A Modest Proposal on Method : Essaying the Study of Religion [1 ed.] 9789004281417, 9789004281233

Citation preview

A Modest Proposal on Method

Supplements to Method & Theory in the Study of Religion Editorial Board Aaron W. Hughes (University of Rochester) Russell T. McCutcheon (University of Alabama) Kocku von Stuckrad (University of Groningen)

VOLUME 2

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/smtr





A Modest Proposal on Method Essaying the Study of Religion By

Russell T. McCutcheon

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: ©iStock.com/princessdlaf Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McCutcheon, Russell T., 1961 A modest proposal on method : essaying the study of religion / by Russell T. McCutcheon.   pages cm. -- (Supplements to method & theory in the study of religion, ISSN 2214-3270 ; VOLUME 2)  Includes bibliographical references and index.  1. Religion--Methodology. 2. Religion--Study and teaching. I. Title.  BL41.M353 2014  200--dc23               2014029472

This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, ipa, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 2214-3270 isbn 978-90-04-28123-3 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-28141-7 (e-book) Copyright 2015 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Global Oriental and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper.

I offer this to those who have found me online, through social media, in appreciation for both the seriousness and the humor of your queries and the curiosities you are pursuing; let the comments begin.

∵

Contents Acknowledgments ix Sources xi Preface xii Introduction  Plus ça change… 1 1 Introduction 17 A Modest Proposal on Method 22 2 Introduction 32 I Have a Hunch 36 3 Introduction 48 Myth 52 4 Introduction 72 Introducing Smith 77 5 Introduction 96 How to Give Up the Bible, and Learn to Love It Again 102 6 Introduction 119 “Why Do You Seek the Living Among the Dead?” (Luke 24: 5) 125 7 Introduction 140 A Response to Donald Wiebe from an East-Going Zax 145 8 Introduction 160 “And That’s Why No One Takes the Humanities Seriously” 165 9 Introduction 187 It Could be Different Reinventing the Study of Religion in Alabama 193 Afterword 209 References 213 Index 227



Acknowledgments I have been fortunate over the years to have been able to write and publish a variety of works that explore an alternative way for scholars of religion to understand themselves as professionals, to reconceive the problematics that attract their interest, and to reconsider the ends that they, qua scholars of religion, might attain. This new set of essays furthers that initiative, and therefore must echo and thereby reinforce the various acknowledgments that I have made in the past concerning the many people who have assisted me in rethinking what it means to talk about religion in an academic setting—from the professors who once taught me and those with whom I carry out my research and work, to those who I have had the honor to teach and, in turn, learn from over the past twenty years. Many of these people are named in notes that accompany some of the following chapters. I would also like to thank my co-editors for the series in which this volume appears, and to acknowledge Brill of the Netherlands, the press that published so many of the classics in the study of religion that I read early on in my career, as evidence of where the field had been. To see my own work join those titles at this publishing house is humbling. Given the beginnings of Method & Theory in the Study of Religion (mtsr) as a journal created, edited, and managed entirely by graduate students at the University of Toronto (a group I had the honor to be part of for some time), it is quite heartening to see this new book series associated with the journal and the academic domain that its founders correctly thought was so underrepresented in academic publishing. Also, I wish to thank Becky Brown, my copyeditor, for helping me to shorten a few of the following sentences; I’ve never met a semi-colon—nor an em-dash—that I didn’t like. One group of people in particular whom I would also like to single out is the members of a research collaborative in which I now participate: Culture on the Edge. Begun in late 2011, the group also includes Craig Martin, Monica Miller, Steven Ramey, Merinda Simmons, Leslie Dorrough Smith, and Vaia Touna—a collection of mid- and early-career scholars who work on a variety of topics, from ancient to modern and from Asia to America. It grew from a collaborative project that I participated in with two colleagues at the University of Alabama the year before—planning a series of activities showcasing research on our campus on Greece, planned with Ramey, Simmons, and others. Culture on the Edge therefore resulted from our enjoyment working on a common project together, something which we wished to continue in some way. Finding a shared frustration with the manner in which so-called cutting-edge research on identity often ends up normalizing the very thing it claims to study

x

Acknowledgments

(a frustration that we found nicely theorized in the world of Jean-François Bayart [e.g., 2005]), we decided to invite a small group of people to consider whether we all sufficiently shared this frustration and wished to do something about it (being itself a nice example of how identification functions). The people invited I’ve known for varying amounts of time, e.g., some I met at the end of their undergraduate careers and others I met as they were working on or completing their graduate studies or even beginning their own careers as faculty members. Two working sessions supported by my own department (with thanks to Ted Trost, then the chair) took place (one in Tuscaloosa and one in Chicago), a book was conceived, but then a book series (with Equinox Publishers) and blog resulted as well (edge.ua.edu). However, what was most encouraging was the manner in which our collective efforts benefitted the individual members’ own, ongoing work, with Culture on the Edge providing us with a shared space to think through and experiment with ways of tackling problems in which we were already each interested. Although I am not inclined to think that the cognitivist turn in the study of religion holds as much promise as do some, much earlier in my career I recall being envious of the collective nature of their research (something I also recall feeling with regard to close friends working in Christian origins, a research area with hundreds of years of intensely collaborative efforts already under its belt): a common problem broken down, in suitably scientific fashion, into its component parts, each tackled by a different member of the larger group who understood themselves to be contributing to a wider effort. Despite collaborating on a variety of separate projects in the past, most notably co-writing or co-editing volumes and journals, and often with my one or both of my longtime friends, Willi Braun or Bill Arnal, Culture on the Edge constitutes the first time in my career that I have participated in that sort of sustained, shared focus on a particular sort of problem with the same group of scholars: how it is possible to feel, deeply in our bones, that we each are something, are each part of something. I’m therefore grateful to the other members of our group for the stimulating environment we’ve created—an ironic appreciation, of course, given our interest in theorizing groupness, but there you have it. For at the end of the day, inasmuch as scholars are human beings, we are our own data. What we say of “them” must be equally applicable to “us.” The trick, I think, is for scholars to figure out how to use an anecdote as an instance of a wider, maybe even cross-cultural, issue to be examined and seen in a new light, as but an instance of something we’ve seen elsewhere before (what I take Jonathan Z. Smith to have meant by “redescription”), rather than just a good story to tell.

Sources Chapter 1 originally appeared as “A Modest Proposal on Method,” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 25/4&5 (2013): 339–349. Reprinted here with the kind permission of E.J. Brill. Chapter 2 originally appeared as “I Have a Hunch,” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 24/1 (2012): 81–92. Reprinted here with the kind permission of E.J. Brill. Chapter 3 originally appeared as “Myth” in Willi Braun and Russell T. McCutcheon (eds.), Guide to the Study of Religion, 190–208. London: Continuum, 2000. Reprinted here with the kind permission of Bloomsbury Publishing. Chapter 4 originally appeared as “Introducing Smith,” in Willi Braun and Russell T. McCutcheon (eds.), Introducing Religion, 1–17. London: Equinox Publishers. Reprinted here with the kind permission of Acumen Publishers. Chapter 7 originally appeared as “A Response to Donald Wiebe from an East-Going Zax,” Temenos 42/2 (2006): 113–129. Reprinted here with the kind permission of the journal. Chapter 9 originally appeared as “Afterword: Reinventing the Study of Religion in Alabama,” in Steven Ramey (ed.), Writing Religion: The Case for the Critical Study of Religion. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Reprinted here with the kind permission of the University of Alabama Press.

Preface Although a recent reviewer for Numen, tackling Bill Arnal and my 2013 collection of mostly previously published essays, The Sacred is the Profane: The Political Nature of “Religion”, made it more than apparent that he had little patience for essay collections such as this, I feel I should note, right from the start, that we are hardly the first to have come up with the idea nor the last who will attempt it. (That we turned singular pronouns in the original essays to plurals in our light rewriting of many of the chapters—such as “We will argue…” instead of “I will argue…”—is, I think, a strong indication of agreement and collaboration rather than some sign, as insinuated by the reviewer [at least as I read him] of laziness.) While I leave it up to a publishing house’s acquisition editors and their cost-benefit analysts to decide whether such books are worth publishing, I know that I’ve benefited greatly from other people’s various collections of their own essays, whether its individual parts had already appeared in print or not, regardless the degree to which they have been rewritten. I could name some of them—Jonathan Z. Smith and Bruce Lincoln come to mind, of course—but then I fear opening myself to the next round of reviewers’ collective scorn for being so bold as to compare myself to such writers. Suffice it to say that, for a variety of reasons (not all intentional), I, like some others in our field, find that I have become an essayist, and so I offer this collection of previously uncollected pieces to those who find it beneficial to read, for whatever reason. The following nine essays, three of which have never appeared in print before, are all accompanied by newly written, substantive introductions that provide some of the background on each chapter or extend its critique to other related topics (thereby providing the provenance of each piece and an elaboration or updating on its theme). I should add that none of these were originally written or collected here for the benefit of those sufficiently senior or respected enough to act as its reviewers. Neither were they written for my generational peers in the study of religion—while I’d like to think that I’m scientificallyinclined and thus open-minded enough to entertain that my opinions can be changed on this or that topic, at this stage of my career, I have trouble imagining what would constitute sufficient evidence or an argument forceful enough for me to make an about turn on some topics. Given the response some of my work has received over the years from those more senior to me in the field, I think this is a fair description of their position as well. Because I see myself as operating outside the dominant school of thought in the study of religion— despite having held some positions of administrative leadership (making me

preface

xiii

part of the proverbial problem, perhaps), a topic discussed in the concluding chapter—I know that there continue to be younger scholars working to create careers for themselves and forming opinions of their own on all sorts of matters that they will draw upon, apply, and experiment with throughout the coming years. It is for such readers that I have come to realize I write (a point made explicitly in a recent collection of responses that I’ve written over the last twenty years, Entanglements: Marking Place in the Field of Religion, published in 2014). So, like that collection, I see myself here as being in a conversation with those who know that they are dissatisfied with the field but who are still considering what might be changed, or at least tweaked, in order to press the field in what they consider to be new and interesting directions. The number of graduate students who, whether or not they agree with the model and thus the future direction for the field that I present, continue to find me on Facebook, eager to argue over issues in its message feature, confirms this for me on a daily basis. So, this volume is written with them in mind.

Introduction

Plus ça Change…

Michael Pye, the onetime General Secretary of the International Association for the History of Religion (iahr), and specialist in the study of Japanese religions—whom I first met in person in Mexico City at the 1995 Congress of the iahr, but whose work came to my attention earlier in my graduate studies, back when I was reading on the German theologian, Ernst Troeltsch (1865– 1923), and the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule [the turn-of-the-era German history of religions school] (see, for example, Troeltsch 1913; Morgan and Pye 1977)—recently presented a keynote lecture, “Digging for Theory,” at a conference at the University of Göttingen, Germany.1 For those interested in the current place of methods and theories in the study of religion, watching his lecture online will surely be useful, for it focuses on the longstanding debate between those who argue that theory is the means by which a field is created in the first place—for otherwise, how do we know what to look at when we go out into the world?—and those who, like Pye, see theory as an additional step, something that only happens after one proceeds descriptively through the field, thereby drawing on the classic inductivist model that natural scientists once presumed (and on which, I admit, I was reared as a school boy, first writing down my methods, then my observations, and finally my generalizations and conclusions). For according to this model, one first observes carefully, doing descriptivist or ethnographic work while fully and deeply immersed in the field, and only later generalizes from these collected observations, to form theories about the world (whether analytic [i.e., creating comparative systems and patterns] or explanatory theories [i.e., accounting for causes and functions]). It’s much the same model that Max Weber famously employed that allowed him to note, at the outset of his now classic The Sociology of Religion (1993: 1), that defining religion (let alone eventually developing a theory about this thing you’ve just now defined) could only take place at the end of his study, only after he had thoroughly described its component parts. (See also Arnal’s citation of this in the opening chapter to Arnal and McCutcheon 2013: 17.) “Only through studying something does it become really possible to theorize about it,” as Pye aptly phrases it (see 3:40 of the video), whereby “studying” presumably equals “describing.”

1 Watch this Nov. 9, 2013, public lecture at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4-KjVAa278 (accessed Dec. 28, 2013).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004281417_002

2

Introduction: Plus ça Change…

While not wishing to speculate on precisely who those out-of-touch North American scholars are, those whom Pye, in his lecture, pretty plainly accuses of lazily reclining in their library’s armchairs (see the 4:00 point of his lecture’s video—apparently, however, many in attendance at the lecture know, judging by the laughter that greets his concluding “I think you know who they are”), I’ll put my own cards on the table from the outset of this set of essays and make clear that I’m firmly in the former camp. I would argue that it is not a coincidence, for example, that a Freudian scholar of religion, already armed with a view of the world that has something to do with oral stages and Oedipal complexes, “sees” the repression and displacement that supports her theory, making her descriptions of the world deeply interested observations made possible by her pre-observational definition of what in the world counts as worth looking at—a definition that is her theory in miniature. For without that to guide her gaze, I don’t think she’d know what “materials in the field,” as Pye calls them in his lecture, to look at or even to look for, since the world as I see it really is an awfully big place with a lot going on simultaneously. That she does not just stumble across, say, class conflict or minimally counter-intuitive ideas is thus no accident, I think, since she’s not looking for either and likely doesn’t even see “them.” After all, that’s for either the Marxist or the cognitivist to find (or should I say “fabricate?”—a word that Jonathan Z. Smith later suggested might have been far more useful than the “imagining” that he instead used for the title of his famous essay collection [see Smith 1996c]). As I’ve noted on previous occasions, it is no accident that archeologists visiting a long-excavated site will also dig through the dumps of previous archeological teams; interests change, of course, and so, too, do the distinctions we draw—let me repeat: we draw—between artifact and debris. If this alternative model is persuasive, if theory is needed to figure out what “somethings” we ought to be talking about, then the overly neat distinction between detached armchairs, on the one hand, and the reality of being immersed in the actual field, on the other, is rather misleading, even simplistic; for it appears to me that, whether we always recognize it or not, we take our recliners and our library books with us wherever we go, for that’s how we know where to go in the first place and thus where to look for the evidence that we later end up organizing, interpreting, and explaining; that is, there are those of us who would argue that Weber had it completely backward. For, as I’ve noted on other occasions, how in the world did he know what to look for or the component parts to break it into for the sake of his analysis, if not because he was already armed with a particular folk definition of religion (e.g., one that had such typical parts as priests, prophets, theologians, mystics, etc. [see the various chapters to Weber 1993])? Or, to put it another way, I’m not sure what some

Introduction: Plus ça Change…

3

hypothetical person raised in the wild, without having spent long hours reading in those stuffy libraries, without having been taught common folk knowledge, would passively or naturally “just come across” or purposefully “dig for” if he was dropped in the field, given a shovel, and told simply to dig or just “observe carefully” (with a grateful nod to a line from Karl Popper that I’ve cited before [McCutcheon 2001: 215, n. 5])—what will count as a fragment worth recovering and which fragments will then go together…, and in what way? What will be the relics we treasure and what will be the junk we discard (for future treasure hunters to pick over, no doubt)? Surely such a truly (though still hypothetical) disinterested observer wouldn’t naturally start using the Latin-based word “religion,” defined in a particular manner (belief in gods is the preferred definition, usually), and then set about digging for its natural equivalents in, of all places, Japan. Would he? But despite my disagreement with it, Pye’s characterization of theorists as being out-of-touch is hardly unique; for it brings to mind not yellowing criticisms of the dangers of reductionism as found in old volumes written by long past writers—much earlier criticisms that, if addressed today, afford commentators to claim that one is doing battle with outdated strawmen—but, instead, a moment near the end of a very recent online interview with David Morgan, chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Duke University in the u.s.2 In that interview, he says: Theory is a great tool, but a lousy end-in-itself. Honestly, I think theorywonking is pointless. But there is nothing so consequential as the creative revelation that happens when a theoretical model allows us to see our evidence, our questions, and our field with new eyes. It’s like waking from sleep. Suddenly, the world is much richer. So it is very important for doctoral students to endure theory seminars. It’s a vital rite of passage. It shakes them up, challenges them to recognize the importance of the critical interrogation of the métier they are struggling to master. It’s part of the disciplining that makes for good scholars. We should always read widely and we should be smartly challenged by  our students and colleagues. Academics easily miss how dogmatic they can become. I see it all the time. The older we get, the less risky we become. Historians are among the worst in this regard. There is something about the work of historians that makes them theory averse. I’m not sure what it is. I guess they are so taken by their subject-matter and the 2 Read the entire Dec. 12, 2013, interview at http://usreligion.blogspot.com/2013/12/four -questions-with-david-morgan.html (accessed Dec. 28, 2013).

4

Introduction: Plus ça Change…

often deft way they are able to write about it that they mistrust theoretical engagement. But we need not choose between good prose and theory. It is quite true that some of the worst writing in the last century has come from high theory types. But that is no excuse to avoid their work.3 The casualness with which such claims are made is revealing, I think. In fact, I  also think that Morgan has missed just how dogmatic his stance is—but that’s what comes from occupying a position of dominance. For, as I read it, Morgan is also articulating the standard view in our field: there’s obvious stuff that we all know is out there (i.e., “our evidence” or the “subject-matter”) and then there are the tools that we use to talk about it in this or that way, tools that illuminate the familiar, but in a new light. The former, the subject itself, sitting out in the field somewhere, is real and primary, of course, whereas the latter, much like stage lighting, is helpful, yes, but we all know that it’s merely secondary and thus inessential, for the subject remains regardless how well it is lit, allowing us to see the same old thing but in a new light, as the saying goes. And, as with Pye, only studying the former seems to count, since people who study the latter are—yes, you read Morgan’s comments correctly—doing nothing other than theory-wonking, thereby engaged in a “pointless” exercise. But how are such claims evidence of a luxurious position of dominance? Because, as someone who thinks of himself as a social theorist, perhaps among the ranks of those previously mentioned out-of-touch North Americans, I can’t imagine dismissing (and if you read that extended quote above about armchair theorists as anything but an outright dismissal, then I think you are kidding yourself) people who study, say, what Morgan himself studies—religion and visual culture, sometimes also termed material or embodied religion (e.g., Morgan 2005)—by saying that, honestly, they’re descriptivist wonks who do pointless work. Such a claim would—rightly, I think—be judged unscholarly and thus unacceptable as part of an academic discourse. But what if I went on to say, in print, that it is quite true (luckily, such truisms require no evidence or argumentation) that some of the worst writing in the last century has come from people who now engage in old-school (and, for many of us in the field, long-discredited) phenomenology of religion but repackage it as trendy “­material religion,” “embodied religion,” or “visual culture” and the like? Of course, since studying religion and material culture is now a widely accepted 3 Find another interview with Morgan at The Religious Studies Project: http://www .religiousstudiesproject.com/podcast/podcast-david-morgan-on-material-religion/ (accessed Dec. 29, 2013).

Introduction: Plus ça Change…

5

specialty, seen by many to be on the cutting edge of the field, I would probably not get away with such a sweeping, dismissive claim—at least not without providing evidence and argumentation. (But more on that below.) Given the difficulty getting this far in my claims, I have trouble thinking that I’d then be able to conclude by saying that these shortcomings are certainly no excuse to avoid reading such work; so grad students beware: you must figure out how to endure—that’s right, endure, as in to undergo a trial, suffer through, persevere, tolerate, put up with, etc.—those pointless ethnographic, descriptivist seminars because getting through them is just a rite of passage. No, I cannot imagine writing anything like that. The luxury of occupying a less risky dominant position in the field, however, is that you can get away with off-the-cuff assertions like this and the last thing anyone would call you is dogmatic and, perhaps, anti-intellectualist, or even ask for a modest amount of evidence and argumentation (even in an online interview). Instead, when coming from certain sorts of scholars, such claims are more than likely read by many as showing an enviable command of the field and a benevolent generosity—even a spirit of noblesse oblige, perhaps?— toward those whom we all already know to be, you guessed it, just wonking. wonk (n.) “overly studious person,” 1954, American English student slang, popularized during Bill Clinton’s administration in U.S.; perhaps a shortening of British slang for “shaky, unreliable.” Or perhaps a variant of British slang wanker “masturbator.” It was earlier British naval slang for “midshipman.” I hope that, given my above comments on Pye’s approach, it is obvious that I couldn’t disagree more with Morgan’s similar portrait of the field or his denigration of those interested in examining the prior conditions that make seemingly commonsense knowledge about religion possible. It brings to mind a moment while I was a doctoral student at the University of Toronto, sometime in the late 1980s, when I recall Will Oxtoby (who, unfortunately, died of cancer in 2003)—then a professor at the University of Toronto, a member of my doctoral supervisory committee (who had also examined me on that rite of passage that goes by the name of comprehensive exams), later the editor of a still-popular two-volume world religions textbook published by Oxford University Press, and “a devout Christian and vocal proponent of interfaith dialogue,” as his alma mater’s obituary saw fit to point out4–—saying to me that 4 See the May 12, 2004, obituary at the Princeton Alumni Weekly http://paw.princeton.edu/ memorials/21/27/index.xml (accessed Dec. 28, 2013).

6

Introduction: Plus ça Change…

theory was like a snowblower (using a suitably northern analogy to make his point): “It helps you to move things around,” he said. As I read them, both Pye and Morgan would likely agree with Oxtoby on this point. There’s something about those who see themselves as working (as opposed to wonking; a change of just one consonant makes a difference, no?) on the margins of an academic discipline that seems to make them attuned to the means of deciding what gets to count as subject-matter and as evidence (or, according to Morgan’s interview, who gets to count as a legitimate scholar and what gets to count as credible scholarship). After all, anyone paying attention to a trial knows that the most important parts are the pre-trial hearings where what gets to be admissible as evidence, what gets to count as something the lawyers can introduce into the record, discuss in front of a jury, and confront the accused with, is determined—in fact, cases are won or lost there. So calling a focus on that same pre-observational moment in scholarship—the means by which the limits of signification and identification are determined, the set of intellectual assumptions or institutional conditions that allow us to see ourselves as working in a field to begin with—as being merely armchair scholarship or pointless wonking is, to me, mere name-calling and thus a lamentable commentary on the state of our field and its level of discourse today. (However, that replies to critiques of widespread practices in our field often and quickly degenerate to such a level might be seen as encouraging for some critics, for it suggests that our interlocutors are at a loss to provide reasoned argumentation in the face of a position that calls long taken-for-granted assumptions and conditions into question.) Writers as diverse as Pye, Morgan, and Oxtoby (for I have no doubt that they would differ among themselves on other matters related to our field) therefore strike me as all assuming that the things of religion are solid objects that exist out there in the real world (or at least solid sentiments deep inside people’s hearts, immaterial sentiments that are externalized in material culture) and that scholarly tools merely assist us to work with them and see these already and always real things from new and different angles. In this way, they use the word “theory” more as some would use “method”—in fact, the terms theory and method are, I fear, too easily interchangeable for many scholars today. So their interests strike me as being limited to studying (as the old saying goes) “that which presents itself to the senses,” of its own accord. Theory, for them, therefore signifies a collection of tools to help us manage all of the many splendid presentations competing for our attention, merely organizing them and placing them in some sort of chronological or causal order. About twenty-five years have passed since Oxtoby spoke to me about snowblowers, during what I recall was a reception for the Centre for the Study of

Introduction: Plus ça Change…

7

Religion, then on the fourteenth floor of Robarts Library; I forget exactly why we were having that conversation (more than likely he was contesting something in my own early work, a draft of which he possibly had recently read, as a member of my committee, while I prepared my dissertation for defense), but in hindsight it’s clear to me that we were staking out positions with respect to each other—for, as with a number of my peers today, we did not agree on too many things when it came to the study of religion. (Though, I happily acknowledge the unexpected kind words that he had for my anthology on the insider/ outsider problem [McCutcheon 1999], words that he shared with me the last time we spoke, at the 2002 annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion in Toronto.) So I recall replying (in keeping with the wintery imagery of that earlier conversation), that I, instead, thought of theory as being more like a snow-making machine at a ski resort: for without the device there is nothing to move around and no hills to be groomed. That is, I instead started with what I think to be a far more epistemologically humble position: the assumption that the world does not present itself to our senses in neatly and naturally packaged units for our somewhat passive consumption—i.e., the truly important, supposedly timeless parts of the texts that we read are not already highlighted, and if they are, then that’s merely evidence of how a reader before us made their way through them and thus hardly an indication for the way that such texts ought to be read. So, theory is a word that I used back then (but a use which, as argued in chapter 1, I would now want to refine somewhat) not just for explanatory, causal accounts of both origins and function, but also for the self-conscious examination of the conditions (intellectual, social, historical, gendered, economic, political, etc.) that make it possible to say that we know something about the world, that something in particular is significant and therefore should be talked about. So, without a selfconsciously employed system to compare and distinguish, it seemed to me then (and still does) that there is nothing to sort through and nothing to arrange, and thus no delimited field in which to dig, for we have no way to mark anything as significant and worth talking about, worth finding, or worth piecing together. As may be evident already, there is much riding, I think, on the notion of self-consciousness that this alternative position presupposes and for which it advocates, for it seems to me that a scholar’s job is to take the usually taken-forgranted structures that allow people to navigate their daily life (in the most mundane of ways, which makes such commonsense grids all the more interesting) and to make of them items of scrutiny and debate. We once referred to that as making the familiar strange and the strange familiar. Which is likely why Jonathan Z. Smith’s work on comparison—who, through an odd quirk of

8

Introduction: Plus ça Change…

administrative need, was himself a doctoral advisee of Oxtoby’s when Smith wrote his (unpublished) 1969 Yale dissertation, “The Glory, Jest, and Riddle: James George Frazer and The Golden Bough” (see its Preface [iii])—has increasingly struck me, over the years, as being so important for a field that has never really shaken off the late-nineteenth century notion of animism, inasmuch as many scholars of religion (just three of whom I’ve surveyed in this introduction), still seem to presume that the world speaks to them in its own voice, of its own significance; for, as Smith famously wrote, over thirty years ago: [T]he student of religion…must be relentlessly self-conscious. Indeed, this self-consciousness constitutes his primary expertise, his foremost object of study. 1982: ix

And it is in that spirit, or at least trying to move in the direction of, like Smith, seeing theory as something far more important than Morgan’s pointless wonking, that I offer the following set of essays; taken together, they attempt to continue offering a counter-voice, in reply to the chorus occupying what I see as the privileged positions of our field, those who trade in what I hear merely as commonsense folk knowledge—no matter how sophisticated it seems to be presented. For instance, consider an example to which I signaled earlier that I would return, to provide the required evidence and argumentation to support my own off-the-cuff critical comment concerning how the now well-known field of material religion can be understood as but a rebranded form of traditional phenomenology of religion. Take as the example, one of Morgan’s own books, which was cited above—The Sacred Gaze (2005), a book on, as he terms it, “the visual evocations of the transcendent” (2005: 260)—whose publisher’s blurb reads as follows: “Sacred gaze” denotes any way of seeing that invests its object—an image, a person, a time, a place—with spiritual significance. Drawing from many different fields, David Morgan investigates key aspects of vision and imagery in a variety of religious traditions. His lively, innovative book explores how viewers absorb and process religious imagery and how their experience contributes to the social, intellectual, and perceptual construction of reality.5 5 See http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520243064 (accessed Jan. 4, 2013).

Introduction: Plus ça Change…

9

The verbs betray much, I think, for within the space of just one brief paragraph we move from, on the one hand, the participant’s own gaze, and presumably her sets of interests, expectations, assumptions, etc., actively investing a presumably generic object with a specific status—which, of course, reads as very provocative, a type of neo-Durkheimian or even postmodern social constructionism, and thus a position to which I might find myself attracted—to, on the other, simply (and far more conservatively) portraying that gaze as just absorbing and processing what now seems like a prior status removed from a more passive observer. That is, taking the first verb seriously means that we create our own experiences of imagery as religious (as argued in Martin and McCutcheon 2012) inasmuch as we classify some things as religious and not others—such as those traditions that, instead, seem here simply to just be religious (in the second sentence of the above quote). And it is this ambiguity, this often unrecognized slippage from the seemingly provocative edge to the familiar center that attracts my attention—a reason for being interested in research on material religion, or so-called embodied religion and lived experience, surely rather different from that which motivates the many others in the field who are attracted to it: for the way that many see this apparent emphasis on the empirical, the contingent, the historical, somehow gets us out of what they now understand as the old rut of studying disembodied beliefs alone. It is this interest that draws my attention to claims such as Morgan’s, in a different recent interview, when he asks, “how does religion happen visually?” or how to study the way we “materialize the sacred” (see the 9:23 and 15:47 points of the interview, respectively)— for there is an unexplored ambivalence here, inasmuch as I read a continued presumption in this scholarship that the visual (or any other sense) merely provides a site for the expression and externalization of a prior, untheorized thing.6 For instance, take the following quote (from the opening to their first newsletter7) from the late 1990s/early 2000s Material History of American Religion Project centered at the Divinity School of Vanderbilt University, funded (like much scholarship on religion in America) by the Lily Endowment, and involving several scholars who went on to become key figures in this scholarly movement: [T]he scholars associated with this project have set out to pay attention to a neglected dimension of the history of religion in America. Too often 6 I am here quoting the previously cited Sept. 10, 2012 podcast posted at The Religious Studies Project’s website. 7 The newsletter can be found online at http://www.materialreligion.org/newsletters/news1/ index.htm (accessed Dec. 28, 2013).

10

Introduction: Plus ça Change…

the story of religion has been told as though it were a matter of thoughts and ideals alone. Material history is embodied history and recognizes that religious people have enacted their spiritual beliefs and religious ­ideals in a very material world. We are looking at the material evidence, getting into the material, and finding out a great deal in the first year of this project. Like the much earlier Social History turn in Departments of History, there is here the shift to studying so-called real people’s day-to-day lives, studying things from the ground up, as it were (shifts that tell us about the scholars’ own political sensibilities more than something about so-called actual life of real people). But more than just noting that, we might ask, “evidence of what?” Well, it is apparently material evidence of the very beliefs, faiths, experiences, etc., from which this approach claims to depart (i.e., “religious people enacted their spiritual lives and religious ideals,” after all)—prior, inner states that are still somehow assumed to motivate people to do this or that with their bodies, so as to act them out (quite literally, doing so from inside out). Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, non? My point? I am at a loss to explain how—apart from, say, simply changing the old word “manifestation” to the new “embodiment”—this recent but no less philosophically idealist approach is any different from the old approach that once dominated (though, if my argument is persuasive, still seems to dominate) our field, represented nicely by the work of Mircea Eliade but also so many others who drew on a mix of hermeneutics and phenomenology to come up with a method to “get at” what they considered to be the essential, private, and yet universal sine qua non of religion. For in both cases, “that which presents itself to our senses” is assumed to be evidence of a something else— and that something else is asserted to be non-empirical, causal, and only able to be inferred from our so-called historical, descriptive, and comparative studies. Call it faith, belief, experience, meaning, the human spirit, or soul—I am not sure what difference it makes, for what these two approaches share is a common presumption that, despite the apparent focus on the material, history and the body are merely transient, arbitrary stages on which ahistorical themes, meanings, and dispositions of private origin but universal scope are played out. After all, as phrased in the opening editorial (volume 1, issue 1) to the international journal Material Religion (now in its tenth year): “words combine with things to create even richer, more embodied forms of experience that must be scrutinized in order to capture the complex sense of religious meaning-making” (2005: 6). How words, or the texts in which they are written,

Introduction: Plus ça Change…

11

are not always and already things escapes me; in other words, despite how those working in material religion portray their specialty’s supposed advances over other, older forms of scholarship, we never have studied belief, only people talking, acting, and writing, along with the things that such actors left behind (inscriptions, graves, architecture, pottery, etc.)—but in doing so, we inferred the intangible something called belief and then, in suitably idealist fashion, portrayed our inferences as empirical descriptions, inasmuch as we couldn’t imagine anything tangible existing except as a secondary expression of some inner, invisible momentum. But seeing these observations as actually being inferences, which helps us to see belief as an item of discourse all along (a point driven home in chapter 2 as I use of a favorite quotation from Slavoj Žižek), also helps us to understand that, once we drop our philosophically idealist blinders, the study of religion, like any element of daily, human practice, has always been, and could never be anything but the study of mundane things and their always-contestable valorization by people. It is a shift nicely identified in a recent blog post by a colleague in my department. Mike Altman writes: About a year ago I was having coffee with an American religious historian I greatly admire. We were discussing how we imagined ourselves, our work, and our audience. This historian looked at me at one point and said something to the effect of, “I wanted to show historians that religion is a powerful force. That it does stuff.” Religion does stuff. Isn’t this the theme of our subfield? I don’t walk the halls of a history department but I imagine this is what the religious historian says to their Marxist colleagues. I don’t walk the halls of divinity schools either, but I imagine it’s what church historians tell future church leaders. Religion is not epiphenomenal. It is not simply a mask for politics or capital. It does stuff. For example, in their 2010 article in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, titled “Everywhere and Nowhere,” Paul Harvey and Kevin Schultz described the ways historians of American religions have “found the persistence, continuity, and adaptability of American religion an impressive, motivating, guiding, and ever shape-shifting specter,” (131). Motivating. Guiding. Shape-shifting. So many verbals. Because religion does stuff, right? Religion guides, motivates, adapts, continues, persists, right? Or maybe it doesn’t. Maybe those moments of persistence, guidance, motivation, and continuity are actually the moments where religion itself gets constructed. Maybe it’s shape-shifting because it is constantly

12

Introduction: Plus ça Change…

being rebuilt. But by who? And to what end? These were the questions driving my skepticism.8 But making the shift to see the agents and structures that make discourses, and their effects, possible (effects such as the widespread impression that belief, faith, experience, religion, etc., are all causal forces in the world that do things), and thereby coming up with answers to such questions presents most with a considerable challenge, for we do not easily give up the assumption that religion, like the proverbial unseen (i.e., merely posited) tree falling in the forest, is there regardless how we observe the world. This is a shift considerably far from what we currently see in the material religion domain, where the interest is instead to reaffirm the view that images themselves do things to people (that they have a “capacity to frighten, seduce, deceive, influence, and inspire” [Morgan 2005: 258]). Or, as another case in point, while reading the opening pages of Colleen McDannell’s widely influential volume, Material Christianity (1995), it again appears that this move to material culture is something new and radical. But taking seriously that sermons and scriptures (the things we ought no longer to emphasize in our studies, we are told, in favor of such under-studied items as home décor and body adornment) are as much items of material culture as is anything else, taking seriously that words (whether spoken or written) are not somehow in lockstep with the immaterial world of faith or intention or meaning but are, instead, the material building blocks (as are the letters of the alphabet and the rules that govern the way we can and cannot connect them together) from which we (again) infer those supposedly prioritized interior domains, means that there’s nothing all that new in this supposed turn toward the embodied and the material. After all, even such a groundbreaking book as Material Christianity, in the end, conserves an old, old story: that faith comes first and is merely embodied later; for, we read on the opening page: American Christians, this book argues, want to see, hear, and touch God. It is not enough for Christians to go to church, lead a righteous life, and hope for an eventual place in heaven. People build religion into the landscape, they make and buy pious images for their homes, and they wear special reminders of their faith next to their bodies. Religion is more than a type of knowledge learned through reading holy books and listening to

8 Posted on Jan. 2, 2014, at http://usreligion.blogspot.com/2014/01/thomas-paine-is-my-spirit -animal.html (accessed Jan. 3, 2014).

Introduction: Plus ça Change…

13

holy men. The physical expressions of religion are not exotic or eccentric elements… 1995: 1; emphasis added

While I could focus on the lens of American exceptionalism that seems to inform the volume’s rationale (Question: have these authors never been to, say, Greece, and seen all those icons in people’s homes?) or the way in which the objects are simply presumed already to be pious, to be religious or to be Christian, leaving for us merely to study how they are used and how they affect us, in looking at this paragraph I would instead simply want to point out how the animating faith is not itself an historical, social, material artifact but is, instead, already there, simply needing external reminders, public venues for its expression (as in the action of squeezing something out), and thus paths of transmission to the next generation. In my reading of the field, this is a rather familiar tale, one conducive to the interests of the very people we are studying. But given that, as already indicated, the Lily Foundation supported the above-quoted, early material religion project (of which McDannell was a participant, and her book, Material Christianity, was itself a beneficiary of the Lilyfunded Louisville Institute [see McDannell 1995: ix])—just as Lily supports much research on religion in the u.s., a field that, in my experience, closely overlaps much research on material religion, evidenced in Morgan’s own career, in fact—then maybe none of this should come as a surprise. After all, as the Foundation phrases its mission: The ultimate aim of Lily Endowment’s religion grantmaking is to deepen and enrich the religious lives of American Christians, primarily by helping to strengthen their congregations. To that end, our religion grantmaking in recent years has consisted largely of a series of major, interlocking initiatives aimed at enhancing and sustaining the quality of ministry in American congregations and parishes.9 It seems to me that a scholarly approach that heralds the empirical and the socially constructed (in a word, the human, or perhaps the historical) but which so nicely also conserves common assumptions concerning the primacy of a non-empirical and trans-human spirituality and inspiration—after all, The Sacred Gaze is marketed to readers “interested in how religious images and visual practice order space and time, communicate with the transcendent, and 9 Source: http://www.lillyendowment.org/religion.html (accessed Dec. 28, 2013).

14

Introduction: Plus ça Change…

embody forms of communion with the divine”—quite understandably is also an approach that enhances and sustains a certain sort of participant viewpoint. But instead of reproducing and authorizing it, it is a view that we, as scholars, could instead be examining, thereby learning how the very classification of something as a religious image (or not!) is itself a technique to order space and time in a very particular way, making particular sorts of actions and associations possible (or not!), a technique that deserves our sustained a­ ttention, rather than being so uninterested in the source and consequences of this common designation as to only wish to study its impact on people or how they use it. It is for these reasons that I find research on material or embodied religion, lived religion, to be but a rebranding of the phenomenology of religion. Which brings me all the way back to Troeltsch and his 1913 article, cited in my opening paragraph—for in the past one hundred years it turns out that we really have not come all that far as a field, if those whom I’ve so far cited in this introduction, those who see themselves as defending the field from theoretically inclined interlopers, are judged as exemplars of what counts as the study of religion today. For Troeltsch’s essay, published in The American Journal of Theology (the University of Chicago-based periodical which was in publication from 1897 until 1920), conveys to his u.s. readers, from a century ago, how the findings of the then new German science of Religionsgeschichtliche, which he translates there as comparative religion (1913: 1, n. 1), does not threaten but, on the contrary, will enhance their faith in true Christianity and confirm the universal core of all religious experience. At least for contemporary, theologically liberal types, even liberal humanists intent today on tracing the path of this thing they call the enduring human spirit—two groups which, despite using different rhetorics, are, as I see it, making the same argument—this remains a surprisingly relevant message. As Troeltsch goes on the claim: “[w]hen one attains this broader outlook [made possible by comparative religion], the limited horizon of belief in the supernatural, universal validity of one’s own religion is widened to include all historical religious movements, with their mutual conflicts and similar claims to truth” (1913: 2). In a vein little different from current scholars who continue to use the comparative method to discover cross-cultural similarities that, they believe, point toward an ahistorical core of some sort, he continues: From the scientific point of view one’s attitude toward the religious life of men can no longer be that of a supernatural or philosophical defense of one’s own religion, but must rather be that of a comparative, his­ torical  study of religions everywhere. Overwhelmingly difficult as this undertaking may be, and liable as we are to superficial self-deception,

Introduction: Plus ça Change…

15

nevertheless this is the primary aspect of investigation in the religious problem today. (2) Leaving aside “skeptical, positivistic, and illusionistic theories which may have adopted the religionsgeschichtliche point of view”—and, given for whom he was writing, he set them aside here and elsewhere for good reason, of course— his essay makes evident just how compatible the findings of this new science were with a turn-of-the-century liberal theology that was prepared to entertain that the challenges of religious pluralism, and not the opportunities for missionizing, are what its attention ought to be focused upon. Now, one hundred years later, I would argue that the problem of the transcendent one still lurking within the historical many is the overwhelmingly dominant preoccupation of scholarship on religion. In fact, as Troeltsch concludes in his final paragraph, these two pursuits are so compatible as to ensure that the findings of comparative religion actually vindicate Christianity as being in lockstep with all religious life itself. Christianity is conserved by the fact that in the affirmation of a Christian view of the world, the personal-theistic point of view, the tragic warfare of sin and redemption, and the future hope reaching out beyond the limits of this world are affirmed as the fundamental traits of religious life. Now these are the very traits which we find in history emphasized by the prophets of Israel and by Jesus. The essentially Christian character of such a dogmatics [a dogmatics “which develops consistantly (sic) from the religionsgeschichtliche point of view” (17)], therefore, cannot be questioned. (21) That The American Journal of Theology, in which Troeltsch’s essay was first published, merged with The Biblical World seven years later (also published by The University of Chicago Press, from 1893–1920, and edited by its Divinity faculty—a journal which itself had gone through three previous incarnations, each with an increasingly wide focus [e.g., The Hebrew Student, founded by the University of Chicago’s first President, William Rainey Harper (1856–1906), and which ran for a year (1882–3) before being rebranded first as The Old Testament Student (1883–8) and then as The Old and New Testament Student (1889–92)]10) 10 See The Biblical World’s closing editorial (54/6 [1920]: 553–554) for information on these publications, as well as the four final pages (prior to the ads) of its final issue (54/6 [1920]) where the history of the merger that resulted in the then-forthcoming The Journal of Religion is discussed in some detail.

16

Introduction: Plus ça Change…

and thus, in 1920, gave birth to the still in-print The Journal of Religion (in which, ironically perhaps, one of the following chapters, on the work of Jonathan Z. Smith, first appeared in print), now a leading journal in the field, also supports the claim, I think, that we, as a field, have not come so very far in the past century. That an article arguing Troeltsch’s position, with surprisingly little updating, could still appear in many of the field’s main peer review journals—after all, with but a little revision (e.g., changing the presumed norm of liberal Christianity to liberal humanism), it reads comparably to the rationale that drives the still growing world religions textbook genre—supports it even more. In fact, the now-preferred nomenclature in our field’s main professional association—the American Academy of Religion (aar)—has changed over the past decade or so to the current “religious studies and theology,” a phrasing of an apparently shared interest and task that accords surprisingly well with the rational for forming The Journal of Religion almost a century ago: “the advance and demands of modern scholarship requires a journal which shall secure the broadest possible cooperation of scholars in many fields” (as quoted from The Bible World’s announcement in the closing pages of issue 54/6 [1920]). I see all of this as evidence of longstanding problems in our field. Armchairs, wonking, snowblowers, expressions of an immaterial faith and belief in the material world, and studies that both compliment and complement their own object of inquiry. I have a hunch that we can do much better than this, both in terms of the sort of work that we, as scholars of religion, engage in, as well as the way that we debate among ourselves the pros and cons of the differing approaches that we adopt. My hope is that the following chapters continue to press the field in that direction—whether to prompt some of its members to do things differently or, at the very least, to come up with better, more academically defensible ways of answering the challenges that follow. Overwhelmingly difficult, to ironically echo Troeltsch, as this undertaking may be…11 11

In hopes of demonstrating the relevance of social media and blogs as a place not just for informally connecting but also for succinctly experimenting with ideas and ways of phrasing them that deserve elaboration elsewhere, this introduction draws upon four separate blog posts that I wrote while preparing the following chapters for publication; two of these posts appeared on edge.ua.edu (on July 2, 2013 [which was itself an elaboration of a what was originally a far briefer post on Facebook, from Feb. 28, 2010] and on Oct. 3, 2013) and the other two appeared on the blog for the department in which I work (as.ua.edu/rel/blog, which also has posts by current students and graduates of our department), posted on Dec. 13 and 15, 2013, respectively.

chapter 1 Introduction The following paper, written in response to an invitation from the immediate past president of the North American Association for the Study of Religion (naasr), William Arnal, was presented as part of a panel on the identity and future of naasr that he organized at naasr’s 2012 annual meeting in Chicago (a meeting that, for some years, has been held concurrently with the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion [aar] and the Society of Biblical Literature [sbl]). The others invited to participate on the panel were: Aaron Hughes (the current editor of Method & Theory in the Study of Religion (mtsr), [since 1993, naasr’s official journal]), Julie Ingersoll (onetime naasr vice president [2003–6]), and Nicole Kelley (a faculty member at Florida State University). Donald Wiebe, one of the three people who founded naasr in 1985 (E. Thomas Lawson and Luther H. Martin being the other two) was invited to respond to the panel. The complete set of papers was published by mtsr in late 2013 (issue 25/4&5, the year that marks the journal’s twenty-fifth anniversary). I do not think it necessary to rehearse here the history of naasr—though it is a history worth knowing for anyone interested in the state of the study of religion in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. For instance, see Martin and Wiebe’s unpublished, online essay, “Establishing a Beachhead: naasr, Twenty Years Later” (2004), especially their quotation, in note 2, from the American Academy of Religion’s letter citing the four reasons for the aar Board being “overwhelmingly opposed, in terms of numbers” (as the then aar executive director, James Wiggins, phrased it in his letter) to naasr’s initial request for scholarly affiliation with the aar.1 Among the reasons was: “4) All three of the aar initials appear in the naasr letters.” Understandably, Martin and Wiebe conclude that the reasons were somewhat spurious (at best, I would add). But their paper ends with the following paragraph: 1 Because the aar and sbl are such large scholarly organizations (which, despite a brief hiatus from each other, once again meet together annually), a variety of smaller academic societies (such as naasr) not only time/place their own annual meetings to coincide with the aar/sbl conference, but have traditionally sought formal affiliation with these large organizations so as to obtain various perks for their own members, such as having the additional meetings’ program schedule and participants’ names listed in the aar/sbl program book, the ability to book meeting space through the aar/sbl conference planning service, etc.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004281417_003

18

chapter 1

In our judgement, the challenges still facing naasr still include the creation of genuinely alternative and creative annual program formats. In addition, naasr needs to develop a more inclusive and efficient organizational structure; work towards increasing active membership; and continue to facilitate our international connections. We conclude that the membership of naasr can be justifiably proud of its accomplishments over the past twenty years. For a small scholarly organization, it has made significant contributions to a theoretically based study of religion both nationally and internationally. Following the late Gary Lease (d. 2008), who was naasr’s executive secretary/ treasurer from 1995–2004, I took on this role from 2004–7, and, along with others, worked on meeting a variety of these very challenges. Routinizing governance procedures, developing a functional and informative website, increasing membership and communicating regularly with it, and growing the annual program were all goals that, in those years, we mostly accomplished—we even had name badges for our meeting (following the request of then-president, Greg Alles). In so doing, however, the previously settled definition for the small group that initially comprised naasr’s members, concerning what counted as theory in the study of religion, was expanded—an expansion necessary for my own continued sense of place within the organization, not to mention that of a variety of people who gravitated to naasr because they were no less dissatisfied with the generally liberal theology that passed for scholarship on religion within the aar. But the various disaffections of all these members were not all the same, of course, and neither did they all complement each other. For several years, two different executive secretaries, and three different presidents later, naasr found itself in a position to be hosting papers at its annual meeting that certainly looked rather different from the narrowly explanatory, naturalistic scholarship that, back in 1985, likely constituted the limits of theory, at least as conceived then (and, I think it safe to say, now) by its three founders. In fact, the term “theory” had been stretched far enough that I, too, was frustrated—frustrated enough to accept Arnal’s invitation to join his presidential panel on naasr’s identity. Much like this presidential panel’s theme—a naasr tradition begun during Tomoko Masuzaw’s time as president (2005–8), and continued under Willi Braun (2008–11) and also Arnal—some variation on “Retrospect and Prospect” has frequently been used in our field to provide the organizing rationale for conferences and books. For example, I think of the late Joseph Kitagawa’s 1985 volume, of course: The History of Religions: Retrospect and Prospect. The prevalence of this theme is likely due to—as that volume’s afterword phrased it

Introduction

19

(co-written by Greg Alles and Kitagawa)—“[t]he dichotomy between history and phenomenology…[that] set[s] the central methodological question for the discipline” (1985: 149). Given our field’s history (e.g., the influence of the Protestant seminary model that yet animates more than one curriculum in the study of religion), given the highly charged valence placed upon the category “religion” in our society (whether for good or ill, in this or that speaker’s opinion), and given the numerous, sometimes contradictory, reasons for going into the study of religion in the first place (whether as training to be a missionary to the heathens, on the one end of the spectrum, to, on the other end, learning ancient secrets from the exotic Other), it seems naïve to think that we will ever somehow overcome this tension. That includes overcoming it in the broadest possible way (e.g., in determining the shape of an association like that aar, with many thousands of members) or in a more precise venue which seemingly has far less variables (e.g., such as naasr, a far more specialized academic association with only a couple hundred members, at best). So, seeing the “where have we been and where are we going” theme arise again and again, not just in the field as a whole but, more specifically, within naasr itself—a small society nearing only thirty years of age—should not be surprising. It is, after all, a rhetorical effort to address, and thereby minimize, contradictions by chartering a course for who the “we” ought to be. In fact, one could posit that this so-called navel-gazing is a healthy sign, evidence of multiple actors with multiple interests being drawn to the group for whatever reason. A far less encouraging situation, or so this line of reasoning might conclude, would be unanimity of agreement on purposes and direction, for that would likely characterize a group of one. So if disagreement on origins, rationale, and direction is the sign of a vibrant, dynamic social formation, then, at least as evidenced at the November 2012 panel in Chicago, naasr is certainly alive and kicking. Whereas Hughes recommended most provocatively that naasr cease meeting alongside the aar/sbl and thereby relieve itself of any anti-theoretical, pro-theological temptations,2 Ingersoll reflected 2 Minimizing the presence of theological studies—what was assumed to be the overriding approach of a society exclusively devoted to the study of but one scripture (i.e., the sbl)— was the publicly stated rationale for why, during Robert Orsi’s presidency of the aar (2003), a split from the sbl was announced. At the aar’s initiative, the two organizations, which had previously met together since 1970 (and which, when they both left the umbrella of the Council of Societies for the Study of Religion [cssr, of which I was president when it finally disbanded in 2009], had formed the joint Scholars Press) therefore separated in 2008 and met separately in 2008, 2009, and 2010 (thereby dissolving Scholars Press as well, with Oxford University Press picking up the aar’s share of titles from that onetime shared venture). In his presidential address where the rationale for the impending split was discussed,

20

chapter 1

on the important role that naasr debates have played in her own career, and Kelley used an aside of my own concerning the indistinguishability of naasr’s 2012 annual conference program from a typical aar program, that was posted by me on Facebook, as the jumping-off point for a meditation on naasr’s internal conflicts. My own paper, which follows, made what I thought to be a practical (and, per my reasoning, easily attainable—if agreed to…) suggestion for how two generally distinguishable groups who, despite various disagreements among their members, nonetheless share a common estrangement from the style of work that characterizes the aar, could seek shade under naasr’s one umbrella. It was pretty evident, however, that none of this was persuasive to our respondent (Wiebe 2013)—not all that surprising, really, given our various other conversations over the years—whose response, as usual, pulled no punches. In fact, as I recall, Wiebe pulled the rug out from under pretty much all of the previous papers by proposing that naasr ought to rename itself naassr—the North American Association for the Scientific



Orsi concluded (in language not dissimilar to Ernst Troeltsch, cited in the introduction to this volume, from one hundred years ago): “Our mission is clarified: the aar welcomes all scholars of all religions, scholars who are religious practitioners themselves and scholars who are not, scholars of religious texts, practices, imaginings, and theologies, in the present and the past, around the world and in the United States. Our strength has always been our diversity and inclusiveness. But we do not learn from our diversity and inclusiveness by denying difference or subsuming it under an authoritative singleness. We learn from our diversity and inclusiveness by our courage, confidence, and delight in stretching out across differences to meet each other in the shared work of understanding all the things that humans have made of themselves, of each other, and of their worlds in the idioms of their religions and in the company of their gods.” orsi 2004b: 600 For a variety of practical reasons, the split ended in 2011. I am not alone in thinking that the split—ironically, perhaps—increased the presence of theology within the aar since the departure of the sbl meant that an almost equally-sized academic society comprised of scholars who, no matter how theologically inclined or religiously conservative, nonetheless understood that a long history of interpretive scholarship and critical commentary was needed to make a text interesting and meaningful, had been divorced from close contact with aar members, many of whom strike me as presuming that their object of study is inherently important. That is, despite seeming to study but one text (two texts, of course, if we take seriously the Christian appropriation of the Hebrew Bible), at least sbl members are cognizant of the need for method (if not theory). Related to these topics see Smith 2009 (for his 2008 sbl presidential address, when the two organizations were first meeting separately) and Wiebe 2006 (for his follow-up analysis, in light of the recently announced split, of aar presidential addresses [see also Wiebe’s 1997 essay, for his first critique of these addresses, reprinted as Chapter 15 in Wiebe 1999]).

Introduction

21

Study of Religion (emphasis added)—thereby freeing itself of anything but the most rigorously causal, naturalistic theorizing (exemplified best, presumably, in Martin’s, Wiebe’s, and Lawson’s longtime focus, to varying degrees, on applying the cognitive sciences to the study of religion). But of all the people who attended that session—one of the larger naasr events that I recall, at least from recent memory—that would likely leave only Martin (who was in attendance) and Wiebe, and maybe a handful others. I’m not sure what the take-away from that panel was; there certainly was a bit of a show for those who happen to have attended, such as when some sparks flew on a couple of occasions (yes, I admit to being involved). But the longer-term result is hard to gauge; maybe it is far too early to think that the various proposals from that day ought to have any effect yet—if ever. Judging by naasr’s 2013 program in Baltimore and the 2014 program in San Diego, the effect seems negligible. It was unfortunate that Hughes’s recommendation— ceasing the meet annually in November alongside those other academic societies and, instead, selecting some other occasion and destination, perhaps even in Europe, for a meeting—seemed lost on a variety of those attending, for it was the paper that, I think, took most seriously naasr’s need to rethink its raison d’etre. With that need in mind, I would like to think that there is still something to my own suggestion that naasr members take seriously the two words in the title of their journal, that Hughes now edits—method and theory—and to use them as a way to understand two different sets of scholarly interests and practices. In part, this approach characterizes the very book series in which this volume appears, so why not an academic society as well?

chapter 1

A Modest Proposal on Method …having been wearied out for many Years with offering vain, idle, visionary Thoughts; and at length utterly despairing Success, I fortunately fell upon this Proposal; which, as it is wholly new, so it hath something solid and real, and of no Expense, and little Trouble, full in our own Power.… jonathan swift (2009: 237–238)

Let me open with an anecdote that I first drew upon in 2011 for a paper presented at the sbl (and included as Chapter 5 of this volume), in which I critiqued secular Bible critics for doing little different from the theologicallyinspired hermeneuts with whom they disagree. Who knew that I could use the same story to make much the same point a year later at a naasr panel? In 2010, I was among a group of naasr members invited by the executive council to discuss the future of the organization. Throughout the day, Jonathan Z. Smith’s name was often invoked as we discussed the group’s raison d’être. Though not among its triumvirate of founders—Tom Lawson, Luther Martin, and Donald Wiebe—Smith eventually joined the organization, served as naasr’s president (1996–2002), and had obviously influenced the work of a number of the people present that day. Among the proposals pitched, as a way to better define naasr’s identity and thus its contributions to the field, was one for a panel, to be jointly sponsored by both naasr and the sbl, and to be held at the following year’s annual meeting in San Francisco, on the place of the Bible in the study of religion (the panel took place in 2011).3 This discussion led to further brainstorming on other provocative, one-word theoretical topics or key words (somewhat akin to the chapter titles in Critical Terms for Religious Studies [Taylor 1998] or the Guide to the Study of Religion [Braun and McCutcheon 2000]) that, like “Bible,” could provide the basis for other naasr meetings. It was at this point that Matt Day, then the editor of naasr’s journal, mtsr, connected two of that day’s topics: “Bible,” portrayed as a critical category, and the group’s shared indebtedness to the work of Smith; leaning

3 The 2011 naasr/aar/sbl co-sponsored session, organized and chaired by Tomoko Masuzawa, was entitled “Biblical Studies and the Modern Invention of ‘Religion’” and involved Elizabeth Clark, Karen King, Suzanne Marchand, Halvor Moxnes, and Yvonne Sherwood.

A Modest Proposal On Method

23

across the table, he looked at me and said, “Russ, would Jonathan see ‘Bible’ as a theoretical category? Would he have a panel on ‘the Bible?’”4 For those familiar with Smith’s work, the answer to Matt’s softball lob of a question should be obvious. So I recall saying something like, “No, he would not.” I then went on to say something about the fact that Smith, who obviously has written on the Bible (e.g., 2000, 2009), would instead see “Bible” as a relatively uninteresting native or local folk category. In an effort to make it interesting, however, he’d compare it to something of his choosing (such as, say, the way mere ingredients become a cuisine), eventually leading to his redescription of that closed collection of texts known locally as “the Bible,” seeing it now as but one species of a larger genus that had no necessarily religious or scriptural significance to it, something like the wider term List or its subtypes, Catalogue and Canon. Thus, the e.g. “Bible,” when placed into a controlled relationship with some other authorized list, would simply be Smith’s way into studying the roles played in human affairs by the inevitably paired relationship of delimitation and innovation (e.g., Smith 1982: 36–52). So, while having a panel on Canon, conceived as evidence of an ongoing social process, he’d likely not have one on the Bible. I re-tell this anecdote because I think it nicely represents the reason why naasr is once more pondering its identity and thus place in the study of religion. My aim today, in this brief paper, is to work backwards from the ending that I just offered and to suggest a narrative to help make sense of how we arrived at a point where the members of its executive council—a group, at least back in 2010, whose use of the plural pronoun “we” usually signified their membership in the aar rather than naasr—could so differently understand what it means to do theory in the study of religion. Or, to put a finer, if more confusing, edge on it, how did naasr get to the point where one of its panels—again, back in 2010—could include a paper entitled, “The Untranslatability of Religion, the Untranslatability of Life,” in which the following statement is made (as quoted from its published version in mtsr): Symbol, released from time, then redeems itself, and thereby redeems time, by returning to time, to itself, by way of symbolizing “it,” being other than itself. Releasing carries this sense of “turn” and “return.” That which is free from time, then, is outside, or better yet, extended beyond, time. It is from this outside, from the beyond, that it—again whatever this it may be—may return to itself. abeysekara 2011: 270

4 Prior to using this anecdote in my 2011 sbl paper, I confirmed my memory of his question with Matt himself.

24

chapter 1

That the aar has a Mysticism group that, to use but one example from the 2012 program book, devoted a panel on Sunday afternoon to “Erasing Discourse: Mystical Silence Across East and West”5 makes perfect sense to me (even if the panel topic does not). What we need to answer is how did we—whomever this we may be—ended up doing much the same at a nassr session? My answer is that naasr’s present difficulties can be understood in terms of its two distinguishable sub-groups that, although both understanding themselves to be marginal to the field’s dominant form (as represented by the aar’s “come one, come all” approach), seem hardly to be comfortable bedfellows. To put it bluntly, over the past decade or so, naasr may have discovered that the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my ally. naasr’s rise and present aimlessness is, I would therefore argue, a case study in the operation of a hegemony. To demonstrate this point, afford me the luxury of briefly using my own career as an e.g. from which I hope to draw a lesson applicable to naasr, an association of scholars whose history roughly overlaps with, and whose influence directly impacted, my own maturation from graduate student to faculty member and, eventually, to department chair. In the late 1990s, I was beginning to move away from my earlier interest in naturalistic, explanatory theorizing (an interest that animates my first book, Manufacturing Religion [1997b]), toward an increasing focus on discourse theory—a change that made the old science versus theology distinction less than useful to me, for now explanatory as much as hermeneutical approaches (whether identified as humanistic or theological) were equally interesting as instances of data. Eventually, this became my current interest in how the category religion is itself used—regardless who uses it and in what way—to name a distinct domain of human action, one requiring special tools for its study, whether they are uniquely nuanced hermeneutical approaches, as per many who call themselves Historians of Religion, or the theories of religion championed by those who are more scientifically inclined. For both sides in this old pairing, religion—and there is no matter to me whether one uses 5 See the 2012 aar/sbl program book, meeting A18-225 (on page 284). I thank Jack Llewellyn for bringing this example to my attention. The description for the session reads as follows: “The purpose of this session is to explore how the radical silencing of speech about the divine or ultimate reality across different traditions becomes the locus for radically transformative mystical experiences that challenge and explode conventional notions of subjectivity, alterity and discourse. The presenters will touch on topics as diverse as Nagarjuna’s radical apophaticism and deconstruction of subjectivity, the embodied performativity of silence in the Daoist tradition, and the interplay of silence and visualization in the context of Tibetan Buddhism and the Christian Renaissance.”

A Modest Proposal On Method

25

the singular or the plural noun, the adjective, or, as now preferred by some, the term religiosity—names an identifiably real and separate aspect of human life, and, in both cases, it is a puzzling thing that is in need of closer study, whether that puzzle concerns interpreting its deeper meaning or explaining why it even exists. I have therefore become a theorist who does not wish either to interpret or explain religion. To phrase the issue as I just have indicates that, over the course of my career, I have been using the word “theory” in different ways, increasingly distinguishing my current use of it from what I once assumed to be its only academically useful meaning: naturalistic explanations of observable states of affairs. Although I likely was not aware of why I was focusing on this topic at the time, looking back, I now think that smoothing over the potential conflict between two different senses of theory was what motivated my writing an essay, published first in 1997 in Canada (1997c), that eventually became Chapter 7 in Critics Not Caretakers (2001: 103–121).6 Entitled “‘My Theory of the Brontosaurus…’: Postmodernism and ‘Theory’ of Religion,” it used a line from a Monty Python sketch to set the stage for an argument concerning the more and less useful ways of understanding what was then a dirty word in the field. In case the recent past is a foreign land for some here today (and for them I recommend Charlotte Allen’s 1996 essay “Is Nothing Sacred? Casting Out the Demons from Religious Studies” as an ethnography worth reading), let me add some background by saying that I recall the time when I was advised, in my first job at the University of Tennessee (1993–1996), to use the word “approaches” instead of “theory” in a syllabus, so as not to alienate my colleagues and students (is it worth noting that “approaches” and not “theories” is the chosen term in naasr’s own foundation documents?7), as well as the time, in my second job at what was then called Southwest Missouri State University (1996–2001), when I was told that I should add something by Peter Berger to my syllabus somewhere—since his work was apparently representative of what was, at least for some of my colleagues then, considered an acceptable level of 6 See Arnal 1998, McCutcheon 1998b, and also MacKendrick 1999 for the discussion that followed on the original publication of this essay. 7 According to its website’s description, “The North American Association for the Study of Religion (naasr) was initially formed in 1985 by E. Thomas Lawson, Luther H. Martin, and Donald Wiebe, to encourage the historical, comparative, structural, theoretical, and cognitive approaches to the study of religion among North American scholars…” (http://naasr .com/about.html [accessed Oct. 24, 2012]). naasr’s 1986 Constitution and Bylaws simply stated that the purpose of the association was “to encourage the historical, comparative, and structural study of religion…” (document dated Nov. 23, 1986; available as a PDF at http:// naasr.com/constitution1986.pdf [accessed Oct. 24, 2012]).

