This module is not currently running in 2024 to 2025.
The category of religion is hardwired into histories of Enlightenment, modernity, and post-modernity to the point that it is now difficult to discuss any of these periods without negotiating religion as a problem of central importance. This course develops a multidisciplinary mapping of religion as an object of academic research in order to better understand the polemics, politics, assumptions and everyday practices which continue to determine the status of religion. Working with various subfields within the study of religion, this comparative and collaborative course develops new maps of mutual influence, borrowing, translation and struggle between subfields, all of which produced the dominant images of religion within university and popular cultural contexts alike.
Indicative topics include: how and why did the study of religion emerge as a ‘human science’ opposed to earlier research on theology? What cultural and political projects shaped the category of “world religion”? How did scholars of biblical and European traditions react to nineteenth-century developments in the study of Buddhist and Hindu traditions? What were the political tendencies behind modern European and North American denigrations of ritualized practice in favour of religion as the study of “belief”? What were universities roles in establishing the limits and value of the concept of the “secular”, and why are so many academic discussions of religion currently so keen to dislodge the same concept?
Students will learn to engage in sophisticated ways with classic primary texts by those who lastingly shaped the modern invention of the academic study of religion, figures like G. W. F. Hegel, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Max Müller, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Sigmund Freud, Marcel Mauss.
Total contact hours: 20
This module is compulsory for students studying on the MA in Religion and MA in Religion (Paris).
Essay (5000 words) - 100%
Durkheim, E. (2008). The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Oxford: Oxford University Press;
Feuerbach, L. (2008). The Essence of Religion, London: Prometheus;
Frazer, J. (2009). The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, ed. Robert Fraser; Oxford: Oxford University Press;
Masuzawa, T. (2005). The Invention of World Religions, or How European Universalism was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism, Chicago: Chicago University Press;
Schleiermacher, F. (1996). On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press;
Strauss, D.F. (2012). The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined, trans. George Eliot; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press;
Weber, M. (2008). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Stephen Kalberg; Oxford: Oxford University Press.
See the library reading list for this module (Canterbury)
Students will have gained a critical awareness of the formation of the discipline of religion in relation to other modern disciplines and foundational modern concepts (e.g. the theoretical definition of 'the political');
Students will have gained a comprehensive knowledge and understanding of how, and why, and with what consequences the category of religion was invented;
Students will have gained a comprehensive knowledge and understanding of major 'inventors' of religion and techniques for studying religion;
Students will have gained an ability to analyse critical approaches to the study of religion;
Students will have gained the ability to situate their own specialist area (e.g. Hindu Studies, Biblical Studies) in relation to the genealogies and questions mapped in this course
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