Provincialism and ethnocentrism come in many forms, not least of which is under an academic, scholarly guise. The social-scientific study of religion is, of course, not immune to such hazards – showing, for instance, in our choice of topics, our implicit cultural assumptions, the bibliography of many of our studies, and/or our range of theoretical toolkits (limited, for instance, to just one discipline, gender, language, school, and/or region of the globe).

Not that such trap was successfully avoided at all times by Pierre Bourdieu – or by Terry Rey, or by myself, for that matter – but maybe those risks are part and parcel of the reasons why Bourdieu has been so conspicuously absent, and for so long, from the reaches of our discipline.

Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) is considered in many quarters as one of the most influential thinkers of the second half of the twentieth century. A sociologist, indeed, but no less of an ethnologist, an anthropologist, a linguist, and a philosopher, with a postmodern bent for flouting and cross-pollinating disciplinary traditions, Bourdieu was an heir, among others, of the work of Marx, Engels, Weber, and Durkheim – and not least of their work on religion, precisely. Surprisingly, however, his name is often all but unknown for many (most?) US specialists in the social-scientific study of religions.