THE INDIGENOUS MYTH OF THE LAND WITHOUT EVIL AS A BACKDROP FOR THE IDEA OF AN AUTONOMISED SCIENCE OF RELIGION

Abstract

The objective of this work is to explore the possibility of an autonomised Science of Religion, guided by the following question: what a discipline that holds concepts, methodologies and theories that originate in its object, could mean for studies that approach it outside this epistemological protagonism suggested, as do some approaches of the Social Sciences and the Phenomenology of the Religion? Operationally, we use an example and a conjecture, by bringing both the problems of analyzing the myth of the Earth without evil on the basis of the theoretical apparatus of the Social Sciences (the example), and the challenges arising from categories within the Science of Religion, still in phenomenological key (the conjecture). From this parallel, we bring the idea of an autonomous Science of Religion as a possibility of solution in relation to the limitations that one and another perspective faces only starting from its presuppositions, both, however, addressing the same object of study: religion. In the final considerations, we return to this path, emphasizing the need to overcome these problems under the suggestion of a methodological synthesis that this Science of Religion could undertake.