(46)Within the modern study of religion the division between philosophy of reli- gion and the histolw of religions-long regarded as a truism insofar as it reflects the distinction between universal and particular-has become increasingly blurred in recent years with the growing influence of’ cultural and critical theory on the humanities and social sciences. Unlike the earaier paradigmatic split between theology and anthropology (or social science methodology) , cultural theory has helped not only to dismantle well worn dualisms such as religion/politics, theism/atheism, sacred/secular, but more importantly has helped to narrow the gap between academic practices and cultural practices such as religion that scholars seek to study. (47)That is to say, cultural theory has simultaneously problematized and challenged essentialist and theological tendencies (such as dreams of absolute principles, supernatural origins, ahistorical authorities, pure traditions etc. ) as well as scholars’ claims to methodological objectivity and impartiality, since the academy far from being a site of neutral value-free analysis, is itself thoroughly implicated in cultural realities. Indeed in what might seen as a reversal of critical theory’s atheistic roots in the "masters of suspicion" contemporary cultural theory has been adapted by scholars not only to successfully dispute the atheistic presuppositions of modern secular thinking in the social sciences, thereby revitalizing religious and theological reflection in the Christian and Judaic traditions, but, more surprisingly perhaps, it has legitimized the use of phenomena from these particular traditions as resources for critical thinking about religion per se.
(48) By contrast, however, the effects of critical theory on the study of nonWestern religions has not only been far more modest, in many cases it seems also to have had precisely the opposite effect. In the study of South Asian religions, for example, the effect of critical theory seems to have reinforced the priority of the secular. In his recent work "Provincialising Europe" Dipesh Chakrabarty points out the very different interventions of critical theory in the two traditions. (49) Whereas in the Western intellectual traditions fundamental thinkers who are long dead and gone are treated not only as people belonging to their own times but also as though they were our contemporaries, the thinkers and traditions of South Asia, once unbroken and alive in their native languages, are now matters of historical research. These traditions are treated as truly dead, as history. Few if any social scientists working in the history of religions would ever try to make the concepts of these traditions into resources for contemporary critical theory. (50) And yet "past Western thinkers and their categories are never quite dead for us in the same way. South Asian(ist) social scientists would argue passionately with a Marx or a Weber without feeling any need to historicize them or to place them in their European intellectual contexts".
(47)That is to say, cultural theory has simultaneously problematized and challenged essentialist and theological tendencies (such as dreams of absolute principles, supernatural origins, ahistorical authorities, pure traditions etc. ) as well as scholars’ claims to methodological objectivity and impartiality, since the academy far from being a site of neutral value-free analysis, is itself thoroughly implicated in cultural realities.
