JAMES L. COX
The phenomenology of religion, alongside the history of religions, forms part of a larger field initially associated with the comparative study of religions but nowadays frequently referred to in academic institutions simply as religious studies. Movements to conduct research on religious communities using contemporary scientific methods originated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from disciplines as diverse as linguistic and textual studies, anthropology, sociology, archaeology, economics, and political studies. The phenomenology of religion, as a specific branch of the science of religion, was influenced from two main sources: the philosophical phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and liberal Christian theology as it developed at the end of the nineteenth century. Ultimately, phenomenologists of religion distinguished their methodology from that employed by theologians, philosophers, and social scientists by arguing that religions must be interpreted according to a unique methodology. Although the social sciences were regarded as integral to contributing to an understanding of religion, scholars in the phenomenological tradition insisted that a method needed to be developed that would identify and interpret the uniquely religious elements that were interwoven into historical and social contexts. Philosophy was employed inconsistently in phenomenological writings, with most scholars selecting basic concepts derived from philosophical phenomenology without attempting to employ its methods in depth. As we will see, only Gerardus van der Leeuw attempted to apply Husserl’s epistemological analyses directly to a methodology for the study of religion. Theology, since it originated from within specific traditions, was regarded as forming part of the phenomena of religion, which, alongside other phenomena such as myths, rituals, and beliefs, comprised part of the data for the study of religion itself.
EARLY HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
C. P. Tiele (1830–1902), the Dutch theologian and scholar of ancient Egyptian religions, was a foundational figure in the formation of the comparative study of religions. Tiele promoted a comparative study of religions as a way of distinguishing a “science of religion” from “confessional theology.”1 Tiele argued that the study of religion begins with accurate and scientifically verifiable descriptions of religious behavior. Comparisons of religions are made possible by the scholar initially grouping the religious phenomena described into typical patterns, then identifying the origins of each class of religious practice, and finally ranking the types according to their place in the evolution of human religious development. Tiele believed this step-by-step methodology would show that religions evolve in phases from nature religions through mythological religions through doctrinal religions and finally to the world religions. Key to the transition from the nature stage to the mythological stage is the capacity for humans to think symbolically. Throughout this progression, the scholar identifies the abiding core of religion as it is expressed at every level of development. Tiele believed that discovering the essence of religion could only occur at this final stage in the process. Otherwise, preconceived notions of religion would render the entire method unscientific.
The first thinker to employ the term “phenomenology of religion” was another Dutch scholar, Pierre Daniel Chantepie de la Saussaye (1848–1920).2 Chantepie defined the phenomenology of religion as a method for classifying and comparing religious beliefs and practices, which would produce a new discipline, falling midway between the history of religions and the philosophy of religion. Among the phenomena of religion he included “religious acts, cult, and customs,” particularly as they are expressed in rituals, which he believed provided the “richest material” for the phenomenology of religion. Chantepie defined religion as focusing on beliefs in “superhuman powers,” the universal character of which confirmed that religions everywhere originate from a divine source.3 When scientists of religion observe, describe, and classify religious phenomena, therefore, they actually are recording the revelations of God. By affirming the universality of natural revelation, Chantepie, like Tiele, separated the science of religion from confessional theology, the latter being confined largely to a study of the special revelation of God in Christ. This meant that for scholars to understand religion scientifically, they must note variations in the human responses to God, compile them historically, and classify them for comparative purposes according to phenomenological typologies.
