Religion Compass 1/6 (2007): 787800, 10.1111/ j.1749-8171.2007.00049.

Exporting the Local: Recent Perspectives on Religion as a Cultural Category

Daniel Dubuisson*
CNRS-Universit Charles de Gaulle-Lille 3 (Translated from the French by Arthur McCalla)

Abstract

This article examines new perspectives in the field of religious studies recently opened up by the works of T. Fitzgerald, R. McCutcheon, R. King, T. Masuzawa, G. A. Oddie and D. Dubuisson.1 It begins, however, by taking up the origin and history of these studies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries so as to underline the paradoxes and impasses that still too often characterize them today. Cet article examine quelques-unes des plus rcentes perspectives ouvertes dans le domaine des religious studies par les travaux de T. Fitzgerald, R. McCutcheon, R. King, T. Masuzawa, G. A. Oddie et D. Dubuisson. Mais il revient pour commencer sur lorigine et lhistoire de ces tudes aux XIXe et XXe sicles afin de souligner les paradoxes et apories qui les caractrisent encore trop souvent aujourdhui.

1 Introduction Over the last decade or so, and particularly in the English-speaking world, the field of study and research conventionally called the history of religions has witnessed the appearance of new questions and new working hypotheses. There are a certain number of significant convergences and common themes among them; and two or more of their authors sometimes think along parallel lines. We must also note that these new perspectives have the potential to make unrecognizable the traditional landscape of the history of religions as it was constructed over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We will examine the most important among them in a moment, but only after reminding ourselves of a few facts that will permit us to understand better how these new approaches break radically with the past. 2 A Word, a World, and a Man The essential starting point relates to the word religion itself (Smith 1998, pp. 269 84; Dubuisson 2003, pp. 229). It derives from a well-known
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Latin word, religio, which probably meant something similar to the word traditio (King 1999, pp. 357). In this sense it designated, as will still be the case for Augustine, an attitude and sentiments founded on the respect in which one holds ones parents, ones kin, and that governs all social relationships (Augustine 1957, X, 1). But Christian thinkers, including notably Lactantius, considerably modified this pagan and secular meaning so that the word religio came to designate for them the bond, founded on faith and piety, that unites man to God (Lactantius 1987, LXIV, 57). In this way, Christianity, in a very specific historical context, invented the idea our idea of religion. Moreover, several intrinsic characteristics that defined its content were progressively associated with this western construction of religion (Dubuisson 2003; Engler, Miller & Dubuisson 2006). We must take particular note of the following among these characteristics because, as we continue our discussion, we will find them at the heart of important controversies and essential questions. The Christian tradition considers mankind to be naturally religious, because God himself inscribed this aptitude or this faculty in each soul from its creation. In other words, religion is a divine work and each person, Gods creature, is by essence a homo religiosus: In creating the human soul he [God] necessarily created it religious, capable of knowing him and loving him . . . ( Vacant 1937, col. 2286). One might equally cite Eusebius of Caesarea, Clement of Alexandria, Calvin, Schleiermacher, Constant, Kant, Jung, Durkheim, Eliade, and so many others. All would have been able to say with Renan: Man, as soon as he distinguished himself from the animal, was religious; that is to say, he saw in nature something beyond material reality, and for himself something beyond death (1863, p. 2). The field of religion constitutes an ontological domain, fundamentally different, distinct, and separate from the profane world (Dubuisson 2004b, pp. 4923 and 506). Christianity very quickly defined itself by a strict orthodoxy that was itself conceived as immutable, because it rested on the original and revealed speech of a unique god who is omnipotent and perfect beyond anything that mankind is capable of framing in thought or words. This orthodoxy was itself defended by a powerful centralized and theocratic institution, the Church, which more than once in the course of its history displayed a brutal intolerance toward those who separated themselves from it or criticized it. Confronted with the other religions, which it treats as idolatrous, false, or fallen, Christianity claims itself and itself alone to be the exclusive keeper of truth. Max Scheler aligned himself within this long tradition when he declared that it is not the most perfect of religions, it is the absolute religion (1944, p. 357). This religion was over the centuries a central notion, omnipresent in the history of the West. Most of the works of art, speculation, intellectual
