alles studyreligionlasty50years

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Chapter 3The study of religions:the last 50 yearsGregory Alles

In one sense , the study of religions is as old as religion itself, or at leas t as the first humanbeings who looked at their neighbours or themselves and wondered what they were doingwhen th ey did wha t we have come to ca ll religion. In ano ther sense , in mos t pa rtS of theworld the study of religions in a narrowe r, more technica l sense, as the non-theo logica l studyof religion in the context of higher education, did no t begin in ea rnest until after the SecondWorld Wa r. In the same period, the academi c study of religions e xpanded grea tly in Eu rope,which already had firm if small tradi tions o f such study. In those parts of the world th at hadtraditions of teaching theology, such as No rth Ame rica and co lonial Africa, th e develop mentof the study of religions was largely a shift in emph asis from examining the world througha lens shaped by religious conviction to examining it through one shaped by perspectivalpluralism, re ligious uncertainty, or o natura lism, usua lly an uneve n mixture o fall three . The shift rarely satisfied eve ryone. In other parts o f the world, such as East Asia,it invo lved building an academic enterprise around an imported foreign ca tegory, 'religion',

Although th e expansion and in ternationaliza tion of th e study of religions bega n inea rnes t after the Second World War, an exact starting po in t is impossibl e to determine. Asthe preceding chapter demonstrates, the academic study of re ligions had a long prehistoryand history in Europe, and the globa l move to study re ligions academica lly had neither asingle founder nor a founding moment. Nevertheless, it is clear that as Europe and Japanrebu il t, as Europe gradua lly divested itself of its colonies, as much of the rest of the worldtried its hand at self-government, and as the Co ld War divided up th e world betwee n twoand later three grea t powers vy ing for influence , the United States, the Soviet Union , andthe Peo ple's Republic o r China, un iversities and co lleges in many parts of the wo rld inst itutedprogrammes for the study of religions.

From the poin t of view of hi story, it is just beco ming poss ible to assess the ea rliest of theseevents. Their lasting significance - the significance that makes peo ple in la ter pe riods wantto remember them and transmit them to succeeding generations as history - will not beapparent until those la ter periods co me into being. At the same time, one should not ignorethe m, even if it is te mpting for o lder ge ne rat ions to dismiss some deve lopments as re trog rade.They are the movements that shape the stud y of religions today.

The study of religion in contextThere were probably many reasons for the expansion and interna tiona liza tion of religiousstudies after the Second World War. Some of them were truly global in scope.


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40 The study of re li gions: the last 50 years, One reason was the vast expansion ofbath the wo rld's populat io n and of te rtiary ed ucat ion.

In 1900 the wo rld's popula tion was 1.65 bill io n ( 109) . In 1950 it was 2.5 bi ll ion; by 1999 it wasa lm os t 6 bi ll ion. With a ll oth er factors constant, the number of scholars studying religionsworldwide should have increased four-fold during the co urse of the twentieth century, mos tof the growth taking place aft er the Second Wo rld War. O ther fac tors did no t, howeve r,remain constan t. After the Second World War, coun tries in Europe and the Eu ro peandiaspora ge nera lly shifted from elite to mass unive rsities, giving a much higher perce ntageof the ir populations access to higher education and e mploy me nt within it. Furthe rmore ,in both the e ~ c o o world and in nations at tempting to demonstrate th e viability ofan alternati ve politica l id eology, such as the People 's Republic of Chin a, the establishmentand promo tion of terti alY educat ional institutions a llowed governme nts to sta ke claims toqu ality. A government th at fostered a sys tem of universities and co lleges deserved loyalty andres pec t. Under such conditions even a fiel d o f study th at loses a moderate amoun t o f marketshare will ac tua lly expand (cf. Frank and Gabler 2006 ).

Such statistics alone do not, howeve r, explain the expansio n and in ternatio nalizatio nof the study of religions after the Second Wo rld War. Significant global technologica land cu ltural developments probably played a ro le, too. Among them one mi ght mentioninfras tructural facto rs such as the in troduc tion in the late 1950s of commercial jet aircraft- the de Hav illand Comet 4 and the more successful Boe ing 707 in October 1958, theDouglas DC-8 in Sep tember 1959 ; and the launch of communica tion satelli tes - Sputnik Iin October 195 7, Projec t SCO RE in Dece mber 1958 , Telstar in July 1962 . Commercial jet airtransportation ga ve increas ing numbers o f peo ple, including scholars, ready access to moredi stant parts of the world. Satelli tes enabled the transmi ss ion of hi gher volumes of audi to ryand visual communica tion throughout mu ch of the world. Both had the e ffec t of stimu latingcurios ity abo ut places elsewhere, creating demand fo r knowledge abollt re ligions, amongother topics, and prov iding affo rd able means to meet that demand . At leas t in some people,they also had the effec t of undercutting old er, loca lly defin ed loyalties, including assertionsof exclusive claim s to religious Truth associated with traditional approaches to theo logy.' Forthe pluralists, the space programmes of th e 1960s and ea rly 1970s , especia lly images of theearth from space, such as th e ea rth rising over the moon shot from Apollo 8 in 1968 andthe whole-ea rth view shot from Apollo 17 in 1972 , provided visual ico ns. There is also someevidence th at the events of the Holocaust and the Second Wo rld Wa r themselves madeparochial definitions of Truth seem more untenable wi thin an academi c context (Frank andGabler 2006: 67).

In addition to global factors, local factors pr obably also co ntributed to an expansion inthe volume of the study o f religions as we ll as to a shift in its emphases in various parts ofthe world. For exa mple, in th e 195 0s , during the Co ld War against godless Communism,religiosity and, in some circles, religious plurality beca me markers of identi ty for th e UnitedStates. (Significantly, the study of religions had very different trajecto ries in nations underthe influence of the Soviet Union.) In 1963 the US Supreme Co urt noted in a ruling thatalthough government institutions could not teach students to be religious, th ey co uld andprobably should teach students about religions (School District of Abington v. SchemPll 374US 22 5 [1963J). As the Vietnam War and public opposi tion to it intensified, in terest inAsian re ligio ns gre w, because the expe rience o( the war and its aftermath prov ided mo rcintimate co ntact with what often seemed strange rcligionsi consider the impact of ThichQuang Duc's self-immolation on June II, 1963. That in terest also grew because re ligionslike Buddhism and Hindui sm co uld be promoted as alte rnatives to a seemingly stifling and


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The study of re ligions: the last 50 years 41be ll icose Christianity. In 1965, the United States also changed its immigration laws, allowinglimited numbers of As ians, previously ba rred, to e nter the COUlHl)', eventua lly crea ting a newreligious demographic.

Expansion and intern a tionali za tion 2These factors and others as we ll combined in the decades fo llowing th e Second Wo rld War tocrea te a general shift coward a more pluralistic co nce ption of re ligious studies as well as theestablishment of new academic uni ts and positions. Unt il the 19605 many state unive rsitiesin the United States had largely avo ided the study of religions. In the I960s state universitiesbegan to found academic uni ts for it. The most significant of these wa s the department ofreligious studies at the University ofCa lifornia-Santa Barbara, established in 1964. AlthoughFriedrich Max Muller (1 867) had announced the birth of the science of re ligion whi leworking at Oxford, the United Kingdom had lacked academic units devoted to its study.That changed, toO, as Great Br itain began to institute such programmes, es pec ially in its newuni versities. The way was led by Ninian Smar t , who founded the first British department ofre ligious studies in Lancaster University in 1967 . Earlier, in 1960, the fifth section (Sciencesreligieuses) of the Ecole Prat ique des Hautes Etudes in Paris expanded to include 29 chairs. Ithas since grown to roughly twice that size and is the largest single unit devoted to the studyof religions in Europe. In orientation its work has tended to be more exactingly historical andphilological than is often the case in religious studies departments in other countries .

