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Comparativism in the history of religions:

Some models and key issues
a
Silvia Mancini
a
Département Interfacultaire d'Histoire et de Sciences des Religions,
Anthropole, Université de Lausanne, Lausanne-Dorigny, 1015, Switzerland E-
mail:
Published online: 22 Feb 2011.

To cite this article: Silvia Mancini (2007) Comparativism in the history of religions: Some models and key
issues, Religion, 37:4, 282-293, DOI: 10.1016/j.religion.2007.10.004

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 Religion 37 (2007) 282e293
www.elsevier.com/locate/religion

Comparativism in the history of religions:

Some models and key issues*
Silvia Mancini
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De´partement Interfacultaire d’Histoire et de Sciences des Religions, Anthropole, Universite´ de Lausanne,

1015 Lausanne-Dorigny, Switzerland

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to defend a specific epistemological position, which the author places in the con-
text of two modes of comparativism frequently practised in the comparative studies of some cultural productions
commonly subsumed under the adjective ‘religious’. These are, on the one hand, an anthropological/analogical
comparison bent upon ‘generalizing’; on the other hand, a comparison of a historical type, which looks for ‘sin-
gularities’. Both are based on the distinction between the ‘universal’ and the ‘particular’. The author distances
herself from both positions and makes a plea for another one, called ‘differential comparativism’, which is based
on the distinction between the ‘general’ and the ‘differential’. She submits that this third approach proves to be
historically and empirically more firmly grounded, therefore epistemologically more fruitful. For the historian of
religions, it has notably the advantage of serving as an efficient antidote against various risks. These risks are,
namely, the essentialism which is implicit in any religiously, anti-historically oriented phenomenology; an
also often implicit agnosticism; an empiricism limited to the mere, a-problematic description of the so-called re-
ligious phenomena; and, last but not least, an absolute cultural relativism. This form of comparativism, called
‘differential’, has already brought about remarkable results in the History of Religions, mainly thanks to the
works of the scholars of the School of Rome founded by Raffaele Pettazzoni. The latter was, indeed, the first
who successfully tried to reconcile the necessity of a truly historical knowledge of civilizations with the holistic
and systemic procedures of cultural and social anthropology.
Ó 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

*
Translated from the French by Christine Rhone.
E-mail address: silvia.mancini@unil.ch.

0048-721X/$ - see front matter Ó 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.religion.2007.10.004
 S. Mancini / Religion 37 (2007) 282e293 283

The scope of the present article does not cover an exhaustive range of the models and purposes
of comparative studies in the History of Religions.1 My considerations are grouped into three sec-
tions. The first discusses three points which are mutually complementary, and which seem to me
an integral part of the very practice of comparativism. The second highlights some issues which
are connected to the fact that comparativism is torn, nolens volens, between two opposite tenden-
cies, universalism and particularism. The third aims to show the advantages of another kind of
opposition, namely, that of the general and the differential.
Before presenting these thoughts, it seems necessary to indicate their general orientation and to
specify which type of comparative practice in the history of religions I am here defending. This
orientation, essentially, is one that can act as an antidote to three positions which, to my way
of thinking, do not correspond to the secular, reflexive, and constructivist vocation of this disci-
pline. These three positions are: the essentialism implicit in any religious, anti-historical phenom-
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enology; the agnosticism implicit in cultural relativism; and finally, the naturalism associated with
a purely descriptive and a-problematic research practice relating to the ‘religious’ understood as
a ‘self-evident’ object. Running counter to these three positions, that of the secular, critical and
constructivist researcher, here defended, consists in maintaining equidistance from the various civ-
ilizations and periods being studied, and in pursuing a cognitive project, ‘strong’ in the sense that
it does not pretend, under the pretext of relativism, to minimize the historical and cultural sub-
jectivity of the researcher. In these circumstances, let us always bear in mind that the comparative
history of religions, understood as a mode of knowledge proper to modern Western culture, im-
pels us to become aware that the scientific issues posed by this discipline proceed from problems,
as much cognitive as practical, which are inseparable from the historical society whence this type
of knowledge has emerged and in which it is embedded. It is, in my opinion, in this reflexive sense,
which has the advantage of avoiding relativism, that the adjective ‘historical’ must be understood
in discussing the comparative history of religions. The secular, critical and constructivist position
of the researcher also consists in never losing sight of the fact that the concepts, theories and in-
stitutional practices of research in the history of religions are endowed with a ‘self-realizing’ fac-
tor, in that they construct themselves at the same time as they construct the object that they are
claiming to ‘describe’.

Three related questions: general survey of the inherent problems

of historico-religious comparativism

If the comparative approach to civilizations widely separated in time and space necessarily en-
tails the relativization of the values, institutions and categories of each culture (and more partic-
ularly of our own, which is responsible for initiating the intercultural comparison), then how and
why has the practice of comparativism in the history of religions resulted in promoting a sort
of ‘naturalization’ of the typically Western institution-value that is ‘religion’? Which factors
of this category could resist the process of relativizing those philosophical absolutes to which

1
For a general methodological approach, see Robert Segal’s ‘defense of the comparative method’ (Segal, 2001), which
also presents (note 1, pp. 339e340) a detailed bibliography of studies in comparativism published in English.
 284 S. Mancini / Religion 37 (2007) 282e293

anthropological and historical procedures are supposed to lead? Lastly, what are the ‘objective’
scientific reasons that motivate many researchers to separate, with regard to the civilizations
they are studying, the mythico-ritual life from the whole of the historical, institutional and
symbolic relationships that organize the culture? The prime importance of these three questions
cannot escape anyone who intends correctly to treat the problem of the use of comparativism,
because they relate to the pertinent unities which must first be isolated and then compared.
An answer may lie in the fact that, for a lengthy period, the comparison of cultural forms from
different civilizations was supported, implicitly or explicitly, by a type of analogical comparison
rooted in the classical philosophical distinction between the universal and the particular. Now,
without first stating the problematic of this mode of comparing, the use of comparativism could
only produce constructions that were hybrid, because replete with philosophical assumptions of
a nature to impede concrete historical research.2
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In fact, just as the universalist anthropological model that issued from the Enlightenment and
the model that issued from historical Romantic particularism both draw their legitimacy from the
universaleparticular opposition, so by the same token they fail by ‘philosophism’. Furthermore,
some historians of religion, not wishing to engage in either alternative, prefer not to state their
personal opinion on a matter which nevertheless seems to them a reciprocal contamination of his-
tory and philosophy, a contamination underlying the ‘traditional’ manner of practising intercul-
tural comparison. This is why, moreover, either they do not compare or they adopt, albeit often
implicitly, a position in favour of one of these two ‘classical models’ of comparativism.
Some of them, who are inspired by universalism, emphasize the unvarying aspects of human
institutions; others, more concerned with the historical and particularist dimensions, instead em-
phasize the singular and local aspects of these institutions. Others, finally, avoid the question by
declaring that historians are not responsible for presenting a philosophical theory of their object
of study. This distrust with regard to a position that consists in exposing the theory or theories of
history underlying empirical research also has historical reasons. Comparativism has indeed long
been confronted with theories of history which almost always lead to one of the following concep-
tions of history: either the universalist, but evolutive and deterministic; or the particularist, which,
by considering each civilization as an incommensurable unit, can only lead to cultural relativism.
Another way may exist, however, which consists in transforming the historico-comparative
method into a historical theory e thus empirical, relative and non-philosophical e of an object
which is also historical. In fact, the latter, by its very nature as history, can be understood only
through the practical relationships that it maintains with the subject of knowledge. It is, indeed,
only by taking into account such practical (‘historico-concrete’) relationships that the theoretical
risks of philosophical relativism can be avoided.3 Obviously, the move from considering the
purely theoretical plane to that of the historical and practical relationships maintained between
civilizations does not occur without causing a certain amount of ‘damage’. We perceive, for ex-
ample, that a coherent application of the historico-comparative method to the study of cultures
can lead to a radical historicization of the religious, and this on two different levels. Relocated

2
For recent, cogent discussions of the issue ‘universals vs. particulars’, and relevant bibliographical elements, see
Paden (2001), Jensen (2001) and Saler (2001). On the postmodernist position thereon, see Segal (2001, p. 347).
3
On the limits and pitfalls of relativism, see for example Segal (2001, p. 347); De Martino (1962, 1977) and Mancini
(1997).
 S. Mancini / Religion 37 (2007) 282e293 285

within their own historical and cultural contexts of emergence and usage e and interpreted in
function of the historico-human needs and problems that they address and resolve e religious
facts ultimately lose any autonomous and absolute characteristics. Moreover, if it remains coher-
ent with these presuppositions, then the practice of historical comparativism in the history of re-
ligions can also result in a radical historicization of the very concepts establishing it as a specific
discipline (including the concept of religion itself) e and this compels researchers to redefine and
reconceive the cultural realities different from those in whose context the notions they are using
were forged.

Philosophical models of comparison: leaving by the front door and returning through the window
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The reticence with which, in France and Germany especially, comparativism is practised in the
religious sciences appears to be ordinarily attributable to two sources of fear. The first concern is
having openly to explicate the theory underlying the concrete research. The second is having to
proceed to a readjustment of the historical and cultural perspectives of the categories marshalled
in the research. The argument advanced to justify the second fear is generally that of the risks of
relativism. The result of this situation is that comparativism does not surpass the status of a tool
meant to delineate a general morphology of the religious forms studied, or to reconstruct, in a phil-
ological manner, the historical filiations and relationships between religious facts. Or again, it can
happen that, with the aim of naturalist universalism, comparativism is placed in the service of
anti-historical theses, underpinned, for example, by certain orientations of the cognitive sciences,
which are interested in the universal and objective foundations (of a neurophysiological or bio-
chemical nature) of human behaviour.
Now, should we not always remember that the history of religions, like anthropology, is not the
science of an object (religions), but the science of the relationship between Western culture and
other civilizations distant in time and space? These civilizations, in the period when comparati-
vism was first set up as a scientific tool, were apprehended through a category called ‘religion’
that belongs exclusively to the West. We can only observe that, if this perspective implies a re-
examination of the nature, finalities and efficacy of comparativism, as well as a re-examination
of this concept of ‘religion’, then at the same time it also implies that we re-examine the manner
of understanding ‘history’, understood as a method of comprehending and objectifying human
phenomena.4
As we know, since the second half of the nineteenth century, anthropology and the history of
religions have both pursued a common project. This implied that knowledge of the alterity must
be based on the use of comparison. Certainly, the objects of these two disciplines do not concur
completely. For anthropology, this object is ‘culture’; for the history of religions, it is ‘religion’
understood as one cultural component among others. Despite this difference, comparativism is
revealed as consubstantial to both disciplines. One reason is that their status as disciplines treating
of cultural diversity incites them to turn toward forms of life other than ours. Another reason is

4
On the different manner in which the tradition of German post-Hegelian historicism, on the one hand, and that of
Italian historicism, on the other, conceive of history, see Mancini (1997, 1999, 2000).
 286 S. Mancini / Religion 37 (2007) 282e293

that they expose and compare the most general and generalizable structures of meaning that the
West has developed to understand not only itself but also other civilizations.
Here, the adjective ‘general’ is not chosen haphazardly. Indeed, if structures of general meanings
refer to conditions of production linked to purely contingent historical circumstances, structures of
universal meanings, on the other hand, refer to a generalization that is rooted in an ontology re-
moved from any historicity. Now, it is indeed a matter, for both anthropology and the comparative
history of religions, to replace effectively, through empirical research bearing on cultures and so-
cieties historically different from ours, the old opposition that is typically philosophical between
the universal and the particular with the opposition between the general and the particular. We
must, however, be careful of the fact that here we are dealing with a particular that is understood
not as ‘in itself’, but as ‘differential’. In other terms, the practice of historical comparison should
transform the particularity of a cultural phenomenon into a particularity which springs from its
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being put in relationship to another ‘particular’, which also draws its singularity from the contrast
opposing it to other particular phenomena. Unlike the old one, this new particularity does not ap-
pear in the form of an expression or a manifestation of the universal. Rather, it appears as the sim-
ple variant of a historical generality, a variant that takes its specific meaning from being put in
relationship to other historical variants. Thus, the particularity of a cultural phenomenon will
not be understood as the actualization of an archetype situated outside history (in the universal );
its identity will not be endowed with essence proper, in the sense that its identity will issue, much
rather, from the relationship that the said phenomenon maintains with other particular phenom-
ena. These variants, which could be qualified as differential particularities, will then appear as local,
conjunctural responses to general and not universal historical and human problems.5
Cultural productions (discourse, institutions, practices) will then be apprehended as punctual
solutions applied to specific historico-human problems, problems whose ‘generality’ is limited
to certain contexts and particular conjunctures. At this point, we are led to distrust a practice
of comparativism that would begin systematically with categories currently used in our discipline,
for instance, that of ‘sacrifice’; that is, not to limit ourselves to describing the phenomenological
variants of ‘sacrifice’ (i.e., other sacrificial forms). Thus without completely abandoning these con-
ceptual categories e in as much as they are part of the tools of our discipline, it seems much more
useful and fruitful to focus on identifying the specific and local nature of the historical and cul-
tural problems that sacrificial practices are supposed to resolve. Here, deductions made according
to analogical models are quickly revealed to be ineffective. The historicity of these problems, in
fact, lies much more in what remains irreducible in them to such models; it becomes apparent
as soon as historians of religions interpret the phenomena that they are studying as a local manner
of practically treating and resolving contradictions and historico-cultural problems circumscribed
in time and in space.
In the case of analogical comparative practice, we are comparing cultural traits (institutions,
practices, discourse), whose form and meaning are analogous to those that we already know.
In the other case, we are comparing human problems and strategic systems of responses to these
problems, without dissociating them from their specific historical and cultural environment.

5
Courageously to define one’s disciplinary field starting from a problematic and a specific approach, rather than from
the normative definitions of an object (religions), may perhaps be the best course to take in order to avoid any risk of
essentialism e whether of a philosophical, theological, psychological, or biological nature.
 S. Mancini / Religion 37 (2007) 282e293 287

Finally, what distinguishes analogical comparison from differentiating historical comparison is

the choice that consists, in the one case, in establishing the comparison between unities posited
as universal from the start, unities that we find reconfirmed at the end of the process; and, in
the other case, in establishing the comparison between unities similar in the beginning, but whose
apparent unity is dissolved at the end of the process to make way for new structures of meaning.
In brief, it is a matter of comparing either, in the first case, ‘religions’ (and the institutions sup-
posed to characterize them); or, in the second case, ‘cultures’, understood as systems of practices,
discourse and institutions whose meaning is not known before the empirical enquiry.
The argument stating that analogical comparison reflects a spontaneous propensity of the hu-
man mind which, in order to conceptualize the world, proceeds from the known to the unknown,
raises a major objection. Can we, in fact, make from a spontaneous approach a guarantee of a sci-
entific knowledge? One of the major contributions of anthropology, from Franz Boas to Claude
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Lévi-Strauss, has consisted in showing that, in order to study civilizations in anthropology, we

must understand them as systems of symbolic and social relationships e and that to understand
them from the ‘inside’ requires a systemic or holistic approach. Indeed, Lévi-Strauss, in 1958,
encouraged his readers to abandon the conceptual categories that religious phenomenology (he
called it ‘‘tedious’’ [fastidieux]) was striving to find everywhere (cf. Gasbarro, 2006). The model
of comparison put forward by Lévi-Strauss interests us here less for its a-historical philosophical
assumptions (owing to their naturalist implications), than as an effective method for the intelligi-
bility of differentiated cultural systems. Now, it is precisely this model that is likely to suggest new
leads in the area of comparative thought e and this with a view to practising a comparativism
between cultures that would be at once differential and historical.

Phases in the comparative history of religions: hesitation between universalism and particularism

For the past two centuries, the problematic of diversity e as much in the anthropology issued
from the Enlightenment, as in ethnology and the comparative history of religions issued from the
historical particularism of Romantic inspiration e is organized according to modes which are
certainly distinct but strangely symmetrical, around the aforementioned opposition between the
universal and the particular. Now, recourse to this opposition (the background for the positions
of both Enlightenment universalism and Romantic particularist relativism) has ultimately turned
these two models into absolute and rigid principles, which impede the practice of comparison con-
ducted according to the procedures suggested above e while, as we have seen, for the opposition
between the universal and the particular, it is rather a question of substituting that of the general
and the particular, the latter understood as the relational (cf. Gasbarro, 2006).
We can, in the history of comparativism, distinguish three phases in the scientific and system-
atic modality of the use of comparison. The first phase was that of evolutionism, oriented in a sec-
ular sense. This phase opened in 1871 with Primitive Culture by Edward B. Tylor and extended to
about 1900 with the publication of The Golden Bough by James Frazer.6 Evolutionism was

