Nga rang gi chos khyod rang gi chos: “My Religion and Your Religion”? About Some Fundamental Issues in the Global History of Religion

What is it about?

This article examines the eighteenth-century encounter between Tibetans and Catholic monks in Lhasa and asks how Tibetans perceived the foreign religious teachings, whether they compared them to their own teachings, and what analytical vocabulary they used to describe them. Using the example of the encounter on the roof of the world, questions about the role of comparison in the study of religions, translation practices, and the genealogy of emic taxonomic orders that are not the result of colonial encounters are discussed. The aim is to contribute to a global history of religion that not only examines current global entanglements, but also focuses on the historical knowledge orders of non-European lifeworlds in their own particular taxonomies.

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