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First published in 1997,
Manufacturing Religion was a controversial book because it critiqued a widely adopted style of scholarship that presumes that religion is utterly unique, inexplicable, and therefore able only to be interpreted by privileged scholars. Claiming religion to be
sui generis (or self-caused), this approach has undisclosed practical effects--institutional and geo-political--at a variety of sites, from the types of textbooks commonly used in introductory classes to the way that political events are often represented in the mass media. Russell McCutcheon documented the ubiquity of this approach and showed how harmful it was
Updating its wide-ranging evidence and adding new chapters, this new edition demonstrates the impact of this critique while showing how little the field has generally moved in the past thirty years.
List of contents
- 1: Introduction
- 2: The Manufacture of Religion
- 3: Ideological Strategies and the Politics of Nostalgia
- 4: Autonomy, Discourses, and Social Privilege
- 5: The Debate on the Autonomy of Eliade
- 6: The Poverty of Theory in the Classroom
- 7: The Imperial Dynamic and the Discourse on Sui Generis Religion
- The Category "Religion" in Recent Publications-Again
- Appendix: Theses on Making a Shift
About the author
Russell T. McCutcheon earned his Ph.D. at the University of Toronto and is now an honorary life member of the International Association for the History of Religions. Beginning in 2001, he was the Department Chair at the University of Alabama, a role that he played for 18 years. His many publications on the history of the field and the practical effects of the category religion in liberal democracies, along with a number of resources created specifically for teachers and students, are widely used in the field today.
