Cultural Approaches to Studying Religion: An Introduction to Theories and Methods 9781350023734, 9781350023772, 9781350023765

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Contributors
Introduction
Why study religion?
Where did the study of religion come from?
Where is the study of religion going?
The relevance of theory
Why these theorists?
Reflecting power dynamics
Challenging the field of religious studies
Structure of the volume
Comparative approaches
Examining particularities
Expanding boundaries
Part I Comparative Approaches
1 The Bounds of Hierarchy: Mary Douglas
Biography and historical context
Key writings and signature approaches
Purity and danger
Grid/group typology
Ritual and meaning
Risk and organizations
Anthropology of the Bible
Analysis of Douglas’s work
Critique of Douglas’s work
Suggested further reading
2 Feminist Textual Critique: Phyllis Trible
Biography and historical context
Key writings and signature approaches
Rhetorical criticism
Feminist criticism
Christian theology
Analysis of Trible’s work
Rhetorical criticism
Feminist criticism
Theology
Critique of Trible’s work
Suggested further reading
3 Myth and the Religious Imaginary: Wendy Doniger
Biography and historical context
Key writings and signature approaches
Doniger’s early phase: The foundations of her comparative approach
Doniger’s toolbox for studying religion
Doniger on gender and identity
Doniger as translator
Doniger as editor
Critical reception of Doniger’s work
Concluding thoughts
Suggested further reading
4 Ritual and Belief: Catherine Bell
Biography and historical context
Key writings and signature approaches: Thought and action
Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice
Ritual as discourse
Ritual as strategic practice
Belief and believing
Critical reception of Bell’s work
Suggested further reading
Part II Examining Particularities
5 Womanist Religious Interpretation: Alice Walker
Biography and historical context
Key writings and signature approaches
Womanist and womanism
Motherhood and the Grandmother spirit
Activism: From womanist writer to Grand Mother
The Grand Mother and Buddhism
Critical reception of Walker’s work
Womanist thought: Womanist and feminist responses
Reception of Walker’s activism
Reception of Walker’s Buddhism
Conclusion
Suggested further reading
6 Signifying Religion in the Modern World: Charles H. Long
Biography and historical context
Key writings and signature approaches
Combining theology, the academic study of religion, and semiotics
The Black religious experience
Significations
An epistemology of cultural contact and conquest
A theology of freedom
Analysis of Long’s work
Race and religion
Challenging academic compartmentalization
Critique of Long’s work
Suggested further reading
7 Gender and Materiality: Caroline Walker Bynum
Biography and historical context
Key writings and signature approaches
The study of gender in the Middle Ages: Jesus as Mother
Historicizing women’s religious experience: Holy Feast and Holy Fast
Bodies that matter as change, fragmentation, paradox: Christian Materiality
Analysis of Bynum’s work
Critique of Bynum’s work
Suggested further reading
Part III Expanding Boundaries
8 Mestiza Language of Religion: Gloria Anzaldúa
Biography and historical context
Key writings and signature approaches
Mestiza|nepantla
Trauma|wound
Spirituality|shaman
Critical reception of Anzaldúa’s work
Suggested further reading
9 Performative, Queer Theories for Religion: Judith Butler
Biography and historical context
Key writings and signature approaches
Gender is as gender does: Butler’s performative turn
The normative as performative
Changing the system: Performativity and anti-normativity
Critical reception of Butler’s work
Butler’s impact on religious studies
Suggested further reading
10 Disrupting Secular Power and the Study of Religion: Saba Mahmood
Biography and historical context
Key writings and signature approaches
Ethics, politics, and agency
What is political?
Logics of piety
Imagining offense beyond the law: The limits of secular semiotic ideology
The paradoxes of political secularism
Secularity, history, and hermeneutics
Critical reception of Mahmood’s work
Suggested further reading
Notes
Introduction
3 Myth and the Religious Imaginary: Wendy Doniger
6 Signifying Religion in the Modern World: Charles H. Long
7 Gender and Materiality: Caroline Walker Bynum
8 Mestiza Language of Religion: Gloria Anzaldúa
9 Performative, Queer Theories for Religion: Judith Butler
Bibliography
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Additional works by Wendy Doniger
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Index

Citation preview

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Cultural Approaches to Studying Religion

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ALSO AVAILABLE FROM BLOOMSBURY A Beginner’s Guide to the Study of Religion, Bradley L. Herling The Bloomsbury Reader in Cultural Approaches to the Study of Religion, edited by Sarah J. Bloesch and Meredith Minister The Bloomsbury Reader in Religion, Sexuality, and Gender, edited by Donald L. Boisvert and Carly Daniel-​Hughes The Study of Religion, George D. Chryssides and Ron Geaves

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Cultural Approaches to Studying Religion An Introduction to Theories and Methods Edited by Sarah J. Bloesch and Meredith Minister

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Copyright © Sarah J. Bloesch, Meredith Minister and Contributors 2019 Sarah J. Bloesch and Meredith Minister have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Terry Woodley Cover image: Street graffiti, Lower Haight, San Francisco, USA © Jason Langley / Alamy Stock Photo All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-​party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bloesch, Sarah J., editor. Title: Cultural approaches to studying religion : an introduction to theories and methods / edited by Sarah J. Bloesch and Meredith Minister. Description: 1 [edition]. | New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018009116 | ISBN 9781350023741 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781350023734 (hpod) Subjects: LCSH: Religion–Methodology. | Religion and culture. Classification: LCC BL41 .C85 2018 | DDC 200.7–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018009116 ISBN:HB: 978-​1-​3500-​2373-​4 PB: 978-​1-​3500-​2374-​1 ePDF: 978-​1-​3500-​2376-​5 eBook: 978-​1-​3500-​2375-​8 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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To the contributors who enthusiastically agreed that this project was a necessary intervention. Thank you for your time and your energy. This could not have been done without you.

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Contents

Acknowledgments  ix List of Contributors  xi

Introduction  Sarah J. Bloesch and Meredith Minister  1

Part One  Comparative Approaches  1 The Bounds of Hierarchy: Mary Douglas  Kathryn Lofton  17 2 Feminist Textual Critique: Phyllis Trible Rhiannon Graybill  33 3 Myth and the Religious Imaginary: Wendy Doniger Laurie Patton  49 4 Ritual and Belief: Catherine Bell  Kevin Lewis O’Neill  63

Part Two  Examining Particularities  5 Womanist Religious Interpretation: Alice Walker Carolyn M. Jones Medine  77 6 Signifying Religion in the Modern World: Charles H. Long  Juan M. Floyd-​Thomas  93 7 Gender and Materiality: Caroline Walker Bynum Jessica A. Boon  111

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Contents

Part Three  Expanding Boundaries  8 Mestiza Language of Religion: Gloria Anzaldúa Joseph Winters  127 9 Performative, Queer Theories for Religion: Judith Butler  Ellen T. Armour  143 10 Disrupting Secular Power and the Study of Religion: Saba Mahmood  SherAli Tareen  155 Notes  173 Bibliography  177 Index  197

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Acknowledgments

From the moment we began dreaming of this volume in 2014 over Meredith’s kitchen table while Sarah was visiting until its submission in 2017, crafting this volume has been an enormous undertaking that would not have been possible without the support of our families, friends, colleagues, and institutions. Our partners, also both scholars of religion, were the first to support our dream and offer helpful insights as we began to outline our vision. They have continued to support us throughout this project, making it possible for us to be in the same place when critical steps in the project required us to have more extended meetings and edit endless drafts of our work. Julie Mavity Maddalena provided consistent friendship throughout the project. When we presented our idea to Kathryn Lofton at AAR in 2015, she became an immediate supporter and helped direct us to Bloomsbury and the editorial assistance of Lalle Pursglove, with whom it has been an absolute pleasure to work. We also appreciate Lucy Carroll’s guiding hand in all details, great and small. Their excitement, insight, and support has shaped this project and helped bring it to fruition. We received tireless support from a dedicated group of readers and conversation partners who read drafts of the introduction and thoughtfully engaged the state of theory in religious studies: Kevin Minister, Jes Boon, Rhiannon Graybill, and Jill DeTemple. We thank them and the anonymous readers for their insights and work on this volume. We began enlisting contributors shortly after meeting with Bloomsbury and were overwhelmed by their positive reception, and it is to them that we dedicate this work. On March 16, 2017, just before our April 1 deadline for a first round of submissions, Meredith was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer and immediately began treatment, which involved a surgery that her medical oncologist later deemed “aggressive and risky,” followed by six months of chemotherapy. When she received the diagnosis, one of her first questions (which she reactively asked a very patient gastroenterologist) was, am I  going to be able to finish the books I  have under contract? As she sat with a grim prognosis in the short week before surgery, she decided that her final acts might be to finish her current book projects. This decision put an immense amount of strain on the people around her (including Sarah and the contributors, who we asked to contribute their chapters so that Meredith could work on editing them before becoming worn down by the final rounds of chemo).

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Acknowledgments

This project would not have been possible without the support Meredith received through treatment from Sarah, from Meredith’s and her partner’s extended families, from her friends, from an extended network of colleagues, and from colleagues, students, and administrators at Shenandoah University. A few special mentions for unquantifiable support go to her partner, Kevin Minister, friends who drove her to chemo when Kevin was out of town, Andrea Smith and Dana Baxter, Sarah, of course, who arranged her own working schedule around Meredith’s treatment, Meredith’s parents, grandmother, and aunt, H.  D.  and Kay Williams, Glenda Cooper, and Ladonna Cooper, her in-​laws Andy and Becky Minister, her brother-​in-​law Stephen Minister and his family, Justin Allen for being an information node, relieving Meredith of the responsibility, and, finally, to everyone who laughed at her jokes about death instead of staring at her with horror (an especially high mention to folks who crafted new jokes). A few local businesses also supported Meredith during her treatment, including Shenandoah University, the Hideaway Café, and Shine Yoga. This list leaves out so many who sent care packages and helpful readings (usually feminist authors writing about illness and speculative fiction), brought food, vacuumed, did laundry and dishes, walked the dog, mowed the lawn, took over classes and committee work for Meredith and her partner (including finishing program planning for a conference committee they were on), organized fundraisers and marches, wrote cards and jokes for Meredith to read during chemo, and generally managed things that Meredith ignored to work on this volume. While finishing the manuscript, Meredith had the opportunity to go on two retreats for cancer patients. The first was sponsored by Mary’s Place by the Sea, a house in Ocean Grove, New Jersey where women with cancer gather near the ocean for spa-​like healing services including massage, gentle yoga, and prepared meals. The other retreat was sponsored by First Descents, an organization that arranges adventure programming for young adults with cancer. At both retreats, Meredith met amazing people who helped her manage many of the side effects of the treatment. These organizations are doing incredible work, and Meredith wishes to thank them for the retreats and would like to promote the work that they do to other women and/​or young adults with cancer. She also wishes to thank the people who accompanied her on these retreats and their willingness to share laughter and grief, often at the same time. For Sarah it is only appropriate to begin and end acknowlegdments where this project did, with enormous graditude to Meredith for our shared ongoing discussions, work, negotiations, visions, questions, friendship, and creativity (you’re the J to my P). Sarah would also like to thank her friends, colleagues, and students at Elon University who have provided a rich opportunity to discuss, debate, and refine the role of theory and methods in the discipline and the classroom. Further, Sarah cherishes her time with the Duke/​UNC Theory Reading Group and the intellectual rigor and friendship it provides—​these are the settings to which an academic aspires. Finally, Sarah would also like to thank her family for their love and support through the many stages that come before a book ever reaches publication.

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Contributors

Ellen T.  Armour is the E.  Rhodes and Leona B.  Carpenter Chair in Feminist Theology Associate Professor  at Vanderbilt University. Her recent publications include Signs and Wonders:  Theology after Modernity, Deconstruction, Feminist Theology, and The Problem of Difference:  Subverting the Race/​Gender Divide, and Bodily Citations: Religion and Judith Butler (with Susan St. Ville). Sarah J. Bloesch is Visiting Assistant Professor in Religious Studies at Elon University. She has published in Culture and Religion and Theology and Sexuality. She is working on her first monograph, tentatively titled Salvation of Desire:  Melancholic Bodies, Deified Flesh. Jessica A. Boon is Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina-​Chapel Hill. Her recent publications include Mystical Science of the Soul: Medieval Cognition in Bernardino de Laredo’s Recollection Method and Mother Juana de la Cruz 1481–​1534: Visionary Sermons (with Ronald Surtz). Juan M. Floyd-​Thomas is Associate Professor of African American Religious History at Vanderbilt University. His recent publications include Liberating Black Church History: Making It Plain, The Origins of Black Humanism in America: Reverend Ethelred Brown and the Unitarian Church, and The Altars Where We Worship:  The Religious Significance of Popular Culture (with Stacey Floyd-​Thomas and Mark G. Toulouse). Rhiannon Graybill is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Rhodes College. Her most recent publications are Are We Not Men?:  Unstable Masculinity in the Hebrew Prophets, The Bloomsbury Reader in Women in the Bible (with Lynn Huber), and Rape Culture and Religious Studies: Critical and Pedagogical Engagements (with Beatrice Lawrence and Meredith Minister). Kathryn Lofton is Professor of Religious Studies, American Studies, History and Divinity at Yale University. Her most recent publications are Consuming Religion, Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon, and Women’s Work: An Anthology of African-​American Women’s Historical Writings from Antebellum America to the Harlem Renaissance (with Laurie F. Maffly-​Kipp).

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Carolyn M. Jones Medine is Professor of Religion at the Institute of African American Studies at the University of Georgia. Her publications include Contemporary Perspectives on Religions in Africa and the African Diaspora (with Ibigbolade S. Aderibigbe and Hans D. Seibel). Meredith Minister is Assistant Professor of Religion and Affiliated Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at Shenandoah University. Her publications include Trinitarian Theology and Power Relations: God Embodied, Rape Culture on Campus, and Rape Culture and Religious Studies: Critical and Pedagogical Engagements (with Rhiannon Graybill and Beatrice Lawrence). Kevin Lewis O’Neill is Professor in the  Department for the Study of Religion, Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. His most recent publications are Secure the Soul: Christian Piety and Gang Prevention in Guatemala, City of God: Christian Citizenship in Postwar Guatemala, and Securing the City:  Neoliberalism, Space, and Insecurity in Postwar Guatemala (with Kedron Thomas). Laurie Patton is President at Middlebury College. Her most recent publications include Bringing the Gods to Mind: Mantra and Ritual in Early Indian Sacrifice, Myth as Argument:  The Brhaddevata as Canonical Commentary in Religiongeschichtliche Versuche und Vorarbeiten, and The Bhagavad Gita (with Simon Brodbeck). SherAli Tareen is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His publications include Imagining the Public in Modern South Asia (with Brannon D.  Ingram and J.  Barton Scott). His forthcoming monograph is titled Contesting Muhammad in Modernity: Tradition, Reform, Innovation. Joseph Winters is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Duke University. His publications include Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress.

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Introduction Sarah J. Bloesch and Meredith Minister

During the summer of 2016, authorities at some French beaches began banning the burkini, a bathing suit designed by Aheda Zanetti in 2003 and worn by some Muslim women. This suit, which covers the whole body with the exception of the hands, feet, and face, was designed to marry conservative Muslim dress practices with the fashion needs of a contemporary, sporty Muslim woman who swims in public. The ban on the burkini followed two sets of related French laws. The first set of laws, passed in 2004, banned headscarves, long A-​line skirts, and “conspicuous” religious attire in public schools. The second set of laws, passed in 2014, banned the burka (a full body covering) and the niqab (a veil that covers the whole face minus the eyes).1 These laws are supposed to protect secular social order by discouraging or prohibiting any clothing, symbol, or ornamentation regardless of tradition but, as many scholars have argued, the idea of secularism itself relies on Christian assumptions. France, after all, continues to fund the maintenance of churches built prior to the 1905 law separating church and state, a law that made religious buildings the property of the state (Prélot 2015: 75–​82). This opening vignette demonstrates how we cannot study religion as some distinct entity that remains isolated from culture. As scholars suggest, France’s idea of secularism is an incomplete (and impossible) break from religion that hides assumptions of Christian superiority and Muslim inferiority (Fernando 2014). And so we ask: How do we negotiate everyday religious practices—​practices that often occur in public spaces? How can we make laws in a religiously diverse world? Why is a burkini considered religious in the first place when a bikini is not? In other words, how do we define what counts as religious and what does not? These are the questions we face every day, both as individuals and as communities. Our answers to these questions often inscribe value-​laden judgments that play out through regulations of women’s bodies and acceptable cultural practices, including ritual-​like aspects of how behavior at the beach is to properly unfold. These prohibitions and the responses to them reflect a tension at the heart of studying religion:  the tension between assuming that religion is only a private

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Cultural Approaches to Studying Religion

matter and realizing that religion continues to shape how we organize our social and public lives together. In brief, these bans help us see ways of being religious that tend not to be recognized as religious; they ask us to examine the ways religion is always embedded in specific cultural contexts. While the French laws appear to impose a religiously neutral world, these laws, instead, highlight the inability of creating a public without religion. The French laws are not only banning certain ways of being religious, they are also imposing parameters for acceptable ways to do religion. Related to the idea that religion is something some individuals have while others do not, another common assumption about religion in the United States and western Europe is that religion has no role in public life. The reasoning here assumes that if religion can be confined to individuals, it can be kept out of public life. This notion connects to the idea enshrined in the first amendment to the US Constitution that no one religious tradition will be privileged—​commonly referred to as the separation of church and state. We are reminded of it whenever we talk about religion in public schools; yet US political officers take their oaths on the Bible or, as in the case of Tulsi Gabbard, the first Hindu woman to be elected to Congress in the United States, on the Bhagavad Gita, or Keith Ellison on Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an. Although the assertion that religion remains separate from political life often plays a part in conversations about religion, it fails to make sense of how religion operates not only in the United States and in western Europe but also around the globe. More than anything else, the separation of church and state offers a goal or an ideal, something to which the United States and many countries in western Europe have aspired, yet which does not describe reality. The idea that church and state are completely separate cannot account for the complexities in the relationship among politics, culture, and religion. We need a complex understanding of religion in order to understand why we tend to identify religion as present in some places—​such as wearing the burkini or swearing in on the Bhagavad Gita—​but do not see religion manifesting in other instances, such as swearing to tell the truth in a courtroom on the Bible. This allows an exploration of the theories of religion that support as well as challenge understandings of the world as neatly divided into secular and religious spheres. A complex understanding of religion also creates space to explore how religion intersects with gender, race, and colonialism. If, as religious studies scholars have argued, secularism is not the end of religion or the mark of religion as private but, rather, the multiplication of ways of being religious, then we must begin to recognize the many unexpected forms in which religion occurs (see Asad 2003; Lofton 2011; Seales 2013). Religion is not confined to spaces designated as religious but, rather, proliferates into our governments, sports arenas, exercise rooms, and even in the food we choose to eat or not eat. This volume provides access to recent theories of religion that are most useful for understanding and engaging religion.

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Introduction

Why study religion? As the French and US examples demonstrate, religion has not disappeared from our world (Berger 1967). Because navigating religious difference is important in a globalizing world, students need to be equipped with the most up-​to-​date cultural approaches to studying religion that most accurately describe religion in a globalizing world and enable us to better engage religion today. Former US Secretary of State John Kerry insists that an education in comparative religion is more useful for international affairs than an education in political science. As he has said, “Religious actors and institutions are playing an influential role in every region of the world and on nearly every issue central to U.S. foreign policy” (Kerry 2015). If it is the case that religion matters for nearly every issue central to US foreign policy, then the study of religion prepares us to understand and live well in a globally connected world. While most public high schools in the United States do not offer entire courses in religion, students are nonetheless taught a basic set of assumptions about religion in the United States. As the debate over the burkini demonstrates, whether it feels like it or not, we are already making assumptions about religion because we are part of societies that make collective decisions about religion. If you are reading this for a class, you might take a minute to consider your own assumptions about religion and where they come from. What is religion? Is it a set of beliefs, practices, or both? Where do you see religion? In religious buildings? On the floor of Congress during legislative debates? Who is religious? Are you religious? Do you have religious grandparents, other family members, or friends? What does it mean to be religious? Can you be spiritual but not religious? What does that mean? Your answers to these questions describe what you think about religion. They also serve as a starting point for the study of religion because the answers locate all of us within personal and social contexts that have influenced how we understand religion. You might also start to ask yourself how you know what you know about religion. This consideration is as important as the answers to the questions above. Can you describe why you answered the questions above as you did? Where and from whom did you learn how to think about religion? Answering these questions begins to develop reflexivity or an awareness of the context out of which your own perspective develops and the limitations of that perspective. Once we start looking for and identifying our assumptions about religion and where those assumptions come from (e.g., family, media, political institutions), we may start to see religion in unexpected places. The study of religion requires us to be aware of our own presumptions about religion before attempting to understand the religiousness of others. For many in the United States and western Europe, foremost among assumptions taught about religion is the idea that religion is a property of individuals. We might think about having to choose our own religious beliefs and practices or about

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statements such as “you’re entitled to your beliefs but I  believe this . . .” We could also think about how people are identified in relation to their perceived proximity to religion in claims such as “she’s so religious.” These statements reflect a commonly held assumption that religion is something an individual has or does not have and some have more than others. Perhaps we also think that religion is an encounter of an individual with something otherworldly or at least unexplainable. These questions suggest that we need better theories of religion. The theorists in this volume take differing stances on whether something supernatural, otherworldly, or unexplainable needs to be present when discussing and defining religion. They also respond differently to whether someone can “own” or “possess” religion individually. Yet each of them understands cultural influences to be integral to shaping not only the production of religion but also the study of religion. These inklings that religion matters suggest that there is much promise and potential in the study of religion. Relying on individualistic assumptions about religion fails to make sense of how religion operates in everyday encounters that, in fact, profoundly shape how people eat, dress, work, and express love. What marks a decision to dress by covering skin as religious while a decision to dress with skin showing appears to be neutral? The study of religion helps us answer this question (and others) and is, therefore, indispensable for understanding our past, our present, and our future together.

Where did the study of religion come from? Although the study of religion contains much promise for navigating a religiously complex world, as a discipline it developed from Western colonialism. It is important to know where something comes from, a history of how it developed, so we can then decide how to proceed in the present. Beginning in the nineteenth century, scholars from the inception of the discipline conducted their work to order the world’s religious traditions. This produced the template for separating “world religions” into the familiar categories of “Christianity,” “Judaism,” “Islam,” “Buddhism,” and “Hinduism.” This template resulted in a hierarchy that located traditions according to each tradition’s presumed moral, cultural, and evolutionary superiority, culminating with Christianity (Smith 1998). In addition to assuming that religious traditions could be organized based on which ones were better than others, the organization of religious traditions also depended on assumptions of acceptable or normal behavior. In this sense, Christianity became the baseline for what was assumed to be normal religion. Religious traditions could then be ordered according to their proximity to the norm of Christianity. The categorizing of religious traditions in a way that

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Introduction

consistently placed Christianity as a superior form of religion both resulted from and perpetuated assumptions of Christian superiority in the academic study of religion (Daggers 2010). In the nineteenth century, the study of isolated “world” religions began to shift to a geographical approach, which explored the customs and people of distinct regions, including South Asian traditions or the religions of the Americas (Masuzawa 2005). This development resulted from the plurality of ways of being religious within umbrella traditions (e.g., Egypt’s Coptic Christianity looks very different from a Sunday morning at a US mega-​church, but both are understood to share something that can be described as “Christian”). Further, it was often understood as a turn away from Christian-​centric and Euro-​centric visions of the world. Scholars hoped that this turn to geographically based, social–​scientific data gathering would function to distinguish the study of religious data from the universalizing claims of Christian theology. While promising to be a progressive move toward recognizing religious diversity, the study of religion in geographic terms recreated a version of the world as divided along an East/​West fault line. This reconfiguration, which still reproduced colonial interests, perpetuated dichotomous understandings of the world that pitted West against East and often assumed Western traditions to be better than Eastern traditions (Said 1978). The scholars in this volume offer theories that challenge and complicate these Christian or Western assumptions. Despite an attempted correction in the direction of scholarship, Christian theological assumptions again supported the foundations of the study of religion even though theorists of religious studies often claimed to be operating an objective, nonideological study (McCutcheon 2012). The embedding of Christian claims in the discipline of religious studies haunts attempts to distinguish the disciplines of religious studies and Christian theology (Masuzawa 2005). Traces of these influences remain in the controversies around the burkini. We hear the anger and fear in statements such as when the then-​prime minister of France Manuel Valls drew from ideals of white, Western feminism and democracy to argue that the swimwear indicated “the enslavement of women,” saying that it “is not compatible with the values of France” and that “the nation must defend itself ” (Editorial Board 2016). In such rhetorically and emotionally charged debates, scholars of religious studies need resources to work through the layers of gendered, racialized, colonial, and religious assumptions to respond to, and not merely reproduce, histories of power. This is particularly true whenever we focus on theories and methods for the study of religion. Thus, we present theories here that equip us to read between the lines of such statements, identify the prevailing assumptions (of both ourselves and others), and decide how to analyze the confluence of religious and cultural forces. This volume asserts that there is no neutral study of religion.2 The myth of neutrality enshrined in the nineteenth-​and twentieth-​century scholarship and found

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in public/​private debates makes things that might be questioned appear normal and serves to hide bias. Rather, this collection offers a direction for the study of religion that does not depend on the false choice between neutrality and bias or on the false choice between objectivity and subjectivity. This volume presents scholarship within the trajectory that says we should look for nuance and ambivalence within and across religious traditions and practices. Religiously complex times call for theoretically sophisticated tools.

Where is the study of religion going? Scholars and non-​scholars alike have never settled on a single definition of religion—​they have produced long running debates about whether certain rituals, stories, and relationships should be considered “religious” or “nonreligious” or where such activities are “appropriately” said to take place. Further, debates about religion change when placed in a globalized and globalizing context where flows of people—​whether forced or chosen—​produce a mixing of languages, customs, foods, ideas, histories, and resources. Again, the expectations of beach attire and activities, whether they are enforced by dominant notions of leisure or law, reveal this confluence of culture, religion, expectation, and strife. This volume approaches the study of religion in a moment when the assumptions of communally based religious identity seem to be loosening. We can see this loosening in shifting terms—​for example, spiritual but not religious—​or globalization processes. In spite of this loosening, religion simultaneously exerts a much stronger political force than was predicted by scholars of religious studies (e.g. Peter Berger) who assumed religion would become obsolete as an important factor in public and private life. The concept of “religion” has a history of disciplinary development that is inextricably linked with the changing understanding of “culture.” Although defining culture seems like it should be self-​ evident, religious studies scholar Tomoko Masuzawa explains different meanings of the term “culture.” Initially, scholars exclusively equated culture with the concept of European “high culture,” associated with the grand endeavors of the elite, such as performing opera, writing symphonies, and commissioning masters to paint (Masuzawa 1998). However, according to Masuzawa, even though understandings of culture have shifted over several centuries, this first way of conceptualizing culture remains ingrained in scholarly assumptions and maintains hierarchies of value—​highbrow, civilized, proper, and official still being prized as “better” or “more advanced” than the lowbrow, primitive, vernacular, and noninstitutional. This led to the emergence of cultural theories, which sought to make these binaries such as good/​bad, primitive/​civilized, east/​west, and male/​ female visible and open to debate (Masuzawa 1998: 72).

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This book resides within the broader study of cultural theory; these theories are used to explore the mechanisms and histories of the religion/culture intertwining, that has produced, categorized, and valued some traditions over others. As we have insisted previously, the choices and methods of how we study religion and culture are not value-​free and its production and investigation are not separate from the moral, intellectual, and practical issues of the world. Cultural theory does not just assert “everything is culture”; rather, it investigates why and how social structures have come about. Cultural theory’s attention to unexamined hierarchies and binaries could help one French mayor, for example, who could not quite articulate why he felt uncomfortable with Muslim women who are fully covered at the beach. Seeing a woman wearing a burka he reflected: “It was a beautiful, warm, sunny day . . . We are in a small town and the beach is a small, family-​friendly place . . . [and it is not] what one normally expects from a beachgoer” (Rubin 2016). Cultural theory examines how he conflates what he assumes to be “natural” or “normal” for a small town with secularism, or a bland cultural Christianity; it explores his reaction to the presence of alterity in the form of gendered, perhaps racialized, religious others and what that reveals about his own relationship to culture, religion, and the concepts of sameness and difference. Cultural theory asks why the French mayor believes that the only way to enjoy a sunny day is by wearing shorts and a t-​shirt or a bikini. Recent developments in the study of religion offer theories that challenge the centrality of Europe and Christianity while also accounting for religious difference. These theories also attempt to account for the histories of gender and racial superiority in the study of religion. The theories described in this volume attend to multiple perspectives on the study of religion, a multiplicity that creates nuance and empowers students to navigate religious difference. These theories help explain why culturally embedded religious activities such as myth, ritual, and modesty codes continue to be important in our fast-​paced world. The study of religion remains critically important for understanding the past and our present realities, and for helping shape the possibilities of our shared futures.

The relevance of theory Theory is the set of tools that leads us into inquiry. It takes what seems to be “natural,” “given,” or “self-​evident” and asks about its constitution and its history. Theory is a term that is often used and yet difficult to limit to one easy definition due to its long history and entanglement with myriad disciplines, including philosophy, literary criticism, and historical studies. In a general sense, theories provide an intentional way of looking at specific contexts, such as texts, communities, actions, sayings, and beliefs. Scholars use different theories to form questions that emerge from a specific starting point. Gayle Rubin, theorist of gender, sexuality, and literature,

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says: “Whenever we look at anything we are already making decisions at some level about what constitutes the ‘seeable,’ and those decisions affect how we interpret what it is that we ‘see’ ” (Rubin and Butler 1994). For example, Charles Long asks scholars to “see” religious practices not through European categories or voices but to hear explanations and interpretations from those who practice. Philosopher and feminist Sara Ahmed asks us to think of theory as a context-​specific endeavor that relates each of us to what we study: “Orientations shape not only how we inhabit space, but how we apprehend this world of shared inhabitance, as well as ‘who’ or ‘what’ we direct our energy and attention toward” (Ahmed 2006: 3). Our starting points matter. The questions we bring to the inquiry matter. Whether we believe we know where we are going to end up influences the trajectory and assumptions of a study. Theories, methods, and approaches are tools that lead us into, around, away from, and through contexts, depending on when and how they are used. Black feminist bell hooks writes of “theory as a liberatory practice,” explaining that she “came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend—​to grasp what was happening around and within me” (hooks 1994: 59). If a theory can be both an explanatory framework and a method of grasping, inquiring, and comprehending, then creating new theories, which provide new insights and outlooks, can nuance and change the questions we ask. The terms theories, methods, and approaches are often used interchangeably in the humanities. Perhaps we conceptualize the distinctions more easily in science, which seems to more clearly distinguish between the theory—​what an investigator hopes to prove or disprove (like the theory of relativity)—​and the methods are the means an investigator uses to carry out the experiment (the physical machinery and math necessary). Yet even these distinctions do not quite hold, according to theoretical physicist Karen Barad, who argues that the questions we ask provide different imaginations of what we might pursue, which in turn shape the questions we bring, which reconceptualize instrument usage, which offer different views, and so on (Barad 2007). Rubin, Long, Ahmed, hooks, and Barad suggest that theories both emerge from and shape everyday encounters. Following in this tradition that connects theory and practice, the theorists in this volume offer resources for understanding the ways identity, experience, structural power, and relationships affect our life together.

Why these theorists? While many Introduction to Religious Studies classes concentrate on academic forefathers such as Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, and Mircea Eliade, the field of Religious Studies as an interdisciplinary discipline has been profoundly shaped in the second half of the twentieth century by questions of cultural theory. These questions have been articulated by leading scholars in a

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range of disciplines from anthropology to history to philosophy to cultural studies. In this volume we present ten crucial figures who have been influential in cultural theory: Mary Douglas, Phyllis Trible, Wendy Doniger, Catherine Bell, Alice Walker, Charles Long, Carolyn Walker Bynum, Gloria Anzaldúa, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood. The methods of studying religion have not been settled. In this volume, we have scholars who perform field work, read premodern texts for cultural content, construct philosophical notions of the individual, and highlight the use of autobiography and narrative in research. With forces such as globalization, social media, and rapidly occurring migration patterns, it is now more important than ever to hear from theorists who are thinking through the nuances and complexities of social and religious life. Instead of following the assumptions of our so-​called academic forefathers, we include theorists who attempt to study religion with an awareness of how power operates to center some people and marginalize others. By foregrounding questions of power in our choices of the theorists in this volume, we question how the study and teaching of religion might be different if we focused on theorists who are attentive to how knowledge is situated and dependent upon specific contexts. The tools in this volume propose new categories for studying ritual, they question what myths reveal when embedded in culture, and they examine social formations that exceed Western, scholarly conceptions.

Reflecting power dynamics The theorists in this volume acknowledge the fact that there is no neutral study of religion. Theorists of religion have always inhabited a specific stance in their research and writing. There are at least three ways in which these scholars reveal power dynamics, each by resisting forms of scholarship that prize the notion of a disembodied author who writes as a neutral observer. The first way in which several of these scholars resist forms of traditional scholarship is in seeking to disrupt the understanding that Christianity is monolithic. In other words, their work strives to show the diversity of practices, people, and ideas that has always been present within Christianity across time and place. Phyllis Trible and Caroline Walker Bynum read Christian texts (such as the Bible and mystical writings), artifacts (from paintings to architecture), and cultural contexts (including food preparation and relationship expectations) to reveal understandings of gendered power, agency, and representation. In her own complex relationship with Christianity, Alice Walker reflects her specific contributions on Black religion in light of the legacies of slavery and her representation of two broader movements in the study of religion: womanism and narrative approaches. Another way many of these authors resist forms of imperial scholarship is the methodological use of narrative and autobiography. Locating subjecthood in writing

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has long been considered an offense against the imagined ideal of neutrality. Like the signifier “man” used in scholarship that is supposed to indicate the inclusion of everyone, the norm of the “universal human” (i.e., white, male, educated, heterosexual, able-​bodied) has dominated theoretical writing. People marked as not conforming to this, so the academic understanding goes, should not impose their own specific point of view. Thus, writing the self into theorizing is subversive and powerful. Moreover, these autobiographical approaches help us to better understand the full breadth of ways of being religious. In varying degrees we encounter autobiography and self-​ reflexive discussion in the works of Wendy Doniger, Alice Walker, Phyllis Trible, Judith Butler, and Gloria Anzaldúa. A third way in which these authors resist forms of colonial scholarship involves questions of identity—​including but not limited to the roles that race, sexuality, gender, and colonialism play in religion—​and the construction of relationship. We see how questions of person, place, education, language, and desire allow us to ask different questions and pursue other ways of conceptualizing order, expectations, and institutions. Theorists who discuss identity, relationality, and the implications of mutual influence include Charles Long, Judith Butler, Saba Mahmood, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Alice Walker.

Challenging the field of religious studies Each of the scholars in this volume have not only changed how we study religion but have also influenced generations of scholars who have engaged, extended, and critiqued their methods. Mary Douglas’s theories of purity and pollution, Wendy Doniger’s engagement of comparative mythology largely in Hindu contexts, Catherine Bell’s reconceptualization of ritual, and Charles Long’s attention to colonial and racialized assumptions in thinking religion come from religious studies departments and represent broader movements in subfields of religion including textual studies, mythological studies, ritual studies, and symbolic studies. Students are often introduced to scholars who pose theories of religion. These scholars ask how we define what counts as religion and where we draw boundaries to delimit religious practices. For example, Émile Durkheim and Max Weber used sociology to construct explanations of religion as it related to group dynamics; Freud invoked psychoanalysis to connect religion and the individual, and Mircea Eliade relied on history to offer descriptions of the difference between “religious” and “nonreligious.” Following this trajectory of identifying theories of religion, Douglas, Doniger, Bell, and Long each seek to work at explicitly analyzing the limits of where religion “starts” and “stops” and how those markers come into being and are maintained, whether through purity (Douglas), the use of myth and ritual (Doniger and Bell), or colonial power (Long).

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This volume also includes another group of scholars whose methodological insights have been taken up by many in religious studies. These scholars offer theories for studying religion. For this group, their first task is not to ask questions about what counts as “religion,” yet their work contributes to the discussions of how religious practices, traditions, and persons exist. They provide questions that come from other fields of inquiry that are then used to interrogate religion. Anzaldúa provides a theory of the boundary itself, asking us to spend time specifically thinking about the places and times when difference comes together in fronteras or borderlands and the violence and potential that are part of these encounters. Trible offers a feminist textual interpretation to interrogate the patriarchal assumptions of biblical texts, and her method of biblical criticism has been taken up to explore other religious texts. Scholars of religion have drawn on Walker’s work to forefront racially gendered dynamics in the study of religion and, in particular, Christian theology. Butler formulates a theory of the individual, relationality, and performativity that scholars (including Mahmood) apply to analyzing religious traditions, places, and people. Bynum’s historical method brings feminist inquiry to premodern texts while also allowing the material to shape contemporary questions. Mahmood’s ethnography reveals the tensions that remain in the scholarship that assumes the liberal Western subject to be ideal. Each of these theorists tests the boundaries of what appear to be self-​contained religious traditions. As authors such as Trible, Bynum, and Anzaldúa push and test the boundaries of how far a tradition called “Christianity” can maintain its identity, they open questions about authority, authenticity, the importance of group cohesion, and identity. Trible asks questions about the limits of textual interpretation and authority. Bynum traces lines of heresy and orthodoxy, asking about the “proper” accepted places of institutions, gender, and social/​domestic practices. Anzaldúa examines the contours of white Christianity’s relationship to and its self-​presumed dominance over Aztec, indigenous, and Mexican religious traditions. The definition of religion in each instance proves to be malleable, contentious, and historically, socially situated. The chapters each address a means of approaching religious contexts and specific modes of questioning that do not produce a seamless narrative of methods that build upon one another. Rather, the aims and assumptions of each theorist seek to trouble or complicate direct entry into a known entity we could call the “religious subject” or the “context or tradition of religion.” Faced with such diversity, it was difficult to decide which theorists to highlight in this volume. We, therefore, adopted the criteria of (1) focusing on theorists who reflect that the study of religion is not neutral and (2) choosing theorists whose work represents a broader movement in the field of religious studies. This required that we leave out many theorists we would have liked to include. The most glaring omission, we think, is the absence of someone working with disability theory such as Robert McRuer, whose Crip Theory:  Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability continues to be influential inside and outside of the field of religious studies. The absence of

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science studies in the presence of a theorist such as Donna Haraway or Bruno Latour is another regrettable omission, as the future of the study of religion must continue to challenge the scientific stranglehold on the formation of knowledge. We could also have included the so-​called French Feminists for their pathbreaking work in feminist psychoanalysis. We hope that future volumes and scholars take up this enormous task that still awaits.

Structure of the volume This volume is divided into three sections that generally move chronologically and topically: comparative approaches, examining particularities, and expanding boundaries. Our decision to group the theorists in this way points to general trends that have occurred in studying religion and the difference it makes when a scholar begins their investigation with a guiding set of assumptions, such as: can and should religions be compared?; what happens when we privilege the microcosm of a specific society?; how does the study of religion change when the subject is uncertain?

Comparative approaches The first section, “Comparative Approaches,” introduces scholars whose theoretical work follows a long tradition within studying religion—​one that describes patterns that can be identified across different geographical places, traditions, and histories. Mary Douglas formulates what is now the well-​known analysis of a community’s structuring roles of purity and pollution that she applies across contexts. Douglas assumes that one methodological point, here the structures of dirt and purity in a specific culture, creates parallels that allow the scholar to compare different geographies, times, and cultures. Phyllis Trible proposes a feminist method of reading and reclaiming texts from the Hebrew Bible/​Old Testament. While Trible focused on biblical texts, her feminist hermeneutic for reading sacred texts has been taken up, critiqued, and expanded in relation to the texts of other religious traditions. Trible, thus, offers a comparative feminist hermeneutic. Wendy Doniger’s work continues the project of a comparative enterprise; she traverses time and space, bringing together medieval England, ancient India, and current events in her construction of comparative mythology. Drawing on psychoanalytic theories and the work of the religious imaginary across cultural contexts, Doniger offers a comparative theory of myth while at the same time warning against the potential misuses of this comparative theory. Finally in this section, Catherine Bell articulates a comparative analysis of ritual—​specifically not grounding her work in one ethnographic study but looking for common structural

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features in the performance of ritual. Each of these theorists provides templates for studying and engaging religion that could be used broadly across multiple contexts. Students of these theorists can see how they focus on embodiment, the role of women, and performance. Identifying patterns that are shared by multiple people creates possibilities for mutual understanding, making familiar what is often felt to be dangerous or foreign.

Examining particularities The second section, “Examining Particularities,” follows a movement away from broad, generalizable methodological statements toward a focus on specific locations and the cultural influence of historical eras. Although the scholars in this section are contemporaries of those in the first section, they pursue a different aim in their respective bodies of work. Alice Walker explores the historical reality and continuing effects of slavery and Black life through specific characters, in specific locations, at specific historical junctions. Charles Long’s work looks at the moments of colonial encounter and the assumptions that follow when scholars rely on the victor’s account of history. By flipping the emphasis and focusing on the stories and texts of those who were the subject of imperial force, he begins to fill in the perspectives of groups marginalized by the history of theory. Caroline Walker Bynum is the only theorist here trained as a historian. Bynum, therefore, reflects a broader use of historical methods in the study of religion. Bynum also contributes to the study of religion the insistence that scholars examine how the cultural impact of gender roles and anxiety over embodiment shifts over time, rather than importing their own contemporary assumptions. The work of these theorists calls attention to the insufficiencies of prior attempts at comparison. They consider contexts that acknowledge particularities with nuance. Thus, these theorists provide a model for how sustained attention to the specifics of race, body, place, paradox, and time affects the study of religion.

Expanding boundaries The third section addresses the “Expanding Boundaries” that have marked the postmodern turn in the humanities. Gloria Anzaldúa, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood each problematize the notion of the universal, Western, liberal subject that the study of religion has relied on since its inception. Anzaldúa proposes a wholly different cosmology based on indigenous narratives and explores the splitting and suturing of national identities in single bodies. Her fluid combinations and transitions among English, Spanish, and Nahuatl languages, deities, and locations reproduce the very problems and potentials that arise from life at a border. Butler draws on a long history of Western philosophy and the psychoanalytic tradition to discuss how gender and sexuality result from interpersonal and cultural relationships.

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Her formulation of performativity reconsiders the binary that places “gender” as a cultural category and “sex” as a biological one. Mahmood’s ethnographic work takes on large questions of feminist agency, differing expressions of subjecthood, and the construction of secularism. The theorists in this section examine the processes and results of life that occurs when people, ideas, and histories come into contact. They expand the boundaries of studying religion, thus empowering students to attend to a globalizing world through their attention to the detailed power structures at work. *** This volume covers an enormous range of theoretical perspectives and methodological nuance. Therefore, each chapter in the volume follows a repeating pattern to introduce the theorist and their sophisticated ideas. Beginning by introducing the theorist, each chapter then covers the author’s main methodological approaches along with well-​known works and provides a concise analysis, laying out the specific interventions of each theorist. Because these scholars have created such long legacies, we have a rich history of those who have not only been influenced by their work but who also have critiqued and challenged their ideas and practices. Throughout the chapters that cover this material, we have sought to create a regular structure that will allow readers to track and compare these theorists. We hope that a familiar, repeating structure throughout the volume will allow readers to engage most fully with the complexity of the ideas presented by these important theorists that continue to shape the study of religion. Each chapter positions readers to enact a different relationship to approaching these tangles of practices, identities, places, and ideas that we conveniently name “religions.” As scholars we tend to apply theories to try to fix in place dynamic entities, allowing us to maintain a fiction of control while we study them. Yet, more often, the theories we hope will settle a debate actually render the field of inquiry more fluid and create more questions. We offer to you, then, chapters—​read on their own or in combination—​that provoke the reader to take note of their surroundings, seek out underlying assumptions, and apply exciting theories and methods to complex, interstitial, and often ambiguous contexts. We hope these theories leave you wanting more.

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Part I Comparative Approaches

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1 The Bounds of Hierarchy:  Mary Douglas Kathryn Lofton

After she died in 2007, the words of praise were significant. Anthropology Today described Mary Douglas as the “most widely read British social anthropologist of her generation” (Iyenda and Fardon 2007:  25). Anthropological Forum said she produced “one of the most profound and ambitious bodies of social theory ever to emerge from within anthropology” (6 2014: 287). Despite this obituary recognition, Douglas has never achieved canonical regard in the study of religion, and during her lifetime many in the anthropological establishment considered her work marginal to the mainstream tradition. Her antecedent in the annals of British anthropology, E.  E. Evans-​ Pritchard (1902–​ 1973), and her nearest interpretive peer, Clifford Geertz (1926–​2006), dominate the attention of scholars interested in twentieth-​ century social and cultural anthropology of religion. However, as the study of the secular increasingly dominates discussions of religion in the twenty-​first century, Mary Douglas’s subject matter and analytical investments become only more, not less, relevant. In more than fifteen books and scores of articles, Douglas sought to show the patterned ways people communicated with and responded to one another. She was less interested in the diversity of human expressiveness than she was in the common frames human beings invent to organize their relationships. For this reason, she wrote more about rules than about acts of art, more about systems than about exceptional persons. As her intellectual biographer Richard Fardon argued in his Guardian obituary for her, posterity should remember Douglas as an innovative social theorist who took the techniques of research into non-​Western societies and applied them to her own Western milieu (Fardon 2007). Today scholars assume that there are no “primitives” or “moderns.” But this understanding required the work of anthropologists like Douglas who helped us see that Western civilization included the same rites, magical beliefs, and social needs as those previously designated as “primitives.”

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If Douglas endures in scholarly memory, it is for her 1966 book Purity and Danger:  An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, in which she effectively showed that modern pollution fears in western Europe are as much magic as the incantations of tribespersons in the Global South. Today we assume the reasonableness of our various physical, environmental, and social hygiene practices because we think there is real pollution to be kept at bay, whether it is plaque on our teeth or toxins in our groundwater or criminals in our society. Douglas doesn’t explore the scientific reasonableness of such fears about polluting forces. What she said is that we use certain conceptions of ultimate reality to justify and legitimate certain practices of social order. We build pipelines to bring natural resources to certain populations and we build prisons to contain other populations. Bringing such “order” to society does not diminish the likelihood of disorder—​rather, order makes disorder. When we tell a child where the “right” place is to put their toys when they are done playing, we are teaching them that there are not right places for toys. Concepts of order require assignments of disorder. In her effort to explore these themes, Douglas examined areas as diverse as kosher diets, consumer behavior, environmental advocacy, and alcohol consumption in order to describe how humans work together to define and reiterate systems of shared meaning. Over her lifetime, her work deepened in its interpretive complexity and expanded in its topical reach. But as she would herself reflect, she never got over her primary interest in how the little things in human life indicated significant shared frames of social hierarchy.

Biography and historical context “I have always been attracted to hierarchy,” Mary Douglas wrote in a ruminative autobiographical essay later in her life. “Hierarchy is the encompassing principle of order which systematizes any field of work, whether a library, a game, an alphabet, mathematics, systematics of all kinds.” Douglas understood her scholarship to be organized by hierarchy, a concept that organizes all human activity, whether people perceive it or not. She understood that studying hierarchy was not especially sexy, especially in the era of political counterculture that defined the first decade of her intellectual career. She knew that her “good feelings” toward hierarchy were, in some sense, “countercultural” to a culture suffused with the spirit of radical dissent. “But then, I am not defining [hierarchy] as a soulless bureaucracy. I see it as a spontaneously created and maintained inclusive system, organizing its internal tensions by balance and symmetry, and rich in resources for peace and reconciliation.” Because Douglas understood hierarchy as a “positional system in which everyone has a place,” and in which “the pattern of positions is coherent and the roles are coordinated,” she liked hierarchy and affirmed it as the controlling element of social life. She missed it when

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it was not there. Hierarchy isn’t a problem in social life, Douglas argued. It defined its greatest freedoms (Douglas 2005: 95–​96). Mary Douglas described her early life as defined by the recognition of this positional system. She was born Mary Tew on March 25, 1921, in San Remo, Italy, when her parents, Phyllis Twomey and Gilbert Tew, stopped off as they traveled home to England from Burma where Gilbert was posted in the Indian Civil Service. Mary and her younger sister, Patricia, lived with their mother’s parents in Devon, England, until they were old enough to become boarders at the Sacred Heart Convent in southwest London. After the early death of her mother, closely followed by that of the maternal grandfather, Mary found a sense of security in the relatively hierarchical and secluded world of the convent school. Writing about her grandparents’ home, she explained the intimate management of power, how her grandfather seemed to run the household, but that “nobody could doubt that my grandmother is the person really in control” (Douglas 2005: 97). Douglas discovered at Sacred Heart that the implicit principles of her grandparents’ home became explicit within that disciplinary environment. Spatial boundaries were loaded with significance, and strict rules governed their embodiment; sex was never mentioned. Douglas says she accepted this rule-​driven organization without complaint, and left it “endowed thereby with a lifetime project—​to make sense of it” (Douglas 2005: 102). She left Sacred Heart and found herself studying at Oxford during the war. She read philosophy, politics, and economics, and  got a degree in 1942 before being mobilized for service. She was directed into the Colonial Office, where she stayed until 1946. It was at the Colonial Office where she first met social anthropologists and decided to return to Oxford for a two-​year conversion course, then to register in 1949 for her doctorate in anthropology. Her mentor was E. E. Evans-​Pritchard, whose work on witchcraft in East Africa was groundbreaking. In her 1980 biography of Evans-​Pritchard, Douglas explained that he taught “that the essential point for comparison is that at which people meet misfortune” (Douglas 1980: 12). Douglas remained interested throughout her career in the ways that marginal groups sustained themselves in society. She wanted to understand how conflict and competition could be minimized through strategies of social order. During her studies at Oxford, she did her own fieldwork in what was then the Belgian Congo, studying the Lele, a matrilineal tribe. She observed within that community “varied ways of dispersing power, trying to maintain stability, [and] principles of fairness controlling willful individuals” (Douglas 2005:  96). She decided that hierarchy works to limit conflict when everyone in the system respects the value of everyone else. Such respect is made possible, she argued, through rules. In 1951, after a brief appointment at Oxford, she married James Douglas, who became a researcher for the Conservative Party research department just as Mary took up an appointment at University College London (UCL), where she was to remain for a quarter of a century, and was professor of social anthropology from 1970 to 1977.

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She would return to UCL in 1994 to a distinguished fellowship after several years in the United States. During Douglas’s career she authored many books, including many edited collections representing substantive collaborative and comparative discussions among teams of scholars about risk, food, institutional development, witchcraft, and the status of religion in the United States. Douglas never tired of conversation and engagement, and she hoped her theorizing would enable other scholars to discover new possibilities in familiar topics. Her long tenure at UCL was a relatively happy one. She liked UCL in part because of its peculiar mission: “Wanting to make a space for free thought, they created a taboo-​like prohibition:  there was never to be a divinity school. It became known as the Godless University” (Douglas 2005: 110). When Douglas left London in 1977, she did so to join Aaron Wildavsky at the Russell Sage Foundation. An American political scientist, Wildavsky had just become president of the foundation, and he invited her to develop her work on culture under its auspices. As Douglas began her research in New York, Wildavsky was unceremoniously fired, an experience that would inform Douglas’s perspective on the culture of large corporations. Douglas did not think most corporations were terribly effective hierarchies because they simultaneously encouraged individualist thinking while hoping to sustain organizational structure—​a simultaneity, she argued, was unsustainable. She and Wildavsky collaborated on many studies investigating the nature of institutions and risk culture until his untimely death in 1993. Douglas moved between several institutions during that time, including visiting appointments at Northwestern and Princeton Universities and Princeton Theological Seminary (PTS). Douglas remained intellectually engaged until her death on May 16, 2007. Less than three weeks before she died, The Spectator published an interview in which she used her own cultural theory to discuss Al Qaeda. She urged the United States to let the group express its views. “If these people hate America anyway, and America attacks them, it increases the hostility of the enclave,” she said (Howse 2007). Until the end, she argued that the stability of the social world was not accomplished by overt aggression, but by crafting spaces of mutually beneficial collectivity in which diverse expressions of opinion might be articulated.

Key writings and signature approaches Mary Douglas’s career can be divided into three parts: the first third included the publication of her dissertation on the Lele and her groundbreaking Purity and Danger; the second third found her leading many large collaborative research projects on risk and organization as she developed her typology for social organizations, and in the final third she explored biblical texts as anthropological evidence for human investment in the themes she had pursued throughout her scholarly life. Although

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the evidence she used changed, her basic analytic inquiries were invariant. She wanted to understand how humans organized themselves.

