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Historical atlas of the religions of the world
388
REVIEWS
The book as a whole makes for easy reading, yet there are frequent arresting details and comments, and some fine summary assessments. More important, the author’s scholarship, which is evident on every page, is carried lightly and presented gracefully. In brief, this is a book “to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention”. Like Sir George Clark’s The Seventeenth Century, written more than forty years ago, it should take its place as a valued reference work for the historical geographer as much as for the historian. Western Washington State College
ISMA5~ RTici AL FXRCQI(Ed.)
JAMESW. SCOTT
and DAVID E. SOPHER(Map Ed.), Historical Atlas of the Religions of the World(New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1974. Pp. xxi + 346. $12.50) Whether or not this work should properly be called an atlas is a moot issue, for the sixty-five maps it contains comprise only around one-eighth of its total bulk. Nevertheless, because its maps will most commend themselves to readers of this journal, the work will be reviewed primarily as an atlas, rather than as a comparative history of religion, which it also aspires to be. One cannot, however, ignore the text completely; some judgements must be made on its internal coherence and on the degree of editorial success in the blending of text, maps and other portions of the work (photographs, chronological appendices and indices) into a harmonious whole. Unlike the text, authored by thirteen different hands, the maps in this volume are essentially the work of a single individual, David E. Sopher. They display throughout a sensitive understanding of the subject matter portrayed. Sopher’s own prefatory remarks on the substance of his maps merit quotation: “. . . There is the geography of the religious myths themselves, and that of the communities of their believers. . . . The fundamental myth of one religion may take place in the real world, involving persons, places, and events for whose existence the evidence can meet the strictest standards of historical scholarship. Another may be set in a mythic world, or the real world mythologized. “A religious community’s history-its relations with other religious systems, its political and economic fortunes will in varying degree shape the way in which the myth is elaborated and reinterpreted in the lived religion of the community. These differences in historical experience as well as . . . in the institutions maintaining communities of. . . believers and bridging the physical gaps separating them mean that a different map content must be found to tell each religious society’s history”. Additional considerations which determined the choice of map content and the extent of coverage were the availability of data and the desire to redress the balance of what is currently available elsewhere, a balance heavily tilted in favour of Christianity and Judaism. That imbalance is here only partially rectified: Islam is treated in seventeen maps, as against fourteen and thirteen for Christianity and Judaism respectively, while but six are devoted, in whole or part, to Buddhism, for which data suitable for mapping are far from abundant. Not a single map accompanies some of the chapters, such as that on ‘Traditional religions in Africa’ among others. Many of Sopher’s maps are highly original, such as those showing the distribution in the Americas-in the ethnographic present-of such religious traits as the Sun and Ghost Dances and of the use of various stimulants and narcotics, or the map depicting the aggregate duration of Muslim rule in South Asia. Other maps, however, fall short of what they might be; the map entitled ‘Nineteenth-century Catholic and Protestant missions in the Old World’, for example, could well have been broadened in time span, differentiated by period of advent of missionary work and, for both faiths, differentiated also by order, missionary society or dominant confession. Aesthetically, many maps leave much to be desired. All are executed in varying shades of but two colours : black and a rather lifeless sepia. This suggests an ill-advised economic constraint imposed by the publisher, on what is, on the whole, a handsome book with
REVIEWS
389
excellently selected and reproduced photographs. The resort to printing much small lettering in sepia against a screened field of the same colour frequently limits the clarity of the maps, which are otherwise well designed. Elsewhere, the choice of lines and dots to differentiate regions is often less then optimal and the quality of much of thelineworkis crude. The map editing, by and large careful, shows occasional lapses, for example, the omission or loss on map 1 of the colour screen depicting Christianity along parts of the coast of Africa. A few additional shortcomings must be noted: the spelling of names on the maps occasionally differs from that in the text (e.g. “Kilwa” and “Kiloa”, both used on p. 258); more seriously, the maps are not indexed (the two text indices-by subject and proper names-are, incidentally, woefully inadequate); and the map bibliography, a mere thirty-seven items, is unaccountably skimpy. Although Sopher states that the authors of the text “have assisted in varying degree” in the preparation of the maps, he, they and al Fariiqi, the general editor, have failed to achieve a well-integrated work. For a number of chapters (for example, that on Hinduism) one senses that the author wrote in almost total disregard of what might best be mapped about the history of the religion which he was dealing