Editing Mircea Eliade (section)

===Lack of empirical support===
Several researchers have criticized Eliade's work as having no [[Empirical method|empirical]] support. Thus, he is said to have "failed to provide an adequate methodology for the history of religions and to establish this discipline as an empirical science",<ref name="ricketts">Mac Linscott Ricketts, "Review of ''Religion on Trial: Mircea Eliade and His Critics'' by Guilford Dudley III", in ''Journal of the American Academy of Religion'', Vol. 46, No. 3 (September 1978), pp. 400–402</ref> though the same critics admit that "the history of religions should not aim at being an empirical science anyway".<ref name="ricketts"/> Specifically, his claim that the sacred is a structure of human consciousness is distrusted as not being empirically provable: "no one has yet turned up the basic category ''sacred''".<ref>Gregory D. Alles, "Review of ''Changing Religious Worlds: The Meaning and End of Mircea Eliade'' by Brian Rennie", in ''Journal of the American Academy of Religion'', Vol. 71, pp. 466–469 (Alles' italics)</ref> Also, there has been mention of his tendency to ignore the social aspects of religion.<ref name="oscaderea"/> Anthropologist Alice Kehoe is highly critical of Eliade's work on Shamanism, namely because he was not an anthropologist but a historian. She contends that Eliade never did any field work or contacted any indigenous groups that practiced Shamanism, and that his work was synthesized from various sources without being supported by direct field research.<ref>Alice Kehoe, ''Shamans and Religion: An Anthropological Exploration in Critical Thinking'', Waveland Press, London, 2000, ''passim''. {{ISBN|1-57766-162-1}}</ref>

In contrast, Professor Kees W. Bolle of the [[University of California, Los Angeles]] argues that "Professor Eliade's approach, in all his works, is empirical":<ref name="bolle">Kees W. Bolle, ''The Freedom of Man in Myth'', [[Vanderbilt University Press]], Nashville, 1968, p. 14. {{ISBN|0-8265-1248-8}}</ref> Bolle sets Eliade apart for what he sees as Eliade's particularly close "attention to the various particular motifs" of different myths.<ref name="bolle"/> French researcher Daniel Dubuisson places doubt on Eliade's scholarship and its scientific character, citing the Romanian academic's alleged refusal to accept the treatment of religions in their historical and cultural context, and proposing that Eliade's notion of ''[[hierophany]]'' refers to the actual existence of a supernatural level.<ref name="mlimpost"/>

[[Ronald Inden]], a historian of India and University of Chicago professor, criticized Mircea Eliade, alongside other intellectual figures ([[Carl Jung]] and [[Joseph Campbell]] among them), for encouraging a "romantic view" of [[Hinduism]].<ref name="indenmorny">Inden, in Morny Joy, "Irigaray's Eastern Expedition", Chapter 4 of Morny Joy, [[Kathleen O'Grady]], Judith L. Poxon, ''Religion in French Feminist Thought: Critical Perspectives'', [[Routledge]], London, 2003, p. 63. {{ISBN|0-415-21536-6}}</ref> He argued that their approach to the subject relied mainly on an [[Orientalism|Orientalist]] approach, and made Hinduism seem like "a private realm of the imagination and the religious which modern, Western man lacks but needs."<ref name="indenmorny"/>