Who Owns Religion? by Laurie L Patton

Who Owns Religion? by Laurie L Patton

Who Owns Religion? focuses on a period—the late 1980s through the 1990s—when scholars of religion were accused of scandalizing or denigrating the very communities they had imagined themselves honoring through their work. While controversies involving scholarly claims about religion are nothing new, this period saw an increase in vitriol that remains with us today. Authors of seemingly arcane studies on subjects like the origins of the idea of Mother Earth or the sexual dynamics of mysticism have been targets of hate mail and book-banning campaigns. As a result, scholars of religion have struggled to describe their own work to their various publics, and even to themselves. Taking the reader through several compelling case studies, Patton identifies two trends of the ’80s and ’90s that fueled that rise: the growth of multicultural identity politics, which enabled a form of volatile public debate she terms “eruptive public space,” and the advent of the internet, which offered new ways for religious groups to read scholarship and respond publicly. These controversies, she shows, were also fundamentally about something new: the very rights of secular, Western scholarship to interpret religions at all. Patton’s book holds out hope that scholars can find a space for their work between the university and the communities they study. Scholars of religion, she argues, have multiple masters and must move between them while writing histories and speaking about realities that not everyone may be interested in hearing.

Laurie L. Patton is a Winship Distinguished Research Professor in the Humanities and Emory University's Professor of Early Indian Religion. She is the author of several publications, including Myth as Argument: The Brhaddevata as Canonical Commentary (1996), Gems of Authority: Women and Text in the Hindu Tradition (2002), and Fire's Goal: Poetry from a Hindu Year (2003).

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780226675985
ISBN 10	022667598X
Title	Who Owns Religion?
Author	Laurie L Patton
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	The University of Chicago Press
Year published	2019-11-27
Number of pages	320
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.