The Contemporary Deconstruction of Religion: How Current Scholarship in Religious Studies is Changing Methods and Theories
Bibliographic record
Abstract
My paper has 3 goals: 1) to introduce and outline the field of ‘critical religion’; 2) to set out my contribution to this field by explaining how and why religions should be considered ‘vestigial states’; and 3) to suggest ways in which the approach to the topic of religious synthesis in India might be influenced by critical religion in general and vestigial state theory in particular. I argue that ‘religion’ as an ahistorical, eternal, indefinable category –what Roland Barthes called ‘depoliticized’ speech –warrants energetic critique. To this end, I survey a variety of theorists whose work deconstructs ‘religion’ and attendant binaries such as religious/secular and religion/politics. I maintain that religions function as vestigial states within contemporary states. By ‘vestigial states’ I mean practices and institutions originating in particular histories as survivals of former sovereignties. These remnants are tolerated as attenuated jurisdictions within fully functioning states. These vestigial states (religions) are always somewhat problematic because they compete with contemporary states - especially if they challenge the present state’s right to control violence. However, religions also work to ground the governments that authorize them by recalling earlier, mystified forms of sovereignty. Moreover, religions are useful because they can be depicted as less progressive versions of power. Thus do ‘religions’, understood as vestigial states, both disturb and maintain current regimes. I conclude with some speculations on how insights derived from critical religion might impact work on conceptualizing ‘religious synthesis’ in India specifically and ‘interreligious’ interactions more generally in a global context.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.048 | 0.041 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.118 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.022 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.015 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".