Chapter 3 - Tensions Past, Tensions Future: Middle Eastern Studies Confronts Religious Studies

Summary

That is to say, while there is a staggering amount of data, of phenomena, of human experiences and expressions that might be characterized in one culture or another, by one criterion or another, as religious – there is no data for religion. Religion is solely the creation of the scholar's study. It is created for the scholar's analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Religion has no independent existence apart from the academy. For this reason, the student of religion, and most particularly the historian of religion, must be relentlessly self-conscious. Indeed, this self-consciousness constitutes his primary expertise, his foremost object of study

(J. Z. Smith 1982, xi; original italics).

The 1970s saw the academy increasingly turn its attention away from attempts to discover a set of illusory and illusive “universal modes” of human behavior. Universalism subsequently came under attack from various constituencies as little more than another form of political and ideological hegemony, the will to power of a dominant group over others. This shift in emphasis, driven in large part by postmodern critiques of the Enlightenment project, questioned many of the operating assumptions that were traditionally assumed as de riguer, including traditional binary oppositions such as center/margin, male/female, white/non-white, and the interpretive strategies that tended to privilege the first term of each of these constructs at the expense of the second.