To do this, the authors sum…
Is critique possible in the study of lived religion? Anthropological and feminist reflections
This article, based on the author’s fieldwork in a Catholic context, aims to theorise the dilemmas of taking seriously religious worlds at precisely those moments when they may be in tension with academic worldviews in terms of epistemology and ontology. The lived religion approach has emerged as a critical enterprise which serves as a corrective to more text-based or macro-sociological approaches, developing a form of radical non-reductionism an…
Religious Experience and Phenomenology
Religious experience and the experiential dimension of religious practice have come to constitute a fruitful area of enquiry for anthropology. This entry discusses the phenomenological school of philosophy as a source for the anthropology of religion. Concepts from this school that have been taken up within the anthropology of religion, such as bracketing, intentionality, embodiment, and lifeworld, are explained. The work of anthropologists who h…
Secularist understandings of Pentecostal healing practices in Amsterdam: Developing an intersectional and post-secularist sociology of religion
The past decades have seen an intensification of debate around migrants, gender and sexuality. For the Netherlands, several authors have pointed out how this has given rise to a form of sexual nationalism whereby the idea of being a modern, progressive country is strongly linked to a program of liberal sexual values and offset against a presumably ‘backward’ migrant who is ‘still’ religious and traditional. In this article, the author analyses ho…
Around Joan Wallach Scott's Sex and Secularism
Around Joan Wallach Scott's Sex and Secularism Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017, hardback, 240 pages
Certainty and uncertainty in contemporary spirituality and Catholicism: Finding proof versus destabilizing certainties in popular religion in the Netherlands
This article is based on several years of ethnographic research in the Netherlands on contemporary spirituality and Catholicism. The emphasis within the networks of contemporary spirituality discussed here is on finding ‘proof’ of ‘the other side’. This quest for certainty is compared to another religious context, dominated by a discourse of liberal Catholicism, where the emphasis is on learning to deal with uncertainty (previously discussed in t…
Gender and Power in Contemporary Spirituality: Ethnographic Approaches
peer reviewed
Faith in the Familiar: Religion, Spirituality and Place in the South of the Netherlands
Faith in the Familiar is an ethnography of religious change in the Netherlands, a country that has moved from strongly pillarized to strongly secularist in the space of fifty years. This book shows how people look back on this, but also how Catholic rituals continue to play a role in the reproduction of place. Furthermore, it shows how forms of spiritualism and new age have become part of a pluralistic local religious landscape, and are used to c…
Secrets, Gossip and Betrayal: Doing Fieldwork on the Role of Religion in Moral Orientation in a Dutch Catholic Province
This article discusses the process of doing fieldwork on the role of religion in moral orientation and then writing about it as a series of small betrayals. During the research it became clear that to gain insight into the ways in which moral worlds are constructed and the place of religious institutions and their representatives in these moral worlds, it was very important to understand how individual "shameful" secrets were produced. Furthermor…
Why Participation Matters to Understand Ritual Experience
Two cases in which researchers take part in religious ritual show how being a participant enhances the researcher’s understanding of what is happening. Through these cases the authors attempt to shed light on the methodological problems concerning the “intersubjectivity” of research on ritual. Ritual goes beyond the verbal and pulls bodily sensations, emotion and gestures into the domain of intersubjectivity established through fieldwork. Experie…
Encounters of body and soul in contemporary religious practices: Anthropological Reflections
I want to feel the Camino in my legsA: trajectories of walking on the Camino de Santiago Keith Egan Chapter 2. Holding the saint in one's arms. Miracles and exchange in Apiao, southern Chile Giovanna Bacchiddu Chapter 3. Embodying devotion, embodying passion. The Italian tradition of 'La Festa dei Gigli' in Nola Katia Ballacchino PART II: CORPOREALITY, BELIEF AND HUMAN MOBILITY Chapter 4. The Body and the World: Missionary Performances and the Ex…
Nigerian Missionaries in Europe: History Repeating Itself or a Meeting of Modernities
This article discusses the question how to construct a vantage point from which to study the phenomenon of Nigerian missionaries in Europe. When theoretical frameworks extrapolating from the history of religion in western Europe are used to understand a religious network that originated in Nigeria, Nigerian missionaries and missionaries from the Global South inevitably appear as a case of history repeating itself and even as 'premodern.' In contr…