At the o ther end of the Eurasian land mass, the People's Republic of C hina founded theInstitute for World Religions in Beijing in 1964, although the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) severely disrupted its work . In Korea and japan the study of religions was promotedthrough academic appointments and the establishment of new academ ic units, such as thechair of religious studies at the Unive rsity of Tsukuba, founded in 1973 . In New Zealand(Aotearoa), the Un iversity of Otago_established a chair in the phenomeno logy of religionin 1966; Victo ria Un ive rsity, We llington, established a chair in religious studies in 197 1.The Un iversities of Queensland and Syd ney, Aystralia, established Departments of Studiesin Religion in 1974 and 1977, respectively. Meanwh ile, in Africa, especially those parts ofAfrica formerly under British rule, programmes in religious studies wcre founded as newlyindependent African nations established national universities . Nigeria was and remainsparticularly active in the study of religions, beginning with the founding of the department ofreligious studies at the University of lbada n in 1949. In addition to local African professo rs,African programmes in religious studi es have benefited from the services of many leadingscholars of European and, less frequently, North American origin, such as Geoffrey Parrinder,j. G. Platvoe t, james Cox , ROSG lind Hackett, and David Chideste r.

Scholarship invo lves more than academic uni ts in un iversities. It also involvesprofessiona l associat ions and other structures that facilitate schola rly communication andresearch. These structures, too, map the growth of religious studies dur ing the last fifty years .Among the new profess ional associations founded after the Second World War were theInternational Association for the History of Religion (established 1950), fo llowed (or in somecases preceded) by the founding of national associat ions in many European countries, theAmer ican Academy of Religion (the new name give n to the National Association of BibleIn str uctors in 1963), the Korea Association for Studies of Re ligion (1970), later rev ived asthe Korean Associa tion for the History of Religions; the Soc iety for the Sociology of Religion(a j apanese association founded in 1975; the japanese Associa tion for Religious Studies has


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42 The study of religion s: the last SO yearsn founded in 1930); the Austra lian Associat ion for the Study of Religion (J 975); the New

Zealand Associat ion fo r the Study of Religion (1978); the rmainland] Ch inese Associat ionof Re ligious Studies (1979), and the African Association for the Study of Religion (1992).Similarly, a host of new journals came into be ing, incl uding, to name only a few: Numen(journal of the IAHR , 195 4), Przeglad Religiaznawczy (Poland, 1957), Histo ry of Religions (US,196 1), Tcrnenas (F inland, 1965) ,101,ma lofReligion in Africa , Rel igion en Afrique (Africa, 1967),Religion (UK and North America, 1971), l alJanese l aumal of Religious Studies Gapa n, 1974) ,Shijie Zangjiaa Yanjiu (China, 1979) ,langkya Yeang1' (Korea, 1986), l aumal for ,he Study ofReligion (Sout hern Africa , 1988), Me,hod and Theory in the Stlt dy of Religion (N o rth America,1989), Zeirschriit fiir Religionsw issenschaf' (Ge rm any, 1993), Religio. Revue /1"0 Religionistiku(Czech Rep ublic, 1993), ArclJaevs : S",dies in the History of Religions (Romani a, 1997), andBandue (Spa in, 2007). Space does not pe rmit mentioning the many book series and textbooks, reference wo rks, and antho logies that appeared, but one mi ght note the pub lica tion oftwOed itions of two major encyclopaedias in thi s period: Religion in Geschichte und Gegemua rt(1957- 1965, 1998-2005) and The fncyc/o/,edi" of lle/ igian (1987 ,2005 ).

It would be mi sleading to suggest that after the Second Wo rld War religious studiesemerged eq ually in every part of the world . In the Soviet sphere of influence , the study ofreligions was under severe po li tica l pressur e, and some scholars, such as Kurt Rudolph, anexpert in Gnosticism and Mandae ism at the Un ive rsity of Le ipzig, left for the West. Sincethe fall of European Comm unism, vigorous program mes in re ligious studies have arisen inplaces such as the Czech Rep ublic, Hungary, Romania, and Bu lgar ia, with recent promisingbeginnings in Russia itself. Aside from Israel, universities in the Middle East still tend toteach 'theology', or rathe r, Islami c law, although a non-theo logical study of religions hasbeg un to emerge in some countries, such as Turkey. In South Amer ica, othe r academic uni ts,such as histo ry, anthropology, sociology, and psyc hology, ge nera lly s tudy local religions. InSouth A sia there are very few programm es in re ligio us studies, but sociology, introduced intoIndian univers ities in the 1960s , has produced very fine schola rly work on re ligions, such asthe work ofT. N. Madan (1976, 2004, 2006).

Theoretical beginningsDespite the wide geographi cal expanse of the study of religion, theore tical work in thefield has tended to be done in Europe or countries associated with the Europea n diaspora.That hard ly means, however, that only people of we stern European ancestry have beentheoretica lly influential. A domi nant influence in the first part of th e per iod under reviewwas the 'Chicago school', associated above all with the names of three pro fessors at theUn ive rsity of Chicago, none of whom wa s western European in the common usage of theterm: Joseph M. Kitagawa, Charles H. Long, and Mircea Eli ade.

In many ways the Roman ian-born scholar, Mircea Eliade (1907- 1986), defined the studyof religions througho ut much of the period under conside ration. T hat is true both for hisadmirers and fo r his many critics, who reacted by de liberately co ntrasting the ir work with his.Although Eliade is closely associated with the name ' history of re ligions', the designat ion wasin some sense a relic of Romanian and French terminology as well as of earlier terminologyat the Univers ity of Chicago. Rather than histo ry, Eliade's thinking represented perhaps thelast grand flourishing of the phenomenology of religion. Rejec ting approaches that sought toexplain religion in terms of something th at wa s not re ligio lls, s llch as society o r the humanpsyche, he a ttempted to develop what he called a morphology of the sacred. That is, he


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The study of religions: the last 50 years 43wanted to identi fy the bas ic fo rms through which the sacred manifested itself in humanconsciousness . He was particularly interested in cosmogonies (myths of origin) and theirritual re,enac rm ent, whic h he interpreted as an attempt to return to the time or originsand live in close proximi ty to the sacred. He developed these ideas in full form in Pa ttems inCompara tive Religion (1 949b: En g. trans. 1958) and The My th of the EtenlQl Rewm (I 949a :En g. trans. 1954), then repeated them tireless ly in a se ries of more popu lar books. He was alsoparticul arl y known for his studies of yoga (1954: Eng. trans. 1958) and shamanism (1951 :Eng. trans. 1964) .

