Religion, Language, and Power

Religion, Language and Power shows that the language of ‘religion’ is far from neutral, and that the packaging and naming of what English speakers call ‘religious’ groups or identities is imbued with the play of power. Religious Studies has all too often served to amplify voices from other centers of power, whether scripturalist or otherwise normative and dominant. This book’s de-centering of English classifications goes beyond the remit of most postcolonial studies in that it explores the classifications used in a range of languages — including Arabic, Sanskrit, Chinese, Greek and English — to achieve a comparative survey of the roles of language and power in the making of ‘religion’ . In contextualizing these uses of language, the ten contributors explore how labels are either imposed or emerge interactively through discursive struggles between dominant and marginal groups. In dealing with the interplay of religion, language and power, there is no other book with the breadth of this volume.

Nile Green is Associate Professor of History, University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). He has published over 35 articles in international journals, as well as Indian Sufism since the Seventeenth Century (Routledge, 2006) and Islam and the Army in Colonial India (Cambridge, 2008). Mary Searle-Chatterjee has published articles in edited collections including ‘World Religions’ and ‘Ethnic Groups’: Do these Paradigms Lend themselves to the Cause of Hindu Nationalism?" , as well as chapters in edited collections. Her books include Contextualising Caste, co-edited with Ursula Sharma (Blackwell, 1991; reprinted Rawat, 2003) and Reversible Sex Roles : The Special Case of Benares Sweepers (Pergamon, 1981).