Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia

In this book, Russell McCutcheon offers a powerful critique of traditional religious scholarship, focusing on a number of interrelated targets. Most prominent among these are: History of Religions as a discipline; Mircea Eliade, the founder of the discipline; contemporary textbooks on world religions; and the oft-repeated bromide that `religion' is a sui generis phenomenon. He skilfully analyses the ideological basis for and service of the sui generis argument, demonstrating that it has been used to constitute the field's object of study in a form that is ahistoric, apolitical, fetishized, and sacrosanct.