Religion and Orientalism in Asian Studies 9781474289733, 9781474289764, 9781474289757

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Religion and Orientalism in Asian Studies

Also Available From Bloomsbury Buddhism and Iconoclasm in East Asia, Fabio Rambelli and Eric Reinders Confucius: A Guide for the Perplexed, Yong Huang The Daoist Tradition, Louis Komjathy

Religion and Orientalism in Asian Studies Edited by Kiri Paramore

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2016 Paperback edition first published 2018 © Kiri Paramore and Contributors 2016 Kiri Paramore and Contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identifi ed as Editors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: PB: ePDF: ePub:

978-1-4742-8973-3 978-1-3500-6652-6 978-1-4742-8975-7 978-1-4742-8974-0

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Paramore, Kiri, editor. Title: Religion and Orientalism in Asian studies / edited by Kiri Paramore. Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references. Identifi ers: LCCN 2016016466 (print) | LCCN 2016017537 (ebook) | ISBN 9781474289733 (hardback) | ISBN 9781474289757 (epdf) | ISBN 9781474289740 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Asia–Study and teaching. | Religion–Study and teaching. | Religion and the social sciences–Asia. | Religion and the humanities–Asia. | Religions–Asia. Classifi cation: LCC DS32.8 .R45 2016 (print) | LCC DS32.8 (ebook) | DDC 306.6072–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016016466 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

In memory, Harold Hays (1965-2013), soldier, scholar, seeker

Contents Introduction Kiri Paramore

1

1

Religion in Southeast Asian Studies Bernard Arps

13

2

Religion in the Sociology and Anthropology of India Rowena Robinson

25

India and the Making of Hinduism: The contribution of the Purāṇas Peter C. Bisschop

39

The Study of Chinese Religions in the Social Sciences: Beyond the Monotheistic Assumption Anna Sun

51

5

Coming to Terms with Religion in East Asia T. H. Barrett

73

6

From Field to Text in the Study of Chinese Religion Barend J. ter Haar

85

3 4

7

Religion in Korean Studies: The Case of Historiography Marion Eggert

107

The Role of Religion in European and North American Japanese Studies Hans Martin Krämer

119

Religion, Secularism and the Japanese Shaping of East Asian Studies Kiri Paramore

129

10 Christian–Muslim Borderlands: From Eastern European Studies to Central Eurasian Studies Christian Noack and Michael Kemper

145

Notes

165

Bibliography

173

Biographies for Religion and Orientalism in Asian Studies

207

Index

211

8 9

Introduction Kiri Paramore

This book looks at how religion has shaped Asian Studies, and how Asian Studies has shaped, and is continuing to shape, academic understandings of religion. Religion, and the history of its study in the modern academy, has affected not only the methodologies but also the disciplinary and regional arrangement of different Asian Studies over the past century. Asian Studies has also affected, and is increasingly shaping, the study of religion. This volume looks into this symbiotic relationship – both in current practice and in modern history. In the past decade, our understanding of the origins of Asian Studies and its Oriental Studies predecessor has undergone a sea change. New research has focused attention on the positive religious motivation of much traditional orientalist research, and likewise on the significant religious and philosophical foundations of much of the twentieth-century research that gave birth to Asian and Area Studies (Girardot 2002; Marchand 2009; App 2012). These attentions to the intellectual, religious and moral motivations behind early Orientalism have problematized the traditional 1970s story of the primarily political origins and utilitarian motives of Area Studies (Said 1978; Miyoshi 2002). They thereby provide a promising new path for conceptualizing the field of Contemporary Asian Studies. This new outlook on how Asian Studies and religion were historically intertwined can also inform how we think about the relationship between Religion and Asian Studies today, and how we practise within that relationship. It speaks to other recent critical thinking on the contemporary context of the study of religion in Area Studies environments and the challenges and opportunities that arise in the contemporary practice of Asian Studies (Flood 2011; Pollock 2009; Harootunian 1999, 2000). Writings on Asian Studies to date have tended to look at the field generically rather than per region, and have predominantly tended to call for a strengthening in the trans-regional capacities in Area Studies to counter

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national reification and cultural essentialism (Wessley-Smith and Goss 2010). Most have emphasized the role of the social sciences in the post–Second World War formation of Area Studies, with little consideration of earlier religious and broader humanities conceptions of regional, oriental and later Asian Studies (Miyoshi and Harootunian 2002). The interaction between the long running history of Oriental Studies in the humanities, and the post–Second World War phenomenon of Area Studies in the social sciences, has thereby not been explained. Similarly, very few books on Asian Studies acknowledge the different experiences of different country and region-based Asian Studies.1 Yet, comparing the development of different Asian Studies related to different regions can be an empowering tool, enabling us to break down some of the generic descriptions of the field that have arisen over the past two decades. This is why each chapter is designed to address a particular regional or country-focused branch of Asian Studies. Presenting chapters on different Asian Studies in this manner also parallels the way these subjects are offered at most universities. All chapters, despite concentrating on different regional Asian Studies, share a number of overarching themes such as local academic agency, the role of states, the divisions between humanities and social science fields, between past and present, and the contrast between secularist and pluralist outlooks. Together, these chapters most significantly demonstrate surprising similarities and differences in the role of religion in the different regional Asian Studies. In the case of Japan, for example, it is clear that the ideology of secularism is a powerful force. Rather than being a force of secularization, however, the ideology of secularism invited scholars of Japanese Asian Studies to portray the primary object countries of Japanese imperialism – Korea and China – in particularly religious terms, while at the same time manufacturing a particularly secular image for their own country. As Marion Eggert’s chapter in this volume shows, the enforcement of that vision through Japanese control of academic institutions in pre-1945 Korea meant a religiously dominated vision of the history of that country in the pre-1945 colonial period, which then informed a similarly religiously inclined, if value-opposite, nationalist reaction after liberation. There are some echoes of this in the portrayal of religion in visions of India pre- and postcolonial. As Rowena Robinson argues in her chapter, colonial impositions of religion-centred visions of culture there,

Introduction

3

rather than being rejected outright after independence, were rather simply turned around and incorporated into the ideology of the new nation-state. Religion maintained its core position defining nation. The role of nations and nation-states in Asian Studies is often closely connected to the issue of agency, particularly in contexts of colonialism and/or military confrontation. The role of the Cold War in the origination of modern Area Studies has already been written about at length (Dower 1985; Miyoshi and Harootunian 2002). Chapters in this volume on both East Asia and Central Asia demonstrate how that securitization of Area Studies had both a pre-Cold War history, and a post-Cold War afterlife. Our chapters on Japan, China and India also show how similar geopolitical considerations, with active state involvement, colour Asian Studies practice today in contexts of international conflict where Western powers no longer play a significant role. This reinforces one of the lines that runs through several of the contributions in this book: that the interaction between religion and Asian Studies, and the politics of religion played out in Asian Studies, related as it is to modernist and nationalist priorities, today has increasingly little to do with Western constellations of either politics or knowledge.

Area Studies, Orientalism and the modernist ideology of secularism Although looking to draw attention to current practice and recent past, most of the chapters in this volume also share an awareness that the contemporary practices of Asian Studies, and current conceptualizations of ‘religion’, are ultimately indivisible from the long-durée history of Orientalism. As the chapters here by sociologists Anna Sun and Rowena Robinson make most clear, the legacy of Oriental Studies and Orientalism is as influential in the practice of contemporary social sciences as in the cultural disciplines (indeed, perhaps more influential). Of course, this is not to suggest that late-twentiethto early-twenty-first-century Asian Studies and nineteenth-century Oriental Studies are the same. There is no doubt that the Area Studies of the post–Second World War period possesses some different dynamics to the Oriental Studies of the pre-war. A particular self-reflexivity is one result of those dynamics. The

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beginnings of responses that gave rise to this self-reflexivity, however, clearly date from out of a much longer history, as elucidated upon in chapters by Ben Arp and Barend ter Haar. There is also an obvious continuity in the pedagogy that underlies both Oriental Studies and Asian Studies. Asian Studies, regardless of disciplinary or thematic focus, is usually pedagogically based around language acquisition. Asian Studies as a pedagogical discipline surrounds language study as a core activity with the acquisition of cultural knowledge (including history) necessary for engagement with any object of scholarly enquiry in the given area.2 Asian Studies and Oriental Studies both possess(ed) this pedagogical alignment and produce(d) research influenced by it. The centrality of projected images of religion in both Asian Studies and Oriental Studies representations of region, culture and country is actually the most obvious example of continuity between the two fields. The negativities inherent in the depictions of the near East ‘Orient’ Said honed in on were often based on a modernist discourse on religion that attributed social, political and technological ‘stagnancy’ to particular religious traditions and cultures (Asad 1993). As a number of the essays in this volume demonstrate, this rabid modernism, which Said correctly identified (as ‘imperialism’) with some strands of Oriental Studies, was an even stronger constituent in the social science turn of Area Studies (Dower 1985). It is important, however, that we identify the roots of this pejorative discourse on traditional religion in certain strands of enlightenment thought and modernism, rather than just as the anti-foreign imperialism that Said emphasized. After all, as Talal Asad made clear in the 1990s, the original targets of this aggressive and dismissive modernist discourse of religion were as much within Europe as without (Asad 1993). If we are too influenced by the cultural side of Said’s interpretation, we may actually miss how widely we can potentially apply the critique underlying his thesis – not only to the history and study of the colonized but also to major groups within Europe, from Jews to Irish Catholics, and also to never formally colonized peoples beyond – notably the Chinese and Japanese. For commentators from Hegel, through Marx’s interlocutor on ‘the Jewish Question’ Bauer, to Weber, the force of ‘unenlightened’, non-individualized, ‘traditional’ religion in binding different aspects of human activity and society together was exactly what seemed to render it premodern (and thereby

Introduction

5

problematic), and their host societies stagnant, backward and thereby requiring ‘Western liberation’ – the justification for the imperialism Said and others have emphasized (Marx 1968: 36–45). Ideas of relatively recent figures like Samuel Huntington demonstrate that these outlooks are not simply vestiges of longgone imperialist history, but rather still current in ongoing projects that employ images of culture to justify geopolitical domination (Huntington 1997). Today, politicized images of religious induced social stagnancy projected upon places like Xinjiang and Tibet, ironically enough by China, itself a former victim of exactly this kind of propaganda, demonstrate that this political utilization of religion in shaping images of culture is not limited to the West and not limited to the past. The fact that this kind of politicized culturalist outlook based on pejorative visions of religion is so current even today, and even in Communist China, seems to somewhat challenge Said and other commentators’ attribution of it to particular forms of nineteenth-century European imperialism. In fact, recent scholarship on the birth of the tradition of Oriental Studies has made clear that the early-nineteenth-century field of professional Oriental Studies was not at all dominated by this kind of modernist and normative vision of religion. Rather, Oriental Studies also emerged from a completely different, more traditionalist, but more universalist vision of religion, which competed directly against the modernist idea of religion rising at that time. For Suzanne Marchand, the late-eighteenth- to early-nineteenth-century world that gave birth to the pejorative modernist vision of an individualized religion, which condemned ‘Jewishness’, conversely also originated a competing vision of religion which looked to Hebrew in particular as an entry point into a deeper history which might reveal the origins of shared universal human norms (Marchand 2009: 26–7). The reinvigoration of studies of Hebrew and Jewish tradition played an important early role in the origination of modern Oriental Studies. Oriental Studies branched out slowly beyond the cultures of the Book eastwards to places like China, partly in search of confirmation of a universal model of human civilization – the unified truth of Christ initially, later a model of shared yet differently manifested humanist values. This trend appeared early in European visions of Confucian culture in China, and persists today in sometimes rather naïve, but nonetheless very positive imaginations of Buddhism (Jensen 1997; App 2010).

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This volume suggests that this alternate vision of religion’s role as universalist unifying positive value is not a simple legacy of the past, but a theme of Oriental Studies ongoing in modern Asian Studies. Opening our eyes to this alternate and competing vision of religion, present from the very beginnings of Oriental Studies (according to Marchand 2009 and App 2010), empowers us to see the fields of Oriental Studies and Asian Studies no longer as fields projecting one negative vision of modernized religion, but rather as fields of conflict, where contestation over various visions of religion and religion’s place in our understanding of global society occurs. It is a contest in which Asian Studies scholars and students are participants. Modern academic approaches to the study of cultures and countries thus contain, and from the beginning have contained, a contradiction and contestation. On the one hand, the study of other cultures, areas, religions and countries was a universalist search within oneself and the world beyond for a (possibly pluralistically manifested) shared truth. On the other hand, it was the rejection of the other and the assertion of a singular superior modernist self as uniquely progressive in contrast to stereotyped images of stagnation and backwardness associated with all others. These negations were justified in terms of the alleged ‘particular’ natures of different cultures, yet actually followed standard forms applied similarly to groups as different as Arabs, Koreans and Irish, and always with religion deployed centrally. There is thus a shared history and religious centrality to most Area Studies. Yet, the study of different countries and regions, and the different Area Studies practices and traditions that have emerged to contain them – Chinese Studies, Arabic Studies, Japanese Studies, South Asian Studies and so on – have also each seen religion employed in different political contexts for different political outcomes. The balance between the contradictory visions of the place of religion in studies of culture has played out differently in different Asian Studies. The chapters of this volume chart those differences. Part of this mix in shaping the interaction between Asian Studies and religion has been the role of secularism in the construction of different Asian Studies. The modernist ideology of secularism – the fantasy of a linked connection between degrees of secularization and degrees of modernity (Gellner 1983) – has over the past two decades been clearly exposed as fiction, notably in high profile scholarship from Charles Taylor and Jürgen Habermas, among others

Introduction

7

(Taylor 2007; Habermas 2006). The chapters of this volume suggest that different regions and countries’ differing abilities to manipulate this fantasy, especially through the twentieth century, had a significant effect on how those Asian Studies developed and how those regions, countries and cultures were seen. By reintroducing the religious element to our critical consideration of Asian Studies, this volume thus follows recent trends in some of the most influential political philosophy and political science scholarship of recent years, which has been arguing in more general terms for serious consideration of religion in our understandings of contemporary politics and political science. This book’s critical interaction with the contemporary development of Asian Studies thus similarly looks to have thinking about religion, and its historical role, inform our understanding of contemporary politics – both within the academic field of Asian Studies and within the diverse, real world it seeks to understand.

Region by region This volume contains chapters on each of the major regions dealt with in contemporary Asian Studies. Corresponding roughly to the size of the fields, the book contains three chapters focusing on Chinese Studies, two on Japanese Studies, one on Korean Studies, two on South Asian Studies, and one on Southeast Asian Studies, as well as a comparative chapter on Eastern European and Central Asian Studies. These chapters are written by sociologists, anthropologists, linguists, political scientists, philologists and historians, all of whom work at least partly in Asian Studies programmes. Ben Arps’ piece on ‘Religion in Southeast Asian Studies’ surveys a representative field of literature in Southeast Asian Studies over the past century that centrally considers religion. Some of these works have had major influence across academic disciplines – notably those by Clifford Geertz and Ronit Ricci. Arps uses the Asian Studies/Religion nexus to set these works in a larger and more longue-durée scholarly context, which he sees as ‘illustrative of a certain scholarly ambiance’. For Arps, understanding this ambiance allows us not only to better understand these works but also to further define the nature of, and problematize core ongoing conceptual themes within, Southeast Asian Studies in particular and Area Studies in general. Turning to current

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trends, Arps particularly concentrates on the increasing emphasis on ideas of mobility, which inhabit Ricci’s writing, and has also recently been highlighted by other scholars as a major issue in the current development of Area Studies (Wessley-Smith and Goss 2010). Arps, preempting Sun’s later citation of Swidler, frames his piece in relation to a definition of ‘religion’ as ‘a complex repertoire of practices, technologies, and theories (models, ideologies) of world-making, in which language is central’ (Swidler 1986). This definition of religion stands in contrast to earlier Protestant-influenced individualizing, modernist conceptions of ‘religion’ that, as Anna Sun notes in her contribution to this volume, were intertwined with the early-twentieth-century definitions of ‘world religions’. It is important to note that this latter manifestation of the modernist definition of religion influenced even the more progressive work of scholars like Geertz. Arps’ implied criticism of Geertz’s portrayal of religion as a motivating functional social system rests on a problematization of his methodology. Geertz’s overwhelming reliance on participant observation and conversations, and his lack of analytical attention to cultural performance. (in Singer’s sense; see Singer 1972)

Here, we see more recent definitions of religion as repertoire interacting with criticism of core methodological practices, theories and texts of modern Asian Studies (and in this case Anthropology as well). We also see a criticism of Geertz that further develops earlier analyses of Geertz problematizing his uncritical acceptance of certain tropes of religion (Asad 1993: 47). Rowena Robinson’s chapter, ‘Religion in the Sociology and Anthropology of India’, establishes a strong link between the history of orientalist approaches to the study of area and religion, and the place of religion in current imaginations of ‘areas’ and ‘nations’, particularly in South Asia. Robinson argues that the orientalist legacy continues to play a defining role in sociology and anthropology in contemporary India, both disciplines often deploying representations of religion centrally to create images of Indian culture that conform to nationalist categories. Robinson follows much recent critical writing on Area Studies in pointing out the lack of trans-regional and transcultural outlooks engendered by Asian Studies – something also picked up in Ben Arps’s chapter on Southeast Asia. Robinson argues that this then creates separate religiously defined and

Introduction

9

culturally essentialized ‘areas’ in South Asia corresponding to ‘Hindic India and Nepal’, ‘Islamic Pakistan’ and ‘Buddhist Sri Lanka’. South Asian Studies then, as a label of Area Studies, is an empty vessel, used to cover a blatantly religiously defined cultural essentialism sitting at the base of many studies of India. In ‘India and the Making of Hinduism’, Peter C. Bisschop, by investigating how the concept of Hinduism as a single religion was formed before the colonial period, and in interaction between European scholarship and Indian traditions, challenges both postcolonial and neocolonial research approaches that privilege the story of British imperialism in the disciplinary histories of Indology, Indian Studies and Hinduism. Bisschop relates this history, and that of the colonial period, to current practice, arguing for the necessity of serious study of premodern Indian tradition as part of the recovery from the postcolonial. Bisschop’s point thus resonates with Robinson’s, but from a completely different, historically earlier, and more textually oriented methodological angle. Rowena Robinson writing on modern religious studies, and Peter C. Bisschop writing on classic textual studies, both show how the adoption by the modern Indian state of a discourse of Hindu nationalism has limited possibilities for breaking through problems of religious division in both classical scholarship and contemporary society. These two chapters add new dimensions to our understanding of issues often raised from postcolonial perspectives because they point to roots of religious political problems in South Asia that lie beyond British colonialism. These chapters suggest a need to reengage overlooked areas of the study of religion to deepen and broaden our understanding of particular countries, rather than simply criticizing the study of religion as the cause of a problem. Anna Sun’s chapter, ‘Chinese Religions in the Social Sciences: Beyond the Monotheistic Assumption’, critiques the religious exclusivism and beliefcentric nature of the modernist conception of religion – notably in the latenineteenth- to early-twentieth-century guise of ‘world religions’. She argues that contemporary social science research needs to develop methodologies that allow scholars to explain and theorize diversity of practice and belief. To achieve this, Sun suggests the increased application of a syncretist model of religion, partly through employing Swidler’s idea of religion as repertoire, particularly through the lens of Robert Campany’s interpretation of this in relation to China (Swidler 1986; Campany 2003). She concludes by demonstrating the

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similarities between this emerging syncretist vision of ‘religion’ as a category in the study of China, and that which has emerged in recent research on religion in other cultures. Tim Barrett’s chapter, ‘Coming to Terms with Religion in East Asia’, builds on recent work by Jason Josephson to consider the history behind the adoption in East Asia of the modern European concept of religion (Josephson 2013). It points to the lack of capacity for pluralist conceptualizations in the modern concept of religion. Whereas Sun emphasizes the ultimate incapacity of the modern concept of religion to describe phenomena in contemporary China, Barrett instead focuses on how this same conceptualization of religion in historical fact reordered and to some extent directed Japanese and then Chinese modern thinking. Barrett directs our attention to the modern historical consequences of the dominance of this idea of religion in twentiethcentury East Asia, and it is here that the critical implications of his argument are to be found. Barend ter Haar’s chapter, ‘From Field to Text in the Study of Chinese Religion’, similarly and more directly attacks the imposition of modernist conceptualizations of religion on China in research from the early twentieth century. Ter Haar does this by plumbing the earlier history of the European study of Chinese religion to reveal a period where, before the formation of modernist categories in Europe, Europeans paid more attention to the sociality and social practice of religion in China. By confronting the problems of modern and contemporary study into Chinese religion with this apparently more satisfactory earlier nineteenth-century model, ter Haar not only challenges common assumptions about the negativity of early orientalist practice but also provides a model for critique of current practice. Marion Eggert analyses the centrality of religion in the creations of modern and contemporary visions of Korean history, both within Korea itself, and beyond. She demonstrates how Korean Studies as a field, and the core transdisciplinary element within it, history, have been debated primarily through the lens of religion. Eggert particularly concentrates on the role of modern colonization in this interaction, linking the processes of colonization and decolonization to the positioning of religion in various manufactures of Korean history. She argues that Korea’s lack of sovereignty made issues of religious culture, linked as they were to projections of national culture, uninteresting for

Introduction

11

scholars of Korea outside Asia before independence, and a nationalist fetish for those within after. Hans Martin Krämer’s chapter, ‘The Role of Religion in Japanese Studies’, argues that Japanese Studies has remained a particularly religion-free field of Area Studies right up until the recent present. He sees this as related to the particularly utilitarian perspective underlying Japanese Studies, a perspective, which as Dower, Miyoshi, Harootunian and others have made clear, was closely related to the ‘modernization’ – centric approach to US Japanese Studies in the Cold War (Dower and Norman 1985; Miyoshi and Harootunian 2002). Krämer also links this approach, and the problems inherent in it, to major attempts to understand the sociology of Japanese religion from non-Japanese Studies scholars – notably Robert Bellah and S. N. Eisenstadt. His chapter, however, by noting that current trends in Japanese Studies research run completely against this secularist tradition, closes with a prediction for the future of Japanese Studies that sees it as likely to become increasingly reintegrated with images of religiosity. Krämer predicts that this future trend in research will have no time for pseudo-Weberian assertions about the Japanese as the ‘Protestants of Asia’ and is rather likely to transform Japan in the international academic gaze back into just ‘another Asian country’. My chapter looks to different roots of this secularist ambiance in the history of Japanese-led Oriental and Asian Studies, focusing on the efforts of Japanese elites in the modern period. I argue that modern Japanese elites, realizing the discourses of secularism that were put to use in justifying colonialism, on the one hand, deliberately pushed a secularist image of Japanese culture in the West, while, on the other, advancing a particularly religious image of China and Korea. This constituted an important political element in the major Japanese intellectual contributions made to modern Sinology and Korean Studies in the early twentieth century. In both these fields, Japan appropriated negative aspects of the European Orientalist tradition to advance their own imperialist ambitions over these two neighbouring countries. In the final part of my chapter, I demonstrate direct links between these early-twentiethcentury Japanese Sinology and East Asian Studies and the birth of modern Area Studies in the United States at Harvard in the immediately post-war. I thus identify twentieth-century Japanese academia as an important conduit through which negative elements in the European Orientalist tradition came

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to affect the development of modern Area Studies in the twentieth century. Many of the practices and theoretical contours of modern Area Studies can thus be seen as having been shaped by attitudes in the academia of modern Japanese imperialism. The final chapter in the volume provides a comparative perspective on the role of religion in Asian Studies, by contrasting it against the secular history of post-Soviet Eastern European and Central Asian Studies. The first half of Michael Kemper and Christian Noack’s chapter, ‘Christian-Muslim Borderlands: From Eastern European Studies to Central Eurasian Studies’, outlines the secularist or non-religious origins of Eastern European and Eurasian Studies, as developed in both the East and West during the Soviet period. The second half of the chapter moves on to point out, by contrast, the central role of religion in the current post-Soviet development of society, nation-building and academic self-conception in these areas. It also pointedly notes the lack of knowledge in the academy to analyse these religious dimensions – due partly to the earlier referred to secular history of the field. This chapter, by demonstrating the rise of Islam within the post-Soviet worlds of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and the centrality of the Russian language and culture of post-communism in this process, also challenges Area Studies to unpack often-assumed relationships between religion, language and culture.

1

Religion in Southeast Asian Studies Bernard Arps1

Over the past few decades, the heartland of Area Studies has witnessed regular assessments of the state of the Southeast Asian Studies field as practised in the United States, in the form of symposia and their proceedings. Religion is remarkably thin on the ground in these self-reflections. In his introduction to the volume Southeast Asian Studies in the Balance (Hirschman, Keyes and Hutterer 1992) that came out of one of these exercises, Keyes noted a lack of humanities research in US-based Southeast Asian Studies. He specifically mentioned cultural history and, as part of it, religious history (Keyes 1992: 17). The participant who focused on the humanities in his contribution, Reynolds, was of the opinion ‘that history of religions is in the best position to establish an effective humanistic beachhead within Southeast Asian studies’ (1992: 64), although up till then ‘the relationship between [the history of religions discipline] and Southeast Asian studies has been minimal indeed’ (1992: 65). It was not to be. In a renewed stocktaking a decade later, the underdevelopment of the humanities is again noted (Weighing the Balance 2000: 33) and the history of religions is conspicuous by its absence. Religious studies is represented by a statement from an anthropological point of view about the importance of religion in modernity in Southeast Asia (2000: 29). In his contribution to another bigger survey a few years later, one of Area Studies at large, anthropologist of religion Bowen (2004) showed that the lack of Southeast Asia-focused humanities research in the United States was compensated for by work done in other circles: ‘The striking feature of Southeast Asianist anthropology, the dominant discipline in U.S. studies of the region, has been its consistent attention to those performance forms that constitute the primary object of study for the humanities’ (Bowen 2004: 420).

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In the Southeast Asian context, many of these performances of course have religious connections. A related point of attention in cultural anthropology was explicitly religious. Anthropologists have taken up the local performance and interpretation of scripture, from world religions, as a distinct topic of research (Bowen 2004: 422–3).2 In fact, Bowen was rehearsing a point he had already made a decade earlier. The anthropology of Southeast Asia engaged in ‘studying local interpretations of “world religions” ’, especially texts (Bowen 1995: 1053). He also pointed out how important this was on the ground: ‘Most Southeast Asians draw extensively from the traditions of Christianity, Buddhism, Confucianism, or Islam. When they do so, however, they interpret the tradition through the lenses of their own culture and history. The resulting dynamic of local and translocal is nowhere in the world richer than here’ (Bowen 1995: 1054). As works like Adams and Gillogly’s reader (2011) demonstrate, this idea and the connected focal point in anthropology have endured. In Europe, Southeast Asian Studies retains a sizable humanities component from the orientalist scholarship out of which it grew. But European Southeast Asian Studies is and remains highly fragmented in terms of intellectual traditions. In this respect, too, it is like the originary Orientalism. Different areas are often studied in their former colonizing countries, and disciplinary orientations also tend to be nationally determined. Moreover, in recent decades, Southeast Asian Studies in Europe has been bedevilled by a neoliberalization of the higher learning sector that, where left unchecked, inexorably reduces universities to teaching facilities. Stocktakings produced here are fewer than in the United States but tend to be more globally oriented (Kratoska, Raben and Nordholt 2005; Chou and Houben 2006). Religion is by no means as prominent in them as warranted by its past and present significance in the region and as the (contrastive) lamentation of its absence in the US-based Southeast Asia-focused humanities might suggest. In other quarters of Southeast Asian Studies, the way the situation is evaluated does not differ substantially. In his thought-provoking essay on the degree and manners of participation of Southeast Asian nationals in Southeast Asian Studies, Heryanto confirms that religiosity in Southeast Asian social life, which he, too, identifies as prominent, has been badly served by scholars (Heryanto 2007: 97). He also states that Southeast Asians are particularly

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well positioned to study it (2007: 99). Undoubtedly, research by long-term participants has distinct advantages, especially in the study of contemporary religiosities, because of the relative ease with which geographical and social and cultural access can often be had. But there are drawbacks as well. Some academic institutions in Southeast Asia fetishize US-based research (hand-inhand with the importance attached to university league tables) and still lack a certain confidence in own achievements and potential. Research elsewhere in Southeast Asia may be confident enough but not accessible to outsiders (Bowen 2004: 401). In addition, a dedicated Area Studies partisan may find it painful to observe that much of this scholarship does not address globally relevant problematics; it is nationally oriented. Possibly more painful still – though explicable from the historical hegemony of Western scholarly traditions in the international academy – may be that it does not tend to take local ways of knowing and thinking seriously and in fact often seems to be ignorant of them or to refuse to acknowledge them.

Four monographs in a century Despite the findings of these surveys and these general tendencies, much research has been done on religion in Southeast Asia. I will now briefly characterize a few examples of the position of religion in Southeast Asian Studies, using research on religion in Java as a case example. The intervals of one or two scholarly generations between them make major changes in scholarly direction discernible. I have chosen works that took off from the mainstream scholarship of the day and moved in Asian Studies and Area Studies directions, reflecting novel trends and in some cases helping to set them. The first book to be discussed, Drewes’s 1925 study of three nineteenth-century Islamic teachers in Java, is based on manuscripts in a colonial collection, but focused on people and their intellectual milieus far more than was common at the time. The Religion of Java, for which Geertz did the fieldwork in the early 1950s, grew from the concerns of early Cold War Area Studies but analysed culture and religion according to a simple (and compelling) social classificatory model, breaking with the historicist and textualistic approaches of European Orientalism. Beatty’s Varieties of Javanese religion (1999) reflects

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the then-recent tendency in anthropology to situate ethnography historically again; it is also exemplary in the way it considers theory-formation on the ground, while Ricci’s Islam Translated (2011) transcends the established Area Studies paradigm by considering cultural flows traversing the Indian Ocean. While each of these studies is unique, they also partook of a then-current scholarly ambiance, especially thematically, and it is here that my focus lies. These vignettes illustrate broader traditions and trends in Southeast Asian Studies. I attend particularly to the three features of the emergent Area Studies: theoretical catholicity (no pun intended) and relativism, transdisciplinarity, social contextualism and historicism. These vignettes also aim to identify further issues surrounding religion and Southeast Asian Studies: the very category of ‘religion’, the religiosity of Southeast Asianists and the religiosity of theory.

Drewes, Drie Javaansche goeroe’s (‘Three Javanese Gurus’) (1925) In his doctoral dissertation, whose title I would render in English as Three Javanese Gurus: Their Lives, Teachings, and Messianic Preachings (1925), G.  W.  J. Drewes examined the personal manuscript collections of three Muslim teachers who were largely based in Western Java in the second half of the nineteenth century. Drewes was interested in the variety of doctrines they taught, including such materials as extra-Islamic magical formulas. His book was a typical high colonial-era scholarly monograph on indigenous Indies (Indonesian) cultures: researched in the Netherlands, written in Dutch, based on texts and indeed manuscripts, focusing on past circumstances.3 Drewes’s work was atypical, however, in that he thematized individual human beings and their works and ideas rather than one or a few texts. In a way, his study was quite ethnographic. He tried to understand these gurus in their historical and geographical contexts while largely steering clear of teleological historiography (except in a lengthy historical excursus about eschatology in Java and Bali that appears rather out of place). Drewes did not automatically belittle folk- or para-religious elements. Nonetheless, he approached religiosity as consisting in doctrines. Practice was of subordinate interest. His perspective

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arose from the contemporaneous textualist bias in the humanities. Indeed he was a textualist pur sang. In fact, later, when fieldwork had become a real possibility and Drewes spent a total of fifteen years in Indonesia (before and after the Second World War), he chose to focus on even more ancient texts. Having finally repatriated to become a professor at Leiden, he became the most important editor and translator of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Islamic treatises in Javanese (Drewes 1954, 1969, 1978). In what sense could Drewes’ book be characterized as Southeast Asian Studies and as Area Studies, both necessarily avant la lettre? It was a contribution to the study of Islam in the Dutch East Indies. Focusing on Western Java, it referred to seventeenth-century Malay Islamic writings from Sumatra and Aceh, for instance, and to eschatological texts from Bali, but not to, say, the Malay peninsula or Mindanao. In this sense, it was not Southeast Asian Studies, but then, the concept was yet to be born (Emmerson 1984; Bowen 2004; Kratoska, Raben and Nordholt 2005). As to Area Studies, it is particularly remarkable that Drewes did not dwell on the ethnicity and everyday languages of his subjects. He was interested in their thoughts, which he took either as language independent but local, or as Arabic and Islamic. These gurus moved about in Java – and in two cases beyond Java, as they died in exile, having been banished from the island by the Dutch colonial authorities. Drewes appears not to have felt constrained by disciplinary boundaries, and took Islamic models, some of local provenance, seriously. Although his approach was rooted in European scholarly tradition (even if he said little of a theoretical nature), he attempted to let the materials he worked with speak for themselves and, importantly, thereby engage rather than objectify the figures whose doctrines he tried to understand. In this manner, we could perhaps say that Drewes’ approach was prescient in pointing towards an approach to ‘Area Studies’ which would later become more mainstream.

Geertz, the Religion of Java (1960) Because it is more widely known I can be briefer about Geertz’s work, its academic context and – something not touched on in my discussion of Drewes’s  case because it was limited – its impact. Like Drewes’s, Geertz’s

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orientation was synchronic, but it was set in the present, and its sources were of a radically different nature. His book was almost exclusively based on fieldwork – possibly in part as a reaction against Dutch colonial textualism. Geertz received some criticism for disregarding what had already been written about Javanese religion and culture in Dutch (Benda 1962: 405–6). But he certainly could write himself, and it is interesting that he would play such a major role in later developments in American cultural anthropology, particularly the ‘Writing Culture’ phenomenon (Clifford and Marcus 1986). Geertz’s conception of religion in this book was innovative. It was exceptionally inclusive. He discussed religion as practices, social structures, ethics, snippets of ideology and a tiny bit of mythology to boot. At the same time, his approach was a strongly model-constructing and categorizing one. It produced some rather crude superpositions from one cultural field onto another, especially in its mapping of certain categories of religious practice onto social ones. Religion, as he would later theorize it (Geertz 1973 [1966]), is a cultural system that functions to inspire people with moods and motivations and to make them appear realistic. Many matters outside institutionalized or world religion fit this bill. Although it did not spring from a Southeast Asian studies programme, The Religion of Java was a product of the Cold War period, when Area Studies centres were being established in the United States, and indeed it was welcomed as a contribution to this field (Benda 1962: 403). Epistemologically, it was perhaps less Area Studies flavoured than, for instance, Drewes’s book. This is caused, I think, by Geertz’s overwhelming reliance on participant observation and conversations, and his lack of analytical attention to cultural performance (in Singer’s sense; see Singer 1972). At this time in his scholarly career, Geertz had not yet made the theoretical move ‘away from culture as a set of values to culture as a set of publicly accessible forms’ (Bowen 1995: 1049), the Geertzian conception of culture that would become so incredibly influential. Because of this focus on interviews and quotidian life, Javanese theoretical models of more than everyday sophistication do not feature in his study. In Java, too, these tend to be constituted on paper and/or displayed (and contested) in self-representative performance, sometimes in limited circles. The theory is overwhelmingly Geertz’s and part of a Euro-American intellectual lineage.

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Beatty, Varieties of Javanese Religion (1999) Like all subsequent scholarship on Javanese religiosities (and Javanese culture more generally), Beatty’s Varieties of Javanese Religion (1999) is, willy-nilly, a response to Geertz. It is likewise an ethnography, based on data and knowledge collected during extended residence in a single location. But it is more selfconsciously Area Studies in several respects. Although the village that was Beatty’s research site is identified by a pseudonym (like Geertz’s town), it is more explicitly and elaborately situated than Geertz.4 Beatty’s account of local religious practices and ideologies is less modelled, less idealized, less generalized than Geertz’s. It discusses theories about matters like self, social relations and linguistic semantics, entertained by the mystically inclined in this village, with great sympathy.5 Beatty was able to access these theories despite the absence of written doctrines in his village by immersing himself in the discourse of local mystics. They spin elaborate theories in extended mutual dialogue without much in the way of texts being involved. Varieties of Javanese Religion is not Southeast Asian Studies. Its frame of reference is decidedly sociocultural anthropology. It is relatively monodisciplinary, although compared to Geertz, Beatty devoted a great deal more attention to historical backgrounds and to directions into which local religious life seemed to be moving. But while attending to older sources and the diachrony, in this book Beatty did not (nor, to be fair to him, did he aim to) contribute to diachronic knowledge, to how things were or how they change.

Ricci, Islam Translated (2011) How did Ricci approach ‘religion’ in her Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia? This is a very different work from the three other benchmarks in my bird’s-eye survey of religion in Java-focused Area Studies. Ricci studied change. She examined the process of Islamization, highlighting one text (a conversion narrative originally composed in Arabic), translated in three locations and into three languages in the sixteenth to twentieth centuries: Javanese, Malay and Tamil.

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Ricci’s book is unlike any of its predecessors in Javanese, Indonesian and Southeast Asian religious studies, but, to be sure, it is indebted to intellectual currents that have been flowing for some time. It builds on an analogy between religious conversion and translation that was explored earlier by Rafael in his study of Catholicism in the Philippines (1993). It also builds on the study of transnational networks of Islamic scholarship of which Azra (2004) is a prominent recent exponent. Finally, Ricci’s idea of the Arabic cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia elaborates Pollock’s of the Sanskrit cosmopolis in approximately the same parts of the world (2006). Ricci’s study exemplifies that groundbreaking and well-received scholarship on religiosity in Southeast Asia in the early twenty-first century can be more than just historically sensitive: it is historical tout court. While she engaged in dialogue with local scholars and theories for her research, her book is about texts and not about them in the present but in the past. The book is remarkable because not only is its scope translocal, in fact it transcends Southeast Asian Studies, as it takes in Tamil. I would say that it is representative of the emerging new Area Studies exactly in its epistemological relativism, interdisciplinarity, and sociohistorical contextualism. It has not been my intention to paint a comprehensive picture of the study of religion in Javanese contexts, let alone Indonesian and Southeast Asian ones. There was religious life in Java before Islam, for instance, and much has been written about it. Nor do I want to give the impression of some kind of single-stranded progression in the history of Southeast Asian scholarship. Many other persuasions are represented. As far as Islam is concerned there is also, among others, politicalinstitutional history as in Ricklefs’s trilogy (2006, 2007, 2012), critical historical studies of the colonial/scholarly ‘making of ...’ persuasion (especially Laffan 2011), and hard-core philology (especially in Indonesia itself, where philology is a big field). Still rare are properly Southeast Asian studies approaches, such as Tagliacozzo’s deft study of the hajj from Southeast Asia (2013).

Religiosity in/of Southeast Asian Studies What I have written so far, however, should give an impression of how the religiosity of individuals, communities and institutions in Southeast Asia

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has been studied. I gladly refer to the studies themselves – these and others – for the full richness of the answers given to the question of where to locate religiosity in the region. But there is at least one important severely neglected theme: ‘Religion’ (and its translational equivalents) as a category, a specific discursive theme, in Southeast Asia. Along with its subcategories and collateral categories like ‘Islam’ it needs to be examined in this capacity (Picard and Madinier 2011). This is part of the dynamics of religion in the region itself. It is central to the region in the sense that it is metadiscursively prominent, while religious practice may often not be. But they do influence one another. Take the category of abangan in Javanese religiosity. This was put on the scholarly agenda by Geertz, who defined abangan, which he saw as one of the ‘three main cultural types’ in Java, as ‘a balanced integration of animistic, Hinduistic, and Islamic elements, a basic Javanese syncretism which is the island’s true folk tradition, the basic substratum of its civilization’ (1960: 5). From Geertz’s scholarly work, it became a hot item in the public discursive agenda on Indonesia. This thematization in turn was a factor (one among several) that contributed to the eradication of abangan practices from large parts of Java under orthodox Islamic influence (see Hefner 2011). As this example suggests, the creation and circulation, by scholars, of concepts and nomenclature in the religious realm deserves special attention in a properly reflexive Area Studies. Southeast Asianists, too, may have certain religious preferences, predilections, and antipathies. This may show through in their work, as noted at least once in passing above. As another case in point, there is an Islamic bent in some Southeast Asian Studies. Azra’s work on transnational Islamic networks in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (2004) is interesting from an Area Studies perspective because, as an elaboration of the Islamic silsila or chain of transmission of religious knowledge and authority – that is, the intellectual genealogy of Islamic scholars – it weds Western-style historiography with Islamic models of epistemological history. The influence of Islam on the general practice of Southeast Asian Studies, however, is far more circumscribed than that of Christianity. Some of the roots of Southeast Asian Studies lie in Christian missionary activity and Bible translation (see, e.g., Arps and Van der Molen 2000), and even today some Southeast Asian Studies are conducted in such a milieu. It does not follow that all scholars working in these contexts are or were committed missionaries

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or even Christians. In the third quarter of the nineteenth century, Van der Tuuk – comparative linguist, lexicographer and ethnographer and historian of religion in the cause of philology – was an interesting if certainly exceptional counterexample. He was employed by the Netherlands Bible Society for several decades while remaining a vociferous anti-Christian and atheist (see Van der Tuuk 1982; Groeneboer 2002). This does not detract from the fact that his theories were arguably part of a Christian tradition of scholarship. Indeed, the question of the religiosity of the general theories that stood in the background of these people’s work (which, to be sure, was largely descriptive) is a pressing one. An obvious candidate for examination is the idea of unilinear historical development that, as is well known, parallels certain basic Abrahamic religious tenets about temporality. Much remains to be investigated.

New prospects and desiderata When Area Studies perspectives on religiosity are employed, new prospects and desiderata come to the fore. One relates to the ontology of the very themes and problematics of Area Studies. When area is taken as seriously as is (to be) done in Area Studies, mobility is (to be) taken equally seriously. In discussing the world-making that religion keeps going, it has to be realized that much world-making takes place, so to speak, in transit. Tagliacozzo’s The Longest Journey (2013) singles out a signal case: the annual pilgrimage of Muslims  – in this study from across Southeast Asia – to Mecca and Medina. Besides pilgrimage, also migrancy, diaspora and transnationalism are both significant phenomena in their own right and help to shed light upon the religious worldmaking that occurs in stasis. Ricci’s study, too, is a profitable step towards a motion-centred perspective on religious world-making, in this case regarding the motion of the premier kind of world-making artefacts, that is, texts. This line of thought asks to be extended. Critical attention to the ‘area’ in Area Studies draws attention to change, difference, movement, evanescence and variation (across time, space and the social), alongside the established and stable systems and structures, and fixed and bounded geopolitical areas that have long provided the standard frame of reference. Critical attention to ‘area’ calls

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for multisite ethnography and historiography, which, in its turn, necessitates attention to different conceptualizations of kindred phenomena, and indeed to the nature of differences between conceptualizations – particularly of religion. For South East Asian Studies, the comparative approach will remain key, not focusing anymore on typology or influence, but rather on meetings between religious traditions in concrete historical circumstances. Southeast Asia, as a meeting-place of religions before, during, and after colonialism, is an eminently fertile terrain for exploring these new prospects for Area Studies and Asian Studies more generally.

