Religionswissenschaft as Colonialist Discourse: The Case of Rudolf Otto

Authors

  • TIM MURPHY

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.33356/temenos.4604

Abstract

The dominant approach to the study of religion known as the phenomenology of religion's core assumption was that underlying the multiplicity of historical and geographically dispersed religions was an ultimately metaphysical, trans-historical substratum, called 'man', Geist, or 'consciousness'. This transhistorical substratum is an expressive agent with a uniform, essential nature. By reading the data of religion as its 'expressions', it is possible to sympathetically understand their meaning. Geist, or 'man', then, is both a philosophy of history and i hermeneutical theory. It also forms a systematic set of representations, which replicate the structure of the asymmetrical relations between Europeans and those colonized by Europeans. The metanarrative of Geist is a narrative of the supremacy - their term, not mine - of white, Christian Europe over black, 'primitive' Africal and 'despotic' Asia. Spirit moves from the South to the North; away from the East to the West. This paper locates Rudolf Otto's work within the structure and history of phenomenological discourse and argues that the science of religion as described there conforms nearly perfectly to the structures of colonial discourse as this has been discussed and analyzed by theorists such as Jaques Derrida and Edward Said.

Downloads

Published

2007-01-01

How to Cite

MURPHY, T. (2007). Religionswissenschaft as Colonialist Discourse: The Case of Rudolf Otto. Temenos - Nordic Journal for the Study of Religion, 43(1). https://doi.org/10.33356/temenos.4604

Issue

Vol. 43 No. 1 (2007)

Section

Articles

License

Copyright (c) 2007 Temenos - Nordic Journal of Comparative Religion

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 Unported License.

Author's Guarantee

  • The Author acknowledges that the Work will be publicly accessible on the Internet and that such access will be free of charge for the readers.
  • The Author guarantees that the Work is her/his original work that has not been published before and cannot be construed as copying or plagiarism. Furthermore, the Author confirms that the Work contains no statement that is unlawful, defamatory or abusive or in any way infringes the rights of others.
  • The Author confirms that she/he has secured all written permissions needed for the reproduction in the Publication of any material created by a third party.

User Rights

Under the CC BY 4.0 license, the Author/s and users are free to:

  • Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially,
  • However, the Work must be attributed to the original Author and source of publication.

The license of the published metadata is Creative Commons CCO 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0)

Author Rights

The Authors maintain the right to:

  • copyright, and other proprietary rights relating to the Work,
  • the right to use the substance of the Work in future own works,
  • the right to self-archiving/parallel publishing (publisher's PDF allowed).

Rights of Publisher

  • The Publisher reserves the right to make such editorial changes as may be necessary to make the Work suitable for publication in the publication, e.g. style of punctuation, spelling, headings and the like.
  • The Publisher will publish the Work if the editorial process is successfully completed and reserves the right not to proceed with publication for whatever reason.
  • The publication entitles the author to no royalties or other fees. This agreement will be governed by the laws of Finland.