Purity and danger Evans-​Pritchard defined Douglas’s early sense of herself as an anthropologist:  she pursued the same geographic region for her field work as he did for his, and she asked herself similar questions about the cultural logic of anomalous events. Yet her scholarship would ultimately reach much further in its comparative scope and theoretical ambition. She argued that research should identify things that are anomalous within the prevailing classifications, examine how those anomalies are dealt with or not by the prevailing social systems, and seek to explain them functionally. Functionalist interpreters like Douglas examine how each part of society contributes to the stability of the whole. Her interest in such functional explanations has its roots in her intellectual encounter with Evans-​Pritchard at Oxford. The first book Douglas ever read in an anthropology introductory course was his Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (1937). This study showed that witchcraft accusations did not fall randomly but were structured around certain predictable dynamics. Within a given community, individuals would accuse rivals or enemies who stood in ambiguous or problematic relations with themselves of witchcraft. Douglas sought to continue the analytic thread of this work, but considered more deeply why certain individuals were marked as problematic within a society. She undertook ethnographic fieldwork among the Lele in the Belgian Congo (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) in 1949–​1951 and in 1953. It eventuated in both a DPhil in 1952 and a monograph, The Lele of the Kasai, published in 1963. Civil war prevented further fieldwork, and Douglas did not return to the country, known from 1971 to 1997 as Zaire, until 1987. Her wider renown was never based on her reputation as a fieldworker or on her ethnographic writings, although these established her competence within the profession. Her second book, Purity and Danger:  An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, established her investment in social theory. Inspired by her ethnographic work, Purity and Danger took as its premise the practices of distinction she observed among the Lele. It was “by studying their food taboos and rules about who could enter the forest, the abode of spirits, and at what times, that I started to think about the themes of purity and danger,” she would reflect (Douglas 2005: 108). Every society demarcates certain objects, animals, and persons as distinct from others. While in Africa, Douglas decided to compare the Lele discrimination between edible and inedible meats with those rules defined in the first five books of the Hebrew Bible that are often referred to as the Mosaic Law to reference the laws given to Moses by God. Through the richness of this comparison between the Lele and Leviticus, Douglas was able to argue that the taxonomy of things in a society reflects the order of its social

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organization. She decided that “taboos and separations were techniques for dispersing power” (Douglas 2005: 109). Later, in her essay collection Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory (1992), Douglas would extend this argument, showing that everyday practices communicate social classifications. But in Purity and Danger, Douglas was less invested than she would later be in the social work of rituals and more invested in demonstrating how connected abstract principles about life were to rudimentary rules for living in a society. “Because of my youthful experience of hierarchy as a system of marked places, and the training that focused on being in the right place at the right time, I was powerfully struck by Lord Chesterfield’s definition of dirt as ‘matter out of place,’ ” she observed, connecting her autobiography overtly to her intellectual project (Douglas 2005: 111). Douglas did not seek to offer a theory of human disgust. For some people in some societies, disgust might become a trained affective reply to taboo things. But Douglas wanted to describe more neutrally the inevitability of systems, not the judgments inlaid within those systems. In some societies, disgust or revulsion toward the forbidden might predominate; this does not need to be inherently the case. If anything, Purity and Danger seeks to show the profound human reason deployed in the effort to justify figures of anomaly. For example, Douglas said foods were banned as unkosher because they did not fit into any definite category: pigs seemed ambiguous because they shared the cloven hoof of ungulates but did not chew cud. Leviticus does not say pigs are terrible animals; it simply observes that the pig “is unclean for you” (Lev. 11:4–​7). Deciding a pig is a bad animal because of its distinctions from other hooved creatures is a secondary move; the primary move, Douglas shows, is to understand difference itself. To be clear, there is a moral judgment inlaid in such descriptions. “It is not that scraps of food are clean when on the plate and dirty when on the table, but that they should be on the plate, and not on the table,” subsequent commentators would explain, “there is a moral dimension to reality that makes the question of classification, and misclassification, also a question of right and wrong” (Wuthnow et al. 1984: 87). The moral judgment is not on the pig, however, as much as it is on the person who eats the pig, thus defiling themselves and, by extension, the community that determines the pig is inedible. In Purity and Danger, Douglas repeatedly argued that the creation of order is not the condemnation of disorder. Disorder can be productively destructive, especially in systems that do not have the right balance. Disorder “has potentiality” to bring about new power arrangements, new systems, and new rules (Douglas 1966: 95). Purity and Danger has found a significant audience among scholars who research more orthodox religious movements and scriptures, especially those interested in laws regulating gendered bodies. From the beginning, Douglas was interested in how the distinction of the sexes is the primary social institution, and how the most important institutions in society rest on the difference of sex. This is a difficult, often violent, field of ethnographic insight. The notion of “sex pollution” and the different

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ways certain practices occur highlight how important controlling access and exits is to the internal maintenance of a social system. Different societies determine different definitions of adultery and incest, for example, but there are very few societies that possess no definition of marital behavior or familial sexuality. Even more basic are the many rules regarding effluvia. As Douglas writes: “We cannot possibly interpret rituals concerning excreta, breast milk, saliva and the rest unless we are prepared to see in the body a symbol of society, and to see the powers and dangers credited to social structure reproduced in small on the human body” (Douglas 1966: 116). To be a student of social distinction is to be a student of embodied distinction. “The body is the stock example of corporate unity,” Douglas wrote, “and gender the favorite example of complementarity” (Douglas 2005:  104). There is no such thing as a system of rules that does not have gendered consequences. Regulations invariably determine the ways which we can exchange with and relate to one another and the natural world. In Douglas’s view, no kingdom exists in which rules for the body do not include gendered distinctions. Douglas was not neutral about the value of committing to social rules. She repeatedly spoke of the positive power of rules, and would, in her own life, bemoan when the communities to which she was committed loosened their grip on them. In 1966, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a “Pastoral Statement on Penance and Abstinence,” in which they declared that it was no longer a sin to eat meat on Fridays. Many Catholics took the option and began to eat meat on Fridays. Douglas, a lifelong Catholic, regarded this shift as a threat to people’s sense of solidarity: with God and with their chosen community of Roman Catholics. Single rules establish an individual’s relationship to larger frames of power: Defilement is never an isolated event. It cannot occur except in view of a systematic ordering of ideas. Hence any piecemeal interpretation of the pollution rules of another culture is bound to fail. For the only way in which pollution ideas make sense is in reference to a total structure of thought whose key-​stone, boundaries, margins and internal lines are held in relation by rituals of separation. (Douglas 1966: 41–​42)

Rules relate to structures that determine social life. Douglas had a personal investment in social life being maintained in a way that maximized human freedom and minimized interpersonal chaos. She did not think she was alone in this investment. She believed human beings, as primarily social creatures, have a love of order, and feel disquieted by its absence. The description of a balanced social system became a central subject of her career.

Grid/​group typology From 1970 until the mid-​1990s, Douglas developed her theory of the limited options for social organizations. If you hear about a particular conflict in a family or a business,

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you might think “every community is different, with different challenges.” Douglas did not agree with that. She observed conflict in many different social contexts and found that social groups organize themselves in relatively few ways. Contrary to Émile Durkheim’s early writings, Douglas rejected the idea that “societies” provide a basis for explanation. Rather, she followed his later approach in using forms of social organization at a variety of scales to explain the cultivation of thought styles. However, despite the differences, Douglas’s work is openly indebted to Durkheim (and, to a lesser extent, to Marcel Mauss), so it is worth identifying the suppositions they shared. Like Durkheim, Douglas assumed a unifying structure to society; like Durkheim, she assumed that social structures exhibit limited variation. She had read enough anthropological work to know that in real-​life contexts many hybrids of these elementary forms are available. But again, she assumed a formal structure, one in which variability was less common than most individuals might believe. Douglas’s work begins with the assertion made early in Durkheim and Mauss’s Primitive Classification that the classification of things reproduces the classifications of people, and that there were a finite number of ways people classified things and people. Against scholars arguing for the virtuosic particularity of local examples, Douglas insisted that variation in thought styles and social systems was limited. She worried that such relentless particularism might reify differences among classes and races of people, and her scholarship worked to break down simple notions of (for example) distinctions between primitive and civilized people. She wanted to revoke the exemption of modern Western societies from anthropological study, and believed that many of the findings from earlier anthropological work—​like that by her mentor, Evans-​Pritchard—​would be applicable to modern-​day Great Britain. “I knew it was a mistake to treat taboo and pollution as matters to be found in exotic cultures but not in our own. Like our own taboos on talking about sex and money, I proposed that foreign taboos are rational attempts to control the flow of information and to resist challenge to a precarious view of the world” (Douglas 2005: 112). While Purity and Danger (1966) won widespread acclaim, Douglas’s next book, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (1970), was more controversial. In this work, Douglas began to systematize her insights from Purity and Danger to develop a typology of social structure and views of nature. This was the origin of grid/​group analysis to which so much of her career would be subsequently focused, though particularly detailed descriptions of it can be found in Cultural Bias (1978) and Essays in the Sociology of Perception (1982a). Before offering a description of that typology, however, a step back into Durkheim is necessary. In Suicide:  A Study in Sociology (1897), Durkheim described two dimensions of institutional variation in social organization: social regulation and social integration. Douglas would relabel these as “grid” (the regulatory form) and “group” (the integrative form). These forms could convey the function of an organization and its basic thought style in

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any setting, irrespective of bureaucratic complexity, technological sophistication, or ethnic demarcations. Douglas was not the first person to try to describe the forms social life took. As she said, the grid/​group typology was developed to “gently push what is known into an explicit typology that captures the wisdom of a hundred years of sociology, anthropology and psychology” (Douglas 1982b: 1). Typological thinking is itself no longer in fashion, so several provisos must be made in order to honor Douglas’s own intention to create a subject for argument and debate. The typological thinker believes there is some limited number of stable forms that explain the observed patterns of diversity. Over the past decades, many scholars from a variety of disciplines have preferred to understand variation as the grounding fact of biological and social life. Douglas knew about these debates, and she recognized the criticisms of typologies as too restrictive of human particularity. But she thought that typologies were useful ways of seeing how diversity was itself an organizational concept, and she was committed to seeing how certain organizations allowed for greater variation than others. For her, a typology is a static, heuristic device designed not to illustrate change but to represent loci of persistent social formation. With those provisos in mind, Douglas developed a four-​part typology in conversation with other social scientists that she organized in a two-​by-​two table. Her purpose was to think about the basic social context of the group. Douglas concentrated on forms derived deductively in four cells. These forms are hierarchy (strong regulation and strong integration, based on prescribed vertical and lateral boundaries); individualism (weak regulation and weak integration, based on competition); enclave, or factionalism (weak regulation, strong integration, often based on egalitarianism); and isolate ordering, or atomized subordination (strong regulation, weak integration). This four-​part model of social organizations includes everyone, Douglas argued. These basic forms of social environments are not static; they are fluid frames of reference, all of which would be present in any single organizational structure. Later scholarship by her collaborators would argue that the relation between the four cultural types was inherently adversarial (Thompson et  al. 1990). But whatever the subsequent scholarship discovered, Douglas’s own conclusion—​that differentiated, hierarchical, and bounded institutions provided the most conducive environments for complex thinking and symbolism—​remained the same, whatever changes her theories underwent. Only hierarchies had strong integration and strong regulation, the balance of which was necessary for the widest diversity of people to thrive in a given social structure.

Ritual and meaning Judged solely by the titles of her published works, Mary Douglas’s interest in the anthropology of contemporary religion might seem to have lain dormant during

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the dozen years between the publication of Natural Symbols in 1970 and Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of Technical and Environmental Dangers (with Wildavsky) in 1982. But everything Douglas writes about, she does with an eye to religion (Fardon 1999: 168). The persistent analogies in her work are to religious subjects, whether to specific cultic forms from Africa or scriptural referents from the Bible. Time and again, she connects everyday rules to broader cosmologies, arguing that rules infuse into ordinary practices a multivalent system of implicit meanings. As she demonstrated in the 1973 anthology that she assembled, Rules and Meanings: The Anthropology of Everyday Knowledge, Douglas understood the history of anthropology to be a history of observing rules that expose ideas about social life. “The rules which generate and sustain society allow meanings to be realized which otherwise would be undefined and ungraspable,” she wrote in an essay on Biblical law. “The purity rules of the Bible . . . set up the great inclusive categories in which the whole universe is hierarchized and structured” (Douglas 1973a: 138–​139). The causal mechanism by which societies and organizations cultivate meaning is ritual. As she said in Purity and Danger (reiterating Durkheim), to be social is to be a participant in ritual (Douglas 1966:  66). When she wrote of rituals, Douglas did not have in mind formal ceremonies. Rather, she understands ritual as a regular, everyday action that conveys social commitment. But “to use the word ritual to mean empty symbols of conformity, leaving us with no word to stand for symbols of genuine conformity, is seriously disabling to the sociology of religion,” she wrote. Instead, Douglas argues that ritual is a way to communicate social relations. “It will help us to understand religious behavior,” she explained, “if we can treat ritual forms, like speech forms, as transmitters of culture” (Douglas 1970: 3, 21). Douglas makes an analogy of language and ritual to emphasize that ritual transmits collective information. To speak is itself to partake of a ritual, to participate, as several later commentators would observe, “in the affirmation and reproduction of basic social relations and commonly held values” (Wuthnow et al. 1984: 104). Douglas demonstrated the pervasiveness of ritual in her comprehensive theoretical analysis of consumption behavior, The World of Goods:  Toward an Anthropology of Consumption (Douglas and Isherwood 1979). This work offered an anthropological critique of the individualism of the economist’s lonely consumer. In it, they argued that contemporary consumption was a ritual expression of social relationships and lifestyle preferences. In the second half of the book the authors take a strong policy stance, suggesting that the increasing emphasis on individual consumption threatened a crisis in collective provision. If consumption was a form of communication, then those individuals who consumed less also communicated less. In their especially adroit summation: “Goods are neutral, their uses are social; they can be used as fences or bridges” (Douglas and Isherwood 1979: 12). Like so

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many of Douglas’s ideas, this ritual description of consumer behavior is now so common sense it is hard to imagine a time when it needed to be articulated. Yet Douglas, together with her collaborators, was an early figure in the anthropology of consumption, which served as a description of behavior and an argument toward those economics, agriculture, and environmental studies that if left unregulated, would result in human ritual behavior that would lead to a significant abuse and diminishment of available resources.

Risk and organizations All of Douglas’s work had an explicit or implied normative intent. She was not simply describing social life but also hoping for certain forms of social experience over others. In her early writings, she worked to recommend a certain form of social organization over others in order to diminish simple iconoclastic isolationism or capitalistic individualism. In her later writings, she collaborated with a range of social scientists to argue for a better collective sense regarding the limited natural resources available for communities to share. Douglas was always also a theorist of her normativity, writing about the very kind of polemical talk her own arguments could deduce to create. Recognizing that “risk” was becoming synonymous with “danger” (as she had studied it in Purity and Danger), Douglas’s major effort in the 1980s and early 1990s was to explain conflicts over what were now represented as “risks.” Douglas observed that things demarcated as “risks” were always morally charged. For example, ecological crises were considered to have emerged because of immoral human action. In the 1982 book Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of Technical and Environmental Dangers, she and Aaron Wildavsky argued that environmentalists’ complaints reflected an antipathy toward dominant social hierarchies. The authors compared environmentalists to religious cults and superstitious groups of the past. Douglas and Wildavsky showed that predictions of doom are typical expressions of the small factional group. Such groups may prod and poke at society, but tend to become caricatures of their own complaint. Douglas observes that nearly every American articulates some factional thought style. “What are Americans afraid of?” Douglas asks. “Nothing much, really, except the food they eat, the water they drink, the air they breathe, the land they live on, and the energy they use” (Douglas and Wildavsky 1982: 10). While life expectancy has increased, the general public imagines life to be riskier than ever. “America has gone further down the path of cultural individualism,” Douglas wrote, “and so can make more use of the forensic potential of risk (Douglas 1992:  28–​29). Ominous risks are described and depicted over and over, and this ritual repetition reinforces social solidarity among emergent groups. This solidarity is furthered by blaming those understood to be at fault for their own marginalization as well as leadership, who is understood always to be somehow corrupt. Such a ritualization of risk culture

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can be seen in every election cycle and within every political movement. In Risk and Blame (1992), Douglas argued that: The modern concept of risk . . . is part of the system of thought that upholds the type of individualist culture, which sustains an expanding industrial system. The dialogue about risk plays the role equivalent to taboo or sin, but the slope is tilted in the reverse direction, away from protecting the community and in favor of protecting the individual. (Douglas 1992: 28)

What is important to understand about this passage is that when Douglas refers to the “individual” she does not mean the solo person. Rather, she means an organization that is itself not interested in the collectivity of the common but rather is driven by organizational imperatives to select risks for management attention or to suppress them from view (Douglas 1985). Risk management isn’t about saving individuals from something deemed risky; it’s about protecting the organization’s interests, which might involve fear mongering in order to sustain its commercial, social, or political practices. The protection of institutional structure is the ultimate cause of risk perception. Risk “is invoked to protect individuals against the encroachment of others” (Douglas 1990:  7). As Douglas explained in Purity and Danger, pollution myths perform a special role in the struggle to maintain moral order in society. Pollution and taboos are mobilized when other economic or political sanctions are inadequate. Risk is a critical feature of thought in social reproduction. Although all societies have taboos, pollution myths do change. As the economic and political conditions alter, so do the prescribed forms of order.

Anthropology of the Bible The later part of Douglas’s career found her where she began: thinking about the Bible as a site of cultural thinking. During a visiting appointment at Princeton Theological Seminary, she became compelled by the Bible as a source for reflecting on cultural rules. She had been asked to talk to students as an anthropologist about rituals of sacrifice in the Book of Numbers. She had never read Numbers, but would later reflect that once she did she found herself returning to childhood experiences. “Full circle, I was back to the sacred spaces of the convent and the reticences of my grandmother’s house—​and cleanings, washings, different garments for different places, sins, and a forgiving God” (Douglas 2005:  118–​119). She came to read biblical texts like ethnographic field sites, and would publish several works of biblical commentary. Her fascination with the ancient priestly writings led to three books treating the Torah as a data set about conflict dynamics and institutions for reconciliation. In an essay titled “Why I Have to Learn Hebrew,” she describes the motives for her biblical studies:

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My personal project in the study of the Bible is to bring anthropology to bear on the sources of our own civilization. This is in itself enough of an explanation for having to learn Hebrew. But there is more. In pre-​Enlightenment Europe, other religions were condemned as false, even as evil; the Enlightenment changed the condemnation to irrational superstition. Neither stance was conducive to understanding. The practice of anthropology has been to provide a critical, humane, and sensitive interpretation of other religions. (Douglas 2004b: 151)

It is not surprising therefore that Douglas’s work resonates with pioneers such as Johann Herder and Robertson Smith who were important figures in both biblical studies and cultural anthropology. Mary Douglas is a successor to these scholars, who brought to biblical studies an anthropological vision. In 1993, she published In the Wilderness: The Doctrine of Defilement in the Book of Numbers, a meditation on the literary construction and social context of the Book of Numbers; Leviticus as Literature followed in 1999, revising ideas about the Jewish dietary codes that Purity and Danger had made famous; and in 2004 Jacob’s Tears: The Priestly Work of Reconciliation completed the series, asking who had edited the Torah, and how their aims might explain its textual form. In each of these studies, Douglas criticized Western preoccupations about religion, asking scholars to approach biblical religion as itself an “exotic” religion (Hendel 2008:  2). Rather than assume the Bible as culturally normative, Douglas used her anthropological approach to show how strange it could be understood to be. This anthropological approach is not unlike the critical method in biblical studies developed by earlier Enlightenment philosophers, including Spinoza, Herder, and others.

Analysis of Douglas’s work Douglas argued that our habits reflected our thoughts, that our thoughts and habits reflected our social environments, and that our social environments had limited variation. In her fifty-​year scholarly career, she described this aspect of cultural life in many ways, using terms like “implicit knowledge,” “cultural bias,” and “thought styles.” She thought anthropologists were especially able to show modern life is determined by the social contexts from which we emerge. For this reason, she understood our forms of social life to be profoundly interrelated to our forms of moral judgment. If there is a “Douglasian” school, it consists of those who have made use of the theory of limited variation in elementary forms of organization. Her work is mainly used by researchers from disciplines working on organizational aspects of industrial and postindustrial settings. In addition, the typological strand in her work has been influential in political science, public administration, business and management studies, criminology, development studies, and health services studies—​indeed, almost everywhere except her own specialist fields of African anthropology and

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sociology of religion (6 and Richards 2014). Some researchers use the typology diagnostically and descriptively, identifying the relative importance of “cultures,” but attempting little real explanation. Others use it normatively, identifying strengths and weaknesses cultivated under each distinctive institutional form. Others are interested in the dynamics of conflict and rapprochement in and between the four institutional styles. The body of empirical studies using her typological theory proliferates in management, information technology, environmental policy, and public health, suggesting that Douglas’s greatest impact is upon those researchers who seek to argue for new policies and are thinking strategically about the right social mechanisms to bring about different social worlds. There is “a utopian strand, or aesthetic preference, to Douglas’s social thought,” writes her biographer, Richard Fardon. Douglas’s hope that hierarchies could establish levels of responsibility between mutually constituted parties might be seen as simple fancy. Yet her fight for systems of justice that could emerge from such a social arrangement is something that has inspired many social scientists to think strategically about how certain social orders might make social good (Fardon 1999: 259). Although cultural anthropologists resisted her work, quantitative social scientists—​ especially sociologists and political scientists—​embraced and extended her theory, supplying theories of disorganization and hybridity among the elementary forms she described in her typology of limited variation. Perhaps even more interesting is the twenty-​first-​century ascendance of evolutionary and neuroscientific arguments about social organization, implicit bias, and the role of cognition in our religious behaviors. In this moment of big data and cognitive theorizing, Mary Douglas’s work might offer resources to reply to those claims about the natural science of our behaviors. For her, the natural world was not the source of human reason. Humans invented the “natural,” not the other way around. Anthropologists and humanists of all stripes can find in Douglas a commanding sense of what social theory is needed to defeat the troublesome naturalism lurking in scientific modernisms. Within the study of religion, Douglas is largely known for her early work on taboo and pollutants. Yet the field could benefit as much from the considered way she thought comparatively about social groups. “Debates which originate in quite mundane issues tend to become religious if they go on long enough,” Douglas observed, suggesting that she saw the archive of religion and the archive for sociology to be one and the same (Douglas 1992: 271).

Critique of Douglas’s work Despite her commitment to anthropological method, most anthropologists have been enormously skeptical of Douglas’s importance and of the Durkheimian tradition generally, of which she was a confessed part. Declining anthropological

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interest in social structure contributed to her being neglected by the mainstream in the discipline. Although Douglas herself wrote detailed critiques of Claude Lévi-​ Strauss to show why her structural approach to social context was the very reverse of his ideational one that relied on interrelated notions of meaning within a system, students still bracketed her work with his, and dismissed both as reductive of human complexity. Douglas’s failure to be a celebrated member of the anthropological community could be chalked up to poor timing. Her Lele monograph appeared at a time when anthropologists had begun to emphasize history and regional dynamics in their approach to ethnographic writing. Marxism was enormously influential. Her perceptive fieldwork was recognized, but its comparative analysis did not engage anthropologists who were increasingly committed to local studies emphasizing political economy. Purity and Danger was an instant and lasting success, and is still widely used in teaching. But many anthropologists were confused by, or simply rejected Natural Symbols (1970) because it did not address prevailing debates about the problems of structuralism, including assumptions about the contained and self-​ referential nature of structures. British social anthropologist Edmund Leach went so far as to call it Catholic propaganda (Leach 1971). Mainstream anthropologists largely ignored the writings of her middle and later periods when she focused on risk culture, institutions, and biblical criticism. Douglas’s work has been critically classified as modernist and reductive. Anthropologists in particular resisted her attempt to delimit variation in human social organization, observing that such work belongs to an era of social thought designated as “modernist” for its utopianism and social reductionism. As the influence of Clifford Geertz’s “thick description” and the “writing culture” debate spread among cultural anthropologists, Douglas’s scholarship appeared a problematic rival to postmodernist rejections of causal explanation. More philosophically inclined critics worried that Douglas’s explanation of “thought styles” as the result of social organization was relativist. Douglas would rebut such criticisms by arguing that relativism was a thought style itself requiring social explanation. More psychologically inclined critics argued that social organization has less influence over cognition than Douglas supposed. Again, Douglas rebutted those claims by arguing that there was no cognition conceivable outside of social referent. Time and again, Douglas engaged critics through her own theories, arguing that every critique could be anticipated in her theory of social forms. The brilliance of her scholarly record can be measured not only by the range of subjects she studied, but also the excitement and seriousness with which she tackled critical responses to her work. In addition to the meaningful interpretive contributions she made to a wide range of scholarly endeavors, she also practiced a high level of interpretive engagement as a scholar. Right until the day she died, she never stopped reading, never stopped discovering new subjects for study, and

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never stopped thinking about how human beings organize themselves, with what rules and restrictions and cosmologies of world creation.

Suggested further reading Douglas, Mary. (1966), Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Douglas, Mary. (1986), How Institutions Think, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Douglas, Mary. (1992), Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory, London: Routledge. Douglas, Mary. (2005), “A Feeling for Hierarchy.” In J. L. Heft (ed.), Believing Scholars: Ten Catholic Intellectuals, 94–​120, New York: Fordham University Press. Fardon, Richard. (1999), Mary Douglas: An Intellectual Biography, London: Routledge. Wuthnow, Robert, James D. Hunter, Albert Bergeson, and Edith Kurzweil. (1984), “The Cultural Anthropology of Mary Douglas.” In Cultural Analysis: The Work of Peter L. Berger, Mary Douglas, Michel Foucault and Jürgen Habermas, 77–​132, London: Routledge.

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2 Feminist Textual Critique: Phyllis Trible Rhiannon Graybill

The feminist study of religious texts, and of the Bible in particular, has a long history. In the late nineteenth century, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and a group of women produced The Woman’s Bible:  A Classic Feminist Perspective, a biblical commentary from a feminist perspective (Stanton [1895] 2002). Within the discipline of biblical studies, however, it was not until the 1970s that feminist criticism emerged as an accepted textual approach. Essential to this hermeneutic shift was Phyllis Trible, a biblical scholar and theologian turned mother of feminist biblical criticism. Trible’s work is foundational to feminist readings of the Bible; it likewise provides a model for feminist textual approaches to religious studies more broadly. Raised as an American Baptist, Trible has remained a committed Christian as well as a feminist, a subject position she frequently reflects upon in her work. In “Take Back the Bible,” she observes: To know that one is a feminist and to know that one loves the Bible is, in the thinking of many, be they feminists or opponents, an oxymoron. It will not work. After all, if no man can serve two masters, no woman can serve two authorities, a master called scripture and a mistress called feminism. (Trible 2000: 428; cf Trible 1990: 232)

It is safe to say that Trible’s extensive body of work, along with her life itself, stand as a refutation to this common presumption.

Biography and historical context Phyllis Trible was born in 1932. After receiving her BA from Meredith College in North Carolina, she enrolled at Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University. While there, she studied under biblical scholar James Muilenburg, a key figure in the development of rhetorical criticism of the Bible. Trible completed her

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PhD in 1973 at a time when few women were employed as seminary professors or biblical scholars. She taught at Wake Forest University before being appointed to Andover Newton Theological School in 1971. Trible’s appointment at Andover Newton was the catalyst for her groundbreaking work in gender, biblical criticism, and religion. All new faculty members at the institution were expected to present a scholarly paper to the faculty on any topic in biblical studies. That paper became “Depatriarchalizing in Biblical Interpretation,” a foundational text in feminist approaches to religious texts. “Depatriarchalizing in Biblical Interpretation” was published in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, the flagship journal in the field of religious studies, in 1973. In 1978, a book-​ length articulation of the argument followed, entitled God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality. Though the presentation at Andover Newton was the immediate catalyst for Trible’s work on gender, feminism, and the Bible—​topics that have remained central to her work for the past half century—​Trible herself has traced the origins of her interest earlier. Reflecting back on God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality on the occasion of the book’s twenty-​fifth anniversary, she describes an experience from her childhood at a church camp in Virginia: As for the girls, we were put in the care of a missionary woman who was home on furlough. She was to tell us Bible stories. What a subversive opportunity! This woman said, “Girls, everything God created got better and better. What was the last thing that God created?” Well indoctrinated, we replied in unison, “Man.” But she said, “Oh, no. Woman.” (Trible 2003: 22–​23)

This unnamed missionary was not the only woman to influence Trible, who was nourished by the matrix of feminism, both as theory and as practice. Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex was translated into English in 1953; Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was published a decade later in 1963. The second-​wave feminist movement took off in the 1960s, calling for equal rights and the liberation of women while celebrating the sisterhood of all women. Women’s studies emerged as a new academic discipline, with the first departments and programs in women’s studies popping up in the late 1960s. Women’s studies in religion quickly followed. Mary Daly’s The Church and the Second Sex (1968), which brought de Beauvoir’s insights to bear on religion, was the first important work in this area; Daly’s Beyond God the Father followed in 1973. Other feminist scholars quickly joined. Nearly all of this first generation of feminist scholars of religion were women. Some wrote from within religious traditions, offering both theological and nontheological critiques; others rejected religion as a form of patriarchal oppression. In addition to documenting the patriarchy of religious traditions, feminist approaches to religion sought to recover female voices in texts and traditions and to recuperate or create feminist readings and rituals. While second-​wave feminism and feminist studies in religion preceded Trible, if slightly, the feminist study of the Bible began with her. “Depatriarchalizing in Biblical

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Interpretation” inaugurated what has become a dynamic field of biblical scholarship, practiced by scholars, theologians, and believers. As with Daly’s The Church and the Second Sex, Trible’s article was quickly followed by a host of other feminist readings of the Bible, by scholars working on both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. Like their counterparts in feminist/​women’s studies in religion, these scholars sought, variously, to document patriarchy, to recover lost female and feminine motifs, voices, and lives, and to recuperate texts from the worst forms of patriarchy (see Plaskow 1993). While important feminist work on the Bible was published at an increasing rate throughout the remainder of the 1970s and early 1980s, the discipline of biblical studies—​which was both heavily male and highly traditional in their methods—​ resisted engaging with or acknowledging this work. In 1980, for example, the Society of Biblical Literature celebrated its centennial; as Trible noted, this celebration ignored and even erased the presence of women in the discipline. Reflecting on the events, she noted with some bitterness that “in the Society of Biblical Literature women have mattered hardly at all” (Trible 1982: 3). Fortunately, looking back several decades later, history has begun to tell a different tale, both in Trible’s career, and in the field as a whole. Continuing to break ground for feminist scholars, in 1980 Trible returned to Union Seminary, where she had completed her PhD, and joined the faculty. She became only the fourth woman ever to hold the rank of full professor; Christian ethicist Beverly Wildung Harrison, the third woman, preceded her by a single day. In 1994, she was the second woman to become president of the Society of Biblical Literature; the first woman president was fellow feminist and New Testament scholar Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (see Gray 2006: 167n1, 176). In 1998, Trible returned to Wake Forest to join the faculty of the newly formed divinity school, where she taught until retirement. In her work following God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, Trible continued to map the contours of a feminist response to biblical texts. In 1984, she published Texts of Terror: Literary-​Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives, based on the Lyman Beecher Lectures she had given at Yale Divinity School in 1982. Texts of Terror is at once a continuation of and a counter to God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality. While the first book focused on “depatriarchalizing” the biblical text, the second sought to document “texts of terror” in the Bible. Trible uses this phrase to refer to stories of gender violence and suffering. In addition to these two monographs, Trible has published a number of articles and shorter pieces on gender, feminism, and the biblical texts.

Key writings and signature approaches Throughout her career, Trible’s work has been characterized by three key features:  rhetorical criticism, feminist hermeneutics, and Christian theological commitments. In describing these features, I  center my examples on Trible’s two

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most important works, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality and Texts of Terror, while also drawing on other relevant works where appropriate.

Rhetorical criticism Trible is best known for her contributions to feminist criticism and feminist hermeneutics. It is worth noting, however, that before Trible was a feminist critic she was a practitioner of rhetorical criticism, advocating for a close reading of biblical texts as literary works. While the notion of reading the Bible as a literary text has a long history—​a point Trible herself notes repeatedly (e.g. Trible 1978: 8, 27; notes 40, 41; Trible 1994 passim)—​“rhetorical criticism” as such emerged in biblical studies in the 1960s. The approach was championed by Trible’s doctoral adviser James Muilenburg. Muilenburg framed rhetorical criticism as a movement “beyond” existing modes of biblical criticism, chiefly called “form criticism,” a critical method focusing on literary forms and genre (Muilenburg 1969:  5–​6). He urged biblical scholars to supplement attention to form with literary sensitivity and nuance, an approach he termed “rhetorical criticism.” Muilenburg’s own students, including Trible, were important proponents of the approach. Trible wrote her dissertation on the book of Jonah; much of what she produced there is rhetorical criticism, concerned with the literary dynamics of the text. She later published a guide to the method in the Guides to Biblical Scholarship series (1994), also centered on Jonah. In perhaps her most important work, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, Trible offers a description of how she understands and uses rhetorical criticism as a method. For Trible, as for Muilenburg, rhetorical criticism is at once a complement to and a movement beyond form criticism. She describes: My choice [of method] is rhetorical criticism, a discipline I place under the general rubric of literary criticism. According to this discipline, the major clue to interpretation is the text itself. Thus, I view the text as a literary creation with an interlocking structure of words and motifs. Proper analysis of form yields proper articulation of meaning. (Trible 1978: 8)

As Trible highlights, to read the text rhetorically is to read it as a literary text. Furthermore, the keys to interpreting a text are not outside literary methods applied to the text, but come from within it. Thus, “In general, the practice of rhetorical criticism relates to literary criticism by accenting the unique as a major clue for interpreting a text” (Trible 1978: 11). Trible used rhetorical criticism throughout her career as a biblical scholar. Her close readings sometimes transpose biblical narratives into the idiom of the stage dramas; frequently, she speaks of “acts” or “scenes” in a biblical text. In Texts of Terror, each of the narratives of a terrorized woman from the Hebrew Bible—​Hagar

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(Gen. 16, 21), Tamar (2 Sam. 13), Jephthah’s daughter (Judges 11), and the unnamed woman (Judg. 19–​21)—​is divided into narrative scenes, each of which is addressed with close analysis. Thus we consider the rape of Tamar, for example, “before the crime,” “[during] the crime,” “after the crime,” and via “responses to the crime” by Absalom, the narrator, and the readers (Trible 1984:  37–​63). This critical strategy forces readers to contemplate the terror of the text, as well as our own complicity in this terror as heirs to the biblical tradition. Thus “Israel is found wanting—​and so are we” (Trible 1984: 57, italics original). At other times, her method is closer to that of the detective, tracing “clues in a text,” which often consist of a single word or constellation of ideas. For example, the second chapter of God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, titled “Journey of a Metaphor,” traces the Hebrew root rḥm, meaning “womb” or “compassion” across a number of texts (Trible 1978:  31–​ 59). This approach draws out new connections between previously disparate texts while also highlighting otherwise invisible strands of meaning—​in this case, the association of God with the womb, maternal compassion, and the feminine. Trible’s insights into texts, including her groundbreaking feminist readings, are constructed with the tools of rhetorical criticism. This method is at once foundational to Trible’s work and exportable to other readers, texts, and contexts; as such, it is a major contribution of her work.

Feminist criticism Were Trible’s contributions to biblical studies limited to her championing of rhetorical criticism, she would be a respected scholar in the discipline of biblical studies but perhaps not known beyond it. Scholars of other religious traditions working on textual materials might find her formulations of the rhetorical approach useful, especially in devising how best to read texts. However, her most important work remains her foundational contributions in feminist studies of the Bible. These contributions, moreover, model a feminist approach to religious texts and traditions with significance beyond the biblical tradition. The article “Depatriarchalizing in  Biblical Interpretation” is indispensable to both Trible’s work and to feminist studies of religion as such. Trible begins by articulating her complaint:  while “considerable evidence indicts the Bible as a document of male supremacy,” it is a grave error to dismiss the Bible on these grounds, or to give up on finding other ways of reading the text (Trible 1973: 30). Instead, “The hermeneutical challenge is to translate biblical faith without sexism” (Trible 1973: 31). This challenge animates Trible’s work from this point forward, while also inspiring many others, in biblical studies and beyond it. In the body of the article, Trible draws out a number of “themes disavowing sexism” in the biblical text. These include the repeated use of female metaphors for God, the significance

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of women in the story of the exodus from Egypt, and the “corporate personality” of God, which positions the deity beyond the masculine. She also sets forth two readings of the Bible that will become foundations of all her subsequent work: of Genesis 2–​3 (the story of the man, the woman, and the snake in the Garden of Eden) and of Song of Songs. Briefly, Trible argues that Genesis 2–​3 has been woefully misread as a story of woman’s transgression and justified punishment. Through a careful analysis of the Hebrew, she argues that adham, (“person,” also “Adam”; the word is related to adhamah or “earth” and thus could also be translated along the lines of “earthling”) “is basically androgynous” (Trible 1973: 35). It is only when Eve is created that gender difference is instigated: “Man as male does not precede woman as female but happens concurrently with her” (Trible 1973: 37). Furthermore, the woman is not the man’s inferior. She is instead equal, creative, and intelligent: “Throughout the myth she is the more intelligent one, the more aggressive one, and the one with greater sensibilities” (Trible 1973:  40). Turning to Song of Songs, Trible argues that the text is a poem of mutuality, equality, and love. Not only does it differ radically from the negative representations of gender elsewhere in the Bible, it reverses and even heals the narrative of Genesis 2–​3. While the Genesis story begins with love in a garden and ends in expulsion, misogyny, and pain, Song of Songs presents a garden scene of love, mutuality, and pleasure between men and women. Trible further refines her description of the feminist method in Texts of Terror. It is worth quoting her introduction at length: As a critique of culture and faith in light of misogyny, feminism is a prophetic movement, examining the status quo, pronouncing judgment, and calling for repentance. This hermeneutic engages scripture in various ways. One approach documents the case against women. It cites and evaluates long neglected data that show the inferiority, subordination, and abuse of the female in ancient Israel and the early church. By contrast, a second approach discerns within the Bible critiques of patriarchy. It upholds forgotten texts and reinterprets familiar ones to shape a remnant theology that challenges the sexism of scripture. Yet a third approach incorporates the other two. It recounts tales of terror in memoriam to offer sympathetic readings of abused women. If the first perspective documents misogyny historically and sociologically, this one appropriates the data poetically and theologically. At the same time, it continues to search for the remnant in unlikely places. (Trible 1984: 3)

In many ways, this remains a defining statement of the methods of feminist criticism. Some feminist work is centered on documenting the harms perpetrated against women in texts, traditions, or elsewhere. Some feminist work traces possibilities of saving seemingly misogynistic texts from themselves, a strategy sometimes called redemptive reading. A  third feminist possibility—​and the one that Trible pursues

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here—​does the work of memory, remembering and commemorating suffering and pain without seeking to read this suffering as redemptive. As Trible cautions, “to seek the redemption of these stories in the resurrection is perverse. Sad stories do not have happy endings” (Trible 1984: 2). Texts of Terror undertakes this work of remembering by tracing the stories of four terrorized and suffering women in the Bible: Hagar, a slave woman forced into sexual slavery and then rejected (Gen. 16, 21); Tamar, the daughter of David who is raped by her brother and abandoned by her father David (2 Sam. 13); the unnamed woman in Judges who is gang-​raped, murdered, and dismembered, leading to internecine war, kidnapping, and rape (Judg. 19–​21), and Jephthah’s daughter (Judg. 11), who is sacrificed by her father to fulfill a vow. Texts of Terror argues that these stories, however horrible, are also a necessary object for feminist critique because of both their terrible content and their textual afterlives. Furthermore, a feminist reading must acknowledge that they are not simply unpleasant artifacts of a distant past. Instead, “Misogyny belongs to every age, including our own. . . . To take to  heart this ancient story, then, is to confess its present reality’ ” (Trible 1984: 87). Feminist critique is necessarily concerned with the present moment, as much as with the past.

Christian theology The third important feature of Trible’s approach is her theological commitments. Trible is a Christian theologian and her theological orientation, including a belief in basic Christian doctrines, informs her work. For Trible, (the Christian) God is present in the texts and in the world. The project of reading the texts is thus a theological project, as much as it is a literary one. Before going on, a word about the academic study of the Bible and its relationship to theology may be helpful. Biblical studies is a peculiarly located academic discipline, often found within the umbrella of religious studies but also extending beyond it (it may also be located in literary studies, in regional studies such as Near Eastern or Middle Eastern studies, or in history, for example). The field contains a mixture of what Russell McCutcheon terms “insiders” and “outsiders” (McCutcheon 2001:  72, 195–​196)—​that is, scholars who are members of religious groups that take the Bible as sacred text, and scholars who do not. A second complication is the issue of theology—​that is, the academic study of the nature of God and of religious belief. There are biblical scholars who study the theologies of the Bible (what ancient people believed), as well as who read the Bible theologically (as a text that tells us what or how to believe). There are also theologians (typically Christian or Jewish, sometimes others) who use the Bible as an ingredient in developing theologies. And there are biblical scholars who, consciously or unconsciously, use their own (largely preexisting) theological ideas as a lens through which to view the Bible. These various positions tend to create disagreements and fierce debates.

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As a scholar, Trible is open about her own theological commitments. She frequently uses the language of Christian theology, referring to concepts such as grace and sin; thus patriarchy is a “sin” (Trible 1990: 233). She also describes her own work as a form of wrestling with the text, evoking the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel in Genesis 32:24–​29: “Do not abandon the Bible to the bashers and thumpers. Take back the text. Do not let go until it blesses you. Indeed, make it work for blessing, not for curse, so that you and your descendants, indeed so that all the families of the earth, may live” (Trible 2000: 431). This is a beautiful statement of the work of the scholar; it is also a theological summons that implicitly assumes the reader shares Trible’s commitments, both feminist and religious. While not all feminist interpreters are interested in “tak[ing] back” the Bible, and while the tools of feminist criticism may be used toward a variety of ends, both rehabilitative and deconstructive, Trible here addresses the reader who believes the Bible is both salvageable and worth saving. A similar theological spirit animates God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality; after offering a feminist reading of the book of Ruth, Trible turns, as she often does at the end of her readings, to the theological: “As a whole, this human comedy suggests a theological interpretation of feminism: women working out their own salvation with fear and trembling . . . That challenge is a legacy of faith to this day for all who have ears to hear the stories of women in a man’s world” (Trible 1978: 196). The work of both feminist and rhetorical critique is, for Trible, in the service of theological ends—​a theology, we might note, both feminist and Christian. In Texts of Terror, the practice of memory (that is, of remembering the victimized women) is a theological practice. The book ends with a page labeled “in memoriam” listing the names of the four women. Each chapter also begins with an illustration of a tombstone for the woman, as well as a quote, taken from the “suffering servant” texts in Isaiah (often read by Christians as referring to Jesus), the Gospels’ Passion narratives, and Eucharistic sections of Paul’s epistles. In addition to performing the work of commemoration and memory, these quotes perform theological work. Just as rhetorical criticism provides Trible with her method, so do the principles of feminism and of Christian belief give shape to her readings of the text. It is only when we perceive all three together that we gain a full picture of Trible as interpreter, scholar, and theologian.

Analysis of Trible’s work Trible’s work has been influential in multiple fields of criticism and scholarship. While she is best known for her contributions to feminist hermeneutics, she has also influenced rhetorical criticism and Christian theology. As with all important thinkers, she has also attracted her share of critics. Other scholars have built on

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Trible’s work, pushing feminist hermeneutics, rhetorical criticism, and feminist theology to develop and grow in new and exciting ways.

Rhetorical criticism Trible’s work as a rhetorical critic influences both feminist and nonfeminist biblical scholarship. Though Trible writes about the Hebrew Bible, her method is exportable to New Testament texts as well. Her Rhetorical Criticism: Context, Method, and the Book of Jonah (1994) remains an important descriptor of what it means to practice rhetorical criticism; it also models the application of the critical method to a biblical text (in this case, Jonah). While Trible’s work remains important to rhetorical critics, rhetorical criticism itself has had a more mixed reception. As described by Trible’s advisor and mentor Muilenburg, rhetorical criticism represented a movement beyond simply attending to the forms of biblical literature, allowing critics to explore particularities and nuances of each text. Rhetorical criticism is thus a form of reading the Bible as literature. Of course, this was an approach to the text with a long history. Bishop Robert Lowth described parallelism as the key feature of biblical poetry in his Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (De Sacra Poesi Hebraeorum Praelectiones) in 1753. The idea of reading the Bible as a literary text also circulated during the Enlightenment (Sheehan 2005; Graybill 2013). Literary figures such as Matthew Arnold, Samuel Coleridge, and T. S. Eliot have all likewise written about the Bible. Rhetorical criticism is thus an approach with a lofty genealogy. Given this genealogy, it is ironic that it is literary criticism that has emerged as the greatest rival to rhetorical criticism, in many ways surpassing it. In the 1980s, the so-​called literary approach to the Bible became a major method of biblical study. Similar to rhetorical criticism, this approach takes as a starting point the idea that the Bible is a literary text, and should be read as such. While this may seem obvious to many contemporary readers, it was a major innovation in the discipline of biblical studies. Works such as Robert Alter’s The Art of Biblical Narrative (1981) and The Art of Biblical Poetry (1985), Meir Sternberg’s The Poetics of Biblical Narrative (1985), and James Kugel’s The Idea of Biblical Poetry: Parallelism and Its History (1981) are frequently considered foundational to reading the biblical texts; occasionally, these works invoke other earlier sources, such as Alter’s use of Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature ([1946] 2003). Literary criticism of the Bible has evolved and grown to encompass a wide range of new theoretical approaches to texts, or what in literature departments is often referred to as “Theory.” Literary criticism’s openness to new methods, as well as its coziness with literary theory and literary studies beyond biblical studies, has led to significant growth. The expansiveness of literary criticism as a method has allowed it to flourish and

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grow in a way that rhetorical criticism has not. Indeed, the success of the former has sometimes seemed to come at the expense of latter; what is the need for rhetorical criticism if literary criticism is “harder, better, faster, stronger”? One consequence of this is the quiet erasure of rhetorical criticism from the toolbox of literary approaches to the Bible. As with rhetorical criticism, so too, in this respect, with Trible, who is often erased or minimized in accounts of the development of the literary approach. When she is mentioned, it is either in passing, or dismissively (often on account of the theological commitments in her work; more on that below). And yet the literary approach to the Bible is in many ways a continuation of the rhetorical criticism that Trible pioneered. It serves us well to remember that not all the progenitors of biblical literary criticism were fathers.

Feminist criticism Trible’s work in feminist criticism was both groundbreaking and influential. Together, “Depatriarchalizing in Biblical Interpretation” and God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality were foundational works in the emergence of feminist approaches to the Bible. “Depatriarchalizing” is widely recognized as the first work on this topic in the field of biblical studies. Women and others had written about misogyny and sexism in the Bible before—​most famously, Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s The Women’s Bible ([1895] 2002)—​but Trible’s work brought together the content of second-​wave feminist critique with the disciplinary practices of biblical studies. Athalya Brenner, a major figure in feminist biblical studies in her own right, describes “Depatriarchalizing in Biblical Interpretation” as “an article that should be considered as the honored mother of feminist Song of Songs scholarship” (Brenner 2013). Its significance in studies of Genesis 2–​3, and of the Bible more broadly, is hardly less significant. Trible was not the only feminist scholar of religion in the 1970s when she began her career; neither was she the only feminist biblical scholar. In the fields of religious study and theology, feminists were already articulating sharp critiques of the sexism of religion. Perhaps most famous is Mary Daly’s critique of the inherent sexism of Christian symbols of God the father and his son, set forth in Beyond God the Father:  Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation ([1973] 2015). In 1971, female scholars in the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL), the two major disciplinary societies, formed a Women’s Caucus to advance the study of women and religion. Carol P. Christ and Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, both important feminist scholars, were elected as chairs (Scholz 2013:  4). At this time, women were still extremely underrepresented in the field; in 1970, only 3.5 percent of the SBL membership was female (in 1920, in contrast, it was over 10%) (Bass 1982: 9). Women scholars began producing scholarship about women and religion. In 1974, Rosemary Radford Ruether edited the influential Religion and Sexism: Images

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of Woman in the Jewish and Christian Traditions (1998), which included an article on women in the Hebrew Bible by Phyllis Bird and in the New Testament by Constance F. Parvey. A core of feminist Hebrew Bible scholars emerged in the 1970s, including Trible and Bird but also Esther Fuchs, Carol Meyers, and Katherine Doob Sakenfield (see Leneman 2013). Feminist scholars such as Schüssler Fiorenza, Bernadette Brooten, and Elaine Pagels engaged the New Testament and its cultural worlds (Plaskow 1993: 14). Feminists also considered other texts, traditions, and questions, as in Christ and Judith Plaskow’s 1979 Womanspirit Rising:  A Feminist Reader in Religion (1979). As with the feminist movement more broadly, this first generation of feminist biblical and religious scholars was almost entirely women. Furthermore, women of color and lesbians were excluded (Plaskow 1993:  14). In 1990, Clarice J.  Martin called explicitly for a womanist biblical interpretation (Martin 1990); this has emerged as a significant subfield of feminist biblical studies (Junior 2015). Lesbian and, more recently, intersex and transgender critique have also appeared in biblical studies (Hornsby and Guest 2016); these reading strategies emerge from a larger genealogy of feminist approaches. One specific challenge in the early feminist readings of biblical texts is implicit anti-​Judaism or Christian supersessionism, the idea that Christians have replaced, or “superseded,” Jews as the chosen people (Plaskow 1991); Trible herself identified this as a threat to be avoided (Trible 1989: 281). Religious difference is not the only mode of otherness attended to by Trible. Instead, in describing the work of feminism, she consistently names race, class, and global location (e.g. Trible 1984:  27; Trible 1989:  281); she also considers environmental concerns (Trible 1971). Racism and poverty are, for Trible, feminist issues (1971: 159; 1978: 7; 1989: 289). Thus her feminism is, from its early moments, what comes to be called “intersectional”—​that is, it attends to the intersections of multiple identities, including race, class, gender, sexuality, and gender identity. The term intersectionality was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989; it was, however, implicitly present in practice in the feminism of Trible (and others) long before. What was missing was the naming of intersectional oppressions, not the approach. Feminist theology has begun to embrace intersectionality while also acknowledging its own limitations, though this process has remained troubled. Some feminist theologians, especially white theologians, have resisted addressing race or incorporating it into their work. Other branches of feminist theology have centered intersectionality and other issues of difference. Thus womanist theology, like womanist criticism more broadly, names and rejects feminism’s focus (implicit or explicit) on the experiences of white women. Mujerista theology elevates the Latina/​Latinx experience. Other feminist scholars have directed attention to Native American and indigenous experience, or to intersections between feminism and the environment (such as Ecofeminist theology). Interestingly, this concern with the environment also has a parallel in

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Trible’s work; prior to taking up feminism publicly, Trible authored “Ancient Priests and Modern Polluters” (Trible 1971), a biblically informed call for environmental justice. In later work, Trible has also advocated for conversation between Jewish, Christian, and Muslim feminisms, as in her volume edited with Letty Russell, Hagar, Sarah, and Their Children:  Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Perspectives (Trible and Russell, 2006). What constitutes feminist interpretation of the Bible, and what the goals of the approach should be, remain questions of lively debate in feminist biblical studies (e.g. Fuchs 2008; Scholz 2013). What is undebatable, however, is that feminist interpretation has become a major method of biblical interpretation.

Theology Trible did not simply model a feminist approach to the Bible; she also wrote in an explicitly theological idiom. Her work has lasting influence in Christian theology as well as in secular biblical studies. This is remarkable, given that Trible never authored a work of “Old Testament Theology,” preferring instead to write about specific texts. Trible’s influence in theology plays out in several ways. Most clearly, her work has influenced feminist theology in the Christian as well as Jewish traditions. Her equality-​ minded reading of Genesis 2–​3, which does significant interpretive work to recuperate the representation of the woman, remains frequently cited in feminist writing about the Bible. In particular, her argument for reading adham as either androgynous (as in “Depatriarchalizing in  Biblical Interpretation”) or as “sexually undifferentiated” (as in God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality) maintains a strong influence in responses to the Genesis tradition. Trible’s own work is clearly Christian in its orientation—​she reads across the boundaries of the New Testament and Hebrew Bible/​Old Testament, for example. Further, the God she describes resembles the Christian God, though stripped of much of his misogyny; here Trible’s work is less radical than, for example, Mary Daly’s. Some Jewish theologians and Bible scholars have pushed back against the Christian orientation of Trible’s theology. Others, however, have found ways to use, appropriate, and adapt her work to a Jewish context. Trible herself is sensitive to the possibility of anti-​Judaism in (Christian) feminisms. In a reflection on feminist hermeneutics and biblical theology, she writes:  “Prophetic movements are not exempt from sin. Feminism struggles with this awareness. Jewish feminist theology, e.g., detects anti-​Jewish sentiments in some Christian formulations. Third World feminists criticize the privileged positions of class and race that afflict First World feminism. African-​American women, claiming the identity ‘womanist,’ challenge white feminists” (Trible 1989: 281–​282). In her work, then, we find an openness to acknowledging struggles within feminism. In addition, in framing feminist reading as a prophetic movement, she clearly casts her project in a theological idiom.

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As a theologian, Trible is clearly located in the Christian tradition. Her work is equally grounded in feminist theological concerns, which she understands to encompass race, class, environment, and other issues of social justice. As a result, Trible’s theological work resonates across multiple religious and secular communities, extending beyond “biblical theology” to engage a wide range of interlocutors.