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Religion in the Sociology and Anthropology of India Rowena Robinson

Introduction The question posed in this volume with regard to the role played by religion in the constitution and practice of Area Studies and allied fields is enormously relevant in the context of understanding the historical development of the disciplines of sociology and social anthropology in India. In India, the study of religion was the precursor to sociology and anthropology and these disciplines were in turn largely the study of religion and, by extension, of caste. To a considerable extent, the present Studies of religion within these disciplines speak of a vigorous and thoroughgoing attempt to disengage from received understandings and disentangle threads of interpretation that have their origin in Indological characterizations of Indic religions. In this chapter, I will argue that anthropology and sociology in India have been infused by regionalism. India has been treated as a cultural and civilizational region defined by Hinduism; other religions are seen unambiguously as coming from outside. Religions that emerged within India have been typically fused with Hinduism. The roots of anthropology and sociology lay in Indological and Orientalist knowledge of the early decades of the twentieth century. It must be said that the concept of Area Studies can hardly resonate for a scholar located in India or South Asia. On the other hand, one might argue that Orientalism while promoting Area Studies actually prevented regional studies from developing thoroughly and restricted regionalism instead to ‘India-centrism’ (versus the West). Thus, if the Area Studies model is to be replaced by one less tainted because of its origins and

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more attuned to contemporary academic concerns, it might be something along the lines of comparative South Asian Studies – the ‘region’ is not set aside but is rather brought more fully into focus and made to do more work. The Aryan theory was the dominant paradigm of Orientalism (Trautmann 1997). This theory has had widespread ramifications for social sciences and particularly for studies of religion and caste. Many taken-for-granted ideas in Indian sociology or anthropology can be traced to this paradigmatic myth. Among these are the definition of India as ‘Hindu’ and the understanding that caste is India’s most important social and cultural marker. Concomitantly, one can trace the marginalization of the study of other ‘communities’, whether Christian or Islamic, to the Aryan myth. While, as I try to show below, academic sociology and anthropology are making progress towards recovering the study of religion from the effects of the Aryan myth, the latter continues to reverberate in the contemporary politics of identity and religion (the Dravidian anti-Brahman movement, Sri Lankan ethnic politics or Hindu nationalism in India) in the region.

Indology, anthropology and sociology The racial understanding of Indian civilization developed through the Aryan theory was constructed jointly by Indologists and colonial administrators, including William Jones, H. H. Wilson, Henry Colebrooke, Charles Grant, James Mill and Max Müller. Ancient Indian textual evidence, in particular the Rig Veda, was referred to constantly. According to the theory, Indian history originated in Aryans conquest of the dasas. The Aryans had superior language (Sanskrit) and culture. Dravidians were similarly defined by language and race. They were an indigenous race. Dravidian subjugation by the Aryans created India’s most distinctive institution: caste. Caste sets India apart from the West. Later, the well-known French anthropologist Louis Dumont made the same distinction between the Indian homo hierarchicus and the Western homo equalis. Another set of ideas bringing together race, language and nation was projected onto this theory. This linkage was critical in the context of the emergence of nation-states in the nineteenth century. Language and race

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were crucial elements of national identity. The association was important for differentiating indigenes from foreigners, the rightful inheritors of the land from the mere parvenu. This theory has had several implications for India’s political history. There was substantial convergence across Indological and administrative discourses. Efforts in cartography, linguistics, zoology, botany, epidemiology and anthropology were led by the need to map the colonized territory for proper governance and to establish authority over the ‘Orient’. Thus, though linguistics gave proof of the ‘kinship’ of Europeans and Indians through the Aryan theory, in colonial administrative discourses at least, this was the kinship of the unequal. The empire could legitimize itself only within a hierarchical model. William Jones assisted in this process by claiming that though India had a linguistic brotherhood with the West and Hindu mythology was a relic of Europe’s ancestral past, Hinduism had lost its past glory and been degraded from pure monotheism to polytheism (see Pennington 2005: 122; Annavaram 2011)). Significantly, even the discovery of the pre-Vedic Indus Valley Civilization did not entirely displace the Aryan theory, which played a role in influencing the development of sociology and anthropology in India. The people of the Indus Valley were sometimes treated as non-Aryans who (like the Dravidians) were conquered by the Aryans. Otherwise, attempts were made, particularly by Hindu nationalists, to redefine the Indus Valley Civilization as an Aryan civilization (Thapar 1997). This idea merges neatly with the early Hindutva argument that the Vedas were the source of all knowledge and that modern India should emulate Vedic society. In Hindutva constructions, the requirement that the Hindu Arya be indigenous leads to a denial of the Aryan invasion. Hindutva ideology does not require the racial integrity of the Hindu Arya but needs to stress ethnic identity, as only the Hindu Arya and his descendants are indigenous to India. Christians and Muslims are alien, since India is neither their punyabhumi (sacred territory) nor their pitrbhumi (land of their ancestors). These ideas repeat themselves in many different places. The Constitution itself defines all Indians as Hindu unless they are Muslim, Christian, Parsi or Jew by religion. In other words, all Indians are ‘Hindu’ other than those belonging to religions originating outside India. Once this synthesis between the ancient and the modern is woven around the idea of ‘the caste Hindu’,

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Hinduism emerges full-blown and complete, transcending time, capturing space, suppressing difference and variation. Modern anthropological and sociological discourses in India had another trajectory, but along the way, associations with colonial administrative and Indological frameworks were established both empirically and theoretically. Indology was the father of colonial scholarly discourses. The colonial administration collected vast amounts of data on India giving empirical substance to anthropology. For anthropology, fieldwork was the basis of the discipline. Indological knowledge had built itself on faithfulness to the ‘text’; in anthropology, the text was eschewed in favour of the ‘context’, the ‘field’; the field could also include data collected by colonial administrators. Studies with both textual and contextual emphases emerged in Indian sociology and anthropology. One of the first prominent Indian sociologists strongly influenced by Indology was G. S. Ghurye who studied under the diffusionist W. H. R. Rivers and his works illustrate an interesting merging of the ideas of diffusionism with Orientalism. In his oeuvre, Indian civilization is ancient and has a civilizational unity, a core. Religion and Brahmanic values constitute that core to which all groups assimilate themselves through integration in the caste system. Aryans brought Vedic religion to India and spread it in the form of cultural traits. In Gods and Men, Ghurye looked at the notion of the Godhead in Hinduism and was eager to show that ancient Hinduism had certain monotheistic elements and ideas of a ‘Supreme God’ (1962: 11–12, 140). According to Annavaram (2011), this fitted in seamlessly with William Jones’ Orientalist ideas. Other authors have also viewed Ghurye’s work as sharing in the worldview of Orientalist scholarship (Venugopal 1986; Upadhyay 2007). For Ghurye, religion and culture were two sides of a coin. In The Aborigines so called and their future, he argued that tribes were assimilated to greater or lesser degree into Hindu culture, and their future lay in assimilation into Hindu society as castes (Singh 1996: 39–43). Thus, he accepted Orientalist constructions of Hindu religion and Indian civilization and fused these with diffusionism when speaking of the dissemination of Brahmanic values in Indo-Aryan times or the flow of Hindu culture to the tribes (Annavaram 2011). The early structural-functional approach and the folk-civilization continuum model used to study religion enabled the merging of anthropological and Indological traditions. They linked the empirical field-based data with the

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textual tradition. One had the ‘great’ and the ‘little’ traditions, the ‘civilizational’ and the ‘folk’, the ‘universal’ and the ‘parochial’. The framework was provided by the search for the unity of the ‘East’, the principle by which the entire civilization was structured and functioned. Indology offered that principle by pairing caste and Hinduism. Caste became the major link bonding the little field studies with the textual models; village studies linked the village to the ‘great’ Sanskritic tradition. India was Hindu; Hinduism was caste (Dumont 1980). One cannot understand Christianity or Islam in this model. There is no great ‘Indian’ tradition to which these could be linked. Tribal studies also suffered because of the focus on caste Hinduism. Later, Dumont’s work located the study of India at the confluence of Indology and sociology and turned away from the village to the text as the source of indigenous categories of meaning. Dumont threw open the text/context debate, but privileged the text, treating it as synonymous with India. This tradition, grounded in the belief that the spirit of India is essentially Hindu, led to a reification of Hinduism and marginalization of non-Hindu communities. The India versus the West debate launched by Dumont opposed the two statically without possibility of rich comparative or historically grounded studies. Finally, the way in which non-Hindu communities were brought to the analytical table was by viewing them through the lens of caste, that essence of Indian social structure. Studies on Muslims emphasized caste and ignored what was specifically Islamic about them, because this was non-Indian and could be studied elsewhere. It was not unique to the East and could not constitute the ‘essence’ of India. Thus, in anthropology and sociology, other communities, their religious practices and their social organization were hardly studied. Tools for the analysis of these communities were not sufficiently developed to take account of the complexity of issues they raise. In studying Christianity or Islam, the text was seen as something static like Hindu texts, but also universal. All practices of Christians and Muslims that did not fit the universal textual tradition were viewed as deviant. This framework dominated studies in the postcolonial period. Interest in Muslims, Christians and Sikhs developed in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly in relation to their importance vis-à-vis Hindu society, usually as a result of conflict. Hence, studies of Muslims mostly figured in the area of politics, Partition and communalism (in opposition to Hinduism) (Pandey 1993; Chandra 1984; Hasan 1997). Studies on Sikhism emerged in the

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context of the politics of identity in Punjab. Christianity was viewed through the lens of conversion (from Hinduism). These trends led to problems in understanding the interaction between the different religious streams and in developing concepts to discuss such interaction. The terms ‘syncretism’ and ‘composite culture’ had their limitations. They viewed the interaction between different religious streams as being essentially harmonic and located religion within a notion of culture untouched by questions of control or conflict or of relationships of power and hierarchy (Oberoi 1994). One should perhaps make a reference here to the tropes of nearness and distance. The elusive pursuits of anthropology and its constant search for the exotic and the remote hardly help rectify this imbalance. In fact, these shape the way anthropology looked at religion in South Asia. ‘Other’s religion was meat for anthropology which took Christianity for granted. Later the study of Christianity entered, but again its more exotic non-Western forms. This is a continuing problematic for anthropology. In a globalizing world, anthropology today has attempted to gear up to the study of ‘cosmopolitanism’. At the same time, when it discusses non-Western societies, it takes recourse, once again, to the concept of ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’.

Dumont’s structuralism and beyond Dumont’s ideas were available early on through the pages of the Contributions to Indian Sociology, though his magnum opus Homo Hierarchicus came out somewhat later. The centrality he gave to indigenous categories of meaning, even if based on textual traditions, brought into the study of Indian society the notion of subjective meanings and of cosmologies. Considerable Indian research was influenced by Dumont’s ideas. Veena Das’ Structure and Cognition (1977), R. K. Jain’s Text and Context (1976), R. S. Khare’s Hindu Hearth and Home (1976), T. N. Madan’s Non-Renunciation (1996) and other works bring out the development of this kind of interpretation of Hindu culture and religion. Hindu cosmic thought and structure came to lie at the centre of studies in the sociology and anthropology of religion. This was particularly so in foreign scholarship, but also among Indians. Madan (1992 and 2004) brought together some of the voices in the sociology of religion in India,

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as did Robinson (2004). Dumont’s writings undoubtedly had enormous impact on Indian scholarship on caste and religion, though authors were not slow to critique several aspects of his work (Das and Uberoi 1971; Madan 1971; Beteille 1979). Clearly, his perspective gave rise to a good deal of debate. The Dumontian perspective that dominated the study of Hinduism by Indian scholars as well as others for so long again gave centrality to a reified, upper-caste version of Hinduism. In effect, not only did Indians largely study Hinduism in India, but they also rarely studied religious or cultural movements outside of India. Whatever perspective they may emerge from, we have a range of studies on various aspects of Hinduism including the idea of purity and impurity (Das 1977; Srinivas 1952, 1969), temple organization, festivals, sacrifice and pilgrimages (Appadurai 1981; Appadurai and Breckenridge 1976; Bharati 1963; Selvam 1996, 1997; Shankari 1982, 1984; Kapur 1985; Das 1983), popular religion at the village level (Ghurye 1960; Chauhan 1967) and religious movements, gurus, cults and goddess traditions (Dandekar 1988; Gupta 1973; Banerjee-Dube 2001; Kakar 1983; Ram 1991; Mines and Gourishankar 1990). Interestingly, Indologist P. V. Kane’s monumental work in five volumes, History of Dharmaśāstra, continues to form the background for any discussion of classical Hindu law (1968–77). Contributions to Indian Sociology has been a major site for debates and new perspectives on religion. It was in its pages that Dumont and Pocock first set out their programmatic vision for the understanding of Indian civilization in terms of the higher Sanskritic values and of caste, which gave rise to enormous discussion among scholars in India and abroad (1957). Over the years, this journal of international repute has seen the publication of numerous articles on various aspects of religion. The Indian Economic and Social History Review and the Economic and Political Weekly have also offered their pages for discussion and publication of original research on themes related to religion in a contextual framework and in a historical perspective.

Studies of other religious communities As mentioned earlier, as a result of established paradigms, often non-Hindu communities tended to be viewed in the first instance through the categories

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employed for the study of Hinduism. Ahmad (1973) pioneered studies into the world of Muslim communities, and enunciated his ideas in Contributions to Indian Sociology (1972) where he stated that greater attention must be paid to non-Hindu communities to build a comprehensive sociology of India. At the same time, one of the first questions that he raised was with regard to the presence of caste among the Muslims. Despite this initiative, the paradigms of the debate did not at first alter radically. Certain forms of ritual such as life-crisis rituals came in for a good deal of attention (Ahmad 1978), perhaps because they could be more easily captured by the conceptual category of ‘syncretism’. This perspective allowed for the idea that Islam (or Christianity) in India was somehow not quite authentic. It appeared that the most important feature of these religions was their syncretic character, marked in the first instance by the ‘adoption’ of caste. While in the early stages, it was certainly the often fractious relationship with Hinduism that spurred interest in Muslim, Christian or Sikh communities, this interest rose sharply in recent times possibly in relation to the heightening politics of identity in the region as a whole. Whether spurred directly by contemporary political strife or engendered by a variety of different forces, religious conversion, the politics of religious identity and conflict have taken centre stage in studies in several South Asian countries (see Das 1990). More and more, the relationship between the ‘majority’ and ‘minority’ religions and the state is coming into focus from different angles. In India, the question of secularism has come in for a good deal of attention. Several scholars, mainly sociologists and political theorists, have participated in the debates. These include Bhargava (1998a, b), Bharucha (1998), K. Basu and Subrahmanyam (1996), Vanaik (1997), Madan (1997, 1998), Sheth and Mahajan (1999) and Nandy (1985, 1990). Madan and Nandy put forward a fervent critique of secularism on the grounds that it does not take religions seriously and is of limited value in South Asia, where religion shapes identities to a great extent. Secularism tries to push religion to the private sphere, but in South Asian societies, this enforced retreat has led to the resurgence of religion in a more aggressive form. On the other side of the debate, Bhargava, Bharucha and Vanaik, among others, justify the idea of the secular. They have largely agreed that secularism must remain the foundational principle of the Indian polity.

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Debates on secularism and discussions about fundamentalism have proceeded simultaneously. A good deal of attention has focused on majority fundamentalism. Religious or communal violence and its implications for state and politics, for individual survivors and for communities and their relations with each other has for obvious reasons been of central concern to many scholars of South Asia (Engineer 1984; Varshney 2002; Kanapathipillai 1990; Robinson 2005; Kakar 1995). An important aspect of recent studies, which arose in part out of the critique of Dumont but is also crucially linked with trying to understand the reworking of Hinduism under the influence of fundamentalist and nationalist ideas, has been an interest in looking at the modern ‘representation’ or construction of Hinduism, including of Hindu deities and the idea of caste (Dalmia 1995, 1997; Basu et al. 1993; Kapur 1993). As scholarship slowly sheds the ideological baggage of the past, studies of Muslims and Christians in particular have begun to increase considerably. The Jews have received some attention. These studies have challenged several received notions in the study of religion in South Asia such as ‘syncretism’ and ‘composite culture’. Ram (1991) has argued that while most Christian communities live in worlds permeated with ‘Hindu’ ideas, it is facile to view the retention of Hindu elements among Christian groups as a sign of the lack of authenticity of their faith or to assume that converts always have a harmonious (‘syncretic’) relationship with all strands of Hinduism. Questions of caste and identity remain crucial (Kaur 1986; Jayaram 1992; Bhatty 1996; Tharamangalam 1996), while other concerns have also come to the foreground. These include the relationship between text and practice, the cult of saints and the play of gender, belief and ritual (Visvanathan 1993; Ghadially 2003, 2005; Mehta 1997; Fazalbhoy 2000; Pinto 1995; Saiyed 1995) and the rise and implications of minority fundamentalism (Sikand 2002). The questions of stereotyping and demonization of minorities are also significant. In particular, discussions have focused on the processes through which the ‘threat’ of the Muslim, in particular, are raised in times of communal conflict. This issue has been further connected to the idea of security as a productive discourse, one that not only secures but also fabricates the dangers to security (Anand 2012). Wæver’s idea of ‘securitization’ (1995), wherein the rules of the democratic political system are suspended when the position of minorities is labelled an issue of national security has emerged as sociologically relevant.

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Furthermore, the idea of conversion and the modes of transaction, translation and interaction between communities (Sikand 2003) have seen some novel interventions, including the exploration of conversion as a subversion of state power and its linkages with political imaginings. Uberoi uses the semiological method to weave a narrative linking Sikh and Gandhian philosophy through an understanding of the ways in which these reconcile the oppositions of state and power and the individual and the collective (1996). Robinson and Clarke (2003) argue that conversion has been treated as a taken-for-granted term, a term transparent, when its whys and hows differ fundamentally by social and political context. They challenge the ‘coercive’ model and the models of ‘assimilation’ and ‘sanskritization’ that have been used extensively to understand conversion on the subcontinent. A range of new themes have now entered the field: the dynamics of interaction between converters and social groups in different regions, the forms this interplay of cultures and discourses takes, the modes through which converts often challenge and contest elite or priestly authority and the negotiation (and sometimes clash) of new faiths and creeds with prevailing patterns of kinship, marriage and inheritance as well as with food conventions and sartorial codes (Robinson 2003). Conversion to Christianity has particularly benefited from this opening up. S. Dube (1992, 1995, 1999) ruptures the linear narrative of conversion that assumes a known or ‘familiar’ ending and looks critically at the complex relationship between evangelical discourses and the culture of colonialism and the ways in which converts might subvert missionary agendas. Mayaram’s work on Muslims (1997), especially the Meos, has problematized several taken-for-granted understandings about Muslim identity and relationship to the state. Working from a subaltern perspective, she engages with the oral traditions of the Meos of northwest India as these evoke a particular selfconstruction of identity, which has, historically, been threatened by a series of oppressive regimes. Categories of cultural memory, identity and tradition arise in a historical context that is by no means secured against conflict and control. The transgressive culture of the Meos survives, but increasingly precariously, on liminal terrain neither absolutely Hindu nor wholly Islamic. On the other hand, partly due to the vestiges of the Orientalist imagination, cross-cultural comparative studies have not thrived. There have been very few

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studies by scholars of Indian origin of modern religion or religious movements outside India (see Giri 1994; Fazal 1999; Sinha 2003; S. Srinivas 2008). Diaspora studies have provided the terrain for explorations in contemporary religion and culture across the globe by scholars of Indian origin (for instance, Jain 1993; Shukla 2003). Appadurai (1997) with his work on cultural globalization, and Robinson (2001) through the analysis of Internet sites on Hinduism provide other perspectives on the play of religious identities on a global stage (Mayaram 2004). Nandy’s abiding interest in contemporary ethnic and religious conflict brings him to collaborate on work on several countries in South and Southeast Asia (Pfaff-Czarnecka et al. 1999). It is true for much work, but certainly not in every case, that specific religions have been studied by those belonging to the particular faith.

Past, present and future Thus, the present sociological and anthropological studies of religion in India show considerable diversity and an effort to move away from erstwhile rigidities and fine-grained analyses of a variety of sects, traditions and movements, as well as of religious conflicts and violence. At the same time, certain traces of the past appear hard to shake off even in focal texts in the literature. For instance, Veena Das and T. N. Madan were very influenced by the structuralism of Dumont. Das’ otherwise fascinating research in Structure and cognition or Language of sacrifice betrays a preoccupation with Dumontian structural dichotomies. In particular, as she opposes Christian and Hindu or Semitic and Vedic forms of ritual and sacrifice, we see the analysis taking the form: India versus the West. Madan’s discussions on secularism are also worth examining a little more closely. Though he talks of the presence of different religions on the subcontinent, he speaks of all of them as fitting the Dumontian frame. By this, he means that they make a distinction between the religious and the secular and place the first above the second. These characteristics, he says, are typical of religion in South Asia. He does not tell us why this is so, but since he quotes Dumont extensively, it might not be far-fetched for us to attribute the assertion to the fact that these religions participate in the Indic/Hindu civilization.

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These religions (Hinduism and Islam on the subcontinent) participate in the common Indic culture and are sharply contrasted with Christianity of which secularism is the begotten son. However, what of South Asian Christianity? Clearly, Madan sees it as being from ‘outside’ and is unable to deal with it. He only speaks of Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism and Islam (in the so-called South Asian variant). Interestingly, and tellingly, he does not say that Islam outside of South Asia adheres to this framework. Apart from the blemish of its original aims, the Area Studies model also does not really accord the ‘region’ itself adequate seriousness. The Area Studies story so far has ended up as the ‘Indic’ civilization story. South Asia is actually a ghost region since as I have pointed out no cross-cultural comparative studies take place. What we have are actually ‘India’ studies. Indians don’t study other South Asian countries and know next to nothing about them, their religious communities or societies. So what we see is that the reification of culture takes place in regional studies – one culture defines one region (one ‘country’) and thereby a process of essentialization occurs. Hinduism is seen as defining India and Nepal, as Islam is perceived as defining Pakistan, and Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are defined by Sinhala Buddhism. Paradoxically, the effort to focus on religion through the lens of caste may have actually obscured religion. Even more ironically, perhaps, it obscured caste in other South Asian countries. The framing of caste in ‘culturalist’ and ‘Hindu’ terms heuristically disallowed its transference across borders. Since the political and economic perspectives of caste were suppressed, it could not be readily employed to understand other ‘non-Hindu’ South Asian contexts such as Sri Lanka or Bangladesh, which then had to be discussed only through other categories such as sect, religion or ethnicity. The use of a unipolar approach rather than a multipolar one and a ‘culturalist’ trajectory that gazes towards the past rather than a ‘developmental’ trajectory that looks towards the future together ensure that discussions on fundamentalism, majoritarianism or the problems of secularism cannot be seen in a comparative perspective across the different South Asian countries. As mentioned earlier, some studies are now breaking down these cognitive barriers. One might also mention here Kothari’s work on the Banni grasslands bordering India and Pakistan. Tracing the stories, songs and memories of the largely Muslim pastoralists of Banni, Kothari questions the ideas of territorial

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boundaries, of nation and of region (Khotari 2013). The cultural imaginary of belongingness of the Muslims of this border zone who speak a language native to the Pakistani province of Sindh has to negotiate many political realities including partition, the construction of Pakistan as an ‘enemy’ nation and the homogenizing tendencies of the government of Gujarat.

Conclusion Area Studies have had a long and controversial history. While the development of Area Studies in Europe and the United States has had different trajectories, everywhere today the domain is subject to critical reassessment. The knowledge produced by Area Studies is said to be tainted due to the conditions of its production; it has been criticized because the paradigms of knowledge production remain North American or European and the ‘area’ under study contributes only micro-level information, not theoretical interpretations. It has been argued that the use of geopolitical categories to carve up the world reinforces the idea that such divides have some enduring reality and, further, underplays the past and present linkages between people across these constructed partitions (Palat 1996). On the other hand, those who wish to retain Area Studies assert that the term is a ‘modest’ one and is no longer bogged down by its original aims. Thus, it may be usefully employed to engage with different cultures when defined objectively as a ‘cross-disciplinary unit of collective experience within which one can discern complex interactions among economic, social, political, religious, and other spheres of life’ (Schwartz 1980: 15). The employment of such a term gives confidence to researchers about the extent and depth of the expertise they may lay claim to (Mintz 1996). As a non-Western scholar practising in an Indian rather than a European or North American academic environment, I have argued that Area Studies has actually tended to fragment into country-specific studies (see also Palat 1996). Each country has been treated as both culturally distinct and culturally (and religiously) homogenous, while in parallel, and in sharp contrast, the establishment of the unity of the West has been achieved (Harootunian 1999). This has also undermined cross-cultural studies. As I have argued

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in the chapter with regard to the lack of comparisons within and across regions, Palat (1996) too laments that despite the richness of contemporary scholarship in these areas, there has been no interchange of ideas between the Indian subaltern scholars and the scholars of resistance in Southeast Asia. Furthermore, as this chapter has contended, since the focus has been largely on the minutiae of data, Area Studies have, in the past, exoticized their subject matter and reduced the cultures of the people being studied to a few axioms. For example, caste (or Hinduism) has represented India. Palat (1996: 287) mentions additionally how tribalism has been said to represent the ‘essence’ of Africa and Confucianism of that of China. As the chapter has asserted, the appeal to culturalist explanations weakens Area Studies and further prevents comparative analysis. Even if one were to discard the labels Area Studies and Asian Studies, the ‘region’ itself, as a focus of analysis, will not be as easily done away with, though as Kothari (2013) argues even this may be restrictive and one could experiment with concepts such as the ‘zone’. The real problem is not in the idea of a ‘region’ or an ‘area’ but in how each is understood and in the notions of culture and civilization that are employed in such studies. A comparative analysis of peoples within and across regions that takes seriously not just language or culture but also social, material and political processes could perhaps reinvent the seriously battered image though perhaps not the category per se of Area Studies. As emerging studies in South Asia show, such research concomitantly deeply problematizes and queries received categories of nation, state, civilization or region.

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India and the Making of Hinduism: The contribution of the Purāṇas Peter C. Bisschop

Introduction There has been a flood of studies over recent years on what is variedly referred to as the ‘discovery’, ‘construction’ or ‘invention’ of Hinduism, ranging from the postcolonial critique that Hinduism was essentially a colonial construct of British Orientalists (Balagangadhara 1994; King 1999b) to more intricate historical studies of Hinduism’s appearance on the map of world religions (Lorenzen 1999; Sweetman 2001, 2003). David Lorenzen has noted a ‘tendency of many historians of India – especially those associated with the subaltern school – to adopt a postcolonialist perspective that privileges the British colonial period as the period in which almost all the major institutions of Indian society were invented or constructed’ (Lorenzen 1999: 654). Indeed, such a perspective would be the worst possible outcome of the Saidian critique. In the words of Wilhelm Halfbass, ‘We may want to be not only beyond Orientalism, but also beyond the critique of Orientalism’ (Halbfass 1997: 23). A number of Indologists have recently turned their eyes on the period immediately preceding the arrival of the British to identify indigenous developments within India itself (e.g. Nicholson 2010). These studies have gone a long way to show that already prior to the arrival of the British a notion of a ‘unified Hinduism’ had taken shape, even though the term itself may not yet have been in use, and that it is therefore not the British Orientalists who are to be credited with the ‘creation of Hinduism’. An important question that has not been sufficiently answered in this connection concerns the sources that were used by the early European authors

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in their writings on Indian religion. Although one encounters in the works of early European authors frequent references to the Vedas as the primary sources of Indian religion, it is my contention that it is in fact a different set of writings, the so-called Purāṇas, that have been the main sources of information for the views presented by these early authors. Indeed, the Vedas themselves for a very long time remained no more than an authoritative name to the Europeans, with the exception of the notorious case of the Ezour-Vedam, a work that has been proven to be no more than a European fabrication (Rocher 1984; App 2010: 393–403). The Purāṇas (literally ‘Tales of Old’) constitute a massive corpus of literature that falls squarely within the field of brahmanical religious literature. Although there are also Jain Purāṇas (Cort 1993), the great majority of the Purāṇas show a distinct brahmanical orientation, and they are as such central to the makeup of brahmanical Hinduism. Estimates of the number and volume of existing Purāṇas are hard to make, and in the words of V. Raghavan, ‘to take stock of them is an impossible task’ (Rocher 1986: 2). The Purāṇas are first of all written in the classical language of Sanskrit, but at least from medieval times also in various vernacular languages of India (Rocher 1986; Bailey 2010). Defining Purāṇas is notoriously difficult, but in general, we can say that Purāṇas deal with space and time: cosmology, cosmography and history are crucial aspects of all Purāṇa literature. They deal in particular with mythology (Purāṇas are full of stories of gods, sages and other superhuman beings) and ritual (they promote pilgrimage, temple worship, etc.). In many cases, they are connected to specific sacred sites and temples, and it is no surprise that one encounters in the works of early European authors frequent references to legends on individual sites, in particular temple towns in South India where some of them were active. The primary objective of the Purāṇas may be defined as showing the primordial origins of a religious ideal or practice in order to promote their authority. As such, the stories told in the Purāṇas are frequently concerned with origins and manifest an obsession with the notion of the primordial and the ancient, a feature that runs through Indian history up to the present day.1 The Purāṇas reflect the ideals and practices of the brahmanical community. Given that early European authors made good use of the Purāṇas, this characteristic has naturally had a great impact on their representation of Hinduism, which is by and large brahmanical Hinduism.

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‘Construction’ of Hinduism In his Mapping Hinduism (Sweetman 2003), Will Sweetman looks into the formative period (1600–1776) of the notion of a single Indian religion called Hinduism in European sources. Contrary to the postcolonial critique, Sweetman convincingly argues that Hinduism was not a colonial construct, created ex  nihilo and projected onto the Indian people, but a notion that developed over time in direct interaction with the, primarily, Brahmin informants. Various Europeans played a role in this process; first, the Jesuits subsequently followed by Dutch and German Protestants. One of the outcomes of Sweetman’s work has been to show that right from the start European authors were well aware of the complexity and diversity of the different traditions that made up the intricate Indian religious culture eventually called Hinduism. The main sources discussed by Sweetman are the following: − Henry Lord, ‘Discovery of the Banians’ (1630). − Abraham Roger(ius), Open Door to hitherto concealed Heathenism/ Open-Deure tot het Verborgen Heydendom (1651). − Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg, Malabarisches Heidenthum/Malabarian Heathenism (1711, but only published in 1926). − Jesuit Letters, Lettres édifiantes et curieuses (seventeenth to eighteenth century). While the category of heathenism features prominently in the titles of the works of both Rogerius and Ziegenbalg, these authors in fact display an evolving awareness that heathenism is not a single category, but that it falls into various strands and traditions. This insight eventually led to the abolishment of the term and the identification of Hinduism as a distinct religion, although Rogerius and Ziegenbalg do not yet use the term themselves. Important for the discussion about the origins of the notion of Hinduism as a single religion is that it shows that the British Orientalists were clearly building on earlier notions that had been developed not so much under a colonial regime but by missionaries and ministers who tried to make sense of the, in their eyes, heathen religion they encountered in India. They were all men of faith, with a strong belief in their own intellectual competence. The predominantly religious motivation and orientation of these authors is undeniable and has

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to be taken into account in any history of Orientalism. As forcefully argued by Urs App, ‘The role of colonialism (and generally of economic and political interests) dwindles to insignificance compared to the role of religion’ (2010: x). In this respect, we may speak of a U-turn in the thinking about the origins of Orientalism. Although Sweetman does not discuss the use of the Purāṇas by these early authors, it soon becomes clear that many of the notions of the religion of the Indians discussed by these early European authors stem from the Purāṇas, either explicitly or implicitly. Because of the prolificacy of the Purāṇas among the brahmanical population, it is not surprising that the early European authors should draw their first information on Indian religion from these texts, but the fact that they do not easily fit into a recognizable format also means that they are often not recognized as such. How has Purāṇa research contributed to the ‘making’ of Hinduism? In this chapter, I will present a necessarily brief and selective survey of some key authors who refer to or have drawn upon the Purāṇas, from the time of the Portuguese Jesuits up to the British Orientalists (see also Rocher 1986: 1–48). For a proper historical assessment, it will be essential to identify, as far as possible, the actual underlying sources, used either directly by these authors themselves or, as in most cases more likely, by their Brahmin informants. This remains a task for future research.

A brief survey of references to the Purāṇas in the works of early European authors Before we turn to the earliest European references to the Purāṇas, mention should be made of one influential work from a much earlier period, written by a scholar who was not a native of India either. I am referring to the famous Tahqiq mā-lil-Hind of Al-Bīrūnī (translated as India by Sachau 1887), an eleventh-century Persian author at the court of Mahmud of Ghazni. Al-Bīrūnī’s Tahqiq mā-lil-Hind is the first systematic survey of Indian customs and religion by a non-native and remains a mine of information on many aspects of early Indian culture. Halbfass (1997) has rightly argued that it should have been included in Said’s history of Orientalism as the first ‘Orientalist construction

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of India’. Although this of course would have had the consequence (perhaps unwelcome for Said) that Orientalism would no longer be an exclusively European affair. Indeed Al-Bīrūnī did everything for which Said castigated the Orientalists: ‘We may mention his “essentialization” of Indian society in terms of castes, his ideas about Indian irrationality and traditionalism, his appeals to rationality and disinterested theory, and in general his notion of a fundamental and pervasive Indian otherness’ (Halbfass 1997: 14). A telling example of Al-Bīrūnī’s viewpoint is his statement at the start of the work that, ‘they [the Hindus] totally differ from us [the Muslims] in religion, as we believe in nothing in which they believe, and vice versa’ (Sachau 1887: 19). In his work, Al-Bīrūnī provides a standard list of the eighteen Purāṇas and frequently refers to myths and concepts taken from individual Purāṇas that are quoted by name. The first European author who deserves to be mentioned in this short survey is the Jesuit father Giacomo Fenicio (ca. 1558–1632), who, already in 1609, composed a work on South Indian religion in Portuguese for which he made extensive use of the Purāṇas. The term ‘Purāṇa’ is absent from the original Portuguese title (Livro da Seita dos Indios Orientais), but it appears in the title of its Latin translation (1789/90), which at the same time alludes to the heathen aspects of the Indian religion: Collectio omnium dogmatum & arcanorum ex Puránis seu libris Canonicis paganorum Indianorum, seu tractatus de falsa secta paganorum Indianorum Asiae maioris seu Indiae Orientalis, & praesertim de superstitionibus Gentilium Malabarium (Rocher 1986: 11). The work was not published in Fenicio’s lifetime and the original Portuguese text was only discovered and published by Jarl Charpentier in the early twentieth century (Charpentier 1933). In an earlier article, Charpentier wrote: ‘This manuscript is the one seventeenth century source at present known to me that deals exclusively with Hindu cosmography and tries to give a complete ... survey of its leading tenets’ (1924: 318). Although it is the first systematic overview of Hindu religion and mythology by a European author, written some centuries before the British Orientalists, no English translation of this very important work as yet exists and little work has been done on it following Charpentier’s publication of the text in 1933. The Livro da Seita dos Indios Orientais was written as a handbook for Jesuit priests to equip them with an adequate knowledge of Hindu mythology in order to refute

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their doctrines. A Jesuit eyewitness report gives a lively account of this early knowledge exchange: There was one fellow who pretended to know better, and contended that his faith was a good one, and that he possessed the books on the creation of the world; the Father made him fetch them, for then, by discussing and giving reasons, the truth would be found out. The ignorant wiseacre fetched the books and began to sing in a singing voice (as is their habit); the book dealt with the origin of the cosmos, how originally when nothing existed God turned himself into an egg, which burst, and one half became the earth and sea, with rivers, mountains, and living beings, while the upper half became the heavens; and how God placed the universe on the horn of an ox, and as the ox moved and the universe was on the verge of falling down, he put a huge rock in the way of it. The Father easily refuted these nonsensical stories of his, asking him whence God got hold of that rock with which he supported the universe and on what the ox as well as the rock could lean themselves? (Charpentier 1923: 743)2

A letter from Goa dated 19 November 1559, written by Ludovicus Froes, provides interesting insight into how the Jesuits at times may have acquired knowledge about Indian religion. It reports of a Brahmin convert who, one night, stole a library from the house of a Brahmin to donate it to the College of the Jesuits. The letter continues to note that the manuscripts were translated by the Brahmin convert in the college and subsequently with the help of the Franciscans. As Charpentier observes, the description given by Froes (eighteen volumes ascribed to Vyāsa) suggests that these were most probably Purāṇa manuscripts (Charpentier 1933: xliv). Charpentier has shown that Felicio’s work has been heavily plagiarized by the more famous Dutch author Baldaeus, in his Afgoderye der oost-indischen Heydenen or Idolatry of the East-Indian Heathens, published in 1672 (de Jong 1917). The role of the Jesuits in the knowledge production of Indian religion can hardly be overestimated, also in the light of the fact that later European authors frequently relied on Jesuit sources without acknowledgement (Stolte 2012: 99; Sweetman 2003: 127–53). The Jesuits were also responsible for composing the very first European grammars of Sanskrit. These grammars were as a rule not printed, possibly because of the suppression by the Vatican (Bodewitz 2002: 6). A good example is the manuscript of the Grammatica

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Grandonica of Hanxleden (ca. 1712–32), which was only recently rediscovered in Monte Compatri (Lazio, Rome), in 2010 (Van Hal and Vielle 2013). It is one of the oldest European grammars of Sanskrit. As for the engagement of the Jesuits with the category of Purāṇa literature, an interesting case is the work of father Thomas Stephens (1549–1619), who wrote a Kristapurāṇa (Christian Purāṇa) in a mix of Marathi and Konkani. The book was first published in Goa in 1616 (Discursos sobra a vida de Jesu Christo nosso salvador ao mundo, divido em dous tratados) and then republished as Kristapurāṇa in 1649 (Rocher 1986: 74). Like the Christian Bible, it is divided into an old testament, called Ādipurāṇa, and a new testament, called Devapurāṇa. Mention should also be made of a work of the French Jesuit Etienne de La Croix (1579–1633), Discursos sobre a vida do Apostolo Sam Pedro (1616). The book, written in Marathi and refuting the errors of Indian religion, is subdivided into three ‘Purāṇas’: the first on the life of St Peter, the second on Indian religion and its gods, and the third on Christianity (Rocher 1986: 75). The composition and naming of works like these, meant for conversion purposes, indicates a clear awareness among the Jesuits of the importance of the category of the Purāṇa literature in Indian religion.3 Following the Jesuits, a remarkable figure is Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg (1682–1719), a German Lutheran missionary who spent a number of years in South India, learnt Tamil there and collected a large library of Tamil manuscripts. Ziegenbalg’s two major works, Malabarischesch Heidenthum (1711) and Genealogie der Malabarischen Götter (1713), were published only after his lifetime, respectively, in 1926 and 1791 (Sweetman 2012: 104, n. 1). Recently it has been shown that his Genealogie relies heavily upon a hardly known Tamil work, the Tirikāla cakkaram, a section of the Puvaṇa cakkaram (Sweetman and Ilakkuvan 2012: 38–42; Sweetman 2004). It is important to note that it is this native Tamil work that has provided much of the backbone of Ziegenbalg’s conception and categorization of Indian religion and its pantheon of deities, showing that Ziegenbalg’s work is not an ‘Orientalist’ outsider’s attempt at categorization, but rather a reflection of native understanding of the different strands of religion. While not being identifiable with any individual Purāṇa, this Puvaṇa cakkaram is very similar in content to the cosmological treatises of the Purāṇas. Ziegenbalg’s recently published annotated catalogue of his library of Tamil manuscripts, the Bibliotheca Malabarica, consisting of 165

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entries, provides valuable information on the works that were in his possession (Sweetman and Ilakkuvan 2012). Included in this catalogue are a number of Tamil Purāṇas and works of Purāṇic nature and content. Ziegenbalg made extensive use of these Purāṇas and quotes from them in his Malabarisches Heidenthum. Some of them he clearly read himself,4 about others he may have learnt from his informants. In general Ziegenbalg stands out among other early authors in the exact manner of quotations, referring not only to the titles of works but also to individual chapter and verse numbers (Sweetman and Ilakkuvan 2012: 20). Ziegenbalg had a clear understanding of the importance of the Purāṇas to the Indian people, as is also indicated by his mention in the Malabarisches Heidenthum that, ‘the eighteen Paranen [purāṇas] and other history books are ubiquitous, and parts of them can also be found with the common people’ (App 2010: 86). This understanding contrasts with his bare knowledge of the Vedas, which Ziegenbalg referred to as ‘four small books of law’, hardly an appropriate description of the four Vedas, even though he was aware of their titles, referring to them as ‘1. Urukkuwedum [Ṛgveda]. 2.  Iderwedum [Yajurveda]. 3. Samawedum [Sāmaveda]. 4. Adirwannawedum [Atharvaveda]’ (App 2010: 86). Finally, it deserves notice that Ziegenbalg’s sources were Tamil rather than Sanskrit, which has greatly informed his presentation of Indian religion. He effectively describes South Indian religion. While both Fenicio and Ziegenbalg have each made extensive use of the Purāṇas in writing their early surveys of Indian religion, all of this stands in no comparison to the systematic enquiries of the British Orientalists, starting with the all-influential Sir William Jones (1746–94). With Jones, judge at the court of Calcutta and founder of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, scholarship of Indian literature is taken to an entirely different level. What is most striking about Jones’s work in comparison with that of his predecessors is the systematic nature of his undertaking. We should, however, not lose sight of the religious motivation of much of his research as well. Both App (2009) and Trautmann (2012) have convincingly shown how Jones brought with him his own Biblical notions and concerns and that these greatly influenced his writings and approaches to research. Trautmann draws attention to what he calls ‘floodology’, the notion that India was seen as ‘a witness to the truth of the history recorded in the Bible; but it is imperfect testimony, marred by fable, allegory, and exaggeration’ (Trautmann 2012: 176). App provides the general

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background picture: ‘It is easily forgotten that even in the 1820s Europeans believed with few exceptions that the world is only a few thousand years old, that all the world’s peoples can be traced back to Noah’s Ark, and that Christianity is the fulfillment and goal of all religions’ (App 2010: xiii). Jones was looking for independent confirmation of the Biblical truth in the oldest Indian traditions and the Purāṇas were among the most valuable sources for this research, as transmitters of the most ancient histories of the world: ‘By means of the Puránas, we shall in time discover all the learning of the Egyptians without decyphering their hieroglyphicks’ (Jones 1788: 254, quoted by App 2009: 23). Among Jones’s ‘desiderata’ found in his papers after his death are the following two items: ‘The Ancient Geography of India, etc., from the Puranas’ and ‘A Translation of the Puranas’ (Rocher 1986: 2). One of his influential works on Indian history, ‘On the Chronology of the Hindus’ (1790), relies heavily on a summary of the Purāṇas (Purāṇārthaprakāśa) prepared by Pandit Rādhākānta Tarkavāgīśa at the instigation of Warren Hastings in 1784. Jones’s knowledge of the Purāṇas thus appears not to have been first hand, but through the help of this influential compendium, prepared by one of the pandits employed by the British. Jones eventually employed the same Rādhākānta at the court of Calcutta as one of the chief authorities responsible for preparing the materials for what would eventually become the Digest of Hindu Law, on Contract and Successions, translated into English by Colebrooke in 1797 (Rocher 1989; for a brief summary of the Purāṇārthaprakāśa, see Rocher 1986: 215–16). It was left to another British Orientalist, Horace Hayman Wilson (1786– 1860), to complete the work conceived by Jones. Wilson was the first occupant of the Boden chair of Sanskrit at the University of Oxford and one of his great achievements was his annotated translation of the Viṣṇupurāṇa (1840), one of the earliest and most important Sanskrit Purāṇas. This has remained the standard translation up to the present day.5 Like Jones, Wilson employed pandits in helping him to extract the required materials from the huge body of Purāṇic scriptures: ‘Engaging the services of several able Pandits, I employed them to prepare a minute index of each of the Purāṇas’ (Wilson, quoted by Rocher 1986: 3). The information provided by these notes formed the basis for the extensive annotations that he added to the translation, ‘so as to render the present publication a sort of concordance to the whole, as it is not very probable that many of them [Purāṇas] will be published or translated’ (Wilson 1840: lxxii).

