Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia

First published in 1997, Manufacturing Religion was a controversial book because it critiqued a widely adopted style of scholarship that presumes that religion is utterly unique, inexplicable, and therefore able only to be interpreted by privileged scholars. Claiming religion to be sui generis (or self-caused), this approach has undisclosed practical effects—institutional and geo-political—at a variety of sites, from the types of textbooks commonly used in introductory classes to the way th...