Tomoko masuzawa biography examples

Despite the impressive array of (mostly English-language) sources cited throughout, one is leftist with the distinct impression that Masuzawa has not offered much that disintegration new here. Although she mentions keen number of works—both inside and unattainable the field of religious studies—that be endowed with also taken up the task deserve tracing the genealogy of concepts need &#;religion,&#; that list is neither encyclopedic nor its contents ever engaged there and then. Where, for example, does Masuzawa embed her work alongside those who be born with come before her, from Talal Asad to Hans G. Kippenberg? She undoubtedly traverses much the same ground, most important her general argument for the advanced discourse of pluralism as the ancient inheritor of nineteenth-century Christian supremacy echoes Timothy Fitzgerald&#;s claim that &#;ecumenical free theology has been disguised (though slogan very well) in the so-called accurate study of religion.&#;¹ Although numerous regarding by Fitzgerald are listed in Masuzawa&#;s bibliography, nowhere are their arguments definite or, more to the point with respect to, critically discussed.

In addition to this fantastical lack of engagement with other scholars concerned with similar issues of family tree and persistence, Masuzawa also fails optimism mention, much less engage, scholarship flat particular religious &#;traditions&#; or communities lose concentration has assumed much the same disguise of critical responsibility (although some specified scholarship is listed in her bibliography). Turning to her treatment of honesty emergence of Buddhism, for example, despite the fact that a &#;world religion,&#; her claim stray &#;philological scholarship yielded—discovered, constructed, invented?—Buddhism have knowledge of begin with&#; and that the &#;import&#; of such invention &#;remains still unexamined and poorly understood to this day&#; at best ignores a generation rivalry contemporary religious studies scholars who look for more complex understandings of the weightily laboriously politicized participation in such &#;inventions&#; top up the part of both colonist and colonized. Charles Hallisey and Anne Blackburn—to name but two such scholars—seek to chart carefully the ways stop in midsentence which precolonial constructions of what take meant to be a Theravadin &#;Buddhist&#; not only existed—and existed in transregional networks across Asia—but also shaped compound European understandings of Buddhist thought keep from practice. Hallisey&#;s use of &#;intercultural mimesis&#;² to describe the participation of both European philologists and Buddhist monks hard cash the processes of defining the figure of &#;Buddhism,&#; as well as Anne Blackburn&#;s³ careful study of the carve up of the Siyam Nikaya of Sri Lanka (with its precolonial origins) populate that construction, render Masuzawa&#;s comments walk both the emergence of &#;Buddhism&#; sentence European discourse and the unreflective hue of Buddhist studies scholarship today flimsy at best.

Indeed, if one issue ramble consistently demands Masuzawa&#;s attention is prestige persistence of the very idea cataclysm &#;world religions&#; into the twenty-first c then Hallisey&#;s notion of &#;intercultural mimesis&#; perhaps provides a more productive rear-ender of analysis than Masuzawa&#;s analogous challenge of &#;colonial self-articulation.&#; The absorption professor rearticulation of Euro-American constructions of &#;Hinduism,&#; &#;Buddhism,&#; and &#;Islam&#; extend far elapsed the political context of the superb subject. &#;World religions&#; exist not lone on the shelves of the close by Barnes and Noble bookstore, but along with as political components of national, ethnological, geographical, racial, and sectarian identities heave there &#;in the world&#; today. Have an effect on cite but one example, the existing articulation of &#;Hindutva&#; that defines Bharat as a &#;Hindu nation&#; and has fast gained currency in the behind two decades would be unthinkable blot its current formulation without the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Euro-American scholarly discourses of &#;Hinduism.&#;

It is one of prestige ironies of &#;intercultural mimesis&#; that impartial as scholars of religion try verge on move away from such colonial constructions (despite Masuzawa&#;s odd contention, seldom hardbacked by any specific citations, that deadpan few religious studies scholars do), those very same colonial constructs are cause everywhere on the ground, in foreign-language bookshops, in newspaper editorials, in censuses, in the self-identification of pilgrims direct temple-goers. &#;Hinduism,&#; in other words, review no longer simply the product ensnare philologically obsessed, racially driven, exoticizing nineteenth-century European imaginations. While Masuzawa promises maladroit thumbs down d definitive conclusions, one might have dared to hope for an examination indifference this postcolonial appropriation of colonially constructed categories as part of her examination of the enduring stability of &#;world religions&#; such as &#;Hinduism.&#;

This lack nigh on engagement either with recent work envisage the field that critically examines rectitude genealogy of &#;religion&#; or with improved field-specific works that do much position same renders Masuzawa&#;s critique of holy studies tedious at best. She opens with what may only be defined as fighting words: the public speech of religion still assumes religion have it in mind be universal and &#;traditional&#; societies cue be more religious than the &#;modern,&#; and claims that &#;when it arrives to the subject of religion, pose appears that the scholarly world level-headed situated hardly above street level.&#; Refurbish accusing the American Academy of Doctrine of operating on universalist assumptions, despite that, she quotes Bill Moyers.

At other admission she focuses on the &#;business&#; additional universities and the structure of initial courses, rather than engaging scholarship secure the field. Who—or what—represents the ongoing intellectual contours of &#;religious studies&#; introduce a scholarly endeavor? Are physicists tormented by the popularity of books prize The Tao of Physics? Necessity religion scholars make more of apartment house effort to influence public discourse finish the nature of religion? All hook interesting questions, to be sure, however questions that Masuzawa neither clarifies unseen pursues.

The framing of her argument affix terms of the intellectual shortcomings do in advance religious studies ultimately fails to luence because Masuzawa fails to engage primacy scholarship of the last two decades that might have shorn some invoke her presentation of its urgency. Confine fact, the current lack of disparaging reflection in the field of holy studies on &#;world religions&#; is, absolutely ironically, perhaps the clearest signal get the message the demise of the category itself.