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The latter words reflect Wilson’s generally negative opinion about the contents of the Purāṇas. The extant Purāṇas were, according to Wilson, overall rather late, sectarian works and a far cry from the original, authentic sources he, and Jones before him, was looking for. Wilson posed the theory of the existence of earlier Purāṇas that had degraded over time: ‘They preserve, no doubt, many ancient notions and traditions; but these have been so mixed up with foreign matter, intended to favour the popularity of particular forms of worship or articles of faith, that they cannot be unreservedly recognised as genuine representations of what we have reasons to believe the Puráṇas originally were’ (Wilson 1840: lvi). Rocher (1986: 4–5) holds this negative verdict of Wilson partly responsible for the neglect of Purāṇa studies in the years to come.

Twentieth century, present and future By way of conclusion, let me finish with a few remarks on the current state of Purāṇa research. First, we can observe that since the time of Wilson, editions of most of the major pan-Indian Purāṇas have been published, along with numerous editions of lesser-known, regional Purāṇas in both Sanskrit and vernacular languages. To this extent, Wilson’s negative prediction has not come true: a large number of Purāṇas have in fact been published (Rocher 1986). At the same time, one must concede that the quality of these text editions is generally very low, in the majority of cases only based on a handful of recent manuscripts, weakening their potential for cultural-historical research. It was only from the 1960s onwards that the first critical editions of Purāṇas were produced and published by the Kashiraj Trust in Benares. More recently, a few, but no more than a handful, individual Purāṇas have been critically edited. The difference in quality between these text editions varies greatly. If anything, one of the chief objectives of Purāṇa scholarship of the future should be the production of more reliable Purāṇa editions. The ongoing critical edition of the Skandapurāṇa, which contains different layers of apparatus allowing for the reconstruction of different stages of transmission of the text, may serve as a model of what can be achieved in this respect (Adriaensen, Bakker and Isaacson 1998, for the first volume). The text-critical approach manifested in this edition reconsiders the ideal of the search for an ‘Ur-Text’ expressed in the

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citation from Wilson above, for its objective is not just to try and get an insight into the earliest reconstructable form of the text but more precisely to present the various stages of redaction through which the text has gone over the ages. This makes it into a very valuable tool for cultural-historical research, going far beyond the Orientalist ideal of a single Ur-Text. As for translation, it is primarily the major Sanskrit Purāṇas that have been translated. An ongoing series of volumes of translations of individual Purāṇas by ‘a board of scholars’ is published by Motilal Banarsidass under the title Ancient Indian Tradition and Mythology. These translations leave, however, much to be desired. The regional and vernacular Purāṇas remain largely untranslated and understudied. Shulman 1980 attests to the rich materials available in the Tamil Purāṇas, but I know of no comparable other study. The situation today stands in marked contrast to the work of Ziegenbalg, whose main sources of study were Tamil rather than Sanskrit. What is most urgently needed in contemporary Purāṇa research is a combination of text-critical study, aiming at the production of critical editions, and cultural-historical study, placing the contents of the Purāṇas within cultural space and time. While text-criticism and cultural history are often treated as separate fields, in fact the two are two sides of the same coin. The text-critical establishment of the text presupposes a deep cultural-historical understanding of the production and transmission of the text, while a cultural-historical study can only be done through deep text-critical engagement with the text in question. Research in this direction can also resolve the vexed question of the orality of the Purāṇas. In many publications on Purāṇas, reference is made to the intrinsically oral nature of the Purāṇas, in accordance with the indigenous model of Purāṇas narrated by bards at festive occasions (Bailey 2010: 127). Text-critical research has shown, however, that although memory certainly plays an important role in the composition and transmission of the text, the Purāṇas that we have are essentially textual traditions that were composed and transmitted in manuscript form. Anthropological research can yield insights into the oral performance of the Purāṇas, but even here, the general rule throughout history appears to have been that Purāṇas were recited directly from a manuscript, or, in more recent times, a book.6 In the end, we can conclude that the Purāṇas still need to find their place in the history writings of the world. The Purāṇas offer a counterargument to

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the commonly encountered idea that pre-British ancient India had no history writing. In essence, the Purāṇas offer us history, but not history as we know it. In a recent article Thomas Trautmann has stated the same in different words: ‘Ancient India does have history, and it has it exactly where the Orientalists were looking for it, and failed to recognize it, in the Puranas’ (Trautmann 2012: 201). Instead of taking them as a-historical, mythological texts, as has been the tendency in the past, the Purāṇas must be encountered as texts produced in historical time and space7 that give a brahmanical account of the workings of the world from the beginnings of time up to the present. Taking stock of the diversity of Purāṇa traditions will help us gain a better understanding of the development of brahmanical Hinduism as a hugely diverse and rich cultural complex, involving many agents and communities. As Ludo Rocher remarks, ‘The Purāṇas are, first, important documents for the study and reconstruction of the history of Hindu India. In a more practical way, they have contributed to the continuity of Hinduism through the ages, and are indispensable for a correct understanding of Hinduism today’ (Rocher 1986: 12–13). In times of the increasing politicization of Hindu identity in contemporary India and abroad, the study of the Purāṇas has particular societal relevance. Over the last few decades, there has been a growing tendency among Hindu right-wing groups to claim a homogenic origin and identity of Hinduism, which is perceived to be the original religion of the sacred land of India, as opposed to the foreign religions of Islam and Christianity. All of this is subsumed under the notion of Hindutva (‘Hinduness’), the original title of V. D. Savarkar’s 1923 ideological pamphlet Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? The decision in February 2014 by Penguin publishers to withdraw and pulp its copies of Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History (2009) in India, as part of a settlement with an Indian district court (Taylor 2014), is but one reminder of the need for a balanced and informed understanding of the origins and development of Hinduism as a multifaceted affair. That the study of the Purāṇas is part of this process as well is highlighted by a recent initiative of the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) to write a national history of India on the basis of the Purāṇas.8 The ‘Tales of Old’ continue to guide India’s immediate future.

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The Study of Chinese Religions in the Social Sciences: Beyond the Monotheistic Assumption Anna Sun

Scholars of China have been struggling for years with how to analyse the diversity and apparent contradictions in Chinese religious practice.1 In recent studies, we see how the very ideas of ‘religion’ and ‘belief ’, which are deeply rooted in Protestant Christianity, continue to cause great confusion in the study of Chinese religion (Sun 2013; Goossaert and Palmer 2010). Indeed, an understanding of religion that focuses on belief and membership cannot capture what is distinctive of Chinese religious life. For instance, in the World Values Survey, 93.9 per cent of Chinese respondents answered ‘No’ to the question ‘Do you belong to a religious denomination?’ and 89.7 per cent answered ‘Never’ to the question ‘How often do you attend religious services?’ But if we focus on everyday religious practices in China, we find that 67 per cent of people have performed ‘ancestral rites on the gravesite of a deceased family member in the past year’ (Sun 2013). As in many other societies with non-Abrahamic religious cultures, people in China will often visit different temples for different purposes: a Buddhist temple to pray for health or for fertility; a Confucius temple for success in examinations; a  Daoist temple devoted to a local god for protection of one’s fortune in business. This picture, in the abstract, is not so different from what one might have seen in ancient religious practices in Rome, with temples for local gods and hero cults everywhere, coexisting and interdependent with one another. In fact, the majority of Chinese people perform rituals from different religious traditions (Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism, and the so-called popular or folk religion) largely indiscriminately. In addition, there is the phenomenon

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of the so-called syncretistic religious practices, including Catholics performing ancestral rites, and Christians calling themselves Confucian Christians. It is not unusual for people to have multiple religious identities in China, and to burn incense in front of any altar they may encounter.2 As will be expanded upon further in the next two chapters, the problem of trying to analyse non-Abrahamic religious practices and cultures through originally Protestant-inspired categorizations of religion is undoubtedly a historical one.3 Yet, its consequences are still very much with us today. Indeed, this is a problem particularly salient for scholars who conduct empirical research in China, for their research methods, especially survey work and other forms of data gathering, require them to operate under a stable and clear classification scheme. What makes this problem of categorization especially challenging as well as captivating is its being rooted in the deeper, theoretical problem of religious plurality. How should we understand religions and religious practices that coexist through fluid boundaries? How should we approach an account of religious life that does justice to this ineluctable multiplicity? In recent years, scholars of Asian religions have shown us that there have been creative uses of religious categorizations in Asian societies throughout history. In his nuanced historical analysis of the Buddhist ‘tactics’ of dealing with religious plurality in China, T. H. Barrett suggests that the Buddhist use of the paired Chinese concept ‘nei-wai’ (‘inner and outer’) has served an important role in distinguishing Buddhism from other traditions in China.4 In recent work in the study of Japanese religions, the emphasis on the honji suijaku paradigm, or ‘combinatory religion’, referring to the dynamic interconnections between Shinto and Japanese Buddhism, allows us to challenge the preconceived boundaries between doctrines, deities and practices (Teeuwen and Rambelli 2003). As a sociologist of religion, my focus is on the theoretical interventions made by scholars in the past as well as the new directions in which we may wish to proceed in the future, especially for studying Chinese religious life as lived experience. In the first section, I introduce the unquestionably antiquated concept of henotheism, a nineteenth-century ‘solution’ to the question of religious plurality and in many ways a product of colonial constructions of knowledge. In the second section, I turn to the more contemporary alternative,

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the concept of syncretism, which has been advocated by many scholars in the past few decades. In the third section, I discuss the notion of the cultural tool kit or repertoire, a new concept adopted from the sociological study of culture, which provides a fruitful new theoretical framework. I suggest that this approach allows us to view assorted Chinese ritual practices as parts of a ‘Chinese religious repertoire’, which refers to sets of diverse religious habits, rituals and beliefs from different religious traditions that are more or less shared by Chinese people. I conclude with a brief proposal for a new theoretical approach, one that focuses on the interaction and interdependence of diverse religious systems. It requires the development of an ecological analysis of the Chinese religious system and a return to a more polytheistic imagination.

The intriguing idea of henotheism Among the many half-forgotten concepts from the early history of the comparative study of religion, henotheism is one of the most intriguing.5 It was a concept much used as well as much debated at the end of the nineteenth century, yet it is barely mentioned today, with a few interesting exceptions. It may not come as a surprise that the concept has been associated with Friedrich Max Müller, who is usually considered the founder of comparative religion and the science of religion. And it may not come as a surprise that the concept was rather contested in Max Müller’s day, like many other ideas he advanced. Let me start with two concrete examples from the end of nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century in which the term ‘henotheism’ is used in relation to China. The first is from James Legge’s The Religions of China, first delivered as ‘the spring lecture of the Presbyterian Church of England’ in London in 1880: Five thousand years ago the Chinese were monotheists – not henotheists, but monotheists; and this monotheism was in danger of being corrupted, as we have seen, by a nature-worship on the one hand, and by a system of superstitious divination on the other. It will be my object to show, first, how the primitive monotheism has been affected by these dangers in the course of time, and how far it has prevailed over them. (Legge 1880: 16)

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Here Legge speaks of ‘primitive monotheism’, which is in danger of being corrupted by ‘superstitious’ practices often associated with polytheism. He pointedly states that the origin of Chinese religion (‘five thousand years ago’) was not henotheistic but monotheistic. The second text is China and Its Future: In the Light of the Antecedents of the Empire, Its People, and Their Institutions (1899), written by James Johnston (1819–1905), a Presbyterian missionary to China and a great admirer of James Legge. According to the online Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Christianity, ‘Johnston’s stay in China was brief, but his impact on the English Presbyterian mission was significant. He was the third English Presbyterian missionary to arrive in Amoy (present day Xiamen) in Fujian Province.’ He was in China from 1853 to 1857. There is an extensive discussion about Chinese religion in his book, especially the puzzling phenomenon of the non-antagonistic relationship among Buddhism, Daoism and Confucianism: The mutual relations of the three forms of religion in China are of the most friendly character. They are not antagonistic to one another. They have formed an alliance, based, on the one hand, on a frigid religious indifference, and on the other by their being supplementary to one another. (Johnston 1899: 136) The same man may be what is commonly called by foreign writers a thorough Confucianist, and yet a devout worshipper in the temples of the Taoists and Buddhists. Even Emperors, who acted in their official capacity as high-priests in the patriarchal rites and sacrifices, have been leaders in Taoist superstitious practices, and some were devout Buddhists. As for the great mass of the people, they practice all the three forms of worship, and at all the great events of social and domestic life, the man who would call himself a follower of the old faith would think himself quite consistent in calling in the priests or monks of Taoism and Buddhism to perform their ceremonies at the birth, the burial, or marriage of his sons and daughters, and the ministers of these two different sects would see no impropriety in the union of their diverse rites. The frigid creed of Confucians is not incompatible with their introductions. (138) What, then, is the true religion of China, which we find so free from the innovation of imported Buddhism and the corruptions of Taosim? The answer must be brief. First of all, the creed is what may be called henotheistic. (140)

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Johnston then defines his use of ‘henotheism’: The supreme object of worship is One, but he is attended by subordinate deities, or deified ancestors or heroes, who receive a lower form of worship, and are regarded as attendants on the Supreme God, who is worshipped with the highest honours. … This supreme object of worship is known by the names or titles of Ti (Ruler), or Shang-ti (Supreme Ruler), or Thien (Heaven), the name by which God was designated in the earliest times, and found in use by Nebuchadnezzar in Babylon, and applied by Daniel to the God of Israel: ‘until thou know that the heavens do rule’. The use of the term heaven for God as the great Ruler is quite in harmony with the Chinese conception. The name of the dwelling-place of God is used for that of its great Occupant as not only appropriate in itself, but as more reverent than the personal name. … The attributes of Shang-ti are summed up by Dr. Medhurst, Dr. Faber, and other competent authorities. ... ‘This,’ Dr. Medhurst adds, ‘is what China holds, and, in her highest exercise of devotion, declares concerning Shang-ti. I am confident the Christian world will agree with me in saying, “This God is our God.” ’ This might be called monotheism, were it not that the word signified not only the worship of one God, but the entire exclusion of all other objects of worship, even of an inferior kind. We prefer to call it henotheism, which implies, in the sense in which we use the term, the worship of one Supreme God, but does not exclude the worship of other gods subordinate to the One. (140–1)

What is interesting about this understanding of henotheism is that it places great emphasis on the strict hierarchy of deities: the one Supreme God has to be higher than the other gods and is worshipped accordingly, ‘attended by subordinate deities, or deified ancestors or heroes, who receive a lower form of worship’. It is not the plurality of gods that worries Johnston, a missionary who had to deal with Chinese ritual practices such as ancestral rites; it is the anarchy of gods that is the real concern. Friedrich Max Muller’s original conception of henotheism is indeed different. In ‘Semitic Monotheism’, published in 1860, quite early in Max Müller’s long career in Great Britain (he settled in Oxford in 1848 and died there in 1900), Max Müller lays out his idea of henotheism as follows: There are, in fact, various kinds of monotheism, and it becomes our duty to examine more carefully what they mean and how they arise. There is one kind of monotheism, though it would more properly be called theism, or

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henotheism, which forms the birthright of every human being. (Max Müller 2002: 29)

He defines it in the language of natural theology, speaking of the intuitive knowledge of a creator that is universal in human nature, which is a position he expresses consistently in his writing, from Chips from a German Workshop to his lectures on the ‘Science of Religion’. He puts it in the following way in ‘Semitic Monotheism’: What distinguishes man from all other creatures, and not only raises him above the animal world, but removes him altogether from the confines of a merely natural existence, is the feeling of sonship inherent in and inseparable from human nature. That feeling may find expression in a thousand ways, but there breathes through all of them the inextinguishable conviction, ‘It is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves.’ (30)

For Max Müller, there is a crucial difference between monotheism and henotheism: The primitive intuition of the Godhead is neither monotheistic nor polytheistic, and it finds its most natural expression in the simplest and yet the most important article of faith – that God is God. … There are, in reality, two kinds of oneness which, when we enter into metaphysical discussions, must be carefully distinguished, and which for practical purposes are well kept separate by the definite and indefinite articles. There is one kind of oneness which does not exclude the idea of plurality; there is another which does. When we say that Cromwell was a Protector of England, we do not assert that he was the only protector. But if we say that he was the Protector of England, it is understood that he was the only man who enjoyed the title. If, therefore, an expression had been given to that primitive intuition of the Deity, which is the mainspring of all later religion, it would have been – ‘ There is a God,’ but not yet ‘ There is but “One God.” ’ The latter form of faith, the belief in One God, is properly called monotheism, whereas the term of henotheism would best express the faith in a single God. (31)

In other words, the key difference between monotheism and henotheism is that the former assumes exclusivity whereas the latter assumes plurality. This is indeed very different from the hierarchical henotheism proposed by others, such as Johnston. Five years later, in 1865, Max Müller delivered his ‘Lecture

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on the Vedas, Or the Sacred Books of the Brahmans’, at the Philosophical Institution in Leeds. Here he suggests that the religion of the Veda is not polytheistic, and we should be careful not to see it in such terms, for polytheism is something we find ‘repugnant’: Large numbers of the Vedic hymns are childish in the extreme: tedious, low, commonplace. The gods are constantly invoked to protect their worshippers, to grant them food, large flocks, large families, and a long life; for all which benefits they are to be rewarded by the praises and sacrifices offered day after day, or at certain seasons of the year. Only in order to appreciate them justly, we must try to divest ourselves of the common notion about Polytheism, so repugnant not only to our feelings, but to our understanding. No doubt, if we must employ technical terms, the religion of the Veda is Polytheism, not Monotheism. … Yet it would be easy to find in the numerous hymns of the Veda, passages in which almost every important deity is represented as supreme and absolute. Thus in one hymn, Agni (fire) is called ‘the ruler of the universe’, ‘the lord of men’, ‘the wise king, the father, the brother, the son, the friend of man: nay, all the powers and names of the other gods are distinctly ascribed to Agni. Though Agni is thus highly exalted, nothing is said to disparage the divine character of the other gods. … This surely is not what is commonly understood by Polytheism. Yet it would be equally wrong to call it Monotheism. If we must have a name for it, I should call Kathenotheism. The consciousness that all the deities are but different names of one and the same godhead, breaks forth indeed here and there in the Veda. (55)

The context of this discussion is clearly the negative connotation of polytheism – or paganism – in contrast to superior, monotheistic Christianity.6 Max Müller is concerned with the usual treatment of the religion of the Veda as merely polytheistic. In his own interpretation of the Veda, he sees much of the characteristic of what he calls ‘the primitive intuition of the Godhead’ (31). The solution he offers is to use the idea of henotheism to distinguish what he sees in the Veda from the polytheism of the pagans, who are perceived to be religiously corrupt and inferior. The concept of henotheism was not originated by Max Müller. It was by Friedrich Wilhelm von Schelling (1775–1854), with whom Max Müller studied in his youth. In fact, Max Müller attended Schelling’s lectures on the philosophy of mythology in 1843–4 at the University of Berlin. These greatly

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influenced his thinking. As the late-nineteenth-century-theologian Francis L. Patton summarizes, While Max Müller is the originator of the word henotheism, it is to Schelling that we are indebted for the distinction expressed in the original application of it. Schelling’s views are given in the earlier part of his ‘Philosophy of Mythology’, and are referred to very copiously by Schultze in his ‘Fetishismus’. Primitive man was possessed of a religious nature. … This primitive belief was monotheism, but it was a relative and not an absolute Monotheism. From this watershed of primitive Theism, two streams have descended, one issuing in pure Monotheism, the other in Polytheism. (Patton 1882: 17)

Max Muller develops Schelling’s idea further. The term “henotheism” first appeared in his writings in 1860, in “Semitic Monotheism.” The term Kathenotheism first appeared in 1865, in “Lectures on the Vedas.” Later Max Muller uses the two terms quite interchangeably. After the burst of interest in the end of the nineteenth century, discussions of henotheism gradually faded away. There have been sporadic mentions of it in the twentieth century, and when they do occur, interestingly, it is often in the context of Chinese religion and Hellenistic religion.7 Here are two notable examples in the Chinese case. The first is an entry from a recent encyclopaedia of Confucianism: Henotheism: The belief in a particular god while at the same time acknowledges the existence of other gods. Henotheism has been used to describe various religious traditions at different points in their history. The potential for belief in the early Confucian tradition in Shang-ti (Lord upon High) and T’ien (Heaven), raises the question of henotheism, particularly when both names are found in textual sources indicating a recognition of Shang-ti by the Shang people and of T’ien by the Chou people. It seems, however, that they are different names for the same idea. Yet the Confucians repeatedly understand Shang-ti or T’ien as an absolute force in the universe rather than anything that can be identified as a god. (Taylor and Choy 2005: 212)

This understanding of Confucianism is similar to Legge’s, which emphasizes the theistic nature of early Confucian tradition. In fact, it does not make use of the concept of henotheism, stressing that ‘Shang-ti’ and ‘T’ien’ ‘are different names for the same idea’. The second example is from a recent collection of essays on Chinese philosophy, Chinese Philosophy in An Era of Globalization

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(Wang 2004). Zhou Dunhua, a scholar of early Chinese philosophy, in his essay ‘The Chinese Path to Polytheism’ argues that monotheism and henotheism existed in early China: Although Chinese religion’s major form was polytheistic, nevertheless it did not entirely devolve into polytheism. It went through three stages: first, in the historically earlier period, through the worship of the highest deity, though it was not at all a primitive henotheism, we can at least say that it was something approaching henotheism because it was a relatively simple worship focused on the highest deity. Second, religion during the Shang and Zhou periods reached maturity and had a typical, systematic polytheism. Third, after the Warring States period, there remained something approaching monotheism as well as the heavily documented polytheism. (Zhou 2004: 66)

Although there is no mention of Max Müller, this argument clearly follows the Müllerian tradition of analysing the development of religion along the spectrum of monotheism-henotheism-polytheism. It also assumes a ‘progressive’ trajectory of religious development, with monotheism possessing a higher value than polytheism. In his response to Zhou’s essay in the same edited volume, Stephen Davis, a philosopher of Christian theology, stresses that there are, in fact, many variations of monotheism: 1. Atheism – no God, gods or divine reality exists. This is the opinion of many educated people today, both in the West and in the East, and especially in those places in the East that have been strongly influenced by Marxist thought. 2. Monism – there is only one reality; all differentiation is only apparent or illusory. There are several religions or philosophies that espouse radical monism. Advaita Vedanta Hinduism is certainly an example. 3. Esoteric monotheism – other things exist beside the one God, but God is the sole underlying reality of all things. 4. Metaphysical Monotheism – one and only one undifferentiated God exists. Judaism, Islam and many other religions espouse this theory. 5. Trinitarian Monotheism – the one and only God exists in three persons. This is the orthodox Christian view. 6. Metaphysical Henotheistic Monotheism – many gods exit, but one of them is more powerful or more perfect than the others, and is to be worshipped.

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Some scholars of the Hebrew Bible hold that this is the view of God held by the preexilic Hebrews. a. Cultural Henotheistic Monotheism – many gods exist, all or many of them roughly equal in power or perfection, but one of them is singled out by a given culture to worship. b. Polytheism – many gods exist, and all of them, or at least a certain number of them, need to be correctly worshipped (Davis 2004: 70). What is striking about this typology is that there is no place for henotheism. It returns to the traditional dichotomies of atheism versus theism, and monotheism versus polytheism. As Davis states, Now my point in listing these eight views is that all the religious theories listed here between 1 and 8 can be and often are referred to as ‘monotheistic’. So the trichotomy that Professor Zhou uses in his paper – monotheism/ henotheism/polytheism – is, in my view, not as helpful as it might be. (70–1)

This view that nothing exists between the poles of monotheism and polytheism is exactly what Max Müller tries to change when he expands on the concept of henotheism he inherited from Schelling. Have his efforts been in vain? Wendy Doniger, one of the few contemporary scholars of Hinduism who have made use of the concept of henotheism, responds to Max Müller’s position in an interesting way: But the polytheism of Vedic religion sometimes functions as a kind of serial monotheism that the Vedic Scholar Friedrich Max Müller named ‘henotheism’ or ‘Kathenotheism’, the worship of a number of gods, one at a time, regarding each as the supreme, or even the only, god while you are talking to him. Thus, one Vedic poem will praise a god and chalk up to his account the credit for separating heaven and earth, propping them apart with a pillar, but another Vedic poem will use exactly the same words to praise another god. (Wendy 2010: 2)

She then terms this phenomenon ‘serial monotheism,’ akin to ‘serial monogamy’: Bearing in mind the way in which the metaphor of adultery has traditionally been used by monotheistic religions to stigmatize polytheism (‘whoring after other gods’), and used by later Hinduism to characterize the love of God (as in the Bengali tradition of Krishna and Radha), we might regard this attitude as a kind of theological parallel to serial monogamy, or, if you prefer,

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open hierogamos: ‘You, Vishnu, are the only god I’ve ever worshipped; you are the only one.’ ‘You, Rosaline, are the only woman I’ve ever loved; you are the only one.’ (2)

This response stresses one aspect of Max Muller’s concept, which is that all gods are treated as equally supreme in henotheism. But what matters the most to Doniger is to break away from the metaphysical cage of binary thinking: To the question, ‘Is Hinduism monotheistic or polytheistic?’ the best answer is, ‘Yes’ (which is actually the answer to most either/or questions about Hinduism). (1)

In our world of multiple religious traditions, with God, gods and spirits coexisting, concepts such as henotheism help us see that monotheism has not necessarily been the norm of religious life. The late-nineteenth-century attempt to understand the historical development of religion as a liner trajectory, either monotheism-henotheism-polytheism, or polytheism-henotheismmonotheism, is an intellectual project most scholars of religions today have left behind. Such models reflect the monotheistic assumption regarding religious life to which we should no longer subscribe. However, henotheism, along with monotheism and polytheism, are thought-provoking theoretical categories. One might cross the symbolic boundaries of religions all the time without noticing, the way one is unaware of the complex formation of rivers or oceans when one is swimming in them. These categories represent different modalities of relationship between deities, between ritual practices and between people who move among different religious traditions.

Syncretism as an alternative category of religion The problem of the classification of Chinese religions is of particular importance to scholars who conduct empirical studies of Chinese societies. We rely on such classifications to carry out empirical research such as religion surveys, which can be an essential part of both scholarship and modern statecraft. Indeed, the problem of how to classify Chinese religions has scholarly, social as well as political implications. Many scholars of Chinese religions have

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voiced their discontent over the commonly accepted general classifications of Chinese religions today.8 This is a fundamental problem that also troubled Wilfred Cantwell Smith: We have here a recapitulation of a standard gradual process of reification: the preaching of a vision, the emergence of followers, the organization of a community, the positing of an intellectual ideal of that community, the definition of the actual pattern of its institutions. The last two steps seem to have been taken only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. … The Chinese also do not fit into a pattern of religious systems. We have already seen how the vigorous attempt to impose such a pattern on them from the outside is now beginning to be abandoned by Western scholars in the light of closer awareness of the situation itself in China. Western and Muslim students tend to be baffled when they first learn that a single Chinese may be and usually is a ‘Confucian’, a ‘Buddhist’, and a ‘Taoist’, They cannot imagine how a person can ‘belong to three different religions’, as they put it, at the same time. The perplexity arises not from something confused or bizarre about China so much as from the conceptualization of religious systems, which is brought to bear but is evidently inappropriate (Smith 67–8).

Let us consider alternative conceptualizations of religious classification. Is syncretism the answer? Scholars of Chinese religions have been using the concept of syncretism as a theoretical tool for years, especially in the study of popular religions. As Judith A. Berling puts it, ‘Syncretism is central to the religious life of the Chinese’ (Berling 1980: 1). In recent years, Jordan and Overmyer take up this concept in their study of Chinese sectarianism in Taiwan; Kenneth Dean uses it as a key framework for his study of the cult of the ‘Lord of the Three in One’ (sanyijiao); and it is also the central concept in Stephen Sharot’s discussion of popular religion in China in the context of a comparative sociology of world religions (Jordon and Overmyer 1986; Dean 1998; Sharot 2001). According to Luther H. Martin, the notion of syncretism was first invented in the nineteenth century to study Hellenistic culture as ‘the east and west mixture of people’, and its origin in comparative religion indeed gave the early notion of syncretism an ‘essentialist or sui generis understanding of religion’ (Martin 2000: 277–80). Many scholars have challenged the concept; one of the most recent ones is Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, who states in his book The Dao of Muhammad that the process of Chinese Muslim identity formation ‘is not

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adequately captured by such terms as “accommodation” (which implies some sort of “compromise”), or “syncretism” (which assumes the blending of distinct, well-defined entities to create a new, distinct, and well-defined entity)’ (Benite 2005: 12–13). In his often-discussed essay ‘Syncretism’, first published in 1956, Hendrik Kraemer says the following about Chinese religions: One of the best-known features of Chinese universism is that the three religions – Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism – are virtually treated as one. The religious allegiance of the average man is not related to one of the three religions. He does not belong to a confession or creed. He participates, unconcerned as to any apparent lack of consistency, alternatively in Buddhist, Taoist or Confucian rites. He is by nature a religious pragmatist. (Kraemer 2004: 39)

It is worth noticing that Kraemer uses the term ‘Chinese universism’, for this is also used by J. J. M. De Groot in his 1912 book Religion in China: Universism: A Key to the Study of Taoism And Confucianism, whose work on Chinese religions produced some of the major texts in the early stages of the world religions discourse (De Groot 1912). This model of syncretism is well known among scholars of non-Western religions. For instance, similar arguments have been made about other Asian religions; Toshimaro Ama has argued that, in Japanese religious life, people blend Shinto, Confucianism, Buddhism and Christianity into a ‘hybrid form of spirituality’ (Ama 2005). In ‘Syncretism and the History of Religions’, Robert D. Baird responds to Kraemer in the following way: The important point here is noticed by Kraemer himself. To the Chinese believer there was no inconsistency in such a religious practice for they were treated virtually as one. The reason for this is that there was a broader and over-arching religious attitude which made it possible to incorporate all such practices and beliefs as seemed useful. Kraemer says that the Chinese believer was in this case a pragmatist by nature. If that be true, then that was his/her religious attitude, and it was hardly inconsistent to act in the described manner. It is the outsider who does not share such an attitude, and fails to recognize its significance. It is also the outsider who uses the term to describe the phenomenon. (Baird 2004: 55)

In other words, Kraemer’s formulation of syncretism is more of an outsider’s view, rather than an insider’s understanding of lived religious experience.

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Baird explains his position in more detail in the same essay under a section entitled ‘Syncretism, a Barrier to Understanding’: The term syncretism is usually not used by a believer to describe his or her own religion. One of the most common uses of the term in the history of religions is to describe certain Eastern religious expressions. … It seems to be implied that in each case the Eastern religious expressions have brought elements together that are conflicting and illegitimate. This is never the religious attitude of those involved, however, who sense no such logical problem. The failure to find a recognition of inconsistency where it might be expected has been problematic for Western scholars. (54)

For Baird, the methodological problems with syncretism make it irredeemable. However, the concept has been revised and reinvented extensively in recent years, and we now have seen many constructive uses. As David Chidester puts it, In the study of religion, this postcolonial notion of hybridity has been anticipated by the term ‘syncretism’. Although the term has borne the burden of suggesting impure or illicit mixtures of religion, it has more recently been recovered as a medium of religious innovation. (Chidester 2000: 435)

For example, Kurt Rudolph proposes several new perspectives on syncretism in his essay ‘Syncretism: From Theological Inventive to a Concept in the Study of Religion’. In order to discover ‘the most relevant heuristic means of pursuing syncretism research’, he offers a typology informed by the sociology of religion, with categories such as ‘symbiosis’, ‘amalgamation or fusion’ and ‘metamorphosis’. Rudolph believes that the symbiosis model fits Chinese religions the best: Symbiosis, not merely in the sense of the newly-won unity of two or more traditional components, but also in the ‘living together’ of two externally separate forms of religious expressions which the believers consider to be a relative unity. In China and Japan, two or three religions exist side by side and are selectively taken by most, depending upon the exigency (Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism; Shintoism and Buddhism). (Rudolph 2004: 81)

In The Syncretic Religion of Lin Chao-en, the study of a sixteenth-century Chinese scholar-official, Berling offers the following definition of syncretism: Syncretism may be tentatively defined as the borrowing, affirmation, or integration of concepts, symbols, or practices of one religious tradition into

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another by a process of selection and reconciliation. Syncretic borrowing may not be entirely conscious, but it is not a hypocritical manipulation. … Syncretism is here defined as a religious category. (Berling 1980: 9)

What sets these new uses of syncretism apart is the emphasis on practice and action, rather than propositions and doctrines. Note that Rudolph speaks of the ‘living together’ of two forms of ‘religious expressions’, and how they ‘exist’ side by side as ‘a relative unity’. Similarly, Berling speaks of the ‘borrowing, affirmation and integration’ of ideas as well as ‘symbols or practices’. This emphasis on experience and action suggests a new way of solving the ‘inconsistency’ argument inherent in the older notion of syncretism. It moves us away from the purely theoretical discussion of propositions and truth claims and concentrates instead on the actual practices of people, as Taylor suggests in his discussion of ‘Neo-Confucian Syncretism’ (Taylor 1982). But one problem remains. Berling says, ‘Syncretism is here defined as a religious category’; she seems to imply that it could coexist conceptually with other religious categories, such as Christianity or Islam. Does this mean that, in empirical work, we should classify religious practitioners in China as Christians, Muslims and Syncretists? A related issue is the fact that not all Chinese religions are the same in terms of their distance from the syncretism model. As C. K. Yang points out in Religion in Chinese Society, there is a distinction between what he calls the ‘institutional religion’ and ‘diffused religion’ in China (Yang 1961). In the case of institutional religions, we find Buddhist temples or Christian churches with monks, priests, or ministers. In the case of diffused religion, the religious activities are conducted in more secular settings, such as the family. If we adopt the syncretism model of classification, we would risk collapsing people who practise rituals that cannot be clearly defined as Christian, Muslim, Buddhist or Daoist (which would include perhaps the majority of Chinese ritual practices) into the ‘syncretism’ category. In fact, scholars show that it is difficult to even separate Buddhist and Taoist rituals from the so-called popular religious ones (Goodrich 1991; Feuchtwang 2001). This approach would likely result in having a great number of Chinese religious practitioners counted as syncretic, which would pose a new methodological problem in empirical research. One possible solution to this problem is to introduce an entirely different conceptualization of religion, which focuses on the diversity of religious practice rather than

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coherence of particular traditions. By adopting ideas from the field of sociology of culture, scholars of Chinese religions have been approaching the plurality of Chinese religions with the concepts of ‘tool kit’ and ‘repertoire’.

The Chinese religious tool kit or repertoire In her influential 1986 essay ‘Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies’, Ann Swidler offers the following definition of ‘cultural tool kit’: Culture influences action not by providing the ultimate values toward which action is oriented, but by shaping a repertoire or ‘tool kit’ of habits, skills, and styles from which people construct ‘strategies of action.’ … Culture consists of symbolic vehicles of meaning, including beliefs, ritual practices, art forms, and ceremonies, as well as informal cultural practices such as language, gossip, stories and rituals of daily life. It offers an image of culture as a ‘tool kit’ of symbols, stories, rituals and world-views, which people may use in varying configurations to solve different kinds of problems. (Swidler 1986: 273)

As Robert Campany suggests in a discussion on finding new ways of studying religion, what Swidler shows us is how ‘agents [use] culture’s repertoire in complex, varying ways on various occasions’, and the idea of the tool kit can indeed be very useful in understanding religious actions (Campany 2003: 318). He concludes, If we imagine religions and cultures as repertoires, then everyone – not merely those who study religions but also those who participate in them – is potentially in the position of bricoleur, syncretist, and comparativist. (319)

The notion of tool kit is indeed important to the understanding of Chinese religions. First, it emphasizes the fact that there are diverse religious traditions (beliefs, symbols, objects and practices) available to people, the way very different tools are ready for use in a large tool bag. Second, it stresses the freedom and creativity of individual actions in Chinese religious. This explains the seemingly perplexing phenomenon that many Chinese appear to practise ‘several religions’ simultaneously. The religious classification system used today – adapted by both the Chinese state and most scholars of Chinese religion – is one that came out of the world

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religions legacy modelled on a Judeo-Christian, monotheistic framework, which is very much in conflict with the actual practice of Chinese religious life. The result is that this classification system is incapable of capturing the complexity of actions of individual Chinese religious practitioners. In this classification system, a person has to be either a Buddhist, a Daoist, a Confucian, a follower of folk religion (which overlaps greatly with Buddhism, Daoism and Confucianism) or someone who is ‘syncretistic’. One may see the Chinese religious tool kit as something readily available to people, for the various tools are transmitted through familial and communal life. In this model, the focus is not on the distinction between different religious traditions or doctrines but rather on the shared rituals, beliefs and other symbolic practices, which may be claimed by various religious institutions and organizations. As a result, people may draw upon the assorted resources from their religious tool kit for different purposes and actions. Besides Swidler’s conception of tool kit, Michèle Lamont’s articulation of cultural repertories is also crucial to our reformulation of Chinese religious syncretism (Lamont and Thevenot 2000; Lamont 2001). As Lamont explains in Money, Morals and Manners, her emphasis is different from Swidler’s: In contrast to the voluntarist view of culture suggested by took kit theorists, the multicausal explanation I propose takes into consideration how remote and proximate structural factors shape choices from and access to the tool kit – in other words, how these factors affect the cultural resources most likely to be mobilized by different types of individuals and what elements of tool kits people have most access to given their social positions. (Lamont 1992: 135)

To put it simply, whereas Swidler focuses more on the repertoires that a society makes possible to its members (the supply of cultural tools), Lamont is more concerned with what affects the access that different groups of people have to the tool kit (access to cultural resources), as well as what affects the ways they make use of the repertoire (the conditioning of their strategy for action). In other words, it is not enough for us to find out what different tools there are in the syncretic Chinese religious tool kit in different times or regions; we also need to understand what contributes to certain groups of people’s access to certain religious beliefs and practices, as well as how and why certain groups of people use certain strategies in their religious practice.

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For instance, if we want to study how urban young professionals use the Chinese religious tool kit differently from rural peasant elders, we need to ask questions such as: Do they have equal access to the tool kit? The urban professionals are likely to know more about Western religions such as Protestantism and Catholicism, whereas the rural elders might know more about ancestral worship and how to worship a variety of local gods. Do they have different strategies in using the tools available to their groups? The urban professionals are perhaps more likely to be searching for values and beliefs if they decide to visit a Protestant church; they might have more practical goals in mind when they pray in front of the statue of Confucius on Chinese New Year’s Day. On the other hand, the rural elders might burn incense in front of the pictures of their ancestors or a statue of the God of Wealth regularly as part of an everyday routine, and they might attend temple ceremonies on certain holidays as members of a close-knit clan. In order to analyse the complex ways that the Chinese religious repertoire is used, I believe the following needs to be done in empirical social science research: 1. Collect lists of available tools in the Chinese religious repertoire. We need to know about the diverse rituals, beliefs, narratives and other practices that are available to Chinese practitioners. 2. Survey the social institutions through which these tools are preserved, shared, transmitted and reinvented. We need to understand through which social institutions – family, clan, church, mosque, temple, religious festival or other forms of social institution – these tools are passed from one person to another, and from one generation to the next. 3. Survey the situations in which such tools are used. We need to have a concrete sense of the situations in which people make use of these tools, such as holidays, weddings, funerals, medical emergencies and other everyday situations. 4. Analyse how different social groups of practitioners may have different degrees of access to such tools. We need to study the issue of access by examining institutional factors such as state power, economics, education, occupation, ethnicity, the rural/urban divide and other societal factors.

