Save

The Discourse on Primal Religion

Disentangling Regimes of Truth

In: Method & Theory in the Study of Religion
Author:
David Atwood University of Basel, Study of Religion Heuberg 12, 4051 Basel Switzerland david.atwood@unibas.ch

Search for other papers by David Atwood in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Close
Download Citation Get Permissions

Access options

Get access to the full article by using one of the access options below.

Institutional Login

Log in with Open Athens, Shibboleth, or your institutional credentials

Login via Institution

Purchase

Buy instant access (PDF download and unlimited online access):

$40.00

This article presents a formalized way to distinguish different regimes of truth in the historiography of religion. By focusing on the nineteenth-century European discourse on the origins of humanity and its (primal) religion in Africa, I will show how narratives of the origin always oscillate between a scientific and a religious regime of truth. The article further outlines a possible method to formally differentiate between insider and outsider positions by redefining them as the assignment to a certain way of organizing a discourse or a semantic field according to a regime of truth. A discourse analysis and sociology of knowledge approach reveals possibilities to distinguish different constructions of insider perspectives by heuristically identifying codes, rarefactions, rules of formations, and regimes of truth.

Content Metrics

All Time Past 365 days Past 30 Days
Abstract Views 527 73 12
Full Text Views 219 6 0
PDF Views & Downloads 78 12 0