Chapter 4 - The Comparative Risks of Comparison: On Not “Remaining Caged within Our Own Frame of Reference”

Summary

No comparison, no religious studies

There can be no such thing as the modern, humanistic study of religion unless it includes cross-cultural comparison of religions in its repertoire of basic practices. I thus recall more than a century's old retrieval by Friedrich Max Müller's of Goethe's classic formulation about the need for comparison in our knowledge of languages. Thus, while Goethe said that “he, who knows one language, knows none,” in 1873, Max Müller would say that “he who knows only one religion, knows none.” No less a figure in the study of religion than Durkheim reaffirmed the same perspective or his new science of society, noting that “Comparative sociology is not a special brand of sociology; it is sociology itself, insofar as it ceases to be purely descriptive and aspires to account for facts” (Durkheim 1982, 157). In the same vein, the great British anthropologist, A.R. Radcliffe-Brown asserted that: “without systematic comparative studies, anthropology will become only historiography and ethnography” (Radcliffe-Brown 1958, 110).

Among the many other reasons that Louis Dumont is a key figure in the study of religion is that he was one of our most committed and expert modern comparativists of religion. As he says of his own denominated discipline, “social anthropology,” it is “comparative at heart even when it is not explicitly so” (Dumont 1977, 3).