Product Description

A reference and teaching resource for the study of religion in college and university settings. It provides for students and scholars a collection of specially commissioned articles that comprise a comprehensive and critical guide to the ways in which religious artifacts and practices are defined. The text is a handbook charting the theories and methods that govern the operation of defining and exlpaining certain phenomena as religious and that pays considerable attention to the intellectual, cultural and political environments in which these operations take place. Contents of the guide are arranged under three general headings: "Descriptions", "Explanations" and "Locations". Essays in the first of these deals with specific theoretical and methodological issues around the question of determining what data falls within the domain of religion. The text therefore proceeds on the assumption that "religion" refers to a range of ordinary human practices. The second set of entries describe and evaluate a broad range of theoretical systems and analytic categories by which those artifacts and pratices defined as religious are explained. The aim is to redescribe some traditional approaches and to identify emergent approaches. The third set of essays focus on the contextual directives and constraints that envelop the theoretical operations and systems described in the previous two sections and serve to illustrate that religious studies is not an isolated discipline but one located in more general, multi-disciplinary, study of cultural and social formations.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #511416 in Books
• Published on: 1999-12-16
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 560 pages

From the Author
Description of the Guide to the Study of Religion
Scholars of religion often proceed as if their object of study was immune to the critical tools used throughout the rest of the human sciences. Drawing on a rather different scholarly tradition--one that understands religion to be a thoroughly human enterprise--The Guide to the Study of Religion provides students and scholars alike with a map not to religious practices but, rather, to the tools necessary for imagining religion as an object of academic inquiry. The Guide's thirty-one original essays are arranged in terms of three inter-related moments of analysis: description, explanation, and location. Opening with essays devoted to the acts of definition, classification, comparison, and interpretation, the Guide's authors then move on to investigate the possible ways to explain the cross-cultural similarities and differences that result from descriptions of human behaviour. Not content to understand scholarship on religion as an essentially intellectual activity, the Guide's closing section turns to examine the study of religion itself, a discipline that arose from out of nineteenth-century Europe and that was reborn in North America only a generation ago. By turning attention away from the data of religion, and instead focusing on the categories and tools scholars use in their work, the Guide offers a much needed perspective on the manner in which scholarship on religion takes place.