Preparing for a new historiography of religion

The conceptual framework briefly sketched here is not an end in itself. It has been developed and will be used to pursue a critical review and a revision of the historiography of religion, of the reconstruction and narration of religious change. And a revision of this sort must confront historical claims made by historical agents and naturalized in a continuum of emic and academic historiography.

Such claims did not come about in so many areas and periods merely by chance. The narration of one’s past is one of the most important tools available for defining one’s identity. This holds true as much for individuals in genealogies or conversion narratives as it does for social groups and nations who bolster the coherence of their collective identity by reference to shared histories. Religious groups use similar tools (Otto, Rau, and Riipke 2015). Given the lack, or the rudimentary state, of religious organization, the lack of membership concepts, the contested character of orthodoxy and heresy, the existence of phenomena of ‘civil religion’ or other widely shared practices and beliefs in many regions and epochs, the definition of the subject of a history is of paramount importance. A history of religion of the people living in the Netherlands is different from a history of Christianity in the Netherlands, and much more so from the history of the religious groups based on the confession of Dordrecht (1632, Mennonites); a history of Christendom is different

A critical view of the concept of religion 15 from a history of religion in the West, and much more so from a history of the one and holy Church. It is through the very narrating of origins, conflicts, exclusions, and alliances that the identity of the narratives’ subjects, their characteristics and boundaries, are defined. This is as crucial for separating believers and non-believers as is addressing the balance between religion as a collective enterprise (religions) and religion as an individual practice (religiosity, as used above, or ‘spirituality’).⁸ It is, however, not groups who write histories: it is individuals. Michel de Certeau has pointed out the very individual character, the subversive power and strategic moves, and the complex relationship to their audience of the producers of historiographical writing (Certeau 1988; Riipke 2015). Such writers are as much in the business of creating, redefining, and instrumentalizing groups as they are of serving them. The command to write a history is usually self-imposed, not given by an institution. It often even has a religious purpose, and is part of and testimony to the author’s communication with the divine (Becker and Riipke 2019). Thus, the existence of the traditions, as much as the dividing line between secular and religious (Burchardt and Wohlrab-Sahr 2013; Wohlrab-Sahr, Karstein, and Schmidt-Lux 2009), cannot be regarded as a precondition of the historiographical account, but might be a product, and a permanent result, of the very act of narrating.

These claims of mine will need substantiation, which will be given in the course of the book. 1 will even support the further claim that historiography of religion, emic and academic, is instrumental in creating both religions and the concept of a plurality of religions as accountable social units with a history of their own. It is in such historiography that we find the terminological tools (religions, confessions, schools, sects) for the naturalization of competing claims of religious claim-makers. We find their narrative tools (stories of oaths and treaties, of deviance, of people who contend against the orthodox positions, etc.) and the compositional decisions directed towards that purpose (ingroup-outgroup changes of perspective, comparison, succession as an organizing principle, definition and treatment of epochs; see Riipke 2018d). All in all. the entanglement of emic and etic historiography has been very significantly underrated as a factor in the construction of the very terms and units of analysis of the history of religion. As such, it needs to be taken into account in any adequate conceptual reflection on the topic. Since conceptual reflection of this sort does not, 1 argue, result in the rejection of the term religion, the critique of historiographical accounts does not imply the rejection, but only the revision, of the historiographical practice as characteristic of Religious Studies.

The basis for any such critical stance is not just the amassing of ever larger quantities of sources. History never reconstructs itv'c es wirklich gewesen ist (‘how it really was’) as historicism attempted. It is for specific perspectives that specific approaches - more precisely, specific definitions and models - are more fruitful than others. And to turn the issue around, specific questions and interests demand specific concepts. An interest in religious individualization and a concept of religion that is focused on religious agency result in a description of lived religion or religion in the making, rather than of religions, religious systems, or religious traditions. When viewed in the light of such an approach, historical claim-makers will be part of the narrative rather than those who define its terms from the outside.

Notes

• 1 Arnal and McCutcheon (2013); Burchardt and Wohlrab-Sahr (2013); Edgell (2012); Engler (2011); King (2013); Kurita (2018); Lambek (2014); Losonczi and Van Herck (2015).
• 2 Bellah (2011), see also Bellah and Joas (2012) and for criticism e.g. Stroumsa (2012); Bowersock (2013) and comprehensively Stausberg (2014).
• 3 For definitions of religion based on the concept of ‘sacred’, see briefly Dobbelaere (2011) and his much earlier remarks in Dobbelaere and Lauwers (1973).
• 4 Bowern and Evans (2015); Keller (1994,225-553); Brinton (2017); Filppula et al. (2017).
• 5 Sacralization is developed here on the model of Catherine Bell's ‘ritualization’ (Bell 1992).
• 6 Thus, concepts like ‘sacral topography’ or ‘the sacred landscape’ (e.g. Cancik 1985; Ando 2001; Caseau 1999; Ceccarelli 2008; Hahn 2008; MacCormack 1990; Stein-sapir 2005) need to be discussed with regard to the degree of sacralization as much as they do with regard to visibility, readability, and intentionality.
• 7 Otto (1917, 2014); on Rudolf Otto see Deuser (2014); Eliade (1961); Urban (2003); Joas (2017).
• 8 For a typical critique of the concept of spirituality, see Gallagher, Bauman, and Lopez (2009).

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