calls ‘McDonaldization’, that is, ‘the process by which the principles of the
fast-food restaurant are coming to dominate more and more sectors of
American society as well as of the rest of the world’ (Ritzer, 1996:1). These
principles—efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control through non-
human technology—may indeed be shaping the manner in which research is
conducted and supported and education delivered worldwide, but to the extent
that they are doing so, and to the extent that the results are negative, scholars
of religions in Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand would
seem to be victims of these processes just as much as scholars elsewhere.
Consider the conclusion to Stausberg’s chapter and the kinds of stringent
budgetary pressures that Franzmann identifies.
Rather than searching the literature for more adequate terms than
globalization, glocalization, and grobalization, I want simply to reflect on the
study of religions. I begin rather slowly with an observation that, I hope, is
not controversial: there are ways of treating other people’s knowledge,
including religious knowledge, that are clearly unacceptable. Here are two
current examples. Legality aside, it is immoral for a pharmaceutical company
to patent traditional medical knowledge that it has learned for free from other
people, especially when those other people have meager access to economic
resources and may as a result be denied access to the benefits of their own
traditional knowledge, now supposedly the possession of someone else (cf.
Mgbeoji 2006). It is also immoral for people to establish exclusive legal
ownership of religious practices that they have not themselves created.
According to Foreign Policy(Gajilan 2006), by mid 2006 the United States
government had granted ‘at least 137 patents and 1,098 trademarks and
copyrights relating to yoga’. To prevent the further patenting of its people’s
traditional knowledge, the government of India has established a massive
Traditional Knowledge Digital Library.
Theft is clearly wrong, but most scholars of religions are not thieves. They
do not copyright other people’s knowledge in the hopes of making a fortune.^3
But do they destroy other people’s knowledge? This is somewhat trickier. To
reply that the study of religions, like anthropology, has actually helped to
preserve religious knowledge is to miss the point. To reply that science is science,
it is what the university does, come what may, is to beg the question. Does the
study of religion impose one manner of thinking about religions and destroy
others? Consider the opposition that has erupted in India over representations
of the Harappans and the alleged Aryan invasion or migration by what a
prominent Hindu-nationalist archaeologist has labeled ‘Marxists in India...
Muslim fundamentalists and Neo-Imperialists in England and America’ (Gupta
2001: 58). Recently, some have taken to calling the destruction of traditional
knowledge, especially in colonial situations, ‘epistemicide’ (e.g. Moosa 2006).
There are legitimate concerns about the creation and advancement of
knowledge in situations characterized by inequality in power and access to316
GREGORY D. ALLES