Historiography of Religions

Historiography of religions examines how histories of religion have been written, how the discipline itself developed, and how its categories and narratives have changed over time.

Definition

The study of how the history of religions has been conceived, narrated, and institutionalized as a field of inquiry.

Scope

This topic covers the formation of the academic study of religion, the genealogy of key categories such as 'religion' and 'world religions', the influence of colonialism and Enlightenment thought on religious history-writing, and reflexive critiques of the discipline's own assumptions. It describes these scholarly developments and debates without adjudicating the truth claims of any religion.

Core questions

• How did the modern academic study of religion come into being?
• How have the categories used to organize religious history been shaped by their historical context?
• What role did colonial encounter and Enlightenment critique play in constructing 'religion'?
• How can the discipline reflect critically on its own assumptions?

Key theories

Invention of the 'world religions' framework

Masuzawa's analysis of how the now-standard list of world religions was assembled in nineteenth-century European scholarship and preserved earlier universalist and hierarchical assumptions.

Critique of sui generis religion

Russell McCutcheon's argument that treating religion as a unique, self-contained domain insulates it from ordinary historical and political explanation and serves particular interests.

History

The disciplinary history runs from nineteenth-century comparative philology and evolutionary anthropology, through the institutionalization of the field in European and American universities, to the critical and genealogical turn after the 1980s that historicized the discipline's own central categories.

Debates

Whether the discipline's categories are colonial artifacts

Scholars debate the extent to which 'religion' and 'world religions' are products of European, often colonial, history and whether they can be used responsibly for non-Western traditions.

Key figures

• Eric J. Sharpe
• Tomoko Masuzawa
• Russell T. McCutcheon
• Talal Asad

Seminal works

• masuzawa2005
• sharpe1986
• mccutcheon1997

Frequently asked questions

Is 'world religions' a neutral classification?

Many scholars argue it is not; works such as Masuzawa's trace how the scheme encodes nineteenth-century European assumptions about which traditions count and how they rank.

How is historiography of religions different from religious history?

Religious history narrates what happened in religious traditions; historiography of religions studies how such histories are written and how the field that writes them came to be.