The German theologian Rudolf Otto (1869–1937) also played a critical formative role in the phenomenology of religion, particularly through his landmark book The Idea of the Holy (first published in 1917 as Das Heilige, with its English translation appearing in 1923).4 One of the most important concepts in Otto’s thinking derived from his description of the core of religion as an unknown and unknowable “holy,” which is expressed and hence becomes observable in religious experience. In his discussion of the “elements of the ‘numinous,’ ” Otto referred to the experience of “creature-feeling,” which he defined as “the emotion of a creature, abased and overwhelmed by its own nothingness in contrast to that which is supreme above all creatures.”5 The numinous is objective, outside the self, and responsible for the intensity of feelings produced within an individual who responds to it. The “nature of the numinious,” described by Otto as the mysterium tremendum, is manifested in the feelings it produces in humans, which vary in intensity and mood depending on how it is apprehended by the individual. By calling the source of these experiences a mystery, Otto implied that the cognitive content of the numinous remains “hidden” and lies beyond the ability of humans to conceptualize it or put it into words. In this sense, the mysterious numinous reality is couched in negative terms as something unknown in itself, but it can be seen positively in the feelings it produces in human experience, such as awe, majesty, dread, fear, urgency to be in relation with it, and concurrent emotions of fascination and revulsion.6
Although the comparative study of religion, as conceived by Tiele, Chantepie, and Otto, ultimately was motivated by their shared conviction that Christianity would be shown in the light of science to be superior to other religions, we find in their writings the main components that formed the basis for the thinking of later phenomenologists. These include the requirement for accurate descriptions of religious behavior both historically and in contemporary practice, the classification into typologies of the descriptive material, the use of comparative studies to discern the core or essence of religion, and, finally, the recognition that religion as a universal phenomenon shares a common source which can be understood only by a scholar who possesses religious sentiments.
KEY PHENOMENOLOGISTS OF RELIGION
One of the earliest thinkers to develop a phenomenological approach to the study of religions was Tiele’s student, W. Brede Kristensen (1867–1953), who for thirty-six years beginning in 1901 held the chair of the history of religion in Leiden University. Kristensen defined phenomenology quite simply as a method that places characteristic data of religion into groups in a systematic way in order to provide insight into the human religious disposition.7 Kristensen’s description of the role of phenomenology as a science of classification resulted in the general portrayal of phenomenology in academic circles during the first third of the twentieth century primarily as a method for identifying religious typologies, by which the scholar organizes the vast diversity of human religious beliefs and behaviors into orderly categories for comparative purposes.
Kristensen also introduced the notion into the phenomenology of religion that the scholar must privilege the believer’s point of view in any interpretation of religious data. The primary technique Kristensen advocated to achieve this was “empathy,” by which he meant that a scholar must cultivate a feeling for what is unfamiliar by relating it to one’s own experience. This involved more than a hypothetical “as if,” since it is virtually impossible for a scholar of religion to employ this technique unless the scholar has some personal experience of religion. Kristensen thus thought that the use of empathy would deepen and strengthen the personal faith of the researcher. Whether or not a genuinely scientific methodology has been applied would be disclosed only by research findings, which are based on such an empathetic approach. By giving priority to the adherents’ perspectives, Kristensen offered a resolution to the problem of evaluating religions, which he had inherited from Tiele. He rejected any form of evaluative comparison that presupposes an a priori ideal or standard whereby one religious act, belief, or practice is judged as better, higher, or more valuable than another act, belief, or practice. Instead of judging by what the believers of the religion in question identify as the key to understanding their own beliefs and practices, the scholar who engages in evaluative comparison uses an alien interpretative key or prejudgment imposed from without. Over against evaluative comparison, Kristensen advocated the practice of an informed comparison based on historical data, a method that leads to understanding rather than judgment. Historical evaluation does this by helping the scholar discern what is important and lasting in religion and helps avoid wasting time on fleeting movements or transitory events. By leading to informed, as opposed to evaluative, comparisons, history becomes the servant of phenomenology and ensures that it retains a fully scientific methodology.
