The papers contained in this Dossier were originally presented at a roundtable discussion at the Sixth Biennial EASA Conference (Krakow 2000). Several of the papers contain explicit or implicit reference to Charles Stewart's pre-circulated abstract for the roundtable which stated the following: The majority of anthropologists are virtually card-carrying secularists. In this respect they conform to theories of secularization which contend that the further we proceed into modernity the less significance religion will have for people. Yet when it comes to writing about societies on the basis of empirical research, anthropologists are often forced to reject the secularization thesis. The people we study often embrace a vast array of old and new religions and practice them in ways that Weber never dreamed of. The emergent anthropological orthodoxy on secularization is that it hasn’t happened. That anthropologists should hold personal convictions quite different from those of the people they study is not novel. In the case of religiosity, secularism, anti-secularism and non-secularism, the positions of anthropologists are, however, part of the overall picture. They are part of the phenomenon under study. A better contextual understanding of anthropologists’ secularist convictions might therefore improve our ability to analyse religion in the modern world. The central purpose of the roundtable discussion was to explore this gap between ‘our’ secularism and ‘their’ religion by historicising it and submitting it to empirical and reflexive consideration. At the same time we must ask how those anthropologists who do embrace religion in their personal lives can situate themselves within the overall secularist ethos of professional anthropology. Can these anthropologists provide special insight into the non-secularisation of world societies?