The Emergence of "Esoteric" as a Comparative Category: Towards a Decentered Historiography
This case study contributes to ongoing debates about religious comparativism by focusing on the emergence of the notion of "esoteric" as a de facto comparative category since the seventeenth century. Scholars have so far restricted their studies to a preconceived "Western esoteric cor...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Equinox
2023
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| In: |
Implicit religion
Year: 2021, Volume: 24, Issue: 3/4, Pages: 353-383 |
| Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains: | B
Esotericism
/ Concept of
/ Religion
/ Europe
/ Asia
/ Egypt
/ Comparative religion
/ Oriental philology
/ Historiography
/ History 1600-1900
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| IxTheo Classification: | AA Study of religion AZ New religious movements KBA Western Europe KBK Europe (East) KBL Near East and North Africa KBM Asia TK Recent history |
| Further subjects: | B
global religious history
B religion in Asia B Esotericism B European religious history B religious comparativism B orientalist studies |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | This case study contributes to ongoing debates about religious comparativism by focusing on the emergence of the notion of "esoteric" as a de facto comparative category since the seventeenth century. Scholars have so far restricted their studies to a preconceived "Western esoteric corpus" that limited our view on the majority of source material. This obfuscated the fact that notions such as "esoteric," "gnosis," or "Cabala" have been widely employed historically to discuss subjects ranging from the Arabic and Persianate world via India to East Asia. Since the eighteenth century, "esoteric" language formed an integral part of orientalist scholarship, which explains its omnipresence in (South) Asianist scholarship today. This immediately relates to broader issues of religious comparativism: I argue for the necessity of a decentered historiography to understand the development of categories such as "esotericism" and "religion," not as a unilateral process of "Western" diffusion and projection but through entangled historical exchanges. Based on the approach of global religious history, I provide preliminary insights into what conditioned and structured these exchanges. |
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| ISSN: | 1743-1697 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Implicit religion
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1558/imre.23260 |