Kristensen’s version of phenomenology of religion had a lasting impact on his student Gerardus van der Leeuw (1890–1950), whose name by the mid-1940s was virtually synonymous with the phenomenology of religion. Van der Leeuw’s main contribution to the field is found in his substantial book of over seven hundred pages Phänomenologie der Religion, first published in German in 1933, and translated into English in 1938 as Religion in Essence and Manifestation.8 Van der Leeuw defined phenomenology initially as a method for outlining the proper relationship between subjects and objects. In the study of religions this relationship defines the role of the scholar as one who seeks to understand the behaviors of religious practitioners, who in various ways respond to supernatural forces. This starting point is intended in van der Leeuw’s phenomenology to provide sympathetic insight into the way devotees experience religion, while at the same time allowing scholars to study objectively the manifold religious apprehensions of the supernatural.
Van der Leeuw drew explicitly on the philosophy of Edmund Husserl to describe what he meant by the relationship between the subject and the object. He explained that phenomenology as a way of knowing deals with what “appears,” but this is complicated by the fact that what appears manifests itself to someone, implying that “appearance” is ambiguous in that it refers equally to what appears and to the person to whom it appears.9 This classical Husserlian analysis of perception led van der Leeuw to assert that what appears is not a pure object, since it results from the interaction between subject and object. This does not mean that the objective reality of the phenomenon that appears is determined or “produced” by the subject, but it is important nonetheless to emphasize that it appears to “someone.” When this “someone” begins to talk about what has appeared, to analyze it, and to give it objective meaning, phenomenology, the study of phenomena, arises. By speaking of the phenomena, the observer attempts to make sense of otherwise “chaotic” data by sketching an outline of them, that is, by giving them a structure. The structure of what is observed does not appear directly in experience, nor does it result from logical analysis. It is somehow “understood” in its totality by the observer, in a way that draws us back to the primary relationship between the subject and the object. The subject-object distinction in this sense translates into a relationship between “understanding” and “intelligibility,” which van der Leeuw asserted is connected in a way that is “unanalyzable” because it is an “experienced connection.”10
In order to make sense of this analysis for the study of religion, van der Leeuw identified five stages that ultimately came to define the phenomenological method in the study of religion as a step-by-step process, although van der Leeuw admitted that the stages in practice occur simultaneously.11 First, the phenomenologist assigns names to that which is observed in order that various phenomena can be identified, separated, and classified. Certain practices fit into one classification and other practices do not, but each must be assigned a different designation for purposes of clarification. Hence, one act might be called “purification” and another “sacrifice,” since they are distinguishable in kind. Second, the phenomena must be interpolated into the scholar’s own experience in order to avoid misunderstanding religious practices with which one is not familiar. The foreign character of religions other than one’s own is complicated by the fact that what appears and that which is named are always mediated through symbols and language that must be interpreted through the personal experience of the researcher. This requires a sympathetic understanding, much more akin to art than to pure logic. Interpolation thus is employed to promote understanding by inserting what is unusual or unfamiliar into the researcher’s own experience. Third, the phenomenologist performs the epoché, that is, bracketing out or suspending one’s own prior assumptions or potentially distorting biases. Van der Leeuw referred to epoché as observing “restraint” by concerning itself only with phenomena and not by assuming what is “behind” appearances. It is precisely all such prior assumptions that are restrained, or put within brackets, thereby suspending judgments about their reality or their value. Fourth, the scholar allows the phenomena to speak for themselves in a way that clarifies their meaning. The phenomenological clarification refers to structural relations and connections, in which ideal types are identified and arranged to reveal their comparative significance. Finally, the end of this process, when stages one through four are combined, produces understanding in the sense of comprehending deeply, thoroughly, and intuitively.
Van der Leeuw thus defined the principal role of the phenomenology of religion as making sense out of otherwise chaotic religious phenomena that “appear” to the observer. Although this may sound entirely subjective, even mystical, phenomenology, like all sciences, seeks understanding that has resulted from an interpretative or hermeneutical analysis of data. In the final analysis, for van der Leeuw’s phenomenology of religion, the use of the twin techniques, epoché and sympathy, led to a unique understanding (Verstehen) of religion, a result that he contended established phenomenology as a genuinely scientific discipline.
