What Does the Study of Religion Study?
At the end of the twentieth century, scholars in the academic study of religion made what we might call the reflexive turn, in that they picked up the tools of genealogy, deconstruction, and post-colonial studies and they began in earnest to reflect critically on their own conceptual categories. W...
| Published in: | Harvard theological review |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Electronic Review |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Cambridge Univ. Press
[2018]
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| In: |
Harvard theological review
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| Review of: | Religion, theory, critique (New York : Columbia University Press, 2017) (Schilbrack, Kevin)
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| Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains: | B
Religion
/ Science of Religion
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| RelBib Classification: | AA Study of religion |
| Further subjects: | B
Book review
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| Online Access: |
Volltext (Verlag) Volltext (doi) |
| Summary: | At the end of the twentieth century, scholars in the academic study of religion made what we might call the reflexive turn, in that they picked up the tools of genealogy, deconstruction, and post-colonial studies and they began in earnest to reflect critically on their own conceptual categories. Where did the very concept of religion come from? Whose interests are served by this apparently modern, European, and Christian way of categorizing practices? One way to think about the effect of the reflexive turn is to think of the conceptual vocabulary in religious studies as a window or lens through which scholars had previously been examining the world. What had been taken as natural and transparent now becomes itself the object of study. Richard King calls this the Copernican turn, that is, as he nicely puts it, a turn to focus on the representation that makes the object possible rather than the object that makes the representation possible. The goal of this turn is to denaturalize the concept of religion (King, 1). The reflexive or Copernican turn, in my judgment, is a crucial aspect of social inquiry that scholars of religion should not ignore. But it clearly leads to the question: once one denaturalizes the concept of religion, what does the academic study of religion study? |
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| ISSN: | 1475-4517 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Harvard theological review
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1017/S0017816018000196 |