Religion and the Secular: Historical and Colonial Formations

by Fitzgerald,Timothy

• ISBN13: 9781845532666
• ISBN10: 184553266X
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2014-08-08
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

The collection of essays in this volume critically explore various aspects of the modern development of the religion-secular dichotomy and its ideological function in the assertion of colonial power since the 16th century. The authors hope to illuminate the role and formation of the modern category of religion, and of the academic study of religion, as colonial instruments in the more general subjection of indigenous concepts of order to the classificatory needs of Euro-America. The methodology tends to overflow traditional disciplinary boundaries and offers analyses that are historiographical, literary and ethnographical. However, rather than seeking comprehensiveness in such a vast field, the authors here concentrate on specific aspects of the colonial relationship either from the point of view of a particular colonized culture, for example Mexico, Guatemala, Vietnam, India, Japan, South Africa, Canada; or from the point of view of the colonizing powers, in this case England, Germany and the United States. The authors hope to encourage further studies by specialists in different cultures and languages in the problems of imposition, translation, and reception of the separation of 'religion' from other domains such as 'politics', 'economics' and the 'non-religious' civil domain.

Table of Contents

Dialectics of conversion: Las Casas and Maya colonial Congregacion	p. 25
A higher ground: the secular knowledge of objects of religious devotion	p. 47
Secularizing the land: the impact of the Alaskan Native Claims Settlement Act on indigenous understandings of land	p. 71
The formative process of State Shinto in relation to the Westernization of Japan: the concept of 'religion' and 'Shinto'	p. 93
Religious and secular in the Vietnam War: the emergence of highland ethno-nationalism	p. 103
Colonialism all the way down? Religion and the secular in early modern writing on south India	p. 117
Understanding politics through performance in colonial and postcolonial India	p. 135
Real and imagined: imperial inventions of religion in colonial southern Africa	p. 153
Religion in modern Islamic thought and practice	p. 177
Rudolf Otto, cultural colonialism and the 'discovery' of the holy	p. 193
Encompassing Religion, privatized religions and the invention of modern politics	p. 211
Colonialism and the myth of religious violence	p. 241
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