with. Further, one feels that too little was done to elicit from the authors a modicum of similarity of basic approach. Thus, much of the chapter on Hinduism reads like a catalogue of Hindu metaphysical writings, little attention being given to what Hinduism has meant over time to the masses of its adherents; the text on Islam, though ostensibly historical, is largely structured to support a partisan bias-commendably lacking or subdued elsewhere-in favour of the puritanical Wahhabi Sunni sect and the associated Hanbali legal school (so that Shi‘ahism, accordingly, is only perfunctorily discussed); the chapter on Sikhism reads more like political than religious history; the treatment of African religions stresses cultural predispositions. The thirty-eight pages of chronologies appended to the text are even more lacking in systematization than is the text itself. Neither text nor chronologies go nearly as far as they might have done in elucidating the maps. Of the potential readers of this atlas, students of comparative religion will profit most from it, despite the fact that it is not as universal as the publishers pretend. No note is taken of the existence of Bahaiism (not surprisingly in the light of the cursory treatment of Shi‘ahism) and within the chapter on Christianity, Protestantism gets less than its due; such singular denominations as the Unitarian, Church of the Latter Day Saints, Seventh Day Adventists and Christian Scientists are not so much as mentioned in the text. Unspecialized students of cultural history and historical geography will find much of the text exceedingly difficult (terms like “docetic”, “pleroma”, “soteriological” “dromena”, “ennead”, for example, are used without definition). Those concerned with particular religions or regions will certainly be able to find elsewhere more lucid accounts than most of those given here. For the student of the geography of religion, however, particularly of its historical aspect, much of what appears in this work is nowhere else available. And whatever the shortcomings of the maps may be, many of those included have considerable heuristic value. University of Minnesota
JOSEPHE. SCHWARTZBERG
CLAUDIO G. SEGR&,Fourth Shore: The Italian Colonization ofLibya (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, Studies in Imperialism Series, 1974. Pp. xix+237. $15.00) Quixotic romanticism, technical sophistication, brazen imperialism, vacillating yet aggressive, politically motivated and propagandistic, humane and paternal yet oppressive, all these adjectives describe varying characteristics of Italy’s twentieth-century adventure on the “Fourth Shore”. Conceived as a North African complement to Italy’s Tyrrhenian, Ionian and Adriatic coasts, the Libyan colony was seen as an outlet for demographic pressures afflicting the mother country and as a complement to its economy. SegrB’s
REVIEWS
The book as a whole makes for easy reading, yet there are frequent arresting details and comments, and some fine summary assessments. More important, the author’s scholarship, which is evident on every page, is carried lightly and presented gracefully. In brief, this is a book “to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention”. Like Sir George Clark’s The Seventeenth Century, written more than forty years ago, it should take its place as a valued reference work for the historical geographer as much as for the historian. Western Washington State College
ISMA5~ RTici AL FXRCQI(Ed.)
JAMESW. SCOTT
and DAVID E. SOPHER(Map Ed.), Historical Atlas of the Religions of the World(New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1974. Pp. xxi + 346. $12.50) Whether or not this work should properly be called an atlas is a moot issue, for the sixty-five maps it contains comprise only around one-eighth of its total bulk. Nevertheless, because its maps will most commend themselves to readers of this journal, the work will be reviewed primarily as an atlas, rather than as a comparative history of religion, which it also aspires to be. One cannot, however, ignore the text completely; some judgements must be made on its internal coherence and on the degree of editorial success in the blending of text, maps and other portions of the work (photographs, chronological appendices and indices) into a harmonious whole. Unlike the text, authored by thirteen different hands, the maps in this volume are essentially the work of a single individual, David E. Sopher. They display throughout a sensitive understanding of the subject matter portrayed. Sopher’s own prefatory remarks on the substance of his maps merit quotation: “. . . There is the geography of the religious myths themselves, and that of the communities of their believers. . . . The fundamental myth of one religion may take place in the real world, involving persons, places, and events for whose existence the evidence can meet the strictest standards of historical scholarship. Another may be set in a mythic world, or the real world mythologized. “A religious community’s history-its relations with other religious systems, its political and economic fortunes will in varying degree shape the way in which the myth is elaborated and reinterpreted in the lived religion of the community. These differences in historical experience as well as . . . in the institutions maintaining communities of. . . believers and bridging the physical gaps separating them mean that a different map content must be found to tell each religious society’s history”. Additional considerations which determined the choice of map content and the extent of coverage were the availability of data and the desire to