Entanglements: Marking Place in the Field of Religion

Entanglements attempts to argue against those who claim that scholarship on the category religion is only of secondary interest, in that it fails to do primary research on real religions. The volume collects eighteen responses, written across twenty years, that each exemplify the inevitably situated, give-and-take nature of all academic debate. These essays call into question the often used distinction between primary and secondary sources, between description and analysis. Published here in their original form, each contribution is accompanied by new, substantive introduction describing the context of each response and explaining how each shows something still at stake in the academic study of religion--whether its the rhetoric used to authorize competing scholarly claims or the difficulty involved in suspending our commonsense view of the world long enough to study the means by which we have come to see it that way. An ethnography of scholarly practice written mainly for earlier career readers--whether undergraduate or graduate students or even tenure-track faculty--Entanglements tackles the notion that some scholarship is more pristine, and thus more valuable, than others, thereby modeling for scholars earlier in their careers some of the obstacles and arguments that may face them should their research interests be judged unorthodox.

Table of Contents:
Preface Introduction: Apologia for an Obsession 1. Naming the Unnamable? Theological Language and the Academic Study of Religion (1990) 2. Ideology and the Problem of Naming: A Reply (1991) 3. Returning the Volley to William E Arnal (1998) 4. Of Strawmen and Humanists (1999) 5. A Brief Response from a Fortunate Man (2000) 6. Who Sets the Ground Rules? A Response to "Comparativism, Then and Now" (2000) 7. Artifacts Not Relics: A Response to "Missing Links in the Study of Religion" (2000) 8. Filling in the Cracks with Resin: A Reply to John Burris's "Text and Context in the Study of Religion" (2003) 9. A Few Words on the Temptation to Defend the Honor of a Text (2004) 10. Theorizing the Politics of "Religion": Rejoinder to Robert A. Segal (2005) 11. The Perils of Having Ones Cake and Eating it Too: Some Thoughts in Response (2005) 12. Theses on Professionalization (2007) 13. A Response to Prof. Robert Campany's "Chinese Religious History and its Implications for Writing 'Religion(s)" (2008) 14. "As it Was in the Beginning - ": The Modern Problem of the Ancient Self (2010) 15. A Direct Question Deserves a Direct Answer: A Reply to Atalia Omer's "Can a Critic Be a Caretaker too?" (2012) 16. Recovering the Human: A Tale of Nouns and Verbs (2012) 17. Three Dots and a Dash (2012) 18. The Sacred is the Profane (2013) Afterword and References

About the Author :
Russell T. McCutcheon is Professor and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama. His major publications include Manufacutring Religion (Oxford University Press, 1997), The Guide to the Study of Religion (Bloomsbury, 2000), Critics not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion (State University of New York Press, 2001) and The Discipline of Religion: Structure, Meaning, Rhetoric (Routledge, 2003). His most recent book, co-authored with William Arnal, is The Sacred is the Profane: The Political Nature of 'Religion' (Oxford University Press, 2013).

Review :
The book will be of interest to religious-studies scholars of all stripes and sub-disciplines. ..the compelling dynamism, complexity, and value of the theorist of religion's arguments is difficult to deny. The volume provides a nuanced picture of a controversial figure in the field and in doing so undermines myriad caricatures of that scholar's positions, arguments, and stances. ...the book is certainly the most helpful work I've encountered... in terms of professionalization in religious studies. Where are other books of this stature intended to support early career scholars? ; Religion