Religions in All Ages and Places: Discerning Colonialism with Jonathan Z. Smith

If Jonathan Z. Smith was not the first to trouble the category of religion, he was certainly among the most successful in troubling scholars of religion about the subject of their craft. Smith indelibly unsettled an ease of presumption that religion is a given or has always been around as the common-sense category of today’s popular experience. Among the most cherished and widely read of his works is the cogent essay “Religion, Religions, Religious,” wherein Smith adumbrates the emergence of the “essentially anthropological” European study of religion among a global variety of populations as early as the 1500s (Smith 1998).