6
On James Frazer’s (and also William Robertson Smith’s) ‘evolutionist comparativism’, see Segal (2001, pp.
346e372).
 288 S. Mancini / Religion 37 (2007) 282e293

a tributary of the cultural horizon inside which the concept of ‘civilization’ was prevalent (on the
opposition between the notions of civilization and Kultur, cf. Dumont, 1991; Elias, 2002). It chal-
lenged creationist dogma, but its Europe-centred character, with a few praiseworthy exceptions,
did not allow it to go much beyond the analogical schema of understanding cultural alterity e in
fact, it was barely cognizant of any other cultural traits than those of its own historical heritage.
This first ‘scientific comparison’ was thus chiefly analogical and, therefore, the normative objec-
tivity of the foundations of human culture prevailed over diversity, even if this normative objec-
tivity and universality were supposed to experience an indefinite and ‘finalized’ evolution and
result in ‘accomplished forms’ e copied, all the same, from those of European civilization.
The second phase opened with the critique addressed in 1887e1899 by Franz Boas against the
historico-comparative model of the evolutionists. It extended to about 1940 and included the
works of Father Wilhelm Schmidt, Leo Frobenius and Adolf Jensen. This anti-evolutionist cri-
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tique was quickly and forcefully affirmed, especially in the cultural milieux of Mittel-Europa
where the concept of Kultur predominated. It then advanced all over Europe, after World War
One, even in the countries which had believed in the perfectibility of the civilizations of humanity.
This new model of comparativism would then orient, in the second half of the twentieth century,
the research of both anthropologists and historians of religion.
The birth of the anthropological concept of ‘culture’, which refers to cultural traits shared as
much by the West as by so-called primitive societies, only confirms the idea of the ‘equal rights’
of cultures, an idea always present, at least implicitly, in Enlightenment anthropology. This equal-
ity is founded on the capacity, which all civilizations would have, to produce artefacts, understood
as means of regulating mores and as normative models of social relationships. We have a ‘culture’
as soon as we have ‘rules’ understood as artefacts. According to the Tylorian concept of ‘culture’,
particular cultural traits (that is, basic human institutions) must be posited as universal; in fact,
the idea of ‘civilization’ as the evolutionists understand it refers to the constructive capacities
of ‘conscious’ and free citizens e capacities activated by social and individual ‘consciousness’.
However, this ‘consciousness’ could be extended to all humanity only on condition of being en-
dowed with the status of rationality and intentionality. Similarly, the postulate of a historical final-
ism, defended by the evolutionists, becomes imperative in order to avoid making chance the
mainspring of history e which the idea of history seen as rational and scientific would come to
contradict. At this point, if the concern to proceed with comparing the West with other civiliza-
tions has led evolutionist anthropology to take into account and analyse cultural differences, then
it must be said, on the other hand, that the need to safeguard historical unity and assure the sci-
entific universality of knowledge has ultimately prevailed. Here the practice of analogical compar-
ison takes any meaning, and we observe that the ‘tables’ of humanity set up in the comparative
works of anthropologists all rest on the generalizing postulate of common cultural traits.
Immediately striking in this transformation characterizing the second phase is what we could
call the reversal of the ‘scientific schema’ of the analogy. Certainly, the accent on ‘equality’, influ-
enced by the Enlightenment and linked to the concept of civilization, here disappears to the benefit
of an interest in empirical and descriptive differences. Yet, we do not see that this new schema of
the intelligibility of equalities and differences has dealt a fatal blow to the belief, remained so preg-
nant, in a universality of normative structures. Fundamental cultural traits such as kinship, reli-
gion, law, economy, etc. have remained in place in the new historical ethnology. The dimensions
of these traits have nevertheless expanded to include new forms and contents. And this happens
 S. Mancini / Religion 37 (2007) 282e293 289

