It is commonplace for scholars in the field of Religious Studies to quote Jonathan Z. Smith’s phrase “….there is no data for religion” and yet simultaneously fail to take seriously the call to analytical rigor that such a phrase was intended to invoke regarding how and why we construct the concept “religion.” This introduction presents the reader several key theoretical and methodological issues scholars of religion must face as they consider what constitutes their data – that is, the object of their study — and provides an overview of the structure of the book.

Research in Religious Studies has repeatedly emphasized the modern, contingent, and constructed character of the category of “religion(s).” This experimental essay seeks to move beyond the fixation on this category to consider how practices of categorization (including but not limited to genealogies and critiques of categories) function within the discipline of Religious Studies. Although much has been gained through genealogies that contextualize the modern theorization of difference through the taxonomic rubric of “religion(s),” it may be useful also to consider the power and limits of categories, not least by looking also to other modern and premodern practices of ordering knowledge, such as anthologizing and narrativization. A broader purview opens up other points of connection between premodern and modern discourses about difference, while also exposing some of what is effaced in the recent fixation on pinpointing the moment of the so-called “invention” of “religion.”

I argue that—despite its manifest objective of contributing to the decolonization of Indigenous-Settler relations in Canada—the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada was guided by a latent taxonomy of Indigenous religion that essentialized inconvenient differences surrounding Indigenous practices of witnessing and perpetuated the colonial violence of homogenization. I recommend Annette Yoshiko Reed’s method of narrativization as an alternative strategy for use by scholars, bureaucrats, and politicians when studying, or developing or implementing public policy involving, religious data that similarly fails to neatly fit into existing scholarly taxonomies of religion. I propose that this methodology can help prevent the same kinds of totalizing mistakes as those made by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.

In my response to Annette Yoshiko Reed’s paper, I reflect on the ways we might read Reed’s piece as a philosophical critique of the current scholarly practices of categorization in the study of religion of late antiquity. Taking her analysis as a jumping-off point, I then suggest four different research trajectories in the historical study of religion that have the potential to address some of the problematics in our current categorization practices: a (re)examination of various native methodologies and alternative categorization schemes; a continued study of the relationship between the scholar and time through cross-disciplinary research on the practice(s) of periodization; the development of more robust theories of difference between and among categories; and an emphasis on engaging with the fields of ethics and philosophy in our work.

In response to the provocative essay by Annette Yoshiko Reed, this paper engages with some of her main ideas and the ways categorization operates as a practice in academic and cultural contexts. First interrogating some philosophical bases for approaching religion as a discrete category, I proceed to frame Reed’s approach in the nominalism of David Hume by which general ideas are formed by relations of impressions. After characterizing Reed’s efforts as the analysis of narrative constructions of contiguity, I use the case of transnational Sikh groups striving for political recognition in the early to mid-twentieth century as a case study for another nominalist relation: contrariety. By analyzing the ways religion was used in a two-pronged attempt to distinguish Sikhism from its parent ‘religion’ Hinduism, this essay provides a complement to Reed’s model by considering how religious classification is employed in a specific socio-cultural context towards political ends. I conclude with an encouragement to attend to the ‘why’ of categorization as much as the ‘how’.

This response takes up Annette Yoshiko Reed’s attention to the power dynamics and the limits of categories and categorization in academic scholarship on religion. I consider her warnings of anachronism and reification in relation to her work on texts in late antiquity in relation to the “five pillars,” a primary framework for categorizing the central beliefs and practices in Islam. More specifically I consider the prevalence of this framework within contemporary social scientific research on Muslims in Canada and its purchase within a recent collaborative qualitative research project.

It has been argued that “there is no data for religion,” however, there do exist “data for Religious Studies” both in the sense that “Religious Studies” is a social formation within academia, and in the sense that scholars working in Religious Studies (and adjacent fields) have treated great masses of things in the world as givens (“data”) for purposes of their research. In spite of widespread theoretical objections which have questioned whether the category “religion” even names a distinct object of study, scholars continue to do “Religious Studies.” This essay examines the “data for religious studies,” in both senses of the phrase, concluding that scholars focused on “religion” are engaged in a colonialist and post-colonialist political/pedagogical project termed here the management of surprise. From this overview of the field and its data, the argument pivots to a closer examination of one current methodological trend, “material religion,” which emphasizes the peculiar value of material objects and artifacts as data for Religious Studies. Some prominent exponents of “material religion” (and its close cousin “lived religion”) are reviving a phenomenological, neo-Ottonian understanding of “religion” as a human response to manifestations of mysterious and transcendent non-human realities, in which they would argue material objects play an important mediatory role. Such exponents are here termed the school of the more. As an antidote to the mystifying metaphysics of presence advocated by the school of the more, this essay concludes with six theses on the study of “objects,” both material and ideal, within a “Religious Studies” conceived of as branch of the human sciences.

