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What Does the Study of Religion Study?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 July 2018

Kevin Schilbrack
Kevin Schilbrack*
Affiliation:
Appalachian State University
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Extract

At the end of the twentieth century, scholars in the academic study of religion made what we might call “the reflexive turn,” in that they picked up the tools of genealogy, deconstruction, and post-colonial studies and they began in earnest to reflect critically on their own conceptual categories. Where did the very concept of “religion” come from? Whose interests are served by this apparently modern, European, and Christian way of categorizing practices? One way to think about the effect of the reflexive turn is to think of the conceptual vocabulary in religious studies as a window or lens through which scholars had previously been examining the world. What had been taken as natural and transparent now becomes itself the object of study. Richard King calls this “the Copernican turn,” that is, as he nicely puts it, a turn to focus on the representation that makes the object possible rather than the object that makes the representation possible. The goal of this turn is to “denaturalize” the concept of religion (King, 1). The reflexive or Copernican turn, in my judgment, is a crucial aspect of social inquiry that scholars of religion should not ignore. But it clearly leads to the question: once one denaturalizes the concept of “religion,” what does the academic study of religion study?

Type
Review Essay
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 111 , Issue 3 , July 2018 , pp. 451 - 458
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 2018 

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References

1 Daniel Dubuisson (King, 269) also asserts that the “nominalist stance . . . would appear to be indisputable.”

2 Fitzgerald's chapter also includes what I judge to be the weakest critique of the concept of “religion,” namely, the argument that the concept is incoherent, since, if one were to re-classify the “non-religious” as religious (as he recommends), then one could see that the concept is analytically useless: “By reclassifying as ‘religious’ our faith in capital and it's ritual management by state and city functionaries, we have trouble locating the imagined domain of the nonreligious secular at all . . . [and] the term religion becomes so all inclusive as to fade into useless abstraction” (King, 436).

3 Given the insightful discussion by Mark Q. Gardiner and Steven Engler in their chapter on “Semantics” (Stausberg/Engler, ch. 13), it is important to clarify that Casadio does not argue for (and this review essay does not argue for) a representationalist semantics according to which the word “religion” is meaningful only because it represents or names something real. Given an interpretationist semantics, which I endorse, a word can be meaningful whether or not it corresponds to some real object, and so the word “religion” can be meaningful whether or not there are forms of life in the world that the use of the word helps us grasp. The point of the realist argument, rather, is ontological: namely, that the fact that the presence or absence of the word “religion” in a given community has no bearing on whether there is or isn't a form of life “out there” in the world. Such a form of life can be present in a community that lacks the word, and it may be absent in a community that has it. I thank Mark Q. Gardiner for helpful discussions on this point.

4 Nongbri, Brent, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Boyarin develops this history of the emergence of the concept of religion in late antiquity in Barton, Carlin A. and Boyarin, Daniel, Imagine No Religion: How Modern Abstractions Hide Ancient Realities (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, though I would argue that the historical work in that book should have led the authors not to the anti-realist title Imagine No Religion but rather to a realist title like Distinguishing Religion.

6 Smith, Jonathan Z., Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982)Google Scholar xi; idem, Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) 179. I discuss the realist and the anti-realist elements in Smith's work in Schilbrack, Kevin, “A Realist Social Ontology of Religion,” Religion 47:2 (March, 2017) 161–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 It is also worth keeping in mind that when a practice in which one participates is named, or when one names it, it can be changed by being labelled. There is “an epistemological shift” (King, 155) when one names “religion,” just as there is, for instance, when two people who have been socializing with each other name themselves a couple.