just when cultures and religions were beginning to be understood as complex systems of historicity
and of practices, as entities endowed with an internal self-regulating principle.7
We then see the third phase opening (from about 1950 to 1970). This was the phase of the ‘great
systemic and differential comparison’ meant to replace the analogical narrative of evolutionism. It
was the conveyer of criticism directed against the mechanism and normative historicism of
the precursors, against their myth of progress understood as the mainspring of the process of
civilization. It would be interesting to dwell here on some aspects of this new model of compari-
son. First of all, let us underscore that it would not challenge the idea of the universal equality of
humanity. Neither the mouthpieces of Kultur (hence, Franz Boas and his theory of ‘primitive
thought’), nor the champions of civilization (for example, Emile Durkheim and his ‘elementary
forms of religious life’), dare to cast doubt on the universality of different cultural traits. Analogy,
understood as a theoretical model founded on the ‘equality’ of cultural institutions arranged on
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a cumulative historical scale, remains in place in this phase of the history of comparativism; it acts
as a tool for thinking about cultural differences. However, two new elements, and important ones,
appear from between 1890 and 1940. (A) Comparison will now have as an object cultural systems
and their internal articulation. Each of these systems responds differently to the determinations of
nature, which, at this stage of thought, remains present as the backdrop to historical and anthro-
pological discourse.8 (B) If, according to these two perspectives, each cultural system is conceived
as a holder of fundamental cultural traits that are also present in the other systems, it nonetheless
remains that, henceforth, the scope of these stable cultural traits broadens disproportionately, to
the point of incorporating hitherto unknown forms and contents (new fields of research thus pro-
viding an ongoing stream of new materials for historical and anthropological analysis). ‘Religion’,
for instance, understood as a fundamental cultural trait, had properly to include not only poly-
theism, but also magic, and all kinds of other ritual forms e such as rites of passage, forms of
divination, possession cults, and prescriptive and prohibitive practices foreign to forms of worship
known until then.
These two novelties (systemic and differential comparison, on the one hand, extreme dilation of
the limits of cultural traits, on the other), result from the fact that historical particularism from
now on views all human cultures as endowed with greater autonomy and greater variety. These
cultures appear at this point as microcosms, finally removed from the evolutive mechanism of
a historical process that would always be the same. But on the other hand, this particularist
and holistic tendency, present more especially in the American school, has resulted in cultural rel-
ativism, a natural outcome of particularist historicism issued from Romantic Kultur. From the
viewpoint of this particularist historicism, cultures can only be apprehended in their singularity,
in themselves and for themselves. The emphasis placed on their intrinsic difference, which only
a holistic approach can reconstruct, has made the need felt for their internal comprehension.

7
See, in this sense, the ‘patterns of culture’ of American cultural anthropology, or again the paideuma of Leo Frobe-
nius e as well as the idea of ‘socio-cultural structure’, very prevalent in British social anthropology.
8
Certainly, the culturalism heir to the model of Kultur continues to consider civilizations as extensions of nature, in
continuity and in syntony with it and with its internal finalism e while sociology and anthropology, oriented to the
model of civilization, accentuate instead the transforming effect of human action and social organization on nature.
All the same, it remains that the divergence between these two views has little impact, during this period, on the choice
of a differential and systemic comparison of cultures.
 290 S. Mancini / Religion 37 (2007) 282e293

This is considered an access to the specificity of each culture, the normative differences proper to
them, and their unique cultural traits, which are also envisaged in themselves and for themselves.
And we see emerging, in this context situated between 1920 and 1940, field research identifying
with an emotional and participatory attitude. In conformity with the cultural heritage of Mit-
tel-Europa, which is perceptible here, researchers are required to enter into the spirit of the culture
observed in order to discern its hidden morphology, its true meaning which is hiding behind its
most ‘spiritual’ and qualitative traits. They are especially required to ‘penetrate’ this culture as
a ‘form of life’ materialized in symbols that structure its profound meaning (cf. Mancini,
1999). In fact, in this historical phase when comparison in the history of religions places so
much emphasis on ‘difference’, we see the question of the relationship between the universal
and the particular leaning to the detriment of the first term. History is understood as that of
each individual civilization. Certainly, civilizations may have contact with one another, but this
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never compromises their basically irreducible identity e their incommensurable particularity.

Despite this, the nature of this new orientation, reinforced by the American culturalist school
marked by the influence of Franz Boas, remained underpinned by a world view that failed to con-
sider the relationships between cultures. Indeed, the tendency was to apprehend them as ‘incom-
mensurable’ systems. It is in this perspective that cultural relativism takes root. In the course
of this historical phase, in which comparison is a vehicle for the triumph of difference, the ques-
tion of the relationship between the universal and the particular has bent in favour of the second of
these two terms.

