Notes from our homework: “In departments of religious studies throughout North America, [there is] a profound lack of interest in religious experience… and a shift in scholarship in the field not just to historical research but to historicism… Unreflective ethnocentrism, and its concomitant cognitive imperialism… have become prominent features of the academic study of religion in North America.”
“Why has the role of subjective experience in religion been totally abandoned as a subject of academic study?”
“The field emerged from liberal Protestant theology… and the concerns of Christian theology predominated. As the field gradually moved… toward an attempt to consider other religious traditions of the world on an equal footing, the field nonetheless continued to think about religion in the terms and categories of Christian theology.”
“By failing to explore human subjectivity, scholars of religion…remain blind to the very personal, subjective, ethnocentric, and cognitive imperialistic biases of their own approaches.”
“There is a newly emerging movement … that has broken free of Western epistemological biases and asserts that human experience is fundamentally both embodied and intersubjective… The theme of intersubjectivity lies at the very core of the Indo-Tibetan Buddhist way of viewing the world…”
“According to this worldview, each person does exist as an individual, but the self … does not exist as an independent ego that is somehow in control of the body and mind. Rather the individual is understood as a matrix of dependently related events, all of them in a state of flux…”
“We cannot ignore human subjectivity by the intellectual trick of pretending that it doesn’t exist or isn’t relevant, as we find in the cognitive imperialist perspective [that dominates the field of religious studies].”
Quoted from Harold Roth, “Against Cognitive Imperialism: A Call for a Non-Ethnocentric Approach to Cognitive Science and Religious Studies” in The Contemplative Foundations of Classical Daoism, SUNY Press, 2021.