Critique of Trible’s work Nowhere in her work does Trible offer a comprehensive theory of religion. She is not interested in theorizing the religious as an analytic category, or even in advocating for a single method or object of study over all others. Trible’s concern is with the particular, not the general; she prefers to spend her time exploring a single story, image, or even word, rather than pronouncing broad generalizations. Even her approach to method is uninterested in making exclusive claims. Trible’s own hermeneutical method is rhetorical criticism; this serves her purposes, and so she uses it. For other feminist readers, other hermeneutical methods may prove more fitting or useful. The beauty is that these different approaches still fit within the larger category of feminist criticism. Indeed, in its openness, Trible’s work offers many gifts to readers and interpreters. Perhaps the most important of these is Trible’s intersectionality. Her work suggests that feminist critique has not simply an opportunity but also a responsibility to address other forms of injustice. The 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, is for Trible an event that feminists must remember (Trible 1989: 289). One task of feminist criticism is to work against racism. This is a notion that clearly resonates in our own historical moment, when calls for intersectional feminist work for racial justice have become pressing, both within and outside the academy. For similar reasons, rereading Trible’s work in the early/​mid-​twenty-​first century is also invigorating to rediscover her commitment to environmentalism and environmental justice. The greatest strength and value of Trible’s work for scholars of religion of all sorts is in her modeling of a feminist approach. This suggests an example that scholars of many traditions, ancient or modern, can emulate. Her specifically theological commitments, while valuable to those working in contemporary theology, especially Christian theology, hold less extrinsic value for scholars of religion working in a secular mode. Indeed, at times the theological framing of Trible’s readings of the Bible runs up against the potential subversive nature of her work. Theology also sometimes slips into piety, especially as Trible undertakes memory work (such as remembering female victims of violence). The seriousness and respect in her scholarship is admirable; at times, however, the weighty tone bears down a bit too heavily, especially for the reader who does not share Trible’s theological commitments. Readers who are not Christian may find

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the Christian framing of many of her readings unnecessary or difficult to ignore. Trible has been criticized for tying feminist interpretation too closely to Christian theology, as well as for her insistence that the Bible can be “saved” for, or through, feminist reading. Though it is less well-​known than her feminist work, Trible’s work in rhetorical criticism offers another useful tool for scholars of religion. This is especially well-​ suited to the texts associated with a religion or religions, though the method could also be adapted to performances, visual art, or rituals (much as structuralism has been). Trible reminds us that attention to the details, including the choice of the words and the texture of a text, often opens new avenues of meaning. Furthermore, grounding claims in close analysis of the text is among the most effective ways to make radical innovation persuasive, especially to tradition-​minded scholars, critics, and believers. The durability of Trible’s feminist reading of Genesis 2–​3 depends, to a large part, on its rhetorical detail. Put another way, the reading is persuasive because it is grounded in the text so closely. Rhetorical criticism is not simply useful as a technique for browbeating reluctant readers into submission. It is also, as Trible shows, a flexible, playful, and pleasurable approach to the scholarly enterprise as such. Readers of Trible, old and new, can learn from her the joy of writing, both as manifested in religious texts, and as expressed by the critic and scholar. Readers are also summoned to theological and/​or ethical positions of responsibility (though Trible’s idiom is consistently theological, the readings can speak as well to nontheological readers). Still, it is not enough merely to read; Trible also summons us to speak. Concerning the unnamed woman in Judges 19–​21, she writes: To speak for this woman is to interpret against the narrator, plot, other characters, and the biblical tradition because they have shown her neither compassion nor attention. When we direct our hearts to her, what counsel can we take? What word can we speak? What can we, the heirs of Israel, say in the presence of such unrelenting and unredeemed terror? (Trible 1984: 86)

These are difficult questions, even impossible questions, but this does not mean that they can stay unanswered. It is the task of criticism not just to unpack the literary workings of the text, but also to offer a response to the suffering within it. Trible’s work offers a beautiful model of the forms such a response might take.

Suggested further reading Fuchs, Esther. (2003), Sexual Politics in the Biblical Narrative: Reading the Hebrew Bible as a Woman, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press.

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Huber, Lynn, and Rhiannon Graybill (eds.) (2018), The Bible, Gender, and Sexualities: Critical Readings, New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark. Koosed, Jennifer L. (2017), “Reading the Bible as a Feminist,” Brill Research Perspectives in Biblical Interpretation, 2,(2): 1–75. Plaskow, Judith. (1993), “We Are Also Your Sisters: The Development of Women’s Studies in Religion,” Women’s Studies Quarterly, 21 (1&2): 9–21. Scholz, Susanne (ed.) (2013), Feminist Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Retrospect. Volume 1. Biblical Books, Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press. Scholz, Susanne (ed.) (2014), Feminist Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Retrospect. Volume II. Social Locations, Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press. Scholz, Susanne (ed.) (2016), Feminist Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Retrospect. Volume III. Methods, Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press. Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth. (2001), Wisdom Ways: Introducing Feminist Biblical Interpretation, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Trible, Phyllis. (1973), “Depatriarchalizing in Biblical Interpretation,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, XLI: 30–48. Trible, Phyllis. (1978), God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Trible, Phyllis. (1984), Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives, Overtures to Biblical Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Trible, Phyllis. (1990), “The Pilgrim Bible on a Feminist Journey,” Princeton Seminary Bulletin, 11,(3): 232–239. Trible, Phyllis, and Letty M. Russell (eds.) (2006), Hagar, Sarah, and Their Children: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Perspectives, Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press.

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3 Myth and the Religious Imaginary: Wendy Doniger Laurie Patton

Wendy Doniger’s work spans and incorporates the intellectual trends of the twentieth and early twenty-​first centuries. Beginning with a dramatic entrée into the study of religion with an intense structural study of a single mythological tradition, that of the Hindu god Shiva, Doniger has gone on to become one of the most prolific and influential mythologists, courageous comparativists, and widely read translators of our time.

Biography and historical context Wendy Doniger grew up in 1941 in Great Neck, Long Island, where, as she frequently notes, many other prominent intellectuals in her field and other fields seem to have made their home.1 Her childhood was dotted with several influences—​the generosity and support of her publisher father and his many liberal freethinking friends who visited their home, and the relentless criticism of her mother, who had a deep commitment to communism, and who, in a joint interview with Doniger in the 1990s on National Public Radio, asked if Doniger believed in anything that she studied. Add to this heady mix a brilliant child who was also gifted in dance, and you have the Doniger household. The senior scholar Doniger pays tribute to her early education in dance in the following way: There is the training as a performer, the importance of presence (horses and ballerinas have it so I got two shots at it). There is the element of rehearsing over and over and over again; I think this is part of what drives me to rewrite and rewrite and rewrite, where other scholars settle for earlier drafts. (Doniger 2017a)

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Doniger’s decision to pursue work in the study of India at Radcliffe College, and then graduate work at Harvard University, was inspired in part by her childhood reading, which included Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, E. M. Forster’s Passage to India, and Aubrey Menen’s satirical retelling of The Ramayana. But even in college, Doniger always read slowly, and she often tells the story of when she received from Radcliffe, on the same day, a letter that reminded her that she needed to do a course in remedial reading and another that she was graduating first in her class (Doniger 1987). Her doctoral work at Harvard was supervised by the Indologist Daniel H. H. Ingalls, who gave her access to his library and the solitude to work therein. Her PhD dissertation, written in Cambridge, was the first structuralist study of its kind in Indian mythology, exploring what she identified as the most basic elements of the mythology and how they functioned together as a whole in their relationship. (When the book version was later presented as the work of a promising young historian of religion to Mircea Eliade, he wryly remarked, “Il ya de longeur . . . [There is the issue of length . . .]”) Ingalls sent her to India, but her erstwhile Indian teacher did not agree to studying with a woman, so she traveled instead, learning traditions of Indian dance and learning Indian civilization through temples and travels. Her time in Oxford, England, in pursuit of her second PhD, focused on the idea of evil in Indian mythology, and was supervised by Edward Zaehner, whose academic advising consisted of taking her out once a year to a delicious dinner and giving her advice about reading Indian texts. After obtaining her Oxford degree on the concept of heresy in Hinduism, she was offered a job at School of Oriental and African Studies in London, where she worked in the history department. It was also here that she met David Shulman, who took one of the classes she offered in the history of Indian civilization, and who was to become one of the great Indologists of the next generation. Doniger also had a stint in Moscow, where most of the Indologists were dissidents, and much of their conversation was conducted in Sanskrit both for political and practical reasons. After a short time at the University of California, Berkeley, where she was not terribly comfortable in her openly embraced “low brow Sanskritist” identity, she accepted an offer at the University of Chicago, where she has made her intellectual home since. Doniger’s autobiographical writing is filled with wry assessments of the traditional Indologist’s dislike of her personal flair and her eclectic approach to Indian texts. The debate during the 1960s and 1970s was based on whether philology (the study of language and grammatical structure) and history were the highest and best way of interpreting ancient Indian texts. Doniger’s structuralist approach paid more attention to the use of symbols and folkloric motifs across a wide range of genres and time periods. It paid more attention to the range of human experiences to be unlocked in Indian texts. Berkeley was as much allergic to these newer interpretive methods as the more expectedly staid Oxford and, when she arrived at the University of Chicago, she felt that she finally had a home in the companionship of poet and

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literary critic A. K. Ramanujan, Bengali expert Edward Dimock, and classicist David Greene, among many others. They too were interested in a broader range of methods. The history of religions was a burgeoning field in the 1970s and early 1980s. The comparative approaches that Mircea Eliade, Joseph Kitagawa, and others promulgated were in the service of a larger, liberal understanding of humanity and, in this way, Doniger’s work fit right in. Her structuralist approach was a soft structuralism that held none of the nihilism that others attributed to the great structuralist Claude Lévi-​ Strauss.2 Rather, even in her early work, and certainly throughout her later writings, there is a kind of existential empathy, and a commitment to understanding in Hindu mythology a play of paradox that also gives texture to our own lives. After Eliade’s death in 1986, Doniger assumed the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions, just as two major intellectual trends were gaining traction. The first was the questioning of Eliade’s legacy in light of his early commitment to the Iron Guard in Romania; and the second was the rise of the new historicism that questioned the idea of comparative work as a-​contextual, ahistorical, politically suspect, and, in the case of the study of India, orientalist. When she arrived at Chicago, the field of history of religions had yet to undergo the kind of crise de confiance about the role and social position of the writer in relation to his or her object of study that its sister field, anthropology, would also undergo in the 1980s and early 1990s. Briefly put, there were two main issues at stake during the late 1980s and 1990s, which changed the field dramatically. The first was whether outsider scholars had a role in the study of religions whose cultures and origins they did not share. Could Western non-​Hindus ever share the same worldview, and insight, of those who grew up in the traditions in India, or even the United States? Some argued that primacy should be given to insiders; others felt that even if they changed over time, the canonical methods of scholarship were appropriate to apply by anyone to any object of study. The second issue was related: over the last two centuries, knowledge about South Asian religions was developed primarily by British and other European colonial scholars, whose interests were integrally bound up with the colonial project of governance and control. This knowledge itself should be exposed as orientalist—​inherently distorted in its view of South Asian traditions as “other” and therefore “inferior.” This could take many forms, whether it be characterizing South Asian religions as overly exotic, feminine, soft, spiritualized, or mystical in nature. Doniger’s subsequent work from the mid-​1990s onward addressed all of these challenges in turn. One can trace her intellectual biography in part by her tribute to those colleagues whose views differ from hers, but with whom she has the deepest and longest conversations. In this she combines her mother’s rigor and her father’s generosity of spirit. In addition, Doniger is noteworthy for her insistence on the right to interpret with freedom. Critiques of her work as “orientalist” by the Hindu Right began in the early

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2000s, just as the internet started to emerge as a driver for global cultural criticism. The publication of The Hindus: An Alternative History (2009) was also subject to attack. Despite its attempts to engage in subaltern histories, the histories of women, and the role of Islam and untouchability, her detractors argued that its publishers, Penguin India, should withdraw the book. Penguin India promptly stopped distributing the book. However, the former editor of Penguin India retained the rights to the book and started his own publishing company, Speaking Tiger Press, which released the book again with a new cover in 2015. Doniger’s faithfulness to freedom of expression is matched only by her devotion to her graduate students. As of this writing she has mentored over ninety graduate students through their dissertations at Berkeley and the University of Chicago. This alone constitutes an extraordinary legacy, even though she is less motivated by a need for influence and more with her commitment to enable students to pursue what they always wanted to pursue. Doniger married Dennis O’Flaherty in 1964, and their son Michael was born in 1971. After the marriage ended, she returned to her maiden name, Doniger, as her authorial nom de plume. Her life and her work have also been punctuated by many horses, including Nandi, Rebel, Damien, Smif, and the long-​lived Babur, as well as her dogs Bill and Henry, Kali, and Kim. Whether Doniger is writing of her own or others’ human-​animal relationships, about sexual masquerades, or about dreams and illusions, the holding together of opposites, and the existential ironies that such situations reveal, has been the stuff of Doniger’s writing and life. As she puts it about the scholars’ mediation between “right” and “wrong,” in the interpretation of mythology:  “I would express my dissident opinions, but only on my own turf; if I  read in a book something that I thought wrong, that ignored texts that revealed another aspect of the subject, the ‘wrong’ book would inspire me to write the ‘right’ book, using those neglected texts to make my own point” (Doniger 2015). For Doniger, even “right” and “wrong” can be creatively combined toward a productive intellectual resolution.

Key writings and signature approaches Doniger’s contributions can be grouped into several trends: aesthetics, translation, textual reading, and the relationship between textual reading and ethnography. Doniger has insisted on the artistic and literary dimensions of mythology and religion, and the legacy of aesthetics in comparative religions. In locating the history of religions in the aesthetic and heuristic realms, Doniger suggests that cross-​ cultural patterns are experiential patterns that help us “read” the world around us. Moreover, they act more as provisional lenses rather than absolute categories. Finally, for Doniger, they are lived categories, lived by the scholars themselves in

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constantly shifting categories. These trends will be woven throughout this discussion of Doniger’s overall contribution.

Doniger’s early phase: The foundations of her comparative approach Doniger’s first two works were heavily influenced by the structuralist approach, particularly Lévi-​Strauss, with whom she corresponded until his final days. In structuralist interpretation, the author isolates “motifs” or “structural elements” of narratives, rituals, and other cultural forms, and focuses on the ways in which contrasting elements constitute an underlying cognitive system. Her Shiva:  The Erotic Ascetic ([1973] 1981) was one of the first structural studies of the corpus of Shiva—​making his theology come alive with themes and motifs that had either been unnoticed or not opened up as a function of the human condition. Eroticism was contrasted with asceticism, householder identity with mendicant wandering, and wild rage with domestic nurturance. (Lévi-​Strauss was, after all, even with his love of mathematical formulae, fundamentally interested in the basic contradictions and pathos of human life.) Her approach was quasi-​mathematical in its own right, with early editions showing numbered motifs that could be cross-​referenced with other motifs in the Sanskrit corpus, including the Vedas, the Brahmanas, the Hindu epics, and the Puranas. A subsequent work, The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology (1976), was a development of her DPhil at Oxford. Doniger focused on the idea that the philosophy of karma could not solve everything in Hindu theodicy, and took those alternative narratives where karma was insufficient to explain suffering. These narratives too were ripe for structural study, using as they did such characters as “the good demon” and the “evil devotee” as a way of thinking through insoluble issues of right and wrong, just and unjust, within the Hindu framework of samsara. In other words, a straightforward explanation of divine justice was impossible in Hindu traditions. Rather, Hindu narratives provided an ongoing exploration of moral ambiguity amid characters doing their best to follow their dharma, or sacred duty. Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts (1980), as well as Dreams, Illusion, and Other Realities (1984), continued to focus entirely on Indian culture—​this time on the role of dreams and dreaming, but we see an expanding methodological approach in which comparisons to Plato, Aeschylus, and other Western philosophers became woven throughout her text. In this early period of Doniger’s work, we could argue that, as David Shulman notes in his foreword to Notes from a Mandala:  Essays in the History of Indian Religions in Honor of Wendy Doniger (Shulman 2010), Doniger wrests the study of Hindu myth from the dull plodding methodologies that had previously

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accompanied it. The awkward contradictions within the myth of Shiva become instead profound comments on the ambiguity of human sexuality and spirituality. The category of theodicy in the study of religion suddenly included the huge corpus of narratives from India as well as early Mediterranean cultures. The way in which we dream became a topic no less illuminated by Indian ideas than by science and philosophy. Doniger’s thoroughgoing comparative method creates a wider framework within which to learn Indian ideas, and continually situates them in the broader framework of human experience. In turn, Western ideas are also situated within an Indian context, moving the interpreter’s perspective constantly back and forth. One might think of Doniger’s book Other Peoples’ Myths:  The Cave of Echoes (1988a) as the culminating work of this earlier period. Other Peoples’ Myths is a methodological work that focuses on the cross-​cultural study of myth: why we find insights in other people’s narratives, what the joys as well as pitfalls are in turning to other cultures. In this work, Doniger becomes more fully comparative in her approach, using Greek, Indian, biblical texts, as well as texts from contemporary soap opera and film, including the work of Woody Allen. In addition, she argues for the centrality of myth and narrative in people’s lives, and the ways in which we should interpret these according to the best intellectual tool we have available to us. In this she cultivated the “toolbox” approach—​an eclecticism that she was to defend later in her career.

Doniger’s toolbox for studying religion Other Peoples’ Myths shows us the ways out of the dilemma of the universal category, viewing myth as a kind of railroad “switching station” in which human themes are addressed. As she writes, The pluralism of India may also provide a model for the pluralism of the scholar of religion. If one can ask many different good questions about any single myth, and one can answer any of these questions in a variety of good ways, it makes sense to try several different approaches—​structuralism, Freudianism, Marxism—​to round up the usual hermeneutical suspects. The metaphor of the microscope illustrates the uses of the multidimensional approach: you must constantly change the scale in which you view any particular phenomenon, for there are always at least two levels above and two levels below what you are looking at at any given moment. (Doniger 1988a)

For Doniger, the microscopic approach to myth deals with the particular, detailed experience of the author or interpreter. As such, it is a microcosm of one particular world of interpretation. The telescope, on the other hand, deals with the universal, the general, and the abstract. Telescopic interpretations give us a larger view, but make it hard to refer to any specific context or experience.

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The Implied Spider:  Politics and Theology in Myth (1998) engages the political critiques of the 1980s and 1990s study of mythology and offers a way in which human experience and political commitment can be combined unapologetically in comparative mythology. In particular, she introduced the idea of micro-​myth (the essential story), macro-​myths (all versions of a particular story), and the negotiations in between that a scholar might embrace.3 Her embrace of the comparative dimension of the study of mythology is shared human experience:  our understanding of our bodies, of passions, of loss and mortality. This work is perhaps her greatest contribution to the study of religion: that comparative work need not be ahistorical, and it can and should be grounded in shared human experience.

Doniger on gender and identity Doniger’s tour de force in the early 2000s comprises a three-​volume work on gender and identity in world mythology. Picking up some of the themes from Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts, she shows the ways in which the soul and the memory are gendered in sexual relationships and the ways in which men and women have used storytelling to storm the oppressive barricades of gender and culture. Splitting the Difference: Gender and Myth in Ancient Greece and India (1999) addresses the theme of doubling and splitting in ancient Greek and Indian mythologies (with the occasional excursus into contemporary film and literature), and how such bifurcations and reproductions affect the relationship between the sexes. The Bed Trick: Tales of Sexual Masquerade (2000) is a voluminous meditation of that Shakespearian category—​sex with a partner who pretends to be someone else. Doniger teaches us that while we might find the term “bed trick” in Shakespeare’s tomes, the motive, and the profound existential questions behind it, are also integral to the world’s major mythologies as well as contemporary film and literature. Finally, The Woman Who Pretended to Be Who She Was (2005) completes the trilogy. It addresses the surprisingly widespread theme of self-​impersonation, people imitating other people who are imitating them. Mythology, literature, Hollywood, and Bollywood are replete with stories where people wear masks of themselves and, as such, the disguise acts as much as a revealer as a concealer of truth. All three books go to the heart of how humans negotiate reality, illusion, identity, and authenticity—​ crucial themes to explore again in this age where identity has emerged as both a political and an ontological category. Doniger’s work in these three volumes go to fundamental questions of our time: if sexual identity is political, then how do ancient and contemporary narratives show how identity can be manipulated to gain, or lose, power? How can the bedroom also be the place where politics are played out? So, too, if identity is ontological, that is, a function of one’s very being, how does being become negotiated, even relativized, through the play of sexual identities and masquerades?

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Doniger’s most recent publications continue the themes introduced in The Implied Spider, particularly concerning the voices of women. In her magisterial The Hindus: An Alternative History (2010, originally published by Penguin in 2009), she argues that one can and should write a history of Hinduism that did not need to be either essentialist or orientalist, but could bring to light the full engagement of women, untouchables, and interactions between Brahmanism and other religions. In Doniger’s 2016 work, Redeeming the Kama Sutra, we see the role that women play in driving sexual play, and a frank assessment of the mythology as well as the cultural content of the text, free from the scrutiny of the medicalized or orientalized gaze that had previously held it captive. In her Ring of Truth and Other Tales of Sex and Jewelry (2017b), Doniger explores the mythologies of sex and jewelry, from ancient India to medieval Europe to contemporary Greece, focusing on the ways in which, while women are frequently understood as “passive” recipients of the rings men give them, they actually drive the plots of the stories and the journey of the ring. In all of these writings, she argues that, even though they might not be immediately apparent, through careful reading and comparative contexts, women’s voices can be recovered and interpreted nonetheless.

Doniger as translator Doniger’s translations have served a number of important and subtle functions. They have provided much-​needed anthologies for use in the classroom (Hindu Myths: A Sourcebook, Translated from the Sanskrit [1975]; The Rig Veda:  An Anthology, 108 Hymns Translated from the Sanskrit [1981]; as well as Textual Sources for the Study of Hinduism [1988b]). Those anthologies are no less widely used than when they were first published. They have also given us new ways of thinking about the multiple worlds of Hindu authors, such as the mysterious rishis of the Rig Veda or the legislative energies behind the Laws of Manu. In addition, the recently published Kamasutra of Vatsyayana (co-​translated with Sudhir Kakar) begins to change the traditional orientalist perspective on the Kamasutra as an exotic or medicalized text, and places it squarely in the realm of culture and dharma. Doniger’s approach to translation has always been twofold. On the one hand, she chooses texts that have not been readily accessible to the larger public, such as Puranic Hindu myths or the ancient text of the Rig Veda. On the other, she chooses texts that have been misunderstood or mischaracterized, such as the Kamasutra. In both choices, while acknowledging the imperfection of any translation, she renders texts that might be distant to the contemporary world more relevant to our everyday experience.

Doniger as editor Finally, Doniger’s dramatically prolific output as an author and translator need not overshadow her work as an editor. Her editorial oversight of the English translation

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of Bonnefoy’s Dictionary of Mythology was a gargantuan task that has provided the English-​speaking world with an invaluable resource for general study. Earlier, in The Critical Study of Sacred Texts (1979), she wove together some now classic essays in the area of comparative study and textual analysis. Her Purana Perennis: Reciprocity and Transformation in Hindu and Jaina Texts gives us a theoretical frame from which to think about the Puranas from a pan-​Indian, cross-​traditional perspective. Her many coedited volumes—​with Howard Eilberg Schwarz, Off with Her Head! The Denial of Women’s Identity in Myth, Religion, and Culture (1995); with Laurie Patton, Myth and Method (1996); with Jack Miles, The Norton Anthology of World Religions—​have given us state-​of-​the-​field overviews as well as in-​depth studies of important and overlooked comparative themes, such as decapitation in world mythology. These volumes have also given other scholars an opportunity to hone their work and build on her legacy. Howard Eilberg Schwartz developed a theory of sexuality in Judaism in concert with this edited volume; Laurie Patton a theory of myth as argument; Jack Miles a chance to move from a theological focus on god to a broader theory of world religions.

Critical reception of Doniger’s work Doniger’s work has reflected the intellectual trends of the late twentieth and early twenty-​first centuries, beginning with structuralism (the study of culture through an analysis of opposing motifs, or themes); Freudianism (the study of culture through sexual impulses and drives); post-​structuralism (a critique of structuralism); postmodernism (an interpretive movement focusing on the role of ideology and a suspicion of reason); feminism (the study of culture focusing on the roles of women and resistance to patriarchy); postcolonial theory (the study of culture focusing on the history and effects of colonization in so-called  developing societies); post-​ orientalist theory (the critical study of culture with a focus on its distorted view of “oriental” societies); anthropology (the study of other cultures and societies); the rise of film criticism (critical analysis of film through multiple interpretive lenses); and the rise of new historicism (the focus on historical contexts in the production and promulgation of cultural artifacts). In each context, Doniger has taken up the basics of the intellectual battles and applied them in new ways to the comparative study of mythology and to Indian mythology. However, she has also foregone the ambitions of the earlier “great systematizers” of mythology to create a single, unified world of “myth” or “religion,” and instead focused on human insights that comparative moves can give us. Her productivity and insight over a wide range of texts have led many to name her as the leading scholar of Indian mythology and comparative mythology of her generation. Doniger has also defended her methods against the critiques of many of the followers of these approaches. For example, after the structuralist perspective was

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understood as too removed from the life of the myth maker or the myth reader, Doniger wrote Other People’s Myths to give voice to the human side of the cross-​ cultural enterprise. The Implied Spider was a response to the critique that comparative work could not really honor the historical contexts in which mythologies were born and thrived. Her trilogy on myths of sexuality and illusion (Splitting the Difference, The Bed Trick, and The Woman Who Pretended to Be Who She Was) demonstrated a way of writing a history of sexuality inspired by but also undaunted by both Freudian and Foucauldian readings. Doniger’s early period brought a vibrancy to the field that made otherwise arcane materials suddenly relevant. Shiva became a topic of broad interest, both within the world of Indology and beyond it; theodicy became a comparative enterprise that engaged Indian thinkers as well as contemporary theologians of many religious traditions, and dreams became important stories to think about cognition. All of these works popularized Indian mythology, but did constitute a focus on the psychosexual, the psychological, and the symbolic realms, and the connections between texts across a wide array of historical periods and regional subcultures within India. While embraced for revitalizing a field, Doniger’s work was also criticized for eliding these crucial differences in its pursuit of representing a more holistic view of Indian narrative. These critiques can be further contextualized in the (now tired) debate about whether the orientalist study of Indian religions has been unduly influential—​particularly through the theories of Eliade, as mentioned above. As the critique goes, Eliade’s earlier work on India, particularly his book on yoga, gave him the template through which to view all religions. Even with a detailed historical study of different techniques of yoga, he observes that there is a continuity of behavior with respect to time, both down the ages and in various cultures. After Eliade’s death, many scholars placed the origins of this ahistorical approach in the early association of Eliade with Romanian fascism.4 As Douglas Allen writes of Eliade, so too some scholars asked of Doniger: “The question is whether Eliade universalizes—​as his essential model for all religion—​an archaic ontology and certain kinds of Eastern spirituality that devalue the temporal and the historical” (Allen 1998). According to this critique, the cultural contexts of religions, the role of ideologies in their formation, and the historical forces that shape them, are obscured, if not altogether elided, in Eliade’s work. Doniger occupied the Eliade Chair in the History of Religions just as Eliade’s legacy was challenged after his death, and this situation made those critiques all the more noticeable. As mentioned above, Doniger’s The Implied Spider was a repartee to many of these charges of taking religions out of context and critics’ suspicion about the comparative enterprise (Inden 1990: 122ff). The book provided a robust defense of comparative mythological work on political, historical, and cultural grounds. The Implied Spider has provided an influential blueprint for those interested in comparative work, and has survived long after the paroxysms of anxiety about historical and cultural contexts have become slightly less shrill. The work has been updated since its publication, with

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a new preface that delves even further into the question of the positionality of the comparative mythologist and the ways in which attention to context in comparative work can be achieved at different levels. As Doniger writes, postmodern and postcolonial critiques share an aversion to a universalizing essentialism, a rejection of meta-​narratives, which subsume all forms of cultural difference and which render all elements “the same.” However, in response to this she argues, “The simultaneous engagement of the same and the different, the general and the particular, requires precisely the kind of double vision that myth, among all genres, is best able to maintain” (Doniger 1998: 30). Beginning in the early 2000s, Doniger faced increasing critique from Hindu nationalist groups, both in India and in the diaspora. They insisted that outsiders should not have a primary voice in the representation of Hinduism, and have protested her influence over generations of younger Western-​trained scholars. What is more, they are offended by her focus on sexual themes, Freudian interpretation, and her lack of acknowledgment of indigenous Hindu claims about India’s history. Some of that resistance has been outside the sphere of publicly written critique, such as the famous event in 2003, when an audience member threw an egg at her when she was delivering a lecture on the Ramayana in London. However, the debate became more serious when Dinanath Batra, head of the Hindu activist group Shiksha Bachao Andolan (Movement to Save Education), mounted a lawsuit, which demanded that Penguin India, the publisher, pulp all versions of her The Hindus: An Alternative History in India. Penguin India’s ultimate decision to withdraw the book sparked a worldwide protest, both over the agreement to stop production and pulp the book, and more importantly, over the law that inspired it—​Section 153A and 295A of the Indian Penal Code. The laws make it a criminal act to offend the sensibilities of any religion. Eventually, the book became openly available once again in India through another press, the Speaking Tiger Press, started by a former editor at Penguin. But The Hindus:  An Alternative History and Doniger herself made their mark on a global concern over the long term. Many scholars of India, from India, Europe, and the United States, have hoped that the Indian Penal Code will be changed so that authors can publish works without fear of intimidation, censure, and worse. Doniger herself has become an advocate in this global conversation—​for the possibilities of free speech, of intimidation-​free publishing, and of public engagement on questions of religion (e.g., Doniger et al. 2016).

Concluding thoughts Doniger’s work on mythology has consistently argued for multiple methods, whether it is the “toolbox” method she argues for in Other People’s Myths, or the multiple

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layers of similarity and difference in The Implied Spider. What is more, whether she is writing on illusion, on sexuality, or on animals, she is arguing that they are in a sense their own method—​that each mythological topic requires its own bespoke approach. Doniger tackles issues that require complex approaches, where the influences are not unidirectional, but rather multidirectional. Moreover, in her overall oeuvre we can see how the study of Indian religions and general theory in the study of religion reshape each other. Doniger has also been able to place front and center many little-​discussed issues in the history of Indian religions—​issues all too often eclipsed by the larger history of religions debates, or relegated to other fields of inquiry. In her insistence on methodological complexity, Doniger has shaped a new generation of leading scholars whose work falls in the interstices between the traditional disciplines: gender studies, the history of sexuality, the role of textual study and translation in the early twenty-​ first century, the borders between myth and literature, and so on. Doniger’s work has also consistently dealt with the dynamics of the jump across the ever-​elusive and undefinable boundary we call “cultural difference.” Her translations almost always begin with a consideration of the cross-​cultural implications of the very act of translation itself. Indeed, some may argue that for Doniger, translation is a far better term for the work of the historian of religions than the “objective study” or “science” of a particular phenomenon, or the more “subjective study” asserted as a counterclaim to such scientific ones. Doniger demonstrates that historians of religions deal with many levels of translation—​the line-​by-​line act of translating a text and its accepted art of approximation, the act of reading a text foreign to one in order to align it with one’s own terms of reference, and the act of translating a set of motifs across cultures. Doniger has also offered new perspectives on key classical texts, and encouraged her colleagues to do the same. For Doniger, one should always be rereading classical Indian texts—​indeed, all texts—​in self-​critical and fresh ways. Such a view also understands that linguistic philology need not be narrowly locked in a battle with larger interpretive frameworks, such as philosophy or morphology, but work in conversation with them in mutually self-​corrective ways. Finally, Doniger shows the intriguing possibilities of combining ethnographic and historical work in the study of religion. This combination—​frequently practiced by scholars of Indian religion—​has yet to be fully theorized in the study of religion more generally. As anthropology continues its introspective moments, particularly concerning the identity of the ethnographer, historians of religions are poised to take on full force questions about the play of identity. This open embrace of ambivalent identities in both ethnographic and historical work is possible because Doniger has argued that her subject matter, mythology, has always queried identity in a relentless quest for self-​transformation.

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Suggested further reading Doniger O’Flaherty, Wendy. (1988), Other Peoples’ Myths: The Cave of Echoes, New York: Macmillan. Doniger, Wendy. (1998), The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth, The 1996–7 ACLS/AAR Lectures, New York: Columbia University Press. Doniger, Wendy. (1999), Splitting the Difference: Gender and Myth in Ancient Greece and India. The 1996 Jordan Lectures, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press and University of London Press. Doniger, Wendy. (2000), The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Doniger, Wendy. (2005), The Woman Who Pretended to Be Who She Was, New York: Oxford University Press. Doniger, Wendy. (2009), The Hindus: An Alternative History, New York: Penguin.

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4 Ritual and Belief: Catherine Bell Kevin Lewis O’Neill Biography and historical context Catherine M.  Bell graduated from the University of Chicago’s Divinity School with a PhD in the History of Religions in 1983 and retired in 2007 as the Bernard J.  Hanley Professor at Santa Clara University. Her dissertation, “Medieval Taoist Ritual Mastery: A Study in Practice, Text and Rite” (Bell 1983), focused on a series of foundational manuscripts that the Taoist scholar Lu Hsiu-​ching (406–​477 CE) edited. The specifics of this study drove Bell to consider not just the relationships between ritual and texts within Taoism, but also helped catapult her line of thought toward more theoretical considerations about the study of religion. Bell’s enduring contribution to the discipline, to put it in a sentence, induced a shift in scholarly understandings of ritual from thoughtless action to strategic practice with the landmark publication of Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (Bell [1992] 2009). The book proved timely and provocative, forcing scholars of religion to move away from ritual as merely a point of comparison between major world traditions and toward ritual as strategic practice. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice also proved influential for many outside of religious studies, as it encouraged the consideration of ritual’s analytical relevance to the study of society more generally. The book delivers a wide-​ranging history of ideas that marks a pivotal moment in approaches to examining the structure and function of ritual. The book’s central question is: Why and when is ritualization an effective way of acting? (Bell 2009: 197). This groundbreaking work was the first of two major research moments for Bell, as she initiated but never completed a complementary study of belief that took religious conviction as embodied practice. Bell died in 2008 at the age of fifty-​five due to

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complications related to prolonged illness. The outlines of this second major research project survive in a series of articles and unpublished manuscripts. Perhaps the most abiding aspect of Bell’s life’s work is its persistence in prompting scholars of religion to see their most familiar assumptions from a critical distance, while offering a language to generate different lines of thinking. One of her last publications, titled “Paradigms Behind (and before) the Modern Concept of Religion” (Bell 2006c), animates this charge; the intellectual imperative acting as nothing less than a complete reassessment of religion itself. She writes:  “These paradigms demonstrate the limits on theoretical variety in the field, the difficulty in making real changes in set ways of thinking, and productive foci for interdisciplinary methods of study” (Bell 2006c: 27). For Bell, this was not mere critique—​one that continually pulls back layers of falsity to reveal religion’s reality. Her approach never took religion as an absolute value but rather as an array of embodied practices. Put more broadly, Bell’s intellectual project endeavored to get scholars to consider how and to what end they employ the category of religion. Or, as she puts it in her unpublished manuscript on the problem of belief and the practice of believing: “How [do] we think of ourselves . . . and how [do] we think about what we are doing with our inherited interpretive categories [?]‌” (n.d.a). These were her questions.

Key writings and signature approaches: Thought and action A single concern organizes Catherine Bell’s two major lines of research: the presumed separation between thought and action. This partition, Bell argues, appears throughout the study of religion, marking a fundamental assumption about how scholars of religion construct the subject of religion. Examples of this divide include religious actors mindlessly engaging ceremonies, devotees kneeling without any real consideration as to why, and the faithful supplicating to divine authority without a second thought. While this kind of rote activity can appear in any religious life, Bell questions whether this is a sustainable way to consider the structure and function of religion itself. Take the act of kneeling as one example. There is a temporality to submission and supplication, with the religious subject willing to kneel. However, one may decide to kneel more slowly or quickly than is generally accepted—​all to communicate critique. Or the religious subject may not kneel at all, deciding to stand instead. Yet these strategic possibilities remained largely unthinkable by scholars within the study of religion because of the very way the discipline came to understand religion as an object of study. Separating thought from action effectively reduced the religious subject to robots, ones that obey a murky set of orders without any real reason to do so. Constructing ritual as such was productive in that it created the conditions for comparison

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among ritual traditions, though this approach obscured the complexity of religious actors within a given tradition. This concern became a particularly powerful point of contention for Bell as mapping this gulf in the history of religion allowed her not simply to grapple with scholarly formations of religion but also with what such formations help illuminate and what they hide. These include concepts such as agency, subjectivity, and the body. The culprit of this pervasive legacy, Bell argues, is Émile Durkheim. In the early twentieth century, amid the rise of structural–​functional sociology, Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life famously crystallized this separation between thought and action by dividing the elementary forms of the religious life into not just the sacred and the profane but also rites (actions) and beliefs (thoughts). Durkheim announced that “religious phenomena are naturally arranged in two fundamental categories: beliefs and rites. The first are states of opinion, and consist in representations; the second are determined modes of action. Between these two classes of facts there is all the difference which separates thought from action” (Durkheim [1912] 2008: 36). Durkheim’s theory of religion states, in short, that rites, or ritual activity, create the feeling of collective effervescence; and it is this sensation that fundamentally constitutes society. For Durkheim, collective effervescence is “warmth, life, enthusiasm, enhancement of all mental activity, uplift of the individual above himself ” (Durkheim [1912] 2008:  427). Collective effervescence shapes a group into a crowd, a mob into a church; it sets aside particular people or places as sacred. Think of the rush of emotion delivered by a Sunday service or the stillness sustained by a candlelight vigil. These feelings of connectivity and of sociality are what Durkheim dubs the sacred. Everything else is profane. In this formulation, ritual activity becomes the driving force for producing meaning, symbols, feelings, and responses. These, in turn, become the driving force for both the semiotic and the affective dimensions of religion for Durkheim. This is to say that ritual activity distinguishes the sacred from the profane, and that these rites signify the sacred and the profane as wholly incompatible plots of earth. “The sacred and the profane life,” Durkheim writes, “cannot coexist in the same space” (Durkheim [1912] 2008: 308). Rites, for Durkheim, make possible the embodied sensation that binds society together. Curious for Bell is that Durkheim does not give a reason as to why the religious subject would act—​that is, attend either a Sunday service or candlelight vigil. They just do, for Durkheim, without much consideration or motivation. In response, Bell’s two major research projects trace the fault lines that this separation of thought from action creates and the rumblings it provokes. Many years after her first book’s publication, amid its success, she wrote: “I tried to dismantle the nineteenth-​century construction of ritual as a universal phenomenon, considered utterly distinct in its structural mode of action and, inevitably, dependent on all of our unexamined assumptions about thought and action” (Bell 2009:  44). Her effort is relatively straightforward—​the mark of true brilliance. Instead of assuming the uniqueness

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of ritual, Bell analyzed “ritual activities as fully within the context of all other forms of social action” (Bell 2009:  44). This yielded a rather potent question, one that asked:  “If ritual is not a uniquely different way of acting, that is, one lacking a particular universal structure, then the questions shift to what is the difference between ritual and other ways of acting and, very key to my mind, when and why would people decide to do ritual acts instead of something else?” (Bell 2009: 44). Bell would go on to ask a similar set of questions about belief as practice, as scholars of religion were also prone to taking belief as something “mental, cognitive, or linguistic in opposition to the physical or active” (Bell n.d.a). Bell, then, considered how belief could also be embodied practice. From thoughtless action to strategic practice, and from mental activity to embodied practice, Bell enabled the field to conceive both ritual and belief anew.

Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice Bell’s signature contribution arrived with the publication of Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (Bell 1992), which she divides into three parts but really has two major moments. The first is the recognition that ritual is a discourse. That is to say, ritual is an object of knowledge brought into being by conversations about that object of knowledge. Without scholars of ritual, there would be no ritual to study. The second is that ritual is a strategic practice. Ritual is a discrete activity that angles toward some end. These two major moments allow Bell to historicize ritual while also understanding its utility in everyday life. Religious subjects do things with ritual.

Ritual as discourse Unlike many of her contemporaries, Bell astutely recognized that the study of ritual is a discourse. Drawing from earlier work by Michel Foucault, Bell took ritual not as a neutral activity but instead a discourse that exists within a particular relationship between knowledge and power. Hence, ritual does not simply exist in the world ready to be discovered by the historian of religion but comes into being as a discursive accomplishment through the efforts of scholars trying to define the term in the first place. Put differently, efforts at theorizing ritual have in effect created the idea of ritual. The philosopher Ian Hacking might have called this invention of ritual yet another moment of historical ontology, one in which the idea that “a kind of person [or object] comes into being at the same time as the kind itself [is] being invented.” (Hacking 1999: 165). From W. Robertson Smith to Clifford Geertz, Bell insists that these highly structured theoretical discourses on ritual have constructed the practice as a sociological concept. Consider the epigraphs that serve as an introduction to Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. Each contributes to the construction of ritual as an object of study. “I take ritual to be the social act,” announces Roy Rappaport

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(Rappaport 1979). “Ritual is pure activity, without meaning or goal,” explains Frits Staal (Staal 1975). “In ritual, the world as lived and the world as imagined . . . turn out to be the same world,” explains Clifford Geertz (Geertz 1973). While this definitional work is understood to be descriptive, it was in fact productive too. Bell compellingly asserts that this expert-​driven discourse on ritual brings the category of ritual into being as “a mechanistically discrete and paradigmatic means of sociocultural integration, appropriation, or transformation” (Bell 2009: 16). Talal Asad published a parallel argument about anthropological conceptions of religion a decade before Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (Asad 1983). He argues that anthropological efforts to define religion have imbued the category of religion with Christian assumptions. Asad’s overriding concern is that the anthropology of religion is a discourse that structures the discipline along some rather Christian coordinates. Asad and Bell pursue comparable projects in that both concern themselves with the structure and effect of categories in the study of religion. For Bell, the impediment of ritual as a category that theoretically silos thought from action ultimately estranges the thinking subject from the acting subject. Doing so forecloses any nuanced analysis of the religious subject while obscuring the significance of ritual to those who engage in its very activity. “Theoretical descriptions of ritual,” she writes, “generally regard it as action and thus automatically distinguish it from the conceptual aspects of religion, such as beliefs, symbols, and myths” (Bell 2009: 19). Bell adds that ritual “is then described as particularly thoughtless action—​routinized, habitual, obsessive, or mimetic—​and therefore the purely formal, secondary, and mere physical expression of logically prior ideas” (Bell 2009: 19). The history of religions, she argues, presents a series of case studies that reaffirm this distinction and, thus, limit the bounds of scholarly interpretation (Bell 2009:  47). Bell’s final warning is rather straight to the point:  “The implicit structure of ritual theory, while effective in identifying a distinctive phenomenon for cultural analysis, has imposed a powerful limit on our theoretical flexibility, our divisions of human experience, and our ability to perceive the logical relations inscribed within these divisions” (Bell 2009: 17). To reimagine the bounds of ritual theory is in effect an effort to reimagine the limits of religious studies.

Ritual as strategic practice However, Bell’s task was not to provide an alternative definition of ritual. Yet another definition or theory of ritual would simply create more categories, further compounding the very problem that Bell spots in the first place. There are already too many established distinctions, she stresses, between ritual and liturgy, ritual and ceremony, ritual and drama, ritual and performance, and ritual and play. Her interest, then, was to address how these lines come to appear as fact in the first place and how such distinctions become meaningful to scholars. Each definition aspires toward a

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universal understanding of ritual as a discreet and autonomous activity. But Bell’s insight is not to focus on form so much as intent; it was to ask the question: What do these activities do that other activities cannot or will not do (Bell 2009: 70)? Thus to adequately grasp ritual is to focus on its intent, Bell suggests. Moving toward just such a line of inquiry posits an entirely new framework for interpreting ritual. It is this attention to developing a framework as opposed to a theory of ritual that sought to avoid the trappings of the universalistic tendencies of theory. By placing ritual activity within the context of everyday life, Bell proposed a focus on ritualized acts, or what she calls “ritualization” in an effort to get at what precisely ritual activity does rather than what ritual is. But what, then, does ritual activity do? This is the question that pivoted a field of study. “Whereas Durkheim defined religion and ritual as that which is addressed to the sacred,” Bell writes, “the approach presented here is an inverse of his, showing how a particular way of acting draws the type of flexible distinctions that yield notions and categories like ‘ritual’ or ‘religion’ ” (Bell 1992:  91). This interest in doing as opposed to being connects Bell’s work squarely with the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, a scholar with the greatest influence on her work given Bourdieu’s focus on practice as always embedded within culture. In his Outline of a Theory of Practice, Bourdieu gives a quick example of what he means by strategic practice. Using the case of the gift, a paradigmatic anthropological concern, Bourdieu notes that structural understandings of gift giving evacuate notions of time from the scenario (Bourdieu 1977). Extending the work of Marcel Mauss and Claude Lévi-​Strauss, Bourdieu insists that there is a technique to gift giving—​it is, at its core, a strategic practice. Consider, for example, the principle of reciprocity. This is the obligation to match a gift with a gift. Bourdieu stresses that the gift must be both different and deferred. One cannot receive a cake and then return the very same cake. Doubly odd would be to immediately give a cake as a gift after receiving one. Both scenarios of reciprocity, Bourdieu stresses, would amount to an insult. Relatedly, one must not wait too long to return the favor or this second gift does not reciprocate the first gift. The gift is but one instance of a practice that is strategic, but so too are other practices, such as ritual. Compelled by the notion of strategic practice, Bell argued convincingly over the course of her career that ritual is, like gift giving, a strategic practice. Contrary to dominant theory, her central thesis and ultimate contribution is that ritual is not about the control of society or individuals. This is not the intent of ritual. But this does not mean that ritual is not about power. Bell goes on to say that ritualization creates the conditions for a certain embodiment of power—​it is a strategy that constitutes relations of power. Bell returns to the work of Michel Foucault to flesh this last idea out. If ritual theory as a discourse sets the conditions for conversations about ritual, then Bell, deploying a different moment in the work of Foucault (Foucault [1972] 2010), suggests that the force of ritual activity is “to structure the

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possible field of actions of others” (Bell 2009:  200). As Bell points out, Foucault routinely invokes the term ritual to articulate those routinized, formulaic practices that constitute subjects and mold the body. The body is understood as a political field, shifting the focus from large-​scale efforts at dominating groups of people to the micro-​politics of bodily submission and comportment. From this perspective, Bell is able to understand ritualization not as the conditioning of the mind but instead the disciplining of the body. Ritualization, in effect, works below the level of discourse (Bell 2009:  206). “Ritualized agents do not see themselves as projecting schemes,” Bell writes, “they only see themselves acting in a socially instinctive response to how things are” (Bell 2009: 206). She goes on to write: “Durkheim’s perception has been analyzed for too long only in terms of the so-​called illusions generated by affective states of social enthusiasm. Yet as the forgoing analysis suggests, his statement may accurately capture the truth of ritually constructed power relations, not the delusions of collective emotions” (Bell 2009:  218). The impact of this observation would not simply change but also enliven the field of ritual studies, allowing scholars to reinterpret both new and old data along a different set of analytics.

Belief and believing Bell observed that The Encyclopedia of Religion, one of the field’s most canonical texts, does not provide a single entry for “belief.” For those interested in belief, the Encyclopedia directs the reader to “See Doubt (and Belief),” which presents a decidedly theological discussion on the division between the two and a somewhat stunted history of both (Jones 2005). This realization was considerably surprising given the Encyclopedia’s index, which grants explanations of far-​flung terms like cats, clowns, and cocks, but not belief. Taking this absence as indicative of something larger, however, Bell notes:  “One must therefore conclude that belief was of sufficiently minor importance, from any angle, for religion as it was conceived by the scholars who organized and wrote for this definitive work in the field of history of religions and, one can conclude, religious studies in general.” (Bell 2008 85–​86). Bell admits, of course, that one cannot draw too much from the presence of an absence, that some of the largest topics are always the hardest to assign a definition with a clear consensus. The Encyclopedia of Religion is an award winning resource that deserves much credit. Yet the exclusion still signals what a much more robust literature review reveals: “that the history of religions as a field has failed to have any discussions of [belief]” (Bell 2006c). Bell then points out the biggest problem with such an oversight. She writes: “Although [belief] is ignored in all formal senses, the field makes nearly constant reference to the idea of belief in nearly every publication” (Bell 2006c). Scholars of religion, simply put, “have not seen any problem with belief . . . and may [in fact] need to be prodded to see belief at all” (Bell 2006c). Seemingly everywhere in every moment, belief has remained invisible to the scholar of religion.

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It is an omission tantamount to that of a fish having absolutely nothing to say about water. What to make of belief? Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice notes, in only the book’s second paragraph: “I have enjoyed the prospect of a subsequent and complementary study giving full attention to the problem of belief ” (Bell 1992: vii). This sentence is in many ways a bold outlier from other religious studies works, one that could very well have been deleted by either an overzealous editor or an unsure author. In all of its bravado, this quick but poignant sentence gestures toward a second major study. The tragedy is that Bell stopped short on fleshing out her thoughts on belief. After constructing belief as a problem for the study of religion, after suggesting that the field might benefit from a study of believing rather than belief, Bell announced to her audience at a lecture at Oxford that: “I cannot lay out for you today a ‘practice theory of believing’—​much as I wish my work were at that stage. I am confined to a ‘gadfly’ role for today” (Bell 2006c). She had an intuition, of course. Only a sentence later in her lecture, Bell explains that a ‘practice theory of believing’ would incorporate “an historical analysis of a non-​essentialized lineage of people, groups, stories, texts, and rites both public and private over varying amounts of time and place” (Bell 2006c). Such an approach would be interested in cultural strategies—​what Bell called “a strategic way of acting that enabled a certain type of meshing of constructed expectations, understood cosmology, and reinforcing personal experience, a meshing that would accomplish personalized socio-​cultural ends, however political or even aesthetic they might be, however incomplete in any particular instance” (Bell 2006c). Believing for Bell was about religious actors holding disparate things together rather than confirming a singular reality. She states: “I [simply] suggest that, for starters, choice, commitment, and rejection is not at all what Christian believing is about. That is what Christians like to think they are doing, and while not irrelevant by any means, it is only half the story. Most likely, believing most generally is likely to involve the ways in which contradictions are maintained, not truths affirmed” (Bell 2006c). That is, believing as practice for Bell actively reconciles the complexities of life. Bell’s notes toward a practice theory of believing, to be sure, provide no clear answers. They simply raise the question, how might we proceed? One clue appears in her lectures at Oxford University and the University of California, Berkeley, where she directs the scholar of religion toward the body. Previously this attention—​to embodied practices, embodied performances, and with embodied gestures—​was long understood as something other than belief by those scholars more comfortable with Cartesian divisions between mind and body. Bell writes: “[Michel] De Certeau’s work is the oldest and clearest ‘practice-​like’ theory around, to date, but provocative resources lie in the ideas of [Paul] Connerton and [Danièle] Hervieu-​Léger on memory (which attempt to shake up our premises and explore other cultural issues that may be involved in believing)” (Bell 2006c; 2006b). These authors transform

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belief into both an intellectual object of study and an ethnographic problematic, reframing it not as a faculty of the mind but rather as practice. As not just cognitive but also corporeal. Bell relied on a close reading of How Societies Remember (Connerton 1989) to advance her argument. The author of this book is sociologist of memory Paul Connerton. He argues against the notion that memory is an individual faculty and, instead, argues in favor of a notion of memory as a deeply social activity, one grounded in the body. Memory, for Connerton, becomes “silted” (to use his word) into corporeal consciousness and praxis by way of bodily gestures. This notion of silting proved important to Bell, which is to say that although memories can become inscribed in print, encyclopedias, and indexes, memory can also become incorporated into bodily practices, such as posture and etiquette. Connerton, by way of Pierre Bourdieu, insists on a “mnemonics of the body,” which peak in culturally specific postural performances, because “the past is, as it were, sedimented in the body” (Connerton 1989:  72). This too proved critical for Bell. How, Connerton asks, does memory become embedded in daily practices and rules? How do people practice embodied memories? “In the cultivation of habit,” he writes, “it is our body that understands” (Connerton 1989: 95). The body, not just the mind, remembers, which, in light of Bell’s work, raises the question: If the body remembers, how might the body believe? Connerton identifies three different kinds of memory, which Bell found productive. The first is personal memory, which deals with the experiences of a single individual. These kinds of memories have been the object of psychotherapeutic study ever since the work of Sigmund Freud. The second is cognitive memory, which Connerton takes as cultural knowledge. This is the ability to remember, for example, the meanings of words and jokes. These memories sit squarely within the purview of social psychologists and developmental theorists. The third kind of memory is what Connerton calls habitual memory, which is “the capacity to reproduce a certain performance” (Connerton 1989:  22). Habitual memory is embodied memory. He writes: “Many forms of habitual skilled remembering illustrate a keeping of the past in mind that, without ever adverting to its historical origin, nevertheless reenacts the past in our present conduct. In habitual memory the past is, as it were, sedimented in the body” (Connerton 1989: 22). Here, the body is, itself, a site of memory. It is this specific notion of habitual memory that allowed Bell to connect Connerton’s work to Bourdieu’s scholarship on taste and etiquette—​on the social importance of bodily comportment. Building on and borrowing from Bourdieu’s notion of habitus and practice, Bell notes that Connerton makes clear that “habits [of memory] are more than technical abilities” (Connerton 1989: 94). They are “more than a disposition,” and they are “not just a sign” (Connerton 1989: 94). Habits of memory reside in the body. They work through the body, and they contribute to the constitution of a body’s personhood. One of Connerton’s clearest examples of how

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the body “stylistically re-​enacts an image of the past” is his discussion of posture (Connerton 1989:  72). Posture, he argues, does not just communicate but it also memorializes power and rank within a given society. Sitting or standing properly, for example, inscribes onto and through the body a kind of habitual memory that establishes a transmissible culture. Posture divides people by way of class, gender, and race. This is to say that posture actively reminds people of their respective place in this world—​as someone who bows as opposed to someone to whom people bow. Posture as a certain type of movement, or “bodily practice” to use Connerton’s terms, may even evoke some aspect of a group’s historical origin. Sitting properly “as a woman should” can point to a gendered history that now resides in a body, one that has become shaped by centuries of practices and behaviors (Connerton 1989: 104). Put plainly, the body remembers in ways that the mind does not. Departing from this point, the pivot from memory to belief is not a terribly arduous one for Bell. Following Connerton, Bell argues that there is more than just one way to believe. There can be personal belief (i.e., I believe in God), and there can be cognitive belief (i.e., I believe that the train will run on time). Though most interesting regarding the question of believing (rather than belief) is that a focus on memory helps to conceive of something called habitual beliefs. Habitual beliefs are not just signs or mere technical abilities and dispositions. Habits of belief reside in the body. They work through the body. They contribute to the constitution of personhood. Think for now of bodily comportment in sacred settings—​bowing one’s head, whispering in a temple, kneeling on cue, mumbling alongside fellow practitioners during the recitation of prayers. For a practice theory of believing foregrounds an analysis of diverse practices like sitting up straight in church, closing one’s eyes and raising one’s head to church bells, or ablutions. All of which are not just cognitive but habitual—​triggered, so to speak, by everyday life. This insight courses through her unpublished lectures and essays on belief.

