Publication details
How does the Concept „Religion” Prevent Understanding of Religion?
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| Year of publication | 2010 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | This presentation deals with some methodological implications of the criticism of the category „Religion” for its use as an analytical tool in the Social Sciences. The aim of the presentation is to demonstrate, how this poorly defined category prevents understanding of social role and significance of traits and phenomena it partly assembles by (1) delimiting the field of study a priori without revisions following its many empirical fails, (2) its methodologically incorrect use, which prefers its intuitive construction with blurred contours to the consistent application of clear definitions. The result of this incorrectness is that due to theoretical prejudices or ideological reasons unjustified boundaries (1) cut of the apparent connections between „religious” and „non-religious” on one hand, and (2) group together numerous not related traits and phenomena on the other. This argument will be elaborated on the ground of an analysis of the use of the category „Religion” in sociological literature. Furthermore the direction of a desirable move towards less ambiguous and less ideologically loaded categories will be shown. The presentation is methodologically inspired by the Actor-Network-Theory as it was elaborated by Bruno Latour. |