A longer paper that grew out of this essay can be found here.
What might be an appropriate and useful way to talk about something like “religion” across times, locales, and disciplines? This is a question shared by classical approaches to the study of religion like those of Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, and Max Müller, and more recent scholars like Clifford Geertz, Talal Asad, Tomoko Masuzawa, and Jonathan Z. Smith. What Smith, Asad, Geertz, and Masuzawa share in common is a sense of the inadequacy of the classical approaches. Asad, Smith, and Masuzawa in particular offer as alternatives paying more attention to reflexivity, disciplinary history, and the relation between power and knowledge. In this post, I want to offer some comments and a question based primarily on Asad’s chapter “The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category” in his seminal book Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).
Continue reading “Notes on Talal Asad and Clifford Geertz on the Study of Religion”