Genealogies of religion : discipline and reasons of power in Christianity and Islam / Talal Asad.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Asad, Talal.

Contributor:

Hazel M. Hussong Fund.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Religion.

Christian civilization.

Islamic civilization.

Rushdie, Salman.

Physical Description:

335 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, [1993]

Summary:

In Genealogies of Religion Asad explores how religion as a historical category emerged in the West and has come to be applied by scholars, journalists, and politicians as a universal concept. The idea that religion has undergone a radical change since the Christian Reformation - from totalitarian and socially repressive to private and relatively benign - is a familiar part of the story of secularization. It is often invoked to explain and justify the liberal politics and world-view of modernity. And it leads to the view that "politicized religions" threaten both reason and liberty. Asad's essays explore and question all these assumptions. He argues that "religion" is a construction of European modernity, a construction that authorizes - for Westerners and non-Westerners alike - particular forms of "history making". Asad examines aspects of this authorizing process in the so-called fundamentalism of Saudi Arabia, in the Rushdie affair in Great Britain, and in other phenomena.

Contents:

Genealogies

1. The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category 27

2. Toward a Genealogy of the Concept of Ritual 55

Archaisms

3. Pain and Truth in Medieval Christian Ritual 83

4. On Discipline and Humility in Medieval Christian Monasticism 125

Translations

5. The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology 171

6. The Limits of Religious Criticism in the Middle East: Notes on Islamic Public Argument 200

Polemics

7. Multiculturalism and British Identity in the Wake of the Rushdie Affair 239

8. Ethnography, Literature, and Politics: Some Readings and Uses of Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses 269.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 307-323) and index.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Hazel M. Hussong Fund.

ISBN:

0801846315

0801846323

OCLC:

27727085