No figure has exercised such an extensive influence over the academic study of religions in North America, and arguably elsewhere, as Mircea Eliade (1907–86). Even today, over twenty years after his death, his writings are read and debated among students of religion in numerous international settings. Eliade, who was born in Bucharest, Romania, went to India to study at the University of Calcutta as a young man. Although he remained in India for just three years, his experience there had a lasting effect on his eventual theory of religion. In 1958, after having spent over a decade in Paris following the Second World War, Eliade was appointed chair of the history of religions in the University of Chicago, where he made substantial contributions to the study of religion. Some of his most important books include Patterns in Comparative Religion, The Sacred and the Profane, Rites and Symbols of Initiation, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, and The Quest: History and Meaning of Religion.12
Eliade’s theory of religion depicts the religious person as focused on a time when the world came into being through an initial creative act of sacred manifestation. The religious person imagines a primeval moment, before the foundation of the world, dominated by the terror of profane homogeneity, where there were no indications of sacred orientation. In a homogeneous universe, everything is the same; no points of demarcation can be located. This is equivalent to being lost, where a person cannot identify any familiar landmarks and experiences utter despair and hopelessness as a result. In like manner, for the religious person, homogeneity, the inability to recognize sacred points of orientation, results in a sense of absolute meaninglessness and total chaos. In the beginning, in illo tempore, sacred intrusions broke into the homogeneity of space and time, revealing what would otherwise (following Otto) remain unknown and unknowable and providing life with meaningful points of cosmic orientation by “founding” the world.13 As religions develop in history, these primordial hierophanies become expressed symbolically chiefly through cosmogonic myths and their ritual reenactments. The history of religions thus becomes a study of sacred manifestations (hierophanies), uncovering how they have been enshrined in myths and how they are brought into the present through rituals. For the religious person, myth and ritual are replete with symbolic meaning and provide the scholar with the tools necessary for interpreting religious experience. As a result, the scholar of religion can best be described as a “hermeneutist,” one who identifies hierophanies within the history of religions and deciphers their meanings for believers.
Because religion primarily is about orientation, certain symbols recur in various forms throughout the world and across history. These primarily have to do with cosmic centers, which connect the layers of the world, the upper levels reaching to the heavens and hence to the gods and the lower levels extending to the foundations of the earth, often inhabited by murky figures, devils, and demons, what Eliade called “the infernal regions.”14 Such centers result from hierophanies, but for Eliade these not only provide points of orientation for religious people; they primarily facilitate “communication” between the “cosmic planes,” that is, between the upper world, the earth, and the lower world.15 This explains why myths and symbols frequently refer to natural objects extending to the sky, such as mountains, trees, birds, sun, and moon. It also explains why the shaman constitutes such a central and universal religious figure, since the shaman primarily travels to the upper and lower worlds and converses directly with the gods on behalf of the religious community. Although some hierophanies do not convey meanings beyond their own cultural contexts, the universal pattern whereby the sacred discloses itself can be discerned everywhere.
Clearly, on this model, Eliade has constructed a dichotomy between the sacred and the profane, what he calls “the dialectic of the sacred.”16 To understand this, we need to note that anything at all can become a hierophany, a conduit for manifesting the sacred, but not everything does. A particular entity becomes sacred precisely because it has manifested what otherwise would remain unknowable. A mountain may be selected because it is the highest in the region and hence nearest the abode of the gods, or a tree may be identified because of its unusual shape indicating the presence of a mysterious force. The hierophany thus implies a choice: not every tree, mountain, pool, or river is sacred; only those that are associated with hierophanies obtain such significance. The sacred object also possesses a certain ambivalence, since potentially it can be dangerous if it is not treated in a prescribed fashion, or if it becomes polluted by contact with profane objects. Its ambivalence is also enhanced by its mundane character; a stone or a tree remains what it is even while manifesting the “wholly other.” By understanding the dialectic of the hierophany, the scholar gains insight into the way the religious person apprehends and experiences the world, and thus is able, as a hermeneutist, to disclose for academic understanding the structure of the religious consciousness.
