Talal Asad on the Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category

Abstract

The present article aims to introduce to the scholarly community as wellas to the general public the distinguished anthropologist Talal Asad, currentlya professor at the Graduate Center of New York City University, who studies relationships between religion and power from a comparative perspective.Thispaper reviews Asad’s essay The Construction of religion as an anthropologicalcategory, which is a constituent part of his monograph Genealogies of Religion(Asad 1993), and which reveals some of his thoughts and reflections on theessentialist definitions of religion.