This paper encourages a new critical engagement with “folk religion” as both a category of analysis and as a field of practice. I argue for a renewed attentiveness to the ideological dimensions of categories deployed by scholars and to the relationship they bear to the field of practice they seek to signify. Firstly, I will briefly explore the discursive nature of the construction of folk religion as a category of analysis and how it’s semantic loading functions to “pick up” distinctive “contested” practices from the religious field.  Secondly, drawing on the work of Bourdieu and Riesebrodt, I characterise the “folk religious field of practice” as relational, a shifting site, both gendered and political, of competing agencies.