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The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism. By Tomoko Masuzawa. University of Chicago Press, 2005. 359 pages. $19.00.

2006; Oxford University Press; Volume: 74; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/jaarel/lfj038

1477-4585

Leigh Eric Schmidt,

American Constitutional Law and Politics

In this ambitious work on the nineteenth-century science of religions Tomoko Masuzawa makes the “the world religions discourse” part of the critical theorist’s anatomy theater (xiv). On the surface the patient might look healthy enough—the inherited talk of ten to twelve world religions no more than an honest attempt to reckon with the global plurality of faiths. But the anatomist knows better, and the knife will expose the malignancies within the discourse, the hidden racial and imperial presumptions of European universality. Sometimes the demonstration proves spectacular, “the current epistemic regime” exposed, if not excised (xii); at other times the exhibition proves painful to watch in its blunt execution. Masuzawa positions her work within the larger turn toward historical analysis of the discourses that have shaped the study of religion from the seventeenth through twentieth centuries. The fourfold schema of Jewish–Christian–Muslim pagan that had long held sway in early modern compendia and dictionaries was gradually broken up in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. That model was replaced by longer lists of “national,” “universal,” or “great” religions, and these late nineteenth-century representations, in turn, crystallized by the 1920s and 30s into a taken-for-granted “world religions” classificatory system. Masuzawa does a fine job of setting out that history, in so far as she cares to credit such empirical or documentary endeavors. Her own chosen method of discourse analysis delights in textual fissures, precipices, gaps, billows, and black folds, so her historical narrative necessarily does not convey a strong sense of precision, connection, or meticulous contextualization. Indeed, even when it looks like Masuzawa is quite capable of pinning down the history of “world religions” as a category—unearthing a crucial entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1884 by C. P. Tiele, for example—she readily slips back into a preferred rhetoric of opacity, “the uncertainty of the appellation,” the various indeterminacies lurking within the discourse’s “compromised heritage” (107).