Imagining a Connected History of Religions
Imagining a Connected History of Religions
This concluding chapter returns to the themes adumbrated in chapter one, highlighting examples from chapters two through six to reaffirm the book’s principal arguments: that vernacular religion (often the purview of women) always precedes, subverts, and overflows the boundaries and claims of male-dominated official religion; and that a connected histories approach to religious phenomena is preferable to that of the comparative historian. The chapter concludes by cautioning against the tendency on the part of humanities scholars to seek to emulate the methodological rigor and non-falsifiability claims of the so-called exact sciences. Like theoretical physicists sifting through traces left by the collisions of subatomic particles to make sense of the universe, historians attempt to make sense of the past by reading the traces left by the words and deeds of countless human actors lost to memory; and like theoretic physicists, historians cannot do better than to rely on the most powerful tools they have at their disposal to decipher those traces: their imaginations.
Keywords: official religion, vernacular religion, women in religion, methodology, connected histories, comparative history, humanities, theoretical physics, imagination
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