Re-Branding Gaudiya Vaishnavism: Bhaktivinoda Thakura and the Religious Marketplace of 19th-Century Bengal: Journal of Vaishnava Studies

Abstract

The relationship between the “marketplace” and “religion” has long vexed scholars of the latter. Guided by the interpretive spirit of
the phenomenologist, Mircea Eliade, academic religionists have been traditionally wary of using the idea of the “market” to assist in our understanding of religion. As Eliade once famously quipped: “To try to grasp the essence of [a religious phenomenon] by means of . . . economics . . . or any other study is false; it misses the irreducible element in [religion] —the element of the sacred.”1 But if
historians of religion like Eliade have been overly cautious to avoid economistic reductions of religion to more and other elementary phenomena, social scientists have not proven so circumspect. I would argue that this lack of circumspection has proven, or can prove, beneficial to historians of religion. Scholars such as Peter Berger, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel De Certeau, Maurice Bloch, Rodney
Stark and William Bainbridge have all utilized the conceptual language of the marketplace in order to come to better understandings of religion as a humanly produced and negotiated phenomenon.