Methodological Ludism and the Academic Study of Religion
The usual options scholars have when dealing with religious truth claims-methodological atheism, theism and agnosticism-are criticized for being restricted to the contrast between science and religion. They represent researchers' perspectives that are not helpful in studying believers' truth claims. Furthermore, they are associated with positivist or neo-positivist approaches to religion. Methodological ludism is presented as an alternative point…
Portrait: José Casanova
José Casanova’s Public Religions in the Modern World (1994) has transformed the study of religion quite considerably. As I recall, the book was received relatively slowly in its first years. Casanova’s thesis gained momentum with the escalating focus on religion after 9/11 and the ensuing publicity for Huntington’s (1996) thesis of an imminent clash of civilizations. While many only then turned to the study of religion, Casanova had already prepa…
Nigerian-initiated Pentecostal Churches as a Social Force in Europe: The Case of the Redeemed Christian Church of God
This article discusses the spread and impact of the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), a successful example of a Nigerian-initiated Pentecostal church in Britain, the Netherlands and Germany. The church’s capacity as a social force in Europe is assessed with reference to three dimensions: the social impact on the wider society through its missionary and civic activities, the social impact on members’ lives, and the extent to which the churc…
Book and Film Reviews
BENTLEY, Alex (ed.), The Edge of Reason? Science and Religion in Modern Society, 222 pp., foreword. London: Continuum, 2008. Paperback, £13.99. ISBN: 9781847062185. BERGER, Peter, Grace DAVIE, and Effi e FOKAS, Religious America, Secular Europe? A Theme and Variations, 176 pp., bibliography, index. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Paperback, £16.99. ISBN: 978075466011. LEVEY, Geoffrey Brahm and Tariq MODOOD (eds.), Secularism, Religion and Multicultural…
Movimentos Religiosos Transnacionais: De Redes a Territórios
Este artigo, baseado em trabalho de campo multi-situado, descreve igrejas pentecostais transnacionais originárias da Nigéria. A religião é frequentemente descrita como desterritorializada, devido aos processos de globalização. Neste artigo, a autora argumenta que territórios, localidades e lugares são em realidade muito importantes para o pentecostalismo nigeriano transnacional, e que igrejas pentecostais africanas, em geral, constituem territóri…
We did not come here as tenants, but as landlords: Nigerian Pentecostals and the Power of Maps
This article is an attempt to show how the spaces in which African Christians in Amsterdam can move are produced by the mapping of various actors and the geographies that are created based on these maps. It first situates and describes a Nigerian-initiated Pentecostal church within global cultural flows, in relation to Nigeria and in relation to the Netherlands. In the view of many African Pentecostals, Europe, and by extension the Netherlands an…
Global Christianity: Contested Claims
The Role of Spatial Practices and Locality in the Constituting of the Christian African Diaspora
Theorizing lived religion: Introduction
The introduction to this special issue describes the emergence of the lived religion approach in relation to other approaches within the study of religion and sociology of religion as a way of going beyond the emphasis on texts and institutions, on the one hand, and the focus on the fate of religion in modern times, on the other hand. It also introduces the aim of this special issue, namely ‘theorizing’ lived religion. To do this, the authors sum…
Assessing Phenomenology in Anthropology: Lessons from the Study of Religion and Experience
■ How did phenomenology inspire anthropology to re-evaluate its principal method: participant observation? This question is answered by exploring how phenomenology has contributed to the anthropological study of religion. The focus in this field is not only on the way people perceive but also how they experience the world. This allows for a view that does not treat experience of the world separately from cognition of the world. Religion can thus …
We did not come here as tenants, but as landlords: Nigerian Pentecostals and the Power of Maps
This article is an attempt to show how the spaces in which African Christians in Amsterdam can move are produced by the mapping of various actors and the geographies that are created based on these maps. It first situates and describes a Nigerian-initiated Pentecostal church within global cultural flows, in relation to Nigeria and in relation to the Netherlands. In the view of many African Pentecostals, Europe, and by extension the Netherlands an…
Methodological Ludism and the Academic Study of Religion