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5. Analyse how different social groups may have different strategies in using these tools. We need to study the issue of socially shaped strategies by analysing structural and institutional factors similar to the ones listed above. After these foundational data are collected, we can move on to try to answer even more intricate questions. For instance, are there competitions between different religious institutions? How do people make sound judgements about the relative merits of different religious teachings and practices? What Robert Wuthnow says about the internal tensions of pluralism in America may be used to discuss religious life in China: The virtue of American religion, it is often said, is that pluralism permits people to draw comparisons, sorting out the good from the bad, and at least to be more mindful of the options set before them. As pluralism increases, some increase in competitiveness and even conflict among religious traditions may also be expected. Competition alone will not ensure that the best in religion triumphs over the worst. But mindfulness of the comparisons among teachings and practices can generate valuable considerations of their relative strengths and weaknesses. … Religious pluralism will prove most enriching if it results in a practice of sustained critical reflection about the unwavering human desire for transcendence. (Wuthnow 2005: 314)

The syncretic nature of Chinese religious practice means that people are constantly making comparisons, judgements and choices. How do people discriminate when they are facing large repertoires of different teachings and practices? How is ‘sustained critical reflection’ achieved in this process? These are sociological as well as ethical questions, and they can only be answered after we have gained a comprehensive understanding of the history and texture of the actual religious tool kit or religious repertoire of the Chinese people.9

Towards a new theory of Chinese religious life The following is from the classicist John Scheid’s definition of Roman religion: ●

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This is a religion without revelation, without revealed books, without dogma and without orthodoxy. It was a ritualistic religion and, as such, was strictly traditionalist.

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It was a religion in which rituals and ritual attitudes defined and disseminated representations of deities and of the order of things. It was religion which kept explicit expression of belief quite separate from religious practice. It was a religion under no particular authority or leader, even at the level of public cult. Religious authority was always shared. Nor did this religion recognize any specific founder, whether divine or sent by God. It was a polytheistic religion. The gods varied according to the community concerted; they were, so to speak, members of the same community as their worshipers (Scheid 2003: 18–19).

As a scholar who has conducted extensive ethnographic work on religious life in China, I find this account of Roman religion in Late Antiquity to be strikingly similar to the everyday religious practice I observe in contemporary Chinese society. It may seem radical to make such a broad analogical connection across vastly different historical periods. However, when one stands back and surveys the landscapes of ancient Roman religion and religious practices in China today, one senses that the study of contemporary Chinese religion may indeed benefit from scholarship on Roman society. Glen W. Bowersock’s Hellenism in Late Antiquity shows the flourishing of Hellenism alongside Christianity in different parts of the Roman Empire. According to Bowersock, late Roman paganism consisted of patronage of the classics, acceptance of classical literature and art, and participation in pagan rites. Christians and pagans alike shared the classical tradition. This is illuminating when we compare the centrality of Hellenism in the Roman Empire with the centrality of Confucianism in the history of Chinese religious life. In Jörg Rupke’s extensive studies of Roman religion and society, such as From Jupiter to Christ: On the History of Religion in the Roman Imperial Period (2014) and The Roman Calendar from Numa to Constantine: Time, History, and the Fasti (2011), we see an emphasis on the interconnectedness between rituals, politics and other aspects of everyday life in ancient Rome. Along with colleagues in the fields of ancient history, archaeology, classics and Jewish studies, Rupke is now promoting a new research programme of ‘lived ancient religion’, which ‘hopes to stimulate the development of new approaches which

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can encompass the local and global trajectories of the pluralistic and multidimensional religions of antiquity’ (Rupke et al. 2015: 2). In my current ethnographic project, ‘The Social Life of Prayer in Contemporary Urban China: Beyond the Monotheistic Imagination’, I focus on the interconnections between polytheistic Chinese religious traditions – a combination of Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism and the so-called folk or popular religions – and the rising tide of monotheistic religions (China today has the world’s seventh largest Christian population and the twelfth largest Muslim population). Indeed, like ancient Rome, contemporary Chinese society is one in which widespread polytheistic religious traditions, from ancestral veneration to worship of local deities, coexist with monotheistic religions. To requires this rich, complex and constantly evolving reality of Chinese religious life requires a new imagination. Religions in China are not separated by straight boundaries, like islands made of stone; they are more like living things in a vibrant ecosystem, constantly changing and constantly evolving through conflicts as well as through interdependence. I believe that deep-seated monotheistic assumptions lie behind scholars’ difficulty in analysing the logic of practice in a predominately polytheistic religious life. As many scholars have already argued, a conception of religion that assumes the exclusivity of belief, conversion and membership cannot capture what is distinctive of Chinese religions in particular, and Asian religions in general (Goossaert and Palmer 2010; Schmidt-Leukel and Joachim Gentz 2013). Although there has been recent work challenging the dominance of the monotheistic framework (Dubois 2014), new theoretical tools need to be developed in order for us to carry out nuanced analytical and empirical studies. Religious ecology could serve as a new framework for the study of religion, focusing on the diversity, plurality and resilience of practices rather than on homogeneity of belief and stability of membership. Such an approach would help us connect rather than isolate different religious traditions. It would help us gain not only fuller knowledge of contemporary religious life in China, but also deeper understanding of the ongoing encounters between polytheistic religions around the world and Abrahamic monotheisms today. Hegel famously said, ‘Monotheism of reason and the heart, polytheism of the imagination and art, this is what we need!’ For Hegel, reason has replaced

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the notion of God, and polytheism should be found only in the aesthetic realm. But we as scholars also need the polytheistic imagination to do justice to the actual experiences of today’s living religions. There is no better place to start than China.

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Coming to Terms with Religion in East Asia T. H. Barrett

The outline provided here of the introduction of the concept of religion to East Asia is historical, but the issues raised remain current. What changes did the arrival of Western notions of religion entail? What existing terminology was thereby displaced? Did this represent progress? How useful is the term in understanding East Asia? This sketch was initially prompted by contemporary scholarship – a chance reading of the brief but vigorous debate in 2003–4 between Ian Reader and Timothy Fitzgerald, provoked by the latter’s analysis of the whole field of religious studies, already published in monographic form in 2000, an analysis which drew some key points from his own, much more recent experience of Japan (Fitzgerald 2000). Many of the questions raised in that debate have been largely superseded by the admirable work of Jason Ānanda Josephson, whose investigation embraces historical perspectives occasionally touched upon but not fully explored by either Fitzgerald or Reader (Josephson 2012). Here, however, this research is placed in a broader comparative and historical perspective. Three initial caveats need to be made. First, to look at the question of terminology is in itself only a fairly recent trend in scholarship, so doubtless much remains to be discovered. This tardiness may be a reaction to the nineteenth century itself – worthy and protracted discussion of the ‘term question’ in Protestant missionary circles concerned with China perhaps exhausted the patience of several generations of later academics. Note, for example, that the first version of the standard bibliography on Chinese religion by Laurence G. Thompson chooses explicitly not to list any of the relevant literature, preferring instead simply to refer the reader to a much earlier general bibliography of Henri Cordier (Thompson 1976: vii). East Asian Studies well

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into the late twentieth century was dominated also in the Western world by the extremely violent global history of the first half of that period, so questions of power and of politics dominated over questions of culture. It is only the luxury of a relatively stable world that has allowed us to address the subtler yet more intractable frictions created by cultural difference. These now loom increasingly large in a world in which political conflict between powers that are culturally largely similar has been superseded by tensions between less mutually intelligible rivals. Take, for example, William Beasley in the 1950s, addressing the then-urgent task of explaining the appearance of Japan as a participant in the world warfare of the mid-twentieth century through a study of its arrival in the international community of the nineteenth century. How his translations of diplomatic sources touched upon questions of religion is considered below. But we should note that his groundbreaking work was obliged to adopt pragmatic, commonsense yet makeshift solutions in respect of linguistic questions to which scholarship has now returned with a vengeance. In the introduction to his translations, he devotes one paragraph to the word yí [barbarian], which he declines to render as ‘barbarian’ for fear (as it would seem) that by using this word instead of the more neutral ‘foreigner’ his volume might prove more redolent of Gilbert and Sullivan than serious scholarship (Beasley 1955: 2). Fair enough – and as a professor of East Asian history, he cannot be faulted for failing to perceive the Chinese background to this term. But in the twentyfirst century, the issue of how to translate it has attracted an entire monograph from Lydia Liu without, it would appear, remotely exhausting our renewed appetite for research in this area (Liu 2004). Second, by narrowing the discussion to issues of translation, I do not intend to suggest that the ‘impact’ of English or indeed any other Western language on East Asia provides the sole key to understanding developments. One of the virtues of Josephson’s research is that internal conflicts in Japan are identified as an important dimension in the creation of religion there (Josephson 2012). Looking further afield, it is possible to find nineteenth-century examples of the reconfiguration of the understanding of religious traditions of East Asia that owe nothing to any Western stimulus as conventionally understood. David Atwill has shown how in Yunnan during the so-called Panthay Rebellion the concept of jiao, normally regarded as signifying ‘teaching’ if not ‘religion’, was

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reworked to mean a cultural tradition. This avoided any identification of Islam as something to which the word jiao might be applied, thus ensuring that the Chinese Muslim Hui, the Han Chinese and the various other peoples of Yunnan collectively known as yí – the very word we have already mentioned – could be brought together in a multi-ethnic coalition of resistance to the Qing Empire (Atwill 2006: 111–13, 155–9, 186). The situation in East Asia was fluid for reasons not necessarily directly connected with the ‘impact of the West’. Third, the remarks offered here make no attempt to address the Korean case. Josephson touches briefly on the 1915 Japanese colonial use of the new concept of religion in Korea, but makes no comment on earlier usage there (Josephson 2012: 262). It seems improbable that this marks the beginning of the story in Korea, but simple ignorance prevents me from commenting further. To turn, then, to the debate of 2003–4, which spanned a number of contributions online, there seems little to be gained from trying to summarize the interplay between two perfectly articulate protagonists in an argument, other than to commend the perusal of their actual words. Here, the only issue I am concerned with is the historical background touched upon in the debate, which of course has its own history too. One is impressed by the fact that both participants demonstrated well before the twenty-first century a strong sense that the word ‘religion’ or its equivalent in Japanese, shūkyō, has never accorded well with the observable facts of Japanese life. Ian Reader in 1991 pointed out that the word, far from being used to describe a range of phenomena, conjured up something rather specific for one Japanese colleague, namely ‘bad images of being disturbed on Sunday mornings by ladies ringing one’s doorbell and asking awkward questions’ (Reader 1991: 14). Similarly, according to Tim Fitzgerald, in an early review article of 1995, ‘Religion and society are really modern Western categories into which we try to force the data. When considering life in Japan it may be more fruitful to think in terms of ritual’ – thus introducing another Western category generalized in the late nineteenth century (Fitzgerald 1995: 217). So clearly, neither scholar came to the debate with any naively Eurocentric approach to the problem. Rather, they simply differ as to whether there was anything like what we call religion in Japan before the introduction of the European term. For Tim Fitzgerald and now for Josephson, who concisely reviews some of the writings of both scholars, the answer is no; for Ian Reader, yes (Josephson 2012: 6–8).

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Curiously, both scholars seem from the start to have been well aware that phenomena were present in pre-nineteenth-century Japan that may or may not be covered by the term religion, but that certainly attracted at the time an analysis somewhat more subtle, and more ‘at home’ in the East Asian context, than any terminology that any Western language had to offer. Tim Fitzgerald devotes two and a half pages of his review to a chapter by Ian Reader that describes two aspects of Japanese Buddhism: ‘this-worldly’ and ‘other-worldly’; Fitzgerald identifies these with the South Asian terms laukika and lokottara (Fitzgerald 1995: 209–11). This useful pair of words had been translated into East Asian equivalents very many centuries earlier, in the course of the introduction of Buddhism to China, and is certainly crucial to our understanding of how the Western concept of religion might or might not map onto East Asian ways of seeing things (Barrett 2009). By reserving for Buddhism alone the higher category of a teaching capable of leading to nirvana, it was possible for Chinese Buddhists to affirm the rest of Chinese culture, including not only what we generally perceive as the secular tradition of high culture stretching back in the Chinese view to the sage kings of ancient times, but also all the observances also sanctioned by tradition that were directed towards the unseen world of the spirits. Only the Daoism of the postHan period, which attempted in the Buddhist view to arrogate to itself a role that only Buddhism could fulfil, was allotted no place in this scheme, since it was by Buddhist standards a mere confection of notions stolen from their own beliefs, rather than anything rooted in reality (Barrett 2009). Whatever one chooses to make of the privileged position of Buddhism in this polemical scheme, the standard East Asian view of seen and unseen worlds constituting one common level of existence governed by the same principles was thereby given a status of relative validity that preserved it intact. Since no special measures were required to deal with the unseen world that were qualitatively different from those employed in the visible world, in one sense no form of religion was actually necessary. One could, indeed, if so disposed see the requirements of ritual as spanning both. Unfortunately, the Western term ‘religion’ in its modern use finds no place either for different levels of validity or for ways of thinking combining the seen and unseen worlds on the same level. Religions as generally understood in Europe even today deal primarily if not exclusively with the unseen world, and

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compete with each other for valid and exclusive interpretations of that realm. The consequences of this model for East Asia today have been divisive, since participants in the now disenfranchised former lower, laukika [this-wordly] level have been obliged either to deem themselves entirely secular in the Western sense – perhaps generously exempting the entire premodern cultural tradition from religiosity at the same time – or face the consequence of being labelled ‘superstitious’ (MacInnis 1972: 88). Receiving this latter, opprobrious designation, with a consequent loss of standing as moral actors of any sort, has in fact been the lot of a very great proportion of the Chinese population at least. The full history of the emergence of the category of superstition, the evil twin brought from the West together with religion, remains to be written for both China and Japan, though some preliminary work on this has been done (Josephson 2012: 253–4).1 It should not, however, be thought that the Buddhist analysis of a thisworldly level within the unseen realm and a higher sphere beyond that reserved for Buddhism disappeared overnight with the arrival of Westernstyle religion. In Japan, one sees it clearly restated by the senior Buddhist Fukuda Gyōkai ⿅⭦㺂䃗 (1809–88), even while he admits the corruption of Japanese Buddhism by the ‘this-worldly’ elements identified by Ian Reader (Fukuda 1965). Outside Buddhism, one may perhaps further detect its lingering influence in the work of the Christian leader Kozaki Hiromichi ቅፄᕎ䚉 (1856–1938), whose Seikyō shinron ᭵ᮏ᯦䄌 of 1886 discusses Confucianism as a ‘religion’, using the new term shūkyō (Ballhatchet 1988). Kozaki ultimately treats Confucianism, in accordance and by analogy with the Pauline view of Judaism, as a preparation for Christianity (Kozaki 1975: 27).2 But in introducing Confucianism as ‘China’s indigenous religion’, he notes that it may be called a social system or a ‘religion of this world’ ⨴ьʌᇍᮏ.3 In this instance, though, we may at the same time suspect the importance of Western views of Confucius, which are cited by Kozaki (9–10).4 In Europe, as Anna Sun demonstrates, Confucianism was already being discussed as a ‘world religion’ by this point, and no doubt the clear institutional identity of the Confucian tradition in Japan also helped (Sun 2012; Paramore 2012). Possibly yet another example of the use of a similar category to Kozaki’s ‘religion of this world’, also suggesting a persisting Buddhist influence, is to be found in the presentation of Meiji Shinto as a ‘non-religion’. For while the issues discussed under this

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rubric may be particular to the Meiji situation, Japanese Buddhists of the period appear to have given the new Shinto they saw emerging before them a position reminiscent of that earlier assigned to ‘worldly’ teachings within their own tradition of polemics (Nitta 2000). Even so, the chief impression given by dipping into Meiji writing on the new category of religion is how very ready all in sundry seem to have been to abandon what they already knew. But we must defer any consideration as to why they did this until we have traced what may be known so far as to how this change came about, and specifically how the terminology needed to express new thoughts came somewhat slowly and erratically into being. Since the English words ‘religion’ and also ‘superstition’ appear in the Bible, its earliest translation into Chinese two hundred years ago could be taken as the point of origin of this process of change. But though the first translator, Robert Morrison (1783–1834), was not quite a renaissance man like some of his Jesuit predecessors, he was by no means uneducated, so he and those who later tried to improve on his efforts in effect did not translate the word ‘religion’ as used in the nineteenth century but rather the Greek underlying its use in the King James Bible, which in James 1.26 means, in fact, something more like ‘devoutness’. Toshikazu S. Foley has, furthermore, traced one occurrence of the translation of the word ‘superstitious’ in the Bible, in passing and in a preliminary way, with equally discouraging results: Morrison has St Paul’s comment on the Athenians that ‘in all things ye are too superstitious’ rendered into Chinese as ‘you revere bodhisattvas too much’, while of the other options surveyed, at least two twentieth-century Chinese Bible translators have the Athenians excessively given to zongjiao, precisely the word in Chinese that has normally come to mean religion as opposed to superstition (Foley 2009: 42–4). Here too, however, the underlying Greek in the New Testament allows for the possible translation of ‘god-fearing’ in a not necessarily negative sense, so the sources of the Christian tradition are by no means as clear cut as most nineteenthcentury Western Christians probably imagined.5 But while the vocabulary of the Chinese Bible seems to have had remarkably little impact, missionary attempts at describing Europe appear to have been far more influential – and not only in China.6 In 1838, Karl Gützlaff (1803–51) describes the Papal States of pre-1870 Italy as constituting

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a jiaozong state. Now both jiaozong and zongjiao (which are formed using the same two Chinese characters but in reverse order) have a number of meanings in East Asian Buddhism, including some omitted even from the best dictionaries; yet neither term is used to translate anything coming from Indian languages.7 Thus apart from the more common meanings, which tend to indicate ‘teachings’ or doctrines within the larger category of a school of Buddhist thought, occasionally one finds jiaozong used to cover the Buddhist religion as a whole, while in the ninth century Pei Xiu 㼪Շ (787?–860) uses the expression to mean a person of religious authority (Dong 1814: 743.7a8). Perhaps significantly, this latter usage, which today is among many Chinese Catholics reserved as the Chinese word for the Pope, was in 1871 used by a Chinese visitor to Europe to indicate a Catholic hierarch immediately below the Pope, presumably a bishop or archbishop (Zhang 1982: 249).8 But the best evidence for the way in which the two elements combined in these terms were used in the middle of the nineteenth century in China comes from the lay Buddhist and political reformer Wei Yuan 内Ⓠ (1794– 1856). In his writings, we find the two separate elements contrasted to signify two different strands in the Chinese Buddhist tradition, namely Chan and doctrinal studies. This type of contrast goes back to the ninth century and is prominent in the tenth; the writings of twentieth-century masters such as Yinguang দ‫( ݿ‬1861–1940) show that it remained current after Wei’s time also (Li 2000: 210). Taken together, in any order, these characters might stand for the whole spectrum of Buddhism. But whatever the proximate derivation of Wei’s deployment of the two elements, they do certainly suggest that the Papal States were being described as ‘religious’. Thereafter another reformer, Xu Jiyu (1795–1873), took up this description of the Papal States as forming a jiaozong institution in 1848, and his writings using the term were introduced into Japan in 1861. By this point, Japanese translators had already been obliged to come up with their own rendering of the word ‘religion’, since as Beasley’s compilation of materials shows, in 1857 a treaty had been signed with the Dutch and in 1858 a further treaty with the Americans that both included provisions mentioning the word (Beasley 1955: 154, 187). Josephson notes the Buddhist institutional overtones here of the equivalent Japanese term selected, shūhō ᇍ⌋, but since that term also had an important meaning in the secular Chinese tradition,

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meaning the principles of the genealogical system inherited from antiquity, one can see that it was not an entirely apt choice (Josephson 2012: 90). In the phrase ‘religious animosity’ in the American treaty, the translators choose the adjective shūshi ᇍᰞ, which Josephson connects with Buddhist sectarian belief, though the meaning is often quite broad (Josephson 2012: 90–1). The word shūkyō for religion seems not to occur in diplomatic materials till 1868 (Josephson 2012: 189). Thereafter, however, this neologism (actually, as we have seen, a neologism combining two elements long associated in China) seems endowed with a marvellous utility. In 1872, one of the first Japanese monks to visit Europe, Shimaji Mokurai ጬ൦唎䴭 (1838–1911), deploys it deftly when speaking generally of ‘the founders of religions’. But in the same piece he also uses shūshi to translate the European word ‘religion’, specifically referring to French (Shimaji 1965: 67). In addition he does use the term kyōshū, the equivalent of the Chinese jiaozong, evidently with a more specific meaning than ‘religion’ as a broad category, but I am not sure I see exactly what he intends by this. At one point in his plea for religious toleration on the European pattern, he distinguishes kyō no shū ᮏʌᇍ (more or less, the moral element in religion) from kyō no jitsu ᮏʌሜ (the outward effects of religion) and kyō no jō ᮏʌ᛻ (the emotional or persuasive element); he later speaks of Buddhism in Southeast Asia as providing the basis for kyōshū there, apparently meaning the first-named category (Shimaji 1965: 64–5, 69). What is conspicuous here is the complete absence of the traditional Buddhist analysis of the situation. Shimaji’s improvised tactical defence against contemporary threats would have immense consequences (Breen 1998). For this trend in time went further: the Shin Buddhist reformer Kiyozawa Manshi ␻◚┵ҁ (1863–1903) in his Skeleton of a Philosophy of Religion prepared for the 1893 World Parliament of Religions, discusses shūkyō as ‘religion’ with some reference to traditional Buddhist notions like causality – but largely within a framework of imported Western categories (Kiyozawa 1970). By this time, then, ‘religion’ had ‘triumphed’ in Japan, not simply as a Western import but as a word fully at home in Japanese discourse. Meanwhile, what had been happening in China? Very little in the way of similar linguistic change, it seems. Even on those occasions when we find Chinese and Japanese discussing religious matters, it is clear that they are able to get along perfectly

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well using their common heritage of shared vocabulary. In 1870, for example, we find the young Chinese traveller Zhang Deyi (1847–1919) setting out for a second visit to Europe on a boat that also carried some Japanese. On being asked if his country honours Confucianism (rujiao ݈ᮏ), he replies that only one or two people in tens and hundreds of thousands support any other teaching (jiao). When he asks in return what teaching is honoured in Japan, his interlocutors tell him, ‘Our country has a national teaching, which is supported by Confucianism. In the past the ignorant masses believed in Buddhism, but now they have all abandoned it’ (Zhang 1982: 62). One is forcibly reminded of Sir Henry Wotton’s dictum that ‘an ambassador is an honest gentleman sent abroad to lie for the good of his country’, though perhaps both sides in this conversation believed what they were saying. Zhang at any rate evidently saw no problem with his assertion despite the fact that earlier in his trip he reports having seen the wife of a colleague toss a manuscript of the Diamond Sutra overboard to quieten a storm.9 Later, too, in Europe he answers a question as to why Chinese had not become Catholics by saying that the school of Confucius is the original teaching of China (Kong men nai Zhongguo zhi ben jiao ᆊ䮶ѹѣുҁᵢᮏ) which none venture to change (Zhang 1982: 120). One wonders to what extent such encounters encouraged a change in the presentation of the Confucian tradition over time, but clearly ‘religion’, or at least zongjiao, does not enter the picture here. No more does it enter the picture even in 1899, when the Japanese plenipotentiary, Yano Fumio ⸘䠄ᮽ䳺(1851–1931), approached the Chinese authorities to argue that since Buddhists from his country also encouraged people to do good, they should be afforded the same standing as other missionaries, in accordance with existing treaties. The Treaty of Tientsin in 1858 had indeed stated in Article VIII ‘The Christian religion, as professed by Protestants or Roman Catholics, inculcates the practice of virtue, and teaches man to do as he would be done by’ (Mayer 1906: 12–13). The Chinese pointed out in reply that the treaties only stipulated Catholicism and Protestantism, not any other jiao, though if the Japanese proposed sending Catholic or Protestant missionaries to China, that of course would be just fine (Zhongyang yanjiuyuan jindaishi yanjiusuo 1980: 2177). At this period, too, we find Chinese intellectuals interested in comparative religion – Tan Sitong 䆐ఙੂ (1865–98) touches on the topic more than once in his Renxue ӷᆮ, completed

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in 1897 – still using the old vocabulary without any apparent problem (Chan 1984: 93, 189, 250, 283). Even the Japanese influence that began to be felt about this time does not seem to have established the Japanese terminology. A work by the educational reformer Mori Arinori ἤᴿ⿤(1847–89), Education in Japan, based on a number of contributions from American educationalists and originally published in English in 1872, was in 1896 rendered into a Chinese version, constantly reprinted, which has a great deal to say about religion and education (Peng 1976: 384–7). But if one checks passages that in the original English discuss religion, one finds zongjiao is by no means the only translation word used, though it does occur.10 Nevertheless, Yang Wenhui ᾀᮽᴹ (1837– 1911), the first Chinese Buddhist ‘to think of Buddhism as a world religion’ (Welch 1968: 10), despite employing a traditional Buddhist analysis of laukika, ‘worldly’ Confucianism, opts for using zongjiao in a broader comparative context (Huang 1995: 8, 27) – and soon enough Chinese Buddhists were fretting over whether they followed a religion, a superstition or something else (He Jianming 1998). Thus, the West ultimately ‘triumphed’ in both Japan and China, but with an interval of at least three decades in between. What was the cause of this divergence? In times past, before the era of reform in China, the success of Japan’s development by contrast with that of China was a much-discussed issue – it was argued, for example, that the explanation was that Japan was subject to fewer international pressures (Moulder 1977). Enough will have been said here to make it clear here that what we have been describing was not development, except perhaps in a retrograde direction. It would be wrong to suggest that earlier in East Asia the various regional cultures were so lacking in complexity that all areas were completely pellucid to all participants – it is clear, for example, that those at the top of the eighteenth-century Manchu society were apparently somewhat baffled by elements in popular belief (Kuhn 1990: 223–30). Yet, everyone spoke the same language, and could communicate effectively on matters relating to the unseen world across social divisions. By contrast, as I have explained elsewhere with regard to the Chinese case, Westerners spoke a language that coped very badly with the outlook of speakers of Chinese, though only the rise of modern anthropological observation, within living memory, eventually exposed the weakness of their analysis (Barrett 2005). The controversy between Ian Reader and Tim

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Fitzgerald suggests that similar problems have bedevilled Japanese Studies also. Note, too, that the scriptures of Christianity could not be used to justify the language imported, as we have seen, because they simply do not deal with religion in the sense used in late-nineteenth-century documents. At best, the New Testament recognizes something called ‘Judaism’ but this, following the Greek usage in 2 Maccabees describes the opposite of ‘Hellenism’ – something no one construed (or construes) simply as ‘a religion’. This all makes it even more mysterious as to why intellectuals in East Asia, Christians or not, should have adopted such an apparently unhelpful vocabulary imposing the new and alien dichotomy of ‘religion’ and ‘superstition’. Fortunately, Josephson’s account now explains something of the issues involved in the ‘invention of religion’, enough to attempt a rough comparative sketch, at least. As the documents translated by Beasley already show, the Tokugawa state derived its legitimacy from its hostility to Christianity.11 Resolving the transition to a new order required delicacy on all sides, and a new, neutral terminology untainted by past associations must surely have helped in that process. But at the same time Japan contained constituencies like those Buddhists represented by Shimaji Mokurai, who perceived how foreign ideas could be pressed into service in the tight manoeuvring between different groups that followed in the wake of the passing of the Tokugawa regime. Entirely different circumstances prevailed in China. Until the emergence of the reformers of the late 1890s no internal constituency existed that could put a new terminology of this type to any use. External pressures too were quite different. In the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842, there is no mention at all of Christianity; rather, it was opium that the British had to sell – we may note that enough of the former commodity had already been imported in any case to precipitate the Taiping Rebellion in due course. Certainly, until the intervention of imperial powers in the second half of the nineteenth century, the protection of missionaries did not loom large on anyone’s agenda. Catholic missions had been subject to sporadic investigation and control into the late eighteenth century, but had been able to cope (Standaert 2001: 522–4). We now know, too, that the initial Protestant plan for China, given the lack of resources available, did not emphasize the insertion of missionary personnel into China with an eye to mass conversions, but rather the education of a small core of Chinese Christian converts (Daily 2013).

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As for outcomes, comparison of how the new situation worked at the level of state intervention suggested to one historian in 1967 that ‘the Chinese people possibly have had a better opportunity to modernise themselves and their society than the Japanese’, taking into account the alacrity with which the Meiji state exploited the possibilities of Shinto as a national faith compared with the failure of proponents of a state Confucianism in China (Kobayashi 1967: 107). To look at matters from the point of view of the ordinary inhabitants of East Asia, though, Chinese in the early twentieth century whose temples were turned into schools explicitly saw themselves as undergoing a process very much like that which took place in Meiji Japan (Duara 1988: 153). How radical that process was there in creating disjunctions emerges with great force and vividness from local studies of Japanese history (Thal 2005). The pace of change emerges as confusing for everyone. Much could be debated regarding these Sino-Japanese comparisons. The consequences, however, of the introduction of the Western term ‘religion’ into discourses concerning the East Asian region, and especially discourses within the region itself, surely cannot be regarded as positive.

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From Field to Text in the Study of Chinese Religion Barend J. ter Haar

Over the past few decades, there has been increasing interest in how Asian Studies and the conceptual categories it uses came into being. An important part of this enterprise has been an increased understanding of how current understandings of religious culture in China have been shaped, and indeed are still being shaped, by specific Western, often Protestant and theologically inspired, assumptions. This increased reflexivity is definitely a good thing, but sometimes it feels as if the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater. Here, I will look at the example of the invention of the category of Confucianism and the question whether we should label it a religion (or religious culture) or philosophy, as a lens through which to consider the longue-durée role of religious culture in the formation of Asian Studies. While crucial categories for describing ‘China’ were created by the Jesuits in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, their nineteenth-century missionary successors made important contributions of their own. The creation of the category of Confucianism seems to have been one of them. In doing so, they were of course still led by Europe- or US-centred preconceptions (App 2009, 2010; Girardot 2002; Reinders 2004). Our first task in this brief study will be to see what different meanings of the category of Confucianism these missionaries created. But there is another dimension as well. When reading the secondary literature from the nineteenth century, one can only be struck by the fact that, despite their prejudices, its authors also often saw more than we can see today, because they lived and worked in the midst of a traditional Chinese social and religious culture that was still fully functional. Here, I aim to use the invention of the category of Confucianism as a religious culture in

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the nineteenth century to argue that its creators were informed not only, rather predictably, by their own prior categories, but just as much by their encounters in the field. They may have been prejudiced, but they were not blind. When the next generation of purely academic writers adopted the label of Confucianism, but redefined it as philosophy, they were inspired by their Western classical training, and the increasing dominance in Chinese academic circles of a textual, philological view of the Chinese classics. At the same time, the relationship between classical textual heritage and social and political life had irretrievably changed in China due to the abolition of the examination system in 1905. In many ways, this next generation of Western authors, as well as their contemporary Chinese colleagues, saw much less than their predecessors. Because the performative dimension of Confucianism was now hidden, though by no means completely gone, and because the new generation of Chinese scholars focused largely on the texts, they became blind to the nineteenth-century meanings of the then-still new neologism Confucianism. The result of this reorientation of the term from religion to philosophy has been a recurrent debate on whether Confucianism ‘really’ is a religion (or, as I would call it, religious culture) or a philosophy. In this debate, the question where the label Confucianism itself has come from is rarely asked, leave alone what it originally referred to (Chen 1999, 2013). I believe that we can learn from nineteenth-century scholars in at least two ways. For one, they had to create a set of characteristics to make up this new label of Confucianism, but each of them did so in very different ways, though always based on experiences in the Chinese world around them. This tells us something about the complete subjectivity of the label, not only at the time that it was created, but by implication also in the subsequent century or so of academic studies of China. There simply cannot be one correct way of defining it, since there is no straightforward relationship between the label and the objects and experiences that it can be taken to denote. The second, and, to my mind, more interesting lesson originates in the earlier observation that nineteenth-century scholars were still able to see the living phenomena that they were attempting to describe and categorize in their full context (Meulenbeld 2015: 27–40). After the devastation of the mid-nineteenthcentury rebellions, followed by revolution and civil war in China, the larger political, social and religious context was destroyed and what remained were

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increasingly isolated fragments of rituals and other practices that were given new meanings or subsequently lost as well. My point here is not that the nineteenth-century scholars were always right, but that it is certainly valuable to take these witnesses to Chinese religious life more seriously than they have been. Finally, quite apart from what we can learn from these earlier scholars, the term or label ‘Confucianism’ itself has become a crucial part of modern interpretations of China and Chinese history. Understanding its history of becoming should help us get a better perspective on the various hermeneutical problems in using or rejecting it. Both nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars were heavily text based. Even scholars who did have a clear interest in living practice privileged texts to an extraordinary degree. One will rarely find them reporting in any detail on the opinions of local people with whom they had had a personal exchange. Nonetheless, living in China and looking around (as well as smelling, listening and touching) made a big difference. As has been and also needed to be demonstrated, this has led to prejudice and bias, but we would be naive to the extreme if we assume that indigenous observers at the time, or indeed Western or Chinese observers today, could be without bias either. The writers whom I study briefly in this chapter did not ask themselves very precisely what ‘religion’ or ‘philosophy’ meant. To them, these were not necessarily in contradiction. Most of them were Protestant in background and still deeply religious. All of them had been brought up in a culture in which Christianity still dominated, with their own (former) religion serving as the implicit benchmark for judging the religiousness of other cultures. Traditional Chinese authors did not raise this question either, since they lacked a notion of religion or philosophy as something that might be identified separately. They would use terms such as ‘teachings’ (jiao ᮏ) or ‘way’ (dao 䚉) and others for what we would nowadays label as either religion or philosophy (Barrett 2009; Campany 2003). To give a very simple definition of religion, I use it to refer to a way of explaining, describing and living (in) a world with reference to some kind of outer values, force or being whose existence is postulated and cannot be denied. Philosophy does much that religion also does, except that any philosophical approach would ideally be open to complete falsification. In practice, the two overlap much of the time in any cultural context, and maybe the distinction is somewhat artificial anyhow.

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My discussion starts with John Barrow’s Travels in China from 1804, followed by missionary authors such as Robert Morrison, Joseph Edkins, James Legge and Justus Doolittle, and the first full-time academic fieldworker in China, J. J. M. De Groot. Except for John Barrow, the others had a rich experience of living in China (or a Chinese environment) for many years or even decades. None of these men created a strong academic school and their work on Chinese religious culture, including Confucianism, would be mostly ignored for much of the twentieth century. Legge is largely known for his translations of the Chinese ‘classics’ (he advisedly did not use the more obviously religious term ‘scriptures’) and De Groot was only rediscovered by Maurice Freedman in the early 1970s (Freedman 1979). Nonetheless, they saw traditional China in ways that were no longer available to academic observers in the twentieth century, as a result of the abolishment of the examination system in 1905 and the waves of destruction of religious institutions that would follow upon each other during the various revolutions, invasions and wars of that century.

The living religious context Compared to most twentieth-century or later writers on Chinese religion, nineteenth-century writers had a much larger exposure to religious life in China. This was not only the result of longer stays in China, since several of the early-twentieth-century scholars on Chinese philosophy also lived for long periods in China, such as J. J. L. Duyvendak (1889–1954) from 1912 to 1918 (ter Haar 2014) or Richard Wilhelm (1873–1930) from 1900 to 1924 (Lackner 1999). When twentieth-century scholars of philosophy lived in China, and this is still true today, they largely interacted with the Chinese intellectuals of their day, rather than living locally among the people and participating, however unwittingly, in the local rhythms of religious life – which included the worship of Confucius as a matter of course. This is quite a difference from their nineteenth-century colleagues who lived in a different time, when religious culture was still alive in all of its different facets, including various forms of worship involving Confucius and the worship of ancestors in all of its richness. In this section, I will survey the varying degrees of exposure of our authors to

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Chinese culture, to prepare the way for the next section in which I then discuss their varying definitions of the term ‘Confucianism’. Most of our authors spoke a variant of the spoken language and were able to read texts in classical Chinese, allowing them at least potentially a considerable degree of access to living Chinese culture. The only exception is John Barrow, who only spoke limited Chinese and whose knowledge was based on his journeys with the Macartney Embassy of 1792–4 to Beijing, his stay of a few months in the Summer Palace (i.e. the Yuanming Park), and some travelling around while in Beijing. On the other hand, he was extremely well read by the time that he composed his final report, some ten years after his original journey. Much of his reading on China was in the French-language literature composed by Jesuit priests in the Qing imperial court, which was the principal source of information on China at the time. Although the embassy was frequently put up in religious institutions, which traditionally functioned as a kind of hotel, Barrow’s information on this topic is quite modest (Barrow 1804: 418–87). He tends to be at his best where he can see, hear or smell things, suggesting that his ability to obtain information through his conversations was limited, explaining why he failed to obtain much information on religious life as a whole, except for what he would call the Confucionists. Notwithstanding Barrow’s limited field experience in China, his book would become extremely influential throughout the nineteenth century (on him and his book, see Adas 1989: 177–83; Kitson 2013: 192–5). Brief reference must also be made to Robert Morrison (1782–1834). He was one of the first Protestant missionaries to the Sinophone world, although his main visit to China itself was as an interpreter in the failed 1816–17 embassy led by Lord William Amherst. Otherwise, his experiences were based on years of living under abominable circumstances in Macao and Guangzhou (Daily 2013, 2014). He is now known best for his dictionary and other linguistic tools, but also wrote various comments on Chinese life in general. Given his location, his opportunities for obtaining a representative view of Chinese religious culture were limited and he does not really relate any personal experiences with this culture in his work. Nonetheless, his work was widely consulted at the time and I will briefly comment upon it below. A very different case is Joseph Edkins (1823–1905), who lived in China from 1848 until his death, first in Shanghai and then also in Beijing. He was an

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active preacher, but at the same time also studied various aspects of Chinese culture assiduously through Chinese books (Penny 2007). In his Religion of China (revised version of 1878), Edkins describes in much detail how he visited Buddhist monasteries, including the recluses living nearby, and how he talked extensively with one of the abbots (Edkins 1878: 42–7, 51–2, 61–3). Similarly, he witnessed officials visiting the local City God as part of their duties, as well as officials holding lectures on the imperial edicts against Buddhist, Daoist and Christian practices (Edkins 1878: 48–9). He once visited the private home of a ‘mandarin of the third class’ (actually the higher echelon), in Suzhou. ‘In the innermost of his apartments up stairs we found what seems to have been the most sacred thing to him that his house contained. It was the shrine and image of Kwan-yin, goddess of mercy. … Before the image sticks of incense were burning, which had been fresh lighted that morning.’ It is unlikely that this was merely the altar of the official’s wife, as it is hard to imagine that such a highly placed official would have let the missionary enter the women’s quarters (Edkins 1859: 85–6). Even though he was still first and foremost a missionary with a very clear Protestant Christian agenda, Edkins had seen a breadth of religious activities in traditional China that would be equalled by very few twentieth-century or later Chinese specialists. From an academic point of view, the most remarkable of all of the early missionaries must be the American Justus Doolittle, who was active in the Fuzhou region, in northern Fujian. He published little articles on his experiences in a Hong Kong newspaper between 1861 and 1864, which he eventually republished and expanded with other materials in his Social Life of the Chinese (1865). Where Edkins’ experiences remained largely textual and limited to larger religious institutions or what he came across in the street, Doolittle acquired a much more intimate knowledge of local social and religious life thanks to his local guides. Like his missionary colleagues, he is quite open about his own religious assumptions, declaring in his preface that ‘for over twenty centuries China has been in bondage to the writings of Confucius and Mencius, and, for nearly the same period, to the religions of Tauism and Buddhism. This fact satisfactorily accounts for many of the absurd, superstitious, and stereotyped opinions and customs prevalent in that empire’ (Doolittle 1865: Preface). Given this statement, one would expect a rather bigoted report on local Chinese religious culture, but it is almost as if

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this admission freed him up to give a detailed and matter of fact report of local religious beliefs and social customs. Timothy Barrett suggests that one reason why Doolittle is so extraordinarily informative may well be that he looked at China without the prior framework created by the French Jesuits of the preceding century (Barrett 2005: 523). A contemporary of Edkins and Doolittle was James Legge (1815–97). He was mostly active as a teacher in Malacca and then Hong Kong, as well as a translator of classical Chinese works. He was in China with some intermissions from 1839 until 1873, but his personal knowledge of China outside Hong Kong was limited to one big journey to Shanghai and North China in 1873 (Girardot 2002; Pfister 2004). He is now best known to us as a translator, but during his time as a fellow and then chair of Chinese at Oxford (1874–97), he also wrote a book on Chinese religions. I include him in my sample because of his significance in the history of Chinese studies, rather than any attested field experience. As far as I know, he did not even write on religious life in the Hong Kong region. As we will see, his influence on the study of Chinese philosophy and religious culture was quite important nonetheless, since he created some crucial translations for Chinese religious terms. Not even remotely a missionary was the Dutch scholar J. J. M. De Groot (1854–1921). He had left the Roman Catholic Church before he entered the university, out of protest against the interference of the parish priest who had wanted to prevent the marriage of his elder sister to a Protestant. His choice for Chinese studies was explicitly to understand China’s religious culture. Moreover, he is customarily described as a sinologist, but saw himself as an ethnologist. Indeed, before he took up the chair of Chinese studies, he was the second occupant of the professoriate in ethnology at Leiden University and the first to have done actual fieldwork (Werblowsky 2002; ter Haar 2006). Between 1886 and 1890, he went to do fieldwork in the Xiamen (Amoy) region in southern Fujian, with trips elsewhere in the province as well. He even learnt photography and kept a fieldwork diary, although sadly only an edited extract is extant, made by himself towards the end of his life. His approach included conversations with local people and very close observation, for instance by living in a Buddhist monastery for several months (De Groot 1893), or attending temple festivals and religious gatherings of local new religious groups. On the other hand, he made extensive use of written texts

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and his work is filled with lengthy quotations. He was extremely eclectic in his selection of materials, allowing him to touch on a wide variety of socioreligious phenomena, interspersed with brief or sometimes more substantial observations about the situation in southern Fujian. Other missionaries such as Arthur Smith (1845–1932) (e.g. Smith 1899), John MacGowan (1835–1922) (e.g. MacGowan 1907) and Lewis Hodous (1872–1949) (Hodous 1929), to mention just a few, would also go on to make many valuable observations of local social and religious practices and beliefs, that we do well to consult and take seriously. Even though they mingled in all kinds of judgements that we might, and probably should, nowadays disapprove of, they saw a much more complete spectrum of religious activities in their larger religious and social context, than we can today. Sadly, we have forgotten about these and other writers, because of their missionary background and extremely judgemental points of views, throwing out the baby with the rather dirty bathwater. Thus, this small article is also intended as a small contribution towards incorporating their work back into our study of the different aspects of traditional Chinese society, while maintaining the requisite critical attitude. In many ways, using their writings is not that different from using the equally biased writings of Chinese literati, which were often very normative and left out large parts of traditional society as well. Moreover, whether we like it or not, their impact on the way in which we construct Chinese religious culture has been crucial, both in terms of what we include and in terms of what we exclude. A case in point is their invention of the term ‘Confucianism’, even if eventually the connotations of this term would again be changed in the course of the early twentieth century.