26

chapter 1

theory in the religious studies classroom. So, regardless what those now coveted naasr buttons once said, “theory” was indeed a four letter word, even as recent as the late-1990s—a fact that, in some regards, has changed greatly from the spring of 1993 when, as a research assistant working with the late Bruce Alton at the University of Toronto, I surveyed the place of theory in North American curricula in our field and found very few required, and not even many elective, courses explicitly on theories of religion.8 But now, instead of the once prominent, hermeneutically-inclined “ways of understanding religion” or “interpreting religion,” we routinely find the words “method and theory” listed in job ads, at least as a supplementary area (more on this below), as well as in course titles that populate curricula across the field, both undergraduate and graduate. In fact, not long ago my colleague passed along to me a flyer from Case Western Reserve University for a newly instituted M.A. degree that “will concentrate on method and theory in the study of religion.”9 Just what we mean by “theory,” though, deserves further scrutiny for, despite all this talk, theory remains largely theoretical. I still find our field to be mostly phenomenological—it’s just that we now say that religion is, for example, “embodied” as opposed to “manifested.” But I digress—well, not really. “My Theory of the Brontosaurus” took as its starting point an article published in 1995 in the Journal of Religion that argued that the work of Karl Barth ought to be added to reading lists for courses concerned with theories of religion. The author, Garrett Green—who retired from Connecticut College in 2006—argued that, because postmodernism had enabled us to see that all data are theory-laden, then there is no defensible grounds to exclude some writers (just because they are conservative, he argued) from our religious studies canon (Green 1995). I saw this as terribly sloppy reasoning, a useful example of the manner in which postmodern critiques are often used by people to relativize (most) things, in order to slip in the backdoor their own favored item, as if it were the timeless nugget that remained once all the historical gravel had been sifted out. It’s the move that Intelligent Design advocates in the u.s. regularly make, to so qualify the word “theory” that almost anything counts as one, thereby opening the door of the high school science classroom to everything10—well, not quite everything, of course, 8

9 10

This is a different claim than Martin and Wiebe (2012), who find no truly scientific program or department now in existence. My claim is rather less ambitious, simply drawing attention to what was then an almost complete lack of courses on naturalistic theories of religion. See the description of the program at http://www.case.edu/artsci/rlgn/gradprograms.html. See Tammy Kitzmiller, et al. v. Dover Area School District, et al. (400 F. Supp. 2d 707, Docket no. 4cv2688) for the most recent u.s. federal court decision that focused, in part,

A Modest Proposal On Method

27

because I’ve yet to meet an Intelligent Design advocate who also wishes to introduce into the science classroom the story—or should we call it a theory?—of Brahma doing his work after Shiva does his dance. But I digress again—well, not really. As my answer to Green’s redefinitional move, I attempted to tease out the two uses of the word theory that, as I argued then, were legitimate in the public university: theory-as-naturalistic-explanation and theory-as-critique— neither of which characterized what Karl Barth was up to. I concluded, then, that the embarrassment of this issue was not, as Green claimed, “that the postmodern study of religion has failed to include such writers as Barth but, rather that many scholars of religion have failed to understand just what it means to theorize and have most recently disguised this shortcoming through their conveniently selective appropriation of the postmodern turn” (2001: 114). And it is this strategically selective appropriation that, I think, lies at the heart of naasr’s current problems; for, upon closer inspection, I do not think that we as yet know whether scholars working on theory-as-explanation and those carrying out theory-as-critique can co-exist within the same small professional guild because, along with the latter group’s entry into the domain that was originally instituted only to house the former, there also came those who, much like Garrett Green, used postmodernism as a blunt instrument to reauthorize their own favored norms. However, what is curious about this partial form of critique finding a new home in naasr—as evidenced in my earlier quotation concerning a symbol being redeemed when released from time—is that it is already comfortably at home in much of the aar, where it is not difficult to find people now working on, as briefly mentioned already, such supposedly cutting-edge, empirically based topics as material, lived, or embodied religion. Each time I see these terms, however, I wish to ask how we might study immaterial, unlived, disembodied religion. That is, what we cannot fail to see is that the old philosophically idealist approach to seeing religion as concerned with the immaterial (either spirit or meaning) has found a new home in these seemingly empirical studies, inasmuch as it is assumed that, through studying the visible, we can infer things about the immaterial (i.e., the world of meaning, as Humanists would phrase it). This is nothing but the phenomenological assumption that fueled the old “Myth, Symbol, Ritual” class that I was asked to teach at the University of Tennessee back in 1993—all three on the meaning of “theory” and thus the testability of claims as ways to define science in opposition to religion. The decision is posted at http://www.pamd.uscourts.gov/kitzmiller/ kitzmiller_342.pdf (accessed Oct. 24, 2011).

28

chapter 1

being empirical domains where the sacred manifested itself.11 But how to explain this approach reappearing in naasr, of all places? Social theorists tell us that a certain amount of social capital is acquired by those who successfully reproduce a marginal identity within hegemonic conditions—i.e., if they are able to steer wide of purists’ claims of “selling out,” they can exist within the group as outsiders in the “proper” (i.e., tolerated) manner, thereby attracting some who also wish to increase their status in the group, so that they, too, stand out, but in an acceptable manner, of course. And that’s the position, I would argue, that theorists in our field were in, at least in the 1980s and 1990s. As was evident in my opening anecdote, I find many people who approvingly, even reverentially, cite Smith’s work, making the appearance of his well-known quotation on the invention of religion a genuflection required of anyone who wishes to have their work taken seriously (on this point see Chapter 4 in this set of essays). They know that they should read him, they make it evident that they have read him, and this is enough to gain their new status, so that they can just get on with their work as if they had never read him at all.12 In much the same way, the efforts represented institutionally by naasr have, in a way, been extremely successful over the past twenty years, since almost everyone in our field today thinks that they ought to be theoretical, though this success means that the larger hegemony predictably has— inasmuch as it is hegemonic—adapted and domesticated what was once oppositional to it, thereby dulling it considerably. I think here of a recent Journal of the American Academy of Religion (jaar) essay that used my early work opposing the role of a caretaker to argue for the need for “critical caretakers” (Omer 2011; see McCutcheon 2014 where I address the wider context of Omer’s critique; for background see also Omer 2012 and 2013 along with Simmons 2013a and b), or even the very name of the aar’s “Reflection and Theory in the Study of Religion” book series, let alone the many explicitly theological titles within it.13 naasr’s problem, then, at least when seen from the view of social theory, is that it was too successful; the group that was once ceremoniously denied admission to the aar’s big tent has therefore been 11 12

13

See McCutcheon 2001: Chapter 12 for the review essay (first published in jaar in 1998) that I wrote, debriefing on how to teach this course in a way that emphasized theory. I could elaborate, if I had more time, on how I think that the current vogue, for some, of applying the findings from the cognitive sciences (i.e., the “real sciences” as characterized by some converts to cog sci) to the study of religion could, I think, be explained in much the same manner. See: http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/series/AARReflectionandTheoryintheStud y/?view=usa&sf=all.

A Modest Proposal On Method

29

assimilated; the revolution got away from it—a process begun, one could argue, with the Trojan horse strategy, which I recall Ivan Strenski advocating to naasr about twenty years ago, whereby active naasr members have invested much of their professional time in aar groups, to the detriment of naasr (case in point, consider the membership of the Critical Theory and Discourses on Religion group). That this strategy has not been all that effective is evident, to me at least, when I consider that, an academic generation later, expertise in method and theory is merely a supplemental, but most often just a symbolic, strength on the job market, not one that replaces expertise in an “actual” religion; there are virtually no positions in method and theory and anyone who specializes in it is seen as having no specialty whatsoever (or doing pointless wonking, thinking back to the introduction to this volume). The once antagonized boundary between naasr and the aar has thus become utterly permeable—we are now just another group getting rooms for free and meeting under the auspices of the aar; thus, the once provocatively marginal naasr is now doing what is routinely done all throughout the field (a fate that mtsr has, so far, successfully resisted, I should add, confirming for me that naasr needs mtsr far more than mtsr might have once needed naasr), indicating that we now have, much as with the internecine war of so-called secular Bible exegetes arguing with theological exegetes (as further elaborated in Chapter 5 of this book), a difference of little or no consequence— for how a naasr program now differs from an aar program is, to me, almost impossible to discern. What’s more, why anyone would join naasr— especially since the aar is now also a member of the International Association for the History of Religion (iahr)—is even more perplexing. My diagnosis is therefore that, unlike well-functioning social groups whose cohesion is often premised on a nurtured sense of victimization or exploitation by outside influences, prompting the marginalized group to continually reinvent itself in response to changes in the dominant group, naasr’s success has, it seems, produced a degree of complacency that, I think, results in its now ambiguous place in the field. But I feel like I cannot stop here, merely offering a diagnosis of what ails us; for I have often been (unfairly, I think) criticized for failing to suggest constructive solutions to the problems that I describe.14 So, to quote another 14

I say unfairly because most, if not all, of my work carries with it explicit and detailed recommendations for alternative approaches, from the concluding chapter to my first book, Manufacturing Religion, to the various anthologies and handbooks, aimed at students, that I have edited or co-edited, to the undergraduate course book that I have written (2007). That the alternative that I present challenges readers to thoroughly reconceive the

30

chapter 1

Jonathan—Jonathan Swift—from whom I have derived my paper’s title: “I shall now therefore humbly propose my own Thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least Objection” (Swift 2009: 232). For if my modest proposal is objectionable, then I fear that, somewhat like Swift’s own recommendation for dealing with poverty, those of us who are equally alienated from our field will end up cannibalizing not Irish babies but ourselves in the near future by warring over issues of theoretical purity and scientific rigor, thereby leaving no organized opposition to the aar’s hegemony. So let me therefore conclude by saying that if these two equally alienated groups—those working on theoryas-explanation and theory-as-critique—are to work together to achieve goals other than those of the aar (a group for which “theology and religious studies” has now become the accepted way to represent its constituency), then I propose that naasr re-organize around the precisely defined key terms in its journal’s title—method and theory—to enable those who wish to scrutinize the tools scholars use to go about their work (i.e., the study of their methods) also to have a place at the table with those who wish to develop and test naturalistic explanations (i.e., theory). This proposal is about more than mere housecleaning; though this motive alone is sufficient reason to pay some attention to our current description, which states that naasr was formed “to encourage the historical, comparative, structural, theoretical, and cognitive approaches to the study of religion”— what a “theoretical approach” is, and how it differs from the others named in the list, completely eludes me, to be frank. But this confused terminology is indicative of deeper problems. For example, unlike my friends who provocatively suggest that their earlier way of thinking was actually delusional (e.g., Martin and Wiebe 2012), I would admit that mine was mistaken when I used the word “theory” to characterize those two positions that, at least back in that 1997 essay, I thought could work together. For what I once termed theory-as-critique, I would today rather name more precisely as a rigorous historicization of the tools (including the categories) that we, as scholars, use— an exercise in keeping, I would argue, with understanding methodology as the systematic study of the methods (i.e., tools and assumptions) that scholars use to go about their work. Or to quote Willi Braun (the immediate past naasr president), who recently recollected over email a point that he made at the 2010 meeting that I referenced in my opening anecdote, “I understand naasr… as devoted to critical scrutiny of the intellectual practices in the study of focus and rationale for their work and the field, and not simply add some new element and stir, is likely what leads to the caricature of my work as being only a negative critique— it is far easier to dismiss such recommendations if they are systematically ignored.

A Modest Proposal On Method

31

religion. That is, its subject matter is not religion but scholarly practices; its orientation to the subject matter is one of critical scrutiny.” Whether or not this attitude characterizes naasr as a whole, as I believe Braun was recommending, I would at least hope that it describes a vibrant portion of it.15 Defined in this way, we will all know that a naasr panel (dare I also suggest, to our journal’s editor, Aaron Hughes, an mtsr article as well?) is either a scrutiny of a specific scholarly situation and practice or a naturalistic explanation of religion’s causes or origin, but surely not both since, as I argued in 1997, these two signify different logical operations—we therefore study either method or theory, indicating that the conjunction (or better, disjunctive conjunction) matters—providing, that is, that we keep in mind that it is always the word “methodology” that hides behind the catchier term “method.” For, unlike an earlier generation which considered a focus on method simply to mean one’s recognition that the selection of tools ought to be dictated by the deeply meaningful and obviously significant object of study (e.g., Eliade and Kitagawa 1959), what I instead have in mind when I use the term methodology is an anthropocentric and thus historical focus on scholars, their interests, and their tools, and the manner in which these make otherwise generic items of the world stand out as worth talking about. If understood in this way, then we may have a no-cost solution of little trouble that is well within our power to enact, inasmuch as we save, rather than devour, the baby by agreeing that—at least when defined against those who somehow think they can transcend language—it has two unaddressed halves: what my scientific friends call “theory” and what I call “methodology.”16 15

16

Ironically, only those working on naturalistic theories of religion could have their work considered for an aar Award for Excellence, under what it calls the “AnalyticalDescriptive study of religion” rubric, since it is defines this as including “works of analysis or theory that focus on religion as an object of enquiry or on its typical components, such as myth, ritual, or tradition.” Methodology, as I have described it, finds no home in the aar that I can see, suggesting that, as Braun advises, it may be the defining trait that sets naasr apart. Learn more about the aar Book Awards at http://www.aarweb.org/ programs/Awards/Book_Awards/rules-excellence.asp. In arriving at this conclusion, I have in mind something akin to Arnal and Braun happily relinquishing the category religion, as argued in their co-authored, “The Irony of Religion” that concludes our co-edited Festschrift in honor of Donald Wiebe (see Arnal and Braun 2012).

chapter 2 Introduction The original, shorter version of the following paper was written for conference on belief held at Yale University on April 15, 2011, and it is that version that appears at the end of an anthology on religious experience that I co-edited (Martin and McCutcheon 2012). A revised version of the paper, closer to the version published in 2012 in Method & Theory in the Study of Religion (mtsr) (24/1) (which, with an introduction by Kathryn Lofton [2012], the Yale conference organizer, appeared alongside the papers of three of the other participants: Jason Bivins [2012], Mary-Jane Rubenstein [2012], Mayanthi Fernando [2012]) was also presented as the inaugural response to what, back in 2011, was the newly constituted American Academy of Religion (aar) panel on Critical Approaches to Hip Hop and Religion (at the invitation of its organizers, Chris Driscoll and Monica Miller). That longer version of the paper is what follows. Both times the paper was presented publicly, it was met with a predictable but still curious reaction. In the first case, at Yale, when I finished the paper, the chair of the session in which Rubenstein and I had each presented our papers, started the Q&A off by asking me—at least as I remember hearing the question, it struck me as sincerely posed—“Can you tell us a little more about what you mean by a hunch?” That is, the parody of the paper—and reader beware: it is a parody—was completely lost on many of the people in the room, despite hushed chuckles and giggles on the part of yet others once the first few sentences of the paper had been spoken. Now, of course there is no reason why anyone who attended that small conference should know anything about my past work and therefore there is no reason why any of them should have been shocked that I, of all people, was now making an argument based on the presumed priority of the unseen interior world of affectation and sentiment. But given the purely folk (i.e., a popular concept used by members of a social group) status of the thing that we call “a hunch,” I would have hoped that anyone at an academic conference calling for a non-reductionistic, cross-cultural phenomenology and hermeneutics of hunches would have struck everyone in the room as just a little bit silly, at best. (Though, come to think of it, there are people with Ph.D.s who use the notion of “irreducible complexity” to authorize Intelligent Design, so I guess there’s no limit to the technicalization of folk discourses.) But given the manner in which many scholars of religion take the status of participant claims for granted and seek simply to describe and then compare them to the claims made by other equally authorized participants,

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004281417_004

Introduction

33

lacking any sort of explanatory analysis whatsoever to such studies (akin to Eliade’s Patterns in Comparative Religion [1996] really, where symbolism of the moon or water, from this or that group, was just put alongside everyone else’s moon and water symbolism, in a style not dissimilar to the grand age of comparison in the late nineteenth century), this is just the response that someone like myself should be hoping to receive; for any other response—such as the whole room breaking out in laughter—would suggest that the regnant, philosophically idealist discourse is not nearly as regnant or as idealist as my work portrays it as being. The panel chair’s question, then, was just the response that my paper presupposed—just the response that it needed. In response to that opening question, I decided to play it straight—I’m no Stephen Colbert, of course, but I did my best not to wink at the audience, for that strikes me as rather disrespectful, actually. However, presenting the parody in the first place is likely disrespectful enough by many people’s standards—so I turned to my left to criticize the “attacks” of Rubenstein (still seated at the head table with me, both of us ready for questions) inasmuch as her analysis of the discourse on private belief (rather than just an appreciation for it, and thus authorization of it, that goes by the names of description and interpretation) “reduced” and thus “explained away” my intuitions as being something other than what I experience them to be for myself. It was therefore the imperialism of her method that I claimed to be particularly offensive. That I, of course, agreed with much of Rubenstein’s paper (2012)—especially memorable was her inventive but incredibly effective use of the Whac-a-Mole game that appears at county fairs in the u.s. or in arcades, as a metaphor for how the discourse on belief, even when you think you’ve addressed its problems in class, continually keeps popping up—was pretty obvious to her and many others in the room, but that it was not apparent at all to many of the other attendees is the curiously predictable thing. That fall, as already stated, I used an enlarged version of the paper as a response to a panel on hip hop and religion at the aar conference. Given the manner in which identity and discourses on experience, belief, faith, etc., are intertwined (think here of claims about “the American experience” that, when seen with sufficient distance, clearly portray a very particular segment of the nation, one whose self-image is a product of specific historical, social, economic, political, racial, etc., conditions, as if it were the whole), it seemed to me that this paper would also function rather nicely as a provocative response to a set of papers that, in my reading, did little more than faithfully describe a series of participant claims concerning distinctness and its links to inner affectations known as beliefs. Lacking any sense that the pre-distributed papers understood the discourse on belief to be the thing that, as scholars, ought to be

34

chapter 2

attracting our attention, and instead seeing the papers mostly to be presupposing that inner, private, nonempirical dispositions that are somehow, nonetheless, shared across a social group, are the motivating factors in human behavior and social organization, it seemed to me that this paper would get to the heart of the difficulties that I found in the work sent to me for my response. Now, this was the same meeting at which I replied critically to the so-called secular bible critics (see Chapter 5 in this collection)—and, despite what some might think to be important differences between these two groups (one was on an ancient, obviously religious text while the other was an edgy, contemporary urban art form thought by some not to be legitimately religious [i.e., the scholarly effort was often to determine why an obviously religious object, such as the image of Jesus, was used in what was obviously not religious, such as a song about drugs in the inner city]), both groups offered surprisingly similar—i.e., silent—reactions to my paper, making evident that, at least for many of the people to whom I spoke on those two occasions, responses are not meant to be substantive, scholarly, and seriously engaged with the material but, instead, are probably more akin to a ritualized benediction in which an authorized figure says some nice things (literally the meaning of “benediction”), thereby lending his or her imprimatur to all that had been said before, thereby ritually signaling that the occasion has come to an end and that the questionsthat-are-never-actually-questions can now begin. While certainly not wishing to play such an insubstantial role (and yes, I fully realize that I ironically sound like a Protestant reformer criticizing “empty” Roman Catholic ritual), I admit to having a bit of a sense of occasion, so knowing that the distinctiveness of both identity and hip hop as a cultural form, along with the presumably universally shared sense of an African American identity and experience, were all evident in the papers that I had been sent, I conferred with one of the organizers prior to the event, going so far as to provide an advance copy of the following paper, so as to ensure that my effort to press the panelists and the audience on how they use such categories as experience, faith, and belief in their discussions of identity (whether applied to a social group of an art form) was not something that would undermine this new program unit’s goals. Assured that this was just what the group needed to kick off its inaugural session, the paper became my reply. While the panelists and the audience were polite, of course, only one panelist, as I remember the event, made any reference to my paper whatsoever during the comments that followed my response. It was as if I had not even presented during the session, for the Q&A was far more concerned with clarifying descriptive details (as is almost always the case when one presenter calls the entire endeavor into question—a reasonable response for those still committed to the cause is to circle the wagons and

Introduction

35

reinvest considerable exegetical energy within the limits of the domain, to shore up the walls from attack). But perhaps this, like my paper’s reception at Yale and the reception of my 2011 Society of Biblical Literature (sbl) paper mentioned earlier (again, see Chapter 5), is evidence that I did my job, by prompting people to look at a particularly difficult question in a public setting, by trying to make evident the important work taking place in a taken-forgranted set of interconnected concepts—after all, this is the sort of thing that, it seems to me, a scholar is not just willing to do (which carries with it the sense of regret and grudging duty) but, instead, is downright eager to do. I’m not sure what the long-term result of presenting either of those papers will be— perhaps none. I heard rumors that, afterward, a few interpersonal sparks flew in the case of my role as a respondent to that aar hip hop panel, but I have no firsthand experience as to that, so I leave it to others to document or discuss if it illustrates something of relevance. Concerning the style that this paper adopts, answering whether parody works or not as a form of critique is best left to its readers. I opted for this style when, after accepting Lofton’s very kind invitation to visit Yale for the first time, I realized that, other than repeating myself, I really had very little new to say on the topic of belief. I happen to think that scholars like Donald Lopez (1998), Robert Sharf (1998), and Joan Wallach Scott (1991)—who are all quoted in this chapter—have already said all that needs to be said on the topic of belief, experience, faith, etc., and so the topic is, to my way of thinking, pretty much settled. However, that the topic—like Rubenstein’s pesky little moles— keeps coming up, despite these scholars’ thorough critiques, is what prompted me to consider trying my hand at a new genre: what if one made the exact same arguments that won the day in the 1950s and 1960s to help establish the academic study of religion as an institutionally autonomous field in the u.s., but this time applied them to something that’s, well, kind of silly or outlandish? Might that prompt us to rethink why such arguments were (and for many, still are) persuasive when applied to “belief?” That was the approach I adopted—a classic exercise in comparison whereby the unfamiliar is used to make the familiar a little more interesting. Perhaps, after reading the following chapter, those younger readers who are not all that familiar with how people once argued for separate Departments of Religious Studies will be curious about how much progress we have (or have not!) made in the past fifty years when it comes to how we talk about belief, faith, and experience—all commonsense, folk designators of our own social world. But whether that makes them cross-cultural universals of analytic value to scholarship is, of course, an entirely different matter.

chapter 2

I Have a Hunch Look like the innocent flower, But be the serpent under’t. Macbeth, Act 1, Scene v

Despite my earlier, more youthfully provocative forays into discussions on theory in the study of religion, lately I’ve had reason to take a little more seriously the motivation behind my colleagues’ many references to studying beliefs, experiences, meanings, identities, and impulses, all of which are understood as dispositions that, although private, are nonetheless also considered to be: 1. public (inasmuch as people express them [a key verb here]), 2. universal (inasmuch as large numbers of people apparently share them, thereby making individuals into groups), and 3. virtually timeless (inasmuch as these groups apparently endure over time, possessing what some today call cultural memories [look no further than the common phrase, “the American experience” or even “the human spirit”]). Seeing such key terms and assumptions used again and again as the starting point for scholarly analysis (terms that signify to me that recovering the research subject’s transcendental meanings and experiences is generally agreed as the goal of scholarship) encourages me to make a disclosure in print that I’ve never yet had the heart to make in public: I have hunches. There, I’ve said it. I have hunches and I experience them as internal states that periodically sweep through me, registering somewhere deep in my being. My hunches, somewhat like the “pre-cog” visions in that futuristic Tom Cruise movie, are about moments in a possible future and they cause me to adjust my behavior in the present. It’s difficult to express this deep, visceral experience within the limitations of language, I know, but I have hunches and I live my life accordingly; in fact, I’m having one right now: I have a hunch that you know what I’m talking about. It was this hunch about the universality of the hunch that first made me feel that hunches were cross-cultural—a feeling that, over time, led to my belief that a rigorous, scientific study of the meaning and the rich variety of hunches was worth pursuing. But it was my realization that I am not alone in holding this belief that encouraged me to go public (for example, the vast majority of scholars of religion agree that, despite their empirical invisibility, such interior states are our ultimate object of study). In fact, recognizing that my belief in the existence and causal power of hunches was little different

I Have A Hunch

37

from almost any reader’s commonsense belief in the authorial intentions and meanings that lurk within a text (such as this very one), made coming out even easier. But I can guess what you’re going to say—and by the way, substituting that utterly dismissive term “guess,” which is nothing more than an ignorant stab in the dark, is an insult not only to those of us who have faith in our hunches but also those pursuing the thick description of the hunch. You might say: Why do we need to establish a phenomenology and a hermeneutics of hunches? Aren’t others already studying these sorts of things, such as psychologists? Why do we need new budget lines and new institutional sites for the scientific study of the hunch? Anyone familiar with the forces lined up against our resourceful predecessors in the study of religion—those historians of religions who, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, had to respond to those trying to prevent the establishment of publicly-funded Departments of Religious Studies (at least in the u.s.)—will recognize such questions for what they are: an unbelieving reductionist’s attempt to negate the meaning and significance of the hunch, our faith in them, and thereby derail our development of the special methods needed for their proper study. My reply, then, is that I believe—sincerely and deeply believe—that we, as scholars, are ethically compelled to correct the over-emphasis on the cognitive content of the hunch, for it overlooks the richly textured, lived experience of those who report having hunches. This is why I distinguish hunches not just from idle guesses, as I’ve already indicated, but also from more systematic hypotheses or predictions. Certainly, because hunches are human phenomena, they do indeed have, for example, a psychological and a social component; thus, there is no doubt that parts of the hunch can be reduced to, say, a testable prediction (based on generalizations from past observations, i.e., inductive reasoning), but, in my experience—and I’m assuming that we are all agreed that it is our faithfulness to the experience of the participant that drives our work—scholars who think that they have sufficiently studied hunches by merely reducing them to predictions fail to take seriously the unique, irreducible nature of the hunch, for even when a hunch seems incorrect, it nonetheless still teaches us something about our richly textured subjectivites—indicating that the value of the hunch lies in its deeper truth, its meaning, and not its mere accuracy. For as I’m sure you all have felt, having a hunch is an emotive thing, a form of unmediated, noncognitive communication with the self—or what Carl Jung famously described as “perception via the unconscious” (1968). So, while there may be certain aspects of the hunch that those in other, already-established disciplines can study, their methods do not fully account for the kernel that remains once we have studied the psychology, sociology, history, and anthropology of this trans-human

38

chapter 2

experience. Studying the hunch in its fullest, most authentic, and concrete sense—both its meaning to the participant (i.e., the hermeneutics of hunches) and the varied forms taken by the hunch in different times and places (i.e., the phenomenology of hunches)—can therefore be achieved only by an institutionally autonomous comparative science of hunches.1 But despite many of us believing in hunches—and believing in them in precisely the same way that we already believe that our beliefs motivate our actions2—there is a small but nonetheless influential group of critics in the academy today who would argue that, in making the sort of claims that I am advancing here, I am confusing first-order description of how a group of people talk about themselves and their worlds (such as their local debates about what this or that means to them) with second-order scholarly analysis of such debates and self-reports (such as investigating the material conditions that make the production of meaning, regardless the type, possible in the first place or why one among many possible meanings wins the day and comes to be seen by participants as commonsense). What’s more, in portraying mere description and paraphrase as scholarly, analysis critics argue that we are reproducing and thereby legitimizing what is actually just folk psychology (e.g., the popular idea that we have internal states called beliefs that motivate our behaviors and that we have private experiences and meanings that we only later express publicly in symbolic form). The problem, they claim, is that a scholarly paraphrase of a group’s commonsense account of the world fails to examine the wider, nonintentional structures that made, for instance, talk of hunches, beliefs, experiences, even inner impulses and meanings, possible and credible in the first place. Failing to take seriously our belief in, and thus our shared experience of, the private, interior world, these overly critical scholars explain it away as derivative of what, for them, are their even more primary, public conditions (e.g., non-intentional structures such as the economic system, the system of gendered relations, the structure that we call the liberal democratic nationstate, etc.). I think here of four examples of such critics: Donald Lopez, Robert 1 I am indebted to Mircea Eliade, among others, for this highly effective line of argumentation. See, for example, the foreword to his mid-twentieth century classic, Patterns in Comparative Religion: “I do not mean to deny the usefulness of approaching the religious phenomenon from various different angles; but it must be looked at first of all in itself, in that which belongs to it alone and can be explained in no other terms” (1996: xvii). 2 This belief in belief is easy to document, such as in any courtroom in which the accused’s motive is part of the evidence or in the work of virtually any pollster trying to determine such things as how people’s religious beliefs cause them to draw certain conclusions about gay marriage or abortion, or vote in a certain way.

I Have A Hunch

39

Sharf, Joan Wallach Scott, and Slavoj Žižek. Due to the limitations of space, consider merely the following four representative quotations, in which each of these writers historicize, socialize, politicize, and thereby dismiss the irreducibly originary, causal nature of the dynamic interior world from which hunches (not to mention beliefs, meanings, experiences, and impulses) arise. First, consider Lopez’s and Sharf’s essays in Mark Taylor’s Critical Terms for Religious Studies. In his essay entitled “Belief,” Lopez concludes: [T]he statement “I believe in…,” is sensible only when there are others who “do not”; it is an agonistic affirmation…Thus a statement of belief is a convention appropriate to a specific situation, sanctioned by a history and a community. As Wittgenstein notes, “the expression of belief…is just a sentence;—and the sentence has sense only as a member of a system of language; as one expression within a calculus”. 1998: 33–34

And from his essay, “Experience,” Sharf argues: The rhetoric of experience tacitly posits a place where signification comes to an end, variously styled “mind,” “consciousness,” “the mirror of nature,” or what have you. The category is, in essence, a mere placeholder that entails a substantive if indeterminate terminus for the relentless deferral of meaning. And this is precisely what makes the term experience so amendable to ideological appropriation. 1998: 113

Contrary to those of us who, like the musician, poet, or artist experiencing the sublimely motivating force of creativity,3 have experienced the power of the hunch for ourselves, both Lopez and Sharf argue that representing the individual as socially autonomous and motivated by an active, inner life is itself a political strategy whereby the contingent and inevitably public situations that determine such things as who gets to count as an individual are erased from view and thus protected from analysis, leaving only their discursive 3 I am in the debt of, among others, Rudolf Otto (e.g., his famous opening paragraph to Chapter 3 of The Idea of the Holy [1950]), for pointing out the manner in which the ineffable as experienced in aesthetics is essentially comparable to such feelings as religious experiences and, I would argue, hunches. Although I have no evidence to support this contention, I have a hunch that it was just such a presumed linkage that, at least in part, led to each of 2011’s issues of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion to open with a poem. This is the topic of Chapter 8 in this volume.

40

chapter 2

products, as if they were naturally occurring, stand-alone facts—much, such critics might argue, as a properly performed point with one’s index finger draws people’s eyes to a newly curious object across the room instead of toward the one doing the pointing. Demeaning the inherent value of the object that attracts our attention, reductionists like Lopez and Sharf would instead see such a gesture as an attempt by one speaker to coercively override the standards of others, leading us to conclude that those who adjust their bodies in response to a speaker who points to some object at the back of the room are simply exhibiting their docile participation in (and yet their active reinforcement of) a taken-for-granted authority system—a system and a participation that, the critics argue, evade analysis when we merely focus on the object and not the institutions that made it an item of discourse. As you might imagine, for such writers portraying local discursive products as if they were facts of nature (such as people’s claims to having such things as experiences, beliefs, and impulses, let alone hunches) fails to count as scholarship—a move that seems to presume, rather pompously I admit, that scholarship is somehow set apart from the lived experiences of the real people whom we study—an approach that critiques those of us who study what we call actual, concrete, and deep things by saying that (thinking back to Lopez’s nod to Wittgenstein) words like actual, concrete, and deep are just that, words. Nothing more or less—that is, saying that something is deep doesn’t make some posited “it” any deeper; instead, they argue that these are all words that authorize one position over all others, much like children defending the legitimacy of their claims by saying that they really really really believe in something. Critics therefore argue that taking at face value the use of such words as “belief” or “experience” is not what amounts to the sort of critical approach that gets to call the university its institutional home. For example, Joan Wallach Scott, former president of the American Historical Association, ends a long review essay on the place of the category of experience in historical studies by concluding as follows: What counts as experience is neither self-evident nor straightforward; it is always contested and always therefore political. The study of experience, therefore, must call into question its originary status in historical explanation [i.e., the assumption that scholarship begins with people’s disclosures of their experiences]. This will happen when historians take as their project not the reproduction and transmission of knowledge said to be arrived at through experience but the analysis of the production of that knowledge itself. 1991: 797

I Have A Hunch

41

And what might analyzing the production of experience—what amounts, rather counter-intuitively I might add, to writing a history, sociology, politics of belief—look like? Slavoj Žižek, among our more promiscuous intellectuals today, sketches its outlines in the opening to his anthology on ideology: Religious belief, for example, is not merely or even primarily inner conviction, but the Church, as an institution, and its rituals…far from being a mere secondary externalization of the inner belief, stand for the very mechanisms that generate it. When Althusser repeats after Pascal: “Act as if you believe, pray, kneel down, and you shall believe, faith will arrive by itself,” he delineates an intricate reflective mechanism…That is to say, the implicit logic of his argument is: kneel down and you shall believe that you knelt because of your belief…in short, the “external” ritual performatively generates its own ideological foundation. 1997: 12–13

In other words, such critics argue that we talk of belief, faith, and inner impulses as actual things despite all knowing that, to stick with Pascal’s original example, no Roman Catholic child first kneels (i.e., an observable action) because he or she believes or has faith (i.e., because of an inner disposition); instead, they argue, they kneel because everyone else kneels, a social uniformity operationalized by mom or dad pressing down on their little shoulders again and again (making tender but no less coercive physical action and peer pressure the cause of the action to such sceptics—an action whose repetition leads subjects (a word that now takes on even more theoretical significance) eventually to understand themselves as subject to the conditions of belief (with “believer” itself being a newly re-defined word as well, now signaling one’s status as a particular sort of group member). Belief, in this model, is a trace of a prior social occasion, somewhat like Frank Sinatra sang in “I Believe”: “And when it’s Christmas time I believe in Santa Claus.”4 Or, to rephrase: to the question, “Why do you believe that the University of Alabama’s football team is worth cheering for,” a student of mine once impiously answered: “Because my grandfather made me watch the games with him”—the reply of an ironic fan. In shifting our focus from our ability merely to recognize the obvious worth of the team to the purely happenstance social situations that, over time, made 4 Lyrics by Sammy Cahn and music by Jule Styne (1947)—written for the 1947 mgm musical, “It Happened in Brooklyn,” starring Frank Sinatra and Jimmy Durante and directed by Richard Whorf.

42

chapter 2

Santa seem worth believing in, and in redirecting our scholarly attention away from the game and to the moments when the little boy is, as Louis Althusser might have phrased it, interpellated as “fan” and as “grandson,” we see the great tragedy of this sort of critical approach: the inherent value of the free-floating signifier has been lost—whether it is what we consider to be a compelling piece of music, the deep meaning of a text, the beauty of a painting, the sacredness of a symbol, or the intentions and even the agency of the author.5 For now, those isolated, enduring things that we once knew as value, truth, beauty, sacrality, and yes, even meaning and identity, are (as Emile Durkheim has persuaded some overly impressionable thinkers) no longer expressions (there’s that word again) of a unique and enduring inner impulse only secondarily manifested in the world. As such, to refer again to Ol’ Blues Eyes singing about what he believes, to the song’s question, “Why do I believe,” we will no longer be satisfied with the song’s answer: “I guess that I believe because I believe, I believe…” Instead of what cynics will surely characterize as circular, selfauthorizing rhetorics, disclosures of belief will now be heard as a discursive residue of prior, non-intentional public situations (such as the meanings that readers of this text likely believe they have floating in their heads being seen as the product of an English grammar that was pounded into them as children by authority figures). And thus such critics conclude that carrying out scholarship that debates the meaning of some signifier (much as the same exegetical methods are used by so-called secular as well as theological scholars in many areas within biblical studies6) or argues for the correct way to express some identity (like the many scholars today who distinguish normative, peaceful, and thus orthodox Islam from what they then characterize as its dangerous deviations7) 5 Although I do not have a sound argument to use in refuting Althusser on this point, perhaps citing his apparent admission to having strangled his own wife as well as the time he subsequently spent in an asylum is sufficient to undermine a reader’s confidence in his critical position on this point. 6 For instance, they might cite the blog post by Jacques Berlinerblau, “An Afternoon with the Society for Pentecostal Studies” (http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/an-afternoon-with -the-society-for-pentecostal-studies/41496 [accessed Dec. 4, 2011])—despite his outspoken criticisms of the presence of theologians in our professional associations (such as the Society of Biblical Studies), according to his blog, both secular and theological biblical studies share the same goal of finding meaning in the text (i.e., exegesis). 7 Aaron Hughes (e.g., 2008, 2012b) comes to mind as a lamentable exception inasmuch as he argues that, as scholars, we instead ought to be studying the manner in which (in the case of Islam, in particular) normative Muslim identities are styled and authorized—whether that activity is carried out by the people whom we study or in the scholarship of those with whom we work.

I Have A Hunch

43

leaves those contingent and authorized situations intact and unexamined. Regardless of how it is portrayed, such scholarship is (according to the critics) actually highly conservative inasmuch as something historical and thus contingent (such as the very judgment that this and not that form of Islam is a deviation) is portrayed as inevitable and necessary—what that dilettante Roland Barthes famously described as “the ‘naturalness’ with which newspapers, art, and common sense constantly dress up a reality which, even though it is the one we live in, is undoubtedly determined by history” (1973: 11).8 But how, you may wonder, would this critical approach impact my commonsense proposal for a hermeneutics of hunches?9 Not well, is my simple answer. We have already witnessed the adverse effect that such a critical turn had on the academic discipline of history a generation or two ago, when radical social historians undermined what some now disparagingly call the “great man theory of history” (inasmuch as it was argued that portraying history to move by means of the deeds of lone social actors, such as Caesar or Napoleon, was an ideological fiction); we know too well how this same move curtailed an anthropologist’s right to interview only the men or the leaders of a village (inasmuch as critics argued that moving too quickly from the observation of select parts to conclusions about the whole served political agendas); we’ve also seen how an area study such as biblical studies has had to regroup when a small, disgruntled band of scholars claimed that it was not enough simply to interpret the meaning of the Word of God—something that had been a noble pursuit for thousands of years—but that, instead, we must try to explain why and how a social world could produce (and more importantly subsequent worlds reproduce) such texts and see them as sensible and useful in everchanging conditions—worlds that included competing sub-groups, all with their own interests and representations (ensuring that today it is highly problematic to assume that we, as scholars, can sensibly talk about such harmless generalizations as “the Bible says,” let alone describing the contours of “the 8 I refer to Barthes, even the entire “science” of semiotics, as a dilettante since he makes the outlandish claim that all signs can be studied in the same fashion, as a part of a larger system of signification. Clearly, anyone who thinks that, for example, professional wrestling can be studied in the same fashion as the Bible has failed to delve into the obviously deeper meaning of one of them. 9 Although some may challenge my use of “impact” as a verb, I feel that it makes the causality, which David Hume argued was simply an inferential product of our judgment (as opposed to something empirical that we can actually observe in the world), sound far more real, solid, and dare I say impactful, than opting simply for a word such as “influence.”

44

chapter 2

Muslim mind” or “the African-American experience”10). And it is unlikely that literary studies will ever sufficiently recover from Jacques Derrida’s preposterous claim that there is no outside to the text, Barthes’s silly idea that the author is the fictive product of a reader’s imagination, and that, no matter how closely we read Macbeth, we will never know what Shakespeare quite literally had in mind by having Lady Macbeth utter the words that, for whatever reason, appear as the epigraph to this very essay. If such time-honored academic fields as History, Anthropology, Biblical Studies, and Literature have been struck so hard by what is really nothing more than a scholarly fashion, if the purely private bedrocks of the academic study of religion—belief, experience, and faith—are now understood by some misguided thinkers to be anything but the pristine and originally innocent things that William James once knew them to be, then what hope has the science of hunches? Contrary to what I may have argued in earlier publications, and regardless of the reputation those writing have earned for me as being a threat to the very field in which I earn my living,11 I now believe—dare I add the word deeply, to make the ethereal realm of my belief all the more weighty and thus compelling—that more than the science of hunches is at stake in this debate. In fact, at the risk of sounding overly theatrical, let me add that Western Civilization itself—e.g., our unique notions of canon, tradition, meaning, justice, property, ownership, the free market, national identity, privacy, intentionality, and even the idea of the individual citizen which is the foundation of it all—may rise or 10

11

Luckily, there still are those among our ranks who, somewhat like the colonialistera scholars whom we no longer read for some reason, understand how essential commonalities can indeed be understood to unite people across time and space, regardless of the many other observable ways that they may seem to differ. I have in mind Jacob Olupona who, in his introduction to a review symposium on Arvind Sharma’s volume on the philosophy of religion in so-called “primal religions” (a traditional, perhaps even classic, category valiantly revived by Sharma, hence Olupona’s own admission that the works cited by Sharma are “perhaps a bit old fashioned” [2011: 792]) writes about how the preference for burial, rather than cremation, “reveals a general African tendency…”—though Olupona immediately goes on to find an exception in west Africa, where this “general African tendency” is not shared (2011: 791–792). Of importance is to note that his own discussion (791) makes evident the influence across the African continent of Christian and Muslim imperialist attitudes toward burial—attitudes and practices evident worldwide, of course—does not deter Olupona from admirably asserting that there is something generally “African” in this attitude. Most recently, see this claim as made by Nathan Schneider in his article, “Why the World Needs Religious Studies,” published online by Religion Dispatches (http://www .religiondispatches.org/archive/culture/4636/why_the_world_needs_religious_studies_/ [accessed Dec. 8, 2011]).

I Have A Hunch

45

fall by our ability to combat this currently fashionable but dangerous critical approach. (In fact, the American dream itself is now under attack: I think here of the National Public Radio story from the fall of 2011, reporting that the Pew Charitable Trust’s Economic Mobility Project had determined that regardless how fervently or deeply we may believe in the upward mobility of the American dream, it is actually one’s non-intentional structural conditions [like what profession your parents had, did they go to college, did they own a home, etc.] that determine one’s own class mobility. Simply put, they concluded that believing that hard work gets you ahead doesn’t necessarily get you ahead; being born to the “right” parents is a far better predictor.12) For by concluding that talk about such seemingly credible, taken-for-granted dispositions as deep beliefs, faith, feelings, impulses, experiences, intentions, and meanings is no different whatsoever from talking about such apparently silly things as hunches, and by arguing that scholars ought to do something other than merely adopt local, commonsense folk notions and then use them as if they were cross-cultural universals, such a critical approach not only makes a mockery of the lived experiences of the real people, in concrete situations, whom we study (by suggesting that they are not the final authority on how their own worlds work), but also mocks the scholars who understand that their role is merely to paraphrase, as faithfully as possible, what the so-called real people are already saying for themselves about themselves. So where does this leave us? Well, if, as stated by Bruno Latour in the opening to his 2010 book, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods, “Belief is not a state of mind but a result of relationships among people” (2), then scholars will have to completely rethink how it is that they go about their studies—I’m not optimistic about this, by the way, since they have long completed their own school work and earned their degrees, so it is unlikely that they will think they have anything new to learn. If they are willing to retool, then they will need to consider that so-called individuals (whether doing fieldwork or reading texts) and their claims of interiority are the tips of institutional icebergs, thereby never succumbing to the temptation to time-travel by thinking that any one disclosure, any one meaning, is somehow closer to an original or more authentic source. They will also need to take seriously that following scholars such as Latour means that we cannot simply universalize and ontologize anyone’s so-called experiences as if they were real things in the world. Ultimately, this all means making their own practices their object of study, and becoming 12

Weekend Edition Sunday (Nov. 6, 2011): http://www.npr.org/2011/11/06/142072783/american -dream-for-middle-class-just-a-dream. See also http://www.economicmobility.org/ (accessed Nov. 7, 2011).

46

chapter 2

(as Jonathan Z. Smith has been too often quoted as writing), the sort of historian of religions who is relentlessly self-conscious (1982: xi). And thus, as Pierre Bourdieu phrased it in the introduction to The Logic of Practice, we arrive at a position where we must pay more attention to ourselves, the ones doing all the pointing (i.e., all the defining), than the supposedly interesting things that once attracted (another key word, as if by their own animal magnetism?) our attention. For, following the scholars quoted above means that we must not only, as objectivism would have it, break with native experience and the native representation of that experience, but also, by a second break, call into question the presuppositions inherent in the position of an ‘objective’ observer who, seeking to interpret practices, tends to bring into the object the principles of his relation to the object. 1992: 27

This implies not studying the meaning of an object—whether it be the Bible or a hunch, I guess—but, instead, the historically embedded conventions that allow some thing to become meaningful for a specific group at a specific time; it implies no longer studying the identity of a group but the contingent structures in which particular social actors come to think of themselves as having shared affinities and estrangements (to borrow terms from Bruce Lincoln), as well as the techniques they use to authorize those structures as if they were eternal and universal; it entails ending our studies of traditions and instead examining the contestable means by which traditions and canons are created and legitimized, as if they carry an internal eternal kernel. Simply put, adopting such a critical approach means that my hunch that you, too, have hunches tells me more about my social world than it does about you and yours, making my beloved category “hunch”—not to mention the categories experience, belief, faith, meaning, and impulse—a surprisingly poor analytic term. If so, then I fear what might happen to the proposal for a Consultation on the Hermeneutics of Hunches that I was hoping to submit to the American Academy of Religion’s Program Committee for possible inclusion in an upcoming annual meeting. For if I take such criticisms seriously, really really seriously, then my earnest hope for my proposal to be accepted, and my even more deeply held hope for the establishment of this bold new field, seems to be in complete jeopardy. And to think that I had hoped so hard…so very, very hard. Come to think of it, it suddenly occurs to me that scholars do not give nearly enough attention to the category “hope” as a cross-cultural human universal— after all, “[i]f we define religion as the systematic expression of the interplay between traditional faith and transforming hope, then hope is of the essence

I Have A Hunch

47

of religion” (Slater 2005: 4125). Overlooking for the moment that there’s really no compelling reason whatsoever to define religion in this manner—other than to get the word “hope” into play in the opening line to an encyclopedia article—I have a hunch that a comparative science of hopefulness deserves our immediate attention.13 13

Thanks goes to William Arnal, Willi Braun, Jack Llewellyn, Craig Martin, Mary Jane Rubenstein, Robert Sharf, Merinda Simmons, and Vaia Touna for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

chapter 3 Introduction When, in the early spring of 1996, I was interviewed on campus for what became my tenure-track job, one of the faculty members asked me what I recall as the following question: “Although it might seem a little unfair to ask this question, but I think you’re up to it: so what do you think a Department of Religious Studies should look like?” The unfair part was not due to, say, my early career stage, for it was evident, I assume, that I had thoughts on how the field as a whole should work, but (at least to my way of thinking) referred to the setting in which such a question was being posed, I think: a job interview with a room full of strangers (though almost anything goes at a job interview, hence the question was posed, despite the comment that prefaced it). For, despite how much prep they might do, applicants have no idea where the other people in the room stand on the various issues of the day, and thus no idea what landmines they’re stepping on (I recall a friend who, many years ago at the start of her career, was asked, at a job interview, “So, what do you think of Eliade?”); so, while one wishes to be honest (for who wants to get a job and then, each day, never live up to the impression you created at the interview?) one also wishes not to shoot oneself in the foot, put one’s foot in one’s mouth, or live up to any of the other colloquial foot sayings. So I recall answering something about how I understood the field to work and the sorts of specialties and focus that I thought a Department of Religious Studies in a public university ought to have, probably doing so a little gingerly since it was apparent that the department interviewing me was largely comprised of people working either on the Bible or religion (read: one or another form of Christianity) in America. Being then in my third year as a full-time instructor at the University of Tennessee (a budget line that was drying up because the senior faculty whom I was replacing in the classroom was about to return to the department from serving in the university’s senior administration, leaving me with no employment for the coming year), having already earned my Ph.D. a little more than a year before, having already completed and submitted the contracted manuscript for my first book, Manufacturing Religion (though it would not be published for another year), and having already served as a co-editor of Method & Theory in the Study of Religion (mtsr) for several years, I certainly felt—rightly or wrongly—that I had an opinion on how the field ought to operate. Perhaps it showed. But given my assessment of the entrenched interests then (and still) governing the field, and the lengths to which those in power will sometimes

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004281417_005

Introduction

49

go to ensure that marginal interests remain just that (accurately or not, one old timer in the field once warned me about the “long knives” certain other, senior, and well-placed scholars in the field sometimes wield, despite their apparent commitment to civility and pluralism), it was just as evident to me that there is time for frank conversation and also time for honest but strategic disclosures. For whatever reason, I got the job. (For all I know I was their first pick or, as may be more likely, several people got the nod ahead of me but ended up turning down the job for who knows what reasons.) So I moved to Springfield, mo—where the worldwide headquarters for the Assemblies of God Pentecostal denomination (i.e., the World Assemblies of God Fellowship) happens to be located, a fact that was apparent, I always thought, in a certain sense of conservatism in the air—and began work at what was then called Southwest Missouri State University (some years later renamed Missouri State). Not long after my arrival, my friend from grad school, one of my mtsr co-editors, and partner on many subsequent projects, Willi Braun, took a trip down to the “Show Me” state from Quebec, where he then worked at Bishop’s University. Over the weekend we planned an edited volume that we had been discussing for some months, a resource that we thought was novel and much needed. Of course, we were not aware at the time that Mark C. Taylor’s Critical Terms for Religious Studies was already in the works, a volume that appeared in print two years before our own, taking a little of the shine off what we thought was our novel idea, just a little. (Moral of the tale: nothing is sui generis, for Taylor had obviously also seen Chicago’s already published Critical Terms for Literary Studies, a volume that influenced our own thinking.1) But given the—from where we sat, anyway—eclectic line-up of authors in his volume (though, I gladly admit that 1 See Arnal and McCutcheon 2013: Chapter 2 for my own survey of the various word books that are now available in the study of religion. Although that chapter was written prior to the publication of Robert Orsi’s edited volume, The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies (2012a), the highly critical review of it by Stefan Arvidsson (2013) nicely expresses what I also think of the volume. In part, Arvidsson writes: “In the first part [of the volume], dealing with the identity of religious studies, Orsi writes one of the key articles in the anthology, revolving around ‘the problem of the holy’. Before reading this ‘companion’, I would never have guessed that the most influential scholar in contemporary American religious studies—judging from Orsi’s discussion and references all over the anthology—is Rudolf Otto! When I was a student I learned to look upon Otto as an object for our investigations and not as someone that is likely to give us a hand in the job of explaining the complex world of religion. And no, neither Orsi nor the other contributors changed that lesson. For me ‘the holy’ will continue to be as religious a concept as ‘messiah’ or ‘dao’”. (586–7)

50

chapter 3

several of the chapters are, in my opinion, among the best written on their topics), we were still pleased to see our own moving forward. Thirty-one authors contributed. Janet Joyce—then an editor at Cassell, uk, who had already contracted an anthology series of my own—contracted the book in November 1996 (wisely, I would say, since many of the authors associated with that volume later ended up going to her with projects of their own, some even following her when she founded Equinox Publishers), during the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion (aar) and the Society of Biblical Literature (sbl) (held in New Orleans that year—Willi and I still recall the memorable meal, in the French Quarter, where, when we thought the time was right, Willi produced the proposal from his sport coat’s pocket…), and in 2000, the Guide to the Study of Religion was published. The essay that follows— though the topic was originally assigned to another contributor and thus something that I wrote at the last minute when Willi and I learned that author was unable to complete it on time—was a chapter in that volume. We couldn’t imagine the book without an essay entitled “Myth.”2 The reason that I began this introduction where and when I did is because Willi’s weekend trip to Missouri, to plan what we hoped would eventually just be called “The Guide” (I still recall when, seated in various places on the floor or at the kitchen table in what was then my sparsely furnished one-bedroom apartment, Willi came up with the idea of naming it after naturalist field guides as opposed to seeing it as a word book), took place just a few months after I started that tenure track job for which I had interviewed the previous spring. And so, when the Guide was finally published, the year before I ended up moving from Missouri to my current job chairing the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama, I walked across campus to the office of that colleague, the one who had posed to me that “unfair” interview question, and presented a copy of the Guide. My colleague did not need reminding of the question that had been posed, once I brought it up as the occasion for my visit, and so I gave the book, saying something along the lines of, “This is how I think the field ought to be organized.” The Guide’s organization is not alphabetical, like so many word books in our field, but thematic, suggesting a rationale, played out in terms of the different stages of scholarship: Description, Explanation, Location. That is, before one theorizes a domain, one needs to know what is in it (and what is not), and in 2 Another author, a little while later, was unable to complete a contribution to the volume to be entitled “Body” and, with the deadline approaching, we were unable to reassign that topic. But apart from these two, I recall all other contributors coming through with their assigned topics.

Introduction

51

order to do that, one needs to figure out what one will pay attention to and what one will ignore. So scholarship’s descriptive phase, we argued, begins with definition (i.e., theory in miniature), classification, comparison, etc., long before it tries to understand either the meaning of this or the cause of that (i.e., Explanation). And, eventually, scholarship ought to be aware of its own setting, the conditions of its own possibility: Location (which, in turn informs definition, and so the wheel turns). And that location, we thought, was one that is distinguishable from the locations occupied by the people and things that catch our attention, as worth talking and writing about; after all, we saw a difference between living your life and talking about other people living their lives. That such talk is itself the way that some of us happen to live our own lives makes us all curious to yet some other set of eyes—something we hoped was evident in ending the book with an epilogue containing one essay on the playful nature of scholarship. Rigorous, analytic, and self-reflexive—that sums up, I think, what we thought the field ought to be, in distinction from what it often ends up being. A copy of the Guide therefore still conveys a model of the field rather different from how most departments are organized. Hopefully, the essay that I wrote for the book on the topic of “myth” exemplifies this inasmuch as “myth” itself, and not just narratives labeled as myths, takes center stage by its close, as the camera pulls back further and further, hopefully persuading readers that the problem that ought to attract our attention is the fact that we think some things are myths, as opposed to the more common preoccupation of figuring out what myths really mean. Was presenting a copy of the Guide too brazen a move? Perhaps. I had already been promoted but denied tenure (two years before), and had been told to reapply for tenure again in the future—something that I was in process of doing when I was hired by the University of Alabama to chair its own small department (which was badly in need of reinvention; more on this in Chapter 9). So, although it was some months prior to when I later applied to Alabama (which was the second year they had searched for an outside chair, inasmuch as the search had failed the previous year), I guess it seemed to me that I had little left to lose from being less strategic than I had once tried to be in that job interview. My colleague accepted the volume and we discussed the field for a while, but since that department did not make a counter-offer to try to retain me when I eventually notified them that I had an offer from the University of Alabama, well, it indicated to me that my thoughts on a redescribed field— evidenced in how I try, in the following chapter, to rethink what it means to talk about myth—were not necessarily shared widely there—or at least not among the departmental gatekeepers at that time.

chapter 3

Myth Open a newspaper, a magazine or even a scholarly book and find the word “myth.” The odds are that the writer uses the word to convey one of two meanings. First, “myth” commonly denotes widely shared beliefs that are simply false—as in Bruce Lawrence’s Shattering the Myth: Islam Beyond Violence (1998), an attempt to expose and correct stereotypes of Muslims, or John Shelby Spong’s question, Resurrection: Myth or Reality? (1994), or Naomi Wolf’s best-selling The Beauty Myth (1992), a critique of the way women are forced to estimate their social and personal selves with reference to an impossible, ideal beauty standard. Second, “myth” is used to tag apparently fictional stories that originated in early human communities as attempts to explain commonplace but mysterious events in the natural world. Myths, in this sense, are understood to be aetiologies that explain the origins or causes of something that cannot be explained by scientific accounts. Although the first use of “myth” is harsher than the second, in both cases the word carries with it a strong judgment about ourselves and others: either we labor under falsehoods— unbelievable beliefs, stereotypes that disfigure those not like us, punishing standards of beauty, and so on—or, despite our best efforts, we do not understand the way the world actually works and so we use stories to come to the rescue where knowledge fails us. Despite the fact that these two senses originated in dramatically different social and historical contexts, as we will see, they co-exist so comfortably in the popular imagination today because both are modernist in character in that they are based on the premise that one can somehow perceive and distinguish between reality as it really is, on the one hand, and reality as it happens to be (mis)represented, on the other. Without this modernist supposition, neither of these uses of the word “myth” would make much sense at all. And it is precisely the underlying premise of the two most common uses of “myth” that should occupy our attention when considering the category “myth.”

Beware of Mythmakers

The term “myth” is not of our own recent invention; it comes to us from ancient Greece. Because it is with the Greeks that any commentary on myth must begin, surveys of the history of myth studies typically begin by recounting the

Myth

53

difference between two Greek terms, mythos and logos. Although these two terms originally seem to have been synonyms, both signifying “word” or “story”—in the ancient world a mythologos was a storyteller—mythos eventually took on restricted meanings. When Greek intellectuals and critics began to question the traditional tales of gods and heroes during the period of the “sophistic enlightenment,” mythos became an “implausible story” (Herodotus 2.23.1), mere “fabulous” tale-telling opposed to true history (Thucydides 1.22.4), or popular but false stories and even outright lies opposed to logos, which especially Plato defined as propositional statements open to demonstration and proof by means of logical reasoning (see Graf 1993: 1–2). Plato’s oppositional classification of mythos and logos has become a master trope in popular and scholarly discussions of myth. As for Greek thought, however, things were a little more complex than this. Richard Buxton (1994) has shown that Plato’s clean, oppositional distinction between mythos and logos is not always evident in ancient Greek literature and thus may not have been as widely representative of Greek views on mythos as is now customarily thought. Since Plato’s classification has been so axiomatic in Western myth studies, representing it as the Greek view, it may have more to do with the modern European “imaginary” Greece—among the most often used genealogical authorities for sanctioning everything from our own classificatory language to our culture—than with the historical Greek meaning of mythos and logos.3 In addition to the possibility that our own tale about Plato’s classification itself functions as a myth of origins for modern myth scholarship, we should take into account another provocative ambiguity. In the modern era, the term “mythology” usually denotes both a collection of a people’s myths as well as the science of studying collections of myths. The former refers in Platonic manner to a grouping of stories spun out of the human imagination, that is, unverifiable discourses, while mythology as a scholarly activity connotes, in similarly Platonic fashion, rational, demonstrable argumentation, the trading in verifiable discourses. The scholarly mythologos, the teller of scientific truths, thus works both in concert and in contest with the folk mythologos, the teller of fabulous and fantastic tales. It would seem, getting ahead of ourselves a bit, that it is not all that clear who the mythologists really are. 3 Lincoln’s Theorizing Myth (1999)—a book that came out after I first wrote this chapter—is, probably, the best single resource in our field, or any other, for thinking critically about theorizing the category myth itself (along with the politics of using it to describe other people’s tales), especially important in rethinking the taken-for-granted tale that we tell ourselves of the role of mythos and logos in ancient Greece (see his opening two chapters).

54

chapter 3

We see here one instance of the messy state of the category “myth.” Although it is usually used as a simple classificatory term to set off one kind of discourse from another, it turns out that the category is often intellectually committed to an a priori clean distinction between fact and fiction, truth and falsehood, fabulous delusion and scientific lucidity, us and them, just as it is rhetorically wielded to reinforce these oppositions by coordinating them with a scale of moral, social, and political values. Hence the power to label someone’s story as myth, and to classify our worldview as “scientific” over against their worldview as “mythic,” is not only to classify stories, but people (are they gullible or intelligent?), societies (are they uncivilized or civilized?), and cultures (are they primitive or advanced?). The apparently straightforward distinction between false and true tales (mythos versus logos) is therefore loaded with social significance and consequence. For example, we would be naive to think that Plato opposed mythos with the superior rationality of logos simply out of pure theoretical interest. Despite expressing what seems to be a sincere admiration for the talent of the poet, i.e., the story-teller (Republic 398a; see also 568a-c), Plato thought that poets are dangerous. But why? The mimetic poet sets up in each individual soul a vicious constitution, by fashioning phantoms far removed from reality, and by currying favor with the senseless element that cannot distinguish the greater from the lesser, but calls the same thing now one, now the other. Republic 605c

Readers who are acquainted with the rest of the Republic might wonder why, if such imitation and re-presentation by means of story-telling should be disallowed, Plato is so free to tell his own story that sounds suspiciously like a mythos of origins to authorize his just state (Republic 414c–415e). What appears, then, to be ultimately at stake in Plato’s—and our?—distinction of mythos from logos is a contest for the right to define the proper constitution of the state, the right to define the proper constitution of “the good,” “the true,” and “the just.” It was a contest in which “the myths that Plato didn’t like…were lies and the myths he liked…were truths,” as Wendy Doniger bluntly puts it (1998: 3). Plato’s mythos was not so much an innocent classificatory term as a word that he used to censure views he did not like in the arena of public discourse and persuasion. Turning to a more recent example, we could demonstrate how the mythoslogos distinction was once strategically allied to European expansionism and colonialism, an interest for which people characterized as primitive,

55

Myth

uncivilized, and gullible came in handy as needy beneficiaries of European “civilization” (Bowler 1992; R. Williams 1980). If we throw in the once-common view of European writers of the early modern era concerning the dawn of a slow but steady victory of science (logos) over mere superstition and religion (mythos), a dawn that must not only enlighten Europe but all the nations of the globe, we see once again that the classification “myth” is far from an innocuous academic label. It is instead a master signifier that authorizes and reproduces a specific worldview. With all this in mind, there just might be something to the fact that an ancient storyteller and the modern scientific study of mythology bear the same name. When thinking about the category of myth, therefore, we must reckon with, and not evade the possibility that [m]yth is everything and nothing at the same time. It is the true story or a false one, revelation or deception, sacred or vulgar, real or fictional, symbol or tool, archetype or stereotype. …Thus, instead of there being a real thing, myth, there is a thriving industry, manufacturing and marketing what is called ‘myth.’ ‘Myth’ is an illusion—an appearance conjured or ‘construct’ created by artists and intellectuals toiling away in the workshops of the myth industry. strenski 1987: 1–2

To anticipate the conclusion of this essay, despite our apparent interest in talking about real things—myths that are lived, told, written down, anthologized, and studied—we are continually struck by how our very judgment as to just what is and what is not a myth betrays some generally undetected logic inherent in our own social world and does not necessarily tell us about something that is self-evidently inherent in data we classify as myth.