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currents and, consequently, the controversies that have fed the intellectual history of the West for almost twenty centuries, developed around it, or sometimes in opposition to it. Moreover, from the beginning, Christianity similarly set out its own vision of human beings, its anthropology, characterized by a certain number of original characteristics (faith in God, immortality of the soul, eternal life, original sin and human guilt, moral duties, contempt of the body and the flesh, etc.). This indigenous anthropology has frequently served the West as a reference and as a universal norm. And yet, ever since Pauls missionary work, Christianity has also distinguished itself from all others precisely by attributing to itself a universal vocation; that is to say, it addressed itself to all people, whatever their origin or their status might be. Nevertheless, this idea of religion did not remain unchanged over the course of this long history (Despland 1979). It seems incontestable, as Fitzgerald (2000, pp. 278) notes, that (under the Protestant influence of F. D. E. Schleiermacher, B. Constant, W. James, R. Otto, E. Troeltsch, C. P. Tiele, N. N. Sderblom, G. Van der Leeuw, J. Wach, etc.) it evolved toward an increasingly austere conception in which religion becomes an individual phenomenon linked to the individual interior conscience and to the personal relationship of the individual with the divinity. The immense galaxy built up around the notion of religion by the thousands of texts written over almost 2000 years offers, nonetheless, a major paradigm (Dubuisson 2003 [1998], pp. 140 4; 2006, pp. 28997). It is organized by opposing theists to materialists and atheists, and features a number of exemplary topics, such as myths and their various modes of interpretation. These examples are there to remind us that this field was not only traversed by polemics and innumerable controversies, but equally that it was constructed and constituted around them. But we must immediately add, in order to bring this section to a close, that this ideal religion, that of the clerics, of the theologians of the church, remained up to a certain point an abstract creation in the sense that, even in the West, it only imperfectly and partially correlated with popular beliefs and practices. This, no doubt, is the origin and justification of popular religion. 3 Some Crucial Questions Is it, or was it ever, possible that so specific a notion, a notion so determined by its origins, by its history, and by the contingent conditions of its development, could serve science by designating an intrinsic characteristic of mankind, ahistorical and recognizable in all cultures and in all eras (King 1999, p. 40; Dubuisson 2003 [1998], pp. 53 95)? Or, if one prefers, is/was this Christian category universalizable? that is to say, applicable to all the forms of society and of culture, from remote prehistoric tribes to Californian adepts of the New Age.
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And yet, this is what happened in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when historians and anthropologists used religion as a common reference, an accepted principle, a model, a norm, an ideal, and sometimes even an arch, an eternal eidos: The view that all of the major-traditions of the world (with the exception of the European Enlightenment tradition) are examples of a single genus religion, and that they therefore share certain characteristics with Christianity (the archetypal religion in all of these debates) is, I would suggest, a fundamental doxa of modernity (King 2006, p. 229).2 In other words, what began as a particular cultural creation, an historical accident (McCutcheon), an invention of Christian theologians, has become, with the help of Western science itself associated with our modern anthropocentric or humanistic vision of history (King 2006, p. 234), a major and constitutive dimension of mankind. Science and ideology, following theology, had made man into a homo religiosus. As if human beings, whatever and wherever they may be, were supposed to reproduce in their behaviour a type of which the archetype, model, source, and most fully realized expression would be found only, according to its theologians, in the Christian West. And still today, not only Christianity but other religions too are analyzed with Christian terminology. It is easy to recognize that, in the former case, the analysis is in some way predetermined