Confucianism as a religious culture When Protestant missionaries arrived in China, they were confronted with a highly diverse religious culture that was truly strange to them. They talked to local educated men, who would have possessed the cultural baggage that comes with preparation for the civil service examinations. During such conversations, they would have been told by their local informants about the division of Chinese religion/philosophy into the Three Teachings or sanjiao пᮏof ru,

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fo and dao ݈֑䚉. But how should these concepts be translated, and was this religion or philosophy? The Jesuits had once constructed ru as philosophy, to enable them to allow continued ancestor worship by their converts. On the other hand, the famous polymath William Jones identified Confucius both as a philosopher and as having ‘religious opinions’ (Fan 1946; Kitson 2013: 45–59). Since all three teachings involved rituals and showed many similarities to what nineteenth-century Western observers saw as religious culture, it made good sense to understand the three teachings in a similar vein. The term fo was the easiest, since the religious culture or subculture or substratum that was identified as such abounded in figures identified with this term. The first fo of the present time and age (kalpa) was Shakyamuni or the Buddha, as we still call him today. He could be identified with good reason as the founding figure of the religion, henceforth labelled as Buddhism. This was a neat parallel to Christianity or Mohammedanism (as Christians still called Islam at the time), both called after their (purported) founders (Reland 1705). More difficult was the term dao. Clearly, it did not refer to any known person. However, there was this sacred text called the Book of the Way and the Virtue or daodejing 䚉ᗭ㏉. In this book, the concept of the dao or the Way was foundational. The obvious equivalent to something akin to a church were the Heavenly Masters on Dragon and Tiger Mountain, who were living in exile in Shanghai in the latter half of the nineteenth century (Edkins 1880: 391, n. 1). They traced their lineage back to Zhang Daoling ᕫ䚉䲫, who had once received the Book of the Way and the Virtue from its putative author, Laozi 㘷ᆆ, himself. While the text itself had little to do with the later ritual tradition, it functioned as a crucial legitimizing text (like a dynastic treasure) and the concept of the Way was seen by this tradition as the basis of the cosmos, so the choice to name this tradition Daoism (initially spelt Taoism or Tauism) was easily made. The most difficult term was ru. Our early observers learnt quite soon that by the late imperial period ru referred to people, norms, values and ritual practices that could be traced to works ascribed in one form or another to Confucius and his pupils. Of these works, the Five Classics are traditionally seen as composed, edited and/or transmitted by Confucius (Nylan 2001). Of the Four Books, which formed the core of the examination system, only the Mencius was seen as authored by someone else. The choice of the term

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Confucianism named the traditions associated with these texts neatly after their supposed creator. This was especially natural to Protestants who thought of their religion as going back to the life of Christ himself, as recorded in the Bible, rather than a mediating institution like the papacy in Rome. In the limited scope of this essay, I can only trace the outlines of the nineteenth-century origins of the term Confucianism. In 1994, Lionel Jensen suggested in his award-winning Manufacturing Confucianism, that the term had been first coined by the seventeenth-century Jesuits (Jensen 1997). As Nicolas Standaert’s critical review of this book has shown, they may have coined the Latinization Confucius (from the then-current term for him, kongfuzi ᆊཡᆆ), but not the term Confucianism (Standaert 1997). Interestingly, we do not find the term in the main eighteenth-century Jesuit publications either (I have checked Aimé-Martin 1843; Amiot, Bourgeois and de Poirot 1777; contrary to Mungello 1985: 345, claiming the authority of Lundbaek 1983). Anna Sun has recently argued that the term Confucianism as a label for a specific religious tradition, rather than a secular philosophy, arose from James Legge’s 1880 lectures in Oxford, which were published that same year as The Religions of China (Sun 2013: 37; also Girardot 2002: 298–328). In fact, Legge was not at all the first or only one to talk about Confucianism as a religious culture. John Barrow already uses the term Confucionists thrice in his influential 1804 work entitled Travels in China. He does not refer to an -ism, but to a group of people, who had the following cosmology. ‘The Confucionists, like the Stoics, seem to have considered the whole universe as one animated system, made up of one material substance and one spirit, of which every living thing was an emanation, and to which, when separated by death from the material part it had animated, every living thing again returned’ (Barrow 1804: 458). As we will see below, this view is not that different from that of J. J. M. De Groot either. Barrow explicitly criticizes the French Jesuit view of the Confucionists as secular, in his words ‘atheists’: ‘The missionaries in their writings have endeavoured to impress the world with an idea that the Chinese, and particularly the Confucionists, are atheists; that they disbelieve in a future state of existence; and that they are the victims of a senseless superstition. Nothing can be more unjust than such an accusation’ (Barrow 1804: 461–2). After a lengthy description of the religious culture of local temples, he

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uses the term one final time, here it seems as a label for the social group of Confucianists, who pay for the upkeep of their own priests, whether Buddhist or Daoists: The Emperor pays his own priests, which are those of all his Tartar subjects; the Chinese Confucionists, or men of learning, and the state officers contribute to the maintenance of theirs, whether of Fo or Tao-tze (Barrow 1804: 463 call these ‘Sons of Immortals’), and the mass of the people, from the prevailing propensity of enquiring into futurity, afford the means of support to many thousands, I might perhaps say millions of priests, by the offerings carried to the altars whenever they find it necessary to consult the book of fate, which is done on most of the common occurrences in life. (Barrow 1804: 486)

Barrow’s actual descriptions of this religion do not refer to the Confucionists, but rather to the ‘religion of Confucius’. While he recognizes that the dominant religious cultures would be Buddhism (fo), Daoism (tao-tze) or popular temples, he explains that the ‘religion of Confucius’ relates it to anything that is inspired or legitimated by the classical writings associated with Confucius. He includes the worship of Heaven, Earth and agriculture on altars, the metaphysics (his term) of the Book of Changes, and the worship of Confucius by means of a tablet in ‘the house of Confucius’ that is found in every city (Barrow 1804: 452–62). In his description, he describes ancestor worship as a thoroughly religious practice: In the great hall appropriated for this ceremony a plain tablet is erected, on which is painted an inscription, in gilt characters, to this effect: ‘O Congfoo-tse (his italics), our revered master, let thy spiritual part descend and be pleased with this our respect which we now humbly offer to thee!’ Fruit and wine, flowers, perfumes and other articles are then placed before the tablet, during which are also burning various kinds of scented gums, frankincense, tapers of sandal wood and gilt paper. This ceremony, which in every respect is the same to that which he taught as an observance towards the manes of departed relations, they are persuaded is agreeable to the invisible spirits of those to whom it is offered, who delight in hovering over the grateful odour of flowers, of fruit, and the smoke of incense (Barrow 1804: 459).

He emphatically rejects the idea that this was an atheist (we might now use the term secular) tradition, as argued by his French Jesuit sources.

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One of the first China experts to take up the term Confucian, possibly inspired by Barrows, was Robert Morrison, although not yet in a very systematic way. In his Chinese Miscellany published in 1825, for instance, he labels the Confucian tradition a ‘School of Atheistical Materialists’ and defines it as ‘the indispensable system by which to attain honour, offices, and emoluments in that country’ (Morrison 1825: 36, 42; Morrison 1825: 50 mentions Barrow as one of his sources). In an earlier work from 1817, he includes a detailed calendar of local festivals, as well as descriptions of the ‘three sects or religions’, identified as Joo, Shih and Taou. In his description of the ‘Joo-keaou’ he mainly lists the divinities that are officially worshipped by the state, from Heaven and Earth to Emperor Guan 䰒ᑓ and Wenchang ᮽ᱂ (Morrison 1817: 110). He does not use the term Confucianism (or Confucian) here and does not present a systematic discussion, but merely a list. In a letter from 1832, he does refer to the ‘mummery of Buddhism, Tauoism, and Confucianism’, but here he gives precious little information (Eliza Morrison 1839: 464). However, in another letter from the same year he speaks of Confucian atheists, who do not believe in an eternal soul (Eliza Morrison 1839: 469). Although Morrison does not present a sustained narrative on the nature of Confucianism (or the adjective Confucian) it is clear that he uses such terms to refer to state cults, on the one hand, and the class of those who have studied for the examinations and who in his opinion do not believe in an eternal soul. In this final aspect, he clearly continues the old Jesuit idea of literati as atheists – whether this is entirely correct is another matter, of course. In his limited exposure to China before the country was increasingly opened up to foreigners, he could indeed not have had a much more elaborate view than this. This was very different from Joseph Edkins, who did have broad social encounters. Edkins identified Confucianism as a religion in the 1859 book entitled The Religious Condition of the Chinese (based on journal articles in the preceding years; revised and republished in 1878 as Religion in China). He saw Confucius as someone who found a ‘religion already existing in China, with a very practical system of moral’ (Edkins 1859: 7). But he is also very much aware that there is more, such as a variety of temples, including that for Confucius, which he describes in some detail. Interestingly, he feels that for instance children ‘do not, indeed, suppose him to have the attributes of a god, but they pay him religious respect, as the embodiment of all that is sacred and

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good’. Other temples that he identifies as belonging to the Confucian religion are the shrine for local virtuous women and the altar for agriculture. He feels that these institutions are ‘funereal’ in character, or abodes of the dead, which he also deduces from the presence of tablets (shenwei ⾔փor lingwei 䵾փ) as the residence of the spirits worshipped here (Edkins 1859: 28–32). He identifies ‘the religious veneration paid to ancestors’ as founded on the duty of filial piety, which is one of the moral values propagated by Confucianism (Edkins 1859: 58–9). Edkins’ description differs little from Barrow’s, but makes some additions that suggest that he came to this description independently. Throughout his booklet, Edkins places moral values in a religious context, which no doubt derives from his Protestant background. This would also have prepared him for seeing Confucianism (a term that he explicitly and repeatedly uses) as a religion. As already noted, a very different witness to China was the American missionary Justus Doolittle. In his fascinating The Social Life of the Chinese, Doolittle starts his discussion of the ‘Priests of Confucianism, or the Sect of the Learned’ by discussing the so-called ‘professors of ceremonies’, probably a translation of the Chinese lisheng ⿤⭕ (Doolittle 1865, I: 265). Doolittle distinguishes those who are employed by the local officials and those employed by the local people. According to him, both the ‘mandarins’ and their ritual specialists are Confucians at heart. Although most modern scholars of Confucianism in any definition would be hard put to identify the ‘professors of ceremonies’, both Liu Yonghua on Fujian and David Johnson in his work on exorcist ritual theatre in northern China noted the existence of this category of local ritual specialist. Johnson explicitly discusses the remarkable similarities in ritual practice between their activities and what we are more accustomed to seeing as state or Confucian religion (Liu 2013 and Johnson 2010: 91–2, 311–15). According to Doolittle, Confucianism consists of the religious, moral, and philosophical tenets and doctrines which are to be found in the Chinese classics, the writings of the sages and the worthies of antiquity. It numbers among its adherents and followers all the learned men of the country. Many of them might also be considered Buddhists and Tauists, if regard be had to what they perform as religious acts, or permit to be performed in their families (Doolittle 1865, I: 267–8).

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Later in his book, he makes implicitly clear that to him Confucianism in the sense of religion is a translation of the Chinese term rujiao or ‘teachings’, when he says, ‘The Chinese usually speak of only three native religions – Confucianism, Buddhism, and Tauism.’ He then goes on to oppose this to state religion, including the worship of Confucius (Doolittle 1865, I: 380–97). Similarly, he separates the Confucian religion from the custom of public moralistic lecturing, which was increasingly popular in the late imperial period (Doolittle 1865, II: 463, n. 1). Thus, the conceptualization of Confucianism at the time was still in statu nascendi. Doolittle also suggests, at least for his own region of Fuzhou, that even in the nineteenth century, a ‘large majority of the literary class, or the Theoretical Confucianists, although they pretend to disbelieve and despise the doctrines of the Buddhists, practice, or allow members of their families to practice, the superstitious rites and ceremonies of these religionists which relate to future rewards and punishments’ (Doolittle 1865, II: 449). In my opinion, this is a crucial observation, which tallies well with the one by Edkins quoted above. It also underlines their analysis that both Confucianism and Buddhism at the time are better understood as forms of religion, or maybe even still parts of a single larger religious culture. This culture also had more strongly philosophical expressions, but never excluded religious forms of feeling and worship. Whereas people like Edkins and Doolittle had a fairly broad knowledge of living Chinese religious culture that informed their thinking, James Legge was much less knowledgeable about living religious culture and also took a completely different approach towards understanding it. In 1880, James Legge published The Religions of China, which dealt with both Confucianism and Daoism, and compared them with Christianity. ‘I use the term Confucianism, therefore, as covering, first of all, the ancient religion of China, and then the views of the great philosopher himself, in illustration or modification of it, his views as committed to writing by himself, or transmitted in the narratives of his disciples’ (Legge 1880: 4). The discussions that follow clearly indicate that this included the Classics and the Four Books, which he at the time was translating, but also state religion and ancestor worship. Apart from very few remarks based on living religious practice, he draws mostly on old texts, much as a Protestant might who is raised to prioritize the written text of the Bible (Legge 1880: 196–202). Legge’s decisive influence on the field of religious

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studies would be his studious avoidance of the term ‘scripture’ for jing (㏉), to prevent equalling them to the Holy Scripture. Legge kept strictly to his texts and made no study whatsoever of their ritual context, which would indeed have been very difficult for him as he spent most of his time in the foreign community of Hong Kong and later in even more isolation from the Chinese world in Oxford. Although Legge himself positioned his translations of the ‘classics’ within a religious framework, the use of the term ‘classics’ allowed later users of his translation to read them primarily as philosophical works. These earlier missionaries described and analysed the books that they read and the rituals that they saw differently, but they certainly agreed that Confucianism was a religious culture. They saw a set of ritual activities that according to the educated elite derived from the sayings of Confucius and the writings that he had edited, transmitted and/or compiled. They might include different activities under the label, which in Chinese would have been rujiao ݈ᮏ, but they were certain that Confucianism was not just philosophical texts, but also included a broad range of ritual activities for supernatural beings or forces. I conclude my all-too-brief discussion with the Dutch ethnologist and sinologist J. J. M. De Groot, through his less-known synthetic work, entitled The Religion of China (lectures given in the United States in 1910 and published in 1912; later much expanded as Universismus and published in Germany in 1918). He provides the following remarkably inclusive definition of Confucianism: The state religion, accordingly, may be called classicism. It may be called Confucianism, universalism, or Taoism. It may be called canonical, and orthodox, for, since there is only one Tao, or order of the world, and one set of bibles or classics promulgating and maintaining the Tao among men, all other religion must naturally be inconsistent with the universe itself, and consequently dangerous for the government and the human race. (De Groot 1910: 93 and De Groot 1918; compare Edkins 1878: 20)

It becomes clear later that, unlike the missionaries, he does not include ancestor worship in Confucianism (De Groot 1910: 99). The above is a very striking definition. The Confucianism as he defines it definitely includes the classics ascribed in one way or another to Confucius, but also the entire edifice of state cults that is traditionally traced back to the classics. Moreover, he places Confucianism and Daoism on the same level because they share

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the same overall cosmology, which goes back to the Way or dao. For a long time scholars have separated the two, but Anna Seidel in an epochal article demonstrated the common roots of Confucian (~state) ritual tradition and Daoist ritual tradition in the feudal rituals of the Zhou period (Seidel 1983). Intriguingly, in the same chapter entitled ‘Confucianism’, De Groot also describes the worship of local cults (which he even calls Confucian deities!) and the practices of Daoist priests and mediums (as we would label them) (De Groot 1910: 121–31). To him, this was a continuum of religious practices, beginning with the state cult that was real classicism or Confucianism, rather than a separation between ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ practices. We can no longer ask him, but it is worthwhile to keep in mind that territorial deities in particular were constructed as repositories of higher values such as ‘loyalty’ and ‘righteousness’, if they were (and were to be) recognized by the state. While we today might not use the label Confucian anymore, properly recognized temple cults were worshipped by magistrates or even by the emperor and his highest representatives. De Groot concludes by judging that Confucianism, as defined by him in a rather broad manner, is too focused on concrete material gains and therefore should be called a religion of a lower order. It is very tempting to point out the various ways in which we now (sometimes) disagree with De Groots analysis, not in the least because we have subsequently developed such a different, more philosophy oriented view of Confucianism. There is a well-established tendency to scoff at his analysis (Erkes 1919; Leese 2004; more in ter Haar 2006). But we should not forget that all definitions of Confucianism are modern constructions anyhow, meaning that there is no a priori reason why his way of combining things is worse (or better) than ours. What is certain is that state religion, local religion, Confucianism and Daoism have much more in common than we are wont to think because of our modern handling of the labels. De Groot would duly quote his sources, but ultimately his insights were based on a total of some six years of focused fieldwork, mostly in the province of Fujian. He makes no mention of Confucian scholars as informants, and we know that as a young student he had already skipped the classes of the Confucian teacher in Xiamen who was supposed to instruct him in spoken Chinese (oral communication Koos Kuiper 2012). This will have allowed him a very different entry into his sources than most writers since him who have been heavily influenced by literati views that would invariably privilege texts.

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A sea change We have long forgotten that reading, or more likely reciting, the Chinese classics, too, was itself a highly charged religious event, even involving at times the burning of incense in order to establish contact with higher (~supernatural, in our words) dimensions (e.g. Li 1990: 130–1). Reciting the Four Books was much more than just an ideological exercise, but would be accompanied by worship and sacrifice at various levels (in school and in the state cult, minimally) as well. I would even argue that the texts were so sacred precisely because of the ritual context. Similarly, the worship of Confucius was directly connected by all literati to their studies for the civil service examinations, indeed from their first education onwards. Both Guo Moruo (1892–1978) and Shen Congwen (1902–88) write in their auto-biographies about their primary school education in the final years of the imperial era, how their schools featured a spirit tablet for Confucius and how they would be punished in front of this spirit tablet (Guo 1955: 34; Shen 1947: 14). Although ancestor worship has a much more complicated history, with an important role for Buddhist inspired practices such as the Ghost Festival and funerary rituals, it was conventionally constructed as the product of texts that were associated with the figure of Confucius, such as the Book of Rites and the Book of Filial Piety. The basic intuition of these nineteenth-century authors of associating something called Confucianism with religious culture was not necessarily wrong. Moreover, our five authors came to this observation despite substantially different backgrounds and types of expertise, from the isolated observer Barrow without much linguistic expertise, writing around the turn of the nineteenth century, to the missionaries Edkins, Doolittle and Legge in the nineteenth century, and finally the first academic ethnographer in China, De Groot, who did most of his fieldwork in the early 1880s and wrote most of his work on religious culture in the following three decades. But for all their faults of perception, these early observers could see the larger cultural or religious context as a whole, unlike their more academically sophisticated successors of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The fact that the term ‘Confucianism’ cannot be traced back beyond the early nineteenth century and was almost invariably associated with religious activities is not unimportant. It was in part developed as a label against the

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Jesuit practice of thinking about the literati and their philosophical ideas as an atheistic tradition. Thus, from a historical perspective the term is directly connected to the identification of a religious culture, even if that culture was identified by different authors in quite different ways. After De Groot, several developments caused a fundamental change in the way that Confucianism was to be constructed throughout the twentieth century. The abolishment of the examination system took much of the meaning out of the sacrificial rituals for Confucius. By the time of the May Fourth Movement, Confucianism was even considered responsible for many of the social ills that intellectuals at the time perceived to plague China (Chow 1960). Although Kang Youwei had attempted to create a Confucian religion (kong jiao ᆊᮏ) that could serve as the national religion in the same way that Christianity did in the West, this had largely failed by the time of the 1911 Revolution (Kuo 2013). In Europe, the new dominant way to study China was by means of the philological approach, under the influence of classical studies. This meant translating early philosophical texts, dating them and analysing their contents. The nineteenth-century authors discussed above were soon forgotten, except for the translations produced by James Legge. But where Legge had positioned his translation of the ‘classics’ within a religious framework, they were later read primarily as philosophical works. The fact that he had avoided the term ‘scripture’ for these texts, to prevent equalling them to the Holy Scripture, made this shift in contextualization only easier. In China, there continued to be groups for whom Confucianism remained a source of inspiration, although they might disagree considerably on its contents. For Western authors, however, what was originally seen as a religious phenomenon in itself was increasingly seen as the philosophical parallel to early Greek philosophy and its successors. Subsequent work on Confucianism in Europe and Northern America would be largely textual and almost completely ignored the larger ritual background (or in my view the religious cultural context) of Confucian ideas that had existed through most if not all of their history. They would continue to use the nineteenth-century label, but constructed it now largely as a philosophy rather than a religion. De Groot’s pupil J. J. L. Duyvendak produced a standard narrative of a sequence of texts that is entirely the product of philological tradition, from Lunyu to Mengzi to Xunzi and so forth (ter Haar 2014). Richard Wilhelm, who had worked

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in China first as a missionary (1900–20) and then as an academic (1922–4), would also privilege the texts, no doubt influenced by his own Protestant text-oriented background and his intellectual advisers, such as the traditional scholar Lao Naixuan (Wilhelm 1929: 27–33, 42–50; Lackner 1999). Of the latter, it is well attested that he had no love lost for traditional religious culture, but was primarily an ideologically conservative official and philological scholar (Sielaff 1988). Nonetheless, Wilhelm would distinguish the ‘ritualists’ as the latter day keepers of Confucius’ heritage, whose practices he analyses as follows: ‘It is an agnostic religion, a religion as if, that was cultivated by them (Es ist eine agnostische Religion, eine Religion als ob, die von ihnen gepflegt wurde).’ According to him, Confucius was already reticent with respect to religion (or in my terms religious culture), and later generations developed this into outright scepticism (Wilhelm 1929: 52–6, esp. 53; compare Graham 1989: 15–18). Whether we agree with this judgement is, as always, very much a matter of definitions, although it is difficult to deny the larger religious context of the worship of ancestors, for instance in its incorporation of a wide variety of Buddhist rituals and stories. As a footnote, I would like to offer a further, slightly more speculative perspective here as well. Religious practice in traditional China, including the Confucian rituals directed at Confucius and his real or imagined pupils, state as well as ancestral cults, all involved the sacrifice of bloody meat and alcoholic spirits, as well as the burning of incense. To Christian-informed sensibilities, this must have been highly problematic.1 This was true of the sacrifice of meat and spirits which to the modern Christian mind was too concrete and brutal. There was of course the Roman Catholic Eucharist that consisted of the consumption of the consecrated host and red wine that were trans-substantiated into the Body of Jesus Christ. And the Protestant version that was even more abstract, at least in Calvinist and Lutheran traditions, with the sharing of bread and red wine in remembrance of Christ. The burning of incense was yet another insult to Christian sensibilities. In the Roman rite the priest will fill the ritual space with his incense burner at various points, but none of the worshippers will burn incense himself or herself. The Protestant rite does not use any incense at all and indeed the burning of incense is looked upon disapprovingly. Obviously, all of the writers whom we have encountered in our discussion were themselves devout Protestants, except for the Roman

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Catholic J. J. M. De Groot who had left his church in early adolescence and had grown up in a largely Protestant environment anyhow. Unlike the twentiethcentury authors, however, they did not necessarily write about China to admire it. Precisely because of their often dismissive attitude to China, they also did not need to make it palatable either. Protestant writers such as Duyvendak and Wilhelm wrote in order to make China and Confucianism part of world history, which also meant making it palatable. This was even more true of many subsequent writers, down to this very day. In such a view of Confucianism, there is certainly no room for sacrifice and incense burning. Thus, while the word Confucianism may be a nineteenth-century coinage and generally included religious contents, this view of Confucianism as a religious culture did not survive the descent into philology that took place in the course of the twentieth century. While influential and significant in terms of our own intellectual history, these new narratives were quite divorced from the realities of Warring States philosophical debate (when none of these texts existed as yet), equally far from Chinese intellectual history (since these texts were never read as stand-alone objects, but always with crucial commentaries), and even further from the lived reality of Confucian religious culture of the last ten or more centuries (exceptions are Chow 1994; Wilson 1995; Wilson 2002). In this study I have tried, first, to show that the category of Confucianism was a nineteenth-century creation, which then evolved from a definition of the different things that were thought to be contained in it as ‘religion’ (or in my own terminology ‘religious culture’, that is, a specific dimension of a culture, rather than something that can stand alone), to a new definition of quite different things that were now thought to be contained in it as ‘philosophy’. Second, I would propose that we take nineteenth-century scholarship much more seriously than many of us are wont to do, because they lived in a time when whatever we want to label as Confucianism was still alive in its larger social, religious and philosophical contexts. Can we then save the phenomenon? In other words, can we simply declare that we will use the term Confucianism today as the term ru or Classicism was used in the past? Sadly, I do not think that this is possible either. First of all, the term Confucianism suggests very different connotations from ‘classicism’, and indeed that is precisely why the latter term is now the preferred translation for ru. But even then, I do not think that we actually have a good sense of

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how ru was used, since we prefer to ignore the cultic, or what I would label as religious, elements. If my final comments are right, the fact that most of us largely ignore these elements also has much to do with twentieth-century history and the need to upgrade Confucian philosophy by divesting this larger culture of its religious dimensions. Making Confucianism secular also makes it more palatable to the secular mind. It seems to me that the question whether Confucianism is religion or philosophy is usually answered on the basis of our own ideological needs and our own view of the status of religion and philosophy, rather than an analysis of its contents and practice. Here, a closer look at the way in which the term was originally defined by nineteenth-century scholars may help us get closer to the real issue, which is not what Confucianism really is, since it is whatever we want it to be, but rather what the underlying practices, beliefs and texts did for and meant to people at the time, understanding it as one larger whole in its own chronological and spatial and social contents, rather than making it serve any modern agendas. In moving away from just debunking previous scholars as Orientalists, or chastising ourselves for our own modern agendas, we should, most of all, make our agendas more explicit still. Our Western predecessors, and maybe we as well, saw things in certain ways that can be instructive to us today. In doing so, they influenced us as well as their objects of study, whether Chinese, Korean or Japanese, in the way that they themselves looked at their own religious and/or philosophical studies. Thus, we can broaden our topic still further by asking ourselves not only why academics look at Confucianism in certain ways, but also how our colleagues and their own predecessors looked at it, and why. A truly international Asian Studies would mean the inclusion of all these perspectives, even if that does not necessarily make the job of writing any easier.

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Religion in Korean Studies: The Case of Historiography Marion Eggert

Many fruitful trajectories could be chosen in the attempt to look at Korean Studies through the lens of religion. For both past and present, we may ask about the role of religion as a motivation for the study of Korea, and as an object or thematic field within Korean Studies. And indeed, religion was important in both senses at the time of the inception of the field, and continues to be so today – perhaps more so than is the case with the larger surrounding ‘areas’ of Area Study, China and Japan. In this chapter, I will mainly focus on religion in historiography. However, in order to provide some contextualization, I will start with a few general remarks on some peculiarities of Korean Studies as such, particularly as it is practised outside of Korea. In the mid-1980s, when I decided at some point during my undergraduate studies of Sinology in Munich to learn more about Korea, I tried to find relevant literature in the Bavarian State Library. Since, of course, there were no electronic databases available at that time, I had to consult the thematically arranged card catalogue. Keywords were attached to the front of the card trays. No tray was tagged ‘Korea’, but when I checked the card trays marked for ‘Japan’, I found Korea as a sub-section. About 80 per cent of the cards contained therein concerned the Korean War – to my delight, in a way, because it rendered the remainder of ‘Korean Studies’ so manageable. Two lessons about Korean Studies can be taken from this little anecdote. First, Western literature on Korea used to be – and still is, to some extent – quantitatively dominated by works about Korea on the world stage. Besides the Korean War, the most recurrent themes of the more popular literature on Korea concern

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the economic ‘miracle’ of South Korea (South Korea having been a battlefield for development theories in the 1970s, the country’s rapid economic rise still serves as a source of arguments for modernization theorists who are happy to forget about the immense Western support for this bulwark of capitalism), and North Korea as a problem of US Foreign Policy, especially the recurring nuclear crises. More often than not, however, these writings would not be subsumed under Korean Studies by scholars in the field, since their authors usually have no knowledge of the Korean language, and many do not even define themselves as Korea experts (being political scientists or economists, or in some cases journalists). We will therefore exclude this kind of non-specialist writing from the field of Korean Studies treated here, narrowing our object of inquiry down to linguistically, culturally and historically informed academic writings. Yet, as a side note, we might note that even in the former kind of writings, religion is not absent as a theme. In literature on the Korean War, the conflict is often depicted in terms of a dividing line between a Christian and a Communist Korea. In ‘economic miracle’ writings, Confucianism is quite often mentioned as a source of success (depending on the latest state of the South Korean economy – during the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, Confucianism rather served as the explanation for economic failure). In studies of North Korea, the religious character of the Juche ideology is highlighted. Second, the Bavarian State Library’s card trays illustrated the degree to which Korea tends to be perceived as an appendix to its larger neighbours by the larger public until quite recently. The facts of Korea’s geography and its historical integration first into the Chinese tribute order and later into the Japanese Empire forced those concerned with Korea to engage with this view, whether they shared it or not. This had, on the one hand, the advantage of making the employment of a comparative perspective (at least with China and Japan) quite natural to Korean Studies scholars. At the same time they were (and still are) tempted to counter the misperception of Korean cultural dependency by overly Korea-centric narratives and the tendency to over-emphasize Korean uniqueness. Religion is certainly a thematic field that encourages comparative study – the present volume itself is evidence of this. Conversely, an interest in studying one’s own area of specialization in comparative terms can lead to a  focus on religion. This said, comparative perspectives are often used in Korean Studies to highlight Korea’s uniqueness. Thus, rather than taking

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Korea as a case study to learn about religion, religion is more often employed as a means to learn more about Korea. In this general trend of emphasizing Korean uniqueness, Western ‘Korea hands’ and (later) Korean Studies scholars were united with Korean scholars, and in this far reaching alliance between them we have a third characteristic of Korean Studies that probably differentiates it from most other Area Studies. Different from the other countries around it, by the time of the rise of geopolitically engaged Oriental Studies in the mid- and late-nineteenth century, Korea was of little political and economic interest to Western imperialist powers. In the struggle to survive between Japanese, Chinese and Russian imperial ambitions, gaining the interest (and therefore protection) of Western countries appeared as one strategy to counterbalance the encroachment on Korea’s sovereignty by her neighbours. Thus, quite from the beginnings of whatever may be called Western Korean Studies, there was a sense of shared objectives between those Westerners whose knowledge of Korea was their selling point, and Koreans eager to inform Western audiences about their history and culture. This remained the case throughout the colonial period. Of course, Korean Studies outside of Korea was and is certainly not free of competition and struggles with Korean scholars about approaches and the prerogative of interpretation, but a shared conviction that it is first of all necessary to create interest in Korea and prove the relevance of Korean Studies within academia at large has tended to gloss over much of this. In the field of religious studies, this tendency is probably especially strong, since scholars engaged in it often share religious motives on top of their common interest in strengthening ‘Korea’s position’. As in other East Asian Studies fields, religious motivation has indeed been a strong factor in the engendering of Korean Studies: All the groundwork has been laid by missionaries, with the exception perhaps of geographical/geological studies. The earliest book-length Western language treatment of Korea’s history was Claude-Charles Dallet’s (1829–78) History of the Church of Korea (Histoire de l’Église de Corée), published in 1874 and composed from the records of missionaries of the Société des Missions étrangères de Paris who had been present in Korea from 1837 onward, as the first and only Westerners to proselytize in Korea until 1884. Similarly, William E. Griffis (1843–1928), a seminary graduate teaching in Japan, published a much used handbook on Korea in 1882, Corea,

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the Hermit Nation, without ever having visited the country. He based this work, among other sources, on the writing of John Ross, who as missionary to Manchuria had visited the Korean border and produced the first Korean grammar, Corean Primer, in 1877. What could be dubbed the first Korean Studies journal, the Korean Repository, was edited by Homer Bezaleel Hulbert (1863– 1949), one of the earliest Protestant missionaries in Korea. The man considered the founding father of Korean Studies in Germany, André Eckardt (1884–1974), a member of the order of St Benedict, proselytized in Korea between 1909 and 1929. He wrote books, some of them path breaking, on Korean music, arts, language, script and literature. Needless to say, while motivations to choose certain fields of cultural–historical inquiry may have been of a quite individual nature (Eckardt, for example, was the son of an artist and a composer), the general religious motivation behind the avant-garde role missionaries played in the accruing and dissemination of ‘area’ knowledge was twofold: the need to learn enough about their potential proselytes to communicate effectively with them, and the need to arouse enough interest in their mission fields with their audience at home to secure continued financial support. These motives aligned themselves well with the interest their Korean ‘informants’ and their counterparts had in religion, especially – but not only – Christianity. Both sides were united in a discourse on ‘civilization’ and modernization that posited for religion a central role in the achievement of a high civilizational status and, most crucial for Korean intellectuals, national survival. The former aspect – the state of religion as marker of civilizational achievement – was utilized and thus afforded significance by Japanese scholars engaged in the project of justifying Japan’s domination over Korea through the denigration of Korean culture.1 Thus, Japanese scholars like Takahashi Tōru (1878–1967) tended to denigrate Korean Buddhism as an uncreative tradition entirely imitative of its Chinese counterpart (Takahashi 1929; Buswell 1999: 103; Mohan 2010: 295). Meanwhile, Korean shamanism (first identified as such by Western visitors in the last decade of the nineteenth century) and other expressions of folk religiosity were used as evidence for Korean backwardness and irrationality, a point where Japanese viewpoints coincided with Western ones and those of Korean enlightenment thinkers (Hwang 2009: 78–80). The assumption that Korean religious customs were a dangerous source of resistance both to the forces of modernization and to colonial rule

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led to thoroughgoing Japanese surveys of these traditions and customs, most notably those by Murayama Chijun (1891–1968) in the 1930s which, in spite of their hardly hidden agenda, laid the groundwork for later studies in these fields, be it his work on Korean ghost beliefs (1927), geomancy (1931) or ‘new religions’ (1935). Korean intellectuals did not leave these assaults on their traditions unanswered. Since – especially after annexation – the spiritual survival of the nation was at stake, religion became one of the primary foci of nationalist scholarship. Much effort concentrated on demonstrating the originality and independence of the Korean Buddhist tradition, with Yi Nŭnghwa (1869–1943) compiling vast collections of historical material and Ch’oe Namsŏn (1880– 1957) providing many of the perspectives that have informed post-liberation scholarship on Korean Buddhism until recently (Buswell 1999: 100–5). Along the lines of a nationalist re-claiming of Korean tradition, even shamanism/folk religion was redeemed from centuries-old intellectual neglect and disdain. From the 1920s onwards, it found itself elevated to the position of the spiritual foundation of Korea throughout her history. Again, both Ch’oe Namsŏn and Yi Nŭnghwa played an important part in formulating these claims (Tangherlini 1999: 130; Kim 1992: 135). Seeing how that the story of Korea’s political history led to the loss of sovereignty to a foreign power, nationalist history became instead identified with a history of the nation’s spiritual lifelines. But even before colonization, already from the late nineteenth century onwards, missionaries and many of their elite Korean audience had agreed that religion (and at this early stage, this word, even for Koreans, usually meant Christianity), was an ‘intangible strength’ indispensable for the retaining (or, later, regaining) of state sovereignty (Wells 1990). As an anonymous author wrote in the newspaper Taehan Maeil Sinbo in 1905, shortly after Japan had forced Korea into protectorate status: Today, the number of Christians in Korea has reached several tens of thousands, and all of them, even at the point of death, pray to Heaven for the maintenance of Korea’s independence, and recommend [the Christian religion] to their compatriots. This forms the foundation of Korea’s independence. Some shallow fellows view these developments cynically, but in a few years they will surely see their results. (Sin’gyo chagang, Taehan Maeil Sinbo, 1 December 1905, in Tikhonov 2010: 115)

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Of course, as the last sentence shows, the strong ‘recommendation’ of Christianity was a minority view in Korea, although this minority was perhaps the most vocal group. However, even if Christian theology was far from universally shared, Christianity-derived views of history became rampant in the wake of the spread of ‘civilizational discourse’. The traditional, Confucian mould of historiography with its emphasis on the legitimacy of rule and moral evaluation of conduct and its preferred form of chronicle was replaced by a narrative historiographical mode seeking progress, purpose and plot through time. In a situation where ‘Korea’ was on the brink of disappearing, salvation history – in whatever way this salvation was conceived of – carried promise and the power of conviction. The newly widened and differently structured concept of space to which educated Koreans had to adapt went hand in hand with a similarly different conceptualization of historical time. While space reduplicated, with its centre of gravity dissolving into infinity, historical time became streamlined, condensed into a vector of development.2 A fine example of this new sense of history – and of the fact that it needed explication – is Sin Ch’aeho’s (1880–1936) introduction to his Ancient History of Korea (Chosŏn sanggosa), where he defines history: What is history? It is a record of the state of the mental activities that make up the development in time and expansion in space of the struggle between the Ego and the Non-Ego in human societies. … What is the ‘ego’, what is the ‘non-ego’? Put simply, what is placed in the position of subject is the ‘ego’, what is external to it is the ‘non-ego’. To a Korean, for example, Korea is the ego, and England, Russia, France, America, and so on are the non-ego; ... . The property-less class considers itself as the ego … while the landlord or the capitalist class considers itself as the ego. ... (Sin 1924, trl. partly adapted from Lee 1996: 483)

The subject of history, the ego, is unequivocally marked as the outcome of a construction. History writing is portrayed not only as a record of struggle between ego and non-ego, but also as a tool in this struggle. Narrative history writing, we may conclude, was clearly seen as demanding a moralizing inner trajectory. Thus, the vision of a plot in history, the struggle for national survival and the conviction of missionaries and their proselytes that only God could save the country converged into a tendency to assume a religious plot for Korean history,

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or else to write the history of Korea in religious terms. For those (Westerners) directly or indirectly engaged in the missionary enterprise, the pivot of Korean history resided in the special hopes they had for this country in relation to the broader Christianization of East Asia. As early as 1888, a long time before the numbers of converts or even the general intellectual trends of the times could lend any substance to such ideas, Griffis wrote – in his preface to the second edition of the above-mentioned work – that, the Korean character being ‘a happy medium between the stolid Chinaman and the changeable Japanese’, ‘Corea may become Christian sooner and more thoroughly than Japan, and might aid in the mighty work of evangelizing China’ (Griffis 1894: xi). Such sentiments could only grow stronger when Korea proved to be relatively open to the proselytizing efforts and events like the P’yŏngyang revival movement of 1907 seemed to bespeak a spiritual inclination of Koreans towards the Christian message as well as practice. Christianity was seen – and represented to Koreans – as the fulfilment of Korean religious traditions, imbuing past tribulations and what Sin Ch’aeho would have called ‘defeats of the ego’ with deeper significance (Oak 2013: 311–16). Religion became the thread to bind experiences and events into history, to provide the plot that could turn past defeats into future glory. The work most illustrative of this inner logic is a book tellingly titled The history of Korea seen in terms of its meaning (Ttŭs-ŭro pon Han’guk yŏksa), authored by the quaker Ham Sŏkhŏn (1901–89). This history was first serialized in 1934–5 in the journal Sŏngsŏ Chosŏn (Bible Korea) under the title ‘Korean history from a biblical point of view’ (Sŏngsŏjŏk ipchang-esŏ pon Chosŏn yŏksa), with book versions appearing in 1950 and (with the new title) 1965. An English version, published in 1984, carries the title Queen of Suffering. Starting from the claim that ‘history flows from meaning’ (Ham 1986: 44), Korean history is told as the story of a chosen people who have to undergo a seemingly endless series of suffering and defeats in order to help bring about a kind of historical salvation. The contemporaneous tribulations (colonial status in 1934/5, military dictatorship in the 1960s) are interpreted as a ‘trial stage in Korean history’ from which both the special significance of Korea within ‘universal history’ and the ultimate triumph would spring forth. The Bible – more precisely, the suffering of Jesus – becomes the obvious template for the narration of Korean history. But in Ham’s view, religion as a

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basis for the understanding of history is not restricted to the Christian model. He emphasizes that he chose this model only since he was best acquainted with it. In general, he claims, history needs a religious core in order to unfold in a meaningful way. So much are history and religion intertwined in his view that, in fact, the (religious) meaning of life can only be grasped in the context of the unfolding of history. Religiosity needs to be firmly based, he argues, both in individual lived experience and in ‘a significance-producing understanding of history’ (Ham 1934/no. 61: 28). But the production of significance in history does not mean an amplification of possible meanings of events, but their limitation, a narrowing down of history to a single, unified narrative: [That history is] a record of the factual events of the past is of course correct. However, to pick out a number of factual events and record them in detail from beginning to end is not yet history. In recording the events, one has to make out the living relations between the facts and bring them into a systematic order. By aligning the links of causality between the facts, history has to be brought into the form of a unified body. There is only one history. The history of Chosŏn [Korea] is not a lining up of the happenings of five thousand years in individual paragraphs, but is one whole, living entity. … What we call a historical record must be understood as a reconstruction of a complete, unified living entity, using the historical facts as material. But this reconstruction is not a reconstruction of phenomena, but of meaning; therefore the record is, rather than a record, an interpretation. It comes close to the truth to call it an artistic creation. (Ham 1934/no. 62: 58)

But this narrowing down can only succeed if the narration is based on a single, unified standpoint, and here, history conflates with religion: For writing history, one needs a view of history (sagwan). ... The view of history that brings forth an understanding of the true meaning of the life of humans in this universe is the view of history contained in the bible. (Ham 1934: 62/60)

Non-Christian intellectuals of colonial times agreed – not necessarily with the contents, but with the historical method propagated by Ham Sŏkhŏn. Even Confucian historiography, though inspired by a different message, could not evade the imperative of historical plot and the metaphysical tendencies that by default accompanied such ‘unified’ historiography. Chŏng Inbo (1892–?), who is counted among the representative scholars of the Korean Confucian

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tradition during colonial times, authored a newspaper series on ‘5000 years of the history of the Korean soul’, also in the 1930s. While clearly attempting to bring a Confucian point of view to bear on his historiography, he replaced the historical core concept of the Confucian tradition, the legitimacy of rule, with the guiding idea of a national mind/soul and the progress of its moral cultivation (Chŏng 2013: 91–100). Of course, this competition for the best narration of Korean history was intimately connected to the search for the right religion for Korea. Buddhists, Confucians and Christians all made their own claims that they were the ones to save the nation, while at the same time new religions, many of them based on shamanic traditions, began to appear in increasingly large numbers as well. In studies of Korean culture and history – that is, in the rise of the humanities section of Area Studies – this then began to affect the question of what were the religions of Korea, often with the undertone of determining the ‘right’ – that is, the dominating, plot-providing – religion. In other words, in Korean Studies there has been a pronounced tendency towards trying to somehow define Korean history through religion(s) or towards grappling with the religious identity of the Korean people. These tendencies are expressed in two major ways. First, especially in contributions to Korean Studies from Korea, we find attempts to highlight the importance of one of the major religious traditions of Korea in the cultural development of Korea. In the vision of nativists, for example, Shamanism tends to be seen as the root of Korean culture, the ‘real’ religion underlying the expression of all other religious traditions found in the country.3 Confucianism is of course often presented in general discourse as a cultural tradition that defines the Korean national character even without requiring religious adherence; scholars with an agenda in favour of its continuing influence on present-day Korean society build on this, yet tend to emphasize its religious character as a way to claim a constructive role of Confucianism in Korea’s cultural future.4 It is more difficult to make an analogous case for Buddhism; however, given its history of first dominating elite culture (during the Silla and Koryŏ periods, ca. 7th to 14th centuries), then being sustained and perpetuated by the general populace in spite of exclusionary court politics, it has been described, among other things, as the spiritual force forging a Korean nation (minjok) to begin with.5 As we have

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seen, the role for Christianity in this arena of religious essentialisms would of course be that of a telos of Korean history.6 Second, and more importantly for Korean Studies as an element of Asian Studies and Area Studies in the West, the degree to which scholars seem to agree on the enormous importance of religion as such for Korean culture and history is demonstrated by the comparative abundance of works that use religion as a lens to understand Korean history as such. That general studies of Korean religions, such as Vos 1977, have a tendency to evolve into histories of Korea may be not be unexceptional; the tendency to write full histories as religious histories, however, seems to be especially pronounced in the Korean case. It may be telling that none of the authors of the most prominent examples (Wissinger 1984; Grayson 1989/2002; Kranewitter 2005) would be counted among the leading figures in the field of Korean history.7 The author of the latest of the mentioned works was, not by chance, a missionary to Korea. So while presentations of Korean cultural history as a history of religions can in some cases be prompted by specific religious agendas, this does not mean that these views do not find their way into the field in its most academic forms. As an illustrative example, we may adduce a book co-edited by two of the most respected scholars in Korean historical studies, Martina Deuchler and JaHyun Kim Haboush. Their Culture and the State in Late Chosŏn Korea (2002) is, in effect, a collection of articles about trends in religion and cult in the late Chosŏn. Admittedly, it is not rare these days to find the term ‘culture’ being used to replace ‘religion’ due to the perceived terminological inappropriateness of the modern term ‘religion’. Yet, the discrepancy between the expectations most probably raised by the book’s title and its actual contents seems to me to point to the more-than-usual weight that religion carries in scholarly dealings with Korean culture. To sum up, I have tried to show how the religious motivations of Western people first engaged in learning about Korean history and culture, and the patriotic motivations of Koreans first engaged in creating academic knowledge about Korea, worked together in creating a strong emphasis on religion in the study of Korea that has had noticeable reverberations in the field, right up until today. I have not attempted to sketch neat lines of historical development conforming to set periods, but have instead chosen to combine sources which span across the Korean ‘enlightenment’ and colonial periods. I have made this

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choice from the conviction that we are dealing here with a bundle of factors that remained effective over the whole sixty years in question (between the advent of Protestant missionaries and the end of the Second World War), and which had repercussions that are still felt in scholarship today.

