ABSTRACT
WHEN IN 1963 MIRCEA ELIADE published ‘The History of Religions inRetrospect: 1912 and After’, a survey of the European and North American historiography of religion of the previous fifty years, he mentioned several anthropologists who worked in the United States-among them Paul Radin, Robert Lowie, Franz Boas, Alfred Kroeber, Clyde Kluckhohn and Ruth Benedict-along with two sociologists-Talcott Parsons and Milton Yingerand a Religionswissenschaftler who had written on the sociology of religion, Joachim Wach. But among those who could be classified as historians of religion the only North American scholars named by Eliade were William F. Albright, Erwin Goodenough, and Theodore Gaster. It is not the case, to be sure, that Albright, Goodenough, and Gaster were the only historians dealing with religious materials between 1912 and 1962 in the United States. Among the names that come to mind one may mention the Indologist W. Norman Brown, the Sinologists Herrlee Creel and Holmes Welch, or the scholar of Iranian religions A. V. Williams Jackson. Had Eliade been writing now, the number of anthropologists and sociologists of religion would have multiplied, and the number of historians who dealt with religion, as well as of ‘historiansof-religion’, would have reached such a proportion that an overview such as the present one could have degenerated into a mere listing of names and publications. Moreover, when facing now the task of surveying the state of the study of religion in North America one must deal with approaches to religion unknown to Eliade and his contemporaries-cognitive science, ethology, and economics, among others-as it is increasingly clear that it is only with the help of these disciplines that one can expect to do a measure of justice to the cluster of phenomena generally labeled ‘religion’. Another issue to be considered in an essay such as the present one is that of boundariesnot just the uncertain boundaries among and within traditions, but also disciplinary ones. Regarding the former, one must be mindful that terms taken for granted just a scholarly generation ago-for example, ‘Hinduism’ or ‘Gnosticism’—are now being questioned; or that it is no longer uncommon to find references to ‘Christianities’ rather than to just ‘Christianity’. Indeed, disciplinary reflexivity-some of it, alas, reflex-like-has led to the term ‘religion’ itself being regarded with suspicion, thus contradicting James Beckford’s claim that ‘specialists in comparative religion, history of religions and theology may take it for granted that religions constitute discrete objects sharing generic properties’ (Social Theory and Religion, 2003: 19). At a more practical level, that of the authors to be mentioned, the issue of boundaries is equally relevant, as scholars move between continents and in some cases between-or even among-languages. Be that as it may, for the purposes of this essay we will be concerned with scholars who, regardless of their place of
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If we begin by considering the term ‘religion’, we find that, unlike the situation that prevailed not too long ago, when it was a matter of choosing among the multiple definitions available or of coming up with a new one, now the very validity of the concept of ‘religion’ is being questioned. It is claimed, in some cases, that, despite its pre-Christian Latin source, religio, ‘religion’ is a Western, indeed a Christian, invention, and that therefore ‘religion’ cannot be found beyond the confines of Christendom. Having been formulated for the most part by scholars working in Europe-Timothy Fitzgerald, Daniel Dubuisson, and the late Dario Sabbatucci-these views fall beyond the scope of this essay. In the United States and Canada, the unease or outright rejection of ‘religion’ as a category prevails mainly among academics influenced by Jonathan Smith, some of whose essays, collected in Map is not Territory (1978), Imagining Religion (1992) and Relating Religion (2004), have had a remarkable impact. Some of that impact has been salutary, some of it less so. Insofar as Smith has demanded that the student of religion be ‘relentlessly self-conscious’, he has contributed to the questioning of the assumptions, many of them of a theological nature, that pervade and in some ways constitute the field. But while, regardless of their ultimate cogency-why should relentless selfconsciousness be demanded only of scholars of ‘religion’? How is ‘religion’ different from ‘art’, ‘history’ or ‘sexuality’? How does one know that one is a scholar of ‘religion’ in the first place?—Smith’s theoretical and metatheoretical positions have been advanced in a manner that not infrequently combines insightfulness, erudition and wit, such qualities are seldom found among Smith’s progeny. In many cases, in fact, attempts to argue along Smith’s lines tend to consist of predictable variations upon a theme-the theme being Smith’s notorious, italicized, claim that ‘there is no data for religion’, as well as the two no less notorious dicta that follow it: ‘Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study’, and, ‘Religion has no independent existence apart from the academy’. One of the most deplorable consequences of these statements is that some of Smith’s admirers seem to have taken his words as a prohibition against studying anything that may appear as being ‘religious’ in its own terms; that is, against occupying themselves with any event, person, utterance or object that may appear as not depending upon the scholar’s sovereign agency in order to be considered ‘religious’. The no less unfortunate result of this lack of concern with ‘religions’—however, ‘imagined’, ‘invented’, ‘constructed’, or ‘manufactured’ these may be-is that some academics have ended up occupying themselves in a single-minded manner with the denunciation of the past and present ideologically cum theologically motivated misdeeds of scholars of ‘religion’ as well as of the organizations that comprise them-the latter being, for all practical purposes, the American Academy of Religion. An exception to this trend is found in Benson Saler’s Conceptualizing Religion (1993/1999), an insightful attempt to approach the definition of ‘religion’ from the
It may be pointed out in this context, that acquaintance with scholarly work produced in languages other than English has all but disappeared among a sizable number of North American academics in the field of religion. This is particularly troubling in the case of theory and meta-theory, as some of the most important work in these areas is carried out in languages other than English, especially in German. One can attend interminable debates about the ideological functions of religion as well as about the need for scholars of religion to engage in ‘scientific’, that is, non-theologically colored work not only without ever hearing even a single reference to the stuff that constitutes ‘religion’ but also without anyone ever mentioning Hans Albert’s lucid work or Ernst Topitsch’s exercise in ideology-critique, Vom Ursprung und Ende der Metaphysik, a book published almost fifty years ago (1958). In order to be reminded that books and articles are published outside the English-speaking world-in order, indeed, to be reminded that other languages do exist-one needs to have access at the very least to reviews of books written in a number of languages. While US based journals such as Religious Studies Review and History of Religions regularly publish such reviews, the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, the most widely read journal among North American scholars of religion, no longer considers it necessary to acquaint its readers with the multitude of books published in foreign languages. In addition to contributing to the parochialism of some of the scholarship produced in the United States, this deplorable policy constitutes a step back, as the journal that eventually became the JAAR, namely, the Journal of the National Association of Biblical Instructors, known later as the Journal of Bible and Religion, regularly published reviews of such books, including, in 1952, a couple in Russian and Swedish. This salutary practice continued when the JAAR came into existence in 1967; in fact, reviews of Japanese books appeared in 1968 and 1969, with a good number of foreign language books having been reviewed between 1975 and 1983. Thereafter the number decreased sharply, until after 1996 reviews of books written in languages other than English ceased altogether.