The comparative history of religions revisited: the distinction between the general and the differential

It was during the period when this intellectual framework dominated the scientific debate that
in Italy9 Raffaele Pettazzoni (1883e1959) initiated an inverse procedure, inspired by the approach
of ‘historical comparativism’ which he stated as early as 1924 in his inaugural lecture (Pettazzoni,
1924). As a historian of religions, he followed the lead taken by Max Müller as far as the choice of
the object (religions) and of the discipline (the comparative history of religions) are concerned. In
the end, he nevertheless echoed Edward B. Tylor’s viewpoint as far as the method and the general
perspective are concerned. Pettazzoni thus treated of the object ‘religion’. He nevertheless recog-
nized that this notion was still filled with too many theological ambiguities. In order to dissipate
them, he undertook to submit the most important institutions of the Christian religion to histor-
ical and cultural comparison.
He began with the historicization of the concept of ‘God’ such as it appears in monotheism; he
thus submitted this concept to the operation consisting in reconstructing its genesis and develop-
ment in a given cultural context (Pettazzoni, 1921,1924,1929e1935,1955). He then applied the
same procedure to the concept of ‘sin’ and to the concept of ‘mystery’ associated with religious
experience. This comparativist work, conducted starting from empirical enquiries, brought about
two results. First was the discovery that these structures of meaning are typical of the Christian

9
For a general presentation of ‘the Italian school of History of Religions’, in particular of Raffaele Pettazzoni,
Ernesto de Martino and Angelo Brelich, see Massenzio (2005).
 S. Mancini / Religion 37 (2007) 282e293 291

religion and belong to it exclusively. Second was the observation that once situated and integrated
in a global context e in these circumstances, ‘civilization’, they then appear to lose any specificity
that would be really proper to them (they would thus lose their ‘autonomy’). These observations
were to turn the comparative history of religions in Italy in a new direction. This watershed can be
summarized in two points. It is first a question of becoming aware of the fact that we cannot iden-
tify the basic cultural and historical traits of our civilization (one of which is ‘‘religion’’) without
undertaking a comparative approach e the very act of comparing has the power to highlight these
features in a striking manner. Then, this differential history does not concern religion exclusively,
which thus is no longer the object of a specific discipline. It includes rather the whole set of the
other institutions and spheres of meaning which are interdependent on the object that is ‘religion’
(for example, the sphere of the ‘civic’, which is defined by opposition to the sphere of meaning of
the ‘religious’; likewise, the spheres of ‘science’ and of ‘magic’), all these being simultaneously re-
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ferred to when, in the West, religion is mentioned as an autonomous field. At this stage, however,
the history of religions takes another turn. It changes, in fact, into a comparative history of civ-
ilizations, notably those with which extra-European ethnology is concerned e including those
which are least easily placed ‘analogically’ in the same category as our Western civilization.
The historical approach inaugurated in his country by Pettazzoni can be considered original for
two reasons. The first is that, unlike the German historical school which cultivates the particular
for the particular and seeks e unlike Max Weber e the irreducible historical originality of each
culture, Pettazzoni does not submit the original cultural trait to comparison from the beginning. It
is rather the supposed universality of the cultural trait, the structure of meaning postulated as uni-
versal, that he makes the object of critical examination. In other words, the relative character of
the cultural trait is not considered as a given from the start, a theoretico-philosophical postulate,
but as a point of arrival e in fact, as the result of the application of a procedure, the very one of
‘historical comparativism’ (see in this same orientation Sabbatucci, 2002, pp. 7e26). The conse-
quence of this is that a culture’s originality is revealed not so much as the tributary of a historical
miracle, than as something arbitrary whose formation and development can be explained in terms
of the considered culture’s internal history. For this reason, Angelo Brelich preferred to qualify
Pettazzoni’’ systematic and differential comparative method, not as the ‘‘comparative history of
religions’’, but as ‘‘historical comparativism’’ (Brelich, 1959, 1977). This second appellation better
indicates the reversal of viewpoint undertaken by this Italian scholar. Indeed, for him, singular-
izing historical knowledge is obtained by the practice of comparison between cultural systems.
Also, this is quite unlike German historicists, for whom the historical approach is postulated
from the start as a singularizing science.
Pettazzoni’s approach is also original in the sense that it yields an unexpected result, however,
inevitable it may be from his methodological choice of starting point.
This result is the dissolution of the concept of ‘religion’ understood as a pertinent tool for un-
derstanding historical and cultural diversities. This disappearance occurs to the benefit of the con-
cept of ‘civilization’ or ‘culture’, which must be considered e a procedure that inevitably agrees
with anthropology e as both theoretical and practical systems whose function is to provide solu-
tions for specific historical problems. Indeed, for those who follow this procedure, anthropology
appears as the basic premise of any history of religions.
At this point, considered as a systematic and differential history, the history of religions ceases to
be a discipline endowed with an intellectual object which is proper to it (religions). Instead, it is
 292 S. Mancini / Religion 37 (2007) 282e293

