Can the Atlas Survive the Critique of "Religion"?
Genealogy, jurisdiction, and what the map cannot contain
The critique
For four decades, some of the most important work in religious studies has argued that "religion" is not the neutral universal object the field's early frameworks assumed it to be. Talal Asad's Genealogies of Religion and Formations of the Secular trace the specifically modern, largely Christian, and colonially entangled histories through which the category was assembled and exported. Jonathan Z. Smith's essays argue that religion, as a comparative analytic object, is created in the scholar's study — an artifact of the disciplinary act of comparison rather than a natural kind found in the world. Tomoko Masuzawa's The Invention of World Religions documents how the apparently pluralistic discourse of world religions preserved specifically Christian-European assumptions within a new classificatory form. Timothy Fitzgerald's The Ideology of Religious Studies pushes the argument to its strongest conclusion: that religious studies itself reproduces a Protestant analytic in secular guise, and that the discipline as constituted may be beyond reform. Russell McCutcheon's Manufacturing Religion frames the field's institutional life as a struggle between critics who take the genealogical work seriously and caretakers who protect the object of study from the critique that would dissolve it. Bruce Lincoln's "Theses on Method" articulates a programmatic critical-historical religious studies in which no claim about the sacred is exempt from scholarly scrutiny.
This body of work ranks among the most consequential scholarship the field has produced. Any contemporary atlas of religious studies must reckon with its methods and findings as part of the field’s methodological self-understanding.
The atlas therefore faces a question it cannot decline: if "religion" is not a natural kind, if the very category is a historical artifact carrying specific colonial and confessional freight, in what sense is a methodological atlas of "religious studies" even coherent? An atlas that failed to confront this question would not deserve the trust of readers who take the critique seriously. An atlas that confronted it defensively — that domesticated the critique into a manageable zonal contribution and then moved on — would confirm the critique's diagnosis of the field's evasive habits.
This page is the atlas's attempt at honest reckoning. It states what the atlas can survive from the critique, what it cannot, and where its relationship to the critique remains a working problem rather than a settled position.
Where the critique operates
A precise distinction matters here. The methods through which the genealogical critique is developed — historical, ethnographic, discourse-analytic, archival — can be located methodologically within and around Zone 4. Asad's genealogies are ethnographies of concepts; Smith's essays are comparative-historical arguments; Masuzawa's book is intellectual history. These are Zone 4 methods, and the figures who developed the critique appear as central Zone 4 contributors on that page.
The critique's metatheoretical claim is another matter. The claim that "religion" is a specifically Christian-modern-colonial construction bears not only upon particular religious formations that Zone 4 studies. It bears upon the atlas's whole enterprise — upon the coherence of a project that maps eight methodological approaches to something called "religion" without first establishing that the something exists as a stable object.
The atlas can locate the critique's scholarly operations within its own map. It cannot absorb the critique of its own governing categories as merely another zonal contribution without blunting, and potentially self-refutingly domesticating, its force. That distinction is the honest one. The atlas holds it openly rather than pretending the two levels of the critique are the same.
Three concessions
The atlas makes three concessions to the critique without hedging. These are not places where the atlas holds a subtle counterposition it will develop later. They are places where the critique is right and the atlas needs to say so.
None of these concessions requires the atlas to be dismantled. What they require is that the atlas operate with visible awareness of its own constitution, and that its claims to usefulness be legible as methodological claims rather than as claims about the ultimate nature of what it studies.
Two claims the atlas holds
Against the strongest constructivist reading of the critique, the atlas holds two claims. These are not defenses of the category "religion" as a natural kind, which the atlas has already conceded. They are claims about the methodological question that remains once the genealogical work is done.
The atlas concedes ground on the category. It holds ground on the method.
Panikkar alongside Asad — productive tension, not resolution
Concessions and defensive claims are necessary but not sufficient. An atlas that only knew what it could survive from the critique would still be reacting to Asad rather than working. The atlas therefore names a second methodological interlocutor whose role is not to critique the atlas but to equip it for the comparative work the critique makes harder.