The structure of the religious consciousness can be made objective through the categories of sacred and profane, and in the typologies of myth and ritual, but the symbolism that infuses both cannot be grasped by the scholar or interpreted to outsiders without the scholar adopting an entirely empathetic attitude toward the religious worldview. To understand in the fullest sense is to articulate that, for the religious person, symbols convey reality, meaning, and being. The religious person thus longs to be as near as possible to the sacred, to the moment when everything became new, and the only way to do this is to reexperience the creation by telling the story of beginnings and reenacting it in powerful and symbolic ritual dramas. The scholar simply cannot communicate the potent strength of a religious symbol without understanding it religiously. We see clearly from this analysis that Eliade’s hermeneutical method suggests a thoroughly religious interpretation of the world. His investigations into “religio-historical facts” were intended not only to enhance the understanding of religion academically, but in the end to commend religion as the only way to achieve a sense of meaning in life and to attain what he called “access to the world of spirit.”17
By 1970, as exemplified through the writings of Kristensen, van der Leeuw, and Eliade, the influence of phenomenology as a methodology for the study of religion had reached its apex, the primary characteristics of which can be summarized in the following points:
Religion constitutes a subject matter in its own right, and thus must insist on its own unique methodology.
The methodology peculiar to religion clarifies the relationship between historical data and the interpretation of the data by the researcher and distinguishes phenomenology, understood in a partnership with the history of religions, from all other academic approaches.
Testing interpretations from phenomenological research always takes place by recourse to the data of the religions themselves.
Phenomenological interpretations privilege the perspectives of believers, which are conveyed appropriately and academically only by scholars who cultivate a personal sensitivity to the religious experience of adherents.
Evaluating data is to be distinguished from interpreting meanings and delineating structures; evaluation does not belong within a scientific approach to the study of religions, whereas interpretations leading to understanding define its fundamental purpose.
PHENOMENOLOGY AS SURREPTITIOUS THEOLOGY
Since its heyday in the 1970s, serious methodological questions have been asked about the assumptions that motivated many of the key thinkers in the phenomenology of religion. Increasingly today phenomenologists are being criticized for combining theological assumptions with a simplistic understanding of Husserl’s phenomenology in support of their claim that religion constitutes a unique subject matter, irreducible to any other dimension within human experience. In this light, the phenomenology of religion, although pretending to be a genuine science of religion, actually masks the fact that its aims are theological at their root. The related philosophical problem to the theologizing of the study of religion, particularly as it was expressed by van der Leeuw, resulted from the classical formulation of the subject-object dichotomy. When translated into religious studies, this has been formulated in terms of the personal faith of the scholar of religion and how that faith influences the scholar’s understanding and interpretation of religious data. This has resulted in the phenomenological emphasis on a sympathetic approach to the study of religious communities by identifying the core of religion as something akin to Eliade’s “sacred,” which is expressed through its observable manifestations. The manifestations can be described, classified, and compared, but never understood apart from the scholar’s possessing some personal sense of the essence of religion itself.
