Daniel Dubuisson The Western Construction of Religion

Abstract

In "The Western Construction of Religion", Daniel Dubuisson argues that the concept of \u201Creligion\u201D is too historically and culturally contingent to serve as the basis for a comparative discipline: it is indigenous to Western culture and inherently theological or \u201Cphenomenological\u201D. He argues for a constructionist view of this human science and proposes a replacement concept, \u201Ccosmographic formations\u201D. This move frames religious and other phenomena in terms of discursive constructions that link embodied individuals to social, cultural and cosmic order. The following papers (S. Engler; A. Hughes; R. Segal; W. Dupré; A. Taves; F. L. Vance; T. T. McCutcheon) evaluate Dubuisson's arguments, relating them to broader currents in the theory of religion and raising several dimensions of critique. The symposium closes with a cumulative response by Daniel Dubuisson.