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The Marketplace and the Temple: Economic Metaphors and Religious Meanings in the Folk Songs of Colonial Bengal

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 March 2010

Hugh B. Urban
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The marketplace and the temple: traditionally, Western scholars have been nervous and ambivalent about bringing these two spheres into too close a proximity. On one side, historians of religions trained in the lineage of Joachim Wach or Mircea Eliade have long warned that “reductionism” is the cardinal sin in the study of religion, which is claimed to be a sui generis, or irreducible phenomenon. Hence, “economic reductionism” or “vulgar economism” would be the most heinous crime of all (Wach 1958; Eliade 1958, xi). On the other side, those trained in Marxist and neo-Marxist traditions have typically wanted to explain religious myths and rituals either as ideological screens masking deeper material forces or as symbolic expressions of misrecognized social interests. As Pierre Bourdieu—one of the most sophisticated recent representatives of this tradition—explains his own method, he wishes to “utilize the economic model to extend materialist critique into the realm of religion and to uncover the specific interests of the protagonists of the religious game, priests, prophets and sorcerers” (1990, 107).

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The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 60 , Issue 4 , November 2001 , pp. 1085 - 1114
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Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 2001

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