Ninian Smart (1927-200 1) had a different background and a different approach to thestud y o f re ligions. He also occupied a different sphere of influence. A Scotsman, he readphilosophy and class ics at O xford. As noted above, he founded the department of religiousstudies at Lancas ter Uni ve rsity in 1967. Ev entu ally he also took a position in the Uni tedStates at the University of Califo rnia-Santa Barbara. Wh ile Eliade's no tion th at the sacredmanifes ts itsel f as a stru c tur e of human conscio usness can be read in a re ligiously committedsense, Smart (1973) insisted that sc holars of religions needed to adopt a methodologica lagnosticism: as scholars they should be non-committal in the matter of religious truth.Instead of developing a grand theory of religious content, as Eli ade did, Smart id entifiedsix, later seven, dimensions constitutive of religion: doctrinal, mythologica l, ethical, ritual,experiential, inst itutional, and material. He also famo usly no ted the s im ilarity betwee nMa rxi sm, for example, and more traditional religions and suggested that the study of religionsis properly the stud y of worldviews (Smart 1983) . Lik e Eliade, he, too , was a popu larizer, bu tin a broader range of med ia. A notable example was his series 'The Long Sea rch' on BBCtelevision (Smart 1977).O ne fin al fi gure anticipated mu ch work in the study of religions th at was to follow,the Canadian Wilfred Cantwell Smi th (1916--2001), a professor at Harvard, among otheruniversities . An Islamic ist who taught in Laho re prior to Pak is tani independence, Smith(1963) c ri tically interrogated the central ca tegory on whi ch religious studies is based,'re ligio n' itself The tcrm, he contended , wa s a modern invention that d id no t correspond towhat was found empirica lly throughout mos t of human history. He recommended replacing itwith the te rm s 'faith' and 'cumulative tradition'. In addition, he objec ted to an objec tivizing,'us' and 'them' mentality, wh ich he saw underlyin g re ligious studies. He e nvisioned a timewhen the peoples of the world would come toge ther to talk wi th eac h other about themselves(Smith 195 9: 34). If Smart advocated a methodological ag nosticism and Eli ade provideda grand statement of the cOntent allegedly underlying a ll religions, Smith took a differentapproach and eventually moved Towa rds a World Theology (l 98 1).

These three thinkers were not the only leading figures in the study of religions at thebeg inning of the period under consideration. There were many o ther impo rtant scho larsas wel l. Arguably those wh o did careful historical and phi lological work contributed justas much if not more substance to the study of re ligion than thes e three figures did. Amongsuch scholars one mi ght name, to include only a fell', Hideo Kishimoto (1 903-1964) and!chiro Hori (l91O-1974) in Japan, P. V. Kane (1 880-1 972) in India, Raffaele Pettazzoni(1883- 1959) in Ita ly, Annemarie Schi mmel (1922-2003) in Germany, Henri-Charles Puech(l902- 1986) and Marcel Sim on (l907- 1986) in France, S. G. F Brandon (1907- 1971) inthe United Kingdom, and Okot p'Bitek {I 93 1- 1982) in Uga nda, genera lly known for hiscontributions to literature but also important for his contributions to the stud y of Africantraditional re ligions. Nevertheless, the prominence of the institutions with which Eliade(Paris, Chicago), Smart (Lancaster, Santa Barbara), and Smith (Harvard, Dalhousie) were


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44 The study of re li gions : the last SO yearsassociated gave them unparalleled importance for scho lars of re ligions who aspired to bemore than philologists or historian s in the strictest sense o f the words. They se rved to definethree maj or u b m m u n i t i with in the study of religions.

Second thoughtsFigures like Eliade, Smart, and Smith provided starting points for the study of religio nsduring the last fifty years. It is striking, howeve r, how li t tle of the work that has been donehas directly deve loped the ir ideas. Most theoretical directions in the study of religion havebeen se t from the outside as scholars reacted to the writings of Eliade, Smart, and Smith,especially Eliade. Although some have wanted to see the stud y of religion as a disc ipline,defined by a particular method, in practice it has been an undisciplined, polymethodic fieldlargely planted with seeds from elsewhere. Many heirloom cultivars - ideas of earlier scholarssuch as Emile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, and Max Weber - have continued to produce richcrops. Among the most important sources of new seeds have been anthropology, literarystudies, cultural studies, and in recent days, the social sciences.

An anthropological turnA central claim in Eliade's theory of re ligion was that 'archaic' peoples were the prim erepre sentatives ofhomo religiosl1s, religious humaniry. It should not come entirely as a surprise ,then, that in the last fifry years scholars of religions have turned to the fie ld that once tooksuch 'a rchaic' peoples as its object of study, anthropology. Ini tia lly they used anthropology asa means to assess and critique Eli ade's claims. Then they returned to it repeatedly as a wellfrom which to draw the fres hest methodological waters. This is not the place to recite thehistory of anthropology over the last fifty yea rs, but some names are un avoidable.

Wh ile Eliade had sought to ident ify the content of re ligious thought, the Frenchanthropolog ist Claude Levi-Strauss took a different approach, art iculated in several booksfrom the mid-1950s to the early 1960s (1955, 1958, 1962a, 1962b; Eng. trans. beginning196 1). Under the In sp irat ion of structural lingu ist ics , he tried to desc ribe the logicalpatterns according to which the mind worked, along with their implications. The resultingstructuralism, which made heavy use of binary oppositions to identify the language underlyingre ligious 'utterances' rather than the meaning of the utterances th emse lves, became a majormovement within the study of religions. Levi-Strauss himse lf applied the method at lengthto the e lucidation of myth. Wendy Doniger, who studies Hindu mythology, applied it to goodeffect in her ea rly work on the god Siva (1973). Hans Penner (1989, 1998) has continued tobe a vigorous spokesperson for the poss ib ilities of structura lism.

Other anthropolog ists also exercised profound influence on the study of religionsbeginning in the 1960s. The American, Clifford Geertz (1926-2006) sought to effect aparadigm shift in anthropology away from a structural-functionalist anthropology that soughtcausa l explanat ions toward a herm ene utical an thropology that sought to understand themeaning of symbols. Among his most influential contributions to the study of religions arehi s programmes of 'thick descr iption' , identifying local kn owledge, and 'reading' culture asa text, as we ll as his account of 'religion as a cultural sys tem' (Geertz 1973, 1983). Anotherimportant anthropologist from the sa me period, Victor W Turner (1920-1983), adaptedArnold van Gennep's analysis of rites of passage to many other cu ltural areas, exploringthe anti-s tructural phase of' limina li ty' in act ivities such as pi lgrimage (Turner 1967, 1969,


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The study of religion s: the last 50 years 451974) . Mary Douglas {I 92 1-2007) rose to prominence because of her book Pllri'y (md Danger

.( 1966), which, inspired by structura lism, argued that dirt and pollution we re not th e resulto f natural experiences but rather re flec ted an inability to fit ce rtain item s inw estab lishedca tego ries . Each of these anthropolog ists wa s ex tremel y influential on work in the study ofreligions. For example, Victor Turn er is in some ways a founding fi gure for the late r fie ld ofritual stud ies .

T he names Geertz, Turner, and Douglas hardly exhaust the anthropologists from the1960s wh o had an im pa ct on the study of religion. Among hi s many wri tings, the stru cturalistEd mund Leach (1966) published a harsh cr itique of Eliade. O ne mi ght also mention MelfordSpiro (1970) and Stanley Tambiah (I970, 198 1) , who wo rk ed on Burmese and ThaiBuddhism, respectively. Spiro has been particul arly important for a defi ni tion of religion thathe published at the same time that Geertz published 're ligion as a cultural system': rel igionis 'an institution consisting of cul tu rally patterned interaction with culwrally postulatedsuperhuman beings' (Spiro 1966: 96).Eventua lly this new ge neration of anthropologists came in for harsh criticism. Theirsuccessors found them vulnerable on a number of grounds, including an overl y sys tematicvicw of culture, an inattention to the politica l dimensions ofcul tural activity, and a propensityto over-interpret the data. For sc holars of religions, however, th ey had the effec t of callingim porta nt paradigms into ques tion, especially those associated with Eliade. Specifica lly, agrand synthesis of rel igious content such as Eliade and the other phenomenologists hadattempted to prov ide seemed untenable and irresponsibl e to the complexities of cultu raldata.

