ABSTRACT
Steven Wasserstrom's fine study, Religion after Religion, may be an example of genealogy written with the motivation of identifying pathology, but it probably makes little sense to suggest that he entered into it as a result of identification. As in the study of biological descent, genealogy is an open-ended, interest-driven enterprise, and there is no reason to expect that the construction of scholarly genealogies is any different. In examining genealogies for the study of religions outside Europe and North America, what we stand to gain is in part, not only some recognition of the processes by which that study has emerged in various parts of the world but also some broader understanding of that study's distinctive characteristics. For in reflecting on scholarly practices outside Europe and North America we confront, among other things, the difference between science and non-science, between the study of religions and other forms of discourse about them, in greater complexity.
