Research Catalog

Title

Genealogies of religion : discipline and reasons of power in Christianity and Islam / Talal Asad.

Author

Asad, Talal.

Publication

Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, [1993], ©1993.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

335 pages; 24 cm

Summary

"In Genealogies of Religion Asad explores how religion as a historical category emerged in the West and has come to be applied by scholars, journalists, and politicians as a universal concept. The idea that religion has undergone a radical change since the Christian Reformation - from totalitarian and socially repressive to private and relatively benign - is a familiar part of the story of secularization. It is often invoked to explain and justify the liberal politics and world-view of modernity. And it leads to the view that "politicized religions" threaten both reason and liberty. Asad's essays explore and question all these assumptions. He argues that "religion" is a construction of European modernity, a construction that authorizes - for Westerners and non-Westerners alike - particular forms of "history making." Asad examines aspects of this authorizing process in the so-called fundamentalism of Saudi Arabia, in the Rushdie affair in Great Britain, and in other phenomena."--BOOK JACKET.

Subject

• Rushdie, Salman
• Religion
• Christian civilization
• Islamic civilization

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. 307-323) and index.

Contents

Genealogies -- 1. The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category -- 2. Toward a Genealogy of the Concept of Ritual -- Archaisms -- 3. Pain and Truth in Medieval Christian Ritual -- 4. On Discipline and Humility in Medieval Christian Monasticism -- Translations -- 5. The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology -- 6. The Limits of Religious Criticism in the Middle East: Notes on Islamic Public Argument -- Polemics -- 7. Multiculturalism and British Identity in the Wake of the Rushdie Affair -- 8. Ethnography, Literature, and Politics: Some Readings and Uses of Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses.

ISBN

• 0801846315 (alk. paper)
• 0801846323 (pbk. : alk. paper)

LCCN

93021831

OCLC

• 27727085
• ocm27727085

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries