Religion and the Secular: Historical and Colonial Formations

The essays in this volume critically explore various aspects of the modern development of the religion-secular dichotomy and its ideological function in the assertion of colonial power since the sixteenth century. The authors hope to illuminate the role and formation of the modern category of religion, and of the academic study of religion, as colonial instruments in the more general subjection of indigenous concepts of order to the classificatory needs of Euro-America. The methodology tends to overflow traditional disciplinary boundaries and offers analyses that are historiographical, literary and ethnographical. However, rather than seeking comprehensiveness in such a vast field, the authors here concentrate on specific aspects of the colonial relationship either from the point of view of a particular colonized culture, for example in Mexico, Guatemala, Vietnam, India, Japan, South Africa and Canada, or from the point of view of the colonizing powers, in this case England, Germany and the United States. The authors hope to encourage further studies by specialists in different cultures and languages in the problems of imposition, translation and reception of the separation of "religion" from other domains such as 'politics', 'economics' and the 'non-religious' civil domain.

Timothy Fitzgerald is Reader in Religion at the University of Stirling.