Within the st udy of religions itself this kind of cri tique is probably best represented andfurthered by a younge r co lleague of Eli ade's at C hi cago, Jonat han Z. Smith (I 978, 1982,2004). A specialist in Greco-Roman reli gions who has been more a writer of essays th anof monographs, Smith has bee n particularly inte rested in iss ues of defin ition, class ification(taxonomy), difference, and relation. A careful reader and relentl ess cr itic, Smith anticipatedmllch futu re criticism by seeing Eliacle's views as re fl ecting an overly conservative po litica lorie ntation, emphas izing locative , normative aspects of re ligion wh ile ignoring utop ian,radical dimensions. Among Smith's other di stinc ti ve id eas is the cla im that definitions shouldnOt be rooted in essential fea tures, as in Spiro's definition mentioned above, but 'polyth etic ',loose bund les of fea tures anyone of which might not be present in a spec ific instance ofre ligion. He has also insisted that the stud y of rel igion consists in translat ing the unknowninto the known and of redescribing the orig in al in terms of other categories. H is favouriteexample of such translation is Emile Durkheim 's Elementary Fonns of the Religious Life, whichtra nslates the religious into the social.

Inspired in part by Sm ith as well as the anthropological turn, scholars of religion havelarge ly abandoned the older phenomenolog ical enterprise and turn ed instead to deta iledstudies informed by theoretical iss ues but carefu lly delimited in te rms of geographical,te mporal, cul tural, and linguistic extent. They have also fe lt less comfortab le than a scholarslich as Eliade d id abollt discussing relig ions of communities whose languages, history, andculture they do not themselves have a good wo rking knowledge of. Such reluctance ledEliade and others with similar sentiments to lament the loss of the grande oellvre and thefragmentat ion of the field into a great variety of subspecialties. From the other sid e, suchlimi ta t ions seemed a prerequisite fo r responsibl e scholarsh ip.


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46 The study of re li gions: the last 50 yearsCritical modesSmith's wo rk intersects with anthropolog ical theory, but it in tersects with more wo rk as well.It also addresses issues of interest to various modes o f critique th at became common in the197 0s and 1980s . These modes - pos tmodern, pos t-structural, pos t-colonial, feminist - aremost close ly associate cl wi th literary and cultural studies. A number of French thinkers fromthe late 1960s were influenti al in their development, among whom the mos t fa mous areJacqu es Derrida (1 930-2004) and Michel Foucault ( 1926- 1984). In some quarters theseappro aches are qui te controversial.

The postmodernDerrida's work is noto riously difficul t, but pe rhaps one may say that it explores th e limits ofhuman speech ancl , implici tl y, hum an conceptualiza tion. For Dc rrida, human atte mpts tomake defini te ut te rances always ul tim ately fa il; inde te rminacy is implicit within them. If th egoal of one kind of academi c discourse is to constru ct mea nin gful accounts - or in Smith'sterms, to translate the unknown in to the known - the goa l of an alternative kind ofdiscourseis to deconstru c t s lich accounts, to show that, ultimate ly and irredeemably, they miss o ut.Thiscan ofte n be done through crea tive rheto rica l mea ns that ca ll into ques tion the pre tensionsof the discourse at hand , for example, by res ponding to ea rnest attempts at precise defini tionby deliberately play ing with words, blurring their boundar ies and obscuring the ir meanings.A lthough Derrida's brilliance at such deconstruction is read ily acknowledged, it is not clearthat some of his epigones have not devolved into silliness.

The major impact of postmoderni sm has been not so much on the study of re ligion inthe narrow se nse as on theo logy. This makes se nse, both because pos tmode rnism rejectsthe 'modernise pro ject that an 'objec tive ' stud y of religio ns wo uld seem to pres ume , andbecause conte mpo rary natura list discourse o ften seems entire ly at odds with theolog ica lclaim s. (Rece ntl y th eologians and scientists have begun to exp lore a possible merger of thetwo .) In vulgar te rm s, if God can no longe r be found in rat ional accounts, as in the clayswhen philosophers of religion claimed to be able to prove God 's existence by reason alone,perhaps intimations of God can be found in the inevitable limi tations of naturalist discourse.Le ading post-modern theologians include John D. Capu to, John Milbank, and Mark C.Tay lo r. Within the study of religions more narrowl y, perhaps the best representat ive of thisapproach is Tomoko Masuzawa (1993, 2005), who has reread th e hi sto ry of th e study ofre ligion from a postmodern perspec tive .

Post-structural, post-colonial, and feminist currentsMany pos tmodern thinkers have tended to concentrate on language . For some of them,language in (ac t creates the world, and there is no wo rld outsid e language. Such an orienta tiondoes not necessa rily preclude soc ial and ethical reflec tion , but other critica l modes, poststructural, o and fe minist, arose with a morc distinc t o rientation to ward socialcriticism. Perhaps th e leading thinker for this line of thought was Michel Foucault.

Among o ther conce rn s, Fouca ult examined the mann er in which knowledge and powerare mutually implica ted. Powerful institutions and persons create knowl edge in suc h a waythat it pe rpe tu ates and ex tends the ir powe r. At the same time, those who possess know ledgealso possess powe r. Power,knowl edge exercises its govern ance through defining the marg inal


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The study of religions: the last 50 years 47and controlling it in a number of ways . Foucault pur sues the theme th rough the examinationof insti tutions such as psychi atric treatment, hospi ta ls, and prisons, as well as by looking athow what counts as kn owledge, the va rious co nditio ns fo r kn owl edge , have changed overthe centuries . Although Foucault himse lf did little with re ligion I,er se, it should be fa irlyapparent that these ideas prov ide a rich set of possible themes (o r the stud y of re ligions toexplore. Parallel currents of thought particularly important fo r the study of re ligion we repost-coloni alism and feminism.

