An anthropology of belief and a theory of homo religiosus

Abstract

This article examines the modalities of belief on the basis of an ethnographic study of French Catholics. The author distinguishes the nature of religious statements, the modes of discourse people use to express their beliefs, and the personal modalities of acts of believing, which are isolated moments followed by various shifts into other activities, characterised by irony, doubt or detachment with regard to beliefs. The article concludes with a depiction of religious activity as a displacement, a hesitation, a perpetual oscillation between fiction and reality, believing and not believing, presence and absence.