while in the year 2000 all other regions of the globe averaged more than 200
students in tertiary education for every 10,000 persons, that number for sub-
Sarahan Africa was less than fifty (Schofer and Meyer 2005: 908). A related
problem, which emerges not only from Chitando’s chapter but also from the
contributions by Eugen Ciurtin, He Guanghu, and Patrice Brodeur, is political.
We should be wary, however, of attributing political problems exclusively to
the world outside Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand. For
example, along with others I argued, as president of the North American
Association for the Study of Religion, against proposing to host the next IAHR
Congress in the United States because of potential difficulties participants might
face in gaining entrance to the country. (The 2010 Congress will be held in
Toronto.)
Another significant challenge that a global study of religions faces is the
challenge to avoid trivialization.^4 We trivialize when we reduce epistemological
issues to slogans such as ‘epistemicide’ or ‘neo-liberal imperialism’. We trivialize
when we ignore the complexity of people who inhabit our world, as in speaking
about ‘the Other’, which excuses us from engaging with other people, including
colleagues, and allows us to trade instead in nothing more than Hegelianesque
antitheses to whatever it is ‘we’ happen to think—or more likely, whatever
arguably prevalent views we happen to dislike. We also trivialize when we
make, as I sometimes see happen in North America, the issue of studying versus
practicing religion an issue of ‘the West versus the rest’. On the one hand,
interreligious dialogue is just as much a European and North American
program as is the academic study of religion. Compare the distinction that
Fujiwara notes (citing Tsuneya Wakimoto) between ‘Japanese pluralism’ and
‘Western tolerance and dialogue’; note, too, that at Bangalore in 1967 Cantwell
Smith tried to sell interreligious dialogue to Indian academics (Khan 2005:
8790). On the other hand, such an approach ignores the complex levels on
which intellectual activity takes place in all parts of the world and risks
confining scholars outside of Europe, North America, Australia, and New
Zealand to the role of ethnographic object, nothing more. (Ezra Chitando
reminds us how wrong it is simply to assume that prior to European
colonization ‘everyone’ in sub-Saharan Africa was religious.) We trivialize when
we speak today of the ‘Western’ university. The contemporary university is a
distinctively global institution that arose after World War II. It is informed by
European and North American predecessors, it is true; but it also differs from
them, just as it differs from more distant predecessors in North Africa and
West Asia and from the even earlier Buddhist universities of northeast India.
Similarly, we trivialize when we speak of ‘Western science’. Science is a global
undertaking. It must be. A science that is geographically limited—one that sees
the oxygen theory of combustion as fit for one group of people, but the
phlogiston theory as fit for another—is no science at all. (That different groups
of people may actually hold different theories is beside the point.)
1111
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
1011
1
2
3111
4 5 6 7 8 9
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30111
1
2
3
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35
6
7
8
9
40111
42222
3
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TOWARD A GLOBAL VISION OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES
319