Critical reception of Bell’s work Ritual does not represent power structures but instead is a technique of power. Bell’s argument marked a fundamental shift in the study of ritual, and yet weathered some critiques. Three stand out. One is the style of her analysis, which relies heavily on the analysis of ritual studies as a discourse. Bell establishes her argument by mapping the state of the field, noting how ritual has been constructed as an object of study. As has been noted, Bell provides very little evidence for her theory of ritualization as strategic practice. She makes a passing reference to the body in Roman Catholic rituals but never gives robust examples of her theory. This has left some scholars wanting more evidence and less theory from Bell. A second concern cuts to the very core of ritual studies, wondering whether the category of ritual need be defended so

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ardently by Bell. If her critique is that a field of scholars have constituted the category of ritual to describe a style of action or practice in universal terms, then why propose a framework that more or less does the very same thing? Put another way, is not Bell’s theory of ritualization guilty of the very same universalizing tendencies as other theories of religion? A final question regards the novelty of Bell’s work altogether, suggesting that the contribution is one of emphasis rather than originality. The difference between Bell’s approach to ritual and Bourdieu’s understanding of practice is by and large identical, sometimes making it difficult for scholars to know when to cite Bell and when to cite Bourdieu. The contribution, regardless, has been lasting, with the field of religious studies able to assess its commitment to ritual as well as to a host of related themes, such as the body, agency, and submission. Bell’s work on belief promised to make similar waves, but it remains largely unpublished. There is and will not be a real sense of its reception or critique. Her extant work can only lead future scholars in a certain direction. She writes: I [simply] suggest that, for starters, choice, commitment, and rejection is not at all what Christian believing is about. That is what Christians like to think they are doing, and while not irrelevant by any means, it is only half the story. Most likely, believing most generally is likely to involve the ways in which religious subjects reconcile the complexities of their worlds. (Bell 2006b)

For Bell, bodily comportment did not evidence the effect of belief but rather is itself belief, and this bodily comportment carries effects, namely the maintaining of contradictions. It is ultimately a sketch that suggests a line of future research on belief, one whose full reception is yet to be achieved.

Suggested further reading Bell, Catherine. (1990), “The Ritual Body and the Dynamics of Ritual Power,” Journal of Ritual Studies, 4 (2): 299–313. Bell, Catherine. ([1997] 2009), Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, Revised edition, New York: Oxford University Press. Bell, Catherine. (2002), “The Chinese ‘Believe’ in Spirits: Belief and Believing in the Study of Religion.” In Nancy K. Frankenberry (ed.), Radical Interpretation in Religion, 100–116, New York: Cambridge University Press. Bell, Catherine. (2006), “Paradigms Behind (and before) the Study of Religion,” Theory and History, 45 (4): 1–20. Bell, Catherine (ed.) (2007), Teaching Ritual, New York: Oxford University Press. Bell Catherine. (2009), “Belief: A Classificatory Lacuna and Disciplinary ‘Problem.’ ” In Willi Braun and Russell T. McCutcheon (eds.), Introducing Religion: Essays in Honor of Jonathan Z. Smith, 85–99, New York: Equinox Publishing.

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Part II Examining Particularities

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5 Womanist Religious Interpretation: Alice Walker Carolyn M. Jones Medine Biography and historical context Alice Malsenior Walker is an African American author, having written over forty volumes as a novelist, short story and children’s literature writer, poet, and essayist. She is recognized as an internationally important writer and activist. Walker was born February 9, 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia. She is the youngest child of her parents, Minnie Tallulah Grant and Willie Lee Walker. The Walkers were sharecroppers. Walker attended Spelman College, beginning in 1961, where she became active in the civil rights movement. She writes about her experiences in her second novel Meridian, in which she considers the role of women in the movement. Walker transferred to and completed her degree at Sarah Lawrence College in 1965, leaving Spelman after Howard Zinn was fired (Busch 2013). She went to Jackson, Mississippi as part of her civil rights activism. There she taught history, interviewed sharecroppers who had not been able to register to vote, and served as a writer-​in-​residence for Jackson State University. Walker married Melvyn Leventhal, a white Jewish civil rights attorney. They have one daughter, Rebecca. Leventhal and Walker divorced in 1977. She writes beautifully about their relationship in an essay/​letter, “To My Young Husband,” in The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart (Walker 2000). Walker moved to California where she resides at this time. Walker is the recipient of many awards. She received the Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts in 1977. She was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, and both her personal and literary papers are located at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. In 2015, she was named the inaugural Delta Visiting Chair for Global Understanding at the University of Georgia (“Delta Chair”). This chair, funded by Delta Airlines, functions to present “global problems in local context, with a focus

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on how the arts and humanities can inform conversations on major contemporary issues.” In addition, Walker’s life and work has been documented in the PBS American Masters series, in a film called Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth (2014). Walker’s writing, which has been translated into more than twenty-​ four languages and has sold more than fifteen million copies, has been internationally influential. Her literary achievements are numerous; she has produced over forty volumes. Her third novel, The Color Purple, won the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1983—​the first African American woman’s work to do so. It was made into a feature film, directed by Stephen Spielberg (1985) and was nominated for eleven Academy Awards. Walker reflects on the making of the film, including the rejection of Walker’s screenplay, and the controversy it engendered in its depiction of Black men, in The Same River Twice:  Honoring the Difficult (1996). The novel has been made into a musical. It was on Broadway from 2005 until 2008, had a revival in 2015, won a Tony Award for Best Musical Revival (2016), and began an American tour in 2017. In the same year that The Color Purple won the Pulitzer Prize, Walker’s collected essays, organized as an autobiographical memoir, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, was also published. These two volumes laid the foundation for Walker’s future work and the theory that emerges from it. Here, I  will examine four themes that are constant in her work: womanist thought, particularly its reconception of God; the role of the mother and her current insights into the role of the Grandmother/​Grand Mother; Walker’s activism, and, finally, her practice of Buddhism. Walker’s work is immense, and I will not be able to discuss it fully. I want to suggest, however, that her novels, poetry, and essays are dialogic in nature. The poetry, for example, reflects on the same issues as the novels, while the essays unpack the theoretical concerns of both novel and poetry. They should be read together.

Key writings and signature approaches Womanist and womanism Walker’s oeuvre can and must be considered in the light of the epigraph to In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens. The work is dedicated to her daughter Rebecca, who, looking at Walker’s right eye, which was blinded when Walker was eight years old, Saw . . . what I considered a scar And redefined it as a world. (1983)

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Making wounds into worlds is Walker’s work (LeBlanc and Medine 2012:  172). This transformative work is shaped by her participation in the modern civil rights movement. Walker writes that her life found “its beginnings and purpose at the precise moment” that she heard Dr. King speak. The African American writer’s task is to be a voice for freedom. What Dr. King returned to African Americans was a continuity of place: the ability to live in the south and to remain in community. The African American writer, for Walker, reconstructs the history and consciousness of those who live in that place, honestly, which has caused, much to the horror of some African American audiences, Walker to reveal patriarchy’s role in the Black family. Walker writes about African American life in all its complexity. To understand this complexity, Walker argues, means turning to ways of knowing and being that have sustained that community, modes that are disrespected by Enlightenment reason. Walker, in all her work, interweaves history—​the authorized narrative—​with memory. As a civil rights worker, in Mississippi, she taught history to a group of teachers. There, she met women who knew no history as it is academically defined, yet they were deeply harmed by that history, having been taught that their slave past was shameful. In a bold theoretical move, Walker expands the notion of history to embrace memory, including in history the unauthorized story that illuminates “the faith and grace of a people under continuous pressures” and the strategies that helped Black people to stay in “a beloved but brutal place” without “losing the love” (1983: 143). This counter-​memory entered the academic conversation and was rigorously debated. For example, in “The Politics of Memory: Remembering History in Alice Walker and Joy Kogawa,” David Palumbo-​Liu argues that while memory can “inscribe significance where none was allowed,” it “has yet to find a stable alternative site on which to found its memory and which can move memory to the point of history” (Palumbo-​Liu 1996: 225). In other words, memory has no stable authority. Walker wants to argue that the authority of memory and history are one and the same, that they occupy the same epistemological territory, and that they inform, enhance, and nuance—​ not replace—​each other. Only when history and memory are in dialogue can the whole story of humanity be told. A key element of recovering memory, for Walker, is finding neglected women’s work. This led to her recovery of the writing of Zora Neale Hurston, which, as we will see, played a role in the development of the academic field of womanism. In addition, Walker’s work turned academic attention to women’s work and art, which—​like food, for example—​often is consumed and forgotten. In her mother’s garden, in quilts, recipes, and music, for example, Walker found women’s knowledge. These women, possessing an intense, deep unconscious spirituality had only gardens and kitchens in which to express their art. And there, they did the work their souls needed (Walker 1983:  241). In these women’s arts, identity was exercised. These

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arts, passed mother to daughter, expressed Black humanity, and kept the race alive through, as Walker puts it, the notion of song (Walker 1983: 237). This looking both “high and low” (Walker 1983: 239) introduced a womanist epistemology: a different way of knowing than reason expressed only through authorized writing. Women’s work became a legitimate site of academic study. Womanist thought, therefore, occupies and defines the paradoxical and double space between history and memory. Womanist thought, which became womanism in the religious studies academy, has become a method in women’s studies. As Walker defines the term in four parts in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: a womanist is “outrageous, audacious, courageous, capable, and willful.” She is “Responsible. In charge. Serious.” She is also socially and politically committed to growth of not just her self, but of the community (Walker 1983: xi–​xii). She is “committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female,” to recognizing and celebrating the diversity of peoples—​and to their freedom: “Mama, I’m walking to Canada and I’m taking you and a bunch of other slaves with me.” Reply: “It wouldn’t be the first time.” (1983: xi)

As this section of Walker’s definition suggests, this mode of identity and its commitment are born in and shaped by the sufferings of slavery and its violent aftermath, as well as in hope for the future, represented by Canada. Womanist intensity—​“Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender” (Walker 1983: xii)—​is forged in suffering, but so is womanist joy, which brackets Walker’s work and life. Womanist joy, most of all, is an unconditional and boundless love that embraces all that is and that moves with and in the creation under all conditions of being: “Regardless.” This definition of womanist, with its recognition of Black women’s agency, is paralleled with a new sense of the nature of God. In The Color Purple, the main character Celie and her lover and friend Shug deconstruct a Western, male, patriarchal and imperialist idea of God. Celie’s conception of God is of a big, old white man in white robes (Walker 1982: 201). Shug tells Celie that that is the god of white people, one constructed for the oppression of others. God, she says, is not gendered, but is an “it” (202) that is in everything, including the human being:  “I believe God is everything . . . Everything that is or ever was or ever will be” (1982:  202–​203). Shug expresses an idea that suggests Walker’s future embrace of Buddhism. All is interconnected:  “I knew that if I  cut a tree, my arm would bleed” (1982:  203). In addition, Shug’s god is interconnected—​not an unmoved mover—​and wants us to love it:  “God love admiration” (1982:  203). The title of the novel emerges here:  “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it” (1982: 203). Walker suggests that we engage in a search for the divine; we have to look for “it” in whatever form liberates and frees us, and that seeking leads to joy. This search undoes the effects of both systemic evil and patriarchy. Suffering and sorrow, Shug suggests,

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may start the journey, but beside this immense interconnectedness, human evil, Shug says, is small. This search gets “man off your eyeball” (204). Celie, as she enters this interconnectedness, can curse Mr. _​_​_​_​(1982:  213), her brutal husband, with the power of the cosmos behind her. She can both leave him, for her own health and out of her own self-​worth and, more importantly (and Spielberg’s film was criticized for ignoring this), return and become his friend. Walker describes this “god” as the Spirit (Walker 1983:  xii) in her definition of womanist. Walker sometimes speaks of the Earth as Mother and Nature as her Spirit (Walker, 1997: 9). However she constructs the divine, it is, primarily, a divine feminine. When asked, in a BeliefNet interview if she has a preferred word for God, Walker answered, “I like ‘Mama’ ” (“Alice Walker Calls God ‘Mama’ ” 2007: 1).

Motherhood and the Grandmother spirit The epigraph to Rebecca in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens emphasizes the importance of the mother-​ child relationship for world building. Walker, like many African American women writers, has focused on motherhood. Since Black women were, in slavery, producers who produced products, and the bond between mother and child was interrupted by sale and separation, that bond is a sign of both community and identity. Mothers play a large role in In Search, from Walker’s own mother to Walker as a mother. The mother-​daughter relationship grounds womanist action. In In Search, Walker comes fully into being in the role of mother, and her identity as an artist is affirmed in the mother-​child relationship when her daughter sees a “world” in her eye (Walker 1983: 393). The mother, whose face is recognized and named by the child, can dance, and the other “bright-​faced dancer” who joins her is “me”: “beautiful, whole, and free” (1983: 393). Yet, Walker problematizes the mother-​daughter relationship. Walker reveals in “A Writer because of, Not in Spite of, Her Children” what it means to be writing as a woman with children and how that reality undercuts Western notions of how art is produced—​and what art is, I would add (Walker 1983: 66–​71). In addition, she is honest about the conflicts that emerge when being a mother and being a writer demand equal time. There has been a rift, though now healed, between Walker and her daughter (Busch 2013). Walker has come into her full identity as a writer, I would argue, in the role of grandmother, and her embrace of that figure has signaled a new theme in her work. The Grandmother is introduced in Walker’s talk and essay, “Sent by Earth:  A Message from the Grandmother Spirit” (2001), and expanded upon in her novel, Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart (2004). In the novel, which received mostly negative critical reception, the protagonist Kate reaches a midlife crisis. She undertakes a pilgrimage into the Amazon to understand her past. There, she and her companions undergo an Ayahuasca or yagé (Banisteriopsis caapi) ritual. Yagé is a tropical shrub,

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made into a tea and ritually consumed under the supervision of a shaman. The herb brings on vomiting and/​or diarrhea after which one has a psychedelic experience that shows one what one needs to know about the self. Kate calls the drug Grandmother. Grandmother is a medicine, aligned with the feminine (Walker 2004: 102). In the novel, Walker expands the idea of what yagé is: she aligns it with the Grandmother ancestor archetype. Grandmother, for Kate, is the ultimate ancestor—​a relative (2004: 69). Throughout the novel, Grandmother speaks. Grandmother teaches that she cannot be destroyed: “There is no potion, no poison you can create, that will do anything but rearrange the pattern I  have made” (2004:  77; italics original). What we destroy, in exploiting the earth and in refusing to suffer, is our own happiness (2004: 77). To be in touch with Grandmother gives us peace (2004: 118). Grandmother offers a way of knowing that is before and beyond language, aligning with Walker’s use of discredited knowledge and practice in earlier works. Walker expands the power of the Grandmother in a poem, “Calling All Grand Mothers,” in Hard Times Require Furious Dancing. There, she calls all Grand Mothers to step into leadership, to “assume /​the role /​for which /​you were /​created:  /​ To lead humanity /​To health, happiness /​& sanity.” Turning to address men, she calls on them to stand aside, “gracefully,” and let the Grandmothers lead. (Walker 2010a: 30). The Grand Mother spirit does not tolerate ego but rather asks all people to see beyond ego for the more urgent work: the protection of the earth, particularly of the young. This Grandmother energy, I would argue, is an expansion of womanist energy. The Grand Mother is a global womanist energy. As such, the Grand Mother intersects with Walker’s activist work, to which, now, we will turn.

Activism: From womanist writer to Grand Mother Walker has been an activist since her work in the civil rights movement. She has said that activism is the “rent” we all pay for living on this planet (Film Poster, Alice Walker:  Beauty in Truth). Many of her essay volumes have explored her activism, including Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer’s Activism (1997) and Overcoming Speechlessness: A Poet Encounters the Horror in Rwanda, Eastern Congo, and Palestine/​ Israel (2010b), which documents her work with the women’s peace movement Code Pink (www.codepink.org). That group protests, fasts, and engages in other actions for peace, locally and globally. Walker explores the roots of her activism in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, describing the “Womanist Revolutionary Artist.” The work of the revolutionary artist is to participate in the lives of the people and to present their voices. The tasks of the artist are five. First, the revolutionary artist actively witnesses and records:  that is to say, she observes and preserves the facts of ordinary lives she

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encounters and in representation, both records and interprets the meaning of those lives. Second, this means that the revolutionary artist is concerned with the least glamorous stuff, the needs and thoughts of ordinary folk. Third, the revolutionary artist supports: she stands with the people—​a feature that also describes the Grand Mother or Grandmother, which Walker uses differently in different works. Fourth, the revolutionary artist supports and makes public the “miracle” that Black women represent in their struggle for justice and compassion. Fourth, Walker particularly emphasizes the values of the civil rights movement: the revolutionary artist might uncover tension but must temper hate. And, the revolutionary artist may hate what large groups stand for, but she has tolerance toward individuals. Finally, the revolutionary artist must not just present but also instruct: the revolutionary artist is a teacher, as Walker was to the women in Mississippi, helping others to reach wisdom through knowledge and compassion (LeBlanc and Medine 2012:  176). These themes persist through Walker’s life work, maturing in the Grand Mother (Walker 1983: 136–​138, 176). The Grandmother is a cosmic figure. For example, in the final poem in Hard Times Require Furious Dancing, which is a poetic companion volume to Overcoming Speechlessness, Walker speaks to those who face the violence of oppression. “Yes /​ I know,” the poem begins, and Walker lists the multiple modes of violation by the powerful: murder, in single and in mass. This is not new, but she suggests that there is something new, that the Grandmother is so interconnected with reality that she can know what is happening, “Wherever /​it is /​happening,” and she will know who the perpetrators are (Walker 2010a: 152). The Grand Mother consciousness, therefore, is womanist, but it is a global consciousness that sees and knows all (158), and that witnesses, keeping the record, and that loves. Walker writes that she wants those who suffer to know as true, to remember and to say “Alice loves me /​Alice loves me /​And I am not blamed for this (2010a: 156–​158). The Grandmother also affirms interdependence, as Celie and Shug do in The Color Purple. What happens to anyone, Walker writes in her poem, happens to “me.” This “me” is the “me” at the end of In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens (Walker 1983: 393), stepping out of her daughter’s room, going global in the Spirit, a process that Walker affirms in all her work. Walker has returned, after not using the term for many years, to the term “womanist” and to a strong consideration of the Spirit. In commenting on the 2012 presidential election, she used the term “democratic womanism,” which emerges from the Grandmother work. This “democratic womanism” is female energy that loves all peoples and that works to keep the “entire community” educated and safe. These “fierce warriors,” and Walker calls the names of many women, rise when need arises, and there are “new ones always rising, wherever you look (“ ‘Democratic Womanism’: Poet and Activist Alice Walker on Women Rising, Obama and the 2012 Election,” 2012).

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The Grand Mother and Buddhism Walker has been a fearless searcher for spiritual truth. This search has led her away from Christianity. She tells us this in In Search, that though her parents had made their Christianity noble and good, she rejected Christianity as a “white man’s palliative” (Walker 1983:  18). Walker, most often, has characterized herself as a pagan. In a poem to Muriel Rukeyser, her teacher, she wrote: “Pagan. /​I laugh to see /​ this was our religion /​all along” (Walker 1991a: 420). She told Amy Goodman, in an interview for Democracy Now! that, like Shug, she is “a renegade, an outlaw, a pagan” and a rebel (“I am a Renegade, an Outlaw, a Pagan,” 2006). Not all womanist scholars accept Walker’s paganism. Karen Baker-​ Fletcher, for example, in Dancing with God:  The Trinity from a Womanist Perspective, writes: “Walker proposes paganism as an alternative to Christianity. Her argument for paganism, however, rather than for christocentric faith is not persuasive. If the love taught and embodied by Jesus is the same love many ancestors knew, then why not follow Jesus?” (2006: 130). Walker, as we see even in her embrace of Buddhism, does not reject Jesus. She rejects the Christianity that was “force-​fed” to her ancestors as a “white man’s palliative” (1983: 16–​17), and she recognizes that African Americans have adapted that religion to meet their needs. For her, however, God is not beyond nature (1983: 265); God and nature are inseparable. Buddhist meditation is an adaptation. In the Democracy Now! interview, Walker talks about meditation as a way “that you can really clear yourself of so much that’s extraneous to your purpose in life, so that there is room for what is important to your spirit, something that has to be given space and something that has to be given voice” (“I am a Renegade, an Outlaw, a Pagan,” 2006). Walker practiced Transcendental Meditation for many years before beginning to practice Buddhism formally. I have argued that, like many African American Buddhist practitioners, Walker does not reject Jesus as a figure, but Christianity in its organized form. Buddhism is a practice that begins the internal healing that African American Buddhists need, even after civil rights has conferred legal rights, in order to continue to act in the world in transformative ways. For Walker, Buddhist practice is an extension of and a new step in her civil rights and other activist work. For example, in a conversation with Pema Chodron, one of Walker’s key teachers, the moderator asked them how Buddhist practice could work in situations of oppression. Walker replied that one should see that the oppressor is a miserable person, though that is a leap of understanding. Chodron added that the cause of someone’s aggression is his or her own suffering and that a strong sense of enemy-​making closes down connection: “You can also just realize that your aggression will not help. [Practice] and breathe in the recognition of the oppression of all people and something different can come out of your mouth.” If this can be done, Walker added, “War will not be what comes out of your mouth” (Alice Walker and Pema Chodron in Conversation 1999: Sounds True Video). This

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language of seeing the misery of the oppressor echoes the nonviolence of the civil rights movement. Walker has undertaken an intense if—​true to her unique life and work—​unusual and personal study of Buddhism. She, along with a group of women, studied Buddhism with Jack Kornfield in Walker’s own home, because, like many African Americans, she finds American sanghas to be very white and unconsciously oppressive. Studying Buddhism outside a traditional structure, she and the women claimed the freedom to engage in a “mutuality of learning” (Busch 2013) and, I would argue, to shape a Buddhism to their needs. In an interview in Lion’s Roar, “Alice Walker: The Beautiful Truth,” Walker talks about The Color Purple as a “ ‘Buddha book that’s not Buddhism’ ” (Busch 2013). Walker recognizes that Buddhism has influenced her thought from the moment she encountered Zen poetry in college. This recognition makes sense of Walker’s practice of religion. She does not desire to enter a religious system of any kind, but to engage in what she calls “deep trench activity,” starting with tearing down “the segregation in the heart” in order to heal the self and the ancestors. What Walker finds in the Buddha and in Jesus is Spirit that fuels “outrageous, audacious,” to return to the definition of “Womanist” (Walker 1983: xi), womanist revolutionary artists and, now, the Grand Mother’s work. She argues that people see in Jesus and the Buddha “a certain spirit, which is often lacking in places where people profess to be about spirit” (Busch 2013). In her activism, Spirit is and has been what sustains her. Traveling to many sites of oppression, she finds Spirit that persists even in the face of horror. In Overcoming Speechlessness, at one point, she and the women with whom she travels find that they have no more words to say about the horror they have witnessed. So they dance. This dance releases the Spirit. Walker argues that this spirit is indestructible. It is everywhere and always accessible: “Even when we are unaware of its presence internally, it wears us like a cloak.” (Walker 2010b: 60). This Spirit is what Walker cultivates in Buddhist practice. Walker has written or spoken about her Buddhist practice in many publications—​for example in her volume The Cushion in the Road:  Meditation and Wandering as the Whole World Awakens to Being in Harm’s Way (2013a).

Critical reception of Walker’s work Womanist thought: Womanist and feminist responses In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens and The Color Purple laid the foundation for womanist criticism in the academy. These two volumes opened the discourse of

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African American women’s thought with Walker’s coining of the term “Womanist,” which became, in the academic academy, “womanism”—​particularly in the field of Religious Studies. The first generation of womanist thinkers, Katie G.  Cannon, Delores Williams, and Jacquelyn Grant, are religious ethicists and theologians. Cannon, in Black Womanist Ethics (1988/​2006), uses Zora Neale Hurston’s work as a model for religious ethics; Delores Williams (1993) interrogates the Hagar story from the Biblical narrative and examines the “dialogic intent” of womanist thought; Grant’s White Women’s Christ Black Women’s Jesus:  Feminist Christology and Womanist Response (1989) explores feminism, womanism, and Christology. These womanists, firmly rooted in Christian thought, reshaped Walker’s work to understand Christian theology and ethics and founded the “Womanist Approaches to Religion and Society” Unit in the American Academy of Religion. Emilie Townes, who is the transitional figure to the second generation of womanists, brings together womanist analysis from the first and second generations in edited volumes on suffering and evil (1993), hope, salvation and transformation (2006), and systemic oppression, with essays by thinkers like Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, M.  Shawn Copeland, Karen Baker-​Fletcher, Marcia Riggs, and others. The second generation of womanists began the analysis of what their foremothers created, delineating what womanism is and can be. Two thinkers, Layli Phillips [Maparyan] and Stacey Floyd-​Thomas, have best outlined womanist theory and methodology. Floyd-​Thomas (2006) makes the distinction between “womanist” and “womanism,” arguing that Walker has defined what it means to be womanist, but scholars have examined what it means to “practice womanism” (Floyd-​Thomas 2006:  7). Floyd-​Thomas’s and Phillips’s volumes illustrate the variety in womanist thought, that it is not one canon, but examines, as Floyd-​Thomas says, multiple “voices, cultures, and experiences” (Floyd-​Thomas 2006: 7). Phillips, in The Womanist Reader, traces Walker’s use of the term to 1979, in the short story “Coming Apart.” A wife finds her husband is abusing pornography, and though the wife “never considered herself a feminist,” she “is, of course, a ‘womanist.’ A ‘womanist’ is a feminist, only more common” (Phillips 2006: 7). Phillips describes womanism as “a social change perspective rooted in Black Women’s and other women of color’s everyday experiences and everyday methods of problem solving in everyday spaces, extended to the problem of ending all forms of oppression for all people, restoring the balance between people and the environment/​nature, and reconciling human life with the spiritual dimension” (2006:  xx). Phillips argues that womanism is not feminism and that they cannot be “conflated,” though it is related to feminism—​as well as other critical theories and justice concerns. Phillips separates womanism from feminism, arguing that its concern for all people and for multiple forms of oppression raises it to a different “level of equal concern and action” (2006: xxi). Womanism’s link to gender, Phillips argues, “is the fact that the historically produced race/​class/​gender matrix that is Black womanhood serves as

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the origin point for a speaking position that freely and autonomously addresses any topic or problem.” Given these key differences, womanism cannot be said to be a “version” of feminism (Phillips 2006: xx–​xxi). Womanism is, first, according to Phillips, “antiopressionist,” confronting all forms of oppression and standing against oppression. Second, womanism is “vernacular”: it utilizes the everyday life of ordinary people. Third, it is “nonideological,” moving outside structures to function in a “decentralized” way. Fourth, womanism is “communitarian,” concerned with the “commonweal”:  the state of collective well-​ being. Finally, womanism is “spiritualized.” Womanism acknowledges a transcendent realm, a realm of the spirit with which all—​human and material—​“intertwine” (Phillips 2006: xlvii). Stacey Floyd-​Thomas, in Deeper Shades of Purple:  Womanism in Religion and Society, works through the elements of what she and other womanists call Walker’s “four-​part definition.” She argues that its four parts represent radical subjectivity, traditional communalism, redemptive self-​love, and critical engagement (Floyd-​ Thomas 2006:  7). Arguing that womanism offers an alternative epistemology to Western reason, she sees radical subjectivity as one that can subvert imposed identities and any “hegemonic” truth claims. Traditional communalism suggests the ways of “being, doing, and thinking” that have helped Black women in their communal actions for liberation. Redemptive self-​love suggests acceptance of the self, but also ongoing self-​examination, and Black women’s expressions of self in art and culture. Finally, critical engagement places womanism in conversation with other liberationist analytical modes, but also suggests that womanism has to be on the critical edge of discourse, opening new forms of naming and thinking. The criticism of Walker’s term has come, primarily, from feminism, and two key critics are Patricia Hill Collins and Monica A.  Coleman. Patricia Hill Collins, in “What’s in a Name? Womanism, Black Feminism, and Beyond,” places Walker’s term in the context of Black Nationalism and a tradition of pluralism. Collins also argues that womanism claims an “epistemological superiority via suffering under racial and gender oppression” (Collins 1996: 11). She, in error I think, argues that the term gives Black women “distance from the ‘enemy,’ in this case, whites generally and white women in particular” and supports “racial separatism” (1996:  11). The use of the term, she suggests, “sidesteps” the issue of interracial cooperation among women, though it does support Black men. Collins offers several criticisms of womanism, in line with Phillips’s list. She argues that there are contradictions in the definition itself, focusing on its statement that a womanist is both committed to the survival of whole people and loves other women “sexually or nonsexually.” She recognizes that womanism has been relatively silent on the “ ‘taboo’ sexuality of lesbianism” (1996: 12). She criticizes the selective reading of the term “womanist,” comparing it (since it is being read by theologians, I assume) to selective reading of scripture. Collins also suggests that there is a difference between

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describing Black women’s responses to oppression as womanist and “using womanism as a visionary term delineating an ethical or ideal vision of humanity for all people,” as this usage collapses the “historically real and the future ideal” (Collins 1996: 12). She sees Black feminism as more clearly articulating a practical political agenda. More importantly, Collins reminds us that the debate over the correct term for Black women’s activism occurs among “relatively privileged black women,” including those in the academy. She argues that both “camps,” womanists and Black feminists, should examine their positions. She also suggests that the tension between the terms Black feminist and womanist “can lead to engagement in the difficult task of working through the diverse ways that black women have been affected by the interlocking systems of oppression” (1996: 16). Monica A.  Coleman, one bridge to the third-​ generation womanists, in “Roundtable Discussion: Must I Be Womanist?,” categorizes womanism in the study of religion as “religious scholarship” (Coleman 2006: 85). She writes that Walker’s definition leaves her “in a house without enough furniture . . . for me or many of the black women I know and love.” What Coleman suggests is that the womanism she sees does not allow for “multiple sexual, spiritual, or political ways of living” (2006:  86). Coleman agrees with Collins that Black lesbians and gay people have been excluded from womanism, criticizing its heteronormativity (2006:  87). She argues, in addition, that womanism has not reflected “the religious pluralism of black women’s faith associations,” focusing almost exclusively on Christianity, and that womanist religious scholarship has not taken strong political stances (2006: 90–​ 91). And, like Collins, she suggests that womanism has become too internalized, becoming “of black women, by black women, for black women,” thereby not having enough to say to other audiences (2006: 91). Traci West, in “Is a Womanist a Black Feminist? Marking the Distinctions and Defying Them: A Black Feminist Response,” echoes this charge, reflecting on “the dangers of parochialism that might be inherent” in womanism (West 2006: 293). Coleman also indicts the academy, which expects a Black feminist scholar to identify as and to write as a womanist (Coleman 2006: 92ff). She calls for a third wave of Black feminist/​womanist scholarship that can work through thus far neglected subjects like religious diversity, sexuality, gender, beauty, and others. Phillips answers these criticisms, as do other womanists, by arguing that the critics “rest their premises on an incomplete version of womanism.” They also fail “to distinguish womanism as something of a different type than feminism . . . [implying] that womanism is a poor and problematic imitation of feminism” (2006:  xlvii). Womanism, Phillips argues, is “something different altogether” (2006:  xlvii). Finally, Phillips argues that the critics fail “to acknowledge the positive (culturally grounded) sources of womanist thought, confining their discussion of womanism to those aspects of womanism that revolve around rejecting racism among feminists and marginalization within feminism” (Phillips 2006: xlvii). She concludes: “These

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authors overidentify womanism with ‘race’ and underidentify it with ‘Africanity’ (and/​or other culturally situated sources of knowledge and politics)” (2006: xlvii). Finally, she points to the evolving nature of womanist thought. Indeed, the third generation of womanists has taken up the challenges of Collins and Coleman. Melanie Harris, in Gifts of Virtue:  Alice Walker and Womanist Ethics (Harris 2010) and in other publications, argues that third-​wave womanism has emerged out of Emile Townes’s work, that it addresses a variety of religious perspectives of women in Africa and the African diaspora, utilizes comparative religious methods, and develops interreligious dialogue. The third wave is also more critical, as Harris points out, of womanism’s use of Christian categories and works in a more interdisciplinary way to engage in thought around key contemporary issues, including ecology and the environment, issues that have a deep impact on all human beings but often manifest in the Black community in death-​dealing ways. Others in this generation include Nyasha Junior (2015) and Shanell T. Smith (2014). This allows womanism to open its borders to larger conversations.

Reception of Walker’s activism Walker’s activism, particularly her work against female circumcision, or female genital mutilation, has been deeply criticized. Critics often read The Color Purple as part of a trilogy. Celie’s granddaughter is one of the protagonists in The Temple of My Familiar (1989), and Possessing the Secret of Joy (1991b) features Tashi, Celie’s daughter-​in-​law. Tashi is not circumcised as a young girl, but voluntarily undergoes the ritual as a teenager, wanting to be marked as a member of a culture under imperial destruction. Tashi is nearly driven mad, and the novel chronicles her search for healing. In addition to the novel, in 1993 Walker produced Pratibha Parmar’s documentary, Warrior Marks. In the film, Walker interviews women who have been circumcised and those women who perform the ritual. This work was as controversial as the portrayal of Black men in The Color Purple. Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, in Women Filmmakers of the African and Asian Diaspora: Decolonizing the Gaze, Locating Subjectivity, argues that Walker and Parmar, in their criticism of female circumcision, risk becoming—​and, indeed, were—​labeled cultural imperialists and essentialists (Foster 1997:  91). Walker reflected on these attacks in The Same River Twice (1996), in which she compared the reaction to the critics of The Color Purple: The attitude of our accusers was only too familiar. I thought of how, when The Color Purple was published, and [how] I  was called a liar for showing that black men sometimes perpetuate domestic violence. It is harder, in a way, to know that my image, and attacks upon it, have been used to distract attention from a practice in Africa, and other parts of the world, that endangers the health of literally millions of people every day. (Walker 1996: 38–​39)

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Activism is a dimension of Walker’s work that has been embraced strongly by womanist thinkers from the first wave forward. For example, Emilie M. Townes’s In a Blaze of Glory: Womanist Spirituality as Social Witness examines nineteenth-​century African American women and social reform and lynching (Townes 1995). Rima L. Vesely-​Flad, in Racial Purity and Dangerous Bodies: Moral Pollution, Black Lives, and the Struggle for Justice (2017) demonstrates the “third wave” womanist concern for activism, exploring the Black Lives Matter movement, “Stop and Frisk” laws in New York City, and Michael Brown’s shooting.

Reception of Walker’s Buddhism Walker’s Buddhist practice has become a focus of third generation womanist work in interdisciplinary conversation and scholarship with Buddhist Studies scholars. There have been three meetings of Buddhist Studies and Womanist Studies scholars in a group called The Womanist–​Buddhist Consultation. It met at Harvard Divinity School (November 2009)  and at Texas Christian University (2011), where Alice Walker joined the group. In these meetings, Womanist Studies scholars and Buddhist Studies scholars read a variety of Buddhist texts together, working out Buddhist–​ Womanist readings. Charles Hallisey of Harvard University convened both meetings, leading the reading/​conversation process. He and Melanie Harris of Texas Christian University hosted the meetings. In 2010, I hosted Harris and Hallisey at the University of Georgia to do this form of “reading together” with faculty and graduate students. Two panels at the American Academy of Religion, organized and sponsored by the Society for Buddhist Christian Studies, emerged from these consultations. Papers were published in the journal Buddhist–​Christian Studies in 2012 and 2016. The first set of papers, “Womanist–​Buddhist Dialogue,” reflected on the insights and processes of the consultation; the second set of papers, “Old Buddhist Texts, New Womanist Thoughts,” read poems of early Buddhist women from Hallisey’s translation, Therigatha: Poems of the First Buddhist Women (2015) in relation to Alice Walker’s first public dharma talk, “This Was Not an Area of Large Plantations,” from We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness (2006). In both sets of essays, womanist scholars explored the possible spaces of confluence and conversation between womanism and Buddhism, but also the jagged edges that rub against each other in terms of orthopraxy, methodology, and postmodernity (Leath 2012).

Conclusion Alice Walker’s work is an interconnected whole. Her essays, poems, short stories, and novels reflect on each other and on her commitments to radical social justice

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and freedom, particularly for African American women. Walker’s work is immense, spanning forty volumes and countless personal appearances, only some of which are published. Her work has appeared in print, in film, and on stage. In this period of the Grand Mother, Walker seems to have found great joy. Joy pervaded the four-​ part definition of “Womanist” (Walker 1983). In her embrace of Buddhism, Walker has intensified that joy. In her volume of poetry, The World Will Follow Joy: Turning Madness into Flowers (2013b), she writes: The world—​the animals, including us humans—​wants to be engaged in something entirely other [than the ugliness of war, of gratuitous violence in all its hideous forms], seeing and delighting in, the stark wonder of where we are: This place. This gift. This paradise.     We want to follow joy.      And we shall. (Walker 2013b: xiv)

Suggested further reading Cannon, Katie G. (1988, 2006), Black Womanist Ethics, Atlanta: Scholars Press; Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, reprint. Floyd-Thomas, Stacey. (2006), Deeper Shades of Purple: Womanism in Religion and Society, New York: New York University Press. Grant, Jacquelyn. (1989), White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus: Feminist Christology and Womanist Response, Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press. Harris, Melanie L. (2010), Gifts of Virtue, Alice Walker and Womanist Ethics, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Phillips [Maparyan], Layli. (2006), The Womanist Reader, New York: Routledge. Roundtable Panel. (2016), “Old Buddhist Texts: New Womanist Thought,” Buddhist Christian Studies, 36: 3–47 and Roundtable Panel. (2012), “Womanist-Buddhist Dialogue,” Buddhist-Christian Studies, 32: 45–88. Walker, Alice. (1982), The Color Purple, New York: Simon and Schuster. Walker, Alice. (1983), In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Walker, Alice. (1991), Possessing the Secret of Joy, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Walker, Alice. (2004), Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart, New York: Random House.

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6 Signifying Religion in the Modern World: Charles H. Long Juan M. Floyd-​Thomas

In November 2003, the African American historian of religion Charles Houston Long participated on a panel of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) regarding the usefulness of Nobel laureate Toni Morrison’s writings for religious studies. On a busy Sunday afternoon with multiple concurrent sessions at an academic conference with over 10,000 religious scholars in attendance, the medium-​sized meeting room was filled to capacity. While the panel’s topic as well as the alluring array of presenters was already hugely attractive on their own terms, there was a sizable contingent (myself included) that was magnetically drawn to the session because of Long’s presence on the roster. As both an estimable scholar and masterful orator, Long energized this audience of thinkers and writers from around the world who had gathered to hear this luminary figure parsing his pioneering approaches to African American religion and cultural analysis. Needless to say, Long did not disappoint. While giving thoughtful reflection on the difficulty for most readers to fully engage with the unbridled power and poignancy of Morrison’s classic novel Beloved, he momentarily departed from his prepared remarks to mention extemporaneously that “you know that reading hasn’t always been our thing!” Whether or not listeners were well-​versed in Long’s trailblazing scholarship in the history of religions broadly—​culminating in his celebrated volume Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion  —​Long gave everyone in that room a rich example of “signifying” in action.1 In an extemporaneous fashion that was equally witty and wicked in nature, Long’s comment—​clearly intended as a joke—​was addressing a roomful of academics who still considered there to be a stark division existing between the consumption of “serious” literature produced by the likes of Morrison as opposed to the study of popular culture that  they often felt was beneath them. In this light-​hearted,

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nonchalant manner, Long was illuminating perceived tensions between high and low culture in a sense that the late cultural theorist Stuart Hall termed “the ‘authenticated, validated’ tastes of the upper classes and the unrefined culture of the masses” (Hsu 2017). Furthermore, Long’s retort was focused on the snobbish self-​righteousness among some scholars who would name-​drop a widely celebrated novel such as Morrison’s without ever truly comprehending the text. Long’s sly remark, as the famed US novelist Mark Twain once commented, reminds us that classic books too often bear the ignominious distinction of being “something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read” (Twain [1910] 2013: 69). Last but certainly not least, Long’s remark could be interpreted as an astute insight into the fact that literacy is, in fact, a relatively new means by which all people, but especially oppressed and marginalized peoples, historically have engaged with, interpreted, and understood our knowledge of religion and culture. Throughout his illustrious career, Long has never deemed this sort of elitist hierarchy as beneficial to the necessary work of deciphering religion and culture. Declaring what he calls “the new hermeneutical situation,” Long contends that his particular approach to studying religion and culture “has forced us to understand the profound expressions of human existence as symbols. By symbolic expression we are referring to that quality of expression which renders human experience objectively significant and at the same time allows for an intense degree of subjective participation. The interpretation of these symbols constitutes one of the major tasks of historians of religion and culture” (Long 1963: 6). Therefore, as Long might argue, religion does not merely consist of whatever denominations, rituals, or principles that the educated onlookers and wealthy elites might happen to fancy. Instead, religiosity for Long’s purposes might be understood better as how the complex yet seemingly ephemeral aspects of the human experience with the sacred and supernatural are defined, interpreted, and lived. Even more, serious and systematic study of religion can tell us things about the world, he believes, that more traditional studies of politics, history, economics, or sociology alone could not.

Biography and historical context Charles Houston Long was born on August 23, 1926 in Little Rock, Arkansas. He was the seventh child in a family of nine children with a father who was an ordained Baptist minister. After nearly two years in the US Army Air Force, Long returned home to Little Rock in 1947. He summarily completed a two-​year Liberal Arts program at Dunbar Junior College, a public junior college for African Americans. He departed Little Rock, headed for Chicago in 1949. Upon his arrival in Chicago, Long spent some time studying at Illinois Institute of Technology and Moody Bible

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Institute. Following an extremely fortuitous meeting with William Nelson Hawley, the dean of students at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, and his successful completion of a daunting array of comprehensive entry examinations, he eventually enrolled in the graduate program in religion during the autumn of 1949. As Long embarked on his graduate studies at the University of Chicago, he gravitated toward the tutelage of visionary religious scholars Joachim Wach and Mircea Eliade. While completing his doctorate during the 1950s, he also served as assistant dean on the university staff. By the 1960s, Long had officially joined the faculty of the divinity school and ultimately he was made a member of, and served subsequently as Chair of, both the History of Religions Field as well as the Committee on African Studies, respectively, at the University of Chicago (Long 1963: 6; 2010: 6–​7; 2018: pages 1–4). Spanning several decades, Long spent much of his teaching career at some of the nation’s most renowned institutions of higher learning—​the University of Chicago, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of California Santa Barbara, Duke University, and Syracuse University. This career has led to him influencing roughly three generations of scholars of religious studies and African American studies, among other academic fields. Moreover, Long’s distinguished body of work as a scholar and researcher consists of many pioneering contributions to religious studies and theology, most notably landmark texts such as Alpha: The Myths of Creation (1963) and Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion (1986). As further illustration of his towering status as a visionary scholar, Long has received numerous achievements and accolades, including being president of the American Academy of Religion in 1973, president of the Society for the Study of Black Religion (SSBR) from 1986 to 1989, and University of Chicago Divinity School’s Alumni of the Year in 1984.

Key writings and signature approaches Long’s role in helping to shape the modern study of religion in an academic sense speaks to the general meaning of religion in history and culture, and specifically about African religion in the Atlantic world, from a unique perspective. He participated in establishing the first curriculum for the study of religion in the College of the University of Chicago. Among his key contributions to the University of Chicago’s pioneering History of Religions project, alongside colleagues such as Mircea Eliade and Joseph Kitagawa, Long contributed profoundly to the growth of the modern study of religion as an academic discipline. The discipline of the history of religions, according to Long, “seeks to understand, from a description and analysis of all of humankind’s religious expressions, the nature of religious experience and expression.” Taken further, he notes: “Though one may begin by following a linear chronology of

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religious expression from prehistory to the present, this approach is not motivated by a search for origins as an objective history” (Long [1986] 1999: 50).

Combining theology, the academic study of religion, and semiotics There were three modes of religious interpretation with which the incorporation of signification as Long’s approach to the history of religion is in direct conversation. First, there was theology as the formal study of human-​divine relationship qua God-​ talk, best summarized by medieval Christian thinker Anselm’s classic dictum “faith seeking understanding.”2 Comparing biblical witness to revelation is like a proverbial pair of spectacles; John Calvin’s striking metaphor illustrates how faithful believers see God, the world, and themselves in radically new and better ways. Second, the academic study of religion (otherwise known as religious studies) in its various forms and contexts from the nineteenth century onward as fostered by seminal Western scholars—E. B. Tylor, Max Müller, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, James George Frazer, E.  E. Evans-​Pritchard, Bronislaw Malinowski, Sigmund Freud, and Carl S.  Jung among others—promote the understanding of the sacred dimensions of life and the roles played by religion in human life and history. Third, there was the burgeoning field of semiotics—​the theoretical study of “sign,” “signifier,” and “signified”—​inaugurated by linguist Ferdinand de Saussure’s concept of the association between words and the ideas they indicate. Various aspects of Saussurean research were later advanced by Claude Lévi-​Strauss and Roland Barthes among countless others in the early half of the twentieth century through an examination of the process of attaching sacred meanings to secular signs and vice versa (Barthes [1964] 1968; Lévi-​Strauss 1963; Saussure [1916] 1959). When thinking of how these various elements coalesce in Long’s contemplation of signifying, one is reminded of the old Latin maxim, Videri quam esse—​“ To seem to be, rather than to be.” Toward this end, we must recognize that various religious cultures throughout human history have been inspired or supplemented by concrete images, whether in two dimensions or three. Thus, the degree to which images, icons, and symbols (as well as the ideas they convey) are used or permitted, as well as their functions—​whether they are for instruction or inspiration, treated as sacred objects of veneration or worship, or simply applied as ornament—​depend upon the tenets of a given religious tradition and cultural context as they exist in a given place and time. If Long had simply been responsible for bringing together these three distinctive but disconnected academic fields, that would be an impressive feat by itself. However, by infusing this hybrid approach to the history of religion with his own innate knowledge and curiosity about the myriad ways that race, racism, and religion

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informed the making of the modern world, Long ensured his legendary status as a scholar and researcher.

The Black religious experience Mindful of his predecessors as well as his peers, Long initially identified a serious incongruity between Black religious experience and normative Western Christianity as overarching frames of reference. Much of his work over the years concentrates on how religious studies lost its way in his opinion. Long argues that a chief way in which Western scholars tried during the modern period, to establish the humanities literally as “a science of the human” was, in fact to turn to an examination of foreign and exotic cultures (the primitives) and discuss and analyze these cultures in terms of their religions. Furthermore, they tended in their work to emphasize the irrational nature of religion in these cultures. The unexamined assumption contained in these investigations was that primitive cultures represented an early stage of human development, an irrational stage gradually being supplanted by the rationality of modern thought and life. What they failed to grasp was that their ideals of rationality and objectivity, rather than being self-​evident properties of critical method, reflected an ideological bias which prevented them from seeing and understanding the phenomena they were studying. (Long [1986] 1999: 75)

Instead, he proposes that philosophical and theological discourses within the modern Western intellectual canon should take into account the specific historicity and sacred experience of marginalized and oppressed peoples, especially those of African descent. That reoriented focus, in turn, is meant to foment a transformation in religious thought and scholarship. For our purposes, the basic definition of signification is the process or act of using signs, symbols, and imagery as a means of interpreting and comprehending religious meaning-​making. In many ways, Long’s book is analogous to W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk ([1903] 1994). Whereas the driving question of Du Bois’s book is “What does it mean to be a problem?” the critical concern for Long’s Signification is grappling with the altered realities of the latter half of the twentieth century, namely:  “What is the meaning of the human now that the West must realize that those who were formerly considered lesser or second-​class human beings have in fact always been fully human?” (Long [1986] 1999:  83). Moreover, just as Du Bois’s classic essay “On the Faith of the Fathers” (Du Bois [1903] 1994) helped establish a typology for the study of Black religious life in the early twentieth century, Long’s classic essay “Perspectives for a Study of Afro-​ American Religion in the United States” is possibly the most invaluable explication of the methodological and hermeneutical principles to guide further study into the nature of Black religion by the century’s end. The principles in question are: Africa as historical reality and religious image; the involuntary presence of the Black

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community in America; and the experience and symbol of God in the religious experience of Blacks (Long [1986] 1999: 187–​197). Long’s work suggests that such a fresh approach will lead to reorganization of social and religious structures that are more accommodating to Black experience. The implicit aim of Long’s work is to alter religious and theological perspectives—​ particularly within the context of American Christianity—​in order to overcome the racial and cultural divide within the realm of religious traditions as well as shifting intellectual discourse away from its exclusive privileging of Eurocentric paradigms toward embracing the experiences and realities of marginalized Others. For Long, signifying in all of its iterations was just such an approach.

Significations In its purest form, signifying is a form of wordplay that directs attention to the connotative, context-​bound significance of words, accessible only to those who share the cultural values of a given speech community. Historically, the expression is derived from folktales about the “Signifying Monkey” that originated in enslaved African American communities in the antebellum US South. In these cherished stories, the Monkey was a beloved Trickster figure who, regardless of the situation, repeatedly defeats the more powerful Lion through artful subterfuge and skillful deception. In his celebrated work on the subject, literary critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. states that signifying within Black popular culture represents how the “complex act of language Signifies upon both formal language use and its conventions, conventions established, at least officially, by middle-​class white people” (1988: 47). Arguably, the term “signifying” in and of itself is imbued with a range of metaphorical and theoretical meanings that stretches far beyond its literal scope of reference within Black religion and popular culture. Nevertheless, unlike the way Gates emphasizes how signifying deploys dualistic (and sometimes dueling) metaphorical and theoretical meanings within Black language in opposition to mainstream white culture, Long envisions signification as a realm of Black cultural imagination, and innovation is never seen as far removed from Black religious experience. Signifying, in Long’s purview, is a subversive activity of self-​regard and survival that aims to combat the entrenched estrangement and elitism produced by the Western canon. Writing in a demonstrably adoring fashion about signification, Long can barely contain his strong indebtedness to the intellectualism and insights of countless Black people from his segregated Little Rock hometown who gave him the rudiments of signifying. Additionally, although Long’s writings have wide-​ranging subjects, they are somewhat unified by an unbridled enthusiasm for freedom as well as an affectionate concern for the life and well-​being of Black people. Long’s approach to the history of religions reveals that the purpose of signifying is ostensibly to force

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marginalized peoples and their ideas to the surface, to give them greater force and substance in order to ameliorate, animate, and arouse the minds and spirits of Black people. Often considered his masterwork, Long’s Significations offers the study of race, religion, and colonialism in the modern world’s interpretive modalities as necessary for understanding the way religion serves as both orientation and meaning-​making for people of African descent. Furthermore, given the overall sea change in religious studies scholarship in the wake of Significations, it is vital that we pay close attention to how a generation of scholars have interpreted and adapted Long’s definition of signification—​the process of using signs, symbols, and imagery as a means of interpreting and comprehending religious meaning-​ making—​ for their own respective purposes of comprehending the divergent ways in which human beings communicate, seek, and negotiate historical definition and sociocultural power in both the sacred and secular spheres. Chief among the many accomplishments brought forth by Significations is that this text represents Long’s efforts to promote a more expansive vision of the theories and methods rooted in the grand tradition of the University of Chicago’s history of religions approach while also illuminating the rich historical, theological, and philosophical elements of African American religious life.3 His emphasis on how words, images, and ideas are leveraged by both the powerful and powerless reveals that signification provides a means for nuanced descriptions and critical analyses of Black religious experience (consisting of the complex matrix of sights, sounds, movements, and other sensory stimuli that are in contradistinction to the invisibility, instability, and invalidation imposed upon subjugated peoples by normative Western discourses and practices). Within the pages of Significations, Long proposes that philosophical and theological discourses should take account of the specific historicity and sacred experiences of Black women, men, and children. That renewed focus, in turn, is meant to foment a paradigmatic transformation in religious thought and scholarship. The intertwined history of slavery and imperialism from a Western perspective dictated that these redefined women, men, and children were expected to jettison all forms of native beliefs and supposedly become tabula rasa. It is only now, when Blacks are able to express themselves fully, that we are finding out that the conversion of Blacks did not occur according to white designs, and that native Black experience has never been erased and remains extant in the religious life of the Black community. To this end, Long argues: It is therefore the religious consciousness of the blacks in America which is the repository of who they are where they have been and where they are going. A purely existential analysis cannot do justice to this religious experience. A new interpretation of American religion would come about if careful attention were given to the religious history of this strange American. (Long [1986] 1999: 197)

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By his own estimation, it is this “strange American” (speaking concretely to the US experience) who has been lost within the context of the New World, bereft of any claims to voice, visibility, or vindication by the status quo. Aside from a difference in hermeneutical perspective and historical methodology, Significations also diverged from other formative texts on African American religion of that era such as John Blassingame’s The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (1972), Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974), Milton Sernett’s Black Religion and American Evangelicalism:  White Protestants, Plantation Missions and the Flowering of Negro Christianity, 1787–​1865 (1975), Albert Raboteau’s Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellem South (1978), Lawrence Levine’s Black Culture and Black Consciousness:  Afro-​ American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (1977), Mechal Sobel’s Trabelin’ On: The Slave Journey to an Afro-​Baptist Faith ([1979] 1988), and John Boles’s edited volume, Masters & Slaves in the House of the Lord: Race and Religion in the American South 1740–​1870 (1988) that had an overwhelming preoccupation with Christianity as the shared religion between Blacks and whites in the antebellum south. However, this clearly was not the case with Long’s work. Long’s analysis of signification recognized a different religiosity and epistemology for Blacks, and thereby triggered a latter-​day reformulation in theology and religious thought, one that is more accommodating to the Black experience. Long’s work echoes some of the bittersweet ambiguity and nebulous hope about the prospects of African American life and culture embedded in Du Bois’s masterpiece. Equally notable, Long’s exploration of African-​derived religious identities, spiritual beliefs, and ritual practices speaks more dynamically to the complex and fluid dimensions of modernity’s effects upon Black faith and culture here and now.