Some Workshops in the Myth Industry

Although the use of the label “myth” to distinguish false from true stories continues to live on, the story of “myth” in the course of the past several centuries of modern scholarship fortunately is richer than that. Because there is a wealth of good resources that survey the many uses of “myth” (see for example Bolle 1968, 1983, 1987; Bolle et al. 1974; P. Cohen 1969; Doty 1986; Eliade 1973, 1991; Graf 1993: 9–56; Kirk 1973; Segal 1980; Vernant 1980: 203–260), we will only briefly sketch some of the major types here.

56

chapter 3

(1) Pre-scientific explanations of natural phenomena. Prominent among a group of nineteenth-century anthropologists was the view that myths are attempts on the part of early human beings to explain aspects of their natural environment. This understanding of myth was articulated influentially by the German philologist Christian Gottlob Heyne (1729–1812), though he had forerunners (on Heyne and his predecessors, see Graf 1993: 9–19). Heyne recovered and rehabilitated the term mythos, preferring it over his contemporaries’ use of fabula (fable), which Heyne considered to too tied up with notions of the fictive and absurd to capture what he considered the serious intent of mythos (Graf 1993: 10). As with so many of his contemporaries, Heyne believed that the key to understanding myths is located at their origin, which he pursued by a textual “paring knife” approach (i.e., source-critical and philological methods) on the assumption that the textualized myths available to him had accreted to themselves many additions and modifications in their oral and literary history. He concluded that  myth arose in prehistoric times, during the childhood of mankind. … [He] did not suppose that myth was a bizarre invention of primitive man; instead, he thought that it came into being naturally and inevitably at the moment when early man, overawed or frightened by some natural phenomenon, first sought to explain it, or when, moved by a feeling of gratitude toward some exceptional person, he wished to recount and extol a person’s deeds. graf 1993: 10

This view is commonplace in the scholarship of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a view that culminates in the Intellectualist tradition associated with such figures as F. Max Müller, Herbert Spencer, Andrew Lang, Edmund B. Tylor, and James G. Frazer. As suggested above, this understanding of myth continues to dominate today’s popular imagination. (2) Tales of heroes. For Heyne, myths were an explanation of natural phenomena as well as a memorialization of dramatic past events or heroic deeds, a view that goes back to the philosopher Euhemerus of Messene (340–260 bce), who suggested that tales recounting the deeds of the Olympian gods actually were disguised stories that glorified the exploits of real, but long-dead figures. In the modern era, this approach— sometimes called Euhemerism—was reintroduced by one of the fathers of nineteenth century evolutionary theory, Herbert Spencer. Spencer

57

Myth

argued that the historic origins of the belief in supernatural beings were to be found in the ancient worship of actual but long-dead ancestors. Over time, such ancestors came to be venerated as powerful beings (ghosts, gods, etc.) who were satisfied by means of ritual offerings. “Ancestor worship is the root of every religion,” Spencer concluded, and myths were both the proof for and the access to the historic “roots” of religion. (3) Expression of mythopoeic mentality. Another line of European thought focused on the emotive or expressive sources and functions of myth. Rather than understanding myth as an attempt to explain the natural world, it could be taken as the spontaneous expression of what many label the “mythopoeic mentality.” For instance, Bernard de Fontenelle (1657–1757) regarded myths as the evidence of a so-called “primitive mentality,” a form of pre-logical cognition and rationality that pre-dates logical and scientific rationality in the evolutionary history of the human mind. Fontenelle then drew a direct link between ancient human beings and contemporary “savages” (e.g., Iroquois, Laplanders, Kaffirs), a link that allowed him to make inferences about ancient people by studying the emotional life of his “savage” contemporaries. In this tradition of myth scholarship, we could also place the early twentieth-century philosopher Ernst Cassirer, a key figure in focusing attention on the fact that what sets humans apart from other members of the animal world is our ability to traffic in symbols. In the words of Percy Cohen, for Cassirer myth-making can no more be explained or explained away than can the making of poetry or music: myth is one way of using language for expressive purposes, through the symbolic devises of metonymy [when one thing stands in for another] and synecdoche [when a part stands in for the whole] and myth-making is, in some respects, an end in itself. p. cohen 1969: 339

For yet others, the “savage” was an appealing figure in its own right. Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), for example, thought that the more “savage” a group was, the more spontaneous and alive they were. Valorizing immediate “experience” and its raw expression, Herder and other nineteenthcentury Romantics evaluated myths positively as “repositories of experience far more vital and powerful than those obtainable from what was felt to be the artificial art and poetry of the aristocratic civilization of

58

chapter 3

contemporary Europe” (Bolle et al. 1974: 718). Assuming that “religious” emotions are somehow different from other experiential states, myth becomes the medium by which those emotions, inspired by the numinous or the holy, are expressed and made public. A fairly coherent tradition develops around this assumption of religion as “feeling” or “experience,” which is expressed by myths or other phenomena that can be studied in an attempt to gain access to religious experience. Joachim Wach’s dictum that myths should be read as the “theoretical expression of religious experience” (Wach 1958: 65) is a more recent statement of a very popular tradition that continues among scholars and the general public alike (on the problems of “experience” as an analytic category, see Scott 1991; Sharf 1998). (4) Social dreaming. In some psychology-based theorizing, myths function on the social level much as dreams, nervous habits, or slips of the tongue do in the life of the individual. That is, myths are thought of as the disguised expressions of anti-social but completely natural desires and wishes. Sigmund Freud (1913; see Segal 1996: vol. 1) painted a picture of the human condition as one in which individuals attempt to fulfill their private needs for pleasure (e.g., sex, food, power) while simultaneously attempting to secure their place in a larger social unit where such wish-fulfilment is rarely allowed for the sake of maintaining the social unit (e.g., to preserve family harmony, few of us actually tell our family members what we really think of them). Freud theorized that to be human means one is caught in a catch-22 of the worst kind: we are stuck with completely natural wishes that we have no choice but to suppress and internalize for the relative harmony of social life. Such suppression, however, creates anxiety. Sooner or later, this repressioninduced anxiety builds to such a point that the repressions must be let out, but only in a disguised form (since we can never actually act on the real desire), thereby giving vent to the anti-social desires but in a more socially acceptable manner. As a cruel footnote to this state of affairs, the guilt associated with acting out disguised desires, i.e., expressing desires inauthentically, produces new anxiety and the cycle is endlessly repeated. To be human, therefore, is to be neurotic to varying degrees, and myth is a narrative mechanism, a kind of collective therapy of neurotic desire, that allows members of social groups to act out their collective desires and fantasies while allowing them to remain within a seemingly coherent social unit. For instance, what better way is there to fulfill one’s love-hate relationship with authority figures (based on desires

Myth

59

of incest and patricide) than by telling and retelling, acting and living out tales of children rising up against parents and siblings battling each other? Be it the ancient Greek myths (e.g., Hesiod’s tale of the origin of the gods in the Theogony), biblical stories (e.g., the fratricide in the Cain and Abel story, or the sacrifice of Jesus, the supposed son of God) or modern movies, novels, and soap operas, this view sees them all as narrative vehicles for projecting and momentarily resolv­ ing  the inevitable and never-ending anxiety associated with social existence. (5) Expressions of the collective unconscious. Other psychologists see myths not as mechanisms for venting and coping with anxiety but as symbolic messages projected from ourselves and directed to ourselves. Following Carl Jung, these scholars understand myths as the means whereby aspects of our personality that are banished to our unconscious are given symbolic voice in the forms of certain archetypes (e.g., the Wise Old Man, the Earth Mother, the Innocent Virgin). We therefore ignore the messages of myths to our own peril, for they are the expressions of our full potential and true personality (Hudson 1966; Segal 1998). In our time, the late Joseph Campbell is perhaps the best known advocate of this viewpoint. Following a number of anthropological theorists before him, Campbell identifies a universal three-part quest motif involving departure-confrontation and change-return that comprises heroic stories told the world over throughout time. (Campbell draws attention to the exploits of Luke Skywalker in George Lucas’s Star Wars trilogy as one of the most recent instances of this age-old narrative.) Our attraction to these stories is understood as a function of our identification with their archetypical images (e.g., the viewer becomes Luke Skywalker or maybe Darth Vadar), an identification that helps us to realize and balance the various aspects of our own personality. Campbell asserts that the proper analysis of stories as different as the adventures of Odysseus and the televised images of the Apollo astronauts splashing-down in the ocean can provide evidence of certain fundamental aspects of not just individual human psyches but also aspects of our common human need to “follow your bliss” (Joseph Campbell 1968, 1988; Noel 1990)—a recommendation that, for some, earned Campbell the title of guru to the yuppie generation (B. Gill 1989). (6) Structuralism. For modern scholars of myth, the challenge generally is to see these apparently illogical and fantastic narratives as very much ordered and therefore understandable. Following the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1972, 1975–78), himself influenced by the structural

60

chapter 3

linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, some scholars study myths much as one studies language: as structured public evidence of the order of human cognition itself. Myths are structured in a fashion similar to the structuredness of human language, which is functional and meaningful only because of the complex inter-relationships among its basic units such as letters, phonemes, words, sentences, etc. Structuralists thus study myths not in terms of their historical development and change (the Euhemerist approach), nor as evidence of a pre-scientific rationality (the Intellectualist approach), nor as expressions of some raw emotional or mystical mentality (mythopoeic analysis), nor by artificially isolating one of their many elements in an allegorical hunt for archetypes (Jung). Rather, structuralists think that the message of a myth results from how its elements relate to each other as part of a coherent structure (Gordon 1981; Leach 1967; 1976). (7) Myths as truth. The theories of myth surveyed so far obviously arise from a diverse number of disciplinary fields (anthropology, philosophy, psychology, etc.). Drawing on these and other theories, a group of scholars in the history of religions school (a designation that translates the German Religionswissenschaft, literally “science of religion”) has developed an approach to the study of myths that is particular to much scholarship on religion. From this viewpoint, myths are stories that convey, in some veiled, encoded or symbolic form, a social group’s deepest personal and social values. Although programmatically exemplified in the works of Mircea Eliade (1959, 1960, 1963, 1974), myths as veiled, deep truths is the operative assumption in most current scholarship on religion. Here is a representative sampling: [M]yth is above all a story that is believed, believed to be true, and that people continue to believe despite sometimes massive evidence that it is, in fact, a lie. …[W]hat a myth is is a story that is sacred to and shared by a group of people who find their most important meanings in it; it is a story believed to have been composed in the past about an event in the past, or, more rarely, in the future, an event that continues to have meaning in the present because it is remembered; it is a story that is part of a larger group of stories. doniger 1998: 2

[T]he governing function of myth is to reveal exemplary models for all rites and all meaningful human activities. eliade 1991: 4

61

Myth

[Myth is] an expression of the sacred in words: it reports realities and events from the origin of the world that remain valid for the basis and purpose of all there is. Consequently, a myth functions as a model for human activity, society, wisdom, and knowledge. bolle 1987: 271

[M]yth is a narrative of origins, taking place in primordial time, a time other than that of everyday reality. ricoeur 1987: 273

[M]yth is a distinctive expression of a narrative that states a paradigmatic truth. long 1987: 94

[M]yth is the first form of intellectual explanation of religious apprehensions. wach 1951: 39

Encoded in these tales (i.e., tales “dating” from when the gods walked the earth, so these authors might argue) are the abiding values that help to form and maintain a social group. For example, myths told and acted out in ritual reinforce the value that humans are at the center of an orderly, created world, or the value that, despite being a unified whole, society is a complex hierarchy and all of its members have their own particular duties and responsibilities. Regardless of how reality really is, the view of myth as veiled communication of the true constitution of the world and humanity’s place in it suggests that in studying myths, the modern reader can learn how past or distant societies believed reality—and their place in it—to have been. At the heart of the “myth as truth” approach evidently is the attempt by scholars to celebrate myths as containing some sort of profound meaning that “cannot be expressed in simple propositions” (Sharpe 1971: 43). “Mythology,” to quote the late Italian historian of religion Raffaele Pettazzoni, “as the science of myth, must quit its traditional anti-mythical attitude. It must be livened by the spirit of humanism, by an attitude of sympathy towards the myth as a mark and a document of our human estate” (1954: 36, emphasis added). Studying myths thus amounts to divining our deepest human “estate” (essence), for all myths are generated by that estate and convey it, if only we apprehend the mythic narratives rightly. According to this view, the proper use of “other people’s myth” means recognizing that “their myths have always been our myths, though we may not have known it; we recognize ourselves in those myths more

62

chapter 3

vividly than we have ever recognized ourselves in the myths of our culture” (Doniger O’Flaherty 1986: 224). With this sympathetic turn in myth scholarship, the distance between the liar and the truth-teller has disappeared, as has the distance between the mythmaker and the myth analyst. For, insofar as we are all parts of social groups, we all have myths, myths we live by (to echo a phrase of Joseph Campbell). If the academic study of religion is understood as something other than the practice of religion, then this sympathetic turn (and it is, rightly put, sympathetic rather than empathetic) has profound implications for whether it is possible to study religion in an academic sense.

Redescribing Myth as Something Ordinary

Despite certain differences, the approaches I have outlined are unified in that all see myths either as a terribly false or as a deeply true narrative object to be read and interpreted. Common to all these approaches is the assumption that “myth” is the product, the effect or an evidentiary trace of some absent, forgotten, distant—that is, not immediately apparent—phenomenon or human intention. Thus the mission of myth scholarship has generally been construed as a reconstructive and hermeneutic labors bent on ferreting out the truth or falsity of myth, on decoding and then recovering obscured meanings. In short, common to all approaches has been the view that myths are signs of such personal or interior causes and intentions as (1) a mentality, (2) an emotional or psychological “experience,” (3) a universal human “estate” such as Human Nature. Given the utter difficulties of studying such interiorized dispositions and mentalities—after all, scholarship can only examine that which is public, observable, and documentable—is there another way of defining and tackling the issue of myth? Can the category “myth” be redescribed and the study of myth be rectified? Recall the definition of myth offered by Doniger: “what a myth is is a story that is sacred to and shared by a group of people who find their most important meanings in it” (1998: 2). Most scholars of religion would accept this definition as straightforward and uncontroversial, but attention needs to be focused on two words: “sacred” and “important.” Both words convey socially-based value judgments. After all, the word sacred comes from a Latin root that means “to set apart.” It seems that deeming myths as sacred, true, essential, paradigmatic, or important is somewhat circular, for what makes something sacred or true in the first place? Thinking of Eliade’s understanding of myths and rituals as the apolitical containers of primordial truths—truths that are repeatedly made manifest in retellings and re-enactments—we can reply that “primordiality does not

Myth

63

emerge out of natural givenness, but is an essentially fragile social construction which—like every social construction—needs special rituals and communicative efforts [myths] in order to come into existence and be maintained” (Eisenstadt and Giesen 1995: 78). Taking this view makes yet another part of Doniger’s definition stand out: she noted that “a group of people…find their most important meanings in [myth]” (1998: 2, emphasis added). Might it not be that a group of people fabricate their most important meanings by means of myth? Instead of perpetuating the view that myths are self-evidently meaningful things (whether true or false, oral or written or ritually performed) that can be learned, retold, recorded, interpreted, and studied, I would like to suggest that we redescribe the term myth. Let us think of it not so much as a kind narrative identifiable by its content (e.g., traditional tales of the gods or ancient heroes), but as a technique or strategy. Let us suppose that myth is not so much a genre with relatively stable characteristics that allow us to distinguish myth from folktale, saga, legend, and fable (Bolle et al. 1974: 715–717; Graf 1993: 6–8) as a class of social argumentation found in all human cultures. Let us entertain the possibility that myths are not things akin to nouns, but active processes akin to verbs. Instead of saying that “a people’s myths reflect, express, and explore the people’s self-image” (Bolle et al. 1974: 715), or that the contents of myths act as a “pragmatic charter of primitive faith and moral wisdom” (Malinowski 1926), a shift in perspective allows us to suggest (1) that myths are not special (or “sacred”) but ordinary human means of fashioning and authorizing their livedin and believed-in “worlds”; (2) that myth as ordinary rhetorical device in social construction and maintenance makes this rather than that social identity possible in the first place; and (3) that a people’s use of the label myth reflects, makes possible, and legitimizes their own self-image. To build on Malinowski, we can say that myth is the vehicle whereby any of a variety of possible social charters is rendered exemplary, authoritative, singular, unique, as something that cannot be imagined differently. Redescribed in this manner, the study of myth becomes not just the domain of historians of religion conversant in long-dead languages and cultures— their data understood by them to be “an autonomous, hermetically-sealed territory” (Buxton 1994: 14)—but the domain of a far-wider collection of scholars who study the ways by which human beings the world over construct, authorize, and contest their social identities (on religious studies as a domain within culture studies, see Fitzgerald 1997, 1999). No longer would myths be considered unique, symbolic, religious narratives, identified by the fact that they are “specific accounts of gods or superhuman beings involved in extraordinary events or circumstances in a time that is unspecified but which is understood as existing apart from ordinary human experience” (Bolle et al. 1974: 715).

64

chapter 3

Instead, scholars would query just what it is about these tales—and what it is about many other modes of public discourse—that leads people, including scholars, to boost them into the realm of the extraordinary in the first place. After all, for the scholar in the human sciences, the data of human behaviour is ordinary (which does not mean simple or simplistic) to begin with in the sense that it is human behaviour. Myths thus are utterly mundane and assigning them an “extraordinary” status as a precondition for studying them rightly is to begin our study with a mistake that deflects us from a more interesting and productive scholarly aim: undertaking the difficult study of the mechanisms whereby societies create the extraordinary from the everyday. Pierre Bourdieu puts the issue properly: There is nothing more difficult to convey than reality in all its ordinariness. Flaubert was fond of saying that it takes a lot of hard work to portray mediocrity. Sociologists run into this problem all the time: How can we make the ordinary extraordinary and evoke ordinariness in such a way that people will see just how extraordinary it is? bourdieu 1998: 21

While the study of specific types of stories—stories with gods set at the beginning or the end of time, for example—is indeed fascinating and well worthwhile, would it not be far more interesting to study the mechanisms whereby just these and not other stories became important or sacred to begin with? Taking for granted the importance, the sacredness or the extraordinary character of certain stories only puts off asking what I take to be a more basic question: how is it that individual human beings accomplish, in part by dealing in myths, the all too ordinary but fascinating trick of coming together and acting collectively over great spans of time and space?

Myth as What-Goes-Without-Saying

To begin answering this question, we can appeal to Roland Barthes, who examines the process of mythification, or even mystification, a term that might be more appropriate than myth. For when he identifies myths, he examines not stable stories but networks of actions, assumptions and representations— what other scholars might term a discourse. Like Bourdieu after him, Barthes’s interest concerns the manner in which the ordinary is made to stand out, is set apart (made sacred), and made to appear extraordinary. Barthes therefore problematises the “‘naturalness’ with which newspapers, art, and common

Myth

65

sense constantly dress up a reality which, even though it is the one we live in, is undoubtedly determined by history” (Barthes 1973: 11; see also Moriarty 1991 and Saper 1997). For Barthes, then, myth “is not defined by the object of its message, but by the way in which it utters its message: there are formal limits to myth, there are no ‘substantial ones’” (1973: 117; emphasis added). He departs from the traditional way of defining myth with reference to its unique substance or content and opted, instead, to see myth as a particular type of human endeavour displayed in but not limited to storytelling. Breaking away from some long-held notions, Barthes answers his own rhetorical question: “Everything, then, can be a myth? Yes, I believe this” (1973: 117). Within the field of religious studies, we find a related sense of myth as human activity—this time the active process is aptly renamed “mythmaking”—in the work of the scholar of Christian origins, Burton Mack, one of whose books is subtitled, The Making of the Christian Myth (1995). For Mack, the art of mythmaking “turn[s] the collective agreements of a people into truths held to be self-evident” (1995: 301). As noted by the French scholar of ancient Greece and Rome, Paul Veyne, “truth is the most variable of all measures. It is not a transhistorical invariant but a work of the constitutive imagination. …[N]ot only the very aim of our divergent assertions but our criteria and means of obtaining true ideas—in short our programs—vary without our realizing it” (1988: 117–118, emphasis added). According to this position, we do not find, discern, or interpret truths and meanings. Rather, in every age and culture, people actively work to selectively make some things true and meaningful and other things false and meaningless. If we see myth as one way of making meanings, then it is little wonder that scholars like Mack are equally interested in both the Bible and the u.s. Constitution as products of rhetorical mechanisms that construct seemingly self-evident meaning and authority. Both documents are particularly powerful instances where active processes have dressed up what might otherwise be mundane and forgettable historical moments as extraordinary ones. I can think of no better example of such practices than the familiar words used in the u.s. Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be selfevident.” There is a rhetoric embedded here that generally passes by unnoticed. These words do something, but what? The opening of the Declaration effectively removes readers from the tug-and-pull of the contingent, historical world and places them in an abstract, ahistorical realm where such things as truths are obvious, enduring, and self-evident. Through this rhetoric of self-evidence, then, the long European history of philosophical, political, and social debate and development which eventually led to this document—and the nationstate founded upon it—is completely obscured, as if the Declaration, and later

66

chapter 3

the u.s. Constitution as well, spontaneously arose from the ground fully formed. After all, self-evidences do not have a history, they leave no trace, and they are not manufactured. They simply appear and announce their existence. Although lost on the masses of people, these so-called self-evidences were perceived by a privileged class of “Constitutional framers.” Within such texts, then, there is also a rhetoric of discernment—only some of us have “eyes to see and ears to hear.” Just as the pre-existent Veda was heard only by the Indian rishis of old, the pre-existent Qu’ran was heard only by Muhammad, the preexistent voice of yhwh prompted a response only in some listeners, and the Christian “Word” (logos) which pre-existed creation itself was truly heard by only a few, so, too, the content of the Declaration benefits from (i.e., is authorized by) not just a rhetoric of self-evidence but by the privileged status of those wise or lucky enough to have discerned it. To push this a little further, it is wholly misleading to talk of the document being authorized, for this document cannot exist apart from the social world from which it arose and which it supports. Therefore, the all-too-real world of its framers and users is what ultimately gains legitimacy. Considering the manner in which many “founding fathers” of the u.s. continued their practice of owning slaves, the supposedly self-evident, timeless rights of equality, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are circumscribed in terms of the interests of a rather narrow ruling elite of land-owning white males.

Mythmaking and Social Formation

Reconceiving mythmaking as the ongoing process of constructing, authorizing, and reconstructing social identities or social formations would be to create a “catalog of strategies for maintaining paradoxes, fighting over dissonances, and surviving [and recovering from] breakdowns” (Lease 1994: 475)—breakdowns insomuch as social identity is not eternal. After all, despite the success of certain ways of producing social identities, people today do not identify themselves as Roman citizens—unless, of course, one recalls how Mussolini and the Italian fascists tried to “recover” the glorious Roman past in their attempts to forge a new Italian social identity earlier in this century. Such a catalogue of strategies would amount to a map of the many social sites where tales, behaviours, institutions, clothing styles, even architectural details are used to generate and defend (and sometimes to overthrow) authority (Lincoln 1994). Acting as a sort of demythologizer reminiscent of a tradition in New Testament studies that was made famous by Rudolf Bultmann (1958), Burton Mack writes:

67

Myth

Social formation and mythmaking are group activities that go together, each stimulating the other in a kind of dynamic feedback system. Both speed up when new groups form in times of social disintegration and cultural change. Both are important indicators of the personal and intellectual energies invested in experimental movements…[S]ocial formation and mythmaking fit together like hand and glove. mack 1995: 11

This reciprocal relationship between social formation and mythmaking was made clear as early as Émile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912). A society can neither create nor recreate itself without creating some kind of ideal by the same stroke. This creation is not a sort of optional extra step by which society, being already made, merely adds finishing touches; it is the act by which society makes itself, and remakes itself, periodically. durkheim 1995: 425

In keeping with the Durkheimian tradition of sociological studies on religion and myth, we could say that a social formation is the activity of experimenting with, authorizing or combatting, and reconstituting widely circulated ideal types, idealizations or, better put, mythifications that function to control the means of and sites where social significance is selected, symbolized, and communicated. It is this tradition of scholarship on mythmaking to which Gary Lease contributes when he speaks of religions as totalized systems of meaning, or Jonathan Z. Smith when he thinks of ritual as exercising an “economy of significance” and of myth as a “strategy for dealing with a situation” (1982: 56; 1978a: 97). I place Roland Barthes in this tradition as well, for he speaks of the ways myths authorize contingent History by re-presenting it as necessary Nature. Because this is a tradition that sees mythmaking as an ideological activity, we also find Bruce Lincoln here, who once noted that an ideology…is not just an ideal against which social reality is measured or an end toward the fulfillment of which groups and individuals aspire. It is also, and this is much more important, a screen that strategically veils, mystifies, or distorts important aspects of real social processes. 1986: 164

Mythmaking is thus a species of ideology production, of ideal-making, where “ideal” is conceived not as an abstract, absolute value, but as a contingent,

68

chapter 3

localized construct that comes to represent and simultaneously reproduce certain specific social values as if they were inevitable and universal. Social formation by means of mythmaking, then, is explicitly caught up in the ideological strategies of totalization, naturalization, rationalization, and universalization. With Benedict Anderson, we could say that social formations are based on mythic “ontological reality [that is portrayed as] apprehensible… through a single, privileged system of re-presentation” (Anderson 1991: 14). Accordingly, Durkheim’s thoughts on the creation and authorization of “some kind of ideal” find their modern equivalent in the works of the authors just named. Social formations are the ongoing results of mythmaking activity (where I see mythmaking as a discourse involving acts and institutions as well as narratives), an activity that unites into a totalized system of representation what Mack refers to as the epic past, the historical past, the historical present, the anticipated historical future, and the hoped-for epic future in one narrative, behavioral, and institutional system (on the production of history, see Braun 1999). Where but in religions and forms of nationalism do we see this happening most effectively? We should not forget that despite attempts to construct a past or future long removed from the present, mythmaking takes place in a specific socio-political moment and supports a specific judgment about the here and now. Myths and rituals, therefore, do not simply project consensual agreements that have been reached; they do not merely communicate some specific substance so much as give shape and authority (i.e., significance) to this or that system of judgments and messages. Myths present one particular and therefore contestable viewpoint as if it were an “agreement that has been reached” by “we the people” (a phrase that is part of a powerful mythic rhetoric common in the history of the u.s.). For instance, to take up Mack’s use of the contemporary American situation as an example, a rhetoric that brings together references to the founding fathers (the epic past), the image of the patriarchal nuclear family of the 1950s (historical past), current crime rates, teenage pregnancy rates, abortion and divorce rates (one particular present), projections for budget reductions in the next ten years (historical future), all of which contribute to the future well-being or “security” of the American nation (epic future), is the consummate art of mythmaking. By means of mythmaking, the historicity and specificity of each of these elements is collated into one grand unfolding narrative. By means of a disguised or undetected ideological slippage, “is” becomes “ought,” the myth of presence and self-identity is established, and value-neutral “change” is judged to be either good or bad, progressive or retrograde (Jameson 1988: 17; Geertz 1968: 97). Mythmaking, “a particular register of ideology, which elevates certain meanings to numinous status” (Eagleton 1991: 188–189), has here done its work.

69

Myth

Evidently, this view of “myth” differs significantly from the suggestion that, because “mythlike ideologies” such as capitalism and communism have taken on greater prominence in recent time, “the word ideology might indeed be replaced, in much contemporary discussion about politics, by the term mythology” (Bolle et al. 1974: 727). The tradition of writers that I have just surveyed would hold just the opposite position: by means of mythmaking, local, symbolic worlds of significance are authorized and naturalized by being (mis) taken for or actively portrayed as universal, literal ones. This is the role of ideology in human affairs. Because one of the premises of all social-scientific scholarship is that all human doing is contextualized within historical (social, political, economic, gendered, etc.) pressures and influences, we must therefore understand all such doings partial and linked to specific temporally and culturally located worlds. “There is no primordium,” as Jonathan Z. Smith reminds us, “it is all history” (1982: xiii). Or, as Marx and Engels put it, “social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of human practice” (1970: 122). Acknowledging this ensures that we do not lose sight of the fact that mythmaking allows a sleight of hand; it is the art of manufacturing, from raw materials which are, by definition, only part of the whole, total symbolic systems. Because social values, truths, and ideals are hardly universal, because, as Durkheim noted, the “mystery that appears to surround them is entirely superficial and fades upon closer scrutiny…[when one pulls] aside the veil with which the mythological imagination covered them” (1995: 431), there is an inherent contradiction embedded at the core of social formations—a point taught to us by Marx long ago. Accordingly, there is much at stake for members of a social formation to maintain the mythic status of the system of representation and signification—their very self-identity is continually at stake! As Lease comments concerning the inherent contradictions of all totalizing practices, “a society cannot live without [totalizing practices], nor can it live with them” (1994: 475). It is precisely the mythmakers (theologians, politicians, teachers, pundits, and, yes, even and too often scholars of religion) who develop discourses that obscure and thereby manage these contradictions (see further McCutcheon 1998c).

“Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain”

Mythmaking, then, is the business of making “particular and contingent worldviews appear to be ubiquitous and absolute” (Arnal 1997: 317). Social formation

70

chapter 3

by means of mythmaking is nothing other than the reasonable response to the inevitable social disruptions, contradictions, and incongruities that characterize the ordinary human condition. Systems of social significance, encoded within narratives of the epic past and the anticipated plenary future, coordinated within behavioural and institutional systems of cognitive and social control, characterize our responses to the various incongruities and disruptions that come with historical existence: “myth both unites the group and provides an interpretive framework for coping with the exigencies of, and threats from, the natural world” (Giddens 1984: 265). Mythmaking might even be the pre-eminent means for creating cognitive and social continuity amidst the discontinuities of life. As Jean Baudrillard suggests, it is our way of maintaining our accumulative culture by way of “stockpiling the past in plain sight” (1994: 10). Or, as the scholar of early Christianity Ron Cameron puts it: “Religion as mythmaking reflects thoughtful, though ordinary, modes of ingenuity and labor” (1996: 39). We should thus expect that mythmaking is a highly political affair, that “mythmaking is an everyday practice which permeates the discourse of political communicators” (Flood 1996: 275). When redescribed in this fashion, [t]here is no need to consider myths as variant expressions of psychological archetypes. There is no need to posit a special form of consciousness or to situate the process of mythmaking within a consciousness or to situate the process of mythmaking within a psychopathology of the irrational. There is nothing strange about mythmaking. There is nothing wrong with it. It is an entirely normal way of making political events intelligible in the light of ideological beliefs. flood 1996: 275

Classifying and studying so-called myths of origins, end-times, tricksters, etc., as if these tales express some deep, abiding truths that require some kind of deep, abiding appreciation on the part of scholars, leaves this entire form of political analysis untouched—a point brought home with sharp clarity in Graeme MacQueen’s critique (1988) of Alan Dundes’s (1984) collection of essays by myth theorists, most of whom understand myths as essentially apolitical. The implication of all this for scholars of religion is that if we take for granted the already established meaning and unquestioned authority of “myth”— myth’s sacredness—we, too, may have come under its spell and, as a consequence, perpetuate a politics of which we may be unaware (Cady 1998;

Myth

71

McCutcheon 1997a, 1998c; Murphy 1998). In so doing, we miss out on asking: What is going on when we constantly dress up our own creations in “decorative displays” to make them pass for what Barthes calls “what-goes-without-saying?” How can the descriptive “is” so smoothly become the prescriptive “ought?” If anything, I presume that Bolle’s use of the phrase “expressions of the sacred in words” would attract Barthes’s interest in demystification just as much as does professional wrestling, the striptease, and even margarine, only to name a few cultural goodies that occupy his attention (1973). Where historians of religion are often content to employ a purely descriptive, supposedly value-free phenomenological method simply to determine what people hold to be sacred, exemplary, and paradigmatic, Barthes’s and Mack’s critical methods identify the strategies that construct the set-apartness of various conventions, beliefs, and practices in the first place. The gain of this redescriptive turn in myth studies is its applicability to all human efforts to construct a place beyond criticism, then to equate a particular instance of human society and culture with it. After this redescriptive turn, myths are no longer merely a subset of stories. Rather, myths are the product and the means of creating authority by removing a claim, behaviour, artifact, or institution from human history and hence from the realm of human doings. A rectified study of myths thus turns out to be study of mythmaking. Despite my disagreement with much scholarship on myth, I think that Bolle, Buxton, and Smith were on the right track when they suggested that “a myth has its authority not by proving itself but by presenting itself” (1974: 715). In attempting to manufacture an unassailable safe for the storage of social charters and “worlds,” mythmakers, tellers, and performers draw on a complex network of disguised assumptions, depending on their listeners not to ask certain sorts of questions, not to speak out of turn, to listen respectfully, applaud when prompted, and, in those famous lines from The Wizard of Oz, to “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.”

chapter 4

Introduction

Up to this point in my career, I’ve been lucky enough to be involved with producing several different collections of essays in honor of senior faculty members who have had an important impact on my thinking and my career. The first that I edited was ­self-published and I had a small number of copies bound and distributed to the contributors and the recipient only; it was in honor of the now-late Douglas Crichton, a  professor at Queen’s Theological College, upon his retirement in the late 1980s. The others—a special issue of Method & Theory in the Study of Religion (mtsr) in memory of the late Gary Lease (21/2 [2009]), a multi-authored book (co-edited with William Arnal and Willi Braun [2012]) in honor of Donald Wiebe, and also the Festschricht in honor of Jonathan Z. Smith, for which the following essay served as the introduction—came later and reflect a rather different set of interests than I had much earlier in my career when conceiving of that volume in honor of Doug. (It was entitled In Celebration of Faith [1989]; although I guess I removed that self-published volume from my c.v. many years ago [if it was every there], my Master of Divinity and Master of Theology degrees [M.Div. 1986 and Th.M. 1987, respectively, and both earned at Queen’s University, in Canada] have always remained there, evidence of the path that I happen to have taken to arrive at the questions that I now find compelling.) For after deciding that a fourth year in my undergraduate degree was not a priority to me (I hadn’t done very well on the Medical College Admissions Test [mcat], so an M.D. was no longer much of an option, if it ever really had been), I graduated with a B.A. in Life Sciences (rather than the B.Sc. Honors that completing the fourth year would have earned for me), enrolled in the Master of Divinity degree, and realized shortly thereafter that although I found the object of study fascinating— just why do people believe in God? (as I surely defined religion back then)— I was rather less motivated to be credentialed as a ritual specialist who led a flock of his own. It was for that reason that I never completed the pastoral training/practicum side of the degree and was never ordained (the college I attended was affiliated with the United Church of Canada, the country’s largest Protestant denomination; most of my peers went on to become ministers, and one of them [my good friend then, David Giuliano] eventually went on to become the moderator of the church [i.e., its elected, national leader]). Because my wife, Marcia, then had another year remaining in her own education (earning her B.A. in Social Psychology and then her Master’s degree in Education,

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004281417_006

Introduction

73

also at Queen’s University—where we met, in fact), and because the M.Div. was hardly an academically rigorous degree (and I skipped far too many classes, as I recall—in fact, I so infrequently attended some classes that my Biblical Greek professor didn’t even award me a grade, giving me instead merely a “Pass”), I remained at Queen’s for an additional one-year Master’s degree (the Th.M.), thereby tackling my first thesis (under the direction of Pamela Dickey [later Pamela Dickey Young]), hoping it would be good preparation for the eventual doctoral dissertation that I was then wanting to write one day. In terms of approach and data it wasn’t, however, but in terms of learning how to make an extended argument across several chapters it was—thus, an early lesson in form versus content. For my work back then was on the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne, and, by extension, its Christian theological use (e.g., by such authors as John Cobb and David Ray Griffin). My 1987 Th.M. thesis was entitled, Process Thought and the Problem of Evil: A Study of the Contemporary Process Theodicy of David Griffin in the Light of Charles Hartshorne. I even wrote abstracts for their journal, Process Studies; in fact, three of the first four reviews I published in various journals, between 1989 and 1993, were on books in this area. My interest then was the problem of evil or, in process thought, the lack of such a problem (i.e., there was no longer any such problem inasmuch as these writers did not posit agency in quite the same way as others, ensuring that all actual entities or actual occasions, as they named their building blocks of reality, had a role to play in outcomes—hearkening somewhat back to that memorable line from Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who: “a person’s a person no matter how small”). My next degree, an M.A. at the University of Toronto (1988), was also on process philosophy, directed by the late Ernie Best—a degree that I had not planned on earning since I had applied directly to their Ph.D. degree instead, but as liberal (or progressive or whatever you might call it) as I might have seemed to myself back in Kingston, where I was surrounded by people training to be ministers, my two theology degrees and interest in theodicy (rightly, I eventually came to think) signalled mixed messages to the acceptance committee, prompting them to accept me into a one-year M.A., despite my own wishes. In hindsight, I’d say that it took me two or three years to make the shift in my thinking, to move from taking courses in Plato’s dialogues, Aristotle’s Metaphysics, and Kant’s first Critique to find faculty like Donald Wiebe (with whom I eventually took a variety of classes) and Neil McMullin (who eventually became my dissertation supervisor), as well as to make good friends (as it turns out, career-long friends) like Willi Braun, Bill Arnal, Darlene Juschka, Bruce MacKay, and Herb Berg, all of whom helped me to come to understand that a whole new set of questions and tools were now

74

chapter 4

available to me in this new institutional domain (despite disagreeing with many of the faculty who then worked in Religious Studies at Toronto— inter-religious dialogue and the search for deep meaning seemed the order of the day then, as it continues to be in many departments today). Thus, the dissertation topic that eventually became my first book, Manufacturing Religion (1997b), was begun with a change in thinking largely brought about by Donald Wiebe’s uncompromising distinction between theology and the academic study of religion, on the one hand (theologians back in Kingston had cautioned me about him when they learned I was going to Toronto; “think for yourself, Russell,” one of them had warned me in a letter, in 1990, that I now have framed on my office wall) and Neil McMullin’s—what shall I call it?—post-Marxist approach to issues of power, discourse, agency, and identity, on the other. All of this was then passed through the filter of countless conversations in the library, in cafeterias, and in coffee shops, with classmates and good friends—sometimes carried out while reading and editing submissions to mtsr, the journal begun by doctoral students at the University of Toronto and which I was lucky enough to join, as a co-editor, late in its second year. None of these unforeseen situations could have been anticipated by me back in Kingston, of course, when I was focused on trying to solve the problem of evil. And it was one of those fortuitous situations, referenced a few pages below, involving Willi Braun, somewhere in the stacks of Robarts Library at the University of Toronto, as I recall, that brought Jonathan Z. Smith’s work to my attention. I’m not sure exactly when it took place (in fact, despite the broadbrush-stroke narrative I’m spinning here, I don’t think I now recall much of those days, to be honest); I tend to think that it was around the time his Drudgery Divine was first published in 1990. Given the role that the title of his Imagining Religion (1982), coupled with Chomsky and Herman’s Manufacturing Consent (a book I first became aware of through the documentary on Chomsky, of the same title [1992], whose premier I attended at the Toronto Film Festival with Stephen Heathorn, then working on his Ph.D. in History, and the person who introduced me to such writers as Benedict Anderson, Eric Hobsbawm, Joan Wallach Scott, and E.P. Thompson, among others), played in the title of my dissertation and the book it became (I made note of this influence in the opening to that book), it should be evident that Smith’s work soon began increasingly to shape my thinking—i.e., determining what counts as a problem worth considering, how to approach it, and the sort of results we can expect from our work. When I left Toronto for my first job, as an instructor at the University of Tennessee, in the late summer of 1993, I had already settled on the title and had about three quarters of it written, although I would not

Introduction

75

complete it and defend it until January 1995. From first learning of Smith’s work, until publishing that book, I read all of his works I could—being ­especially influenced by his writings on pedagogy while I was overwhelmed by early career expectations and commitments (many of these pieces have recently been ­published together in a volume edited by Chris Lehrich [Smith 2013])—influenced to such an extent that I came to realize that I sometimes found myself making a point that, if I paid attention to what I was saying or writing, sounded suspiciously like something of Smith’s that I’d surely read before—an effect that I think is all the more evident as time has gone on (something I noted for the first time in the acknowledgments of Critics Not Caretakers [2001]). And it is with this back story in mind, and its various unplanned twists and turns, that I think my 2002 essay on the problem of evil—soon after revised and published as a chapter in The Discipline of Religion (2003a), entitled there, “‘Like Small Bumps on the Back of the Neck…’: The Problem of Evil as Something Ordinary”—was a bit of a watershed moment for me. I’d gained enough critical distance from my earlier interests, had sufficiently recalibrated my focus and my approach, to be able to circle back again to those same topics, but this time doing so in a rather different manner than I had first approached it—in fact, the “it” had changed entirely, from asking why evil exists to examining why people think things ought to be ordered and sensible in the first place (a sufficient deviation from which is greeted by them with a rhetoric of evil or chaos). This redescription—to borrow Smith’s term and method—of the problem of evil, s­ eeing the so-called problem itself as an object of study that can be examined quite apart from trying to solve it, was an important point for me to reach, I think, and constitutes one of the essays I’d cite if asked (as I sometimes am, usually with a paternalistic edge to the question) if I’d ever studied something real, for what’s more real than people characterizing some act or event as evil and then trying to grapple with why it took place? After all, no less a writer than Max Weber thought it a worthwhile topic to treat academically (though he took suffering for granted as something in need of addressing). But, with that redescriptive move in mind, the domain in which this seeming problem now becomes interesting is one far removed from the assumptions of those who pose questions of theodicy and suffering; for, when shifted from the overly ambitious stage of speculating on the existence and intentions of gods or meaning to the more mundane but, I happen to think, no less interesting stage of human affairs, this problem becomes rather more easily understood as but one among many “collections of artful but all too human devices that help to portray any given world in which we happen to find ourselves as the ‘world without end’” (as I phrased it when concluding that 2003 book chapter I cited

76

chapter 4

above). The very fact that we happen to see a situation as evil, as comprised of suffering is now the topic of analysis, a move that raises a host of questions concerning the unexamined norm against which mere variations stand out as deviations. And retaining the human, the happenstance, the contingent—in a word, the historical—strikes me as one of the most important lessons that I’ve learned from Smith. Perhaps that’s why those two theology degrees will proudly remain on my c.v.—as evidence of prior structures in which I moved and a hint at the situations that made possible choices than led to changes, all of which I see today with the sort of nostalgic lens evidenced in this very tale that I’ve just spun.

chapter 4

Introducing Smith1 I work very hard at persuading my college students that facts become data only for purposes of argumentation. Smith 2002: 9

How does one open a volume which has among its goals to remark on the influence that the obviously influential work of Jonathan Z. Smith has had in our field? Perhaps we could rephrase that question as follows so as to remove the apparent redundancy: How does one prompt readers, who likely consider themselves to be already familiar with his work, to make Smith’s acquaintance anew? Where to begin? To anyone aware of Smith’s own style of setting up his arguments, the answer should be obvious: pique the reader’s curiosity by citing two instances of human data in your opening—instances that, at least on first glance, appear to have little to do either with each other or with the main focus of the essay (which itself may be a topic that strikes the reader as so commonplace as to be uninteresting). Then, over the course of the essay, persuade readers that, when put into a particular, stipulated sort of relationship with something already familiar to them, these opening exotica illustrate something about the familiar that makes it fascinating in a whole new way. As phrased by Tomoko Masuzawa, this is a method comprised of “acts of establishing equivalencies for the purpose of elucidation and illumination” (2008: 337). Now, in adopting this well-known Smithian strategy, I admit to some fear of coming off as a poor imitator. I also admit to being concerned that I’m far too audacious in thinking that this chapter can shed any new light on his muchcelebrated body of work. However, given that my goal is to provide an opening for a set of essays in his honor—examples of either working on Smith or, as is the case in most of the papers, working with Smith—I cannot resist the temptation of setting the table by putting to good use a thing or two that I have learned since Willi Braun first told me, while we were both students at the University of Toronto, that despite my not working in Christian origins I ought to be reading Smith—reading him not necessarily for his data but, instead, to learn how one goes about working with data of any sort. Because I have never 1 Portions of this chapter originally appeared as McCutcheon 2006b, a commissioned review of Jonathan Z. Smith’s Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion (2004).

78

chapter 4

yet received bad advice from my co-editor, I’ve been reading Smith ever since. And, I have come to the conclusion that, although seeming thoroughly familiar to readers, his writings contain much that remains oddly strange to many of our colleagues. It therefore strikes me as a worthwhile exercise to bracket— just for a moment—the acquaintance that we presume already to have with Smith and to spend some time introducing him. ***** So, with a respectful nod to his unmatched ability to establish equivalences for the purpose of elucidation and illumination, I begin by asking readers to ­consider a scene from Quentin Tarantino’s 2004 movie, Kill Bill, Vol. 2, in which the late David Carradine—the infamous “Bill” of the title—sits by a campfire one night and, in an intertextual bow to his earlier role in tv’s cult classic “Kung Fu,” plays a traditional bamboo flute. In between its haunting notes he tells his  assassin apprentice—known simply as “The Bride” (played by Uma Thurman)—the following story: Once upon a time in China…[the] head priest of the White Lotus Clan, Pai Mei, was walking down the road, contemplating whatever it is that a man of Pai Mei’s infinite power contemplates—which is another way of saying “who knows?”—when a Shaolin monk appeared, traveling in the opposite direction. As the monk and the priest crossed paths, Pai Mei, in a practically unfathomable display of generosity, gave the monk the slightest of nods. The nod was not returned. Now, was it the intention of the Shaolin monk to insult Pai Mei? Or did he just fail to see the generous social gesture? Bill’s questions are posed merely for effect; for, instead of offering answers, he has only the following to say by way of a conclusion: The motives of the monk remain unknown. What is known, were the consequences.2 Consider now a scene from yet another memorable, but slightly older film: Clint Eastwood’s second Dirty Harry movie, Magnum Force (1973). At its end, 2 And what were those consequences? “The next morning,” Bill continues, “Pai Mei appeared at the Shaolin Temple and demanded of the Temple’s head abbot that he offer Pai Mei his neck to repay the insult. The Abbot at first tried to console Pai Mei, only to find Pai Mei was inconsolable. So began the massacre of the Shaolin Temple and all sixty of the monks inside at the fists of the White Lotus.”

79

Introducing Smith

Harry’s corrupt police superior, Lieutenant Briggs (played by Hal Holbrook), drives away from the crime scene in Harry’s car, having just explained, in that overly-confident and self-satisfied manner typical of many movie villains, how he has framed Harry for what were, in fact, his own crimes. Unbeknownst to Briggs, of course, a bomb intended for Harry is still in the car. In Eastwood’s typically dispassionate, dead-pan acting style, Harry watches as Briggs drives the car away and as it explodes. Looking at the ball of flames Harry dryly repeats the words he had said to Briggs earlier in the film: A man’s got to know his limitations. As phrased in that old game show’s title, there is either truth or there are consequences; and there are those who know their limits and those who do not. The study of religion is one place where issues of consequence and limitation have particular relevance and Smith is the one who has been the most persistent in bringing them to our attention. ***** To begin to tease out the significance of these two stories for our reconsideration of Smith’s contributions to the field, allow me the luxury of telling a third, and final, story. In the spring semesters of both 2004 and 2005, my one-time colleague in Alabama, Kurtis Schaeffer (currently chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia), offered our department’s senior undergraduate seminar. What made his course novel was that Smith’s work was about all his students read. After providing some historical context in which the study of religion developed by having them read Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane (1959), followed by Joseph Kitagawa’s “The History of Religions at Chicago” (1987), his students spent the rest of the semester reading nothing but Smith. Starting with selections from his first book since 1990, Relating Religion (2004), they moved on to the essays collected in Smith’s widely cited Imagining Religion (1982), then on to Drudgery Divine (1990), as well as some of the essays published together in To Take Place (1987). All the while, Schaeffer had his students use the Smith-edited Harper Collins Dictionary of Religion (1995) as if it were a primary source. The course ended with reading (and watching) “God Save This Honourable Court: Religion and Civic Discourse.”3

3 Published as the last chapter of Relating Religion, this lecture was presented as the second annual Ninian Smart Memorial Lecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and

80

chapter 4

During these semesters, I kept my ear to the ground, interested in what our Religious Studies majors would make of this curricular experiment.4 Given that the vast majority of courses in our field focus on the descriptive data—prompting students to specialize in this or that religious tradition, culture, language, and historical period—I wondered what they would make of a writer whose work refused to stay still and, instead, moved over such a broad domain. After all, as was made plain to me just recently by a student who transferred into our department from another school—leaving him rather unprepared to do anything but describe—upper-level courses often do little more than narrow the gaze that was first introduced at the lower-level, such that one is no longer studying, say, the entire New Testament, as one might in an introductory survey, but, instead, studying just one of the gospels or one epistle. Apart from preparing students for a career in which they will narrow their gaze even further, and end up studying nothing but one pericope,5 narrowing the focus in terms of content seems to add little to the student’s intellectual tool box, for the same skills are being taught and used, just in a more exacting manner and on a smaller piece of the pie. Accustomed to such courses—in fact, this seems to be the only model to which most of our students are exposed— I wondered what our students would make of someone whose writings challenged them to look not at the data for its own sake but, at least as I read Smith, to use the recorded remnants of human behavior as what he likes to call an “e.g.”—an instance that exemplifies some wider process only apparent after two or more seemingly disparate things are somewhat provocatively simulcast in Lancaster. A video of this lecture is available at http://www.uctv.tv/shows/God -Bless-This-Honourable-Court-Religion-and-Civic-Discourse-7910 (accessed Dec. 24, 2013). Around this time, Smith also presented versions of this lecture at Grinnell College, the University of Alabama, and the University of California, Santa Cruz. 4 The experiment involved not simply reading Smith but the fact that they read only one author throughout an entire course. I should mention that my co-editor, Willi Braun, taught a Smith course of his own at the University of Alberta, in the spring 2005 semester. These are the only two such courses of which I was aware when, in the spring of 2012, I taught my own version of an upper-level undergraduate seminar based on his work (see an abbreviated version of the syllabus for that course in the appendix to this chapter). 5 I am reminded of a former colleague who, while debates were taking place concerning the specialty for a possible hire, advocated for a scholar of Paul by saying that the department’s other New Testament scholar studied, and therefore taught, the gospels and not the letters. This statement betrays a luxury that New Testament scholars have long enjoyed in our field—one certainly not shared by those who work in that catch-all area commonly known as History of Religions, in which no less specialized scholars must nonetheless be prepared regularly to teach world religion surveys and courses well outside their training.

Introducing Smith

81

juxtaposed (provocative? Yes, for after all, they’re supposedly disparate, and possibly incompatible, in the eyes of his or her peers…) within the framework established by the scholar with a hunch. One day, after stopping by our student lounge for some coffee, I inquired of a few of them about their course. They were four or five weeks into it, and by now starting in on Drudgery Divine, a book ostensibly on early Christianity and the religions of Mediterranean antiquity, but one which could just as easily be understood as a long mediation on the dos and don’ts of historically grounded comparative scholarship, a point nicely made by William Arnal in his review of the book quite some time ago.6 I would like to report that our students were all preparing to make a pilgrimage north from Tuscaloosa, al, straight up the interstate highway that leads eventually to Illinois, passing right by Vanderbilt in Nashville as well as the Louisville Seminary in Louisville, ky., before arriving finally at the University of Chicago, so that they could become the next generation of graduate students intent on sneaking into the back row of Smith’s undergraduate liberal arts courses or tacking a note to his office door to request a meeting. Instead, what they talked about was how incredibly frustrating they found the amount of detail in the book—the footnotes in particular.7 After a few years of reading textbook surveys and edited anthologies, and becoming accustomed to lectures that use Joe Friday’s “Just the facts, ma’am, nothing but the facts” approach (for which PowerPoint presentations seem to have been tailor-made), they were not sure what to make of an author who would provide them with, for example, a full-page footnote, in rather small type, detailing the ins and outs of John Adams’s and Thomas Jefferson’s relationships with Joseph Priestly (1733–1804), the British clergyman and author of such works as The History and Present State of Electricity, with Original Experiments (1767) and An History of Early Opinions concerning Jesus Christ, compiled from Original Writers, proving that the Christian Church was at first Unitarian (1786). Furthermore, they didn’t know what to do with the fact that Smith then records 294—count ‘em!—separate citations from The Theological and Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Priestly (1819–31) as evidence of Priestly’s view that the original, 6 Arnal opens his review (1994) as follows: “It may strike the reader as curious that such a slim volume…would merit a lengthy review in a journal devoted to method and theory in the study of religion. For Smith’s book addresses itself to the very specific issues of Christian origins and the historiography thereof…This limited focus, however, in no way diminishes the impact or importance of Drudgery Divine, and its relevance for the comparative, historical, or sociological approach to religion in general” (190). 7 Case in point: about thirty percent of Relating Religion is endnotes and just under half of its opening biographical essay’s sixty pages are notes, many containing extended discussions on substantive topics.

82

chapter 4

unpolluted message of so-called primitive Christianity was already corrupted by the time of the earliest Christians, what with their taste for Greek philosophy (Smith 1990: 9–11). (This view, by the way, is one that is shared by many scholars to this day, Smith might add, pointing to the common “roots and branches” metaphor that is yet used to suggest that pristine origins and experiences lie behind their sadly degraded public expressions.) For our students, unaware that Smith’s list was doing something in his text and was not simply an accumulation of facts meant to demonstrate erudition, his detailed enumeration of Priestly’s language comprised a bad joke that went on far too long, making it that much more frustrating to them. But at least they thought it was  hilarious that, at its end, Smith placed a typically understated footnote that in part reads: “In the above, I have sought to provide only a few instances of each term, including the most striking, rather than a complete concordance.” (I would hate to have to count the entries in a complete accounting!) In the midst of their frustration, I admit that I hoped they were beginning to understand what Smith might have had in mind when, writing in the opening to “Manna, Mana Everywhere and /˘/˘/˘”—originally written for a conference at Dartmouth University in 2000, celebrating the accomplishments of the late Hans Penner—Smith remarked, “Historians are a funny kind of folk” (2004: 117). They’re funny—or at least the sorts of historians I read are—because they tend to assume not only that the details (or, in Smith’s case, the details about the details) are important, but also that the details don’t mass together of their own accord to form coherent, teleological narratives. The formation of such narratives—in fact, the very constitution of generic items (or what Mary Douglas once simply referred to as “matter,” in contradistinction to both “soil” and “dirt”) qua details—requires an awful lot of selection (which, simultaneously, implies that one ignores or simply forgets a lot of stuff8). Moreover, such selection is driven by choice and directed by criteria that are themselves representative of interests. Making such choices and interests explicit (both our own and of those whom we study) is the work of scholarship and, in the study of religion, there is none better than Jonathan Z. Smith at putting this into practice. Given that, at times, much is at stake in not making such interests explicit, it can be understandably tempting (because it is self-serving) for scholars to 8 Despite its apparently colloquial, and thus less than scholarly pedigree, given that the English word “stuff” derives from the Old French estoffe (modern French, étoffe), meaning quilted material, it is entirely fitting to use it in place of Mary Douglas’s “matter” to refer to generic material of unspecified type that one works with. As for the role of forgetting—sometimes coercively forced, other times politically expedient—it is central to the work of such writers as Connerton (1998) and Trouillot (1995).

Introducing Smith

83

overlook the role played by choice and sheer happenstance in the history of human affairs.9 This amounts to adopting the role of historian qua maker-oflists and chronicler-of-names-and-dates—a role especially common in undergraduate classrooms that help to reconstitute and thereby authorize the conventional rather than asking how just this, rather than something else, became conventional in the first place, a point taught to us long ago by Hayden White, among others. It was Smith’s refusal to play this role and to insist and persist instead in examining the relationships between the details so as to learn something about the choices that make them stand out as details—what Smith phrases as his “uncommon faith in the revelatory power of a telling detail”—that struck some of our students as particularly troublesome, likely because it required them not only to do their homework but also to take a closer look at a few of their own cherished taken-for-granteds.10 What’s more, it seems to me that, despite their celebrations of his work (e.g., Smith’s Relating Religion was awarded a book prize by the American Academy of Religion [aar] in 2006), this strikes many of our colleagues as troublesome as well. For, over twenty years ago, the Introduction to Smith’s Imagining Religion (1982), which includes chapters that date to the mid- and late-1970s, made all of this more than explicit. Since then, however, it has largely been ignored by the book’s many readers. Of course, I should qualify this statement; for given the number of times his now famous words from this book’s opening page have been quoted— [T]here is no data for religion. Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Religion has no independent existence apart from the academy.

9

10

Jared Diamond’s bestselling Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997) comprises an excellent example of a scholar working to theorize the role played by happenstance in human history— such as his suggestion that “latrines are merely one of the many places where we accidentally sow the seeds of the wild plants that we eat” (117)—i.e., where the unintentional transplantation and subsequent germination might have first occurred, eventually leading to those consequences that we today, in hindsight, refer to as the apparently programmatic activity of domesticating plants. Diamond’s book can therefore be read as an extended critique of an excessive emphasis on intentionality in the work of historians. Perhaps it was because they had not, in fact, done their homework, but whatever the reason, Schaeffer reported to me on several occasions that a number of his students failed to differentiate Smith’s own voice from his careful description of the positions of others—sometimes meaning that students adamantly disagreed with Smith despite the

84

chapter 4

—it would seem to be either misleading or at least counter-intuitive to claim that his work has been disregarded. Moreover, if appearances on the program at the annual meetings of the aar and Society of Biblical Literature (sbl) (of  which Smith served as president in 2007)—notably, appearances as the respondent, that authorized position which institutionalizes the right to get in the last word—are any indication, Smith is among the field’s most respected elder statesman. But having seen how often citations of Imagining Religion’s provocative opening lines are followed by scholarship that reads as if he had never written these words, let alone backed them up with a score of essays that covered instances of human behavior derived from across the globe and throughout various periods, it seems that, like some of our students, colleagues are also getting lost in the details and failing to understand the larger project for which Smith’s essays are merely “e.g.s” playing the role of heuristics helpful in illustrating a wider point.11 In fact, I would go so far as to say that, for ­whatever reason,12 for many in our field today, citing Smith has itself become a ritual gesture, something akin to an earlier generation of religionists authorizing their own work by citing Justice Clark’s famous words, in the Abington v. Schempp Supreme Court decision in 1963, concerning the important place for an objective, neutral study about religion’s contributions to civilization. Much like buying an indulgence, citing Smith on the invention of religion has become a genuflection, a disciplined act of deference that, once accomplished, allows one to go about doing what one was already intending to do—which is pretty much how Smith himself has often critiqued those who, in the opening of their books, discuss the importance of defining religion yet, after acknowledging the difficulties entailed by this project, proceed either as if no definition was required or as if the participant’s own self-understanding was sufficient for setting the scholarly table.

11

12

fact that, upon a closer look, they discovered that they were disagreeing with the position Smith first described and critiqued himself. It may therefore be telling that Smith, whether intentionally so or not, is an essayist—all of his published books are collections of essays and/or lectures. If one considers Smith to be involved in a long-term, and still developing, project that he tests at a number of sites, then the monograph is a rather unhelpful genre. I admit that I have my hunches: apart from his academic lineage at Chicago, Smith’s truly impressive and intimidating command of source and scholarly languages, ethnographic information, as well as of the scholarly traditions in which so many of us work, prompts respect from the more traditional, hermeneutical, and philologically-trained colleagues who seem not to understand that Smith’s project understands their own as an instance of data.

Introducing Smith

85

So just what are all these ritualized references to Smith missing out on? Although tempting for area specialists to focus exclusively on the specifics in his work, perhaps we ought to inquire why he’s putting just these details into relationships with just those. If we accept even just a little of what Ferdinand de Saussure told us about how we make meanings (aside: note that meanings are made, not recognized), then what do these relationships tell us? For, they certainly don’t reveal deep truths about the details themselves. So what larger forest are Smith’s readers missing if they’re not peering beyond the wealth of ethnographic data that comprises its many trees? Although scholars would be wise never to trust any native informant’s ­self-reports—a rule of thumb observed, I think, by too few in our field today (see McCutcheon 2006a)—the opening chapter in Relating Religion stands out as one place to begin when trying to figure out what he’s been up to all this time—especially given the manner in which he has, in the recent past, been called upon to make things a little more explicit.13 In the opening lines to that book’s preface, Smith writes: Although I have been delighted that an earlier collection of essays, Imagining Religion (1982), has made its way onto a number of course syllabi, it has been an unintended source of frustration. As I talk with individuals and come across references to my work in print, I seem to have been arrested somewhere in the 1970s when those essays were first composed. To correct such an ahistorical reading of his work, the first chapter of Relating Religion, entitled “When the Chips Are Down,” constitutes what Smith calls a bio-bibliographical essay. Taken along with the essays that follow it (all of which were published or first delivered between the mid-1980s and early 2000s), his introduction makes it clear that Smith ought not to be accused of suffering from arrested development. After completing his undergraduate degree as a philosophy major at Haverford College, Smith recounts how he entered Yale Divinity School, intent on studying the New Testament in the vein of Rudolf Bultmann’s demythologizing project, but soon moved to its newly autonomous Department of Religion in 1962. During these years, he interacted, he says, “on a daily basis with tribal Protestants” in a way that “was analogous to an anthropologist’s fieldwork”—at which point we learn 13

Those familiar with Smith’s work will no doubt agree that he can, at times, be a bit cagey—not in the sense of being evasive but, in my reading, in a cunning or strategic sense. Perhaps it was this strategic element that was not detected by Urban (1999).

