Manufacturing Religion : The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia

This work offers a critique of traditional religion scholarship, focusing serially on multiple interrelated targets.

Most prominent among these are history of religions as a discipline; Mircea Eliade, the founder of the discipline; contemporary textbooks on world religions; and the oft-repeated bromide that religion is a "sui generis" phenomenon.

He analyzes the ideological basis for and service of the "sui generis" argument, demonstrating that it has been used to constitute the field's object of study in a form that is ahistoric, apolitical, fetishized, and sacrosanct.