The heightened attention to material manifestations of religion in the last decades of the 20th century has led to a new outburst of phenomenological scholarship. However, phenomenology is not intrinsic to the material approach. I would go even further to state that the attention to material aspects of religion can be of benefit to a critical study of religion. The problem lies in the definition of religion, but I don’t think that it is entirely encompassed in the distinction between emic and etic or through a critique of religion as a sui generis category. Common definitions of religion usually frame what is understood as religion through its meaning for the religious alone. What religion means for the rest of society—for the nonreligious or also for religious non-conformists, and in turn for the critical scholarship about religion—is not included, and leaves a blind spot in such a definition. A focus on the material manifestations of religion can help to make this impact visible if it overcomes the romantic idealization of religion through religious and academic discourse. However, this requires reflecting on some methodological challenges, which become more apparent through the focus on material manifestations of religion, but are inherent to the field in its entirety.

In this essay, I draw attention to Matthew Baldwin’s suspicions of recent discourses on materiality as just one more phenomenology. I agree with his frame of discourse analysis but think he too quickly skips over the materiality of history that funds his argument. This response addresses the potentials of historicization–potentials Baldwin labels as “surprises.” By considering what informs scholarly surprise specifically, I extend the term and relate it to how to describe the movements of political economy generally. In reflecting how the social field produces its objects, I highlight that scholars are not the only site for object construction. Non-scholars, I argue, are under similar urgency to form objects; however it is the scholar who is tasked to give an account of these mechanisms of production. A more nuanced concept of history, what Fredric Jameson capitalizes as History, contributes to my own account of how materiality might appear as impersonal excess. It is this excess that is surprising and can occasion thought in scholars and non-scholars alike. To demonstrate the usefulness of broader notions of materialist surprises, I reflect on two mundane objects relevant to popular religion to highlight how particularity can give way to the overwhelming substance of history.

This article builds on Matthew Baldwin’s critique on the current “data” of religious studies to explore the historical and biased origins of notions about the category of “religion” and “world religion” currently employed in academic and political circles. Reflecting recent trends within the field, this paper challenges assumptions about a universal, identifiable and distinct component of society and human experience called “religion” that can somehow bestow on us the tangible items and goods that are all too often presumed to be the necessary objects of our analysis. Recognizing that it is the state, particularly through public policy and law, that plays the central role in identifying what is or is not “religion” for the purposes of social governance, this paper argues for greater focus on the “data” to be found in legislation, policy documents and court rulings that can illuminate the way that “religion” is deployed to perpetuate certain privileges and social hegemonies. In so doing, it argues that scholars of religion should turn a critical eye to the “data” of recent global events that reveal the perpetual tensions that exist between the category of “religion” and broader social movements and conflict.

In his piece, Matthew Baldwin lays bare the key epistemological issues pertaining to the question regarding subjects and objects in the study of religion, focusing particular attention upon the intersubjective character of objects. In my response, I attempt to illustrate through an explication of a shared source – Theodor Adorno – the ways in which Baldwin’s account of intersubjectivity fails to capture an essential element of the intersubjective relation between objects and subjects – namely, the fact of contingency. Rather than attempting to juxtapose mystification and “what is going on,” object and subject, I show how, for Adorno, an element of objective unknowability phenomenologically conditions subjective positing. The result of this formulation is neither a primacy of subject, nor of object. Rather, my analysis of Adorno yields a dialectical conception of the subject as always already objectively conditioned, and objects for-thought as always already figured by the so conditioned subject. There is, in the final instance, only the oscillation between objectivity and subjectivity – the real always remains unknowable in any total sense precisely because it conditions, the constructed positing of the subject arrests the fluctuation between condition and conditioned in a circumscribed sense through the use of concepts. In the end, I argue, what is at stake in the theoretical and methodological discussion regarding objects in the study of religion is nothing less than the larger epistemological and existential question concerning how to conceive the conditions of thinking, the interplay between freedom and necessity. As such, it is both possible and necessary to reconceive the problems and debates in religious studies theory and method as specific occasions for thought, open to a larger range of theoretical and philosophical inquiry.

Poststructuralists have long since argued that scholars constitute their objects of study, in part through the use of discourses that construct reality. Critics often argue that this sort of anti-realism entails a fundamental, dualist opposition between reality-as-it-appears-in-discourse and reality-in-itself. According to their critics, poststructuralists imagine themselves locked into a prison house of language, from which reality-in-itself is inaccessible. In this paper I argue that this critique grossly misrepresents poststructuralism, and that more careful attention to poststructuralist, anti-realist arguments is necessary before dismissing them.

Scholars who study the ancient world often assume that material artifacts from the past have a meaning, an identity, and the role of the scholar is to access those meanings as much, or as closely and accurately, as possible. Despite this common assumption and in response—as well as in agreement—to Craig Martin’s chapter, who argues that reality is mind-dependent and that scholars produce what they study, this essay further looks at how artifacts, such as for example terracotta figurines, became meaningful objects from the past and consequently items worth studying through scholarly discourses.

