shift from a religious to a naturalistic framework for the study of religion’
(Preus 1996: 207; cf. Segal 1994).
Roughly a century, however, separates Hume’s Natural Historyfrom the
academic institutionalization of the study of religion. This observation led the
German scholar of religion, Hans Kippenberg, to challenge Rudolph’s thesis
and point to the Romantic critique of the Enlightenment as the birth-era of
the study of religion (Kippenberg 1991: 28–31). He credits Friedrich
Schleiermacher’s speeches On Religion (1799) with the decisive change.
Obviously, a substantial gap of three quarters of a century separates
Schleiermacher’s speeches from the institutionalization of the study of religion.
Hence, other relevant developments and stimuli need to be taken into account.
These include a further influx of relevant materials inviting scholarly attention
and intellectual domestication; political, religious, and cultural developments,
such as the increasing separation of state and religion; industrialization and
urbanization; missionary activities and colonialism; groundbreaking achieve-
ments within the humanities such as the translation of hitherto unintelligible
writings, the decipherment of hitherto undecipherable documents, the discovery
of the affiliation of families of languages, the archeological and geological
unraveling of a vast territory of prehistory beyond the reach of the biblical
frame of reference, the rise of a historical-critical approach to the Bible and
scripture in general, the advancement of professional historiography, and last
but not least the formation of the theory of evolution (cf. Kippenberg 1997:
44–59). To various degrees and at different times these factors were relevant
in different countries of Western Europe.
‘Religion’: a foundational concept
The most obvious, crucial, and lasting impact of Western Europe on the study
of religion, however, is the genesis of the very concept ‘religion’. Recent
decades have witnessed the emergence of a vast body of scholarly literature in
Western Europe as elsewhere, most of it written by authors who ignored each
other, on the history and implications of ‘religion’ as a clear and distinct if
not altogether autonomous and universal domain of human reality.
The Italian historian of religion Dario Sabbatucci (1923–2002) empha-
sized that there were no objective criteria for classifying facts as ‘religious’
in non-Western cultures, as the category of religion was valid and functional
only in the Western cultural environment (1988: 46). He also argued that the
study of religion led to the dissolution of the religious object (Sabbatucci 1988:
55, 57).
Some years later, and without reference to Sabbatucci, the British-American
anthropologist Talal Asad challenged the ways in which dominant theoretical
understandings of the category of religion imply its conceptual division ‘from
the domain of power’ (Asad 1993: 29). Without any apparent reference to Asad,
1111
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
1011
1
2
3111
4 5 6 7 8 9
20111
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
30111
1
2
3
4
35
6
7
8
9
40111
42222
3
411
WESTERN EUROPE
17
