Pub Date : 2020-04-01DOI: 10.1163/15700682-12341473
Isabel Laack
In the last decades, the worldview(s) of so-called Indigenous religions have regained academic interest. Scholars of religion, anthropologists, and Indigenous writers engage in a new research field called new animism characterized by a diversity of insider and outsider positions. The field contains immense potential for inspiring general debates in the study of religion because it touches on fundamental questions about hermeneutics, epistemology, epistemic goals, disciplinary identities, and the influence of Western ontology on scientific and academic research. This article aims to draw the attention of scholars of religion to the new animism by contextualizing the field within disciplinary and cultural history, presenting its core theories, analyzing its methodological and epistemological positions, and identifying the central players ands its politically highly charged social contexts with asymmetrical power relations. Finally, it discusses how the new animism challenges general debates within the study of religion and may provocatively stimulate them.
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Pub Date : 2020-01-24DOI: 10.1163/15700682-12341466
M. Lang, R. Kundt
The explanatory gap between the life sciences and the humanities that is present in the study of human phenomena impedes productive interdisciplinary examination that such a complex subject requires. Manifested as epistemological tensions over reductionism vs. holism, nature vs. nurture, and the study of micro vs. macro context, the divergent research approaches in the humanities and the sciences produce separate bodies of knowledge that are difficult to reconcile. To remedy this incommensurability, the article proposes to employ the complex adaptive systems approach, which allows to study specific cultural systems in their ecologies and to account for the myriads of factors that constitute such systems, including nonlinear interactions between these factors and their evolution. On a specific example of religious systems, we show that by studying cultural systems in their contextual variability, mechanistic composition, and evolutionary history, the humanities and the sciences should be able to fruitfully collaborate while avoiding previous pitfalls of excessive reductionism, genetic determinism, and sweeping overgeneralizations, on the one hand, and pitfalls of excessive holism, cultural determinism, and aversion to any generalizations, on the other hand.
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Pub Date : 2020-01-24DOI: 10.1163/15700682-12341468
N. Reeh
This article argues that the problems that comparative religion encountered in the 1980s and onward did not arise from the comparative project as such, but rather from the fact that comparative religion was founded on an analytical strategy that relied on defining religion. In order to overcome these problems and critique of Jonathan Z. Smith, Talal Asad and others, it is proposed that the comparative study of religion could be re-established on the basis of a different analytical strategy and more specifically on the basis of a relational perspective, in which the crucial point of departure is the finding that religions in many periods and cultural settings seem to constitute themselves in relation to at least one significant other religion. In periods and cultural settings, where religions relate to each other, we do in fact have a commonality between all religions, namely the inter-religious relation. This relation can ensure that we are not comparing things that have nothing in common. If the inter-religious relation is the point of departure, the comparative study of religion can be transformed in such a way that it is not overturned by the social constructionism or post-modernism of J. Z. Smith, Talal Asad and others.
本文认为,比较宗教学在20世纪80年代及以后遇到的问题并不是由比较项目本身引起的,而是因为比较宗教学是建立在一种依赖于定义宗教的分析策略之上的。为了克服这些问题和对乔纳森·史密斯(Jonathan Z. Smith)、塔拉勒·阿萨德(Talal Asad)等人的批评,有人建议,宗教的比较研究可以在一种不同的分析策略的基础上重新建立起来,更具体地说,是在关系视角的基础上,其中关键的出发点是发现许多时期和文化背景下的宗教似乎至少与一种重要的其他宗教有关。在宗教相互关联的时期和文化背景中,我们实际上在所有宗教之间都有一个共同点,即宗教间关系。这种关系可以确保我们不是在比较毫无共同之处的事物。如果宗教间关系是出发点,那么宗教比较研究就可以以一种不被J. Z. Smith、Talal Asad等人的社会建构主义或后现代主义所颠覆的方式进行转型。
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Pub Date : 2020-01-24DOI: 10.1163/15700682-12341464
D. G. Robertson
April DeConick’s The Gnostic New Age demonstrates that scholarship of Gnosticism is still entrenched in an Eliadian phenomenological paradigm which essentializes an ahistorical sui generis “Gnosis”. This approach is traceable to the Eranos Circle, particularly Carl G. Jung and Gilles Quispel, and builds certain philosophical and psychoanalytical affinities into an ahistorical religious current. DeConick’ comparison with New Age is tenuous, and misses the important fact that Gnosticism and New Age share specific genealogical antecedents. Interdisciplinary work needs to pay more attention to the theological and colonial implications of categories, or such problematic categories will continue to take root in the gaps between academic specialisms.
