edition is now available in Chinese: Pals 2005) discusses in turn E. B. Tylor
and James George Frazer, Sigmund Freud, Émile Durkheim, Karl Marx, Max
Weber, Mircea Eliade, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, and Clifford Geertz—a list that
could have been compiled already in the early 1970s. An introduction in
German, Klassiker der Religionswissenschaft, edited by Axel Michaels (2004),
discusses a larger number of theorists, but similarly ranges, as the subtitle puts
it, from Friedrich Schleiermacher to Mircea Eliade. The unsurprising result is
that the manner in which the history of the study of religions is presented has
become increasingly antiquated.^11 This volume will not define a new canon,
but the hope is that it will go some of the way toward bringing reflection on
the history of the field and its current state up to date.
As already mentioned, the Afterword makes a step in the direction of
constructing a global vision of religious studies. Although it comes at the end
of the volume, it is in a very real sense only preliminary. Like a fine Scotch
(apologies to those for whom alcohol is forbidden), more mature reflection
requires aging.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It remains here to thank the various authors for their contributions. Some of
them had very few precedents for giving an account of the study of religion
in their regions. That made their work especially arduous, but it also makes
it particularly significant. I owe all of the contributors my profound thanks.
Thanks also for comments and other assistance on the Introduction, the
Conclusion, and the project generally to Don Wiebe, Edith Franke, Eugen
Ciurtin, Giovanni Casadio, Gustavo Benavides, Laurence Wu, Mahdi
Hasanzadeh, Michael Stausberg, Rosalind Hackett, Russell McCutcheon, Tim
Jensen, and others I may have inadvertently forgotten to mention. Although I
have not always taken their advice, I realize that I have done so at my own
peril. And finally a thank you to those at both Routledge and Florence
Production who have given this volume such careful attention.
NOTES
1 Although Mark Taylor (1998: 12) does not use the terminology of deparochial-
ization, he attributes this benefit quite explicitly to religious studies in the United
States. I take it that Jakeliçand Starling (2006: 205), for example, have something
similar in mind when they refer to ‘global concerns and global perspective in
the study of religion’. Mark Juergensmeyer puts such concerns into practice in
three fine volumes that he has edited (2003, 2005, 2006). Bryan S. Turner (2004)
has, however, something different in mind. He identifies twin tasks for religious
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INTRODUCTION
9
