Claiming Identity in the Study of Religion - Social and Rhetorical Techniques Examined - Monica R. Miller
12. The Resiliency of Conceptual Anachronisms: On the Limits of ‘the West’ and ‘Religion'
Claiming Identity in the Study of Religion - Social and Rhetorical Techniques Examined - Monica R. Miller
Russell T. McCutcheon [+]
University of Alabama
Russell T. McCutcheon is Professor and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama. His major publications include Manufacutring Religion (Oxford University Press, 1997), The Guide to the Study of Religion (Bloomsbury, 2000), Critics not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion (State University of New York Press, 2001) and The Discipline of Religion: Structure, Meaning, Rhetoric (Routledge, 2003).
Description
In the previous chapter, Vaia Touna looked to a small village in Central Macedonia to introduce this chapter by McCutcheon. The two chapters engage seemingly distinct data sets, to suggest that scholars, and their use of tradition, rely on and make possible various authorizing acts. Tradition is not a thing unto itself, but a notion offered through reification and manipulations of time, and uncritical, unreflexive, anachronistic uses of methodologies inherited from disciplinary silos.