Religious Studies and Transcultural Studies: Revealing a Cosmos Not Known Before?
Autor/innen
- Esther Berg
-
Katja Rakow
post-doc, research assitant
Drawing on our research on Pentecostal Christianity in Singapore, the article introduces the transcultural approach and discusses its possible contributions to the academic study of religions. After a short overview of the history of the discipline, the article introduces our understanding of the transcultural approach and a discussion of similar or related approaches in Religious Studies, which emphasize relationality and polyvocality in the study of religious practices and discourses. The final section of the article is devoted to two case studies that demonstrate the fruitfulness of adopting a transcultural approach to our research material. The first example contests the prevalent narrative of the Azusa Street Revival (1906–1909) as the birth of Pentecostalism and an inherently American religious phenomenon, which was subsequently exported from the US to the rest of the world. The second example discusses Singaporean Pentecostal missionary narratives and genealogies of small group practice, which decentre North America, Europe, and the North Atlantic as focal points of the religious world map.
Copyright (c) 2017 Katja Rakow, Esther Berg

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Copyright (c) 2017 Katja Rakow, Esther Berg

Dieses Werk steht unter der Lizenz Creative Commons Namensnennung - Nicht-kommerziell 4.0 International.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
