1st Edition

Religion, Language, and Power

Edited By Nile Green, Mary Searle-Chatterjee Copyright 2008
    242 Pages
    by Routledge

    242 Pages
    by Routledge

    Religion, Language and Power shows that the language of ‘religion’ is far from neutral, and that the packaging and naming of what English speakers call ‘religious’ groups or identities is imbued with the play of power. Religious Studies has all too often served to amplify voices from other centers of power, whether scripturalist or otherwise normative and dominant. This book’s de-centering of English classifications goes beyond the remit of most postcolonial studies in that it explores the classifications used in a range of languages — including Arabic, Sanskrit, Chinese, Greek and English — to achieve a comparative survey of the roles of language and power in the making of ‘religion’ . In contextualizing these uses of language, the ten contributors explore how labels are either imposed or emerge interactively through discursive struggles between dominant and marginal groups. In dealing with the interplay of religion, language and power, there is no other book with the breadth of this volume.

    Introduction. Mary Searle-Chatterjee and Nile Green.

    Part 1. ‘Religion’: a Hegemonic Concept.

    Chapter 1. Making Religion in Modern China. Francesca Tarocco.

    Chapter 2. Technologies of Faith: Dialogues on Religion and Violence at the Parliament of World Religions. John Zavos.

    Part 2. Self and Others: ‘Religious’ Labelling.

    Chapter 3. Language and Power: The Case of Three Early Jewish Sects: The Rabbis, the Descenders to the Chariot and the Dead Sea Community. Philip Alexander.

    Chapter 4. ‘"To Be a Christian": Discourse and Social Change in the World of the New Testament and the Apostolic Fathers’. Todd Klutz.

    Chapter 5. Who are the Others? Three Moments in Sanskrit-based Practice. Jacqueline Suthren-Hirst.

    Chapter 6. Uses of the word ‘Hindu’ in North India. Mary Searle-Chatterjee.

    Chapter 7. ‘Sacred Language’ and ‘Infidel dog!’: The Theological Specificity of Approbatory and Derogatory Terms of Reference in Religion, and the Question of the Reality and Translatability of ‘Sacred Languages’. Alan Williams.

    Chapter 8. Writing the Islamic Holy Man: Language, Genre and the Politics of Description between India and Iran. Nile Green.

    Chapter 9. Reclaiming Mysticism: Anti-Orientalism and the Construction of ‘Islamic Sufism’ in Post-Second World War Egypt. Andreas Christmann.

    Chapter 10. Articulating Anglicanism: the Church of England and the Language of the ‘Other’ During the Long Eighteenth Century. Jeremy Gregory.

    Conclusion

    Notes

    Bibliography

    Index

    Biography

    Nile Green is Associate Professor of History, University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). He has published over 35 articles in international journals, as well as Indian Sufism since the Seventeenth Century (Routledge, 2006) and Islam and the Army in Colonial India (Cambridge, 2008).

    Mary Searle-Chatterjee has published articles in edited collections including ‘World Religions’ and ‘Ethnic Groups’: Do these Paradigms Lend themselves to the Cause of Hindu Nationalism?" , as well as chapters in edited collections. Her books include Contextualising Caste, co-edited with Ursula Sharma (Blackwell, 1991; reprinted Rawat, 2003) and Reversible Sex Roles : The Special Case of Benares Sweepers (Pergamon, 1981).