Book Description

This volume collects select papers on methodology in the study of religion that were originally presented at the XVIIth Congress of the International Association for the History of Religions, held in Mexico City in 1995. Granted the status of adjunct proceedings for the Congress, the collection opens with the editors’ detailed survey of the longstanding importance of discussions on methodology within the IAHR. The twenty-one essays which follow examine religion and the history of the study of religion within a variety of theoretical contexts. The essays are organized in terms of three general sub-divisions: general issues in methodology (from the impact of both postmodernism and reflexive anthropology on the study of religion to the politics of religious studies as practiced in different national settings); reflections on the categories commonly employed by scholars working in the field (e.g., “religion,” “syncretism,” “gender,” “New Religious Movements,” “sacred,” “power,” “experience,” etc.), and finally, the collection ends with a review symposium on one of the more sophisticated recent treatments of the problem of defining religion, Benson Saler’s Conceptualizing Religion (Brill, 1993). Despite carrying out their work in a variety of settings—from Denmark and Finland, to Britain, Switzerland, Germany, Canada, the USA, and Mexico—the authors all model a similar approach to studying religion as but one instance of human culture.