Publisher's Synopsis
While there is healthy discussion on the history and politics of the category 'religion', there is surprisingly little debate on the history and politics of the institutional site within which such debate becomes possible in the first place: namely, academic Departments of Religious Studies or Study of Religions. This volume examines the politics of 'Religious Studies' or 'Study of Religions' as an academic disciplinary category and departmental formation in universities and colleges in the second half of the twentieth century. It sets out the important, ongoing debate on the nature and rationale of the study of religion(s) as a disciplinary formation, which it treats as a particular Euro-American problem in terms of genesis and political development. The selection of readings is drawn from three geopolitical regions - North America, the UK, and Northern Europe - which historically constitute the institutional matrix of Religious Studies as a contemporary disciplinary formation and which have therefore come to define its parameters and constraints: what it can and cannot say and do. Each reading therefore outlines and defends, implicitly or explicitly, a particular methodology for Religious Studies as a meta-field of enquiry. The Reader takes the resultant looseness, even ambiguity, of this sum of disciplinary constructions of Religious Studies as its basic problem or datum, and presents a reflexive, contextualizing approach to crucial questions such as: What exactly is Religious Studies? Is it a science or an art? Where does it come from? Who devised it and developed it? What is it for? What makes it different from Theology or Cultural Studies? What is its role within the public university? These and related questions on the history and politics of disciplinary formation are tackled through a series of interconnected readings from the 1950s to the present day by key international scholars.
