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The Editorial Fieldwork in Folkloristics and the Study of Religions: An Interdisciplinary Introduction
It is perfectly possible to study religions without doing ‘fieldwork’. An obvious case in point is Friedrich Max Müller. A renowned Indologist, historian of Indian religions, and theorist of myth, Müller arguably was the single most important figure for the establishment of the study of religions as...
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| Published in: | Marburg Journal of Religion |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Journal Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Philipps-Universität Marburg
2024
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| Online Access: | Online Access |
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| Summary: | It is perfectly possible to study religions without doing ‘fieldwork’. An obvious case in point is Friedrich Max Müller. A renowned Indologist, historian of Indian religions, and theorist of myth, Müller arguably was the single most important figure for the establishment of the study of religions as a field of research, and through his edition of the Rigveda (1st ed. 1849–1874) the philologist Müller made outstanding contributions to the study of early Indian religious history. Yet Müller never once travelled to India: as he saw it, the India he was studying was not the India of his time, but an India that lay several centuries in the past (Kippenberg 1997, 65). Similiar things can be said about many other traditional fields of research in the study of religions. Another classic of ‘armchair scholarship’ is James George Frazer: as the author of The Golden Bough, Frazer wrote one of the most monumental, most influential, and most successful studies of myth ever published. Since the publication of its first two-volume edition in 1890, one version or another of The Golden Bough has been in print continually, now for more than 130 years and counting. Much of the material that The Golden Bough is constructed from consists in anthropological data; and most of this, in classic ‘armchair’ fashion, Frazer quarried from books in library reading rooms. |
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| DOI: | 10.17192/mjr.2024.25.8692 |