| Summary: | This essay aims to investigate the representations of inner Eurasia’s indigenous religions in the texts of west Europeans from the Age of Reason. Primary sources for the study are texts of John Bell, Lorenz Lange, Anders Pihlström and Philip Johan Tabbert von Strahlenberg. The inquiry attempts to map correlations between the authors’ positions, attitudes and their representations of the local religious traditions. Since the theoretical starting point for this study is discourse analysis from the perspective of historiography and sociology of knowledge, the investigated phenomenon is placed in a system of background factors, or dispositifs, which include aspects of epistemology and colonialism. The conclusion of this inquiry is that all authors constitute the indigenous religions in the discourse of heathendom but do so in a variety of ways employing different patterns of interpretation.
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