In Search of Dreamtime: The Quest for the Origin of Religion / Edition 1

by Tomoko Masuzawa

Overview

In this pioneering work of discourse analysis, Tomoko Masuzawa observes that the modern study of religion is peculiarly ambivalent toward the question of origin. Today's historians of religion maintain that they have abandoned speculative quests for the origin of religion; at the same time, they allege that concepts of absolute beginnings are fundamental to religion itself. By renouncing the desire for origins that they claim religious peoples embrace, historians can vicariously participate in the forbidden quest—so it seems—without forfeiting the authority accruing from their objectivist position.

This ambivalence of contemporary scholars echoes their ambivalence toward the ancestral "giants" of the discipline: Durkheim, Müller, and Freud. Masuzawa shows that the speculations of these three men on the origins of religion render the very notion of time and history problematic and contain powerful instruments for dislodging the position of "Western man" as the keeper of knowledge. Her critical rereading of these forefathers is framed by a compelling discussion of the postmodernist subversion of absolute origins in the works of Walter Benjamin and Rosalind Krauss and a comparison of Mircea Eliade and Nancy Munn's accounts of the Australian aboriginal "dreamtime." Engaging a number of critical issues within the burgeoning field of cultural studies, Masuzawa's book will have far-reaching implications not only for religious studies but throughout the human sciences.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	2900226509852
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	12/01/1993
Series:	Religion and Postmodernism
Edition description:	1
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 1.25(h) x 9.00(d)

About the Author

Tomoko Masuzawa teaches European intellectual history and critical theory at the University of Michigan, where she holds a joint appointment in the Department of History and the Program in Comparative Literature. She is the author of In Search of Dream Time: The Quest for the Origin of Religion, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Original Lost: Myth and Ritual and the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
2. Society versus Difference: Durkheim's Shadowboxing
3. Accidental Mythology: Max Müller in and out of His Workshop
4. History on a Mystic Writing Pad: Freud Refounds Time
Freud's Beginnings
Lessons of the Wolf-Man
Metapsychology of Temporality
5. Dreams Adrift
Conclusion
Notes
Index