This is an important and provocative book, written with sharp, surgical prose, lucid argument and high spirit. Daniel Dubuission's essential theoretical and critical enquiry constitutes a complete critical overview of the history of religion' as a concept, and, more ambitiously, a reconstruction of the very heart of our notion of religion' itself. Few people in this field have undertaken quite such a program of redefinition, and in my opinion no one involved in the scholarship of the history of religions can afford to ignore this book." --Dean A. Miller, University of Rochester Where does religion and the religious impulse ultimately come from? What are religion's most fundamental characteristics and expressions? These questions have never ceased to haunt Western thought, which has subjected religious texts, artifacts, and practices--whole belief systems--to rigorous scientific scrutiny for over a century now. Largely unexamined by historians and anthropologists of religion, however, is the possibility that the "universal" concept of religion underlying these questions is itself a cultural product specific only to the Christian world. In The Western Construction of Religion, Daniel Dubuisson explores this possibility by examining the many insoluble paradoxes which the concept of religion brings to any anthropological reflection; recounts the religious history of the West in order to make clear its singular characteristics; and addresses the study of religion in Western thought and points out the extent to which the discipline's assumptions and conceptual tools rely on these characteristics. Throughout this triple inquiry into the idea and history of religion, Dubuisson calls intoquestion the West's arrogant claim to define all of humanity according to religious and spiritual criteria by which it defines itself.
