A Twice Told Tale: The History of the History of Religions’ History
Author(s)
Thomassen, Einer
Abstract
In religion, as it is elsewhere in literature and life, repetition becomes one of the most salient markers for importance. The history of the history of religions, however, is hardly a story to be understood in terms of the “enlightenment” of our studied cultures (regardless of the number of times this story has been told). If we are to so restrict the history of religion to the taxonomic controversies that seem to be the practical performances of the religious scholar then it seems that the history of religion is merely a child of the Renaissance. Rather, when speaking of the history of religion, it is important to understand the fluidity of the paradigms we adopt, the lines and boundaries not clearly demarcated but rather left (at least somewhat) open. Too much of religious history, Smith argues, is concerned with paraphrasing, and a theory or model can rarely, if ever, be fully explained by the data writ large. It is resistance to the idea that any translation or generalization garners its cognitive powers from the disparate nature it holds against the subject matter. To continue in this fashion is to relegate the history of religion to a field concerned with telling the same story twice, and such a field is doomed to inconsequence.
