ABSTRACT
Despite the analytic utility of this act, something that ideally provides broad and comparative frames of reference, redescription is sometimes mistrusted or even completely avoided in the academic study of religion. Redescription is then resisted because, too often, the field works with the default position that religious acts, beliefs, and texts provide direct access to these otherwise unseen sources and, accordingly, they ought to be protected from disinterested scrutiny so as to be appreciated or conserved as somehow innately or inherently “special.” The act of redescription—taking an initial folk or idiosyncratic description and then reframing it in a different and more analytic register—is central to the academic enterprise of the Humanities and should, in theory, be especially so within the study of religion. The term “redescription” is a uniquely English one that gained use across the twentieth century, formed, by derivation, from the noun “description”.
