The Relational Structure of Discourse - (Supplements to Method & Theory in the Study of Religion) by Laura Jean Vollmer (Hardcover)

About the Book

A groundbreaking framework for discourse analysis, this book reveals how concepts evolve through relations - exemplified in the long-contested terrain between religion and science - offering a relational theory and method that redefines how we understand language, meaning, and even knowledge itself.

Book Synopsis

A groundbreaking framework for discourse analysis, this book reveals how concepts originate and evolve through relational structures. Focusing on the long-contested terrain between religion and science, it introduces relationality analysis, a method to track how meaning emerges through differentiation and likening. Why is Buddhism "scientific"? How did quantum physics become "mystical"? Through detailed case studies, this book maps how relational constructs of opposition, nonopposition, identity, and representation drive discursive change. By shifting the question from what terms mean to how they mean, it offers a bold, post-postmodern theory of knowledge construction that reshapes how we understand language and meaning making.

About the Author

Laura J. Vollmer, Ph.D., is a freelance editor and prolific independent scholar of religion. She is the founder of relational discourse analysis and pioneered a new field of study in Toward a Historiography of Dreams(Poligrafi, 2023).