Daniel Dubuisson, The Western Construction of Religion

In The Western Construction of Religion Daniel Dubuisson argues that the concept of ‘religion’ is too historically and culturally contingent to serve as the basis for a comparative discipline. The concept is indigenous to Western culture and is inherently theological and phenomenological. He argues for a constructionist view of the discipline and proposes the concept ‘cosmographic formations’ as a replacement for ‘religion’. Religious phenomena should be taken as discursive constructions that link embodied individuals to the social, cultural and cosmic orders. The following reviews evaluate Dubuisson's arguments, relating them to broader currents in the theory of religion. Daniel Dubuisson responds to each of the reviews.¹