Map is not territory

Abstract

Philosopher of religion Wayne Proudfoot argues that the emphasis on experience within religious studies has its roots in theology and in the protectionist strategies of twentieth-century scholars of religion interested in maintaining the autonomy of religion and the irreducibility of religion to naturalistic explanations. Proudfoot worries about philosophers of religion and religious studies scholars who use the evidence of putatively religious experience as the justification for religious belief. The discussions open the door to the kinds of broadly Foucaultian-inspired analysis of the constitution of experience as sexed, gendered, and sexual/ized that we see enacted by scholars like Saba Mahmood, Daniel Boyarin, Elizabeth Castelli, and Stephen Moore. The suggestion first made by the sociologist Marcel Mauss, Asad argues that ‘body techniques’ give rise to a habitus, a bodily mode of being in the world.