Читать книгу SCM Core Text Sociology of Religion - Andrew Dawson - Страница 11

The academic discipline of sociology is inextricably fused with the rise of modern, urban-industrial society. This rise occurred initially in Europe and North America and properly began at the close of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. As this emergence occurred at a particular historical moment in a particular geographical space, the discipline of sociology bears the marks of a specific time and place. Of course, the twentieth-century globalization of the modern, urban-industrial paradigm has occasioned the socio-cultural pluralization of the sociological gaze. The growth of modernity and spread of urban-industrialization to virtually all parts of the world have resulted in sociology’s welcome variegation through the addition of multiple voices speaking with pluriform accents and articulating miscellaneous concerns. However, and for a variety of historical and contemporary reasons, the overwhelming majority of the theory, vocabu­lary and analytical preoccupations of sociology continue to be those of the modern-day West. Because modernity is ‘multiple’ and the processes of urban-industrialization multifaceted, it cannot be assumed that theories and concepts which illuminate social dynamics in the West automatically apply to the likes of Brazil, China and India (see Chapter 10). By no means negating the ability of sociology to address matters beyond its traditional Western cradle, this observation nevertheless warrants an element of caution, if not humility, both in respect of sociology in general and the sociology of religion in particular (Cohen and Kennedy, 2007).