An Unnatural History of Religions

Academia, Post-truth and the Quest for Scientific Knowledge

Leonardo Ambasciano

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781350170247
• eBook ISBN: 9781350062405
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Religion

An Unnatural History of Religions examines the origins, development, and critical issues concerning the history of religion and its relationship with science. The book explores the ideological biases, logical fallacies, and unwarranted beliefs that surround the scientific foundations (or lack thereof) in the academic discipline of the history of religions, positioning them in today's 'post-truth' culture. Leonardo Ambasciano provides the necessary critical background to evaluate the most important theories and working concepts dedicated to the explanation of the historical developments of religion. He covers the most important topics and paradigm shifts in the field, such as phenomenology, postmodernism, and cognitive science. These are taken into consideration chronologically, each time with case studies on topics such as shamanism, gender biases, ethnocentrism, and biological evolution. Ambasciano argues that the roots of post-truth may be deep in human biases, but that historical justifications change each time, resulting in different combinations. The surprising rise of once-fringe beliefs, such as conspiracy theories, pseudoscientific claims, and so-called scientific creationism, demonstrates the alarming influence that post-truth ideas may exert on both politics and society. Recognising them before they spread anew may be the first step towards a scientifically renewed study of religion.

1

An Incoherent Contradiction

A history of the development of Religious Studies as a scientific enterprise in the modern university is an incoherent contradiction that reveals tensions between putative claims to academic status and the actual reality of continuing infiltrations of extrascientific agendas into the field.

Luther H. Martin and Donald Wiebe

A geological divide

‘History of religions’ is an academic label as ambiguous as any. The preposition ‘of’, as Bruce Lincoln once remarked, ‘is not a neutral filler. Rather, it announces a proprietary claim and a relation of encompassment’ (Lincoln 1996: 225). However, the relational nature of this non-impartial filler is not entirely clear. What does ‘of religions’ really mean? Is history thought of as the main driver of religious phenomena (objective genitive)? Are ‘religions’ supposed to provide the framework, the tools, the sense and the meaning of historical research (subjective genitive)? As anyone might guess, this is no linguistic trifle: the two meanings underlie two radically different approaches (see Table 1). Then again, a curious interlocutor – let us say, a prospective student – might feel prompted to ask, does the objective understanding of this not-so neutral label really differ from the study of religions as it is commonly practised in historiographical studies? Is the meaning implied by the subjective genitive all that different from theology? What’s the point of having such a doppelgänger of other disciplines? What are, then, if any, the main features of this weird academic discipline?

For all her doubts, our curious interlocutor might think that, after all, if such a discipline is part and parcel of the contemporary academic panorama, then it should also possess a precise disciplinary charter – which might look something like this. History of religions (HoR, henceforth) has been and still is usually conceived of as the study of religion (singular) and/or religions (plural) via comparative methods aimed at recovering and enhancing similarities (and, more rarely, differences) among religious beliefs and practices from the ancient past to the present day. The discipline aims at gaining an insightful and precise classification of religious phenomena which, in turn, is supposed to enlighten the religious contents of human cultures from the first written documents to the newest religious movements, from the ethnographic accounts of bold nineteenth-century explorers to the religious vagaries of the Internet and the spiritual, digital-age miscellanea available online. The available academic handbooks and the most important works from the past usually enlist a series of features deemed:

Table 1 History of what, exactly?

	Stress on	Method and theory	Adopted by	Theology
Objective genitive	history	historical	Historicism	×
Subjective genitive	religion(s)	religious	Phenomenology	✓

1.to strictly delimit and define the independence of the discipline from other apparently similar fields;

2.to point out the existence of a specific modus operandi;

3.to single out the major accomplishments and benefits deriving from the adoption of such m.o.

And yet, all of this is merely a façade. For all the relief and satisfaction that our curious interlocutor might experience, we should admit, for the sake of professional ethics, that the HoR has instead a rather convoluted history, and an even more complicated academic ID. When we look at the history of the discipline, we can notice that, quite astonishingly, a widespread, shared consensus among the researchers about the nature and scope of the HoR is difficult, if not impossible, to recognize. Indeed, the history of the discipline reveals that the grammatical divide between the objective and the subjective genitives runs like a geological fault across the field, with many shifts and cracks that stretch along the surface. Therefore, in order to navigate this rugged and unstable landscape without getting lost, we could definitely use a map.

