Re-contextualizing the Concept of Scene for the Empirical Study of Post-Institutional Religious Spaces in Practice

Following the continuing general decline of institutional religion across the Western world, scholars have increasingly turned their attention to the emergence of various types of, less conventionally organized, post-institutional forms of religion. Post-institutional religious spaces have, however, often proven difficult to pin down and grasp empirically through already available frameworks and concepts. This article aims to provide an impetus for further methodological discussion on the empirical study of post-institutional religious spaces through re-contextualizing the framework of scene for the study of post-institutional religious spaces in actual practice. The article outlines and explicates the methodological utility of the framework of scene through applying it on a particular geographically located post-institutional religious space: the present-day so-called “fringe-knowledge” scene in Finland.