and will without fail discover what it is looking for, while in the latter case the others will be either disfigured or deformed until they are formatted to the Christian standard. Several consequences and impasses emerge from this short rehearsal, but one of them warrants our immediate attention: to speak today in whatever manner of religion(s) almost always means using a nomenclature, notions, ideas that were begotten within Christian culture. Because of this words like religion, faith, sin, soul in contemporary European languages provide only a very poor lexicon with which to describe cultural realities (Chinese, Aztec, paleo-Siberian, prehistoric, etc.) that are located light years away from the mental universe of a Bossuet or a John of the Cross. In fact, these words and the oppositions that they imply are truly applicable only within the Christian civilization that created them for its own purposes. Everywhere else, they are simply inadequate, imprecise, deceptive, and/or anachronistic. And the same applies for the principal semantic fields associated with these terms. The idea that the word religious only conventionally designates cultural phenomena that present no fundamental originality,3 or that various profoundly distinct figures of religious might exist that do not share any atemporal essence, has only very recently been taken into account. This polymorphism is in fact incompatible with a tenacious and unconscious prejudice that tacitly supposes that a single religious determining function (or aspiration) must correspond to mankind in nucleo. This prejudice is one of the most curious epistemological inheritances from theological monotheism in the operations of modern science.4 Conversely, and to
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propose another academic hypothesis intended to prove the lack of autonomy of past scientific reflection in relation to the Christian tradition, can one imagine a definition and/or explanations of religion that would be valid for all cultural formations we conventionally call religions except for Christianity? Or that we would be able to conceive of this definition or these explanations by abstracting a priori from the Christian example; that is, by de-Christianizing the idea of religion? Or again that such explanations would lead us to conclude that the purest or most authentic forms of the religious are in fact to be found far from the West, for example, in certain forms of syncretism that inextricably mix together (always from our European point of view) actions designated magicoreligious? These three last suggestions underlie one of the most embarrassing questions that confronts specialists in the human sciences: how are the latter able to pass off as universal types what are simply minimally retouched copies of our own categories and therefore of our local prejudices? 4 The History of Religions in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Since they have merited the name,5 or for about a century and a half, the human sciences have never seriously considered sacrificing the pretensions to universality of a notion that appeared to them as a basic anthropological datum and not as a particular historical creation. They have not done so, in fact, because Western culture in its entirety is largely constituted around Christianity and the human sciences, especially the anthropology of human sciences, for a thousand reasons and by a thousand channels, derive from that same tradition. Under these circumstances, it was almost inevitable that European scholars, even when they were atheists and materialists (Bourdieu 1971), would use the central concepts provided by their own cultural and anthropological tradition to define mankind, concepts about which they were in any case the most learned and for which they were the fiercest propagandists. When, therefore, scholars thought about the exotic or distant worlds they encountered, they drew on categories that they already used in their own world. In their eyes, religion and religious carried the evidential weight possessed by any cultural category that one has made ones own and which one inhabits, all the more when one grants it an absolute superiority. Could a Western scientific anthropology have been constructed on the indigenous categories of China, of ancient Mexico, or of African cultures? The words of one of the fathers of modern anthropology, Lewis H. Morgan, give a clear answer: The Aryan family represents the central stream of human progress because it produced the highest type of mankind, and because it proved its intrinsic superiority by gradually assuming control of the earth (1877, p. 468). How could a concept central to the definition of man have come from a primitive or savage race, as was said without the least scruple in the nineteenth century?