This chapter responds to Craig Martin’s discussion of the realist/anti-realist debate and its importance to the academic study of religion. Building on Martin’s call to take anti-realism seriously, this response begins to imagine how an anti-realist theoretical framework could become a part of the field’s self-definition. Could anti-realism provide a foundation for the academic study of religion to construct itself as a field that acknowledges the strength of second-order critical thought as its central form and content? As a framework that renders visible the creation of both religion and scholars of religion, I suggest that anti-realism can be generative of the field’s value.

In the following chapter I open with a discussion on food labels – or more specifically claims of fair trade. This type of terminology is meant to persuade consumers that the food they are buying and consuming is in some way socially just. However, as can be seen in many studies on tea and coffee, fair trade is not a homogenous label, but rather a contested name that can be manipulated in bureaucratic fashions for the purpose of capitalist accumulation. I use this as a segue into Martin’s work on anti-realism, and particularly my own interest in the study of “religion.” I argue that “religion” as a category is the opium of the scholar, where a categorical tool acts like opium to conceal underlying symptoms in society, constructs realities, and obscure the scholar’s involvement in this very construction. I end with a few notes on how commodity chain studies might offer insight on how one might approach the study of religion.

This chapter argues the work of Jacques Derrida, particularly his concept of “deconstruction,” ought not be connected to debates over whether or not reality is in part mind-dependent. Derrida’s work on the nature of language cannot be connected to these debates because, for Derrida, language only refers to itself, not an external reality. This claim has no bearing on the nature of reality or our relationship to reality; it only refers to our discourse about reality. Drawing this distinction is important for understanding the stakes of Derrida’s project and the implications of his conclusions. For religious studies, Derrida shows us that debates over how to define “religion” should not revolve around the kinds of empirical data that might fit, exceed, or contest a proper definition; rather, our interest ought to be in the ways that our discourse about religion slips away from us the moment we think we have it pinned down. In other words, the problem of how scholars can speak about religion is a problem exclusively of language rather than experience.

This chapter approaches “the academy” as form of data in order to interrogate and evaluate the current state of academic labor, particularly in twenty-first century North America. Drawing on discourse analysis, the essay examines how governing academic norms and practices sustain and exacerbate the structural and material challenges facing the most vulnerable academic laborers today. In particular, the author explores how academic labor is socially constructed through the mobilization of various “mythologies of work” and even through critical genres such as “quit lit” that seek to expose perceived injustices. The enactment of these discourses, the chapter argues, ultimately reinforces the status quo and serves the interests of academic elites.

Higher education in North America increasingly implores teachers to adopt frameworks of values education, pre-professional student-learning, and assessment backed by the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). Teacher-scholars in religious studies have reason to question whether such initiatives put a critical understanding of our data at odds with the ideological state apparatuses within which our institutions are situated. Thinking with the work of Louis Althusser, this chapter historicizes classroom tensions and outlines an alternative way for theoretically-minded scholars to negotiate the task of pedagogy.

This chapter proposes that the foundation of a university department is its curriculum. Using the recent development of the Religious Studies major at Middle Tennessee State University as a case study, it explores how a shift to competency-focused program design avoids noteworthy pitfalls related to content-based and theory/method-based models. Beginning with a brief outline of the development of religious studies departments, this chapter shows how our pedagogy and representations of the discipline should take seriously the context of our institutions and students. At Middle Tennessee State University, we have eschewed coverage models such as the world religions model or an explicitly method and theory driven model in favor of a curriculum that promotes skills sets or competencies. This curriculum centered on areas of description, analysis, and critique allows the department to organically expand in dialogue with broader social shifts within the academic study of religion, student learning needs, and the research expertise and pedagogical interests of its faculty.

“Neoliberalization” is a convenient term for a number of changes that have taken place in higher education especially since the 1980s. The changes are broadly associated with the application of market principles to the operation of colleges and university. This chapter first identifies the author’s professional location within the study of religions and then turns to a concentrated consideration of the impact of these changes. It sees some positive value in the neoliberal turn, for example, in its emphasis on globalization and even in the much maligned concern with a quantitative assessment of research output. Nevertheless, it also identifies areas where a neoliberal approach has been detrimental: conceiving of higher education as a private rather than a public good, judging the importance of fields of study in terms of the number of students they attract, relying increasingly on poorly compensated contingent or adjunct faculty as an economizing measure, and determining the value of reserach on the basis of its economic return either to the academic institution or to private business. Although all academic fields are subject to these pressures, the humanities, including religious studies, are at a particular disadvantage in comparison with the STEM fields.

Using as a test case the membership requirements of a longstanding private association for scholars of religion—but also noting such other diverse sites as tenure and promotion criteria and ongoing debates on method in the study of religion—this article examines the practical, gatekeeping function of the discourse on collegiality as it is practiced in the academic study of religion. Given its generally undefined nature and undisclosed criteria, this value is argued to conserve an orthodoxy in the field, inasmuch as it can be used in the service of unprofessional criteria that are strategically useful in patrolling the boundaries of dominant discourses.