Manufacturing religion: The discourse of sui generis religion and the politics of nostalgia

This dissertation argues that the scholarly category of 'sui generis religion' has been an effective discursive strategy both for establishing the institutionally autonomous discipline known in North America as the History of Religions and for privileging certain socio-political claims. This study contributes to the current debate on clarifying the place of reductionism in the study of religion insomuch as it questions whether recent critiques of sui generis religion have been accurate in characterizing it as a religious claim. Apart from any religious implications or motivations that such a claim might entail, the purported socio-historical autonomy of religion carries with it profound discursive as well as political implications. To test this hypothesis, a variety of data are examined in light of the ways in which discursive and rhetorical strategies privilege and authorize scholarly representations of religion as a socially autonomous, and therefore nonreducible, experience. The main data comprise: (i) the interpretive controversy over the life and scholarly works of Mircea Eliade; (ii) examples drawn from Eliade's methods and theories; (iii) world religions textbooks; (iv) media and scholarly representations of Vietnamese Buddhist suicides in the early 1960s. These and a variety of other examples are employed as suitable instances of a much wider and more pervasive discourse on sui generis religion. In each of these representative cases, the study examines how the claim that religion is sui generis, along with the methods of study sanctioned by this claim, serves as a protective strategy that can ultimately authorize and normativize a socio-political programme. The study concludes by identifying possible directions for future research and suggests that the system of generalizations and dehistoricizations sanctioned by the sui generis strategy, evident throughout much of the academic study of religion as a whole, can be interpreted not only on a discursive and political scale of analysis but, finally, on a larger geo-political scale. On this scale, the study of religion as an ahistorical category participates in a larger system of political domination and economic and cultural imperialism.