The usual options scholars have when dealing with religious truth claims-methodological atheism, theism and agnosticism-are criticized for being restricted to the contrast between science and religion. They represent researchers' perspectives that are not helpful in studying believers' truth claims. Furthermore, they are associated with positivist or neo-positivist approaches to religion. Methodological ludism is presented as an alternative point…
Nigerian Missionaries in Europe: History Repeating Itself or a Meeting of Modernities
This article discusses the question how to construct a vantage point from which to study the phenomenon of Nigerian missionaries in Europe. When theoretical frameworks extrapolating from the history of religion in western Europe are used to understand a religious network that originated in Nigeria, Nigerian missionaries and missionaries from the Global South inevitably appear as a case of history repeating itself and even as 'premodern.' In contr…
The Role of Spatial Practices and Locality in the Constituting of the Christian African Diaspora
Is critique possible in the study of lived religion? Anthropological and feminist reflections
This article, based on the author’s fieldwork in a Catholic context, aims to theorise the dilemmas of taking seriously religious worlds at precisely those moments when they may be in tension with academic worldviews in terms of epistemology and ontology. The lived religion approach has emerged as a critical enterprise which serves as a corrective to more text-based or macro-sociological approaches, developing a form of radical non-reductionism an…
Why Participation Matters to Understand Ritual Experience
Two cases in which researchers take part in religious ritual show how being a participant enhances the researcher’s understanding of what is happening. Through these cases the authors attempt to shed light on the methodological problems concerning the “intersubjectivity” of research on ritual. Ritual goes beyond the verbal and pulls bodily sensations, emotion and gestures into the domain of intersubjectivity established through fieldwork. Experie…
Portrait: José Casanova
José Casanova’s Public Religions in the Modern World (1994) has transformed the study of religion quite considerably. As I recall, the book was received relatively slowly in its first years. Casanova’s thesis gained momentum with the escalating focus on religion after 9/11 and the ensuing publicity for Huntington’s (1996) thesis of an imminent clash of civilizations. While many only then turned to the study of religion, Casanova had already prepa…
Movimentos Religiosos Transnacionais: De Redes a Territórios
Este artigo, baseado em trabalho de campo multi-situado, descreve igrejas pentecostais transnacionais originárias da Nigéria. A religião é frequentemente descrita como desterritorializada, devido aos processos de globalização. Neste artigo, a autora argumenta que territórios, localidades e lugares são em realidade muito importantes para o pentecostalismo nigeriano transnacional, e que igrejas pentecostais africanas, em geral, constituem territóri…
Around Joan Wallach Scott's Sex and Secularism
Around Joan Wallach Scott's Sex and Secularism Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017, hardback, 240 pages
The Role of Religious Certainty and Uncertainty in Moral Orientation in a Catholic Province in the Netherlands
In the post-secularization debates about the role of religion in contemporary European societies, social scientists and philosophers often build on (speculative) sociological theories as to whether the conditions of life in (high) modernity produce existential insecurities that give rise to a need for a particular kind of religiosity. This religiosity is seen as rooted in the only things that still seem to provide some basis for certainty: experi…
Assessing Phenomenology in Anthropology: Lessons from the Study of Religion and Experience
■ How did phenomenology inspire anthropology to re-evaluate its principal method: participant observation? This question is answered by exploring how phenomenology has contributed to the anthropological study of religion. The focus in this field is not only on the way people perceive but also how they experience the world. This allows for a view that does not treat experience of the world separately from cognition of the world. Religion can thus …
We did not come here as tenants, but as landlords: Nigerian Pentecostals and the Power of Maps
This article is an attempt to show how the spaces in which African Christians in Amsterdam can move are produced by the mapping of various actors and the geographies that are created based on these maps. It first situates and describes a Nigerian-initiated Pentecostal church within global cultural flows, in relation to Nigeria and in relation to the Netherlands. In the view of many African Pentecostals, Europe, and by extension the Netherlands an…
Global Christianity: Contested Claims
The Role of Spatial Practices and Locality in the Constituting of the Christian African Diaspora
