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    Empire of Religion: Imperialism and Comparative Religion
    Unavailable
    Empire of Religion: Imperialism and Comparative Religion
    Unavailable
    Empire of Religion: Imperialism and Comparative Religion
    Ebook656 pages7 hours

    Empire of Religion: Imperialism and Comparative Religion

    By David Chidester

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    How is knowledge about religion and religions produced, and how is that knowledge authenticated and circulated? David Chidester seeks to answer these questions in Empire of Religion, documenting and analyzing the emergence of a science of comparative religion in Great Britain during the second half of the nineteenth century and its complex relations to the colonial situation in southern Africa. In the process, Chidester provides a counterhistory of the academic study of religion, an alternative to standard accounts that have failed to link the field of comparative religion with either the power relations or the historical contingencies of the imperial project.
     
    In developing a material history of the study of religion, Chidester documents the importance of African religion, the persistence of the divide between savagery and civilization, and the salience of mediations—imperial, colonial, and indigenous—in which knowledge about religions was produced. He then identifies the recurrence of these mediations in a number of case studies, including Friedrich Max Müller’s dependence on colonial experts, H. Rider Haggard and John Buchan’s fictional accounts of African religion, and W. E. B. Du Bois’s studies of African religion. By reclaiming these theorists for this history, Chidester shows that race, rather than theology, was formative in the emerging study of religion in Europe and North America. Sure to be controversial, Empire of Religion is a major contribution to the field of comparative religious studies.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateMar 19, 2014
    ISBN9780226117577
    Unavailable
    Empire of Religion: Imperialism and Comparative Religion
    Author

    David Chidester

    David Chidester is Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. His recent books include Authentic Fakes: Religion and American Popular Culture, Wild Religion: Tracking the Sacred in South Africa, and Empire of Religion: Imperialism and Comparative Religion.

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