Decolonizing “the Data” of Religious Studies: A Case against the Worldview Model of Difference

Abstract

Challenging the false neutrality of secularism, J. Z. Smith (1988) declared that between “religion” and “religious studies” there is “no difference at all.” The subsequent rise of area studies matched the decline of comparative programs whose underwriting logic faltered under postcolonial scrutiny. This turn toward particularity and data expansion was a way of reckoning with the ethnocentric universalizing of modern social theory. Today, scholars in both religious studies and anthropology worry about how ethnocentrism persists in the very form of “the data.” However, the former have largely misunderstood the contributions of anthropology’s ontological turn—specifically the “radical” variant “perspectivism”—to disciplinary reform. I explain why perspectivists suggest replacing talk of multiple views with talk of multiple worlds to model a genuine alternative to cultural relativism.