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The Role of Religion in European and North American Japanese Studies Hans Martin Krämer

As many people have pointed out, there is a disconnect between religion and ‘religion’ in contemporary Japan. That is to say, although everyday life is rife with actions that most observers would label religious, there is very little consciousness among the actors that these actions belong to a sphere usefully called ‘religion’ (Fitzgerald 2000; Ama 2005).1 A structurally similar disjuncture is operative, I will argue in this chapter, in the study of Japanese religions. Although an enormous number of studies of Japanese religious practices exist, the mainstream of Japanese Studies, understood as an Area Studies field, has never put religion at the centre of its understanding of Japan. Obviously, a specific understanding of Area Studies is at the heart of this claim. Japanese Studies as Asian Studies or Area Studies is here understood not just as any research on Japan, but more narrowly as academic efforts directed at explaining and understanding Japan, originating from outside Japan, and offering the contextualization of more specialized research within the area of Japan. The primary peer group of someone doing research on Japanese religions as a practitioner of Japanese Studies as Area Studies consists of other researchers on Japan (e.g. working on Japanese society or Japanese history), not other Religious Studies scholars working on, say Europe or Africa. Area Studies in this sense, and Japanese Studies is no exception, derives a great deal of legitimacy from pedagogical concerns, from its existence as a course of study at universities. Even critics of Area Studies contend that it is difficult to train a good, say, historian of Japan, unless that person receives a solid grounding in both the Japanese language and what is called Landeskunde in German, that

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is, a broad background knowledge on the area of study, next to a knowledge of historical methods and theories (Spivak 2008: 225–32). While scholars may not fully conform to the model outlined here and have different allegiances at the same time, the fundamental question remains: Is the religion that one studies (e.g. Buddhism) used to understand something about the region, and knowledge about a region (e.g. Japan) used to understand something about the religion? Or is the research mainly about the phenomenon of Buddhism, in order to further the understandings of Buddhism? The latter case would be a case of research on Japanese religion, but it would not fall under Japanese Studies as an Area Studies discipline.2 The difference between the two will be fleshed out in more detail below, where I will introduce the main branches of the study of Japanese religion. First, however, let me briefly review the history of Japanese Studies, focusing on the role of religion within it and in the process highlighting the main protagonists of that story and their entanglement with Japanese informants and scholars.

History of Japanese Studies The first systematic introduction of knowledge about Japan to Europe was through the hands of the Christian mission, mostly conducted by members of the Jesuit order, since the middle of the sixteenth century. Urs App has recently demonstrated just how influential and long-lived the body of information on Japan produced by the Jesuits was (App 2010). No serious scholarship on Japan emerged until Engelbert Kaempfer, whose travels outside of Europe led him to Japan from 1690 to 1692, summarized the information he gathered during his stay there. In his posthumously published The History of Japan (1727), Kaempfer included a substantial chapter on religion, remarkable for its antiBuddhist stance and its nuanced portrayal of Shinto, best explained by the use Kaempfer made of his Japanese informant Imamura Gen’emon (Antoni 1997). Kaempfer’s book remained the most reliable source on Japan in a nonEast Asian language until the nineteenth century, when Philipp Franz von Siebold’s Nippon: Archiv zur Beschreibung Japans (1832–58) was published. Like Kaempfer, Siebold treated religion in a separate chapter, which showed little serious interest in Buddhism. Siebold’s source of information were Dutch

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‘dissertations’ written by his Japanese ‘students’, although the main part of the religion chapter was in fact penned by another collaborator of Siebold’s, namely Johann Joseph Hoffmann, who became the first Professor for Chinese and Japanese Languages at Leiden University in 1855. It is noteworthy that the Japanese informants involved in these two instances were not pristine sources of indigenous ways of learning. Rather, both Imamura Gen’emon and Siebold’s ‘students’ were physicians immersed in Dutch learning, that is, Japanese experts in European medical and natural sciences scholarship. This means that to some degree their portrayal of Japanese religions was already prefigured by European categories and specific interests in Japanese society and culture. There is thus, already in these early instances, a complex entanglement in the production of knowledge rather than a unidirectional flow between two poles independent of each other. In fact, the nineteenth century was to witness more examples of this in the study of Japanese religions. A dozen or so Buddhist scholars from Japan descended upon Europe from the 1870s onwards, primarily motivated by a desire to study Sanskrit or Indology. At best recognized to be ‘native informants’, these ‘students’ – really accomplished scholars in their native traditions – actually contributed considerably to the European knowledge of East Asian Buddhism in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Shimaji Mokurai, in Europe during 1872 and 1873, prompted Léon de Rosny, the father of Japanese Studies in France, to turn from language and literature to Japanese religions as his main pursuit (Krämer 2015: 92–5). In the 1880s and 1890s, more of these Buddhists – most of them hailing from the True Pure Land tradition of Japanese Buddhism – came to Europe to study under the likes of Friedrich Max Müller (Oxford), Sylvain Lévi (Paris), Hermann Oldenberg (Kiel) or Ernst Loimann (Strasbourg). These Japanese ‘students’ would not only go on to become the founding fathers of modern Buddhist Studies in Japan, but they also published in European languages, the most prominent example probably being Nanjō Bun’yū’s role in co-editing volume 49 (containing texts from the Mahāyāna Buddhist tradition) of Max Müller’s Sacred Books of the East series in 1894. Another prominent member of this group of internationally active scholars, Takakusu Junjirō, initiated the edition of a canon for East Asian Buddhism that has remained authoritative until today for any scholarship on Mahāyāna Buddhism, the so-called Taishō Tripitaka, published in Tokyo between 1924

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and 1934. While all of these Buddhist priests had received a thorough traditional training within their Buddhist sects before leaving Japan, at the same time they were already products of the frequent exchanges between Europe and Japan, and thus familiar with the categories of European learning. In fact, the motive for going to Europe was to elevate Japanese Buddhism to the standard of a ‘religion’, as it was newly conceived in Japan and Europe (Krämer 2015). The same can be said of the two most important individuals impacting the Western understanding of Japanese religion in the first half of the twentieth century, D. T. Suzuki (Suzuki Daisetsu) for the popular sphere and Anesaki Masaharu in more scholarly circles. Both Suzuki, whose works went on to influence the understanding of Buddhism among Europeans and North Americans up to the beat and hippie generations, and Anesaki, whose 1930 History of Japanese Religion (reprinted in 1963) for decades remained the only scholarly overview over Japanese religions in any Western language, had studied in the West (Suzuki privately with Paul Carus and Anesaki at several European universities) after graduating from Tokyo Imperial University, and both published in English (in addition to Japanese for their home audiences). Much could be said about similar cases for the postwar period: Several important Japanese scholars of religion, many of them with some form of training in the West, came to define the field and its basic concepts, as it was understood by Western scholars of Japanese religion.3 Instead of deepening this line of inquiry, however, let us turn to the role religion plays in the field of Japanese Studies today.

Religion in the study of (Modern) Japan Although so far the role of religion in Japanese Studies has been highlighted, religion has in fact not necessarily been central to the understanding of Japan as conceived by the overall field of Japanese Studies. This is due, I would argue, to a secularist bias on the side of most researchers on Japan – certainly modern Japan – a bias incidentally shared by Japanese historians, sociologists and anthropologists of Japan. The dominant conviction is that religion is not crucial for understanding modern society – in marked contrast to how the rest of Asia has been framed since eighteenth-century Orientalism, as is most virulently the case with South Asia (King 1999).4 Although I speak here mostly about the

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interest in modern Japan (i.e. since the Meiji period, 1868–today), in fact, the structurally secularist approach to Japan is also true for the study of early modern Japan (i.e. the Tokugawa period, 1603–1868) and, to an extent, of ancient Japan (roughly seventh to twelfth centuries). Only for medieval Japan has a Buddhist worldview always been seen as constitutive and impossible to ignore even for historians with a materialist view of society. Accordingly, the study of Japanese religions has therefore been largely relegated to premodern studies or, most conspicuously in the case of new religions, to non-Japan experts.5 This claim is at least superficially corroborated by a look at the articles published in the leading international journal of the field, the Journal of Japanese Studies. Between 2000 and 2014, 126 articles have been published in the Journal of Japanese Studies overall, out of which no more than three deal with religion.6 To be fair, this is also due to the existence of two other prominent journals in the field: the specialized Journal of Japanese Religious Studies, and Monumenta Nipponica, which, although it has a claim to covering the field comprehensively, has a clear focus on Japanese culture, including religion. Yet, the marginality of treating Japanese religion for the field overall becomes even more visible if we look at the contexts in which the religious traditions present in Japan are studied.7

Buddhism Buddhism was early on acknowledged as the major religious tradition in Japan conforming to the concept of religion, as it has been understood since the nineteenth century both within and without Japan. Furthermore, as the discipline of Buddhist Studies had been well established in Europe already, Japanese Buddhism also came to receive a great deal of attention. These studies, however, are rarely conducted within a framework of Japanese Studies, that is, perceived by the peer community at large to have a great relevance for our understanding of Japan. Why is that so? The main reason is that Buddhist Studies is so well established as its own discipline, with its own journals, associations and even modes of training. Scholars researching Japanese Buddhism would typically have been trained in Indology or a type of Buddhology centred around the study of ‘classical’ Indian Buddhism. Their

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research interests are therefore typically also informed by the field of Buddhist Studies, attempting to speak to scholars of other local Buddhist traditions (or to the ahistorical chimera of ‘universal Buddhism’). Not infrequently, the issues would be philosophical in nature, that is, attempting to answer systematic rather than historical questions. Indeed, a second line of inquiry that is addressed by studying Japanese Buddhism is more squarely situated within the discipline of philosophy and connected to the study of twentieth-century Japanese thought, more precisely: the Kyoto School of philosophy. This most often goes along with an interest more specifically in Zen Buddhism, although it need not be an explicitly historically grounded interest in modern Zen contemporaneous to the Kyoto School, but rather a, typically philosophical interest in Zen ‘per se’ that is then coupled with research on modern Japanese philosophy.8 More broadly, the confluence of interest in Buddhism and the adoption generally of an intellectual history perspective are neatly documented by the practice of the European Association of Japanese Studies to have a section called ‘Religion and History of Ideas’ at their representative triannual international conference. A minor, albeit in the twentieth century not uninfluential, interest in Japanese Buddhism is that brought forward by Christian theology, an interest, that is to say, in (Japanese) Buddhism as a partner of interfaith dialogue.9 What all the approaches mentioned so far share is that, although they may sometimes be taken note of by Japanese Studies practitioners not working on Buddhism, they are largely directed at other audiences. The same is true for the study of Shinto, New Religious Movements and Japanese Christianity.

Shinto, new religious movements and Japanese Christianity In marked contrast to Buddhism, new religious movements and, to a lesser extent, Shinto are most frequently studied within the framework of Religious Studies. It is interesting to note here that one researcher is thereby often expected to deal with several religious traditions, to investigate some common religious trait across a spectrum of groups.10 That the frame of reference is Religious Studies means that work on new religious movements tends to treat their objects of inquiry less as an aspect of Japanese society, but rather as a

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religious phenomenon to be shared with colleagues working on religions in other parts of the world, not with Japanologists working on other aspects of Japan. Christianity in Japan has overwhelmingly been the object of study for Christians. It is written by Christians, often with a missionary background, for Christians. Again, the problem consciousness is not to learn something about Japan, but to learn something about Christianity in a non-European context, the audience being scholars active in the fields of World Christianity or Mission Theology rather than practitioners from Japanese Studies.11

Postwar Japanese Studies and religion Going beyond the individual traditions, the strongest indication of the low importance accorded to religion in Japanese Studies might be that it has contributed little to the grand theories informing Japanese Studies since the second half of the twentieth century. This means first and foremost modernization theory, dominating the field from the early 1950s until the late 1960s, and indeed casting its shadows much farther than this, as is visible in many a study from the 1980s and later (Krämer 2006). The treatment of Japan within modernization theory was, of course, motivated by the ‘economic miracle’ of postwar Japan – a story in which religion was not accorded much explanatory power. It is important to note that while modernization theory in the narrow sense did not come to life before the 1950s and its main explanatory goal lay in understanding contemporary Japan, the ‘success of Japan’ narrative does in fact go back to the Meiji period. That is to say, not only did 1950s/60s modernization theory focus heavily on the ‘modern’ trajectory of Japan since the middle of the nineteenth century, but even Western observers of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Japan had already displayed the tendency to see the country’s success as the one true explanandum, indeed laying the ground for viewing Japan as deviating from the rest of (East) Asia, particularly China – a view which was to become even more prominent after 1945.12 Furthermore, modernization theory was not merely an external imposition upon Japan, but found its supporters within Japanese academia, not in the least because it offered them an elegant way to view Japan as unique vis-à-vis the rest of Asia (Conrad 2012).

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To be sure, functional equivalents to a Protestant Ethic in Japan have been sought actively, seeking to demonstrate some non-material foundation for Japan’s later success in premodern, or more precisely: early modern times. The most prominent of these attempts surely was Robert N. Bellah’s influential 1957 Tokugawa Religion: The Values of Pre-Industrial Japan. Yet, it would be difficult to sustain that what Bellah, and even more so others pursuing a similar line of inquiry, called ‘religion’ resembles religion in the sense that scholars of Japanese religion understand the term today. Bellah’s object of inquiry, his ‘religion’, was shingaku (lit. ‘Study of the Heart’), a popular movement for moral reform with weak religious overtones. Rather than shingaku, it was Confucianism which was to become the main suspect for having nurtured a premodern economistic outlook on life in Japan – rarely, however, considered a religion in the sense that Christianity was for Weber’s conception of the Protestant Ethic.13 Interestingly, the multiple modernities approach, developed mainly by Shmuel N. Eisenstadt since the late 1980s and in many ways a successor to modernization theory, also saw a worldview as central to its conception of Japanese ‘civilization’ (Eisenstadt 1996). This, however, was Shinto, not Confucianism. While one could debate whether Shinto is for Eisenstadt more than a community-based form of emperor worship, the more important consideration for our purposes probably is that multiple modernities failed to make a major impact on the field of Japanese Studies. Unlike earlier modernization theory, it has neither led to fruitful research nor provoked major dissent. A final approach to studying Japan that has been influential, even if always shunned and ridiculed by a majority in the Western field of Japanese Studies, is the essentialist-culturalist approach stressing Japanese uniqueness, known as Nihonjinron or Nihonron. Even here, however, among the many cultural qualities supposedly characteristic of and unique for Japan, religion does not play a prominent role.

Latest trends More recent work on Japanese religion has arguably been more directed to arousing an interest in Japan studies more broadly conceived. This is also

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the  case because historians, anthropologists and sociologists of Japan are increasingly turning to religion without making it their sole profession. Studies on the history of Japanese religions, for instance, tend less and less to be histories of one school or sect or tradition, or doctrinal histories, and more to be social histories of religion, such as in the works of Sarah Thal (2005) or Barbara Ambros (2008, 2014). This is especially true of the Tokugawa period, for which discarding the old paradigm of the decline of Buddhism in that period  has opened the door to several studies dealing with religion as an important factor of social life interwoven with issues such as sexuality, play or politics (Hur  2000; Williams 2005; Lindsey 2007; Hur 2007). Another recent trend in the history of Japanese religion that has received attention from Japanese historians working on modern Japan more broadly has been the batch of no fewer than four books devoted to the problem of the reception of the concept of religion in modern Japan (see Josephson 2012; Isomae 2014; Maxey 2014; Krämer 2015). Beyond history, religion increasingly seems to be taken seriously as a social force to reckon with in modern and especially contemporary Japan. Thus, several studies have concentrated on everyday life at Buddhist temples (Covell 2006; Borup 2008), the socioeconomic circumstances under which temples operate (Rowe 2011), innovations by contemporary Buddhist priests (Nelson 2013), rituals in the lives of lay Buddhist practitioners (Arai 2011), the role of a specific Buddhist sect within modern Japanese culture (Porcu 2008), the redefinition of Shinto as an environmental movement (Rots 2012) or even the impact of globalization on Japanese religions generally (Dessì 2013). Finally, the recent batch of standard textbooks on Japanese history give religious issues, including those of the modern era, a fair treatment. All three major English-language textbooks on Japanese history or modern Japanese history since the Tokugawa period deal with the forcible division of Buddhism and Shinto in the 1860s and 1870s, the role of Christianity for Japanese elites in the Meiji period, the rise of new religions and their political persuasion in the 1920s and 1930s, the role of Sōka Gakkai after 1945, the Aum Shinrikyō Incident of 1995 and the dominance of this-worldly benefits in everyday religious practice in Japan (Totman 2000; Jansen 2000; Gordon 2003). This seems to signal one more way in which Japan is belatedly escaping the modernization paradigm: In the eyes of Western Japanese Studies, Japan is finally becoming a ‘normal’ (East) Asian country. Dogged by over two

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decades of economic downturn, Japan today is no longer the unique success case whose particular characteristics need to be explained in contrast to other Asian countries, first and foremost China, but rather another Asian country. For better or for worse, coming back into the fold of Asia might entail also being subjected to one of the oldest moves of Orientalism: viewing Asia as dominated by vibrant religiosity, a religiosity that is important for constructing the otherness of Asia vis-à-vis the West.

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Religion, Secularism and the Japanese Shaping of East Asian Studies Kiri Paramore

Criticism of the practice of Area Studies and the history of Orientalism over the past decades has drawn attention to various problems inherent in Orientalism’s historic depiction of non-Western religious tradition. Talal Asad’s work in the 1990s problematized modernist constructions of religion in general, demonstrating how in relation to both the Middle East and Europe these constructions desocialized and ahistoricized religious traditions and the groups and communities practising them (Asad 1993). In the context of Area Studies and the history of Orientalism, these kinds of essentialist religion-centred representations of culture have been used to project a vision of (often colonized) cultures and countries, which is clearly defined to stand against a normative standard of modernity. This is not simply an element in the nineteenth-century history discussed by Said, but has been repeated many times through the late twentieth century, and continues to play a  key role in politically dominant conceptions of global society (Said 1978; Huntington 1996). There is no denying the history and current practice of the use of religion to objectify, essentialize and debase other cultures. Readily discernible in the context of ongoing imperialism, this practice of cultural objectification and negation is also regularly practiced back on the West itself, as work on discourses of so-called Occidentalism has shown (Buruma 2004; DuBois 2005). Furthermore, as Asad has demonstrated, this discursive pattern originates from modernist European imaginations of its own history. If to be perceived in terms of colonialism at all, then domestic colonialism might be the concept with which to begin. Certainly, representations of Catholicism in

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Ireland and other British colonial areas followed this trend. As Peter van der Veer has argued in relation to Britain and India, the emergence of a modern politics of religion and its engagement with imperialism occurred through the networks of global empire itself – interaction played a role in determining the ideological contours of imperialism, the imperial centre was object as much as subject of this process (van der Veer 2001). This chapter considers one such complex, ongoing process of modern imperial interaction. It examines the role of the academic networks of the modern Japanese Empire in affecting the history and current practice of Area Studies on East Asia. I will argue that highly politicized ideologies of secularism lay at the roots of Japanese approaches to different East Asian Studies through the twentieth century, and that the history of Japanese engagements with these ideologies went on to crucially affect the development of post–Second World War Area Studies globally.

Japan, modernity, the Western Academy and East Asia Elite Japanese interventions played a major role in the modern shaping of Area Studies. Manipulations and adaptations of modern ideas of religion and secularism were centrally deployed in largely successful Japanese attempts to control the development of Japanese Studies, Chinese Studies and Korean Studies through the twentieth century. Analysis of these Japanese interventions sheds light both on important aspects in the history of Area Studies, and on current issues in the relationship between religion and the contemporary academic practice of Asian Studies and Area Studies. The maturation of Orientalism into its high period at the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century, and the transformation of Oriental Studies into what we now call ‘Area Studies’ in the mid-twentieth century, both occurred after the consolidation of the modern Japanese state. The modern Japanese nation and its knowledge institutions and elite were thus positioned differently to those of any other ‘object’ culture/country of Orientalism and/ or Area Studies. Japanese elites had greater capacity to exercise agency over the strategies of representation that gave shape to Japanese Studies. Moreover, from the 1890s, Japan also established itself increasingly as an imperial empire,

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as much in the field of knowledge as economic and military power. Japanese academics and institutions through the early twentieth century displaced the French as the dominant force in Sinology. They were thereafter able to give shape to developments in Sinology as well as Japanese Studies, utilizing earlier imperialist and modernist manipulations of the place of religion in Chinese society to ideologically assist their own expansive geopolitical endeavours. The field of Korean Studies was basically originated by Japanese scholars in tandem with the creation of other institutions and frameworks of Japanese colonial rule in Korea – and as an offshoot of Sinology.1 Religious paradigms were to the fore in these developments not only because of the history of their centrality in the European Orientalist tradition, but also because culturalist elements of Marxism based on religious world views, notably the Marxist idea of Asian despotism, provided Marxists and leftist educated elites in Japan (a significant element in the academy) a path for conforming to the demands of Japanese expansionist imperialism. The powerful Marxist academic elements in Japan in the early twentieth century, although showing anti-imperialist sympathy for the colonized early on, eventually became co-opted into the project of capitalist imperialism partly through these intellectual employments of culture related to religion. This chapter looks first to Japanese influence on the emergence of a field of Japanese Studies in Europe before briefly looking at parallels and disparities between this field of area study, and those of Sinology and Korean Studies, which Japanese scholars critically affected in the twentieth century. Finally, the essay will demonstrate the interaction between Japanese constructions of Sinology and Japanese self-representation in the emergence of post–Second World War ‘Area Studies’ in the United States. It argues that American adoption of the strict religion-based division between Chinese and Japanese cultural history (established by Japanese scholars), and its value judgements (positive for Japan, negative for China), lay at the heart of the post–Second World War reformulation of Area Studies in the United States. US Area Studies was thus critically influenced by (in fact, was to some extent a repetition of) wartime Japanese Sinology, and also demonstrated continuity with European traditions of Japanese Studies from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which had also been crucially influenced by state-supported Japanese academia.

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This chapter is thus divided chronologically into four parts. Part one looks at Japanese roles in the construction of a vision of ‘Japanese culture’ in Europe, notably in London, Berlin and Hamburg. Part two looks at Japanese Sinology and Korean Studies pre-1945. Part three looks at the effects these pre-1945 Japanese-shaped images of East Asia had on the crystallization of US approaches to Area Studies in the early Cold War. The chapter concludes in part four by considering the central role of religion in all these developments, and thinking about how current trends in the engagement of religion with Asian Studies and Area Studies relate to this formational history of the discipline.

Japan in Europe and Europe’s Japan Japanese Studies was the last of the traditional fields of Oriental Studies to emerge in Europe. European Oriental Studies tended to originate from Biblical Studies, thus starting in the Abrahamic cradles of the Middle East, and moving slowly further away to the East in the geography of their areas of interest. The nineteenth-century professionalization of Oriental Studies also demonstrated a trend of Eastward geographic development. Sinology thus came after studies of areas to the West of China, and Japanese Studies only emerged on the periphery of (and chronologically after) Sinology (Marchand 2009: 99–100). The first professional scholars of Japan in Europe clearly emerged from Sinology. The first professorial chair in Japanese Studies, established at Leiden in 1855, was actually conceived of as a chair for education in both Chinese and Japanese. It is clear from the publications of that first professor, Johann Joseph Hoffmann (1805–78), that he perceived of and positioned his work as part of the European academic field of Sinology.2 Later foundational figures in European Japanology, notably the first professor of Japanology at a German university, Karl Florenz (1865–1939), and even mid-twentieth-century figures like Serge Elisséeff (1889–1975) had also been trained originally in Sinology (Wachutka 2001: 52–4; Reischauer 1957: 8). These early scholars of Japan who emerged from Sinology always positioned religion centrally. Hoffmann did that by using Confucianism centrally in education on Japan, deploying the first of the Four Books of Neo-Confucianism, the Daxue or

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Great Learning, as his main primer for Japanese. He explained the choice in the following terms. The Grand Study – da hio, or, as it is called in Japan, Dai Gaku – is the first of the four classical books of the Chinese, and not alone in the Middle Kingdom, but also among all the Oriental peoples, who are indebted for their civilization to the influence of the Chinese literature, as the basis of their moral and political education. (Hoffmann 1864: iii)

This led Hoffmann on to the conclusion that appending a standard Japanese version of the text ‘provides us an opportunity of furnishing an example of the scientific style of the Japanese’ (Hoffmann 1864: iii). For Hoffmann, the prime religious text of East Asia, in its Japanese context, was an example of the most ‘scientific’ form of the Japanese language. A prime text of intellectual tradition was core to language learning, and specifically ‘scientific’ language learning. The contemporaneous stereotyping of Confucianism as a premodern throwback indicative of a stagnant society is nowhere to be seen. Karl Florenz privileged religious ethnographical approaches in his representation of core elements of the recently created modern Japanese national canon of traditional Japanese literature. As Michael Wachutka has pointed out, this approach of Florenz, although typical of European orientalists of the time, ran against the political imperatives of the Japanese scholars Florenz had studied with in Tokyo (Wachutka 2001: 47). Religious and literary scholarship in Japan at this time represented the dominant secularist ideology of the times, and participated in state attempts to portray Japanese culture, notably including the Shinto tradition, in secularist terms. This was achieved in large part through an emphasis on the ‘native’ (meaning non-Sino-Japanese) Japanese literary tradition, a literary tradition that Florenz also engaged. Florenz’s ethnological and religious methodology, however, inherited from Sinology, went against this dominant Japanese-led secularist and nationalexclusivist trends. Japanese scholars did all they could to clearly disengage Japanese Studies from Sinology, and the history of Japanese religion and culture from that of China. There were clear geopolitical imperatives behind this. Japanese were already, by the mid-nineteenth century, well before the Meiji Restoration, very aware of the problems faced by China in relation to Western power.

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The enforcement of unequal treaties on Japan in the late nineteenth century used the same justifying discourse of ‘civilizational development’ as that used on China.3 Large-scale dispatch of Japanese students to Europe in the late nineteenth century, primarily through Japanese state support, equipped the Japanese elite with real-time sensitivity to changes in the European civilizational discourse which justified imperialism. They were therefore in a good position to detect the rising role of political secularism in these discourses, and its interaction with increasing acceptance of the idea of separation of church and state (separation of religion and state) in the ongoing construction of Western ideas of political modernity and ‘civilization’ (DuBois 2005). Later, this close engagement would also allow Japanese intellectuals to quickly engage, and exploit, social organism theory and other pre-runners of racialism. Japanese elites, in both the new state-sponsored and controlled modern university system, and the state itself, were therefore from the very beginning careful to project an image of Japan as secular, even to the extent of disengaging traditions like Shinto into ‘secularized’ State Shinto and religious Shrine Shinto sections (Hardacre 1989). Japanese intellectuals were also very successful in projecting this new image of Japan as an advanced secularist state back into Europe. De Gruchy has alluded to the extent of Japanese manipulation of late-nineteenth to earlytwentieth-century European academia in his book Orienting Arthur Waley, where he shows a significant intersection between Japanese political, cultural and intellectual interests and the emergence of serious scholarship on Japan in England and elsewhere in Europe (de Gruchy 2003). Japanese state and statealigned Buddhist-sect supported students in Europe also played a major role in this process of influence (Kraemer 2013). One major example of this kind of influence was at the German institution which in my view is key to understanding early Japanese Studies: the Seminar für Orientalische Sprachen (SOS) in Berlin. In the final decades of the 1800s, well before Florenz’s chair was established at Hamburg in 1914 (and during one of the many periods of inactivity of Japanology at Leiden and Paris), the German government established the SOS in Berlin. This institution is considered formative in the careers of many later leaders in Japanese Studies, including Florenz himself, and perhaps most importantly Serge Elisseéff, who trained there before going to Tokyo. This institute emphasized language

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training, but also included elements of Landeskunde – a form of what we might now call ‘content’ Area Studies. The first ever teacher of this subject in Berlin was a Japanese state-supported student: Inoue Tetsujirō (1856–1944) (Brochlos 2002). While studying philosophy in Berlin on a Japanese government grant, Inoue had already been teaching at the University of Tokyo and would go back to be appointed the first Japanese professor of philosophy at that university in 1890. One of his major roles at the University of Tokyo was the founding of the academic study of Confucianism in Japan, a study he would present not in terms of religion, but as ‘philosophy’ (Paramore 2015). Inoue is also generally recognized as one of the major nationalist ideologues of Japan in this period, specializing in the defence of the state’s ‘secularism’ through radicalizing attacks on other religions, as well as through academic projects, which in effect secularized and sanitized the elements in Japanese history, culture and thought that may have otherwise been perceived in religious terms. The fact that the programme of Area Studies knowledge on Japan attached to this formative institute in Berlin was devised by a Japanese of this calibre is notable. No other non-Western country’s official state academic elite was able to so crucially affect the Western academic study of their country. The SOS went on over the following decades to train many of the most influential Western scholars working on China and/or Japan, crucially including Serge Elisseéff, the founder of East Asian Studies at Harvard in the 1930s and, as will be discussed later, in many ways the grandfather of modern Area Studies.4 Japan’s ability to influence such central institutions of Western Japanese Studies so early was facilitated as much by the quick knowledge-based Westernization of Japan, as by Japanology’s relative state of underdevelopment in the Oriental Studies fields of nineteenth-century Europe.

China and Korea: Japanese appropriation and revitalization of the weapons of Sinophobe Orientalism Korean Studies was begun in earnest under the auspices of the Westernized university system of post-Meiji Japan (Takeda 2000: 127). Japanese imperial designs on Korea, which were realized by increasing control of the peninsula around the turn of the century and formal annexation in 1910, created a

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special place for Japanese scholars in originating Korean Studies, not only as a major part of the disciplines of ‘Oriental Studies’ (tōyōgaku) and ‘Oriental History’ (tōyōshi) in Japanese universities, but also through the establishment of Keijō (Seoul) Imperial University as an academic outpost of the Japanese elite in Korea. The shared Confucian and Buddhist religious traditions of both countries, and the medium of Classical Chinese, further empowered Japanese intellectuals to steer a course for representations of Korea in the westernized world of international academia (Takeda 2000). It was in this context that Korea, and notably the Joseon dynasty (1392–1897), which Japanese power displaced, was often historicized in the classical orientalist terms of Sinitic stagnation, a stagnation attributed primarily to the central role of religion in Korean (as in Chinese) society. This approach both fit European intellectual trends of the time, and acted as a perfect justification for Japanese imperialism in Korea. Japanese control of Korea was thus justified academically in similar terms as Western powers had justified intervention in China: the interluders represented the force of enlightenment in a backward-stifled sacralized polity  – the unchanging timeless world bound by timeless religious relations which would live on into the later twentieth century in the form of Marxist ideas on Asian despotism or Weber’s vision of China. In the case of China, Japanese scholars did not need to originate a new discourse, but merely appropriate what had been articulated so clearly in Europe from Hegel’s description of Chinese Empire as ‘theocratic despotism’ onwards. According to the likes of Hegel, Ranke and other base lines in nineteenth-century Western intellectual life, Confucianism’s religious and timeless domination of Chinese society had created a despotic society requiring some form of liberation (Ranke 1881, I: iv; Hegel 1930: 236–7).5 Already from the 1890s, Japanese scholars had begun to ruminate upon what kinds of ‘liberation’ might be possible. Some argued that China could not go on as one country – break-up into smaller regional units was inevitable. Others saw absorption of China into a Japanese-led East Asian federation as the only option. Still others argued that China could only be ruled by an absolutist autocratic regime – Japan and other nations must simply choose and support someone appropriately receptive to their own interests – Yuan Shikai (1859–1916) was pushed forward on many occasions in these terms (Fogel 1984: 8–16).

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Naitō Konan (1866–1934), the major Sinologist of the twentieth century, is an example of a Japanese scholar who is both partly representative of the imperialist imperatives of Sinology at this time, and yet who also, to some extent, tried to resist those imperatives. Most famously, he defended the viability of a unified culturally coherent Republic of China in his 1914 book Shinaron (Discussing China). His thesis defending the idea of the Republic against its (mainly Japanese) detractors rested squarely on an inversion of the by-this-time usual reading of the relation between Neo-Confucianism and Chinese politics as a purely negative cause of stagnation (Naitō 1972: 308– 28). Naitō’s contrary claim, and a theory still actively discussed by Sinologists and global historians today, was that China, far from being behind the ball on modernization, had actually already reached a kind of earlier modernity in the Song dynasty (960–1279). His articulation of this (what came to be called) ‘Song modernization thesis’ was multifaceted. The Song was modern in terms of its literacy, its commercial culture, the state’s relation to the market and in various other facets. The core of Song modernity, however, was religious/ intellectual: Neo-Confucianism’s emphasis on individual moral subjectivity and its interaction with family and then state governance. This linkage of Neo-Confucianism to a modern moral publicness would be picked up half a century later by American and Chinese scholars claiming for Neo-Confucian religiosity a special suitability with liberalism (de Bary 1983). In his own time, by positing a positive role for the indigenous religious and cultural traditions of China in a vision of modernity, Naitō provided a theoretical alternative to (Japanese imperialist) brute domination. However, Naitō’s criticism of Chinese traditions of bureaucracy have also been likened to those of Max Weber, and similarly can be seen as having justified a culturalist prejudice against China employed in imperialism (Fogel 1985: 193). In this way, we can see in the Japanese tradition of Sinology a similar tension to that identified by Suzanne Marchand in the modern academic manifestation of Oriental Studies in nineteenth-century Europe. Marchand implies a tension in that tradition between a (secular) practical imperialist drive for knowledge and pejorative representations of Asia on the one hand, and a religiously inspired (and positively universalist) desire to find a form of original Christian truth within non-biblical societies on the other (Marchand 2009). In Japan, not only the imperatives of modern empire, but also the values

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of the traditional circles of Chinese Learning (kangaku) and Confucianism from the early modern period (Tokugawa Shogunate) were visible in the origins of modern Orientalism (tōyōgaku) within which China and Korea were studied (Takeda 2000: 147). This traditional Confucianism’s effect on the modern discipline, like Christianity’s effect on modern Orientalism in Europe, explains the incredible sympathy for China, especially in its Song Neo-Confucian form, as expressed by Naitō. A good parallel example from Korean Studies is Takahashi Tōru (1878– 1967). Takahashi authored the first modern academic publications on the history of Korean Buddhism and Confucianism. While his approach to Buddhism emphasized its stagnancy and lack of cultural development in relation to China, his work on Korean Confucianism could not help but follow the early modern Japanese tradition praising the Korean Neo-Confucianism of Yi T’oegye (1501–70). In this way, Takahashi both played in to the discourse of stagnancy – for Korea in relation to Buddhism, and for China in relation to Confucianism – and also provided a lifeline to Korean cultural history (and thereby potentially national identity and pride) by asserting the existence of an indigenous progressive culture defined through Yi T’oegye’s Confucian religiosity. Takahashi’s historically correct linkage of this Korean tradition to Japanese Confucianism furthermore provided a basis for conceiving of Korea within the Japanese Empire in a comparatively positive way. This discourse encouraged a pluralist vision of culture within the empire, and inherently opposed the assimilationist discourse of Japanese cultural superiority that was on the rise in Japan during that time (Takahashi 1929: 1–18). Takahashi, Naitō and their peers, operating in an increasingly totalitarian and anti-Chinese early-twentieth-century Japan had little room to move. They possessed within themselves a tension around the issue of the representation of religion, and they were clearly aware of and deliberately engaging the politics of these representations. Yet ultimately, their work at the time was primarily employed in the process of ongoing imperialism. A similar internal conflict, and ultimate result, can be seen in the history of the scholars who later undertook on the ground religious ethnography work in North-Eastern China during the Japanese occupation of the 1930s (DuBois 2006). Despite the fact that Naitō’s thesis was obviously ineffective in halting anti-Chinese sentiment in early-twentieth-century Japan, it is still highly

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significant as an example of the way inverting the place of religion in an Orientalist discourse can work to problematize a generally imperialist outlook. By inverting the place of the dominant religious tradition in imperial Chinese history – Neo-Confucianism – Naitō countered teleological developmentalist arguments which sought to justify a ‘modernizing’ violent intervention in China. Takahashi, by doing something similar in the Korean case, was not advocating Japanese withdrawal from Korea, but he was implying that Korean national identity, within the Empire of Japan, had value. Takahashi’s position was thus inherently supportive of a vision of imperial plurality, and resistant to proposed imperial policies of violent cultural assimilation. Both scholars constructed their competing narratives by historicizing, and by digging deeper into the complex sociology of religion in China and Korea. Reversing the imperialist employment of Orientalism in geopolitics was intimately related to recasting the value attributed to religious culture that underlay that orientalist perspective. Orientalism, and particularly the role of religion therein, was not necessarily imperialist. In fact, quite the opposite, as the example of Naitō shows, the religious element was central to early attempts by area specialists to resist imperialist manipulations of the representation of particular civilizations or cultures.

Cold War Area Studies and the Orientalist tradition: The Second World War and the theoretical interconnectedness of Chinese and Japanese Studies This then brings us to the relationship between Orientalism and Area Studies. Some see the emergence of Area Studies in post–Second World War America as representing a break with the tradition of Oriental Studies. They depict Area Studies as having emerged more from wartime intelligence structures that from pre-war academic ones (Miyoshi and Harootunian 2002). Yet, if we look at the roots of Area Studies in wartime and immediately post–Second World War America, notably in Harvard’s East Asian Studies programme, where most writers see this trend beginning, the continuities between the two traditions are obvious. The continuity between classic European Orientalism and postwar American Area Studies is personified by Serge Elisséeff. Elisséeff

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began his studies of China and Japan in Berlin at the SOS. Although Inoue had long left by this stage, he came into contact there with Japanese of similar academic standing and right-wing political proclivities – notably Shinmura Izuru (1876–1967) (Reischauer 1957: 8).6 From Berlin, Elisséeff made his way to Japan where he was the first Westerner to gain normal entry to a degree programme at the University of Tokyo and the first to gain a standard degree by coursework and thesis. At Tokyo, he studied Japanese literature. Although his thesis was written on Matsuo Bashō (1644–94), most of his coursework and a large section of his final examinations were based around National Learning (kokugaku) commentary on works of Japanese literature – what today would be studied as intellectual history or the history of religion (Reischauer 1957: 14–15). He also continued his interest in Chinese and began learning Korean. On return to Europe, he taught about both China and Japan but was academically active primarily in Sinological circles and associations. His appointment at Harvard as the first professor of Far Eastern languages was very much because of his capacity across the different area fields: his experience in Japan and his reputation in the French world of Sinology. Professor Elisséeff … started on his dual task of building up a center of Far Eastern studies at Harvard in the best traditions of European Sinology and of seeking to influence through it Sinological studies at the Christian universities of China. (Reischauer 1957: 24)

It was under his professorship that the transformations associated with the beginnings of Area Studies in the United States occurred. He was professor to the figures notably associated with early Area Studies – notably Edwin Reischauer (1910–90) and John Whitney Hall (1916–97). They were exposed to an education based on the traditions of European Orientalism, almost always centred on issues of religion, intellectual history or literature related to great religious traditions – notably Confucianism and Buddhism. In fact, well into the 1950s, the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies was dominated by articles on these topics, often authored by scholars who ironically at the same time were profiling themselves as advocates of a more ‘social scientific’ approach to Area Studies. This attention at Harvard to the academic standards of European Orientalism did not end with Elisséeff. His student and replacement, Reischauer, also continued to supervise traditional cultural subjects. Reischauer was even

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more representative than Elisséeff of the deep interaction between Chinese and Japanese Studies in the birth of Area Studies. Recent studies often compare Reischauer and Fairbank, seeing the former as the father of modern Japanese Studies, and the latter of Chinese Studies. In the 1950s, however, the division between the two was primarily based on period not country. As Elisséeff had done before him, Reischauer taught the premodern periods, with all the classic  literary and religious tradition, for both Japan and China. Fairbank meanwhile did the modern period, again for both counties. Reischauer’s first Chinese connection then was related to his pedagogical tasks. Much more importantly, however, Reischauer also packaged the entire Harvard enterprise of expanding Asian Studies (the birth of Area Studies), including the privileging of literary and intellectual rather than only social scientific studies, in relation to US national imperatives in the immediately post–Second World War Chinese Civil War. The peoples of Asia are asking for an ideology. We have in many ways failed to give it to them. There is a crying need for people to have our ideology. We aren’t in the habit of giving it. We have the ideology but we aren’t presenting it to other people. (Dower and Norman 1975: 44) The real point I want to bring up is the problem of the special place of the scholarly classes in the Far East, particularly in the area of China, Korea and Japan – that area affected by Chinese civilization. … If we exploit the special prestige position of the scholar, the intellectual group in that area, it would seem to me that propaganda work, information aimed primarily at them would be the most effective kind of information work. (Dower and Norman 1975: 49)

Previous commentators, notably Dower, have focused on the implications of this quote relating to the politicization of the scholarly creation of Area Studies. What I find interesting, however, is rather the emphasis on intellectual knowledge – for real purposes. Reischauer followed Orientalist tradition as much as reality in seeing Chinese intellectuals and intellectual discourse as being deeply tied to a vision of culture that was rooted in intellectual, literary and religious tradition. The reason why modern US national interest ‘Area Studies’ had to centre on these kinds of religious and intellectual questions was related to the centrality of religion in Asian cultural life imagined by the Orientalist tradition in which Reischauer had been trained.

