Hijacked - A Critical Treatment of the Public Rhetoric of Good and Bad Religion - Leslie Dorrough Smith
3. Religious Studies and the Jargon of Authenticity
Hijacked - A Critical Treatment of the Public Rhetoric of Good and Bad Religion - Leslie Dorrough Smith
Jason A. Josephson Storm [+]
Williams College
Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm is Chair & Professor of Religion at Williams College. He received his PhD from Stanford University and has held visiting positions at Princeton University, École Française d’Extrême-Orient, France and Ruhr Universität, Germany. He is the author of The Invention of Religion in Japan (2012, winner of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, Book of the Year award), The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity and the Birth of the Human Sciences (2017), and “Absolute Disruption: The Future of Theory after Postmodernism” (forthcoming).
Description
This essay responds to Aaron Hughes’s essay “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: Neo-Orientalism and the Study of Religion” from the perspective of Buddhist studies, engaging with the insider/outsider problem in religious studies and questions of value-neutrality in the social sciences by challenging the often unstated view that insiders have privileged access as well as the claim that outsiders are necessarily more critical.