ABSTRACT
Keeping in mind the relationship – suggested from the outset by Mary Douglas’s comments on ‘soil’ and ‘dirt’ – between classifiers, their system of classification, and that which they are classifying, we can see why a number of contemporary scholars have found the essentialist approach to be unproductive inasmuch as it presumes a common identity, or essence, to underlie a thing’s many varied manifestations – the presumption that motivated an earlier scholarly movement known as the Phenomenology of Religion (e.g., see the Dutch scholar, Gerardus van der Leeuw’s classic 1933 work, Religion in Essence and Manifestation). Classification is now seen by some to be an inherently and inescapably political activity – something apparent to some members of the United Nations when, not long after the attacks of September 11, 2001, and during debates on developing a means to define and then combat terrorism, they made a point of arguing that groups considered ‘terrorists’ by one nation might just as easily be conceived as ‘freedom fighters’ by another – all depending on how closely their goals do or do not complement those of the classifier. (This might explain why there is currently no agreed-upon definition of terrorism among the UN’s member states.) So, just as studies of the politics of scholarship have recently appeared throughout the human sciences, so too the study of religion is being re-conceived as a site constituted by choice and practical interests rather than one based on sympathetic spiritual insight (see, for instance, the work of William Arnal, Talal Asad, Bruce Lincoln and Tomoko Masuzawa).
