ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a brief introduction to debates concerning the nature of history, with some reference to their implications for the study of religion. History as an academic study is under fire at the most profound level. Eric Hobsbawm is deeply worried that 'history is the raw material for nationalist or ethnic or fundamentalist ideologies'. One of the most notable debates in recent discussion of historiography concerns the interaction with the intellectual phenomena associated with titles such as postmodernism, deconstruction, linguistic turn, post-structuralism and so on, and thinkers such as Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard and Rorty. It has been pointed out that in other languages the equivalent word to 'science' can include history, such as the German Wissenschaft which means a body of organized knowledge. Science in this sense is the search for some kind of truth based on broadly agreed practices which can in turn develop this body of knowledge.
