Guanghu, Chung Chin-hong, and Lee Chang-yick all remark upon how odd
the term originally seemed in Chinese and Korean. Ezra Chitando expresses
concerns about whether ‘religion’ accurately reflects practice in sub-Saharan
African. Patrice Brodeur notes that it has been common in Islamic universities
to study not religion (d¥n) or theology (lÇht) but shar¥’ah.Michael Stausberg
and Gustavo Benavides mention several studies critical of the term. Yet as
Stausberg observes for Western Europe, and as Chung and Lee underscore for
Korea, few people actually seem willing to abandon ‘religion’. For all its faults,
people still find the term useful.
One question these observations provoke is the following: does religious
studies require a concept of ‘religion’ that is universal and unambiguous in
order to be academically viable worldwide? An affirmative answer may seem
self-evident, but it is not. On the one hand, the study of religion in South Asia
is hardly the only case of institutional exceptionalism. In terms of faculty share,
one of the most successful social sciences over the course of the twentieth
century was geography, but not in the United States, where the field is very
poorly represented. Is that exceptionalism due to a peculiarly US American
conception of earth, planet, or land? On the other hand, some fields organized
around categories with much firmer boundaries and presumably universal
recognition prior to European colonialism have done considerably worse than
religious studies. A good example is botany, which has lost a much larger
proportion of faculty share than most other natural sciences and is represented
at fewer universities in the Frank and Gabler sample than religion and theology
(Frank and Gabler 2006: 160, 164). A field in even worse shape is astronomy,
whose boundaries would seem to be sharply and unexceptionally defined as
the science that deals with anything that is not on the planet earth. Always
marginal, it lost 89 percent of its faculty share over the course of the twentieth
century—more than even classics and archaeology—and it is almost entirely
absent in the Frank and Gabler sample of universities worldwide (Frank and
Gabler 2006: 160, 164). Combine these examples with the moderate growth
in faculty share in religion and theology since World War II, and there is room
to doubt whether departments of religious studies really need an unambiguous,
universal category ‘religion’ to be academically viable. Indeed, there is reason
to doubt the need for unambiguous highest-order structuring categories for
any academic unit, from art and music to biology and chemistry. In the long
run, what may be more important are categorical and methodological
flexibility, a sense among other scholars that materials captured by the delimiter
‘religion’ are unusual enough to require more than passing attention, and a
consensus that those materials are sufficiently significant socially to merit
academic investigation. There may, however, be other good reasons notto
institutionalize religious studies in a separate academic unit. Consider dis-
cussions in Southeast Asia summarized at the end of Vineeta Sinha’s
contribution.
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
TOWARD A GLOBAL VISION OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES
313