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But things get more curious still. The explications of the religious conceived by these modern scholars were often inspired by those that Western tradition, ever since Antiquity, had imagined in order to explain myths, cults, or ceremonies. Very schematically, they all fell within a great binary paradigm that opposed reductionist explanations to metaphysical ones. On one side, reductionist explanations included political explanations (Critias according to Sextus Empiricus, Polybius, Diodorus of Sicily, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Spinoza, Marx, etc.), psychological explanations similar to that of Lucretius, and, most recently, the sociological explanations conceived by E. Durkheim, M. Mauss, and M. Weber (Dubuisson 2004b, pp. 357421). On the other side, metaphysical explanations grounded on the alleged religious nature of man and on the existence of a transcendent plan (Schleiermacher, Constant, Tiele, and Sderblom) joined up in the twentieth century with the current known as the phenomenology of religion (Otto, van der Leeuw, and Eliade). This current is characterized by the radical rejection of all historical, sociological, and/or anthropological approaches to the data it designates religious on the grounds that it possesses a specific and incomparable dimension (McCutcheon 1997, p. 13; Wasserstrom 1999, p. 98, 109; Dubuisson 2004b, pp. 6834). The paradigm reproduces the general orientation of the ancient opposition between Platonists and Epicurians, between idealists and materialists. These modern explanations of religion or of religions, whether or not they call themselves atheist, were all the quicker to adopt the Christian concept of religion as a sort of innate religious disposition that was held to be universally valid. Religion in this sense offered them a pre-theorized concept that conveniently disqualified a priori a large number of embarrassing questions that since then have in fact remained without responses. In particular, it excused them from having to redefine the word religion or find an original alternative to it (Dubuisson 2003 [1998], pp. 53 63). Paradoxically, under these conditions, the word religion in the end offered an advantage of sorts by providing a common label for numerous and heterogeneous activities. This last point is no doubt capital, despite its vague and hazy character. While it has proved impossible right up to the present to define this (mental, ontological, structural, or functional) core common to all the heterogeneous activities called for want of a better term religious, it has always seemed evident to Westerners that they must display some necessary and obscure affinities even though no one can agree on their number and their nature. One sees here a supplementary proof of a well-known fact: we are more sensitive to the persuasive force of an inveterate cultural prejudice than to an empirical truth that deceives us precisely, because it contradicts the affirmation contained in the former. Thanks to this epistemological preferment, Western science assumed for itself the exclusive privilege of thinking about mankind, the human phenomenon, in light of its own conception and of its own values. From this point of departure, the mankind studied by Western science
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became also religious, and must be studied from this point of view. In a parallel manner, the field of religious studies eagerly transformed into religions old wisdoms, magical practices, cultural configurations, and cosmographic formations that otherwise would not have been deemed worthy of study (Dubuisson 2003 [1998], pp. 195 213). Study after study of the religions of prehistory, of Egypt, of China, of India, of primitive civilizations, etc., were therefore carried out without scholars ever satisfactorily explaining either what was fundamentally in common among them or how to understand their easily observable differences (MacWilliams et al., 2005, pp. 136). Scholars extricated themselves from this misstep by opposing more or less explicitly religion to the religions variously designated as primitive (animism, fetishism), archaic (idolatry), ancient (polytheisms), popular, or savage. Many present day reflections on the religions are still tacitly nurtured by this evolutionism and these summary oppositions. To declare, or lazily to admit, that some activities are religious allows them to be studied only in light of criteria that the model religion, Christianity, itself validates as authentically religious criteria. A short example will help us to understand the curious paradoxes to which this truism very quickly leads. Christianity excludes from the religious sphere proper the magic that it contributed to discrediting (Vacant 1926, col. 151213). The history of religions not only similarly excluded magic from the religious sphere, but also, let us emphasize, levelled against it the same slanderous judgments. These judgments literally drew their inspiration from those that theologians had been pronouncing since before the time of Augustine. Modern science here borrowed one of the prejudices of Christian theology and, along with this prejudice, the same designation, the same way of dividing knowledge, and the same system of values. For numerous scholars of the second half the long nineteenth century (1860 1914) everything occurred as if the evolution of humanity had necessarily led to the appearance of the monotheistic religions of which we, Europeans, possessed the fullest and most complete expression. Linear teleology, summary evolutionism, colonizing imperialism, an unfailing sentiment of absolute superiority and arrogant narcissism joined together to give to Western man the most comforting version of his own destiny and of the history of humanity. His pretensions to world domination found nothing to add to it. These prejudices have endured up to our own day with an astonishing strength. They, along with the cultural and ethnocentric values on which the history of religions was constructed in the nineteenth century, have only very recently been called into question. 5 Recent Perspectives This last remark leads directly to the new perspectives that have been introduced into the field of the history of religions over the last decade or so.
