Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of NostalgiaOxford University Press, 19 Jun 1997 - 272 halaman 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. |
Isi
| 3 | |
1 Ideological Strategies and the Politics of Nostalgia | 27 |
2 Autonomy Discourses and Social Privilege | 51 |
3 The Debate on the Autonomy of Eliade | 74 |
4 The Poverty of Theory in the Classroom | 101 |
5 The Category Religion in Recent Scholarship | 127 |
6 The Imperial Dynamic and the Discourse on Religion | 158 |
7 Institutional Identity and the Significance of Theory | 192 |
Notes | 215 |
References | 227 |
Index | 243 |
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Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the ... Russell T. McCutcheon Pratinjau terbatas - 1997 |
Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the ... Russell T. McCutcheon Pratinjau terbatas - 1997 |
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Istilah dan frasa umum
academic study analysis aspect of human asserts assumption autonomy beliefs Buddhist Cantwell Smith chapter comparative religion concerning constitutes construct contemporary context Couliano critical critique cultural datum debate defend devotees discipline discourse on religion discourse on sui distinct dominant economic Eliade Eliade's employ essay essence essentialist essentially examined example exclusively fact field Geertz generis claim generis religion hermeneutic hierophanies historical history of religions ideological implications insomuch institutional intellectual interpretation Iron Guard issues Ivan Strenski Manea meaning methodology Mircea Eliade modern myths naturalistic nature normative political practices presumed privilege Quang reading reductionism religious experience religious pluralism religious studies Rennie rituals Romanian sacred Saler scholarly scholars of religion scholarship self-evidently Simply put skyhooks social sociopolitical specific strategies Strenski study of religion suggest sui generis religion symbols Terry Eagleton textbooks texts theological theoretical tradition undefended understand unique Wiebe words world religions writes
Bagian yang populer
Halaman vii - 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.
Halaman 103 - that God is no respecter of persons, but that in every nation he that feareth him and worketh righteousness is accepted with him.
Halaman 81 - Genres are essentially literary institutions, or social contracts between a writer and a specific public, whose function is to specify the proper use of a particular cultural artifact.
Halaman 159 - My own view is that it is most useful to see 'literature' as a name which people give from time to time for different reasons to certain kinds of writing within a whole field of what Michel Foucault has called 'discursive practices', and that if anything is to be an object of study it is this whole field of practices rather than just those sometimes rather obscurely labelled 'literature'.
Halaman 73 - The critique reads backwards from what seems natural, obvious, self-evident, or universal, in order to show that these things have their history, their reasons for being the way they are, their effects on what follows from them, and that the starting point is not a (natural) given but a (cultural) construct, usually blind to itself...
Halaman 12 - For any body of theory concerned with human meaning, value, language, feeling and experience will inevitably engage with broader, deeper beliefs about the nature of human individuals and societies, problems of power and sexuality, interpretations of past history, versions of the present and hopes for the future.
Halaman 47 - ... boy is with her in full embrace, the supports are withdrawn, the logs drop, and the couple is killed. There is the union of male and female again, as they were in the beginning, before the separation took place. There is the union of begetting and death. They are both the same thing. Then the little couple is pulled out and roasted and eaten that very evening.
Halaman 23 - Its basis is that a relation between people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a 'phantom objectivity', an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people.
Halaman 12 - The common ground on which students of religion qua students of religion meet is the realization that the awareness of the numinous or the experience of transcendence (where these happen to exist in religions) are — whatever else they may be — undoubtedly empirical facts of human existence and history, to be studied like all human facts, by the appropriate methods.
Halaman 58 - The first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along with something else. But any object that is infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also as if it must be sui generis and unique. Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. "I am no such thing," it would say; "I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone.
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