The domestication of religion: The spiritual guardianship of elderly jewish women

Fieldwork conducted among elderly, Oriental Jewish women living in Jerusalem reveals a religious world centred around guarding over ancestors and descendants. The article identifies and labels the “domestication of religion” as a process in which people who profess their allegiance to a wider religious tradition personalise the rituals, institutions, symbols and theology of that wider system in order to safeguard the well-being of particular individuals with whom they are linked in relationships of care. It is argued that individuals (such as the Oriental women) who have a great deal invested in interpersonal relationships, and who are excluded from formal power within an institutionalised religious framework, tend to be associated with a personally-oriented religious mode.