identified with a strategic perspective, which is a working modality proper to our civilization, a mo-
dality of such a nature as to promote a comparativism that permits us to understand ourselves in
relation to others and to understand others in relation to ourselves. It is no longer so much a matter
of a ‘comparative history of religions’ as it is a ‘comparative history of civilizations’.
This leads us to describe, in contrast to the Italian model, the type of comparativism investi-
gated in France by certain authors, which in several respects has a model symmetrically opposed
to the Italian one. Since Durkheim, in fact, France, strongly marked by positivist sociology, has
not initiated a specific approach of particular cultural traits supposedly endowed with autonomy
(such as, for example, ‘religion’) with a view to achieving a systemic comparison oriented in
a broadened anthropological sense. In France, the emphasis has rather been on questions of a so-
ciological order (for example, ‘How can the social sense be established in subjective conscious-
ness?’), these questions being initially endowed with a universal character, whence systematic
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and differential comparisons are to be developed. This has produced very different results from
those obtained in Italy. Indeed, the sociological problem postulated as universal, once applied
to the problematic of historical and cultural diversity, in France has resulted rather in a ‘historical
anthropology’ (with, for example, the works of Jean-Pierre Vernant and Marcel Détienne on an-
cient Greece). The Italian history of religions, to the contrary, springing from historicist and phil-
osophical positions, has chosen to begin with specific historical objects (such as ‘religion’), while
practising a type of systemic and differential comparison. Thus the result is an ‘anthropological
history’ rather than a ‘historical anthropology’.
Despite these differences, both ways agree on two points (see also on this subject, Gasbarro,
1990). First, they give pride of place to the relationship between religion and civilization by stress-
ing the second term e different from the approaches to the religious which are located within the
cultural boundaries of Kultur. Second, recourse to systematic and differential comparison pro-
duces, if its basic assumptions are pursued coherently, the dissolution of any pretension to the
normative superiority of the West and, thereby, the dissolution of the category of religion as a nor-
mative category of reference. Now, it is this precisely which could permit the comparative history
of religions to break with the models of the old humanism rooted in the philosophies of subjec-
tivity and consciousness e in particular, with the philosophies which support many current lean-
ings in modern theology, religious phenomenology and religious hermeneutics. In addition, it
would be to the benefit of the concept of this field of knowledge, understood not in a substantialist
but in a differential and constructivist sense e in other words, in such a way as to increase the
value of the practical modalities of relationships between cultures.

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Silvia Mancini is Professor of History of Religions at the University of Lausanne where she teaches Epistemology of the
Study of Religions, and Marginalized and Transversal Religious Traditions. Among other works and besides those
mentioned above, she is the author of Da Le´vy-Bruhl all’antropologia cognitiva e Lineamenti di una teoria della menta-
lità primitiva (Dedalo, Bari, 1989); «Les implications théoriques de la méthode comparative». Ethnologie française
(33, 2), 1993, 603e612; « Postface » (302 pp.) to Le monde magique by Ernesto De Martino (Paris, Institut d’Edition
Sanofi-Synthélabo, Paris, 1999; ‘‘Historicisme absolu et Histoire des Religions’’, 8e26. Dario Sabbatucci, La perspec-
tive historico-religieuse, Edidit: Paris, 2002; « Mimétisme et rite: de la lamentation funéraire à la phénoménologie de
Padre Pio ». Revue de l’Histoire des Religions (fasc.3), 2004. P.U.F., Paris, 327e353. (Editor): La Fabrication du
psychisme. Pratiques rituelles au carrefour des sciences humaines et des sciences de la vie (Paris, La Découverte, 2006).