studies in the context of globalization: in his words, it should ‘provide an
understanding of human frailty and... [an education in] cosmopolitan virtue’
(2004: 104). Valuable as they are, none of these texts especially displays a global
vision in the sense in which I am using the term.
In the part of the world that I know best, the United States, there is a large
literature on globalizing or deparochializing the curriculum. See, for example,
the essays in Globalizing the Liberal Arts, vol. 5 of Liberal Arts: Journal of the
Gaede Institute for the Liberal Arts at Westmont(July 2006), and the literature
cited there.
2 José Ignacio Cabezón (2006) writes: ‘it is hard for us to conceive of the day
when a “Theories of Religion” course might be taught with a substantial selection
of readings from nonwestern sources... something that some of us [would]
consider a sign of maturity’ (Cabezón 2006: 31). Would it really be so difficult
to include a text such as Alatas 1977 in such a course? Alatas and Sinha 2001
provide a model for internationalizing such a course, even if that course depends
heavily upon European and North American theorists. In this volume Ezra
Chitando notes that African scholars have made major contributions to method
and theory. That includes addressing, as Alatas 1977 does, the term ‘religion’
and such classic issues as the insider/outsider problem.
Not only does Cabezón conceive of the study of religions as a European and
North American pursuit (see esp. p. 23, including n. 4), he also seems to imagine
that the only people outside of the region with whom it is worth talking seriously
about religion are religious people, and it seems that these people will inevitably
object to academic analysis (p. 32). One hardly needs to leave the United States
or Western Europe to have such discussions. Writing in the same issue of the
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Gavin Flood is even blunter: the
study of religions involves ‘reasoning within the horizon of the western academy’
(Flood 2006: 50).
3 An example from this volume: Chung Chin-hong and Lee Chang-yick note that
Korean scholars are actively translating European and North American works
into Korean: Friedrich Max Müller, Gerardus van der Leeuw, Mircea Eliade,
Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Jonathan Z. Smith, William Paden, and Bruce Lincoln.
Who, I wonder, is translating the works of Korean scholars into English?
4 At the end of 2006 the IAHR had a total of 37 national and 5 regional affiliates.
5 Important predecessors include Pye 2004, a selection of articles in Antes, Geertz,
and Warne, eds (2004, vol 1: 13–184), and a series of entries in Jones, ed. (2005:
8761–96, 10072–82), for which I served as consultant.
6 There is an immense literature on this topic, and I will not try to rehearse it
here.
In a classic act of boundary-keeping, R. J. Zwi Werblowsky (1960: 216–18)
noted the growing internationalism of the IAHR evident at the Marburg Congress
but also a lack of understanding of the boundaries between the study of religion
and theology. One must be wary of a latent—or perhaps overt—Orientalism in
this regard. As Satoko Fujiwara points out in this volume, the Japanese thought
it was the Europeans who were responsible for overstepping this line.
In what follows, I use the term ‘theology’, partly because it is common in my
particular linguistic community, and partly because it is a designation that
UNESCO officially recognizes. In a global context, however, to speak of theology10
GREGORY D. ALLES