Associate Professor Will Sweetman is a Historian of Religion at the University of Otago, New Zealand. He studied Philosophy, Religious Studies, and Theology at the universities of Lancaster and Cambridge. He has taught at universities in London and Newcastle and has held research fellowships at the University go Halle (Germany) and the University of Cambridge. Will has published three books and several articles on the historical and theoretical aspects of the study of Hinduism. He is also the founding editor of the journal Relegere: Studies in Religion and Reception, and a Fellow of the New Zealand India Research Institute. Will is also the present Head of Department of Theology and Religion at the University of Otago.
In this interview Associate Professor Will Sweetman talks to Thomas White about the idea that ‘Hinduism’ and many of the other terms we use to classify religions—including the term religion itself—are modern inventions, emerging out of nineteenth-century inter-cultural contact and European colonialism. Will argues against this critique, and to make his case he draws on historical sources that discuss ‘Hinduism’ both outside of the anglophone ...
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