Religionswissenschaft as Colonialist Discourse: The Case of Rudolf Otto

Abstract

The dominant approach to the study of religion known as the phenomenology of religion's core assumption was that underlying the multiplicity of historical and geographically dispersed religions was an ultimately metaphysical, trans-historical substratum, called 'man', Geist, or 'consciousness'. This transhistorical substratum is an expressive agent with a uniform, essential nature. By reading the data of religion as its 'expressions', it is possible to sympathetically understand their meaning. Geist, or 'man', then, is both a philosophy of history and i hermeneutical theory. It also forms a systematic set of representations, which replicate the structure of the asymmetrical relations between Europeans and those colonized by Europeans. The metanarrative of Geist is a narrative of the supremacy - their term, not mine - of white, Christian Europe over black, 'primitive' Africal and 'despotic' Asia. Spirit moves from the South to the North; away from the East to the West. This paper locates Rudolf Otto's work within the structure and history of phenomenological discourse and argues that the science of religion as described there conforms nearly perfectly to the structures of colonial discourse as this has been discussed and analyzed by theorists such as Jaques Derrida and Edward Said.