Carole M. Cusack, Huizinga and Goffman Walk into a Bar: G. I. Play and Performance in the Creation of Religion Carole Cusack European Association for the Study of Religion (EASR), ‘Religions 360’, 20-25 September 2026, Bucharest.

https://www.academia.edu/176141156/Carole_M_Cusack_Huizinga_and_Goffman_Walk_into_a_Bar_G_I_Play_and_Performance_in_the_Creation_of_Religion?email_work_card=title In the twenty-first century the performance of selfhood is a given in Western society and is rapidly manifesting around the world. Identity politics, individuation, psychology, digital selves, and life writing testify to the primacy of the self as a spiritual and religious goal. Is this a new phenomenon? This lecture brings together Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (1938) and Erving Goffman’s sociological study The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life (1956) and argues these two pioneering scholars inadvertently offered a model of the origins of religions that is still not fully integrated into Religious Studies after more than half a century. I argue that play is crucial to the origin of religion, and the performance of self and community offers a model of the maintenance of the religious institution, in that religions are primarily sites of identity. It is concluded that embodied experience (rather than orthodoxy of belief) is the core of religious and spiritual identity and thus is an ignored or neglected factor in the cultural complex that is commonly identified as religion.