Abstract
Emma Tomalin,
Religions and Development
, Routledge Perspectives on Development, Routledge: London, 2013; 296 pp.: 9780415613491, £85.00 (hbk), 9780415613507, £24.99 (pbk)
Tomalin observes that, until recently, religion ‘has tended to be ignored or marginalized by international development research, policy and practice’ (p. 1). One reason for this gap has been an ideological blind spot in development aid which routinely ‘assumed that religious worldviews were inimical to economic development and that as societies modernized, they would become less religious’ (p. 5). In the past decade awareness of the permanent significance of religion, particularly in developing countries, has grown. Yet while other fields in development studies have burgeoned, religion and development remains ‘a new and emerging field of academic study’ (p. 11).
Religions and Development makes an important contribution to that field by filling the need for an introductory textbook that surveys where the discipline is currently. Tomalin is also concerned to reshape the discipline by presenting ‘a critical analysis of the aid business, in terms of its failure (at least until recently) to fully acknowledge and engage with cultural and religious diversity, and of the implications of the more recent ‘‘turn to religion’’ for development and religious traditions’ (p. 13).
It is to be expected in a new field of study that the central terms are contested. Debates about what is meant by ‘international development’ are rehearsed in Chapter 2. Chapter 3 outlines similar debates about the definition of religion. Chapter 4 explores religious approaches to development, noting significant diversity between religious traditions. Chapters 5 and 6 examine two particularly vexed areas in which religion has often been taken to be problematic: human rights and gender. Chapter 7 debunks romanticized accounts within religious traditions concerning environmentalism that anachronistically map contemporary concerns onto ancient religious traditions and texts. Chapter 8 explores the role of faith-based organizations in development – another area in which definitions are rarely clear. Each chapter is illustrated by pictures, figures, statistical tables and inserted boxes that cite example texts or detail key initiatives such as the Assisi declarations (p. 181), begins with a summary of its aims and concludes with discussion questions and recommended reading.
Tomalin is well aware of what is methodologically entailed within social scientific approaches to religion and development, for example writing about religion that ‘while there is overlap, a theologian’s definition is likely to differ from that of a sociologist, and an anthropologist will again take a different view’ (p. 52).
Elsewhere, Tomalin has written of the ‘agnosticism’ that should characterize social scientific study of religion. A theologian is bound to think such claims daft: no viewpoint is ever neutral. Take gender: Tomalin mentions the powerful influence of religion on women’s’ reproductive choices that ‘may result in threats to their reproductive rights’ (p. 162). Such a statement sets up an opposition between, on the one hand, the ‘influence of religion’ and, on the other, a reified neutral norm called ‘women’s reproductive rights’. But both moral rights and legal rights express norms that are negotiated and agreed by people, people with perspectives and theories that shape them every bit as much as Christianity has shaped me.
Religions and Development is everything one could want of a textbook on this topic; it is hard to think of any way in which it could be improved – other than perhaps by a dose of theological scepticism.