86

chapter 4

another detail in an endnote: his only other fieldwork experience was working on a dairy farm for three months one summer, in upstate New York. This status of an outsider, to whatever degree, is likely an important theme for those who consider themselves theorists, if only because it prompts them to be curious about that which their peers take for granted, for they can easily imagine things being quite otherwise. Such early fieldwork experiences undoubtedly played a role in Smith developing the approach now associated with his work—if I can be permitted to quote from that “unintended source of frustration” as my evidence: “no datum possesses intrinsic interest. It is of value only insofar as it can serve as exempli gratia of some fundamental issue in the imagination of religion. The student of religion must be able to articulate clearly why ‘this’ rather than ‘that’ was chosen as an exemplum” (1982: xi). We learn in that essay of his first position, at Dartmouth College (1965–6), where he worked with Jacob Neusner and Hans Penner. We also learn about the invitation by the late Robert S. Michaelsen, the first chair of Department of Religious Studies at Santa Barbara, to join Walter Capps and Gary Comstock as a faculty member in this newly established department.14 Here, Smith wrote much of his doctoral dissertation, “The Glory, Jest, and Riddle: James George Frazer and The Golden Bough,” which was concerned with, among other things, using the study of Frazer’s work as an occasion to argue that “fact and theory cannot be so easily separated and that their inter-relationship is a complex affair.”15 After a brief stay the University of California at Santa Barbara, where he met Mircea Eliade for the first time while Eliade was a visiting professor at Santa Barbara,16 Smith moved to the University of Chicago at the beginning of 14

15

16

Because its other original faculty members were all appointed to the newly established department from other ucsb appointments, Smith was hired into the department’s first new position. His interest in methodology was apparent at this early stage in his career, insomuch as he concludes that Frazer offers no corrective for “our contemporary methodological malaise” because “Frazer had no method, either explicit or implicit, for his innumerable comparisons. He links material together by means of the catalogue or list, the digression, verbal association or superficial observation almost exclusively carried out on the level of X looking like or reminding him of Y” (1969: 429, 427). A copy of Smith’s dissertation is ­easily  obtained through University Microfilms (or umi) at http://wwwlib.umi.com/ dissertations/search. Although their later disagreements are well known, chapters two and three of Relating Religion (which were published originally in Chicago’s journal, History of Religions) comprise a two-part reconsideration of Eliade’s Patterns in Comparative Religion on the occasion of the book’s fiftieth anniversary. These essays have a tone similar to Smith’s

Introducing Smith

87

the 1968–69 academic year, and he has remained at Chicago to this day, holding a variety of appointments, including a brief stay in the Divinity School itself along with various administrative posts and putting in place and serving as the program coordinator for his one-man Religion and the Humanities program in the University of Chicago College. In 1977, he resigned his Divinity School appointment and, since 1982, has been free of departmental affiliation, thereby allowing him the wide degree of freedom that is evident throughout his work.17 “When the Chips are Down” offers some delightful bio-disclosures that provide insight into his intellectual preoccupations, such as: his childhood interest in agrostology, or grass breeding, which informed his lifelong interest in classification; happening upon a 10-cent copy of Ernst Cassirer’s 1945 article, “Structuralism in Modern Linguistics” while he was still an undergraduate, an article that, as he recalls, helped him bridge his interest in biological morphology, on the one hand, and structural linguistics, on the other; and a description of what he calls his “reading habits” that would be a challenge for anyone to adopt.18 Most instructively, Smith ends “When the Chips are Down” by detailing the “persistent preoccupations” that have been at the center of his scholarly career. These include many of the topics examined throughout the following chapters: classification and taxonomy, incongruity and difference, generalization19 and redescription, and, of course, translation. As he phrases it there, these larger themes all share “the insistence on the cognitive power of distortion, along with the concomitant choice of the map over the territory” (2004: 31). Put differently, one might say that Smith’s writing career has developed into a series of discrete and highly controlled experiments, each of which was set up by means of a provocative juxtaposition focused on situations in which human novelty was required in order to apply structure to what is, in

17

18 19

dissertation on Frazer’s comparative work, inasmuch as both writings demonstrate the respect Smith has for each of their ambitious though, in his analysis, fundamentally flawed comparative projects. For example, see Smith 2004: 44, n. 41 for a list of Smith’s publications on education; a full bibliography of Smith’s writings on religion and education, including a three-page, alphabetical list of the unattributed entries that he authored in Smith 1995, is provided in an appendix to Relating Religion; see also Smith 2013. For those amazed by the breadth of information contained in any one of Smith’s essays, a lot can be explained by reading Smith 2004: 37, n. 27. Given his career as a teacher participating in, as well as administering, a general-education curriculum, Smith’s interest in generalization gives the lie to those in our profession who think that teaching, administration, service, and research somehow occupy mutually exclusive domains.

88

chapter 4

fact, an untidy experience (again, to nod in the direction of Mary Douglas). Quoting a teacher of his own, he has referred to this method as “an exag­ geration in the direction of truth.”20 Sharing more in common with his anthropological predecessor, E.B. Tylor, than simply the fact that they both were educated in Quaker schools, his approach presumes that the perception of incongruity is a fundamental aspect of contingent (that is, historical) existence, making human beings a group whose activities can be examined crossculturally as processes of inventive, ad hoc problem-solving by means of a delimited series of shared tools (such as symbols and lists) and strategies (such as comparison) when negotiating the social and natural worlds.21 Although not an Intellectualist in Tylor’s or Herbert Spencer’s sense of the term—after all, Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, and Claude Lévi-Straus, among many others, have each left their indelible marks on his work—Smith nonetheless shares with his Intellectualist ancestors a fascination with the human capacity for rationalization in the midst of ambiguous, historical circumstances. So, despite changes in his interests over time that have yet to be charted in a diachronic study of his corpus, this synchronic theme of dialectical experiments to trace human responses to incongruity can be found throughout his career. Case in point; consider how, in his well-known 1980 essay, “The Bare Facts of Ritual,”22 he argued for ritual’s role in governing what he then termed an unregulated economy of signification by opening the essay with two quotations, one from Kafka and the other from Plutarch, that each 20

21

22

This is quoted from an online essay of Smith’s entitled, “The Necessary Lie: Duplicity in the Disciplines,” formerly posted at a University of Chicago site intended for incoming graduate teaching assistants (http://teaching.uchicago.edu/?/ctl-archive/course-design -tutorials/assessing-and-improving/smith [accessed Jan. 14, 2014]; this brief essay also appears as the afterword in McCutcheon 2007). Elsewhere Smith has spoken of “the cognitive power of distortion” (1996c: 19). I would suggest that this could stand as Smith’s description of the thing that many call the human condition—a troublesome term that we seem to have no choice but to employ (e.g., see the description for his Religion and the Humanities Program’s description, available at http://collegecatalog.uchicago.edu/programs/relh.shtml). For an example of Smith’s efforts to historicize such universalist rhetorics by placing them within their context of difference and conflict, see his essay “Nothing Human Is Alien to Me” (1996a). Originally published as Smith 1980, it was also published in Smith 1982: 53–65. This is one of the few of Smith’s essays to have prompted direct replies by scholars, such as Ray 1991 and Kimura 1999. Apart from one of Smith’s earlier essay’s influence in prompting Kimberley C. Patton and Benjamin C. Ray’s edited collection of essays (2000), there have been few studies of Smith’s body of work, apart from Urban’s already-cited essay as well as Gill 1998 and Altieri 2004.

Introducing Smith

89

portrays different ways of dealing with the intrusion of the unexpected.23 Then again, consider how, over twenty years later, we find, in Relating Religion’s closing chapter, Smith drawing on two recent u.s. Supreme Court cases to examine how strategies of familiarization and defamiliarization are employed by the justices to negotiate the limits of similarity and difference from a point where the boundaries are anything but obvious—such reasoning amounting to nothing but another exercise in the economy of signification.24 And it is this unrelenting attention to the easily overlooked, daily work of boundary creation and maintenance—the manner in which we collectively massage and tweak our social worlds—that strikes me as most important about Smith’s contribution to the field, for he never fails to make clear that, despite the claims of the people we study, a scholar’s focus is not on the gods but on these very human beings and their creative responses to the ambiguous worlds they inhabit. Yet, what for some is a plus, is surely not so for others, especially those descriptivists who are merely interested in documenting and comparing the content and the meaning of people’s words and behaviors, focusing, as Smith has written, “too much scholarly energy…on getting ‘behind’ the word to some natural phenomenon as if that endeavor guaranteed its being of interest” (2004: 134), as opposed to examining the structure by means of which things get to count as meaningful words and purposeful actions. But making this switch by learning to see the fruits of our descriptive labors as the products of pre-operative structures, relationships, and theories is difficult, for it is a switch that ensures that the results of description are prompted by the scholar’s sense of curiosity in the face of perceived anomaly—which, by the way, makes the scholar just as human as anyone else, for, as Smith’s work makes evident, scholarship is itself a self-conscious exercise in signification, as opposed to the scholar’s presumed ability to read the minds or “feel the pain” of the people they study. Just ask our students who, at least initially, understood Smith to be grand-standing in his accumulation of data for data’s sake. 23

24

Or, as he phrases it in chapter ten of Smith 2004, “Trading Places,” ritual has “characteristic strategies for achieving focus, with its typical concern for ‘microadjustment,’” which he considers “a miniaturization that is, one and the same time, an exaggeration of everyday  actions, as major theorists of ritual from Freud to Lévi-Strauss have rightly maintained” (227). The first case, from 1993, was The Church of Lakumi Babalu Aye, Inc. and Enesto Pichado v. City of Hialeah (508 us 520) and revolved around the city’s attempt to outlaw the Santeria practice of animal sacrifice. The second, from 1984, was Lynch v. Donnelly (465 us 668), which focused on whether a nativity scene, erected by the City of Pawtucket, ri, outside a shopping center, constituted a religious display.

90

chapter 4

Just ask those colleagues whose acquaintance with his work ends after citing a few sentences from Imagining Religion or ask those who pass by Smith’s work altogether because much of it is associated with the cultures of antiquity, a data area foreign to their own specializations and therefore of no ­relevance to them. I was encouraged that, contrary to their initial reaction, some of the students in Schaeffer’s class began to see that, despite his accumulation of details from distant lands and ancient texts, each of Smith’s essays was modeling for them a way of thinking about human behavior in general; they realized that, if  they could avoid getting lost in all the trees, then they could detect the movement of his dialectic. And, they could see something else going on in his work, something that might inform their own studies of those things Smith had not yet come across while perusing the library stacks. They therefore ended their course by seeing Smith, like all good teachers, as offering to them an invitation, the same sort of invitation I believe he offers to his colleagues each time he rises at the end of a panel of paper presentations at a conference, slowly makes his way to the podium with the small binder that contains his lecture, and, head down with both hands stretched out to grip the lectern, begins his paper or his response to the preceding papers. It is an invitation to engage in the tough work of (to borrow a word from a previous generation, but to use it rather differently) taking the people and their performances that we study, as well as our own studies of them, seriously. That this requires us to know the details about the details can indeed be daunting; but, after reading far more of Smith than they ever imagined they’d be reading, our students came to understand that it also meant watching for the winks and the nudges—both Smith’s own as well as those of the resourceful people we study. ***** This brings me back to the lessons we learn by juxtaposing the two movie scenes from my essay’s opening with the story of our students’ troubles when reading Smith. Although to some it might constitute an insult, it strikes me that, contrary to the unbridled optimism of most of our intellectual predecessors concerning how scholarship on religion will reveal the enduring, essential, and thus universal truths about this thing called the human condition, one of Smith’s greatest accomplishments has been to introduce a sense of perspective and economy to our work as scholars, drawing attention to the role played by circumstance, choice, and contingency in both those acts we study

Introducing Smith

91

as well as our study of those acts. Now, for those unwilling to pay the price of seeing their work as inhabiting a specific place and those unwilling to recognize that their interests and curiosities are hardly universal or self-evident, reading Smith will surely bring on a sense of profound frustration. Yet this is an important moment of self-reflexivity, I think, for the frustration results from understanding that we, like the people we study, work from a contingent, local moment which is our only basis for imagining such things as others, pasts, and futures; the price to be paid by this recognition is that we can’t have it all, because there is no all to be had in the world of empirical objects. In a word, Smith has helped to bring history (i.e., contingency) back into our discourse by reminding his readers that (as he phrased it in the opening to Imagining Religion, but a little lower on the page from those lines that everyone feels the need to quote): [T]he student of religion, and most particularly the historian of religion, must be relentlessly self-conscious. Indeed this self-consciousness constitutes his primary expertise, his foremost object of study. 1982: xi

Because not everything can be equally interesting, and because interest is understood as an effect of prior preferences and assumptions (which we collectively call traditions), some things—some facts, as Smith might call them (see the epigraph to this essay)—must necessarily be overlooked and unknown in order for us to get on with the business of paying attention to yet others. This suggests to me that scholars’ greatest tool is their recognition of the limits of both their gaze and their work; we go about our task knowing from the outset that we are not mind readers and that, by means of our studies, we will not discover the source of the Nile, the Fountain of Youth, or the Northwest Passage to the exotic Orient. Instead, our far more modest hope is that our work will not only help to satisfy the curiosities of those who share our interests but that it will also someday be outdated. For the historian in us assumes that interests and curiosities change, different facts will become data for someone else’s different arguments, and our field’s arguments will move on to new topics, with new things at stake. If we’re lucky, our work will someday be an artifact in the archive of the field’s own history that satisfies the unanticipated curiosities of those who will follow us. How could it be otherwise? Despite such things as the impressive erudition of his scholarship, his ability sometimes to be both a quick-witted interlocutor and a sly provocateur, and the truly intimidating manner in which he can pensively sit there,

92

chapter 4

listening to a conference paper being read while looking at the ground, with hands and chin resting on the end of that gnarled tree branch that is his walking cane, Smith’s work brings with it this sense of history, contingency, and thus humility. We must know our limits, for we do not know the monk’s intentions. (And if Freud was even partly correct, neither does the monk!) But recognizing the limitations of historical existence does not mean that scholarship ceases to be bold and innovative; for, despite only being able to observe the consequences of actions, we are nonetheless free to juxtapose what we have seen with innumerable other things that have also caught our eye. In the process, we are challenged to develop new arguments to help us arrive at intellectually satisfying accounts of the similarities and differences among the facts that have made us curious enough to give them a careful second look— which is none other than the moment at which the generic stuff of social life becomes scholarly data. Therefore, like all aspects of culture that Smith has studied (from closed canons and their infinitely varied commentaries to delimited ingredients capable of producing richly varied cuisines), scholarship, too, provides a case study in the interplay between limitation and variety. Perhaps all of this could have just as easily been stated at the outset by citing something that I once saw pinned to a crowded bulletin board in Smith’s office, tucked away in one of the thick-walled turrets of the University of Chicago’s Harper Memorial Library: “Chutzpa is not Hubris” Indeed; so, as I’m told Jonathan would himself say to his classes, let’s go to work! Appendix

rel 490 Capstone Senior Seminar Spring 2012

Prof. Russell McCutcheon [email protected] Phone: 348–8512 Office: 211 Manly Hall

3:30–5:50 Thursday 210 Manly Hall www.as.ua.edu/rel/rel490spring.html

For the self-conscious student of religion, no datum possesses intrinsic ­interest… jonathan z. smith

93

Introducing Smith



Description

This seminar, required of all majors and minors in the Department, uses the work of the University of Chicago’s Jonathan Z. Smith—perhaps the most important scholar of religion of his generation—as the way into examining the current state of the academic study of religion. Apart from reading on the history of the study of religion in the u.s. (to establish the context into which Smith makes his contributions), we will also be reading Smith’s Imagining Religion and Drudgery Divine as well as chapters from a collection of essays in his honor, Introducing Religion. .

1.

2.

3.

Requirements Attendance: Regular attendance and active participation (as evidence of having read the material) is worth 20% of the course. I should be able to call on any student, at any time in the course, to introduce or comment on any reading assigned for that day’s class and receive from them a thoughtful, informed commentary. I will be doing this and taking note of who is able to respond. You are also required to bring your readings and notes with you to class on the day when readings are discussed. Notebooks: Students will be given a notebook to use in the course—the first half of the notebook is for new vocabulary and the names of new scholars of significance to the course and the second half is for notes on the readings. (It is up to you to acquire a similar notebook [from Barnes & Noble, perhaps] if you require a second one.) Students will submit their notebooks to the professor (following a requirement sometimes used by Prof. Smith) on Thurs Mar. 8 and again on Fri Apr 27 (along with their review essays [see below]). Notebooks will be read each time for evidence of the student keeping a list of new vocabulary (citing where in our readings the term appeared), providing definitions for this list of words, keeping a list of new scholars (citing where in our readings the scholar was discussed), along with brief information on each. Notebooks will also be read for evidence of the student making note of what they consider to be important points from the articles they have read. Notebooks are worth 30% of the final grade (half awarded at each time the notebook is submitted). Presentation 1: Each class I will ask for the new vocabulary and the names of the new scholars mentioned in the reading(s) for that day. I expect students to have defined the new vocabulary they found (I generally exempt foreign language phrases and, instead, am focusing on English technical terms) and to have acquired some basic information on the new scholars who were mentioned in that day’s reading. One student, selected by the professor, will then be asked to come to the next class prepared to elaborate, in greater detail, on one of the new

94

4.

5.

chapter 4 pieces of information from the reading that the class decides needs greater attention. This brief, informal presentation, which will open the next class, is worth 10% of your final grade. Presentation 2: On either Mar 22, Mar 29, Apr 5 or Apr 12 each student will present on one essay of their choosing from either Relating Religion or Introducing Religion. This presentation, which requires a summary of the author’s argument and then a commentary on the manner in which the essay (if written by Smith) exemplifies his style of scholarship or (if written by another scholar) is influenced by/works with Smith’s scholarship, will be approx. 10–15 minutes in length and is worth 10% of the final grade. We will create a list of articles in advance so that all students know which chapters to read in preparation for class. Review Essay on Drudgery Divine: Each student will submit a final paper in this course—a 1,500 word review essay of Smith’s study of early Christianity. You will write this essay as if the journal Method & Theory in the Study of Religion has commissioned it—that is, writing it for an audience interested not so much in the data of the book as the method the book uses to examine the data (that is, mtsr’s audience is far wider than just Christian origins specialists). This review essay (typed, double spaced, 12 pt font, one inch margins, with cover page bearing the student’s name and the title of the essay) is worth 30% of your final grade and is due by 4  pm on Fri. Apr. 27. Review essays will be discussed in class.



Tentative Schedule

Th Jan 12

Th Jan 19

Th Jan 26

Th Feb 2

Introduction to the Course “God Bless This Honourable Court: Religion and Civic Discourse” (video of public lecture by J.Z. Smith at the University of California, Santa Barbara) Classification Matters Nix v. Hedden, 1893 (online us Supreme Court Decision) D.G. Burnett, Trying Leviathan, Chpt. 1 Russell McCutcheon, “Introducing Smith” (Introducing Religion) The Context I Joseph Kitagawa, “The History of Religions in America” Joseph Kitagawa, “The History of Religions at Chicago” Russell McCutcheon, “Reinventing the Study of Religion in Alabama” The Context II Mircea Eliade, The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion

Introducing Smith Th Feb 9

Th Feb 16

Th Feb 23

Th Mar 1

Th Mar 8

Th Mar 15 Th Mar 22 Th Mar 29 Th Apr 5 Th Apr 12 Th Apr 19

Th Apr 26

Introducing Smith J.Z. Smith, selections from The Glory, Jest, and Riddle (Dissertation, Yale Univ., 1969; online) J.Z. Smith, “When the Chips Are Down” (Relating Religion) Imagining Religion I Introduction Chpt. 1 “Fences and Neighbors” Chpt. 2 “In Comparison a Magic Dwells” Imagining Religion II Chpt. 3 “Sacred Persistence” Chpt. 4 “The Bare Facts of Ritual” Imagining Religion III Chpt. 5 “The Unknown God” Chpt. 6 “A Pearl of Great Price” Chpt. 7 “The Devil in Mr. Jones” J.Z. Smith, “Reading Religion: A Life in Scholarship” (American Academy of Religion public lecture by J.Z. Smith) Interview of J.Z. Smith (2008); go to: http://chicagomaroon. com/2008/06/02/full-j-z-smith-interview/ Spring Break Students Present Chapters from Relating Religion or Introducing Religion Students Present Chapters from Relating Religion or Introducing Religion Students Present Chapters from Relating Religion or Introducing Religion Students Present Chapters from Relating Religion or Introducing Religion Smith in the Classroom J.Z. Smith, “Playful Acts of Imagination” J.Z. Smith, “Religion in the Liberal Arts” J.Z. Smith, “The Introductory Course: Less is Better” No Class: Work on review essays

95

chapter 5 Introduction An earlier, shorter version of the following chapter was originally presented as one of two responses (the other by Jim Linville of the University of Lethbridge) as part of a book review panel on Secularism and Biblical Studies (Boer 2010), held at the 2011 annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature (sbl) in San Francisco, Ca.. Later, in the spring of 2012, a version was also presented to the members of the cross-disciplinary Culture on the Edge research collaborative, when it met at the University of Alabama.1 Working under the assumption that I would revise and enlarge the paper for possible inclusion in a future published project, the paper grew over that time and has resulted in this previously unpublished chapter. As mentioned in the final note of the paper, Randy Reed (Appalachian State University)—whom I first met when he began organizing panels at our regional American Academy of Religion (aar)/(sbl) meetings, in the southeastern u.s., around the topic of method and theory—invited me, several months prior to the conference, to be a respondent for a group of panelists who were contributors to a book that tackled a non-theological (a.k.a. secular) approach to studying the Bible. Chaired by Roland Boer, the editor of the volume, the panelists (all of whom summarized their chapters) were: Ward Blanton, Hector Avalos, Philip Davies, and Hanna Stenström. My role was communicated to me by way of Reed’s invitation (sent by email on Jan. 5, 2011), when he wrote: “I thought it would be interesting to get the perspective of someone outside the field of Bible on this.” Reed was correct: I clearly do not specialize in studying the Bible—and, in fact, calling much of the scholarship in the volume “New Testament Studies” would be entirely accurate—though I know enough about studying these texts to be dangerous (knowledge gained from past courses I took [e.g., with Dan Fraikin at Queen’s University in the mid-1980s], from being a teaching assistant for Michel Desjardins’s “Introduction to the New Testament” at the University of Toronto, where I worked alongside Bill Arnal, not to mention a long 1 As described elsewhere in this volume, along with myself, the group’s members are: Craig Martin, Monica Miller, Steven Ramey, Merinda Simmons, Leslie Dorrough Smith, and Vaia Touna. The goal of this research collaborative is to produce and encourage more theoretically sophisticated studies of identity formation, and to publicize them in a book series, by the same name as the group, published by Equinox Publishers of the uk.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004281417_007

Introduction

97

friendship with people like Arnal and Willi Braun and, through them, my acquaintance with a wide variety of other people and issues of relevance to their field). Given that the panel was concerned with a non-theological approach to the study of the Bible (i.e., what the word “secular” in the title communicated to me), it seemed reasonable that my expertise in reading texts (given that I, like others, make my living reading and writing about texts) seemed enough of a credential, for the last thing that I presumed anyone involved in a “secular” approach to the Bible would do would be to assume that a special set of interpretive skills would be necessary inasmuch as the text itself was somehow considered to be a special case. After all, those are the assumptions of the theologians with whom so many of us apparently disagree. So I accepted Reed’s kind invitation; but, as the following chapter makes plain, once I began reading the book, I soon discovered that I was quite wrong in assuming that I knew what a secular approach to studying the Bible might be. The problem of the relationship of the secular to the sacred has been very much on my mind for the past decade or so, culminating in a collection of essays, published with Arnal (2013), in which we play with a famous title of Eliade’s, in hopes of pressing his thesis in a rather novel direction: instead of seeing these terms as naming a distinguishable substance in separate objects (the sacred, on the one hand, and the profane, on the other), we proposed that the sacred and the profane are mutually defining and thus a purely rhetorical pairing, no different from applying Mary Douglas’s well-known argument to distinguishing the same generic stuff as either “soil” or “dirt,” seeing these words not as naming separate identities in the objects so classified but, instead, being the trace of the classifier’s interests concerning how the world ought to be arranged (I think here of her famous line: “dirt as matter out of place” [1992: 35]). This is not the approach taken by the many studies on secularism that can now be found in bookstores, however; for there, “religion” or “religious” names something eternal in the human, something that can be traced back to cave paintings, that—or so the argument goes—was only recently (i.e., in the past few hundred years) marginalized, privatized, and thereby contained through the invention and the policing of “the secular.” In fact, many scholars are already confidently pronouncing the end of the secular and speculating on what religion (which, unlike secularism, is somehow thought to be eternal) will look like in what they now commonly refer to as the post-secular world. While the popularity of coupling a realist reading of religion with constructivist reading of secularism makes sense—inasmuch as it dehistoricizes and thereby normalizes people’s prior views on the supposedly deep-seated nature of those values that go by the name of religion while

98

chapter 5

also giving their scholarship enough of a taste of the historical to lend it academic credibility—it is less than satisfying for anyone who takes history seriously. For just as “indoor/outdoor” were invented together (i.e., prior to developing covered lodgings, I don’t think people just naturally knew themselves to be living outside), so too with the sacred/secular pairing. As Arnal and I argue in that book, it is only with the advent of modernity and, more specifically, the invention of the nation-state (understood as the socio-political and economic domain that is portrayed as transcending all other social worlds to which a person may belong, and thus the domain exclusively authorized to legitimately distinguish private from public, legal from illegal, domestic from foreign, etc.) that normative claims on people’s lives that do not promote the state’s specific interests get connected to a variety of other, quite possibly distinguishable, beliefs, behaviors, and local institutions, which are then named collectively as religion or religious. This so-called religious zone, then, is both controlled by the state (i.e., state bureaucracies, such as taxation, decide if something is or is not religious) yet isolated from impacting the domain claimed by the state (e.g., think of the standards of public education versus private religious education)—thereby, the distinction is itself constitutive of the state. For instance, from my own national setting, I could cite the act of swearing on the Bible, praying before the u.s. Congress is in session, or the fact that the public school year is organized around the Christian liturgical calendar (e.g., what we now call “winter break” has long been known as “Christmas vacation,” and in many cases “March break” and “Easter break” are still the same thing though the name has changed)—none of these, however, are considered religious, of course, but, instead, are just the way some posited “we” do things. But making an argument for, say, reorganizing the school year around the holidays of Hindus or Muslims (i.e., some marginal group that is identified as religious and therefore afforded some freedoms but also is controlled via a variety of restrictions) would, however, be seen as miring the seemingly neutral state in local “religious” rivalries—akin to how “special interest groups” is the name given to those marginal to power who are trying to exert influence (i.e., those not marginal to power do not have “special interests”; they simply govern). When I speak of secularism, then, I am simultaneously talking about the invention of the discourse on religion and thus an effective form of social management widespread in the liberal democratic nation-state (see McCutcheon 2005b for an elaboration of this thesis, along with the last chapter of McCutcheon 2003a). Although I have sufficient expertise in Bible studies to know a thing or two about what Hebrew Bible, New Testament, or Christian origins people are up to (and thus to be able to judge, at least to my satisfaction, when scholarship on

Introduction

99

these databases are doing something I find novel and interesting, and when they are not), and although I’ve done my share of thinking about secularism, the reaction I received from some to the following chapter—reactions that only partly came during the panel itself—demonstrated that, for many Bible scholars, I was an insufficiently trained interloper who stuck his nose where it did not belong, inasmuch as I was apparently not sufficiently attuned to the demands of their unique object of study. What therefore lies in the background is a classic example of classificatory arm wrestling: that I study religion is fine, but this is the Bible! For example, consider the following email that I received from one person who attended (I don’t feel the need to disclose the identity of the author; this correspondence was received on Dec. 7, 2011, a few weeks after the panel took place, and was copied to some of the other panelists as well, indicating to me that it is not only a document that was sent to me but also one that, as soon as it was sent, entered the public domain): Dear Russell A number of people expressed surprise and even disappointment at my silence in the sbl session reviewing Secularism and Biblical Studies. Partly this was out of shock at what seemed to me a blatant attempt at hijacking the session (which succeeded: Jim Linville’s thoughtful response was almost ignored); second was the realization that there was nothing much in my own contribution that needed further defence [sic] or explanation. But perhaps I could have responded on behalf of the other contributors. Had I done so, I would have said that it was bad enough fighting people who worshipped God without having also to confront people who worshipped J Z Smith. I had heard of this Canadian sect, but never encountered one of its priests face to face. I would also have pointed out that a great deal of biblical scholarship is engaged precisely in redescription: of canon, text, of ‘Israel’, of cult, of borders, of worship, almost everything in the traditionla [sic] vocabulary of the subject. I rather think that your targets were in fact our targets (as Yvonne Sherwood tried to point out) and that we were being ambushed by friendly fire. Next, we were, of course, dealing with biblical studies, not religion, and dealing with a unique phenomenon which can be subjected to any number of reductionisms, of which the Smithian is just one. There is also (this would have taken far too long) the question of the different disciplinary principles of sociology and humanities, both

100

chapter 5

of which biblical studies employs (sometimes being aware of the difference). Last, while it was unfortunate that no contributor mentioned Smith, individual contributors cannot be responsible for collective omissions. Roland is the only one who, as editor [of the volume], might have been able to ensure that this particular approach was given attention. But as chair he was not in the best position to defend himself and perhaps he had good reason to think that Smith was not the panacea. I’m sorry that the session degenerated into turf war. The volume was not uniformly good, I agree, but there was plenty of interesting stuff to engage with and issues worth debating in a scholarly fashion. What a pity it hardly happened. Anyway, that is what I felt like saying after your sermon. I am glad I held my peace, but you should know what thoughts were in my head, and perhaps the heads of others on the panel My reply, sent back the same day and copied to those who received the original email, along with the organizer of the panel, read as follows: You are a fascinating lot, [name excised]. You call for rigor and science, in contradistinction from all that sloppy, uncritical work going on in the sbl, but as soon as someone offers a criticism other than the one you are prepared to defend against you get incredibly defensive and basically end up taking personal insult, calling me names and belittling my position. (I’m told that, despite all his talk about falsification, [Karl] Popper treated criticism similarly.) As for hijacking the session, I assume you see how silly this claim is. I did not ask to go last, I did not ask people in the audience to pursue some of the lines of critique I outlined, one of whom was the co-chair who organized the panel. (I’ll copy him in case you wish to speak with him about my behavior.) And I did not ask you to remain silent or interrupt you when you attempted to speak. I believe I represented a scholarly demeanor properly in my role as respondent. As for your thoughts on my role as a priest in the sect of Smith, I take that as high praise indeed. Thanks. One of your book’s contributors kept talking about [Francis Schüssler] Fiorenza as a model for recovering the ethical in bible studies, perhaps you feel the same about him? And where would Roland be without Marx? Perhaps you wish to label him in the same dismissive manner? Finally, I was charged with responding to this book, not replying to the various sorts of work going on in the wide field of Biblical studies. Your admission that the volume was not uniformly good seems to me a pretty

Introduction

101

good opening for a reply such as my own. As for your claim concerning the unique phenomenon of the Bible, that line pretty much sums up everything that I find troublesome about the less than provocative line of inquiry represented by many, but yes not all, in the volume. (Blanton and Penner were indeed interesting to read.) Sui generis claims often re-enter the field through the back door when ceremoniously kicked out the front. A mutual friend told me that, after the panel, some panelists dismissed my reply as irrelevant. It’s so nice to see that you are not among them and took the trouble to write to me. Holding to the standards for science that are widely accepted today, standards very important to many of the contributors to the volume on which I’m commenting in the following chapter, I leave it to readers to judge my reply for themselves, once they have read the following chapter and, if so motivated, looked at the book in question as well. Although the content of the panel discussion that day has been lost to time—as, I would say, is the case for the vast majority of what went on in the past—the following text and the book have both survived, allowing others to come to their own conclusions.

chapter 5

How to Give Up the Bible, and Learn to Love It Again The statement can, of course, be exegeted in many ways… Davies in boer 2010: 206

Let me open by repeating an anecdote, cited already in Chapter 1, from 2010 annual meeting of the North American Association for the Study of Religion (naasr). Having once served as its executive secretary and treasurer (2004–7), I was among those invited by the executive to an all-day retreat to discuss the future of the organization. Throughout the day, Jonathan Z. Smith’s name was invoked on a number of occasions as we discussed the organization’s raison d’être—Smith having served as naasr’s president (1996–2002) and having influenced the work of a number of the people present. Among the proposals pitched that day was for a panel, to be jointly sponsored by both naasr and the sbl, and to be held at the 2011 annual meeting in San Francisco, on the place of biblical studies in the study of religion.2 This discussion then led to some brainstorming on what was seen as provocative, one-word headings (somewhat akin to the chapter titles in Critical Terms for Religious Studies or the Guide to the Study of Religion) that could provide the basis for future naasr conferences, the critical category “Bible” being one among them. It was at this point that Matt Day, then editor of naasr’s journal, Method & Theory in the Study of Religion (mtsr), connected two of that day’s topics: “Bible” as a theoretical category and our apparently shared indebtedness to the work of Jonathan Z. Smith; leaning across the table, he looked at me and said, “Russ, would Jonathan see ‘Bible’ as a theoretical category? Would he have a panel on ‘the Bible?’” For those familiar with Smith’s work (and the fact that, to the best of my ability to find it, his large body of work using biblical materials is not cited by a single contributor to the book that I am here using as the way into examining the state of so-called secular scholarship on the Bible—Secularism and Biblical Studies—is something to which I shall return), the answer to Matt’s softball lob 2 As already indicated, the session, organized and chaired by Tomoko Masuzawa (also a former president of naasr [2005–8]), was entitled “Biblical Studies and the Modern Invention of ‘Religion’” and involved Elizabeth Clark, Karen King, Suzanne Marchand, Halvor Moxnes, and Yvonne Sherwood.

How to Give Up the Bible, and Learn to Love It Again

103

of a question should be obvious. So I recall saying something like: “No, he would not” (and, just to be sure, I recently double checked Matt’s memory of this exchange); I went on to say something about Smith more than likely instead seeing “Bible” as a native or local folk category (akin to Veda, the local name for a ritual text collection and thus hardly a critical, theoretical category of any cross-cultural use) and that, after comparing it to something of his choosing (such as, say, the way mere food becomes a specific cuisine), he would eventually end up redescribing that closed collection of texts known locally by some as “the Bible,” seeing it now as but one species of a larger genus—a genus that had no necessarily religious or scriptural significance to it, something like the wider term List or its subtypes, Catalog, and Canon. Although I didn’t elaborate any further then, let me now continue by noting that the purpose of such a Smithian redescription is that it serves the scholar’s goal of understanding the supposedly distinctive religious object as instead being but one more moment of mundane but no less interesting human ingenuity. As a result, at least as compared to why most people read it (or better put, use it, for it is a ritual object, after all), the document called the Bible now becomes interesting for a whole new set of reasons: for, as Smith has made plain, it is a closed collection that is nonetheless infinitely variable inasmuch as its contents can be interpreted in any number of ways (much like, Smith suggests, a delimited number of ordinary dietary ingredients can be prepared into a variety of distinctive cuisines). Such a comparative-driven redescription, then, makes clear that the actual object of study is the rules that determine what Smith calls “the dynamics of…limitation and variation” (Smith 1982: 40). In my reading, this is the point of his 1977 essay, which appears as Chapter 3 in Imagining Religion: “Sacred Persistence: Toward a Redescription of Canon” (1982): despite what many who have an interest in this document may assert concerning its origin, coherence, and meaning, there is nothing unique about the Bible once we see it as yet another cultural site (an e.g., to borrow Smith’s well-known terminology) where the process of signification is taking place, a process that involves the paired (we might as well say dialectical) human activities of delimitation and innovation within those self-imposed limits. While reading Secularism and Biblical Studies I was reminded, time and again, of this moment from that naasr meeting. For like those naasr members who, despite their claims of having been influenced by Smith’s work, failed to understand the place of “Bible” in our theoretical repertoire, many of the contributors to this book strike me as doing little different from the people whom they critique for failing to live up to what is required of so-called serious, secular, or scientific scholars. For the object of study throughout much of the book is, surprisingly, still the Bible. Or, to put it another way, the object of

104

chapter 5

study is not the socio-political conditions of its various components’ creation nor is it the history of its invention as a closed, authorized collection, and not even is the volume concerned with describing its current use. Instead, many of its authors are concerned with the meaning, accuracy, or proper use of its various parts. To put it another way, I have not read a book with the word exegesis in it—and not used ironically, mind you—so often since I took a New Testament course over twenty years ago. (Though, curiously, mention of eisegesis—that practice tied of strict necessity to that of exegesis—is nowhere to be found in the book; why is that?) Yet here, in a book devoted so explicitly to secular studies of the Bible, I find what I once understood as a term of theological relevance (i.e., interpreting the Word of God) used all throughout, sometimes in puzzling conjunction with such qualifiers as atheist or secular (e.g., Jacques Berlinerblau uses the former [22] while Hanna Stenström uses the latter [43]), as if the task of so-called serious biblical scholarship was to draw a non-religious meaning from out of the text. But the peculiar thing to me is the manner in which some of the contributors fail to see that, in advocating for the role of the atheist exegete, they are doing precisely the same thing as their theological interlocutors (perhaps the word adversaries better catches the tone of some of the book’s chapters), which is why their use of the old distinction between scholars of religion and theologians, between science and religion, strikes me as entirely missing the point. For in many cases, both sides bring ahistorical assumptions to bear on a text as if it were the keeper of some transcendental thing that we call its original meaning or authorial intention—whether that author is a believed-in deity, on the one side of the debate, or some long-dead and thus equally believed-in author.3 In my reading, all origins discourses (and not just those that open with “In the beginning…”) are ideological narratives, regardless the original meaning that we’re on a time travelling quest to find—a position that makes Hector Avalos’s criticism of how the relevance of the Bible is “often maintained by using translation to hide and distort the original meaning” (89; emphasis added) curiously ahistorical.4 So I see little difference between 3 It has always amazed me how often biblical scholars who maintain that they are doing something other than theologians nonetheless say such things as “Ezekiel thought…” or “Paul argues…,” never hinting that they are simply using such names as convenient short hands for redactional communities stretching across generations. For in my experience, even when pressed on these points, they will sooner or later fall back into their non-ironic “Paul believes…” comments, betraying their assumptions concerning a coherent, intentional agent motivating the text’s meanings. 4 Niels Peter Lemche’s equally curious aside—in his even more curiously titled contribution to the book, “Guns Do Not Kill, People Do”—that “there are humans behind decisions, not

How to Give Up the Bible, and Learn to Love It Again

105

making claims about some ahistorical referent called equality or freedom or justice or meaning (the things that a number of this volume’s authors are searching for in the Bible by means of their honed exegetical skills) and the supposedly theological move of talking about divine revelation. Although it is likely that for many of the contributors there is a glaring difference between, for example, believing in the Holy Spirit and, let’s say, believing in the enduring human spirit—both of which the text of the Bible apparently channels, all depending to whom you are talking—to split hairs by creating a taxonomy that allows us to distinguish “hs” from “hs” in some essential, substantive manner, arguing that the former non-obvious, universalized being is religious whereas the ­latter, equally non-obvious, universalized being is secular,5 serves merely to legitimize one mode of authority over another. Put simply, both sides are vying for control over the same game—but it is not the only game in town. Case in point: my first job was teaching at the University of Tennessee, and I recall a classroom moment that nicely illustrates this point. At least in the early 1990s, the student population in a city like Knoxville seemed rather different from the one that I had left behind in Toronto, where I did my Ph.D. But instead of lamenting the theoretically unsophisticated nature of those students, as some might, I think that I have some of those early career experiences to thank for keeping me on the methodological straight-and-narrow. For instance, not long after arriving, a student told me in class that Roman Catholics were not Christians. To say that I was surprised to hear this would be a huge understatement. Not only are they Christians, I remember thinking to myself, but they were the first ones—and so, for a time, the only ones; for I had paid attention in my History of Christianity course and certainly knew that off of them split the eastern Church and then, centuries later, there were those splinters that resulted in the thing that came to be known as Protestantism. Clearly this student was historically wrong and my role, as the serious scholar, was to set him right. institutions” (53), strikes me as a species of this typically liberal emphasis on free individual agency. That such an assertion fails to take seriously the non-intentional prior structures in which supposedly free choices are made, let alone the composite nature of the apparently free agent, should disqualify such work from being considered all that different from the universalized generalizations that characterize what Lemche himself (in a voice seemingly drawn straight from the nineteenth century) calls “the religious mind” (52). 5 For example, consider Boer in the introduction, outlining several reasons why the debate represented by this volume attracts the interest of different scholars: “For others, it is a struggle between those who rely on a transcendent category in order to interpret the Bible and those who draw their terms purely from this world” (9).

106

chapter 5

But before I opened my mouth to reply I realized that I, as a scholar of identity formation, don’t have a dog in the identity fight that he was waging in my class. Who am I to intervene in the debates of the people whom I study? Aren’t those very debates the things that I’m interested in examining and not settling—their history, their structure, and their implications? If he and the other members of his in-group wish to limit to whom the identifier “Christian” is applied, isn’t that their right? After all, isn’t it—like “Bible”—their signifier? Sure, I think I’d not be doing my job if I didn’t figure out a way to try to coax that student to move toward being a scholar of identity claims, at least while he’s in my class, and thus able to entertain that the designator “Christian” has been used in a lot of different ways by a lot of different people, and that those various uses reflect interests6 that members have and are trying to accomplish in the world—such as the student’s own interest to reserve the term for those who confronted the meaning of the Word for themselves rather than getting mired in all that institutional bureaucracy (what that student might as well have called popery). Maybe, if I’m lucky, I’d even get that student to consider that his own claims arise from just as much of an institutional setting as anyone’s (i.e., he didn’t teach himself the Lord’s Prayer, now did he?), making the whole mud-slinging activity over whose reading is right or closer to the original or in step with the intentions of the author or more useful for redemption or emancipation from other people’s oppressive readings (a phrase found repeatedly in some of this book’s essays) a rather pointless exercise, at least when carried out within the academy. So you see why I did not correct that student—because he was right! For members of his social group (the position from which he was making the claim, having not yet either understood or been persuaded by the transition that I was asking him to make it my class), Catholics are indeed not Christians. My reply, then, was directed at prompting him to consider that, in making this claim in my classroom, he was occupying a different institutional space where we play by a different set of rules. So, after establishing that the Roman Catholics whom I know considered themselves to be Christians, we started talking about why they would be disallowed from that identification by yet others who also used the term as their self-identifier, which led us to discuss the various ways in which the signifier “Christian” is used by people. And, as I recall, it resulted in a pretty good conversation—a conversation that helped us to shift the ground from debating the normative limits of orthodox Christian identity to examining the discourse on Christian identity itself. 6 See the appendix to this chapter on this term “interests.”

How to Give Up the Bible, and Learn to Love It Again

107

But that’s the move that I see almost nowhere in this volume (though Ward Blanton’s and Todd Penner’s chapters certainly stand out as doing something rather different from many of the others, inasmuch as both are concerned with the meta-conditions of biblical scholarship itself7)—the move from the interpretation of the correct meaning of artifacts to an examination of just why they counted (or still count) as artifacts worth interpreting. Instead, a number of authors wish to liberate and emancipate people from what they term oppressive Bible interpretations and abuses of the Bible (Roland Boer’s introduction and his “A Manifesto for Biblical Studies” sets the tone for this approach8) or to pull the rug out from under the fairy tale that is the Bible (Hector Avalos’s chapter being the best example of this latter approach9). Both positions strike me as engaging in the same discourse from which the volume claims to be removed (suggesting that the term “secular” in the title—a term with a rich literature but one little investigated by the authors—has little to do 7 In the case of Blanton’s interesting chapter, I wonder what might be lost in biblical studies if, as he recommends, we radically rethink the religion/not religion binary. Although such a recommendation is certainly not new to me, nor is it controversial, I do wonder if, having jettisoned this distinction, “the Bible” will continue to stand out as a document that attracts our attention. That is, although this canonized text long predates the fairly recent categorical distinction between religious/secular, this distinction has provided the enabling conditions of our studies of the document for several centuries. Without the ability to call it a “scripture,” and without the ability to understand “the Church” as a coherent “religious” (i.e., “Christian”) institution, I am unsure whether we will continue to find the text either interesting enough to study of even be able to conceive of “it” (i.e., the canon) as a coherent document that can be studied. My point: does “the Bible” predate the discourse on religion or, as I suspect to be the case, is the former (at least as we conceive of it today) a product of the latter? Put simply, how do we study the Bible before it was religious? 8 “[W]e are looking for an approach that not only interprets the Bible without the imposition of theological issues but one that also takes into account and enables a critique of precisely the theological underpinnings of biblical criticism. Similarly, we need a mode of holding the church itself responsible for its domination and (ab)use of the Bible, for its tactics of conversion and missionary work, for its continued rejection in many quarters of people due to gender, sexuality, race, and class. We must not, as Jione Havea points out, let the church off the hook” (30). Because the intellectual or political warrant for this need is never discussed, but simply asserted, I assume that the “we” of this passage refers only to those who share Boer’s political interests—such as Stenström, whose response to Boer’s Manifesto is equally concerned with such things as correcting (ill-defined) abusive interpretations of the Bible. 9 Because, as Avalos argues, the Bible is recognized to be a product of a different culture, “then there is no reason to continue to expend scholarly effort on a book that is no more relevant to the modern world than numerous other works of antiquity, many of which still lie untranslated” (86).

108

chapter 5

with the approach many of the contributors adopt); if that’s how we play it, if we’re here to debate which reading is more emancipatory or closer to some hypothetical original, then we’d better correct that student who claims exclusive rights for the label Christian.10 But of course the trouble here is that any and all approaches to what counts as Christianity are no more grounded, no more legitimate a reading, than any other—i.e., they all swim in the same selfinterested soup, vying for control of the designator (as evidenced in any debate over orthodoxy11). For, as (unironically) stated in the epigraph, the statement, You are (or are not) a Christian, “can, of course, be exegeted in many ways…” (206)—which is why scholars who wish to do something other than just play the old, old game need to shift the ground from the utterly unregulated economy of exegesis. When it comes to the more specific topic of how best to read the Bible (not unconnected to how to define Christian identity properly), many of the volume’s authors and those whom they criticize remain in the same contest— both using rhetorics of origin, meaning, and intention to legitimize a reading of what is collectively recognized by both sides as a foundational document to further one’s own contingent interests (such as Stenström’s puzzling aside, in her close, calling for “resistance against fundamentalism” [48]). But what happens if you’re interested in studying the contest itself, what if you’re not predisposed to using the self-evidently authorized artifact but, instead, wish to examine the criteria that are being used to distinguish artifact from trash (a problem for any theorist of archeology)? Then, the last thing you’ll be interested in doing is exegesis and all those who do exegesis, no matter what meaning they end up pulling from that text, will be seen as playing the same game—whether it is called theological or secular (indicating the insubstantial, paired nature of this set of terms). And conflicts over which emancipatory reading is truly liberating, which document is really historical or true, and whether the Bible is relevant or not to modern life, will be seen as internecine squabbles motivated by what Freud aptly called the narcissism of minor difference. (Notice, by the way, that I’m not even using what Michael V. Fox dismisses early on as postmodern sophistry [16] to go into the utterly problematic 10

11

Edgar W. Conrad adopts this very position in his chapter, in which he characterizes one type of Christian self-understanding as “peculiar” (164) and spends a fair bit of his time critiquing evangelical Christian methods of using the text. My point is that I see no interesting difference between national politicians critiquing each other as less patriotic and, most recently in the news in the u.s., Roman Catholics in Rome trying to censure American nuns inasmuch as they are portrayed as deviating from the faith.

How to Give Up the Bible, and Learn to Love It Again

109

nature of thinking that there’s such a thing as getting meaning from some supposedly uniform thing called a text—for to open that door, to take seriously how meaning production might actually work, might result in the old exegesis/ eisegesis distinction breaking down completely. In that case, all we will have left is reading meaning onto inherently meaningless cultural artifacts by the imposition of a historically contingent rule system [i.e., a grammar] and that certainly will not help us to read the text in the “right,” non-abusive way.) But if I was frustrated by the manner in which many of the book’s chapters seem to do little different than the work of those whom its authors criticize, then what I found even more troublesome was that—as signaled in my opening aside—the work of Jonathan Z. Smith appears nowhere in this volume (and I base that observation not simply on perusing the index but there may have been a mention in a footnote that I missed, despite going through them all).12 That is, the most interesting scholars whom I associate with the sbl, those who have gone some way toward rethinking what it means to study this thing people call the Bible, are completely absent from the book. Somewhat like the so-called new atheists (I have in mind such writers as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett), who write as if there was no such thing as an academic study of religion, this volume strikes me as (badly, I maintain) reinventing the wheel. For example, take the multi-authored Redescribing Christian Origins project, begun at the sbl’s 1992 meeting in San Francisco,13 which has already indicated how non-humanistic and non-theological studies of the data-domain over which these authors all have command can be studied in a historically rigorous and theoretically sophisticated manner (the first of several volumes of its papers, edited by Ron Cameron and Merrill Miller, was published back in 2004, as part of the sbl’s Symposium Series). Unless I overlooked something, I found no citations to the redescribing project. This puzzles me and I am not sure what accounts for it. We all have to make choices, of course, since there’s only so much time in the day, and specialization carries with it a narrowed gaze, so perhaps I expect too much in assuming that Secularism and Biblical Studies’ contributors read what I, a non-specialist, read 12

13

Somewhat oddly in a book dedicated to secular criticisms, the work of Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, professor of Roman Catholic Theological Studies at Harvard Divinity School, is cited multiple times by different contributors, such Joseph A. Marchal’s chapter using his work (“an ethics of accountability”), as providing a role model for scholarship on the Bible that corrects the “dangerous, destructive, and dominating dynamics of biblical interpretation” of the past (110). The first group of papers from that meeting were published in mtsr (8 [1996]). On the redescriptive project in Christian origins, see also Chapter 6 in this collection.

110

chapter 5

in their field. For it is indeed a highly specialized field—though, of course, “specialized” may just be a euphemism for “entitled,” since I recall a New Testament colleague (cited in a previous chapter), earlier in my career, who once successfully argued for a new hire who worked on Paul because, as he (again, unironically) phrased it in a faculty meeting, “I do the Gospels; I don’t do the Epistles!” Despite the widely presumed legitimacy of such a narrow (i.e., privileged) gaze—widely presumed only among New Testament scholars, mind you14—given the frustration repeated throughout the volume concerning the way much scholarship in the sbl is carried out, then more alliances with those few other equally frustrated and intellectually provocative and productive scholars makes great sense to me. But returning to the work of Smith in particular, what I find most troubling is that his 2008 sbl presidential address is cited nowhere in the book (but when did this 2010 book go to press?). I am troubled because the address, entitled “Religion and Bible” (Smith 2009),15 outlines precisely how one might go about engaging in an academically sound study of that collection of ancient yet still-used documents known collectively as the Bible. As the opening to this essay made plain, Smith has made arguments such as this for many years, of course, going back at least to his 1973 essay, “The Social Description of Early Christianity” (Smith 1975), in which biblical and non-canonical texts become the data for theoretical tools, in an effort to say something about the social worlds that produced these texts and the social worlds that, over time, have used these texts. But moving from attempts to reconstruct the social contours of the earliest forms of Christianity, his 2008 presidential address (which, I assume, some of those in the book heard in person) is perhaps his most detailed statement on how scholars can make use of the Bible to achieve aims other than what we might characterize as the theological concerns of previous generations. Much like his previously cited 1977 essay on sacred persistence, Smith’s argument here is comparative, though not the sort of comparison advocated by many of Secularism and Biblical Studies’ contributors, in which their comparisons are always between the use of the Bible in this place versus 14

15

Although it is utter speculation, at places in the volume I wondered if some of the authors are dealing with the insecurity that attends the loss of such entitlement—i.e., the realization that, due to current economic issues affecting the job market or the changing hiring tastes of universities, the long taken-for-granted place and status of, for example, the New Testament scholar in a Department of Religious Studies can no longer be taken for granted. If so, some of their anxiety may (ironically) be linked to now being treated like every other member of a field in which no specialty holds pride of place or is deemed essential. This address is not to be confused with Smith’s earlier essay, “Bible and Religion” (2000).

How to Give Up the Bible, and Learn to Love It Again

111

that. (In my reading only one contributor compared the Bible to anything nonbiblical, that being the cultural authority that Shakespearean language also has [104].) Instead, recognizing (as I presume that all of the contributors do) that the imagined coherency to this thing called “the Bible” is a postbiblical phenomenon (and thus talking about “the Bible” as a coherent thing implicitly reauthorizes the strategies that made it appear to be a coherent collection in the first place, something to which I will return), Smith makes his usual redescriptive move and, with an ironic nod to Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s work on the comparative studies of scripture (1993), presses his sacred persistence argument further, making plain that the Bible is not the object of study for scholars who take history and contingency seriously. Instead, the Bible becomes but one of many e.g.s that we ought to be comparing in order to draw general conclusions concerning the “formation, limits, and stability” (Smith 2009: 24) of interpretive communities and traditions. Arguing that cross-cultural traditionformation is actually our object of study, he prompts us to ask: where are the biblical scholars who study canon formation or, perhaps even better, are also able to read Sanskrit or Arabic—that is, those who, in the tradition of F. Max Müller, can work in a truly comparative, cross-cultural manner by drawing upon at least two different canonical systems, carrying out what Smith, back in 1977, called a comparative study of canons, in which, as he phrased it in his sbl presidential address, “the object of study…is not so much the text itself as it is the tradition, its trajectories” (Smith 2009: 21). Instead, it seems to me that many of the authors in this volume wish merely to continue studying the text itself (placing a typical Index of Bible References in the book suggests that the same is assumed of its readers), thereby taking not just the existence but also the limits of the collection known as the Bible for granted and then setting about to work within those limits (as does any interpreter) to find new meanings that are conducive to the interests and ­situations in which they happen to find themselves. (As an aside, let me say that buried here is the presumption that the text ought to have continued ­relevance, if only we can find it. That we, as historical-critical scholars who maintain that we are doing something other than theology, do not read other ancient texts in this manner ought to cause us to pause for a moment.) In this way, whether a theist or an atheist interpreter, a sacred or secular exegete, all  such interpretive scholarship plays the same role—for, to quote Smith’s “Sacred Persistence” once again: Every canon needs a hermeneut, “whose task  it is c­ ontinually to extend the domain of the closed canon over everything  that  is known or everything that exists without altering the canon in the  ­process” (Smith 1982: 48)—what Smith terms “exegetical totalization.” Thus canon and exegete are part of the same ritual-based, tradition-making

112

chapter 5

exercise—­regardless the school of which the exegete is a part, both exegete and canon are data. Athalya Brenner’s chapter on the implications of the Book of Ruth for the plight of foreign workers in modern Israel and Yairah Amit’s chapter on the modern implications for the State of Israel of “the Bible’s position on the Samaritans” (192) provide fitting examples of the totalized (i.e., ahistorical) exegete’s labors, i.e., working to make these ancient texts speak to modern situations. How these two chapters are connected to the others in this volume—as troublesome as I am arguing many of the other chapters are—is rather puzzling since these two seem to comprise data for the other authors’ secularizing efforts. But another fitting (though ironic, in a way perhaps unintended by the author) example is Philip Davies’s perplexing chapter, “The Biblical Roots of Secularism,” in which he argues that what many of us take to be a late-modern European political creation—i.e., the distinction between church and state, between religion and politics—is actually a biblical creation. The irony here is that, in arguing for a way of studying the Bible different from that which admittedly dominates the sbl, Davies reproduces a very old method: anchoring and thereby authorizing contemporary concerns by finding biblical sources/­ precedents for them. Although he likely intended his chapter as ironic (­perhaps even satirical?)—inasmuch as it seems to argue that the book that so many sbl members take to be transcendentally authoritative itself tells them that they ought to partition their religious views from their public roles as scholars—it nonetheless reads like the father in the film My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002), who was able to source everything to the Greek language, even the word “kimono.” I therefore find in the book under review what Smith once called “a theological apologetic [but] without a theology” (Smith 1982: 43). For example, each time one of the contributors discussed “the Bible,” I wanted to ask, “To which Bible are you referring?”—for we all know, I presume, that there are any number of different canons, some of which are still in use today (and even those many uses hardly converge) and some not, all with curious similarities and differences, indicating that there is no such thing in the world of material objects as “the Bible” (making “the Bible says” statements—much like the “Paul thought” statements that I heard at another sbl panel in San Francisco— either theological or, when coming from the pen of a so-called secular scholar, historically very sloppy). I was guessing that they did not mean the Hebrew Bible or Marcion’s, but did they mean Thomas Jefferson’s (as Conrad does, at times, in his chapter) or maybe Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s? Of course, the Syriac canon is not the same as the Greek Orthodox, or as the Catholic. And one must not forget the Coptic, of course. Yet everyone kept writing about “the Bible” as

How to Give Up the Bible, and Learn to Love It Again

113

if readers knew what they were talking about. How is this not exceedingly poor scholarship that relies on assumption of homogenization and transcendentalism?16 Of course, it would be unfair of me to assume that almost everyone in the volume is talking about the Protestant canon (and specifically about the portion designated the New Testament) and thus exemplifying such things as their own theological origins and exegetical place; I would need far more data than I currently have to make a speculation like that stick, however. But I’m guessing that it would not be difficult. (For instance, do they study the Book of Kings or 1st Kings and 2nd Kings?) My hope is that by now it is apparent that I do not think that the sort of scholarship modeled in Secularism and Biblical Studies exhausts the alternatives from which we have to choose if we’re seeking to do something different from “the faithful” when we, as scholars, study the Bible. In closing, let me therefore refer to my opening, specifically my Dr Strangelove-influenced title, “How to Give Up the Bible, and Learn to Love It Again,” and cite a chapter from a Festschrift in honor of Donald Wiebe that I have co-edited with Willi Braun and William Arnal (two more of those interesting scholars trained in biblical studies whose work, predictably, perhaps, appears nowhere in this volume). In the close to that volume, Arnal and Braun argue that the category religion— the means by which we as scholars create an apparently transcendental data domain within which we group an otherwise diverse number of texts, behaviors, institutions, etc., as if they all share an essential identity, i.e., their religiosity—is itself a non-scientific category (call it theological or humanistic, if you will); they argue that the category religion is not worth fighting for and that those who take history and contingency seriously ought to just relinquish it to those who think that they can time travel to an author’s intentions by giving a text a “close reading” and those who claim to be able to draw general conclusions concerning eternal human nature from their observation of a select number of specific cases. As they phrase it: So, let us then in all honesty hand over Religion to them that know what it is, to them that are sure which human productions, performances, 16

This is the sort of ideological—or what many of the contributors to this volume might call theological—moves that such scholars would undoubtedly identify if someone else tried to homogenize the viewpoint of, say, the synoptics. What is truly fascinating is that such critically minded scholars nonetheless feel quite comfortable talking about some coherent thing called “the New Testament” as if it had a uniform voice or position on topics (e.g., see Davies’s concluding chapter in which the New Testament itself does not provide any basis for such [i.e., political] activity and actually forbids it [208]).

114

chapter 5

affectations and the like are religious and why “religious” must be the descriptive or classifying adjective for a given, or any, human datum. Let us transfer the deed of ownership of Religion to its legitimate disciplinary proprietors, to its epistemological and analytic virtuosi, the religiologists or theologians, be they confessional theologians, world religiologists, ­aficionados of the universal Sacred, or analysts of a natural homo religiosus or religio eo ipso. Arnal et al. 2012: 233–234

In their reconceived field, freed from the transhistoricism that comes with the category religion, we will be able to get on with interesting work when we develop new ways to cut across and group together the human behaviors that catch our attention (thereby recognizing that our grouping activities reflect our interests and are not our way of merely recognizing shared, natural identities inhering in objects). With their provocative suggestion in mind—one that amounts to far more than simply giving all our religion-data a new name so as to keep studying Buddhists and Muslims, and Hindus, and Jews—I recommend giving up the fight over who rightfully owns the Bible, not to mention the practice of exegesis, and leaving both to those who rightly own this ritual/ liturgical text—that socio-political institution we call the Church. Much like acknowledging that it is up to self-identified Christians to debate who ought to be considered a Christian, and that we as scholars are neither part of that debate nor are we referees governing how it is played, we also need to realize that, unlike theologians and other elite ritual specialists, we as scholars do not study Bible—a word used by some to name some sort of obviously existing and enduring object that supposedly has deep meaning and ongoing relevance for situations that arise in life. If we were being cute, we could just call this the Bible of faith and appeal to an earlier quest in New Testament scholarship when advocating that we simply give up searching for its true meaning and proper use. Failing to make this move when it comes to studying the Bible lands scholars in the role of debating with the Brahmin over what the Rig Veda really means, how it really ought to be used in these modern times, or what it tells us about the minds and the meanings of its ancient authors—if these are not our debates in south Asian studies or among Sanskritists, then what of biblical studies? I therefore assume that it is evident just how strongly I disagree with, for example, a statement such as Boer’s from his Manifesto: “the church has colonized and domesticated a collection of texts that by no means sits easily in that situation” (29). His effort to recover and re-interpret this set of texts fails to take seriously just who owns them, who uses them, who created the collection qua

How to Give Up the Bible, and Learn to Love It Again

115

canon to begin with, and thus the discursive context in which any of us come to know these otherwise divergent ancient writings as texts worth paying attention to. Claims that the church has colonized them for its purposes presuppose some coherent text that predates its supposed domestication and this, I contend, is just poor historical thinking. The very existence of these documents (i.e., that they have been copied time and time again, edited, collected, preserved, interpreted, and reinterpreted, etc.) attests to a longtime collaborative relationship between redactional communities, the documents they produce, and members of this socio-political institution who continually find uses for these texts. In fact, it is we, as scholars, who are the non-specialists, the interlopers, the colonizers—if, that is, all we’re trying to do is interpret and apply the meaning of the Bible properly.17 Although I advise that debating how to rescue the text from the theologians is ill-advised, we may still study texts and their uses/users in any number of fascinating ways. For if any type of scholarly work counts as secular, or at least reconsidered, then it must at least be scholarship that scrutinizes the history of the document, the canon-making processes themselves, their links to the manner in which social actors portray an always reinvented social life as constant (i.e., the rhetoric of tradition), and the implications of continuing to see any malleable item of discourse as if it were a real, solid, and active force in the world. Or, as phrased by Penner in his chapter, 17

One of the more widely read contributors to this topic, as well as an author in this volume, is Jacques Berlinerblau. His chapter, “The Unspeakable in Biblical Studies,” mostly reproduces his earlier online “sbl Forum” article of the same name. (The original, with  different paragraphing, was posted in February 2006 and can be found in their archives at: http://www.sbl-site.org/publications/article.aspx?articleId=503 [accessed Dec. 7, 2011].) As a critic of the sbl (e.g., see his 2006 Chronicle of Higher Education essay, “What’s Wrong with the Society of Biblical Literature” [http://chronicle.com/article/ Whats-Wrong-With-the-Socie/12369/ (accessed Dec. 7, 2011)]), his other blog post, “An Afternoon with the Society for Pentecostal Studies” chronicles his experience attending a 2011 conference session of one of the sbl’s affiliated program units—a unit whose theological assumptions are held to be at odds with the historical-critical method as practiced by serious scholars (find this blog post at: http://chronicle.com/ blogs/brainstorm/an-afternoon-with-the-society-for-pentecostal-studies/41496 [accessed Dec. 7, 2011]). Yet, predictably perhaps, the blog post makes plain that his suggested alternative is still an exegetical approach—one that “leans heavily on the findings of modern biblical scholarship.” So the difference, then, is not in kind, since all participants in these debates are trying to interpret the original meaning of the text; rather, as already suggested, the difference is in the manner in which the interpretations are authorized.