redress the balance of what is currently available elsewhere, a balance heavily tilted in favour of Christianity and Judaism. That imbalance is here only partially rectified: Islam is treated in seventeen maps, as against fourteen and thirteen for Christianity and Judaism respectively, while but six are devoted, in whole or part, to Buddhism, for which data suitable for mapping are far from abundant. Not a single map accompanies some of the chapters, such as that on ‘Traditional religions in Africa’ among others. Many of Sopher’s maps are highly original, such as those showing the distribution in the Americas-in the ethnographic present-of such religious traits as the Sun and Ghost Dances and of the use of various stimulants and narcotics, or the map depicting the aggregate duration of Muslim rule in South Asia. Other maps, however, fall short of what they might be; the map entitled ‘Nineteenth-century Catholic and Protestant missions in the Old World’, for example, could well have been broadened in time span, differentiated by period of advent of missionary work and, for both faiths, differentiated also by order, missionary society or dominant confession. Aesthetically, many maps leave much to be desired. All are executed in varying shades of but two colours : black and a rather lifeless sepia. This suggests an ill-advised economic constraint imposed by the publisher, on what is, on the whole, a handsome book with
REVIEWS
389
excellently selected and reproduced photographs. The resort to printing much small lettering in sepia against a screened field of the same colour frequently limits the clarity of the maps, which are otherwise well designed. Elsewhere, the choice of lines and dots to differentiate regions is often less then optimal and the quality of much of thelineworkis crude. The map editing, by and large careful, shows occasional lapses, for example, the omission or loss on map 1 of the colour screen depicting Christianity along parts of the coast of Africa. A few additional shortcomings must be noted: the spelling of names on the maps occasionally differs from that in the text (e.g. “Kilwa” and “Kiloa”, both used on p. 258); more seriously, the maps are not indexed (the two text indices-by subject and proper names-are, incidentally, woefully inadequate); and the map bibliography, a mere thirty-seven items, is unaccountably skimpy. Although Sopher states that the authors of the text “have assisted in varying degree” in the preparation of the maps, he, they and al Fariiqi, the general editor, have failed to achieve a well-integrated work. For a number of chapters (for example, that on Hinduism) one senses that the author wrote in almost total disregard of what might best be mapped about the history of the religion which he was dealing with. Further, one feels that too little was done to elicit from the authors a modicum of similarity of basic approach. Thus, much of the chapter on Hinduism reads like a catalogue of Hindu metaphysical writings, little attention being given to what Hinduism has meant over time to the masses of its adherents; the text on Islam, though ostensibly historical, is largely structured to support a partisan bias-commendably lacking or subdued elsewhere-in favour of the puritanical Wahhabi Sunni sect and the associated Hanbali legal school (so that Shi‘ahism, accordingly, is only perfunctorily discussed); the chapter on Sikhism reads more like political than religious history; the treatment of African religions stresses cultural predispositions. The thirty-eight pages of chronologies appended to the text are even more lacking in systematization than is the text itself. Neither text nor chronologies go nearly as far as they might have done in elucidating the maps. Of the potential readers of this atlas, students of comparative religion will profit most from it, despite the fact that it is not as universal as the publishers pretend. No note is taken of the existence of Bahaiism (not surprisingly in the light of the cursory treatment of Shi‘ahism) and within the chapter on Christianity, Protestantism gets less than its due; such singular denominations as the Unitarian, Church of the Latter Day Saints, Seventh Day Adventists and Christian Scientists are not so much as mentioned in the text. Unspecialized students of cultural history and historical geography will find much of the text exceedingly difficult (terms like “docetic”, “pleroma”, “soteriological” “dromena”, “ennead”, for example, are used without definition). Those concerned with particular religions or regions will certainly be able to find elsewhere more lucid accounts than most of those given here. For the student of the geography of religion, however, particularly of its historical aspect, much of what appears in this work is nowhere else available. And whatever the shortcomings of the maps may be, many of those included have considerable heuristic value. University of Minnesota
JOSEPHE. SCHWARTZBERG
CLAUDIO G. SEGR&,Fourth Shore: The Italian Colonization ofLibya (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, Studies in Imperialism Series, 1974. Pp. xix+237. $15.00) Quixotic romanticism, technical sophistication, brazen imperialism, vacillating yet aggressive, politically motivated and propagandistic, humane and paternal yet oppressive, all these adjectives describe varying characteristics of Italy’s twentieth-century adventure on the “Fourth Shore”. Conceived as a North African complement to Italy’s Tyrrhenian, Ionian and Adriatic coasts, the Libyan colony was seen as an outlet for demographic pressures afflicting the mother country and as a complement to its economy. SegrB’s