What Really Happened: Radical Empiricism and the Historian of Religion
Against those who would argue for the reformation of religious studies as a species of the natural sciences, this article contends that there is something about religion that exceeds what can be observed in the material conditions of its existence. Building on the work of ethnographers like Michael...
| Published in: | Journal of the American Academy of Religion |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Oxford University Press
[2016]
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| In: |
Journal of the American Academy of Religion
Year: 2016, Volume: 84, Issue: 4, Pages: 881-902 |
| Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains: | B
Religion
/ History
/ Empiricism
/ Religious studies scholar
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| RelBib Classification: | AA Study of religion |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (Verlag) Volltext (doi) |
| Summary: | Against those who would argue for the reformation of religious studies as a species of the natural sciences, this article contends that there is something about religion that exceeds what can be observed in the material conditions of its existence. Building on the work of ethnographers like Michael Jackson and Robert Orsi who have successfully deployed a Jamesian radical empiricism as a means of attending to and accounting for this experiential excess, this article argues that through the medium of narrative and the mode of juxtaposition, the historian, too, can ply her trade from that medial site between observer and observed. Specifically, the methodological approach to the study of religion proposed here is one that demands the juxtaposition of a multiplicity of incommensurate narratives, including the scholar's own autobiographical narrative, as a means of engineering an epistemologically-productive encounter between the historian and her temporally and spatially distant subject. |
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| ISSN: | 1477-4585 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: American Academy of Religion, Journal of the American Academy of Religion
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1093/jaarel/lfw011 |