Mapping the problematique

As Daniel L. Smail has aptly remarked, ‘metaphors do much of our thinking for us. Evoking whole fields of thought, they communicate complex ideas and images with extraordinary efficiency’ (Smail 2008: 78). In our case, a metaphorical map can be exploited as a cognitive device by which a handy shortcut to highlight the main features that lie unseen is readily provided. The geological divide that characterizes metaphorically the disciplinary landscape is the result of historiographical tension and friction between the two forms of genitives implied in the label ‘history of religions’. As we will see in more detail shortly, during the twentieth century this tension climaxed in the objective genitive being adopted by historicism, while the subjective genitive had been mainly embraced by phenomenology (see Table 1). The various unsuccessful attempts to reconcile these two trends might be imagined as cracks that characterize the fault surface of our metaphorical map. Each one of those labyrinthine cracks implies a specific subset of points of view, ideas, issues and – most of all – problems.

By the juxtaposition of metaphor and reality, when we look at the fault zone depicted on our imaginary geological map, we can identify three main layers or discontinuities which represent what can be probably considered as the main issues of HoR qua discipline (see Figure 1):

Figure 1 The disciplinary landscape: major issues in the history of religions visualized as a geological map

1.As hinted at earlier, there has never been a disciplinary consensus on what the discipline should exactly be. In a recent volume, Swiss historian of religions Philippe Borgeaud has underscored that ‘history of religions is a branch of knowledge that has its own specificity, but it is a branch that presupposes a trans-disciplinary curiosity. In fact, history of religions is dependent (among others) on history […], philology […], sociology, […] ethnology and anthropology, […], psychology’ (Borgeaud 2013: 33–5). In one of the most remarkable accounts of the discipline from the first half of the 1960s, Mircea Eliade, possibly the most influential historian of religions of the past century, wrote that the ‘mission’ of the HoR is indeed ‘to integrate the results of ethnology, psychology and sociology. Yet, in doing so, it will not renounce its own method of investigation or the viewpoint that specifically defines it’ (Eliade 1964: xiii). To be fair, Eliade’s statement may sound a bit confusing since it leaves our curious interlocutor wondering about what this specific ‘viewpoint’ should be when so many different disciplines are involved. It is not just our interlocutor who happens to be confused, for the historians of religions themselves have had their fair share of hassles and headaches to figure out what this discipline should be about. In a remarkably comprehensive panorama of the whole history of the discipline published in 2010, Italian historian of religions Natale Spineto frankly admitted that HoR has an ‘uncertain epistemic foundation’ and that, ‘indeed, the boundaries of the discipline are not very clear: depending on the disciplinary trend, it is possible to expand them to include substantially every field dedicated to the study of religion. Conversely, it is possible to narrow them to indicate a very restricted number of disciplinary schools of thought and perspectives’ (Spineto 2010: 1256). This ‘epistemic patchwork’ definition of HoR as a sort of Frankenstein discipline composed of many heterogeneous pieces, so to speak, is quite common and it is almost always highlighted as something necessary and useful for the wellbeing of the discipline.

2.There has never been a shared disciplinary consensus on what the methods of the HoR should really be. Basically, there are as many methods as historians of religions. ‘History of religions’, according to historian Ioan P. Culianu, ‘is almost never conceived of in the same way by two different scholars’ (Culianu 1978: 18). Why is that? Basically, every major national school of HoR, more or less influenced by the presence of each pre-existing, locally predominant theological tradition, has developed independently a set of specific peculiarities and idiosyncratic features, so much so that the most important branches do not completely overlap in terms of methods and theories. For instance, according to one of the major encyclopaedic sources currently available on the HoR, German Religionswissenschaft is not quite the same as French histoire des religions, and the Italian storia delle religioni does not coincide exactly with the English history of religions (Casadio 2005a; cf. Wheeler-Barclay 2010: 247). Furthermore, there seems to be a lack of interest in resolving such issues. For instance, here is what Christian K. Wedemeyer wrote back in 2010: ‘For some, the study of religion today is precisely attractive because of its intellectual indeterminacy or, to give it a more respectable moniker, its “interdisciplinarity”’ (Wedemeyer 2010: xxv). So, the fact that the historical study of religion is an autonomous branch of academia should be accepted at face value while abiding by the ‘intellectual indeterminacy’ of its methods – which is something weird at best, reprehensible at worst, considering that such disciplinary identity is not the result of any epistemological reflection about cross-disciplinary integration (e.g. O’Rourke, Crowley and Gonnerman 2016). The result is something that, from an institutional point of view, might appear to fly in the face of any disciplinary acceptability.

3.Finally, there has never been a disciplinary consensus on what religion is, must be, or should be. This final point might even be considered the root of all disciplinary evil, as it were, for it is the source of all confusion and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface: Ghosts, Post-truth Despair, and Brandolini’s Law
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Text
• 1 An Incoherent Contradiction
• 2 The Deep History of Comparison
• 3 The Darwinian Road Not Taken
• 4 Goodbye Science
• 5 Eliadology
• 6 The Demolition of the Status Quo
• 7 The Cognitive (R)evolution: The End?
• Epilogue: The Night of Pseudoscience
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright