The Ideology of Religious Studies

By Timothy Fitzgerald

Book Overview

In recent years there has been an intensifying debate within the religious studies community about the validity of religion as an analytical category. In this book Fitzgerald sides with those who argue that the concept of religion itself should be abandoned. On the basis of his own research in India and Japan, and through a detailed analysis of the use of religion in a wide range of scholarly texts, the author maintains that the comparative study of religion is really a form of liberal ecumenical theology. By pretending to be a science, religion significantly distorts socio-cultural analysis. He suggest, however, that religious studies can be re-represented in a way which opens up new and productive theoretical connections with anthropology and cultural and literary studies.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195167694
• ISBN13: 9780195167696
• Release Date: October 2003
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

More powerful version of Asad

I'm the Fitzgerald advocate on my campus and carried Discourse on Civility and Barbarity everywhere I went last month. This is the book I would recommend, though. The best part is not his theory, which is basically Talal Asad simplified and polemicized for rhetorical effect, but his crazy examples from all over the field. To uncover the ideology crawling under the rocks he ignores the fussiness of (pro-category) postmodern theory and instead examines introductory texts for college students. To show where the religious category doesn't make sense, he takes us to Japan and India. It's an extremely entertaining read and your faith in Geertz will be shaken. Personally, I think that studying religions rather than ideologies at this point in the academic world is a little nuts.

A must read for religious studies students.

Any student of "religion" should take Fitzgerald's argument seriously. In fact, I would go as far as to say that many within the academy now teaching (or rather, preaching) religion should also examine Fitzgerald's work. I was first exposed to this book late in my undergraduate career in religious studies. For me the theoretical discourse on "religion" had always seemed convoluted, but nevertheless it was a conceptual morass that I believed could be resolved. But--trust me--it can not be, and Fitzgerald cogently explains why. Instead of elaborating further, I would suggest that anyone at all interested in relgious studies or "religion in general" (or philosophy, imperialism, social control, the modern world, globalization, etc.) to read the first few pages of this book online. I can say without hyperbole that this is one of the most important books I have ever read. My hope in writing this review is that it will inspire others take notice of Fitzgerald's work.

Good but loaded

Fitzgerald's bk is an example of the widespread feeling of uneasiness in a variety of academic fields concerning supposed neutral positions from which to evaluate the data in their respective fields. With scholars coming from a variety of incompatible metaphysical and other philosophical commitments it becomes increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to provide a neutral standpoint from which to adjudicate rival claims. In short, the term "religion" cannot possibly pick out some theory neutral concept with clearly necessary and sufficient conditions. The author persuasively argues that if religion is to function as a useful and neutral term it ends up covering so many phenomena as to loose any meaning. (Is Marxism a religion?, Gardening?, etc.) He treats various attempts to save the concept of "religion" such as Wittgenstein's Family Resemblance theory and I believe shows that such attempts fail because the Family "resemblance" is stretched so far as to be "useless." We are much better of, the author concludes, with dividing up the analytical work that the concept of religion supposedly did and assigning that work to a variety of fields.The one major draw back of the work is that much of the authors' argument is steeped, he thinks necessarily, in a Marxist or Critical Theorist framework. Which is great if one is a Marxist. But the argument could be made just as easily without the Marxist framework and jargon. If you can look past the Marxist framing of the argument, the book offers a good argument for two possible directions. Either the re-theologizing relative to some theology of religious studies (a route that the author doesn't seem to want take) or of getting rid of the concept of religion altogether, the authors preferred route. Those interested in parallel debates in contemporary Analytic philosophy over the concept of Justification (see Alston's "Epistemic Desiderata" [article]) or debates over Truth Pluralism and relativism (see Lynch's "Truth in Context" [book]) will find data here and parallel arguments. Also those of more Continental persuasion will find this text germane to the debates over realism/anti-realism (Rorty & Putnam), "Play" in Derrida, and problems in Semiotics/Structuralism.