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We may conveniently classify three newly developed types of critical analysis by their respective points of view: anthropological, epistemological, and historical. We shall examine them in turn, keeping in mind the argumentative convergence and complementarity among all three. The critique offered from the anthropological point of view picks up the paradoxes cited above: how can a particular historical construction, conditioned by its long history itself made from a thousand contingent incidents, claim to reflect a transhistorical and fundamental human predisposition (Dubuisson 2003 [1998])? This point is all the stronger when it is the most original (and therefore the least universal) characteristics of Christianity such as those that have been enumerated above that are associated with this notion of timeless religion. So, the minimalist definition of religion proposed by Troeltsch (Everywhere the basic reality of religion is the same: an underivable, purely positive, again and again experienced contact with the Deity) (Masuzawa 2005, p. 315) is inadmissible from the anthropological point of view. Such a definition will appear persuasive only to those who have been raised within Christianity. And, in fact, in this quintessential form it merely reflects one of its dogmas. We must not only respond negatively to the question, can our religious be the religious of all people? but quickly add two clarifications. The first is that here as elsewhere it is pointless to seek to raise our indigenous particularism to the dignity of a universal and timeless category. The second, critical, point is that the very idea of an identical religious function present in all cultures is itself contestable. On this point, the anthropologist, in agreement with the recent analyses and conclusions uttered by postcolonial studies (Ashcroft, Griffiths & Tiffin 2006, see eurocentrism), is tempted to challenge the history of religions itself. He notes that this academic discipline, influenced by its Christian heritage, has further served to defend the imperialist interests of Western societies. The history of religions was born in the era when Western Europe colonized Africa and a good part of the rest of the world,6 when the superiority of Western man was unequivocally proclaimed,7 when an evolutionism toward an ethnocentric telos had become its official doctrine. The history of religions cannot dodge the reproach of having been one ideological instrument among others in the service of the (political, economic, military, but also intellectual) hegemony of the Western powers. One may even go a little farther and affirm that in choosing religion as the anthropological criterion par excellence, the West purely and simply annexed the humanity of mankind to its own indigenous anthropology, which in turn allowed it to declare that man, fully realized man, found its most perfect expression in Western man. It is difficult to imagine an attitude at once more ethnocentric and more arrogant. Certain critics have not hesitated to see in the history of religions a mystifying ideology (Fitzgerald 2000, p. ix) that served both the colonial interests of the European powers and those of their missionaries. Fitzgerald with good reason adds that no non-theological
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argument justifies a specific study of religious activities, because the notions of culture and of history satisfactorily subsume everything that one might be tempted to classify under the term religion (pp. 3, 225). Let us imagine, as a measure of the scandalous character of this annexation and disfigurement, that a learned Lapp or Aztec scholar demonstrates that the exorcisms and rituals of disenchantment practised by the Catholic church display numerous affinities with various ceremonies celebrated since prehistoric times by the oldest shamanic cultures. Encouraged by his discovery, he deduces from his insightful demonstration that a homo shamanicus has existed for thousands of years and represents the highest expression of the humanity of mankind. Irked by this precedent, a Bengali professor, the scion of an old family of orthodox Brahmins, would not perhaps hesitate to affirm that on the contrary this honor belongs to homo dharmicus (based on dharma, an impersonal socio-cosmic order and objective), whose most fully realized and purest expressions are to be found within the archaic Indian culture that created it. Do not smile, because this is exactly what the West shamelessly did and continues to do with its homo religiosus in which numerous cultures have not, or would not have, been able to recognize themselves. The criticisms levelled against the concept of religion in an anthropological context are reinforced by a large number of serious epistemological difficulties, or even impasses. First, we must remind ourselves that despite their familiarity, the words religion and religious lack satisfactory definitions (Asad 1993, p. 29). All the definitions