Nineteenth-century anthropology invented the sacred as a universal religious essence

Evidence

It was late nineteenth-century anthropological and theological thought that rendered a variety of overlapping social usages rooted in changing and heterogeneous forms of life into a single immutable essence, and claimed it to be the object of a universal human experience called “religious.” — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 138

Categorization

• XREF: Directly extends the vaulted Cooper thread: both here and in Cooper, putatively descriptive ‘modern’ categories (secular/religious here; secular vs religious-motivated in Cooper) turn out to be products of specific historical-political projects rather than neutral universals.