Derrida and Foucault large ly t hought within the horizons of Europe. In her we ll-knownarticle, 'Can the Sub-Altern Speak?', the Indian thinker and translator of Derrida, Gaya triSpivak (1988). famously re-directed hi s line of thinking in a post-co loni al d irection to talkabout the marginaliza tion of co lonized people, especially wo men. Even large r was the impactof Edward Said's O rienlalism (1978), which in some ways ex tended Fo uca ul t's project beyondthe European frontie r. Th e book examines the va ri ous ways in which O rientalism as adiscourse , including the academic fi e ld known by that name, has im ag ined the people of theMiddle East. According to Sa id, these imag in at io ns are not accurate representations so mu chas the creation of im ages of an 'other' to the European se lf that se rves the Europea n se lf'sown ideolog ica l purposes. Simultaneously, many women, who had largely bee n excludedfrom hi gher educa tion prior to th e tw entie th century, began to examine th e many ways inwhich academi c discourse , including academi c discourse about religions, had bee n narrowlycentred o n men. O nce id entified, such di sco urse eas ily appears as an instrument of contro l.Linking a ll of these approaches toge ther is a perspec tive on human activity that emphasizesthe social constru ct ion of rea lity and id entity, political dominance and cul tural hegemony,and society as a loca tion for suppress ion, app ropriation, and explo itation.Post' stru ctural, postcolonial, and feminist thought each had eno rmo us impact upo n th estudy of religion. It is fairly obvious that religion has se rved to subordinate and excludewomen. For examples , one need only consider the hiring prac tices o( a lmost all churchesprior to the feminist critique or of the Roman Catholic Church and O rthodox synagoguesstill today. Many ea rly feminist thinkers add ressed issues of religion direc tly. Many of themalso wo rked within Chri stian in stitutions or in exp lici t rejec tion o f those in stitutions, andthey were o ften th eo log ians as mu ch as scho lars of rel igions. A mong other names one maynOte Rosemary Radford Ru ether (1 983, 1992), Elisabeth Scheiss ler Fiorenza (1983), and , onthe more radical sid e, Mary Daly (1973, 1978) . Feminism has not , however, been limited toChristiani ty, and in many religio us communities impo rtant women thinkers, such as Ri taGross (I 993 ) in Buddhism and judith Pl askow (1990) in judaism, have emerged to c ri ticizeandrocentrism and patriarchal authori ty, to reread inherited tradi tions, and to reformula tetheir communities ' teac hings and practices. Their work has also had a sa lu taIY impac t onthe study of religions. If at the beg inning of the period under considera tion it was acceptableto equ ate men's re ligioLi s act ivity wi th the re ligious ac tivity of the entire communi ty, it is nolonger so today. A large number of publica tions have appeared devoted to women' s religiouslives . In addition, steps have been taken to encourage women's full par ticipa tion in theacademi c community. O ne example is the Women Scholars Network of the InternationalAssocia tion for the History of Religions, orga ni zed by Rosalind Hackett and Morny joy.

Like feminism, post-co lonial thought has had a major im pact upon the stud y of religion.Said's O rientalism unleashed a reconsideration and critique o f traditional represe ntations no tonly of Arabs, Islam, and the Ancient Near Eas t but al so of people in Asia more ge nerally.Similar dynami cs ca n be found in writing about religions throughout the wo rld. Writingon Islam and Christianity, Talal Asad (1993 ) famously critiqued Clifford Gee rtz's notion of


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48 The st ud y of religions: the last 50 yearsreligion as a cultura l system as being [0 0 rooted in a particular historica l co ntext to be use fulcross;cu iwra lly. Others heVe ex amined the ways in whi ch colonial admin istrators in SouthA sia all ied with certain elements of rhe Indian population to construc t a religion known asHinduism. Donald Lopez (I 998), as we ll as others, has ta lked about the id eological needswhich the Western imagination of Buddhism fu lfils. Berna rd Faure (1991, 1993) has mademuch use of Fouca ult in the study of East Asian Buddhism. The American scholar SamG ill (1987) suggested that the notion that Native American s worshipped Moth er Earth wa slargely an academic creation.

In one way or another, all of these move s represent the introduc tion of the realm of thepoli tical into the study of re ligions. The Chicago scholar Bruce Lincoln (1989, 1994, 2007),influenced as much by Ka rl Marx and Antoni o Gramsci as by post-structural, pos t-co lonial,and feminist th inkers, has produced a body of work interrogatin g, amo ng other topics ,authori ty, power, politics , and ieleo logy in both rel igion and th e study o f re ligio n, includingthe work of Mircea Eliade. Beg inning with Ivan Strenski in 1987, it has become commonto criticize Eliacle on po litical as much as on theoretical gro unds. A hos t o f scholars, amo ngthem Adriana Berge r, Steven Wasserstro m, Daniel Dubuisson (1993; En g. trans. 2006; 2005),and Russell McCutcheon (1997) have nOt only crit icized the political im pli cations of Eliade'stheo ry but have a ttempted to link that criticism to Eliade's activities on behalf of the fascistIron Guard in 1930s Romania. Furthe rm ore, in something of a continuation of the claimsof Wi lfred Ca ntwe ll Smith, the very category of 'religion' itself has also come in for intensescrutiny, and some, including Timothy Fitzge rald (2000, 2007), Daniel Dubuisson (1998; En g.trans. 2003), and Ru sse ll McC utcheon, have advocated abandoning the category altogether.O th ers , including Jonathan Z. Smith and Bru ce Lincoln, have maintained that it cont inuesto have limited utili ty. Although scholars in other parts of the wo rld, such as Southeast Asiaand China, have weighed in on these issues , their voices ha ve not yet bee n incorporated intodiscuss ions by European and North American theorists. The major exception has been S. N.Balagangadhara, but he teaches at the Unive rsity of GheJ1t, Belgium.

New fields of studyIn a review of the work of Bruce Lin coln, Brian Pennington (2005: I) has written, 'Thedeclining hegemony of phenomenology and theology in the stud y of re ligion and the riseof critical methodolog ies in th e wake of post-structuralism, postmodernism, and postcolonia lism have contributed to a discipline that is far more attuned to the production ofknowledge and th e authoriza tion of powe r'. True enough. These movements have also hadat least tw o other major effec ts on the study of rel igions: th e opening o f new fi elds of studyand of new methods o f representation.

The present chapter is probably nOt the bes t place to discuss new fields of study.These arcrepresented by the rest of the chapters in th is book. Nevertheless, it is im portant to nOte thatas a res ult of va rious modes of criticism th at became common during the 1970s, the study ofre ligions has changed tremendously. Some im po rtant shifts have already been noted, such asthe move to include wo men's ex perie l}ces and vo ices within the study o f religions. Anothe rshi ft concerned sources and methods. As it had developed in Europe, th e study of religionswa s heav ily oriented to the examination of texts, especia lly texts that somehow co unted as'classic ', and their histo rical contexts. Today scholars of religions a rc as likely, if not morelikely, to give significant attent ion to many other data sources , including many contemporarymedia of communicatio n, such as radio, televi sion, the internet, and e ve n comic books.


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The study of religions: th e last 50 year s 49Furthermore, scholars prev iously operated, and ofte n still do ope rate, with the notion

. that there is an 'authoritative' or 'correce' ve rsion of a give n re ligion, whether that re ligio nbe juda ism, Ch ristianity, Buddhism, or some other. In one se nse, sc holarship was an effort todiscover the 'correct' form of the va rious rel igions. Today the re is a widespread recognitionthat such 'correct' (o rms only rep resent plays for power and dominat ion. Fo r example, ordinaryBudd hists may practise Budd hism in qui te different ways fro m what one woul d expect fromauthoritative texts and teac hings , and their ideas and prac tices need equa lly to be taken intoaccount . Such recogni tion of plurali ty has led so me to speak in th e plu ral of Christian ities,judaisms, and Buddhisms. It has also led so me to focus on in dividual perform ances ra therthan no rm at ive st ructures for any give n ritual.

Fina lly, du ring the course of the last fi fty years sc holars have beg un to examine topicsconnected with alte rnative conceptions of relig ion. One importan t SOUTce of such topics isdissatisfac tion with a Cartes ian sty le dualism that makes religion a matter fo r the mind orspirit. Scholars have explored ways in which religion invo lves the hum an body as we ll as thehuman mind - corporali ty, sex uali ty, food, and so on-and mate rial rea li ty as we ll as thought.In japan, Europe, and North America there has also bee n considerable interest in studyingnot just religions in their class ica l definitions but in new re ligio us movements.