that have been proposed since the 1850s, like that of Troeltsch cited above, draw their inspiration from the Christian model (Dubuisson 2003 [1998], pp. 53 63). Simply put, they generally attempt to offer an abstract concept that reduces religion to an essential core. Any definition that radically broke with this tradition would be widely reproached for not respecting the specificity of the religious. Conversely, religious, or sui generis,8 analyses of religion, because they necessarily de-contextualize the facts being studied, satisfy no serious epistemological demand. We must instead provoke a healthy epistemological inversion: our indigenous and religious categories must be considered as objects of study, not as tools of knowledge (McCutcheon 1997, pp. 129, 147; Engler et al., p. 175). Delicate problems similarly arise over the attempt to trace the limits (which must be universally valid) of the proper domain of religion and to specify the nature of these limits: are they transcendental, functional, or simply empirical? Difficulties multiply when we attempt to itemize the elements that this domain absolutely must or ought to incorporate or, inversely, exclude. A simple example will suffice to illustrate this last point. If one includes magic, the worship of ancestors, and divinatory techniques among the fundamental religious activities, then Christianity would have either to re-examine its own definition of religion or admit that its
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definition is incomplete, flawed even. But, if we exclude these activities from the religious sphere, most of the so-called religions will lose their identity. We are similarly uncertain as to the general form of a religion; that is, is it a system, an assemblage of changeable elements, a simple juxtaposition of heterogeneous activities, a structure, and, if the latter, what laws govern it? And must or must not all religions incorporate the same stable and invariable core; and, if we answer in the affirmative, into which (social, psychological, political, transcendental, and supernatural) jurisdiction(s) must it fall. It naturally follows that if several jurisdictions are posited, then it will be necessary to arrange them in a hierarchy and to analyze the play of their reciprocal influences. And yet, all this is only a small part of the problem. In fact, as has been said above, the Christian and Western idea of religion is located at the centre of a vast network of controversies and notions indissolubly linked to it (theology, symbol, mysteries, allegory, anti-Judaism, materialism, paradise, sin, sacred, transcendence, monotheism, myths/mythologies, origins, revelation, paganism, magic, eternal salvation, etc.), each of which would require a parallel epistemological analysis. The third type of analysis, to which we now turn and which we may call with Masuzawa the invention of the world religions, overlaps the anthropological and epistemological points of view while adding to them an original historical perspective. Its starting point is a radically new claim. And here the works of Fitzgerald, King, Oddie and Masuzawa are particularly exemplary. Their theses (if I may be permitted to offer a synthetic vision) are encapsulated in the following points. In the nineteenth century, Westerners (scholars, but also traders, industrialists, soldiers, colonial administrators, missionaries, etc.) acquainted themselves (at last) with the Eastern civilizations with which they found themselves in long-term contact. This is why the real discovery of Sanskrit dates only from the end of the eighteenth century, followed immediately by the formulation of the Indo-European hypothesis. And, it was in the course of this intimate and prolonged contact that Western science modelled, ordered, constructed, and/or invented the Eastern world religions from indigenous materials. In particular, it manufactured Indian Hinduism out of these materials (King 1999, pp. 96117; Fitzgerald 2000, pp. 134 55; Oddie 2006) and discovered a prehistoric religious prototype for the various ethnic Buddhisms (from Japan to Ceylon and from Tibet to Java) (King 1999, pp. 14360; Masuzawa 2005, pp. 12146). Japan, itself under pressure from imperialistic powers [ . . . ], invented for itself an autonomous religious sphere that conformed to the Western model and that was known as sect Shinto (Fitzgerald 2000, p. 164). The most astonishing case remains that of Buddhism, which also became a religion as a result of this process of acculturation despite the fact that the teaching of the Buddha rejected, along with the idea of a perennial
