Please note: In order to keep Hive up to date and provide users with the best features, we are no longer able to fully support Internet Explorer. The site is still available to you, however some sections of the site may appear broken. We would encourage you to move to a more modern browser like Firefox, Edge or Chrome in order to experience the site fully.

Supporting your high street Find out how »
Empire of Religion : Imperialism and Comparative Religion, Hardback Book

Empire of Religion : Imperialism and Comparative Religion Hardback

Hardback

Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks

Description

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.

Information

Other Formats

Save 0%

£93.00

£92.45

Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks
Add to Basket
Sign in to add to wishlist
 
Free Home Delivery

on all orders

 
Pick up orders

from local bookshops

Information