Oxford University Press
Reviewed by:
  • The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism
The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism. By Tomoko Masuzawa. University of Chicago Press, 2005, 359 pages. $19.00.

In this ambitious work on the nineteenth-century science of religions Tomoko Masuzawa makes the "the world religions discourse" part of the critical theorist's anatomy theater (xiv). On the surface the patient might look healthy enough—the inherited talk of ten to twelve world religions no more than an honest attempt to reckon with the global plurality of faiths. But the anatomist knows better, and the knife will expose the malignancies within the discourse, the hidden racial and imperial presumptions of European universality. Sometimes the demonstration proves spectacular, "the current epistemic regime" exposed, if not excised (xii); at other times the exhibition proves painful to watch in its blunt execution.

Masuzawa positions her work within the larger turn toward historical analysis of the discourses that have shaped the study of religion from the seventeenth [End Page 229] through twentieth centuries. The fourfold schema of Jewish–Christian–Muslim pagan that had long held sway in early modern compendia and dictionaries was gradually broken up in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. That model was replaced by longer lists of "national," "universal," or "great" religions, and these late nineteenth-century representations, in turn, crystallized by the 1920s and 30s into a taken-for-granted "world religions" classificatory system. Masuzawa does a fine job of setting out that history, in so far as she cares to credit such empirical or documentary endeavors. Her own chosen method of discourse analysis delights in textual fissures, precipices, gaps, billows, and black folds, so her historical narrative necessarily does not convey a strong sense of precision, connection, or meticulous contextualization. Indeed, even when it looks like Masuzawa is quite capable of pinning down the history of "world religions" as a category—unearthing a crucial entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1884 by C. P. Tiele, for example—she readily slips back into a preferred rhetoric of opacity, "the uncertainty of the appellation," the various indeterminacies lurking within the discourse's "compromised heritage" (107).

The discipline of religious studies may well need more histories of its lack of discipline, but Masuzawa's own launching point for that enterprise is itself curiously polemical—or, to use a word favored in this kind of analysis, ideological. At the outset she takes up the axe for two very familiar critiques of Religious Studies: (1) the field is peopled by a bunch of "unreconstituted religious essentialists" who are too friendly to religion in general, and religious experience in particular, to subject the discipline's categories to rigorous historical and critical analysis and (2) faculty in departments of religion keep themselves institutionally and financially viable by continuing to offer world religion courses that they know, at least dimly, are intellectually irresponsible (7). In other words, the history of the discipline is not getting done properly because scholars of religion are mostly naïve romantics and economic opportunists. It is quite unlikely, though, that this history is going to get done any better when undertaken with this political alignment as the starting point. That critical discourse on the current study of religion needs itself to be carefully historicized within longer traditions of freethinking naturalism. Unmasking the covert operations of the world religions discourse—its "hidden" agenda to preserve European and Christian supremacy—sounds like a work of counter-espionage, not laborious scholarship (327).

In better moments in the book (and there are many of these) Masuzawa presents her work in more nuanced terms, that is, an effort "to recover the half-forgotten worries, hopes, and controversies that animated" practitioners within the nineteenth-century academy (21). She rises to that level especially in the chapter on Max Müller's comparative philology and its relation to his conceptualization of the science of religion. Müller, in some sense, does not play to form remaining stalwart in his refusal of a "racialized use of philology" and its underwriting of a larger Aryan mythology (242). Here Masuzawa allows herself to be surprised by her sources, by Müller's "oddity" and adamancy, by the distance he maintained from at least some of the racial presumptions that ran through the work of many of his renowned colleagues, including Ernest Renan (254). In this long central chapter Masuzawa adopts a patient and judicious approach that enables her to [End Page 230] correct previous scholarship and to clarify earlier misconceptions of Müller's thought. (To be sure, in this enterprise she builds on, rather than departs from, the scholarship of other recent interpreters, particularly Lourens P. van den Bosch's monumental biography Friedrich Max Müller: A Life Devoted to the Humanities.) Sure-footed on the relationship in the nineteenth century between the classification of languages and the classification of religions, Masuzawa is similarly canny on representations of Buddhism and Islam in these budding sciences.

Outside the relatively strong-middle section of the book Parts I and III are noticeably thinner and less assured. The handling of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sources can be quite clumsy, hemmed in repeatedly with the rhetorical uncertainties of such expressions as "seems," "probably," "apparently," and "most likely." Of Samuel Purchas's famed early seventeenth-century compendium on religions in all places and ages, Masuzawa remarks, for example, "The endeavor appears to have been something of a novelty then" (51). Of Bernard Picart's eighteenth-century engravings for Ceremonies and Religious Customs of the Various Nations of the Known World, she calls them a "very fine, and oftentimes very amusing" part of a proto-culture industry in which religion becomes "purely consumptive" (67, 63). In a book that pays little attention to visual representations beyond the preface that note of amusement and that kind of analysis are equally trifling. Efforts to create museums for the display of religious objects were also part of the nineteenth-century science of religions, and no sweeping allusion to the culture industry can substitute for careful examination of that ambiguous and momentous aspect of the modern study of religion.

Even in the nineteenth century Masuzawa's reach is sometimes questionable. In her discussion of comparative theology (most notably, the figures of F. D. Maurice, James Freeman Clarke, and Charles Hardwick) she claims to have come across "only a few women" who contributed to this nineteenth-century enterprise (74). And women are indeed largely absent from this account, which essentially accepts the emergent nineteenth-century norms of academic professionalization rather than tracing the contestation of their enshrinement. In any case, gender, alongside race, would have been a relevant category to explore, because there was actually no shortage of women who saw the connection between the comparative study of religions and larger projects of nineteenth-century emancipation, including Lydia Maria Child, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Helen Gardner, Ida Craddock, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

Now, all these women were Americans and that points to another largely unexamined tension in Masuzawa's work. She presents the book as being distinctly about European identity, the ways in which the world religions discourse helped preserve the hegemony of European universalism in the face of collapsing claims about Christian exclusivism (as evidenced, for example, in select lectures of Ernst Troeltsch). Yet, she concentrates primarily on the Anglophone literature, British and American, which raises some vexing questions about whose identity she is really examining. Is American identity to be subsumed into European identity without more discussion of the multiple ways Americans defined themselves against Europe? There are hints of these tensions in Masuzawa's all [End Page 231] too brief discussion of the World's Parliament of Religions, but the issue is pressing far beyond Chicago in 1893. Since, by her account, the world religions discourse ultimately comes into its own in North American college and universities in the 1920s and 30s, how is this story adequately told under the moniker of European identity? If this is "very much an American phenomenon," then surely the scholarship on American religious and cultural pluralism—including such obvious sources as the intellectual histories by David Hollinger and William Hutchison—has to be engaged (32). By the end of this book, one has the distinct impression that it is Masuzawa herself who cannot resist the universalizing gesture of containing the multitudinous worlds of European and American thought in a flattened totality, her own "enormous apparition, the essential identity of the West" (20).

Leigh E. Schmidt
Princeton University

Share