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personality, any form of transcendence (divine or other), any belief in the beyond, any notion of the soul or immortal spiritual principle, and that he knew nothing of any idea of Church, of clergy, or of revelation. These new religions were created9 neither ex nihilo nor arbitrarily or artificially. On the contrary, each one issued from sound choices carried out in the middle of a specific indigenous culture. These choices made possible the creation of complexes that were both internally coherent and as similar as possible to the canonical Western model. To this end, a number of characteristics were privileged: the canons of ancient texts certified as sacred10 (even if they had fallen into desuetude by the nineteenth century . . . ), organizations of an ecclesiastical type,11 idealist philosophies,12 individual soteriologies, theories concerning the beyond, monotheistic tendencies, and, along with the inevitable confessional borders, religious exclusivism (each person must henceforth identify with a single religion). Conversely, archaic wisdoms, magical or divinatory techniques, possession, sexual practices, traditional customs (ancestor worship, for example), manners that directly reflected profoundly original cultural creations in short, everything capable of contradicting our comforting image of religion were dismissed as or relegated to the status of savage or popular beliefs. In India, over the course of the nineteenth century, this process favoured the brahmanization and sanskritization of that which was in the process of becoming Hinduism, a word that, like the word Buddhism 40 or 50 years later around 1830 (King 1999, p. 143), had been created during the last quarter of the 18th century (Oddie 2006, p. 70). These creations, these modernizations, these reshapings or repackagings were carried out under the pressure of Western power or of its prestige. But the fact that they were highly successful, to say the least, raises two questions: why did Western science, and, behind it, the powers of the period, indulge in these creations? And, why were the latter so warmly received by the indigenous populations, or at least by their elites? While the responses to these questions are not simple and require numerous more detailed studies, we may already offer as useful guidelines the following points. From the Western side, it is apparent that this long operation took place within a vast process of acculturation, of ideological control and colonial domination. In this perspective, it was essential for the West to accept the others only on the condition that they conform to its norm, and its alone, in such a manner as these others should fit within its eurocentrism and within its own conception of the history of the world (Fitzgerald 2000, pp. 2130). But, because this history was supposed to culminate in the triumph and domination of the West as the civilizing power, the specificity and the particularity of these others were denied and the exultant West appears alone as the author and exemplary bearer of universal values (Asad 1993, p. 19; Masuzawa 2005, pp. xixii). In choosing religion as a principal vector of this annexation (and not economy, philosophy, or
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political conceptions), the West remained true to itself and to an imperialism that was as much colonial as epistemological (King 1999, p. 4; Masuzawa 2005, p. 20). Did it not, in fact, consider religion to be both the defining marker of man and the most totalizing type of discourse? Furthermore, is not it also the most effective means of depoliticizing social practices (Masuzawa 2005, p. 20)? In any case, it is undeniable that this process was favourably received by educated indigenous elites. Several factors were at work here. Without necessarily having been aware of it, the West offered to the natives, or at least to their most educated and most westernized elites, a return (albeit artificial and idealized) to their distant origins,13 a rather flattering form of identity,14 a powerful unifying factor that had not hitherto existed and could even serve as a focus of national unity (India and Hinduism; Japan and Shinto), and a place in the international concert of world religions15 at the same rank as the three old monotheisms. In this circumstance, to accept the Western point of view proved particularly advantageous. Research into Eastern world religions carried out in the twentieth century by the history of religions consolidated the work of its nineteenthcentury founders and hypostatized these realities that had in the meantime become Hinduism, Buddhism, and Shinto. 6 Conclusion We shall only know, of course, 10 or 20 years down the road whether or not these pioneering works will have modified the meaning and general orientation of studies carried out under the aegis of the history of religions. What is already certain is that they offer the first serious and fruitful alternative capable of freeing the history of religions from its heavy theological heritage, from its dependence on the postulates of phenomenology, and from its deep ethnocentric tendencies. Perhaps one day these works will be recognized as having prepared the way for the most important and most radical aggiornamento achieved by religious studies since its creation. Short Biography Born in 1950, Daniel Dubuisson is director of research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). At present, he steers the Institut de Recherches Historiques du Septentrion in the University Charles de Gaulle-Lille 3. He has published La Lgende royale dans lInde ancienne, Rma et le Rmyana (Economica, Paris, 1986); Mythologies du XXe sicle (Dumzil, Eliade, Lvi-Strauss) (Presses Universitaires de Lille, Lille, 1993, translated into Italian, Romanian, and English); Anthropologie potique (Esquisses pour une anthropologie du texte) (Peeters, Louvain, 1996); LOccident et la religion Mythes, science et idologie (Complexe, Bruxelles, 1998, translated into English, 2003); Dictionnaire des grands thmes de lhistoire
