This book documents and analyzes the emergence of a science of comparative religion in Great Britain during the second half of the nineteenth century and its complex relations to the colonial situation in Southern Africa. In the process, the book provides a counter-history of the academic study of religion, an alternative to standard accounts that have tracked the internal intellectual development of a European academic discipline, but have not linked the nineteenth-century field of comparative religion with either the ...
Read More
This book documents and analyzes the emergence of a science of comparative religion in Great Britain during the second half of the nineteenth century and its complex relations to the colonial situation in Southern Africa. In the process, the book provides a counter-history of the academic study of religion, an alternative to standard accounts that have tracked the internal intellectual development of a European academic discipline, but have not linked the nineteenth-century field of comparative religion with either the power relations or the historical contingencies of the imperial project. Chidester s history of the study of religion is guided by three questions: How is knowledge about religion and religions produced? How is that knowledge authenticated? How is it circulated? He identifies a triple mediation imperial, colonial, and indigenous by which knowledge about South African religions was produced, and shows its recurrence in a number of case studies, including Friedrich Max Muller and his dependence on colonial experts, H. Rider Haggard and John Buchan s fictional accounts of African religion, and W. E. B. Du Bois s studies of African religion. The result is a book that will need to be reckoned with across the entire field of comparative religious studies. "
Read Less
Add this copy of Empire of Religion: Imperialism and Comparative to cart. $52.35, new condition, Sold by Ingram Customer Returns Center rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from NV, USA, published 2014 by University of Chicago Press.
Add this copy of Empire of Religion: Imperialism and Comparative to cart. $141.32, new condition, Sold by Ingram Customer Returns Center rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from NV, USA, published 2014 by Oxford University Press, USA.