Perspectives on Method and Theory in the Study of Religion

This volume collects select papers on methodology in the study of religion that were originally presented at the XVIIth Congress of the International Association for the History of Religions, held in Mexico City in 1995. Granted the status of adjunct proceedings for the Congress, the collection opens with the editors’ detailed survey of the longstanding importance of discussions on methodology within the IAHR. The twenty-one essays which follow examine religion and the history of the study of religion within a variety of theoretical contexts. The essays are organized in terms of three general sub-divisions: general issues in methodology (from the impact of both postmodernism and reflexive anthropology on the study of religion to the politics of religious studies as practiced in different national settings); reflections on the categories commonly employed by scholars working in the field (e.g., ＂religion,＂ ＂syncretism,＂ ＂gender,＂ ＂New Religious Movements,＂ ＂sacred,＂ ＂power,＂ ＂experience,＂ etc.), and finally, the collection ends with a review symposium on one of the more sophisticated recent treatments of the problem of defining religion, Benson Saler’s Conceptualizing Religion (Brill, 1993). Despite carrying out their work in a variety of settings--from Denmark and Finland, to Britain, Switzerland, Germany, Canada, the USA, and Mexico--the authors all model a similar approach to studying religion as but one instance of human culture.

Armin W. Geertz is Professor of the History of Religions at the Department of the Study of Religion, University of Aarhus, Denmark, and is the General Secretary of the International Association for the History of Religions. He is on the editorial boards of a number of journals including Numen and Method & Theory in the Study of Religion. He is the author of numerous books and articles on indigenous religions, methodology in the study of religion, contemporary religiosity and the religion and mythology of the Hopi Indians in Arizona, where he has done fieldwork intermittently since 1978. His books include: Hopi Indian Altar Iconography (Brill, 1987), Children of Cottonwood. Piety and Ceremonialism in Hopi Indian Puppetry (Lincoln & University of Nebraska Press, 1987), Religion, Tradition, and Renewal(University of Aarhus Press, 1991), and The Invention of Prophecy: Continuity and Meaning in Hopi Indian Religion (University of California Press, 1992, 1994).
Russell T. McCutcheon is Associate Professor of Modern Religious Thought at Southwest Missouri State University, Springfield, Missouri, USA. He is the author of Manufacturing Religion (Oxford University Press, 1997), Critics Not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion (State University of New York Press), and is the co-editor of both the Guide to the Study of Religion (Cassell, 2000) and Brill’s journal Method & Theory in the Study of Religion.