ABSTRACT
With some of the techniques of discursive control and constraint used in helping to establish this discipline fresh in our minds, I turn now to an analysis of a contemporary document: the American Academy of Religion’s (AAR) annual research interest survey that divides, and in some cases then subdivides, the study of religion into four main areas. Although this chapter was first inspired by the AAR’s 1997 research interest survey, since that time the survey has not changed in any significant way as far as I can tell (though it is now available to members on line; while the content has remained, the form has changed). In these surveys the discipline is divided into four parts: historical periods, geographic areas, traditions, and approaches and/or fields. My aim in this chapter is to examine the AAR research interest survey as a case study in the way a discipline is understood by some of its practitioners, an understanding that betrays the general bankruptcy of critical intelligence that has now come to comprise the dominant manner in which religion is studied in a public setting. Although one should of course not put too much stock in the significance of this one survey – a survey possibly devised to determine which members mailing list to sell to which advertiser/publisher/book seller – the confused and seemingly arbitrary nature of its classificatory scheme confirms some of the problems already documented in the previous chapters.
