This edited collection seeks to explore the academic study of religion not as the study of a preexisting and established object but rather as a discursive field that produces its object of study in the very process of engaging in the language game of “religion.” In an edited volume of this size, with so many different authors and perspectives to consider, one cannot—indeed should not—expect any uniformity of perspective or single position to prevail. Nevertheless, as an overall editorial project, the volume seeks to move forward our understanding of both the history of the field of the comparative study of religion and its possible future directions by drawing attention not only to the contingent, constructed, and “imagined” aspects of the field but also to theoretical trends in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century that are impacting upon the self-understanding of the field by its scholarly practitioners. Note that in talking about work within the study of religions as imagined (with the appropriate nod toward the work of Jonathan Z. Smith), I am not implying that such work is false (though there is an important dimension of such work that is indeed “made up” or constructed in particular ways) but rather drawing attention to the creative role of the scholar’s imagination in the construction of the field and its object(s) of study. The academic study of religion is of course not a special case in this regard. Academic fields constitute their objects through engagement with specific language games. The stability of such discourses often results in a reification and naturalization of their objects in the process, though this need not be the case. Part of the unmasking of strong disciplinary claims to provide solid, “objective,” and incontestable “scientific” knowledge is precisely to point out ways in which one might imagine such constructions and scholarly fields unfolding differently. Rather than a sign of intellectual weakness or vapid generality, the multidisciplinary and comparativist lenses of the contemporary study of religion remain tangible intellectual strengths in that they make scholarship within the field especially receptive to an awareness of the limitations of narrow disciplinary perspectives and cultural blind spots as well as furnishing opportunities to observe the otherwise largely unseen Western and modernist assumptions that continue to define contemporary academic discourses.
All methodological approaches to the study of religion have embedded within them a series of paradigmatic assumptions about religion and how it might be examined and these presuppositions frame the horizon of investigative possibility for each disciplinary lens. This volume is about the diverse ways in which religion can and has been theorized and seeks to draw out some of the theoretical presuppositions that have framed the dominant ways that religion has been understood and studied in the Academy.
The volume is organized into sections intended to explore how the category of “the religious” has been implicated in a series of elisions (for example, religion/secular/sacred, religion/society/culture). As editor, I have chosen this approach for two reasons. First, to demonstrate that however one characterizes “religion,” it always remains defined in relation to a series of cognate and oppositional categories that establish both its clarity and its usefulness as a conceptual placeholder within discourse. However, in establishing the nature and identity of something called “religion,” the term remains bound up not only with its cognate relatives (“the sacred,” “faith,” “belief,” “devotion,” “ritual,” “myth,” and the like) but also with that which it is deemed not to be (“the secular,” “magic,” “science,” “philosophy,” “society,” and the like). In this sense, “religion” is a signifier that is stabilized in discourse as a meaningful conceptual placeholder through a complex network of repeated elisions and differentiations. “Religion” is not a special or unique case in this regard, though it has played a crucial role in defining and concretizing national and cultural identities across time and space and defining the relationship of “the West” to “the rest.” As such, its ongoing interrogation is a crucial component of any comparative study of cultures/civilizations. Second, organizing sections according to underlying themes, elisions, and assumptions about “the religious” seeks to avoid an approach that might further entrench disciplinary differences and authority claims (from areas such as psychology of religion, sociology of religion, anthropology of religion, and the like), since the process whereby these disciplinary fields become “naturalized” is itself an object of discussion and debate within this volume. Nevertheless, each respective disciplinary lens has constituted its own field of intellectual analysis and has generated a set of approaches and issues that intersect with broader concerns and methods but that also develop their own set of questions and sense of internal coherence. Consequently, contributions are organized in a way that would be recognizable to those seeking to examine the study of religions in terms of established disciplinary approaches.