116

chapter 5

A full emancipation of Biblical Studies, if there is to be one, must engage the genealogy of the discipline, particularly examining the discursive structures as they are fundamentally embedded in the socio-cultural and politico-historical contexts out of which biblical criticism arose (71) And this is where my earlier, sacred/secular-inspired “Bible of faith versus Bible of history” pairing utterly breaks down, for there is no more historical, real Bible to be found once the so-called mythology of faith is brushed off.18 To put it another way, both positions in this debate continue to assume that the document is meaningful, if just read in the right way—the truly radical break from the never-ending back-and-forth of this theological/scientific game would be, as suggested earlier, studying it as a ritual artifact that must be used in a specific, proper manner (when and where it is read, by whom, for what purpose, etc.) rather than seeing it as a transcendentally meaningful text representative of individual desires and motives.19 Such a novel approach (i.e., one that takes seriously the contingency of culture and focuses on the production and distribution of meaning itself) understands that other people’s studies of and uses for this thing they call the Bible, not the Bible itself, is our only object of study—for all we have is the discourse on the Bible, making an index of exegetes and a list of interpretive strategies far more useful in a book such as this than an index of Bible references. So, with these recommendations in mind, I conclude by repeating Smith from 1977: I look forward to the day when courses and monographs will exist in both comparative exegesis and comparative theology, comparing not so much conclusions as strategies through which the exegete (considered here as 18

19

It is refreshing how thoroughly Arnal has made this point with regard to quests for the historical Jesus (2005)—although the resiliency of the position against which he argues is not to be underestimated (e.g., the surprisingly traditional, historicist argument made in Ehrman 2012). I do not just mean reading the Bible as part of a liturgy, of course. As I pass students who are reading the Bible, or holding Bible studies, in my own university’s coffee shops or cafeterias, I admit it is difficult to make this break—to see them, or for that matter, anyone else reading any text, as involved in a performative practice rather than as an isolated mind finding meaning in a text that somehow unites them with an author removed either by distance or time. Making this move requires drawing into question a whole series of modern assumptions concerning the individual, assumptions likely necessary for the smooth functioning of the groups in which we now live (i.e., nation-states seemingly comprised of isolated citizens).

How to Give Up the Bible, and Learn to Love It Again

117

part of our data and not a role model for scholarship) seeks to interpret and translate his received tradition to his contemporaries. Smith 1982: 52

I, too, look forward to this day, because, judging by the contributions to Secularism and Biblical Studies, nearly thirty-five years after Smith wrote those words, it has yet to arrive.20

Appendix: On Interests21

The approach to identification advocated here may puzzle some readers since it troubles the usual notion that we have of the individual who does things for certain reasons. While I talk about interests and purposes, I do not presuppose the usual sort of agent doing things in the world. Is that a contradiction? I don’t think so. I would like to think that “interests,” a term I use on a variety of occasions, is the tip of a more complex social theory of the individual, a word I prefer over “intention,” given the way that the latter usually seems anchored to a notion of isolated, self-motivated authors/social actors publicly inscribing pristine and private things we call meanings in a text for readers to later decipher properly (or not), or in an action for observers to decode properly (or not), so that those who come after them will know what they were thinking. Instead, “interests”—at least as I use it (and since you’re the reader, it’s up to you to figure out how you want to use it)—is part of a prior system of necessarily intertwined agents and structures, the former created by the latter (consider the history, at least in the u.s., of defining what counts as “a person under the law” [e.g., while we could discuss the current legal agreement in many places that corporations are persons or perhaps cite such national cases as efforts in the 1920s in Canada to count women as persons as defined by the British-North American Act of 1867, we might also draw attention to the so-called compromise of the Philadelphia Convention of 1787, as a result of which an African American counted merely as 3/5 of a person, for purposes of enumeration, something which stood until the mid- to 20

21

My thanks to William Arnal, Willi Braun, Matt Day, and Vaia Touna who read and commented on a draft of this response. To Matt, I owe thanks for suggesting a far better title than the one I was using at the time. Thanks also to Randy Reed, co-chair of the Ideology Criticism program unit of the sbl, for the kind invitation to be a respondent for the panel at which this chapter was first presented. The following appendix is adapted from a blog post of my own, from Dec. 29, 2013, posted at http://edge.ua.edu/russell-mccutcheon/secret-agent-man/ (accessed Jan. 14, 2014).

118

chapter 5

late-1860s]) and the latter created by large and loosely organized (if at all!) collectivities of the former. That is, since the quest for origins is itself so problematic (given that each present circumstance will select an originary point that best serves its own teleological needs), I’m not trying to figure out whether the chicken or the egg came first—both the interested individual and the faceless group presume each other and, even if you cannot see them right away, they are each simultaneously present when either is identified or discussed. Simply put, I would not be here without the dating and mating rituals that neither of my parents made up but which they successfully adapted and acted out. So, I am able to type this now because, as a very little boy, I was forced to think and write in a code system (i.e., language) that others before me made up—others who were themselves working within, and adapting through innovation and accident, the results of yet more prior actors, the vast majority of whom had never met and were hardly working in a coordinated manner. For, despite all those hardworking teachers out there who are grading essays and catching errors in noun-verb agreement and split infinitives, it is not like there is a committee meeting somewhere that invented and polices English. These are structures devised by non-coordinated, decentered multiples of agents who were themselves determined by prior structures designed by multiples of yet other agents who were, at least when judged on a collective level, also working in the dark. If this is what lies behind our use of the word “interests”—both agent and structured setting—then we can see it is a shorthand that allows me to focus on an arbitrary point in what I might as well understand as an endless system (Question: where does the past begin, anyway?). But since I have only so much time and energy, I’ll start here at least, knowing there’s plenty more to go in all directions, in hopes that someone else whose interests sufficiently overlap my own (sufficient enough to call them a colleague?) will start over there.

chapter 6

Introduction

How to write a genealogy of religion? This is the problem that still confronts a variety of scholars today who, despite having read their Foucault and Barthes on such topics as the death of the author, despite not succumbing to temptations to side with William James et al. by presuming that some experiential big bang in the heart of a so-called religious genius started it all, and despite having also pondered the implications of Hayden White’s critique of history writing, nonetheless still fall back into old habits—habits like stringing together narratives of causality and development that reach out to us today from a pristine point in the dimly lit past. That is, the quest for origins, despite harsh criticisms from the last few generations of scholars (notably the early twentieth-century functionalists, intent on unseating the Intellectualist tradition that came just before them), remains the predominant mode of discourse in our field—what else is the requisite “survey of the literature” in a dissertation but a chronological narrative of origins that, over the bodies of dead scholars and, often, long-forgotten debates, points the way to the telos, which is none other than one’s one thesis statement? All roads lead to each of our own Romes, after all. So, while historians, many of whom are well aware of such critiques, “may… resolve to suspend the origin-quest indefinitely…the suspension or the renunciation of the hope of satisfaction does not automatically shift and upgrade their scholarly enterprise to a new operating system,” as Tomoko Masuzawa insightfully phrased it in her article “Origin” in the Guide to the Study of Religion (2000a: 222). “[B]ut rather,” she concludes, “it makes the same old system all the more opaque, as the latter becomes partially occluded by denial.” My goal in the following chapter is to make that opacity somewhat more transparent, at least in one subfield of the wider study of religion: Christian origins. The occasion for writing this unpublished paper was an invitation extended by my colleague, friend, and sometimes co-author (e.g., Arnal and McCutcheon 2013), William Arnal, who co-organized a panel for a Society of Biblical Literature (sbl) at its 2013 conference in Baltimore, md (though he was unable to attend). Part of the third phase of an earlier, and quite successful “Redescribing Christian Origins” project1—though the current effort has been renamed as “Redescribing 1 The effort was entitled “Ancient Myths and Modern Theories of Christian Origins”; see Cameron and Miller 2004: 1 ff. for some of its organizer’s thoughts on the project’s rationale. It was then followed by a second phase, organized by Barry Crawford and Chris Matthews.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004281417_008

120

chapter 6

Early Christianity”—this panel was to be devoted to the topic, “What Does It Mean to ‘Explain’ Earliest Christianity?”—a meta-question, at least as I read the invitation, that, I thought, was not sufficiently addressed in the previous phases of what has turned out to be an ongoing project. That is, given the effort it took for a small group of scholars just to stop employing the New Testament’s own picture of the world and its narration of events (if it is even accurate to think that there such a thing as one coherent view in that collection of texts) as if they amounted to disinterested history and thus provided a reasonable enough starting point for a historically rigorous developmental narrative of the origins and subsequent rise of the Christian church (as many scholars still seem to presume), it might have been too much to hope that, at least at earlier stages of such a redescriptive project (i.e., it was begun, formally, in the early 1990s, though based on much work done sometime before, of course), the very presumption that such a narrative was even possible could itself be called into question. Instead, the move was made to try to get behind the texts commonly known as the gospels and the epistles (by focusing on non-canonical texts and social context), to see them as the products of other, prior movements which were engaged in various forms of situated and interested social experimentation with rhetorics (what the earliest members of this group called “mythmaking”) and organization (termed by them “social formation”). Knowing much about the social, political, economic, and intellectual context of the time was therefore assumed to be crucial, should a convincing picture of turnof-the-era Palestine emerge, one capable of helping us to account for how the various and diverse Jesus movements, that some now think existed then, sooner or later coalesced into this thing we today know as Christianity—or so it was thought. But despite what surely strikes some as a rather dramatic shift—when viewed in certain ways it is, of course—the explanatory task set before scholars of Christian origins strikes me as not all that different from the goal of those from whom they seek to distance themselves (i.e., New Testament scholars— whether humanistically or theologically inclined). For both groups are trying to account for how some coherent “we” arrived here today, devising a developmental narrative to get from an alpha, then and there, to an omega, here and now. That one might attribute this sequential development to any number of seemingly different factors (from divine intervention, of course, to thoroughly naturalistic social factors, or even outright historical accident) doesn’t distract me from seeing in both efforts the same quest for origins that so many of us today dismiss without giving it a second thought—if, that is, we see it in the work of our intellectual predecessors (such as E.B. Tylor spinning elaborate yarns, over a hundred years ago, about some speculative “savage philosopher” inventing the idea of a soul, a double, or a life force to come to grips with what we now know to be just a dream he had). I have placed this chapter

Introduction

121

immediately after the previous one because I think they’re both related, both being examples of how seemingly great differences to various groups of participants can turn out to be relatively minor when seen from a new perspective. That new perspective, the one that enables one to see Christian origins as being just as deeply embedded in a speculative (and, ultimately, unproductive) quest for origins, is one that takes seriously the social work that narratives of origin and chronological development accomplish (how this applies to my own opening narrative about the three phases of this sbl group, let alone the other introductions in this book that I’ve written to previously existing papers, needs to be considered too, of course—it’s not turtles but social formation and identification all the way down). Sure, we know this when we talk about other people’s narratives of origin and development (much as when we hear other nation’s tales of origins and conquest), narratives that we still easily classify as myth and study accordingly, but the difficulty of hearing our own tales of the past as being up to the same mischievous social purposes is hard to overcome. Sure, we can say that scholarship is myth with footnotes, as Bruce Lincoln ingeniously did, to try to have it both ways—acknowledging the similarity and yet also the difference between “their” and “our” ideology in narrative form (as he defines myth; see Lincoln 1999: 207–208), but apart from merely saying that our ideology in narrative form follows our own in-group’s strict conventions (for citation and quotation, for example), as opposed to the no-less evident but different conventions followed in theirs (conventions that help to accomplish their purposes, of course), I’m not sure what this move actually accomplishes; for while it distinguishes among what we might call types of authorizing conventions, it certainly doesn’t make the argument that footnotes—i.e., a rigorous and public system for allowing someone to reproduce your results by tracing the path of your argument—get us any closer to what really happened or, say, what, so long ago, David Friedrich Strauss really thought about the life of Jesus. For just a brief acquaintance with some of the more critical work being done in historiography makes plain that quoting this or that sequence of prior authors does not weave your own work into theirs, or into some pre-existing scholarly tradition, so much as constitute that very tradition in the selection of citations to include, thereby weaving your own work into your reading of theirs and thus your criteria for what counts as a tradition worth citing—an utterly self-serving exercise that works only so long as readers think that when I write, “Well, as Lincoln has argued…” I’ve somehow conjured him up here, on this very page, from his office in Swift Hall at the University of Chicago, or wherever he might be at this moment, all of us knowing he’s worth associating with. In fact, one could make an argument—whether convincing

122

chapter 6

or not is up to the listener or the reader to decide—that citation and quotation are but our own form of what our nineteenth-century predecessors would have likely termed sympathetic or contagious magic: a curious form of so-called primitive thought in which results here are thought to occur because of a power, value, or charisma (i.e., argumentative force and scholarly reputation) that resides somewhere else, that is either imitated here (i.e., when I repeat someone else’s argument in my essay) or with which something else has come into contact (i.e., such as embedding someone else’s words in my text via the convention that we call quotation).2 The act of citation, seen as a social act, is then akin to a lock of hair dropped into a brewing magical potion or a ritual repetition of a name or a phrase (such as all the scholars who still find themselves citing Jonathan Z. Smith’s line about religion being the product of scholarly imagination but then who seem not to take this all that seriously in the rest of their work—as I’ve suggested in Chapter 4 of this book, it is a ritual protection to ward off the evil which scholars call critique). Taking seriously this alternative approach was something evident to me when good friends (e.g., Willi Braun and William Arnal), who were involved early on in this Christian origins redescriptive effort, started making not only the argument that there were likely multiple and probably unrelated originary points (thereby championing polygenesis over mono- [e.g., see Braun’s interesting reply to Burton Mack (Cameron and Miller 2004: 433–442)]) but also the far more radical argument that actors in the second century actually invented what came to be seen as the first—that is, their eventual selection of which prior texts to read, value, transcribe, thereby conserve, and eventually to enshrine in authorized collections known as canons (so that a certain picture of origins made it to what we then call the third century, which, doing its own conservation work, invents the second, and so on, and so on…, all the way up to the present). The criteria directing such choices thus came long after the texts themselves were written, for whatever their original purpose may or may not have been. Much as a movie that is set in either the past or the future inevitably betrays the filmmaker’s own situated sensibilities (as I think I’ve mentioned before in print, the original American “Star Trek” television show “looks” an awful lot like what old magazines in the 1960s thought the future would look like), so, too, origins tales are about the teller and not the supposed object of the story. While some may see this sort of thinking as terribly problematic, 2 If this is the way we look at writing and argumentation, then the offense of plagiarism is actually but a species of the fallacy of misplaced authority: one is disciplined for failing to make public the legitimators of one’s own words, by failing to cite the source of those words properly.

Introduction

123

inasmuch as the baby of the actual artifact is thrown out with the supposed bathwater of the narrative that made it worth preserving instead of tossing out, I see it as extremely productive inasmuch as it prompts scholars themselves to take seriously our own role in social formation—we are, after all, the storytellers authorized in schools and courts to say what “really” happened. We have the diplomas on our wall, the graduation gowns, and mortar boards to prove it. Not unlike my colleagues at Culture on the Edge3—Steven Ramey and Monica Miller—who have recently focused on the way that the so-called Nones (people who report on questionnaires that they have no religious affiliation) are actually a product of the demographers, journalists, and scholars who place such emphasis on answers to one or two questions on a survey, as if these replies form the organizational basis for an entire social formation comprised of otherwise different and distinguishable people (e.g., see Ramey 2013b and Ramey and Miller’s co-written piece at the Huffington Post [2013])—so, too, a reconsidered approach to origins in general, and attempts to talk about the origins of some coherent thing called Christianity in particular, might shift our scholarly attention from those ancient writers and their now-torn manuscripts to the work done by our own hands and our own pens (or better, our laptops and desktop computer) in imagining them to begin with. Given that the most recent phase of the redescriptive project describes itself as follows on the sbl’s website for its various program units— The seminar contributes to the study of early Christian history by problematizing current consensus views, unexamined assumptions, and categories; recontextualizing and redescribing the key data through comparative analysis; and accounting for the configurations of texts under view in terms of social theory. —it was my assumption that this would be a good place to think publicly on such matters of origin and mythmaking, but doing so in a way that made scholarly situatedness and historicity just as curious as any other—with or without our footnotes. It is a way more in keeping with Foucault’s thoughts on the past than with those who are trying to roll back stones at tombs, for whatever reason, trying to recover what happened at the source. For, as Foucault said in an interview in 1968 (and which I now ritually repeat for purposes of my own):

3 See edge.ua.edu for a description of this collaborative research group, studying identification—rather than identity—as an ongoing series of actions.

124

chapter 6

I’m not at all interested in the past to try to bring it back to life but because it’s dead. There’s no teleology of resurrection there, but rather the realization that the past is dead. Starting from that death, we can say absolutely serene things, completely analytic and anatomical, not directed toward a possible repetition or resurrection. And for that reason as well, nothing is of less interest to me than the desire to rediscover in the past the secret of origin. foucault 2013: 44

chapter 6

“Why Do You Seek the Living Among the Dead?” (Luke 24: 5) The Many Forms of Christianity…

Subject Line of an Oxford University Press Mass Ad Email, Oct. 21, 2013

It has been some time since the question of the origin of religion was seriously entertained. Today, there is little sign of the matter being resuscitated and once again becoming the focus of the lively debate of old. Looking back upon the bold speculations of their forefathers, contemporary scholars of religion seem to consider themselves to be in a new phase of scholarship, having learned, above all, not to ask impossible questions. Masuzawa 1993: 1

On May 4, 2013, Steve Martin was the guest on National Public Radio’s game show, “Wait, Wait..., Don’t Tell me” During the initial interview, before he went on to answer three questions about boring people, he was asked about hosting the Oscars, which he’s now done three times (depending how you count cohosting with Alec Baldwin, it’s two and a half). After remarking on how, in hindsight, each year the press reassesses the success of the previous year’s telecast, presumably to portray the upcoming Oscars as better than ever, Martin adds: I’ve found that the critics will remember what they need for that year’s commentary.4 At least according to the man who brought us the revisionist history of his hit song “King Tut,” the remembered and even the documented past (in distinction, of course, from the immeasurably silent past that is now something less than dust) is an utterly plastic archive from which a variety of actors in the present can draw for their own continually changing purposes—not unlike my own strategic isolation and then repetition of his one quotation, here today, from that now all-but-forgotten May 4, 2013, radio interview. 4 Listen to the episode here: http://www.npr.org/2013/05/04/180815696/not-my-job-steve -martin-takes-a-quiz-about-boring-people (accessed Oct. 12, 2013).

126

chapter 6

The moral of this tale? The past is continually invented anew for reasons that were, quite literally, previously unthought. My question, then, is: If that wild and crazy guy—the one who rose to fame with balloon animals, an arrow through his head, and a pair of nose and glasses—understands this, then why don’t scholars who continue to dig through those dusty archives in search of relics capable of transporting them back to the time of origins, when the ancestors walked the earth? But because I fear my reputation, whatever it may be, slipping somewhat by opening a paper at such an austere occasion as this, focusing on such an obviously important topic as the history and origins of Christianity, by making reference to the star of The Jerk—and doing so as if all of the objects that we study are nothing more or less than comparable human cultural productions, making them analogically interchangeable in the service of a speaker with a point to make—let me begin anew, this time quoting the final paragraph, in full, from what I consider to be Bill Arnal’s masterful little book, The Symbolic Jesus (2005): And so perhaps the quest for the historical Jesus should be abandoned once again. Not because scholars cannot agree on their reconstructions; lack of agreement may only indicate that further—and more rigorous— work needs to be done. Not because the investigation has been biased; bias is unavoidable, here as elsewhere. Not even because reasonable conclusions are impossible in light of our defective sources, though this may indeed be the case. But because, ultimately, the historical Jesus does not matter, either for our understanding of the past, or our understanding of the present. The historically relevant and interesting causes of the development and growth of the Christian movement will be found, not in the person of Jesus, but in the collective machinations, agenda, and vicissitudes of the movement itself. And the Jesus who is important to our own day is not the Jesus of history but the symbolic Jesus of contemporary discourse. 77

The thing that perplexes me, however, and which prompts me to pose a second question—related, I think, to the first—is how those who read and apparently agreed with Arnal when he critiqued attempts to revive the quest for the historical Jesus—writing such lines as “we [as scholars] are still human beings, and we in the humanities especially engage in the generation of human meanings, in the production of worldviews, in the pensée sauvage that organizes the universe around us” (74)—could so effectively insulate from his critique their own attempt to organize the universe by means of a quest for the origins of not

“Why Do You Seek the Living Among the Dead?”

127

just Jesus but of Christianity itself. So at the heart of the explanatory efforts of this thing called “Christian origins,” I see either a contradiction or an equivocation—either way, it results in an unwillingness or an inability (whether intentional or structural, I’m not yet sure) to take such critiques where readers such as I (and perhaps Steve Martin) think they ought to go: to a critique of the very logic that postulates the existence of some coherent thing that, referring back to Arnal’s wording, develops and grows over time—this thing called Christianity or, as he renames it, “the Christian movement.” To restate: if, as Arnal argues, and I wholeheartedly agree, “[w]e are mythmakers ourselves even in our analysis of myth” and if, as he then immediately adds, [i]n our reproductions of the historical Jesus, we are doing essentially the same thing as the gospel writers did, whether or not we are Christians or even attracted to the figure of Jesus: we are projecting our own beliefs onto a story (history) and so using narrative (or a sort) to create a myth. 74

Then how is it possible to protect quests for the ancient origins of this thing called “the Christian movement” from this insightful critique? For despite the obvious difference between the speculations concerning the individualized person of Jesus, on the one hand, and the thoroughly social, but no less imagined, historical context of ancient Palestine, on the other, in both cases our discourse is deeply embedded in the sort of anachronistic, self-serving projects that Arnal finds so unhelpful in Jesus research and which Steve Martin finds so rampant among Hollywood reporters. For not just the ancient people but also the ancient context in which they lived (whether semantic, economic, or architectural) have long since turned to silent dust or tattered manuscript fragments that do not come with either highlighting or helpful interpretive instructions, suggesting—to adapt Arnal’s words, just quoted—that our reproductions of not just the historical Jesus but also an ancient thing called “the Christian movement” are doing essentially the same thing as we today think the gospel writers did; in fact, just in presuming that there is an obvious place at the start of some narrative on “the Christian movement” for such complex characters as “the gospel writers,” we may well be doing the very mythologizing that historically and socially rigorous scholars of myth somehow think they are avoiding. Put most bluntly, for those who have (in my opinion, justifiable) difficulties with the manner in which a noun such as “Christianity”—let alone “the gospel writers”—conveys the (for some, strategically useful) impression of a stable and uniform identity moving smoothly across time, switching to investigating

128

chapter 6

the equally antique origins of seemingly more dynamic “Christian movement” does not suffice. For a curiously ahistorical essentialism yet persists, despite immersing our work in the imagery of motion. The problem, here, of course, is with the discourse on origins itself, if it presumes that it is somehow transcending the scholar’s own interests and situation, leaving the orbit of the game we alone play, and somehow corresponding to something of significance in the seemingly historic thing itself. That quests for the holy grail now strike us worthwhile only in movie scripts, and that quests for the source of the Nile seem quaintly colonial and outdated, yet we persist in trying to account for the development and growth either of Christianity or the so-called Christian movement by reconstructing either the original authorial intentions or social c­ ontexts from out of which either “it” arose, is the problem that needs our attention. With the Nile in mind, my problem with origins discourses is in the manner in which we disguise our own criteria and choices, as scholars, when deciding which tributary, which stream, which spring and which trickle ought to gain pride of place when it comes to tracing the source of that river’s flow. For even an ardent realist will have to admit that a host of non-watery criteria need to be brought into the conversation if we are to somehow distinguish which of the water that eventually heads northward to the Mediterranean is more authentically or legitimately “the Nile”; after all, the Nile presumably has as many sources as spots up-river (whether a kilometer south of the delta or a thousand) where run-off has pooled together and headed downstream under the relentless force of gravity, no? What’s more, while this seemingly empirical thing called “the Nile” may be more than apparent to observers at the delta, at what point between the imagined source—correction, the virtually innumerable imagined sources, few of which will ever be found—and its termination does this seemingly uniform thing, “the Nile,” become apparent or even come into being? When would one be “in the Nile” if one began one’s journey from somewhere far south? To jump continents: presumably every single trickle within the huge expanse of the Mississippi River run-off is the “source” of the Mississippi River, no? So what sense does it even make to head off on a quest northward, into the heart of the North American continent, to find the origin of that river? Switching from river sources to explaining the, as Arnal phrased it, development and growth of Christianity by reference to its ancient social setting, in portraying one (or two or three—how many is enough?) of the innumerable settings (all of which are now dust) as the context that must be recovered, we likewise mask the choices and interests that allow modern scholars to narrow the field to just what they wish to talk about (the sort of choice early explorers had to make when going upstream and coming upon the first fork in their mysterious river). That narrowing the all-but-limitless field that we know as

“Why Do You Seek the Living Among the Dead?”

129

“the past” is necessary for any sort of conversation to take place—akin to using string grids at an archeological dig that, though arbitrary, create a setting in which we can then talk about some this in relation to that—is something that I take as inevitable and uncontroversial, of course; recognizing that this narrowing requires choice, interests, curiosities, and point of view alien to the object of study itself is, however, lost when the seemingly ancient context we have created by means of our contemporary grids, which allows certain objects to stand out as interesting things worth reading (i.e., this is a “Christian” text versus that which is a “Jewish” text), is taken as given instead of being but an instance of our own thoroughly modern if/then game. For if gender or class, as we define them, are important to us, then we can say this or that about the things from the past that happen to have survived for who knows what all reasons. So for those advocating that we own our curiosities and recognize the selfmade and self-referential nature of the scholarly game that we are all playing, the assumption that a careful reading of the sources will shed new light on the Nile’s source is seen to be a particularly troublesome approach, one that universalizes local, situationally specific interests and the objects in the world that those interests make it possible to discuss and analyze—thereby misportraying discursive objects created from within virtually limitless context-upon-context as if they were naturally found, authentic items merely placed within a backdrop vista (i.e., what I would call the method of “reading a text in its context”), a portrait that erases the artist’s or the reader’s hand in multiple ways (a critique so nicely made, with reference to the portraits of Jesus, all throughout Arnal’s The Symbolic Jesus). I think here of a plenary address delivered by Jonathan Z. Smith at the Atlanta meeting of the American Academy of Religion (aar) on Oct. 31, 2010).5 Introduced by then aar President, Ann Taves, Smith’s lecture, entitled, “Reading Religion: A Life in Scholarship,” consistently emphasized reading—whether a text or an artifact—as a mediation between an ambiguous world and an interested reader, rather than portraying scholarship as an experiential immediacy that passively results from some self-evidently organized and thus inherently significant object or domain that simply (appealing again to those old-school phenomenologists of religion) presents itself to our senses. As an illustration of this point, consider the following anecdote Smith tells (quoting from the 35: 09 point forward): Through the years my chief mode of travel has been to go to the library or to my bookshelves. Although I’ve written a good bit about place, I’ve 5 For those who were unable to attend in person, the full lecture can be found at: http:// aarweb.org/Meetings/Videos/2010Atlanta/2010_A31-137.asp (accessed May 14, 2013).

130

chapter 6

never had the slightest desire to see for myself the places I’ve described. I’ve relied, rather, on published sources: photographs, sketches, verbal descriptions, maps, diagrams. Once, with Elaine, by accident, I found myself before an unknown, rather confusing, building in the old city in Jerusalem. When told that it was in fact the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, a site to which I had devoted a chapter of a book, I went no further inside, remarking, “I prefer my church to theirs.” After brief laughter from his audience, Smith drove home his point: This is to say—and I’m serious about this—this is to say, as I wrote in the conclusion of “When the Chips are Down,”6 I have consistently made a choice of the map over the territory. Although you may well disagree, it has been a self-limitation that, for me, yields cognitive gain. What I have most come to appreciate in Smith’s work is his constant attention to choice and the contingency of setting—summed up in the metaphor of a map that, at all costs, is not to be confused with being some neutral or disinterested presentation of an actual place (i.e., territory). Whatever the territory may actually be, we do not know, of course, since we can’t get there from here but by means of an abstraction that we call our map (i.e., careful listeners will have noticed that Smith doesn’t say “the church” but “theirs” versus “my”7), a map that opens room for interpretation and ambiguity, all of which allows us to think into existence a series of relationships in time and space—again, like that string grid at the site of a dig—such as the idea of some here as opposed to a there, or some then as opposed to now that is far beyond eyesight and memory—but, of course, never further than our imaginations since (like Arnal’s symbolic Jesus) it is the product of our virtually unlimited imagination! And that there are many, potentially competing, imaginations at work, each with different curiosities and choices (from Reza Aslan and Bill O’Reilly to John Dominic Crossan and others), all in different settings, all vying for the right to be seen as representing some definitive territory, is one of the gains of this approach, as I see it, for now we can study not just the continual construction of place or identity but also the competition and authorization of multiple places and identities. For, now the church is always someone’s imagined 6 This essay—which Smith refers to as a “bio-bibliographical essay” (2004: 1)—opens his collection, Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion (2004). 7 As Smith himself writes in the closing line of “Map is Not Territory”: “but maps are all we possess” (1978: 309).

“Why Do You Seek the Living Among the Dead?”

131

representation, a representation that, in some situations, happens to have been so successfully authorized as to erase the agents who put it front and center in the first place. (Despite routinely talking about this thing we call “the law,” anyone who took a civics course knows how laws in a social democracy are made and that they are, in fact, always someone’s—their law, our law, etc.—inasmuch as they are the result of interests, lobbyists, proposals, deals, amendments, compromises, votes, and thus majorities.) But I find that admitting ownership over our creations (e.g., their church versus mine) is not very common in the study of religion, even when we think we’re cognizant of the role played by assumptions and theory. (It is so uncommon, in fact, that I have no doubt that Smith’s frank acknowledgment of it might have caught many in the audience off-guard, thus prompting their laughter at that point in his lecture—for I conjecture that many in attendance certainly knew which of the two churches was the real one and laughed at something akin to what they saw as Smith’s disarming admission of his own adorable hubris—something that I tend to think prompted him, in return, to up the ante by adding “and I’m serious about this…” to preface the conclusion he draws from the anecdote.) For instance, consider the well-known changes that have taken place over the past few academic generations in the work of a sub-group of scholars who no longer identify themselves simply as New Testament scholars but, instead, refer to themselves as scholars of Christian origins. (I won’t even dare try to spin a narrative on the origins of that schism but I find the papers by Merrill Miller, Ron Cameron, Burton Mack, Jonathan Z. Smith, and John Kloppenborg and first published in Method & Theory in the Study of Religion (mtsr) 8/3 [1996] to be an early watershed moment for those intent on disassociating what are now seen as two separate enterprises.) Whereas the former study the text, as made evident by their disciplinary name, to determine its meaning, the latter distinguish themselves by their interest instead in the social world, the context, from which the text and the movement arose, trying to explain, among other things, the origins of the documents that, over time, came to be known as the New Testament, rather than simply taking the New Testament narrative for granted and using it to understand the movements (whether that is a singular or plural possessive, I leave to you to decide) development and growth. As with all name changes, this revision in nomenclature signals important differences for those invested in these exercises—New Testament scholars are, in my estimation, akin to classical Humanists in many ways, being exegetes and hermeneuts intent on finding timeless meaning in texts (regardless whether they take what might be termed the inevitable theological step to determine “what the text means for me, in my life”), whereas those working in Christian origins generally see themselves, instead, as more

132

chapter 6

social scientifically inclined, explanatory theorists, working not with the vagaries of ethereal meaning but toiling on the far firmer ground of social theories of religion. Or so it seems, for despite the shift to the historical and the social (i.e., examining the specificities of the turn-of-the-era Mediterranean world) from the ahistorical (i.e., interpreting the meaning of the text that somehow coheres across the ages and across different readers), there is something ­unsatisfying about this apparent change: a missed opportunity to accept ownership. The problem, as I’ve already suggested, is the inevitably anachronistic manner in which that thing that we call the past is managed so as to transform it into something that can be understood in terms of causal sequences and end points known only to those of us standing at the river’s delta, a process whereby, as I have argued, contemporary criteria, choices, and priorities are inevitably retrojected either upriver or backward in time—but not as modern stipulations and heuristics that scholars must inevitably use, or as a result of what are acknowledged to be contemporary curiosities (i.e., the relatively uncontroversial claim, I think, that we have no choice but to confront the limitless, the unknown, through the limited and the known—for, as Jonathan Z. Smith has phrased it, “maps are all we possess” [see note 7). Instead, the trouble is the manner in which scholars continue to ontologize and thereby authorize the contemporary, taking the world-as-it-happens-to-be-now and representing it as the world-as-it-always-was and necessarily-must-be—akin to scholars who critique colonialism for inventing the idea of “Hinduism,” yet who nonetheless understand the Rg Veda as a Hindu text and who open their historical surveys of Indian religion with images of cross-legged yogis found somewhere in the ancient Indus River Valley. To come back to our example of Christian origins, despite the apparent difference from their New Testament colleagues, the stable item that stands at the center of both exercises is this thing called Christianity (whether noun or adjective, whether static or in motion), conceived in both cases as a transcendental entity that, apparently, has an origin (no matter whether you quibble over mono- or polygenesis) and a trajectory—the so-called thing to which Burton Mack points in the opening lines to his agenda-setting essay on redescribing Christian origins: “For almost two thousand years, the Christian imagination of Christian origins has echoed the gospel stories contained in the New Testament…” (1996: 247). For despite the apparent priority that text takes in the former and context takes in the latter, these two pursuits both presuppose that each is simply a medium in which some prior thing (either meaning or imagination) continually and developmentally manifests itself from age to age. In the case of old school New Testament studies, this critique may be a little more apparent to some who are

“Why Do You Seek the Living Among the Dead?”

133

present today, inasmuch as the goal of these studies, determining the meaning of the text, is thought somehow to float free of real history, as if artful, modern interpreters were time travelling when they made statements about what longdead Saint Paul did or did not mean when he wrote this or that passage. Yet (somewhat like the shift from “Christianity” to “the Christian movement”) making the move that comes with admitting into consideration the importance of context for “properly” explaining the success of an ancient movement—and, to do so, learning about, say, this or that Greco-Roman practice or ancient Jewish belief in order to get at a better understanding of early Christians—hardly improves anything since we still find ourselves working to roll back stones and resurrect a long-lost origin, whether it be an original intention of a long-dead author or the social features of an originary landscape long ago erased from the face of the earth (and whose topographical features are therefore no less reconstituted from, yes…, modern readers reading a variety of things that, following Derrida, we might just as well call texts—whether they derive from a stylus of some sort or an archeological dig). So whether it is a New Testament scholar interpreting or a Christian origins scholar explaining, neither, it seems to me, have left their library armchair in the present, even when they go on their obligatory—because it now credentials them—dig for a few weeks one summer. For they always and inevitably bring their string with them wherever they go, and lay it in a grid of their own making, a grid that follows the conventions of their peers, before they go about making sense of the universe by figuring out what to pay attention to, what to ignore, and what comes before what. To sum up: despite how progressive some may portray it, Christian origins’ explanatory efforts suffer from trying to reconstruct the social world from out of which some bubbling and flowing movement that today strikes us as coherent somehow arose by reading yet more texts so as to reconstruct the context from out of which the very texts they read arose; what’s more, it also implies taking the presumption of Christianity’s existence (defined however) for granted as a virtually Hegelian Geist that was somehow there at its own birth. For despite their attempt at far more nuanced and historically grounded scholarship, a Christian origins scholar’s work is possible only if we so naturalize the existence of what we today know as Christianity that we can retroject it backward, confident that, like the British working class in E.P. Thompson’s famous line that opened the preface to his The Making of the English Working Class (1991), it was somehow there at its own birth. While the realist in me certainly assumes that there were people in the recent as well as ancient past doing all sorts of things (whether we’re talking about London in what we call the nineteenth century, as in the case of Thompson’s work, or the first century of the

134

chapter 6

common era in the part of the world we today call Israel or Palestine), the careful historian in me would argue not just that a shared class consciousness came long after those early modern behaviors and economic relationships that eventually were taken by scholars to be its source but also that the self-designation “Christian” was not present at its supposed origins. What’s more, this marker has been used over the years—let alone today—to signify so many different things in so many different situations that generalizing it to be some overarching, transhistorical identity that had a source and a uniform developmental trajectory—e.g., “the history of Christianity” they call it—is the sign of either terribly sloppy scholarship or an example of invested scholarship engaged in its own identity formation practices (in a word, let’s follow Arnal and just call it myth). Put simply, and for some, perhaps, uncontroversially, the more careful historian, or genealogist, in me would argue strongly that there were no Christians at the origins of Christianity, making “Christian origins” an oxymoron whose contradiction remains unseen only so long as one is untroubled by the practice of doing history qua self-beneficial and socially formative anachronism. Take, for example, debates over what people who are on their own origins quest refer to as “the earliest Christian documents.” If, as a number of scholars now think, the self-designation “Christian” was not used (or we at least do not have material evidence of its use) prior to Ignatius of Antioch (sometime around 100 of the common era), then would a document written before that time, if read into its “proper” context, even be considered “an early Christian document” without risking the anachronism of retrojecting, say, either one’s own or perhaps what we now think was Ignatius’s social/self-understanding to occasions long before? And given what Ignatius’s social/self-understanding for what Χριστιανισμός might have signified for him (i.e., Christianity), how is homogenizing such an early appearance of this term with any of its subsequent uses (e.g., the manner in which I just juxtaposed an ancient Greek term with a modern English one by means of the simple Latin translator “id est,” as if there is an easily recognized interchangeability to them), let alone homogenizing both with the appearance of the term Χριστιανός in the Book of Acts (11: 26), the mark of a careful, situationally specific historian? Simply put, why do we (and it is we who are doing this, not the objects themselves) even presume that these three otherwise distinct items—some modern notion of Christianity, that of a fellow named Ignatius, and the Book of Acts—are somehow obviously or necessarily related in some genealogical manner? The problem we encounter here is failing to study the multiple identifying practices themselves (in a word, discourses), that are always in some present rather than taking for granted the social worlds that result from their

“Why Do You Seek the Living Among the Dead?”

135

successful implementation (i.e., those seeming things we subsequently call identities or traditions). For if we studied the former instead of taking the latter for granted, then every signifying act involving the designation “Christian” or the invocation of the name of a certain author (start with my own citation of Smith, Arnal, Ignatius, or Steve Martin, for that matter) would be a moment when a specific sort of identity was being coalesced all over again, for a strategic and situationally specific set of purposes, and we would no longer look toward the time when either the gospel-writers or even the founders of a nowdistinct academic exercise known as Christian origins walked the earth as being when some definitive big bang occurred and whose animating momentum somehow yet ripples through their tattered old documents (or are they our documents?—now that’s the ownership question, one that shows we’re taking the death of the author seriously, for how can origins discourses be anything but propaganda in light of such critiques?). We instead would look to ourselves, today, at this very conference, as being those who are actively constituting these very identities—in our talk about them as being something other than our talk about them. Making the shift to studying identification as an ongoing, always-in-the-present exercise (a shift that a group of us, at what we call Culture on the Edge,8 are working hard to make in a consistent and rigorous manner), focuses our attention on the “i.e.”—the Latin id est—in my previous paragraph, the ease with which one translates and moves between what are otherwise entirely discrete (potentially competing or maybe even contradictory) uses and situations (let alone language systems: ancient Greek, Latin, and English); it is a move that, if undetected, creates the impression of uniform tradition, heritage, and identity—the result being, in our case, this thing called “the Christian movement,” perhaps?—doing so by glossing over the many possible gaps between some ancient use of “Χριστιανισμός” and a modern use of “Christianity” (let alone the many conflicting modern uses of the term, such as those students who still sometimes tell me that Catholics are not Christians). For despite my cavalier use of “id est,” just above, in many ways the ancient “that,” which is something I can quite literally only imagine, was most probably not the same as some contemporary “this” (or contemporary “these”), which prompts us to ask what scale of value we are choosing—it is our choice, after all—to use in order to manage the competing similarities and differences in the objects that we so casually isolate, translate, and then relate to each other, as if they are all naturally members of one big happy family. Where is the trace 8 See edge.ua.edu for examples of this group’s work; its members include (along with myself): Craig Martin, Monica Miller, Steven Ramey, K. Merinda Simmons, Leslie Dorrough Smith, and Vaia Touna. We are joined by Andie Alexander, our “curator” who helps to manage the blog.

136

chapter 6

of those who made these choices, those who determined the features and the limits of that kin group, and what do we know of the consequences of their actions? Who owns it all? Simply put, whose church is it? For all the seeming progressivism, I therefore find that scholars studying context-oriented Christian origins are generally not asking such self-implicating questions of historically specific situation and agency. Akin to those theologically-inclined colleagues from whom they try so hard (but, according to my analysis, fail) to distance themselves, they are instead actively involved in ­constituting the timeless, essential object that they think they are historicizing—something evident in the heavy recurrence of the past tense in their work, which is none other than a way that we grammatically cover our tracks. The “different way to account for the emergence of early Christianity” (quoting Cameron [1996a: 241]) offered by Christian origins is therefore not nearly as different as many of us think it to be—a critique not dissimilar to one I offered just a couple years ago at the sbl when looking at the work of socalled secular Bible critics who were, it turned out, just as interested in correct meaning and exegesis as those theologians with whom they so vehemently disagreed (there are so many Bibles, with so many differences between them, that I admit I’m still a little puzzled which one they meant when they kept talking about the Bible meaning this or that); those seeking to understand the development and growth of Christianity by placing some transcendental “it” into its proper originary context would therefore be well advised to heed Smith’s comments on the costs of this enterprise, made back in 1996: what he termed the opacity of the past and transparency of the contemporary (1996b: 272); instead, why not study the creation of ever-changing and always-competing contexts—thereby taking seriously that old saying about never stepping into the same river twice—by those who work in the present’s archives of the past, whereby some generic item either becomes, for us or others, Christian or not, either to be linked sequentially with other items similarly classified as Christian or not. Studying the continual reinvention of this thing we call “the Christian imagination” or “the Christian movement” requires studying identification practices and priorities in the always nimble present—where a text and reader inevitably meet—rather than seeking the living among the ancient dead. And if this is the alternative approach that we take, then—to quote Arnal’s own conclusion, but with a slight, though I think logical and inevitable, adaptation—we will find that the Christian origins which is important to our own day is not the Christian origins of history, but the symbolic Christian origins of contemporary discourse.

“Why Do You Seek the Living Among the Dead?”

137

Appendix9 In a recent post,10 I mentioned an upcoming paper I was presenting at a panel in Baltimore on explaining the causes of early Christianity’s origins. My concern in that paper, which I delivered a few days ago, was to draw attention to problems with attempts to account for the origins and development of any social movement—a critique that, for some in this one field, has already invalidated such things as quests for the historical Jesus. However, serious scholars yet persist in trying to account for the originary conditions of this thing we call Christianity. The goal, of course, is to find out “what really happened,” as phrased by one person during the Q&A after the panel. Isn’t it? The problem with this goal, however, is that the one doing the work must posit a transcendental identity—Christianity—and then, from their all-knowing vantage point in the present, read it backward in time, as if it was there at its own beginning, thereby conserving the interests of a present that creates this particular idea of the past (much as writing the history of any nation-state is itself a nationalist exercise, inasmuch as it naturalizes the idea of modern nation as having an origin and a coherent trajectory that leads directly to the historian’s present). After all, today there are so many specific notions of this one signifier, Christianity, each of which differing in this or that way (Question 1: what do you think, are Mormons Christian…?), that scholars have no choice but to pick and choose, from among the various modern options in front of them—to collect the features they wish to constitute their idealized version of Christianity—and then universalize it as if it had been there all along, percolating and bubbling away over the ages, working its way back to us… The curious thing is that, when we do it, we don’t recognize this universalizing of present interests and this displacement of origins (i.e., seeing our retrojected stipulations now as if they were merely passive descriptions of their realities then), or the way that we use contemporary criteria to connect things in the world to one another in causal sequences, but we see it all too plainly when others do. And we usually critique them for doing it, for picking and choosing, and having interests. Case in point, consider the following:

9

The following afterword originally appeared as a blog post on edge.ua.edu (Nov. 30, 2013), as a debriefing after having presented an earlier, shorter version of the preceding chapter at the 2013 annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature. 10 See http://edge.ua.edu/russell-mccutcheon/turning-reality-into-history-lessons/ where I made mention of what was then the upcoming sbl paper on the role of explanation in the study of earliest Christianity.

138

chapter 6 chapter xlvi: The Word in the World Before Christ We have been taught that Christ is the first-born of God, and we have declared above that He is the Word of whom every race of men were partakers; and those who lived reasonably are Christians, even though they have been thought atheists; as, among the Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus, and men like them… The First Apology of Justin Martyr (c. 155 ce)

What’s interesting is that no serious scholar would consider this text to comprise a respectable example of history-writing in a modern sense, since Socrates obviously lived well before Christianity, making claims of him being a Christian an absurd theological anachronism. Right? But Paul also lived well before Christianity, no? For many scholars would agree that the idea of Christianity developed long after those whom we today posit as being at its origin. (Question 2: to what does that third person possessive pronoun “its” point?) But modern commonsense tells us that some real fellow, Paul, was there, with desires and intentions that we can still see to this day, if we just read those texts carefully enough—after all, his writings, preaching, and travels were the things that brought the movement into life, making him what those in the business call “an early Christian.” In fact, I’ve even seen the steps in Veria, in northern Greece, from which he preached, not far from Thessaloniki—where, by the way, I’ve been to a small Greek Orthodox church, high up in the old city, with a sign inside claiming Paul spoke there too. There’s nothing anachronistic in that. Right? But there is. So in what artful way must we—much like that ancient text quoted above—first define and then retroject a certain sense of “Christian” so as to include some figure we today call “Paul” in a family that, or so we all seem to know, also includes so much else that we also now know to have developed long after him? For I have no doubt that much of what strikes us as obviously Christian today would have counted as heretical in previous eras, to previous Christians (the ones who eventually burned other so-called Christians at the stake, perhaps, all in dispute over what this signifier could point to?)— making our grouping of it all as “Christian,” regardless what our predecessors might have thought, a peculiarly modern judgment that allows us (not much different from that text of Justin’s, above) to include long-gone people in a family, people who might otherwise not have recognized themselves as being at home with its other members. If this sort of self-beneficial and hindsight universalizing is how identification works, then—as I argued in my paper—our goal, as scholars, shouldn’t be to find out “what really happened,” but to figure out what’s really happening, right now, when people like us talk about the past, talk that always happens in a here and now that also implicates us.

“Why Do You Seek the Living Among the Dead?”

139

During the Q&A, after the four papers, some started talking about the earlier phases of the group at which we had all just presented. These previous seminars involved prior members who had their own project(s) that, of course, had not anticipated us, that day in Baltimore, talking about them and their work, in the past tense, as the shoulders on which we were now standing, let alone linking (through the conventions of quotation and citation) our efforts to theirs, as if in some causal sequence. Why speculate on ancient origins, intentions, and meanings, I asked, when we have realtime originations happening like this, right in our midst, in real time?

chapter 7 Introduction When The Discipline of Religion (2003a) was published, my former teacher, Donald Wiebe, reviewed it in a long essay in Reviews in Religion and Theology. Entitled “The Reinvention or Degradation of Religious Studies? Tales from the Tuscaloosa Woods,” he described my work to be representative of “a new generation of Religious Studies scholars who raise issues that—whether one agrees with their judgments or not—require more attention than they have received to date” (2004: 13–14), and concluded that my “critical assessments of earlier generations of scholars in this and related fields are often insightful and force scholars in the field to rethink their methodological commitments and the institutional structures within which they function” (14). However, despite this generous assessment, his review also had a far more critical tone; for instance, as Wiebe wrote in his conclusion: In my judgement, then—drawing on McCutcheon’s terminology quoted above—there is a sense in which his scholarship, as well as his style of presentation, is anecdotal, for he seems to baulk at providing careful, ­systematic analyses of the problems characteristic of the academic study of religion he delineates, or well-honed, logically consistent arguments for the positions he espouses (or logically consistent critiques of those he rejects). 13

In fact, I think it worth quoting the rest of the penultimate paragraph in his review essay, in its entirety: McCutcheon, therefore, is less concerned with the ‘Discipline of Religion’ as an academic exercise or scientific pursuit, than with making it a ­context for a different kind of intellectual undertaking, namely that of social critique. And that, in my judgement, amounts to a degradation of Religious Studies as a modern academic undertaking for he extends to the entire field what is characteristic of only a sub-set of scholars within it, namely the liberal humanist scholars who—as he puts it in the new preface to the Greek translation of his first book, Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia— ”systematically re-present, classify, and study human behaviour as

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004281417_009

Introduction

141

if certain of them were informed by or directed toward some unseen power, charisma, or lure” (p. 5; typescript of the English version supplied by the author [Ed. Note: see McCutcheon 2003b]). As I have noted, however, McCutcheon provides no justification (short of invoking the philosophical ‘authority’ of Foucault) for lumping all scholars of religion into his mutually exclusive ideological groups of ‘Caretakers’ (perpetuators of traditional society) and ‘Critics’ (transformers of society)—tertium nihil est! [Ed. Note: trans. “there is no third, or third option!”] (See his Critics Not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion which comprises 13 essays very much in the same vein as those reviewed here.) In my estimation, then, McCutcheon’s The Discipline of Religion is in no way an account of either the nature or the history of the field of the study of religion as a modern, scientific undertaking and is, therefore, of little methodological value to those interested in understanding the scientific character of this field of study. 13

I invite anyone who thinks that a former supervisory committee member reviewing one’s later work will simply end in an uncritical lovefest to read that whole review. It has been evident for quite some time that, despite my work being closely associated with him (at times by rather sloppy readers who more than likely sought to dismiss my work by associating it with the writings of one of my mentors, inasmuch as Wiebe already had a well-established reputation as an ardent and intellectually forceful critic of theology infecting the academic study of religion), Wiebe and I do not agree on all matters; going back to my graduate training in Toronto in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I had spent many occasions in his office, talking over my readings for his and other people’s courses, discussing ideas for my dissertation topic, etc., and in the midst of a tremendous amount of inspiration and valuable professionalization (something I have tried to make evident in some of the other chapter introductions to this volume), there was also a great deal of frustration—on both our parts, I’m sure. For instance, on not a few occasions our conversations resulted in Wiebe asking me—somewhat exacerbated by my recent acquisition of a postmodern attitude, no doubt, but always generous with his time, nonetheless— something very much like the f­ollowing simple question, “Russell, how many books are on my shelves?” or “Are there books on my shelves? Can we at least agree on that?” (His office, then on the second floor of Trinity College’s main Jacobethan building, always was notoriously crammed, in an orderly manner, with books and extra shelving; he was likely among the best customers at

142

chapter 7

the local antiquarian bookshops.) Such questions, presumably, were an effort to prompt me to acknowledge that there were indeed such uncontroversial things in the world called “facts” that could be inter-subjectively detected and agreed upon. It was always clear to me what this question actually was up to, however; for I heard it as an effort on Wiebe’s part to establish a beachhead in the argument, concerning the existence of a zone of apolitical, self-evident knowledge (the so-called facts of the case) and, if granted, from there the argument could be built that science was the method for examining that domain’s contents, which was, of course, distinguishable from other zones of human practice (which one might call ideology or politics, examined by means of interpretation and rhetoric, presumably, etc.). Although I began studying under Wiebe’s direction in my early years at the Centre for Religious Studies (after doing an M.A. there on theodicy and the work of Alfred North Whitehead under the supervision of the late Ernie Best [as discussed earlier]), my move (exactly when, I don’t recall) to work primarily under Neil McMullin (though with Wiebe and Willard Oxtoby still serving on my comprehensive exam committee and my dissertation committee) landed me in the middle of reading not just people like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau, and Louis Althusser, but, as mentioned earlier, a variety of literary critics and social historians as well. Under Wiebe, I had read such scholars as Ernest Gellner, G.E.R. Lloyd, Eric Havelock, Lucien Levy-Bruhl, etc., intent on understanding the intellectual shift that apparently came with, for example, the invention of writing and science—a shift that could help to discern the difference between a theological approach to the study of religion and a truly scientific one. But the presumed gap between these two modes of thought, as I was then trained to call them, was dramatically undermined by what McMullin had me reading. So although I certainly knew how many books were on those shelves, I was also coming to understand that this claim to knowledge was premised on a number of generally unseen assumptions and prior historical conditions (e.g., the axioms of mathematics, the hierarchical teacher-student relationship, the economic ability to own books, and the social ability to value “book learning,” let alone the time to sit and debate such things, etc.) that were themselves far from self-evident or eternal. “Facts” were quickly becoming a problem to be considered rather than a neutral, observational resource to idly draw upon in the creation of theories. The tension between these two intellectual traditions in my early work was evident to some people (e.g., Masuzawa [2000b] when she participated in a review symposium on my first book) and, over the years, I believe that I have satisfactorily (for myself, at least) worked out how they are or are not related. But it is evident from the above quotation from Wiebe’s review essay that he is

Introduction

143

not satisfied; instead, he argues that my work represents, in his words, a degradation of the field, which I understand as meaning a loss from the gains that he and his colleagues felt that they had made in, say, the 1970s and 1980s. Given the respect that I felt for Wiebe and the indebtedness to him that I still recognize (e.g., I dedicated my anthology on the insider/outsider problem to him [McCutcheon 1999], he was among the four people to whom Willi Braun and I dedicated the Guide to the Study of Religion [2000], and I was one of the three co-editors for a recent Festschrift in his honor [Arnal et al. 2012]), I did not think it necessary or even proper to reply in print to his review essay—that is, not until he published, in a Finnish journal (i.e., Temenos—from the Greek for a set apart, or sacred, region) a paper that he first presented at the 2005 Tokyo Congress of the International Association for the History of Religions (iahr) (a paper that I heard in person). When the journal’s editor invited me to respond, I felt that it was time to take Wiebe’s criticisms of my work very seriously, inasmuch as he had complained that I—recalling the above quotation— ”baulk at providing careful, systematic analyses of the problems characteristic of the academic study of religion” and that I fail to delineate “well-honed, logically consistent arguments” for the views that I espouse—criticisms of my work reminiscent of Gustavo Benavides once characterizing it as “the typical postmodern mix of hybris and coyness” (2000: 116). Wiebe’s critique struck me as an awfully nice way of saying that I was rather (to say the least) sloppy as a scholar; the result of taking his criticism seriously was the following chapter, in which I endeavored to take his analysis of my position and his logical argumentation no less seriously than he apparently took my own. The implicit issue at the heart of this exchange is “What is science?”—how shall we define it, what motivates it, and to what use is it put? That Wiebe, like myself, uses persuasive rhetoric, on the one hand, to argue for the supposed gold standard of testable, falsifiable science, on the other (and against which my own work is found so terribly wanting), is an unrecognized irony at best, and a unresolved contradiction at worst, that lies at the very heart of his work. Given that we agree on much in the field, notably our frustration with the liberal humanist/theological consensus, it never struck me as worth pursuing this critique in detail, since that seemed to me a form of intellectual cannibalism that would do neither of us any good. What’s more, come to think of it, I actually have earned a degree in the so-called hard or real sciences (as noted earlier, taking my degree after three instead of four years, I hold a B.A. [1983], rather than a B.Sc.): in Life Sciences (from Queen’s University, Kingston). During that time I took such courses as Calculus, Statistics, Physics, Organic Chemistry, Biochemistry, Physiology, Histology, Microbiology, Genetics, etc. So I have actually p ­ erformed scientific experiments, with bacteria in petri dishes and

144

chapter 7

Drosophila melanogaster (i.e., fruit flies), with 2,4-Dinitroaniline (a possible carcinogen, at high exposure levels, used in azo dyes, found in such things as lipstick coloring), and, yes, regrettably, even with live dogs that were “sacrificed” at the conclusion of the experiment (a practice that I have no doubt is no longer carried out in undergraduate Physiology classes)—all the while, yes, wearing a lab coat (admittedly, all of this was at the u ­ ndergraduate level, though I did also work part-time, during those days, as a research assistant in a Microbiology lab). What that particular anecdote is worth, I’m not sure, but speaking for myself, it certainly makes my exchanges with Wiebe on these topics all the more curious to me.

chapter 7

A Response to Donald Wiebe from an East-Going Zax1 [H]ow fragile is the bond between what we say and what we mean. We do not like to think about the ease with which our words escape from our control. And yet nothing is easier than to endow words with a meaning their author never wished them to have. Fasolt 2004: 151

In 1961, the u.s. children’s book author and illustrator, Theodore Geisel (1904– 1991)—better known as Dr. Seuss—published a short story entitled “The Zax.” It opens with two lone little figures traversing a barren yellow landscape, heading straight for one another. One day, making tracks In the prairie of Prax Came a North-Going Zax And a South-Going Zax. And it happened that both of them came to a place Where they bumped. There they stood. Foot to foot. Face to face. “I never take a step to one side,” says the North-Going Zax in reply to his counterpart’s angry assertion that “I always go south, making south going tracks.” Being members of the same genus, both are highly principled creatures, and the rule that governs their actions is put rather nicely by the South-Going Zax: Never budge! That’s my rule. Never budge in the least! Not an inch to the west! Not an inch to the east.

1 My thanks to Veikko Anttonen for this opportunity to respond to Wiebe’s earlier Temenos essay. My thanks to William Arnal, Willi Braun, Kim Davis, the late Gary Lease, and Melanie Williams for their comments on a draft of this response.

146

chapter 7

So there they stood, eye to eye, on the desolate prairie of Prax, prepared to remain in each other’s way as long as it would take, even if it made the whole world grind to a halt. Upon first reading Wiebe’s essay in Temenos (2005), the story of the Zax came to my mind, for, like those two creatures, both he and I share a number of traits but on key points we diverge rather dramatically—which, perhaps, makes the points where we differ seem all the more pronounced. However, over the years I had taken our various disagreements to be insignificant enough that defending in print where I diverge from my former teacher’s approach, or seeking to define and defend my differences from him, had not dawned on me as something worth doing.2 But, with the publication of his essay, we seem to find ourselves standing toe to toe, instead of shoulder to shoulder. Despite the friendly sparring that we have done over the twenty-five or so years that we have known each other, I had thought that Wiebe and I were generally united in our joint effort to have those aspects of human behavior some of us commonly label as religion studied in precisely the same manner as we study all other human actions, artifacts, and institutions. Now I find that, in his assessment, my work is part of the problem. Given my view that our similarities far outweigh our differences, I therefore see his article as unwisely devouring an ally and an off-spring. This less-thansubtle reference to Hesiod’s story of Cronos makes it evident that I find something oddly Freudian about the Wiebe versus McCutcheon episode, for although it signals that my writing is being read by one of those responsible for my training, it also indicates the possibly inevitable moment when some fathers and sons do battle on a public stage. Having listened to Wiebe deliver an earlier version of his paper in Tokyo at the 2005 iahr World Congress, and having subsequently read its published version in Temenos (Wiebe 2005), I admit that, although I certainly am pleased that my work has provided an occasion for Wiebe to argue once again for his view of the field, it is the manner in which he uses my work that prompts me to offer this reply. Readers ought to know that I do not recognize myself in his account of my supposed advocacy for the position of what we might as well just call the cultured despiser of religion—one who is intent on exposing its falsity and “breaking 2 In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that, while a graduate student at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Religious Studies in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I took a number of courses with Professor Wiebe (who was then the Centre’s associate director), served as his research assistant while he produced a collection of his essays, Beyond Legitimation (1994), and wrote comprehensive examinations and a dissertation with him serving as a member of my three-person supervisory committee.

A Response to Donald Wiebe from an East-Going Zax

147

the spell” under which so-called religious people labor (as most recently phrased by Daniel Dennett [2006] in his attempt to invent a study of religion that many of us happen to think was invented long ago). I should add that, by invoking the notion of self-recognition, I am not ­taking refuge in that old argument concerning the participant’s (in this case, an author’s) right to exercise ownership over the meaning of his or her representations; on sufficient past occasions, I have argued in print for quite the opposite—both when discussing how one might go about studying the disclosures of human subjects as well as how one might go about replying in print to criticisms of one’s own scholarly work (e.g., McCutcheon 2005a). I therefore trust that raising this issue of self-recognition will not prompt readers to dismiss me as but another instance of the classic phenomenological tradition in our field.3 Instead, I am simply pointing to the assumption that, during the descriptive phase of ones work, a scholar ought to portray the data (i.e., the participant’s self-representations) accurately. And, by “accurate,” I simply mean that, because the work of analysis presupposes data to be scrutinized, analysts surely need to begin their work by representing their subject’s disclosures in a manner that is somewhat recognizable to the subject under study. Where the analysis goes from there will depend entirely upon the interests and theories that scholars bring to the table and will not be determined by the participant’s own self-understandings.4 Because of my difficulty recognizing my meanings in his descriptions, I am rather suspicious concerning what Wiebe might be up to in using my 1997 essay (“A Default of Critical Intelligence? The Scholar of Religion as Public Intellectual” [McCutcheon 1997a]) as the occasion for him to argue for a wholly disinterested, objective, and thus truly scientific, approach to the study of religion. I think it is also important to note that I am long past the time when I could easily represent myself as the author of this article, for it was conceived and written in mid- to late 1995, just after defending my doctoral dissertation at the University of Toronto. This reply therefore is difficult to write, for the author of 3 For instance, as phrased by W. Brede Kristensen in his Religionshistorisk studium (1954): “if our opinion about another religion differs from the opinion and evaluation of the believers, then we are no longer talking about their religion” (as translated by Sharpe 1986: 228). 4 At this point, one could refer to the often cited distinction between descriptive and explanatory reduction (Proudfoot 1985: 96 ff.)—the former, it is generally agreed, being well out-ofbounds in scholarship because it eliminates one’s data in the very act of its so-called description, and the latter being what all scholars inevitably do, despite misdirected protests against that which is termed reductionism. On the way that many liberal humanist scholars fail to offer descriptively generous readings of behaviors with which they disagree, see McCutcheon 2006a.

148

chapter 7

that article is long gone.5 Scholars continue to read and to think. As I am sure Wiebe would agree (given his own change of thinking on the possible complementarity between religion and science that was documented in his own book, Beyond Legitimation [1994]), considerable distance quickly develops between one’s earliest work and what one comes to think a decade or two later. But, if I can trust my memory of my own intentions at the time, I assumed that our objects of study are thoroughly historical acts (or, better put, the material artifacts from prior circumstances, whether in the recent or distant past) that are therefore unavoidably part of the contingent social world of give and take (i.e., the world of power and, thus, what we conventionally call politics). Accordingly, our object of study is not just disembodied signification (i.e., texts or symbols) but acts of signification (i.e., the practical consequences of, as well as sets of interests that motivate, signification). Of course, these interests do not always overlap or complement each other (despite what those who practice the study of religion as a form of interreligious dialogue might assume). Therefore, implicit in all this is the assumption that human agents are active in the world, and leave traces of their activity, yet that they are not lone actors; instead, they are assumed to be part of pre-existent social groups (i.e., structures), comprising a variety of complementary/competitive sub-groups,6 in which individual intentions come together in a variety of ways to produce an otherwise unanticipated collective outcome.7 With such assumptions in mind, in my 1997 essay, I argued that scholars who take the historical seriously should avoid being involved in the sort of exercise represented by scholars who use god-talk to legitimize specific political programs—for this is merely to adopt one among many sets of authorizing strategies that portray the historical as ahistorical. Assuming debates on r­eligion’s socially positive or negative role to be a rather uninteresting and entirely misleading issue, the essay instead attempted to change the parameters of the 5 The essay in question was written, and then submitted to jaar’s peer-review process, in the spring and summer following the defense of my doctoral dissertation in January 1995; the revised dissertation was eventually published in 1997 as Manufacturing Religion, around the same time as the jaar essay was eventually published. 6 That is to say (borrowing terms from Lincoln 1989: 9–10), sentiments of affinity and estrangement operate across an ever-changing spectrum all throughout a hierarchically arranged collectivity. 7 I recognize that I have sometimes been critiqued for not putting my own theoretical cards on the table (a critique implicit in Wiebe’s essay); I attempted to do just that in McCutcheon 1998a, for which the preceding paragraph is but an inadequate paraphrase; see also McCutcheon 2005b: 19–23 for my more recent attempt to make evident the view of history that informs my work.

