Reading List#1: "Religion as a 'Western Invention'?"
Dubuisson, Daniel.
The Western Construction of Religion: Myths, Knowledge, and Ideology.
Translated by William Sayers.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2003 [Attacks the
homo religiosus model of Mircea
Eliade].
Eliade, Mircea.
A History of Religious Ideas:
Vol. 1: From the Stone Age to the
Eleusianian Mysteries or Volume 2:
From Gautama Buddha to the Triumph of Christianity or
Volume 3: From Muhammed to the Age of
Reforms. Translated by Willard R. Trask. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1978, 1983, and 1988. [Eliade's
summative study, in which he cautiously privileges accumulated detail over
generalizations, but in which he assumes that religion is a basic and inherent
part of what it is to be human. See also Eliade]
Fitzgerald, Timothy.
Religion and the Secular:
Historical and Colonial
Formations. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2007.
Hjärpe, Jan. ""Essentialism or an Anthropological
Approach: The Role and Function of the Scientific Study of Religion in a
Historical Perspective." Numen
62 (2015): 301-20 [Argues that the categories for religious study originated in
seminaries].
Masuzawa, Tomoko.
The Invention of World Religions:
Or How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Nongbri, Brent.
Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013.
Schilbrack, K. "The Social
Construction of Religion and Its Limits: A Critical Reading of Timothy
Fitzgerald." Method and Theory in
the Study of Religion 24 (2012): 97-117.