IISG Taxonomy of Religions

Rick J. Mourits, International Institute of Social History

To those who study religion, it often makes little sense to classify and categorize religion into a taxonomy. Religions are multifaceted, subject to change over time, syncretic in nature, and per definition hard to define as they deal with the non-corporeal. Yet, not systematizing the existing knowledge comes with a whole set of problems for current and future generations of scholars. Most scholars of societal processes are only familiar with the religious context in which they are raised. This means that they are often unaware of the overlapping roots between religious denominations, which is sometimes necessary to understand social processes. In practice, those well-versed in data science are generally less well-versed in the (comparative) study of religion. Therefore, we require a tool to instill a basic understanding of the historical roots of religious denominations and follow the example of taxonomies for occupational titles (OCC1950, HISCO) and historical causes of death (hICD-10). I will present the IISG Taxonomy of Religions that shows how different religions, branches, subbranches, and religious denominations are related.

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 Presented in Session 70. Wrangling Occupational and Denominational Data