Reply to Carr and Ivanhoe

Abstract

I want to thank the authors and XIAO Yang for allowing me the opportunity to further the conversation. Carr and Ivanhoe identify my theoretical worries with their project as the problem of underdeterminacy in their definition and application of the term “religion,” and they disagree that a “working definition” of religion would have been helpful to their account in fleshing out the various uses of concepts like “faith,” “salvation,” and “spirituality.” They note the lack of consensus within the field on the definitional properties of “religion” and suggest we employ the Wittgensteinian notion of family resemblances to “understand individual religious expressions and how they are similar to or different from those we already know”: “Religions share only a family resemblance; one needs to study and compare the features of a given tradition and only then can one ascertain whether or not it is part of this or some other family.” The authors take my question, “how deep can the differences run before a comparative study becomes untenable?,” to mean that we need a priori criteria or some set of necessary and sufficient conditions before comparative inquiry can proceed. Carr and Ivanhoe suggest that we “jump in and see” and that the “proof” is only a “matter of making the case and the only way to make the case is to make it.” First, I would agree entirely with the Wittgensteinian approach to the study of religion, seeing the pursuit of essences and necessary and sufficient conditions as Platonic quests doomed to failure. I would argue, as the authors note at the beginning of their book, that definitions and taxonomies in the study of religion in the post-Enlightenment West have often served apologetic purposes that reinscribe forms of “cultural hegemony.” And with Carr and Ivanhoe, I would also encourage a liberalization of terms like “religion” to cast as wide a theoretical net as possible in order to facilitate comparison. My concerns with Carr and Ivanhoe do not involve defining the essence of religion nor drawing boundaries around proper warrants for comparative inquiry but Dao (2011) 10:253–254 DOI 10.1007/s11712-011-9208-3