A Response to Donald Wiebe from an East-Going Zax

149

debate by arguing that the so-called disinterested study of religion (i.e., methodologically agnostic)—as represented by our field’s tradition of staking out a middle, neutral ground by means of the still-widely used phenomenological method—came with its own political effects. One such effect was that, in attempting to refrain from historicizing our object of study by means of explanatory analysis and, instead, simply describing the world as the participant reports seeing it (i.e., recording how the religion is represented by its adherents to the observer’s senses) and then trying to interpret its deep meaning, scholars entrench those sets of interests that lead to just this, rather than that, way of mapping and thereby representing the world.8 Thus, I argued, when scholars of religion fail to work toward contextualizing and explaining human behaviors and institutions in terms other than those by means of which subjects themselves understand them, they are defaulting on their critical intelligence. But my argument did not stop there. In exercising this critical intelligence, I  further argued that such work can reasonably be understood to threaten common participant claims concerning the socio-political and historical autonomy of their beliefs, behaviors, and institutions. Thus, recovering the contingency of something claimed to be necessary can be, whether intended or not, an effective de-authorizing move. That the study of structured acts of signification is itself but one more act of signification that takes place within a specific sort of structure (in my case, the tax-supported public u.s. university), makes all this rather complicated. To put it another way, if the study of signification is itself an act of signification, then there is no place to hide when it comes to the historical, and thus political, nature of our work as scholars. I therefore argued that there was no escape from being a public intellectual— as I understood the term—since all we have is the public and our spirited contests over what ought to be protected by public force (i.e., laws) from scrutiny (i.e., privacy is a public phenomenon; in fact, today we could even consider it as a commodity). So, in contradistinction to many in our field, I tried to redefine “public intellectual” to mean scholars who, for good or ill, take the historical and public nature of all human beliefs, behaviors, and institutions as the non-negotiable starting point for their studies. Moreover, if that means that some scholars turn their critical gaze toward the manner in which 8 To help make this point I will sometimes try to come up with an example of some obviously offensive form of human behavior (offensive, at least, to my interlocutor) for which a mere descriptive analysis would never suffice. Case in point: after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, it was virtually impossible simply to describe how the attackers themselves may have understood the world and their role in it. Any scholar in the u.s. attempting merely to do this was quickly branded disloyal, providing “aide and comfort to the enemy.”

150

chapter 7

we reproduce and legitimize our own institutions, then so be it; for, like any institution, the modern research university does not exist by divine fiat. Wiebe’s essay provides sufficient evidence of this, for if the conventions that he values were ­self-evidences, then there would be no need to defend them. This brings me to his defense of pure research and objectivity. I read Wiebe as being deeply troubled by the manner in which various conceptions of scholars’ possible public roles or political influences potentially impinge upon what he considers to be their rightful ability to carry out politically autonomous, disciplined, rational work within the academy—in a word, taking on the role of disinterested scholar-scientists. To make his argument, Wiebe juxtaposes two seemingly different ways of talking about the scholar of religion as a public intellectual: that of William Dean (professor emeritus at Iliff School of Theology in Denver), and myself (professor at the University of Alabama, a publiclyfunded institution). Presumably, Dean’s work is examined because it represents a variety of North American writers who have, over the past decade or so, argued for the scholar of religion’s direct participation in debating and establishing what we might call the good society. In contradistinction to this liberal Christian theologian’s position, Wiebe turns to a discussion of my essay, using it as an example of what, at first glance, appears to be a position rather different from Dean’s. However, Wiebe concludes that my work is just as ideologically-based.9 This is a crucial move in his argument, for in collapsing the apparent distance between my article and the views of those against whom I had earlier developed my own thoughts, Wiebe established a new space for his own views on the sort of work scholars of religion ought to pursue (on the possible values that drive his essay’s prescriptions, see below). And this is not an insignificant space for him to occupy, given that, to the best of my knowledge, my essay was among the first English/North American publications in the study of religion to take a stand against what was then a growing theologically and politically liberal view among academics that religionists ought to be among the arbiters of the public good. This suggests to me that Wiebe has strategically selected my essay as his article’s foil, for if he were able to dispense with a strawman that had previously helped to establish the shape of this debate, then the way would be clear for him to redefine its parameters by establishing his truly antithetical position, in opposition to all those whose work is either confused or ideologically-based. The structure of Wiebe’s article is therefore classically dialectical: he contrasts a thesis (i.e., Dean’s work) with what some took to be its antithesis (i.e., 9 I gather that, for Wiebe, theology is but one species of the genus ideology which can be juxtaposed to what he terms science.

A Response to Donald Wiebe from an East-Going Zax

151

my essay) and, by demonstrating their lack of distinction at a key point, he collapses the apparent difference between them and creates a synthesis, thereby establishing room for his new antithesis. Once this dialectic is complete, once he has undermined my essay’s ability to present “what appears to be a radically different argument” (21; emphasis added), readers have little choice but to side with those who are either ideological (using, I would imagine, so-called non-scientific criteria to decide between Dean and myself) or those who, like Wiebe, are truly scientific.10 The form of his argument is crucial, for by means of it my own stance as a critic of what I, along with others, have characterized as the field’s dominant tradition of caretaking is effectively undermined and my own work is shown to be but one instance of that which I study. Once this merely apparent difference is eliminated, only Wiebe’s position remains as a viable option for anyone unsympathetic to the goals of the theologically and humanistically minded.11 Game, set, and match. But the success of Wiebe’s argument hinges on two crucial items: (i) The ability to collapse (i.e., synthesize) the distance between the arguments of Dean and myself (ii) The ability to retain a safe distance between his own work and the synthesis that he has created If he is not able to accomplish the first, then the second is seriously undermined because having more than two viable options runs counter to the “us or them” structure of his argument. However, even if he is able to collapse Dean’s and my different positions into one ideological mix, winning the day depends upon Wiebe’s ability to persuade readers of the existence of a zone of purely disinterested scholarship on brute facts that his position alone occupies (i.e., the scholar’s ability to “carve reality at its joints,” as Wiebe phrased it recently at a conference12). If he fails to accomplish this and yet has convinced readers that his interlocutors are both unavoidably enmeshed in ideology, then Wiebe’s 10 11

12

I am reminded here of the old joke: there are two types of people in the world, those who think there are two types of people and those who don’t. To anyone familiar with political rhetoric, this strategy will be abundantly familiar; it is the old “you’re either with us or against us” move, which collapses all nuance into apparently simple, black-and-white distinctions of left/right, good/bad, or, in the case before us here, political/apolitical, religious/scientific, and interested/disinterested. This was the inaugural Congress of the recently formed Greek Society for the Study of Culture and Religion (an affiliate of the iahr), organized by Professor Panayotis Pachis of Aristotle University, and held in early June 2006 in Thessaloniki, Greece.

152

chapter 7

own work risks being read as just another item in the ideological smorgasbord. Of course, such a conclusion would also run counter to his argument’s rather effective “us or them” structure for, in such a scenario, it might instead turn out to be “us or us.” For those who, like Wiebe, premised the legitimacy and autonomy of the academic study of religion on the uniquely disinterested nature of its methods, this outcome would constitute nothing but an utter degradation of the field as they once envisioned it.13 However, for those of us less interested than our predecessors in defining the field by means of the religious studies versus theology debate, it presents a new challenge to figure out how to distinguish the scholarship we believe ourselves to be doing from that which constitutes our objects of study.14 To assess his paper’s argument, we must therefore examine each of these two requirements. On the first count, Wiebe can only close the distance between Dean and myself if—and here I return to the issue of recognizing the meaning of my words—my advocacy of “critique” (i.e., exercising critical intelligence) is conflated with the various ways in which we commonly use the word “criticize” (i.e., disagreement and reproach).15 Only in this way does my position nicely complement Dean’s support of religion (to be more specific, his support for a specific sort of liberal Christianity), making them both ideological, as Wiebe understands the term. Yet, contrary to Wiebe’s portrait of my position as being interested in disapproving of religious people, my use of the term “critique”— as in, for example, my claim (also quoted by Wiebe) that “we are explicitly engaged in the ongoing project of critique” (1997a: 453)—signaled the activity of historicizing data that, from the participant’s point of view, is understood to be extra- or non-historical. For regardless of the claims made by the subjects we happen to study, their beliefs, behaviors, and institutions can be theorized 13

14

15

I take the notion of degradation from Wiebe’s review essay (2004) of my 2003 book, The Discipline of Religion—perhaps the concern for the field being degraded is what Ivan Strenski had in mind when he pronounced my work to be dangerous (see McCutcheon 2004b). The futility of continuing to define the field by means of the theology versus religious studies trope is the main point of William Arnal and Willi Braun’s contribution to a volume in honor of Wiebe (Arnal et al. 2012). Basically, I understand Wiebe here to be resurrecting his disagreement with Charles Davis, from the 1980s, and his critique of Davis’s portrait of “critical theology” as being part of the academic study of religion. That I see myself as doing something entirely different from Davis’s project of discerning the correct or proper way to be religious (and doing so by drawing on Marxist social-theory tools first developed by members of the Frankfurt school), should be obvious to readers, I hope.

A Response to Donald Wiebe from an East-Going Zax

153

as thoroughly human artifacts that arise from, and are deployed within, contingent, historical settings. As I stated in an essay originally published in the Canadian journal, Studies in Religion, the same year in which the article under consideration was published: “Critique identifies just what is at stake for portraying or perceiving maps as territories, models as reality, etic as emic, and the local as universal” (reprinted as McCutcheon 2001: 113). This implies that the scholar of religion’s data are subject to the same sorts of theories used all across the human sciences to study all other aspects of human behavior. Arguing against Carl Rashke, whose words I cited in the following quotation, I wrote: “Our ability to ‘penetrate beneath the mere surface of things’ (what Rashke argues we as scholars ought to be doing so as to be able to distinguish between what he describes as healthy versus deviant religion) is nothing more than the ability to historicize all ahistorical claims” (1997a: 447). I then went on to say in the very next sentence: “For the scholar of religion as public intellectual what is most intriguing is that many of our colleagues think there is such a thing as good or healthy religion as opposed to aberrations of religious thinking and behavior.” Revealing the influence that Emile Durkheim has had on my thinking, I then concluded that, “religious discourses, which are neither good nor bad, are simply a brute fact of social ideologies and rhetorics” (emphasis added). To read this as representative of a criticism of religion (thereby plotting my position as being just as ideological as Dean’s advocacy for religion, since, for Wiebe, “ideological” seems to mean anything other than sheer neutrality when it comes to religion) requires one to judge my work by the standards of devotees themselves, for they surely would be troubled by any approach that theorized their claims to normativity, self-evidency, Truth, the will of God, etc., as being nothing more or less than the products of various contingent social settings and rhetorics. However, I cannot imagine why Wiebe would employ such standards to judge the adequacy of my scholarship. I am therefore left rather puzzled as to how the above position can be read as constituting a criticism of religious people for, in my reading of the field, these are relatively uncontroversial words that would likely be taken for granted by anyone interested in pursuing the academic study of religion. As further evidence of the questionable nature of Wiebe’s reading of me as a cultured despiser of religion, consider that he parenthetically adds “of religion” to the previously mentioned quotation from my essay, which, in his article, reads, “explicitly engaged in the ongoing project of the critique (of religion)” (2005: 22; compare to McCutcheon 1997a: 453). If by critique one means merely “historicization,” then Wiebe’s addition of “of religion” to the quotation is insignificant, for all scholars of religion who subject people’s claims and institutions

154

chapter 7

to analysis based on theories operative in the human sciences could be said to be subjecting religion to such a form of critique. If, however, there is a slippage between the terms “critique” and “criticism,” then his addition to my sentence is crucial, for it confirms his position that my work advocates criticizing religions and religious people (i.e., telling them what they ought to believe and what they ought to do), making my work, in his reading, just as driven by ideological motives as that of its cultured supporters. To support my sense of his misrepresentation of my work, consider also that Wiebe describes my position as one that attempts to reveal the “falsehood of religion” (22); he insinuates that those who remain “socially disengaged…do not become critics of religion” (22), which assumes, I gather, that critics are socially engaged and thus criticize religious people; and that my work advocates that “the student of religion must work to undermine the influence of religious thought on society” (23). In support of this final assertion, he cites page 456 of my essay. After re-reading this page I can only guess that he is making reference to the following, which appears as a conclusion after a long quotation from Burton Mack: “The only role possible for scholars who see religion as a powerful means whereby human communities construct and authorize their practices and institutions (i.e., their ‘regimes of truth’) is that of the critic.” Although Wiebe may have read the word “regime” in light of recent political rhetoric (i.e., as used in u.s. political rhetoric to signify “enemy governments” that need to be overthrown), by it I meant to imply the structural parameters (both epistemological and institutional) that determine what gets to count as truthful and meaningful—an approach that sees meaning as itself a contingent, historical artifact. Consider further that, in a footnote (23 n. 21), Wiebe compares my position to the more traditional Marxist ideology critique advocated by the historian of religions, Kurt Rudolph (2000; see also Rudolph 1985 for an earlier statement on the study of religion’s role as a source of ideology critique). After concluding that both Rudolph and I agree that, in Rudolph’s words, “work in the study of religion has ‘ideological-critical consequences’,” by which Rudolph assumes something similar to, but the precise opposite of, Eliade’s new humanism (that, in “one way or another knowledge of the history of religions inevitably alters the religious consciousness of the researched and of the perceptive readers of his or her work” [Rudolph 2000: 239]), Wiebe then writes: In this he is, of course, in agreement with McCutcheon; he does not, however, believe that this requires the student of religion to demand that religious devotees give up their beliefs or even of working toward relieving them of such beliefs.

A Response to Donald Wiebe from an East-Going Zax

155

As with many of Wiebe’s footnotes, this one is complex, and unpacking it deserves some brief attention. To begin with, I am not sure where in my body of work I argue that scholarship on religion either can or ought to change the religious consciousness of the subject under study (i.e., I contest the apparent similarity that Wiebe finds between my work and Rudolph’s). In arguing at length in my first book (McCutcheon 1997b) against Eliade’s new humanism as being a viable option for scholars in the academic study of religion, I cannot imagine ever advocating the exact same position, but simply for a different political end. Without evidence to support his point, I therefore find Wiebe’s “of course”—as in, “In this he is, of course, in agreement with McCutcheon” (emphasis added)—to be rather disingenuous. Second, after asserting this similarity, he attributes a further position to me by means of insinuation: though Rudolph and I apparently agree on X, Rudolph does not believe Y, which implies that I do. This strikes me as a rather poor way to make an argument. Again, I would benefit from being provided with some evidence—the sort of evidence that Wiebe argues scientists of religion must use in their studies—of where in my 1997 essay, or even in my larger body of work, I call upon scholars to change the hearts and minds of the people they study. I know that Dennett, in his most recent book, tackles just such a challenge; and, from conversations with Wiebe, I know that he is very critical of Dennett’s position. However, I do not believe that I have ever advocated it, which prompts me to resist being painted with the same brush that Wiebe uses to critique Dennett. For these reasons, I find Wiebe’s synthesis of Dean and myself deeply misleading. This brings me to an assessment of the second requirement of his essay: the need to demonstrate his own position as being disinterested and thus free of the sort of ideological impurities that he attributes to both Dean’s and my own work. Despite his many publications advocating a pure (i.e., disinterested and thus apolitical) approach to the study of religion, and despite his self-designation as being a scientist (28; I am unsure why he places this term in quotation marks in his essay), Wiebe’s long advocacy for a truly scientific study of religion is based upon his reading and his interpretation of texts, all of which is driven by his effective use of persuasive rhetoric. What’s more, in my reading, this advocacy is rather obviously driven by a strong desire to maintain a certain sort of institution (the modern research university, as he conceives of it) because, I would imagine, he believes that the sort of work carried out within it is valuable and therefore ought to be protected. So throughout his corpus, we have interpretations of meanings as well as non-testable rhetorics, interests, beliefs, desires, and values—all of which suggests to me that his work is “structurally and functionally indistinguishable from those against whom he writes” (31; to

156

chapter 7

borrow Wiebe’s own assessment of my work). Accordingly, there is nothing scientific about his advocacy for a scientific study of religion—if by “science” we mean something other than the broader notion of Wissenschaft and instead, along with Wiebe, mean the narrower sense of systematically arranged sets of inter-subjectively testable hypotheses on empirically observable events in the natural world. Accordingly, there is a profound and unresolved paradox at the heart of his work, somewhat akin to Logical Positivism’s difficulties when it was found that its verificationalist criterion was itself non-verifiable: Wiebe has no choice but to rely on rhetoric to establish what it appears he understands as a rhetoric-free zone. This strikes me as somewhat akin to the paradox of maintaining that an apolitical realm (inhabited by the value-free scholarscientist) can be created by funding that derives either from the nation-state’s practice of forced taxation (as in public universities) or from wealth accumulated through success in the marketplace (as in private universities). I am therefore uncertain how believing that either of these can establish an apolitical sphere fails to qualify as a species of the confused and wishful thinking that I am accused of harboring. But, to be generous, perhaps a truly value-free zone can somehow result from the application of these political and economic forces. Would the study of religion find a place within it? For societies the world over, and across time, have used innumerable local classifiers to name parts of their social and natural worlds, yet scholars surely would not employ each of them as analytic concepts, as if they all signified cross-cultural universals (i.e., the so-called joints where scholar-scientists do their disinterested carving). It is therefore painfully apparent that considerable baggage comes with many taxons. For example, despite scholars’ former confidence that obvious realities in the world could be known as Mohammadism and Heathenism, we no longer find these to be all that useful in carrying out our studies. Speaking more locally, on an October 2005 trip to lecture in Denmark, I learned that, given the way that it collapses differences perceived by many to be of significance, “Scandinavian” is not necessarily preferred by the peoples I had once naively grouped together as “Scandinavians.” Thus, “the academic study of Scandinavia” strikes me now as a rather loaded notion due to the way it asserts homogeneity. That a host of other equally loaded classifiers could come to mind, each bringing with it assumptions and values that would likely trouble the truly objective scholar, suggests that classification is not an innocent activity. This brings us to “religion.” In a series of articles (beginning primarily with the closing chapter to McCutcheon 2003a), I have argued that the modern folk classification “religion” (i.e., only recently have specific groups of human beings asked such questions as, “I’m religious, are you?”) is a particularly useful

A Response to Donald Wiebe from an East-Going Zax

157

management tool, given the way in which it selects a broad range of human practices yet understands them exclusively in terms of their underlying and/or motivating private beliefs, sentiments, and experiences (what we might refer to as the sentimentalization of classical piety). If, as I have tried to persuade readers, the rise of the modern term religion is related to the sort of privatization necessary for the maintenance of specific sorts of large-scale publics (i.e., the modern nation-state), then elevating the folk taxon “religion” to an analytic concept thought to name a cross-cultural human universal may well bring with it a series of values and practical outcomes, whether intended or not by the scientist. Case in point: the model that some current scholars hold up as exemplifying the field’s truly scientific promise—the application of findings from the cognitive sciences to the study of religion—is, for many of its advocates, based on the traditional assumption that the defining trait of this thing we call religion is a specific sort of belief—specifically, belief in supernatural beings. Despite the progress many think we have made, E.B. Tylor told us as much over a century ago; the field therefore seems mired in participant assumptions concerning the priority of the inner over the outer, belief over behavior, mind over body, and private over public. Instead of seeing these oppositions as useful rhetorics (as did no less a writer than Niccolo Machiavelli [1469–1527], who argued to confine the Church’s onetime widespread political and economic influence to the ostensibly private, moral sphere, all in an effort to re-define and thereby re-govern the public sphere of the fifteenth century), the use of these binaries seems to be understood by many scholars as “carving reality at its joints.” This strikes me as uncritically normalizing a set of contingent values; though they may make possible a social world that I take for granted and from which I benefit (working, as I do, in a public university), they are historically specific values whose universalization is, nonetheless, still worthy of study. All of this suggests that this thing we call the value-free study of religion is itself the product of yet more wishful thinking, for the taxon inevitably brings with it all sorts of baggage. To press home my point, consider a case that Wiebe and I have discussed in person: the scholar who serves as an expert witness on religion in a court proceeding (whether paid or not, either for the prosecution or the defense). Often, this occurs when a party has petitioned the government for, or outrightly claims, those rights normally accorded by the State to a group that it defines as constituting a religion (e.g., in many nations, such a designation affords these social movements exemption from certain federal laws, freedom from paying certain sorts of taxes, yet brings with it the inability to engage in certain sorts of political practices, etc.). If, as I have briefly outlined above, the liberal democratic act of classifying certain behaviors and institutions as religious can be

158

chapter 7

understood as one way that a specific type of collectivity (i.e., the State) is continually re-created by means of acts of demarcation and separation (i.e., this is private belief, that is public action; this is benign symbolic ritual, that is dangerous political activity; this is lawful assembly, that is illegal protest, etc.), then the credentialed witness is invited by those who represent either the defendant or the plaintiff to argue for/apply a definition whose outcome will either lead to the extension or limitation of the State’s power (or, conversely, of the sub-group’s ability to be free, in certain regards, from State intervention). Whether intended or not by such scholars, they therefore play a key role in these acts of social formation: they are the acknowledged experts on the defining characteristics (e.g., doctrines, histories, etc.) for those social movements that are generally seen to be exempt from the laws and opportunities that normally govern all other aspects of the social group; exercising the duties of the expert witness on exemptions (somewhat like a doctor looking for flat feet among would-be soldiers) therefore constitutes one site where we can actually see the nation-state being (re-)created, right in front of our eyes. I therefore cannot imagine how anyone would be able to argue that the scholar who sees “religion” to name one of the nation’s joints is playing anything but an ongoing and active political role when they set to work with their carving knife. It therefore appears to me that, on both of the points that I have identified as crucial for his argument, Wiebe’s essay is insufficiently persuasive since it, too, ends up being but one more species of that which he critiques; apparently, it is indeed “us or us.” Of course, I do not claim to have all the answers, but one thing of which I am certain is that the prior generation’s reliance on notions of disinterest and purity as the means to distinguish scholars from practitioners is no longer persuasive to many in the field, despite the fact that they share a number of values in common with their scientific predecessors (on this point, see Braun 2007). That the deteriorating wall once erected between outsider and insider is now allowing all sorts of boundary skirmishes does not mean that we must re-brick it in the same old fashion; if it broke down once, it will surely fall apart again, regardless of how much objective brick and disinterested mortar we pour into it. The challenge to those who today think that, although we are all situated, we are not all necessarily stuck in the same situation, is to develop new ways to persuade our peers of the utility of identifying the assumptions and practices that take place within different sorts of institutions. I now return to that childhood story of two nearly identical characters refusing to allow the other to pass. What these stubborn creatures didn’t seem to realize was that their world was not coterminous with the world, for—as anyone acquainted with Dr. Seuss’s tales could predict—by the last scene the once

A Response to Donald Wiebe from an East-Going Zax

159

empty prairie of Prax has been transformed into a bustling city filled with colorful cars. A highway now circles around our combatants and an overpass traverses the aptly named Zax ByPass, all of which “left them there, standing un-budged in their tracks.” Because their principled conflict eventually constituted something less than a spectacle, I still wonder what Temenos’s readers will make of the local differences between Wiebe and myself. Because our disagreement is more than likely foundational (i.e., a position that is held to be beyond all possible critique16), I do not believe that any words that I can offer will persuade Wiebe of his misreadings. But I also wish not to stand un-budged in my tracks. So my intended audience for this reply has been the Temenos reader who is curious about what is at stake in this admittedly minor but nonetheless important dispute. Thus I close by suggesting that there may be more to be gained by studying the classification “religion,” and discussing where and how best that can be done, than in debating the merits of that wishful thing we once knew as the truly disinterested, “scientific” study of religion—a program which Wiebe, its most persistent advocate, has only been able to plead rather than carry it out. For in setting the methodological standard so far out of the reach of the actual  human beings who constitute the pool of scholar-scientists, writers such as Wiebe have not only succeeded in excluding theologians from our guild but have also prevented themselves from ever meeting their own high expectations—what we on this side of the Atlantic mean by the old saying “to cut off your nose to spite your face.” In recommending that we turn away from their impossible standards, I therefore willingly take a step to the side, bypassing the old debates and gladly letting the scientists proceed on their way, and me on mine. 16

To put it another way, could Wiebe identify the possible conditions under which his commitment to the existence of purely disinterested scholarship would be falsified? For, given his own definition of science, the identification of such possible conditions is a requirement.

chapter 8

Introduction

As described earlier, my undergraduate degree was in what my university (Queen’s University, in Kingston, Ontario) called Life Sciences—what others might have once called pre-med. Many of us wrote the Medical College Admissions Test, or mcat (as I did, though, as admitted earlier, I did not score so well, as I recall), but not all of us got into medicine (as I didn’t, but as my roommate did). In our first year, we took courses in Chemistry, Biology, Physics (each of which also had its own three-hour weekly lab, of course), Calculus, and Psychology—the last being an elective, but everyone pretty much took it. In other years, I enrolled in such courses as Organic Chemistry, Genetics, Biochemistry, Histology, Abnormal Psych, Anatomy, Statistics, Brain and Behavior, Physiology, etc. I would imagine that some of my classmates who, like the vast majority of us, did not get into medicine, have ended up in one of the many adjacent fields—such as going on to do a Master of Science degree in Microbiology (“Micro” for the initiated), or eventually going into, say, Pharmacology—either to do research, work for a drug company’s marketing division (as one friend did after getting his Ph.D.), or owning your own pharmacy (the route taken by yet another good friend from my undergraduate days). But who knows what all careers my onetime classmates have found for themselves? As for me? I ended up getting a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of Toronto. What a waste of that undergrad degree, no? Maybe my point is obvious: not unlike many students who pursue a degree in that broad domain called the Humanities, many who earn an undergraduate degree in the so-called hard sciences also reinvent themselves once they graduate. But—and this is the interesting part—no one seems to see this as a problem in the sciences, while it worries us terribly in the Humanities (and by “us” I generally mean parents and  politicians). Although no one, as I recall, at least, questioned my choice of undergraduate major (after all, who doesn’t want their child to be a medical doctor?—what many today take to be the real kind of doctor), I’ve heard from many students with different experiences. When their family and friends learn that they are opting for a B.A. in Religious Studies, they are immediately asked, “What on earth are you going to do with a degree like that?”—and, given the economy’s crash in 2008, magazines, newspapers, and online career resources routinely feature “Philosophy/Religious Studies” among the top ten worst majors, since who employs a philosopher to

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004281417_010

Introduction

161

philosophize? But enroll in an Engineering degree and everyone somehow knows that you’re on the right track. But here’s the issue: that few of my own undergrad friends who did a degree in Engineering ever actually did any engineering in their careers—because they all enrolled almost right away in an M.B.A. degree and then ended up becoming managers who never picked up a protractor again—does not seem to tarnish that first undergraduate degree in their case, however; for, much like the Philosophy B.A. who does not become a Philosophy professor, or the English B.A. who does not become an English teacher, those Engineering students were also immersed in material that proved of little relevance to how they eventually earned their daily bread. Or…was that first degree directly relevant, perhaps? “Relevant by what standards?” we might ask. I thought that my engineering friends, with the insane schedules and workloads that they had (they certainly had it worse than me in terms of hours per week in class, even though my 5 classes, each meeting three hours per week, plus those three three-hour labs each week, made my time pretty hectic—though yes, I skipped my fair share of classes, too…), were actually being trained in how to manage their time, how to meet deadlines, and how to juggle multiple balls—learning the hard way which would bounce and which would shatter and thus needed more careful attention. That is, especially when they all started doing business degrees after graduation, it seemed to me that they had actually been taught skills and not content in that undergraduate degree, skills that would be handy to them, whatever they should decide to do. Looking back now, it seems to me that the seemingly practical application of their degrees (an application few of my Engineering friends ever realized, don’t forget) provided cover for their professors to—intentionally or not— teach them skills basic to any education and relevant for almost any career. It never really was about the content of those classes, after all. Well played, Engineering professors, well played. I didn’t do the final year of my Bachelor of Science degree, which means I earned a B.A. in 1983 (that’s how the Canadian system was: a four year B.Sc. degree was known as a B.Sc. Honors—there was no plain, three-year B.Sc. option). For after three years of learning about neurotransmitters, regression analysis, and the carbon cycle, I had also moved on to other things. As I discussed earlier, after a brief detour in Divinity school (earning a Master of Divinity degree in 1986 and, in an effort to gain experience writing a thesis, a Master of Theology degree in 1987) made plain that, while studying religion was fascinating, training to be a religious functionary was not (something evident in just the first year of the M.Div.). But looking back now on my undergraduate degree, I think that the sort of analytic problem-solving skills that I learned in those three years, the way to break something down into

162

chapter 8

manageable parts that you can then tackle and from which you can build, have served me rather well in the place where I happen to have landed—in my research, my teaching, my professional service, and my administration. And this means to me that my undergraduate degree, seemingly so very far removed from what I do today, was anything but a waste of my time and resources; sure, I don’t do titrations any more (though metaphors of the distillate that remains have come in handy on plenty of occasions to describe the somethingness that many scholars of religion think remains once you’ve reduced religion as a sociologist, a psychologist, etc.) and remembering the gravitational constant is not something I fret about all that much (measured in meters per second squared, right?), but that training turned out to be crucial in the formation of the scholar who I have become today. The moral of my story? Not all scientists wear lab coats and not all classes are about their content. It is unfortunate that more professors in the study of religion do not realize this. If they did, then—for example—the popularity of the world religions course would likely diminish considerably, for it seems to be our version of a survey course in which rather arbitrary items, such as names of rivers and dates, names of gods and of rituals, become the memorizable (and, once our students leave our classes, all too forgettable for the vast majority of them, I’d wager) material on which we test our students in order to rank them for who knows what all later purposes. While recognizing that grades have an important role in providing feedback to students on their performance and while admitting that knowledge acquisition requires a degree of brute memorization—i.e., I don’t think that, as a small child, there was some hidden logic to learn that made remembering that A came before B any easier; no, more than likely it was that catchy little alphabet song—it has long seemed to me that it will be far more useful to my students to be able to learn to ask questions about the conditions than allowed something to become a fact rather than just take my word for it that this or that is one and thus ought to be memorized. Sure, we all walk around thinking that there are facts, and much of an undergraduate education entails learning them and repeating them back on exams (to be honest, I think that was one of my problems in Organic Chemistry and also in learning new languages—a profound dislike of the sort of memorization required to just learn the rules in which things happen); but any trial lawyer can tell you that something becomes “evidence,” or the “facts of the case” only if the rules of that high-stakes game that we call a court trial, policed by those referees we call “precedence,” “juries,” and “judges,” allows it. If, as I tend to think, the rest of our social world operates along the same model—that things from the generic and hectic world of happenings, from that limitless

Introduction

163

archive called “the past,” stand out as worth talking about and worth paying attention to only because of structures and choices—then students simply repeating the facts back to me means that all I’ve done as a professor is prompted them to internalize and thereby unquestioningly conserve (to borrow Jonathan Z. Smith’s phrase for the umpteenth time) the economy of signification operating within our group. For, as evidenced in Smith’s work on ritual (the classic statement of which, for me, is his essay “The Bear Facts of Ritual” [1982: chpt. 4]), all groups police the boundaries of possible significance (and thus possible group membership) through a variety of techniques. Ritual can be one, as well as customs officers checking passports at the border, but assessing “cultural literacy” (e.g., Hirsch 1988) became one such technique not so long ago, whereby a certain sense of what counted as the legitimate past, and thus what constituted an authorized self-understanding of group members, was either lamented (when people did not know this or that about Shakespeare, as measured on such things as standardized tests) or encouraged (via school curricula reforms) and eventually celebrated (by means of good grades and career advancement). That a very specific sort of group was being remade by means of this seemingly neutral “literacy” was not lost on those who did not see themselves to be members of the dominant group, of course, and who did not place the same stock in its facts. In our own field, this model eventually led to Stephen Prothero’s New York Times bestseller, Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—and Doesn’t (2007)—a book arguing that basic world religions factual knowledge is required of us as engaged citizens. But what are the links between the very recent invention of the discourse on world religions in Germany (Masuzawa 2005a,b), the remarkably efficient worldwide dissemination of this classificatory system in the wake of European colonial expansion (such that, today, pretty much everyone is said to have a religion, and not having one is itself studied by scholars of religion), and the contemporary civic responsibility and global influence of Americans? This strikes me as a worthwhile set of queries. It also strikes me as a set of prior questions that it might be good for a student—especially one who will more than likely never take another course in our field, inasmuch as many of our students in the U.S. come to our classes through mandatory general education or core curriculum requirements—to consider before diving in to memorize the difference between, say, Śruti and Smṛti in that thing that we now all know to be the ancient religious tradition of Hinduism. This is what I think critical thinking does—it prompts one to be curious and inquire into the generally untold backstory. Sadly, I find too little of it in the academic study of religion—a field in which many still take their datum as being so deeply humane and thus self-evidently significant that calling it “data”

164

chapter 8

is seen to be an offense against humanity (e.g., Orsi [2004a] called my work “chilling” in this regard; see my essay in response [2006a]). Inquiring why that object stood out as interesting in the first place—what Jonathan Z. Smith has often called the “So what?” question—is too little asked, I think; and, if asked, it often prompts answers comparable to exasperated parents replying to the relentlessly regressive questions of a toddler: “Because!” And this is precisely what the following unpublished essay, earlier versions of which were delivered as three different public lectures (one, at the University of Utah, in March 2013 [and my thanks to Muriel Schmid for the kind invitation], another at Texas State University in April 2013 [and my thanks also go to Rebecca Raphael for inviting me to her campus to talk], and the third at Queen’s University, in Kingston, Canada, as the keynote to their inaugural graduate student conference, “Unraveling Religion” in March 2014 [thanks to Ian Cuthberston for the kind invitation to return to Kingston and lecture after so many years away]), is concerned with addressing and, perhaps, trying to correct.

chapter 8

“And That’s Why No One Takes the Humanities Seriously”1 [T]he very resistance offered by poetry makes it an ideal prey for myth… - roland barthes, Myth Today 1973: 145

In the second of its four issues in 2011, the widest circulating journal in the academic study of religion—the Journal of the American Academy of Religion (jaar)—opened with a poem. Entitled “Metamorphosis,” it was a new poem written by the American Eliza Griswold; it read as follows:2 The mimosa trees misunderstand the New Year’s heat, and burst into mustard tufts across the garden— their premature buds, a birth forced by the earth’s unnaturalness. Poor trees, like nine-year-old girls, who have to negotiate breasts. It’s death pressing up beneath the most tender flesh. In my day, most of us feared ours were tumors, and we were in season. Long ago, a girl could become a tree. Daphne’s fingers sprouted twigs; root hairs branched from her toes; her torqued curls gnarled into limbs; She thickened, as we do, in this age of self-defense. 1 Two separate portions of this paper first appeared as a blog post on my own department’s blog. I should also add that I have communicated with the jaar editor, either over email or in person, on several occasions concerning the criticisms contained in this chapter. That my advice, offered as a member of the jaar Editorial Board, to discontinue the inclusion of aesthetic pieces to open each issue (first communicated when I initially became aware that poetry was appearing in 2011) had little effect is what has prompted me to write this paper. 2 For more information on the poet, visit her website, http://www.elizagriswold.com/bio/.

166

chapter 8

This marked the second issue for what was then the journal’s new editorial team, headed by the scholar of Islam and interreligious dialogue, Amir Hussain; the previous issue had, understandably, opened with an editorial thanking the outgoing editors and giving an indication of some of the new editor’s goals. Ending his editorial note with his thanks to the various institutions and people who were assisting him in his new role, he saluted two of his mentors at the University of Toronto, the late Wilfred Cantwell Smith (d. 2000) and the late Willard Oxtoby.3 The editor closed his inaugural editorial by quoting Cantwell Smith from his 1963 book, Patterns of Faith Around the World: This much at least we may say: that prehistoric burial shows that men and women from the very earliest traces of their beginnings have recognized that there is more to human life than meets the eye, that our total significance is not exhausted within the six feet of space or sixty years of time whereby we each play our part on the stage of earth. The sober observation of the historian now agrees with the insight of the philosopher, and the faith of the saint, that human beings are not human until they have recognized that the proper response to death is poetry, not prose 1998: 34.

“While I have no desire to turn the jaar into a literary journal,” the editor then concludes, “I think that poetry is the proper way to begin.” And with that, he turns to the poem that opened the first issue for 2011: the late Margaret Avison’s seven-stanza poem, “To Wilfred Cantwell Smith,” which opens with the following words: When asked, What is an intellectual? he said: “An intellectual is a participant in his own society, listening to people. That kind of truth cannot be put anywhere by us, not in words, never put in its place. The human mind can apprehend, not comprehend.” 3 In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that I, too, earned my Ph.D. at the University of Toronto, completing it six years ahead of Hussain, and that the late Willard Oxtoby (d. 2003) was on my own comprehensive exam committee (as detailed earlier), was one of three members on my dissertation advisory committee, and that (like Amir, I believe) I was a teaching assistant for the World Religions course that he then co-taught with the late Joe O’Connell (d. 2012).

“And That‘s Why No One Takes the Humanities Seriously”

167

Despite the editor’s stated desire not to turn the periodical into a literary journal, as we already know the following issue, the second issue for 2011, also opened with a poem. As did the third, which began with a reprint of a poem published in 2002, by Wole Soyinka, a Nigerian who, in 1986, had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.4 And the last of 2011’s quarterly issues also opened with a poem: “Heartease II,” by the Jamaican poet, Lorna Goodison.5 Apart from the first, of course, which was in honor of one of the editor’s late mentors and likely needed some contextualization so that the relevance of the poem was evident to readers, none of these poems receive any commentary or elaboration. They are not epigraphs to the issue, as if setting a thematic tone for a set of papers concerning some related topic. Instead, they are simply  poems opening each issue of what the current editor characterized, in his  inaugural editorial, as “the premier journal for the study of religion” (Hussain 2011: 1). 4 One of its twelve canticles reads: A god is nowhere born, yet everywhere. But Rama’s sect rejects that fine distinction— The designated spot is sanctified, not for piety but— For dissolution of yours from mine, politics of hate— And forced exchange—peace for a moment’s ecstasy. They turn a mosque to rubble, stone by stone, Condemned usurper of Lord Rama’s vanished spot Of dreamt epiphany. Now a cairn of stones Usurps a dream of peace—can they dream peace In iconoclast Uttar Pradesh? 5 Its opening three stanzas read as follows: In what looked like the blackout last week a meteorite burst from the breast of the sky smoking like a censer, it spelled out in incandescent calligraphy a message for all who had deep eyes. If you did not see it I’ll tell you what it said: Cultivate the search-mi-heart and acres of sincerity grass and turn your face towards Heartease. Set out a wash pan and catch mercy rain forget bout drought, catch the mercy rain, bathe and catch a light from this meteoric flame and sit down cleansed, to tell a rosary of your ancestor’s names.

168

chapter 8

The following year, 2012, the journal switched from opening each issue with a solitary poem to, instead, beginning with reproductions of art, accompanied this time by a brief statement from the artist, such as Amalia Masa-Bains’s work that opens the March 2012 issue. Focusing on what she sees as the interrelations between “land, spirituality, and memory” (Masa-Bains 2012: 3), her art had recently been featured as part of an installation at the 2011 aar annual meeting in San Francisco, as well as being part of an hour-long conference session one evening.6 As she says in her artist’s statement: Many of my works were inspired by my own cultural values of the spiritual and the sacred connected to ancient beliefs and indigenous practices revered in the early Chicano/a Movement. My search for the spiritual has been both a personal practice and an artistic form born out of traditional spirituality concerned with home altars, ofrendas for the dead, and vernacular forms such as the capilla yard shrines and descansos, a roadside memorial that is a resting place that marks the site of a death. The editorial that begins the issue in which her art appears, the first issue produced after the San Francisco conference, described how “[a]s academics who study religion, we often focus exclusively on texts, so the creations of Professor Mesa-Bains arouse our appreciation of the nonverbal, including ritual, music, and images as accompaniments to our incalculable destination” (2012a: 2).7 6 The session, A20-409, took place Sunday, Nov. 20, 2011, from 8:30–9:30 p.m., as part of the Arts Series. Entitled “Amalia Mesa-Bains: Circle of Ancestors,” the installation was described in the conference’s program book as follows: “The Circle of the Ancestors narrates through a circle of chairs eight historic moments through eight historic women our cultural genealogy as Chicanas. The circle refers to the arrangement of the eight chairs facing inward around a spiral of candles placed on the floor. The chair, as a metaphor of the body, recalls the suffering and sacrifice present in the lives of these women. At the same time the circle of chairs is a recalling of the intimacy and collective strength of women’s lives in the home, in the fields, even in the Church. The eight figures refer to the ancient, the Mexican Cuatlique, and Coyolxauhui; the Virgen de Guadalupe; the colonial paintings, the Castas; the colonial nun and scholar Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz; the revolutionary woman soldier, Adelita and my own Abuelita (grandmother); the Chicana farm worker; the Pachuca/Chola and my First Holy Communion. The women represented in the chair altars offer us a circle of time where we remember our future, constructing for ourselves a spiritual and cultural genealogy as Mexicana/Chicana women.” 7 In fact, scholarship on ritual is among the more thriving subfields in the study of religion, dating to the very origins of the field in the nineteenth century (I think here of William Robertson’s Smith’s work [1846–1894], which proposed that so-called ancient religion was

“And That‘s Why No One Takes the Humanities Seriously”

169

Issues 3 and 4 for 2012 also opened with art accompanied by artists’ statements;8 and, if the first of 2013’s four issues is any indication, photography comprises the artistic medium of choice for this year.9 To a reader familiar with academic publishing, I think it is unclear why poetry, art, and now photography appear in this academic journal (let alone as an installation at a national conference of academics). They are not connected to any of the scholarly articles in the journal but, instead, stand as a preface to the issue, a speaking beforehand—but don’t let the silence that comes with their general lack of context or background fool you, for I think that something is indeed being said by means of these artistic expressions (for why else are they here?). Because this periodical is devoted to publishing peer-reviewed scholarly research on religion, it’s not immediately evident why any sort of prefatory message is even needed—editorials rarely appear in journals, except when announcing some change or retraction/correction, or, perhaps, when preparing readers for an issue-wide topic (such as a special issue or a commissioned set of papers). But an editor opening an issue of a journal for specialists in the academic study of religion by trying, as he phrased it, to “arouse our appreciation of the nonverbal?” Well, I find this very puzzling, for I had thought that our job as academics was neither to criticize nor to celebrate our object of study, but, instead, to examine whatever we each happen to study in a fashion that is as applicable to the things that we find personally troubling as it is to those we support. Such an equal opportunity methodology—the sign, I’d say, of any disciplined approach to the study of human behavior—surely applies in the organized around ritual and not belief or doctrine [2002, though first published in 1889]), which suggests that the supposedly text-based nature of the entire field is not as apparent as the editor thinks. 8 Sandow Birk’s art appears in issue 3 (2012), accompanied by his illuminated Quran, in the style of classic copies of the Quran, aimed at “investigating how the message relates to our lives in the United States today” (2012: 582); and Robert Davidson’s Haida-styled artwork opens issue 4 (along with a separate editorial commenting on his art [Hussain 2012b]), along with an artist’s statement that concludes, “Since the almost complete destruction of our spirit, our disconnection from our values and beliefs, it is the art that is bringing us back to our roots” (Davidson 2012: 852). 9 Dorothy Braudy’s photographs of various places of worship in the city of Los Angeles open issue 81/1 (2013), along with her artist’s statement; her focus on this subject matter is a result of her “becoming more sensitive to the complex spiritual life of the city.” She continues, “I wanted to celebrate the beauty and diversity of Los Angeles, and it seemed to me religion uniquely embodies what seems to make us separate from one another at the same time that each religion calls on us to become our better selves” (Braudy 2013: 2).

170

chapter 8

selection of the scholarly papers to be published in such a journal, but I do not see how it can apply when it comes to selecting poetry or art, for I don’t suppose that the editor is selecting works which he dislikes,10 or those which, I suppose, “stifle” our appreciation for the nonverbal, though I would hope that he publishes well-written and soundly argued essays with which he disagrees.11 So why open yourself to possible critique by including a domain within a peerreview journal that entirely bypasses the peer-review process—for while there’s ideally a way to account rationally for all editorial decisions concerning why certain papers are or are not being published, there’s absolutely no accounting for taste, as the old saying goes.12 Driving back to Tuscaloosa last November, from the Birmingham airport, after flying home from the aar annual meeting in Chicago, a few of us were talking in the car about this very topic: our premier journal and its puzzling poetry; all of us were curious why a peer-reviewed journal in our field had started doing this. After all, scholarly journals in, say, molecular biology or radiological oncology—fields that study aspects of the human in no less technical and thus specialized ways as the academic study of religion—don’t open their issues by establishing an aesthetic tone for their readers, and even journals in literary studies would publish poetry only inasmuch as it comprised an example of something discussed in one of its articles. Journals in these fields are therefore seen as technical places where specialized research is disseminated to a relatively small group of equally specialized readers—and no one seems to think that they ought to offer apologies for the way this specialization 10

11 12

Opening his remarks by saying that he has “admired [her work] for years” Hussain, not long before taking over as editor of jaar, participated in a “conversation” with Griswold, whose poetry opened the second issue for 2011, on Sept. 30, 2010, at the Los Angeles Public Library. Part of the library’s “Interfaith Series,” the event was entitled, “The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam;” listen to it at http://www .lapl.org/collections-resources/e-media/podcasts/aloud/tenth-parallel-dispatches-fault -line-between. Notably, at the 17-minute mark, Griswold appreciatively recounts when she first read Mircea Eliade and his concept of the hierophany, and how it helped her to understand herself and her own upbringing in the church (her father, Frank T. Griswold, was the Episcopal Bishop of Chicago [1987–1997]). Also in the interest of full disclosure, I have been fortunate enough to have published on a variety of occasions in jaar, including during the current editor’s tenure. Sometimes journal editors reject submissions, much as departments decline hiring someone, due to what is described by them as a “lack of fit;” I find this sort of disclosure, which is nothing but a non-disclosure, very troubling for the manner in which it fails to articulate the criteria by which “fit” was measured, a failure that ends up normalizing these criteria by ensuring that they are never disclosed and can never be debated. So, like taste, there’s no accounting for “fit.”

“And That‘s Why No One Takes the Humanities Seriously”

171

excludes possible readers who do not possess the necessary technical expertise. At a pause in our conversation, while we drove down the interstate, my colleague, Merinda Simmons, summed it all up when, from the back seat of my car, she simply said: “And that’s why no one takes the Humanities seriously.” Although it was an off-hand comment, it caught my ear. Given that I’ve been on the jaar editorial advisory board since 2008, I’ve been privy to some recent conversations on trying to reach new readers—for example, the journal now contains movie reviews and we’ve been told, by the publisher, that readers are more likely to continue reading it if something early on in the publication— say, an image or a poem?—grabs their attention (oddly, I had thought that readers kept reading if the articles were provocative and intellectually compelling). Because the aar is the largest society of scholars of religion in the world, and given that subscription to the journal comes along with membership, I can’t imagine Oxford University Press, the journal’s publisher, pressuring the journal to rebrand itself as more relevant or engaging or open to non-specialist readers (correction: subscribers)—simplification is, to my way of thinking, the death knell for a scholarly journal. Yet the journal is clearly aiming for new markets, in part, it would seem, by means of the artistic opening to each issue—or so the advisory board has been told. But I have a hunch that more than this is going on—after all, although I agree that, when it comes to commenting on religion’s causes or effects, it is rather unfortunate that highly respected scholars working in other fields, such as Political Theory or Sociology, often feel free to draw on what is often their merely Sunday school level of expertise, I hardly think that poetry to open each issue of our field’s main journal will draw them into reading the results of our research. In fact, judging by my colleague’s conclusion that this was sufficient evidence why others do not take scholars of religion, in particular, or Humanists, in general, seriously, such an editorial policy is probably the last thing that will help to persuade specialists outside our field to see the relevance of the academic study of religion. So what else might be behind this artistic innovation? As you may know, there’s a well-established tradition of scholars of religion asserting, first off, that (as the American psychologist, William James, might have phrased it in the early twentieth century) religious institutions are simply a secondary site where a prior, pristine, and personal experience is expressed publicly and, second, that there’s some shared identity between so-called religious experience and what they often call aesthetic experience, which is also thought to exist separately from the work of art. The definitive early statement of this position was made by the German Lutheran theologian, Rudolf Otto, in the opening pages to Chapter 3 of his still influential 1923 German book, Das Heilige, or more commonly known in English as The Idea of the Holy:

172

chapter 8

The reader is invited to direct his mind to a moment of deeply-felt religious experience, as little as possible qualified by other forms of consciousness. Whoever cannot do this, whoever knows no such moments in his experience, is requested to read no farther; for it is not easy to discuss questions of religious psychology with one who can recollect the emotions of his adolescence, the discomforts of indigestion, or, say, social feelings, but cannot recall any intrinsically religious feelings. We do not blame such an one, when he tries for himself to advance as far as he can with the help of such principles of explanation as he knows, interpreting ‘aesthetics’ in terms of sensuous pleasure, and ‘religion’ as a function of the gregarious instinct and social standards, or as something more primitive still. But the artist, who for his part has an intimate personal knowledge of the distinctive element in the aesthetic experience, will decline his theories with thanks, and the religious man will reject them even more uncompromisingly. 1950: 8

This argument, of course, has a long history—an argument that, if effective, allows one to bypass rationalist critiques of religion as being illogical, contradictory, and not premised on empirical evidence by claiming that religious belief and behavior are simply the outward expression of a prior inward sentiment. It is the precursor of today’s “I’m spiritual, not religious” claims. We can trace this argument at least as far back as Friedrich Schleiermacher, the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German Protestant theologian who quite effectively argued against the Enlightenment ideals that often resulted in spirited criticism of religion as mere superstition; much like Otto after him, he did this by holding that religion was first and foremost about “feeling” and as such, was neither a rational nor an irrational element of the human. As Schleiermacher phrased it in his On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers: [R]eligion’s essence is neither thinking nor acting but intuition and feeling. It wishes to intuit the universe, wishes devoutly to overhear the universe’s own manifestations and actions, longs to be grasped and filled by the universe’s immediate fullness in childlike passivity. 1996: 22

As such, and contrary to those of his day whom he labeled the cultured despisers of religion, Schleiermacher concluded that there was no contradiction to be found in a rational person also being a religious person—feelings are

“And That‘s Why No One Takes the Humanities Seriously”

173

non-rational, personal, and thus not prone to logical critique. “Don’t tell me how I feel,” as the B movie dialogue might phrase it, is curiously in keeping with Schleiermacher’s strategically useful prioritizing of the personal and the non-rational. And with this move in mind, we fast forward nearly a hundred years after Schleiermacher’s death (in 1834) to the publication of Otto’s “analysis of such states of the soul” (8), which was significantly subtitled An Inquiry Into the NonRational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational. Although it would not be accurate to maintain that, for a writer such as Otto, an appreciation for the sublime or the beautiful was simply the same as the ability to experience what he called the numinous, usually translated as “the holy”— what he otherwise described as the awe-inspiring mystery of it all—it would be accurate to say that, for such writers, both are related analogically inasmuch as both presuppose deeply personal sentiments that are said to transcend argumentation and documentation. “But the artist,” as Otto wrote, “who for his part has an intimate personal knowledge of the distinctive element in the aesthetic experience, will decline…[the uninformed outsider’s] theories with thanks, and the religious man will reject them even more uncompromisingly.” Why? Because both have had the experience. A unique experience. A private experience. “I can’t quite put it into words—but take my word for it, there was an ‘it’ and I had it. Did you?” Before proceeding, I realize that this brief historical survey may, rightly, leave some dissatisfied, inasmuch as I seem to be doing little more than excavating eighteenth- and nineteenth-century windmills for later toppling. So as to assure you that critiquing the antique strawmen known as Schleiermacher and Otto is not a sly rhetorical trick, I could remind you that both Wilfred Cantwell Smith, still regarded by many as one of the most influential modern scholars of religion, and jaar’s editor presuppose that our object of study transcends rational inquiry and language. While the former was confident “that there is more to human life than meets the eye” and was cited by the poet as saying that “the human mind can apprehend, not comprehend,” the latter wrote, in an already cited editorial, on how such things as “ritual, music, and images are accompaniments to our incalculable destination” (emphasis added)—not too far from Otto’s notion of the mystery of it all that inspires our awe. Or perhaps I could cite nyu’s president and former dean of its School of Law, John Sexton, who appeared as a guest on, of all places, “The Colbert Report,” on March 7, 2013, promoting his book, Baseball as a Road to God (2013). As described on its publisher’s website, the book—which is based on his university course by the same name and on whose reading list William James’s once important study of religious experience, from 100 years ago, and Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the

174

chapter 8

Profane, first published 56 years ago, both regrettably figure prominently—“is about the elements of our lives that lie beyond what can be captured in words alone—ineffable truths that we know by experience rather than by logic or analysis.”13 But instead of citing the work of a lawyer and university administrator who, like so many other people trained outside our field, dabbles as a scholar of religion, consider the words of Robert Orsi, a well-known and muchrespected scholar of American religion and, back in 2003, the president of the aar. Orsi edited the equally recent word book The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies and wrote the chapter entitled, “The Problem of the Holy” (2012b), which opens with the following three sentences: Many (not all) scholars of religion become restive sooner or later with the simple sufficiency of explanations of religious phenomena and experiences in terms of the social and psychological. It is not that these scholars of religion propose foregoing social explanations. It is that they recognize that such accounts fall short of the realness of the phenomena they purport to describe and explain in people’s experience. 84

While this is not the time to rebut Orsi’s position in detail,14 suffice it to say that, as you may have guessed, I am not one of the people who counts among 13 http://www.us.penguingroup.com/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9781592407545,00.html (accessed March 8, 2013). The class is described (in surprisingly confident terms) as ­follows on the nyu course page: “Baseball As a Road to God aims to link literature about our national pastime with the study of philosophy and theology. This seminar aims to blend ideas contained in classic baseball novels such as Coover’s Universal Baseball Association, Kinsella’s Iowa Baseball Confederation, and Malamud’s The Natural with those found in such philosophical/theological works as Eliade’s Sacred and Profane, Heschel’s God in Search of Man, and James’s Varieties of Religious Experience. It discusses such themes as the metaphysics of sports, baseball as a civil religion, the nature of sacred time and space, and the ineffability of the divine. Not for the faint-hearted, this course requires students to read over two dozen works of varying lengths in addition to supplemental readings as they might arise. The course also requires weekly papers. As with any serious commitment of one’s time, the rewards of taking a seminar such as this can be great.” Visit the course page at: http://gallatin.nyu.edu/academics/courses/detail.SP2012 .IDSEM-UG1324.001.html (accessed March 8, 2013). 14 Since Orsi’s argument for why scholars ought to conserve the experiences of the participants under study has changed little from past arguments he has made, I had thought I rebutted it persuasively in McCutcheon 2006a. See also my introduction to Martin and McCutcheon 2012: 1–16 for a critique of such traditionalist discourses on experience.

“And That‘s Why No One Takes the Humanities Seriously”

175

the ranks of his “many,” for unlike those in the intellectual tradition that stretches from Schleiermacher to Orsi (and which contains the various other examples I’ve so far cited), I do not think that it is the job of scholars to speculate on matters that they somehow suppose to transcend the horizon of their academic conventions and credentials; it is therefore not for the scholar to be faithful to the so-called realness of his or her research subjects’ experiences as these people either perceive them or, more accurately, report perceiving them (since we do not study experiences or perceptions but, instead, people talking and writing, a simple though crucial distinction. As such, we therefore study discourses on experience and not experience)—after all, people claim to believe all sorts of things as being really real and while we, as scholars, likely study all of these things, we often do so with a view to explaining why anyone could even conceive of such a thing, much less be persuaded by it. For not everyone who claims to hear voices is venerated as a saint. Or, as Freud provocatively phrased it, “Am I to be obliged to believe every absurdity? And if not, why this one in particular?” (1989: 35). That is, in many cases, we feel no special duty to conserve the reality attributed to the claim for, often, it so opposes our own commonsense view of the world that we can’t be anything but perplexed why anyone would think that—and thus enters the specialist in, say, abnormal psychology. Simply put, even the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of the Saints (Congregatio de Causis Sanctorum) investigates claims to miracles and refuses to legitimize many. The problem, of course, is how we distinguish between those views we as scholars routinely explain in mundane terms and those we instead decide to honor by preserving them untouched—to put it in words I quoted earlier, from Wilfred Cantwell Smith: if, as he holds, “an intellectual is a participant in his own society,” then do we study those who are familiar to us in ways different from how we study those who are not, because there are many other societies and social standards out there other than our own? While of course taking seriously the claims that people make and the stock that they put into them, I would argue that it is not the scholar’s task to take sides by determining which claims are credible and which incredible, which societies are normative and which are not; instead, as suggested earlier, we ought to use an equal opportunity method—might this be what we mean when we talk about the work to be carried out by critical thinking in the academy?—to offer accounts for all of the claims that we examine and not, as Orsi asserts in his introduction to the volume from which I quoted earlier, to provide people with “assistance with the real religious challenges of their local worlds and with their immediate and personal concerns” (2012a: 9). Contrary to Orsi, I do not think it is for the scholar of religion to offer therapies for just some people’s existential, social,

176

chapter 8

political, or economic crises—and I say “just some” because, as suggested just a bit ago, those people with whom we disagree are quickly labeled by us as radical or extremist or dismissed as members of cults or fringe groups, and we, as scholars, would never dream of assisting them with their no doubt equally real and personal concerns. Instead, we study why such people even think and act the way that they do. I therefore strongly disagree when Orsi argues that we, as scholars of religion, have a therapeutic responsibility to the wider public; scholars of religion do not exist to, as phrased by the first artist to have her work appear in the journal’s pages, help with or even appreciate someone’s “search for the spiritual.” Rather, as a scholar of religion, I would argue that my responsibility is to take my profession’s standards of argumentation, evidence, and collegial cooperation seriously and to see upholding these as my duty to the wider public which helps to fund my work. As a husband, as a son, as a brother, as a citizen, as a public employee, who knows what other responsibilities I surely have to the many different communities of which I am a member— some of them surely complementary yet some likely contradictory; but I fear that it significantly over-reaches my expertise as a scholar of religion to claim that I am responsible to help address the existential challenges faced by the people whom I may happen to study or among whom I may happen to live. While I certainly owe to them a fair and thorough description of their claims and their behaviors, descriptions in which they surely ought to be able to recognize themselves, moving from description to analysis I am now in the debt of the scholarly traditions in which I do my work. And I think it is this overly ambitious sense of relevance, based on the presumption that a scholar of religion’s object of study transcends all the usual measures of the human, that propels many of my colleagues’ overly ambitious sense of scholarly duty. I am reminded here of a letter that recently was sent to the program chairs of the aar’s various sections by Laurie Zoloth, an ethicist at Northwestern University and the president-elect of the aar, concerning the conference theme for the 2014 meeting in San Diego: “Climate Change and the Coming Global Crisis: Religions and Responses.” After outlining the threats posed by the facts of climate change, the letter went on to say: “I believe that everyone has a role to play as we try to understand, change, and respond to a warming world, but I believe that scholars, who are in full and early possession of fact, with opportunities to articulate positions and policies, have a role ­specific duty to act now” (emphases added). She then outlined her two reasons for these beliefs: It is our scholarly duty, I would argue, that we bring forward a scholarship from a wide set of traditions that may suggest a meaningful set of actions

“And That‘s Why No One Takes the Humanities Seriously”

177

in response to an unprecedented and shared crisis. Second, there is a normative task. How ought scholars of religious studies behave, meet and live in the world? How do our theoretical concerns influence our academy? Our university, or community of worship? Our annual meeting? Although I too happen to believe—a key term in the memo and one that deserves some critical attention, since, as I’ve already suggested, people believe all sorts of things—that global warming is happening and that human behavior has played an important, perhaps even definitive, role, I am no climatologist and I can’t even name the many different academic specialties that are required to gather the data needed to draw a sensible conclusion on the matter, much less devise a plan to address it. So be clear—I’m no so-called denier; but I have a Ph.D. that, like anyone else with one, is in a precise specialty, credentialing me to make authorized claims within a very specific domain of knowledge, so I sensibly leave to others more qualified than me to pronounce on the so-called “facts” (as they are phrased in the memo) of global warming. Apart from this curious way in which the memo’s repeated statements of “belief” routinely slide into proclamations of “fact,” I therefore find the wellknown fallacy of misplaced authority, and along with it, a misplaced sense of obligation and relevance, running throughout this text, much like the others I’ve so far surveyed. For only if we presume that (A) the object studied by scholars of religion is somehow necessarily beneficial and that (B) those who study it therefore have some special duty to spread the good news of their findings to the benefit of humankind, would a conference populated by scholars of religion (whether they are humanists, social scientists, or theologians of whatever stripe) be called upon to apply their research to help solve the climate change crisis—in a word, to help save the planet. For an academy of scholars whose motto is “Fostering Excellence in the Study of Religion,” I therefore find the unproblematized notion of belief employed as if it is an actual motivating source for action, the uncritical notion that those things we call religions are self-evidently a source of hope for people in crisis (more than one theorist would see them as among the sources of these crises!), and the ease with which scholars trained in, say, the careful study of ancient texts or in doing ethnographies of human behavior are assumed to have a special task in addressing climate change all to be extremely troubling. That this sounds remarkably like a restatement of what Mircea Eliade called “the new humanism” back in the 1960s—which argued that the scholar of religion’s duty was to re-experience past existential situations, encoded in the ancient texts, and thereby give these long-extinct values new life today—is even more bothersome to me for it presumes the scholar of religion to be a

178

chapter 8

medium who channels the wisdom of the ancients—a position that, time and time again, has been criticized by a wide variety of scholars, yet it reappears continually. So, with the aar’s motto in mind—“Fostering Excellence in the Study of Religion”—my question is: Just how much excellence are we fostering if no one questions these sorts of claims when they are made by scholars? For without questioning them, why should we take claims of “excellence” seriously and not just read the word as a handy rhetorical tool? For example, I recall an earlier university where I worked and how, when we discussed the specialty we needed for an open faculty position, someone would inevitably cut off the discussion by saying, rather grandly, that we were simply looking for the cream of the crop, the best applicant—in a word, excellence. It was a pretty useful rhetorical move, of course, since it papered over the controversies in the room concerning just what excellence meant—best according to what measure? That one happens to share some of the beliefs that are credited with animating our then president-elect’s memo should not, I would hope, prevent scholars of religion from knowing their professional limits or curtail them from questioning the sort of excellence that allows our peers to make such claims. If we’re going to sell the practical utility of the critical thinking that we say we’re teaching our students in the Humanities, then maybe we should consider applying these skills a little closer to home than we usually do. For whatever one thinks our “scholarly duty” is to the fate of humankind, isn’t this at least one that we owe to our own profession—perhaps leaving to our civic duty the diagnosis and correction of the various social ills that we may or may not come to believe in? Before proceeding, let’s pause for a moment and make plain the contours of the dominant approach to the study of religion that is evident in the various examples that I’ve so far cited—from poetry in jaar to a former president of the aar rehabilitating “the holy” as a technical term, and finally, to our current president-elect’s invitation to help solve global warming. It presumes, first, that our object of study is individual subjects who each have private experiences that are communicated publicly by means of actions or sign systems— like sausage pressed out of the meat grinder, these experiences are said to be  “expressed;” second, these public systems inevitably mire the original ­experience in ambiguity, such that they must be decoded properly by the careful, authorized interpreter. Third, because these so-called experiences are understood as extra-mundane and thus thought to be of some deep and abiding significance to all of humanity, these interpreters are not only changed themselves, by means of their studies, but they also have a special

“And That‘s Why No One Takes the Humanities Seriously”

179

responsibility not just to the people whom they study—a responsibility to, as Orsi phrases it in the close to his chapter on the holy, help to “unearth experience from the thick sedimentary strata of language covering it” (2012b: 104)15— but also to share this meaning with the entire planet. Which brings us all the way back to the puzzle of the poetry. For apart from sheer random happenstance accounting for it, it seems clear to me that the widely shared presumption that artistic expression and religious expression both provide some sort of privileged access to those prior, extramundane, experiences explains why jaar once openned with poetry and art. In other words, the thing that is implicitly being said in these prefatory texts is a theory of religion—though I use the word “theory” here in such a vague manner— akin to how Orsi used it in describing Otto as a “theorist of the holy” (2012c: 86)16—that anyone familiar with its usual, scientific usage (signifying a hypothesis that can be empirically tested and thus its results reproduced) will stop short of calling this a theory or a scholar such as Otto a theorist, much as they would likely prefer not to call irreducible complexity or Intelligent Design a “theory” of the origin of species. Instead, the approach that motivates the inclusion of art that addresses “the search for the sacred” is more akin to the sort of folk psychology that characterizes each of our commonsense view of the world: for we see here the widely held presumption that: (A) individuals pre-exist groups (despite the fact that individuals are quite obviously the products of those social actions we call pair bonding done according to social conventions we call mating rituals, and then fashioned through styles and standards that are themselves thoroughly social); (B) that these individuals are motivated by private inner states called intentions (despite the fact that we routinely don’t ourselves know why we do many of the things that we routinely do, like why we speak German to someone whenever they sneeze or why we sometimes bounce our knee when we sit); and (C) that these intentions are expressed—that is, quite literally pushed out—into the world of ambiguous public signs which then need to be decoded to ascertain their original 15 16

Orsi is here quoting Ankersmit’s Sublime Historical Experience (2005). As argued in an earlier article, “‘My Theory of the Brontosaurus…’: Postmodernism and ‘Theory’ of Religion” (McCutcheon 2001: 103–121, though originally published in 1997 and noted in my opening chapter.), it appears to me to be worthwhile, for a variety of reasons, to define “theory” in a technical sense, inasmuch as those who seek to define it so widely as to include theologians such as Otto (or Karl Barth, as in the case of an example cited in my earlier article mentioned above) seem to be trying to gain the legitimacy of the narrowly defined technical term (for why else would they be concerned to argue for them having a theory? Why not just call it an approach, viewpoint, interpretation, or just a good guess?) but while applying it to those who would not otherwise qualify as having a scientific theory.

