Zealand and has been very active in hosting conferences out-
side of Europe and North America. The International Com-
mittee of the American Academy of Religion has sought to
foster connections between scholars in North America and
other parts of the world. The impetus for both sets of
activities remains, however, largely European and North
American.
One would anticipate that a growing self-consciousness
among scholars of religions in regions outside Europe and
North America would lead them to explore their own tradi-
tions of knowledge about religions which predate European
contact, as literary scholars have begun to do (e.g., Ganesh
N. Devy, After Amnesia: Tradition and Change in Indian Lit-
erary Criticism [Bombay, 1992]; cf. Japan; North Africa and
the Middle East). At the same time, scholars will need to re-
flect critically on the extent to which a regionalized view of
the academic study of religion will remain expedient. For ex-
ample, are South Asian scholars fascinated with Marx “West-
ernized,” or does that label, or more broadly does the consid-
eration of the academic study of religion region by region,
obscure what may be alternative and ultimately more com-
pelling interests uniting groups of scholars across regional
boundaries?
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Braun, Willi, and Russell T. McCutcheon, eds. Guide to the Study
of Religion. London, 2000.
Chidester, David. Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative
Religion in Southern Africa. Charlottesville, Va., 1996.
Chidester, David. Christianity: A Global History. New York, 2001.
Connolly, Peter, ed. Approaches to the Study of Religion. London,
1999.
Despland, Michel. L’émergence des sciences de la religion. La Mo-
narchie de Juillet: un moment fondateur. Paris, 1999.
Devy, Ganesh N. After Amnesia: Tradition and Change in Indian
Literary Criticism. Bombay, 1992.
Jordan, Louis Henry. Comparative Religion: Its Genesis and
Growth. Edinburgh, 1905.
Kippenberg, Hans G. Die Entdeckung der Religionsgeschichte: Reli-
gionswissenschaft und Moderne. München, 1997.
Lincoln, Bruce. Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholar-
ship. Chicago, 1999.
Michaels, Axel, ed. Klassiker der Religionswissenschaft: Von Frie-
drich Schleiermacher bis Mircea Eliade. 2d ed. Munich, 1997.
Preus, J. Samuel. Explaining Religion: Criticism and Theory from
Bodin to Freud. Atlanta, 1996.
Sharpe, Eric J. Comparative Religion: A History. 2d ed. La Salle,
Ill., 1986.
Taylor, Mark C., ed. Critical Terms for Religious Studies. Chicago,
1998.
Wasserstrom, Steven M. Religion after Religion: Gershom Scholem,
Mircea Eliade, and Henry Corbin at Eranos. Princeton, N.J.,
1999.
GREGORY D. ALLES (2005)
STUDY OF RELIGION: THE ACADEMIC STUDY
OF RELIGION IN AUSTRALIA AND OCEANIA
Aside from literature reinforcing the Christian and Jewish
ways of life, studies in religion in the Oceanic region began
with reports on the customs and beliefs of “savage” or “na-
tive” peoples in and near European colonies. Along with the
published diaries of early explorers, whose observations were
highly cursory, most of the early commentators were mis-
sionaries, including the Spanish Jesuit Juan Antonio Can-
tova, who wrote about the Caroline Islands as early as the
1720s; William Ellis of the London Missionary Society, who
documented various Polynesian cultures by 1829; and the
German Lutherans Carl Ottow and Johann Geissler, who
described the New Guinea Biak people in 1857. In addition,
visitors who utilized missionary informants—such as the
French captain François Leconte, who wrote about northern
New Caledonia in 1847—also recorded events of interest to
the study of religion in the region.
PIONEER MISSIONARIES’ REPORTS. Although evangelization
was their main priority, many pioneer missionaries were sur-
prisingly interested in gaining knowledge of the peoples they
encountered. Such concepts as mana and taboo, destined to
stimulate Western theories about the origins of religion,
hailed from the Pacific mission field. In the 1770s, after Cap-
tain James Cook’s brief notations on the meaning of taboo
in Tahiti and Hawai’i, the term became associated with bibli-
cal prohibition in evangelistic discourse and was thereafter
incorporated into European vocabularies. The priest-
academic Robert Codrington introduced the notion of mana
as manipulated “spirit power” after investigating Banks Is-
lander beliefs (New Hebrides, now Vanuatu) in the 1870s,
at a time when he headed the Anglican Melanesian Mission.
Totemism became an acclaimed feature of Aboriginal (and
thereby very primitive) religion; the earliest significant ac-
count of an Australian native protecting an animal (a goanna)
as his “brother” was made by a London Missionary Society
delegate in 1834. Ideas about high gods, again important for
origins theories (e.g., Andrew Lang in the 1890s), arose out
of Aboriginal talk of the All-Father, which was in all likeli-
hood an innovative indigenous concept to make sense of
missionary teachings about the one God.
That Polynesia could match Europe and Asia for sacral-
ized royalty, moreover, was made plain by the Hawaiian king
Kalakaua’s eulogistic Legends and Myths (1888). With this
background, a professional competitiveness sometimes arose
when secular anthropologists entered the region. There was
no love lost, for example, between the Lutheran Carl Stre-
hlow, a missionary to the Aranda in central Australia, and
Baldwin Spencer, the leader of the 1894 Hort Expedition
and later Chief Protector of the Aborigines (1911–1912),
who divulged many secrets about Aranda religion that Stre-
hlow had honored. In another case, Bronislaw Malinowski,
allegedly the first true field anthropologist, was told nothing
about the coastal Mailu by his initial host, the London Mis-
sionary Society missionary William Saville (1914–1915),
who wanted to write up his own findings. Disappointed,STUDY OF RELIGION: THE ACADEMIC STUDY OF RELIGION IN AUSTRALIA AND OCEANIA 8767