I’ll fly away: religious studies within and without the secular condition

Abstract

ABSTRACT This response inverts a question raised in the introduction to this thematic issue. Rather than inquire how anthropologists relate to scholarship produced in fields such as theology and religious studies, I ask how scholars of religion who are not anthropologists relate to anthropologists’ ways of cordoning off experience for special handling as ‘religious.’ Scholars of religion who are not anthropologists may find we have less at stake professionally in letting ‘ghosts be ghosts,’ on and off the page, in others’ experience and our own. Patrolling the border between religion and the secular, producing more secularity as a bulwark against heightened experience: these do not, for many of us in religious studies, belong centrally to professional identity.