ABSTRACT
DESPITE THE INCLUSION OF Mircea Eliade in major histories of the historyof religions (e.g. Michaels [ed.] 1997), and even Eliade’s stature as a classical figure in that history, Eastern Europe is perhaps the part of the world that is both most promising and most deceptive for a cultural history of the study of religion. There is no study of Eastern European intellectual history comparable to Nineteenth Century Religious Thought in the West (Smart et al., 1985), and there is also virtually no study of religious studies in Eastern Europe comparable to studies of the field in Western Europe, North America, Japan, South Africa, and Australia by prominent scholars of religion aware of and interested in the history of their field. Curiously, many Eastern European scholars interested in the local background of their discipline can recount better the history of the field in Western than in Eastern Europe. The following preliminary sketch, in many respects unprecedented, is of necessity more modest than already classic or recent research, such as Mircea Eliade (1963), Jacques Waardenburg (1974), Eric J. Sharpe (1986), Hans G. Kippenberg (1997/2002), Arie L. Molendijk and Peter Pels, eds (1998), Gregory D. Alles (2005), and Giovanni Casadio (2005). It is, I hope, only a beginning. But it does try to go beyond the contemporary scholarly preoccupation of simply discussing ‘The Academic Study of Religion during the Cold War’ (DoleÏalová, Martin, and Papou‰ek [eds] 2001), followed by an attempt to discern the hottest academic pursuits now that the Berlin wall has fallen and the Iron Curtain has progressively dissolved.
