Religion, History and Identity Construction: Identity Games (Routledge Approaches to History)

Religion, History and Identity Construction: Identity Games covers the historiographical shift from universalistic monogenist narratives to chauvinistic polygenist narratives in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.It offers a detailed study of the intellectual thought and socio-political conditions that shaped the evolution of Eurocentric world history narratives with an argument that various supremacy claims -such as the Scythian Hypothesis, the Northern Hypothesis, bio-illogical racism, and the imagined homogeneity-as well as the Indo-European/Aryan Hypothesis, are distortions of earlier faith-based assertions designed to rewrite world and European histories within ongoing identity games.Each chapter connects and explains how these pseudo-scientific hypotheses are intertwined with religious beliefs. This book emphasizes the need to shift our approach to history writing from teleological and polygenist narratives crafted by linguists to monogenist conclusions backed by archaeology