STUDY OF RELIGION: AN OVERVIEW
Unlike theology, the academic study of religion seeks to pro-
vide accounts of the world’s religions from perspectives that
have no confessional (religious) ground or agenda. As an em-
pirical pursuit, it is concerned with understanding and ex-
plaining what people actually think and do without estab-
lishing or enforcing norms for that thought and behavior. It
takes the entire universe of religions as its object of study;
classically educated scholars were once fond of quoting the
Roman playwright Terence (c. 186–159 BCE), a freed slave
from North Africa: “homo sum; nihil humanum mihi alienum
puto” (“I am a human being; I consider nothing human for-
eign to me”). It also aspires to treat all religions equally. Of
course, these characterizations are subject to critical interro-
gation, both in terms of the degree to which individual works
live up to them and the degree to which they are themselves
philosophically defensible.
Despite the field’s universal reach, Europeans and
North Americans have tended to conceive of the study of re-
ligion ethnocentrically. Although the objects of study—
religious people—have been universal, the subjects—the
people doing the studying—have not. When they did not
physically reside in Europe or North America, they were in-
tellectually, if not biologically, of European or North Ameri-
can descent. They studied religions—as a young scholar in
the Middle East recently described his professional activity
in correspondence with this author—from a Western per-
spective.
The pervasiveness of European and North American
political and economic colonialism and cultural influence
gives some credence to this conception. Nevertheless, a view
of the academic study of religion excessively centered on the
so-called West also takes several risks. It risks ignoring ante-
cedents of that study in various parts of the globe that pre-
date or do not depend upon the European Enlightenment.
It risks neglecting vigorous traditions of that study that are
emerging in various parts of the world. And it risks impover-
ishing that study by looking only to Europe and North
America for theoretical and methodological inspiration. In
other words, it confines the academic study of religion not
within the boundaries of a religious community, as in the
case of theology, but within those of a culture or civilization.
The entries that follow treat the academic study of reli-
gion throughout the world. It has seemed expedient to divide
the articles in terms of large geographical regions arranged
alphabetically, but one should remember that these regions
are themselves somewhat artificial. The entries seek to ad-
dress how religious studies has come into being in different
ways in different academic settings. They treat the contribu-
tion of scholars in each region to the study of religions that
are found outside as well as within the regions. Thus, the
entry on South Asia, for example, treats the manner in which
South Asians have studied religions, not the study of South
Asian religions. The remainder of this entry offers more gen-
eral observations about the emergence of the study of reli-
gion, its development, and its methods.
THE EMERGENCE OF THE ACADEMIC STUDY OF RELIGION.
According to a well-worn German cliché, Religionswissen-
schaft—the comparative study of religion, the history of reli-
gions, the academic study of religion—is a child of the En-
lightenment. Insofar as this cliché invites us to disregard
intellectual developments outside of Europe, it issues an invi-
tation that we should decline. But it does begin to identify
the conditions under which the academic study of religion
appeared in Europe, and in doing so it invites us to reflect
more generally on the conditions under which that study has
emerged.
There are many kinds of knowledge about religions. Be-
fore the emergence of the academic study of religion, people
learned about their own religions from people such as rela-
tives, neighbors, priests, shamans, teachers, preachers,
monks, nuns, and maybe even philosophers and theologians.
They learned about other religions from similar sources,
along with proselytizers, apologists, polemicists, and here-
siologists, who provided information about the practices and
beliefs of other people but also gave reasons either to adopt
those beliefs and practices, to disregard them, to fear them,
or even to persecute and kill the people who adhered to
them. In addition, travelers like Herodotos (c. 484–between
430 and 420 BCE), Xuanzang (602–664), and Ibn Battuta
(1307–1377), at times less interested in specific religious
agendas, provided knowledge of the practices and beliefs of
people who lived in more remote lands. All of these people
and others as well, such as foreign service officers and jour-
nalists, may provide information about religions, but that in-
formation does not in itself constitute the academic study of
religion. In order for that study to emerge, at least three con-
ditions need to be met.
First, the academic study of religion encompasses only
certain kinds of knowledge, namely, those kinds associated
with institutions devoted to the professional production and
dissemination of knowledge, such as universities. These
kinds of knowledge derive their authority in part from the
application of approved procedures. Scholars self-consciously
pursue methods that are presumed to eliminate mistakes and
errors that plague ordinary knowledge and/or that produce
accounts that have the appearance of greater-than-average so-
phistication. These kinds of knowledge also derive their au-
thority in part from various forms of institutional validation:
material support for those who produce and transmit knowl-
edge by approved means; the certification of those who have
mastered both the techniques and content of the produced
knowledge; and the codification and preservation of the
knowledge produced—either in human memory, as in the
case of su ̄tras and ́sa ̄stras, or via external media such as hand-
written, printed, or, increasingly, electronic books and jour-
nals. One condition for the emergence of the academic study
of religion, then, is the development of such institutions of
knowledge, as has happened for example among Maha ̄ya ̄na
Buddhists in north India in the first few centuries CE, in the
Middle East toward the end of the first millennium CE, and
in Europe beginning in the thirteenth century CE.STUDY OF RELIGION: AN OVERVIEW 8761