Representations: crisis and responseIf the new critical modes opened the doors to new topics, they also sparked a c risis ofre presentation. If a scholar wishes to wr ite, but writ ing in the scholar 's fi eld is inev itably anexerci se either in meaninglessness or in cultu ra l appropriat io n, im pe rialism, and o n the mostradical views, vio lence, what is a scho lar to do? T his c risis was by no rn eans limited to thestudy of rel igion. The te rm 'crisis of representation' is taken from the anthropolog ists GeorgeMarcus and Michael Fisher (1986: 7), wh o wrote abo ut a 'c risis of representation in thehurn an sciences' .

Scholars in re ligiOUS studies have responded in at least two ways that might be me ntionedhere, interre ligious dialogue and autobiographical narrative. Both have the e ffec t of insert ingthe scho lar into the narrative and so undercutting an us/them d ichotomy be tween the wri terand the person being wr itten about.

Strictly speaking, neither interre ligio us dialog ue nor autobiog raph ical narrative is simplya response to the crisis of representation in re ligious studies. In terre ligious dialog ue arosefor a variety of reasons. In some se nse it continues the work of Wil fred Cantwe ll Smi th ,but its current is both deeper and wider. Its recent precedents include the l893 Parliamentand less we ll -k nown efforts by Rudolf Otto to c reate an 'interre ligious League' in the 1920s,but it can look back to d isc uss ions in the Mughal emperor Akbar's Ibiidal-khana and beforethat to discuss ions in medieval Spa in between Mu slims, Jews, and Christians. Furtherm ore,inte rrel igious dialogue is not simply an academi c activity but one in which religious bod iesthemselves engage. For ex ample, the Vatican II document, Nos rra Aerate, recommendeddialog ue as the most appropriate way of dealing with people who practise other religions,and there is now in the Vatican a Pontifical Council for Inte rre ligious Dialog ue, once headedby the im portant African card in al Francis Arinze. Among scholars of religion in the narrowsense active in interreligious dialog ue is the Harvard professo r of co mparative religion, DianaEck (1993).

Despite being represented among academi cs who study re ligion, inte rre ligio us dialogueis mos t closely associated with theolog ians. Another strategy whi ch sc holars have employed


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50 The study of religions : the last 50 yearsto negotiate the crisis of rep resentation is to wri te not about others, or only about others,but to write about themselves. Agai n, a utobiographica l re flection is hard ly new to scholarsof religions. Re ligious autobiography has a hi story that goes back, at least in the Christiancontext, to August ine's Co nfessions. It is also a topic on which scholars o f re ligions havedo ne conside rable work . Before telev ision made experiences overseas morc visib ly accessibl e,sc holars, including theolog ians and scholars of religions, often reco unted their experiencesabroad to a wider audience. In addition, a scholar as influential as Mircea Eliade wrote hisautobiography at some length (E liade 198 1, 1988).

Nevertheless, under the im pact of the c risis of representat ion, some scholars haveabandoned the once standard divide between their scholarly work and their autobiog raphi es .They have used autobiography as a presentational mode within their academic writings toa variety o f rheto rical effects, one of the m being to inte rrogate the authoritative gaze of theacademi c expert. In her study of Mama Lo la, a Vodou priestess in New York, the Ame ricanscholar, Karen McCarthy Brown (199 1) prov ided an account not only of her own conversionexperiences but also a fi c tionalized account of her subj ect's biography. While not exactly awo rk in religious studies, Amitav Ghosh's semi -autob iog raphical In an Antiqlle Land (1992)contains much refl ection on religion while reconstructing the geography of the Indian Oceanin medieval times. Robert Orsi, a recent pres ident of the American Academy of Religion,has written an account that interw eaves personal autobiography and family narrative withre fl ections o n his situatio n as a scholar of religions studying the Ca tho licism in which he grewup (Orsi 2005). Autobiog raphica l and other narrative forms have proven ext remely use ful forelucidat ing ' lived religion'.

Science returnsFrom the ir beginnings the social sc iences have studied religions, but their interes t in religionhas waxed and waned. Perhaps twen ty years ago psycholog ists found many other topicsmuc h more interesti ng than re ligio n. Today there is conside rable work being done on thepsychology of religion from a variety of perspectives. Such work, however, is usually housedin other academic units than rel igious studies. It o ften does not make its way into th e 'studyo( religions' narrowly co nce ived.

Within the stud y of religions more narr ow ly, sc ience has occupied a tenuous place, inpart beca use to some extent the field grew from theolog ica l roo ts. A standard trope, whichrece ived much impe tu s from Mircea Eliade , wa s the insistence th at the study of religionsshould be hermene utical, that is, an attempt at understanding other people's mea nings,not exp lanatory, that is, engaged in providing reductive causal explanations of religion.Nevertheless, th roughout much of the period under disc uss ion , a few voices have championedthe need for reduc tive explana tions. They include Hans Penner and Edward Yonan in animportant article from 1972, Robert Segal (1992) in an ope n debate with Daniel Pals, andDon Wiebe (198 1, 1998).

Beg inn ing in the 1990s, two scientific currents have begun to grow within the studyof re ligions. The first seeks to explain rel igion in the terms of rat ional decision making,especially as employed in economic th ink ing. Bea ring some resemblance to Adam Smith'sdiscuss ion of religion in The Wea lth of Nations, this direction began theore tica lly with RodneyStark and W illiam Sim s Ba inbridge's A Theory of Religion (1987) . It is most widely associatedwith the work of Rodney Sta rk and yo unge r co lleagues such as Laurence Iannaccone andRoger Finke (Stark and Finke 2000). Stark et al. tend to address sociolog ical topics, such as


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The study of religions : th e last 50 years 51religious reaffi liat ion and conversion (explai ned by comb ining network th eory with religiOUS

. capital theo ry) and the pos itive effects of a frce re ligious 'market' on rel igious practice .Other scholars, such as II kka Pyys iainen in Fi nl and and Joseph Bulbu lia in New Zealand,are beginning to approach the economi cs of religion from somewhat different pe rspectives.

A second scient ific approach to religion is beginning to receive widespread in ternat ionalattention: cogn itive science, a burgeoning subj ect in many field s at the beginn ing of thet w e n t y ~ f i r century, and a popular one as well. So rn e sc ho lars have in vest igated the ways inwhich physiologica l processes in the brain lead either to mystica l expe riences or to notions ofGod. A mong them are Michael PerSin ge r (1987), who has explored the relationship betweentemporal lobe ep ilepsy and religious expericnce, James Austin (1998) , who has analysed brainstates among Zen practitioners, and Andrew Newberg (Newberg, d'Aqu ili , and Rause 200 1),who has developed a theory of how intense med ita tion and prayer unusua lly arouse certainsys tems within the brain . Another approach works on the level of co ncep ts, among othertop ics exploring the alleged competitive advantage th at re ligious concepts have as 'memes'.Leading rep resentatives of this approach include Pa sca l Boyer (200 I), Robert McCauley andT homas Lawson (2002), Justin Barrett (2004)' and Harvey W hi te house (Whitehouse andLaidlaw 2007).

Some pop ul ar authors, such as Richa rd Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, have emp loyed acogniti ve-scientific emphasis in exp licit, high-profile attacks on religion. Nevertheless, botheconomic and cognitive-scientific analyses have been ofgreat interest to some theologians aswe ll as to scholars of rel igions. Indeed, some leading researchers in the field, such as And rewNewberg and Justin Barrett, have exp licit theologica l agendas.