An epistemology of cultural contact and conquest Nowhere is this situation more evident than in the various ways Long’s work lends itself to the establishment of an epistemology of cultural contact. Long develops an epistemology of contact to account for the contextual situation of cultural contact and conquest. This epistemology not only acknowledges the ability of marginalized, vanquished, or oppressed people and groups to speak, define, and interpret themselves religiously and culturally, but it also understands there is no neutral discourse to describe the “encounter” in and of itself. This epistemology of cultural contact can be applied to all kinds of cultural and religious situations, not only cross-​cultural and postcolonial/​postmodern but also theoretical, interdisciplinary, historical, and theological discourses. This is most clearly expressed in his work in a fourfold manner:  (1) His analysis of Religionwissenschaft—​the “science of

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religion”—​as a contest of rational influences versus irrational impulses; (2)  The binary opposition of Primitive versus Civilized worldviews as a means of creating the “Empirical Other”; (3) His illumination of how the rise of modernity during the so-​called Age of Conquest was a process of centering/​re-​centering the world around the invaders, marginalizing the indigenous; and finally, (4)  The ways in which Long’s provocative study of “cargo cults” have led to trenchant discussions of the convergence of fetish and faith within both a geographical and temporal sensibility. Because the first two aspects of Long’s epistemology of cultural contact are developed in other parts of this chapter, the following paragraphs describe the third and fourth aspects of Long’s epistemology of cultural contact by focusing on how European interpretations of cargo cults attempted to center the world around colonial invaders. Anthropologists studying South Pacific island civilizations’ engaged international trade during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries originally coined the term “cargo cult.” These so-​called cargo cults often encompass a range of practices by colonized groups that occurs in the wake of cultural contact and consequent crises fomented by their protracted albeit lopsided interactions with more technologically advanced Western societies (Lindstrom 1993; Otto 2009; Worley 1957). Early scholars of cargo cult phenomena operated from the grand assumption that practitioners in these indigenous societies were duped by these outsiders and simply failed to understand elements of modern technology, cultural imperialism, or consumerist materialism once introduced into their environments. Moreover, through the relentless reach of global colonialism, many of these island societies were faced with Westerners offering a seemingly endless supply of goods in exchange for their natural resources. Since the modern manufacturing process was unknown to them, leaders and followers of the societies maintained that the manufactured goods of the non-​native culture have been created by spiritual means, such as through their deities or ancestors. These goods were intended for the local indigenous people, but they perceived that the foreigners had gained control of these objects unfairly through malice, manipulation, or mistake. In essence, cargo cults were often portrayed as “primitive” peoples suffering from a grave misunderstanding of their role in systems of mass production, resource distribution, and Western commodity fetishism. However, Long refuted this sort of paternalistic and patronizing depiction of these societies as altogether misguided. Instead, he contends that these groups provide a unique and alternate meaning of human freedom in the modern world. Their traditions demythologized through contact with the modern world, the cargo cult prophets undertake a new quest for a world of sacred meaning. This quest is not a return to the pre-​contact situation, nor a mere acquiescence to the conquerors. The ingredients of the past and the present are reconceived as sacred forms, and from this sacrality new human beings are to be created. ([1986] 1999: 103)

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Viewed this way, many of these practitioners actually focused on the importance of sustaining and creating new social relationships, with the perceived dependency on trade relations and material goods being a relative afterthought. Interestingly enough, Long’s challenge to conventional scholarly wisdom on cargo cults not only lent legitimate credence to the practitioners’ religious experiences but also allowed for a greater interrogation of Western views and values regarding mass produced goods. “In an attempt to understand human life,” Long contends, “the prestige of the Western scientific apparatus is no longer an adequate tool. In some way the objects of the study, other cultures, must be participants in the study as subjects and objects” ([1986] 1999: 135). Greatly informed by Long’s perspective on the matter, theologian J. Kameron Carter aptly formulates: “The cargo cult embodies a marginal cultural philosophy whose inherent critique of the West rests in its attempt not to memorialize a center-​periphery logic. Rather, the center and periphery are in constant dialectical interaction” (2008:  212). Put another way, regardless of the disparities that might have existed at the start of their encounter with one another, both societies can find equilibrium if not actual equality as the relationship persists.

A theology of freedom Yet a crucial question that arises from the core of Long’s research is:  How do we liberate theology itself? This growing edge of his scholarly pursuits arises from an inherent contradiction, which Long describes as persisting in conventional discourse. “What we have in fact are two kinds of studies,” he says, “those arising from the social sciences, and an explicitly theological apologetic tradition” ([1986] 1999: 187). The critical theoretical dimension of the sociological discourse compounds differences, so that it concentrates on Black identity and liberation, while the theological apologetic tradition denies difference and works toward normativity and unity. In Long’s estimation, there arises a “failure to perceive certain creative possibilities in the black community in America” due to this inherent contradiction and the ensuing tension such thought and action generates ([1986] 1999: 187). When thinking about the distinction between liberation theology and a “theology of freedom,” how do we discern, describe, and discuss the difference between these two? Faced with this conundrum, Long advances two key concepts that help him envisage new contours and directions for moving beyond liberation theology toward his desired “theology of freedom.” The first of these concepts is theologies opaque. In explaining this term, Long describes theologies opaque as theological discourses that unabashedly take into full account the concerns of race and ethnicity as well as socioeconomic location and historical oppression. Out of the dismal shadows of history, these particularistic theological formulations would serve a vital function for any methodological insight and theoretical discourse suited for the interpretation of religion.

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Presaging what might be called a transcendent “identity politics” and its correlation to transformative cultural consciousness, Long states: “Black is Beautiful; God is red! These pronouncements by the opaque ones deny the authority of the white world to define their reality, and deny the methodological and philosophical meaning of transparency as a metaphor for a theory of knowledge” ([1986] 1999: 207). If taken to their most logical conclusion, Long declares that “theologies opaque must become deconstructive theologies . . . theologies that undertake the destruction of theology as a powerful mode of discourse.” Going even further, he says:  “The resources for this kind of deconstructive theology are present in the modern period. It means that attention must be given in a precise manner to the modes of experience and expression that formed these communities in their inner and intimate lives. I  don’t have in mind a romantic return to an earlier period” ([1986] 1999: 209–​210). Rather than seeking an impossible escape into a nostalgic fantasy of a glorious bygone age, he envisions a disruptive potential of theologies opaque toward the longstanding Western theological tradition that embraces the fullness of the past in order to remake the present best summarized by him asking the following questions:  “But what would be a history stemming from the oppressed? Are they destined to imitate and repeat a destructive cycle of events?” (Long [1986] 1999: 210). There is a widely used quote stating the definition of insanity as the state of “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Similarly, Long would argue that there is little hope or logic in simply trusting that you will be emancipated by the same theological references, resources, and restrictions that created the conditions of your suffering and subjugation in the first place. Instead, for those seeking to truly be free, he suggests that the appearance of theologies of the opaque might promise another alternative of a structural sort, but only if these theologies move beyond the structural power of theology as the normative mode of discourse and contemplate a narrative of meaning that is commensurate with the quality of beauty that was fired in the crucible of oppression. Those who have lived in the cultures of the oppressed know something about freedom that the oppressors will never know. Opaque theologies in their deconstructive tasks will be able to make common cause with folklorists, novelists, poets, and many other nontheological types who are involved in the discernment of these meanings. ([1986] 1999: 210)

The second concept, Long argues, that  will inaugurate a theology of freedom is oppugnancy. Long introduces this term into the theological discourse in the interest of aiding the construction of a radical hermeneutical method for exploring the nature and meaning of Black faith in the modern world. According to Long, oppugnancy refers to the inordinate cruelty, animosity, and carnage characterized by the enslavement of people of African descent as a constitutive element of the Black

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religious experience and historical reality. In other words, oppugnancy addresses the “hardness of life” for the oppressed by confronting the harsh conditions that brought such a devastating situation into being. Moreover, Long’s definition of the term reflects the sense that said reality was opaque and diametrically opposed to the well-​being of the enslaved and oppressed, thereby provoking oppositional response to such hardship ([1986] 1999: 211). Long thinks the old methodological and theoretical frameworks even within Black liberation theology are inadequate because, although they might take into account the political and sociological aspirations of the Black community, ironically, they ignore the degrees of difficulty, distress, and disaster that have been embedded within the Black religious experience based on the onslaught of modernity. Indeed, most of the models of theological discourse perennially deny a separate or distinctive religious experience at all, deeming that  people are identical as long as they are identified in generalized terms such as “citizens,” “consumers,” and “Christians,” to name only a few. However, he insists on a new methodology as well as a radically different theoretical perspective that is keenly aware of how oppugnancy is at work in the lives of everyone who is deemed an “Other.” Therefore, Long’s analysis of signification acknowledges that a different religious and epistemological framework is required for and by Blacks and similarly oppressed groups, one that is more accommodating to the severity of their history as well as reimaging the conditions of their collective possibilities. In other words, through the examples of theologies opaque and oppugnancy, Long intends to use these reworked and reimagined frameworks for theology to question the very nature and meaning of faith itself.

Analysis of Long’s work Race and religion An undeniable feature of signifying and its role in the study of religion is its usefulness in fighting mainstream assumptions about race, religion, and non-​Western cultures. Ultimately, when one delves deeply into Long’s writings, one becomes privy to a theory of religion that identifies a serious incompatibility between Black religious experience and traditional religion, most notably white Protestant Christianity. Such an incompatibility needs to be properly articulated, and in the past such issues have been glossed over. The long historical situation of slavery, segregation, and colonization has meant that in the past Blacks often lacked freedom to share their voice and vision that would have allowed them to articulate their cultural and religious aspirations. According to the functioning of white supremacy, they were meant to embrace Christianity as a mark of being civilized and, more importantly, controlled,

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and therefore were meant to jettison all forms of native beliefs. Since the 1500s, prevailing Western thought has assumed that Christianity was at first an imposition upon enslaved Africans and their descendants across the African diaspora. By Long’s estimation, however, due to subsequent processes of syncretism and various modes of cultural assimilation following the initial cross-​cultural encounter, it must be said that the Black community adapted this and other faith traditions to its own experience, rather than the other way around. As a result, key figures, images, rhetoric, and ideas from the Bible have been utilized to translate and transmit Black experience, which necessarily includes the religious experience from a pre-​Christian existence/​ non-​European source. Herein lie the roots of comprehending African American Christianity as both a highly contextualized and culturally specific Black theology and also part of a broader African diasporic religious worldview, thus seeing it as something distinct from the mainstream Americanized version of religion. Therefore, the historical situation of slavery, segregation, and systemic oppression meant that in the past Blacks often lacked the freedom to share their voice and vision that would have allowed them to articulate their cultural and religious aspirations.4 It is only now, when Blacks are able to express themselves more  fully, that we are finding out that the conversion of Black people did not occur according to white supremacist designations. Indeed, inchoate Black experience has never been erased, and remains extant in religious life of the Black community. Long provides an exemplary hermeneutical framework that enables us to seek “an interpretation of the historical range of human expressions in their specificity and integrity, whether in art, linguistics, geography, etc.” (Long 2000: 2). In addition, he reminds us that the task of marginalizing and diminishing Black humanity is a function of white supremacy. As such, Long declares that such activity is “more than an accusation regarding the actions and behavior of the oppressive cultures; it goes to the heart of the issue. It is an accusation regarding the worldview, thought structures, theory of knowledge, and so on, of the oppressors. The accusation is not simply of bad acts but, more importantly, of bad faith and bad knowledge” ([1986] 1999: 208). While not being personally adverse or particularly antagonistic toward the church in any sense—​by his own admission he holds ministerial ordination in two Christian denominations—​he finds it crucial to raise issue with an overly simplistic and narrow depiction of Black people’s spiritual practices and principles being perpetuated by scholars, practitioners, and casual onlookers alike. Yet, by exploring how signifying reflects an indispensable feature of Blackness as an integrated state of thought, being, and action, Long forces us to confront the imposed theoretical and methodological limitations of the normative Western imagination. Black religious experience disrupts the previously untrammeled structure of Western thought by pushing back against it with truth claims and assertions that it so proudly and elegantly declared were its sole property. Long majestically asserts:

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As stepchildren of Western culture, the oppressed have affirmed and opposed the ideal of the Enlightenment and post-​Enlightenment worlds. But in the midst of this ambiguity, for better or for worse, their experiences were rooted in the absurd meaning of their bodies, and it was for these bodies that they were regarded not only as valuable works but also as the locus of the ideologies that justified their enslavement . . . The totalization of all the great ideals of Western universalization met with the factual symbol of these oppressed ones. ([1986] 1999: 211)

It is this insurgency along with a concurrent emergence of new visions of material and conceptual relationships that prevent a historic captivity, concealment, and coercion of Black religious experience and expression as a viable, rational, and legitimate manifestation of the human condition. This development results from the material as well as theoretical ordering of things rooted in more than five centuries of Western colonial domination of the globe. Long suggests that, to the contrary, what is proffered by reorienting our perspectives and reawakening our sense of possibility is “the historicity of the human community” and the “possibility of the rediscovery of the life of matter as a religious phenomenon—​an equal and sometimes alternate structure in the face of the dehumanizing and terroristic meaning of history” (Long 2000: 53). If one were to invert the phrasing of the signature slogan of a contemporary protest movement, it could be said that Long strives for all people to remember “Black matter lives.”

Challenging academic compartmentalization By offering signification as a radically disruptive epistemology to the status quo, Long establishes seemingly mundane thought as a meaningful ritual practice that critically engages the past and present by changing dynamics of citizenship, culture, capital, conquest, and commerce in the creation of the modern world order and its cultivation of the metaphysics and technologies of what it essentially means to be human. To illuminate this fundamental query of human existence, Long makes the following assertion that holds deep importance for the humanities as an academic field of inquiry: How are we to define the human species? Are all human beings to be defined as constituting the human species? Are all human cultures, both past and present, to be included in the study of the humanities? Are all human situations part of the possible constituting data of the humanities? In other words, the question is raised, given the actual or possible worlds we live in, is it adequate for the humanities to derive its fundamental orientation, meaning, and data from simply the Hebraic, Greek, Christian meanings of our culture? (Long 1990: 204)

Long questions the inherently contradictory nature of Eurocentric intellectual enterprise camouflaged as humanistic thinking and arguably as normative logic

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itself. This paradox forcibly orients us toward the inexorably unimaginative nature of the categories of dominant Western thought in light of the infinite possibilities and permutations of the human enterprise. Long’s intellectual practice reminds us that exemplary thinking of the human cannot be absolutely contained, categorized, and catalogued under the current regimes of thought. Indeed, signification as a hermeneutical means of deciphering and defining reality overrides this unimaginative quagmire in order to open up new horizons for thought, being, and action as humans. In order to bridge this particular gap between worldviews, Long sees such a radical paradigm shift occurring in the academic departments of religious studies, philosophy, and the social sciences, and he wants to see it come out of this confinement and be tackled by ministers and theologians. To facilitate this process, he asks for religious meaning to be sought in more places than the church and ecclesiastic circles. He suggests that personal faith be given a more important position than conventional norms and practices, which he refers to as “extra-​church.” In this context he says: The Christian faith provided a language for the meaning of religion, but not all the religious meanings of the black communities were encompassed by the Christian forms of religion . . . Some tensions have existed between these forms of orientation and those of the Christian churches, but some of these extra-​church orientations have had great critical and creative power. They have often touched deeper religious issues regarding the true situation of black communities than those of the church leaders of their time. (Long [1986] 1999: 7)

Critique of Long’s work If there was one dimension in which Long’s scholarly purview was compromised, it could be argued that it would have benefited immensely from the inclusion of the lives and perspectives of women, LGBTQ, and differently abled persons whose experiences, in many ways, are perennially obscured and unheard within dominant historical narratives. Much like the earliest definitions of Black liberation theology that Long criticizes, a major part of his scholarship has been delimited by the propensity toward giving a heightened preference to androcentric and heteronormative criteria, even as he clearly advances an agenda that seeks expanded notions of freedom, justice, and equality in terms of racial and ethnic identity. Judging him as being a product of his environment and historical context, it might be easy to suggest that Long’s work should be considered as the outgrowth of an earlier era that was less culturally inclusive and cognizant of human difference rather than by today’s moral and intellectual standards. Nevertheless, that being said, such a consideration feels more like an excuse than an explanation, especially in light of comparably interesting conversations and explorations that can be generated about the shortcomings of the

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civil rights agendas and organizations of the 1950s and 1960s that coincided with Long’s own personal and professional evolution. Ironically, the growth and development of signification as an epistemological system that seeks to disrupt and undermine the status quo must also seek to interrogate its own expansive and inclusive agenda. Even so, the public discourse around and perception of Long’s initial vision of signification can sometimes echo the selectively exclusionary biases of many mid-​twentieth century progressive and liberation movements, despite their self-​professed agendas. I  think this speaks to the ways conversations about “race” have frequently assumed a male subjectivity and eschewed more intersectional approaches to expressing and experiencing different worldviews. Thankfully, more recent texts that have clearly been influenced and inspired by Long’s visionary theoretical and methodological approaches have embraced his innovations while also expanding the template to incorporate these formerly excluded groups. By doing so, these subsequent works invite students and readers more generally to think expansively about how prophets are designated and who defines prophetic speech, and could go a long way in unsettling some of presumed norms and old prejudices. Perhaps this juxtaposition of ancient issues and new ideas as well as dominant traditions and disruptive truths that leads to bold new iterations and innovations might actually be the perfect summation of our discussion of signification. In the final analysis, Charles H. Long’s signifying of modern religion enables us to begin truly contemplating the basic question of “a new humanity” in all of its depth, variety, and splendor while also empowering us to configure ways of thinking and reimagining “an-​other world of human beings” (Long 1990: 214).

Suggested further reading Carter, J. Kameron. (2008), Race: A Theological Account, New York: Oxford University Press, 195–227. Catherine L. Albanese. (1996), “Religion and American Popular Culture: An Introductory Essay,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 64 (4): 733–742. Crockett, Clayton. (2001), “Contact Epistemology for the Sites of Theology.” In Clayton Crockett (ed.), Secular Theology: American Radical Theological Thought, 198–211, London and New York: Routledge. Floyd-Thomas, Juan M. (2016), “Towards a Religious History of the Black Atlantic: Charles H. Long’s Significations and New World Slavery,” Journal of Religious History, 40 (4): 1–22. Long, Charles H. (1963), Alpha: The Myths of Creation, Chico, CA: Scholars Press. Long, Charles H. ([1986] 1999), Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion, Aurora, CO: Davies Group, Publishers.

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Long, Charles H. (2018), Ellipsis . . .: The Collected Works of Charles H. Long, London: Bloomsbury. Pinn, Anthony B. (2003), Terror and Triumph: The Nature of Black Religion, Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Reid, Jennifer I. M. (ed.) (2003), Religion and Global Culture: New Terrain in the Study of Religion and the Work of Charles H. Long, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Rolsky, Louis Benjamin. (2012), “Charles H. Long and the Re-Orientation of American Religious History,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 80 (3): 750–774.

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7 Gender and Materiality: Caroline Walker Bynum Jessica A. Boon

If it is the aim of theory to make the world strange in order to reveal its workings and render it knowable, then it should not be surprising to encounter a historian among the influential theorists of religion, for what came before is most likely to make strange what is taken for granted in the here and now. Caroline Walker Bynum, perhaps the most widely read medievalist by non-​medievalists of the last four decades, was a principal voice in the 1980s and 1990s, transforming the study of premodern Western Christian culture through attention to gender and embodiment. However, she positioned her work in creative tension with the presentism of contemporary feminism by arguing strongly for the contingent historicity of bodies, gender roles, and gendered language. Going beyond the initial impulse of the 1970s to “add women and stir” into a male-​dominated historical narrative from which they had been erased, Bynum’s influential works Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (1982) and Holy Feast and Holy Fast:  The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (1987) highlighted not only the impact of gender roles on both men and women, but also women-​specific modes of religious expression. These studies led her to a more general interest in medieval theories of embodiment, ranging from the wondrously strange belief in werewolves to the omnipresent concerns about the bodily resurrection of the saved in heaven. In the year of her retirement, Bynum, the historian who had shaped the contours of the field of body studies in the premodern, proposed that the term “embodiment” should be reconceptualized as one aspect of the broader category of “materiality.” Her earliest works thus are a mainstay of a field that her most recent work expands and reconfigures. Since the publication of Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (2011), Bynum has not only continued to explore materiality

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in medieval European religious cultures, but has also begun a comparative study of medieval Christian materiality with Hinduism (2014).

Biography and historical context Bynum was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1941, the child of two Harvard PhD graduates. Her mother left her job in philosophy at Georgia State University for Women to raise her two children, while her father taught English literature at Georgia Tech and was eventually diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s. Bynum has reflected on her early attunement to issues of women and society through observing, as a child, her mother’s frustration with the societally imposed dichotomy between being either professor or mother, and on her growing interest in the relationship between self and body through observing her father’s illness when she was a professor (Bynum 1992a: 15–​16; 2005: 1002–​1003). Bynum in turn received her PhD in history from Harvard in 1969, taught there for seven years in an era when there were only eleven women in a faculty of over 600, and for a time headed the Committee on the Status of Women (Bynum 2005: 1004). After she held positions in the history departments at the University of Washington in Seattle and Columbia University, she moved on to full-​time research at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton for the last decade of her career, retiring from the Institute in 2011 but still continuing to write and teach. She has published five monographs and three books of collected, highly influential essays, and is considered a leader in developing the method of “New Historicism” (which examines texts as reflecting historical, material circumstances rather than giving direct access to unchanging truth). Among her numerous honors, Bynum was awarded a MacArthur “genius” grant in 1986 and was president of her field’s primary professional organization, the American Historical Association, a role rarely filled by medievalists.

Key writings and signature approaches While Bynum is best known for establishing the study of women’s spirituality and mysticism as integral to the study of medieval Christian culture, her work from the first took seriously the study of gender in men’s writing as well as women’s. In this section, we will trace her initial forays exploring the importance of gendered language in medieval men’s texts and her premier work on the symbol of food in medieval women’s spirituality. We will then consider her turn toward the study of the body in both men’s and women’s spirituality with gender as one facet of embodiment, a turn that led to her most recent call to reimagine the field of body studies in religion under the broad category of “holy matter” or “Christian materiality.”

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The study of gender in the Middle Ages: Jesus as Mother It is common to attribute a profound dualism to the Christian Middle Ages, a time when heaven was valued over earth or hell, form over matter, soul over body, male over female, active over passive, all in parallel to the primary dualism of good and evil. Bynum’s early contributions to the study of medieval spirituality revealed that those dualisms worked in complex ways—​certainly medieval Christians understood such dualisms to exist, but how those binaries actually structured medieval society requires careful attention. If societal convention asserted that “male is to female” as “form is to matter” as “soul is to body,” then women were evidently equated to that which is limited, embodied, and even evil. And indeed there was a great deal of misogynistic rhetoric along these lines written and preached by medieval priests, theologians, and other literate men. However, Bynum argued that these binaries structure categories, not individuals. For example, a nun pursuing a deep connection to God would be termed “virile,” or masculine, in her activity, while a monk receptive to God’s spiritual guidance would be considered femininely passive. Bynum’s early work illuminated the many ways that individuals activated the gender dualisms rampant in culture and Christian thought far beyond simple dichotomies related to biological gender. In her seminal article “Jesus as Mother and Abbot as Mother:  Some Themes in Twelfth-​Century Cistercian Writing” (1977), Bynum examined the origins of a terminology that seems very strange to contemporary ears:  a maternal image for Jesus. Because the concept of “Jesus (or God) as Mother” had been discussed most extensively by the fourteenth-​century female religious recluse Julian of Norwich, both traditionally trained scholars and feminists assumed that the term was developed by a woman as particularly appropriate to female devotion. Bynum rebutted this assumption by examining the prevalence of the concept of Jesus as mother in the writings of a half dozen twelfth-​and thirteenth-​century Cistercian monks in both England and France. Providing close readings of passages addressed to monks by theological luminaries such as Anselm of Canterbury and Bernard of Clairvaux, Bynum demonstrated that male discussions of Jesus as mother were rooted in representations of God as a tender, nurturing, sacrificial caretaker (Bynum 1982:  131). Rather than seeing the role of caretaker as weak as opposed to the strength of a disciplinary God, however, the monks associated these “feminine” terms with authority, thus complicating the assumed binary. For example, they understood God as powerful and sustaining through the action of nurturing; thus nurturing, while indubitably associated with the female side of the gender dichotomy, was not lower on a hierarchy in comparison to “male” qualities (1982: 148, 154).

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As Bynum pointed out, this association of God with mothering was not particularly exceptional in the course of Christianity. The Hebrew Bible/​Christian Old Testament frequently references God as bearing the Israelites in his womb and describes “Wisdom” as a feminine principal (1982: 125). For that matter, the New Testament provides a tradition of “the first shall be last” (Mark 10:31), which can justify men using “inverted language to express personal dependence” on God (Bynum 1982: 128). Thus, male monks might describe themselves with “feminine” qualities or define the infinite God of Christianity as encompassing both the masculine and the feminine. One result of ascribing female qualities to Jesus or God was that male Cistercian authors who wrote about striving for closeness or mystical unity with God could then use biblical heterosexual erotic language from Song of Songs to express their intimacy with God (1982: 161–​162). One of the principal interests for Bynum in her exploration of the “feminization of religious language” (1982:  135) in monastic texts was that the authors applied this language not only to God but also to conceptualize male leadership in general. Several of the authors were abbots or archbishops who expressed their role in guiding the monks or clerics of lower ranks as a form of giving sustenance or protection, comparing themselves to a human mother suckling her infant or a mother hen protecting her chicks under her wings (Bynum 1982:  113–​117). In other words, the presence of “feminized” language in the writings of men did not constitute evidence of women’s spirituality in that era, but rather reinforced “a consistency of . . . stereotypes” even while suggesting that both gender roles have positive and negative valences and both are crucial for authority (1982: 148). Let us pause for a moment to consider the methodology Bynum utilized in this seminal article, as it is one upon which she relied throughout her career. As she asserted in the introduction to the Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages collection: I have simply assumed that the emotional significance of a word or image (even very common words) cannot be inferred from its modern meaning but must be established by a careful study of the other images and phrases among which it occurs in a text. I  have also assumed that the more images or phrases depart in certain ways from traditions to which they otherwise belong or link aspects of reality not obviously linked by common sense, logic, or previous usage, the more they convey the needs, the anxieties, and the sources of repose in the hearts of men and women. (Bynum 1982: 7)

In analyzing the phrase “Jesus as mother,” a term she admitted was minor except in the theology of Julian, Bynum made several explicit moves. For one, while the term was minor, its usage persisted for centuries, meaning that it is reasonable to suppose that it was relatively unproblematic despite its strangeness to modern ears. Second, the most startling version—​applying ideas of motherhood to a presumptively male divine—​provided a cue to look into related maternal metaphors, leading Bynum to

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identify how regularly Cistercian abbots defined their role as mothering the monks in their monasteries. As a method, then, examining a singular name for the divine can lead the attentive scholar into a wide-​ranging consideration of human institutions, the exercise of authority, and the cultural impact of gender roles. Third, given the change in usage of this one term over a long span of time, from the Hebrew Bible to the New Testament to a half dozen twelfth-​century monks to its peak in the writings of a fourteenth-​century woman mystic, Bynum rejected the simplistic application of contemporary norms concerning gender roles to the premodern subject. While many feminist scholars and theologians in the 1970s and 1980s had sought to highlight female metaphors as a way of emphasizing the value of women in the church, Bynum’s historical survey revealed the presumption that female metaphors would be particularly appealing to women and women alone as a contemporary viewpoint. She paired this insight with a crucial rebuke to the field of women’s history: that the writings of men cannot necessarily be mined for information about female experience, since men’s writing reflects men’s assumptions about women and potentially male-​specific views of gender roles. Indeed, one of the principal problems for medievalists is that even those texts that were “authored” by women in the Middle Ages generally only survived by being copied, edited, and/​or approved for dissemination by male clergy or monks, so direct access to women’s voices is still nearly always mediated by men. Thus, the seemingly simple project of attending to the historical specificity of a single phrase or term can open an expansive window on the religious worldviews of men and of women, yet at the same time can serve to critique the presentism of contemporary feminist analysis. Throughout her career, Bynum continued to examine specific phrases or themes that might seem at first glance narrow but ultimately served to illuminate the religious experience of many strata of society over many centuries. For that matter, Bynum’s later studies, while embedded in the study of medieval Western Christianity, continued to problematize contemporary theoretical frameworks on questions of gender, the body, and eventually materiality.

Historicizing women’s religious experience: Holy Feast and Holy Fast By far the most influential of Caroline Walker Bynum’s books is Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (1987, hereafter HFHF), which she wrote hoping to reach a wide audience of scholars beyond medievalists (1987: 8). It reshaped the study of spirituality in the Middle Ages, the study of women’s Christianity across all time periods, and is considered foundational to the study of food and religion across religious traditions. Perhaps its most significant intervention may sound quite straightforward to us now, but was in no way self-​evident at the

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time:  women’s writings should be surveyed to find out what ideas and metaphors were specific to women. Given that strong gender roles in Middle Ages (including the prohibition of access to higher education) produced a different experience of society for medieval women than medieval men, Bynum asked whether those limits would be reflected in the language women used to describe God or devotional practices. Other feminists of the 1970s and 1980s argued that women writers were worth reading for their contribution to universal questions of interest (e.g., how a philosopher like Hannah Arendt contributed to the same debates as the men before her and of her era). Bynum, in contrast, hypothesized that due to the limits imposed by premodern gender roles, medieval women might well have asked different questions, marshaled different resources, and spoken with different metaphors than those used by men trained at male-​only universities and monasteries. In part, this project was made possible by the fact that starting around 1200, many more writings by and about women survive from Western Christian Europe than from any other premodern society, so that a large data set was available. Most of these narratives by and about women described extreme religious practices such as permanent fasting (and claiming to live on the eucharist alone), heightened eucharistic devotion (the desire to receive the eucharist multiple times a day), or intense and unusual mystical experiences such as visionary experiences of Jesus during mass. These supposedly unusual or shocking practices had for decades been dismissed by scholars as simply female “hysteria” resulting from psychiatric disorders such as anorexia nervosa or bulimia.1 Bynum broke new ground in approaching this data set as a record of serious religious practice rather than psychologically divergent behavior, and in so doing transformed the field of medieval religion by centering women’s texts, particularly their mystical works, as equally worthy of attentive study as books by the leading medieval male theologians. However, rather than seeking evidence that would support contemporary assumptions of what would have appealed to women in terms of religious experience, Bynum reviewed her medieval data set of writings by and about women to help her identify what themes reoccurred consistently, that is, what ideas, strategies, and metaphors were most important to medieval women devotees (1987: xv). This accumulation of close readings of texts from across Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries led Bynum to the issue of food. Reflecting on studies from the 1980s privileging poverty and chastity in the religious vocations of monks, nuns, mendicants, and others who embraced religious lifestyles in the Middle Ages, Bynum argued that scholars were assuming incorrectly that giving up material goods and sexual activity would have been the most difficult choices for a devout person to make. As Bynum suggested, “In our industrialized corner of the globe, where food supplies do not fail, we scarcely notice grain or milk, ever-​present supports of life, and yearn rather after money or sexual favors as signs of power and of success” (1987: 1). Since the Middle Ages was marked by

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widespread famine and consequently by widespread food-​hoarding, “conspicuous consumption” lay not in the accumulation of houses or horses, but in lavish feasts or gifts of food (1987: 2). As an ascetic practice, to renounce food when it was available was to renounce the most basic human drive for survival at a time when that drive was particularly difficult to fulfill. Yet eating held even greater religious significance for medieval Christians than did fasting. The Catholic theology of transubstantiation asserts that the bread and wine of the eucharist are transformed fully and substantially into the body and blood of Christ; eating the host (bread wafer) at mass meant that the devotee ingested God, could even become one with God (1987: 3).2 Eating thus had religious significance both when it was avoided in regular life and when it was sought after in liturgical life. In HFHF, Bynum identified that both types of food-​related spirituality—​fasting and devotion to the eucharist—​were far more predominant in women’s spiritual practices in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries than in men’s spirituality. Since the gender roles of the time made women primarily responsible for cooking in domestic households and drastically limited their access to education (except in convents or, in exceptional cases, tutors in aristocratic households), Bynum proposed that devout women who did not have training in conventional theological vocabulary and methods expressed themselves in metaphors and terms from the kitchen and from breastfeeding. Medieval women thus implicitly presented their daily experience as holy, for their concern with food and food preparation linked them with the body of Christ that was served as bread and wine at every mass. Broadly, these metaphors identified food as life, food as desire, and food as the site of renunciation. The association of women with food as well as with the body of Christ was also possible due to another aspect of medieval culture:  in this era, doctors believed that breast milk was purified blood; thus female lactation could be a parallel to the extensive bleeding during Jesus’s torture and death (Bynum 1987: 65). Bynum argued that this association was evident not only in writings by women but also in altarpieces that portrayed Jesus as pouring blood from his side wound much as a woman might provide milk from her breast (she provides artwork reproduced in the second photo section of HFHF): To religious women food was a way of controlling as well as renouncing both self and environment. But it was more. Food was flesh, and flesh was suffering and fertility. In renouncing ordinary food and directing their being towards the food that is Christ, women moved to God not merely by abandoning their flawed physicality but also by becoming the suffering and feeding humanity of the body on the cross, the food on the altar. (1987: 5)

Bynum suggested that apparently extreme (and at times extremely disgusting) practices, such claiming to survive only on one eucharistic host a day (1987: 119), feeding others through the fluids that exuded from their fasting bodies (1987: 122),

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or drinking the pus from the wounds of a leper and claiming that the scaly flesh was as nourishing as the host (1987: 144–​145), were not simply neurotic rejections of the body. Rather, these women, in denigrating the body, nevertheless privileged it as the means by which they were closest to Jesus’s human experience of flesh and suffering. By doing so, these female devotees transformed the limitations of the medieval gender dichotomy—​woman is to body as man is to soul—​into opportunity. If Jesus’s humanity, his capacity to bleed, was crucial to his sacrifice as medieval theologians and artists insisted, then female devotees as more bodily and regularly bleeding were aligned more closely with Jesus’s suffering than were male devotees. When Bynum asserted that “late medieval asceticism was an effort to plumb and to realize all the possibilities of the flesh” (1987:  294), her point was that ascetic practice did not denigrate the body in denying it. Rather, ascetism worked against the duality that privileged soul over body by asserting that it was through the body that anybody, especially women, could access God. In other words, where scholars had assumed rigid binary oppositions, Bynum saw paradox, opposites whose symbolic power came from their conjunction and the movement between them. Bynum argues here (and elsewhere in her critique of Victor Turner, an anthropologist whose works were foundational to the development of the study of religion, Bynum 1992b: 27–​52) that there was a significant difference between the autobiographical writings of Christian men and women in the Middle Ages. This difference lay in the tendency of men to identify specific turning points, liminal moments of conversion, while women attributed intense meaning to experiences of daily life, using daily life as the source for symbolic, often paradoxical meaning (Bynum 1987: 25, 293). Thus, while some medieval monks and theologians did make ascetic fasting and eucharist feasting central to some of their works, their use of the symbol to mark drastic change and conversion was distinctive in comparison with women’s application of it in ways that that highlighted “continuity” with other food practices in daily life (1987: 288–​294). Bynum ended HFHF with a caution and a theoretical intervention. The caution is against using either contemporary or premodern beliefs about food to intervene in another era. In other words, modern assumptions about anorexia and other eating disorders are not directly applicable to premodern religious practices (either as diagnosis or in order to dismiss them as hysterical). However, a nuanced consideration of the contemporary in light of the premodern might permit a theoretical or contemporary intervention; Bynum suggests that the “range and richness of medieval symbols have something to teach us about the impoverishment of our own” (1987: 299). For Bynum, the paradox of food as something a woman denies herself in order to feast on the divine, a divine whose body as food is in parallel to her own, was a more complex valuation of food than modern assumptions that see food as a resource to be controlled, as a threat to be vanquished—​assumptions that underlie

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the marketing of products to enable women to control their weight, odor, or body shape (1987: 300). While not suggesting that medieval women’s views on food and flesh were a set of ideas to be imported wholesale, Bynum saw the process of learning about the different valuation of food in women’s spirituality in the Middle Ages as a process that teaches us to consider, and perhaps reconsider, our own symbols.

Bodies that matter as change, fragmentation, paradox: Christian Materiality While there is not enough space in this chapter to outline each of Bynum’s books as the significant intervention that it was, it is possible to trace several crucial themes through Bynum’s career, culminating in her most recent book, Christian Materiality (2011). While Jesus as Mother and HFHF forefronted gendered bodies with particular attention to gendered, dualistic language, Bynum turned more and more in her later work to the concept of “embodiment” generally speaking, of which one aspect is gender (1992b 19). She came to recognize that gender itself could not be primary in the study of the Middle Ages, because there was more profound duality underlying the medieval gender binary: the dualism between body as source of pain and body as source of not only pleasure but “personhood” (1991: 19). Throughout several works (Bynum 1992b, 1995a, 1995b, 2001), Bynum concentrated on the symbolism of the body in medieval religious thought. Whether the case study examined debates over bodily resurrection from the third to fourteenth centuries about what type of body those saved would be resurrected with at the Last Judgment (1995a) or the popularity of werewolf narratives in the medieval imagination (2001:  77–​ 112), in each Bynum identified the primary concern to be with the issue of change in the body. She found that a significant fear of change drove these medieval debates, a fear that had to do with the profound connection between body and identity:  If bodies die and decay, how can they be redeemed? If circumstances can permit a human to be changed into a wolf at full moon, how can you know the rest of the month whether a person is really a person or a monster? In each case study, bodily change could involve the loss of personhood or salvation, while bodily continuity seemed to confirm both. While twentieth-​century thinkers considered identity to be an abstract concept and salvation to be a focus of intellectual faith, medieval thinkers instead concentrated on the body in order to make pronouncements on both concepts and doctrines. Her study of how Western medieval Catholic practices and beliefs privileged the body led Bynum to a full-​length book on the most important intersection between belief and body, the blood of Jesus as the wine of the eucharist, Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Germany and Beyond (2007). If blood, which in medieval scientific terms was the primary fluid of the body that gave it life,

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could turn into alcohol, then there was some sort of deep connection between body and other types of substances. For that matter, many objects stood in for blood in the medieval imagination, such as the bread of the eucharistic host or the weapons used in the torture of Jesus, often proven by visions of the eucharist or Jesus’s death in which solid substances bled miraculously (2007:  4–​8). Thus materials could symbolize the body, a paradoxical valuing of both body and materiality supported in part by the paradox of Christology in which an infinite being took on finite human flesh in the incarnation. In the process of this careful attention to one bodily fluid and its transformations and symbolic value in the medieval Christian imagination, Bynum repositioned what studies of embodiment might entail. It is in her latest book, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (2011), however, that she announced this as a fundamental shift in methodology.3 In Christian Materiality, Bynum was not simply following new directions in terms of body as she had done when moving beyond gender as the equivalent of body in the 1990s, but proposed a different conceptualization and organization of the various ways of theorizing embodiment under the general rubric of “holy matter,” that is, materiality (2011:  25–​33). The core project was to “resituate the body in matter” (2011: 32), arguing that medieval thinkers believed that the “matter” that makes up human bodies was the same matter that makes up stars, stones, and statues. In addition, they used the term body as synonymous with blood, pain, and perception (2011: 32, 237–​238, 261). If “body” was both a term for anything material and for its own material components, then materiality broadly speaking—​and not only body as fully formed and gendered male or female—​should be shaping our scholarly understanding of medieval religion. In Christian Materiality, Bynum elucidated how matter, a term associated now primarily with physics, in the Middle Ages included within it the elements of change and transformation of human bodies and the ritual objects with which they come into contact. In other words, if matter was what was held in common between bodies and objects, and if matter in the case of sentient beings was generated, lived, died, and was corrupted, then so, potentially, might sacred objects be able to change (e.g., statues of Jesus or Mary that cried, altered position or color, or bled, Bynum 2011: 22). The term holy matter or materiality thus served to highlight the common ground between various types of material religion that medievalists often separate in their studies, from reliquaries to stained glass to sacraments to visionary experience filled with color, light, and objects (2011: 27–​29). But human bodies needed to be included in this data as well, for medieval authors consistently described how images and relics could transform the body of the viewer, citing healing miracles or stories that babies could be born in the likeness of saint icons kept near the marriage bed (2011: 112). While several of Bynum’s previous works had probed medieval concerns with change, in Christian Materiality she identified the attraction to and fear of the

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fluctuating nature of matter as the principal anxiety of late medieval religious devotion (2011: 24–​25). Whether embracing the cult of a bleeding host because it was perfectly preserved, or rejecting it because it corrupted over time, for example, both laity and theologians believed objects to have power because of matter’s capacity to change and transform. Yet Bynum emphasized not only the anxiety around matter, but also the creative tension of the anxiety that saw “holy matter [as] . . . both radical threat and radical opportunity” (2011: 20). Matter as paradox (desirable, terrifying) was a logical central concern of medieval Christianity in general, for it was changeable matter that “manifest[ed] the eternal changelessness of God” (2011: 285).

Analysis of Bynum’s work It should by now be clear that Caroline Walker Bynum fundamentally shifted how medieval religious culture could be studied. Her contributions have been so formative that at a recent panel discussion of the influence of HFHF on its thirtieth anniversary, the historian Dyan Elliott said that for medievalists, “Bynum is just in the air, much like Foucault or Freud” (Ritchey et al. 2017). No serious study of medieval gender, writings by or about medieval women, embodiment, mysticism, and in many cases medieval theology broadly speaking, published since the appearance of HFHF has ignored Bynum. For one, the massive collection of data concerning women’s devotion collected in HFHF led to countless studies examining specific mystical texts and autobiographical writings by women in great depth, often fruitfully expanding past Bynum’s necessarily abbreviated analysis. Yet those studies are still guided by Bynum’s method of concentrating on the particular or her method of analyzing men’s and women’s writings together for what their different renditions of the gender binary might reveal (for bibliography by her contemporaries, her students, and others influenced by her, see Suggested Further Reading). Her work has not only become a model for the study of medieval religious culture but also for gender history more generally, while also influencing other disciplines such as anthropology. For example, Bynum is cited in the landmark early article by Joan W. Scott on the necessity of gender analysis in historical work (1986), and selections from Bynum’s books are consistently anthologized in works on religion (Twiss and Conser Jr. 1992), the Middle Ages (Little and Rosenwein 1998), and body and anthropology (Lock and Farquhar, 2007). Bynum is often included among the theorists of the body in the twentieth century, alongside feminist philosophers Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, theorist Michel Foucault, and anthropologist Mary Douglas (Haardt and Korte 2002). Bynum has also become a resource for contemporary theorists, even though she has always been restrained in suggesting that any intervention of her work might alleviate modern-​day

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problems. For example, theorist and religious studies scholar Gil Anidjar relies on her extensively for his expansive discussion of the centrality of blood in Christian history, society, and politics (2014). Another example is literary scholar Rosemary Garland-​Thomson who, in writing between disability theory and feminist materiality theory, used one of Bynum’s insights into materiality and history (“shape carries story”) to propose attention to bodies not as set entities but as ones that change in dis/​ability over time (Garland-​Thomson 2011: 595–​595, citing Bynum 1999). Her impact on religious studies as a field has been extensive, not least because she held an adjunct appointment in religious studies while at University of Washington. Bynum’s work deeply shaped the fields of “body studies” and “religion and food” regardless of era, location, or primary religious tradition. Recent work on theories of religion cites her as a founding theorist on issues of gender and religion (Strenski [2006] 2015: 198–​199). Scholars of diverse religious traditions draw on her insights to frame their studies of body in topics as wide-​ranging as devotional embodiment in Hinduism (Holdrege 2015) and women’s roles in Buddhism (Blackstone 1998). For the field of food and religion, Bynum’s HFHF has not only been anthologized in the primary reader on the subject (Counihan and Van Esterik 1997), but is cited, along with Rudolph Bell’s Holy Anorexia and the multicultural examples in Marvin Harris’s Good to Eat as part of the founding trio of food studies in the 1980s (Dallam 2014: xx). Thus a work that just turned thirty years old continues to be crucial in the most cutting edge scholarship on religious culture.

Critique of Bynum’s work While Bynum is acknowledged as one of the most influential medievalists of the last four decades, there have been some pointed critiques, particularly of HFHF. Perhaps the most strongly worded is the accusation that Bynum “essentialized” gender, assuming the structural categories of women and body were self-​evident (Biddick 1993: 393–​396), and equating women with the maternal (1993: 399–​400). Others raised concerns with Bynum’s dismissal of the erotic language of visionary experiences as primarily of interest to a sex-​obsessed contemporary approach. Bynum’s interest in the language of gender reversal in which the male abbot became female to relate to a male God ultimately reifies a heterosexual framework, rather than recognizing the homoeroticism of some medieval mystical narratives (Lochrie 1997). In addition, several significant studies have questioned the possibility of using texts to explore embodiment as Bynum does, given that the textual nature of the archive always presents the body mediated through language rather than in a fully materialized form (Beckwith 1986; Dailey 2013; Watson 1999). Some of this critique stemmed from work that was in process at the time of the publication of HFHF, such as Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity

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in Gender Trouble (see essay in this textbook), which these later scholars used to complicate Bynum’s assumption that women’s voices can be retrieved from amid a patriarchal society (for a strong but more measured assessment of the same concern, see Hollywood 1994; 1995). It is accurate that Bynum was more careful to identify male participation in the construction of women’s narratives in the essays in her earlier Jesus as Mother, and Bynum’s later works on body do not engage strongly with scholarship such as Butler’s from queer theory. However, Bynum did, over her collective works, map out a consideration of body far beyond that of gender alone, one that she believed to be more thoroughly rooted in medieval rather than contemporary conceptions of embodiment (famously, Bynum 1995b). Another type of critique pointed out the limitations of Bynum’s interest in local historical context for any given figure or text, rather than the broader political and religious currents. David Aers, in particular, argued that Bynum did not sufficiently account for patriarchal pressures in medieval society. For one, he refuted her primary thesis in HFHF—​women used food metaphors because they were primarily responsible for food preparation—​as fundamentally flawed because food writ large, in terms of production and commerce and consumption, was a male domain in the Middle Ages (1996:  30). He also questioned Bynum’s proposal that women found strong voices through inverting gendered language (women, as bodily, were closer to a suffering Jesus than men), arguing instead that devotion to Jesus’s suffering primarily upheld medieval patriarchal power dynamics rather than challenging them. “The dominant figurations of Christ’s body, including its alleged ‘feminization,’ were made dominant, constituted as dominant, maintained as dominant” (Aers 1996: 34, italics in original). In Aers’s view, the role of devotion to Christ in “maintaining” a patriarchally structured society meant that associating women with his injured flesh simply confirmed all the more strongly the equation of women with weakness, rather than giving women any access to power (1996: 35). To a certain extent, Bynum addressed the process of critique (of her own work, of that of others) very generously in the last of her major methodological contributions left for us to consider, her method of writing “history in the comic mode.” Whether considering questions of gender, embodiment, or materiality, Bynum has always recognized the necessarily partial nature of any historical analysis. In an introduction to a volume of her collected essays (1992b), Bynum proposed that the drastic limits on historical reconstruction were an invitation to reconsider methodology, a point that was the basis of the volume dedicated to her by her students (Fulton and Holsinger 2007). Rather than overstating the truth claim for any investigation, which Bynum termed the “tragic mode” that narrates progressive sequences and definitive contributions by certain events or authors (Bynum 1992b:  24), she proposed that historians more realistically celebrate the “comic mode,” that is, the fragmentary access that we have to any historical event (or any event at all, if it comes to that). By comic, she did not mean a method that pokes fun at the oddities of the past, nor one

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that focuses on the positive elements alone. Rather, the comic mode of history was in her view one that recognizes that “the story could be told another way” (1992b: 25), and that a seemingly final assessment of historical data is like the punchline that depends on commonly held assumptions between comedian and the audience to win them over. The questions brought to the historical data may change from generation to generation of historians, but Bynum’s entire oeuvre made the argument that discovering, at least partially, what questions the medieval authors were attempting to answer is a more illuminating historical quest than mining premodern texts for answers about gender, body, or materiality that are predetermined by the present.

Suggested further reading Bennett, Judith. (2010), History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Bynum, Caroline Walker. (1982), Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages, Berkeley: University of California Press. Bynum, Caroline Walker. (1987), Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women, Berkeley: University of California Press. Bynum, Caroline Walker. (1995b), “Why All the Fuss About the Body? A Medievalist’s Perspective,” Critical Inquiry, 22 (1): 1–33. Bynum, Caroline Walker. (2011), Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe, New York: Zone Books. Coakley, John W. (2006), Women, Men, and Spiritual Power: Female Saints and Their Male Collaborators, New York: Columbian University Press. Elliott, Dyan. (2004), Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kay, Sarah, and Miri Rubin (eds.) (1994), Framing Medieval Bodies, Manchester: University of Manchester Press. Matter, E. Ann. (2002), “The Undebated Debate: Gender and the Image of God in Medieval Theology.” In Thelma S. Fenster and Clare A. Lees (eds.), Gender in Debate from the Early Middle Ages to the Renaissance, 41–​55, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. McGinn, Bernard. (1991–​), The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism, 5 volumes. New York: Crossroad Publishing. Mikaelsson, Lisbeth. (2004), “Gendering the History of Religions.” In Peter Antes, Armin W. Geertz, and Randi Ruth Warne (eds.), New Approaches to the Study of Religion, 295–​315, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Newman, Barbara. (1995), From Virile Woman To WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Norman, Corrie E. (2012), “Food and Religion.” In Jeffrey M. Pilcher (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Food History, 409–427, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Weber, Allison. (2012), “Gender.” In Amy Hollywood and Patricia Z. Beckman (eds.), Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism, 315–​327, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Part III Expanding Boundaries

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8 Mestiza Language of Religion: Gloria Anzaldúa Joseph Winters

According to French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, “everything happens at the border” (Deleuze 1990:  9). This implies that events, energies, creations, and erasures tend to emerge at the edges of things—​between self and other, identity and difference, spirit and body, and so on. Deleuze’s pithy statement best describes the work and thought of Gloria Anzaldúa. For this late twentieth-​century Chicana feminist,1 queer theorist, activist, and writer, the border is often the site of fear, theft, and violence while also being the occasion of our best prospects for building a more generous and livable world. Anzaldúa insists that one cannot respond to the myriad legacies of violence without reimagining identity, difference, borders, and the relationship between power and the production of knowledge. As she shows us in her writings and interventions, pernicious modes of power—​racism, male domination, heterosexism, the logic of capital—​continue to shape and distort how we think, desire, remember, engage others, and relate to our lifeworlds. Her corpus, which includes multiple genres and literary styles, is unified in its attempt to open up, and gesture toward, new modes of being and coexisting in the face of powers and regimes that perpetually attempt to tame, or eliminate, the queer, the dyke, “la marimacha,” and “la Otra” (Anzaldúa 2009:  163–​164). Growing up on and around the US/​Mexico border, at the edges of two different but intertwined cultures, languages, and histories, Anzaldúa expresses an intimate familiarity with the agony and pleasure of inhabiting in-​between spaces. The trope and lived reality of the border informs her understanding of hybrid identity, or the mestiza, her rewriting of the self/​other relationship, her description of the fluidity between the human and non-​human, and her endeavor to think beyond dominant Western epistemic binaries, such as science and myth or real knowledge and imagination. As these endeavors indicate, Anzaldúa’s thought compels us to think about the deep intertwinement of ethics, politics, epistemology,

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religion, and art. Consequently, her work challenges, and points beyond, the kinds of rigid disciplinary demarcations that continue to organize the academy.

