Religious Studies Encyclopedism: A Recent History

ABSTRACT

As academic reference librarians, we need to historically situate the reference sources we use within changing scholarly disciplines. Mircea Eliade’s Encyclopedia of Religion, for example, is an important text in religious studies, but it is not a neutral text. Rather, it clearly reflects certain intellectual commitments and discursive strategies that need to be situated within histories of scholarship. Failure on the part of librarians to contextualize the perspectives of a reference source is problematic because it leaves the assumptions of the text unchallenged. More constructively, librarians need to problematize the agendas of reference sources, and make salient their discursive positions.

KEYWORDS:

• encyclopedism
• Mircea Eliade
• reference
• religious studies

Notes

^1. It has more recently been argued that the study of “world” or “comparative” religions relies on questionable, orientalist assumptions (Masuzawa, 2005, p. 21). However, during Eliade’s lifetime, such criticisms were only just beginning to appear.

^2. McCutcheon explains that sui generis religious studies centers on “the claim that religious data are … understood as meaning distinct, unique, and self-caused … Eliade’s texts are one, but not the only, example of this type of approach” (1997, p. 386).

^3. For a critique of an attempt to apply Kuhnian paradigms to the history of the study of religions, see Dubuisson (2003, p. 158).

^4. For example, despite Doniger’s prominence in the field and her controversial reputation, her more recent encyclopedias did not draw the amount of scholarly commentary that Eliade’s Encyclopedia did in 1987. This can be roughly discerned by looking at the number of scholarly articles reviewing or discussing Eliade’s Encyclopedia versus those discussing Doniger’s encyclopedias in major humanities journal databases. Although it is certainly not a perfect measure, the difference in quantity of scholarship is striking.