E-Book Overview
In this new book, author Russell McCutcheon offers a powerful critique of traditional scholarship on religion, focusing on multiple interrelated targets. Most prominent among these are the History of Religions as a discipline; Mircea Eliade, one of the founders of the modern discipline; recent scholarship on Eliade's life and politics; contemporary textbooks on world religions; and the oft-repeated bromide that "religion" is a sui generis phenomenon. McCutcheon skillfully analyzes the ideological basis for and service of the sui generis argument, demonstrating that it has been used to constitute the field's object of study in a form that is ahistoric, apolitical, fetishized, and sacrosanct. As such, he charges, it has helped to create departments, jobs, and publication outlets for those who are comfortable with such a suspect construction, while establishing a disciplinary ethos of astounding theoretical naivete and a body of scholarship to match. Surveying the textbooks available for introductory courses in comparative religion, the author finds that they uniformly adopt the sui generis line and all that comes with it. As a result, he argues, they are not just uncritical (which helps keep them popular among the audiences for which they are intended, but badly disserve), but actively inhibit the emergence of critical perspectives and capacities. And on the geo-political scale, he contends, the study of religion as an ahistorical category participates in a larger system of political domination and economic and cultural imperialism.
E-Book Content
Manufacturing Religion
This page intentionally left blank
Manufacturing Religion The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia
Russell T. McCutcheon
New York Oxford OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1997
Oxford University Press Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogota Bombay Buenos Aires Calcutta Cape Town Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madras Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi Paris Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan
Copyright © 1997 by Russell T. McCutcheon Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McCutcheon, Russell T., 1961Manufacturing religion : the discourse on sui generis religion and the politics of nostalgia / Russell T. McCutcheon. p. cm. Based on the author's thesis (doctoral)— University of Toronto, 1995. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-19-510503-6 1. Religion—Study and teaching—Methodology. I. Title. BL41.M35 1997 200'.72—dc20 96-22755
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
This page intentionally left blank
This book is dedicated to my mother Claire (1925-1996), and my brother Elliot (1949-1996), both of whom left us far too soon and too suddenly. It is also dedicated to the woman who continually fills my life with happiness, my wife, friend, and love, Marcia, "all curled up beneath your blanket."
Preface The frontiers of a book are never clear cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network. —Michel Foucault
Where do books such as this come from? Can we trace their path and find their origin? Can we fully acknowledge our d