Religious Studies: A Global View

include sociologists Sudhindra Sharma (2002, 2003) and K. B. Bhattachan

(2000), the historian Prayag Raj Sharma (1978, 1989, 1997), and Rajendra

Pradhan, an anthropologist (1986, 2002).

While academic background clearly influences the modes of writing, there

is increasingly an interest across the board in the relationship between state

and religion and the implications of this relationship for secularism, pluralism

and other democratic values. One of the vibrant debates revolves around the

identification of the state with Hinduism. Sharma (2002, 2003) has tried to

explore indigenous discourses on religion, the role of a Hindu monarch and

the Hindu Dharmashastras and the implications of these discourses for

constitutional monarchy and democracy in Nepal. Academics have also tried

to raise the issue of the ‘ethnicization’ of religion and have employed the

framework of political sociology to the study of religion (e.g. Bhattachan 1995,

2000).

Conclusion

In brief, what we find in this region is that ‘religious studies’ per se is hard to

locate and studies of various aspects of religion are available under sociology,

anthropology, history, and related disciplines. Studies for the most part tend

to be country-specific, with some interesting exceptions. There is the tendency

to concentrate on the religion dominant in a particular country, but this is

now changing. Little attention has been paid by scholars to the study of

religions outside South Asia. Finally, the ethnicization of religion, religious

fundamentalism and conflict and the relation between religion, state, and

democracy has come center-stage in the work of many scholars across the

region as a whole.

Southeast Asia

Introduction

The historical development and contemporary status of religious studies

in Southeast Asia is a challenging topic for a number of reasons, both

intellectual and practical. A primary challenge rested on the very

conceptualization of the description ‘religious studies’. In the available literature

this is broadly understood as the academic study of religions from a variety

of disciplinary perspectives, historical, philosophical, psychological, literary,

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40111

42222

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SOUTH AND SOUTHEAST ASIA

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