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The Ideology of Religious Studies, by Timothy Fitzgerald
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In recent years there has been an intensifying debate within the religious studies community about the validity of religion as an analytical category. In this book Fitzgerald sides with those who argue that the concept of religion itself should be abandoned. On the basis of his own research in India and Japan, and through a detailed analysis of the use of religion in a wide range of scholarly texts, the author maintains that the comparative study of religion is really a form of liberal ecumenical theology. By pretending to be a science, religion significantly distorts socio-cultural analysis. He suggest, however, that religious studies can be re-represented in a way which opens up new and productive theoretical connections with anthropology and cultural and literary studies.
- Sales Rank: #2008005 in eBooks
- Published on: 1999-12-16
- Released on: 1999-12-16
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review
"A welcome critique of the dubious products marketed by an industry whose shares, Fitzgerald claims, are jointly owned by theologians and practitioners of religious studies." Religious Studies
From the Inside Flap
The main thesis of this book is that ‘religion’ is not a genuine analytical category since it does no useful work in helping us to understand the world we live in. While it appears to have something important and meaningful to say about societies and cultures and personal experiences, when one looks at its actual use in a wide spectrum of descriptive and analytical contexts it becomes clear that so much is included in the term that it becomes indistinguishable from ‘culture’. It also fails to specify any distinctive kind of experience or social institution. As such, like a bottle-neck, it inhibits and hinders the flow of intellectual development in the humanities.
According to the author, Timothy Fitzgerald, the long-standing debates about the validity of ‘religion’ as an analytical category which have been taking place in the religious studies community have been circular. One reason for this is that the ideological distinction between ‘religion’ and ‘the secular’ has been so comprehensively institutionalised in western social systems that it appears as being ‘in the nature of things.’ However, many religion scholars themselves have had serious doubts about what constitutes their field of study. After failing to arrive at any consensus about what definitional criteria distinguishes religion from non-religion, or at what analytical level the term is being used, many scholars have virtually claimed that it is self-validating. Its meaningfulness is guaranteed by its use. We all know what we mean, otherwise we wouldn’t go on talking about it. As such the term is so comprehensively embedded in the language game that it inevitably appears as self-justifying to those who employ it and, indeed, to those who are employed by it.
In this book Fitzgerald widens the cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural scope of the analysis, looking at texts, ostensibly about ‘religion’, produced by religionists, anthropologists, historians and others. By analysing its multiple uses, the author demonstrates that the continued faith in the category as an analytical tool and as the basis for distinct academic departments is illusory, and cannot be justified by any supposed analytical gains. He shows the confusions caused in the analysis of social institutions in India and Japan by the adoption of the modern western distinction between religion and non-religion, and the consequent conflict in those cultures between indigenous and western political, juridical and intellectual values. By critically rethinking ‘religion’ scholars can contribute to the wider task of reconstructing western categories, thus opening the academic agenda to new insights and understandings about human values and institutions.
About the Author
Timothy Fitzgerald is at University of Stirling.
Most helpful customer reviews
14 of 15 people found the following review helpful.
Good but loaded
By Perry C. Robinson
Fitzgerald's bk is an example of the widespread feeling of uneasiness in a variety of academic fields concerning supposed neutral positions from which to evaluate the data in their respective fields. With scholars coming from a variety of incompatible metaphysical and other philosophical commitments it becomes increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to provide a neutral standpoint from which to adjudicate rival claims. In short, the term "religion" cannot possibly pick out some theory neutral concept with clearly necessary and sufficient conditions. The author persuasively argues that if religion is to function as a useful and neutral term it ends up covering so many phenomena as to loose any meaning. (Is Marxism a religion?, Gardening?, etc.) He treats various attempts to save the concept of "religion" such as Wittgenstein's Family Resemblance theory and I believe shows that such attempts fail because the Family "resemblance" is stretched so far as to be "useless." We are much better of, the author concludes, with dividing up the analytical work that the concept of religion supposedly did and assigning that work to a variety of fields.
The one major draw back of the work is that much of the authors' argument is steeped, he thinks necessarily, in a Marxist or Critical Theorist framework. Which is great if one is a Marxist. But the argument could be made just as easily without the Marxist framework and jargon. If you can look past the Marxist framing of the argument, the book offers a good argument for two possible directions. Either the re-theologizing relative to some theology of religious studies (a route that the author doesn't seem to want take) or of getting rid of the concept of religion altogether, the authors preferred route. Those interested in parallel debates in contemporary Analytic philosophy over the concept of Justification (see Alston's "Epistemic Desiderata" [article]) or debates over Truth Pluralism and relativism (see Lynch's "Truth in Context" [book]) will find data here and parallel arguments. Also those of more Continental persuasion will find this text germane to the debates over realism/anti-realism (Rorty & Putnam), "Play" in Derrida, and problems in Semiotics/Structuralism.
2 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
More powerful version of Asad
By Avery
I'm the Fitzgerald advocate on my campus and carried Discourse on Civility and Barbarity everywhere I went last month. This is the book I would recommend, though. The best part is not his theory, which is basically Talal Asad simplified and polemicized for rhetorical effect, but his crazy examples from all over the field. To uncover the ideology crawling under the rocks he ignores the fussiness of (pro-category) postmodern theory and instead examines introductory texts for college students. To show where the religious category doesn't make sense, he takes us to Japan and India. It's an extremely entertaining read and your faith in Geertz will be shaken. Personally, I think that studying religions rather than ideologies at this point in the academic world is a little nuts.
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