Exhibiting Religion

Colonialism and Spectacle at International Expositions, 1951-1893

John P Burris author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:University of Virginia Press

Published:29th Jan '02

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Exhibiting Religion cover

World's fairs contributed mightily to defining a relationship between religion and the wider world of human culture. Even at the base level of popular culture found on the midways of the earliest international expositions - where Victorian ladies gawked at displays of non-Western, ""primitive"" life - the concept of religion as an independent field of study began to take hold in public consciousness. The World's Parliament of Religions at the Chicago exposition of 1893 did as much as any other single event to introduce the idea that religion could be viewed as simply one concern amoung many within the rapidly diversifying modern lifestyle. A chronicle of the emergence and development of religion as a field of intellectual inquiry, this volume is an extensive survey of world's fairs from the inaugural Great Exhibition in London to the Chicago Columbian Exposition and World's Parliament of Religions. As the first broad gatherings of people from across the world, these events were pivotal as forums in which the central elements of a field of religion came into contact with one another.

Exhibiting Religion is authoritative and will eagerly be read by all those interested in the relationship between the concept of religion and the geopolitics of modernity. This book is significantly different from virtually all treatments of such events as the World's Parliament, since the norm among contemporary scholars is to celebrate it uncritically rather than thoroughly historicize it, as John Burris has very nicely done. - Russel T. McCutcheon, University of Alabama, author of Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia ""John Burris's perspective brings a mass of information into a new focus, which allows him to build a frequently compelling argument about the broad cultural role industrial and cultural exhibitions played in the second half of the nineteenth century in the West."" - Gary Ebersole, University of Missouri, Kansas City, author of Captured by Texts: Puritan to Postmodern Images of Indian Captivity

ISBN: 9780813920832

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 535g

240 pages