Religion in its many forms is a cultural and social fact, as is the diversity of views on religion. Cultural ethnological research focuses primarily on "lived religion", everyday religious practice or everyday religiosity and its symbolic actions via bodily practices (gestures and rituals, clothing, jewelry, painting), images, music, smells and objects in their cultural, social and historical contexts. The extent to which religion exerts a cultural and socially influential force and, on the other hand, the extent to which social contexts influence religious behavior can be shown here as an example.

While the concept of religion in everyday life is implicitly associated with a faith-fideistic perspective, European ethnological and cultural-anthropological studies on religion and religiosity pursue a methodological agnosticism in which it is irrelevant whether something is dogmatically correct, true or false, rational or irrational. Rather, we are interested in what people consider to be real and realize in their lives and actions.

In Western European societies, everyday religiosity and spirituality follow the traditional rules of the respective institutionalized denominations, such as the established churches, less and less. To "be" Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist is more or less a situational process of appropriation and adaptation, subject- and experience-oriented according to one's own ability.

Since the end of the 20th century, a plural, unmanageable range of teachings, artifacts and practices worldwide via Internet access has led to "new" (popular) religiosities and spiritualities that are no longer or hardly any longer determined by traditional religious institutions. Worldwide religious traditions from the Occident and Orient, from Far Eastern religions and philosophies, or indigenous tribal cultures are shaped into religious bricolages.

In modern Western societies, the religion of denominational communities such as the established churches has lost its self-evident status as a way of structuring everyday life for many people. In political, media and now everyday cultural fields of communication, however, religion has become a much-used topos through which quick and seemingly simple explanatory patterns for (trans)national, social problem areas and/or assumed and declared social anomalies are displayed. Thus, in the everyday perception and interpretation of plural societies, an increasing 'religionization' of socio-economic and socio-political problems (immigration, gentrification, youth crime, poverty, etc.) can be observed in the context of governance and religious diversity (religion as a resource/threat). Religion as a marker of identity plays an important role in symbolic and factual inclusions and exclusions, in drawing boundaries to and between groups, especially in public spaces. In the context of migrant experiences and foreign experiences of migration, an intensification and/or hybridization of religiously determined lifestyles also appears to be discernible. Transnational networks and trans-local digital communication spaces appear to be of crucial importance for the maintenance of norms, practices and identities in the context of the self-organization of religious groups in the immigrant society

Migration, inward, outward, transit and internal movements as well as refugee movements are not new or recent processes, they are part of human existence. Immigration societies, as is currently the case in Europe, primarily experience and perceive immigration as a crisis. The actual experience and the knowledge conveyed by the media about this is currently accompanying particularly conflict-ridden public debates on migration and integration policy. Exclusion and integration, exclusion from and participation in social, economic, political and cultural resources are closely linked to questions of future coexistence.

The connections, conditions and interactions of institutional official and state policies as well as public discourses as elements of an everyday virulent migration dispositive and social orders of interpretation in the everyday lives of migrants and non-migrants are of particular interest here.

Migration results in being confronted with changed external living conditions, the working environment and the living environment and the associated social and cultural adjustments and changes. Migration has a considerable influence on individual and collective self-concepts. This leads to questions such as which relations of power and control, social and cultural delimitations, restrictions and exclusions, identification and identities are evoked in the process and how they are expressed in practical action (approval, opposition, resistance) within the framework of material forms of representation and symbol production. Or to what extent, for example, religion is important as a potential factor of social order for the lifeworlds and everyday coping with life of migrants and non-migrants, and if so, in what way.

These are sensitive interpersonal fields in which the migration experience of immigrants and the confrontation of residents with newcomers often leads to tense situations in view of political, social, economic and legal structures and their changes. They also influence the relationship between researchers and research participants, a field in which people of the most diverse origins and languages interact. Interpreters play an important role in communication here. The analysis and interpretation of contact situations, of conceptual access as cultural translation constellations, requires special reflection on the role of the ethnologist as an "interpreter" (Girtler 2009), i.e. scientific translation work.

Examining culture always means examining media and medialization at the same time. In a broad sense, any materiality can become a medium, a data carrier for the transmission of coded messages and meanings. In other words, a medium makes these appear, materializes, objectifies them, makes them visible, audible, tangible. Not only language, texts and images (popular reading material, films, TV series, advertising, websites, social media, video games, etc.) are communicative media. All things, the body and gestures, even complex formations such as lifestyles are medially conveyed and perceived information and carriers of meaning. The human body as a medium of images and signs, sounds and smells plays a decisive role in socialization processes. The ephemeral, the fleeting, the barely tangible materialized, sounds and noises can also be media. The perception of sound involves far more than the reception of physical-acoustic stimuli. It is adjusted and aligned with internalized listening experiences that have become taken for granted or less appropriated. Depending on the situation, this is expressed, for example, in the perception and assessment of sound. The search for 'the sound', for example, and the associated techniques and practices of listening is a growing trend in popular culture.

European ethnology primarily focuses on "the media of the everyday" (Bareither), which as integral components of everyday worlds also constitute everyday life. How people shape, perceive, experience and interpret their practices is subject to cultural (economic, technical, social) conditions. The various (everyday) media practices and routines and popular cultural formats can thus be analyzed in their respective contexts as indicators of social dynamics and power relations.

Research practice is also subject to media-influenced perception, which is used to shape culture and can be described as the self-perception of societies. Ethnographic texts, drawings and photographs, sound recordings, ethnographic films, audio features, exhibitions, etc. are forms of mediatization, cultural techniques. They are used as research tools for data collection and analysis as well as interpretation and communication, for documentation, inventory and illustration purposes.