Religion as a Discursive Technique: The Politics of Classifying Wicca

This article demonstrates how the category of religion functions as a discursive technique in social formation. The Finnish Wicca movement, which failed to obtain the status of a registered religious community in Finland at the beginning of the twenty-first century, is used as an example of how classifying a group as religious includes a range of social interests and power relations among practitioners themselves, in society in general and also among scholars of religion. The positions and power relations are negotiated partly in and by the discourse on religion. By describing and analysing one particular case, the article suggests that, if the category of religion has become more ambivalent, the study of ‘religion’ as a discursive technique is an important task for scholars of religion.