„Power and the reification of “religion” in prisons‟

Introduction There is a sense in which all intellectual work on religion has a reifying effect. Scholars in the humanities and social sciences necessarily construct religions as particular kinds of object. That is, they take some human emotions, ideas, artefacts and activities and frame them as things called „religions‟. Accounts of these religions provide the basis for inferring something called „religion‟ at a higher level of abstraction. Reification or hypostatisation is involved when this abstraction is regarded as being a real and independent entity in its own right.