Method & Theory in the Study of Religion最新文献

{"title":"A Critical Examination of Pascal Boyer’s Religion Explained The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought","authors":"D. Dubuisson","doi":"10.1163/15700682-12341486","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15700682-12341486","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Behind its theoretical and scientific ambition, Pascal Boyer’s work mobilizes several ideas and notions (starting with that of “religion”) that belong to the old Western cultural tradition. It is precisely this ideological substratum and its indispensable cognitive “crutches” that this article seeks to identify.","PeriodicalId":44982,"journal":{"name":"Method & Theory in the Study of Religion","volume":"32 1","pages":"267-275"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/15700682-12341486","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45295497","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Role of Canon in the Study of Hinduism and Some Notes About Bourdieu: A Response to Stephen L. Young","authors":"J. Llewellyn","doi":"10.1163/15700682-12341482","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15700682-12341482","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This response to Stephen Young’s article begins with his use of the term doxa, drawn from Pierre Bourdieu. For Bourdieu doxa are the unspoken assumptions that undergird social hierarchy, assumptions that are only exposed during times of historical change. It is unclear if Young intends that the exposure of what he calls New Testament studies’ “protectionism” is a sign that the field has undergone such a change. The second part of the response is about the applicability of this kind of analysis to the study of Hinduism in North America, concluding that protectionism concerning the interpretation of the scriptural canon does not seem to be operative there. However, there is a more or less similar controversy about the study of Hinduism by outsiders.","PeriodicalId":44982,"journal":{"name":"Method & Theory in the Study of Religion","volume":"32 1","pages":"373-379"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/15700682-12341482","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41708020","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Protecting Difference: Protectionist Strategies and the Parting of the Ways","authors":"M. Tong","doi":"10.1163/15700682-12341480","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15700682-12341480","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This article takes an interdisciplinary look at protectionist doxa at the intersection of two distinct fields: early Christian studies and rabbinics. I argue that both fields maintain a protectionist doxa of difference; that is, a doxa that early Christianity and rabbinic Judaism are fundamentally different from each other. This difference, which supports the constitution of each field as separate from the other, nevertheless has a secondary effect of shaping our approach to our objects of study—early Christianity and rabbinic Judaism. Specifically, this doxa of difference occludes the ways in which early Christianity and rabbinic Judaism can be similar. I focus specifically on the current “polysemy” debate within rabbinics and show how this doxa has functioned to obstruct comparative approaches across disciplines rather than facilitate them.","PeriodicalId":44982,"journal":{"name":"Method & Theory in the Study of Religion","volume":"-1 1","pages":"1-9"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/15700682-12341480","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41819741","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Religious Rituals as Civil hexis","authors":"Fatima Tofighi","doi":"10.1163/15700682-12341475","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15700682-12341475","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000In their attempt to question the assumption that rituals are merely symbolic, Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood tried to show that rituals have functioned as instruments. In Asad’s study of medieval Christianity and Mahmood’s work on mosque women, rituals function to make selves. These instrumentalist readings stand outside the usual modernist representational readings. For these anthropologists, the distinction between representational and instrumental understandings of rituals seems to be very clear. Nationalist modernist readings of Islamic rituals seem to confirm the representational logic, which apparently falls entirely outside the instrumental framework. In this paper, I intend to disturb this clear-cut distinction, and demonstrate that in many occasions the instrumental understanding is preceded by a representational interpretation, while the representational may, in turn, help create a civil subject. My evidences come from the Iranian Islamic literature in 1960s and 70s, viz. Mortaza Motahhari, Ali Shariʾati, Mehdi Barzargan, and the authors of Maktab-e Islam monthly. Although some of these intellectuals emphasized the instrumental nature of rituals in making the pious subject, others proposed different rationalizations—medical benefit, collective solidarity and order, and existential meaning. For these thinkers or their audience, there was no clear distinction between these justifications. It is true that many of them had a representational logic; but they contributed to making a proper civil subject. Hence, the instrumental-representational binary cannot always be maintained. Asad’s and Mahmood’s critiques of anthropological readings of rituals have yet to be qualified to take into account the prior interpretations and theological context of religious rituals, to highlight the conflation of the representational and instrumental frameworks in many modern rituals, and to note that deciding on the instrumentality of a particular ritual is not only significant when it is about constructing the interior of the private self, but may be involved in building larger communities.","PeriodicalId":44982,"journal":{"name":"Method & Theory in the Study of Religion","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2020-05-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/15700682-12341475","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47051507","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Primary History as Museum Exhibit: Rethinking the Recovery of the Hebrew Bible’s Artifacts","authors":"Andrew Tobolowsky","doi":"10.1163/15700682-12341479","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15700682-12341479","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000The “Primary History” is the scholarly term for the biblical narrative spanning Genesis through Kings, created largely through the combination of pre-existing texts and traditions. This narrative has played a central role in scholarly reconstructions of the history of Israelite and Judahite traditions more generally because it is often possible to recover these pre-biblical traditions apparently intact. However, the recovery of pre-biblical traditions is a more complicated problem than typical approaches—which focus on the reconstruction of original texts—allow. Scholars also need to consider how the combination and arrangement of traditions has altered our perception of them, even when we can recover their original form. This article employs contemporary