Biography and historical context Gloria Anzaldúa was born in 1942 in South Texas (Rio Grande Valley) to Urbano and Amalia Anzaldúa, “sixth generation Mexican-​ American rancher-​ farmers.”2 At a young age, Anzaldúa discovered what it means to be marked, or hailed, as an outsider. As an infant, she was diagnosed with a hormonal condition that caused her to undergo puberty and begin menstruating much earlier than most women. Because of this condition, or dis-​order, Anzaldúa learned how nature and culture often conspire to engender antagonistic relationships between the normal and the deviant. Her sense of being a stranger in her own home was intensified by her interactions with family and teachers. Anzaldúa’s mother, for instance, would occasionally warn her that staying in the sun too long could darken her skin and make her resemble an Indian; or that appearing outside with dirty clothes would make people associate her with filthy Mexicans (Anzaldúa 2009: 38). In these cases, the Indian and Mexican identities that make up Anzaldúa’s and her mother’s ancestry are imagined as obstacles to assimilation, Americanness, and belonging. This admonishment about being too close to the Indian or the Mexican demonstrated to Anzaldúa how people of color, and persecuted communities generally, internalize the tropes and stereotypes that justify racial and colonial hierarchies. In addition to these interactions with her mother, Anzaldúa experienced racism in Texas’s segregated school system as teachers ridiculed her for lack of English proficiency. She reveals: “I remember being caught speaking Spanish at recess—​that was good for three licks on the knuckles with a sharp ruler” (Anzaldúa 1987: 75). What is significant here is that she entered the school system almost a century after the war between the United States and Mexico, a war that “finalized” the incorporation of Texas into the ever-​ expanding “English-​speaking” union. Despite these early confrontations with the violence of normalization, Anzaldúa thrived as a student and became a lifelong proponent of education and teaching. In addition to attending Texas Women’s College and Pan American University in Texas for her undergraduate education (1962–​1968), she later attained a master’s degree in English and education and pursued a doctorate in comparative literature at the University of Texas at Austin (UT). While she withdrew from UT in 1977 in order to move to San Francisco and focus on writing and publishing, she resumed her doctoral studies in literature in 1988 at the University of California at Santa Cruz. In these doctoral programs, she was very much interested in discovering and reclaiming subjugated forms of religious and spiritual knowledge.

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Anzaldúa’s formal schooling was balanced by, and sometimes at crossroads with, other aspects of her life. After her father died in 1957, Anzaldúa worked temporarily in fields with migrant workers to defray the costs of education and to support her family. While pursuing her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in the late 1960s and early 70s, she taught students—​many of which were the children of migrant farmworkers—​ in Texas and Indiana. It was in this context that Anzaldúa began developing creative writing courses and thinking about the possibilities of bilingual education in the context of school systems that have racist legacies and often stifle creative potential in children. In a 1974 poem/​letter entitled “To Delia, Who Failed on Principle,” Anzaldúa reflects on the limitations and contradictions of public school standards and modes of evaluation for children of color (Anzaldúa 2009: 20). Anzaldúa’s attunement to the hybridity of selves and lifeworlds informed her intellectual projects and her writing-​activism. In 1981, for instance, she coedited a volume with Cherríe Moraga entitled This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (this volume was followed by Making Face/​Making Soul/​Haciendo Caras:  Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color, an anthology that Anzaldúa edited in 1990). These edited volumes bring together Latina, Asian, and Black women in the attempt to contest and move beyond the whiteness of regnant forms of feminism and queer theory. In addition to bringing together a diverse assemblage of women authors—​including Audre Lorde and Trinh T. Minh-​ha—​these volumes employ multiple genres and styles, including poetry, the personal essay, autobiography, speaking in tongues, and stream of consciousness. In other words, these texts perform multiplicity in content and form as they explore possibilities for transformation and liberation in a world that is especially dangerous and painful for women of color. As I develop below, the trope of the bridge helps illumine Anzaldúa’s approach to organizing and building connections with women across difference, tension, and conflict. To acknowledge and underscore difference within the general category of women does not foreclose intimacy, receptivity, and collective projects. Difference can be painful and messy but it is not necessarily unbridgeable. In addition to her uneasy alliances with feminist groups and projects, Anzaldúa encountered the messiness and ambivalence of solidarity while participating, throughout her life, in farmworkers’ movements that were often male-​dominated and heteronormative. It would be misleading to separate writing and activism in Anzaldúa’s life. For her, writing was both a necessity and a practice of liberation. She often organized her life, work, and relationships with others so that she could write. And in addition to essays, poems, and collected volumes, Anzaldúa devoted her time to writing novels, short stories, and children’s books. In general, she thought, and demonstrated, that writing opens up possibilities—​new ways of experiencing and diagnosing the social worlds we inhabit, different ways of expressing pain, suffering, joy, and pleasure, and opportunities to experiment with the transcendent, the impossible, and what

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ordinary discourses consider unreal. As Anzaldúa put it in an interview with Linda Smuckler:  “Writing saved my life. It saved my sanity. I  could get a handle on the things happening to me by writing them down, rearranging them, and getting a different perspective” (Anzaldúa 2009:  89). In this interview, Anzaldúa associates writing with mental and physical health, an apt connection considering the many health difficulties she faced during her life. Her particular battle with diabetes ended on May 15, 2004 but her writings and theoretical pursuits have taken on an energetic afterlife. Her work continues to animate discussions in religious studies, cultural studies, women’s and gender studies, postcolonial thought, and queer theory. At a moment when the rhetoric of building walls, protecting borders, and establishing stricter immigration rules seems to be holding sway and winning US elections, a re/​turn to Anzaldúa’s border thinking and writing, especially within religious studies, is urgent.

Key writings and signature approaches In what follows, I describe Anzaldúa’s life and career before laying out key concepts and organizing themes in her work: Mestiza, nepantla (living in-​between), trauma, and what I  call an ethics of the wound. After working through these key ideas, I show how Anzaldúa’s border approach informs her understanding of religion and spirituality, particularly subjects like myth, the sacred/​profane demarcation, and shamanism. I conclude this chapter with an analysis of the possibilities and limitations of Anzaldúa’s thought for contemporary religious discourse and practice. While she wrote voluminously in both English and Spanish, I  focus on three collections of essays that contain her most significant writings on relevant themes:  Borderlands/​ La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Light in the Dark/​Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, and The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader.

Mestiza|nepantla The relationship between self and other, or identity and nonidentity, is more complicated—​in theory and practice—​than we usually imagine. In a culture that frequently celebrates autonomy, or the self-​willed individual, we ignore just how much of our identities and conditions of possibility come from outside of us. According to Anzaldúa, the self, or any identity, always entails an interaction with and dependence on others. In fact, instead of naming a discrete entity, the self might be redescribed as an interaction, an edge or in-​between position. As Anzaldúa suggests in her writings, the self-​enclosed sense of identity similarly denies internal differentiation or how any being is always a process, in a state of becoming, the product of multiple forces, energies, influences, and experiences. To broach themes like alterity, the in-​between,

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and multiplicity is to invoke Anzaldúa’s language of the mestiza and the related notion of nepantla, which is a Nahuatl term for middle or in-​between-​ness. While mestiza-​consciousness and nepantla are co-​constitutive concepts that Anzaldúa often mentions together, I parse out these tropes for clarity and elaboration. Anzaldúa provides a very precise definition of the mestiza in her essay “The New Mestiza Nation.” She writes:  “Mestiza, which is actually an old term, speaks to our common identity as mixed bloods” (Anzaldúa 2009:  205). The use of the adjective “mixed” alludes to the fact that individuals, communities, and spaces are always hybrid and multiple. What connects humans is our mixed-​ness even though we often deny this common, constitutive feature. It would be wrong to think of mixing as the result of two pure, whole beings or “bloods” coming together; for Anzaldúa, any entity is always already the product of crossing, interaction, and amalgamation. My particular existence, for instance, is made possible by a set of violent encounters between Europe, America, and Africa, each of which has multiple histories and legacies. As a heterosexual, middle-​class, Black male, my being in the world is informed and shaped by overlapping identities and configurations of power. My maleness and Blackness are co-​determining and at times, form a tension-​filled relationship (insofar as I am often in a subordinate position within the racial order while in a position of relative dominance within patriarchal and heteronormative regimes). This sense of tension or fraughtness, the result of being formed by multiple forces and histories, resists the notion of a pure self, in the past or future, that is untouched by power, contingency, violence, and so forth. It is important that Anzaldúa describes this mestiza identity as a “product of cross-​breeding” (Anzaldúa 1987: 103), a description that responds to, and rejects, the yearning for purity and the fantasy of preserving pure blood that undergirds white supremacist logics and modern racial hierarchies. The mestiza, in other words, is a site of impurity and ambivalence. In addition, this figure is a mask wearer, a subject of dissemblance. Or as the Chicana author puts it: “As a mestiza, I have many true faces, depending upon the kind of audience or the area I find myself in . . . Identity is a changing cluster of components and a shape-​shifting activity” (Anzaldúa 2009: 211). To be a shapeshifter, or nagual, is to have the capacity to change “from human form to animal [and spiritual] form” and therefore to see the fluidity between these ostensibly opposing forms. Anzaldúa is not naïve about our ability, or willingness, to embrace this general condition of hybridity and multiplicity. She is very much insistent that cultivating a new mestiza consciousness is difficult, painful work. This difficulty arises in a world where the consolidation and sedimentation of identities and perspectives is the norm. This process often happens in the name of diversity and openness to other cultures. (Here we might think of how the United States is collectively imagined as an open and tolerant nation-​state, a quality that ironically justifies a bellicose “us” versus “them” attitude toward peoples marked as intolerant and incapable of governing).3

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Perhaps this is why Anzaldúa distinguishes her thought from fashionable appeals to multiculturalism and diversity, agendas that often diminish the discomfort and anguish that accompanies any engagement with radical alterity and the multiple. As she puts it:  “A radical political agenda is often reduced to superficial efforts to serve international foods, wear ethnic clothes, and decorate corporate complexes and airports with native colors and art. Diversity is then treated like a superficial overlay that does not disrupt any comfort zones” (Anzaldúa 2009:  205). Here the queer theorist acknowledges how difference and diversity regularly get contained and rendered productive for capitalist enterprises, tourist industries, and so on. Difference, within this logic, is acceptable insofar as it can be easily managed and consumed. This paradigm enables us to embrace multiplicity, in the self and broader world, without risking our sense of safety, comfort, and coherence. In opposition to safe, domesticated forms of diversity, Anzaldúa suggests that mestiza-​consciousness is a mode of being in the world that is receptive to ambivalence and painful contradictions. This mode of being resists either/​or logics, binary frameworks, and what she calls “convergent reasoning” or thinking that is directed toward one unified goal (Anzaldúa 1987:  101). As Anzaldúa describes, the mestiza’s “tolerance for ambiguity” (Anzaldúa 1987:  101) often means that she is without a traditional homeland, without a convenient sense of safety, and occasionally alienated from communities and cultures that both shaped and de-​formed her. This tolerance for ambiguity, within and outside the self, also means that one must constantly “take inventory” of the traditions and regimes of power that one internalizes. This is difficult work because the very traditions that make our existence possible are in conflict with one another and have bequeathed legacies of violence and domination. In Anzaldúa’s case, the Spanish and American parts of her identity may look down upon the Native American heritage; the Chicano/​ machismo part of her ancestry is frequently in tension with her queerness. But in order to create new forms of life, the mestiza must work through these tensions and knots, as these tensions work on her. While Anzaldúa speaks about the mestiza as a general mode of existence, her articulation of this inchoate consciousness is clearly tethered to the specific and related histories of the US-​Mexican border, Spanish colonization, and America’s manifest destiny. In her powerful essay “The Homeland, Aztlán:  El otro México,” she underscores the intimate relationship between hybridity in the Americas and conquest, or how the latter conditions the former. She writes: At the beginning of the 16th century, the Spaniards and Hernán Cortés invaded Mexico and, with the help of tribes that the Aztecs had subjugated, conquered it. Before the Conquest, there were twenty-​five million Indian people in Mexico and the Yucatán. Immediately after the Conquest, the Indian population had been reduced to under seven million. En 1521 nació una nueva raza (a new race was born), el mestizo, el mexicano (people of mixed Indian and Spanish blood), a race that had never

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existed before. Chicanos, Mexican-​Americans, are the offspring of those first matings. (Anzaldúa 1987: 27)

As this passage suggests, Anzaldúa refuses a pure origin story that would depict the time before the Conquest as free of violence and subjugation. By including the history of conflict between, and within, indigenous communities, she extends her insistence on hybridity as a central principle in her thought. In addition, the Chicana writer continues to push back against paradigms that celebrate plurality and diversity without a consideration of the trauma and dispossession that historically accompanies cultural contact and intermixing. By repeating and capitalizing the term “Conquest,” Anzaldúa compels us to reconsider the impact and severity of this protracted event, of the ongoing erasure of indigenous peoples and ways of life. Later in this essay, Anzaldúa highlights what she calls a “tradition of long walks,” a Chicano/a legacy of dislocation, migration, and resettlement. She mentions, for instance, the exploration of the southwest United States by Mexican and Spanish ancestors; the outcome of the US–​Mexican war that left Mexican citizens living in annexed Texas susceptible to land confiscation and vigilante violence, forcing many to flee and escape; the recent experiences of Mexicans and Chicano/as who have risked their lives crossing the US/Mexican border in the pursuit of employment—​a movement that is constantly in danger of being reversed by immigration laws and deportation authorities. This “tradition of long walks” theme is historically situated and tethered to the experiences of Mexican Americans; at the same time, it points to and resonates with recent interests in the figure of the nomad and the fugitive.4 For Anzaldúa, these histories of hybridity and movement, while painful and violent, open up possibilities for engaging the world differently—​in opposition to yearnings for unity, coherence, and settlement, yearnings that justify violence and cruelty against those bodies that are marked as opaque, wild, or ambivalent. In fact, she suggests that hybridity and dislocation are conditions for an alternative ethics of nepantla, an ethics of dwelling at the edge. Therefore, Anzaldúa assumes that the mestiza/​Chicana’s history and lived reality renders her more open to living in-​between, living with disconcerting tensions, and engaging the unfamiliar and unknown. While describing the unique dangers that the undocumented female worker faces in her trek to the United States, she writes: Not only does she have to contend with sexual violence, but like all women she is prey to a sense of physical helplessness. As refugee, she leaves the familiar and safe home-​ ground to venture into unknown and possibly dangerous terrain.     This is her home       This thin edge of          Barbwire. (Anzaldúa 1987: 34–​ 35)

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In this passage, which ends in the form of a poem, Anzaldúa suggests that living at the edge, the border, is both an occasion to be cut and torn (raped by a smuggler or shot by border patrol) while also being an opportunity to experience unexplored fields and plateaus. This passage directly connects the mestiza trope to the experience and performance of nepantla. According to Anzaldúa, this Aztec term signifies “an in-​between state,” an “uncertain terrain,” a state of transition. The term is used by her to describe the transition from one identity position to another (crossing class lines, coming out as queer) as well as the anxiety, fear, and excitement that accompany movement from one’s homeland to a strange, new place (Anzaldúa 2015:  56–​57). If the mestiza names a torn, hybrid subject, nepantla alludes to the liminal, chaotic space where different forces, energies, and cultures clash. It is a fraught space, one that is replete with dangers and possibilities for creation and novelty. To put it more strongly, nepantla, similar to the mestiza, signifies tornness and precarious openness to disorientation, change, and movement. As Anzaldúa puts it, nepantla represents the space between extremes; it is located in the cracks and fissures of our social worlds and landscapes. This Aztec term blurs the line between “us” and “them” insofar as “we are both subject and object, self and other, conqueror and conquered” (Anzaldúa 2015: 79). The border, or the “and,” in these relationships becomes an “analogue for the world” in Anzaldúa’s thought and practice. It is important to keep in mind that she avoids two limited ways of think about the relationship between identity and difference. On the one hand, nepantla refuses dualistic and Manichean frameworks that are predicated on fear, ignorance, and reifying the line between self/​other and us/​them. At the same time, because we have been shaped by these kinds of frameworks—​and because people of color, women, and queers bear the onus of difference—​nepantla registers the difficulties and challenges involved in affirming, and living within, the cuts and jagged edges of our lifeworlds. Therefore, nepantla refuses simple and anodyne celebrations of difference and multiculturalism. Because we have been disciplined to desire coherence and unity, liminality and hybridity are often sources of pain and agony—​as well as intimacy, joy, and transformation. As Anzaldúa points out, nepantla resonates with Victor Turner’s well-​known notion of liminality (Anzaldúa 2015: 28; Turner 1977: 95). Yet whereas Turner often confines liminality to special rites of passage, sacred practices in which the initiates temporarily exist between stable identities and outside of familiar roles, Anzaldúa renders liminality, or nepantla, a general condition of existence and being with others. And similar to her concerns about the appropriation of hybridity language, Anzaldúa is aware of how the practice of being betwixt and between—​within art, religion, and popular culture for instance—​is always already in danger of being incorporated into the logic of capital, commodification, and so forth. Think here of how prosperity gospel preachers tell us that the accumulation of wealth is evidence of human beings becoming more godlike (see Bowler 2013). Or think of how bisexual

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behaviors and desires get appropriated by male cultures in ways that privilege, and cater to, heterosexual male fantasies. In these cases, the fascination with being in-​ between (human and god, straight and gay) is an opportunity to secure the order of things.

Trauma|wound Directly related to themes like mestiza-​ consciousness and nepantla, Anzaldúa invites us in her writings to confront the facticity of trauma and psychic and bodily wounds for those who have been systemically persecuted. Trauma talk has become quite fashionable in our culture. In fact, trauma has become an emblem of identity, a necessary experience that one has to overcome in order to thrive and flourish. In these situations, trauma is a temporary obstacle that an individual or community must surmount, a process that results in a stronger, more confident self or group. While Anzaldúa understands the desire to turn trauma into something productive, her writing challenges the general eagerness to get over and transcend painful experiences. Her provocations also prompt us to think more about the general features of trauma. Recall that the English word trauma has a Greek etymology and literally means wound (Anzaldúa frequently uses the Spanish term herida abierta, or open wound). Not unlike literary critics Cathy Caruth and Shoshana Felman, Anzaldúa claims that trauma always signifies a rupture; it names some event or condition that is so overwhelming and shocking—​a car crash, assault to one’s body, loss of a loved one, forced exile—​that one cannot fully process or register the experience. Because trauma shatters our reliable frameworks of meaning, it renders selves fragmented and incoherent. Traumatic episodes can only be made sense of in a belated manner, after the fact, and through painful repetition—​remembrance, dreams, flashbacks, and so on. But this initial description of trauma raises important questions and reservations. For one, how does one distinguish between a traumatic incident and a condition? In other words, is trauma the best way to name protracted forms of violence, slow genocides, or pernicious social arrangements? Because trauma is often defined by its unexpected, sudden quality, it is not clear how it helps us diagnose the effects of violent practices and modes of being that have become normal, entrenched, and all too familiar. Perhaps there is something about the mundane, about normalization, that renders certain kinds of bodies wounded, broken, and incoherent. Anzaldúa provides resources to think about the complexity of trauma. In her essay “Geographies of the Self,” Anzaldúa insists: “For racialized people, managing losses, the trauma of racism, and other colonial abuses affect our self-​conceptions, our very identity, fragmenting our psyches and pitching us into states of nepantla . . . After a racial or gender wounding, something breaks down; you fall to pieces (you’re dismembered)” (Anzaldúa 2015:  87). In this passage, Anzaldúa refuses any stark

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distinction between the social and the psychological—​as if diagnosing the psyche were a retreat from the political. As the Chicana writer suggests, the legacies of racial and gender violence have disruptive effects on how women of color relate to themselves and their lifeworlds; to understand the impact of history, power, and conquest, we have to think about how these “external” factors get internalized, how they form, constitute, and mutilate selves. Tracing the impact, Anzaldúa implies, means registering the abundance and everydayness of trauma while identifying what kinds of anguished possibilities flow from the accumulated wounds. She claims, “every arrebato—​a violent attack, rift with a loved one, illness, death in the family, betrayal, systemic racism, and marginalization—​rips you from your familiar ‘home,’ casting you out of your personal Eden, showing that something is lacking in your queendom” (Anzaldúa 2015:  125). Here she juxtaposes traumas that many would consider unavoidable and universal (e.g., illness and death) with “systemic racism” in a manner that highlights the everydayness of racial violence and the ways in which the more accepted examples of trauma are connected to, and mediated by, inveterate power relationships and hierarchies. Anzaldúa also connects trauma to the loss of home, the loss of one’s sense of being a coherent, settled subject; trauma reminds us of the constitutive lack that haunts and thwarts yearnings for wholeness or understandable desires to be at home in the world. By using words like “cast out” and “ripped,” the Chicana theorist captures the violent quality of being unhoused. Finally, because we always exist on the border or edge of things—​always subjects and objects—​Anzaldúa suggests that having our sense of home shattered derives from being both recipients and perpetrators of injury. One of the most innovative aspects of Anzaldúa’s thought is how she responds to the condition of trauma. While she acknowledges the significance of healing and “collecting the fragments,” her conception of healing resists a simple form of reconciliation, a goal that often involves leaving the past behind or wishing for a restoration of the time before the traumatic break. Healing for her entails both remembrance and mourning as well as moving toward more promising, less damaging, ways of cohabiting the earth. As she puts it: “We never forget our wounds . . . [yet] if you name, acknowledge, mourn, and grieve your losses and violations instead of trying to retain what you’ve lost through a nostalgic attempt at preservation, you learn not just to survive but to imbue that survival with new meaning” (Anzaldúa 2015: 88). For Anzaldúa, mourning and grief become productive but are not directed toward the restoration of a stable subject. Healing involves “falling headlong into the wounding”; it entails a kind of intimacy with individual and collective wounds. This process connects to the practice of taking inventory mentioned above insofar as healing requires us to register how we have been the subjects and objects of pain and injury. As Anzaldúa underscores in her work the ongoing practice of healing, it becomes clear that she plays with the doubleness internal to the very notion of

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the wound. While the wound signifies an injury or break in the body and psyche, it also indicates a kind of vulnerability and heightened sensitivity to the world. As an opening or bridge, the wound becomes an occasion to connect with others, to communicate through breaks and cuts. For Anzaldúa, “wounds heal us” by opening us up to new affective relationships and interactions. And as she insists:  “There is never any resolution, just the process of healing” (Anzaldúa 2015:  20); no resolution because violence and suffering are constitutive and because past episodes have a way of repeating themselves. Consequently, healing is not about getting over trauma; it simply reminds us that the wound is not closed—​it can make room for new experiences and affects that are connected, but not reducible, to pain and grief. As Anzaldúa indicates, trauma, or a wound, creates the occasion for nepantla and liminal existence. In fact, the border or in-​between space—​which enables intimacy, creation, and new ways of being—​is always una herida abierta. Consequently, pain, intimacy, and transformation are regularly intertwined in Anzaldúa’s writing and practice. It is important that Anzaldúa draws from narratives and sacred figures within indigenous traditions to respond to experiences of wounding and injury. She therefore performs the practice of “taking inventory,” (Anzaldúa 1987: 104), the practice of bricolage, as she uses available sources to make sense of the messiness that is our world. One figure that Anzaldúa repeatedly alludes to in her later writings is Coyolxauhqui, the Aztec goddess who, according to inherited myths, was butchered by her brother, the god of war. For Anzaldúa, Coyolxauhqui becomes an icon for fragmentation and wounding as well as the possibility of transformation (since her severed head, after being thrown into the sky, became the moon). Anzaldúa’s creative use of Aztec sacred myths provides a fitting transition to her writings that deal explicitly with religion, spirituality, and the sacred.

Spirituality|shaman It should be no surprise that Anzaldúa extends the trope and practice of nepantla or border-​dwelling into her writings on the spiritual. In the same way that her thought troubles stark distinctions between self and other, reason and passion, or art and reality, she also unravels the kinds of rigid demarcations that operate in religious discourses. In a world that is strongly shaped and haunted by the Enlightenment legacy, many people (at least in academic circles) hold on to the notion that religion is a unique, autonomous domain that is incompatible with the laws and principles of science and reason. This approach to religion is evident in those who dismiss religion as irrational, regressive, and unenlightened and those who tolerate religious life—​ but only insofar as it remains private, internal, and unpolitical. The latter group can live with religion as long as it stays out of the way, as long as it does not disturb the foundations of knowledge, reason, disciplinary boundaries, and so forth.

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Mircea Eliade famously noticed problems in this Enlightenment legacy. By marginalizing religious life and practice, Eliade claims that we abandon resources that provide coherence, meaning, and connection with the world. In addition, Eliade shows how the fervent opponent of religion ironically depends on myths and tropes that derive from religious practices and sacred rituals (even Marx believes in a collective messiah that will rescue the world from the evils of capitalism). For Eliade, there is no way to escape the reality of the sacred because the modern, enlightened subject derives from “religious man” [sic]; religiosity is an essential attribute of humanity. Eliade tends to draw a qualitative, ontological distinction between the sacred and profane, and the religious and secular (Eliade 1987:  20–​ 65). Consequently, he associates the sacred with coherence and meaning and the profane with the chaotic, formless, and opaque, a contrast that, as Anzaldúa notes, has had pernicious implications for women, Blacks, and bodies associated with the chaotic. Yet in Eliade’s work, the strong distinction between sacred and profane space does not always hold—​because thresholds and liminal spaces are necessary for communication between the gods and humans to occur. More than Eliade, Anzaldúa underscores the everyday crossings, openings, and tension-​ filled relationships between these two domains. In her essay “Flights of Imagination:  Rereading/​Rewriting Realities,” Anzaldúa offers a description of spirituality that highlights the connections between the sacred and profane, self and universe, visible and invisible, and immanence and transcendence. She writes: Spirituality is an ontological belief in the existence of things outside the body (exosomatic) as opposed to the belief that material reality is a projection of mentally created images . . . Spirituality is a different kind and way of knowing. It aims to expand perception; to become aware of the interconnections between all things by attaining a grand perspective . . . When you catch glimpses of [the] invisible primary reality and realize you’re connected to it, feelings of alienation and hopelessness disappear. (Anzaldúa 2015: 38)

In this description, Anzaldúa challenges ordinary notions of spirituality that contrast the spiritual and the material. Notice that spirituality is an “ontological” commitment to an external reality that the self or mind did not create. Contra idealism, which privileges the mind of the individual, Anzaldúa is making space for the existence and semi-​independence of visible and invisible forces and energies that make up the universe, realities that are not reducible to the self ’s projections. Contra simple materialism, which assumes that only concrete objects matter, spirituality aims to expand ways of knowing and perceiving, to connect with realities that cannot be demonstrated by science. For Anzaldúa, spirituality is an opening to the vicissitudes, flows, and becomings that connect self and world, that remind us “we are in partnership with the Earth” (Anzaldúa 2015:  39). For the Chicana feminist, this

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sense that we are “bonded to this planet” is intensified through reading, writing, connecting with nature, and wounded relationships with human and nonhuman beings. Similar to Nietzsche, Anzaldúa describes spirituality as an “energizing power for life,” an affirmation of life, with all of its beauty and terribleness. There is an optimistic tone to Anzaldúa’s description of spirituality. She seems to affirm some vague sense of our connection with the world, to valorize harmony and intimacy in a naïve manner. But, as her readers grow accustomed, Anzaldúa distinguishes her version of spirituality and the “zest for living” from contemporary expressions, particularly those that separate spirituality from politics. As she points out, “Most contemporary spiritual practitioners in this country ignore the political implications and do not concern themselves with our biggest problem and challenge: racism and other racial abuses” (Anzaldúa 2015: 39). In contrast, Anzaldúa introduces the notion of spiritual activism, which acknowledges how the spirit (yearnings for transcendence, intimacy, connection) is intertwined with “the grounded realities of people’s lives and struggles” and how activism can become a site where different spiritual practices converge and intersect. Activism is often animated by the desire for a renewed relationship with the earth, a relationship that is not governed by violence, possession, and fear. Spirituality is a political practice. Anzaldúa elaborates on spiritual connectivity by conjuring powerful images, tropes, and myths from the traditions she has inherited. For instance, she introduces the image of the tree (arbol de la vida) as the axis mundi, an image that enables her to trace the connections between the under, middle, and upper worlds. The underworld, signified by the tree’s roots, is the realm of volatile energies, animal and plant spirits, and death. The middle world, represented by the trunk, is the domain of ordinary life and existence. And the upper world, represented by the branches, is the realm of gods and goddesses, noncorporeal realities, and spirits that have moved from the underworld. While Anzaldúa distinguishes between these three realms, she insists that “these three interconnected, overlapping worlds are the same place” (Anzaldúa 2015: 26). Consequently, there is no linear, progressive movement from the roots to the branches, or the underworld to the upper world. For the Chicana writer, there is only “constant ascent/​descent movement” through the various realms, implying that life, creation, and flight are always intertwined with death, chaos, and the opaque. Furthermore, the intimacy between these three realms implies that the human is always in the process of becoming other, both god and animal. Transcendence, according to this logic, must involve going under, confronting and reassembling the dark passions, desires, and forces that shape us, elements of the self and world that are usually repressed, deflected, and projected toward others. To put it succinctly, the image of the tree as axis mundi suggests that flight and descent are co-​generating possibilities. For Anzaldúa, the figure of the shaman is someone who can communicate and travel between different worlds and domains. The shaman is a nepantlera that lives

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on the border of life and death, present and past, dream and ordinary reality; she gains insights from myths, dreams, and imaginary states in order to heal, create, and transform. As Anzaldúa puts it, “She [the shaman] uses specific techniques for altering consciousness so that she can access spiritual realities unseen by those whose awareness focuses entirely on the ordinary reality of daily life. She is a ‘walker between the worlds’ intentionally entering realms that others only encounter in dreams and myth and bringing back information (treasure for healing others, the community, the Earth)” (Anzaldúa 2015: 32–​33). The shaman’s journey includes encounters with ancestors, mythical figures, and the unconscious; during this journey, the shaman is “torn to pieces” by these unsettling forces and reborn with a different perspective and relationship to the normal world. According to Anzaldúa, the artist, as one who obscures the line between the real and the imaginary, is a kind of shaman, and vice versa. In many ways, we can say that Anzaldúa assumes the role of the shaman-​artist in her writing. Through the use of different kinds of genres—​essay, poem, fiction, autobiography, myth, letter—​she endeavors to imagine, discover, and construct new realities within a Western episteme that regulates, and stifles, the imagination according to scientific logics. Performing the role of the shaman-​artist, Anzaldúa reaches back/​below for sacred ancestral figures (Virgen de Guadalupe, Malinche, Coyolxauhqui, Theresa of Avila) that have been dismissed by dominant Christian/​ Protestant narratives as feminine, backward, and mythical in the pejorative sense. By incorporating indigenous female deities and heroines, including the Serpent Woman La Llorona who is associated with wailing and sorrow, Anzaldúa brings to life figures that have been rejected as dark, evil, and chaotic (see Anzaldúa 1987: 47–​61). Similarly, by alluding to and re-​narrating the stories of goddesses that were sacrificed or dismembered by male deities, Anzaldúa transforms regnant conceptions of the sacred; instead of seeing the sacred as a site of purity and coherence, we might associate the sacred with fragments, tornness, and ambivalence. Finally, these stories show that religion and religious studies necessarily exist at the edges, in dialogue with gender studies, political theory, and studies around race and coloniality.

Critical reception of Anzaldúa’s work Anzaldúa’s thought has been generative for those who find themselves studying and exploring the world at the intersection of different disciplines and fields. One sees the influence of her thought, for instance, in the decolonial framework of literary critic and historian Walter Mignolo (2000). For Mignolo, border thinking—​a term that he takes from Anzaldúa—​is a response to the Eurocentric ways of ranking and ordering peoples, geographical spaces, and knowledges. Border thinking, or a thinking of the exterior, attempts to situate thought at the borders of Western modernity, in

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solidarity with peoples and cultures that the West violently defines itself over against. The decolonial turn is both epistemic and ethical insofar as it compels us to listen, see, and think from the perspective of the dark underside of modernity. Within the field of American religion, border thought would mean studying religious phenomena and practice at the edges of US history, experience, and imperial expansion. It would mean at least taking Anzaldúa seriously when she writes:  “America does not stop at the Mexican and Canadian borders . . . We have to stop appropriating the word America to only fit the United States” (Anzaldúa 2009: 206). In addition to the border trope, authors have found Anzaldúa’s formulation of the mestiza useful in debates about diversity, multiculturalism, and mixed-​race identities. For instance, Naomi Zack and Linda Alcoff have exposed tendencies to either erase mixed-​race subjects (e.g., Obama is Black rather than biracial) or associate the mixed-​race person with lack and alienation, tendencies that implicitly reinforce the fantasy of racial purity and monolithic identities. For Alcoff, Anzaldúa provides a “positive articulation of mestiza consciousness and identity,” one that acknowledges both the difficulty and value of negotiating diverse cultures, languages, and forms of life (Alcoff 1995: 276). One aspect of Anzaldúa’s writing that Alcoff praises is the former’s use of different languages in her corpus (English, Spanish, indigenous, and Tex-​Mex). In other words, Anzaldúa performs in her writing a mestiza mode of being, one that disturbs attachments to purity and resists the pressures of linguistic and cultural conformity. Anzaldúa’s writings also provide insights for those who want a third alternative beyond traditionalism and poststructuralism. The traditionalist, represented by a philosopher and ethicist like Alasdair MacIntyre, contends that selves need strong communities with legible social practices and virtues in order to live ethically. MacIntyre suggests that only a tradition resembling the Catholic Church or Aristotle’s polis can provide a teleological vision necessary to live a coherent, virtuous life (1989). Poststructuralism, a term I use reluctantly, contends that the commitment to a coherent self creates violence toward others based on various forms of difference. Consequently, the aim of thought and practice should be a disinvestment in the self and the communities created by forms of difference including race, gender, sexuality, and class. As political theorist Romand Coles points out, Anzaldúa mediates between these two positions (2005: 185–​212). For Coles, Anzaldúa’s mestiza acknowledges the necessity of “taking inventory” of what has been passed down by (religious) traditions and communities while cultivating an openness to ambiguity and fragmentation. The mestiza painfully affirms a double bind: our activities, interactions, and judgments are constrained and enabled by traditions even though prospects for a better world require us to engage those possibilities, desires, and bodies that have been eclipsed and excluded by our traditions. While Anzaldúa’s thought is generative, it is not without limitations. One set of concerns is associated with scholars like Jared Sexton who contend that mixed-​race

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discourses reproduce antiblack sentiments (2008). For Sexton, the emphasis on hybridity and multiplicity, an insistence that often betrays a desire to transcend race, entails a denial of the pervasive nature of antiblackness and an uncritical acceptance of heteronormative family structures (since racial mixtures happen primarily through heterosexual intimacy). Certain kinds of race mixing, or amalgamation, are flaunted as the hallmark of US exceptionalism and tolerance, a predicament that disavows the violence internal to nation-​building, racial formations, and so forth. While Sexton acknowledges that Anzaldúa is no simple multiculturalist, he does detect moments in her thought where she relies on authors who express yearnings for a society that has transcended racial distinctions, an achievement that relies on the extinction of Black people (2008: 198–​202). Taking a cue from Sexton, we might draw out a tension in Anzaldúa’s writings. On the one hand, she occasionally speaks optimistically about fluidity, mixing, inclusion, and becoming whole in a manner that does not sound much different from the liberal, multicultural discourses that she criticizes. On the other hand, her persistent allusion to the border as a “barbwire edge” suggests that self/​other relationships across racial, gender, sexual, and class difference are marked by violent cuts and wounds in addition to unexpected openings and possibilities. Consequently, Anzaldúa’s understanding of cultural and racial mixing is always situated within and haunted by the legacies of colonization, empire, and violent settlements. In the introduction to The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader, AnaLouise Keating notes that Anzaldúa’s middle writings, to the dismay of some, seem more restrictive and less inclusive than her later writings (Anzaldúa 2009: 11). Perhaps the strong, exclusionary language in her middle writings points to Anzaldúa’s sense of the limitations of border thinking in a world where certain power relationships and mechanisms of violence have become so entrenched. Nonetheless, border thinking and a nepantla ethic might be the best possibilities for an alternative to this predicament.

Suggested further reading Anzaldúa, Gloria (ed.) (1990), Making Face, Making Soul/​Haciendo Caras, San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books. Anzaldúa, Gloria, and AnaLouise Keating (eds.) (2002), this bridge we call home: radical visions for transformation, New York: Routledge. Anzaldúa, Gloria, and Cherríe Moraga (eds.) (2015), The Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, Albany: SUNY Press. Arteaga, Alfred (ed.) (1994), An Other Tongue: Nation and Ethnicity in the Linguistic Borderlands, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Viego, Antonio. (2007), Dead Subjects: Toward a Politics of Loss in Latino Studies, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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9 Performative, Queer Theories for Religion: Judith Butler Ellen T. Armour Biography and historical context Judith Butler was born in Cleveland, Ohio on February 24, 1956, into a family of practicing Reform Jews with Ashkenazi roots. By her own account, her introduction to philosophy came at the hands of her rabbi, the late Daniel Silver. Intended as an alternative to Hebrew school—​indeed, as a punishment of sorts for her failure to fully conform to Hebrew school’s demands—​philosophy proved the perfect antidote to her insatiable curiosity (Butler 2006). Butler went on to pursue its study formally at Yale University first as an undergraduate and subsequently as a doctoral student. In 1998, following stints on the faculties of Wesleyan University and Johns Hopkins University, she assumed the academic post she currently holds at the University of California, Berkeley, as the Maxine Elliott Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature. Butler is known primarily for her signal contributions to feminist and queer theory, but her oeuvre has expanded to include a number of other topics, often in response to contemporary events (including the attacks on September 11, 2001 and their aftermath) in which, as we’ll see, religion figures prominently. A scholar of international renown, Butler’s work has been translated into more than twenty languages. She has received honorary degrees from prestigious universities in the United States, Europe, and Latin America and regularly teaches abroad. The recipient of numerous fellowships and awards for her academic work, she has also been recognized for her humanitarian work. Active in a number of human rights organizations, she currently serves on the board of the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York and the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace.

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Key writings and signature approaches Butler is best known for her landmark text Gender Trouble:  Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Butler 1990).1 Although we now think of it as one of the foundational texts in what scholars have come to call queer theory, it was originally intended and received as a game-​changing intervention in feminist theory. Can or should “women” be the subject of feminism is Gender Trouble’s framing question. In asking and answering it, Butler refracted a decade of debate within feminist theory over its proper subject. Critiques from women of color, postcolonial, and lesbian feminists had exposed the limitations of feminism’s subject. The “woman” on whose behalf theorists theorized and activists organized was limited in ways that excluded many of those whom feminism claimed to support. Questions about feminism’s proper subject were exacerbated by the influx of French poststructuralist and psychoanalytically inflected theories into the American academy in the 1980s, an event that also marks the horizon of Gender Trouble’s appearance. These theories challenged concepts at the root of late twentieth-​ century identity politics by raising questions about representation, identity, and thus politics-​as-​usual. While some Anglophone feminists saw in these new intellectual currents potential for deepening understanding of and ability to respond effectively to conditions of oppression—​including those perpetuated by women against one another—​others saw only trouble on the horizon. Gender was indeed in trouble, it seemed; but where would that trouble lead? What stakes, dangers and possibilities did that trouble portend—​theoretically and politically? Butler took up the challenge of pursuing those questions in Gender Trouble. Troubling gender led her into and through the latest trends in French theory as well as feminist research in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Out of that mix she instantiated an important shift in feminist theory, one whose effects continue to resonate within that field and those that intersect with and/​or diverge from it, including what we now call queer theory. More than identifying distinct truths about gender, Butler invites us into a mode of inquiry or process of thought, the character of which is captured well by the word “trouble.” Integral to it is a constant and thoroughgoing questioning of received assumptions—​a “troubling” that allows new possibilities for thought and action to emerge. In order to grasp the mode of inquiry her writings embody, we will follow her thought in action and trace its signature moves—​particularly those generated by her turn toward performativity. It is perhaps easiest to perceive Butler’s contribution to feminist and nascent queer theory by focusing on her review and revision of the sex/​gender debate, a central feature of the second wave of feminism. Its theoretical arm in the United States adopted early on an understanding of sex and gender (and sexuality) as

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binary systems that, though linked to one another, could and should be analytically disarticulated. This move was frequently traced back to the influence of Simone de Beauvoir and Robert Stoller (de Beauvoir [1949] 1973; Stoller 1985). Both wanted to counter biological determinism, that is, the commonly held view that social roles and behavior follow as a natural consequence from biological differences. Both distinguished between sex (male or female, on their read) as a bodily given and gender (masculinity or femininity, on their read), understood as a matter of custom and culture. In The Second Sex, Beauvoir’s analysis of “women’s situation” put descriptive flesh on her claim that “one is not born a woman, but, rather, becomes one,” which many in the English-​speaking world (including Butler) read as demonstrating the normative power of gender (de Beauvoir [1949] 1973:  301; Butler 1990: 8).2 Once acknowledged, the sex/​gender distinction served an important purpose for feminists invested in challenging the systemic inequities it undergirds. Understanding them as socially constructed renders the reigning gendered expectations putatively open to revision. Biological males could take on feminine roles (becoming house husbands, say) while biological females could take on masculine roles (becoming CEOs of major corporations, say). In short, bodies need not dictate or limit what is possible socially. The distinction between naturally given sexes and socially constructed genders held sway into the 1980s, but eventually feminists began to call into question the “naturalness” of the distinction between the sexes—​in part, in response to greater awareness of the inadequacy of our binary system.3 In various ways, different thinkers showed that the natural realm itself never comes to us uninterpreted. What may seem to be a natural binary is itself the product of a specific history, a specific time and place. Further, these interpretations themselves serve distinct ends, benefiting those who conform to it, excluding those who do not. Some theorists—​predecessors to Butler, by the way—​concluded that sex was as socially constructed as gender, and thus itself potentially open to new and different interpretive configurations. Rather than the stable foundation upon which cultures constructed expectations for gendered subjects, sex itself was understood to be subject to variation. For those who accepted the pervasiveness of the constructed character of gender/​ sex, the challenge became how to think and talk about construction. Since societal norms established the constraints for gendered/​sexed identities, they must play some role in the process by which individuals took up those identities. On the other hand, feminism’s political aim of undoing normative constraints required an agent that could resist them. The challenge became developing a theory of gender/​sex that could allow for both. Gender Trouble’s central achievement arguably lies in its proposed resolution to this particular dilemma.

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Gender is as gender does: Butler’s performative turn Before Butler, feminist social constructionists were focused primarily on who does the constructing. If gendered subjects were wholly and seamlessly shaped by society, then gender was as fully determined by the social order as sex was by biology. This view left little room for individual agency and thus appeared to foreclose possibilities for resistance and change. Other theorists placed construction in the hands of the individual subject, who forged an identity by choosing (more or less) freely among the options made available within its social context. While this view secures a form of individual agency, it does so by presupposing a subject that exists outside the social realm. In Butler’s view, both approaches arrived at a familiar dead end. Noting that these debates were roughly analogous to those within modern philosophy over free will, Butler diagnosed the dilemma as symptomatic of a residual liberal humanism, a way of thinking about subjectivity that earlier feminist theorists like Carol Gilligan and Nancy Chodorow had exposed as infused with masculinist assumptions. Moving beyond this dead end would require a theory of social construction that grounded agency’s origins within the subject’s social, cultural, and linguistic formation, on Butler’s read. Rethinking language’s role in subject formation turned out to be the linchpin in Butler’s solution to the problem. Rather than conceiving of language merely as a descriptive tool, Butler focuses on its performative dimension, an insight first articulated by the philosopher J. L. Austin in his aptly titled book How to Do Things with Words (Austin [1962] 1973). Performative language is language that “does what it says” or produces the reality it speaks. For example, Austin notes that within the context of a wedding ceremony, the statement “I now pronounce you husband and wife” moves two people from the state of singleness to that of a married couple (Austin [1962] 1973). One might assume that the power to bring about that result resides solely in the authority granted by the state to the pronouncer. Butler, however, offers an alternative account that locates performative power in language itself, specifically in the performance of the linguistic utterance. “I now pronounce you husband and wife” works because the statement invokes and reiterates a social norm. It is this action itself, the citation of the convention or norm (within a certain ritual context), that centers its performative power, not simply the authority vested in the judge or minister who utters the words. Viewing performativity as a citational process accounts for the productive and regulative successes of norms and for their failures. Butler’s read. Norms are able to compel citation because they establish the guidelines for what is socially acceptable and workable. In this case, the linguistic formula “I now pronounce you husband and wife” defines the boundary between the unmarried and married states. To fail to properly cite or invoke the formula (or others akin to it) is to fail to achieve

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the desired state. At the same time, however, the power wielded by norms is itself citational. This means that the formula produces a husband and wife where once stood a single man and a single woman because it re-​cites its previous use. With each reiteration, the force of the norm is further consolidated. Moreover, without reiteration, the norm cannot be said to have power in any meaningful sense. In this way, the process of reiteration, or the citational process, produces (that is, gives body or weight to) the norms it invokes. Prior to their citation, norms have only a provisional or potential status; it is in and through their invocation and citation that they accrue their authority and their embodied existence. However, Butler argues that the process of citation disguises or conceals the norms’ dependence on the process of reiteration. While social norms are historical and so potentially revisable, they gain the appearance of fixed or eternal givens by their repeated reiteration in and by the subjects who take them on. Because of this appearance, norms are less likely to be questioned—​it seems unthinkable and too risky to forsake them. At the same time, as we’ll see, the fact that norms require citation to substantiate themselves opens a crack, or fissure, in the normative system they undergird and thus an opportunity for resistance to it. To perform is to re-​cite but to recite is not necessarily to repeat. No repetition is exactly the same. Moreover, citations can be faithful reiterations, but iteration is made possible only by the space between one iteration and the next (pace Derrida 1988). And it is precisely this space that opens up the possibility for subversion and change.

The normative as performative What results from understanding the construction of the gendered/​sexed subject as a performative process? Take, for example, the fact that modern US culture tends to equate homosexuality in men with effeminacy and in women with masculinity.4 This cultural assumption references a regnant common-​sense understanding of sex, gender, and sexuality as binary systems that connect the body, one’s behavior, and one’s desire in a linear causal order. That order presumes that males (naturally) act masculine and (just as naturally) desire women; females (naturally) act feminine and (just as naturally) desire men. Admitting to same sex desire calls into question not only one’s sexuality but also one’s gender. And, insofar as both gender and sexuality are understood as expressions of one’s biological sex, admitting to same sex desire ultimately also calls biological sex into question. Butler turns this linear understanding of the relationship of sex, gender, and sexuality on its head. Sexuality is not the (natural) expression of sex or gender but is prescribed by the larger social context. Our binary system arises not from nature but from a social system of compulsory heterosexuality that requires desire to channel itself via masculinity and femininity to its “opposite.” Critically and creatively appropriating feminist theory, psychoanalytic theory, and contemporary critiques of

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the science of sex, Butler argues that, rather than being an expression of (immutable) sex, gender produces sex. Masculinity and femininity are learned bodily performances that masquerade as natural by invoking bodily markers (primary and secondary sex characteristics) as their signature and guarantee. However, those bodily markers that the system relies on as its foundation are not ultimately up to the task. Butler alerts us to the fact that biological sex is often ambiguous at all bodily levels (the genetic, the genital, and the morphological). Feminism, Butler argues, needs to reconfigure its subject to take the reality of this genealogy into account. Because these norms define the viable forms of subjectivity within a culture, subjection to them is necessary to recognition and acceptance as a subject. Louis Althusser’s concept of interpellation comes into play here. Althusser describes the process of subjectification as structured by call and response. His paradigmatic example is the experience of being hailed by a policeman. One hears, “Hey, you!” and turns around. In turning around, one is constituted/​constitutes oneself as the-​ one-​called, as always already guilty. The process of taking up gendered/​sexed subject positions has an analogous call and response structure, according to Butler. This performative process begins immediately as the baby is identified and so “named,” typically, as either a boy or a girl. The process is ongoing and reiterative. Time and again, the developing subject is compelled to reiterate, “cite,” or take on as its own the behavior and identity suited to its designated sex. True to the pattern, with each citation the subjectivity of the person is affirmed and the preeminence of heteronormativity is strengthened. For Butler, the performative process is not purely theoretical or intellectual. She insists that it has real material effects. As she notes, in the designation of the baby as either a boy or a girl, the morphological interpretation is shaped that guides both society’s expectations for the child and the subject’s sense of its own physical boundaries and possibilities. This morphological perception in turn dictates the practices that constantly mark and remark the body into an identifiable physical shape. In this way, the social norms come to reside in and find a concrete manifestation in the body of the gendered/​sexed subject. Thus, as Butler clarifies in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (Butler 1993), the performative process is a process of materialization. Each subject carries the traces of its own history of bodily and emotional investment; indeed, the bodily ego is the mark of the (always tenuous) accomplishment of gendered/​sexed subjectivity. Further, Butler specifies that the performative process is not only reiterative and material but also exclusionary. If social norms define the realm of intelligible and viable subjectivity, then they also mark the boundaries beyond which lie the unintelligible and unacceptable. In this netherworld reside those who do not adequately cite the social norms, those on the spectrum of nonnormatively gendered, sexed, or sexual identities known now as L(esbian), G(ay), B(isexual), T(rans), Q(ueer or Questioning), I(ntersex). Refusing to properly cite the norm is, as those of

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us who occupy these positions know all too well, often violently disciplined in ways that render life outside the norms unbearable or impossible. Although granted no standing or even acknowledgment, these exclusions are also socially necessary in that they form the “constitutive outside” against which the accepted subject may be understood and defined, Butler argues.

Changing the system: Performativity and anti-​normativity So far, our description of Butler’s performative turn has focused on the new frame it gives to our understanding of our current binary regime of sex, gender, and sexuality. Recall, however, that Butler’s political aim is to disrupt and hopefully change this system. Crucial to realizing that aim are the fissures that she has exposed that trouble the system’s coherence and mastery. First, turning to performativity reveals the system as both cultural and material all the way down. Second, turning to performativity reveals identification—​ whether it takes normative or nonnormative form—​ as citational all the way down. To grow into (normative straight) manhood, say, requires more than simply being born with a penis and letting nature take its course. It requires learning to occupy one’s body—​to walk, to sit, to laugh, to speak, to dress—​in certain ways and not in others. One watches older boys or men behave and models oneself after them. One learns—​or is schooled in, should one slip up and throw like a girl, say—​those bodily habits mostly unconsciously. The standards are set by culture and can shift and change. The vintage photograph on the cover of the tenth anniversary of Gender Trouble, for example, features two young children, both in dresses and holding hands. By our standards for children’s dress, we would assume that both are girls. Look closely, however, and other signs suggest that while one is a girl, the other is a boy. In what will prove to be a fateful choice for Gender Trouble’s reception, Butler turns to drag performances as the primary example of disruptive or subversive citational performativity. Drag performances subvert the sex/​gender system by exposing the contingency of the relationship between biological sex and social gender. That certain men can act persuasively (hyper)feminine calls into question the system’s power to compel normative repetitions. Drag performances expose gender as itself performative; that is, as constructed of stylizations that invoke the body as their signature and guarantee. That guarantee is, however, illusory, a fact that extends to sexuality too, insofar as it relies on gender/​sex as its ground. (Recall our cultural expectation that presumes that gay men will act feminine and lesbians masculine, for example.) As Butler writes, “Gay is to straight not as copy is to original, but, rather, as copy is to copy” (Butler 1990: 31). Because performativity creates and consolidates (non)normativity, there is no original ideal to which we conform or from which we deviate.

