Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780197818800)

First published in 1997, Manufacturing Religion was a controversial book because it critiqued a widely adopted style of scholarship that presumes that religion is utterly unique, inexplicable, and therefore able only to be interpreted by privileged scholars. Claiming religion to be sui generis (or self-caused), this approach has undisclosed practical effects--institutional and geo-political--at a variety of sites, from the types of textbooks commonly used in introductory classes to the way that political events are often represented in the mass media. Russell McCutcheon documented the ubiquity of this approach and showed how harmful it was

Updating its wide-ranging evidence and adding new chapters, this new edition demonstrates the impact of this critique while showing how little the field has generally moved in the past thirty years.

Author: Russell T. McCutcheon
ISBN-10: 0197818803
ISBN-13: 9780197818800
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Language: English
Published: 03/03/2026
Pages: 368
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.53lbs
Size: 9.21h x 6.14w x 0.94d