The Pragmatics of Defining Religion: Contexts, Concepts, and Contests

This volume promotes a pragmatic, anti-essentialist and anti-hegemonic approach to the problem of the definition of religion. It argues that definitions of religion are context-bound strategies for pursuing a variety of purposes, extra-academic as well as academic. Religions being immensely varied, complex and multi-functional phenomena, they need to be studied by several academic disciplines from many different perspectives. It is, therefore, legitimate and useful that many definitions of religion are developed. The volume has contributions from scholars in the philosophy of sociology, the comparative study of religions, anthropology of religion, sociology of religion and psychology of religion. It has chapters on the polemics of defining religion in modern contexts, the history of the concept of religion, and the methodology of its definition; it includes and concludes with several definition proposals.