180

chapter 8

meaning (despite the fact that it strikes me as rather uncontroversial to argue that meaning is instead the public result of such things as grammar, that was here long before any of us in this room uttered our first mama or dada, and that without it, all I’m doing up here is making noise). Despite these parenthetical examples of how commonsense can be complicated, this is indeed how we all routinely see our world—somewhat akin to commonsense observation once telling us that it was flat; these assumptions are so basic to our social world that they not only provide the basis for almost every English Literature course you’ve ever taken (where we were always asked the time-travelling question: “What did Shakespeare mean when he wrote…”), but they also constitute the foundation upon which our legal system is based (“Did you intend to kill? If not, then it’s manslaughter.”) But is this commonsense worldview of our society, the one in which we all too obviously live (as Cantwell Smith phrased it), also what we, as scholars, ought to be working with qua scholars? For I thought that, as scholars, our goal was, as suggested earlier, to develop what is often a counter-intuitive expertise in a specialized domain of knowledge, governed by rules all its own, one that, by definition, reaches a very small number of other qualified specialists. To say it somewhat differently, I presume that our goal, as scholars, ought to be to problematize commonsense viewpoints, much as how, for example, a Marxist analysis of labor makes the seemingly simple idea of money or commodities rather more complicated inasmuch as everyday views of both treat them as concrete things when we might instead understand them as the abstracted tips of a large but generally unseen iceberg of working human subjects. In a word (or two), I take this to be what we mean by critical thinking. And with the mention of critical thinking—the often called upon skill that seems to be the main thing that we, in the Humanities, say we’re all selling to prospective students—I wish to close by addressing head-on the topic that, along with what I take to be a poor “theory” of religion, seems to have prompted poetry to open our journal: that topic being our way of representing our relevance as members of the Humanities. Although many in the Humanities would likely agree with those scholars of religion I’ve critiqued, claiming that the disciplines collected together into the Humanities are not an ad hoc grouping but, instead, all share in nurturing expressions of something nonempirical called the enduring Human Spirit, when I use the word “Humanities”—or, to put a finer edge on it, I’d prefer to talk about the Human Sciences, though I hardly mean the term as it is often used now, to name what we once might have called Home Economics—I think of a loosely knit collection of intellectual pursuits that focuses on the study of people and the things they produce and leave behind once they’re gone, but doing so to complicate and not to simplify things (as I have tried to do with the sudden appearance of poetry in our journal).

“And That‘s Why No One Takes the Humanities Seriously”

181

And those intellectual pursuits that I see as being the Humanities do this in a few ways: first, by taking the contingency of historical existence seriously— with a nod to the slogan of the literary critic, Fredric Jameson (“Always historicize!”), our motto as relevant Humanists should be, “Things could have been otherwise” (it would sound so much better in Latin, I know); second, by keeping an eye on both individual agency and social structure at the same time, understanding that both are always present, continually informing each other—after all, if you and I are well schooled in the English language, something that long pre-existed us and was taught to us within various institutions, like schools or the family, we might eventually begin to tweak it, in some previously unforeseen way, and thereby move the structure in some unanticipated, new direction (in fact, isn’t that precisely what jazz is—disciplined variations within a prior structure?); and third, by never forgetting that, while scholars are no less (and, of course, no more) a person than anyone else, they are also not necessarily involved in the social worlds that they happen to be studying, and if they are, then their goal ought to be to use the comparative method to (as many scholars of religion before me have phrased it) juxtapose their familiar alongside the strange, so that something new and exotic can be seen in what had previously only appeared to them to be routine and mundane—the creation of knowledge, in a word, presupposes some form of alienation. For me, then, the Humanities is a designation not so much for a unit of organization within the university but, rather, for a style of scholarship, a set of attitudes, that we should find—but, sadly, too often fail to find—all across the university, regardless the subject matter under examination. It is a stand adopted by the professor in class, the researcher in scholarship, the colleague in conversation, and not something determined by the supposed existential value or deep meaning of the topic that happens to catch our eye. Somewhat akin to the starting point of the literary movement that we associate with the phrase, “the death of the author”—in which the idea of long-past authors leaving symbolic clues in a text concerning their intentions and meanings is rethought, resulting in the notion of the author being seen to be a perpetual construct of subsequent readers, each of whose idea of the author overlaps little, if at all, with some actual human being who wrote the text—I see the object of study, whatever it is, not as defining the approach that ought to be taken when it is examined. Rather, the starting point of scholarship, for me, is that theories and prior interests make things curious, whereby just some of the many things in our world become more or less interesting to us, turning mere stuff into something worth paying attention to. I therefore side with Humpty Dumpty over Alice (in Through the Looking Glass [1871]): we are the master and not the objects that we study:

182

chapter 8

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to me—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master— that’s all.” This is the attitude that I’d say characterizes the Humanities as I would like to see them practiced—an attitude that would likely not conclude that poetry will entice people to read our research or that this genre will somehow more accurately represent reality in some natural or pre-signified state. It is an attitude that would instead tackle the appearance of poetry in a prose academic journal such as jaar in order to examine how signification itself functions. For then, along with someone like Roland Barthes perhaps, we might conclude that, despite the poet’s apparent effort to “regain an infra-signification, a presemiological state of language…to reach not the meaning of words, but the meaning of things themselves” (much as Cantwell Smith and Hussain both suggest in their commentary on poetry’s power to transcend mere prose in its ability to speak truth), “the very resistance offered by poetry makes it an ideal prey for myth: the apparent lack of order of signs, which is the poetic facet of an essential order, is captured by myth, and transformed into an empty signifier, which will serve to signify poetry” (1973: 145–6). “[B]y fiercely refusing myth”—or what Barthes otherwise calls “the essentialist ambitions of poetry” (145)—poetry surrenders to it bound hand and foot” (146).17 But to make such inquiries of poetry in jaar, to see this strategic dodge around the apparent limitations of prose as itself being of political curiosity, requires an attitude far different from the scholarly tradition in the study of religion that I’ve rehearsed in this chapter, which strikes me as nothing more than an intellectual posture in which empathetic observers were trained to recognize religion in the behaviors of others who strike the observer as safe and tolerable, and to describe it in a way conducive to the interests of those who claimed to have experienced the acceptably ineffable “it.” This sort of scholarship strikes me as uninteresting and, to be honest, rather boring, inasmuch as it passively awaits self-evidences to pass by. As an example of what it is that the alternative scholar that I’m proposing ought to be doing, consider the University of Chicago’s Jonathan Z. Smith, who 17

My thanks to Kathryn Stockton, of the University of Utah’s Department of English, for prompting me to consider how a Barthean, for example, might find the appearance of poetry curious rather than merely assuming it to be expressive of some otherwise hidden truth.

“And That‘s Why No One Takes the Humanities Seriously”

183

is, perhaps, the most influential scholar of religion today, and yet one who has also written widely, throughout his long career, on higher education and pedagogy (e.g., Smith 2013). That he has taught introductory courses all along, focusing his teaching career mainly on undergraduate education, and, at the same time, has become one of the most rigorous and prolific writers in the field, is what, for me, sets Smith apart. And it is with the introductory course in mind— not a survey, mind you, but, as Smith is careful to distinguish in his choice of words, an introduction, an initiation into a domain of knowledge, much as someone might introduce a new species into a specific environment—that I think we can best see what I have in mind when I think of the Humanities as a practice that complicates. In an essay that has long been used by the University of Chicago to help train incoming graduate students to become teachers, Smith argues that the introductory course is not a place to simplify (as many assume it to be, such as those who teach surveys of English Literature or World Civilizations that pack in as much as they can in how many ever weeks they have at their disposal), for such an approach unnecessarily hides from our students (not to mention parents, taxpayers, and legislators, to name only three other stakeholders in public education who often question our contributions) the hard work required to make certain human beliefs, behaviors, and institutions stand out as interesting, curious, worth reproducing, and thus worth studying. The contestable human interests and choices—of those who made the texts that we read or devised the steps of the dances that we observe; of those who remembered, continually revised, and rehearsed them; of the professor who made the syllabus that included them; of the publisher that made the standardized exam that came with the textbook that includes them; or of the politicians who created and police the standards that assess whether you’ve learned the correct way to study them—are generally hidden from sight. And we do ourselves no favors, Smith argues, when this is the picture of our profession that we present to our students. In that essay, he writes: …in the name of simplification we treat theory as if it was fact. We treat difficult, complex, controversial, theoretical entities as if they were selfevident parts of the universe that we inhabit. Students coming out of introductory courses in the humanities know that there is such a thing as an author’s intention, and they regularly and effortlessly recover it from a text they are looking at. Students in introductory social sciences know that there is such a thing as society that functions and they effortlessly observe it doing so. Students in introductory sciences are wedded without their knowing it to a tradition of induction from naked faces, in what

184

chapter 8

Nietzsche called “the myth of the immaculate perception.”18 Indeed, I’ve often argued when teaching in the social sciences Core that if I could only have the first week of Chemistry 101, my job would be infinitely easier because at least we would have raised the possibility that one wears eyeglasses when one gazes at the naked facts. 2007: 76

That my own interest happens to revolve around the category religion itself— its history and the utility of using it, in this or that way, to name parts of our social world in distinction from yet other parts—means that the taken-forgranted knowledge of my students, their folk knowledge about what is and what is not religion, is the very thing that I wish them to examine (“Know thyself,” as the old saying goes, gets written now as “Make data of thyself”). So it means that my own work in the classroom involves starting out by asking questions that assume my students to be the experts—for they already know what religion is—but then slowly complicating the narrative that they arrived with in my class, doing so in a way that, if I’m successful, will eventually have them looking back on the world as they once described it and being rather dissatisfied with how easily understood they thought it was. And because many of my colleagues throughout the field are from the same culture as my students, and have thus acquired the same folk knowledge that allows them to confidently name this or that as religion (as pure, as authentic, as original, as apolitical, as personal, etc.), much of my writing adopts the same approach: take a simple thing, like say, a brief, two-page 1893 U.S. Supreme Court decision on whether a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable (Nix v. Hedden 149 U.S. 304 [1893]), but then use it as an opportunity to complicate things, so that we can see some of the intricacies of the social situation of which this seemingly simplistic artifact is just a hint. The high court’s decision—like any artifact of human beings— might end up being not as simple as it seemed and thus much more interesting. While being no Platonist myself, I find this approach, ironically perhaps, to be in-step with the Socratic method that is much valued by traditional, 18 See Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1984), Book Two: Of Immaculate Perception (144–147): “To be happy in gazing, with benumbed will, without the grasping and greed of egotism—cold and ashen in body but with intoxicated moon eyes! For me the dearest things would be to love the earth as the moon loves it, and to touch its beauty with the eyes alone—thus the seduced one seduces himself. And let this thing be called by me immaculate perception of all things: that I desire nothing of things, except that I may lie down before them like a mirror with a hundred eyes” (145).

“And That‘s Why No One Takes the Humanities Seriously”

185

Renaissance-inspired Humanists who assume that we are here to teach students the tools necessary for learning the art of living well—except now we seek complex answers to simple, seemingly naive opening questions. “Of all the ways to live, dear Euthyphro, which will count as living well?” I recall talking, a few years back, to a mathematician on my campus and asking him what he was teaching that semester. “A course on deriving proofs,” he replied, and, without me asking any further questions, he went on to express his frustration with the fact that the students were finding it very difficult. While many of them were quite advanced in terms of working within the rules of mathematics (i.e., those taken-for-granted tennis lines that we call axioms), few of them were able to consider that the rules themselves were historical products (i.e., the artifacts of past agents working within structured settings not of their making) that could be argued for or critiqued. 1 + 1 = 2 was, for them, the simple fact of the matter. These were the students, I presume, that Smith would like to get his hands on, during the first week of Chemistry 101, to suggest to them that, in order to get on with the business of talking about the content of any class, a number of interconnected assumptions needed to be in place, assumptions that are themselves historical products, our possessions, and not something already encoded in the world that we are seeking to describe. I try to do much the same when I bring to my introductory students’ attention D.G. Burnett’s wonderful book Trying Leviathan (2007), which focuses on an 1818 New York state “trial that pitted the new sciences of taxonomy against the then-popular—and biblically sanctioned—view that the whale was a fish” (to quote from the publisher’s blurb). For if I can persuade my students that the self-evidency of their judgment that a whale is a mammal has something to do with the one-time (but now exotically curious) self-evidency, to yet other people, that it was simply a big fish (as Herman Melville has Ishmael state in Moby Dick: “Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old fashioned ground that a whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me”), then I will have succeeded in complicating their taken-for-granted world and, perhaps, have made them curious as to how elaborately authorized, and endlessly repeated, systems of classification, made by the people and for the people, make it possible for us to move around efficiently by taking for granted that green means go and red means stop. For now, when we stop and think about it, we know that it could be otherwise, hopefully making us curious as to why it happens to be just the way that it is. For the last time I checked, the world struck me as pretty complicated, e.g., an ally one day is an enemy the next, and your freedom fighters are terrorists to me. It is a complication harnessed, often with the same dubious success of weather forecasts and stock market predictions, by our tireless efforts

186

chapter 8

to simplify (what we euphemistically call understanding, translation, and interpretation, but also meaning, intention, prediction, tradition, heritage, fate, etc.). Studying people and their efforts to simplify—like those scholars who see religion as the public product of inner experiences and meanings, akin to the apparent truth spoken by the poet19—therefore requires us to muddy the waters considerably, to identify yesterday’s choices and contests, so that, perhaps, students can be empowered to consider which decisions they wish to make tomorrow. The Humanities, as I understand them, therefore ensure that our students become players, whatever way they choose to play the game. The first step toward that is for the professor to stop professing (something I see an awful lot of in those ambitious claims of duty and deep meaning) and, instead, to assume the Socratic role of the strategic but modest inquirer. The trick is in slowly persuading students that their expertise is itself the thing that should attract their attention. If done well, they might declare a major in the study of religion rather than running off, as poor Euthyphro did when Plato’s Socrates asked him one too many questions about defining piety. If you’re able to do this in a classroom or while editing an academic journal, then you’re in the Humanities, and I believe that you’ll be taken seriously by your students, their families, and your colleagues. But if you’re able to do that while teaching the proofs to math students, then you’re also in the Humanities, regardless how an institution happens to divide up the bureaucratic pie for ease of managing its people and its payroll. But if all you’re able to do is represent back to your readers or your students their own taken-for-granted assumptions about the world and themselves—much as virtually every cable news show now does with its own viewers—thereby assuring them that they are right, that those other people are outrageously wrong, and that the world is easily understood, then you’re not in the Humanities and I see little reason to take you seriously. 19

At the 5:06 point in the previously mentioned “conversation” between Hussain and Griswold, the former asserts that “poets tell the truth about the world,” reminiscent of his use of the already cited poem in honor of Cantwell Smith’s: “That kind of truth cannot be put anywhere by us, not in words, never put in its place…”

chapter 9

Introduction

In August 2001, I started at the department where I still work, at the University of Alabama. The following essay appears at the close to a collection of ten annual lectures that the department started to sponsor not long after my arrival, a lecture series funded by a generous endowment to the department for a position in Judaic Studies (called the Aaron Aronov Endowed Chair in Judaic Studies, it was established in 1990 and has been held by several scholars since that time, most recently by my colleague, Steve Jacobs). As described in the essay, the department at that time was “non-viable”—a judgment made by the Alabama Commission on Higher Education (ache), based on an insufficient graduation rate among its majors—and, as its newly hired “outside” chair, my job was clear: revive the department or it risked losing its major and thereby becoming what we call “a service department,” offering only lowerlevel survey courses to “serve” the needs of other departments’ students (thereby offering only courses that meet the general requirements of what we call the core curriculum, such as its Humanities or its writing requirements). Inventing the annual Aronov lecture, to “present issues in the study of religion of broad relevance to the university community” (as our first flyers described it), was among the earliest things we did to begin our institutional resuscitation. But, as the essay makes evident, we did many more things than just this. While I’ll leave to the essay itself a more detailed description of the department’s setting at that time and some of the specific things that we did to reinvent it—a reinvention that, I have no doubt, many departments also need—this introduction affords me the chance to talk a little more broadly concerning the way that I am continually amazed by how little attention professors, by and large, seem to give to the institutional conditions of their own labor. I recall a search committee to which I was once appointed that was looking for a chair of another department, and the mid-career and senior faculty members on it who said that they were too busy to devote time to drafting a strategic plan for the unit, seeing that instead as being the department chair’s job. I admit that at an earlier stage in my career, this would have probably flabbergasted me, but, given some of the experiences that I’ve had in higher education since I first began fulltime work in the university in 1993, this came as not much of a surprise. For on the one hand, we have many in higher education lamenting the loss of “shared governance” (whereby the faculty and the administration both participate in the decision-making that influences the future direction of the

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004281417_011

188

chapter 9

institution) but, at the same time, it is extremely difficult to get anyone to, for example, serve on Faculty Senate at my own institution. Seeing that department, on whose search committee I served, as a microcosm of higher education meant to me that while we all wanted the benefits of a stable institutional home, few of us seem either interested in or capable of stepping up to take on the practical tasks that make that appearance of stability possible. To put it another way, stasis, in my experience, is not a naturally occurring state, much less is growth. (Instead, entropy is, or so the physicists tell us; or, as I sometimes say, “Good things are happening when bad things don’t.”) For I learned long ago that it takes considerable effort to make it look like everything is normal, average, or mundane—making “normal,” “average,” and “mundane” rhetorical tools that hide or downplay considerable effort going on behind the scenes. After all, we all realize the work that it takes every morning in order to look the same every day, no? When it comes to a university department, courses must be scheduled, semesters planned ahead, classroom doors must be unlocked, and dry erase markers and brushes stocked, airline tickets must be purchased for conference travel and reimbursements processed quickly, new faculty have to be brought onto the payroll and retirees have to come off, technology in classrooms must function properly and the photocopier has to be stocked with paper and filled with toner. And this is just the tip of a complex iceberg with many moving parts, one that—“Do you think that office needs to be painted this summer?”—if all are operating smoothly, make possible the conditions in which a professor can just walk into a classroom to teach or a student can just drop by the lounge between classes and check email on a smartphone plugged into the Wi-Fi network. Should it not be working, then one finds oneself standing at a jammed copier with a hundred exams to produce, with 30 minutes before it is supposed to begin. All of this is to say that, in reply to those faculty who maintained that they were too busy to take a leadership role in brainstorming their own unit’s future (an exercise that might chart a course by providing a framework for future decisions, yes, but which will more than likely also simply serve as an exercise to challenge faculty to articulate their own sense of where the unit ought to go, debate it publicly among themselves, and thereby form bonds among themselves [if their differences of opinion are managed correctly] and indicate to others in their institution—such as deans and provosts—that they have an investment in their own department), I simply said (verbatim, as I recall): “The long-term good of the unit in which I earn my income is my first priority; and any time or effort that I invest there comes back to me ten-fold.” Simple as that. That few faculty seem to understand this point is what I find so puzzling, for in light of the exclusive emphasis so many of them place on the social capital

Introduction

189

gained through research and grant writing, it is no wonder that the senior administration of the university has, increasingly over the past generation or two (at least in North America), landed in the laps of former corporate executives who now try to run these schools like for-profit businesses. (Governments don’t mind this, of course, since it provides an opportunity for them to lessen their financial support for public schools, and who among taxpayers is disappointed to be paying less in taxes?) Now, saying all this doesn’t mean that I fail to understand the practical, economic conditions in which a modern university is situated—there are electricity bills and payrolls to meet every month, of course. But the ease with which faculty self-marginalize is what I find so interesting—whether the corporatization of the university is a response to this leadership vacuum or whether this vacuum of faculty leadership is a widespread (and perhaps rational) response to the alienation that follows corporatization is something I leave to others to solve. For all I know, it’s a result of the sort of personalities attracted to doctoral work/produced by the practical conditions of doctoral work (after all, professors are, to one degree or another, social misfits who excel just a little too well in isolated conditions pursuing incremental, long term goals, no? In order to get to the positions we now hold, how many hours did each of us spend alone learning languages, chasing down references, or doing experiments?); we are, in many ways, self-employed (i.e., there’s always another book review than can be written, and who stops being a professor just because its five o’clock?), though many of us, ironically, are also state employees, making us public servants who, with the benefit of the institution of tenure and the social capital our apparent intellects earn for us, live a fictive life in which we fail to recognize the constraints and the conditions of our situations. My concern for the time being, however, is simply the manner in which some faculty—people who, I’d hope, are all skilled at focusing, in a sustained way, on the overlooked detail in their research—often seem to overlook the effort that it takes to make their taken-for-granted work worlds possible. In a small B.A.-granting department that has been judged “non-viable,” and in which all the faculty but myself were yet to earn the protections that come with tenure, that luxury was in scarce supply. And, looking around the field, there are many departments in a similar situation—whether they know it or not. The current debates over the relevance of the Humanities makes this obvious to some, but not all. I think of a guest lecturer who came to our department not long ago, who was working in a department elsewhere in the u.s. that was itself badly in need of reinvention. While it would be unfair to compare our two departments directly, since we here in Alabama have been self-consciously reinventing the place for well over a decade (translation: these things don’t happen overnight), that it

190

chapter 9

sounded like nothing was going on in the other department, despite knowledge that their number of majors, and thus graduates, was dangerously low (when judged in terms of productivity—standards that, whether we like it or not, now have consequence for our lives), says something significant. So I recall that guest snapping pictures along our balcony of bulletin boards and displays, gladly taking samples of the various things we’ve had made for us over the years, that we distribute among our students (Department mugs were, and still are, a big hit, for students and guests who come to our department.). Why do we do all these things? The social theorist in me says that we do it for much the same reason why nations have flags and anthems, or, perhaps, why you periodically repaint the exterior of your house or sweep the floors now and then, do your laundry and iron your clothes, maybe even brush your teeth: the wear and tear of historical existence tends to take its toll on life and so continual tweaking and trimming is needed if one wants to counter the effects of rain and wind. To put it another way, it’s not for no good reason that disparate groups periodically reassemble in person—think of a family recalibrating social relations in light of the death of one of its members (what else is attending a funeral for, from the social theoretical point of view?). Groups—whether families, faculties, or nation-states—are flimsy entities, prone to disillusion if considerable effort is not continually injected. As I suggested elsewhere, rhetorics of victimization within obviously dominant groups are crucial for them to prevent the sort of self-satisfied apathy (i.e., sitting back and enjoying being top dog—“I’ve earned it!”) that will quickly lead to a group’s loss of dominance. What made the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama a challenge was that it took even more effort just to get to the point where continual effort behind-the-scenes could ensure the unit’s continued success. And that effort involved everything from moving furniture (if we wait for the university movers to come, it’ll take months to move this office from here to there so, roll up your sleeves, we’re movers now…) to inventing administrative procedures (sure, forms are a pain, but they at least ensure that we all know how to do things and who’s responsible for what, allowing us to have confidence in how the institution will work not only today, but also tomorrow). Doing so with a hope that students (and, more importantly, perhaps, their families), staff, faculty, and the administration—let alone state government as well—understood that we were a dynamic unit doing things that mattered. For although we each thought what we did mattered (otherwise, why spend several years earning a Ph.D.?), we needed a way to translate and communicate that to the world. For while some departments can take for granted their presumed relevance (e.g., English or History, Biology or Chemistry), a small B.A.-granting unit in the ­academic study of religion, staffed almost completely by tenure-track faculty, situated in a

Introduction

191

setting where cost cutting was happening quite seriously, couldn’t take anything for granted. So while this reinvention meant tackling a host of things that one obviously doesn’t train for in a Ph.D.—after all, who ever told me that I’d be spending time negotiating with another department as to whether the “exclusivist rhetoric” of a men’s bathroom sign was OK to mount on a wall?—it also meant that, as a result of settling these matters, the unit revived, it provided the conditions in which a variety of people were employed, it created the setting in which an even larger number of people studied, got excited, and went on to careers of their own in any number of fields. That is to say, such a setting, in such a situation, challenges one to take seriously just why public education exists and what the role of higher education is in a liberal democracy. All along, while we undertook the exercise, I had an implicit theme guiding me: big things happen in little departments. I admit that it is easy to get drawn into the dominant logic that one’s relevance as a scholar is to be judged by how many doctoral students you supervise or train. Even in a small B.A.-granting program, the same logic rears its head, such as faculty complaining of their lack of access to senior-level seminars as opposed to being stuck in introductory classes. Whether it’s a commitment I already had or a rationalization for the sorts of institutions that decided to take a risk on hiring me, I’m not sure, but I do know how deeply I’m committed to innovative undergraduate education, something I trace to reading Jonathan Z. Smith’s writings on pedagogy over the years. For it was here that I realized I didn’t have to teach everything (since there’s no everything to be taught), that I needed to take responsibility for the things I put on (or leave off) the syllabus, and that, at the end of the day, those choices ought themselves to be the students’ object of attention, thereby empowering them to realize that social life is comprised of actors—just like themselves—working within structures and not simply passively accepting some weighty and selfevidently meaningful tradition that bears down on them. Trying to persuade students of this—especially the generation raised on standardized testing here in the u.s.—can be a challenge, but, I have found, an extremely rewarding one. But without new paint on the walls, the furniture moved, a logo designed, and a lecture series or two established—even if it just meant inviting people from neighboring departments to join us for a brown bag lunch to talk about their work, so that they knew we were here just as much as we knew they were too—there were no conditions in which that sort of teaching could take place and no way to try the sort of experiments that could help to persuade others in the field that big ideas don’t just get hatched in the Ivy League.

192

chapter 9

Every now and then, I’ll meet someone—a colleague or a student—who wants to apply to our Ph.D. program. I admit a slight (maybe sinful?) pride that they assume that we have such a program. For it suggests that the effort to create a substantive website, to house and support research collaborations, to get a student to start making and posting movies about life in the department (yes, we have a Vimeo account, don’t you?), and to use blogs or even the published lectures from a decade-old lecture series has had a cumulative effect far beyond what I could have ever hoped. For, when I arrived as chair back in 2001, who would have thought that this little department at the University of Alabama would attract so much attention or that initiatives we began would have had a campus-wide impact (I think of the College of Arts & Sciences running with our department’s focus on Greece and, later, the so-called crisis in the Humanities)? But it takes effort, often unrecognized, and always on the part of the entire team— as was the case here at Alabama—but, as I  hope my colleagues agree, it comes back to each of us ten-fold—maybe even a ­little more.

chapter 9

It Could be Different

Reinventing the Study of Religion in Alabama



Preamble to Some Final Words

Given my own critique of the field, and, more specifically, my critique of how we, as scholars, often use the category religion (i.e., to name an immaterial disposition that is supposedly pan-human), it may strike some readers familiar with my work as odd to learn that I chaired the department from 2001–9, when we invented this lecture series, and, following my colleague Ted Trost’s four years as chair, that I have just returned to the role for another five years. Prior to offering some concluding thoughts, I therefore think it useful to address some of these issues head on, hopefully in a way that links up with what I see to be important about this volume. I remember hearing from a faculty member, who worked with me when I was first hired to chair the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama, back in 2001, that colleagues elsewhere in the country wanted to know what it was like to work with me since I was—in their opinions—intent on destroying the field. Such a judgment is sadly evidence of just how carefully we read each other (or, as the case may be, not read each other). Given how much I had written early on in my career concerning how I thought the study of religion ought to be organized and carried out, seeing a job announced while I was working in southwest Missouri, back in 2000, for the chair of a small B.A.-granting program in a major u.s. state university that was, at the time, in need of reinvention, well, it seemed a good place to put my money where my mouth was, as we say. That we’re still here hopefully indicates that destroying the field has never been among my goals. One of the curious things to me is that while many scholars critique “literature” or “culture,” few, if any, of these critics think that departments of English or Anthropology ought to cease to exist; instead, the argument is that a reconceptualized taxon will lead to a new way of talking about human behavior, or the stuff that we seem to leave behind after we’re gone (like those things we call texts, buildings, languages, or bureaucracies). So the rhetoric of “a threat to the field” is, I think, actually providing cover for another, unarticulated claim: the field as it has come to be practiced by so-and-so or by those who think and act like so-and-so. That is, my critique of the field is a critique of a certain way of approaching a subdomain of human practices, human arts de faire (to nod to

194

chapter 9

my friend, Willi Braun, and his frequent quotation of the subtitle of Michel de Certeau’s 1980 book, better known in English as The Practice of Everyday Life [1988]): a critique of assuming that some features of human beings somehow escape the manner in which we study other mundane (but no less interesting because of it) things that people do. It is a terribly pompous position, if you think about it, for it dehistoricizes and depersonalizes the field as a domain of human practices, as if academia exists in some unchanging, Platonic realm, whereby any interloper who comes along and thinks that it is changeable, that it is contingent, and that it could be otherwise is, well, a threat. Of course, if this thing called the field or the discipline was as static and uniform as this position maintains, then how could anyone be a threat to it? That is, built into the charge is the implicit acknowledgement that in fact things could indeed be different—perhaps radically different—and that the wagons had better be circled against the incursion of alien novelty that is beholden to a different set of interests, seeking to achieve different goals. So, just because I am a critic of how many departments of Religious Studies in North America or throughout the rest of the world are organized and the kind of work that takes place within them (whether they go by that name or the many others we group together in our field) does not mean that my goal is to destroy a unit within a university. Instead, the goal is to figure out how to rework it to accomplish something novel. For if we all know that “literature” is a convenient placeholder for a wide array of artifacts and that we use this word as a shorthand for complex debates among scholars or among the people they study, concerning what an author is, what a reader is, what a text is, how they’re interrelated and what they all accomplish, then why should the academic study of religion have to follow purer, more rigorous rules than departments of English? I’d like to think that I’m pragmatic and that, while the people with whom I work have not had to reinvent themselves entirely since I arrived in Tuscaloosa, they have at least mulled over a few topics that don’t just strike me alone as worth thinking through. After all, there’s little, if anything, new in much of the work I’ve done—we stand on the shoulders of giants, after all. My own initial critique of the field, conceptualized and written in the late 1980s and early 1990s, was an attempt to apply in my own field the debates that had long been taking place in English Lit—it’s not a coincidence that, say, a literary critic like Terry Eagleton (at least his writings on literary criticism, as opposed to his more recent writings on theology) figures prominently in the citations of my early work. Although various rear-guard actions resulted, some more successful than others, on the part of those trying to protect the aesthetic autonomy of what we might as well just call literariness, I’d like to think that, on the whole,

It Could be Different

195

English Lit is healthier for confronting how its practitioners use such technical terms as text, author, writing, or meaning. Whether Religious Studies has equally benefitted from this type of critique has yet to be decided, I think, for despite the prominence now of the terms “method and theory,” it is hardly common to come across scholars of religion who see their domain as but an ordinary subdomain (with no sacred distillate left over as an irreducible remainder) of, say, culture—a domain that, for the sake of taxonomic convenience (i.e., there are only so many hours in the day and we can’t study “it all”), we further subdivide into something we call religion or economics. Instead, although they think they have shaken off a previous generation’s theological motives, their work seems animated by the assumption that within this one domain, that which some of us happen to call religion, we find the deepest and truest yearnings of this thing that we call the human. But leaving the rest of the field behind for the moment, at least when it comes to the University of Alabama, I’d like to think that the strategies that we’ve adopted here (a reinvention from the top to the bottom, as I’ll discuss in a moment) to revitalize the study of religion have been pretty successful. We’re still here, after all; people’s careers are thriving and mortgages are being paid, many scholars whose careers started here have moved to wonderful jobs elsewhere, students are excited and using their degrees in innumerably inventive ways, and so that’s got to say something, no? We’re small, yes, but I’d like to think that nimble, little programs can set national agendas as much as the ones that think they run the game (after all, we still judge ourselves based on how big our department is). For no one owns the game and yes, things can be different. We’re evidence of that. It doesn’t come easy, but heck, what of worth does? So in closing this preamble I recall the scholar at a much larger department in a state university, with masters and doctoral students, who, when I was visiting there to give a guest lecture some years ago, asked me somewhat incredulously, “What are you doing at a school like that?” (It reminded me, at the time, of the lamenting tone of some u.s. friends when they responded to the news that I was moving to a job in Alabama—you could hear their old stereotypes of the South despite their congratulations and well wishes.) This was a tremendously impertinent question, if you think about it, though of course it was sugar-coated in collegial banter. But it wasn’t disrespectful to me, for at this moment in higher education, we all should be thankful to have a job, wherever it is; rather, it demeaned the program that hired me and invented this lecture series, the students who attend our classes and our public lectures, the donors who made the endowment possible that funds the series, the group of eminently qualified authors who came to Tuscaloosa to speak to us about their

196

chapter 9

work and to learn a little about our own, and the people who produced the book that you now hold in your hands. I therefore hope readers are able to look at our situation rather more generously than that colleague, and that they are willing to entertain that—yes, I’ll say it—size doesn’t really matter. ************* At 7:00 p.m. on Monday, Nov. 4, 2002, professor Martin Jaffee, of the University of Washington, delivered a public lecture at the University of Alabama. Hosted by the members of the Department of Religious Studies and funded by the department’s Aaron Aronov Endowment for Judaic Studies, his lecture was the first in what has now become our annual “Aronov Lecture.” Next door to my office is the seminar room that the department uses and there hang the nicely framed flyers that advertised each of these events (a corresponding copy was presented to each lecturer and, hopefully, they still occupy places of pride in offices all over the country). Thinking back on that first evening, and now looking over this volume that collects a decade’s worth of lectures, provides an opportunity to pause and consider from where we’ve come and how we got here. Although we were an average-sized department when I arrived in 2001 from what was then known as Southwest Missouri State University to become the department chair, what sets us apart—or, better put, what makes us an example worth considering—is that we have gone from only one of those faculty members (myself) being tenured back in 2001 to (at the time of my first writing this) having all but one faculty member tenured (at the time of publication we will have been joined by Eleanor Finnegan and Michael Altman. Due to the long-predicted demographic shift among the professoriate, no one currently serving in this department as a faculty member has been here longer than our immediate past department chair, Ted Trost (who arrived as a tenure-track assistant professor, straight out of grad school at Harvard, in August 1998).1 So, despite being of average size, we are rather different from the portrait found in the American Academy of Religion (aar) Census from a few years back, in which the tenured to tenure-track ratio for the average department was about 1 Careful readers will ask how long the department’s staff members have served. As is often the case, the institutional memory resides primarily among the staff, without whom the day-today running of the unit (everything from ordering supplies to putting together a class schedule, admitting students into courses, and bringing people onto the payroll) would be an utter impossibility. With that having been said, Ms Betty Dickey, the office associate senior, has served the department for over twenty-five years and is the soft-spoken rock to which our enterprise is tethered.

It Could be Different

197

3:1. For when I arrived in August 2001, our ratio was 0.2 tenured colleagues for every one tenure-track professor; but, with an anticipated tenure-track search in 2013–14 (to replace our recently deceased colleague, Tim Murphy, who arrived in Tuscaloosa in 2002), along with our newly hired tenure-track colleague who began work in August 2013 (Eleanor Finnegan, mentioned above), the ratio is now 4:3, which is a rather far ways from 0.2:1 just over a decade ago. With this dramatic change in faculty rank in mind, the question that lies in the background of our decade-old lecture series is: How does one reinvent a department of Religious Studies in the early twenty-first century? For, although not stated explicitly, the establishment of this series, let alone the prominent place for its framed flyers (along with the forty-or-so framed flyers for our more informal “Religion in Culture”2 lecture series that also line a wall in the seminar room, not to mention all those lunchtime discussions we’ve hosted where our students met visitors as well as professors from across our own campus) is evidence of a set of self-consciously developed strategies to revive a small department in a major public university—putting our own social theory to good use. But to know this story fully, we need a little more background: when I arrived twelve years ago, the unit had just been judged “nonviable” by the state-wide accrediting body (more on that below), a new dean of the College of Arts & Sciences had just been hired, the previous year’s search for a new chair had ended in a failed search, and the state of Alabama was in yet another “proration” year, in which various sectors of state government (such as education— both K to 12 and higher ed) were constitutionally mandated to return significant 2 The italicized “in” is quite intentional. As stated on the page on our department’s website devoted to the motto (http://religion.ua.edu/motto.html) that we came up with not long after I arrived: “Basic to this [i.e., the dominant] way of approaching the field is the widely shared assumption that the area of human practice known as ‘religion’ is somehow removed or set apart from those historical influences that go by the name of ‘culture’ (which includes such things as language, art, types of social organization, and custom). Upon further examining this assumption it often becomes evident that an even more basic assumption concerns the popular belief that the area we identify as ‘religion’ is in fact the public, and therefore observable, expression of what is believed to be a prior, inner experience, feeling, or sentiment. ‘Religion’, then, is thought by many to name the public manifestations (such as texts, rituals, symbols, institutions, etc.) of an inner, personal experience. Because one cannot get inside other people’s heads—or so the argument goes—scholars of religion are therefore left with studying these public expressions, comparing them across cultures in search of the similarities and differences that may lead them to formulate a general theory of religion as a universal human phenomenon. ‘Religion and Culture,’ then, names the field which takes as its data the shape adopted by what is presumably the inner essence of religion—a shape taken when it is not just experienced but also expressed in such historical settings as art, architecture, writing, behavior, etc.

198

chapter 9

portions of their already committed operating budgets—conditions that might cause one to be somewhat pessimistic about the future of this small department filled with non-tenured faculty. But the fact that our dean had, in his first year on the job (2000–1), committed once again to search for an outside chair (the position into which I was then hired, as of August 2001) had already made clear that our challenge was to reinvent the study of religion—in the eyes of the accreditors, yes, but also in the eyes of university administrators, colleagues, as well as the students who might see majoring in the study of religion as something worth doing. As with many North American programs in the academic study of religion, the University of Alabama’s—by my accounting, still the only publicly funded department of Religious Studies granting a B.A. major in the state—dates to the mid- to late-1960s (it is tough to pin down an actual date; only someone spinning an origins tale, such as this, could possibly conjure up a definitive beginning, since the current department developed from various antecedents that don’t much resemble what we today call Comparative Religion, the History of Religions, or simply Religious Studies). Prior to that, the university certainly offered courses on religious topics, but—as with so many other programs in the u.s. and Canada at that time—they were indeed religious topics studied religiously and, what’s more, taught on a volunteer basis by a variety of religious functionaries who were already involved in various forms of campus ministry. As described frankly in the university’s 1965 proposal to the Danforth Foundation, requesting financial support to institute a new Department of Religious Studies: These courses have been limited to two hours credit, and students have been permitted to count no more than eight hours in the Department toward graduation. The ministers have received no pay for their teaching. Courses have been devised and offered according to the interests of the Contrary to this approach, to study religion in culture means one is not beginning with the assumption that these two distinct domains periodically bump into each other. Instead, the preposition ‘in’ signifies that the area of human behavior known as ‘religion’ is assumed, from the outset, to be an element within human cultural systems—systems which are themselves historical products. An assumption basic to this approach is that the objects of study for any scholar in any branch of the human sciences are assumed to be historical creations that had a beginning and that change over time. Whether these changes are random or governed by other factors—such as gender, economics, politics, cognition, or even geography and environmental features—is one of the areas that such scholars explore. To study religion in culture therefore means that ones object of study is a product of human belief, behavior and social systems.”

It Could be Different

199

individual campus ministers with little thought given to the general curriculum in religion or to its relation to the over-all University curriculum. As one might expect, the quality of the courses has been mixed.3 According to an October 1964 document which was included with this proposal, between the fall 1960 and the fall 1964 semesters, a total of 81 courses were taught (with an average of 9 courses per semester), with a total of 3,253 students attending these courses, averaging 40 students per class and 365 students per semester—simply put, there was quite an operation up and running despite no department actually being present, at least as we today understand the composition and mission of a department of Religious Studies. Given the voluntary nature of the instructors staffing these courses, these are truly impressive numbers; but, for such reasons as early-1960s u.s. Supreme Court judgments banning prayer in public schools as unconstitutional, the increasing interest in “the East” that was occasioned first by the war in Korea and then the “police action” in Vietnam, as well as the counter-culture movement of this period, studying religion as a religious vocation was, by the time of the mid1960s, starting to give way to a professionalization of the field. Although the voluntary, “pot luck” nature of the curriculum at that time was definitely a “good buy” for that day’s administration (given that its instructors were all voluntary), for a public university these classes were rather troublesome, for their topics (let alone the manner in which they were more than likely taught), were (as with much of the North American field back then) exclusively drawn from a Protestant seminary model, including such standards as: Old Testament, New Testament, Faith and Reason, Life and Teaching of Jesus, Christian Ethics, and the perennial Contemporary Religious Thought. Whatever the quality of these courses, the rationale that drove them was 3 “A Proposal by the University of Alabama to the Danforth Foundation for a Grant to Assist in the Establishment of a Department of Religion” [July 12, 1965]: 1–2. During the mid- to late1960s, it was common for the private Danforth Foundation to fund a department chair’s salary for a newly instituted Department of Religious Studies, under the condition that the institution would continue to budget for the position after the foundation’s initial three-year funding period ended. (My thanks to Charlie Reynolds, of the University of Tennessee, and my first department chair, when I was an instructor there [1993–6]), for his anecdotal comments on the role played by the Danforth in helping to create our field.) The Alabama proposal requested funds for faculty salaries and library purchases, totaling between $17,124 and $28,750 between the years 1966–7 and 1969–70. According to a Sept. 28, 2003, correspondence with Diane Moleski, the office manager for the Danforth Foundation, in 1966 a three-year program was indeed funded (for $16,500) “to aid in establishing a Department of Religion” at the University of Alabama.

200

chapter 9

exploring the foundations of the faith, and that faith was a form of Protestant Christianity. Of course, there were also those more-specialized classes that simply narrowed the focus (as, lamentably, happens so often when one moves through a curriculum to this day—the exact same skills are taught at all levels and only the focus intensifies, from studying the meaning of the entire New Testament in a survey course to eventually writing a dissertation on the meaning of but one verse), such as individual courses on such figures from early Christian history as Peter, John, or Paul; although likely not peculiar to our state, there was even an entire course, offered once every semester, on the Ten Commandments (as one of the department’s standard classes, it seated a total of 549 students in the early 1960s). What’s more, I would hazard a guess that, much like the earlier course in Archeology, its Hebrew language course (offered in the fall of 1960 and which attracted only 5 students), the course on the significantly entitled Old Testament (offered every semester and seating 456 students in total—a course title finally changed to Hebrew Bible only during the time of our current Aronov Chair, Steve Jacobs), along with the course on Judaism (offered only three times and seating a total of 38 students) were more than likely all efforts to find new significance in “other” people’s textual artifacts—artifacts that, importantly, were assumed not just to predate but, as this old theological model presupposed, prepare the way for the eventual Good News (what was once, following a work by the fourth-century Christian apologist Eusebius, called in Latin, praeparatio evangelica). In the nearly forty years between the Danforth proposal and that first Aronov Lecture, a lot happened to ensure that the department moved away from its earlier, overt theological motives and, instead, work toward training students in an anthropocentric approach, studying religion cross-culturally and in a descriptive and comparative manner. Among the most evident of the changes was the arrival (and, eventually, the retirement) of faculty who had earned Ph.D.s in what was then the newly forming field of Religious Studies. The first chair of the restructured department was Joseph Bettis (Ph.D. Drew University), who stayed only several years after his arrival in 1964 and eventually retired an emeritus professor at Western Washington University; the late Leon Weinberger (Ph.D. Brandeis) came to Tuscaloosa in 1964 as the director of the local chapter of the Hillel Foundation but was hired full-time by the department soon after (and retired in 1999); Patrick Green (Ph.D. Drew University), the longtime chair of the department and into whose faculty line I was hired, was first hired in 1970 and retired in 2000 (though we’ve seen him around teaching a course here and there since then); and William Doty (Ph.D. Drew University), who first came to the department in 1981, retired in 2001, but, like Patrick, still taught on campus for different units. Luckily, the College of Arts &

It Could be Different

201

Sciences had the foresight to fill these open lines (usually) with tenure-track hires; although it might be an error to suggest that the department thrived during the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, (for we must not forget that it is now not too much larger, in terms of faculty positions, than it had been in the 1970s), it did survive, which is no small feat, as already intimated, in the budgetary environment public education often experiences here in Alabama, where those institutions that are dependent on our largely sales-tax-driven state budget can sometimes be hit hard by economic slowdowns. Most recently, however, I think that the word “thrive” aptly captures what has happened here, linked to such factors as: the department sharing two cross-appointments with New College as of 1998 (Catherine Roach and Ted Trost; Roach’s position went exclusively to New College in 2006 and Trost, having now completed serving as chair, returns to his 25% appointment with the New College); the department gaining a targeted affirmative action hire in 2005 (when Maha Marouan was hired)—a line into which the department was later able to hire Merinda Simmons (a graduate of our own Department of English’s doctoral program) when Marouan moved to what was then called Women’s Studies in 2010 (but now, after the minor in African American Studies was merged with it, known as Gender and Race Studies); as of the fall 2013 semester, a new cross-appointment with the Department of History (75% rel and 25% hy), devoted to the study of Islam (held by our newest colleague, Eleanor Finnegan); its good fortune in being awarded a new line in Asian religions back in the late 1990s (first held by Reiko Ohnuma [now of Dartmouth], then by Kurtis Schaeffer [now department chair at the University of Virginia], and currently by Steven Ramey, who also directs the Asian Studies minor on our campus); despite tight state budgets, receiving a replacement position when William Doty retired soon after my arrival on campus (Doty’s line was then held by Tim Murphy, until his own retirement, and then untimely death, in March 2013)—a replacement that reflected our dean’s confidence at that time that, though I had just been hired, we were serious about putting viability issues behind us once and for all; and, most importantly perhaps, the good fortune that comes with dedicated resources, such as a student scholarship fund kindly established by the late Dr Joseph Silverstein, or the two endowments that the families of students who tragically died saw fit to establish in our department (a truly humbling indication of just how seriously our students and their families take our efforts).4 4 The Amy Lynn Petersen Endowed Support Fund allows the department to purchase a book for each student enrolled in our Capstone Senior Seminar each spring, in memory of an rel minor who tragically died in 2003. The Zachary Daniel Day Memorial Support Fund was established very recently in the memory of an rel graduate who, in 2011, died quite

202

chapter 9

And then there’s the previously mentioned Aaron Aronov Endowment in Judaic Studies (funds raised within the state of Alabama and supplemented by the university itself), which enabled Richard Cohen (now at the University of Buffalo) to be hired in 1989 as the first person to hold the department’s endowed chair in the study of Judaism. So, since 2003, the Silverstein award has been given out nearly 150 times, helping students to pay for their education, while, over the past twenty-five years, the Aronov Endowed Chair has been held by several people (either as professors, visiting professors, or postdoctoral fellows) and, since January 2001, it has been held by my colleague Steve Jacobs, a specialist in Holocaust and genocide studies. And it was with funds from this endowment, and quite self-consciously aiming to put ourselves on the map of our colleagues’ and students’ collective mind’s eye, that the department brought professor Jaffee to campus, to speak not specifically about the data that falls within the admittedly wide area known as Judaic Studies but, instead, to speak as a scholar of religion involved in debates of relevance not just to our department but to all of our peers in the university; for the department decided that what made us unique was not that our object of study was special—as so many scholars of religion yet presume— but that, although we studied an aspect of culture known as religion, it was simply a word we used to name a specific subset of mundane but no less interesting human beliefs, behavior, and institutions, along with the various things that past actions left behind. (The theme for our 2012–13 public lectures, “The Relevance of the Humanities and Social Sciences in the 21st Century University,” is but the latest example of this attempt to persuade students and colleagues from across the university that we are all in the same boat and can therefore benefit from each other’s insights; that our dean adopted this series and has kept it going suggests we were, to whatever degree, successful in our efforts.) But instituting a lecture series to feature national speakers able to translate their work for a wider audience was just a small part of our reinvention plan— an effort to ensure that people understood that, although we were small, our reach through teaching, research, and service was surprisingly wide. For if a department such as ours was to reestablish itself successfully, it meant rebuilding from the ground up: designing a new curriculum driven not by personalities that happened to work here and the data-domains that come and go with every new hire or departure of a faculty member, but by the common set of skills we hoped our students would gain, regardless the material on which they work (e.g., defining, describing, comparing, interpreting, explaining; a decade

unexpectedly; the inaugural annual Day lecture in religion in popular culture took place in the fall of 2013 and was delivered by Monica Miller of Lehigh University.

It Could be Different

203

later, we redesigned it yet again, to try to make it more appealing to second majors); designing new and engaging online courses to replace the sadly dated distance education booklets that, back in 2001, were still being mailed to a small number of distance learners taking courses in the department (though, now that we have them, working hard to ensure that they do not pull against our in-person lecture courses); created a content-rich website and then, when social media came around, devising ways to use Facebook to help support our mission; rewriting long-outdated tenure and promotion documents (we’ve had two such revisions in the past decade); developing public relations materials to distribute throughout the state’s public and private secondary schools (at present, we’re debating beginning to develop and offer professional development workshops for Alabama public school teachers); contacting graduates and developing mailing lists, annual newsletters, and surveys so we know more about who takes a course with us and what our graduates do with themselves when they leave Tuscaloosa; rewriting job descriptions among the staff and working for long-overdue staff promotions, where needed; developing a host of procedures and routinizing the ways in which student workers assist the department in its work (hiring our own undergraduate students to work in the main office and assist in some of our classes has been one of our most successful, though low-key, mentoring programs to date); setting up a rationale for awarding student scholarships and a way to publicize it every year on what we call Honors Day (large banners bearing every recipient’s name now annually fill our second-floor balcony railings and, I’d hazard a guess, popular photo albums of quite a few families whose children passed through our department); investing energy in reinvigorating our student associations (something most recently accomplished by Merinda Simmons and now taken over by Eleanor Finnegan); tackling the work necessary to give the department’s physical space an overall face-lift—everything from obtaining new classroom furniture to addressing the unfortunate “Welcome Back, Kotter” feel of the classrooms back in the late 1990s, to creating a student lounge; and even having a motto (“Studying Religion in Culture,” as mentioned earlier) and a logo—our totem, if you will—designed by our campus’s University Relations office. Yes, we also have mugs and t-shirts. The bottom line: it’s tough to ignore us (literally, for a 150 foot long banner, three-feet high, lines our building’s New Orleansstyle, wrought-iron railing balcony, declaring who we are and welcoming people to the University of Alabama)—and that was the goal. We’ve even got a Vimeo page for the movies that our graduate and current staff member, Andie Alexander, is making about the department. But at the end of the day, all this effort was aimed not just at administrators but also at establishing rewarding work conditions for the faculty and staff

204

chapter 9

with the hope that this, too, would bring students our way. For reinventing a  department also meant meeting criteria established by the already mentioned Alabama Commission on Higher Education (ache). Comprised of commissioners appointed by the governor, ache long ago set the bar at 7.5 B.A. graduates per year (based on a rolling three-year average; M.A. and Ph.D. degree-awarding programs have their own, somewhat lower, minimum numbers, of course). Failing to meet this minimum meant that a degree program was deemed “non-viable,” a status that risked the loss of the major—a loss that would turn our department into a “service unit” delivering only what we call Core Curriculum courses (i.e., General Education classes) to students from other departments who were satisfying their breadth requirements. Our department’s most recent average, when I arrived back in 2001, was 6.6 graduating majors per year (up considerably from what it had been when ache first came knocking at our doors in the late 1990s), which meant that a detailed waiver application had to be submitted to the state commission as soon as I arrived, that outlined the specific reasons for why the status of “viable” ought to be granted, which it eventually was (in the fall of 2002; that our dean had invested in a new, outside department chair likely went some distance to help persuade ache that the University of Alabama was serious about this reinvention). Regardless of one’s opinion of the role played by such state-regulating bodies, the “bottom line” reality that such commissions and state legislatures inject into our lives provides a practical rationale for investing serious energy into reinventing the material conditions that make our own profession and careers possible. Since the department had most recently seen itself mainly as a service department (with students wishing to specialize in the study of religion often taking independent study courses to fulfill the requirements of the major, and with the department seemingly comfortable with a variety of other units offering courses in the study of religion, such as Philosophy owning the Philosophy of Religion, Anthropology owning the Anthropology of Religion or History owning the History of Christianity), meeting the 7.5 bar required collective ingenuity and effort. But of all these separate sites of social formation, the one that underlies them all involves constituting a shared imaginary among the faculty, staff, and our students. Despite their own individual accomplishments and expertise, it seemed to me back then that 2001’s small group of energetic, tenuretrack scholars had yet to figure out precisely how and why—apart from sheer happenstance—they comprised an academic collectivity. While we had adjacent offices and a classroom, it was not all that clear to me when I first arrived, and Ms. Betty Dickey handed me a master key, that there was actually a department here. For it surely takes more than just occupying adjacent

It Could be Different

205

space to form a department. To rephrase: the sort of intellectual and institutional space in which current faculty and students think and act themselves into an identity had, when the Aronov Lecture series began, yet to be formed, making the sort of introduction to this volume that my colleague has written, as well as the narrative web that holds its chapters together, not something we could have yet imagined. Inviting Professor Jaffee to set the table with his inaugural Aronov Lecture—an invitation extended because of the way in which he theorized his classroom experience and own sense of identity in his 1997 essay, “Fessing up in Theory: On Professing and Confessing in the Religious Studies Classroom” (originally published in Method & Theory in the Study of Religion (mtsr) [Jaffee 1997])—provided the faculty with a common starting point that allowed them to pursue a year-long meditation on issues of methodology, theory, the history of the field, the history and context of our particular department, the place of self-disclosure and identity in our work, the sorts of students we teach, the goal of our curriculum, and the rationale behind our own teaching styles—all topics at the heart of any active and engaged department’s ongoing work. That this conversation now continues, despite the publication of a set of faculty responses to Jaffee’s lecture (published in the Bulletin of the Council of Societies for the Study of Religion [2004]), is the evidence of just how fruitful our collective labors were; that a small. B.A.-granting department previously off the radar of the self-designated important programs in the field has had a national effect constitutes a little more evidence, we’d like to think. A department blog now exists where the relevance of the Humanities is discussed (as already mentioned, our department took the lead on a campus-wide conversation on this very topic), several of us work together on Culture on the Edge, a book series and blog initiative also involving scholars elsewhere, and devoted to redescribing identity studies, and over the past twelve years some thoughtful and motivated students have made us their home while figuring what they wanted to do with their lives—today some of them are in grad school, but many more are teachers, small business owners, lawyers, and doctors. And then there is this very volume, of course, yet another collaborate effort that several of the faculty have tackled together. We are indeed small, when measured in some ways (though, if measured pound-for-pound, I’d hazard a guess that we are among the most productive units in the College of Arts & Sciences), but we are very ambitious and productive in yet other ways, making evident to anyone wishing to judge us that big ideas and impressive accomplishment come to fruition in all sorts of places. For I couldn’t have imagined a collection of a decades’ worth of Aronov Lectures back when I was listening to Jaffee’s talk that evening in Smith Hall’s

206

chapter 9

wonderful old, wood-lined lecture hall, which makes it rather exciting to wonder what the next decade holds for this department, its faculty, staff, and students. Of course, many challenges have also come with the successes that resulted from all of this change—how to ensure that we maintain the sort of direct and personal contact with our students that they so value is one of them, despite inventing large enrollment lower-level classes (that seat from 120 to 150 people) and designing online courses that sometimes have on-campus students enrolled in them, all in an effort to help a growing university meet its enrollment needs (in 2001 we had about 18,000 students at the University of Alabama and now we have about 35,000—a systematic effort to disengage the university’s budget from the vagaries of state funding). Our class sizes have grown and we often have a full-time instructor (or two) now working in the department, as well as a couple of graduate teaching assistants, the former teaching rather more courses than the rest of us (but not more students, since the faculty recently agreed that instructors ought not to shoulder the work of large-enrollment classes, thereby reserving their energies for smaller classes of Honors students)—but how could these not be issues in our department, inasmuch as they are issues all across u.s. higher education? But while not having control over the larger structural conditions that have led to such things as declining public financial support for higher education and thus increasing tuition, the department does control a number of factors that can make larger courses more engaging and intellectually provocative (a professor with a wireless mic and the confidence to walk the room while talking makes a surprising difference), strategies that can limit the footprint that the impersonal online environment has in the lives of local students eager for a face-to-face exchange with a passionate professor, and that can ensure that early-career people eager for tenure-track work can gain valuable experience in a supportive, small department. (In fact, we’re understandably rather proud of the instructors who have worked with us who have gone on to interesting careers of their own. That’s how I began my own career, in fact.) Like any department, our long-term well-being depends upon successfully managing all of this, along with making sure that we have a good supply of department mugs on hand, of course. Although the preceding essays, by a decade’s worth of Aronov speakers, obviously do not start or end in the same place, their authors, like our faculty, all strike me as being involved in thinking through a common set of issues regarding the topics that have preoccupied me in this afterword: identity and scholarship. This commonality suggests that, at least when it comes to a university, every unit’s shared identity is not to be found in the specificity of its members’ separate data domains but, instead, in the shared set of

It Could be Different

207

problematics that they tackle and the tools that they use in going about that work. If this is the case, then my hope is that our labors in Tuscaloosa will be of some use to readers who are looking around for tools to use in doing some collective tinkering of their own. For, much like the student worker who, as I wrote an early draft of this, was going room to room to replace the old, faded black paper that lines the bulletin boards on the outside of each of our office doors, social groups require continual grooming so as to avoid the impression of fading away. If this work is successful, then you’ll never see it happening (which can make it appear to be a thankless task)—that is, not until ten years pass and we look back and decide to celebrate the work that might have once seemed invisible.5 5 I hope that it is fitting that this volume ends with this substantial revision of what was originally the short introduction to the set of published faculty responses to Martin Jaffee’s inaugural Aronov lecture; that introduction appeared in the Bulletin of the Council of Societies for the Study of Religion (McCutcheon 2004a).

