Representation of religious diversity in the study of religions – mappings of religious diversity as a lens to read the recent history of a discipline

Project leader: Dr. Anne Beutter

Project Description

The diagnosis and representation of what has come to be called the diversity of religions is a recurring feature – or Grundproblem – of knowledge production in the academic study of religions/Religionswissenschaft. Models of the diversity of religion/s are deeply ingrained in the discipline’s theoretical and empirical production if we understand them as historically specific ways in which an empirical multiplicity of human activities and thought is distinguised, related and aggregated into concepts of ‘religion/s’. However, as in other discursive contexts, the concept of diversity has remained largely underdetermined in the discipline, while the role diagnoses of diversity have played in theorizing religion has rarely been made the object of explicit study.

This cumulative habilitation project substantiates this observation and fills these lacunae through a series of seven articles that jointly answer the overarching research questions: What role does the representation of the diversity of religions play in the academic study of religions? How does the study of religions diagnose and represent the diversity of religion/s in its knowledge production, and what are the discursive (academic, social-political, material) conditions and consequences thereof?

As an empirical point of departure to answer these questions, the project takes the emergence of a specific form of (visually) representing religious diversity that has gained momentum in the Euro-American study of religions since around the 1980s: mappings of local religious diversity. On the one hand, the project analyses a selection of mapping studies as the discursive and material product of specific transitions (or ‘turns’) in theory and method of Religionswissenschaft toward the end of the 20th century and the broader power-knowledge matrix in which these transitions were embedded. On the other hand, the project develops the aspect of ‘representation of diversity’ as a recurring theoretical problem by discussing the mapping model as one among several ‘models of religious diversity’ that underpinned theories of religion along the history of the discipline. These models are in turn related to the broader societal sentiments about multiplicity and the (global) infrastructures of knowledge production of the respective time.

Thereby, this cumulative habilitation project develops an observational understanding of ‘diversity’ as an analytical term for the study of religion/s and uses this term to write a recent history of the discipline.