Chapter 10 - Study of religion and sociology of knowledge

Summary

We said that the larger disciplinary framework within which Bastide theorises about religion is that of sociology. We can be more specific and define his contribution to a sociology of knowledge. While his interests were wide-ranging, including for instance ethno-psychiatry and processes of decolonization, we should situate the culminating point of his scholarly career in 1965 when he came to preside over the Sorbonne research group in sociology of knowledge. In this capacity, his path as a scholar was based on two premises.

1. The theorist cannot ever absolutely abstract his work from his own personal context. If he cuts his moorings from the society of his birth and youth, he gets acculturated into another. If he divorces himself from a religious tradition, he trails something of it behind himself. If he criticizes (or revolts against) a scholarly tradition, he embeds himself into another (which sometimes is only the opposite of the first). And when he writes with his best professional conscience, he has a language and hence a scholarly public. Furthermore, he has also a style. This is where his chance lies, as we shall see in the next section; because language can accommodate styles that do not make their own categories absolute but set the readers' minds in motion.

A masterful defence of this point is found in Pierre Bourdieu's Pascalian Meditations. We are implicated in a world, from which we distance ourselves in our scholarly work.