This article focuses on religious healing practices in the monastery of St. Menas in Sofia, Bulgaria which involve the touching of a famous miracle-working icon of a saint. I use the practice as a springboard for discussing the relevance of two anthropological concepts known as “sensualism” (Polish: sensualizm) and “non-differentiation” (Polish: nierozróżnialność) for describing multi-sensory religious imageries of pilgrims. Th e concept of sensualism was fi rst proposed by Stefan Czarnowski and relates to religious practice centred primarily on sensory experience. Non-differentiation as an anthropological concept has been adapted from Gadamer by the Polish anthropologist Joanna Tokarska-Bakir. The two concepts have been applied to analyses of non-official practices in Catholic religiosity, a fact which poses certain methodological problems when the concepts are applied to Orthodox Christianity. This article relies on the Orthodox theological concept of the icon to propose a revision to our treatment of those two useful concepts.

This article discusses results of empirical research conducted in selected Catholic shrines in Poland (Gietrzwałd, Jasna Góra, Licheń, Kraków-Łagiewniki, Kalwaria Zebrzydowska, Niepokalanów, Święta Lipka, Piekary Śląskie and Wiktorówki). During the field research I collected various qualitative and quantitative data related to the phenomenon of sanctuary space and its popularity among visitors in contemporary Polish society. I was investigating various symbolic actions, interactions and processes that were performed by pilgrims and tourists visiting the shrines. Analytical tools I use for interpretation of field research data include: frame analysis (of an act of visiting a place of worship), and an analysis of metaphors (which were used by interviewees in their descriptions of shrines and their descriptions of experiences within sanctuaries’ spaces).

This article proposes an analytical model for research on religion, based on elucidation of three aspects of religious phenomena: institutional, organisational and experiential. Those three aspects transform each other: religious experiences can lead to establishment of religious institutions, while religious organisations can initiate and manage religious experiences. Theoretical inspirations are taken from works that combine philosophy and anthropology with cognitive approaches. Ethnographic examples are based on fi eld research in the Republic of Altai (Russian Federation) on cult of nature and activities of shamans and in the Transcarpathian Ukraine among adherents of the Catholic Church of Byzantine Rite.

African evangelical immigrants residing in Lisbon and Lisbon suburban areas exercise different spatial and space making practices to insert in the religious and social life of the host country. Remapping and creating new spatial logics as well as the use of spatial metaphors are important practices of social and religious activities of these communities in Portugal

The time of fiesta is one of the most important events in life of Andean communities (comunidades). Besides its religious function, fiesta is a moment that renews social bonds based on kinship and reciprocity. These bonds have been tying the present day members of the comunidad andina since the pre-Columbian times. The fiesta andina, with all its aspects (the feast in honor of the saints, the liturgical ceremony, and the celebration of the work) can be seen as a kind of a bridge between the sacred and the profane. Th is article is based on the results of field research conducted in 2012/2013 in the area of the Peruvian provinces of Canta and Huarochiri.

This paper discusses beliefs associated with human spiritual elements (often called “souls”) held by the indigenous Nahua from Sierra Zongolica, Mexico. Spiritual elements, such as tonalli, nawalli, and yolotl form part of a complex of correlated and often overlapping concepts. Such semantic intricacy related to the notion of a spiritual element is not just a local peculiarity of Sierra Zongolica. It appears in ethnographic data concerning other Nahuatl speaking areas, as well as in early colonial sources. Th erefore, the case of Nahua beliefs constitutes a challenge to monosemantic, unambiguous defi nitions of Mesoamerican indigenous concepts of human spiritual elements, as presented by many anthropologists and ethnohistorians.