2010 Presidential Address: “Religion” in the Humanities and the Humanities in the University

摘要

Two basic problems that scholars of religion routinely confront—nspecifying an object of study and figuring out how to study it—can benconstrued as opportunities. Scholars of religion typically overcome the dif-nficulties inherent in specifying their object of study by offering a stipula-ntivedefinition.Doingso,however,artificially stabilizes our object of studynand obscures what I believe we ought to be studying: the processes of val-nuation whereby people decide on the meaning of events and determinenwhat matters most. If we take processes of valuation as our subjectnmatter, we can use historical methods to track how those processes unfoldnover time in various domains. In addition, as a subject-oriented discipline,nwe have the luxury of exploring how the processes that lead to the forma-ntion of our instable subject matter work at different, albeit connected,nlevels of analysis. This is an ability that I think at least some scholars innsubject-oriented disciplines can and should cultivate as a contribution toninterdisciplinary collaborative projects. An analysis of the making of “reli-ngion” in the modern university is offered as an example of how we mightntrack a process of valuation over time. A twentieth century (neo-nDarwinian) perspective on evolution is offered as a framework for under-nstanding processes of valuation at multiple levels of analysis.