The critique of phenomenology forms part of a larger debate over a properly conceived methodology in the study of religion, which has developed over the past twenty-five years, often in polarized forms, initiated by scholars of religion, such as Donald Wiebe, Robert Segal, and Ivan Strenski, who assert that religion is not an autonomous subject.18 As a religious study, they argue, it is best placed within theology, and in its scientific form, it is best dealt with in the social sciences. More recently, Timothy Fitzgerald has developed a damning critique of the term “religion,” arguing that it is a Western invention, closely associated with colonialism, and that it should be replaced in academic circles by the more appropriate term “culture.”19 Fitzgerald’s scathing analysis of the term “religion” as a category does not spare the phenomenology of religion in the process. According to Fitzgerald, phenomenologists erred not by carefully describing religious practices and classifying them, but by insisting that for something to qualify as religion it must refer to a sacred or transcendental entity. This makes the category religion indistinguishable from theology, since the study of religion is maintained as a distinct category, sui generis, in a classification of its own, requiring its own methodologies and its own department within universities on the basis of one criterion only: its numinous, sacred, transcendental core. If scholars want to avoid the problems they have inherited from phenomenology and study religion nontheologically, Fitzgerald insists, they must focus on the real object of study: the social, “understood as the values of a particular group and their institutionalization in a specific context, including the way power is organized and legitimated.”20 Fitzgerald concludes that the social is not some dimension of religion, some aspect that can be studied as if it were an “optional extra,” but “the actual locus of a nontheological interpretation.”21
Motivation beneath the phenomenology of religion has produced unintended consequences.22 By emphasizing the central importance of interpreting subjective states, conveyed in terms of numinous experience, faith, or inner enlightenment, the study of religion has been transformed from an empirical science into the study of religious “consciousness.” This is especially clear in the case of Eliade, who derived his notion of the sacred from Otto’s definition of religion as a “creature feeling” for the “wholly Other.” Paradoxically, this grants to the phenomenologist what Flood calls an “epistemic privilege” since it is the researcher who maintains control of describing subjective religious states, thereby veiling the power relations between the researcher and the communities that are being researched.23 By performing the phenomenological bracketing to eliminate every type of prejudice, the scholar of religion remains in control of knowledge and thereby dictates the rules for interpreting religious phenomena. This makes phenomenology, at the very least, vulnerable to the charge that it actually promulgates a method for maintaining power over the objects of academic study, notwithstanding the virtual unanimity among phenomenologists that their personal religious experience provides them with privileged access to the mind of the religious practitioner.24
The line of thinking expressed by Fitzgerald and Flood suggests that the phenomenology of religion is outdated in the light of contemporary postmodern and postcolonial thinking. The postmodern emphasis on specificity and cultural contexts flies in the face of the phenomenological search for the essence or core of religion, which at best suffers from a naive application of Husserl’s eidetic intuition but at worst surreptitiously advocates inserting into an ostensibly empirical study what Fitzgerald calls a liberal, ecumenical Christian theological agenda.25 Flood’s critique points to the lack of awareness by phenomenologists of the scholar’s role in the hermeneutical process, who, by using empathy to cultivate a “feeling for” the practices of religious people, either naively or dishonestly pretends to experience what believers themselves experience in order to promote understanding. This stinging criticism is closely aligned with Fitzgerald’s assertion that phenomenologists of religion, who have campaigned forcefully for a unique academic category called “religion,” are implicated historically with the hegemonic power of the Western colonial enterprise.26
A MODIFIED PHENOMENOLOGY AS A VIABLE METHOD IN THE STUDY OF RELIGION
Very few scholars of religion today would advocate a return to the pure phenomenologies of van der Leeuw and Eliade or other classical thinkers in the phenomenological tradition. In this sense, some contemporary critiques of phenomenology are misplaced, since a case can be made that principles modified from phenomenology can make a viable contribution to the academic study of religions today. For example, the critical assessment of the term “religion” as advocated by Fitzgerald conforms to one central phenomenological tenet, originally advanced by Husserl, that naive assumptions should not go unchallenged. The way phenomenologists have applied the epoché can be interpreted to mean that the scholar needs to bring unexamined presuppositions to consciousness, to expose them to the full light of day and at the very least put them into brackets or suspend them so new perspectives can be explored and tested. This is precisely what Fitzgerald is doing when he calls for a historical reinterpretation of the term “religion.”
