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Books > Humanities > Religion & beliefs > General > Comparative religion
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Discourse on Civility and Barbarity (Paperback)
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Discourse on Civility and Barbarity (Paperback)
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In recent years scholars have begun to question the usefulness of
the category of ''religion'' to describe a distinctive form of
human experience and behavior. In his last book, The Ideology of
Religious Studies (OUP 2000), Timothy Fitzgerald argued that
''religion'' was not a private area of human existence that could
be separated from the public realm and that the study of religion
as such was thus impossibility. In this new book he examines a wide
range of English-language texts to show how religion became
transformed from a very specific category indigenous to Christian
culture into a universalist claim about human nature and society.
These claims, he shows, are implied by and frequently explicit in
theories and methods of comparative religion. But they are also
tacitly reproduced throughout the humanities in the relatively
indiscriminate use of ''religion'' as an a priori valid
cross-cultural analytical concept, for example in historiography,
sociology, and social anthropology. Fitzgerald seeks to link the
argument about religion to the parallel formation of the
''non-religious'' and such dichotomies as church-state,
sacred-profane, ecclesiastical-civil, spiritual-temporal,
supernatural-natural, and irrational-rational. Part of his argument
is that the category ''religion'' has a different logic compared to
the category ''sacred,'' but the two have been consistently
confused by major writers, including Durkheim and Eliade.
Fitzgerald contends that ''religion'' imagined as a private belief
in the supernatural was a necessary conceptual space for the
simultaneous imagining of ''secular'' practices and institutions
such as politics, economics, and the Nation State. The invention of
''religion'' as a universal type of experience, practice, and
institution was partly the result of sacralizing new concepts of
exchange, ownership, and labor practices, applying ''scientific''
rationality to human behavior, administering the colonies and
classifying native institutions. In contrast, shows Fitzgerald, the
sacred-profane dichotomy has a different logic of use.
General
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