Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept

284 Pages·2013·2.487 MB·English

by  Brent Nongbri

BEFORE RELIGION
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BRENT NONGBRI
Before Religion
A History of a Modern Concept
NEW HAVEN AND LONDON
Copyright © 2013 by Yale University.
All rights reserved.
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Set in Janson Oldstyle and Futura Bold types
by Westchester Book Group.
Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nongbri, Brent, 1977–
Before religion : a history of a modern concept / Brent Nongbri.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 978-0-300-15416-0 (alk. paper)
1. Religion— History. I. Title.
BL430.N57 2012
200.9—dc23 2012020811
A cata logue record for this book is available from the
British Library.
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO
Z39.48– 1992 (Permanence of Paper).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Janet and Govanon Nongbri
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CONTENTS
Ac know ledgm ents ix
Introduction 1
one What Do We Mean by “Religion”? 15
two Lost in Translation: Inserting “Religion” into
Ancient Texts 25
three Some (Premature) Births of Religion in Antiquity 46
four Christians and “Others” in the Premodern Era 65
fi ve Re nais sance, Reformation, and Religion in the
Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries 85
six New Worlds, New Religions, World Religions 106
seven The Modern Origins of Ancient Religions 132
Conclusion: After Religion? 154
Notes 161
Bibliography 231
Index 263
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INTRODUCTION
My father grew up in the Khasi Hills of northeastern India. The
Khasi language is today spoken by roughly one million people, mostly
in the state of Meghalaya. When I was in college and just becoming
aware of the complexity of studying religion, it occurred to me one
day that I had no idea what the Khasi word for “religion” was. I
owned a small Khasi-E nglish dictionary, but it did not provide
English-t o- Khasi defi nitions. Faced with the usual number of dead-
lines for various projects, I didn’t immediately try to track down an
answer to the question and soon forgot about it. But a few years
later, the topic came up in a conversation with my father, and I asked
him about the Khasi term for “religion.” He replied that it was ka
niam. By this time I was a graduate student in religious studies, and
I was curious to learn more about this word. I dug out my little dic-
tionary and looked it up. I found it could also simply mean “cus-
toms,” that is to say, not necessarily anything particularly or espe-
cially religious. More intriguing, though, was the asterisk beside the
word that directed me to a short note at the bottom of the page. It
turned out that niam was in fact not an indigenous Khasi term at all
but a loan-w ord from the Bengali niy˙ama, meaning “rules” or “du-
ties.” My father’s language, it seems, had no native word for “reli-
gion.”1
For much of the past two centuries, both pop u lar and academic
thought has assumed that religion is a universal human phenomenon,
a part of the “natural” human experience that is essentially the same
across cultures and throughout history. Individual religions may vary
through time and geog raphi cally, so the story goes, but there is an
element that we call religion to be found in all cultures in all time
periods. Introductory textbooks supply us with competing defi nitions
1