© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2010 DOI: 10.1163/157006810X512338 Method and Teory in the Study of Religion 22 (2010) 136-155 brill.nl/mtsr METHOD THEORY in the STUDY OF RELIGION & Talal Asad’s ‘Religion’ Trouble and a Way Out Ivan Strenski Department of Religious Studies, University of California, Riverside, Riverside, CA 92521, USA strenski@ucr.edu Abstract By this point, almost everyone is familiar with Talal Asad’s assault on the “religion” category. Despite his influence, Asad’s criticisms tend to oscillate between two mutually exclusive posi- tions. I shall argue that Asad’s incoherence is instructive for the field as a whole. Te study of religion would be better off constructing useful and revisable definitions of “religion” rather than abandoning the category all together. Keywords Talal Asad, religion, eliminationism, comparativism, Wilfrid Cantwell Smith, Clifford Geertz, authority, Tim Fitzgerald, Emile Durkheim No discussion of the category “religion” would be complete without attention to the most prominent, sophisticated, although elusive, critic of that term, anthropologist, Talal Asad. In this paper, I shall underline this very elusiveness in Asad’s thinking about religion, and query its utility. Once one tries to still Asad’s elusive discourse on “religion,” I believe it gives way to incoherence. Asad tries to embrace simultaneously what seem like two mutually exclusive positions on the status of the category, “religion.” As a result, he leaves the study of religion in a state of “suspended animation,” pausing at the threshold of what I offer is a “real” study of religion. On the one hand, Asad embraces an “eliminationist” position, akin to Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s. Here, Asad denies that religion “has any essence,” or that “religion” names anything “objective” in our world. It, therefore, has no use in cross-cultural comparison because it does not name a universal feature of human life. On the other hand, Asad also uses “religion” in a general, tacitly universal, way. He writes of the “modern religion in Europe” or a “former kind of religiosity” or “forms of religiosity,” or “the development of religions” or “essential religious virtue,” and on. I find Asad’s combined uses of “religion” in these ways elusive, at least, and incoherent at worst. How can Asad put together