theoretical approaches to museum exhibits in order to explore how the combination and presentation of artifacts reshapes what they seem to mean, without physically altering them, and applies those lessons to the study of reconstructed pre-biblical texts.","PeriodicalId":44982,"journal":{"name":"Method & Theory in the Study of Religion","volume":"32 1","pages":"233-258"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2020-05-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/15700682-12341479","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43814532","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Cognitive Science of Religion and the Study of Islam: Rethinking Islamic Theology, Law, Education, and Mysticism Using the Works of al-Ghazālī","authors":"Aria Nakissa","doi":"10.1163/15700682-12341474","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15700682-12341474","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Specialists in Islamic studies have taken virtually no interest in the influential and rapidly developing field of Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR). The present article seeks to address this problem by considering how insights from CSR can be systematically applied to reconceptualize Islamic theology, law, education, and mysticism. The article centers on what is probably CSR’s most influential and well-established idea; namely, that religion is closely linked to an evolved “mindreading” ability (i.e., a “Theory of Mind Module”). It is argued that Islamic theology employs mindreading focused on events and objects in the universe, Islamic law and education employ mindreading focused on scriptural texts and embodied practices, and Islamic mysticism employs mindreading focused on psychological experiences. The article develops these ideas through an analysis of the Arabic-language writings of Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī, the famous medieval Islamic theologian, jurist, and mystic.","PeriodicalId":44982,"journal":{"name":"Method & Theory in the Study of Religion","volume":"32 1","pages":"205-232"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2020-05-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/15700682-12341474","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44733308","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"You Can Lead a Horse to Water, But You Can’t Make It Drink","authors":"Gabriel Levy","doi":"10.1163/15700682-12341483","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15700682-12341483","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000As I understand it, the central aim of the field of CSR is to reconcile (in the sense of “consilience”) methods and theories from the natural sciences with research on religion, which though defined in various ways, is usually understood as a universal human phenomenon. This does not necessarily mean religion is innate, but like all universal human phenomena, there will be an evolutionary story to tell about how it, or its constituent elements, came about. The stories are usually about the phenomena of religion writ-large, variously defined, rarely reaching the granularity to make claims about specific historical and cultural circumstances where religion is most relevant to agents. I challenge all scholars of religion to make their metaphysics explicit.","PeriodicalId":44982,"journal":{"name":"Method & Theory in the Study of Religion","volume":"32 1","pages":"259-266"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2020-05-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/15700682-12341483","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44115439","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Response to Stephen L. Young, “Let’s Take the Text Seriously”: the Protectionist Doxa in Mainstream New Testament Studies","authors":"G. Dye","doi":"10.1163/15700682-12341481","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15700682-12341481","url":null,"abstract":"This response to Stephen Young’s excellent paper vindicates his general argument against protectionism, connects his analyses to some aspects of contemporary Qurʾanic and Early Islamic studies, and highlights some of the problems with the distinction between dominant protectionism and dominated protectionism.","PeriodicalId":44982,"journal":{"name":"Method & Theory in the Study of Religion","volume":"-1 1","pages":"1-6"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2020-05-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/15700682-12341481","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41852191","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"What’s in a (Change of) Name? Much—but Not That Much—and Not What Wiebe Claims","authors":"Satoko Fujiwara, Tim Jensen","doi":"10.1163/15700682-12341478","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15700682-12341478","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Donald Wiebe claims that the IAHR leadership (already before an Extended Executive Committee (EEC) meeting in Delphi) had decided to water down the academic standards of the IAHR with a proposal to change its name to “International Association for the Study of Religions.” His criticism, we argue, is based on a series of misunderstandings as regards: 1) the difference between the consultative body (EEC) and the decision-making body (EC), 2) the difference between the preliminary points of view of individuals and final proposals by the EC, 3) personal conversations, 4) the link between the proposal to change the name and the wish to tighten up the academic profile of the IAHR. Moreover, if the final decision-making bodies, the International Committee and the General Assembly, adopt the proposal, the new name as little as the old can make the IAHR more or less scientific. Tightening up the academic, scientific profile of the IAHR takes more than a change of name.","PeriodicalId":44982,"journal":{"name":"Method & Theory in the Study of Religion","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2020-05-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/15700682-12341478","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46400977","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Report on the Special Executive Committee Meeting of the International Association for the History of Religions in Delphi","authors":"D. Wiebe","doi":"10.1163/15700682-12341477","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15700682-12341477","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This essay is a report on the IAHR’s Extended Executive Committee meeting in Delphi (13-15 September 2019), and a critical account of its decision, formulated prior to that meeting, to reject the IAHR’s long-standing remit to support a scientific study of religion and religions. It is also a warning that insisting the IAHR be open to considering moral, social, political, spiritual or other cultural ideals will dismantle the only academic association committed to a scientific study of religions, transforming the IAHR into a weak, international version of the American Academy of Religion.","PeriodicalId":44982,"journal":{"name":"Method & Theory in the Study of Religion","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2020-05-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/15700682-12341477","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47955022","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}