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.
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See, e.g., Bayart (2005) on the ambiguous role of missionaries in the creation of colonial myths.
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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.
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 |