Author: Mccutcheon, Russell T.
Hardback; Book; 1 Halftone, Bibliography
266 pages
Published: July 1997
Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195105036
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This provocative book offers a powerful critique of traditional religion scholarship, and particularly the oft-repeated bromide that religion is a sui generis phenomenon. McCutcheon skillfully analyzes the ideological basis for and service of this claim, demonstrating that it has been used to render the field's object of study ahistorical, apolitical, fetishized, and sacrosanct. He considers a range of sites in the modern study of religion -- from the work of Mircea Eliade, to the interpretive controversy over his life, the poverty of theory in comparative religion textbooks, and representations of Vietnamese Buddhist suicides in the 1960s -- and uncovers at each point sui generis religion serving as a protective strategy that ultimately authorizes and normativizes a socio-poliOffering a critique of traditional religion scholarship, this work focuses on multiple interrelated targets. It covers the history of religions as a discipline, and examines the ideological basis for, and service of, the sui generis argument.