Strategic Acts in the Study of Identity - Towards a Dynamic Theory of People and Place - Vaia Touna
10. Strategic Acts I and II
Strategic Acts in the Study of Identity - Towards a Dynamic Theory of People and Place - Vaia Touna
Russell T. McCutcheon [+]
University of Alabama
Description
[T]he history of religions is destined to play an important role in contemporary cultural life. This is not only because an understanding of exotic and archaic religions will significantly assist in a cultural dialogue with the representatives of such religions. It is more especially because, by attempting to understand the existential situations expressed by the documents he is studying, the historian of religions will inevitably attain to a deeper knowledge of man. It is on the basis of such a knowledge that a new humanism, on a world-wide scale, could develop. We may even ask if the History of Religions cannot make a contribution of prime importance to its formation. For, on the one hand, the historical and comparative study of religions embraces all the cultural forms so far known, both the ethnological cultures and those that have played a major role in history; on the other hand, by studying the religious expressions of a culture, the scholar approaches it from within, and not merely in its sociological, economic, and political contexts. In the last analysis, the historian of religions is destined to elucidate a large number of situations unfamiliar to the man of the West. It is through an understanding of such unfamiliar, “exotic” situations that cultural provincialism is transcended. (Eliade 1961: 2–3)