nnn Talal Asad’s Challenge to Religious Studies Donovan O. Schaefer It’s a rare thing when thinkers not only transform their own felds of study, but also have a deep impact on neighboring disciplines. Yet this is, without question, the achievement of Talal Asad. I could write here about the defning efect Asad has had on my own work and that of many other religious studies scholars, shaping our collective approach to secularism, religion, and embodiment. But I would rather tell the story of how Asad has reshaped the entire feld of reli- gious studies. I can’t imagine that the scholarship I now fnd exciting would have been possible without Talal Asad. Tere was no watershed moment marking the arrival of Asad’s scholarship in religious stud- ies. A quick survey of citations in the fagship Journal of the American Academy of Religions shows that his work began to seep into our conversations in the mid-1990s. Many of these early articles cited Asad’s (1983) criticisms of Cliford Geertz that appeared in Man, which came to wider attention when republished as part of Genealogies of Religion (see LaMothe 2008; McCutcheon 1997; Schilbrack 2005). Asad’s challenge to Geertz questioned the way that cultural anthropologists took religion to be a semiotic operation—the ‘thick description’ of symbols and their associated haloes of meaning in context (Asad 1983; see also Asad 1993). For Asad, this semiotic fxation not only produced a Protestantized sense of religion as primarily cognitive, it also created a universalist defnition that would only ever awkwardly translate to contexts exter- nal to the Euro-modern context. Asad (1993: 35) notes that in the opposing view, represented by fgures like Augustine, “it is not mere symbols that implant true Christian dispositions, but power—ranging all the way from laws (imperial and ecclesiastical) and other sanctions (hellfre, death, salvation, good repute, peace) to the disciplinary activities of social institutions (family, school, city, church) and of human bodies (fasting, prayer, obedience, penance).” Religious studies is and always has been a hybrid discipline. To the extent that it has any core integrity as a feld, you could call it a collection of refections on the term ‘religion’ itself. From Tylor to James to Durkheim to Otto to Eliade, the early history of religious studies as a feld probed for a binding organizational defnition of religion. But since at least the 1970s, the emphasis of religious studies has increasingly been on locating ‘religion’ not as a unity at all, but as a fragmentary, holographic projection devised within a particular historical context—the European conversations around states and sects, colonization and conquest—and then aggres- sively imposed on people, places, and times in which it had no organic coordinates of emer- gence. And this, reciprocally, illuminated the bumpy, uneven history of ‘religion’ even within its native, Euro-modern context (Orsi 2004). In the US, the eminent historian Jonathan Z. Smith arguably created the modern discipline of religious studies through his focused criticisms of the powerful History of Religions School