Religion and the SecularHistorical and Colonial Formations
Edited by: Timothy Fitzgerald
| Hardback Price £70.00/$125.00 Paperback Price £25.00/$40.00 |    |
Description
‘Religion and the Secular is an important addition to the growing body of literature on the reconsideration of the concept of religion. For the past decades, religion has been questioned from postcolonial and genealogical points of view. The past literature has failed, however, to place religion in the complicated relationships with other concepts, especially secular. Cartesian dichotomous ideas such as mind-body, spirit-material, rational-emotional, and culture-nature were once considered firmly grounded for modern thinking. The religion-secular, another such modernist dichotomy, is carefully scrutinized by the present book. Dr. Timothy Fitzgerald, the editor and the organizer of the 2003 conference, from which this book was born, has done an excellent editorial job with a brilliant introduction, criticizing not only the attempt to essentialize the religion-secular dichotomy, but also deconstructive attempts for religion as an isolated category.‘
Masakazu Tanaka, Professor, Institute for Research in Humanities, Kyoto University
The collection of essays in this volume critically explore various aspects of the modern development of the religion-secular dichotomy and its ideological function in the assertion of colonial power since the 16th century. The authors hope to illuminate the role and formation of the modern category of religion, and of the academic study of religion, as colonial instruments in the more general subjection of indigenous concepts of order to the classificatory needs of Euro-America. The methodology tends to overflow traditional disciplinary boundaries and offers analyses that are historiographical, literary and ethnographical. However, rather than seeking comprehensiveness in such a vast field, the authors here concentrate on specific aspects of the colonial relationship either from the point of view of a particular colonized culture, for example Mexico, Guatemala, Vietnam, India, Japan, South Africa, Canada; or from the point of view of the colonizing powers, in this case England, Germany and the United States. The authors hope to encourage further studies by specialists in different cultures and languages in the problems of imposition, translation, and reception of the separation of ‘religion’ from other domains such as ‘politics’, ‘economics’ and the ‘non-religious’ civil domain.
‘Religion and the Secular is an important addition to the growing body of literature on the reconsideration of the concept of religion. For the past decades, religion has been questioned from postcolonial and genealogical points of view. The past literature has failed, however, to place religion in the complicated relationships with other concepts, especially secular. Cartesian dichotomous ideas such as mind-body, spirit-material, rational-emotional, and culture-nature were once considered firmly grounded for modern thinking. The religion-secular, another such modernist dichotomy, is carefully scrutinized by the present book. Dr. Timothy Fitzgerald, the editor and the organizer of the 2003 conference, from which this book was born, has done an excellent editorial job with a brilliant introduction, criticizing not only the attempt to essentialize the religion-secular dichotomy, but also deconstructive attempts for religion as an isolated category.‘
Masakazu Tanaka, Professor, Institute for Research in Humanities, Kyoto University
The collection of essays in this volume critically explore various aspects of the modern development of the religion-secular dichotomy and its ideological function in the assertion of colonial power since the 16th century. The authors hope to illuminate the role and formation of the modern category of religion, and of the academic study of religion, as colonial instruments in the more general subjection of indigenous concepts of order to the classificatory needs of Euro-America. The methodology tends to overflow traditional disciplinary boundaries and offers analyses that are historiographical, literary and ethnographical. However, rather than seeking comprehensiveness in such a vast field, the authors here concentrate on specific aspects of the colonial relationship either from the point of view of a particular colonized culture, for example Mexico, Guatemala, Vietnam, India, Japan, South Africa, Canada; or from the point of view of the colonizing powers, in this case England, Germany and the United States. The authors hope to encourage further studies by specialists in different cultures and languages in the problems of imposition, translation, and reception of the separation of ‘religion’ from other domains such as ‘politics’, ‘economics’ and the ‘non-religious’ civil domain.
Contents
Introduction Timothy Fitzgerald
1. Dialectics of Conversion: Las Casas and Maya Colonial and Post-colonial Congregación
Anna Blume, (State University of New York)
2. A Higher Ground: The Secular Knowledge of Objects of Religious Devotion
Trevor Stack (University of Aberdeen)
3. Secularising the Land: The Impact of the Alaskan Native Claims Settlement on Indigenous Understandings of Land
James Cox, (University of Edinburgh)
4. The Formative Process of State Shinto in Relation to the Westernisation of Japan: The Concepts of 'Religion' and 'Shinto'
Jun’ichi Isomae, (International Research Institute for Japanese Studies, Kyoto) translated by Michael S. Wood (Fuji Women's University)
5. Religious and Secular in the Vietnam War: The Emergence of Highland Ethno-nationalism
Tom Pearson, (Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion)
6. Colonialism all the way down? Religion and the secular in early modern writing on south India
Will Sweetman, (University of Otago)
7. Understanding Politics through Performance in Colonial and Postcolonial India
John Zavos, (University of Manchester)
8. Real and Imagined: Imperial Inventions of Religion in Colonial Southern Africa
David Chidester, (University of Cape Town)
9. Religion in Modern Islamic Thought and Practice
Abdulkader Ismail Tayob (University of Cape Town)
10. Rudolf Otto, Cultural Colonialism and the 'Discovery' of the Holy
Gregory Alles, (McDaniel College, Maryland)
11. Encompassing Religion, Privatised Religions and the Invention of Modern Politics
Timothy Fitzgerald
12. Colonialism and the Myth of Religious Violence
William T. Cavanaugh, (University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minnesota)
Reviews
'This is an important book that extends Timothy Fitzgerald's critique of the way in which academics, especially historians and sociologists, use the categories of religion and the secular.'
Ann Taves, University of California at Santa Barbara, in Religion 39, 2009
'This is a highly original and critically important work that provides much food for thought for those working in the field of Religious Studies. It builds upon a growing strand of scholarship that seeks to explore the implications of the socially constructed and culturally specific nature of the category of "religion".
The contributions in this volume aid our understanding of the history of the category of religion and the deployment of the religious-secular dichotomy in a variety of cultural contexts in the modern period. As well as its obvious relevance for historians and theorists of religion, the book will be of enormous interest to anyone concerned with the representation and transformation of non-western societies under European colonial influence. The book contains articles by many of the key authors in this debate and moves the discussion where it now needs to go - namely into specific historical case-studies of the ways in which the terms 'religious' and 'secular' have been deployed in specific modern and colonial contexts. Chapters combine detailed historical scholarship with a contemporary critical edge and make a significant contribution to our understanding of the emergence of the 'secular-religious' dichotomy and the complex processes invoilved in its exportation beyond specifically European cultural horizons.'
Richard King, Vanderbilt University, author of Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and "the Mystic East" (Routledge, 1999)
Specifications
| ISBN-10 (Hardback) | 184553266X |
| ISBN-13 (Hardback) | 9781845532666 |
| Price (Hardback) | £70.00/$125.00 |
| ISBN-10 (Paperback) | 1845532678 |
| ISBN-13 (Paperback) | 9781845532673 |
| Price (Paperback) | £25.00/$40.00 |
| Publication Date | October 2007 |
| Pages | 288 |
| Size | 244 x 169mm |
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