In 1980, when I graduated as a religious studies major from UC-Santa Barbara and headed east to Princeton for graduate studies, I had no idea that more than a decade later I would travel still further east to continue my work in religious studies in Paris. More surprising still, that my office and institutional affiliation in Paris would be at the CREA (Centre de Re Β΄cherche en EpistΓ©mologie AppliquΓ©e), perhaps the only 'laboratory' in Paris where the work of such American analytic philosophers as W. V. O. Quine, Wilfrid Sellers, and Donald Davidson is more important than that of such continental philosophers as Levinas, Derrida, and Lacan. Nonetheless, at this Parisian center of analytical thought much noteworthy work in our field, religious studies, is taking place. Reflecting on the journey that led me here and on what, after eighteen months, I have found here can shed light on the current work and status of our field overseas, or at least in Paris. 1 I first met the director of CREA, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, in 1988 at Stanford University where he has an appointment in the Program of Interdisciplinary Research, and where I had an appointment in Religious Studies and Philosophy. At the time I was writing a book on Durkheim and feeling rather alone with it. That all changed after I met Dupuy and, later, some of his colleagues from the CREA. My solitary work on Durkheim soon became a bridge to my French counterparts. These new colleagues at CREA were not, by the way, scholars in religious studies or even in Durkheimian studies. They were of various stripes-economists, anthropologists, political philosophers, and cognitive scientists. Yet the vocabulary of Durkheim-of shared norms and collective representations, of totality and divinity, of self-transcendence and effervescence, of the sacred and the symbolic-this vocabulary informed their thought and promoted our conversation. Not one of these scholars, at the time, gave much if any thought to the field of religious studies; yet scholars in religion would have recognized the significance of their work for our domain.
Why do these and other French scholars not readily identify with religious studies? In France, as in the States, religious studies is a field either unknown or regarded with suspicion. The French are uneasy with the work of Rene Β΄Girard, for example, because his wide-ranging studies are governed by his theory of religion. Here, as in the U.S., it is commonly presumed that thinking about religion is tantamount to religious thought. This assumption, moreover, gains support as it becomes clear that such scholars as Girard or Levinas are, in fact, religious thinkers. Yet what of such celebrated French scholars as Claude LΓ©vi-Strauss or Louis Dumont, scholars who have contributed greatly to American religious studies? In France they simply are not considered as scholars of religion, nor would they consider themselves as such. There is, of course, les sciences religieuses-an official, state-sponsored section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (l'EPHE). This section, however, has become a rather specialized, even ghettoized,