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Indeed, it is exactly this respect for local tradition and the multifaceted nature of cultural experience that makes Reischauer a so much more sympathetic character than the American Area Studies advocates who came after him. Reischauer’s excellent knowledge of and sensitivity towards Japan came partly from growing up there as the son of a missionary. For him, East Asian culture was the environment he had grown up within. Those who followed Reischauer had rather discovered East Asian culture as an object of military intelligence training. Despite themselves having been trained as linguists and humanists, these later figures showed little comparative respect for either language or culture – notably including religion – in their visions of Area Studies. Their deification of ‘the social sciences’ (which at the time usually implied a quantitative method) at the expense of other academic approaches allowed Area Studies to become a field much less sympathetic to, or even knowledgeable in, the cultural life, thoughts, beliefs and dreams of the people under study. Hall’s argument at the time for ‘discipline based quantitatively testable theories’ was clearly couched as a response to the power of Communist-class analysis (Dower and Norman 1975: 65). Yet, for a reader today, Hall’s naïve determinism strikes one as ironically Marxist – although obviously much more primitive than any Marxist analysis one would come across today. The attempt to jettison culture from the base of Area Studies also ironically went hand in hand with a much more nation-state-based approach. Whereas all specialists in Japan up to and including Reischauer had in-depth knowledge of China and Chinese, later US-based Japanese Studies scholars had often only basic if any Chinese-language training, and bought into Reischauer’s Cold War ideological conceit of seeing Japan and China as opposite cultures. This conceit in turn was of course learnt from earlier Japanese nationalist conceptions associated with figures like Inoue. Ironically, post–Second World War US scholarship on Japan thus accepted major tropes of modern Japanese (pre-1945) nationalist imaginings of the cultural divisions between Japan and China. These were divisions which, as we saw earlier, rested on a fake portrayal of Japan in secularist terms, contrasted against a deeply cultured originally European vision of imperial China as dominated by a kind of undifferentiated, pre-Protestant religiosity that ensured China (like India, Africa, etc.) remained as backward as the

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pre-Enlightenment pre-Reformation Europe imagined by Protestant bigots of the earlier two centuries. It was the religious vision of China and Japan, the separation between the two along the secularist, modernist lines of modern national imperialism, which lay at the basis of the transformation from Orientalism to Area Studies – both in continuity and in change. Religion is thus a centrally important plank in the politics of Area Studies, partly because it was so already in Oriental Studies, but more pertinently (and less visibly) because the modern nationalist ideology of secularism gives religion (and/or the denial of it) particular ideological power in political modernity. Especially in secularist imaginations of modernity religion is central to the condemnation of a place as not modern. We can see this historically in fin de siècle French approaches to China, early-twentieth-century Japanese approaches to Korea and late-twentieth-century US approaches to Southeast Asia. But we can also see it today in some US and European approaches to the Middle East, and in some Chinese depictions of Xinjiang and Tibet. The history of Japan’s engagement with Orientalism and Area Studies, in the depiction of Japan itself, and in its role depicting China and Korea, tells us that without serious historically conscious consideration of religion Area Studies remains all too open to political manipulation and abuse. Because religion has been such a central element in the cultural essentialisms constructed to justify imperialism, it is vital that it be studied centrally in critical Area Studies. This is particularly the case in light of the current trend of using secularism in its place. Repeating 1950s visions of a ‘social science’-based Area Studies which through ‘quantitative’ scholarship provides an ‘objective’ vision of Asia is naïve, not only in its denial of the role of exactly this kind of scholarship in late-twentieth-century international violence and imperialism (e.g. Vietnam), but also in its assumption that an uncritical acceptance of the ideology of secularism is an escape from the discourse of religion. Secularist academic and political ideologies are simply one more form in the ongoing deployment of religious discourse at the core of Area Studies. Rather than a solution to the religion problem, they are a reminder of how central religion is to any attempt to historically or sociologically understand an area culture.

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Christian–Muslim Borderlands: From Eastern European Studies to Central Eurasian Studies Christian Noack and Michael Kemper

The discipline of Eastern European Studies has undergone tremendous transformations in the twentieth century, with 1918, 1945 and 1989/91 as the major turning points. This chapter aims at an evaluation of the role of religion and studies of religion within Eastern European Studies, including by charting the major paradigm shifts that followed the big historical transformations of the century. We argue that in comparison to other branches of Area Studies, religious actors and religious sensibilities played only a minor role in the development of Eastern European Studies in the Cold War period. Since 1989–91, however, the study of religion has acquired central significance in Eastern European Studies. Our focus will be on Islam and Russian Orthodoxy,1 which both experienced a ‘renaissance’ in the post-Soviet area, with both confession groups playing major roles in state-building processes but also providing challenges to the authorities. In the final part of the chapter, we will discuss the connection between political and religious developments in Eastern Europe and the development of academic studies of religion focusing on these areas. The central argument of our chapter is that the study of ‘Eastern Europe’ (in its changing manifestations) has always been shaped by political considerations and contexts, and this is also the motor for the new interest in the role that religions play in the area.

Parallel shifts of paradigms: From East European to Central Eurasian Studies That disciplinary boundaries reflect political realities is by no means a new phenomenon. Already when Eastern European Studies emerged as a field

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of Area Studies, it was largely driven by the need for political expertise. This development was spurred by the demise of the traditional balance of powers at the turn of the twentieth century, in which the political course of the Russian Empire and the ‘Oriental question’ – what would become of the Ottoman Empire and its European provinces – were the central questions (Lemberg 1985; Hughes 2000; Roberts and Bartlett 2009; Hoetsch 2013). As in Ottoman/ Turkish studies, the major issue was the conflict between ‘westernizing’ trends and factors that pinpointed the differences between East and West. The exercise of ‘translating cultures’ usually involved good and fruitful contacts between the first Western specialists on the area and scholars from Eastern European countries.2 Yet, in interwar Germany, this field of study turned into a völkisch-motivated enterprise that largely supported revisionist agendas, and that put forward racist claims against the new nation-states in Eastern Europe and the ‘Bolshevist’ Soviet Union (Burleigh 1988; Haar 2000; Beyrau 2012). After the Second World War, the Russian and Eastern European Studies centres in the United States, not unlike those for Latin American and Middle Eastern studies, were developed along the logic of the Cold War. US scholarship benefited greatly from state-funding opportunities that directly emanated from strategic interests (Engerman 2009). Also, Western Europe saw a second wave of Eastern European Area Studies centres emerging (Roberts and Bartlett 2009: 41–57; Oberländer 1992; Dahlmann 2005; Desjardins 1988). On both sides of the Atlantic, the focus was on the study of communism (as an ideology and as a political, social and economic practice) and on the Soviet Union as the ‘centre’ of the second world. Under such conditions, and following previous examples in Nazi Germany, there was little headroom for fruitful collaboration with colleagues sur place. Very often the necessary knowledge was provided by immigrants – often political exiles – from Eastern Europe; in extreme cases this could lead to an ‘ethnicisation’ of research in the West, as visible in some academic Ukrainian research centres in the United States and Canada, for example in Harvard and at the University of Alberta (Sysyn 1999). After 1989/91, this ‘know your enemy’ approach plunged Eastern European Studies into a deep crisis. The collapse of communism deprived the discipline not only of its central subject (and of much of its strategic funding) but confronted scholars with nagging questions about why the breakdown of the

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socialist system, of the Warsaw Pact and the USSR came as a surprise for the overwhelming majority of experts in the field (Lipset and Bence 1994; Kuran 1995). In the long run, the loss of the ‘significant other’ even challenged the conventional identity of the West as a particular entity (Chakrabaty 2000). The ensuing epistemological and funding crisis forced scholars in Eastern European Studies to come to terms with the obvious deficits and limitations of their research traditions (Creuzberger et al. 2000). This critical selfevaluation in many respects echoed developments in Oriental/Islamic studies and other fields, where Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) was the catalyst for a fundamental rethinking of the disciplines, and especially of their political contexts and frameworks. The enormous popularity and influence of Said’s Orientalism cannot be overstated, and the debates on Orientalism and ‘otherness’ also began to influence Eastern Europeanists (and in particular those who were dealing with the Muslim heritage of the Balkans; cf. Neuburger 2004; Omerika 2014). Yet, it should be pointed out that a critique of ‘Orientalism’ as a broad ‘formation’ (in Said’s terms), and in particular of Oriental Studies and its political role, had already been voiced long before the appearance of Said’s book. Since the late 1950s, there were several authors (mostly arguing from Marxist positions, both in the West and in the Soviet Union) who independently of Said came to similar results about the colonial nature of area study disciplines (Macfie 2000; Kemper 2015). Yet more than by internal debates, the field of Eastern European Studies was shaken by the events of 1989/91. While in the Cold War period, Eastern European Studies was largely an umbrella discipline for everything connected to the European nations east of the Odra River, the collapse of the socialist systems of Eastern Europe split this target region into, on the one hand, ‘East Central Europe’ (i.e. the belt from the Baltic States over Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia to Romania and Bulgaria), and, on the other, the area that geographically forms the East of the European continent (especially Russia, Ukraine and Belarus). While research on East-Central Europe has more and more been integrated into European studies (another umbrella discipline) and European history (Le Rider 2008), Russia, Ukraine and Belarus are now often approached from a perspective of Central Eurasian studies, as a new umbrella for the study of the post-Soviet world. One result of this split is that more

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attention is given to the Caucasus and Central Asia – regions that had formerly been marginal not only in mainstream Eastern European Studies but also in Oriental studies like Turkology and Iranian studies. While the new spotlight that these regions have started to enjoy is a major achievement, the new discipline of Central Eurasian studies arguably contributes to an alienation of the three Slavic republics of Eastern Europe from its western neighbours, and from European perspectives. This does not mean that ‘Eastern European Studies’, in the traditional understanding, has ceased to exist. It does mean, however, that study centres that still define themselves as ‘Eastern European’ have to come to terms with the fact that this area is no longer nicely delineated from the West by the former Cold War division. A new political fracture line emerges between those countries that are drawn into the orbit of the European Union (EU), and those that are not – namely the Russian Federation and the other republics of the former USSR minus the Baltic States. That said, the study of larger areas has always been defined by current politics. This also holds true for ‘Eastern European Studies’ and its successors, European studies that include the East of Central Europe, and Eurasian studies. These fields continue to be highly politicized and focused on contemporary issues, and they still tend to draw their legitimacy from political divisions and political institutions. After all, the new split between European studies (as an interdisciplinary field largely concentrating on EU issues) and the study of the countries east of the EU largely coincides with Samuel Huntington’s division of Europe (first published in his 1993 essay in Foreign Affairs) into a Catholic/ Protestant West and an Orthodox East (Huntington 1993). The field that was less affected by the recent political changes was Eastern European history in the longue durée. But also here, we see major transformations, with an ‘imperial turn’ towards the comparative study of the Habsburg, Russian and Ottoman empires, in both the centres and the peripheries.3 Recent studies of Imperial Russia have, for example, elucidated the peculiar interplay of different religious status groups with the complex build-up of the empire. They explored problems emerging from the co-existence of religious and secular law systems in the imperial peripheries or dealt with the frictions that religious institutions and identities were exposed to in the wake of state-sponsored modernization and the emergence of competing

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nation-building projects (Geraci and Khodarkovsky 1999; Freeze 2001; Werth 2002; Crews 2006; Werth 2011). Most importantly, the Ottoman Empire is no longer regarded as just ‘Europe’s Oriental Other’ but increasingly seen as a fullfledged actor in the larger European concert of empires (Doyle 1986; Motyl 2001; Lieven 2002; Miller and Rieber 2004; Hirschhausen and Leonhard 2009, 2011). This new perspective on the Ottoman Empire feeds of course from the growing realization of the pitfalls of ‘Orientalism’, in the aftermath of Said’s Orientalism of 1978, but also from an impressive wealth of historical studies in Turkey since the 1980s, when old stereotypes and national paradigms became increasingly challenged. This shift is of eminent significance for the study of the Balkans, which has often been set apart as South-Eastern European studies (cf. Todorova 1997). With the demise of Yugoslavia and the wars that followed, we observe a similar shift from Cold War approaches to studies focusing on questions of identity and religion. The second persisting academic tradition in historical research is the study of the socialist countries of Eastern Europe, that is, ‘Eastern European history of the short 20th century (1918-1991)’, which still provides the framework for historical studies on countries that were isolated from the West and forcefully integrated into the Soviet orbit. Here as well the major dynamism results from new opportunities for exchange and collaboration with scholars from those countries, who link up with Western/global trends in scholarship to come to revisions of the socialist-cum-national historiographies of the recent past. Both comparative Imperial studies and ‘socialist history’ draw their strength from the archival revolution that accompanied the break-up of the socialist block, that is, from the new access to imperial and national archives (Khlevniuk 2001; Raleigh 2002; Creuzberger and Lindner 2003; Bobrovnikov 2008). In cultural studies, one observes a shift to issues of representation and image (Gerasimov et al. 2009). While in the past, the major focus had been on the study of centres, the new opportunities of research on the spot produced a wealth of local case studies, especially on the so-called peripheries of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union and the socialist nation-states (Baberowski, Feest and Gumb 2008; Sunderland 2009; Smith-Peter 2011). ‘Postcolonialism’ entered the field, dealing with the dissolution of the Habsburg, Russian and Ottoman Empires, on the one hand, but also deconstructing the changes after 1989/91, on the other. The latter gave new life to the old debate whether the

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Soviet Union was a classical ‘empire’ merely aimed at the exploitation of its colonies, or, as is largely acknowledged today, an ‘affirmative action empire’ (in the terminology of Terry Martin) that attempted to transform and modernize its peripheries (Martin 2001; Suny and Martin 2001). In the first decade after 1989/91, Eastern Europe survived as a coherent object of Area Studies in the form of transitions studies, driven by political scientists, sociologists and economists (Fleron 1996; Chandler 2004). Yet after the millennium, the split of the area into the new EU candidate (later member) states, on the one hand, and a ‘post-Soviet’ realm, on the other, made transitional studies an increasingly questionable replacement of Eastern European Studies; how long can Russia, for example, be regarded as ‘in transition’, and to what? (Rüstov 1970; Schmitter and Karl 1994; Linz and Stepan 1996) More recently, research inspired by anthropological approaches constituted the field of ‘post-socialist studies’. Not unlike postcolonial studies, ‘post-socialist studies’ developed from a makeshift designation (for whatever followed socialism after its demise) into a critical evaluation of the persistent heritage of socialism in the post-1989 projects of state- and nation-building, democratization, and economic reform. In a sense it thus re-established the former ‘second world’ (another Cold War concept) as its object of study, strongly encouraging transnational and comparative research in that realm (Chari and Verdery 2009). These developments are flanked by the philologies, which continue to draw their identities from linguistic divisions. The major discipline here is of course Slavic (Slavonic) studies, which traditionally focuses on Russian (and Ukrainian) literature and language, combined with Polish, Czech/Slovak and South Slavic philologies (from Slovenian to Bulgarian). Slavic philology therefore traditionally excludes Eastern European countries whose majority population does not speak a Slavic language (e.g. Hungary, Romania and the Baltics), and continues to be firmly grounded in paradigms of romantic nationalism, which means also the discipline of Slavic studies has always been politicized (Mazon 1924; Braun 1950; Fürbeth et al. 1999). Still, also here we observe the opening up of the discipline to a wealth of new trends (including media studies) that often shake the disciplinary borders. As mentioned above, the eastward shift from Eastern European Studies to Central Eurasian studies was facilitated by a new Western political and

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economic interest in Central Asia and the Caucasus, and by Russia’s increasing attempts to re-establish itself as the political centre of a broader Eurasian region. Like Russia itself, also the South Caucasus and Central Asia have emerged as important producers of oil and gas, with new competitions over pipelines, exploitation rights and markets. The American coining of a ‘Caspian Region’ designates the growing importance assigned to the Caucasus and Central Asia, not only with regard to energy supply but also in the context of the US-led ‘war against terrorism’, which reached its peak during the 2000s and reinvigorated with the recent rise of the so-called Islamic State. With much delay, the EU has also started to address the Caucasus and the western fringes of the former Soviet space, by upgrading its neighbourhood policies to a specific Eastern Partnership programme in 2009. Beside Ukraine and Moldova, it is above all targeting the South Caucasian states of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. These policies acknowledge the importance of the region, and equally the necessity to build relations on a more intimate knowledge of the area (which is reflected in the priorities of several EU research funding programmes). Hence, both the growing energy entanglements and the increasing geopolitical interest in the region between Europe, Russia, Iran, Afghanistan and China have been important stimuli for the establishment of the new field of ‘Central Eurasian studies’. Inevitably, this political motivation had the result that most scientific literature currently produced on Central Asia and the Caucasus has a narrow focus on political and economic issues, and contributes to a ‘securitization’ of our perspectives on the regions. Cultural studies (historical and philological) on the Caucasus and Central Asia have benefited from interest in the area to a much lesser degree, even if there are now some targeted funding programmes (in Germany, especially by the Volkswagen and Gerda Henkel Foundations). Yet cultural and historical studies require various combinations of specialist knowledge, and due to political circumstances in the countries of Central Asia and the Caucasus, the opportunities for fieldwork on the spot are limited, or at least difficult. This is clearly reflected by the leading current bibliography in the field, the Central Eurasian Reader (Central Eurasian Reader 2008, 2011). In practice, the geographical shift to Central Eurasian studies has not yet resulted in the establishment of a stable research infrastructure at European universities. With the exception of the CNRS in Paris, the Central Asia Seminar

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at Berlin’s Humboldt University and parts of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, there are barely any noteworthy centres of historical, cultural and anthropological Central Asian or Caucasus studies in Europe.4 Rather, most expertise in these fields continues to be scattered over various departments (especially Islamic studies, Turkology, Iranian studies, history, ethnography, archaeology and, partly, Eastern European Studies). Wherever there is a chair of Caucasiology, it tends to be focusing on linguistic studies, mostly with regard to Georgian. This regrettable ‘arrested development’ can be explained by the multitude of native and literary languages that have been spoken and written in the Caucasus and Central Asia, in addition to Russian as the major archival language for the imperial and Soviet periods (Gould 2013). This lack of strong research traditions on the cultural heritage of the Caucasus and Central Asia (in addition to Siberia) contrasts with our good knowledge of Russian/Slavic literatures and languages. This imbalance challenges the applicability of ‘Central Eurasian Studies’ as a new field of Area Studies, at least as long as this concept is meant to embrace various regions of Eurasia (Kotkin 2007) on an equal footing. For many Western scholars of the Caucasus and Central Asia, the only language of access and communication remains Russian, which clearly limits their opportunities, often resulting in an unacknowledged continuation of colonial perspectives. Equally regrettable is that also in the new states of the Caucasus and Central Asia themselves, there is hardly any opportunity to establish ‘Caucasus studies’, ‘Central Asian studies’ or ‘Central Eurasian studies’. Here, the obstacles are of a political nature again, as states and societies continue to call for the production of mono-national histories and cultures, mostly from a teleological perspective that ignores minorities, diversity and inter-ethnic relations. Interestingly, the only recent attempts to write comprehensive regional histories of Central Asia and the North Caucasus come from Moscow, partly with postcolonial approaches; Russian scholars, not unlike their Western counterparts, thereby challenge the national paradigms that dominate the Caucasus and Central Asia (Kemper 2008). Yet direct scholarly exchange is still limited. The French Institute in Tashkent, which used to provide many opportunities to scholars from the region, had to close down, and its counterpart in Baku is limited in its outreach. A remaining engine of cooperation and development is the American University of Central Asia in Bishkek. In Kazakhstan, well-funded

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universities – like the Lev Gumilev University and the Nazarbaev University in Astana – systematically attract Western scholars as lecturers and PhD supervisors; this, however, does not necessarily come without conflicts with the ‘native’ staff in less prestigious sections of the universities. Kazakhstan also stands out because this state developed a form of ‘Eurasianism’ as its new political ideology, acknowledging the country’s multi-ethnic history and population and its location on the crossroads between Russia and Europe, on the one hand, and the Muslim World and China, on the other (Laruelle 2008: ch. 6). Yet also Kazakhstani ‘Eurasianism’ is a national project geared towards state-building. The result is that like elsewhere in the region (and in Russia), most research follows the imperatives of strengthening state institutions and controlling the independent religious sector in the country, that is, to counter the threat of Islamic extremism and the perceived challenge of Protestant missionary movements.

Religion as a determining factor for area concepts? Compared to other Area Studies fields, Eastern European Studies was thus less coined by religious sensibilities or religious studies. As sketched above, the emergence of Eastern European Studies in late-nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century Europe was above all determined by the identification of a block of Slavic languages/literatures and the political interests in Imperial Russia and in the areas ‘vacated’ by the ailing Ottoman Empire. The borders of the empires simply disrespected the historical distribution of confessional groups across Eastern Europe: neither was the Russian Empire thoroughly defined by Orthodoxy, nor was its Ottoman counterpart just an Islamic state, and also the Habsburg Empire was characterized by different national and religious communities. Beyond that, specialists in theology or religious studies in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europe often displayed a condescending attitude towards Eastern Orthodoxy. Adolf von Harnack, the doyen of German Prussian Protestant theology, thought of Orthodoxy as a ritually, intellectually and morally degenerated form of Christendom. This dismissive attitude (also of Catholic theologians) towards the Orthodox churches limited academic

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studies of Orthodoxy, also in other European countries (Pinggéra 2013). The Orientalist fascination of Europeans with Orthodoxy and the ‘Russian soul’ in the late nineteenth century, mediated through Russian writers like Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, reflected above all a trendy modernization fatigue that some Westerners shared with Russian conservative philosophers and writers (Malia 1999; Dodd 2000). Western interest in the fate of the Eastern Churches increased only after the first great wave of intellectual emigration from Russia after the October Revolution, to gain momentum with the Soviet persecution of the clergy and violent attack on Orthodox institutions. For example, the sale of the library of the dissolved Holy Synod by Soviet authorities allowed for the creation of a chair in Eastern European Studies at the University of Erlangen, Germany. Again, religion came onto the agenda because of political developments (Pinggéra 2013: 114). The substantial institutional development of Eastern European Studies during the Cold War, with its focus on communism (often understood as a ‘secular religion’ that developed its own rituals for the sake of social control), further reduced the role for religion in this branch of Area Studies. In fact, many observers rather uncritically accepted the Soviet claim that communist modernization and secularization left only marginal space for religion, which Soviet sources presented as mere ‘remnants of the past’. Neither political scientists nor sociologists working on the Soviet Union or the communist states were terribly interested in the fate of confessions in socialist societies. An exceptional case that did attract interest was Poland, where the Catholic Church developed into a veritable social force after Gomulka’s concessions in the late 1950s (Diskin 2001). The other obvious culprit was Islam. In this case, politics dominated the interpretative framework, too. The Westerners’ lack of access to Islamic activists (imams, scholars and intellectuals) in the region, and to local religious sources in general, made them dependent on Soviet publications; the latter of course reflected the official ideology but left much room for speculation. The most famous research work of this kind of studies on Islam in the USSR was performed by the ‘school’ of Alexandre Bennigsen (1913–88), who, in collaboration with Chantal Lemercier-Quelquejay and other scholars, argued that there was an ‘Islamic threat to the Soviet state’ (Bennigsen and LemercierQuelquejay 1967; Bennigsen and Broxup 1983). The general idea that Muslim

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communities in Central Asia and the Caucasus would unite under the umbrella of Islam to challenge Soviet rule, and to expel the Russians, turned out to be wishful thinking. It was based on a very limited understanding of Soviet policies in the ‘Muslim’ peripheries of the USSR, and above all on an essentialist understanding of Islam as one homogenous force, and of ‘underground’ Muslim communities as by definition oppositional to the regime. The whole construct of an ‘Islamic army in the waiting’ in Soviet Central Asia and the Caucasus became popular after the Islamic Revolution in neighbouring Iran, and it seems to have influenced CIA approaches to support the mujahidin in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989 (Kalinovsky 2015). Still, the Bennigsen School was also effective in raising interest in the area, and its contribution to the field should not be underestimated. While today many political scientists still continue the Bennigsen approach, now with regard to ‘Russia’s Islamic threat’ (Hahn 2007), other scholars, usually with a broader cultural and historical perspective and encompassing knowledge of local languages, consciously develop their own interpretations of the role of Islam in the region, in opposition to the premises that guided Bennigsen and his colleagues (Atkin 1989; Khalid 2007). Also important to note is that the journal that once represented the research line of the Bennigsen School, Central Asian Survey, soon transformed into the most important European venue for serious historical, cultural and political research on the Caucasus and Central Asia. As indicated above, the old view of Europe as a continent divided into a ‘Western’ and an ‘Eastern’ hemisphere, with Protestant and Catholic cultures in the West and Christian Orthodox and Islamic majority societies in the East (cf. Kundera 1983), has seen a powerful revival with the demise of communism. While religion has thus hardly been a determining factor in the establishment of Eastern European Studies, the recent eastwards shift of the discipline to a certain degree resonates with old ‘civilizational boundaries’ deeply ingrained in popular and political imagination. The post-1991 revitalization of religion in the ‘East’, both in terms of institutions and of religious practices, was by necessity perceived as a renaissance, eliciting much attention in scholarship on contemporary post-socialist societies. With the EU accession of the Baltic States, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia – all with Catholic and Protestant confessions dominant – this Huntingtonian fault line obtained even

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more plausibility; Romania, Bulgaria and Greece, with their strong Orthodox cultures, appear to many observers at the moment as somehow ‘alien’ members in the EU – a perception that certainly has its roots in Max Weber’s theories on the impact of religion on work ethos and modern state efficiency. Looking further east, the new playground of ‘Central Eurasian studies’ now appears to cover the frontier zone between Orthodoxy and Islam. In the postSoviet realm, this materializes in a geographical North–South and West–East gradation that ranges from exclusivity (e.g. ‘Orthodox Northern/Central Russia’ vs. ‘Muslim Central Asia’) to mixed borderlands in the middle and east (the Volga-Urals, Kazakhstan and Siberia). This perception of religious borders has been reinforced by a series of huge, often enforced population exchanges (e.g. between ‘Muslim’ Azerbaijan and ‘Christian’ Armenia) and mass emigration of ethnic Russians from the Caucasus and Central Asia (especially Kazakhstan). Religious homogeneity furthermore increased with the mass exodus of Jews and (mostly Protestant) Germans from all parts of the former Soviet Union. Countering these trends of creating nationally and religiously homogenous zones is the growing South–North labour migration, especially of natives of Central Asia and the Caucasus to Central Russia and Siberia. Islam thereby becomes a marker for immigrants, and xenophobia in the Russian cities is getting much more based on religious lines than on national identities. Even a part of the democratic opposition, as exemplified by Aleksey Navalny, called for a ‘Russia without the Caucasus’, thus using religious/cultural identities for their call to dismantle the Russian federal system (which is still based on autonomous ‘ethnic’ republics like Chechnya and Tatarstan), and to create a unitary state (Laruelle 2014). These processes also foment the image of the Orthodox Church as a ‘protector’ of Russian national identity, an issue to which we will return in more detail below. In sum, the recent religious revival and the increasing political importance of confessions in the post-Soviet sphere provide an interesting counter-case to the still dominant secularization thesis; it also sets the post-Soviet area apart from Eastern Europe’s ‘successful’ transition states like Poland and the Czech Republic, which are largely studied from secularist perspectives. Important in our context is that the renewed prominence of religion in the post-Soviet realm speaks against the old overarching concept of ‘Eastern European Studies’, and for its division into Eastern Central Europe and Central Eurasia.

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A new role for religious studies in the framework of Central Eurasian Studies Scholars of contemporary developments, often with a background in political or social sciences, were quick to take note of the new prominence of religious practices and the re-establishment/expansion of religious institutions across the post-Soviet space. In partial ignorance of continuities, they often interpreted the upsurge in religiosity as a quest to fill the spiritual or ideological void that supposedly opened up after the demise of communism. Without explicitly denying this ‘spiritual demand’ from below, other observers emphasized the political functions of post-Soviet religious institutions, and the alliances between secular and spiritual authorities in the processes of postSoviet state- and nation-building (Greely 2002; Krindatch 2004; Johnson 2005; Müller 2011). The Russian Orthodox Church has indeed experienced a stunning institutional revival under state tutelage. The Russian state generously returned church property that the Bolsheviks had seized; religion has become part of school curricula, and leading statesmen and politicians eagerly displayed their respect for religious authorities. Together with elements selected from Imperial Russian and Soviet contexts, Orthodoxy became an integral part of the new federal state’s symbolism (Papkova 2011), and is increasingly exploited in the Kremlin’s foreign policy as well (Payne 2010). Against this backdrop of what some call ‘neo-Byzantinism’, or ‘the new symphony’ (Knox 2003), the Orthodox Church remained strikingly passive in the sphere of social services, which had been left behind in disarray after the collapse of the Soviet welfare state. Here new fields opened up for socially engaged communities, and Catholic charities as well as American Protestant congregational chapters developed bustling activities all over the former USSR. This intrusion into what was perceived as the ‘orthodox realm’ triggered a historically ingrained reflex: the Russian Orthodox Church turned to the state for support and protection. The state had warranted the church’s preeminent position in society from Peter the Great’s creation of the Holy Synod in 1721 until the revolutions of 1917; while in the 1920s and 1930s, the Bolsheviks heavily suppressed the church and its personnel, starting in 1943 the authorities replaced downright

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repression with a more subtle form of control, with Stalin arranging a sort of ‘concordat’ with the Patriarch. In the last decades of the USSR, the Russian Orthodox Church already regained a strong position in society; and the millennium of the Christianization of medieval (Kievan) Russia (in 988 CE) was celebrated still in Gorbachev’s Soviet Union. Since the 1990s, the new Russian state acknowledges the special position of the Orthodox Church, granting it the distinguished status of a ‘traditional religion’ in Russia (Bremer 2013). To be sure, also Islam, Buddhism and Judaism are officially counted as Russia’s ‘traditional religions’, but their leaders are clearly in the role of junior brothers to the Orthodox Church. This distinction disadvantaged the Protestant and Catholic churches, whose activities have often been obstructed. The creation of new Catholic episcopates in Russia (as in Novosibirsk, for example) is regarded as foreign intrusion into traditionally Orthodox territory. Even worse is the situation in the Muslim regions of Central Asia and the Caucasus, where converts to Protestantism are subject of public ostracism, and largely regarded as traitors of their respective nation (Peyrouse 2003; van Gorder 2008; Pelkmans 2009). The situation is very different in Ukraine, which is marked by an increase in religious diversity. The country has not one but several competing Orthodox Church organizations. A part of the parishes remained under the control of the Russian Orthodox Patriarchate in Moscow; others were affiliating themselves with the new Ukrainian Patriarchate in Kiev. The Uniate Church (which follows the orthodox ritual but is subordinated to the Vatican since the Union of Brest in 1595) has been re-established in the western parts of the country. While the Ukrainian state sometimes supports the Kiev Patriarchate (against Moscow’s influence), no openly discriminatory policies have been conducted with respect to other creeds. Protestant missionary activities are widespread, and anthropological research has explored the formation of alternative moralities, transnational communities and political engagement that contribute to Ukraine’s very vibrant (post-)socialist modernity (Wanner 2007). However, in the military confrontations that broke out in the east of Ukraine in 2014, priests of all churches are reported to bless weapons, on both sides. The Crimean Tatar Muslim organizations – traditionally more inclined to ally with Kiev than with the Crimean Russians – are now forced to orient themselves towards Moscow.

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As in the case of competing nationalisms, also religious competitors strive to impose their visions of history (Miller 2011). New construction projects in Eastern Europe exemplify these historical dimensions of confession. The Church of Christ the Saviour in central Moscow, originally built to commemorate the Russian Victory over Napoleon in 1812 (Gentes 1998), was destroyed under Stalin to make room for a gigantic Palace of the Soviets, which however never materialized. The church was re-built in 2000, and in February 2012 became the site for Pussy Riot’s controversial ‘Punk Prayer: Mother of God, Chase Putin Away!’. New mosques arose in all Muslimpopulated parts of Eastern Europe. In the Republic of Tatarstan (within the Russian Federation), a gigantic modern mosque, the Qul Sharif, was erected in the historical Kazan Kremlin, a complex of Russian architectural monuments. The new mosque was to symbolize both Tatar history (the continuity with the Qul Sharif mosque that reportedly stood in the Kremlin before Muscovy’s conquest of Kazan in 1552) and interreligious concord, that is, the integration of a mosque into a complex of many old Orthodox churches (Noack 1998). The development of Islam in the post-Soviet sphere is also characterized by state intervention colliding with bottom-up developments. Already in 1788 Russia began to institutionalize Islam, in the form of a Muftiate (Muslim Spiritual Board) in Ufa, whose chairman, the Mufti, was in charge of all Islamic congregations in European Russia. This Muftiate, although small in scale and heavily controlled by the Tsarist and then Soviet administrations, fell into oblivion in the mid-1930s, but was revived during the Second World War, obviously with the goal of mobilizing the Soviet Muslims for the war effort. Indeed, then-Mufti Gabdrakhman Rasulev issued a call for Soviet jihad against the Nazis. Stalin even established new Muftiates, two for the Soviet Caucasus and one for Central Asia. Still, the authorities allowed for the official registration of only a very limited number of mosques, which meant that most Islamic prayer facilities were by definition ‘unregistered’, ‘illegal’ and thus an easy target for closure if needed. The classical traditions of Islamic scholarship in theology and Islamic law largely faded away with the closing down of the Islamic madrasas (teaching institutes) in the late 1920s and 1930s; in 1945, one Islamic school (in Bukhara) was re-opened, but it produced only few graduates, who could not respond to the needs of the USSR’s forty or fifty million Muslims. Also, the various Sufi brotherhoods were pushed out of the

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public, though some groups continued to practise, and to educate novices, in private (Kemper 2012). This situation contributed to the neglect of religion as a subject for Eastern European Studies, and to the tendency to interpret any kind of unofficial religious activity as potentially subversive and anti-Soviet. Inspired both by ‘post-Socialist’ approaches and anthropological methods, around the turn of the millennium a number of new research projects were launched in Western Europe to re-establish the history of Islam (and other confessions) under Soviet rule. These projects were largely based on the expertise that historians had gained from their work in local archives. The picture that emerges today is that official atheism and anti-religious propaganda had only limited success, particularly in rural areas of the Soviet Union. The dismantling of the Islamic infrastructure destroyed much of Islam’s learned culture in the Soviet realm, but it could not eliminate the belief itself, and not even the maintenance of Islamic rituals and the transmission of Islamic knowledge in private. At the same time, we now see that in the Soviet period, Islamic authorities and congregations, whether ‘official’ or ‘unregistered’, were remarkably flexible in adapting to the changing political, social and spiritual conditions in the ‘Islamic fringes’ of the Soviet Union. Official and non-official Islam were linked in many ways; neither of them was fully pro- or anti-Soviet (Dudoignon, Is’haqov and Möhämmätshin 1997). It is against this continuity and adaptation that the ‘Islamic boom’ became fully visible in the 1990s. While this revival was very much indebted to local traditions, it was also fermented by the new accessibility of foreign sources of Islamic knowledge. This situation triggered conflicts between the adherents of indigenous, ‘Soviet’ variants of Islamic knowledge and practice, and a new form of ‘bookish’ and politicized Islam fuelled from abroad. This is also very much a generational issue – with ‘young, modern, highly educated Salafis’ educated abroad challenging the ‘self-made Soviet’ imams. Also in the context of the two Chechen wars, and of the emergence of Islamic terrorism in the North Caucasus and beyond, Islam came to shape state security discourses in all post-Soviet republics with Muslim populations. While Orthodoxy is the state’s companion, Islam remains ambiguous, divided between militant groups and state-supported Muftiates. The latter mushroomed after 1991, appearing not only in all capitals of the newly independent former Union Republics but also in the capitals of the ethnic

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‘Muslim’ republics within the Russian Federation, plus in many other cities, including Moscow, Kazan, Saratov, Nizhnii Novgorod and St Petersburg. These local or regional Muftiates often compete for the affiliation of Muslim congregations in a given territory, and set up a number of umbrella organizations (Zdorovets 2007; Silant’ev 2008). While the Russian state does everything to support the unity of the Russian Orthodox Church, the fragmentation of the Islamic spectrum created a mosaic with often overlapping territorial claims by the competing Muftis. This means a break with the historical traditions of centralized Islamic administrations within the Russian state. In the processes of re-centralization in Russia and the stabilization of authoritarian regimes in the Caucasus and Central Asia since the mid-1990s, the new states reasserted their control over the Islamic boards and tried to sideline unwanted competitors. With the re-establishment of an ‘official’ staterecognized Islam, many of the autonomous congregations were forced into semi-legal or illegal existence, with some of them transforming into so-called underground jamaats (communities). Violent suppression of these jamaats began already in the second half of the 1990s – thus long before 9/11 and the ‘Global War on Terror’ provided the regimes in the region with a convenient international legitimation for a crackdown (Dudoignon and Noack 2014).

Conclusion: Central Eurasian Studies or European Studies? Eastern European Studies as a regional studies discipline is, like its subject, still in an open-ended process of transition. In retrospective, one will bemoan a loss of professionalism at both ends of the geographical gradient. The integration of East-Central Europe into larger European frameworks suffers from a general lack of linguistic competence in those Eastern European languages that used to be taught in the Area Studies disciplines that were boosted during the Cold War. Many of the ‘smaller’ East European languages have already ceased to be taught at West European and North American universities; and the new (shorter) BA and MA programmes in the European Union make the teaching of Eastern European languages – even of Russian – a real challenge, if not a luxury. The predominance of Russia, and of Russian, also creates new problems

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at the opposite end of the gradient, with respect to the study of the Caucasus and Central Asian regions that have recently come more into focus. Russian can no longer be taken for granted to be the lingua franca in the whole of the post-Soviet space. In post-Soviet countries like Uzbekistan, targeted native language and educational politics have significantly reduced the knowledge of Russian among the new generations. The European Union’s political agenda, as expressed in its European Neighbourhood Policy and Eastern Partnership, focuses on economic interests (mainly gas and oil), border security, stabilization and the channelling of migration. In such policy documents, echoes of Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’ are hard to ignore.5 The approach of ‘know your enemy’ is also not off the table with respect to Islam, which replaced communism as the new foe. If Central Eurasian studies is meant to become a critical discipline beyond political interests and schematic Landeskunde, and instead a tool to deconstruct the new European ‘Orientalisms’, much still remains to be done. Serious religious studies should be part of the effort. In much of the post-Soviet space, after seventy years of Soviet educational policies such research capacities are very scarce, and often integrated into the emerging confessional infrastructures of the Orthodox Church or the Muftiates. The situation in Western Europe or North America is not much more encouraging; as a rule, religious studies are remote from regional studies that tend to focus on ‘secularized’ Europe or its ‘Islamic fringe’ in the South–East. Orthodoxy is not yet taken seriously as an important political, institutional or moral factor, and the multifaceted presence of Islam in Eastern Europe is either folklorized or externalized, wrongly understood as an intrusion from outside the region. Neither the existing academic capacities nor the perspective planning seem to be influenced by these developments. That there seems to be so little room for an integration of religious studies into Eastern European Studies is in stark contrast to the central role of religion in ‘neighbouring’ Middle Eastern Studies. At the same time, the preponderance of Islam and Islamic studies in this field could serve as a fair warning. Research on the fluctuating border zones of Europe should not be aiming primarily at defining an essence – religious or civilizational – of its elusive subject. Instead, it should focus on the historical dynamics, and on shifting relations between old and new centres and peripheries. This does not exclude

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the study of transnational factors like Europeanization and globalization, but also Islamization, all with their peculiar regional manifestations. In this respect, Europe will always form an important frame of reference also for the regions beyond the European Union. As Timm Beichelt recently argued, not only Eastern Europe is in transformation but also the essence of the ‘ever deeper integrating’ European Union. This opens up gateways for innovative comparative approaches in EU integration studies. The perceived isolation of ‘Eastern Europe beyond the EU’ utterly needs deconstruction, as the recent events in Ukraine illustrate. Finally, the global character of the financial and Euro crises challenged the wisdom of neoliberal thought (Beichelt 2013) and brought new attention to national and regional specifics, which are often expressed in cultural and religious idioms.