This may lead us in the direction of reconceiving what is meant by religion, and to consider if indeed it would be better to replace it with a different term. By definition, phenomenology as a method does not foreclose consideration of such a proposal, but I would argue that such a reexamination must be conducted in light of the fact that people around the world form communities, and have done so throughout history, as direct responses to what they postulate to be an alternate reality or realities. The alternate realities do not translate into a transcendent being necessarily, but they define one of the primary reasons such communities claim to exist. The term “alternate reality or realities” suggests that the focus of each community’s attention is something that is perceived by adherents to interact with them in mundane time and space but clearly represents a different kind of time and space from that which is ordinarily experienced, and thus is often expressed in ritual contexts. That communities exist and that they promulgate beliefs and rituals around such alternate realities are undeniable. Of course, they do other things: they construct power structures within their communities; they relate to one another economically; they often adhere to strictly enforced social relations. Nonetheless, a discipline that focuses on how communities understand and organize themselves in relation to their postulated alternate realities would seem to conform to what phenomenologists of religion traditionally have defined as their primary academic task.27
Insofar as phenomenologists stressed the importance of transcendence within human experience and identified a sacred reality as the source for religion, they strayed into theological discourse, but the attempt to describe, understand, and interpret how communities conceive themselves in relation to postulated alternate realities, in my view, qualifies unequivocally as academic research. What phenomenology today sacrifices, in the light of postmodern and postcolonial critiques, is its attempt to provide all-encompassing interpretations of religion that derive from an alleged empathetic understanding of the religious consciousness. A more dialogical method, whereby the researcher and the researched combine to produce interpretations, is likely to emerge—or as Gavin Flood calls it, a narrative approach to hermeneutics that allows the stories of communities to come to the fore rather than following a model based strictly on a subject-object dichotomy.28 Awareness of power relations in constructing knowledge, a suspicion of grand theories, and an admission of the traditional complicity of phenomenology with theology, although affecting changes in the way research is undertaken and understood, need not result in wholesale rejection of the potent insights phenomenologists historically have contributed to the disciplinary formation of religious studies.
NOTES
1. C. P. Tiele, Elements in the Science of Religion (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, 1897–99).
2. P. D. Chantepie de la Saussaye, Manual of the Science of Religion (London: Longmans, Green, 1891).
3. Ibid., 69.
4. R. Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry Into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational (London: Oxford University Press, 1923).
5. Ibid., 8.
6. Ibid., 10–13.
7. W. B. Kristensen, The Meaning of Religion, trans. J. Carman (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960).
8. G. van der Leeuw, Religion in Essence and Manifestation: A Study in Phenomenology (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1938).
9. Ibid., 671.
10. Ibid., 672–73.
11. Ibid., 646.
12. M. Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion (London: Sheed and Ward, 1958); M. Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1989); M. Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth (New York: Harper and Row, 1966); M. Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (London: Routledge, 1964); M. Eliade, The Quest: History and Meaning of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975).
13. Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, 20–22.
14. Ibid., 36–37.
15. Ibid., 63.
16. Ibid., 32.
17. Ibid., 210.
18. D. Wiebe, The Politics of Religious Studies: The Continuing Conflict with Theology in the Academy (London: Macmillan, 1999); I. Strenski, Religion in Relation: Method, Application and Moral Location (London: Macmillan, 1993); R. Segal, “In Defense of Reductionism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 51, no. 1 (1983): 97–124.
19. T. Fitzgerald, The Ideology of Religious Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
20. Ibid., 71.
21. Ibid.
22. G. Flood, Beyond Phenomenology: Rethinking the Study of Religion (London: Cassell, 1999).
23. Ibid., 168.
24. Ibid., 92–108.
25. Fitzgerald, The Ideology of Religious Studies, 63.
26. See, T. Fitzgerald, ed., Religion and the Secular: Historical and Colonial Formations (London: Equinox, 2007).
27. See J. L. Cox, From Primitive to Indigenous: The Academic Study of Indigenous Religions (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007), 75–93; and J. L. Cox, A Guide to the Phenomenology of Religion: Key Figures, Formative Influences and Subsequent Debates (London: Continuum, 2006), 236–42.
28. Flood, Beyond Phenomenology, 154–57.