Religiographies is an open-access, peer-reviewed, scholarly journal dedicated to the field of religious studies and published under the auspices of the Centre for Comparative Studies and Civilisations of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini. Religiographies wishes to foster an interdisciplinary approach to religious phenomena, promoting dialogue between historians, sociologists, anthropologists, literary scholars, philosophers, and psychologists.
We aim at promoting an anthropological history and at the same time a socio-anthropology with a strong historical emphasis, intending to avoid both socio-anthropological presentism and history only focused on ideas and institutions, while ignoring materiality, emotions, everyday lives.
We encourage at deconstructing and challenging categories (including the very word “religion”) not as a theoretical exercise, a proof of concept, but as a practice, showing with fieldwork data, the porosity and frailty of our categories.
We aim at discussing those topics that are often neglected by social and human sciences – such as mysticism, esotericism, spirituality – which, in the words of Michel de Certeau, “haunt scientific epistemology”. Our aim is not to create another journal on alternative spiritualities, but to bring these themes back into mainstream discussions of religious and cultural phenomena.
Finally, with the concept of heterographies– we intend to give space to other forms of representations, such as photography, comics, video, and artwork. These other languages will allow contributors – scholars and artists – to explore dimensions beyond the social sciences frame of objectiveness and coherence. This section, called heterographies, is not strictly scientific : it will not be peer-reviewed, but will receive feedback from the editors and invited commentators.
From 2021 to 2023 Religiographies will publish two thematic special issues per year.