NZ Scholarship Religious Studies cheat sheet
NZ Scholarship Religious Studies · Keep the key ideas within reach.
Religious Studies: Key Concepts, Methods and Skills
Religious Studies is a non-confessional, multidisciplinary discipline: it studies religions as human phenomena using history, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, psychology and textual criticism, and does not adjudicate truth claims.
Ninian Smart's seven dimensions of religion: doctrinal, mythological, ethical, ritual, experiential, institutional, material - a checklist for comparing traditions and for identifying which dimension a source emphasises.
Etic (outsider-analytical) versus emic (insider-believer) description: scholarship usually analyses in etic categories while representing emic meanings fairly; conflating the two is a common error.
Key definitional families: substantive (religion as belief in a transcendent being, e.g. Tylor, Frazer), functional (religion as what a system does for society or the individual, e.g. Durkheim, Geertz), and family-resemblance approaches (Wittgenstein) that reject a single essence.
Geertz's definition treats religion as a cultural system of symbols establishing moods and motivations by formulating a general order of existence - useful for symbolic/meaning-centred analysis rather than belief-centred analysis.
The insider/outsider problem: the same practice (e.g. prayer, pilgrimage) is described differently by practitioners and by analysts; strong essays state which voice is being used and why.
Argument standards for Scholarship: a sustained thesis, engagement with named scholars and primary sources, recognition of counter-arguments, and evaluation of the strengths and limits of each method used.
Primary versus secondary sources: primary = scripture, artefact, ritual text, interview, autobiography; secondary = scholarly interpretation. Claims about what a tradition 'really' teaches should rest on primary evidence where possible.
Comparative method risks: essentialism (treating a tradition as one fixed thing), decontextualisation (lifting a practice out of its historical setting), and false equivalence (using one tradition's category, e.g. 'faith', as a universal yardstick).