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des religions De Pythagore Lvi-Strauss (Complexe, Bruxelles, 2004); Les sagesses de lhomme Bouddhisme, paganisme, spiritualit chrtienne (Lille, Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2004, translated into Italian); and Impostures et pseudo-science Luvre de Mircea Eliade (Lille, Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2005). Notes
* Correspondence address: Daniel Dubuisson, IRHiS, Universit Charles-de-Gaulle-Lille3, BP 60149, Villeneuve, dAscq Cedex, France. Email: daniel.dubuisson@free.fr. McCutcheon (1997, 2003); Dubuisson (2003 [1998], 2004a,b, 2006); King (1999), Fitzgerald (2000), Masuzawa (2005); and Oddie (2006). 2 Although it is hardly news to many scholars that all signifiers are empty, arbitrary signs that derive meaning from their circulation within a series of relationship with others equally empty signifiers, this playfulness of meaning-making stops at the door of religion (McCutcheon 2005, p. 155). 3 I too, of course, look upon the religious field as a stupendous storehouse of images that is far from having been exhausted by objective research; but these images are like any others, and the spirit in which I approach the study of religious data supposes that such data are not credited at the outset with any specific character (Lvi-Strauss 1971, p. 639 [Fr. p. 571]). 4 Compare with Stoczkowskis thesis (forthcoming 2007). 5 This passage condenses Dubuisson 2003 [1998], pp. 147 61. 6 There is nothing shocking about the conquest and rule of an inferior races territory by a superior race, because one necessarily favours the regeneration of inferior or bastardized races by superior races (Renan 1871, p. 390). 7 It is today very likely that the non-white human races will be recognized as incapable of establishing a religious system of any value, and that among the least of them only the crudest notion of God and mindless adoration will be found. If these propositions come to be firmly established, it will follow that metaphysical religions were born among white peoples, and that they alone developed a reasoned symbolism, a serious dogmatic theology (Burnouf 1872, p. 57). 8 McCutcheon 1997, p. xi; 2003, p. 54: The sui generis discourse on religion privileges religious experience by treating religious activities as specific and autonomous (they have no other cause but themselves and their meaning transcends all historical determinations whatsoever). 9 Obviously, it is difficult to find a word capable of adequately subsuming the whole of these complex processes. 10 Such as the Sacred Books of the East, edited between 1879 and 1910 by F. Max Mller. 11 The Brahmans became priests and Buddhist bhikshus monks. 12 Like the Vednta of Shankara and the neo-Vednta (King 1999, pp. 135 42). 13 The veda for Hinduism and the Buddha himself for Buddhism. 14 Conceived on the Western model, these religions displayed only prestigious intellectual and metaphysical aspects that could be compared with those of the West which, at the same period (second half of the nineteenth century), repudiated its Semitic origins (Dubuisson 2003 [1998], pp. 14550; Masuzawa 2005, pp. 147206). Two examples: Fully Jewish at it origin, Christianity freed itself, over time, from almost everything that it inherited from that race, so the thesis of those who consider it the Aryan religion par excellence is true in many respects (Renan 1882, p. 1142); Those who want to see in Christianity only a magnified Judaism, a Jewish sect, are misguided. By itself, with its spirit of exclusion and its rigorous rituals, Judaism could neither have conquered nor regenerated the world. Christianity was born of Greco-Roman philosophy infused, as new blood, into the simple forms of the noblest religion of the East, Judaism. Aryan by the spirit that animates it, its foundation is also Aryan (Reinach 1880, p. 358). 15 Masuzawa (2005, p. xii). The invention and the formatting of the world religions over the course of the nineteenth century allowed Europe to define its relations with other cultures and to rethink its origins in the light of the discovery of the Indo-European family of languages.
2007 The Author Religion Compass 1/6 (2007): 787800, 10.1111/ j.1749-8171.2007.00049.x Journal Compilation 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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