Religious Studies

A Global View

Gregory D. Alles

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9780415397438
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134152704
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Comparative Religion

Drawing on recent developments in the comparative study of religion, this book explores the trends of the past sixty years from a global perspective. Each of the ten chapters covers the study of religion in a different region of the world, from Europe and the Americas to Asia and the Far East. Topics covered include:

• local background to the study of religions
• formation of religious studies in the region
• important thinkers and writings
• institutions
• interregional diversity and interregional connections
• emerging issues.

This book is a major contribution to the field of religious studies and a valuable reference for scholars, researchers and graduate students.

1
Western Europe

Michael Stausberg

		Prehistory of the study of religion 16
		Searching for the roots
		‘Religion’: a foundational concept
		The sacred and the holy
		The emergence and institutionalization of the study of religion: the 1870s to the 1990s 19
		Dimensions and places of emerging institutionalization 20
		Early reference works and textbooks
		Subsequent institutionalization throughout Europe
		Fascism and National Socialism
		Post-World War II developments
		Scholarly associations and what’s in a name
		The decline of institutionalized Christendom and a field on the rise
		Changing constituencies
		Changing religious background of the scholars
		Developments in scholarship 27
		Post-World War II scholarly journals and reference works
		Textbooks and historical survey works
		The great age of the phenomenological treatises
		Leading figures
		Religious education
		The twilight of the phenomenology of religion
		From structuralism to anthropology
		Beyond disciplinary boundaries 34
		Gender matters
		Emerging issues and perspectives 36
		Acknowledgments 38
		References 38

THE CHAPTERS IN THIS VOLUME REFER TO geographical units. But while Western Europe may appear as a homogeneous unit from an American or Asian perspective, it is in fact rather inhomogeneous. It is divided by linguistic barriers, powerful nation-states, and national cum regional identities.

Linguistically, Western Europe is dominated by Germanic and Romance languages. This division also identifies different intellectual environments. Even in Switzerland and Belgium, where both Romance and Germanic languages enjoy official status, the linguistic areas have different academic traditions. These linguistic–territorial divisions, however, are hardly static. For example, nowadays, few young Scandinavian scholars publish in or read German or French, and many scholars mainly follow international debates only to the extent that they are conducted in English (cf. Antes 2004:44). American scholars are generally better known and enjoy greater respect than colleagues from neighboring countries.

European countries have extremely different religious cultures and state– church relationships. Compare the separation of church and state effected in France in 1905 and the French ideology of laïcité (Baubérot 1998) with the various state and folk churches of Northern Europe or with the separation of church and state in countries such as Germany, Greece, Italy, and Spain, which nevertheless grant the church a special legal and cultural status. All of these different relationships shape the study of religion.

The European Union is currently attempting to internationalize the academic landscape. It is introducing a common grading system, funding the intra-European exchange of students and teaching staff, and making considerable funds available for research. Nevertheless, most research in the humanities is still funded by national research agencies. Furthermore, although there is extensive short-term mobility among students and scholars, recruitment of faculty is almost exclusively done either nationally or occasionally within subcontinental regions.

There is as yet no census of departments and programs in the study of religion similar to that undertaken by the American Academy of Religion or a review of current research similar to the Canadian Corporation for Studies of Religion’s State-of-the-Art Review series (Warne 2004:15–23). Peter Antes (2004) is, however, a useful country by country survey. At present the non-confessional study of religion is taught at universities in more than a dozen countries of Western Europe, and the International Association for the History of Religions (IAHR), founded mainly by European scholars in Amsterdam in 1950, has member-organizations in fifteen Western European nations. (The study of religions is still lacking in Ireland and Portugal.) In 2000 the European Association for the Study of Religions (EASR) was founded. It sponsors several electronic discussion lists, subdivided by language, and arranges a series of annual conferences jointly with one of its member-associations.

Prehistory of the study of religion

The non-confessional study of religion did not fall from heaven any more than the books of revelation it studies did. Its pundits have devised several competing accounts of its origins.

According to Eric Sharpe (1986:1), the emergence of ‘comparative religion’ ‘represented the germination of seeds planted and watered over many centuries of Western history’. Sharpe even suggests that ‘the entire history of the study of religion in the Western world … [i]s an extended prelude’ to modern comparative religion. While that may seem like an illegitimate teleological reconstruction, Sharpe is probably right when he claims that ‘[t]he antecedents of comparative religion were far more numerous, and far more diverse, than is commonly realized’. At the same time, he attributes the eventual emergence of the academic subject to theories of evolution as the ‘one single guiding principle of method which was at the same time also able to satisfy the demands of history and science’ (Sharpe 1986:26).

Searching for the roots

Scholars have identified virtually every major epoch of Western history as the ‘real’ origin of the modern field. In a recent book the Swiss historian of ancient religions, Philippe Borgeaud located the roots of the comparative study of religion in antiquity (Borgeaud 2004). He also argued that the modern history of religions required an act of liberation from religion that resulted from adopting an outsider’s perspective (Borgeaud 2004:207).

In a review of Borgeaud’s book the Israeli Jewish scholar, Guy Stroumsa (2006:259), claims that contacts between Christians, Muslims, and Jews have contributed to ‘the genesis of our modern categories for understanding religion’. Jonathan Z. Smith (2004:364) attempts to re-describe ‘our field … as a child of the Renaissance’, given that the practice of the history of religions ‘is, by and large, a philological endeavor, chiefly concerned with editing, translating and interpreting texts’.

Together with the German Egyptologist Jan Assmann, Stroumsa (2001:89) had earlier identified the seventeenth century as laying the foundations for a critical, impartial study of religion. Nevertheless, the study of religion practiced by learned scholars such as John Selden and Samuel Bochart was confessional, often polemical, almost always religiously and apologetically motivated, and deeply immersed in religious worldviews and frames of reference.

The Enlightenment is a more traditional candidate. In his Haskell Lectures the German historian of religions Kurt Rudolph summarily calls the history of religions ‘a child of the Enlightenment’ (cf. Hutter 2003:3), citing that era’s ‘scientific curiosity and religious tolerance’ (Rudolph 1985:23). J. Samuel Preus credits David Hume’s Natural History of Religion (1757) with the ‘paradigm-shift from a religious to a naturalistic framework for the study of religion’ (Preus 1996:207; cf. Segal 1994).

Roughly a century, however, separates Hume’s Natural History from the academic institutionalization of the study of religion. This observation led the German scholar of religion, Hans Kippenberg, to challenge Rudolph’s thesis and point to the Romantic critique of the Enlightenment as the birth-era of the study of religion (Kippenberg 1991:28–31). He credits Friedrich Schleiermacher’s speeches On Religion (1799) with the decisive change.

Obviously, a substantial gap of three quarters of a century separates Schleiermacher’s speeches from the institutionalization of the study of religion. Hence, other relevant developments and stimuli need to be taken into account. These include a further influx of relevant materials inviting scholarly attention and intellectual domestication; political, religious, and cultural developments, such as the increasing separation of state and religion; industrialization and urbanization; missionary activities and colonialism; groundbreaking achievements within the humanities such as the translation of hitherto unintelligible writing...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Contributors
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Western Europe
• 2 Eastern Europe
• 3 North Africa and West Asia
• 4 Sub-Saharan Africa
• 5 South and Southeast Asia
• 6 Continental East Asia
• 7 Japan
• 8 Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands
• 9 North America
• 10 Latin America1
• Afterword—Toward a global vision of religious studies
• Index