Empire of Religion

Imperialism and Comparative Religion

David Chidester

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780226117430, 9780226117263
• eBook ISBN: 9780226117577
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: African History

How is knowledge about religion and religions produced, and how is that knowledge authenticated and circulated? David Chidester seeks to answer these questions in Empire of Religion, documenting and analyzing the emergence of a science of comparative religion in Great Britain during the second half of the nineteenth century and its complex relations to the colonial situation in southern Africa. In the process, Chidester provides a counterhistory of the academic study of religion, an alternative to standard accounts that have failed to link the field of comparative religion with either the power relations or the historical contingencies of the imperial project.
 
In developing a material history of the study of religion, Chidester documents the importance of African religion, the persistence of the divide between savagery and civilization, and the salience of mediations—imperial, colonial, and indigenous—in which knowledge about religions was produced. He then identifies the recurrence of these mediations in a number of case studies, including Friedrich Max Müller's dependence on colonial experts, H. Rider Haggard and John Buchan's fictional accounts of African religion, and W. E. B. Du Bois's studies of African religion. By reclaiming these theorists for this history, Chidester shows that race, rather than theology, was formative in the emerging study of religion in Europe and North America. Sure to be controversial, Empire of Religion is a major contribution to the field of comparative religious studies.

Index

Abdurahman, Abdullah, 55, 182

Ackerman, Robert, 166

Adams, Hannah, 289

Adonis, 246, 302

African Americans: and African religion, xvi, 193–94, 202–4, 208–10, 214, 220–21; and Christianity, 203–4, 208–10, 220–21; and emotional religion, 296–98; and Harlem Renaissance, 212, 215; as “in the way,” 290; and labor, 288; and magic, 197; and primitive religion, 292, 296–99, 306–7

African Choir, 21, 35

African National Congress, 20, 22, 183

African Peoples Organization, 182

African traditional religion, 18–19, 82, 219

Agassiz, Louis, 266

Ahriman, 306

Ahura Mazda, 306

Akbar, Jalāl-ud-Dīn Muhammad, 1–2, 270

Akkadians, 300

Alexander VI, Pope, 92

Algeria, 221

Allen, J. W., 239

Alles, Gregory D., 206

Allison, James, 278

amantungwa, 21

American Board for Foreign Missions, 230

American Folk-Lore Society, 296

American Lectures on the History of Religions, 289, 292, 300

ancestors: and ancestral religion, 73, 75–82; and diviners, 232; and dreams, 112, 114–16, 234, 279; as human gods, 180–81; and mines, 179; and nature mysticism, 266–67; and origin of religion, 127; and psychoanalysis, 234–35; and ritual, 172–75; sacralized, 18; and sacrifice, 234; and sneezing, 118–19; and worship, 42. See also Itongo

Andaman Islanders, 98, 126, 139

Andersson, Charles John, 167–68, 225

Anesaki, Masaharu, 29

Anglican, 2, 9, 27, 39, 67, 69, 75, 81, 228–29, 264

Anglo-Boer War. See South African War

Anglo-Zulu War, 8, 20, 148

Anidjar, Gil, 301

animism: and Dickens, 156; and Du Bois, xvi, 198; and fiction, 156–57; and imperialism, 121, 157; and materialism, 121–22; and Melanesia, 132; and Mesopotamia, 302; and Molema, 241; and nat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• One. Expanding Empire
• Two. Imperial, Colonial, and Indigenous
• Three. Classify and Conquer
• Four. Animals and Animism
• Five. Myths and Fictions
• Six. Ritual and Magic
• Seven. Humanity and Divinity
• Eight. Thinking Black
• Nine. Spirit of Empire
• Ten. Enduring Empire
• Notes
• Index