At the time of writing, scholars of religions seem to be divid ed betwee n two camps, onecamp favouring c ritical cultural studies , the other favour ing morc scientific approaches.A lthough there have been some attempts to synthesize these two orientations, they are intheir very beginning phases.

Final reflectionsIn her awa rd-w inning novel, The lnherilanceoj Loss, Kiran Desai (2006: 269) notes that west ill inhabit a world 'where one side travels to be a se rvant, and the other side travels to betreated like a king'. T he words 'servant' and 'king' are rather harsh, but the dispa rities thatthey po in t to are very real. The current chapter d ivides in to two parts. T he fir st part, thecontextual, di scusses the internationalizat ion of the study of religion. The second part, thetheoretica l, reads as if the st udy of religion were mostly something undertaken by peoplelivin g in Europe and the co untries of the Eu ropean diaspora, most notably, the United Statesand Canada. In part this division reflec ts the inadeq uac ies of the autho r, whose primary baseis in the United States. That inadequacy may itself reflect, howeve r, ce rtain rea lities aboutthe study of rel igions today.

Compa red to their co lleagues in the natural sciences, scholars of re ligions in Europeand the countr ies of the European diaspora are very poo rly funded. Compa red with thei rco lleagues in other parts of the wo rld, particul arly Africa, they have a wea lth of resources atthe ir disposa l. Scholars from the rest of the world frequently do advanced study in Europe andthe United States; the reverse is not often the case, and when it is, those scho lars often findit difficult to get their degrees recognized at home, unl ess they also come with other degreesin hand. The theo ries that scholars most ci te tend to be European and North Ame rica n. Forexample, C hin ese, Korean, and Japanese scholars have been actively discuss ing the work


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52 The study of religions : the last 50 yearsof, fo r example, Mircea Eliade and Jonathan Z. Smi th. By co ntrast , many scholars fro mEu rope or Eu ro pean diaspora count ries who are not C hi na experts might find it d ifficul tto name a single Chi nese theore tician who has been impo rtant in the ir wo rk. Similarly,throughout the world, publicat ion in the United Sta tes or Europe is often taken as a mar kof professional quality. Publication in journals or with presses located elsewhere is generallyless highly valued, and often resul ts in less visibili ty. Gifted scholars fro m o ther parts of theworld often jump at the chance to teac h in Eu rope o r the Uni ted States. Among manypossibilities are, from A fri ca, the Nige rians Jacob O lupona (Harvard) and Afe Adogame(University of Edinburgh), and from India, where th ere are few programmes in re ligiousstudies, many members of the subaltern studies group: Ranaji t Guha (UK, Vienn a), ParthaChatte rjee (Co lumbia, but also Ca lcutta) , Gyan Prakash (Princeton), Dipesh Chakrabarty(Chicago), Sudipta Kaviraj (Columbia), and Gayatri Sp ivak (Columbia) . In o ther word s,when scholars fTO m ot her parts of the wo rld are take n seriously in the so-ca lled Wes t , theyoften move there.In asmuch as th ese dispar ities re fl ect disparities in wea lth, access to resources, and politicaland social power, it may be difficul t to change them through direct action within religious studiesalone. They may change only as other parts of the world assume prominence on the globalstage, as China ap pears [Q be do ing. O ne also suspec ts th at changes in theoretical hegernonywithin the study of religions are not leading bu t lagging changes. That is, they will occur onl yas a result o f, and th erefore afte r, shifts in social , political, and economi c powe r. At the sametime, the study of rel igions con tinues to globalize . At the 2005 Congress of the InternationalAssociation for the History of Re ligions in Tokyo. Japan, new soc iet ies from Gr eece, Romani a,South and Southeast Asia, and Turkel' affiliated with the in ternational body.There are several tensions withi n the study of religion today. O ne has already been brieflynoted, the tension between those who favour critica l cul tural studies and those who favournatural sc ience. A no th er conce rns the tired but appa rently unavoidable division betweentheology and re ligious stu di es. As the preceding su rvey indicates, no t all who count asscholars of relig ions have refra ined fro m re ligious re flection in the ir wo rk. As new scholars -enter discuss ions wi thin the study of religions, whether from other parts of the world or fromo ther parts of the academy, such as the neurosciences, the question of the place of religiouscommitme nt and convict io n within academi c work continues to resur face . Incleed, somescho lars have adopted that ultimate harbingerof contemporaneousness, the pre fix 'post-', andbegun to speak of a 'post-secular' age. The issue of re ligious commitment becomes especiallyimportant when religiously co mmitted people with access to sig ni ficant amounts of privatemoney a ttempt to direct research in direc tions that they find attrac tive. This has happenedin th e case of the social and cognitive scientific study of religion (Templeton Founda tion) andthe study of Hinduism (In fin ity Foundat ion).

Ano ther location of tension is in the relationship between scholars of religions and thebroader public. At the beginnin g of the twe nty-first century, it is often easy to fo rget justhow contentious work in the study of re ligions once was in Europe. The historica l-c ritica lstudy of th e Bible is a good exa mple. In 1839 David Fri ed rich Strauss received a chair at th eUniversity of Zurich, but hi s Ufe of JeSHS was so controversial that he co uld never assumeit. In recent years, commi tted re ligious practitioners fro m o ther traditio ns have begun topay an ention to what scho lars of re ligions are saying about them, and they are not alwayshappy. The most noto rious case may be the critic ism by traditional Hindus, led by RajivMalhotra, of scholars who use Freudianism to examine Hinduism, notably Wend y Donige r,Paul Courtright, and Jeffrey Kri pal (Ramaswamy, de N ico las, and Ba nerjee 2007). There


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The study of re ligions: th e last 50 years 53have, however, been other instances of tension between t r a d i t i o n ~ m i n d e d , po litically activeHindus and sc holars of Hinduism, as well as between scholars and practitioners of otherreligions, such as Sikhs and Native Americans. Unfortunately, these debates have not alw aysbeen conducted according to the norms of academic, or for that matter o n ~ a c a d e m i c ,civility. They have at times led not on ly to threats of violence but also to physical assaultand caused scholars either to sw itch specializations, as Sam G ill has done, or to aba ndonacademia altogether.

There is yet another reason why relat ionships between scholars of religions and thebroader public would seem to be crucial at the beginning of the twenty-first centuty. Withthe shift from elite to mass universities came a shift away from cultural educat ion rootedin the humanities towards advanced technical training rooted in the natural and socialsciences. University studen ts from privileged backgrounds once had the luxury of studyingart, poetry, and religion. Now students all over the world enter higher education looking toimprove their job prospects. Th e place of the human ities in this setting is precarious, andthe study of re ligions perhaps more precarious than other fields. At the same time, eventsat the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries would seem toindicate that even for persons with limited interest in higher education as an end in itse lf,an understanding of religions is useful. Suc h persons may, howeve r, find that usefu lness inpolitica l and commercial purposes to which academics themselves object.

In any case, sc holars of religions have begun to take serious steps to address audiencesoutside the academy. They have served as expert witnesses in courts of law . They haveconsulted for news agencies and the communications media. They have begun to givesignificant attention to the ways in which religion is studied in primary and secondaryeducation . They have even begun to wonder why governments do not consult them moreoften. It is too early to tell what the eventual outcome of these various activities will be.

Notesl ' Lib eral theo log ians had already abandoned such exclusive claims, while orhers were sti ll able

vigorously to assert traditional religious loyalties, as they began to do in the 19705.2 For specific information in this section, readers might consu lt the various chapters of Gregory D.A lles, ed., Religious Studies: A Global View (London: Routledge, 2008).