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Critical reception of Butler’s work Though lauded by some feminist theorists, others were skeptical about the ultimate value for feminism of Butler’s performative turn.5 Many recognized in Butler’s argument a groundbreaking advance in overcoming the impasses that had beset the field. Here was a theory of social construction that could account for the staying power of normative gender roles and the possibility of resistance. The groundwork for change lay within the citationality of the gender norms themselves; if gender is as gender does, gender can be undone. The very mechanism of identity formation and consolidation—​performativity—​was itself the potential agent for change. Still, some saw problems in Butler’s formulation of the trouble with gender; problems that, in their view, called into question performativity’s usefulness as a tool for feminist politics. While Butler was applauded for exposing compulsory heterosexuality as gender’s unthought ground, she was criticized for leaving race’s connections to this framework largely uninterrogated.6 Some read Butler’s reliance on drag to support her claims for performativity as replacing the old feminist slogan “The personal is political” with “The parodic is political,” an approach to politics that they found naïve and ineffectual.7 It seemed to some as though performativity undid agency and thus political change altogether. If there is no subject outside of language, no doer beneath the deed, and our only options are to repeat faithfully or to parody, real political change is impossible. Ironically, others also found Butler politically ineffectual for opposite reasons. Those critics read performativity as synonymous with performance and understood Butler as arguing that we choose our gender as freely and easily as we choose our clothes. Gender identities would then be as easily cast off as last year’s jeans or a theatrical costume—​a claim that struck them as naïve. By contrast, Butler’s impact on nascent queer theory—​and queer politics—​was initially less contested and more fruitful. Organizations like ACT UP and Queer Nation that formed in response to the HIV/​AIDS crisis appropriated Butler’s theory as a resource for formulating political strategy. And the emerging discipline of queer theory saw in Butler’s performative turn fruitful theoretical ground for articulating nonnormative sexual and gender identities as “queer” in multiple senses. For one thing, it gave a theoretical grounding to the creative (if often exhausting) labor of the creative expropriations of body, self, and relationality required to make queer lives livable. For another, though Butler’s own work was not always sufficiently attuned to the diversity of (especially intersectional) identities claiming space under the “queer” umbrella, it seemed to hold open space for resisting the pressure to reduce queerness to a given set of determinable and definable identities.8 In the aftermath of Gender Trouble, Butler clarified, deepened, extended, and, in some cases, revised her theoretical positions in response to her critics, to emergent

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questions in queer theory and queer politics, and to events around her (Butler [1990] 1999: vii–​xxvi). The book that followed, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” includes essays that explore the mutual “imbrication” of sex, race, gender, and class, to refine Gender Trouble’s claims about drag’s subversive potential (and its limits), and attempt to explore more deeply the complex, varied, and intersectional landscape of nonnormative subjectivities (Butler 1993). Reception of those efforts was mixed. Some scholars found Butler’s attempts at intersectional analysis too thin or the examples she used too convenient (Benhabib et al. 1995). Other critiques centered on the limitations of performativity—​especially given its reliance on language—​for fully grasping the role embodiment plays for those positioned outside the norm. Trans scholar and activist Jay Prosser, for example, found Butlerian performativity both uncomfortably parasitic upon and profoundly unhelpful to transsexuals in particular, for whom the body truly and deeply—​not just discursively or superficially—​matters; a criticism disability scholars would also make.9 In the years since, the issues she addresses have broadened as Butler has continued to try to learn from and respond to her critics. While her work has continued its predominately linguistic focus, she has on several occasions explicitly and publicly acknowledged giving the body its due as an on-​going struggle. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative and The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, both published in 1997, think through the connections between language, subjectivity, and culture exposed by Gender Trouble and refined by Bodies That Matter (Butler 1997a; Butler 1997b). In Excitable Speech, Butler exposes the differential treatment accorded to certain kinds of speech (art produced by gays and lesbians, a cross burned in a Black family’s yard, pornography, the Clinton era’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy regarding gays in the military) by government officials and political activists and advocates alike. In each case, she investigates the consequences—​intentional or unintentional—​of the rhetoric invoked by the key participants on both sides of these debates. Butler’s analyses probe beneath the surface of these controversies for what they say about language and its effects. Clearly, words wound, but in what sense? What other violences are done in the attempt to temper their wounding power? Her analyses caution against taking comfort in legal remedies for such problems by warning of the unintended consequences of legislation and court decisions based on it. Legal remedies presumptively reinscribe discursive structures of sovereignty of the subject whose word is his deed, who knows what he says and says what he means, whose actions match his intentions, and who wields power directly. As satisfying as it can be to hold some “one” responsible, such remedies do little to intervene in and are often complicit with racism, sexism, and heterosexism, the very evils that the proponents of these remedies seek to eradicate. If Excitable Speech starts at the surface of political life, Psychic Life of Power starts well beneath it. This book returns to and reframes the question of political agency that lay at the heart of Gender Trouble. Butler attempts to describe the fundamental

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structure of subject formation that generates agency and undergirds life in community. The title aptly names the project Butler has in view here: outlining the dimensions of a chiasmic process that forms us into individuals who can conform or resist society’s demands. Rather than the preexisting foundation of political agency, subjectivity comes into being through subjection. Becoming a subject—​someone who decides for themselves what to do—​ironically requires submission to others, Butler argues. This process trades on our physical, psychic, and social vulnerabilities. Those vulnerabilities reveal bodily and social dependencies, which are embedded in a web of passionate attachments to the others whom we need (including but not limited to family). Autonomy is necessary for psychic and sometimes physical survival but also threatens the subject insofar as it rends that network of attachments. This is the peril and the promise of subjectivity. Rather than the precondition of navigating vulnerability, subjectivity—​and the (ethical and political) agency that accompanies—​ is its result. We act not in spite of vulnerability, passionate attachment, threat, and loss, but because of and through them. In the early 2000s, Butler continued to pursue the intersection of politics and theory in academic contexts and in more popular venues. With Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek, she coauthored a volume that embodied their common concerns for providing theoretical underpinnings for a viable Leftist politics (Butler, Laclau, and Žižek 2000; Butler 2015). But issues of gender and sexuality remain prominent in her thinking. She wrote several pieces on queer theory and politics, including thoughtful essays on the questions of same sex marriage, transgenderism and intersexuality, and antigay violence, many of which are collected (with revisions, in some cases) in Undoing Gender (Butler 2004b). In recent years, Butler has taken on an increasingly visible role as a public intellectual authoring essays in venues such as The Nation and the New York Times and appearing in the occasional documentary.10 Her academic work, too, has become more geopolitical, if you will, in its scope as Butler has responded to major events with new themes emerging as a result. Of particular note is the role that vulnerability plays in her more recent work. Though hardly a new insight to Butler (as we saw, vulnerability is central to her account of subject formation in Psychic Life of Power, for example, and appears in Undoing Gender), it comes to particular prominence in her thinking in the wake of the events of September 11, 2001 and the wars that followed (Butler 1997b; Butler 2004b). Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence likewise acknowledges vulnerability as both physical (precarity) and social (precariousness). Precariousness and precarity limn the site where society and our bodies meet, where subjectivity is both founded and founders (Butler 2003). The attacks on September 11, Butler suggests, preyed on both dimensions in ways that undid us (though some of us more than others). They brought home the extent of our dependence on others near and far for our very being, both material and social. How we reckon with vulnerability has political import, as well, Butler argues. In Frames of

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War: When Is Life Grievable? she attends to the ties between grievability and livability arguing that social recognition (and thus livability) is granted only to those whose lives we deem grievable (Butler 2009).

Butler’s impact on religious studies Doubtless because of the geopolitical expansion of her work, religion has also become a more explicit focus for Butler. With anthropologists Saba Mahmood and Talal Asad, for example, she has written on the troubled distinction between the secular and the religious (Asad et al. 2009). In 2012 she published Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism, a project that proved at least as controversial as her work on gender (Butler 2012).11 While these aspects of her oeuvre are gaining attention from scholars in religious studies, it is her theory of gender performativity that has and continues to be most generative. In many ways, reception of that aspect of Butler’s work among scholars of religion has mirrored that of academia in general in both what scholars find insightful and what they find lacking. While its primary impact has been in scholarship invested in the intersection of religion, gender, and sexuality, Butler’s work has also impacted discussions of methodology in the study of religion; in ritual studies, for example, as well as in contemporary scholarship on the fraught question of the relationship between religion and politics. Though the depth of their engagement with Butler’s work ranges from superficial to substantive, scholars working in a variety of religious traditions and employing a wide range of subdisciplines and methodological approaches have found in her a generative conversation partner, a trend that we can expect will continue well into the future.

Suggested further reading Armour, Ellen, and Susan M. St. Ville (eds.). (2006), Bodily Citations: Religion and Judith Butler, New York: Columbia University Press. Asad, Talal, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood. (2009), Is Critique Secular?: Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech, Berkeley, CA, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press. Brown, Wendy. (2015), Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, New York: Zone Books. Butler, Judith. ([1990] 1999), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity: Tenth Anniversary Edition, New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith. (1993), “Imitation and Gender Subordination.” In Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, David M. Halperin (eds.), The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, 307–320, New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith. (2005), Giving an Account of Oneself, New York: Fordham University Press.

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Butler, Judith. (2009), Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? New York and London: Verso. Butler, Judith. (2012), Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism, New York: Columbia University Press. Butler, Judith. (2015), Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

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10 Disrupting Secular Power and the Study of Religion: Saba Mahmood SherAli Tareen

In the last couple of decades, one of the central arguments that has shaped the study of religion is that the religious and the secular cannot be approached as opposites. Many scholars, in different ways, have challenged the conventional view that while religion concerns matters of God, worship, rituals, and beliefs, the secular represents the abdication of such concerns. They have shown that, rather than as the inverse of religion, the secular is better understood as a regime of discursive and institutional power that constantly regulates and manages what does and does not count as religion (Abeysekara 2008; Asad 2003; Mandair 2009; Modern 2011). To put it more simply, it is precisely by defining religion as its “other” that the secular defines itself. Moreover, the secular reorganization of religion as reducible to propositional beliefs and as belonging to the private sphere of individual piety packages religion in a manner most conducive to liberal political rule.

Biography and historical context Saba Mahmood, whose thought occupies this chapter, was one of the central architects of this argument. In the course of her prolific career, Mahmood examined varied dimensions of liberal secular power in singularly novel and profound ways. Before becoming an anthropologist, Mahmood was trained in and practiced architecture and urban planning. She taught anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley from 2004 until her death in 2018; she received her doctorate from Stanford University in 1998. Mahmood was among a cohort of scholars whose

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genealogical investigations of the secular had been especially inspired by the work of anthropologist Talal Asad. Asad’s thought was the pioneering force behind the now familiar argument that, rather than representing opposite domains of life, the modern categories of “religion” and “secularism” are mutually dependent (Asad 2003). Building on Asad’s thought, Mahmood’s scholarship explored the sorts of normative claims and narratives that nourish and sustain the promise of secularism. Her work shows that secular assumptions about the normative role of religion in society, as belonging to the “private” spheres of inner belief and the family, and the political rationality that authorizes those assumptions, that of political secularism, are anything but universal. Rather, far from preordained, the judgments and assumptions that sustain secularism are contingently authorized in arbitrary conjunctures of specific historical, institutional, and discursive conditions. Thus, a defining feature of her thought was to puncture the coherence and inevitability of dominant and often taken for granted secular claims and narratives. In her work, Mahmood explored, with much depth and nuance, the interconnections between “political secularism” (the state regulation of religion), the “secular” (the powerful yet often ineffable force that sustains the normativity of a secular life), and “secularity” (the kinds of dispositions, sensibilities, and attitudes that amplify and are amplified by secularism and the secular). The power and diffusion of secularism as a normative ideal owe precisely to the operation and cooperation of these ideas as family concepts. Mahmood’s genealogical investigations of secular power interrupted the self-​congratulatory narrative of secularism’s alleged eclipse of tradition and religion. They also disrupted the often-​assumed universality of such liberal virtues and achievements as individual sovereignty, freedom, the separation of religion and politics, religious liberty, and so on. Though much of her scholarship focused on Islam and Muslim societies (primarily Egypt), the theoretical implications and consequences of her work extend much further into multiple contexts. Indeed, the outcome of Mahmood’s interventions was no less than a thorough reevaluation of often taken for granted dogmas about the virtues of secularism. Mahmood engaged the question of the secular through remarkably varied themes such as the politics of ethical action, blasphemy and free speech, secular semiotic ideology, and secularism and sectarian violence. But the one running thread that binds her scholarship was her insistence on subverting the normalcy of dominant assumptions about life by raising and addressing questions that those assumptions foreclose. In what follows, I sketch a narrative of Mahmood’s intellectual trajectory by describing and explaining certain signature conceptual moves and strategies that marked her contributions to the study of religion. Let me begin with a rather detailed examination of arguably her most widely cited, read, and contested work—​the 2005 book Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject.

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Key writings and signature approaches Ethics, politics, and agency Politics of Piety operates on two interconnected yet distinct registers. First, this book represents a work of ethnography centered on the Women’s Piety Movement in Egypt, a movement bound up with the broader phenomenon of Islamic Revival (al-​ sahwa al-​Islami) in the country. And second, Politics of Piety constitutes a rigorous and deeply layered philosophical reflection on the limits and problems of dominant assumptions regarding agency, freedom, and subjectivity that animate major strands of liberal feminist thought. These two registers are ineluctably entwined. The ethnographic narrative constantly informs and nurtures the philosophical and conceptual interventions advanced by the book. At the heart of this book is a sustained critique of the liberal equation of agency with individual autonomy, or with resistance to existing structures of norms and authority. Mahmood argues that among the abiding assumptions around which varied trajectories of liberal feminist thought coalesce is that agency is defined by a woman’s ability to resist and subvert structures of power such as patriarchy. So that, while resisting external sources of authority like patriarchy or divine sovereignty is seen as the exercise of agency, the absence of such resistance is equated with the absence of agency. As a way to disturb the often-​assumed universality of such a framing of agency, Mahmood poses and addresses a couple of broad overarching questions. What are some alternative logics of agency that do not depend on or replicate the equation of agency with resistance? And what are the sorts of analytical questions and explorations that are foreclosed if one remained imprisoned to the liberal binaries of subversion/​submission or resistance/​acquiescence? These are the twin questions that bind the aspirations and objectives of this project (Mahmood 2005: 1–​40). As a way to engage these questions, Mahmood presents the logics and practices of piety found among women who are a part of the Women’s Piety Movement in Egypt. The Women’s Piety Movement attracts women from varied socioeconomic backgrounds and pasts who share a common striving to cultivate what they see as virtuous and pious lives in accord with the normative boundaries and textures of Islam. Their central object of dissatisfaction is the secularization and Westernization of the society around them. By this they mean the diminution of religious practices and norms to mere conventions, the devotional purpose and vitality of which, in their view, has been severely punctured. It is the resuscitation of pious lives and bodies—​at the level of both the individual and society—​that inspires this movement. A crucial aspect of this process is the role of da‘wa, or urging other Muslims to intensified piety and the part played by women preachers and teachers who undertake the work of da‘wa, the da‘iyat (sing. da‘iya; pronounced daa-​ee-​ya, daa-​ee-​yaat). Much of this

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book is occupied with presenting the processes of pedagogy and learning through which members of the Women’s Piety Movement seek to cultivate virtues that might enable piety (Mahmood 2005: 40–​78). What most interests Mahmood is the process of “ethical cultivation” that makes the promise and potential of a pious life possible. For Mahmood, it is precisely in the ethical training of the body that the agency of women in this context is located. More specifically, their agency is enshrined in the capacities for action enabled by and required for an ongoing regime of ethical cultivation. Most crucially, this process of learning depends on a relationship of subordination to, rather than the subversion of, external structures of authority. In an evocative and particularly useful analogy, Mahmood presents the example of a virtuoso pianist learning the art of playing the piano. In order to master her art, the pianist must submit herself to an “often painful regime of disciplinary practice” (Mahmood 2005: 29) structured around hierarchical arrangements of apprenticeship. The skill or capacity developed as a result of such a process of learning is made possible precisely through making the body available to be taught, instructed, and honed. The agent’s capacity for action, or her agency (represented in this example by her mastery over playing the piano) is contingent on her subordination to a disciplinary process of pedagogy and instruction. This is the import of the paradox of what Michel Foucault called subjectivation, a category around which Mahmood frames her argument:  the abilities and skills that lend an actor her agency depend on and are enabled by her subordination to external forms and norms of authority. To put it more simply, the actor derives her agency, her capacity for action, not through resisting or subverting domination but precisely through embracing specific relations of subordination. Here a clarifying note is important: Mahmood does not argue that women in the Mosque Movement do not resist or contest prevailing structures of authority. Her point is not that these women are passive recipients of patriarchy. To the contrary, by occupying public spaces and roles commonly dominated by men and by challenging the state’s control over the regulation of everyday religious lives, these women are clearly engaging in acts of resistance and contestation. However, Mahmood’s point is much more nuanced than the empirical question of whether she considers these women as resisting or submitting to male authority would allow. Her point is this: the forms of reasoning that go into the cultivation of a pious life hardly center on the liberal imperative of resisting and overcoming external obstacles of tradition, male authority, or divine will. In other words, while the women attached to the mosque movement might at times resist norms, it is not resisting but rather inhabiting norms that structures their ethical strivings and, in turn, their agency. And, in a connected move, Mahmood further argues, it is this ethical agency that generates and constitutes their political agency. The entwinement of ethics and politics is a crucial dimension of this book that not only signals key theoretical interventions but also the broader stakes and implications of this project.

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What is political? In much scholarship on modern Islam, revivalist movements such as the Women’s Piety Movement are often categorized as “apolitical.” This is so because they don’t explicitly engage institutions and practices most commonly associated with politics. For instance, they don’t call for the creation of an Islamic state, aspire to control machineries of the state like the judiciary, or actively participate in democratic processes such as elections. However, for Mahmood, such a characterization represents “a gross political and analytical mistake” (Mahmood 2005:  35). The political power and efficacy of such projects of moral reform lie in the transformative potential in their programs of ethical cultivation, both at the level of the individual and that of society. As Mahmood put it, “the transformative power of movements such as these is immense and, in many cases, exceeds that of conventional political groups” (2005:  35). At the heart of her argument is the claim that ethics and the promise of cultivating an ethical life are deeply political. Ethics and politics are inextricably intertwined. And moreover, it is through exploring processes and practices of ethical cultivation that the political power and agency of a moral project such as the Women’s Piety Movement can be discerned and appreciated. Or to phrase it differently, it is in the capacity for and the cultivation of ethical action that one can locate the “politics of piety.” The intimacy of ethics and politics is a crucial dimension of Mahmood’s thought as it shows that the primary occupation of Politics of Piety is not to offer a competing or better theory of agency. Rather, the question of agency works as a theoretical conduit to advance the more central argument regarding the political and social transformation enabled by the cultivation of a disciplined life. The broader implication of this argument is that it urges us to critically evaluate the stakes involved in calling the Women’s Piety Movement and other such projects “apolitical.” By bringing into view the political work performed by disciplinary ethical practices, Mahmood brings into doubt the liberal secular distinction between the public sphere of rational politics and deliberation and the private domain of religious life. Thus, in calling into question the binaries of freedom/​submission and ethics/​politics, Mahmood bursts a range of connected liberal secular binaries like public/​private, rational/​emotional, religion/​politics, and, of course, religious/​secular. So while seemingly focused on questions of gender and agency, the political stakes and theoretical tentacles of this book extend much further, carrying a devastating indictment of multiple normative assumptions and dogmas that sustain liberal secular thought and politics. This is perhaps what explains not only the profound impact of this book, lending it the status of a classic, but also the visceral reactions it often provokes within and outside the academy. At its core, Politics of Piety represents a disruption of normative secular positions and pronouncements regarding the proper place and orientation of religion in the modern world.

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Logics of piety One key strategy through which Mahmood sought to accomplish this task was that of identifying moments when the logics and practices of piety among women in the Women’s Piety movement escaped liberal secular assumptions and expectations. More specifically, her strategy was to interrogate examples that might be seen as quintessential cases of a women’s submission to patriarchy but a closer inspection of which reveals the inadequacy of such a framing. For purposes of illustration, let me focus on two examples: Mahmood’s discussion on cultivating the virtue of shyness and on wearing the veil. The cultivation of virtues is a central theme of this book, one for which Mahmood mobilizes Aristotle’s concept of habitus, or the habituation of dispositions and sensibilities through repetitive practice. Shyness, as a marker of modesty, is a virtue that many women in the Women’s Piety movement consider a critical component of a pious being that is also mandated by the Qur’an. In a liberal feminist framework that equates agency with resistance to external norms and power, embodying shyness might seem a perfect example of feminine deference to male authority. Now the point that Mahmood makes is that not cultivating shyness does not involve subordination to patriarchy; it does. Rather, her point is that approaching such moments of cultivating virtues through the very question of resistance or subordination obscures more than it reveals. Far more crucial to this process is the regime of bodily learning and training through which a subject goes about embodying a particular virtue. To repeat: it is that process of repetitive learning and training that endows a subject her capacity for ethical action, her agency (Mahmood 2005: 153–​188). So in regard to shyness, for instance, in the liberal tradition, if someone acted shyly without feeling so, that might be taken as a sign of cheating and hypocrisy. In contrast, for women in the mosque movement, such dissonance would indicate the need for additional and more intensified training and striving until bodily action and inward motives are synchronized. In this framing, the inner and the outer do not operate as a binary so that the former infuses and informs the latter. Rather, and this is the crucial point, instead of emanating from inner feelings and desires, bodily acts (like simulating shyness or wearing the veil), are themselves central to training the self. To put it differently, external bodily acts are both markers of piety as well as critical means of cultivating piety. This insight is especially critical in the context of the veil that is so often seen primarily as a symbol of a Muslim woman’s religious identity in public. But, in Mahmood’s view, focusing on the symbolic value of the veil is bound to obfuscate the complex ways in which wearing the veil tutors the body in its ethical development. As she puts it, rather eloquently:  “While wearing the veil serves at first as a means to tutor oneself in the attribute of shyness, it is also simultaneously integral to the

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practice of shyness: one cannot simply discard the veil once a modest deportment has been acquired, because the veil itself is part of what defines that deportment.” (Mahmood 2005: 158; emphasis mine). To conclude the discussion on Politics of Piety, a cautionary note is in order: reading this text as an endorsement of patriarchy or fundamentalist Islam would constitute the grossest of misreadings. Trying to sympathetically understand a grammar of life is not to endorse or celebrate it. At its heart, this book represents a work of translation that sought to make intelligible a set of logics and practices that do not neatly fit dominant assumptions and expectations of liberal feminism. But it is a work of cultural translation that does not impose on the object of translation the colonizing certitude of the translator. Exactly to the contrary, the kind of translation work Mahmood conducts in this book is one aimed at halting if not dissolving the certainty with which concepts such as freedom, agency, ethics, and politics are often imagined. Listening closely to a competing logic of life holds the promise of recalibrating the surety of one’s own worldview.

Imagining offense beyond the law: The limits of secular semiotic ideology In the years following the publication of Politics of Piety, Mahmood turned in a much more explicit fashion to interrogating the workings of secularism and secular power. In this vein, her 2009 article “Religious Reason and Secular Affect:  An Incommensurable Divide?” represents a particularly multilayered and powerful example of her attempt at interrupting the religion/​secular binary. The themes and moves of this essay highlight key aspects of her conceptual approach to questions of religion and secularism in remarkably striking and illustrative detail. The central task that animates this article is that of interrupting the often-​assumed division between religious emotion/​affect and the supposed neutrality of liberal secular reason. As the title of this article cleverly announces, Mahmood flips the terms of this division. This article takes as its focus the events and discourses surrounding the controversy generated by the so-​ called Danish cartoons (printed in 2005 and reprinted in 2008)  that caricatured Prophet Muhammad as a celebration of free speech. Mahmood argues that approaching the Danish cartoon controversy as the case of a standoff between free speech and religious taboo is conceptually and politically problematic. This is so because such an approach fails to consider, and thus buries, the strong normative attachments and moral claims that underlie the liberal secular dogma of free speech. Far from neutral, the operation of the free speech principle both depends on and generates a particular conception of what religion in the modern world should look like; a conception largely inspired by Protestant Christianity. Let me explain key aspects of this argument.

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In the middle of and aftermath of the Danish cartoons episode, scholars and commentators from varied ideological orientations, even while espousing radically opposite views on the cartoons, nonetheless agreed on the underlying framing of the issue. Most agreed that this controversy was the product of an inherent clash between religious sensitivity on the one hand and the exercise of liberal free speech on the other. For some, the publication of the cartoons was a necessary step in curbing the threat of Muslim fundamentalism; for them, conceding the right of caricature and offense would mean surrendering to fundamentalist myopia. But while others like the British Pakistani writer Tariq Ali recognized the racism of the cartoons, they remained baffled by and unsympathetic to the pain the cartoons caused to many Muslims. Yet others like the literary critic Stanley Fish attributed the problem to the moral anemia of liberalism that explained its inability to accommodate and consider religious sensibilities (Mahmood 2009:  839–​ 842). According to Mahmood, there are two major problems with such a framing that assumes the exclusive mutuality and opposition of religious taboo and secular freedom. First, it precludes thinking carefully about the kinds of reasoning that informed the pain caused to many Muslims by cartoons mocking the Prophet. And second, it sidesteps the interrogation of the moral claims and religious histories that saturate liberal secular conceptions of free speech. And it is precisely these two tasks that in large part occupy this article. Mahmood is explicit in clarifying that her goal is not to explain the Muslim reaction to the Danish cartoons or to homogenize any such reaction. The objection that many Muslims did not react to the cartoons with much pain will miss her entire argument. Rather than offering the most accurate theory of Muslim pain, Mahmood is instead interested in reflecting on the seeming unintelligibility of a form of moral injury that does not conform with liberal secular notions of law, civility, and offense. Lurking in the reduction of the moral injury caused by the Danish cartoons to religious emotion and sensitivity is a dismissal of the legitimacy of that injury, Mahmood seems to suggest. An uncritical faith in free speech precludes one from considering the secular theology operative in the expectation that Muslims should not be so offended by caricatures or cartoons of the Prophet, Mahmood argues. In what is her signature move in this article, she goes on to argue that at work in this demand is a secular ideology of language. Note here that Mahmood uses the concept of language in its most capacious sense to also include images and icons. According to the secular semiotic ideology, as she explains it, since signs are only arbitrarily connected to the concepts they represent, a rational person should be able to distinguish images and icons from the actual figures they represent. An image of Muhammad is not really Muhammad just like an image of Jesus is not really Jesus. Hence, a rational believer, so the argument goes, ought to be able to distinguish images of these sacred figures from their actual personhood (Mahmood 2009: 842–​845).

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The function of language, according this scheme, is primarily the representation of objects and the communication of meaning. Therefore, in this view, since an image of Muhammad does not comprise the meaning of his being, the violation of such an image should be distinguished from any affront to his personality. Drawing on the work of scholars such as Webb Keane, Mahmood shows that this seemingly secular position is in fact deeply embedded in and indebted to quintessential modern Protestant/​colonial assumptions regarding “authentic” religion that continues to inform different formulations of secular humanist thought. The suggestion that Muslims ought not to take cartoons of Muhammad too seriously rests on a particular assumption. That assumption is this: since the true locus of religion is in the interior of a person and because religion is ultimately a matter of choice, a properly modern subject must possess the capacity to separate inner belief from the external world of objects, images, and materiality (Mahmood 2009: 844). Mahmood argues that this impoverished understanding of religion could only show bemusement toward alternative logics of life whereby venerating a figure like Muhammad is not just a matter of choice consigned to the privacy of inner belief. For many Muslims, Muhammad represents the most intimate moral exemplar and model for inhabiting the world: bodily, ethically, and materially. It is here that she introduces a key concept that kneads her argument: the idea of cohabitation. Drawing from Aristotle’s idea of schesis or embodied habitation, Mahmood emphasizes that venerating Muhammad above all represents a quest for cohabiting the body of the Prophet. This means striving to cultivate a pious and virtuous self through a rigorous regime of imitating intimate details of Muhammad’s life and example, as if by cohabiting his body. Crucially, the cohabitation of the Prophet’s body does not follow the modern liberal imperative of distinguishing between the inner essence of religion (belief) that is protected by law and its external manifestations (actions) that are entirely available for offense and injury. And even more crucially, the relationship to the Prophet sustained by the idea of cohabitation is not one in which the Prophet primarily represents an external source of laws and meanings. He is not just an object of interpretation and decipherment. Rather, his body represents the site and promise of inhabiting a virtuous life and of developing ethical capacities (Mahmood 2009: 847–​850). To clarify again, Mahmood’s discussion of cohabitation is not meant to present a definitive or better account of Muslim piety or that of prophetic reverence in Islam. Rather, her point is to highlight the distance and incongruity between such an imaginary of piety and liberal secular understandings of religion as a matter of choice reducible to inner belief. It is this distance that renders unintelligible and invisible the pain associated with caricatures of the Prophet. There is one other important conceptual move marking this article that deserves a brief mention, especially since it presaged lines of inquiry that would occupy Mahmood’s later work. This move has to do with Mahmood’s insistence that far from offering any

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resolution, recourse to the law can only further exacerbate the problems and conundrums generated by instances such as the Danish cartoon affair. In their bid to counter the rampant Islamophobia around them, some Muslim groups and activists in Europe sought to legally categorize attacks against Islam as a form of racism and hate speech. By doing so, they sought to benefit from European hate speech laws and from legal precedents set by bodies such as the European Court of Human Rights that have limited free speech in the interest of maintaining public order. But as Mahmood trenchantly argues, “The resort to juridical language” encounters “strong challenges not simply because of the European majority’s prejudice against Muslims but because of structural constraints internal to secular liberal law, its definition of what religion is, and its ineluctable sensitivity to majoritarian cultural sensibilities” (Mahmood 2009: 850–​851). In other words, the law, with its foremost concern for maintaining public order, cannot help but prioritize the normative expectations and pressures of the majority population. Since there is no universal consensus on what constitutes offense and moral injury, the free speech principle of “say what you wish so long as you don’t break the law” must by its nature privilege majoritarian priorities and sensibilities. Recourse to the law can only further elevate the power of the state to regulate the boundaries of speech and religion because ultimately it is the state that will “determine when and how free speech may be limited” (2009: 856). The signature move of this essay lies in the way it engages the broader argument about the secular production and regulation of religion explicitly through the concept of a secular semiotic ideology. By focusing on the question of language (and, by extension, images and icons), Mahmood is able to show the workings of secular power in rendering untranslatable logics and forms of life that bring the universality of that power into question. Thus, central to this article is the problematic of translation in the operation of liberal secular power through categories and moral imperatives such as free speech. Considering the proliferation of debates over the boundaries and ethics of free speech in North America and beyond (including at institutions of higher education), the political stakes of this essay cannot be overstated.

The paradoxes of political secularism Mahmood’s second monograph, Religious Difference in a Secular Age:  A Minority Report, brings the role of the modern state in perpetuating the contradictions of secularism into central view. Religious Difference in a Secular Age is a study of the structural paradoxes of political secularism. The central theme of this book is the intimacy of religious inequality and modern state power. By tracking the permeation in Egypt of signature precepts of secularism such as public order, minority rights, religious liberty, the legal distinction between the public and the private, and the emergence of history as the sovereign decider of moral argument, this book seeks to disrupt the binary of Western and non-​Western secularism. It argues that while

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the precise trajectory of religious inequality is historically specific to each context, the inextricability of secularism to liberal political rule is derived from analogous conundrums and paradoxes involved in the modern state’s management of religious difference. The underlying contradiction that haunts political secularism is this: “Secularism as a statist project aims to make religious difference inconsequential to politics while at the same time embedding majoritarian religious norms in state institutions, laws, and practices” (Mahmood 2015: 206). With its focus on Egypt, this book seeks to puncture the commonly held assumption that sectarianism and interreligious tensions and violence in the Middle East are products of the lack of secularism and untamed religiosity in the region. Turning this assumption on its head, Mahmood argues that religious inequality is enshrined in the very organizing logic and structure of political secularism. For all its claims to religious neutrality, the political and legal structuration of the modern state necessitates its involvement in and production of religious difference. While engaging a number of varied themes and settings, the conceptual glue that binds this book has to do with an irresolvable contradiction inseparable from the operation of the modern secular state, namely, (1) the seeming disavowal of religion from the sphere of politics and (2) the simultaneous reliance on religious categories to regulate social life and norms. These two opposing dimensions of political secularism, what Mahmood calls its “regulatory impulse” and its “promise of freedom,” are at once intertwined and codependent. Most importantly, the irresolvable contradiction inherent in this dual impulse is not simply a matter of theoretical abstraction. Rather, this inescapable contradiction of political secularism is crucial to how the modern state orders and generates the contours of religious life and its corresponding forms of exclusion, violence, and hierarchies. Mahmood assembles this broader conceptual argument by focusing on two categories that she sees as symptomatic of the contradictory character of political secularism: the categories of “religious liberty” and “minority rights.” Much of this book is occupied with tracing the intellectual and political careers of these concepts in Egypt, with a constant gaze on how those careers were shaped by the enveloping shadow of modern colonial power. Mahmood also charts the transformation of religious communities in Egypt such as the Coptic Orthodox Christians into minoritized and distinctly enumerated political groups. In doing so, she argues that “rather than see minority rights and religious liberty as universally applicable moral principles, they are best understood as strategies of liberal secular governance aimed at regulating and managing difference (religious, racial, ethnic, and cultural), in a national polity” (Mahmood 2015:  60). Instead of overcoming religious inequality, Mahmood argues, the discourse of minority rights and religious liberty only exacerbates sectarian and communal conflict. This tension is poignantly captured by the following question: “How to banish religion from politics while at the same time devise laws to ameliorate religious inequality?” (2015: 68).

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The most profound outcome of looking to the state for rights and liberty is the magnification of the state’s sovereign agency while individual citizens, marked as belonging to either the majority or minority population, are tied to the state through a system of rights and obligations. Therefore, Mahmood concludes, it is not the failure of secularism but precisely the opposite, the centrality of a secular political rationality that has in large part intensified majority/​minority tensions and violence in Egypt. As she puts her main argument, “The process of secularization in the Middle East, far from eliminating religious difference, has subjected it to a new grid of intelligibility that is compatible with the rationality of modern political rule” (Mahmood 2015: 62). So in its broadest sense, Religious Difference in a Secular Age can be read as an invitation to imagine a horizon of the political that is more suspicious of conceding the problem of religious difference to the sovereign agency of the state and that is less enthusiastic about presenting secularism as the solution to religious inequality and minority suffering. Indeed, the minority report contained in this book reads more like an autopsy report of political secularism that brings its celebratory narrative of having overcome religious difference into fatal doubt. There is one more aspect of this book that deserves mention, for it presents another dimension of Mahmood’s theoretical tool kit not yet discussed. In addition to interrogating the contradictions of political secularism, Mahmood also explores the theme of secularity, meaning “the shared set of background assumptions, attitudes, and dispositions that imbue secular society and subjectivity” (Mahmood 2015: 181). Specifically, Mahmood engages the question of secularity by discussing notions of history and time that animate debates and discourses seemingly centered on matters of religious dispute. This she does by analyzing the terms and texture of a controversy that erupted in contemporary Egypt over the publication of an Arabic novel called Azazeel. The controversy generated by this novel had to do with the way it depicted the fourth-​century doctrinal dispute “about the dual nature of Christ” that “tore Christendom apart and eventually gave birth to the Coptic Orthodox Church” (2015: 181). The author of this novel, Youssef Ziedan, presented an avowedly secular reading of this dispute that advanced a damning critique of clerical authority and also suggested that religion was a human invention. The leaders of the Coptic Christian community in Egypt accused Ziedan of “defaming the Christian religion,” a crime in Egyptian law. They unsuccessfully tried to get the novel banned. In response, Ziedan haughtily brushed aside this accusation and lampooned the Coptic leaders for their religious myopia and failure to understand literary style and conventions. Mahmood argues that seeing this standoff as one pitting religious taboo against literary freedom is at once limiting and misleading. The gravity of their disagreements notwithstanding, far more significant to the grammar of this dispute is an assumption that both the novelist and his detractors held in common. Namely, they both “subscribed to the secular assumption that for revelation to be persuasive it must be commensurate

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with historical truth” (Mahmood 2015: 183). Also, they both understood “scripture as a repository of historical events located in empty, homogenous time” (2015: 182). Despite their competing positions (the details of which I don’t have the space here to rehearse), both Ziedan and the Coptic clerics framed their arguments in a manner that valorized the historical accuracy of the narrative they told about early church history. The desire for historical exactness was so deeply etched to their discourse that they hardly even noticed this epistemic convergence. For Mahmood, most striking here is the sovereign role played by history as supposedly constituting the neutral ground on which competing claims about the past are proffered and contested. But underlying the mobilization of history as the supreme arbiter of opposing claims is a normative assumption regarding the nature of history. That assumption is that history represents a linear progression of time so that it may readily authorize and validate a particular reading of the past. Such an empiricist view of history coupled with its elevation as the validating force of a moral argument represents a hallmark of secularity. As Mahmood put it, “The modern conception of history—​as an autonomous mode of inquiry into the positivity of events as they occur in linear time—​is a key feature of secularity that has had an enormous influence on how religious truth is interpreted and justified in the modern world” (Mahmood 2015: 206). Critical to Mahmood’s analysis is the argument that for all its pretensions to neutrality, it is precisely such a secular imaginary of history—​enwrapped in a linear trajectory of time—​that renders disputes such as the Azazeel controversy so explosive. Put differently, while ostensibly a neutral playing field, the pressure of history, the pressure to furnish a moral claim with the accoutrements of historical certainty, fuels rather than dowses conflict. The following statement by Mahmood masterfully sums up the point:  “Secularity flattens religious incommensurability, forcing religious traditions to confront one another in the uniform space of history, all equally vulnerable to the questioning power of the secular” (Mahmood 2015:  207). This insight crystallizes a key conceptual stance that defines much of Mahmood’s scholarly oeuvre: the insistence on scrutinizing the political and epistemic terrain that makes particular arguments and forms of argumentation possible and intelligible. While Youssef Ziedan and his Coptic antagonists advanced positions that were their own, the terrain they had to contend, one that prized historical certainty, was not of their choosing. That terrain was infused with the pressures and expectations of secularity and secular power.

Secularity, history, and hermeneutics The interconnection of secularity, history, and reading practices, or hermeneutics, is also the central concern of what is arguably Mahmood’s most provocative and certainly her most misread article, “Secularism, Hermeneutics, Empire:  The Politics

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of Islamic Reformation,” published in 2006. In this article Mahmood highlights the convergence of US imperial and some Muslim liberal secular attempts at reforming Islam and Muslims. Especially post 9/​11, machineries of the US state (especially the State Department) and other powerful non-​state institutions have sought to identify and support what they consider “moderate Islam.” Their moderation of Islam hinges on the objective and desire of valorizing modalities of Islam and Muslim identity best suited for the exercise of US interests and power in predominantly Muslim countries. The quest to find moderate Muslim allies has also involved rendering explicit pronouncements on what counts as “good” and “bad” Islam and, by extension, “good” and “bad” Muslims. Mahmood shows that the conception of goodness carried in neoliberal discourses and policy documents on Islam and Muslims rests on a normative model of scriptural hermeneutics. Even more than so-​called fundamentalist or militant Muslims, the quintessential bad Muslims were traditionalist Muslim scholars in the imagination of Washington, DC think tanks such as the RAND Corporation. This was so because of traditionalists’ inability to treat the Qur’an as a historical literary text and on account of their preoccupation with everyday religious rituals and bodily piety. Both these features represented major roadblocks to the development of a moderate, modern, and liberal Islam. What was needed was a hermeneutical and normative attitude that regarded the Qur’an as a historical document and that was eager to jettison all aspects of tradition seemingly at odds with modern sensibilities. In other words, “good Islam,” or, as the title of a widely circulated report of the RAND corporation reads, “civil democratic Islam” (Benard 2003) mirrored a properly tamed and sufficiently moderated secular religion. Curiously, a rather similar hermeneutical desire and operation were at work in the thought of certain contemporary liberal Muslim reformers such as the prominent Egyptian scholars Nasr Abu Zayd (d. 2010), Hasan Hanafi, and the Iranian thinker Abdul Karim Soroush. Some of them were also identified in publications such as the RAND report as “moderate Muslim allies.” Mahmood is careful to emphasize that these scholars did not constitute a monolithic group. They varied not only in their intellectual background but also in their opinions on the US state and its political and military interventions in Muslim societies. What connected them, though, was a common investment in historicizing the Qur’an so as to uncouple its divine origins from the process of its human interpretation. Mahmood sums up their hermeneutical project:  “These liberal reformers do not abandon the religious text but resituate it. The question is, once metaphysical intention is separated from the text, how is this text to be read and what would its significance be for the secularized believer?” (Mahmood 2006: 339). One key effect of severing the text of the Qur’an from its transcendent character is to amplify the place and authority of the individual believer at the center of the interpretive endeavor. As Nasr Abu Zayd, one of the major scholars examined by Mahmood, put it, “The

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principle of divine sovereignty simply results in the sovereignty of religious men—​in the end nothing but human beings with own biases and ideological inclinations” (Abu Zayd 1995:  56; quoted in Mahmood 2006:  339). In addition to this human centered secular hermeneutic, another key feature that bound these scholars, in Mahmood’s view, was their dismissive attitude toward phenomenal forms of religion such as rituals and liturgies. Ritualism was not only philosophically unsophisticated but was also susceptible to being used as a tool for the manipulation of the masses by the political and religious elite. Mahmood’s juxtaposition of the thought of these Muslim reformers with the discourses emanating from places like the RAND Corporation can be easily misread. Her point is not that these Muslim scholars were pawns or agents of empire. Neither is her argument that they were “complicit” (Abbas 2014: 64) in the nefarious politics of such institutions. Her central concern, rather, is with pointing out the widespread currency of a particular normative understanding of what religion in the modern world should look like. The key objective that animated this article is not to discredit or disparage any scholar but to explore the idea and global force of normative secularity. What conceptions of the human do the dispositions and attitudes that sustain secular power, such as the often-​assumed imperative to historicize scripture, generate and anticipate? That is the pivotal question that defines the problem-​space of this article. Impugning the character or credibility of any liberal Muslim reformer or passing a judgment of guilt by association are hardly this article’s implicit or explicit concerns. In pointing out the “convergence between Muslim reformist viewpoints and U.S. strategic interests” (Mahmood 2006: 330), Mahmood seeks to advance an argument that constitutes a signature intervention of her scholarship. That argument is this: the force of secularism “resides not in neutralizing the space of politics from religion but in producing a particular kind of religious subject who is compatible with the rationality and exercise of liberal political rule” (344).

Critical reception of Mahmood’s work Given the multiple registers in which it operates, it is not surprising that Saba Mahmood’s scholarship has informed and drawn attention from a range of disciplines and areas of inquiry. These include, to name only a few, the study of Islam, Middle Eastern studies, anthropology, ritual studies, gender studies, philosophy, theories and methods in religious studies, and postcolonial thought more broadly. In addition to much acclaim, her scholarship has also attracted rather visceral criticism and resistance. Indeed, in addition to representing among the most widely read theorists, she is also among the most misread. Obviously no work or scholar is above critique. But curiously, many of the critical reactions elicited by Mahmood’s scholarship only reinforce the depth and permeation of a normative attachment to secular promises,

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not least in the academy. The dogged resistance to her call for rethinking the alleged virtues and benefits of secularism is rather telling. As a way to build this argument, let me briefly survey some key strands of protest lodged at different aspects of Mahmood’s work. In so doing, I will also reflect on the way they further punctuate the stakes and significance of her scholarly interventions. Perhaps the most common line of criticism directed at Mahmood is that she instrumentalizes Islam and the experience of Muslims (such as women in the Women’s Piety Movement) for her critique of secular power. In the words of one critic, “Islam seems to exist only to reveal the inadequacies of secular liberal assumptions” (Terman 2015: 18). And another: “She [Mahmood] wants to debunk ‘Western’ secular feminism and ‘Western’ secular liberalism, and whether her ethnographic data can provide a solid template for doing so seems to be of lesser importance to her” (Bangstad 2011: 34). Concomitantly, so the argument continues, not only does she give fundamentalist Islam a free pass, but she also establishes an unfounded alterity between Islam and liberal secularism. Moreover, by fracturing the universality of categories like agency, human rights, and religious freedom, she undermines projects of gender and minority justice, staining such noble gestures with the violence of imperial politics. Taken together, the import of these suggestions is that Mahmood’s work is not just analytically sly and self-​serving but also politically dangerous. These overlapping critiques have found expression in varied instantiations. For instance, Mahmood has been charged with engaging in “subtle orientalism” by seeking to save Muslim women from the violence of Western secularism (Terman 2015:  17–​ 19). She has also been declared guilty of “irresponsible critique” on account of apparently disavowing patriarchy in Muslim societies and by “belittling women’s rights defenders and activists who are struggling against patriarchy” (Terman 2015: 22). It has also been argued that her work suffers from a condition of “ethnographic refusal” for it insists on the political agency of pious women who do not call themselves political. And on a related note, Mahmood has been urged to realize that “ ‘fundamentalism’ is indeed a real and important problem” in the lives of Muslim women and that “Islamophobia is not their primary concern” (2015: 22). As the analysis of this chapter should make obvious, the view that Mahmood wants to “debunk secularism” or that her writings “belittle women’s rights defenders,” “disavow patriarchy,” or exonerate fundamentalism is rather untenable. Moreover, the critique that Mahmood conflates liberalism and secularism or that she posits a faulty binary between Islam and liberalism (Gourgouris 2008; Bangstad 2011), evinces a foundational failure to grasp the underlying point about the interaction of discourse and power. Mahmood is not unaware of the variegated modalities and histories of liberalism. But her concern is with the overlapping assumptions and normative priorities regarding a moral life and subject around which the projects of liberalism and secularism coalesce. And if a Muslim calls herself a “liberal secular,” the question that such a declaration immediately attracts is that of the conditions

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that make such identification thinkable and desirable in the first place. Clearly, the operation of secular power, embedded in histories of Western colonial modernity, has something to do with the possibility and efflorescence of that desire. However, the critiques are productive insofar as they open up a useful set of methodological questions regarding the study of religion and secularism. For instance, why must an exploration of the limits of dominant secular and feminist logics of life imply the tacit endorsement of fundamentalism and patriarchy? Why should a critique of secularism amount to a defense of fundamentalism? Why must a scholar invested in exploring the workings and machinations of secular power carry the burden of confronting the alleged cruelties of “religious fundamentalism”? What exactly is the assumed correlation here? Underlying these remonstrations toward Mahmood’s scholarship is the implicit principle that a critique of secularism and feminism is permissible so long as it also accompanies the repudiation of fundamentalist violence. The deeper assumption underwriting such an expectation is that the emancipatory promise of secularism as a counterpoint to religious excess must not be fatally buried. Paradoxically, this assumption and the sorts of critiques it generates miss the entire point of Mahmood’s work, namely that the religious and the secular are not oppositional. Further, they only reinforce the stakes and significance of that point by punctuating the depth and pervasiveness of the faith in the prophylactic power of secularism as an antidote to seemingly religious violence. Finally, it is also useful to consider the contention that it is erroneous to explore the politics of actors who do not call themselves political (Bangstad 2011: 33). This is quite kindred to the claim that since “religious fundamentalism” is a more pronounced problem for Muslim women than secularism (notice the fundamentalism/​secularism binary at work here), its critique should be prioritized over the critique of secularism (Terman 2015:  22). Such lines of critique offer us useful moments to reflect on and remind ourselves of the underlying questions and arguments that animated Mahmood’s work. Was not the very point of Politics of Piety to reconsider ways in which one demarcates boundaries between what constitutes the political and the nonpolitical? Are not the contradictions of political secularism intimately bound to exacerbating fundamentalist and sectarian violence, as Mahmood’s last book showed? But from a methodological standpoint, what is more noteworthy is that underlying both these moderating gestures is the assumption that theoretical inquiry must align with dominant perceptions of conditions “on the ground.” One may respond to these suggestions with the brief observation that making the analytical ambit of a scholar subservient to the apparent empirical realities of her subjects is destined for intellectual suffocation. This is not to argue for the detachment of empirical conditions from theoretical imagination. Rather, theory (thinking) yields the best analytical and political purchase when it strives to excavate and imagine politico-​ conceptual possibilities that challenge dominant narratives about existing categories

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and actors. That is the promise that defines Saba Mahmood’s contribution to and intervention in the study of religion and secularism. The disruption of received and normalized knowledge, which is the hallmark of Mahmood’s scholarship, is a deeply political act. And in a world increasingly beset by the violence of various modalities of modern sovereignty, the urgency and necessity of practicing such a politics of disruption cannot be more pressing.

Suggested further reading Abeysekara, Ananda. (2008), The Politics of Postsecular Religion: Mourning Secular Futures, New York: Columbia University Press. Agrama, Hussein. (2012), Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty, and the Rule of Law in Modern Egypt, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Asad, Talal. (2003), Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Brown, Wendy. (2006), Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Empire, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hurd, Elizabeth. (2015), Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mahmood, Saba. (2005), Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mahmood, Saba. (2006), “Secularism, Hermeneutics, Empire: The Politics of Islamic Reformation,” Public Culture, 19 (2): 323–347. Mahmood, Saba. (2009), “Religious Reason and Secular Affect: An Incommensurable Divide?” Critical Inquiry, 35 (4): 836–862. Mahmood, Saba. (2015), Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mandair, Arvind. (2009), Religion and the Specter of the West: Sikhism, India, Postcoloniality, and the Politics of Translation, New York: Columbia University Press. Modern, John. (2011), Secularism in Antebellum America, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Introduction 1. While the 2004 and 2014 bans have been challenged as an infringement on religious freedom and ruled legal (or not an infringement on religious freedom), the local burkini bans instituted by French mayors were suspended in the Council of State, France’s highest administrative court. Part of the difference in allowing burkas and niqabs to be banned but not allowing burkinis to be banned is related to national versus local jurisdiction. 2. Acknowledging the Christian-​centric and Euro-​centric history of the discipline of religious studies, as well as its ongoing practice in neocolonial contexts, or contexts where powerful nation-​states continue to shape less powerful nation-​states, requires students of religion to reevaluate not just specific contexts but the very tools of the study (Smith 1998).

3 Myth and the Religious Imaginary: Wendy Doniger 1. Fanny Brice, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Francis Ford Coppola, among others, made their residences in Great Neck. In the scholarly vein, Sanskritist Barbara Stoler Miller and legal scholar Geoffrey Stone also grew up in the town. 2. This references Claude Lévi-​Strauss’s use of structural linguistics, upon which he based his structural anthropology, and which, according to some, reduces everything to a system that cannot be changed. 3. Doniger uses the language of micro-​myth and macro-​myth in The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth (1998); whereas Doniger and Patton employ the terms mini-​myth and maxi-​myth in Myth and Method (1996). 4. It is not our purpose here to rehearse all of the debates about the presence or absence of historical and cultural specificity in the work of Eliade and other scholars influenced by him. For a history of the controversy that affected Doniger, see: Smith 1987, Berger 1994, Lincoln 1999, just to name a few. See also Cave 1993, Girardot and Ricketts 1982, Borgeaud 1993. Douglas Allen’s Myth and Religion in Mircea Eliade (Allen 1998) is a thorough assessment of the debates to date. It should not go

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without notice that the literary establishment’s assessment of Eliade’s early fascism, exemplified best by an essay by Norman Manea (Manea 1991), is far more moderate.

6 Signifying Religion in the Modern World: Charles H. Long 1. The panel in question was entitled “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: Interdisciplinary Explorations of the Work of Toni Morrison As Fulcrum for Religious Discourse,” and was sponsored by the Womanist Approaches to Religion and Society Group on November 23, 2003 from 3:00 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. In addition to Long, the other members of the panel were prominent religious studies scholars such as Marcia Y. Riggs, C. Dale Gadsden, Carolyn Medine, Emilie M. Townes, and David Carrasco. 2. For representative examples of the nature and task of Christian theology, See Karl Barth, Evangelical Theology (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1964); Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Vols. 1–​3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951); James H. Cone, God of the Oppressed (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1975); Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sexism and God-​Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology (Boston: Beacon Press, 1983); Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, [1973] 1988); Jürgen Moltmann, Experiences in Theology: Ways and Forms of Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000); and Daniel L. Migliore, Faith Seeking Understanding: An Introduction to Christian Theology, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, [1991] 2014). 3. The emergence of the University of Chicago’s History of Religions program can be traced back to Albert Eustace Haydon’s appointment as Chair of the University of Chicago’s Comparative Religions Department in 1919 and solidified with Joachim Wach’s selection as Haydon’s successor. Deeply influenced by the groundbreaking scholarship of Max Müller, E. B. Tylor, Edmund Husserl, Rudolph Otto, and Gerardus van der Leeuw among others, Chicago’s History of Religions program sought to recreate the Religionswissenschaft approach within the United States context. By the mid-​twentieth century, the dominance of the Chicago’s history of religions approach was consolidated by the proliferation of published research by Mircea Eliade, Charles Long, and Joseph Kitagawa as well as their work in founding the History of Religions journal in 1961. 4. This geographical and temporal sensibility is suggestive of Long’s indebtedness to the influence of the Annales School upon his thoughts and writing. See Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School, 1929–​89 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990); Jacques Revel and Lynn Hunt, eds., Histories: French Constructions of the Past: Postwar French Thought (New York: New Press, 1994); and Andre Burguiére, The Annales School: An Intellectual History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009).

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7 Gender and Materiality: Caroline Walker Bynum 1. As Bynum was completing her book, Rudolph M. Bell’s Holy Anorexia (1985) appeared, using contemporary psychology to analyze the role of fasting in the lives of religious women throughout the Middle Ages. Bynum acknowledges the overlap in their interests as well as the profound difference in their methods (Bynum 1987: xiv). She does draw significantly on a book Bell cowrote, which provides statistical analysis of the rise in the number of women saints in the high and later Middle Ages (Weinstein and Bell 1982). 2. Thomas Aquinas’s theory of transubstantiation was a principal understanding of this doctrine from the thirteenth century onward but was not ratified as the only theory until the Council of Trent in 1563. 3. The rest of this section is drawn in large part from my review of this book (Boon 2012).

8 Mestiza Language of Religion: Gloria Anzaldúa 1. I take Chicana to indicate a person of Mexican descent who is born or resides in America. It is often a self-​selective term, used to express a sense of pride in one’s heritage and culture. 2. I am drawing much of this information from Ana Louise Keating’s introduction to The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader and the website American National Biography Online. 3. For a penetrating analysis of how this operates, especially in a post 9/​11 United States, see Puar 2007. 4. Here I am thinking of the work of Fred Moten as well as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guatarri.

9 Performative, Queer Theories for Religion: Judith Butler 1. Much of what follows is a revised and updated version of “Judith Butler—​in Theory,” an account of Judith Butler’s work that I coauthored with Susan M. St. Ville for our coedited volume, Bodily Citations: Religion and Judith Butler (1–​12). I am grateful to Susan and to Columbia University Press for permission to use this material.

