The Historyless Heathen and the Stagnating Pagan: History as Non-Native Category?
This article asks whether and how J. Z. Smith's contention that religion is a non-native category might be applied to the discipline of history. It looks at how nineteenth-century Americans constructed their own understandings of proper historyauthenticatable, didactic, and progressiveaga...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Interlibrary Loan: | Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany) |
| Published: |
[2018]
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| In: |
Religion and American culture
Year: 2018, Volume: 28, Issue: 1, Pages: 52-91 |
| Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains: | B
USA
/ Historian
/ Nature religion
/ Heiden
/ History
/ Waiting (Philosophy)
/ Smith, Jonathan Z. 1938-2017
/ Religion
/ Conception
/ Strangeness
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| IxTheo Classification: | AB Philosophy of religion; criticism of religion; atheism BB Indigenous religions KBQ North America |
| Further subjects: | B
China
B Heathen B Religion B History B Hawaii |
| Online Access: |
Presumably Free Access Volltext (Verlag) Volltext (doi) |
| Summary: | This article asks whether and how J. Z. Smith's contention that religion is a non-native category might be applied to the discipline of history. It looks at how nineteenth-century Americans constructed their own understandings of proper historyauthenticatable, didactic, and progressiveagainst the supposed historylessness of heathen Hawaiians and stagnation of pagan Chinese. True history, for these nineteenth-century historians, changed in the past and pointed to change in the future. The article asks historians to think about how they might be replicating some of the same assumptions about forward-moving history by focusing on change over time as a core component of historical narration. It urges historians to instead also incorporate the native historical imaginations of our subjects into our own methods, paying attention to when those imaginations are cyclical and reiterative as well as directional, and letting our subjects' assumptions about time and history, often shaped by religious perspectives, orient our own decisions about how to structure the stories we tell. |
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| ISSN: | 1533-8568 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Religion and American culture
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1525/rac.2018.28.1.52 |