King - Religion, theory, critique classic and contemporary approaches and methodologies

Religion, Theory, Critique

RELIGION, THEORY, CRITIQUE

Classic and Contemporary Approaches and Methodologies

EDITED BY
RICHARD KING

Columbia University Press

New York

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright 2017 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-51824-6

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: King, Richard, 1966 editor.

Title: Religion, theory, critique: classic and contemporary approaches and methodologies / edited by Richard King.

Description: New York: Columbia University Press [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016058609 | ISBN 9780231145428 (cloth: alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231145435 (pbk.: alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231518246 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Religion.

Classification: LCC BL41 .R367 2017 | DDC 200.7dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016058609

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Cover design: Jordan Wannemacher

For Lila King and Christina Bosanko

Contents

RICHARD KING

DANIEL BOYARIN

WARD BLANTON AND YVONNE SHERWOOD

ARVIND MANDAIR

LOURENS VAN DEN BOSCH

HUGH NICHOLSON

JUNICHI ISOMAE

RANDALL STYERS

JAY GELLER

TYLER ROBERTS

VOLNEY GAY

TERRY REY

TINA BEATTIE

EDWARD P. ANTONIO

YA-PEI KUO

AHMET T. KARAMUSTAFA

ARVIND MANDAIR

JEREMY CARRETTE

JEREMY CARRETTE AND DAVID LAMBERTH

GREGORY ALLES

VOLNEY GAY

ILKKA PYYSIINEN

STEVEN ENGLER AND MARK QUENTIN GARDINER

LUDGER VIEFHUES-BAILEY

VOLNEY GAY

DANIEL DUBUISSON

BRYAN S. TURNER

SIMON SPECK

RANDALL STYERS

JON P. MITCHELL

RICHARD FOX

ULRIKE BRUNOTTE

ULRIKE BRUNOTTE

JON P. MITCHELL

KOCKU VON STUCKRAD

CHARLES E. SCOTT

JAMES L. COX

GREGORY ALLES

WILLIAM ARNAL

TIMOTHY FITZGERALD

NELSON MALDONADO-TORRES

TERRY REY

ELLEN ARMOUR

JEREMY CARRETTE

RANDALL STYERS

DARLENE JUSCHKA

MORNY JOY

NAOMI R. GOLDENBERG

NELSON MALDONADO-TORRES

DAVID CHIDESTER

WILLIAM DAVID HART

VICTOR ANDERSON

VICTOR ANDERSON

WILLIAM T. CAVANAUGH

GREGORY ALLES

JEREMY CARRETTE

T his 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 cannotindeed should notexpect 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 scholars 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.