Notes Introduction 1 An important exception is Szanton 2002. 2 In Oriental Studies, this cultural knowledge complementing language learning was formalized in German through the study of Landeskunde. Landeskunde was an integral part of programmes of the Seminar für Orientalische Sprachen in Berlin from its establishment in the late nineteenth century and was also an integrated element in the first programme in Japanese Studies established by Karl Florenz in Hamburg (Brochlos 2002; Wachutka 2001).

Chapter 1 1 For their critical comments on drafts of this chapter, a thank you to Marieke Bloembergen, John-Paul Ghobrial, Kiri Paramore and Anna Sun. 2 Bowen’s own work exhibited both tendencies as well; see Bowen 1993. 3 See Fasseur 1993 for a history of Dutch Orientalism in respect of the Netherlands East Indies. 4 Benda noted on The Religion of Java that ‘this is clearly a book about one part of Java, about “Modjokuto,” not about the island as a whole’, something that Geertz should have emphasized more (1962: 404). 5 While doing little to hide a dislike of dogmatist Islam, which would come into its own in a later study by the same author: Beatty 2009.

Chapter 3 1 One only has to think here of present-day Hindu nationalist claims of the antiquity of the Vedas. 2 Italics by Charpentier, who notices that the two stories occur in books I and V of Felicio’s work; he also argues that the source of these stories must be a

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Notes work Felicio attributes to Agastya, known as the Prapañcasṛṣṭi. Its content is clearly Puranic.

3 A catalogue of manuscripts sent to Paris by the Jesuits in 1729–35 (Bibliothèque nationale NAF 5442) provides valuable information on the sources collected by the Jesuits (Omont 1902: 1179–92). Included in this catalogue are twenty-five Sanskrit Purāṇa manuscripts as well as some Tamil Purāṇas. I owe the reference to this catalogue to Sweetman and Ilakkuvan 2012: 19, n. 67. 4 Cf., for example, his remark on the Arubáddu diruwileiadel puranum (BM 106), a Purāṇa on the sports of Śiva in Madurai: ‘a large book in verse, containing the sixty-four manifestations of the idol Cokkanāyakar. I have gone through this book very closely, and extracted several thousand words and beautiful phrases from it. The Malabarians regard this book as very valuable and wonder very much where I got it from’ (translation from the German: Sweetman and Ilakkuvan 2012: 116). 5 The Viṣṇupurāṇa has been recently translated into German by Schreiner 2013. 6 See Wilczewska 2013 on Bhāgavatapurāṇa recitation in modern times. The earliest reference to the recitation of a Purāṇa is in the Harṣacarita of the seventh-century Sanskrit poet Bāṇa (Bisschop 2014). The passage describes a bard who sits down and publicly reads aloud from a manuscript of the Vāyupurāṇa. The bard is appropriately called a ‘manuscript reader’ (pustakavācaka). 7 For a good example of what can be achieved in this respect, see Bakker 2014. 8 The ten-year project is called ‘Puranantargat Itihas’. For a report, see http:// indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/6-times-more-puranas-in-handrss-puts-100-on-job-for-new-history/ (accessed 8 May 2016).

Chapter 4 1 My gratitude to the colleagues who collaborated on this project, especially T. H. Barrett, Barend ter Haar, Hans Martin Krämer and Kiri Paramore. 2 Indeed, this reality of Chinese religious life is so different from the Abrahamic traditions we are familiar with in the West that it takes some effort for scholars to transmit its spirit to their non-Asian students. Barend J. ter Haar speaks of his strategy in ‘Teaching with Incense’: ‘ “Teaching with incense” forces students to confront their own uneasiness at observing what are to them strange and exotic

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practices at the same time that it introduces some basic issues in the study of Chinese religions’ (ter Haar 1999). 3 In recent years, several studies have focused on the complex processes of the historical production of knowledge of Asian religions in the West (see, e.g., Girardot 2002; Masuzawa 2005; Barrett 2005; Sun 2013). 4 Barrett argues persuasively that ‘the rapid resort to the nei-wai distinction in Chinese Buddhist circles suggests a strong desire to keep Buddhism distinct, perhaps reflecting an acute awareness of the syncretizing tendencies of the popular mind, in China as elsewhere. But turning to the discourse of “worldly” and “otherworldly” did achieve an important goal with regard not only to the forms of earlier cultic worship but also to emergent opposition from the Daoists’ (Barrett 2009: 13). 5 My thanks go to Hans Martin Kraemer for including me in his productive workshop ‘Friedrich Max Müller and his Asian Interlocutors: Academic Knowledge about “Oriental Religions” in Late Nineteenth-Century Europe’ at the University of Heidelberg in 2014. This section of the chapter was originally written for the workshop. 6 There have been several illuminating recent studies of the so-called problem of paganism, such as Carlos Steel, John Marenbon and Werner Verbeke, eds, Paganism in the Middle Ages: Threat and Fascination (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2013). 7 A few recent publications include H. S. Versnel’s Inconsistences in Greek and Roman Religion: Isis, Dionysos, Hermes: Three Studies in Henotheism (Leiden: Brill, 1990), and two volumes edited by Stephen Mitchell and Peter Van Nuffelen, One God: Pagan Monotheism in the Roman Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), and Monotheism between Pagans and Christians in Late Antiquity (Leuven: Peeters, 2010). 8 See, for instance, Beyer, ‘The Religious System of Global Society: A Sociological Look at Contemporary Religion and Religions’, Numen 45 (1998): 1–29; Campany, ‘On the Very Idea of Religions (in the Modern West and in Early Medieval China)’, History of Religions 42 (2003): 287–319; Teiser, ‘Popular Religion’, The Journal of Asian Studies 54 (1995): 378–95. 9 One recent productive use of the concept of religious repertoire can be found in Gareth Fisher’s study of contemporary Buddhist life, ‘Religion as Repertoire: Resourcing the Past in a Beijing Buddhist Temple’ (Fisher 2012). Indeed, one wishes there were more studies that show us such rich dynamics of the creativity of actual religious practice.

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Chapter 5 1 Though it is possible to interpret some Chinese terms going back over two millennia as labels for superstition, I have argued that a rather different and not necessarily dichotomous analysis was involved (Barrett 2008). 2 Ballhatchet (1988: 361), identifies the antecedents to this approach, though to my eye there is a reference here also to Galatians 3, 24–25. 3 Ballhatchet (1988: 358), translates this as ‘civil religion’, a good gloss for the 1980s but slightly misleading in the Japan of the 1880s. 4 His specific source was an obscure publication by George Matheson (1842–1906) (Ballhatchet 1988: 364). 5 On ‘superstition’ in the Bible, see the brief but clear summary of Martin (2004: 5–8). 6 The following account, unless otherwise indicated, follows Barrett and Tarocco (2012). 7 For the most common meanings of these terms in Buddhism, see Nakamura (1975: 231d, 645c–d), respectively. 8 Zhang purports to be summarizing a contemporary French concordat with the Vatican, but it seems he is summarizing the 1801 Concordat with Napoleon, the interpretation of which was an issue at the time (Poncet 1997). 9 Zhang 1982: 32. To be fair to Zhang, some missionaries, while well aware of other strands in Chinese belief, opted for calling all Chinese Confucians, in the sense that virtually none rejected the inherited tradition (Smith 1900: 306–7). 10 Peng (1976: 390–3), examines three passages where ‘religion’ or ‘religious’ are used in English, in all seven times; zongjiao is only used once (391). 11 Note Tokugawa Nariaki ᗭᐓ喀ᱣ (1800–60), in 1853: ‘The prohibition of Christianity is the first rule of the Tokugawa house. Public notices concerning it are posted everywhere, even to the remotest corner of every province. … The Bakufu can never ignore or overlook the evils of Christianity. Yet if the Americans are allowed to come again this religion will inevitably raise its head once more, however strict the prohibition; and this, I fear, is something we could never justify to the spirits of our ancestors’ (Beasley 1955: 103–4).

Chapter 6 1 I am limiting myself to Western European Christianity, since the authors who produced the dominant Western record on China originated from that

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background. It would be interesting to know whether Russian writers from an Eastern Orthodox background, or Japanese writers without a Christian background, looked at this differently. On this, see, for instance, Reinders (2004).

Chapter 7 1 Indeed, modern Korean Studies as engendered in Japan as a subfield of ‘East Asian history’ from the 1880s onwards were mercilessly exploited by Japanese media of Meiji times as arguments for Japan’s rights to get involved in Korea (Schmid 2002: 150). 2 The sino-centric world order had been rationalized by assumptions of not only geographical centrality, but also an unequal distribution of life energy, qi, over space, with China being endowed by the purest and most efficient qi. Seeing a globe could create a shock to educated Koreans as late as the 1880s, although knowledge about the round shape of the earth had been available since the early seventeenth century. See Shin Ch’aeho 1977: 384. 3 A good recent example for this view is the 2009 monograph by Ch’oe Chunsik, professor of Korean Studies at the renowned Ewha University, which posits Shamanism as ‘the original Korean religion’ that has to be freed from its marginalization by political power in order to further the development of national culture. 4 The best-known representative of this agenda is the renowned scholar Kŭm Changt’ae. For a recent, popular publication of his along these lines, see Kŭm 2015. 5 See Chŏng Wŏnyong 2008 and Ko Yŏngsŏp 2009 for a series of journal articles developing this argument. 6 This account is admittedly impressionistic rather than based on a systematic survey. 7 James Grayson is a well-respected scholar of Korean Studies, of course, but would be counted more specifically among anthropological scholars of Korean religion, especially Christianity. Both Wissinger and Kranewitter might be called semi-professionals in Korean Studies.

Chapter 8 1 The same point is raised for the case of China in the contributions by Anna Sun and T. H. Barrett to this volume.

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2 Basedau and Köllner (2007: 110, fn. 4) suggest that all Area Studies specialists tend to share their work more ‘with their colleagues in the respective disciplines’ than with those working on the same geographic-cultural area, whom they might at most interact with at meetings of area studies associations. In fact, however, it is uncommon for most Japan specialists, especially in the subfields of literature and history, to attend general meetings of historians or literature scholars or to publish in their venues. In other words, primary disciplinary allegiance is highly dependent on the particular subfield of Area Studies (history, literature, religion, political sciences etc.). 3 The names Kuroda Toshio (for medieval religions) and Shimazono Susumu (for New Religious Movements) immediately come to mind. 4 See also the contribution by Rowena Robinson to this volume. 5 All important books on new religious movements of the postwar period were written by non-Japanese Studies practitioners, until Helen Hardacre (1986), Ian Reader (1991) and Mark Mullins (1993) changed that since the late 1980s. Examples are van Straelen 1957, Thomsen 1963, Offner/van Straelen 1963 and MacFarland 1967. Very little work was done in Western languages on new religions in the 1970s and early 1980s, except for the odd critical book on Sōka Gakkai, the major exception being Davis 1980. 6 These were Bodiford 2006, Jaffe 2004 and Sawada 2006. 7 Confucianism is omitted from the following list (a) because, for reasons mainly having to do with the actual practice of Confucianism in pre-nineteenthcentury Japan, it has almost never been viewed in Japan itself as a member of that new category, ‘religion’, since the nineteenth century, and (b) because Western research on Japan has certainly never treated it as a religion. Instead, books on Tokugawa-period Confucianism invariably deal with Confucian thought. See, however, Paramore 2016. 8 An example of the former is Goto-Jones 2005, of the latter Kopf 2001. 9 Dumoulin 1990 is representative of this trend. 10 Examples are the notion of peace in new religious movements (Kisala 1999) or a certain type of meditation practices in contemporary religions (Staemmler 2009). 11 Paramore 2009 is an exception in treating Christianity as the object of an intellectual history inquiry, an approach so unusual that it was highlighted in most reviews of the book. 12 On this point, see the contribution by Kiri Paramore to the present volume. 13 See footnote 7 for alternate views on Confucianism.

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Chapter 9 1 The traditions of Korean Studies and Korean history, in the modern Japanese university system proper, and in Keijō (Seoul) University in colonial Korea, emerged from and usually remained in the department of ‘Oriental History’ (Tōyōshi), or were studied in the multidisciplinary institutes of ‘Oriental Studies’ (Tōyō kenkyū) (Takeda 2000). The study of both ‘Oriental’ disciplines in Japan excluded (and usually still excludes) Japan itself, which was (and is) studied in ‘national literature’ and ‘national history’ departments. 2 For instance, in his publication of the Greater Learning (Daxue) of the Four Books of Neo-Confucianism, he used the Pekingese transcription commonly employed in French Sinology at the time, instead of giving the Min’nan (Hokkien) dialect readings which he personally used and were standard in Holland because it was the more common form of Chinese used in Indonesia (Hoffmann 1864). His preference for Pekingese indicates he was writing for a pan-European Sinological readership rather than only a local Dutch one. 3 The best example of the obsession with this issue is Fukuzawa Yukichi’s writing on civilization, and his strong views on disengaging Japan from China – particularly in the Western imagination (Fukuzawa 1973). 4 Karl Florenz, the first professor of Japanese Studies in Germany, began his studies of Japanese as the SOS directly under Inoue Tetsujirō, whose introductions paved the way for Florenz’s later studies in Japan (Wachutka 2001: 52–4). 5 Marchand claims Herder as one of the earliest purveyors of this image, citing his reference to China as an ‘embalmed mummy’ (Marchand 2009: 22). 6 On Shinmura, see Paramore 2009: 12, 43. Shinmura’s letter of recommendation was crucial in securing Elisséeff entry to the degree programme at Tokyo (Reischauer 1957: 10).

Chapter 10 1 The role and development of Jewish studies within Eastern European Studies, which for obvious reasons followed a different and much more complicated trajectory (Stanislawski 2002; Gitelman 2011), will not be discussed here. 2 This could include some problematic relations as to quoting the sources. See for Serbian sources in Ranke’s work (Kämpfer 1991).

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3 One of the few successful new journals in Eastern European history, Ab Imperio, edited in Kazan, is explicitly devoted to Imperial studies. The journal’s annual themes and thematic issues neatly reflect the shifts in the field. See http:// abimperio.net/cgi-bin/aishow.pl?state=portal/journal/mission&idlang=1 (last accessed 29 January 2014). 4 In France, the former ‘Études turques et ottomanes’ merged with parts of the former ‘Centre d’études sur la Russie, l’Europe orientale et le domaine turc’ in 1990 to form the ‘Centre d’études turques, ottomanes, balkaniques et centrasiatiques’. In Berlin, the Humboldt University’s Zentralasien-Seminar emerged from a fusion of capacities created during the GDR in Iranian, Turkic and Mongol studies. A chair for Central Asian and Tibet studies was established in 1995, a full MA and doctoral programme in 1997. 5 Browsing through the ‘Agenda 2020’, outlining the EU’s research funding for the next five years can be quite disheartening in this respect.

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Biographies for Religion and Orientalism in Asian Studies Bernard Arps is fascinated by performative and mediated worldmaking, particularly in religious contexts in Southeast Asia. Currently Professor of Indonesian and Javanese Language and Culture at Leiden University, his most recent book is Tall Tree, Nest of the Wind: A study in Performance Philology (2016). T. H. Barrett studied in Britain, America and Japan, and then returned to Britain to teach. He is now Professor Emeritus of East Asian History at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He has published primarily on the religious history of China, but also on Japanese and European understandings of Chinese civilization. Peter C. Bisschop is Professor of Sanskrit and Ancient Cultures of South Asia at Leiden University. He is the author of Early Śaivism and the Skandapurāṇa: Sects and Centres (2006), co-author of The Skandapurāṇa Volume IIB: The Vāhana and Naraka Cycles (2014), and has authored a number of articles concerning classical Hinduism, in particular Śaivism. Marion Eggert studied Sinology and related fields in Heidelberg, Munich, Nanjing and Seoul and is now Professor of Korean Studies at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany. Her research focuses on late premodern Korean (and Chinese) culture and mostly concerns different aspects of subjectivity (such as dreams, travel and poetic self-expression), but also questions of religious contact and knowledge circulation. Barend ter Haar is Shaw professor of Chinese at the University of Oxford, after previous posts at the universities of Leiden and Heidelberg. He has just submitted his new book entitled From monastic protector to moral

208

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paragon: The posthumous career of Guan Yu to a publisher. He has previously published on violence, local religious culture, identity and various other things. His next book project is tentatively entitled Where are China’s witches and deals with the topic of fears and false accusations in social and political warfare. Michael Kemper is Professor of Eastern European Studies at the University of Amsterdam. An Arabist by education, Kemper’s field of research is Islam in Russia, the North Caucasus and Central Asia (Sufism, Islamic law, historiography). He also conducts projects on the history of Soviet Oriental Studies (how did Marxist scholars interpret Islam?), and on the ‘Islamization’ of the Russian language (how do Muslims in Russia use and change the Russian language?). Hans Martin Krämer is a professor of Japanese Studies at Heidelberg University. His interests are in the modern history of Japan, including the history of thought, education, religion and human–animal relations. Among his recent publications are an article on the reception of Islam in Japan and his monograph Shimaji Mokurai and the Reconception of Religion and the Secular in Modern Japan (Hawai‘i University Press, 2015). Kiri Paramore earned his PhD at Tokyo and teaches history and Asian Studies at Leiden. He works on the history of political thought with a focus on China and Japan. Books authored: Ideology and Christianity in Japan (Routledge, 2009) and Japanese Confucianism: A Cultural History (Cambridge University Press, 2016). Currently writing: The Global Politics of Confucianism. Rowena Robinson is Professor of Sociology at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. She has also taught at Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University. Among other publications, she is author of Boundaries of Religion: Essays on Christianity, Ethnic Conflict and Violence (Oxford University Press, 2013), Tremors of violence: Muslim survivors of ethnic strife in western India (Sage, 2005) and editor of Minority Studies (Oxford University Press, 2012).

Biographies for Religion and Orientalism in Asian Studies

209

Anna Sun is Associate Professor of Sociology and Asian Studies at Kenyon College. She received her PhD in sociology from Princeton University. Her first book, Confucianism as a World Religion: Contested Histories and Contemporary Realities, was published by Princeton University Press in 2013.

Index Note: page locators followed by ‘n’ indicate notes section. abangan practices 21 The Aborigines so called and their future (Ghurye) 28 Adams, Kathleen M. 14 Ādipurāṇa 45 Adirwannawedum 46 Advaita Vedanta Hinduism 59 Afgoderye der oost-indischen Heydenen (Idolatry of the East-Indian Heathens) (Baldaeus) 44 Ahmad, Imtiaz 32 Al-Bīrūnī 42–3 Ama Toshimaro 63 Ambros, Barbara 127 Amherst, Lord William 89 ancestor worship 93, 95, 98–9, 101 Ancient History of Korea (Sin Ch’aeho) 112 Ancient Indian Tradition and Mythology (Banarsidass) 49 Anesaki Masaharu 122 Annavaram, Neredimalli 28 anthropology, of India 25–38 anti-foreign imperialism 4. See also imperialism App, Urs 42, 46–7, 120 Appadurai, Arjun 35 Area Studies 3–7, passim emergence of 139 Japan and 143 Japanese interventions and 130 religion and politics of 143 role of the Cold War in the origination of 3 social science based 143 transformation of Oriental Studies into 130 transitions studies and 150 in the United States 131 Aryan civilization 27 Asad, Talal 4, 129 Asiatic Society of Bengal 46

atheism 59–60 Atwill, David 74 Azra, Azyumardi 20–1 Baird, Robert D. 63–4 Baldaeus, Philipus 44 Banarsidass, Motilal 49 Bangladesh 36 Barrett, T. H. 52 Barrow, John 88–9, 94–5 Basu, K. 32 Bauer, Bruno 4 Bavarian State Library 107–8 Beasley, William 74, 79, 83 Beatty, Andrew 15, 19 Beichelt, Timm 163 Bellah, Robert N. 11, 126 Benite, Zvi Ben-Dor 62 Bennigsen, Alexandre 154 Berling, Judith A. 62, 64–5 Bhargava, Rajeev 32 Bharucha, Rustom 32 The Bible 21, 45–6, 60, 78, 98–9, 113–14 Bibliotheca Malabarica (Ziegenbalg) 45 Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Christianity 54 Book of Changes (Barrow) 95 Book of Filial Piety (Confucius) 101 Book of Rites (Confucius) 101 Book of the Way and the Virtue (Laozi) 93 Bowen, John 13–14 Bowersock, Glen W. 70 brahmanical Hinduism 40, 50 British Orientalists 39, 41, 46 Buddha 93 Buddhism 5, 14, 36, 51–4, 63, 67, 71, 76–7, 79, 81–2, 90, 93, 95 in Japan 123–4 Japanese 52, 76–7 Korean 110, 111, 138 Siebold on 120

212

Index

Campany, Robert 9, 66 Caspian Region 151 Catholics/Catholicism 20, 52, 68, 81, 129–30 Caucasiology 151–2 Central Asian Survey 155 Central Eurasian Reader 151 Central Eurasian Studies 152, 156–61 Charpentier, Jarl 43–4 Chidester, David 64 China and Its Future: In the Light of the Antecedents of the Empire, Its People, and Their Institutions (Johnston) 54 China/Chinese religions and Confucian culture 5 and Confucianism 85–6, 88 De Groot on 91–2 Doolittle on 90–1 Edkins on 89–90 henotheism 53–61 Legge on 91 Morrison on 89 Protestants on 103–4 and religious tool kit/repertoire 53, 66–9 and syncretism 61–6 towards new theory of 69–72 Chinese Bible 78 Chinese Buddhists 76, 82 Chinese Catholics 79 Chinese Miscellany (Morrison) 96 Chinese Moslem Hui 75 The Chinese Path to Polytheism 59 Chinese Philosophy in An Era of Globalization (Wang) 58 Chinese Studies 139–43 Chinese universism 63 Chips from a German Workshop (Müller) 56 Ch’oe Namsŏn 111 Chŏng Inbo 114–15 Christians/Christianity 14, 21, 22, 27, 29, 30, 32, 33, 36, 45, 47, 50, 52, 63, 65, 70, 77, 83, 87, 93 conversion to 34 Japan and 124–5 Japanese 124–5 Korea and 112–13

monotheistic 57 Protestant 51 Church of Christ the Saviour 159 Clarke, Sathianathan 34 Cold War 11, 147 Area Studies 15, 139–43 Colebrooke, Henry 26, 47 composite culture 30, 33. See also culture Confucianism/Confucionists 14, 38, 51, 54, 58, 63, 67, 70–1, 77, 81–6, 88, 94–5, 101–2, 170 n.7 Barrow on 94–5 De Groot on 99–100 domination of Chinese society 136 Doolittle on 97–8 Edkins on 96–7 in Europe 102 Legge on 98–9 May Fourth Movement and 102 Morrison on 96 in Northern America 102 origins of term 94–100 as philosophy 105 as religion 105 as a religious culture 92–100 stereotyping of 133 Confucius 77, 81, 88, 90 Jones on 93 Wilhelm on 103 worship of 101 Contributions to Indian Sociology (Dumont) 30–2 Cordier, Henri 73 Corea, the Hermit Nation (Griffis) 109–10 Corean Primer (Ross) 110 Crimean Tatar Muslim organizations 158 cultural essentialism 2, 9, 143 cultural henotheistic monotheism 60 cultural studies 149 culture composite 30, 33 cultural henotheistic monotheism 60 East Asian 142 Geertzian conception of 18 Korean 110, 116 Culture and the State in Late Chosŏn Korea (Deuchler and Haboush) 116 Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies 66

Index Dallet, Claude-Charles 109 dao (Chinese teaching) 93 The Dao of Muhammad (Benite) 62 daodejing. See Book of the Way and the Virtue (Laozi) Daoism/Daoist 51, 54, 67, 71, 76, 95, 99–100 Das, Veena 30, 35 dasas (servants) 26 Davis, Stephen 59–60 De Groot, J. J. M. 63, 88, 91–2, 99–100, 104 de Gruchy, John Water 134 de La Croix, Etienne 45 de Rosny, Léon 121 Dean, Kenneth 62 Deuchler, Martina 116 Devapurāṇa 45 Diamond Sutra 81 diaspora 22, 35 Digest of Hindu Law, on Contract and Successions 47 Discovery of the Banians (Lord) 41 Discursos sobra a vida de Jesu Christo nosso salvador ao mundo, divido em dous tratados (Stephens) 45 Discursos sobre a vida do Apostolo Sam Pedro (de La Croix) 45 Doniger, Wendy 50, 60 Doolittle, Justus 88, 90, 97–8 Dower, John W. 11 Dravidian anti-Brahman movement 26 Drewes, G. W. J. 15, 16–17 Dube, S. 34 Dumont, Louis 26, 29–31 Duyvendak, J. J. L. 88, 102 East Asia, religion in 73–84 Eastern European Studies determination of 153 know your enemy approach 146–7 political expertise and 146 politics and 148 Western Europe and 146 Eastern Orthodoxy 153–4 Eckardt, André 110 Economic and Political Weekly 31 Edkins, Joseph 88–90, 96–7

213

Education in Japan (Mori Arinori) 82 Eisenstadt, S. N. 11, 126 Elisséeff, Serge 132, 134–5, 139–40 enlightenment 4, 110, 136, 143 esoteric monotheism 59 Eurasianism 153 Europe Caucasus studies in 152 Central Asian studies in 152 view of Japan 132–5 European Association of Japanese Studies 124 European imperialism 5. See also imperialism European Japanology 132 European Neighbourhood Policy and Eastern Partnership 162 European Oriental Studies 132 European Orientalism 15, 140 European Union (EU) 148 Ezour-Vedam 40 Fenicio, Giacomo 43, 46 Fitzgerald, Timothy 73, 75–6, 82–3 Five Classics (Confucius) 93 Florenz, Karl 132–3, 171 n.4 fo (Chinese teaching) 93 Foley, Toshikazu S. 78 Four Books (Confucius) 93 Freedman, Maurice 88 Froes, Ludovicus 44 From Jupiter to Chris: On the History of Religion in the Roman Imperial Period (Rupke) 70 Fukuda Gyōkai 77 fundamentalism 33, 36 Geertz, Clifford 7–8, 15, 17–18, 19, 21 Genealogie der Malabarischen Götter (Ziegenbalg) 45 geomancy 111 German Prussian Protestant theology 153 Ghost Festival 101 Ghurye, G. S. 28 Gillogly, Kathleen A. 14 Global War on Terror 161 Gnuse, Robert Karl 58 Gods and Men (Ghurye) 28

214 Grammatica Grandonica (Hanxleden) 44–5 Grant, Charles 26 Grayson, James 169 n.7 Griffis, William E. 109–10, 113 Guo Moruo 101 Gützlaff, Karl 78 Haar, Ter 10 Habermas, Jürgen 6 Haboush, JaHyun Kim 116 Habsburg Empire 153 hajj pilgrimage 20 Halfbass, Wilhelm 39, 42 Hall, John Whitney 140 Ham Sŏkhŏn 113–14 Han Chinese 75 Hanxleden, Johann Ernst 44–5 Harnack, Adolf von 153 Harootunian, Harry D. 11 Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 140 Hastings, Warren 47 Heavenly Masters on Dragon and Tiger Mountain 93 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 4, 71 Hellenism 70, 83 Hellenism in Late Antiquity (Bowersock) 70 henotheism 52, 53–61 Heryanto, Ariel 14 Hindu Arya 27 Hindu Hearth and Home (Khare) 30 Hinduism 9, 25–8, 31–2, 36, 60 Advaita Vedanta 59 brahmanical 40, 50 construction of 41–2 twentieth century, present and future 48–50 The Hindus: An Alternative History (Doniger) 50 Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? (Savarkar) 50 Hindutva ideology 27 history defined 112 Korean 112–15 writing 112 History of Dharmaśāstra (Kane) 31 The History of Japan (Kaempfer) 120

Index History of Japanese Religion (Anesaki Masaharu) 122 The history of Korea seen in terms of its meaning (Ttŭs-ŭro pon Han’guk yŏksa) (Ham Sŏkhŏn) 113 History of the Church of Korea (Dallet) 109 Hodous, Lewis 92 Hoffmann, Johann Joseph 121, 132–3 Holy Scripture 99, 102 Holy Synod 154, 157 homo equalis 26 Homo Hierarchicus 26, 30 honji suijaku (combinatory religion) 52 Hulbert, Homer Bezaleel 110 Huntington, Samuel 5 Iderwedum (Yajurveda) 46 Imamura Gen’emon 120–1 imperialism 129, 134, 138, 143 anti-foreign 4 British 9 Chinese 137 European 5 Japanese 2, 12, 131, 136 India Buddhism in 123–4 caste in 26 and making of Hinduism 39–50 religion in anthropology of 25–38 religious communities 31–5 India (Sachau) 42 Indian Economic and Social History Review 31 Indology 26–30 Indus Valley Civilization 27 Inoue Tetsujirō 135 institutional religion 65 Irish Catholics 4 Islam 12, 14, 17, 20, 21, 29, 32, 36, 50, 59, 65, 74–5, 145, 154–6 development in Russia 159 influence on Southeast Asian studies 21 religious life in Java before 20 during Soviet Union 160 Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia? (Ricci) 16, 19–20 Islamic Revolution 155

Index Islamic silsila 21 Islamic State 151 Islamization 163 Jain, R. K. 30 Jain Puranas 40 jamaats (communities) 161 Japan/Japanese religion Area Studies and 143 Buddhism/Buddhists 52, 76–7, 78, 121–2, 124 Christianity and 124–5 Confucianism and 137–8 image in Europe 132–5 Korea and 110–11 latest trends in 126–8 New Religious Movements 124–5 Shinto 120, 124–5 Western understanding of 122 Japanese imperialism 2, 12, 131, 136. See also imperialism Japanese Sinology 11 Japanese Studies 119 history of 120–2 post-war, and religion 125–6 Second World War and 139–43 Sinology and 131 Java Javanese syncretism 21 religious life before Islam in 20 Jensen, Lionel 94 Jews 4, 27, 33 jiao 74–5, 81 jiaozong 79–80 jihad 159 Johnson, David 97 Johnston, James 54–5 Jones, Sir William 26–8, 46, 93 Joo-keaou 96 Joseon dynasty 136 Josephson, Jason 10, 74, 75, 79–80, 83 Journal of Japanese Studies 123 Juche ideology 108 Judaism 59, 77, 83 Kaempfer, Engelbert 120 Kane, P. V. 31 Kang Youwei 102 Kashiraj Trust 48

215

Kazakhstan 152–3 Kazan Kremlin 159 Keyes, Charles E. 13 Khare, R. S. 30 King James Bible 78 Kiyozawa Manshi 80 Korea Buddhism in 110, 111, 138 Christianity and 112–13 concept of space and 112 Confucianism in 138 culture of 110, 116 (see also culture) ghost beliefs in 111 history of 112–15 Japan and 110–11 Neo-Confucianism in 138 shamanism in 110 Korean Repository 110 Korean Studies 135–6 importance of religion 107, 115–16 Korean Repository 110 Korean War 107–8 Kothari, Rita 36, 38 Kozaki Hiromichi 77 Kraemer, Hendrik 63 Kristapurāṇa (Christian Purāṇa) (Stephens) 45 kyō no jitsu (outward effects of religion) 80 kyō no jō (emotional or persuasive element) 80 kyō no shū (moral element in religion) 80 kyōshū 80 Kyoto School of philosophy 124 Lamont, Michèle 67 Landeskunde 119–20, 135, 162, 165 n.1 Language of sacrifice (Das) 35 Lao Naixuan 103 Laozi 93 laukika (this-worldly) 76–7, 82 Legge, James 53–4, 58, 88, 91, 94, 98–9, 102 Leiden University 91 Lemercier-Quelquejay, Chantal 154 Lettres édifiantes et curieuses 41 Lévi, Sylvain 121 Liu, Lydia 74 Liu Yonghua 97

216

Index

Livro da Seita dos Indios Orientais 43 Loimann, Ernst 121 lokottara (other-worldly) 76 The Longest Journey (Tagliacozzo) 22 Lord, Henry 41 Lorenzen, David 39 Lunyu (Analects of Confucius) 102 Macartney Embassy 89 MacGowan, John 92 Madan, T. N. 30, 32, 35–6 madrasas (teaching institutes) 159 Mahajan, Gurpreet 32 Mahayana Buddhism 121 Mahmud of Ghazni 42 majoritarianism 36 Malabarisches Heidenthum/Malabarian Heathenism (Ziegenbalg) 41, 45–6 Manufacturing Confucianism (Jensen) 94 Mapping Hinduism (Sweetman) 41 Marchand, Suzanne 5 Martin, Luther H. 62 Marx, Karl 4 Marxism 131 Matsuo Bashō 140 May Fourth Movement 102 Mayaram, Shail 34–5 Meiji Shinto 77–8 Mencius 90 Mencius (Mengzi) 93, 102 Meos 34 metaphysical henotheistic monotheism 59–60 metaphysical monotheism 59 Mill, James 26 minority fundamentalism 33 Miyoshi, Masao 11 modernist ideology of secularism 3–7 modernization 6, 11, 108, 110, 125–7, 137, 139, 148, 150, 154 Mohammedanism 93 Money, Morals and Manners (Lamont) 67 monism 59 monographs 15–16 monotheism atheism 59 esoteric 59 esoteric monotheism 59 metaphysical 59

metaphysical henotheistic 59–60 primitive 54 trinitarian 59 monotheistic Christianity 57 Monumenta Nipponica 123 Mori Arinori 82 Morrison, Robert 78, 88, 89, 96 Muftiate (Muslim Spiritual Board) 159–60 mujahidin 155 Müller, Friedrich Max 26, 53, 55–61, 121 Murayama Chijun 111 Muslims 22, 27, 29, 32, 33, 65 Muslims/Muslim communities 154–5, 159–60 Naitō Konan 137–9 Nandy, Ashis 32, 35 nationalism 150, 159 Hindu 9, 26 transnationalism 22 Navalny, Aleksey 156 nei-wai (inner and outer) 52 neo-Byzantinism 157 Neo-Confucian Syncretism 65 Neo-Confucianism 132, 137–9 Nepal 36 Netherlands Bible Society 22 new religions, of Korea. See geomancy New Religious Movements 124–5 New Testament 45, 78, 83 Nihonjinron/Nihonron 126 Nippon: Archiv zur Beschreibung Japans (Siebold) 120 Non-Renunciation (Madan) 30 North Korea 108 Occidentalism 129 October Revolution 154 Oldenberg, Hermann 121 Open Door to hitherto concealed Heathenism/Open-Deure tot het Verborgen Heydendom (Rogerius) 41 Oriental History 136 Oriental Studies 132, 136–7 Orientalism/Orientalists 1, 3–7, 14, 25, 28, 39, 105, 122, 129–30 Aryan theory 26 critique of 147 European 15

Index religion and 139 tradition 139–43 Orientalism (Said) 147, 149 Orienting Arthur Waley (de Gruchy) Ottoman Empire 149, 153 Overmyer, Daniel 62

134

paganism. See polytheism Pakistan 36 Palat, Ravi Arvind 38 Panthay Rebellion 74 Papal States 78–9 Patton, Francis L. 58 Pei Xiu 79 Philippines 20 Philosophical Institution 56–7 pilgrimages 22, 31, 40 pitrbhumi (land of ancestors) 27 Pocock, David F. 31 Pollock, Sheldon 20 polytheism 27, 54, 57–61, 60, 70–2, 71, 167 n.6 Prapañcasṛṣṭi 166 n.2 Presbyterian Church of England 53 primitive theism 54, 58 Protestantism/Protestants 51, 68, 81, 104, 126 Punk Prayer: Mother of God, Chase Putin Away! 159 punyabhumi (sacred territory) 27 Puranantargat Itihas 166 n.8 Purāṇas brahmanical community and 40 survey of references in works of early European authors 42–8 twentieth century, present and future 48–50 Pussy Riot 159 Puvana cakkaram 45 Qing Empire 75 Queen of Suffering 113 Qul Sharif mosque 159 Rafael, Vicente L. 20 Raghavan, V. 40 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) Rasulev, Gabdrakhman 159 Reader, Ian 73, 75, 77, 82 Reischauer, Edwin 140–2

50

217

Religion in China: Universism: A Key to the Study of Taoism And Confucianism (De Groot) 63, 99–100 Religion in Chinese Society (Yang) 65 Religion of China (Edkins) 90 Religion of Java (Geertz) 15, 17–18 religion/religious. See also specific types Area Studies and 143 combinatory 52 communities 31–5 culture, Confucianism as 92–100 definition of 8 as determining factor for area concepts 153–6 in East Asia 73–84 ecology 71 Ham Sŏkhŏn on 113–14 importance in Korean Studies 107, 115–16 Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia? 19–20 monographs 15–16 new prospects and desiderata 22–3 or communal violence 33 Orientalism and 139 philosophy and 87 plurality 52 post-war Japanese Studies and 125–6 the Religion of Java 17–18 and religiosity 20–2 in the study of modern Japan 122–3 syncretism as alternative category of 61–6 Three Javanese Gurus: Their Lives, Teachings, and Messianic Preachings 16–17 Varieties of Javanese Religion 19 The Religions of China (Legge) 53, 94, 98 The Religious Condition of the Chinese (Edkins) 96 The Religious Question in Modern China (Goossaert and Palmer) 51 Renxue (Tan Sitong) 81 Reynolds, Frank E. 13 Ricci, Ronit 8, 16, 19–20 Ricklefs, Merle C. 20 Rig Veda. See Urukkuwedum (Ṛgveda)

218 Rivers, W. H. R. 28 Rocher, Ludo 50 Rogerius, Abraham 41 The Roman Calendar from Numa to Constantine: Time, History, and the Fasti (Rupke) 70 Roman Catholics 81, 91 Ross, John 110 ru/rujiao (classicism) 92–3, 98–9, 108 Rudolph, Kurt 64–5 Rupke, Jörg 70 Russia 147–8, 150–1, 153–6, 158–61. See also Soviet Union Russian Orthodox Church 157, 161 Russian Orthodox Patriarchate 158 Russian Orthodoxy 145 Sachau, Edward 42–3 Sacred Books of the East (Müller) 121 Said, Edward 147 St Paul 78 Samawedum (Sāmaveda) 46 Sanskrit 20, 26, 29, 31, 34, 40, 44–9, 121, 166 n.3 Sanyijiao (Lord of the Three in One) 62 Savarkar, V. D. 50 Scheid, John 69 Schelling, Wilhelm von 57–8, 60 School of Atheistical Materialists 96 Second World War 139–43 secularism 3–7, 32–3, 35–6 Seidel, Anna 100 Seikyō shinron 77 semitic monotheism 55–6 serial monogamy and monotheism 60 Shakyamuni. See Buddha shamanism, Korean 110 Shang-ti (Lord upon High) 58 Sharot, Stephen 62 Shen Congwen 101 Sheth, D. L. 32 Shimaji Mokurai 80, 83, 121 Shinaron (Discussing China) (Naitō Konan) 137 shingaku (Study of the Heart) 126 Shinmura Izuru 140 Shinto 52, 63, 77–8, 84, 120, 124–7, 133–4 shūhō 79–80 shūkyō (religion) 75

Index Shulman, David 49 Siebold, Philipp Franz von 120–1 Sikhs/Sikhism 29, 32, 36 Sin Ch’aeho 112–13 Sinhala Buddhism 36 Sinology 11, 107, 131–3, 137, 140, 171 n.2 Skandapurāṇa 48 Skeleton of a Philosophy of Religion (Kiyozawa Manshi) 80 Smith, Arthur 92 Smith, Wilfred Cantwell 62 The Social Life of the Chinese (Doolittle) 90, 97 The Social Life of Prayer in Contemporary Urban China: Beyond the Monotheistic Imagination 71 Société des Missions étrangeres de Paris 109 sociology, of India 25–38 Song dynasty 137 Sŏngsŏ Chosŏn (Bible Korea) 113 South Korea 108 Southeast Asian Studies in the Balance (Hirschman, Keyes and Hutterer) 13 Southeast Asianist anthropology 13 Soviet Union 146–7, 149–50, 154, 156, 158, 160. See also Russia Sri Lanka 9, 26, 36 Standaert, Nicolas 94 Stephens, Thomas 45 structuralism 30–1 Structure and Cognition (Das) 30, 35 Subrahmanyam, Sanjay 32 Sun, Anna 8, 94 Suzuki, D. T. 122 Sweetman, Will 41–2 Swidler, Ann 8, 66–7 The Syncretic Religion of Lin Chao-en (Berling) 64 Syncretism: From Theological Inventive to a Concept in the Study of Religion (Rudolph) 64 Syncretism and the History of Religions (Baird) 63 syncretism/syncretists 9–10, 30, 32–3, 52–3, 61–7 Taehan Maeil Sinbo 111 Tagliacozzo, Eric 20, 22

Index Tahqiq ma-lil-Hind (Al-Biruni) 42 Taiping Rebellion 83 Taisho Tripitaka 121–2 Takahashi Toru 110, 138–9 Takakusu Junjiro 121 Tan Sitong 81 Tarkavagisa, Radhakanta 47 Tauism 90 Taylor, Charles 6 Teaching with Incense 166 n.2 Text and Context (Jain) 30 Thal, Sarah 127 Thompson, Laurence G. 73 Three Javanese Gurus: Their Lives, Teachings, and Messianic Preachings (Drewes) 16–17 Three Teachings 92–3 T’ien (Heaven) 58 Tirikala cakkaram 45 Tokugawa Religion: The Values of Pre-Industrial Japan (Bellah) 126 Trautmann, Thomas 46, 50 Travels in China (Barrow) 88, 94 Treaty of Nanjing 83 Treaty of Tientsin 81 trinitarian monotheism 59 Tuuk, Van der 22 2 Maccabees 83 Uberoi, Jit Pal Singh 34 Ukraine, religious diversity in 158 United States, Area Studies in 131 Urukkuwedum (Ṛgveda) 46 Vanaik, Achin 32 Varieties of Javanese religion (Beatty) 15, 19

Vedas 40, 46, 57 Veer, Peter van der Viṣṇupurāṇa 47

219

130

Wachutka, Michael 133 Waever, Ole 33 Warsaw Pact 147 Weber, Max 4, 137 Wei Yuan 79 Western Korean Studies 109 Western liberation 5 Western-style historiography 21 Wilhelm, Richard 88, 102–3 Wilson, Horace Hayman 26, 47–9 World Parliament of Religions 80 World Values Survey 51 Wotton, Sir Henry 81 Wuthnow, Robert 69 Xu Jiyu 79 Xunzi 102 Yang, C. K. 65 Yang Wenhui 82 Yano Fumio 81 Yi Nŭnghwa 111 Yi T’oegye 138 Yinguang 79 Yuan Shikai 136 Zen Buddhism 124 Zhang Daoling 93 Zhang Deyi 81 Zhou Dunhua 59 Ziegenbalg, Bartholomäus 41, 45, 49 zongjiao 78–82