Have “culture“ and “religion“ become practically interchangeable terms, or is there a distinction to be made between them? This essay claims that their relationship is a result of practices of conflation or separation depending on an underlying agenda and the way each of the terms is being defined in a given situation. The terms culture and religion, sometimes essentialized and sometimes individualized, are themselves in constant flux, and it is the job of ethnography and discourse analysis to track how they are being used by whom and to what end.

Keywords
religious pluralism, multicultural society, essentialization strategies, culturalization, religionization