Living religion between orthodox christianity and new age spirituality in Greece: Gender and power

Abstract

In contemporary Greece, Orthodox Christianity remains the predominant institutionalized religion, being directly connected to Greek religious and ethnic identity. However, more recently, the socalled ‘New Age spirituality’ has begun to claim an active position within contemporary Greek religiosity. Based on long-term fieldwork, this paper offers an anthropological account of how a new religious pluralism is formed at the level of vernacular religious practice in Greece, through negotiations of gender and power. The main objective is to show how religiosity is lived and transformed, through the amalgamation of religion and spirituality, in a Mediterranean country where, according to the stereotype that follows most countries of the northern shore of the Mediterranean region, Christianity supposedly prevails.