This will be a course that deals with religion as a political force;
The prof. works with an understanding of religion that builds on the understanding of religion as politics, that of religion as non-identical to science, as creating communities, as othering, as method, as value, as …; where does this understanding come from?
Religion is in- and ex-clusion at the same time; it does not ‘exist,’ but is rather defined by various forces and implemented by them. ← this is what we look at in the course.
Exam
We will need to bring a research poster for a project we research throughout the semester for the course.
People care about what religion is
There’s two main ways of approaching it:
- substantialist: there’s an essence/substance to religion that we can identify; thus, they focus on the contents/substance of religion. Rudolf Otto, for instance, refers to the ‘nominous;’ Mircea Eliade would argue that there is a definite distinction between the sacred and the profane, which is what structures the world.
- functionalist:
emic/etic discussion
what kind of epistemic authority comes from which position; from the excluded and the included?