Beyond Phenomenology: Rethinking the Study of Religion

by Gavin D. Flood

This book argues that the understanding and explanation of religion is always historically contingent. Grounded in the work of Bakhtin and Ricoeur, Flood positions the academic study of religion within contemporary debates in the social sciences and humanities concerning modernity and postmodernity, particularly contested issues regarding truth and knowledge. It challenges the view that religions are privileged, epistemic objects, argues for the importance of metatheory, and presents an argument for the dialogical nature of inquiry. The study of religion should begin with language and culture, and this shift in emphasis to the philosophy of the sign in hermeneutics and away from the philosophy of consciousness in phenomenology has far-reaching implications. It means a new ethic of practice which is sensitive to the power relationship in any epistemology; it opens the door to feminist and postcolonial critique, and it provides a methodology which allows for the interface between religious studies, theology, and the social sciences.

Genres: Religion

Paperback

First published August 1, 1999

Reviews

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a "big" book, propelled by fertile thinking about all sorts of issues in the study of religion, but especially animated by the need to find a theoretical and methodological path between two unhelpful pretensions: that the religious studies scholar can intuit the essence of religion amidst the welter of data of religions on the one hand, or that the scholar can reduce religions to nothing but various factors that are not at all religious. Both these pretensions suffer from an uncritical belief in the objectivity of scholarly inquiry. Flood seeks, not to abandon objectivity, but to give a critical account of it, based in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and others on language as the means and medium of all cultural (re)generation, and, even more importantly, the "dialogical" constitution of language and language users.