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L e v i ~ S t r a l l C ., Tristes tro/)iques, Paris, Pio n, 1955.- - Antltro/)ologie stnl ctllrtlle, Paris, Plan, 1958.--W I}ensee s((uvage , Paris, Pion, 1962a.- - Le co rel7l isme aujomd' /lII i, Paris, Pre sses universita ires de France, 1962b.Lin co ln, B., Discourse and ri le Cons rnlcrion ofSoc icl)', New Yo rk , Oxford University Press, 1989.-- Aut/wrir y: Consrn lCtion and Corrosion, Chicago, University of Chicago Press , 1994 .-- Religion, Em/Jire, and Tonure, Chicago, Uni versity of Chicago Press, 2007.Lopez, D. S. , Prisoners of Sll((ngri-La, Chi cago, Univers ity o( Chicago Press , 1998.Madan, 1: N., Images of tile World, Essays on Religion, SecHiarism, and Culture, New Delhi, Oxford

University Press , 2006.Madan, T N. (ed.), Muslim Co mmunities of Sow . Asi((, Nell' De lhi, Vikas, 1976.- - India's Religions, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2004.Marcus, G. E., and M. M. J. Fische r, Anlh ro/Joiog)' as Cuirurtll Critique, Chicago , Unive rsity of Chicago

Pr ess , 1986.Masuzawa, T., 111 Seardl of Dreamrime , Ch icago, University of Chicago Press, 1993.- - Th e Inven/ioll of \\'lorld Religions . Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2005.McCa uley, R. N., and E. T. Law son, Bringing RiH/alto Mind, Ca mbridge , Ca mbridge University Press,2002.McC utcheon, R. T., ManufacU/ring Religion, New Yo rk, Ox fo rd University Press, 1997.Mu ller, EM. , CI.il" from a Gennan WiorksllOl}, vo l. I, London, Longmans, Green, 1867.Newberg, A. B., E. d'Aquili, and V. Rau se, WiltyGod Wion', Go Away, New York, Ballantine Boo ks, 2001.Orsi, R. A., Between Heaven alld Earth, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2005.Penner, H. H., Iml)(lSSe and Heso llllioll, New Yo rk, P. Lan g, 1989.Penner, H. H. (ed.), Te((clring Levi-Strauss , Atlanta, Sc holars Press, 1998.Penner, H. H., and E. A. Yonan, 'ls a Sc ience o( Religion Poss ible!' )oumal of Religioll 52, no. 2 (April

1972): 107- 133.Pennington, Brian, 2005 , 'Introduc tion: A Critical Evaluation of the \Vo rk o f Bruce Lincoln ,' Method((nd Tlreol'Y in ,Ire Swdy of Religion 17, 1- 7.Persinger, M. A., Neuro l"yci lOlogica l Bases of God Beliefs, New York, Praege r, 1987.Pla skow, j., Standing Again at Sinai, San Francisco, Harper & Row, 1990.Rama swamy, K., A. de Nicolas, and A. Banerjee (ed.), Invading ,Ire Sacred, New Delhi, Rupa, 2007.Ruether, R. R., Sexism and God-ta lk, Boston, Beacon Pre ss , 1983.- - Gaia & God, San Francisco, HarperSanFrancisco, 1992.


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The stud y of religio ns: the last 50 years 55Sa id, E. W, Orientalism, New York, Pantheon Books, 1978.Schuss ler Fiorenza, E., In MemOlYof Her, New York, Crossroad, 1983.Segal, R. A" EXl)iaining and huerlJTC !ing Religion, New York, P. Lang, 1992.Smart, N., The Science ofReligion & the Sociology of Knowledge, Princeton, Prince ton University Pre ss ,

1973.- - Tile Long Search, Boston, Little, Brown, 1977.-- \Vor ldviews, Crosscult ural EX /1loml iolls of HlIlI1an Beliefs, New York, Scribner's, 1983.Smith, J. Z., MaJ) Is Not TelTitOlY, Leiden, Bri ll, 1978.-- Imagining Re ligion, Ch icago, Un iversity of Chicago Press , 1982.-- Helming Religion, Chicago, University o(Chicago Press, 2004.Smith, Wilfred Cantwe ll 1959, 'Compm:ltivc re ligion - \Xlh ith er and Why?' in Eliadc, Mircca, and

Kitagawa, Joseph M. (cds), TIle l-iistOlY of Ileligions , Essays in Methodology, Chicago, University ofC hicago Press, pp. 31- 58.-- TIle Meaning and End of Religion, New York , Macmillan , 1963.

- - Towards a World TIIeolo/O" Philadelphia, We stminster, 198 1.Spiro, M. E., 'Religion , Problems of Definition and Explanat ion,' in Michael E. Banton (cd.),An thropological ApJToaches to the s!tldy of Ileligion, London, TavistOck , 1966. pp. 85-126.-- Buddhism and Society, New York, Harper & Row, 1970.Spivak, G., 'Can rl.1C Suba lte rn Speak!' in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (cds), MarxislIl and rhe

hllerl)Tewtion of C ulwre, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1988, pp. 27 1-3 13.Stark, R. , and W. S. Bainbridge, A TheOlY of Religion, New York , I' Lang, 1987.Star k, R., and R. Finke, Acts of Fai,h, Be rkeley, University of Ca lifornia Press, 2000.Strenski, L, Four Th eories of My{1i in Twenricc/t,CenUll)' Histo ry. Basingstoke, Hamp shire, Macmillan ,1987.Tambiah, S. J., Buddhism and the 5/)iri' C ui" in Nortll -East Thailand, Cambridge, Cambridge Univers ityPress, 1970.--A Per/onn",ive A)1J1roach to Ri!t",I , Lond on, British Academy, 198 1.Turner, V. w., The Forest of Symbols, Ithaca, Co rn ell University Press, 1967 .-- The Ritua l Process, London, Routledge & K. Paul, 1969.- - Dramas, Fields, anel Meca/Jtors, IrhacCI, Corne ll Uni vers ity Press , 19-74.\Vhitehousc, H., and J. Laidlaw, Religioll , AncIIToIW/Ogy, and Cognitive Science, Durham, Carolina

Academic Press, 2007.Wiebe, D., Religion and TnIlh, The Hague, Mouton, 1981.- - The Politics of Religious Studies, New York, St. Martin's Press, 1998.Suggested readingA lles, G. D. (ed.), Religious Studies: A Global \lietV, London, Routledge, 2008.

An attempt [ 0 map the study of religions worldwide.Antes,!', A. \XI. Geertz, and R. R. Warne (cds), New A)1J)Toaches to t/Ie Swdy of Heligion, Berlin, Wa lter

de G ruyte r, 2004.Recent chapters on the study of religions, with several on the hi story of the study of re ligions indifferent pans of the wo rl d.

DoleZalova, I. , L. H. Martin, and D. Papoulek (cds), The Academic Swdy of Religion d"ring the Co ld War.New York, P. Lang, 200 I.EspeciaHy important for its deta iled accounts of the study of re ligions in parts of Europe underSoviet influence.

Strenski, I. Thinking about neligion. Malden, MA, Blackwell , 2006 .A good hisrorica i, contextua l account of the study of re ligions. although mostly devoted to thepe riod befo re the Second World Wa r.


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The Routledge Companionto the Study of Religion

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