Religious Studies: A Global View

Indo-European philology and history, in the case of Lévi-Strauss the indigenous

peoples of South and North America. Their grand narratives evoked

enthusiastic admiration in some and stern opposition from others, in the case

of Dumézil in part because of possible right-wing political sub-texts in his

writing. Jean-Pierre Vernant (1914–2007) employed both Dumézil and Lévi-

Strauss in his widely acclaimed work on Greek mythology and society (Vernant

1991). As a theoretical approach, however, very few scholars consider

structuralism seriously today (but see Kunin 2003). Michel Meslin, who held

the Sorbonne chair in the general study of religion, subscribed to neither

phenomenology nor structuralism but to an ‘anthropological’ approach

centering on the notion of religious experience (Meslin 1973, 1988).

Peter Antes has recently bemoaned the absence of comparative thematic

studies in French scholarship (Antes 2004: 48). While this may hold true in

general, there is a notable exception, the Encyclopédie des religions(Lenoir

and Tardan-Masquellier [eds] 1997, 2000). A massive, 2,500-page work, the

Encyclopédie is divided into two parts of almost equal length: the first volume,

Histoire, presents a series of short essays on the religious traditions of the world,

while the second, Thèmes, tackles ten major topics in a comparative manner

through some 150 brief essays. The overwhelming majority of the authors are

French—Italian scholars constitute the next largest group—and the biblio-

graphies that conclude each section are almost exclusively francophone.

Beyond disciplinary boundaries

In Western Europe as elsewhere, there are no clear-cut boundaries between

specialist areas and the general study of religion. Disciplinary boundaries are

to some extent illusory. Scholars may have chairs in the science of religion but

concentrate in their research and often in their teaching exclusively on a single

religion, whereas scholars from neighboring fields may make far more relevant

contributions to the general study of religion. Examples of the latter include

the seminal work of the classicist Walter Burkert on a biologically and

ethologically informed theory of religion and ritual (Burkert 1996) and the

contributions of the Egyptologist Jan Assmann to the study of cultural memory

(1992, 2006). The Italian Jewish historian Carlo Ginzburg developed new ways

of writing religious history, both with respect to micro-history in his famous

early studies (1966, 1976) and with respect to larger morphological and

comparative scenarios, as in his ambitious reconstruction of the origins of the

early modern Witches’ Sabbath in ancient ecstasy-cults (1989).

Not all vacancies for chairs in comparative religion are filled with candidates

trained in the subject. The extraordinary demand for competency in the field

of Islam, for instance, easily lends itself to recruitment from Oriental Studies,

and a background in Indian, Central Asian, Chinese, or Japanese studies often

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MICHAEL STAUSBERG