Religion And Orientalism In Asian Studies

Religion and Orientalism in Asian Studies analyses the role of religion in past and present understandings of Asia. Religion, and the history of its study in the modern academy, has exercised massive influence over Asian Studies fields in the past century. Asian Studies has in turn affected, and is increasingly shaping, the study of religion. Religion and Orientalism in Asian Studies looks into this symbiotic relationship – both in current practice, and in the modern histories of both Orientalism and Area Studies. Each chapter of the book deals with one regional sub-discipline in Asian Studies, covering Chinese Studies, Japanese Studies, Korean Studies, South Asian Studies, Southeast Asian Studies, and Central Eurasian Studies. The chapters are integrated by shared themes that run through the past and present practice of Asian Studies, covering the role of state actors in originating Area Studies, the role of local scholarship in defining and developing it, the interaction between humanities and social science approaches, debates over the dominance of Western and/or modern categories and frameworks, the interaction of past and present and the role of religious actors and religious sensibilities in shaping Asian Studies.

Religion in Southeast Asian studies / Ben Arps -- Religion in the sociology and anthropology of India / Rowena Robinson -- India and the making of Hinduism: the contribution of the Puras / Peter Bisschop -- The study of Chinese religions in the social sciences: beyond the monotheistic assumption / Anna Sun -- Coming to terms with religion in East Asia / T H Barrett -- From field to text in the study of Chinese religion / Barend J. ter Haar -- Religion in Korean studies: the case of historiography / Marion Eggert -- The role of religion in European and North American Japanese studies / Hans Martin Kramer -- Religion, secularism and the Japanese shaping of East Asian studies / Kiri Paramore -- Christian-Muslim borderlands: from Eastern European studies to Central Eurasian studies / Christian Noack and Michael Kemper

Jane Iwamura examines contemporary fascination with Eastern spirituality and provides a cultural history of the representation of Asian religions in American mass media. At the heart of her study is the Oriental Monk, a non-sexual, solitary, conventionalized icon who generously and purposefully shares his wisdom with the West.

Orientalism and Religion offers us a timely discussion of the implications of contemporary post-colonial theory for the study of religion. Richard King examines the way in which notions such as mysticism, religion, Hinduism and Buddhism are taken for granted. He shows us how religion needs to be reinterpreted along the lines of cultural studies. Drawing on a variety of post-structuralist and post-colonial thinkers, such as Foucault, Gadamer, Said, and Spivak, King provides us with a challenging series of reflections on the nature of Religious Studies and Indology.

This begins with a close examination of the intellectual production of Christian missionaries to the Middle Kingdom in the 16th and 17th centuries and the creation of Sinology. The critique describes the problem of Chinese cosmogonies, Confucian thought, moral improvement and non Deistic teaching to the first Western scholars to reach China. It then goes on to discuss the disaster of overarching 'development' theories on China and the misappropriation of Chinese events by Marxists and non Marxists alike.

The Routledge Handbook of Religions in Asia provides a contemporary and comprehensive overview of religion in contemporary Asia. Compiled and introduced by Bryan S. Turner and Oscar Salemink, the Handbook contains specially written chapters by experts in their respective fields. The wide-ranging introduction discusses issues surrounding Orientalism and the historical development of the discipline of Religious Studies. It conveys how there have been many centuries of interaction between different religious traditions in Asia and discusses the problem of world religions and the range of concepts, such as high and low traditions, folk and formal religions, popular and orthodox developments. Individual chapters are presented in the following five sections: Asian Origins: religious formations Missions, States and Religious Competition Reform Movements and Modernity Popular Religions Religion and Globalization: social dimensions Striking a balance between offering basic information about religious cultures in Asia and addressing the complexity of employing a western terminology in societies with radically different traditions, this advanced level reference work will be essential reading for students, researchers and scholars of Asian Religions, Sociology, Anthropology, Asian Studies and Religious Studies.

Focusing on the field of study known as orientalism in the decades around 1900, this volume explores the history of the humanities through the prism of scholarly personae.