Материал: The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells

Comparative religionâ 241â

Paden, William E., 1994, Religious Worlds: The Comparative Study of Religion, 2nd edn, Beacon Press, Boston.

Patton, Kimberley C. and Benjamin C. Ray, eds, 2000, A Magic Still Dwells: Comparative Religion in the Postmodern Age, The University of California Press, Berkeley.

Poole, Fitz John Porter, 1986, ‘Metaphors and Maps: Towards Comparison in the Anthropology of Religion,’ Journal of the American Academy of Religion 54: 411–457.

Saler, Benson, 1993, Conceptualizing Religion: Immanent Anthropologists, Transcendent Natives, and Unbounded Categories, Leiden, Brill.

Sharpe, Eric C., 1986, Comparative Religion: A History, 2nd edn, Open Court, La Salle, Ill.

Smith, Jonathan Z., 1982, Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

——1987, To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

——1990, Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

——2004, Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Whitehouse, Harvey, 2004, Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission, Altamira

Press, Walnut Creek, CA.

Suggested reading

Braun, Willi, ed., 2004, ‘Comparison in the History of Religions: Reflections and Critiques,’ Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 16/1.

Special issue, with essays by religious studies scholars responding to the Patton (2000) volume.

Eliade, Mircea, 1959, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask, Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, New York.

Widely read classic on such themes as sacred space and sacred time by the leading comparativist of the last generation. (A condensation of many of the themes from his larger volume, Patterns in Comparative Religion, 1958.)

Idinopulos, Thomas Athanasius, Brian C. Wilson, and James Constantine Hanges, eds., 2006,

Comparing Religions: Possibilities and Perils? Brill, Leiden.

Essays by thirteen religious studies scholars on the nature and aims of comparison.

Jones, Lindsay, ed. 2004, Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd edn, 15 vols, Macmillan, Detroit, MI.

Major source of articles, with bibliographies, on comparative topics, and a thorough updating of the original 1987 edition (ed. by Mircea Eliade).

Müller, F. Max, 1872, Lectures on the Science of Religion, Charles Scribner Co., New York. Seminal lectures on the importance of comparative perspective by a founder of the discipline.

Paden, William E., 1994, Religious Worlds: The Comparative Study of Religion, 2nd edn, Beacon Press, Boston.

An introduction to comparative perspective in the study of religion and to key patterns and variations in the formation of religious ‘worlds.’

Patton, Kimberley C. and Benjamin C. Ray, eds., 2000, A Magic Still Dwells: Comparative Religion in the Postmodern Age, The University of California Press, Berkeley.

Essays by fourteen contemporary scholars on the ongoing importance of comparative work in relation to the challenge of postmodernism.

Poole, Fitz John Porter, 1986, ‘Metaphors and Maps: Towards Comparison in the Anthropology of Religion,’ Journal of the American Academy of Religion 54: 411–457.

242â Key approaches to the study of religions

Influential analysis of comparative method by an anthropologist of religion (for more advanced students).

Sharpe, Eric C., 1986, Comparative Religion: A History, 2nd edn, Open Court, La Salle, IL.

Remains a usefully informative overview of the development of comparative religion as a modern field.

Smart, Ninian, 1996, Dimensions of the Sacred: An Anatomy of the World’s Beliefs, University of California Press, Berkeley.

Accessible demonstration of seven key categories by which religion can be studied (ritual, mythic, experiential, doctrinal, ethical, social, and material).

Smith, Jonathan Z., 1982, Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Highly influential work raising critical issues on the methodology of comparison.

——, 2004, Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion, Chicago University Press, Chicago. numerous articles on issues of comparison by the best-known contemporary comparativist.

Part 2

Key topics in the study of religions

Chapter 14

Gender

Darlene M. Juschka

What is gender? What is sex? What is gender/sex?

Historical prelude

Gender as a category of analysis has operated in a variety of ways depending on pedagogical location or historical period. For example, in sociological studies gender consists of the study of sex roles in pre-industrial and industrial societies. Or, historically in Europe, gender has simply been the natural designation of the sexes as opposite since the eighteenth century. However, in the 1960s gender became a central category of feminist studies. So for example, in feminist language studies gender becomes the means by which to look at the erasure of women by the generic term ‘man’ and the thingification of women as the object of the male gaze.

The development of gender as a category of analysis can be seen in the work of Margaret Mead and Catherine Berndt, for example, as a slow transformation of the belief in natural sexroles and sex-role assignments to an analysis of the social construction of these roles. In other words, people like Mead and Berndt began to think about how the labor and roles given to men and women may have less to do with biological certainties and more to do with societal demands. These anthropologists examined women’s ritual activities and beliefs among preindustrial peoples, a focus that had been hitherto overlooked by their more androcentric colleagues. They found that the women they investigated tended to operate in a separate female sphere with rituals, symbols, and myths centered on such concerns as fertility and birth, economics, healing, or the well-being of the society, e.g. tending ancestors, the land, or myth cycles. They also became aware of two significant issues in the study of human society: one, the erasure of women and their activities from all fields of knowledge; and two, that women and men’s gendered practices, e.g. work, parenting, status, were in fact social roles that were secondarily assigned as sex roles. Under the influence of firstand second-wave feminism,1 then, the analysis of women as gendered, gender relating to both the oppression of women and creating a new subject of study based upon women, was established.

What is gender?

Gender is something we all know, or think we know. We immediately categorize people (and most everything, e.g. language, animals, planets, or inanimate objects) on the basis of their gender. We categorize ourselves repeatedly by ticking the appropriate box on a form to indicate our gender. We are careful to enter the proper washroom, and we choose particular