Reflexivity or reflex?W
HEN IN 1963 MIRCEA ELIADEpublished ‘The History of Religions in
Retrospect: 1912 and After’, a survey of the European and North
American historiography of religion of the previous fifty years, he mentioned
several anthropologists who worked in the United States—among them Paul
Radin, Robert Lowie, Franz Boas, Alfred Kroeber, Clyde Kluckhohn and Ruth
Benedict—along with two sociologists—Talcott Parsons and Milton Yinger—
and a Religionswissenschaftlerwho had written on the sociology of religion,
Joachim Wach. But among those who could be classified as historians of
religion the only North American scholars named by Eliade were William F.
Albright, Erwin Goodenough, and Theodore Gaster. It is not the case, to be
sure, that Albright, Goodenough, and Gaster were the only historians dealing
with religious materials between 1912 and 1962 in the United States. Among
the names that come to mind one may mention the Indologist W. Norman
Brown, the Sinologists Herrlee Creel and Holmes Welch, or the scholar of
Iranian religions A. V. Williams Jackson. Had Eliade been writing now, the
number of anthropologists and sociologists of religion would have multiplied,
and the number of historians who dealt with religion, as well as of ‘historians-
of-religion’, would have reached such a proportion that an overview such as
the present one could have degenerated into a mere listing of names and
publications. Moreover, when facing now the task of surveying the state of
the study of religion in North America one must deal with approaches to
religion unknown to Eliade and his contemporaries—cognitive science,
ethology, and economics, among others—as it is increasingly clear that it is
only with the help of these disciplines that one can expect to do a measure of
justice to the cluster of phenomena generally labeled ‘religion’. Another issue
to be considered in an essay such as the present one is that of boundaries—
not just the uncertain boundaries among and within traditions, but also
disciplinary ones. Regarding the former, one must be mindful that terms taken
for granted just a scholarly generation ago—for example, ‘Hinduism’ or
‘Gnosticism’—are now being questioned; or that it is no longer uncommon to
find references to ‘Christianities’ rather than to just ‘Christianity’. Indeed,
disciplinary reflexivity—some of it, alas, reflex-like—has led to the term
‘religion’ itself being regarded with suspicion, thus contradicting James
Beckford’s claim that ‘specialists in comparative religion, history of religions
and theology may take it for granted that religions constitute discrete objects
sharing generic properties’ (Social Theory and Religion, 2003: 19). At a more
practical level, that of the authors to be mentioned, the issue of boundaries is
equally relevant, as scholars move between continents and in some cases
between—or even among—languages. Be that as it may, for the purposes of
this essay we will be concerned with scholars who, regardless of their place of
birth, work in North America, and write mainly in English and French.1111
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NORTH AMERICA
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