Mapy nie są terytorium czyli o niemożności wyznaczenia granic opisu
Maps are not Territory. About the Impossibility of Setting the Limits of Description

Summary/Abstract: Writing about religion is a specialty of Western culture, which has also been adopted outside this civilization. However, for several decades now, there have been voices of researchers pointing out the inadequacy and even wrongness of the traditional approach to describing religion. This applies to Mircea Eliade's classic approach to the history of religion and confessional ways of writing about religion. One of the first to draw attention to this insufficiency was the Canadian religious scholar Wilfred Cantwell Smith in his book The Meaning and End of Religion (1964). His thesis was further developed by the American anthropologist of religion Jonathan Z. Smith, in his book Map is not territory (1978). Both of them questioned the ways of writing about religion that were prevalent at that time. A lot has changed since then. Another breakthrough in the approach to religion was the book by Daniel Boyarin and Carlin A. Barton Imagine no Religion. How Modern Abstractions Hide Ancient Realities (2016). Doubts related to the description of religion are not dispelled by cognitive anthropology, which focuses on the phenomenological description of the phenomenon of religion, because it ignores the ambivalent and dark dimension of this reality. Currently, the sociology of religion is dominated by the analysis of living religions, i.e. their social functioning.

• Details
• Contents