Afterword During the 2013–14 academic year, my department advertised a tenure-track position in what we called “Religion, Global Conflict, and Law.” The ad, in part, read as follows: Proficient in critical and social theory, the ideal candidate will analyze the roles played by legal and religious systems in cross-cultural conflicts (whether physical, economic, racial, ethnic, or social). While the research specialty, region, and historical area are open, they should complement without reproducing the expertise of current faculty in the department. While we had a number of strong applicants (along with a predictable number of applications that focused on peace/conflict resolution studies, apparently presupposing that religion—being somehow about spirituality, good intentions, justice, and thus liberal tolerance—could be a force for an untheorized good in the world), I admit that I was surprised by how few people applied to this position. Given how terrible the academic job market in the liberal arts has been for the past few decades, let alone how much worse it became after the global economic collapse of 2008, it was illuminating to find so few people willing or able to entertain applying to this position. What with stories from colleagues at other schools of having hundreds of applications for but one opening, our far smaller number of applicants stood out as curious. It was all the more curious because, in my reading, we were asking something like this: Do you study groups, in a variety of places, that bump and grind against each other? Do you also study how normative institutional systems are involved in such disputes, to create or manage them? Does any of this have anything to do with the word religion, however you happen to define it? If so, then consider applying for this position. Note: we did not say what sort of groups we had in mind—whether nationstates or subgroups of far smaller organizations, it was all fair game; after all, “culture” and thus “cross-cultural” can cut in so many directions—and we did not define (i.e., limit) what we meant by law—it’s not like only those who studied, say, the International Human Rights Court were relevant for such an ad.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004281417_012

210

Afterword

As for religion? While some in our department use the term in a certain way, others use it in yet other ways, and thus a brief look over our syllabi and cvs, all posted in public online, would have told prospective applicants of a wide variety of scholars working in this admittedly small department; for, despite its size, our internal debates are surely no different from any other department out there. In my reading, then, that ad spread the net very wide; we did not ask exclusively for interpretive disputes between long past rabbinic communities (though that might have been relevant), and we did not limit it to conflicts over how to define “person under the law” in contemporary u.s. debates over the legality of abortion (though, yes, that could have been relevant, too). The specialty, topic, region, and historic period were completely open. All we asked was for a specific type of approach, an interest in a certain sort of problematic. The question, then, is: Why did more applicants, all of whom are undoubtedly intelligent people who are eager to begin careers in the field, not also read it this way? My answer to this is that we probably stumped many possible applicants by failing to reproduce the dominant taxonomies in the field, by not specifying which world religion we were focusing on or by not saying we needed an Americanist or a ritual specialist. In other words, we swam against the takenfor-granted way in which members of the field divide up the pie of human actions and organizations—i.e., defining yourself as a scholar by what object you study rather than by what questions you find compelling to ask—and thereby the way that they train and credential the next generation of scholars, many of whom think of themselves as an Islamacist or as a Christian Origins scholar or as a religion and literature specialist. So I suspect that our ad posed a unique challenge to many who read it, inasmuch as it prompted them to reconsider their object of study in light of our interests and thus the thematic way in which we happen to divide up our undergraduate curriculum (i.e., there are three tracks: Religion in Communication, Religion in Context and, yes, Religion in Conflict). To say it yet another way, the ad—which we gave a fair bit of thought to, before posting it—invited applicants to argue for why the topic on which they carried out their research constituted but one interesting e.g. of this wider set of issues that happens to occupy our attention. In a field in which so few seem able to think of their object of study as anything but self-evidently interesting—and this is how sui generis religion has never really left the field, despite how mundane critiques of it now strike many of our colleagues, as if not reading Eliade anymore somehow means that one is immune from assuming that one’s research focus is uniquely compelling—this probably posed a considerable challenge. That candidates could not just search

Afterword

211

for “Hinduism” or “Indigenous Religions” to find the job online, and then use a slightly revised cover letter to go with their application, was probably the first impediment for some, but I think that the requirement to see their specialty as illustrative of a wider set of issues others also found interesting—and, in their application, to be able to provide tangible evidence of seeing their place in the field, or in a Department, in this way—was probably the biggest hurdle. (Aside: this also might account for why so many people find it difficult to explain their research to non-specialists, such as family members.) So the job ad probably seemed “too specialized” to many people, despite my reading of it as one of the most generalist ads circulated this past season. So for those who already know that their object of study is out there, and that they first have to carefully describe it before ever theorizing about it, they probably saw words like “conflict” but realized they didn’t study wars, or “law” and immediately concluded that, because they have not studied, say, u.s. constitutional theory, then their work was not relevant to our needs. Sadly, that’s the entirely wrong conclusion for them to have reached. As I write this, we are on the verge of hosting on campus some semi-finalists for this open position, none of whom directly matched the ad (but this is pretty much how it always goes, really—departments throw a wish list out there and see how closely those looking for work match it, ideally being prepared for inevitable negotiations and compromises, and pleasant surprises by what unexpected things an applicant might bring if hired) but all of whom overlapped sufficiently with what we judged to be important parts of it that we were excited to imagine how they could add to our unit’s strengths by providing an even greater variety of engaging topics for our students to study. We set out looking for someone able not just to discuss the intricacies of his or her specialty but someone who was also able to imagine and communicate why that expertise ought to matter to others, others who happened to study different things, and in our case others who are interested in the far wider topic of cross-cultural conflict—simply put, we were looking for people able to answer the “So what?” question that Jonathan Z. Smith has long posed. What I’m hoping is that the preceding chapters have, in a variety of ways (sometimes modest, other times obviously immodest), prompted readers to consider how a possibly subtle but far-reaching change in their conceptualization of, and approach to, their object of study, seeing it now quite literally as data, is actually an invitation to take more seriously the set of interests they bring with them to the table, long before they ever get to the field to start digging. For despite how this four-letter word—“data”—strikes some as being (e.g., scientistic, imperialist and condescending toward the supposedly real people and so-called lived experiences that we study, etc.), I again follow

212

Afterword

Smith, as in when he wrote, in the concluding chapter to Relating Religion, “God Save This Honourable Court: Religion and Civic Discourse:” What Justice Kennedy has undertaken in this initial statement of fact, or more properly, of data, that is to say, facts accepted for purposes of the argument… 2004: 382

Using the word “data” in this manner, as a marker for how an object of study has been isolated, from the hectic world, by our curiosities, how something has become an item of discourse for us, prompts us, I think, to be far more epistemologically humble in our work as scholars, thereby helping us to see that things become interesting (or not) to us, “for purposes of argumentation,” which is a move that challenges us to articulate our interests, our thesis, and thus the argument that we’re trying to make, instead of simply presenting our descriptions of items in the world as somehow self-authorizing and inherently interesting, as if the world commands us to passively pay attention to this and not that. A number of the people whose credentials we looked over were indeed able to do this, and so I’m somewhat optimistic about where the field is going, should they all be able to join our ranks and contribute to its future direction—something that, in the uncertainly of the current Humanities job market, is tough to predict, of course. That we were not able to meet them all on campus for extended interviews is lamentable, of course, but a fact of life in any institution where resources are not endless and criteria must be devised to focus energies and attention. What is even more regrettable, however, is that more young scholars did not put their credentials in front of us, thereby challenging us to consider their expertise and experience, to prompt us to imagine them as contributing to that experiment that we call our Department of Religious Studies; for surely there are many more out there who study how groups bump and grind and somehow link all of that to this taxon that, however tentatively or controversially, we in our field share: “religion.”

References Abeysekara, Ananda (2011). The un-translatability of religion, the un-translatability of life: Thinking Talal Asad’s thought unthought in the study of religion. Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 23:257–282. Allen, Charlotte (1996). Is nothing sacred? Casting out the demons from religious studies. Lingua Franca 6/7:30–40. Althusser, Louis (2001) [1971]. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. New York, ny: Monthly Review Press. Altieri, Pia (2004). Close encounters of the Smith kind. Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 16:61–71. Anderson, Benedict (1991). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd ed. London, England: Verso. Ankersmit, F.R. (2005). Sublime Historical Experience. Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press. Arnal, William E. (1994). Review of Jonathan Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine. Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 6:190–199. —— (1997). Making and re-making the Jesus sign: Contemporary markings on the body of Christ.” In W. Arnal and M. Desjardins (eds.), Whose Historical Jesus? 308–19. Studies in Christianity and Judaism/Études sur le christianisme et le judaïsme, vol. 7. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. ——   (1998). What if I don’t want to play tennis?: A rejoinder to Russell McCutcheon on postmodernism and theory of religion. Studies in Religion 27(1):61–66. ——   (2005). The Symbolic Jesus: Historical Scholarship, Judaism and the Construction of Contemporary Identity. London, England: Equinox Publishers. Arnal, William E., and Willi Braun (2012). The irony of religion. In W. Arnal, W. Braun, and R.T. McCutcheon (eds.), Failure and Nerve in the Academic Study of Religion: Essays in Honor of Donald Wiebe, 231–238. Sheffield, England: Equinox. Arnal, William E., Willi Braun, and Russell T. McCutcheon (eds.) (2012). Failure and Nerve in the Academic Study of Religion: Essays in Honors of Donald Wiebe. Sheffield, England: Equinox. Arnal, William E. and Russell T. McCutcheon (2013). The Sacred Is the Profane: The Political Nature of “Religion.” New York, ny: Oxford University Press. Arvidsson, Stefan (2013). Review of the Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies, Robert A. Orsi (ed.). Religion, 43(4):586–590. Barthes, Roland (1973) [1957]. In Annette Lavers (trans.), Mythologies. London, England: Paladin. Baudrillard, Jean (1994). In Sheila Faria Glaser (trans.), Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

214

References 

—— (1995) [1991]. The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press. Bayart, Jean-François (2005). In Steven Rendall, Janet Roitman, Cynthia Schoch, and Jonathan Derrick (trans.), The Illusion of Cultural Identity. Chicago, il: University of Chicago Press. Benavides, Gustavo (2000). What raw materials are used in the manufacture of religion? Culture and Religion 1(1):113–122. Birk, Sandow (2012). Artist’s statement: American Qur’an. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 80(3):581–586. Bivins, Jason C. (2012). Ubiquity scored: Belief’s strange survivals. Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 24(1):55–63. Boer, Roland (ed.) (2010). Secularism and Biblical Studies. London, England: Equinox Publishers. Bolle, Kees W. (1968). The Freedom of Man in Myth. Nashville, tn: Vanderbilt University Press. —— (1983). Myths and other religious texts. In Frank Whaling (ed.), Contemporary Approaches to the Study of Religion, 297–363. Berlin, Germany: Mouton. ——  (1987). Myth: An overview. In Mircea Eliade (ed.), Encyclopedia of Religion, vol. 10: 261–273. New York, ny: Macmillan. Bolle, Kees W., Richard G.A. Buxton, and Jonathan Z. Smith (1974). The nature, functions and types of myths. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th ed. 24:715–732. Bourdieu, Pierre (1992). The Logic of Practice. Richard Nice (trans.). Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press. ——  (1998). In Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson (trans.), On Television. New York, ny: New Press. Bowler, Peter (1992). From “savage” to “primitive:” Victorian evolutionism and the interpretation of marginalized peoples. Antiquity 66:721–729. Braudy, Dorothy (2013). Artist’s statement: Sacred Los Angeles. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 81(1):1–5. Braun, Willi (1999). Amnesia in the production of (Christian) history. Bulletin of the Council of Societies for the Study of Religion 28(1):3–8. —— (2004). Smoke signals from the north: A reply to Burton Mack’s “Backbay Jazz and Blues.” In R. Cameron and M.P. Miller (eds.), Redescribing Christian Origins. Society of Biblical Literature Symposium Series, 28, 433–442. Atlanta, ga: Society of Biblical Literature. ——  (2007). The study of religion and the mischief of curiosity. In P. Pachis, P. Vasiliadis, and D. Kaimakis (eds.), Friendship and Society: Festschrift in Honor of Professor Gregorios D. Ziakas, 63–77. Thessaloniki, Greece: Vanias Publishers. Braun, Willi and Russell T. McCutcheon (eds.) (2000). Guide to the Study of Religion. London, England: Continuum.

References

215

Braun, Willi and Russell T. McCutcheon (eds.) (2008). Introducing Religion: Essays in Honor of Jonathan Z. Smith. London, England: Equinox Publishers. Bultmann, Rudolf K. (1958). Jesus Christ and Mythology. New York: Scribner. Burnett, D. Graham (2007). Trying Leviathan: The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature. Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press. Buxton, Richard G.A. (1994). Imaginary Greece: The Contexts of Mythology. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Cady, Linell (1998). The public intellectual and effective critique. Bulletin of the Council of Societies for the Study of Religion 27(2):36–38. Cameron, Ronald (1996a). The anatomy of a discourse: On eschatology as a category of explaining Christian origins. Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 8(3):231–245. —— (1996b). Mythmaking and intertextuality in early Christianity. In E.A. Castelli and H. Taussig (eds.), Reimagining Christian Origins: A Colloquium Honoring Burton L. Mack, 37–50. Valley Forge, pa: Trinity Press International. Cameron, Ron and Merrill P. Miller (eds.) (2004). Redescribing Christian Origins. Society of Biblical Literature Symposium Series, 28. Atlanta, ga: Society of Biblical Literature. Campbell, Joseph (1968). The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 2nd ed. Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press. —— (1988). In Betty Sue Flowers (ed.), The Power of Myth. New York, ny: Doubleday. Certeau de, Michel (1988) [1980]. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cohen, Percy (1969). Theories of Myth. Man (September):337–353. Connerton, Paul (1998) [1989]. How Societies Remember. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Davidson, Robert (2012). Artist’s statement. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 80(4):852–855. Dennett, Daniel (2006). Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. New York, ny and London, England: Viking. Detienne, Marcel (1991). The interpretation of myths: Nineteenth- and twentieth-century theories. In Y. Bonnefoy (ed.), Mythologies, vol. 1, 5–10. Chicago, il: University of Chicago Press. Detweiler, Robert (1998). Literary echoes of postmodernism. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 66(4):737–746. Diamond, Jared (1997). Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York, ny: W.W. Norton. Doniger, Wendy (1998). The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth. New York, ny: Columbia University Press.

216

References

Doniger-O’Flaherty, Wendy (1986). The uses and misuses of other people’s myths. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 54:219-239. Doty, William G. (1986). Mythography: The Study of Myths and Rituals. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Douglas, Mary (1992) [1966]. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London, England: Routledge. Dourley, John P. (2001). Jung, mysticism, and myth in the making. Studies in Religion 30(1):65–78. Dundes, Alan (ed.) (1984). Sacred Narrative: Readings in Theory of Myth. Berkeley: University of California Press. Durkheim, Emile (1995) [1912]. In Karen E. Fields (intro. and trans.), The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York, ny: The New Press. Durkheim, Emile and Marcel Mauss (1963) [1903]. In Rodney Needham (trans. and intro.), Primitive Classification. Chicago, il: University of Chicago Press. Eagleton, Terry (1991). Ideology: An Introduction. London, England: Verso. Ehrman, Bart (2012). Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth. New York, ny: HarperCollins. Eisenstadt, Shmuel and Bernhard Giesen (1995). The construction of collective identity. Archives européennes de sociologie 36:72-102. Eliade, Mircea (1959) [1957]. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. New York, ny: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. —— (1960). Myths, Dreams and Mysteries: The Encounter between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Realities. London, England: Harvill. —— (1963). In Willard R. Trask (trans.), Myth and Reality. New York, ny: Harper & Row. —— (1973). Myth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In P.P. Weiner (ed.), Dictionary of the History of Ideas, vol. 3: 307–318. New York, ny: Scribner. —— (1974). In Willard R. Trask (trans.), The Myth of the Eternal Return. Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press. —— (1991). Toward a definition of myth. In Y. Bonnefoy (ed.), Mythologies, vol. 1, 3–5. Chicago, il: University of Chicago Press. ——  (1996) [1958]. In Rosemary Sheed (trans.), Patterns in Comparative Religion. Lincoln and London, England: University of Nebraska Press. Eliade, Mircea and Joseph M. Kitagawa (1959). The History of Religions: Essays in Methodology. Chicago, il: University of Chicago Press. Fasolt, Constantin (2004). The Limits of History. Chicago, il: University of Chicago Press. Fernando, Mayanthi (2012). Belief and/in the law. Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 24(1):71–80. Fitzgerald, Timothy (1997). A critique of “religion” as a cross-cultural category. Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 9:91–110.

References

217

—— (1999). The Ideology of Religious Studies. New York, ny: Oxford University Press. Flood, Gavin (1996). Political Myth: A Theoretical Introduction. New York, ny: Garland. Foucault, Michel (2013) [2011]. Speech Begins after Death. In conversation with Claude Bonnefoy. Philippe Artières (ed.) and Robert Bononno (trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Freud, Sigmund (1913). In A.A. Brill (trans.), The Interpretation of Dreams. London, England: Allen. —— (1989) [1927]. In James Strachey (trans.) and Peter Gay (intro.), The Future of an Illusion. New York, ny: Norton. Geertz, Clifford (1968). Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia. New Haven, ct: Yale University Press. Gellner, Ernest (1974). The Legitimation of Belief. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Giddens, Anthony (1984). The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gill, Brendan (1989). The faces of Campbell. The New York Review of Books, 28 September, 16–9. Gill, Sam (1998). No place to stand: Jonathan Z. Smith as homo ludens, the academic study of religion as sub specie ludi. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 66:238–312. Gordon, Raymond L. (ed.) (1981). In R.G.A. Buxton (intro.), Myth, Religion, and Society: Structuralist Essays by M. Detienne, L. Gernet, J.-P. Vernant, and P. Vidal-Naquet. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Graf, Fritz (1993). In Thomas Marier (trans.), Greek Mythology: An Introduction. Baltimore, md: Johns Hopkins University Press. Green, Garrett (1995). Challenging the religious studies canon: Karl Barth’s theory of religion. Journal of Religion 75:473–486. Hirsch, E.D. (1988). Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. New York, ny: Vintage. Hudson, Wilson M. (1966). Jung on myth and the mythic. In W.M. Hudson (ed.), The Sunny Slopes of Long Ago, 181–191. Dallas, tx: Southern Methodist University Press. Hughes, Aaron (2008). Situating Islam: The Past and Future of an Academy Discipline. London, England: Equinox Publishers. ——  (2012a). Abrahamic Religions: On the Uses and Abuses of History. New York, ny: Oxford University Press. —— (2012b). Theorizing Islam: Disciplinary Deconstruction and Construction. London, England: Equinox Publishers. —— (2013a). Editorial. Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 25(1):1–3. ——  (ed.) (2013b). Method & Theory in Religion: Twenty Five Years On. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill.

218

References

Hussain, Amir (2011). Editor’s note. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 79(1):1–3. ——  (2012a). Editor’s note: Something observed. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 80(1):1–2. —— (2012b). Editor’s note: Robert Davidson, Haida artist. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 80(4):848–851. Ingersoll, Julie (2013). Establishing a beachhead or kicking up sand? Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 25(4):325–331. Jaffee, Martin (1997). Fessing up in theory: On professing and confessing in the religious studies classroom. Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 9(4):325–337. Jakobsen, Janet R. and Ann Pellegrini (eds.) (2008). Secularisms. Durham, nc: Duke University Press. Jameson, Fredric (1988). The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971–1986, 2 vols. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Josephson, Jason-Ānanda (2012). The Invention of Religion in Japan. Chicago, il: University of Chicago Press. Jung, Carl G. (1968). Conscious, unconscious, and individuation. In Collected Works of C.G. Jung, vol. 9, part 1: 275–289, 2nd ed. Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press. Kimura, Takeshi (1999). Bearing the “bare facts” of ritual: A critique of Jonathan Z. Smith’s study of the bear ceremony based on a study of the Ainu Iyomante. Numen 46:86–114. Kirk, G.S. (1973). Myth: Its Meaning and Functions in Ancient and Other Cultures. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kitagawa, Joseph M. (ed.) (1985). The History of Religions: Retrospect and Prospect. New York, ny: Macmillan. Kitagawa, Joseph M. (1987). The history of religions at Chicago. In The History of Religions: Understanding Human Experience, 133–144. Atlanta, ga: Scholars Press. Kristensen, W. Brede (1954). Religionshistorisk studium. Oslo, Norway: Olaf Norlis Forlag. Latour, Bruno (2010). On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods. Durham, nc: Duke University Press. Lawrence, Bruce (1998). Shattering the Myth: Islam beyond Violence. Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press. Leach, Edmund (ed.) (1967). The Structural Study of Myth and Totemism. A.S.A. Monographs, vol. 5. London, England: Tavistock. —— (1976). Culture and Communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lease, Gary (1994). The history of “religious” consciousness and the diffusion of culture. Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 20:453–479. Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1972) [1955]. The structural study of myth. In Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (trans.), Structural Anthropology, vol. 1:206–231. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin.

References

219

—— (1975–1978). In John and Doreen Weightman (trans.), Introduction to a Science of Mythology, 3 vols. New York, ny: Harper & Row. Lincoln, Bruce (1986). Myth, Cosmos, and Society: Indo-European Themes of Creation and Destruction. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press. ——  (1989). Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification. New York, ny: Oxford University Press. —— (1996). Theses on method. Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 8:225–227. —— (1994). Authority: Construction and Corrosion. Chicago, il: University of Chicago Press. —— (1999). Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, Scholarship. Chicago, il: University of Chicago Press. —— (2012). Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars: Critical Explorations in the History of Religions. Chicago, il: University of Chicago Press. Lofton, Kathryn (2012). Introduction to the Yale roundtable on belief. Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 24(1):51–54. Long, Charles (1987). Cosmogony. In Mircea Eliade (ed.), Encyclopedia of Religion, vol 4:94–100. New York: Macmillan. Lopez, Donald S. (1998). Belief. In M.C. Taylor (ed.) Critical Terms for Religious Studies, 21–35. Chicago, il: University of Chicago Press. Mack, Burton L. (1995). Who Wrote the New Testament? The Making of the Christian Myth. San Francisco, ca: HarperSanFrancisco. —— (1996). On Redescribing Christian origins. Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 8(3):247–269. MacKendrick, Kenneth G. (1999). The aporetics of a tennis-playing brontosaurus, or a critical theory of religion: A rejoinder to Russell T. McCutcheon and William E. Arnal. Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 28(1):77–83. MacQueen, Graeme (1988). Whose sacred history? Reflections on myth and dominance. Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 17:143–157. Malinowski, Bronislaw (1926). Myth in Primitive Psychology. London, England: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Martin, Craig and Russell T. McCutcheon (eds.) (2012). Religious Experience: A Reader. With Leslie Dorrough Smith. Durham, England: Acumen Publishers. Martin, Luther H. and Donald Wiebe (2004). Establishing a beachhead: naasr, twenty years later. Available at: http://naasr.com/Establishingabeachhead.pdf (accessed March 20, 2013). —— (2012). Religious studies as a scientific discipline: The persistence of a delusion. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 80(3):587–597. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels (1970) [1932]. In C.J. Arthurs (trans.), The German Ideology, Part One. New York, ny: International Publishers. Masa-Bains, Amalia (2012). Artist’s statement. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 80(1):3–6.

220

References

Masuzawa, Tomoko (1993). In Search of Dreamtime: The Quest for the Origin of Religion. Chicago, il: University of Chicago Press. ——  (2000a). Origin. In W. Braun and R.T. McCutcheon (eds.), Guide to the Study of Religion, 209–224. London, England: Continuum. ——  (2000b). The production of religion and the task of the scholar: Russell McCutcheon among the Smiths. Culture and Religion 1(1):123–130. ——  (2005a). The Invention of World Religions, or How the Idea of European Hegemony Came to be Expressed in the Language of Pluralism and Diversity. Chicago, il: University of Chicago Press. ——  (2005b). World Religions. In L. Jones (ed.), Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd ed., vol. 14:9800–9804. New York, ny: Macmillan. ——  (2008). Reader as producer: Jonathan Z. Smith on exegesis, ingenuity, elaboration. In W. Braun and R.T. McCutcheon (eds.), Introducing Religion: Essays in Honor of Jonathan Z. Smith, 326–339. London, England: Equinox. McCutcheon, Russell T. (1997a). A default of critical intelligence: The scholar of religion as public intellectual. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 65(2): 443–468. Revised and reprinted as McCutcheon 2001a: 125–144. ——  (1997b). Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia. New York, ny: Oxford University Press. ——  (1997c). My theory of the brontosaurus: Postmodernism and “theory” of religion. Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 26(1):3–23. Revised and reprinted as McCutcheon 2001a: chapter 7. ——  (1998a). Redescribing “religion” as social formation: Toward a social theory of religion. In T.A. Idinopulos and B.C. Wilson (eds.), What Is Religion? Origins, Definitions, and Explanations, 51–71. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill. Revised and reprinted as McCutcheon 2001a: chpater 2. —— (1998b). Returning the volley to William E. Arnal. Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 27(1):67–68. See chapter 3 in this volume. —— (1998c). Talking past each other: Public intellectuals revisited. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 67:911-917. ——  (ed.) (1999). The Insider/Outside Problem in the Study of Religion: A Reader. London, England: Continuum. ——  (2001). Critics Not Caretakers: Redescriving the Public Study of Religion. Albany: State University of New York Press. ——  (2003a). The Discipline of Religion: Structure, Meaning, Rhetoric. London, England and New York, ny: Routledge. ——  (2003b). In Dimitris Xygalatas (trans.), Kataskeuazontas ti Threskeia. [Greek translation of Manufacturing Religion (1997b)]. Thessaloniki, Greece: Vanias Editions. ——  (2004a). Reinventing the study of religion in Alabama: A symposium. Bulletin of the Council of Societies for the Study of Religion 33(2):27–29.

References

221

——  (2004b). Religion, ire, and dangerous things. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 72(1):173–193. ——  (2005a). A few words on the temptation to defend the honor of a text. Bulletin of the Council of Societies for the Study of Religion 33(3&4):90–91. See chapter 8 in this volume. ——  (2005b). “Religion” and the Domestication of Dissent, or How to Live in a Less than Perfect Nation. London, England: Equinox. ——  (2006a). “It’s a lie. There’s no truth in it! It’s a sin!”: On the limits of the humanistic study of religion and the costs of saving others from themselves. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 74(3):720–750. ——  (2006b). Relating Smith. Journal of Religion 86:287–297. ——  (2007). Studying Religion: An Introduction. London, England: Equinox. ——  (2008). Introducing Smith. In W. Braun and R.T. McCutcheon (eds.), Introducing Religion: Essays in Honor of Jonathan Z. Smith, 1–17. London, England: Equinox Publishers. —— (2012). The state of Islamic studies in the study of religion: An introduction. Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 24(4&5):309–313. ——  (2014). Entanglements: Marking Place in the Field of Religion. London, England: Equinox Publishers. McDannell, Collen (1995). Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America. New Haven, ct: Yale University Press. Morgan, David (2005). The Sacred Gaze: Religious Material Culture in Theory and Practice. Berkeley: University of California Press. Morgan, Robert and Michael Pye (eds.) (1977). Ernst Troeltsch: Writings on Theology and Religion. Atlanta, ga: John Knox Press. Moriarty, Michael (1991). Roland Barthes. Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press. Murphy Timothy (1998). The “one” behind the “many.” Bulletin of the Council of Societies for the Study of Religion 27(2):39–40. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1984) [1833–1835]. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One. R. J. Hollingdale (intro. and trans.). New York, ny: Penguin. Noel, Daniel C. (ed.) (1990). Paths to the Power of Myth: Joseph Campbell and the Study of Religion. New York, ny: Crossroad. Olupona, Jacob (2011). Introduction to the discussion of A Primal Perspective on the Philosophy of Religion. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 79(4):7 89–794. Omer, Atalia (2011). Can a critic be a caretaker too? Religion, conflict, and conflict transformation. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 79(2):459–496. ——  (2012). Rejoinder: On Professor McCutcheon’s (un)critical caretaking. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 80(4):1083–1097.

222

References

——  (2013). In the critic vs. caretaker dichotomy a magic dwells: Parroting McCutcheon, policing “religion” (A rejoinder to Merinda Simmons). Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 25(4&5):382–402. Orsi, Robert. (2004a). Fair game. Bulletin of the Council of Societies for the Study of Religion 33(3&4):87–89. —— (2004b). A new beginning, again. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 72(3):587–602. ——  (ed.) (2012a). The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies. New York, ny: Cambridge University Press. —— (2012b). Introduction. In R.A. Orsi (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies, 1–14. New York, ny: Cambridge University Press. ——  (2012c). The problem of the holy. In R.A. Orsi (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies, 84–106. New York, ny: Cambridge University Press. Otto, Rudolf (1950) [1923]. The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational. John W. Harvey (trans.). London, England: Oxford University Press. Patton, Kimberley C. and Benjamin C. Ray. (ed.) (2000). A Magic Still Dwells: Comparative Religion in the Postmodern Age. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pettazzoni, Raffaele (1954). Essays on the History of Religions. H.J. Rose (trans.). Studies in the History of Religions; Supplements to Numen, vol. 1. Leiden, Netherlands: E.J. Brill. Prothero, Stephen (2007). Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know— And Doesn’t. New York, ny: HarperCollins. Proudfoot, Wayne (1985). Religious Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ramey, Steven (2013a). Accidental favorites: The implicit in the study of religions. Presidential address to the Southeastern Region of the American Academy of Religion (March 16, 2013). Posted at: http://vimeo.com/64419019 (accessed April 4, 2013). ——  (2013b). What happens when we name the nones? The Huffington Post (Feb. 21): http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-ramey/what-happens-when-we-name -the-nones_b_2725169.html (accessed Nov. 10, 2013). Ramey, Steven and Monica R. Miller (2013). Meaningless surveys: The faulty “mathematics” of the “nones.” The Huffington Post (Nov. 7): http://www.huffingtonpost .com/steven-ramey/meaningless-surveys-the-f_b_4225306.html (accessed Nov. 10, 2013). Ray, Benjamin C. (1991). The Koyukon bear party and the “bare facts” of ritual. Numen 38:151–176. Ricoeur, Paul (1987). New York, ny: Macmillan. Rubenstein, Mary-Jane (2012). The twilight of the doxai: Or, how to philosophize with a Whac-a-MoleTM mallet. Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 24(1):64–70.

References

223

Rudolph, Kurt (1985). The history of religions and the critique of ideologies. Historical Fundamentals and the Study of Religions, 61–77. New York, ny: Macmillan. ——  (2000). Some reflections on approaches and methodologies in the study of religion. In T. Jensen and M. Rothstein (eds.), Secular Theories of Religion: Current Perspectives, 231–247. Copenhagen, Denmark: Museum Tusculanum. Rybczynski, Witold (1990). The Most Beautiful House in the World. New York, ny: Penguin. Saper, Craig J. (1997). Artificial Mythologies: A Guide to Cultural Invention. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Schleiermacher, Friedrich (1996) [1799]. In Richard Crouter (ed.), On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, 2nd ed. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Schultz, Kevin and Paul Harvey (2010). Everywhere and nowhere: Recent trends in American religious history and historiography. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 78(1):129–162. Scott, Joan Wallach (1991). The evidence of experience. Critical Inquiry 17:773–797. Segal, Robert A. (1980). In defense of mythology: The history of modern theories of myth. Annals of Scholarship 1:3–49. ——  (ed.) (1996). Theories of Myth: From Ancient Israel and Greece to Freud, Jung, Campbell, and Lévi-Strauss, 6 vols. New York, ny: Garland. ——  (ed.) (1998). Encountering Jung on Mythology. Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press. Seuss, Dr. (1961). The Sneetches and Other Stories. New York, ny: Random House. Sexton, John (2013). Baseball as a Road to God: Seeing Beyond the Game. New York, ny: Gotham Books. Sharf, Robert H. (1998). Experience. In M.C. Taylor (ed.) Critical Terms in Religious Studies, 94–116. Chicago, il: University of Chicago Press. Sharpe, Eric (1971). Fifty Key Words: Comparative Religion. Richmond, va: John Knox Press. ——  (1986) [1975]. Comparative Religion: A History. London, England: Duckworth. Sienkewicz, Thomas J. (1997). Theories of Myth: An Annotated Bibliography. Lanham, md: Scarecrow. Simmons, K. Merinda (2013a). Protective parroting: A rejoinder to Atalia Omer. Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 25(4–5):403–407. ——  (2013b). Regulating identities: The silences of critical caretaking. Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 25(4–5):362–381. Slater, Peter (2005) [1987]. Hope. In L. Jones (ed.), Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd ed. vol. 6:4125–4127. Detroit, mi and New York, ny: Thomson Gale. Smith, Jonathan Z. (1969). The glory, jest, and riddle: James George Frazer and The Golden Bough. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. Yale University. ——  (1975). The social description of early Christianity. Religious Studies Review 1(1):19–25.

224

References

—— (1978). Map Is Not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill and Chicago, il: University of Chicago Press. ——  (1980). The bare facts of ritual. History of Religions 20:112–137. ——  (1982). Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown. Chicago, il: University of Chicago Press. ——  (1987). To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual. Chicago, il: University of Chicago Press. —— (1990). Drudgery Divine: On Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity. School of Oriental and African Studies: University of London. ——  (gen. ed.) (1995). The Harper Collins Dictionary of Religion. San Francisco, ca: HarperSanFrancisco. ——  (1996a). Nothing human is alien to me. Religion 26:297–309. —— (1996b). Social formations of early Christianities: A response to Ron Cameron and Burton Mack. Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 8(3):271–278. ——  (1996c). Why Imagine Religion? Unpublished ms. Keynote address at Western Maryland College’s “Reconstructing a History of Religions: Problems and Possibilities” Conference. ——  (2000). Bible and Religion. Bulletin of the Council of Societies for the Study of Religion 29:87–93. ——  (2002). Religion in the liberal arts: Reflections on teaching. In The Place of Religious Studies in the Liberal Arts, 6–14. The Chicago Forum on Pedagogy and the Study of Religion. Chicago, il: The Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago. ——  (2004). Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion. Chicago, il: University of Chicago Press. ——  (2007). The necessary lie: Duplicity in the disciplines. In R.T. McCutcheon, Studying Religion: An Introduction, 74–80. London, England: Equinox. ——  (2009). Religion and Bible. Journal of Biblical Literature 128(1):5–27. ——  (2013). In Christopher Lehrich (ed.), On Teaching Religion. New York, ny: Oxford University Press. Smith, Wilfred Cantwell (1993). What Is Scripture?: A Comparative Approach. Minneapolis, mn: Fortress Press. ——  (1998) [1962]. Patterns of Faith Around the World. Oxford, England: Oneworld. Smith, William Robertson (2002) [1889]. In Robert A. Segal (intro.), Religion of the Semites. Piscataway, nj: Transaction Publishers. Spong, John S. (1994). Reurrection: Myth or Reality? San Francisco, ca: HarperSanFrancisco. Strenski, Ivan (1987). Four Theories of Myth in Twentieth-Century History: Cassirer, Eliade, Lévi-Strauss, and Malinowski. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Swift, Jonathan (2009) [1729]. A modest proposal. In A Modest Proposal and Other Writings, 230–239. Carole Fabricant (ed. and intro.). London, England: Penguin.

References

225

Taira, Teemu (2012). Making space for discursive study in religious studies. Religion 43(1):26–45. Taylor, Mark C. (ed.) (1998). Critical Terms for Religious Studies. Chicago, il: University of Chicago Press. Thompson, E.P. (1991) [1963]. The Making of the English Working Class. New York, ny and London, England: Penguin. Thompson, Thomas L. (1999). The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of Israel. New York, ny: Basic Books. Troeltsch, Ernst (1913). The dogmatics of the “Religionsgeschichtliche Schule.” The American Journal of Theology 17(1):1–21. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph (1995). Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston, ma: Beacon Press. Urban, Hugh B. (1999). Making a place to take a stand: Jonathan Z. Smith and the politics and poetics of comparison. Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 12:339–378. Vernant, Jean Pierre (1980). In Janet Lloyd (trans.), Myth and Society in Ancient Greece. London: Methuen. ——  (1983) [1965]. Myth and Thought among the Greeks. London, England: Routledge. Veyne, (1988) [1983]. In Paula Wissing (trans.), Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? An Essay on the Constitutive Imagination. Chicago, il: University of Chicago Press. ——  (ed.) (1987). In Arthur Goldhammer (trans.), A History of Private Life. Vol. 1. From Pagan Rome to Byzantium. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press. Wach, Joachim (1951). Types of Religious Experience: Christian and Non-Christian. Chicago, il: University of Chicago Press. ——  (1958). In Joseph M. Kitagawa (ed.), The Comparative Study of Religions. New York, ny: Columbia University Press. Weber, Max (1993) [1922]. In Talcott Parsons (intro.), Ann Swidler (intro), and Ephraim Fischoff (trans), The Sociology of Religion. Boston, ma: Beacon Press. Wiebe, Donald (1994). Beyond Legitimation: Essays on the Problem of Religious Knowledge. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave MacMillan. ——  (1999). The Politics of Religious Studies. New York, ny: St. Martin’s Press. ——  (2004). The reinvention or degradation of religious studies? Tales from the Tuscaloosa woods. Reviews in Religion & Theology 11(1):3–14. ——  (2005). The politics of wishful thinking? Disentangling the role of the scholarscientist from that of the public intellectual in the modern academic study of religion. Temenos 41(1):7–38. ——  (2006). An eternal return all over again: The religious conversation endures. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 74(3):674–696.

226

References

——  (2013). Change the name! On the importance of reclaiming naasr’s original objectives for the twenty-first century. Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 25(4&5): 350-361. Williams, Raymond (1980). Social Darwinism. In Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays, 86–102. London, England: Verso. Wolf, Naomi (1992). The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used against Women. New York, ny: Doubleday. Žižek, Slavoj (1997) [1994]. Introduction: The spectre of ideology. In S. Žižek (ed.), Mapping Ideology, 1–33. London, England: Verso.

Index Abeysekara, Ananda  23 Abington v. Schempp  84 agency  12, 42, 73–74, 104 n. 3, 105 n. 4, 117–118, 148, 181 see also structure Alabama Commission on Higher Education (ache)  187, 204 Alexander, Amanda “Andie,”  135 n. 8, 203 alienation  189 Allen, Charlotte  25 Alles, Greg  18–19 Althusser, Louis  41–42, 42 n. 5, 142 Altman, Michael  11, 196 Alton, Bruce  26 American dream  45 exceptionalism  13 religious history  11 American Academy of Religion (aar)  7, 16–17, 17 n. 1, 18–19, 20 n. 2, 24, 30, 31 n. 15, 32–33, 46, 50, 83–84, 96, 129, 170–171, 174, 176, 196 motto  177–178 American Historical Association (aha)  40 American Journal of Theology  14, 15 Amit, Yairah  112 anachronism  127, 132, 134, 138 Anderson, Benedict  68, 74 anecdote  x, 140, 144 animism  8 anthropocentrism  200 anthropology  43, 56 Anttonen, Veikko  145 anxiety  58 archeology  2, 108 archetypes  59–60, 70 Aristotle  73 armchair scholarship  2, 4, 6 Arnal, William (Bill)  x, xii, 1, 17–18, 31, 47 n. 13, 69, 72–73, 81, 81 n. 6, 97–98, 113, 116 n. 18, 117 n. 20, 119, 122, 126–130, 134–136, 145, 152 n. 14 Aaron Aronov Lecture  187, 196, 200, 205, 206 n. 5

arts de faire  193 artifact v. debris  2 Arvidsson, Stefan  49 n. 1 Aslan, Reza  130 authenticity  38, 45, 184 author  104, 194 creation of readers  181 death of  135, 181 authorization  66, 69, 71, 130–132, 185 de-authorization  149 autonomy institution  35 sui generis  49 Avalos, Hector  96, 104, 107, 107 n. 9 Barth, Karl  26–27, 179 n. 16 Barthes, Roland  43, 43 n. 8, 44, 64, 67, 71, 119, 165, 182 Baudrillard, Jean  70 Bayart, Jean-François  x belief  10, 12, 16, 33–36, 45, 155, 157, 175–178 as agonistic  39 in belief  38 n. 2 Benavides, Gustavo  143 benediction, role at academic conferences  34 Berg, Herb  73 Berger, Peter  25 Berlinerblau, Jacques  42 n. 6, 104, 115 n. 17 Best, Ernest  73, 142 Bettis, Joseph  200 bible  22, 48, 96 ff. abuses of  107 n. 8 different bibles  112 of faith v. history  116 imagined coherency  111, 113 n. 16 as product of the discourse on religion  107 n. 7 Biblical World  15, 16 Bivins, Jason  32 Blanton, Ward  96, 101, 107, 107 n. 7 Boer, Roland  96, 100, 107, 114 Bolle, Kees  61, 71 Bourdieu, Pierre  46, 64

228 Braun, Willi  x, 18, 30–31, 47 n. 13, 49–50, 68, 72–74, 77, 80, 97, 113, 117 n. 20, 122, 145, 152 n. 14, 194 Brenner, Athalya  112 Buddhism  114 Bulletin of the Council of Societies for the Study of Religion  205, 206 n. 5 Bultmann, Rudolf  66, 85 Burnett, D. G.  185 Buxton, Richard  53 Cameron, Ron  70, 109, 131 Campbell, Joseph  59, 62 campus ministers  199 canon  23, 44, 46, 99, 103, 122 canonization  107 n. 7 formation  111 Capps, Walter  86 careful reading  129 Cassirer, Ernst  57, 87 catalog  103 categories folk  23, 32, 35 causality  43 n. 8 Certeau, Michel de  142, 194 charisma  122 childhood of the species  56 choice  82–83, 90, 128, 130, 132, 135–136, 163, 186, 191 Chomsky, Noam  74 Christianity  15 American  12–13, 48 definition of  105 early  119 ff. liberal  150 movement  127 origin of the term  134–135 primitive  82 scholar of  210 see also origins church and state  112 Church of Lakumi Babalu Aye Inc. and Ernesto Pichado v. City of Hialeah  89 n. 24 citation  122 citizenship  44 engaged  163 civility  49 civilized v. primitive  54–57

index Clark, Elizabeth  22 n. 3, 102 n. 2 class conflict  2 mobility  45 classification  9, 14, 51, 87, 97, 99, 156, 159, 185 climate change  176–177 climatology  177 close reading  113 Cobb, John  73 cognitive science and the study of religion  2, 21, 28 n. 12, 157 Cohen, Richard  202 collaboration  x, xii colonialism  54, 163 commodification  149, 180 comparative religion  14 comparison  1, 7, 23, 51, 77, 83, 110, 123, 135, 181, 200, 202 juxtaposition  81 Comstock, Gary  86 consequences  78, 83 n. 9, 92, 148 context  128 contingency  76, 90–92, 130, 148–149, 157, 181, 194 happenstance  76, 83, 83 n. 9 history as contingent  91 Council of Societies for the Study of Religion (cssr)  19 n. 2 critic v. caretaker  151 criticism v. critique  152 ff., 154 critique  107 n. 8 critical intelligence (thinking)  149, 163, 178, 180 default of  149 Critical Terms for Literary Studies  49 Critical Terms for Religious Studies  22, 48 Crossan, John Dominic  130 culture category  193, 209 material  6 visual  4 Culture on the Edge  ix–x, 96, 123, 135, 205 Cuthbertson, Ian  164 Danforth Foundation  198, 199 n. 3 data/datum  77, 86, 92, 163, 211–212

229

Index Davies, Philip  96, 102, 112 Davis, Charles  152 n. 15 Davis, Kim  145 Dawkins, Richard  109 Day, Matthew  22, 23 n. 4, 102, 117 n. 20 Dean, William  150 ff., 155 definition  2, 51, 181–182, 202 folk  2 theory in miniature  2 demarcation, politics of  158 see also private v. public Dennett, Daniel  109, 147, 155 Derrida, Jacques  44, 133, 142 description  1, 11, 33, 38, 71, 79, 89, 147, 149, 200, 202 v. analysis  38 first order  38 limits of  149 n. 8 thick  37 Desjardins, Michel  96 dialectics  150 ff. dialogue, interfaith/interreligious  5, 74, 170 n. 10 Diamond, Jared  83 n. 9 Dickey, Betty  196 n. 1, 204 difference  87 discourse  12, 24, 40, 68, 74, 134, 175 distortion  87 domestication  115 Doniger, Wendy  54, 60, 62–63 Doty, William  200, 201 Douglas, Mary  82, 82 n. 8, 88 Dundes, Alan Durkheim, Emile  42, 67–69, 88, 153 Eagleton, Terry  68, 194 eisegesis  104, 109 see also exegesis Eliade, Mircea  10, 33, 38 n. 1, 48, 60, 62, 79, 86, 86 n. 16, 97, 154–155, 170 n. 10, 173, 174 n. 13, 177, 210 Enlightenment, the  172 essentialism  10, 61, 128, 172, 197 n. 2 ethnography  1 Euhemerus  56 Eusebius  200 evidence  3, 4, 155 see also facts

exegesis  29, 35, 42, 42 n. 6, 104–105, 108–109, 112, 114–115, 131 atheist exegete  104 comparative  116 secular exegete  104 totalization  111 see also eisegesis exempli gratia (e.g.)  80, 86 as heuristic  84 experience  9–10, 12, 33–36, 45, 157, 171, 174 conservation of  174 n. 14 as contested  40 discourses on  175 immediate  57 lived  9, 37, 40 mystical  24 n. 5 original  178 as political  40 as private  178, 197 n. 2 production of  41 religious  14, 172 religious and aesthetic  171 ff. rhetoric of  39 unique  173 untidy  88 expertise, limits of  176, 180 explanation  7, 24, 30, 56, 202 as insufficient  174 see naturalism expert witness, scholar as  157 expression  42, 58, 171–172, 178–179 see also manifestation, private v. public externalization  6 fable  56 fabrication  2, 63 facts  77, 91, 142, 162, 177, 212 see also evidence faith  10, 12, 16, 33–36, 45, 166 as motivating  13 falsification  159 fallacy of misplaced authority  122 n. 2, 177 misplaced concreteness  122 familiarization  89 defamiliarization  89 Fasolt, Constantin  145 feeling  45, 172 Fernando, Mayanthi  32

230 fieldwork  45, 85–86 Finnegan, Eleanor  196, 201, 203 Fiorenza, Francis Schüssler  100, 109 n.12 Flood, Gavin  70 Fontenelle, Bernard de  57 Foucault, Michel  119, 123–124, 142 Fox, Michael V.  108 Fraikin, Daniel  96 Frankfort School  152 n. 15 Frazer, James G.  56, 86 had no method  86 n. 15 free market  44 Freud, Sigmund  58, 89, 92, 175 functionalism  119 future epic  68 historical  68 fundamentalism, to be resisted  108 Geist  133 Gellner, Ernest  142 genealogy  119, 134 general education (core curriculum)  163, 187, 204 generalization  83, 87, 87 n. 19, 105 n. 4, 134 good public  150 society  150 Green, Garrett  26–27 Green, Patrick  200 Griffin, David Ray  73 Guide to the Study of Religion  22, 49 ff., 119 structure of  50 Harris, Sam  109 Hartshorne, Charles  73 Havelock, Eric  142 Heathorn, Stephen  74 Hebrew Student  15 Heathenism, as dated category  156 hegemony  28, 30 Herder, Johann Gottfried  57 heritage  135, 186 see also tradition hermeneutics  10, 22, 24, 32, 37–38, 43, 62, 84 n. 12, 131 see also interpretation

index Hesiod  59, 146 Heyne, Christian Gottlob  56 hierophany  170 n. 10 Hinduism  98, 114, 132, 163, 211 historical-critical method  111 historical Jesus  126–127, 137 historicization  30, 152–153, 181 dehistoricize  194 historiography  81 n. 6, 121 history, academic discipline of  43 great man theory of  43 social history  43 see also contingency history of religions  24, 60, 71 Hobsbawm, Eric  74 homogenization  113 holy, the  49 n. 1, 173, 178 hope  46 Hughes, Aaron  17, 19, 21, 31, 42 n. 6 human condition  58, 70 estate  61 nature  62, 113 sciences  64, 153–154, 180 spirit  10, 105, 180 humanism  27, 61, 131 liberal  147 n. 4 new  154–155, 177 humanities  99, 126, 180 ff. as complicating  180 ff. crisis in  192 not taken seriously  171 relevance of  160 ff., 178, 180, 186, 189, 202, 205 Renaissance-inspired  185 skills v. content  160 see also critical intelligence (thinking) Hume, David  43 n. 8 hunch  32 ff., 36 ff., 84 n. 12 v. guess  37 irreducible  37 as poor analytic term  46 Hussain, Amir  166 ff., 166 n. 3, 170 n. 10, 182, 186 n. 19 id est (i.e.)  135 idealism (philosophical)  11, 27, 33 idealization  67 see also mythmaking

231

Index identification  x, 6, 117, 121, 134, 136, 138 Jungian  59 self-  106 identity  ix, 33–34, 36, 46, 49 n. 1, 63, 66, 74, 130, 134–135, 205–206 formation  96 n. 1, 106 see also Culture on the Edge ideology  67–69, 113 n. 16 appropriation  39 Marxist  154 v. science  150 n. 9, 151, 153 Ignatius of Antioch  134–135 imperialism  33 incongruity  70, 87–88 individualism  44–45 induction  1, 183 inference  11 Ingersoll, Julie  17, 19 insider/outsider problem  7, 158 Intellectualism  56, 60, 88, 119 Intelligent Design (id)  26, 32, 179 intentionality  12, 37, 44–45, 104, 117, 128, 138, 148, 179–181, 183, 186 authorial  104, 106, 113, 133 rhetoric of  108 see also author, death of interests  82, 91, 106 n. 6, 117–118, 129, 211–212 disinterested scholarship  150, 155, 158 see also objectivity International Association for the History of Religion (iahr)  1, 29, 143, 146 interpellation  42 interpretation  62, 65, 107, 142, 149, 155, 186, 202 abusive  107 n. 8 emancipatory  106–108, 116 see also hermeneutics introductory course  183, 191 intuition  172 counterintuitive  180 Islam  98, 114, 201 Mohammadism, as dated category  156 Muslim identity  42 scholar of  210 Jacobs, Steve L.  187, 202 Jaffee, Martin  196, 202, 205, 206 n. 5

James, William  44, 119, 171, 173, 174 n. 13 Jameson, Fredric  181 job interview  48 ff. market  212 search  209 ff. Journal of Religion  16, 26 Journal of the American Academy of Religion (jaar)  11, 28, 28 n. 11, 39 n. 3, 148, 165 ff. Joyce, Janet  50 Judaism  114 Jung, Carl  37, 59–60 Juschka, Darlene  73 justice  44 Kant, Immanuel  73 Kelley, Nicole  17, 20 King, Karen  22 n. 3, 102 n. 2 Kitagawa, Joseph  18–19, 79 Kitzmiller v. Dover  26 n. 10 Kloppenborg, John  131 knowledge commonsense  5, 43 folk  3, 156, 184 know thyself  184 Kristensen, W. Brede  147 n. 3 Lang, Andrew  56 language, as code system  118 Latour, Bruno  45 Lawrence, Bruce  52 Lawson, E. Thomas  17, 22 Lease, Gary  18, 66–67, 69, 72, 145 legitimization  150 Lehrich, Chris  75 Lévi-Strauss, Claude  59, 88–89 Levy-Bruhl, Lucien  142 liberal democracy  98, 157 Lily Foundation/Endowment  9, 13 limitation  79 Lincoln, Bruce  xii, 46, 53 n. 3, 66, 67, 121, 148 linguistics  87 Linville, Jim  96, 99 literacy cultural  163 religious  163 literature  193–194

232 Llewellyn, Jack  24 n. 5, 47 n. 13 Lloyd, G. E. R.  142 Lofton, Kathryn  32, 35 Logical Positivism  156 Long, Charles  61 Lopez, Donald  35, 38–40 Lynch v. Donnelly  89 n. 24 Machiavelli, Niccolo  157 Mack, Burton  65–66, 68, 71, 122, 131–132, 154 MacKay, Bruce  73 MacQueen, Graeme  70 magic contagious  122 sympathetic  122 manifestation  10, 42, 172, 197 n. 2 see also expression Marchand, Suzanne  22 n. 3, 102 n. 2 marginalization  97 self-  189 Martin, Craig  ix, 47 n. 13, 96, 135 n. 8 Martin, Luther H.  17, 22 Martin, Steve  125, 127, 135 Marx, Karl  69, 88, 100 Masuzawa, Tomoko  18, 77, 102 n. 2, 119, 125, 142, 163 mathematics  185 axioms  185 proofs  185 McDannell, Colleen  12–13 McMullin, Neil  73–74, 142 meaning  10, 12, 36–37, 42 n. 6, 44–45, 61, 74, 85, 89, 103–104, 117, 181, 186 non-religious in Bible studies  104 original  104, 106, 108, 115 n 17 public phenomenon  180 rhetoric of  108 memory, cultural  36 method  1, 6 equal opportunity  169, 175 and theory  26, 30 Method & Theory in the Study of Religion (mtsr)  ix, 17, 22, 29, 31–32, 48, 72, 74, 102, 109 n. 13, 131, 205 methodological agnosticism  149 methodology, defined  30 see also classification, comparison, description, exegesis, explanation,

index fieldwork, generalization, hermeneutics, historiography, induction, interpretation, morphology, observation, phenomenology of religion, redescription, reductionism, taxonomy, understanding Michaelson, Robert s.  86 Miller, Merrill  109, 131 Miller, Monica  ix, 32, 96, 123, 135 n. 8, 202 n. 4 minimally counter-intuitive  2 missionization  15, 19, 107 n. 8 modernity  98 modesty  186 Morgan, David  3–6, 8–9, 13 morphology  87 motive  78 Moxnes, Halvor  22 n. 3, 102 n. 2 Müller, F. Max  56, 111 mundane  194 Murphy, Tim  197, 201 mysticism, study of  24 myth  51, 52 ff., 121, 134, 182 as collective unconscious  59 demythologization  66, 85 and Euhemerist approach  60 as exemplary model  60 as expression of the sacred  61 and history of religions approach  60 as hero tale  56 ideology in narrative form  121 industry  55 mentality  57 mythos and logos  53–54 politics of  70 as pre-scientific explanation  56 and quest motif  59 redescribed  62 ff., 71 as religious experience  58 and ritual  61, 68 as sacred story  60 as social dreaming  58 structuralist studies of  59–60 mythification  64 see also naturalization mythmaking  67, 70, 120, 123 as ideology  67–68 see also social formation

233

Index nationalism  44, 68, 98, 116 n. 19, 157, 158, 190 conditions for  98 natural sciences  1 naturalism  24, 30 see explanation naturalization  43, 64, 68–69 see also ideology, mythification neurosis  58 Neusner, Jacob  86 neutrality, see objectivity new atheists  109 New Testament scholarship  80 n. 5, 96 ff., 119 ff., 131 Nietzshe, Friedrich  184 myth of the immaculate perception  184, 184 n. 18 Nix v. Hedden  184 Nones, the  123 normativity  153 North American Association for the Study of Religion (naasr)  17, 17 n. 1, 19, 22 ff., 102, 103 description  25 n. 7 founders  22 founding documents  25, 25 n. 7 history of  17–18 recommended name change  20 nostalgia  76 Numen  xii numinous, see holy, the objectivity  46, 147, 150, 153 observation  1 disinterested  3 pre-observation  6 O’Connell, Joe  166 n. 3 Ohnuma, Reiko  201 Old Testament Student  15 Old and New Testament Student  15 Olupona, Jacob  44 n. 10 Omer, Atalia  28 ontologization  132 ordinariness  64 origins  53, 56–57, 59, 70, 77, 81–82, 104, 118, 123–124, 137, 184, 198 as authorizing  54 Christian  x, 65, 81, 81 n. 6, 98, 127, 131–132, 136

as oxymoron  134 discourse on  128, 130, 139 displacement of  137 and end-times  70 monogenesis  122, 132 polygenesis  122, 132 as propaganda  135 quest  119, 120, 121 rhetoric of  108 see also meaning Orsi, Robert  19 n. 2, 49 n. 1, 164, 174, 174 n. 14, 175, 179 orthodoxy  108 Otto, Rudolf  39 n. 3, 49 n. 1, 171, 173, 179 n. 16 theorist of the holy  179 ownership, private  44 Oxtoby, Willard  5–7, 142, 166, 166 n. 3 paraphrase  38 see also description Pascal, Blaise  41 past archive of  163 documented  125 epic  68 historical  68 silent  125 peer review  170 fit, lack of  170 n. 12 Penner, Hans  82, 86 Penner, Todd  101, 107, 115–116 Pettazzoni, Raffaele  61 Pew Charitable Trust  45 phenomenology of religion  4, 10, 14, 27, 32, 37–38, 147 rebranded  8 philology  84 n. 12 piety, sentimentalization of  157 see also private v. public plagiarism  122 Plato  53–54, 73 pluralism  49 political theory  171 Popper, Karl  3, 100 postmodernism  26, 141 as sophistry  108 power  74 preparation evangelica  200

234 primitive thought  122 primordiality  62–63 private v. public  36, 38, 44, 97–98, 149, 158 political consequences of  157 problem of evil, see theodicy process philosophy  73 Process Studies  73 productivity  190 professionalism  176 professionalization  141, 199 Protestant seminary model  199 Prothero, Stephen  163 Proudfoot, Wayne  147 n. 4 psychology abnormal  175 folk  38, 179 public intellectual  149, 153 redefined  149 Pye, Michael  1–6 Ramey, Steven  ix, 96, 123, 135 n. 8, 201 Raphael, Rebecca  164 Rashke, Carl  153 rationalization  68, 88 redescription  x, 23, 51, 62–63, 71, 75, 87, 99, 103, 111, 123 of Christian origins  109, 109 n. 13 reductionism  3, 33, 37, 99 descriptive v. explanatory  147 n. 4 irreducible complexity  32, 179 see also Intelligent Design Reed, Randy  96, 117 n. 20 relic  3 religion adjective  35 baseball as  173 category  156 ff., 159, 184, 193 cultured despisers  153, 172 defined  84, 157 dominant assumptions in the study of  178–179 embodied  4, 9, 14, 27 as folk taxon  157 genealogy of  119 and hip hop  32–33, 35 indigenous  211 interpreting  26 lived  14, 27 material  4, 8–9, 12, 14, 27

index as modern invention  98 non-scientific category  113 plural  25 pluralism  15 primal  44 n. 10 singular  25 v. spirituality  172 subset of cultural practices  195, 197, 197 n. 2, 203 sui generis  210 understanding  26 world religions model  162–163 Religion Dispatches  44 n. 11 Religionswissenschaft  60 Religionsgeschichtliche Schule  1, 14 religiosity  25 representation  131 repression  58 response, see benediction, role at academic conferences  34 retrojection  132–134, 137–138 Reynolds, Charlie  199 rhetoric  14, 54, 65, 97, 108, 115, 142–143, 155–156, 188, 193 of excellence  178 sacred/profane as rhetoric pairing  97 social argumentation  63 Ricoeur, Paul  61 ritual  61–62, 89, 168 n. 7, 173 generates ideological foundations  41 see also Althusser, Louis liturgy  114 theory of  163 Roach, Catherine  201 Rubenstein, Mary-Jane  32–33, 35, 47 n. 13 Rudolph, Kurt  154–155 sacred, the  28, 61, 179 v. profane  97 v. secular  97 Saussure, Ferdinand, de  60, 85 savage philosopher  120 Schaeffer, Kurtis  79, 83 n. 10, 90, 201 Schleiermacher, Friedrich  172, 175 Schmid, Muriel  164 Schneider, Nathan  44 n. 11 science  155 definition  143 see also ideology v. science

235

Index Scott, Joan Wallach  35, 39–40, 74 secular/secularism  98–99, 115 Bible studies  22, 34, 42, 96 ff., 136 post-secular  97 self-consciousness  7–8, 46, 89, 91 self-evidency  65 self-reflexive see self-consciousness semiotics  43 n. 8 sentiments  6, 157 Seuss, Dr. (Theodore Geisel)  73, 145, 158 Sexton, John  173 Shakespeare, William  36, 163, 180 shared governance  187 Sharf, Robert  35, 39–40, 47 n. 13 Sharma, Arvind  44 n. 10 Sherwood, Yvonne  22 n. 3, 99, 102 n. 2 signification  6, 43 n. 8, 89, 103, 148–149, 182 economy of  67, 88–89, 163 Simmons, K. Merinda  ix, 28, 47 n. 13, 96, 135 n. 8, 171, 201, 203 simplification  171, 180 ff. euphemisms for  196 Slater, Peter  47 Smith, Jonathan Z.  x, xii, 2, 7–8, 16, 20 n. 2, 22–23, 28, 46, 67, 69, 72, 74–76, 77–95, 99–100, 102–103, 109, 110 ff., 122, 129–132, 135–136, 163–164, 182–183, 185, 191, 211 Canadian sect of  99 citing him as genuflection/ indulgence  84 choosing map over territory  87, 130, 130 n. 7, 132 interest in methodology  86 n. 15 list of publications  87 n. 17 persistent preoccupations  87 responses to  85 n. 13, 88 n. 22 teaching his work  79 ff., 80 n. 4, 83 n. 10, 90, 92 ff. see also signification, economy of Smith, Leslie Dorrough  ix, 96, 135 n. 8 Smith, Wilfred Cantwell  111, 166, 173, 175, 180, 182, 186 n. 19 Smith, William Robertson  168 n. 7 social capital  28 construction  63

democracy  131 formation  67, 69, 120–121, 158 see also mythmaking science  132 theory  209 society, theorizing  183 Society of Biblical Literature (sbl)  17, 17 n. 1, 20 n. 2, 22, 35, 50, 84, 96, 100, 102, 109–110, 112, 117 n. 20, 119, 123, 136, 137 n. 10 2008 presidential address  110 critique of  115 n. 17 sociology  64, 67, 99, 171 Socrates  138 Socratic method  184 soul  10 specialization  110, 177, 180 Spencer, Herbert  56, 88 Spong, John Shelby  52 stasis v. entropy  188 Stenström, Hanna  96, 104, 107 n. 8, 108 Stockton, Kathyryn  182 n. 17 Strauss, David Friedrich  121 Strenski, Ivan  29, 55, 152 n. 13 structuralism  59 structure  12, 45–46, 89, 105 n. 4, 117–118, 148–149, 163, 181, 191, 206 see also agency Studies in Religion  153 subjectification  41 see also interpellation Swift, Jonathan  22, 30 Tarantino, Quentin  78 Taves, Ann  129 taxonomy  87, 185, 210 Taylor, Mark C.  49 teleology  82, 123 Temenos  143, 145–146, 159 tenure  189 terrorist v. freedom fighter  185 text  194 theodicy  73, 75 redescribed  75 theology in the aar  19 n. 2 critical  152 n. 15 elite ritual specialist  114 and humanism  113, 143 as ideology  113 n. 16

236 theology (cont) v. religious studies  152, 152 n. 14 v. science  24, 104, 142 v. study of religion  104 theory  1, 6, 18, 131, 142, 154, 211 v. approaches  25 as critique  27, 30 theory (cont.) endured  3 as explanation  27, 30 as is fact  183 limits of  18 of religion  179 technical usage  179 n. 16 testable  27 n. 10 as tool  3–4, 6–7 vague usage  179 various usages of  25 ff. as wonking  3–6, 8, 29 therapeutic, scholarship as  175–176 Thompson, E.P.  74, 133 time travelling  104, 180 totalization  68–69 Touna, Vaia  ix, 47 n. 13, 96, 117 n. 20, 135 n. 8 tradition  44, 46, 91, 135, 186, 191 formation  111, 121 rhetoric of  115 translation  87, 186 Troeltsch, Ernst  1, 14–16, 20 n. 2 Trost, Ted  196, 201

index Tylor, E. B.  56, 88, 120 understanding  186 universalization  68, 129, 137–138, 157 university corporatization of  189 public  189, 191 verificationalist criterion  156 see also falsification Veyne, Paul  65 victimization  190 Wach, Joachim  58, 61 Weber, Max  1–2, 75 Weinberger, Leon  200 White, Hayden  83, 119 Whitehead, Alfred North  73, 142 Wiebe, Donald  17, 20, 20 n. 2, 22, 31, 72–74, 113, 140 ff., 145–159 Wiggins, James  17 Williams, Melanie  145 Wissenschaft  156 see also science Wittgenstein, Ludwig  39–40 Wolf, Naomi  52 world religions approach  16 Žižek, Slavoj  39, 41 Zoloth, Laurie  176