Mircea Eliade

The influential scholar of religion Mircea Eliade envisioned a spiritually destitute modern culture coming into renewed meaning through the recovery of archetypal myths and symbols. Eliade defined this restoration of meaning as a "new humanism" of existential meaning and cultural-religious unity. Through a biographical exegesis of Eliade's life and writings from his earliest years in Romania to his final ones as professor of the history of religions at the University of Chicago, Cave sets forward a structural description of what this "new humanism" might have meant for Eliade, and what it signifies for modern culture. Cave concludes by endorsing Eliade's radically pluralistic vision which, he argues, offers a key to the revitalization of our demythologized and material culture. This study repositions previous Eliadean studies and places the "new humanism" as the paradigm in relation to which future readings of Eliade should be evaluated.

In this new book, author Russell McCutcheon offers a powerful critique of traditional scholarship on religion, focusing on multiple interrelated targets. Most prominent among these are the History of Religions as a discipline; Mircea Eliade, one of the founders of the modern discipline; recent scholarship on Eliade's life and politics; contemporary textbooks on world religions; and the oft-repeated bromide that "religion" is a sui generis phenomenon. McCutcheon skillfully analyzes the ideological basis for and service of the sui generis argument, demonstrating that it has been used to constitute the field's object of study in a form that is ahistoric, apolitical, fetishized, and sacrosanct. As such, he charges, it has helped to create departments, jobs, and publication outlets for those who are comfortable with such a suspect construction, while establishing a disciplinary ethos of astounding theoretical naivete and a body of scholarship to match. Surveying the textbooks available for introductory courses in comparative religion, the author finds that they uniformly adopt the sui generis line and all that comes with it. As a result, he argues, they are not just uncritical (which helps keep them popular among the audiences for which they are intended, but badly disserve), but actively inhibit the emergence of critical perspectives and capacities. And on the geo-political scale, he contends, the study of religion as an ahistorical category participates in a larger system of political domination and economic and cultural imperialism.

"By focusing on Scholem, Corbin, and Eliade, Steven Wasserstrom has brought to light many of the tacit assumptions that have informed the study of religious culture in our time. Particularly important is his attentiveness to the primary emphasis placed on the symbolic imagination in these three seminal thinkers and the impact that this orientation had on their assessment of history, politics, and ethics. Wasserstrom has produced a study that will have major implications for the way that historians of religion think about their own discipline."--Elliot R. Wolfson, New York University

South Asian women have frequently been conceptualized in colonial, academic and postcolonial studies, but their very categorization is deeply problematic. This book, informed by theory and enriched by in-depth fieldwork, overturns these unhelpful categorizations and alongside broader issues of self and nation assesses how South Asian identities are 'performed'. What are the blind spots and erasures in existing studies of both race and gender? In what ways do South Asian women struggle with Orientalist constructions? How do South Asian women engage with 'indo-chic?' What dilemmas face the South Asian female scholar?With a combination of the most recent feminist perspectives on gender and the South Asian diaspora, questions of knowledge, power, space, body, aesthetics and politics are made central to this book. Building upon a range of experiences and reflecting on the actual conditions of the production of knowledge, South Asian Women in the Disapora represents a challenging contribution to any consideration of gender, race, culture and power.