STUDY Flashcards
Leuba’s ‘Psychological Study of Religion’ (1912)
listed over fifty different definitions
- illustrating that there is no concept or ‘sui generis’ which is unique to religion and which designates it as a specific category into which things may be
religious/non-religious
the assumption that ‘religion’ exists, presupposes that it is distinguishable from culture, and thus that the ‘religious’ and ‘non-religious’ aspects of life can be easily identified
church and state separation
separation between ‘church and state’ is non-existent as ‘religion’ is intimately woven into the very fabric of the law, ritual and ethics (as with Islam’s ‘Sharia’ and Hinduism’s ‘caste’ system
origin in western colonial history
sought to apply the term ‘religion’ to new cultures they encountered as a means of better understanding the similarities and differences they shared, demonstrating a ‘universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves… in order to bring them nearer to a resemblance with ourselves” TYLOR
consequences of western/colonial concept of religion
forcing an equivalency between them and applying their standards and categorisations, to societies in which there was often no direct parallel, ‘distort(ing) what it seeks to illuminate’ (Smith 1983)
christian/wester ‘religion’
Fitzgerald, Timothy
‘cognitive imperialism’
Because of its Christian origin, there is a tendency to assume that ‘religion’ is ‘anything that sufficiently resembles modern Protestant Christianity’ and therefore that it is fundamentally about belief in a God, spiritual beings (Tylor), or ‘a transcendent intelligent being who gives purpose and meaning to human history
protestant soteriological assumption
Another common assumption deriving from Protestantism, is that ‘religion’ is about soteriology, and is about an ‘personal quest for salvation located in a transcendent realm.’12 However, this idea that it is a personal and individual experience contradicts ideas such as the ‘caste’ system in India which consider religion as much an outward practice as an inward meditation
religion as universal
The assumption that ‘religion’ is a universal feature of every culture stems from a modern, western, Christian understanding of religion, which assumes a distinction between ‘religion’ and the ‘secular’ within all societies
divide between religious and secular
ritual practices ‘permeate social institutions
- Islam - the religion is intricately interwoven into law and behaviour,
D.CHIDESTER
the dichotomy between the ‘religious’ and the ‘secular’ became a means of justifying a mass empire and colonisation, as ‘religion’ was associated with the ‘primitive,’ with ideas of ‘savagery,’ and ‘simplicity,’ whilst the ‘secular’ was synonymous with modernity, metropolitanism and forward thinking.17 We have since become accustomed to this idea that the relationship between the ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ within a society are in some way illustrative of its progression into modernity
HUME
As Hume has put forward, ‘it is not universal,not is there commonality: no two nations, and scarce any two men, have ever agreed precisely the same sentiments… Religion fails the minimal requirements for innateness, that it be absolutely universal in all nations and ages and has a ‘precise’ determinable object, which it inflexibly pursues
FOUCAULT
‘common locus’ (CL) or similarity between those things, and this CL maybe different for different people
The categorisation of objects, concepts and institutions into groups is not fixed, but is result of the time/place in which you live and is affected by historical power relations and political effects.
Order itself is non- existent, and categorisations, similarities and differences exist only in ‘the grid created by a glance’ and we shall ‘never succeed in defining a stable relation of contained to container between each of these categories and that which includes them all.’
additional set of rules as well.
An episteme is a system of thought and knowledge that operates beneath the consciousness of individuals and defines the conceptual limits and structures of the system
E.J SHARPE
asked his students to define it they offered a conflicting range of answers , yet people can
generally agree on what is accepted under its umbrella.
Perhaps, the meaning of the word is ‘its use in the language,’ and because of its extensive use throughout culture we are intuitively aware of that which it designates without requiring a formal definition or criteria.
Yet this supposed predisposition to understand what it means without formal articulation, is influenced by and potentially even stems from its historical usage and its problematic history, and any definition should therefore draw attention to this facT
consider foucault=
If we then consider Fitzgerald argumentation, it seems that the episteme in the sub-culture of religious studies is a problematic, Euro-centric one.
J.Z. SMITH
there is no data for religion
‘it is created for the scholars analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalisation; religion has no independent existence apart from the academy’