Nigerian-initiated Pentecostal Churches as a Social Force in Europe: The Case of the Redeemed Christian Church of God
This article discusses the spread and impact of the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), a successful example of a Nigerian-initiated Pentecostal church in Britain, the Netherlands and Germany. The church’s capacity as a social force in Europe is assessed with reference to three dimensions: the social impact on the wider society through its missionary and civic activities, the social impact on members’ lives, and the extent to which the churc…
Book and Film Reviews
BENTLEY, Alex (ed.), The Edge of Reason? Science and Religion in Modern Society, 222 pp., foreword. London: Continuum, 2008. Paperback, £13.99. ISBN: 9781847062185. BERGER, Peter, Grace DAVIE, and Effi e FOKAS, Religious America, Secular Europe? A Theme and Variations, 176 pp., bibliography, index. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Paperback, £16.99. ISBN: 978075466011. LEVEY, Geoffrey Brahm and Tariq MODOOD (eds.), Secularism, Religion and Multicultural…
Movimentos Religiosos Transnacionais: De Redes a Territórios
Este artigo, baseado em trabalho de campo multi-situado, descreve igrejas pentecostais transnacionais originárias da Nigéria. A religião é frequentemente descrita como desterritorializada, devido aos processos de globalização. Neste artigo, a autora argumenta que territórios, localidades e lugares são em realidade muito importantes para o pentecostalismo nigeriano transnacional, e que igrejas pentecostais africanas, em geral, constituem territóri…
Encounters of body and soul in contemporary religious practices: Anthropological Reflections
I want to feel the Camino in my legsA: trajectories of walking on the Camino de Santiago Keith Egan Chapter 2. Holding the saint in one's arms. Miracles and exchange in Apiao, southern Chile Giovanna Bacchiddu Chapter 3. Embodying devotion, embodying passion. The Italian tradition of 'La Festa dei Gigli' in Nola Katia Ballacchino PART II: CORPOREALITY, BELIEF AND HUMAN MOBILITY Chapter 4. The Body and the World: Missionary Performances and the Ex…
Nigerian Missionaries in Europe: History Repeating Itself or a Meeting of Modernities
This article discusses the question how to construct a vantage point from which to study the phenomenon of Nigerian missionaries in Europe. When theoretical frameworks extrapolating from the history of religion in western Europe are used to understand a religious network that originated in Nigeria, Nigerian missionaries and missionaries from the Global South inevitably appear as a case of history repeating itself and even as 'premodern.' In contr…
Methodological Ludism and the Academic Study of Religion
The usual options scholars have when dealing with religious truth claims-methodological atheism, theism and agnosticism-are criticized for being restricted to the contrast between science and religion. They represent researchers' perspectives that are not helpful in studying believers' truth claims. Furthermore, they are associated with positivist or neo-positivist approaches to religion. Methodological ludism is presented as an alternative point…
Portrait: José Casanova
José Casanova’s Public Religions in the Modern World (1994) has transformed the study of religion quite considerably. As I recall, the book was received relatively slowly in its first years. Casanova’s thesis gained momentum with the escalating focus on religion after 9/11 and the ensuing publicity for Huntington’s (1996) thesis of an imminent clash of civilizations. While many only then turned to the study of religion, Casanova had already prepa…
Secrets, Gossip and Betrayal: Doing Fieldwork on the Role of Religion in Moral Orientation in a Dutch Catholic Province
This article discusses the process of doing fieldwork on the role of religion in moral orientation and then writing about it as a series of small betrayals. During the research it became clear that to gain insight into the ways in which moral worlds are constructed and the place of religious institutions and their representatives in these moral worlds, it was very important to understand how individual "shameful" secrets were produced. Furthermor…
Why Participation Matters to Understand Ritual Experience
Two cases in which researchers take part in religious ritual show how being a participant enhances the researcher’s understanding of what is happening. Through these cases the authors attempt to shed light on the methodological problems concerning the “intersubjectivity” of research on ritual. Ritual goes beyond the verbal and pulls bodily sensations, emotion and gestures into the domain of intersubjectivity established through fieldwork. Experie…
Gender and Power in Contemporary Spirituality: Ethnographic Approaches
peer reviewed
Faith in the Familiar: Religion, Spirituality and Place in the South of the Netherlands
