Spatial Taxonomies of Religion

Abstract

Tomoko Masuzawa’s book The Invention of World Religions describes how a discursive entity called “religion” emerged in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. According to Masuzawa, world religions emerged “as a category and as a conceptual framework initially developed in the European academy, which quickly became a means of differentiating, variegating, consolidating, and totalizing a large portion of the social, cultural, and political practices observable among the inhabitants of regions elsewhere in the world.”¹ Where previously the world was divided into Christians, Jews, Muslims, and then the rest, with Christianity standing as the one true religion among them, in the early decades of the nineteenth century the discursive regime of pluralism rendered “the rest” visible. Buddhism, Hinduism, Shinto, Confucianism, and many others were suddenly understood as distinct entities, clearly demarcated sets of beliefs and practices that marked them off from other competing beliefs, practices, and cultures. On Masuzawa’s telling, these traditions were constructed by European scholars for the purposes of comparative study, as well as for the purposes of cultural classification and domination.