Chidester's book concerns the effort among colonial officials and administrators to compare practices found in southern Africa to those of Christianity. As such, it specifically ties the creation of religion as an anthropological category to colonialism.
Lincoln explores the category of a closely related concept to religion—that of "myth"—and examines how and why certain kinds of stories have been either venerated or derided with this label.
Masuzawa's book deals with the genealogy of the category of "world religions." He explores how and why some "traditions" are included in the canon while others are not.
The author, a scholar of American Catholicism who uses ethnographic and historical methods, discusses both particularities of Catholicism as well as some of the most basic questions in religious scholarship, such as how a scholar can begin to apprehend the "religious world" of another. The last chapter, "Snakes Alive," is a particularly important discussion of this topic.
Noted religious studies scholar Jonathan Z. Smith discusses the construction of religion as an intellectual and human category. Why, he asks, are some things called "religion," while others are not?
This book concerns the ways in which particular kinds of experiences—the "fits, trances, and visions" of the title—were reinterpreted and retranslated throughout the nineteenth century. It explores the ways in which practices can be inscribed as "religious," "secular," or some mediating combination of the two, and how they change because of the way they are described.