Faith in the Familiar is an ethnography of religious change in the Netherlands, a country that has moved from strongly pillarized to strongly secularist in the space of fifty years. This book shows how people look back on this, but also how Catholic rituals continue to play a role in the reproduction of place. Furthermore, it shows how forms of spiritualism and new age have become part of a pluralistic local religious landscape, and are used to c…
Certainty and uncertainty in contemporary spirituality and Catholicism: Finding proof versus destabilizing certainties in popular religion in the Netherlands
This article is based on several years of ethnographic research in the Netherlands on contemporary spirituality and Catholicism. The emphasis within the networks of contemporary spirituality discussed here is on finding ‘proof’ of ‘the other side’. This quest for certainty is compared to another religious context, dominated by a discourse of liberal Catholicism, where the emphasis is on learning to deal with uncertainty (previously discussed in t…
Religious Experience and Phenomenology
Religious experience and the experiential dimension of religious practice have come to constitute a fruitful area of enquiry for anthropology. This entry discusses the phenomenological school of philosophy as a source for the anthropology of religion. Concepts from this school that have been taken up within the anthropology of religion, such as bracketing, intentionality, embodiment, and lifeworld, are explained. The work of anthropologists who h…
Secularist understandings of Pentecostal healing practices in Amsterdam: Developing an intersectional and post-secularist sociology of religion
The past decades have seen an intensification of debate around migrants, gender and sexuality. For the Netherlands, several authors have pointed out how this has given rise to a form of sexual nationalism whereby the idea of being a modern, progressive country is strongly linked to a program of liberal sexual values and offset against a presumably ‘backward’ migrant who is ‘still’ religious and traditional. In this article, the author analyses ho…
Around Joan Wallach Scott's Sex and Secularism
Around Joan Wallach Scott's Sex and Secularism Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017, hardback, 240 pages
‘A merely private activity’
This contribution explores how women, and some men, reshape the ways they relate to both religious and secular authorities through their engagements of the spiritual domain and their development as spiritual practitioners. It will also discuss how the often maligned ‘consumerism’ is an integral part of this reshaping of the ways individuals relate to authority. This is based on several years of ethnographic fieldwork among people who identify as …
Secular Societies, Spiritual Selves: The Gendered Triangle of Religion, Secularity and Spirituality
Secular Societies, Spiritual Selves? is the first volume to address the gendered intersections of religion, spirituality and the secular through an ethnographic approach. The book examines how 'spirituality' has emerged as a relatively 'silent' category with which people often signal that they are looking for a way to navigate between the categories of the religious and the secular, and considers how this is related to gendered ways of being and …
Theorizing lived religion: Introduction
The introduction to this special issue describes the emergence of the lived religion approach in relation to other approaches within the study of religion and sociology of religion as a way of going beyond the emphasis on texts and institutions, on the one hand, and the focus on the fate of religion in modern times, on the other hand. It also introduces the aim of this special issue, namely ‘theorizing’ lived religion. To do this, the authors sum…
Is critique possible in the study of lived religion? Anthropological and feminist reflections
This article, based on the author’s fieldwork in a Catholic context, aims to theorise the dilemmas of taking seriously religious worlds at precisely those moments when they may be in tension with academic worldviews in terms of epistemology and ontology. The lived religion approach has emerged as a critical enterprise which serves as a corrective to more text-based or macro-sociological approaches, developing a form of radical non-reductionism an…
Religion as Relation: Studying Religion in Context
Religion is studied from a multitude of approaches and methodologies: history, anthropology, philosophy, sociology, psychology and the academic study of religion. This volume differs from most other introductions and handbooks in that it draws on ongoing research to show “how” researchers approach their topics. Its aim is to provide orientation in this multidisciplinary context without attempting to homogenize the field. The introduction provides…
Sociology (23 works) · Philosophy (18 works) · Epistemology (15 works) · Religion and Society Interactions (15 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · Religion, Society, and Development (12 works) · Anthropology (9 works) · Psychology (9 works) · Political science (8 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (6 works)