Description
Book SynopsisArgues that the conventional wisdom on religion makes sense only as a strategy of intellectual and political control. It examines how nationalists, officials, missionaries and scholars in the West and the colonis defined and redefined the relationship between the political and religious.
Trade ReviewThe Invention of Religion is a powerful collection of original essays on the multiple connections between religion and modernity in different parts of the world. It offers important insights that will appeal to a wide relationship across discipline. -- Peter Ven Der Veer * University of Amsterdam *
Table of ContentsRethinking religion / Derek R. Peterson and Darren R. Walhof
Why study Indian Buddhism? / Richard S. Cohen
Gambling with God: rethinking religion in colonial central Kenya / Derek R. Peterson
Here (we) are the Haredim: intertextuality and the voice of authority in the representation of a religious fundamentalist movement / Jeremy Stolow
Republicizing religiosity: modernity, religion, and the middle class / Sanjay Joshi
A religion that was not a religion: the creation of modern Shinto in nineteenth-century Japan / Sarah Thal
Secularism and religion in the Arab Middle East: reinventing Islam in a world of nation-states / James L. Gelvin
Tra(ve)ils of secularism: Islam in museums from the Ottoman empire to the Turkish republic / Wendy M.K. Shaw
"These hills will give you great treasure": Ozark tourism and the collapse of sacred and secular / Aaron K. Ketchell
World religions and secularization from a postcolonial and anti-Eurocentric perspective / Enrique Dussel
Literacy in the eye of the conversion storm / Gauri Viswanathan
