Genres der Verwissenschaftlichung: zur Einführung

Abstract

This introduction outlines the AЯGOS special issue Genres of Scientification, which explores the entanglements of religion and science across diverse social, political, and institutional contexts. Using the Second International Congress for the History of Religions of 1904 in Basel as a case study, it illustrates how claims to scholarly authority were asserted, negotiated, and contested, and how these dynamics took shape within specific textual, medial, and social forms. These forms are conceptualized as „genres of scientification”: social framing practices through which scientificity is performatively produced and modeled. Scientification is understood not as a linear progression but as a situated and often contentious process that interweaves epistemological, institutional, and socio-political perspectives. The issue thus investigates the cultural conditions and expressive forms of these processes and their significance for the emergence and self-positioning of the study of religion as an academic discipline.