ABSTRACT
Introduction By the end of the 1990s, the hegemony of phenomenology, as the method of choice for scholars working in religious studies, seemed over. For some such as Segal, the point was that the methods phenomenology privileged were simply incompatible with real, scientific endeavour (Segal 1989). For others such as McCutcheon, the problem was apparently not one of scientific credibility but that those methods had created the very religion they purported to study. However, McCutcheon’s potential radical application of Foucauldian archaeology to the phenomenology of religion was strangely and tellingly undercut by references to ‘naturalism’ (McCutcheon 1997, 6) and ‘explicit and testable theories of religion’ (McCutcheon 1997, 193). For McCutcheon, then, although phenomenology had surreptitiously been busy ‘manufacturing’ its own object of study, there was no
need to panic because the real thing was still out there and accessible so long as the proper methods were to hand.
