History of Religions: New Perspectives in a Time of Crisis
by Philippe Borgeaud and Daniel Barbu
April 7-11, 2025
About Seminar
The history of religions as a scholarly discipline is a moment of crisis, being apparently, either condemned to remain fragmented into a multitude of disjoined areal studies, or to dissolve into the broader field of cultural studies or the history of ideologies, to the detriment of a specific perspective taking religion as its main object of study. Following the linguistic turn rise of critical studies of religions, in the 1990s, the organization and traditional goals of the discipline have been profoundly called into question. The comparative and universalist, i.e. essentially “modern” agenda of the discipline as manifested either in the grand narratives imagined at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries by the founders of the discipline, or the crypto-theological theories produced in the 20th century by phenomenologist of religion, was shown to be bankrupt, both theoretically and ideologically. Critical research revealed a number of methodological problems, such as the uncritical appropriation of indigenous concepts, discourses and notions in the elaboration of a technical language specific to the discipline, or the use of comparison with the sole aim of validating the resemblances postulated by scholars between heterogeneous phenomena, to the detriment of a real evaluation of difference, and also conceptual errors, historians of religion regularly passing off contingent facts as universals. The discipline’s master category, i.e. “religion”, has also been the object of a critical deconstruction, which revealed how Western intellectuals naturalized and instrumentalized a concept and discourse rooted in an essentially Christian and European system of representation and classification. The consequences of this critique have been far-reaching and taken various forms. In particular, the provincialization of the concept of religion has led to a retreat from the general to the particular. The rise of critical theory, with its insistence on the difference and incommensurability of cultures, ultimately rendered any comparative undertaking suspect, leading to what the classicist Marcel Detienne has called a “return to the village”. This move towards fragmentation and ultra-specialization, reinforced by the relativist paradigm, has however limited the ability of historians of religions to shed light on cross-cutting themes and problems that concern also other disciplines of the humanities and social sciences. Another reaction has been to radically alter the discipline’s object and aims, shifting focus from the interpretation of practices and discourses generally regarded as religious to the analysis of discursive practices (mainly academic) used to validate and naturalize the Western – and modern – discourse on religion. This perspective, now firmly anchored in the North American academic landscape, has been reconfigured History of religion as a discipline analyzing the ideological underpinnings of contemporary societies, in particular the forms of political and social exclusion and/or marginalization that the Western discourse on religion has served to sanction. Unfortunately, this reorientation of the discipline has also led to a stronger focus on the Western world, to the detriment of a comparative approach concerned with formulating questions that could be extended to other fields of inquiry, and to include those other geographical and cultural areas where Western discourse on religion has imposed itself through a dual process of colonization and globalization. The aim here is to move beyond both aporias, by reassessing the history of the category “religion” and the discourses to which it has been articulated in the long history of an intellectual history that begins with the Greeks and continues today.
This reassessment will be based on two forthcoming books, both of which examine how social and religious boundaries have been continually reworked in relation to concrete historical and political situations.
- The English version (announced at Cambridge UP) of Philippe Borgeaud’s La pensée européenne des religions: What is religion? European Thought from Antiquity to the Present
- Daniel Barbu’s forthcoming book on the genealogy of the history of religions (based on his lectures in Paris)
Fee
Participation is free of charge.
Quota
11 Participants
Schedule
10:00-11:15 Lecture
11:15-11:30 Coffee Break
11:30-13:00 Lecture
13:00-14:00 Lunch
14:00-15:15 Lecture
15:15-15:30 Coffee Break
15:30-17:00 Lecture
Transportation and Other Services
Participants are provided with a shuttle service to and from Üsküdar Square. Lunches and other refreshments are offered free of charge.
Contact
İrem Gündoğdu – iremgundogdu@hekimbasi.center