Empire of Religion: Imperialism and Comparative Religion (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780226117263)

How is knowledge about religion and religions produced, and how is that knowledge authenticated and circulated? David Chidester seeks to answer these questions in Empire of Religion, documenting and analyzing 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, Chidester provides a counterhistory of the academic study of religion, an alternative to standard accounts that have failed to link the field of comparative religion with either the power relations or the historical contingencies of the imperial project.

In developing a material history of the study of religion, Chidester documents the importance of African religion, the persistence of the divide between savagery and civilization, and the salience of mediations-imperial, colonial, and indigenous-in which knowledge about religions was produced. He then identifies the recurrence of these mediations in a number of case studies, including Friedrich Max M?ler's 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. By reclaiming these theorists for this history, Chidester shows that race, rather than theology, was formative in the emerging study of religion in Europe and North America. Sure to be controversial, Empire of Religion is a major contribution to the field of comparative religious studies.

Author: David Chidester
ISBN-10: 022611726X
ISBN-13: 9780226117263
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Language: English
Published: 03/19/2014
Pages: 400
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.45lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.30w x 1.10d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 10/01/2014 pg. 274