ABSTRACT
Description, one of the most overused and simultaneously undertheorized methods employed in the academic study of religion, derives simultaneously from the French descripcioun and the Latin description. The primary meaning of both involve listing those observable, characteristic features and details deemed significant to understand a place, item, or person as distinguishable from its surroundings. A description is a possibly idiosyncratic and always partial list of qualities or features that the describer decides to use or otherwise highlight and thereby mark-out as characteristic of something. By the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, description begins to take on the connotation of a representation in art.
