Religion and Culture: Sociological and Anthropological Conceptualizations of „Rigid Social Reality” of the Western Balkans

Abstract

In this paper, I point to the fundamental problems of sociological and anthropological conceptualizations of religion and culture within the context of the “rigid social reality” of the Western Balkans in the 21st century. I examine the foundational assumptions through which classical and contemporary sociology and anthropology understand these concepts, seeking to answer the question: what went wrong in the functional integration of post-conflict societies and states that emerged after the dissolution of the SFRY Drawing on certain premises from analytical philosophy, I argue that the overall problems of social ontology (with emphasis on religion and culture as undeniable social facts) should be addressed through the epistemological lens of paraconsistency and fuzzy logic, thereby opening space for a multidimensional understanding of social facts in an “imprecise world”.