April DeConick的《诺斯替主义新时代》表明,诺斯替主义的学术仍然植根于埃利亚现象学范式,该范式将一种非历史的独特“诺斯替主义”本质化。这种方法可以追溯到Eranos Circle,特别是Carl G.Jung和Gilles Quispel,并将某些哲学和精神分析的亲缘关系构建成一股非历史的宗教潮流。DeConick与新时代的比较是脆弱的,并忽略了诺斯替主义和新时代有着特定的谱系前因这一重要事实。跨学科工作需要更多地关注类别的神学和殖民意义,否则这些有问题的类别将继续扎根于学术专业之间的差距。
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Pub Date : 2020-01-16DOI: 10.1163/15700682-12341472
Marcus Moberg
This article highlights the discourse-driven nature of contemporary processes of religious change. Drawing on the textually-oriented discourse theory and discourse analysis of Fairclough supplemented by additional perspectives from organizational discourse studies, the article outlines a discourse-centered analytic framework for the empirical study of the changing discursive practices and modus operandi of contemporary religious organizations. The framework consists of four analytic factors, each of which highlight the role that discourse plays at various levels of processes of religious organizational change. The article demonstrates the application of the framework in actual practice in relation to empirical examples from five traditional Christian churches in three different national contexts, thus bringing the tangible effects of changing discursive practices on the operations and practices of religious organizations into clear focus.
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Pub Date : 2020-01-16DOI: 10.1163/15700682-12341471
S. Fujii
The cognitive science of religion (CSR) is distinctive in its systematic methodology and its interdisciplinary nature. In the field of the study of religion, however, scholars are hardly receptive to CSR because of its “scientific” nature. The reason for this is that CSR is understood as distinct from other studies, nevertheless it has humanistic backgrounds. In order to investigate the intellectual backgrounds of CSR, the paper will describe the initial development of CSR by introducing researches and academic cooperation in the period from the 1990s to the early 2000s. Moreover, by examining academic contexts, what the emergence of CSR brought about to the study of religion will be clarified. CSR emerged as a result of the debate between modernist and postmodernist, connecting various views and resulting in a great shift in the intellectual landscape. This interdisciplinary role can be seen as the most important achievement of CSR.
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Pub Date : 2019-10-31DOI: 10.1163/15700682-12341470
D. Wiebe
This is a manifesto—setting out the framework for the appropriate study of religious thought and practice in the context of the modern university.
这是一份宣言——为在现代大学背景下适当研究宗教思想和实践奠定了框架。
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Pub Date : 2019-10-18DOI: 10.1163/15700682-12341453
B. Purzycki, E. Holland
For at least a century, scholars have argued about whether or not Buddha is considered a god. We treat this question empirically by conducting two ethnographic studies among residents of the Tyva Republic, one of the Buddhist republics in the Russian Federation. Using a mixed methods approach to interrogate the question, this report concludes that Buddha is, in fact, popularly represented as a punitive and moralistic supernatural agent in the republic and demographic factors co-vary with such beliefs. The paper addresses longstanding concerns and situates the results in contemporary social scientific inquiry that addresses questions of when, where, to what degree, and why he is represented as a deity.
{"title":"Buddha as a God: An Empirical Assessment","authors":"B. Purzycki, E. Holland","doi":"10.1163/15700682-12341453","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15700682-12341453","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000For at least a century, scholars have argued about whether or not Buddha is considered a god. We treat this question empirically by conducting two ethnographic studies among residents of the Tyva Republic, one of the Buddhist republics in the Russian Federation. Using a mixed methods approach to interrogate the question, this report concludes that Buddha is, in fact, popularly represented as a punitive and moralistic supernatural agent in the republic and demographic factors co-vary with such beliefs. The paper addresses longstanding concerns and situates the results in contemporary social scientific inquiry that addresses questions of when, where, to what degree, and why he is represented as a deity.","PeriodicalId":44982,"journal":{"name":"Method & Theory in the Study of Religion","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2019-10-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/15700682-12341453","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43358238","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-10-18DOI: 10.1163/15700682-12341452
L. Martin
I have spent a number of years focusing my research on the Roman Cults of Mithras. In this autobiographical reflection on that study, I consider the relationship between research on a specific, if perhaps obscure, religious tradition and methodological and theoretical issues in historical and comparative studies of religion generally.
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Pub Date : 2019-10-18DOI: 10.1163/15700682-12341465
Tenzan Eaghll
This essay offers a critique of how “religion” is defined and studied in the academic field of religion and film, and calls for a more nuanced application of ideological analysis to the subject. Surveying the dominant scholarship in the field, it exposes a tendency to provide either theological or mythological definitions of religion and to privilege the category as something sui generis—a unique, special, or “spiritual” domain of things in the world. Moreover, it shows how this scholarship disparages ideological analysis as reductive, abstract, and elite, and fails to consider how religion itself functions ideologically in film and film criticism. Drawing upon the work of critical scholars of religion to support this latter claim, as well as contemporary film studies theory, the article closes with a call for a more nuanced understanding of how ideology is constructed at both an individual and cinematic level.
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