the French anthropologist Daniel Dubuisson argued that the category of religion
as referring to a separate domain is a Western construct that has helped shape
Western systems of values and representation. He suggested replacing ‘religion’
with the notion ‘cosmographic formations’ (Dubuisson 1998: 276).
Neither Asad nor Dubuisson seemed to be aware of the large-scale research
project of the German Catholic theologian, Ernst Feil. Feil’s (1986, 1997, 2001)
detailed reconstruction of the Western history of the concept from early
Christianity to the Enlightenment further evidences the important epistemo-
logical transformation that occurred in the formation of modernity.
From a postmodern background, Timothy Fitzgerald (2000) has extended
the critique of the intercultural usefulness and validity of the category ‘religion’,
especially when applied to India and Japan. In doing so, he explicitly challenged
the very basis of religious studies as an academic discipline. Still, one looks in
vain for a discussion of the studies mentioned above in Fitzgerald’s book.
Although Western European scholars now generally recognize the Euro-
centric bias of ‘religion’, few, if any, seem prepared actually to give it up. Several
scholars, however, mainly from Britain, the Netherlands, France, Germany,
Denmark, and Italy, are involved in a lively debate on the concept (e.g. Bianchi
[ed.] 1994; Platvoet and Molendijk [eds] 1999; Feil [ed.] 2000). Hans-Michael
Haussig has published a substantial comparative study on (emic) concepts of
religion in Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, and Islam (Haussig 1999).The sacred and the holySome founders of the study of religion focused on the concept of ‘the sacred’,
usually in contrast to ‘the profane’. In 1906, Henri Hubert (1872–1927) and
Marcel Mauss (1872–1950) pointed to the complex nature of the sacred as
‘the central phenomenon among all the religious phenomena’ (Mauss 1968:
17). The same category also appears in Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of
Religious Life(1912), where religion is defined as ‘a unified system of beliefs
and practices relative to sacred things, i.e., things set apart and forbidden’
(Durkheim 1960: 65). These French scholars had been inspired by Scottish
Professor of Arabic William Robertson Smith’s Lectures on the Religion of
the Semites(1889). While Smith had used the adjective ‘sacred’ to qualify acts,
beliefs, institutions, species, tradition, usages, and so on, he had also put
forward the general claim that ‘[t]he distinction between what is holyand what
is commonis one of the most important things in ancient religion’ (Smith 1894:
140).
One year after Durkheim’s Elementary Forms, the Paris-educated Swedish
religious historian and theologian, Nathan Söderblom (1866–1931), at that
time teaching in Leipzig, asserted, ‘Holiness is the great word in religion;
it is even more essential than the notion of God’. Whereas he explicitly rejected18
MICHAEL STAUSBERG