The ideology of religious studies / Timothy Fitzgerald.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 261-267) and index.

Print version record.

In recent years there has been an intensifying debate within the religious studies community about the validity of religion as an analytical category. In this book Fitzgerald sides with those who argue that the concept of religion itself should be abandoned. On the basis of his own research in India and Japan, and through a detailed analysis of the use of religion in a wide range of scholarly texts, the author maintains that the comparative study of religion is really a form of liberal ecumenical theology. By pretending to be a science, religion significantly distorts socio-cultural analysis. He suggest, however, that religious studies can be re-represented in a way which opens up new and productive theoretical connections with anthropology and cultural and literary studies.

Part I: Religious Studies as an Ideology -- 1 Religion, Religions, and World Religions: Religious Studies-A Critique -- 2 Comparative Religion: The Founding Fathers and the Theological Legacy -- 3 Ninian Smart and the Phenomenology of Religion -- 4 Religion, Family Resemblances, and the Use Context -- 5 Religions, Quasi Religions, and Secular Ideologies -- Part II: Religion and India -- 6 Buddhism in India: Ritual, Politics, and Soteriology -- 7 Hinduism -- Part III: Religion and Japan -- 8 Problems of the Category 'Religion' in Japan -- 9 Consrtucting a Collective Identity -- 10 Bowing to the Taxman -- Part IV: Problems With the Category 'Culture' -- 11 Religious Studies, Cultural Studies, and Cultural Anthropology -- 12 The Critique of 'Culture' in Cultural Anthropology.

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