The volume is organized into twelve broadly thematic parts. After an overview essay exploring both the history and the potential future direction of the field of the study of religion, part 1 offers some discussion of formative historical influences on the emergence of the field of Religious Studies. The part does not attempt to offer a comprehensive overview of the early history of the field, since this work is carried out across multiple sections within the volume, but can be better characterized as a series of interventions by the contributors to the question of the formation of the field itself. Part 2 explores the great naturalistic thinkers emerging during the European Enlightenment who sought in various ways to “bring religion down to earth.” Having explored the critical perspectives of Hume, Feuerbach, Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, the part finishes with a critical discussion of what has become known as the “new atheism.”
Most textbooks on the study of religion treat the subject matter from within a wholly Euro-American conceptual framework. In part 3 this approach is disrupted by contributions exploring the category of religion and its deployment in a variety of non-Western contexts. How has “religion” as a concept been translated into cultural contexts where it had no previous history? How might the examination of African, Asian, or Islamic traditions change our understanding of the operational assumptions embedded in discourses about religion? In part 4, we explore the range of broadly psychological approaches that have been taken to the study of religion. How has the religious been conceived when examined as a primarily experiential or psychological phenomenon. This section contains analysis and discussion of key classical thinkers such as Freud, James, and Jung but also examines more recent developments and interest in contemporary neuroscience and the study of religion. What can a study of neuroscience bring to our understanding of religious experience and what are the limitations of such approaches?
No discussion of the study of religion can proceed without some consideration of the central role of language and translation involved in generating comparative or cross-cultural data and claims about the religious. Part 5 brings together analysis of the deployment of the category of religion within Anglo-American debates within the philosophy of religion with pieces on the importance of structuralist linguistics and structuralist theories of religion. This part also provides a critical analysis of dominant theories of myth and religion, and the part is completed with a contribution on the many ways in which the category of religion has functioned as a mode of translation of “the Other” into a modern, Western conceptual framework.
Part 6 of the volume provides contributions on the intersections between religion, society, and culture. Here authors explore the representation of religion within classical sociological work, in contemporary social theory, and in classical and contemporary discussions within anthropology. In the final contribution to this part we explore the understanding of religion and media at work within contemporary mainstream approaches to cultural and media theory.
Part 7 focuses upon classical and contemporary discussions of ritual and theories of religious action. Contributions explore classical theories of ritual and the myth-ritual debate, as well as contemporary discussions of action and performance as constitutive elements of what are usually taken to be religious phenomena.
In part 8, the historical significance of the history of religions or phenomenological school within the comparative study of religion is explored and also subjected to critical analysis. After an introductory overview on phenomenology as a philosophical movement, contributors explore the key assumptions and approaches of the phenomenological approach to religion in general as well as in specific thinkers such as Mircea Eliade. The section is completed with two pieces offering a critical interrogation of assumptions at work within phenomenological approaches to the study of religion.
Part 9 examines the impact of European continental (especially French) philosophical writers upon contemporary theoretical discussions within the study of religion. Contributions explore this influence through an examination of post-Marxist writers and individual pieces on the French thinkers Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault. Finally, the broader perspective of contemporary continental philosophy and the much vaunted “return of the religious” in such writing is explored.
Part 10 engages the intersections between religion, gender, and sexuality with an overview piece on feminist approaches to the study of religion and discussions of the impact of French feminist thinking on debates within religious studies, in particular the work of figures such as Cixous, Kristeva, and Irigaray. This part is completed with a contribution calling for scholars to take seriously the intersections between constructions of sexuality, gender, and religion and the impact of queer theory on debates within the study of religion.
In part 11 the role of colonialism and race is examined in relation to theories of religion. After examination of colonialism in “the Americas” and apartheid South Africa in the production and representation of “religion,” the reader will find a discussion of the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, and Oliver Cromwell Cox in exploring the theoretical imbrications of race and religion. Questions considered in this part include the theoretical intersections of black cultural studies, critical race theory, and religion before asking the question “what might a ‘Black Religious Studies’ look like?”
Finally, in part 12, we find three reflective pieces examining contemporary issues and themes in relation to the category of religion: The first discusses the formation of the contemporary category of religion in the early modern period, the trope of “religious violence,” and the role that such discourses have played in the authorization of the modern, secular nation-state. This is followed by a contemporary discussion of globalization and religion and a contribution exploring the links between religion and economy.