Description
Book SynopsisEntanglements attempts to argue against those who claim that scholarship on the category religion is only of secondary interest, in that it fails to do primary research on real religions. The volume collects eighteen responses, written across twenty years, that each exemplify the inevitably situated, give-and-take nature of all academic debate. These essays call into question the often used distinction between primary and secondary sources, between description and analysis. Published here in their original form, each contribution is accompanied by new, substantive introduction describing the context of each response and explaining how each shows something still at stake in the academic study of religion--whether its the rhetoric used to authorize competing scholarly claims or the difficulty involved in suspending our commonsense view of the world long enough to study the means by which we have come to see it that way. An ethnography of scholarly practice written mainly for earlier career readers--whether undergraduate or graduate students or even tenure-track faculty--Entanglements tackles the notion that some scholarship is more pristine, and thus more valuable, than others, thereby modeling for scholars earlier in their careers some of the obstacles and arguments that may face them should their research interests be judged unorthodox.
Table of ContentsPreface Introduction: Apologia for an Obsession 1. Naming the Unnamable? Theological Language and the Academic Study of Religion (1990) 2. Ideology and the Problem of Naming: A Reply (1991) 3. Returning the Volley to William E Arnal (1998) 4. Of Strawmen and Humanists (1999) 5. A Brief Response from a Fortunate Man (2000) 6. Who Sets the Ground Rules? A Response to "Comparativism, Then and Now" (2000) 7. Artifacts Not Relics: A Response to "Missing Links in the Study of Religion" (2000) 8. Filling in the Cracks with Resin: A Reply to John Burris's "Text and Context in the Study of Religion" (2003) 9. A Few Words on the Temptation to Defend the Honor of a Text (2004) 10. Theorizing the Politics of "Religion": Rejoinder to Robert A. Segal (2005) 11. The Perils of Having Ones Cake and Eating it Too: Some Thoughts in Response (2005) 12. Theses on Professionalization (2007) 13. A Response to Prof. Robert Campany's "Chinese Religious History and its Implications for Writing 'Religion(s)" (2008) 14. "As it Was in the Beginning - ": The Modern Problem of the Ancient Self (2010) 15. A Direct Question Deserves a Direct Answer: A Reply to Atalia Omer's "Can a Critic Be a Caretaker too?" (2012) 16. Recovering the Human: A Tale of Nouns and Verbs (2012) 17. Three Dots and a Dash (2012) 18. The Sacred is the Profane (2013) Afterword and References
