Reflections on Tradition and Inquiry in the Study of Religions (original) (raw)
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Striating Difference : From “ Ceremonies and Customs ” to World Religions
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O bservers of the academic scene in the united states pertaining to the study of religion would doubtless recognize a curiously twinned structure of the field, represented by two learned societies that seem to couple and decouple on various occasions, engage and disengage regularly, and not infrequently quarrel. These two bodies, the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and the Society for Biblical Literature (SBL), are not symmetrical either in size or in scope. As with any deeply entrenched division of long standing, moreover, they do not agree on the nature of the difference that divides them. That said, one way of characterizing this division that might be deemed relatively uncontroversial may be that the former organization claims or aspires to be global and pluralistic in the coverage of the subject, whereas the latter is essentially monocentric, if not also centripetal, in the sense that it is focused on a particular legacy, namely, the biblical-broad, expansive, and diversified though it may be within itself. All this, to be sure, may be but a matter of local curiosity, a state of affairs sufficiently obscure and trivial for most outsiders, I presume, to feel perfectly at liberty to ignore or to remain confused about. It is certainly not my object here to discuss these scholarly bodies, explain their relation, or arbitrate between them. Rather, I draw attention to this regional condition as a backdrop to announcing my actual intention. This latter is, above all, to consider the dominant paradigm that governs our customary thinking about religious diversity today, or what I am inclined to call more generally the pluralist regime for organizing and regulating difference. In this essay I
International Handbook of Practical Theology
Anthropologya nd Religion 1C ulturea nd Religion Starting from the anthropologicallyorientatedc onception that culture, as the world of things, and of people'srelationships with them, "does make human subjects what they are" (Scharfe 2002,2 2; o.t.), the issue outlinest he most important theoretical tendencies,m ethodological specificities, and positions in scholarlyd iscussions about culturea nd religion. The focus is on the field of Cultural anthropology/European ethnologya nd in the German-languagef ield once called Volkskunde since the late 1950s. This historical view underlines subtextual implications of imprinting through internalised denominational, theological knowledge in the sciences of Religion. Foran ethnographic approach within culturala nthropology, and for analysis from the perspective of historical, social,a nd cultural studies, therei saneed to explore the terminological structures determining these disciplinest oseek to identify how religion becomes visibleasthe object of communication. In this way, we can understand and accept the polyphonya nd hybridity of academic discourse and its practicesi nc onnection with Religion. OpenAccess. ©2 022A ngela Treiber,p ublished by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative CommonsA ttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.