Raimon Panikkar's diatopical hermeneutics and homeomorphic equivalence offer disciplines for comparison after the shared category has been rightly contested. Where Asad's genealogy tells the atlas what its object is not, Panikkar offers ways the atlas can proceed once the critique has been accepted. Diatopical hermeneutics is a method for comparison across interlocutors who share no common topos — no shared category, no shared metalanguage, no neutral standpoint from which to survey. Homeomorphic equivalence lets phenomena in different traditions be related without being equated, by locating functional analogues that occupy structurally similar (never identical) roles in different worlds. Panikkar's own recurring illustration is worth naming here as the concrete case: "religion" and dharma are not translations of one another, nor instances of a common genus. They are homeomorphic equivalents whose comparison requires diatopical discipline, and any atlas that begins by treating dharma as an Asian instance of the Western category "religion" has already lost the game. The atlas takes this seriously across every zone. What Zone 1 studies as "religious experience" and what a dhārmic tradition studies as, say, anubhava are homeomorphic — related, illuminatingly comparable, non-identical — not equatable.
But Panikkar's disciplines do not neutralize genealogy, and the pairing with Asad is best understood as productive tension rather than problem-and-solution. Genealogy remains active within every attempted diatopical encounter, because the topoi across which diatopical work moves are themselves historically constituted, colonially entangled, and unevenly positioned. The diatopical encounter between "religion" and dharma is not a neutral meeting of two topoi; it is a meeting shaped by the colonial history through which "dharma" was first offered up to Western religious-studies classification. The atlas's use of the example remains inside that history.
Asad continues to work on Panikkar. Panikkar continues to work on Asad. Neither closes the other. The pairing structures the atlas's honest methodological stance: Asad names what the atlas's object is not, Panikkar offers disciplines for how the atlas can nonetheless proceed, and each keeps the other from becoming the atlas's last word.
A structural commitment
An atlas that only argued it could survive the critique has not, in any meaningful sense, survived it. Arguments accumulate; a critique that operates upon a project's whole enterprise cannot be neutralized by an argument the project itself constructs. What the critique requires is a structural response — a way the atlas actually opens itself to what the argument alone cannot secure.
The atlas has made a structural commitment to publish an invited external critique of the atlas itself during the second phase of the website’s release. The critique will be written by a scholar who does not accept the atlas’s premises and will appear without an accompanying rebuttal. Once published, it will remain a permanent part of the site’s architecture, referenced from the Home page and from this page.
The commitment matters because it converts the atlas from a project that says it welcomes critique into a project that has built a room for it. The difference is not rhetorical. A field-review process shaped the Integral Code of Ethics through comparable means — approximately twenty reviewers whose critical work altered the finished document rather than confirming its initial framing. The atlas takes the same approach here, adapted to a permanent published form.
The invited critique is a live document. It may be updated. Successor critiques from other scholars may be added. The atlas does not commit to responding to any critique; it commits to hosting the critique honestly, on the same page footing as its own claims, permanently and without rebuttal.
What this page does not do
This page does not attempt to close the question it addresses. The relationship between the atlas and the genealogical critique of "religion" is a working problem, and its status as a working problem is itself part of the atlas's methodological honesty. Readers who conclude that the atlas cannot be justified in the face of the critique are engaging exactly the question the atlas has tried to open honestly rather than to foreclose. Readers who find the atlas's response adequate to the reckoning are welcome to use the map with awareness of what it has conceded and what it has held.
The atlas is offered as a working methodological instrument for a specific kind of comparative religious-studies work. Its usefulness will be measured by whether it helps that work be done well, not by whether it survives every question that can be asked about the category "religion." The critique of the category will continue whether or not the atlas exists. The atlas exists because there are methodological questions about how to study the phenomena the category has been used to gather, and those questions do not disappear when the category's genealogy is exposed.