Empire of Religion
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19th century
A01=David Chidester
academic
analysis
animals
animism
Author_David Chidester
belief
Category=NHH
Category=QRAC
Category=QRAX
citizen
college
colonial
colonialism
conqueror
controversial
counterhistory
deities
du bois
educational
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
expansion
faith
gods
great britain
historical
history
imperial
imperialism
indigenous people
john buchan
magic
mythology
postcolonial
professor
religious studies
research
ritual
savage
south africa
tradition
traditional
university
Product details
- ISBN 9780226117263
- Weight: 737g
- Dimensions: 16 x 24mm
- Publication Date: 19 Mar 2014
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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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 Muller's dependence on colonial experts, H. Rider Haggard's and John Buchan's fictional accounts of African religion, and W. E.
B. Du Bois' 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.
David Chidester is professor of religious studies and director of the Institute for Comparative Religion in Southern Africa at the University of Cape Town. He is the author or editor of more than twenty books, including, most recently, Wild Religion: Tracking the Sacred in South Africa. He lives in South Africa.