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2. Toril Moi argues that Butler misreads Beauvoir (Moi 1999). 3. The list of journal articles, anthologies and monographs that Butler cites early in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity is a useful index to the various dimensions of research in these areas just prior to Gender Trouble’s emergence (Butler 1990: 151, n. 9). For more recent analyses, see Fausto-​Sterling 2000; Kessler 1998; and Meyerowitz 2002. 4. Our modern notion of sexual identity has no precise correlate in the ancient world, as a number of scholars have argued. Thus, while ancient Greeks and Romans, for example, associated certain sexual practices/​positions (males who are penetrated, females who penetrate) with gender transgression, they did not expect to see such practices reflected in one’s bearing, taste, or dress. Moreover, they associated male same sex bonds with virility and warned men against the effeminizing effects of too much sex with women. Cf. Martin 1995, Brooten 1996, and Stone’s chapter in Bodily Citations (Armour and St. Ville 2006), which provides a helpful list of references to a larger body of scholarship on sexuality in the ancient world. 5. For an early thoughtful review of Gender Trouble, see Bordo 1992. For a particularly important critical dialogue between Butler and other major feminist theorists, see Benhabib, Butler, Cornell, and Fraser 1995. Analyses of the issues involved (or overlooked) include Anderson 1998 and Webster 2000. 6. On this issue, see in particular Walker 1993. 7. For thoughtful versions of this critique, see Bordo (1992) and Benhabib et al. (1995). Penelope Deutscher (1997) attempts to both defuse and account for this critique in her Yielding Gender: Feminism, Deconstruction, and the History of Philosophy. 8. In particular, see “More Gender Trouble: Feminism Meets Queer Theory,” a special double issue of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, especially Butler’s introduction, “Against Proper Objects” (1994). 9. For a survey of early responses to Butler’s work by trans and disability theorists, see Prosser 1998, especially ­chapter 2, and Samuels 2002. For a more recent and positive take on Butler’s later work and disability, see Betcher 2010. 10. Two are particularly noteworthy. The first, Judith Butler: Philosophical Encounters of the Third Kind, provides an excellent introduction to her work. A second, The Examined Life, features Butler in conversation with the producer/​director’s sister, a disability rights advocate. There is also Judith Butler: Philosophe en tout genre, which is available in six parts on YouTube. Though a French production, it consists mainly of Butler speaking in English. 11. For thoughtful critical responses to it from religious studies scholars, see the 2015 essays in Political Theology 16 (4). Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism was not Butler’s first foray into this troubled terrain. See, e.g., “The Charge of Anti-​Semitism: Jews, Israel, and the Risks of Public Critique” in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004a), a response to Harvard University president Lawrence Summers’s charge that academics court charges of anti-​Semitism by criticizing Israel. See also her contribution to Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (2003), in which she reflects on popular responses to her self-​ presentation during a visit to Germany.

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Introduction Ahmed, Sara. (2006), Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Asad, Talal. (2003), Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Barad, Karen. (2007), Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Berger, Peter. ([1967], 1990), The Sacred Canopy, New York: Anchor Books. Daggers, Jenny. (2010), “Thinking ‘Religion’: The Christian Past and Interreligious Future of Religious Studies and Theology,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 78 (4): 961–990. Editorial Board. (2016), “France’s Burkini Bigotry,” New York Times, August 18. (accessed June 23, 2017). Fernando, Mayanthi L. (2014), “Intimacy Surveilled: Religion, Sex, and Secular Cunning,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 39 (3): 685–708. hooks, bell. (1994), Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, New York: Routledge. Kerry, John. (2015), “Religion and Diplomacy,” America Magazine, September 14 (the link, howerver, shows the date as September 2). http://www.americamagazine.org/ issue/religion-and-diplomacy. Kunin, Seth. (ed.) (2006), Theories of Religion: A Reader, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Lofton, Kathryn. (2011), Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California. Masuzawa, Tomoko. (1998), “Culture.” In Mark C. Taylor (ed.), Critical Terms for Religious Studies, 70–93. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Masuzawa, Tomoko. (2005), The Invention of World Religions: Or How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McCutcheon, Russell. (2012), “Everything Old is New Again.” In William E. Arnal, Willi Braun, and Russell McCutcheon (eds.), Failure and Nerve in the Academic Study of Religion, 6–33, Sheffield: Equinox. McRuer, Robert. (2006), Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability, New York and London: New York University Press.

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Douglas, Mary. (1985), Risk Acceptability According to the Social Sciences, New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Douglas, Mary. (1990), “Risk as a Forensic Resource,” Daedalus, 119 (4): 1–16. Douglas, Mary. (1992), Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory, London: Routledge. Douglas, Mary. (1993), In the Wilderness: The Doctrine of Defilement in the Book of Numbers, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Douglas, Mary. (1999), Levicitus as Literature, New York: Oxford University Press. Douglas, Mary. (2004a), Jacob’s Tears: The Priestly Work of Reconciliation, New York: Oxford University Press. Douglas, Mary. (2004b), “Why I Have to Learn Hebrew: The Doctrine of Sanctification.” In Thomas Ryba, George D. Bond, and Herman Tull (eds.), The Comity and Grace of Method: Essays in Honor of Edmund F. Perry, 147–165, Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Douglas, Mary. (2005), “A Feeling for Hierarchy.” In J. L. Heft (ed.), Believing Scholars: Ten Catholic Intellectuals, 94–120, New York: Fordham University Press. Douglas, Mary, and Baron Isherwood. (1979), The World of Goods: Toward an Anthropology of Consumption, New York: Basic Books. Douglas, Mary, and Aaron Wildavsky. (1982), Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of Technological and Environmental Dangers, Berkeley: University of California Press. Durkheim, Émile. ([1897] 1951), Suicide: A Study in Sociology, trans. John A. Spaulding and George Simpson, Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Durkheim, Émile, and Marcel Mauss, (1963), Primitive Classification, trans. Rodney Needham, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (1937), Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, New York: Oxford University Press. Fardon, Richard. (1999), Mary Douglas: An Intellectual Biography, London: Routledge. Fardon, Richard. (2007), “Dame Mary Douglas,” The Guardian, May 17. Hendel, Ronald. (2008), “Mary Douglas and Anthropological Modernism,” Journal of Hebrew Scriptures, 8 (8): 1–11. Howse, Christopher. (2007), “The pangolin and al-Qa’eda,” The Spectator, April 25. https://www.spectator.co.uk/2007/04/the-pangolin-and-alqaeda/ (accessed August 16, 2017). Iyenda, Guillaume, and Richard Fardon. (2007), “Obituary: Dame Mary Douglas (1921–2007),” Anthropology Today, 23 (5): 25–27. Leach, Edmund. (1971), “Mythical Inequalities,” New York Review of Books, 16 (1), January 28, 1971. Thompson, Michael, Richard Ellis, and Aaron Wildavsky. (1990), Cultural Theory, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Wuthnow, Robert, James D. Hunter, Albert Bergeson, and Edith Kurzweil. (1984), “The Cultural Anthropology of Mary Douglas.” In Cultural Analysis: The Work of Peter L. Berger, Mary Douglas, Michel Foucault and Jürgen Habermas, 77–132, London: Routledge.

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Martin, Clarice J. (1990), “Womanist Interpretations of the New Testament: The Quest for Holistic and Inclusive Translation and Interpretation,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 6 (2): 41–61. McCutcheon, Russell T. (2001), Critics Not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion, New York: SUNY Press. Muilenburg, James. (1969), “Form Criticism and Beyond,” Journal of Biblical Literature, 88 (1): 1–18. Plaskow, Judith. (1991), “Feminist Anti-Judaism and the Christian God,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 7 (2): 99–108. Plaskow, Judith. (1993), “We Are Also Your Sisters: The Development of Women’s Studies in Religion,” Women’s Studies Quarterly, 21 (1/2): 9–21. Ruether, Rosemary R. (1993), Sexism and God Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology, Boston: Beacon Press. Ruether, Rosemary R. (ed.) (1998), Religion and Sexism: Images of Woman in the Jewish and Christian Traditions, Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock. Scholz, Susanne. (2013), “Introduction: The Past, the Present, and the Future of Feminist Hebrew Bible Interpretation.” In S. Scholz (ed.), Feminist Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Retrospect, Volume 1: Biblical Books, 1–10, Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2013. Schüssler Fiorenza, Elizabeth. (1993), But She Said: Feminist Practices of Biblical Interpretation, Boston: Beacon Press. Schüssler Fiorenza, Elizabeth. (2001), Wisdom Ways: Introducing Feminist Biblical Interpretation, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Sheehan, Jonathan. (2005), The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Stanton, Elizabeth C. ([1895] 2002), The Woman’s Bible: A Classic Feminist Perspective, Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. Sternberg, Meir. (1985), The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Trible, Phyllis. (1971), “Ancient Priests and Modern Polluters,” Andover Newton Quarterly, 12 (2): 74–79. Trible, Phyllis. (1973), “Depatriarchalizing in Biblical Interpretation,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, XLI: 30–48. Trible, Phyllis. (1978), God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Trible, Phyllis. (1982), “The Effects of Women’s Studies on Biblical Studies: An Introduction,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, 7 (22): 3–5. Trible, Phyllis. (1984), Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives, Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Trible, Phyllis. (1989), “Five Loaves and Two Fishes: Feminist Hermeneutics and Biblical Theology,” Theological Studies, 50 (2): 279–295. Trible, Phyllis. (1994), Rhetorical Criticism: Context, Method, and the Book of Jonah, Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Trible, Phyllis. (2000), “Take Back the Bible,” Review & Expositor, 97 (4): 425–431.

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Trible, Phyllis. (2003), “Reflections on the 25th Anniversary of God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality,” Lexington Theological Quarterly, 38 (1): 21–26. Trible, Phyllis, and L. M. Russell (eds.) (2006), Hagar, Sarah, and Their Children: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Perspectives, Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press.

Chapter 3 Allen, Douglas. (1998), Myth and Religion in Mircea Eliade, New York and London: Routledge. Berger, Adriana. (1994), “Mircea Eliade: Romanian Fascism and the History of Religions in the United States.” In Nancy Jarrowitz (ed.), Tainted Greatness: Antisemitism and Cultural Heroes, Philadelphia: Temple. Berner, Ulrich. (1997), “Mircea Eliade (1907–1986).” In Axel Michaels (ed.), Klassiker der Religionswissenschaft von Frederick Schleiermacher bis Mircea Eliade, 343–353, Munich: C. H. Beck. Borgeaud, Philippe. (1993), “Myth et histoire chez Mircea Eliade,” Institut National Genevois: Annales, 33–49, Geneva. Cave, David. (1993), Mircea Eliade’s Vision for a New Humanism, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Doniger O’Flaherty, Wendy. ([1973] 1981), Asceticism and Eroticism in the Mythology of Siva, London: Oxford University Press, paperback, 1981, retitled: Siva: The Erotic Ascetic, New York: Galaxy. Doniger O’Flaherty, Wendy. (1975), Hindu Myths: A Sourcebook, Translated from the Sanskrit, Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics. Doniger O’Flaherty, Wendy. (1976), The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology, Berkeley: University of California. Doniger O’Flaherty, Wendy (ed.). (1979), The Critical Study of Sacred Texts, Berkeley: Graduate Theological Union. Doniger O’Flaherty, Wendy. (1980), Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Doniger O’Flaherty, Wendy (trans.) (1981), The Rig Veda: An Anthology, 108 Hymns, Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics. Doniger O’Flaherty, Wendy. (1984), Dreams, Illusion, and Other Realities, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Doniger O’Flaherty, Wendy. (1987), Oral communication with Laurie L. Patton, April. Doniger O’Flaherty, Wendy. (1988a), Other Peoples’ Myths: The Cave of Echoes, New York: Macmillan.. Doniger O’Flaherty, Wendy. (1988b), Textual Sources for the Study of Hinduism, Textual Sources for the Study of Religion series, John R. Hinnells (ed.), Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Doniger, Wendy (trans.) (1991), Mythologies. A restructured translation of Yves Bonnefoy’s Dictionnaire des Mythologies, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Reissued in four separate volumes in paperback, 1993: Greek and Egyptian Mythologies; Roman and European Mythologies; Asian Mythologies; and American, African, and Old European Mythologies. Doniger, Wendy (ed.) (1993), Purana Perennis: Reciprocity and Transformation in Hindu and Jaina Texts, Albany: State University of New York Press. Doniger, Wendy. (1998), The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth, The 1996–7 ACLS/AAR Lectures, New York: Columbia University Press. Doniger, Wendy. (1999), Splitting the Difference: Gender and Myth in Ancient Greece and India, The 1996 Jordan Lectures. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press and University of London Press. Doniger, Wendy. (2000), The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Doniger, Wendy. (2005), The Woman Who Pretended to Be Who She Was, New York: Oxford University Press. Doniger, Wendy. (2009), The Hindus: An Alternative History, New York: Penguin. Doniger, Wendy. (2015). “A Life of Learning,” Charles Homer Haskins Prize Lecture 2015, ACLS Occasion Paper 72. http://www.acls.org/uploadedFiles/Publications/OP/ Haskins/72_2015_WendyDoniger.pdf (accessed October 9, 2017). Doniger, Wendy. (2016), Redeeming the Kamasutra, New York: Oxford University Press. Doniger, Wendy. (2017a), Personal correspondence with Laurie L. Patton, May 7. Doniger, Wendy. (2017b), The Ring of Truth and Other Tales of Sex and Jewelry, New York: Oxford University Press. Doniger, Wendy, and Howard Eilberg-Schwartz (eds) (1995), Off with Her Head! The Denial of Women’s Identity in Myth, Religion, and Culture, Berkeley: University of California Press. Doniger, Wendy, and Sudhir Kakar (trans.) (2002), The Kamasutra of Vatsyayana. A new translation, introduction, and commentary, London and New York: Oxford World Classics. Doniger, Wendy, and Jack Miles (eds.) (2015), The Norton Anthology of World Religions, New York: Norton. Doniger, Wendy, and Laurie Patton (eds.) (1996), Myth and Method, Virginia: University of Virginia Press. Doniger, Wendy, and Brian K. Smith (trans.) (1991), The Laws of Manu. A new translation of the Manavadharmasastra, Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics. Doniger, Wendy, Brian Pennington, C. S. Adcock, and Rupa Viswanoth. (2016), “Roundtable: Outrage, Scholarship, and the Law in India,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 84 (2): 323–366. Forster, E. M. ([1924] 1984), Passage to India, Orlando: Harcourt. Girardot, Norman, and Mac Linscott Ricketts. (1982), Imagination and Meaning: The Scholarly and Literary Worlds of Mircea Eliade, New York: Seabury. Inden, Ronald. (1990), Imagining India, Cambridge, UK: Blackwell.

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Lincoln, Bruce. (1999), Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology and Scholarship, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Manea, Norman. (1991), “Happy Guilt: Mircea Eliade, Fascism and the Unhappy Fate of Romania,” New Republic, August 5. https://business.highbeam.com/4776/ article-1G1-11074726/happy-guilt-mircea-eliade-fascism-and-unhappy-fate (accessed October 9, 2017). Menen, Aubrey. (1954), The Ramayana, As Told by Aubrey Menen, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Shulman, David. (2010), “Foreword.” In Laurie L. Patton and David L. Haberman (eds.), Notes from a Mandala: Essays in the History of Indian Religions in Honor of Wendy Doniger, 7–8, Newark: University of Delaware Press. Smith, Jonathan Z. (1987), To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual, Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Additional works by Wendy Doniger Doniger, O’Flaherty, Wendy. (1975), The Ganges, London: Macdonald Educational. Doniger, O’Flaherty, Wendy (ed.) (1980), Karma and Rebirth in Classical Indian Traditions, Berkeley: University of California Press. Doniger, O’Flaherty, Wendy, and J. D. M. Derrett (eds.) (1978), The Concept of Duty in South Asia, Columbia, MO: South Asia Books. Doniger, O’Flaherty, Wendy, and David Grene (trans.) (1983), Antigone (Sophocles). A new translation for the Court Theatre, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Doniger, O’Flaherty, Wendy, and David Grene (trans.) (1988), Oresteia. A new translation for the Court Theatre, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Doniger, O’Flaherty, Wendy, and R. Gordon Wasson. (1968), “Part II: The Post-Vedic History of the Soma Plant.” In R. Gordon Wasson, Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality, 95–147, New York: Harcourt Brace. Doniger, O’Flaherty, Wendy, Carmel Berkson, and George Michell. (1983), The Cave of Siva at Elephanta, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Doniger, O’Flaherty, Wendy, Matthew Kapstein, and Christian K. Wedemeyer (eds.) (1986), Religion and Change: American Association for the Study of Religion Anniversary Volume, History of Religions, 25 (4). Doniger, Wendy, Stella Snead, and George Michell. (1989), Animals in Four Worlds: Sculptures from India, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Doniger, Wendy. (1999), Der Mann, der mit seiner eigenen Frau Ehebruch beging. Mit einem Kommentar von Lorraine Daston, Berlin: Suhrkamp. Doniger, Wendy. (2001), Holocaust, terreur en galgenhumor, Huizinga-lezing, Amsterdam/Rotterdam: Prometheus/NRC Handelsblad. Doniger, Wendy. (2003a), The Essential Kamasutra, 2 C.D.-Set and 5 C.D.-Set, Boulder, Colorado: Sounds True. Doniger, Wendy. (2003b), La Trappola della Giumenta, trans. Vincenzo Vergiani, Milan: Adelphi Edizione.

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Doniger, Wendy. (2006), The Lady of the Jewel Necklace and The Lady Who Shows Her Love. Harsha’s Priyadarsika and Ratnavali, New York: New York University Press.

Chapter 4 Asad, Talal. (1983), “Anthropological Conceptions of Religion: Reflections on Geertz,” Man, 18 (2): 237–259. Aslan, Reza. (2009), “Foreword.” in Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, vii–viii, New York: Oxford University Press. Bell, Catherine. (1983), “Medieval Taoist Ritual Mastery: A Study in Practice, Text and Rite,” PhD diss., Divinity School, University of Chicago, Chicago. Bell, Catherine. (1987), “Discourse and Dichotomies: The Structure of Ritual Theory,” Religion, 17 (2): 95–118. Bell, Catherine. (1988), “Ritualization of Texts and Textualization of Ritual in the Codification of Taoist Liturgy,” History of Religions, 27 (4): 366–392. Bell, Catherine. (1990), “The Ritual Body and the Dynamics of Ritual Power,” Journal of Ritual Studies, 4 (2): 299–313. Bell, Catherine. ([1992] 2009), Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, New York: Oxford University Press. Bell, Catherine. ([1997] 2009), Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, Revised edition, New York: Oxford University Press. Bell, Catherine. (2002), “The Chinese ‘Believe’ in Spirits: Belief and Believing in the Study of Religion.” In Nancy K. Frankenberry (ed.), Radical Interpretation in Religion, 100–116, New York: Cambridge University Press. Bell, Catherine. (2006a), “Do Buddhists Believe? Not Exactly the Same Old Question,” Lecture at the Berkeley Buddhist Studies Institute, University of California at Berkeley, October 5. Bell, Catherine. (2006b), “Belief, Beliefs, Believing: Declensions of an Old Problem,” Lecture at the Princeton-Oxford Classics Seminar, University of Oxford, October 17. Bell, Catherine. (2006c), “Paradigms Behind (and before) the Modern Concept of Religion,” History and Theory, 45 (4): 27–46. Bell, Catherine (ed.) (2007) Teaching Ritual, New York: Oxford University Press. Bell Catherine. (2008), “Belief: A Classificatory Lacuna and Disciplinary ‘Problem.’ ” In Willi Braun and Russell T. McCutcheon (eds.), Introducing Religion: Essays in Honor of Jonathan Z. Smith, 85–99, New York: Equinox Publishing. Bell, Catherine. (n.d.a), Believing: Assuming Universality, Describing Particularity in the Study (unpublished manuscript). Bell, Catherine. (n.d.b), “Believing: Further Explorations in Theory and Practice,” (National Endowment for the Humanities Proposal, unpublished manuscript). Bourdieu, Pierre. (1977), Outline of a Theory of Practice, New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Connerton, Paul. (1989), How Societies Remember, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Durkheim, Émile. ([1912] 2008), The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, New York: Dover Publications. Foucault, Michel. ([1972] 2010), The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith, New York: Vintage Books. Geertz, Clifford. (1973), The Interpretation of Cultures, New York: Basic Books. Hacking, Ian. (1999), “Making Up People.” In Mario Biagioli (ed.), The Science Studies Reader, 161–171, New York: Routledge. Jones, Lindsay. (2005), The Encyclopedia of Religion, New York: Cengage Gale. Jonte-Pace, Diane. (2009), “Foreword: Notes on a Friendship.” In Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, vii–xi, New York: Oxford University Press. O’Neill, Kevin Lewis. (2012), “Pastor Harold Caballeros Believes in Demons: Belief and Believing in the Study of Religion,” History of Religions, 51 (4): 299–316. Rappaport, Roy A. (1979), Ecology, Meaning and Religion (emphasis in the original), Richmond: North Atlantic Books. Staal, Frits. (1975), “The Meaninglessness of Ritual,” Numen, 26 (1): 2–22.

Chapter 5 Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth (2014), [Film] Dir. Pratibha Parmar, USA: PBS American Masters. Baker-Fletcher, Karen. (2006), Dancing with God: The Trinity from a Womanist Perspective, St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press. Busch, Colleen Morton. (2013), “Alice Walker: The Beautiful Truth,” Lion’s Roar, September 24. https://www.lionsroar.com/alice-walker-the-beautiful-truthnovember-2013/ (accessed August 12, 2017). Cannon, Katie G. (1988, 2006), Black Womanist Ethics, Atlanta: Scholars Press; Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, reprint. Coleman, Monica A. (2006), “Roundtable Discussion: Must I Be Womanist?” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 22 (1): 85–134. Collins, Patricia Hill. (1996), “What’s In a Name? Womanism, Black Feminism, and Beyond.” The Black Scholar, 26 (1): 9–17. “Delta Chair,” (n.d.), Wilson Center for Humanities and Arts, University of Georgia. https://deltachair.uga.edu/about/delta-chair (accessed August 16, 2017). Floyd-Thomas, Stacy. (2006), Deeper Shades of Purple: Womanism in Religion and Society, New York: New York University Press. Foster, Gwendolyn Audrey. (1997), Women Filmmakers of the African and Asian Diaspora: Decolonizing the Gaze, Locating Subjectivity, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.

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Grant, Jacquelyn. (1989), White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus: Feminist Christology and Womanist Response, Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press. Hallisey, Charles. (2015), Therigatha: Poems of the First Buddhist Women, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Harris, Melanie L. (2010), Gifts of Virtue, Alice Walker and Womanist Ethics, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Junior, Nyasha. (2015), An Introduction to Womanist Biblical Interpretation, Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox. Leath, Jennifer. (2012), “Canada and Pure Land, a New Field and Buddha-Land: Womanists and Buddhists Reading Together,” Buddhist-Christian Studies, 32: 57–65. LeBlanc, John Randolph and Carolyn M. Jones Medine. (2012), Ancient and Modern Religion and Politics: Negotiating Transative Spaces and Hybrid Identities, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. McLeod, Melvin. (2000), “Women’s Liberation,” Shambala Sun: Buddhism, Culture, Meditation, Life, July 1. https://www.lionsroar.com/womens-liberation-2/ (accessed August 12, 2017). Palumbo-Liu, David. (1996), “The Politics of Memory: Remembering History in Alice Walker and Joy Kogawa.” In Amritjit Singh, Joseph T. Skerrett, Robert E. Hogan (eds.), Memory and Cultural Politics: New Approaches to American Ethnic Literatures, 211–227. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Phillips [Maparyan], Layli. (2006), The Womanist Reader, New York: Routledge. Roundtable Panel. (2012), “Womanist-Buddhist Dialogue.” Buddhist-Christian Studies, 32: 45–88. Roundtable Panel. (2016), “Old Buddhist Texts: New Womanist Thought,” Buddhist Christian Studies, 36: 3–47. Smith, Shanell T. (2014), The Woman Babylon and the Marks of Empire: Reading Revelation with a Postcolonial Womanist Hermeneutics of Ambivalence, Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Townes, Emilie (ed.) (1993), A Troubling in My Soul, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Townes, Emilie. (1995), In a Blaze of Glory: Womanist Spirituality as Social Witness. Nashville: Abingdon. Townes, Emilie (ed.) (2006), Embracing the Spirit: Womanist Perspectives on Hope, Salvation and Transformation, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Vesely-Flad, Rima L. (2017), Racial Purity and Dangerous Bodies: Moral Pollution, Black Lives, and the Struggle for Justice, Minneapolis: Fortress. Walker, Alice. (1982), The Color Purple, New York: Simon and Schuster. Walker, Alice. (1983), In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Walker, Alice. (1989), The Temple of My Familiar, New York: Pocket Books. Walker, Alice. (1991a), Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems 1965–1990 Complete, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Walker, Alice. (1991b), Possessing the Secret of Joy, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

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Walker, Alice. (1996), The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult, New York: Scribner. Walker, Alice. (1997), Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer’s Activism, New York: Ballantine Books. Walker, Alice. (1999), Alice Walker and Pema Chodron in Conversation (1999), Sounds True Studio. Walker, Alice. (2000), The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart, New York: Ballantine Books. Walker Alice. (2001), Sent by Earth: A Message From the Grandmother Spirit after the Attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, New York: Seven Stories Press. Walker, Alice. (2004), Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart, New York: Random House. Walker, Alice. (2006), “ ‘I am a Renegade, an Outlaw, a Pagan’: Author, Poet and Activist Alice Walker in Her Own Words.” (2006), Democracy Now! Interview, February 13. https://www.democracynow.org/2006/2/13/i_am_a_renegade_an_outlaw (accessed August 12, 2017). Walker Alice. (2006), We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting for: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness, New York: New Press. Walker, Alice. (2007), “Alice Walker Calls God ‘Mama,’ ” beliefnet. Interview. http:// www.beliefnet.com/wellness/2007/02/alice-walker-calls-god-mama.aspx (accessed March 30, 2017). Walker, Alice. (2010a), Hard Times Require Furious Dancing, Novato, CA: New World Library. Walker, Alice. (2010b), Overcoming Speechlessness: A Poet Encounters the Horror in Rwanda, Eastern Congo, and Palestine/Israel, New York: Seven Stories Press. Walker, Alice. (2012), “ ‘Democratic Womanism’: Poet and Activist Alice Walker on Women Rising, Obama and the 2012 Election,” Democracy Now! Interview with Amy Goodman. September 28. https://www.democracynow.org/2012/9/28/democratic_ womanism_poet_and_activist_alice (accessed August 12, 2017). Walker, Alice. (2013a), The Cushion in the Road: Meditation and Wandering as the Whole World Awakens to Being in Harm’s Way, New York: New Press. Walker, Alice. (2013b) The World Will Follow Joy: Turning Madness into Flowers (New Poems), New York: New Press. West, Traci. (2006), “Is a Womanist a Black Feminist? Marking the Distinctions and Defying Them: A Black Feminist Response.” In Floyd-Thomas (ed.), Deeper Shades of Purple: Womanism in Religion and Society, 291–296. New York: New York University Press. Williams, Delores. (1993), Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist GodTalk, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.

Chapter 6 Barth, Karl. (1964), Evangelical Theology, New York: Doubleday Anchor Books. Barthes, Roland. ([1964] 1968), Elements of Semiology, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith, New York: Hill and Wang.

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Moltmann, Jürgen. (2000), Experiences in Theology: Ways and Forms of Christian Theology, Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Otto, Ton. (2009), “What happened to Cargo Cults? Material Religions in Melanesia and the West,” Social Analysis, 53 (1): 82–102. Raboteau, Albert. (1978), Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellem South, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Revel, Jacques, and Lynn Hunt (eds.) (1994), Histories: French Constructions of the Past: Postwar French Thought, New York: New Press. Ruether, Rosemary Radford. (1983), Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology, Boston: Beacon Press. Saussure, Ferdinand de. ([1916] 1959), Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin; Perry Meisel and Haun Saussy (eds.), New York: Columbia University Press. Sernett, Milton. (1975), Black Religion and American Evangelicalism: White Protestants, Plantation Missions and the Flowering of Negro Christianity, 1787–1865, Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press. Sobel, Mechal. ([1979] 1988), Trabelin’ On: The Slave Journey to an Afro-Baptist Faith, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tillich, Paul. (1951), Systematic Theology, Volumes 1–3, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Twain, Mark. ([1910] 2013), “The Disappearance of Literature (Nov. 20, 1900).” In Bob Blaisdell (ed.), Great Speeches by Mark Twain, 68–69, Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. Worley, Peter. (1957), The Trumpet Shall Sound: A Study of “Cargo Cults” in Melanesia, New York: Schocken Books.

Chapter 7 Aers, David. (1996), “The Humanity of Christ: Reflections on Orthodox Late Medieval Representation.” In David Aers and Lynn Stanley (eds.), The Powers of the Holy: Politics and Gender in Late Medieval English Culture, 15–42, University Park: Pennylvania State University Press. Anidjar, Gil. (2014), Blood: A Critique of Christianity, New York: Columbia University Press. Beckwith, Sarah. (1986), “A Very Material Mysticism: The Medieval Mysticism of Margery Kempe.” In David Aers (ed.) Medieval Literature: Criticism, Ideology and History, 34–57, Brighton, UK: Harvester Press. Bell, Rudolph M. (1985), Holy Anorexia, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Biddick, Kathleen. (1993), “Genders, Bodies, Borders: Technologies of the Visible,” Speculum, 68 (2): 389–418. Blackstone, Kathryn R. (1998), Women in the Footsteps of the Buddha: Struggle for Liberation in the Therīgāthā, Richmond, UK: Curzon. Boon, Jessica A. (2012), “Review of Christian Materiality,” Hispania, 72 (242): 830–834.

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Bynum, Caroline Walker. (1977), “Jesus as Mother and Abbot as Mother: Some Themes in Twelfth-Century Cistercian Writing,” Harvard Theological Review, 70 (3–4): 257–284. Bynum, Caroline Walker. (1982), Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages, Berkeley: University of California Press. Bynum, Caroline Walker. (1987), Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women, Berkeley: University of California Press. Bynum, Caroline Walker. (1992a), “Writing Body History: Some Autobiographical and Historiographical Reflections,” Disability Studies Quarterly, 12 (2): 14–16. Bynum, Caroline Walker. (1992b), Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion, New York: Zone Books. Bynum, Caroline Walker. (1995a), The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336, New York: Columbia University Press. Bynum, Caroline Walker. (1995b), “Why All the Fuss About the Body? A Medievalist’s Perspective,” Critical Inquiry, 22 (1): 1–33. Bynum, Caroline Walker. (1999), National Endowment for the Humanities Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, March 22, Washington, DC. https://www.neh.gov/ humanities/1999/marchapril/conversation/the-medieval-the-modern (accessed June 2017). Bynum, Caroline Walker. (2001), Metamorphosis and Identity, New York: Zone Books. Bynum, Caroline Walker. (2005), “My Life and Works (1941–).” In Jane Chance (ed.), Women Medievalists and the Academy, 995–1006, Milwaukee: University of Wisconsin Press. Bynum, Caroline Walker. (2007), Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Bynum, Caroline Walker. (2011), Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe, New York: Zone Books. Bynum, Caroline Walker. (2014), “Avoiding the Tyranny of Morphology; or, Why Compare?” History of Religions, 53 (4): 351–368. Counihan, Carole, and Penny Van Esterik (eds.) (1997), Food and Culture: A Reader, New York: Routledge. Dailey, Patricia. (2013), Promised Bodies: Time, Language, and Corporeality in Medieval Women’s Mystical Texts, New York: Columbia University Press. Dallam, Marie W. (2014), “Introduction: Religion, Food, and Eating.” In Benjamin E. Zeller, Marie W. Dallam, Reid L. Neilson, and Nora L. Rubel (eds.), Religion, Food, and Eating in North America, xvii–xxxii, New York: Columbia University Press. Fulton, Rachel, and Bruce W. Holsinger (eds.) (2007), History in the Comic Mode: Medieval Communities and the Matter of Person, New York: Columbia University Press. Garland-Thomson, Rosemary. (2011), “Misfits: A Feminist Materialist Disability Concept,” Hypatia, 26 (3): 591–609. Haardt, Maaike, and Anne-Marie Korte. (2002), “The Creativity of Corporeal Practices: Introduction.” In Maaike Haardt and Anne-Marie Korte (eds.), Common Bodies: Everyday Practices, Gender and Religion, 1–10, Münster: Lit Verlag.

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Chapter 8 Alcoff, Linda. (1995), “Mestizo Identity.” In Naomi Zack (ed.), American Mixed Race: The Culture of Micro-Diversity, 257–278, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Anzaldúa, Gloria. (1987), Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books. Anzaldúa, Gloria (ed.) (1990), Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color, San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books. Anzaldúa, Gloria. (2009), The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader, ed. AnaLouise Keating, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Anzaldúa, Gloria. (2015), Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, ed. AnaLouise Keating, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Anzaldúa, Gloria, and Cherríe Moraga (eds.) (2015), The Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, Albany: SUNY Press. Bowler, Kate. (2013), Blessed: A History of the Prosperity Gospel, New York: Oxford University Press. Caruth, Cathy. (1996), Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Coles, Romand. (2005), Beyond Gated Politics: Reflections for the Possibility of Democracy, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles. (1990), The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester, New York: Columbia University Press. Eliade, Mircea. (1987), The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard Trask, New York: Harcourt. Felman, Shoshana. (2002), The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. MacIntyre, Alasdair. (1989), Whose Justice? Which Rationality? South Bend: Notre Dame Press. Mignolo, Walter. (2000), Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Puar, Jasbir. (2007), Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sexton, Jared. (2008), Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiculturalism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Turner, Victor. (1977), The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Zack, Naomi (ed.) (1995), American Mixed Race: The Culture of Micro-Diversity, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Chapter 9 Anderson, Amanda. (1998), “Debatable Performances: Restaging Contentious Feminisms,” Social Text, 54: 1–24. Armour, Ellen, and Susan M. St. Ville (eds.) (2006), Bodily Citations: Religion and Judith Butler, New York: Columbia University Press. Asad, Talal, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood. (2009), Is Critique Secular?: Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech, Berkeley, CA, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press. Austin, J. L. ([1962] 1973), How to Do Things with Words, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Benhabib, Seyla, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, and Nancy Fraser. (1995), Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange, New York: Routledge.

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Betcher, Sharon. (2010), “Becoming Flesh of My Flesh: Feminist and Disability Theologies on the Edge of Posthumanist Discourse,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 26 (2): 107–118. Bordo, Susan. (1992), “Postmodern Subjects, Postmodern Bodies,” Feminist Studies, 18 (1): 159–176. Braiterman, Zachary, Judith Butler, Sarah Hammerschlag, Martin Kavka, Vincent Lloyd, and Laura Resnik. (2015), “Discussion of Judith Butler’s Parting Ways,” Political Theology, 16 (4): 367–399. Brooten, Bernadette. (1996), Love between Women: Early Christian Responses to Homoeroticism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Butler, Judith. ([1990] 1999), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Tenth Anniversary Edition, New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith. (1993), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex,” New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith. (1994), “Against Proper Objects,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 6 (2+3): 1–26. Butler, Judith. (1997a), Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith. (1997b), The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Butler, Judith. (2003), “Reflections on Germany.” In Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pellegrini (eds.), Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, 395–402, New York: Columbia University Press. Butler, Judith. (2004a), Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, London and New York: Verso. Butler, Judith. (2004b), Undoing Gender, New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith. (2006), “Afterword.” In Ellen Armour and Susan M. St. Ville (eds.), Bodily Citations: Religion and Judith Butler, 276–291, New York: Columbia University Press. Butler, Judith. (2009), Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? New York and London: Verso. Butler, Judith. (2012), Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism, New York: Columbia University Press. Butler, Judith. (2015), Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Butler, Judith, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek. (2000), Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, New York: Verso. de Beauvoir, Simone. ([1949] 1973), The Second Sex, trans. E. M. Parshley, New York: Vintage Press. Derrida, Jacques. (1988), Limited Inc, ed. Gerald Graff, trans. Jeffrey Mahelman and Samuel Weber, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Deutscher, Penelope. (1997), Yielding Gender: Feminism, Deconstruction, and the History of Philosophy, New York: Routledge. The Examined Life (2008), [Film] Dir. Astra Taylor, USA: Zeitgeist Films. Fausto-Sterling, Anne. (2000), Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality, New York: Basic Books, 2000.

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Chapter 10 Abbas, Sadia. (2014), At Freedom’s Limit: Islam and the Postcolonial Predicament, New York: Fordham University Press. Abeysekara, Ananda. (2008), The Politics of Postsecular Religion: Mourning Secular Futures, New York: Columbia University Press. Abu Zayd, Nasr. (1995), Naqd al-Khitab al-Dini (Critique of Religious Discourse), Cairo: Maktabat Mabduli. Asad, Talal. (2003), Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bangstad, Sindre. (2011), “Saba Mahmood and Anthropological Virtue after Feminism,” Theory, Culture, and Society, 26 (3): 28–54. Benard, Cheryl. (2003), Civil Democratic Islam: Partners, Resources, and Strategies, Santa Monica, CA: RAND. Gourgouris, Stathis. (2008), “Antisecularist Failures: A Counterresponse to Saba Mahmood,” Public Culture, 20 (3): 454–459. Mahmood, Saba. (2005), Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Mahmood, Saba. (2006), “Secularism, Hermeneutics, Empire: The Politics of Islamic Reformation,” Public Culture, 19 (2): 323–347. Mahmood, Saba. (2009), “Religious Reason and Secular Affect: An Incommensurable Divide?” Critical Inquiry, 35 (4): 836–862. Mahmood, Saba. (2015), Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mandair, Arvind. (2009), Religion and the Specter of the West: Sikhism, India, Postcoloniality, and the Politics of Translation, New York: Columbia University Press. Modern, John. (2011), Secularism in Antebellum America, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Terman, Rochelle. (2015), “Islamophobia, Feminism, and the Politics of Critique,” Theory, Culture, and Society, 33 (2): 1–26.

197

Index

Abu Zayd, Nasr 168, 169 activism/​activist 77, 78, 82–​4, 88, 89–​90, 127, 129, 139, 144, 151, 164, 170 Aers, David 123 Aeschylus 53 aesthetics 52 agency 9, 14, 65, 73, 80, 146, 150–​2, 157–​61, 170 Ahmed, Sara 8 Alcoff, Linda 141 Ali, Tariq 162 Allen, Douglas 58, 173 Allen, Woody 54 Alter, Robert 41 alterity 7, 130, 132, 170 Althusser, Louis 148 ambivalence 6, 129, 131, 132, 140 Anidjar, Gil 122 anomaly/​anomalies/​anomalous 21, 22 anthropology 9, 17, 19, 21, 25–​6, 28–​9, 51, 56, 60, 67, 121, 155, 169, 173 Anzaldúa, Gloria 9, 10, 13, ch. 8 Arendt, Hannah 116 Aristotle 141, 160, 163 Arnold, Matthew 41 Asad, Talal 2, 67, 153, 155, 156 ascetic 53, 117, 118 Auerbach, Erich 41 Austin, J. L. 146 autobiography 9, 10, 22, 129, 140 Aztec 11, 132, 134, 137 Baker-​Fletcher, Karen 84, 86 Barthes, Roland 96 Batra, Dinanath 59 belief 17, 39, 40, ch. 4, 99, 100, 105, 111, 118, 119, 138, 155, 156, 163 Bell, Catherine 9, 10, 12, ch. 4 Bell, Rudolph 122, 175 Berger, Peter 3, 6, 32, 173

biblical 11, 12, 20, 26, 28, 29, 31, ch. 2, 54, 86, 96, 114 binary 14, 101, 113, 118, 119, 131, 132, 145, 146, 147, 149, 160, 161, 164, 170, 171 Bird, Phyllis 43 Blassingame, John 100 body 1, 13, 23, 65, 69–​73, 111, 113, 115, 117–​24, 127, 135, 137, 138, 147–​51, 158, 160, 163 Boles, John 100 Bonnefoy, Yves 57 borderlands 11, 130, 142 Bourdieu, Pierre 68, 71, 73 Brenner, Athalya 42 Brooten, Bernadette 43, 176 Buddhism 4, 78, 80, 84–​5, 90–​1, 122 burkini 1–​3, 5, 173 Butler, Judith 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 122–​3, ch. 9, 176 Bynum, Carolyn Walker 9, 11, 13, ch. 7 Cannon, Katie G. 86, 91 capitalism 138 Carroll, Lewis 50 Carter, J. Kameron 102, 108 Cartesian 70 Caruth, Cathy 135 ceremony 67, 146 Chodorow, Nancy 146 Chodron, Pema 84 Christ, Carol 42 Christian theology 5, 11, 39, 40, 44–​6, 86, 174 citation 146–​51, 153, 175–​6 civilized 6, 24, 101, 104 Coleman, Monica A. 87–​9 Coleridge, Samuel 41 Coles, Romand 141 collective effervescence 65 Collins, Patricia Hill 87–​9

198

198

Index colonialism/​colonial 2, 4, 5, 10, 13, 19, 51, 99, 101, 106, 128, 135, 140, 163, 165, 171​, see also postcolonial, decolonial Connerton, Paul 70–​2 Copeland, M. Shawn 86 cosmology 13, 24, 70 Coyolxauhqui 137, 140 criminology 29 cultural contact 100–​1, 133 cultural theory 7, 8, 9, 20 Daly, Mary 34–​5, 42, 44 de Beauvoir, Simone 34, 145 de Certeau, Michel 70 de Saussure, Ferdinand 96 decolonial 140–​1​, see also colonial and postcolonial Deleuze, Gilles 127, 175 depatriarchalizing 34, 35, 37, 42, 44, 47 desire 10, 85, 117, 12, 135–​6, 139, 141–​2, 147, 160, 168, 171 Dimock, Edward 51 dirt 12, 22 disability scholars/​disability theory 11, 122, 151, 176 discursive 66–​7, 148, 151, 155, 156 disgust 22, 117 disorder 18, 22 diversity 5, 9, 11, 17, 25, 80, 88, 131–​3, 141, 150 Doniger, Wendy 9, 10, 12, ch. 3 doubt (as relates to belief) 69 Douglas, Mary 9, 10, 12, ch. 1, 121 Du Bois, W. E. B. 97, 100 Durkheim, Émile 8, 10, 24, 26, 30, 65, 68, 69, 96 ecology 89 Eliade, Mircea 8, 10, 50, 51, 58, 95, 138, 173, 174 Eliot, T. S. 41 Elliott, Dyan 121, 124 embodiment 13, 19, 68, 111, 112, 119–​23, 151 enlightenment 29, 41, 79, 106, 137, 138 environmental 18, 26, 27, 30, 43, 44, 45 epistemology (womanist) 80 epistemology, epistemological frame 79, 80, 87, 100, 101, 104, 106, 108, 127

erotic/​eroticism 53, 114, 122 essentialist 56, 89 ethics 86, 89, 91, 127, 130, 133, 157, 158, 159, 161, 164 ethnography 11, 52, 157 Eucharist 40, 116, 117, 119, 120 Evans-​Pritchard, E. E. 17, 19, 21, 24, 96 experience 8, 20, 22, 27, 28, 34, 43, 50, 54–​6, 67, 70, 71, 77, 82, 86, 94, 95, 97–​109, 115–​18, 122, 128, 130, 133–​5, 137, 141, 148, 170, 174 Fardon, Richard 17, 26, 30, 32 Felman, Shoshana 135 feminism 5, 33, 34, 35, 38, 40, 43, 44, 57, 86–​8, 111, 124, 129, 144, 145, 148, 150, 153, 161, 170, 171, 176 feminist 8, 11, 12, 14, ch. 2, 80, 85, 86, 88, 91, 113, 115, 116, 121, 122, 127, 129, 138, 143–​7, 150, 156, 157, 160, 171, 174, 176 Fiorenza, Elizabeth Schüssler 34, 42, 43, 47 Fish, Stanley 162 Floyd-​Thomas, Stacey 86 form criticism 36 Forster, E. M. 50 Foster, Gwendolyn Audrey 89 Foucault, Michel 32, 66, 68, 69, 121, 158 Frazer, J. G. 96 Freud, Sigmund 8, 10, 54, 57, 58, 59, 71, 96, 121 Friedan, Betty 34 frontera 11, 130 Fuchs, Esther 43, 44, 46 functional 21, 65 functionalist 21 Garland-​Thomson, Rosemary 122 Gates Jr., Henry Louis 98 Geertz, Clifford 17, 31, 66, 67 gender 22, 23, 34, 35, 38, 43, 47, 55, 60, 61, 72, 78, 80, 86, 87, 88, ch. 7, 130, 135, 136, 140, 141, 142, ch. 9, 159, 169, 170 Genovese, Eugene 100 geography/​geographic 5, 12, 21, 101, 105, 135, 140, 174 Gilkes, Cheryl Townsend 86

199

Index Gilligan, Carol 146 globalization 6, 9 globalizing 3, 6, 14 Goodman, Amy 84 Grant, Jacquelyn 86, 91 Greene, David 51 grief 136–​7 habits 29, 71–​2, 149 habitus 71, 160 Hacking, Ian 66 Hagar 36, 39, 44, 47, 86 Hall, Stuart 94 Hallisey, Charles 90 Hanafi, Hasan 168 Harris, Marvin 122 Harris, Melanie 89, 90, 91 Harrison, Beverly Wildung 35 Herder, Johann 29 Heresy 11, 50 hermeneutic(s)/​hermeneutical 12, 33, 35–​8, 40–​1, 44, 45, 54, 94, 97, 100, 103, 105, 107, 167–​9 Hervieu-​Léger, Danièle 70 heteronormative 107, 129, 131, 142 heterosexuality 147, 150 hierarchy (social) 4, ch. 1, 94, 113 Hinduism 4, 50, 56, 59, 112, 122 historical 7, 11, 13, 38, 45, 57, 58, 60 hooks, bell 8 Hurston, Zora Neale 79, 86 hybrid 24, 30, 96, 127, 129, 131, 132, 133, 134, 142 hysteria 116 icons 96, 120, 162, 164 identity/​identities 6, 8, 10, 11, 13, 14, 43, 44, 50, 53, 55, 57, 60, 79, 80, 81, 87, 100, 102, 103, 107, 119, 127, 130, 131, 132, 134, 135, 141, 144, 145, 146, 148, 150, 153, 160, 168, 176 imperial/​imperialist/​imperialism 13, 80, 89, 99, 101, 141, 168, 170 individualism 25–​7 Ingalls, Daniel H. H. 50 intersectional 43, 45, 108, 150, 151 Irigaray, Luce 121

Jung, Carl 96 Junior, Nyasha 43, 89 Keane, Webb 163 Keating, AnaLouise 142, 175 Kitagawa, Joseph 51, 95, 174 kosher/​unkosher 18, 22 Kristeva, Julia 121 Kugel, James 41 Laclau, Ernesto 152 language 6, 10, 13, 26, 40, 50, 64, 78, 82, 85, 98, 107, 111, 112, 114, 116, 119, 122–​3, ch. 8, 146, 150–​1, 162–​4, 173 Lévi-​Strauss, Claude 31, 51, 53, 68, 96, 173 Levine, Lawrence 100 liberation 34, 42, 87, 102, 104, 107, 108, 129, 174 linguistic 60, 66, 105, 141, 142, 146, 151, 173 literary criticism 7, 36, 41, 42, 180 liturgy 67, 185 Long, Charles H. 8, 9, 10, 13, ch. 6, 147 Lorde, Audre 129 Lowth, Robert 41 MacIntyre, Alasdair 141 Mahmood, Saba 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 153, ch. 10, 194 Malinowski, Bronislaw 96 Martin, Clarice J. 43, 176 Marx, Karl 8, 138 Marxism 31, 54 Masuzawa, Tomoko 5, 6 materiality/​materialism 101, 111, 112, 115, 119, 120, 122, 123, 124, 138, 163, 175 Mauss, Marcel 24, 68 McCutcheon, Russell 5, 39 memory 39, 40, 45, 55, 70, 71, 72, 79, 80 Menen, Aubrey 50 Meyers, Carol 43 migration 9, 133 Miles, Jack 57 misogyny 38, 39, 42, 44 modesty codes 7 Moraga, Cherríe 129, 142 Morrison, Toni 93, 94, 174 Mosaic law 21

199

200

200

Index mourning 136, 152 Muilenburg, James 33, 36, 41 Mujerista 43 Müller, Max 96 mysticism/​mystical experience 112, 116, 121 myth 5, 9, 10, 12, 28, 38, 49, 53–60, 67, 95, 127, 130, 137, 138, 139, 140, 173 mythology 10, 12, 50, 51, 52, 53, 55–60 narrative 9, 13, 35, 36, 37, 38, 40, 41, 53, 54, 55, 58, 59, 79, 86, 103, 107, 111, 116, 119, 122, 123, 137, 140, 156, 157, 166, 167, 171 naturalism 30 neutrality 5, 6, 10, 161, 165, 167 new historicism 51, 57, 112 Nietzsche, Friedrich 139 normative/​normativity 27, 29, 30, 97, 99, 102, 103, 105, 106, 145, 147, 149, 150, 156, 157, 159, 161, 164, 167, 168, 169, 170 objectivity 6, 97 ontological 55, 138 opaque 102, 103, 104, 133, 138, 139​ organizations 20, 23, 25, 26, 27, 108, 143, 150 orientalist 51, 56, 58​ orientations 8, 107, 162 orthodoxy 11 orthopraxy 90 Pagels, Elaine 43 Palumbo-​Liu, David 79 paradox 13, 51, 80, 107, 118, 119, 120, 121, 158, 164, 165 Parmar, Pratibha 89 particularities/particularity 13, 24, 25, 41, 75 Parvey, Constance 43 patriarchy 34, 35, 38, 40, 57, 79, 80, 157, 158, 160, 161, 170, 171 Patton, Laurie 57, 173 performance 13, 67, 70, 71, 134, 146, 148, 149, 150 performativity 11, 14, 122, 144, 146, 149, 150, 151, 153 Phillips, Layli 86, 87, 88 philology 50, 60 Plaskow, Judith 35, 43 Plato 53

political science 3, 29 pollution 10, 12, 18, 21, 22, 23, 24, 28, 90 post-​orientalist 57 postcolonial 57, 59, 100, 130, 144, 169​ postmodernism 57 poststructuralism 57, 141 poststructuralists 144 power 5, 8, 9, 10, 14, 19, 22, 23, 55, 66, 68, 69, 72, 82, 93, 99, 103, 107, 116, 118, 121, 123, 127, 131, 132, 136, 139, 142, 145, 146, 147, 149, 151, 152, 155, 156, 157, 159, 160, 161, 164, 165, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 176 premodern 9, 11, 111, 115, 116, 118, 124 primitive 6, 17, 24, 97, 101 profane 65, 130, 138 Prosser, Jay 151, 176 Protestant/​Protestant Christianity 100, 104, 140, 161, 163 psychoanalysis/​psychoanalytic 10, 12, 13, 144, 147 psychological 31, 58, 116, 136 psychosexual 58 public health 30 public/​private 6, 159 purity 10, 12, 18, 20, 21, 22, 24, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 90, 131, 140, 141 queer/​queer theory 11, 123, 127, 129, 130, 132, 134, 143, 144, 150, 151, 152, 175, 176 Raboteau, Albert 100 race 2, 10, 13, 24, 43, 44, 45, 72, 80, 86, 89, 96, 99, 100, 102, 104, 108, 132, 140, 141, 142, 150, 151 racism 43, 45, 88, 96, 127, 128, 135, 136, 139, 151, 162, 164 Ramanujan, A. K. 51 Rappaport, Roy 66, 67 relationality 10, 11, 150 religious attire 1 religious experience 95, 97, 98, 99, 102, 104, 105, 106, 115, 116 religious expression 95, 96, 111 representation 9, 38, 41, 44, 59, 65, 83, 113, 144, 163 resurrection 39, 111, 119 revulsion 22

201

Index rhetorical criticism 33, 35, 36, 37, 40, 41, 43, 45, 46 Riggs, Marcia 86, 174 risk 20, 22, 26, 27, 28, 31 rites 17, 65, 70, 134 ritual 1, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, 13, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 34, 46, 53, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 72, 73, 81, 89, 94, 100, 106, 120, 138, 146, 153, 155, 168, 169 ritual activity 65, 68 ritualization 27, 63, 68, 69, 72, 73 ritualized 68, 69 Rubin, Gayle 7, 8 Ruether, Rosemary Radford 42, 174 Rukeyser, Muriel 84 Russell, Letty 44 sacred 12, 28, 39, 41, 53, 57, 65, 68, 72, 94, 96, 97, 99, 101, 130, 134, 137, 138, 140, 162 sacred objects 96, 120 Sakenfield, Katherine Doob 43 Schwarz, Howard Eilberg 57 science 8, 12, 30, 54, 60, 97, 100, 102, 107, 127, 137, 138, 144, 148 secular 1, 2, 17, 44, 96, 99, 138, 153, 155, 156, 159–​72 secularism 1, 2, 7, 14, 156, 161, 164, 165, 166, 167, 169, 170, 171, 172 secularity 156, 166, 167, 169 semiotic/​semiotics 65, 96, 156, 161, 162, 164 September 11 (also, 9/​11) 143, 152, 168, 175 Sernett, Milton 100 sex 14, 19, 22, 24, 34, 55, 56, 61, 122, 144–​9, 151, 152, 176 sexism 37, 38, 42, 151, 174 Sexton, Jared 141, 142 sexuality 7, 10, 13, 23, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40, 42, 43, 44, 54, 57, 58, 60, 87, 88, 141, 144, 147, 149, 152, 153, 176 Shakespeare, William 55 shapeshifter 131 Shiksha Bachao Andolan (Movement to Save Education) 59 Shiva 49, 53, 54, 58 Shulman, David 50, 53 shyness 160

sign/signifier 10, 71, 72, 81, 93, 95, 96, 97, 99, 116, 149, 160, 162 signifying/​signification 93, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 104, 105, 106, 107, 174 slavery 9, 13, 39, 80, 81, 99, 100, 104, 105, 108 Smith, J. Z. 4, 173 Smith, Shanell T. 89 Smith, W. Robertson 29, 66 Smuckler, Linda 130 Sobel, Mechal 100, 190 social construction 146, 150 social system 21, 23, 24, 147 sociological 38, 66, 102, 104 sociology 10, 24, 25, 26, 30, 65, 68, 94 Soroush, Abdul Karim 168 Spielberg, Stephen 78, 81 Spinoza 29 spiritual 3, 6, 84, 87, 88, 100, 101, 105, 113, 117, 128, 131, 137, 138, 139, 140 spirituality 54, 58, 79, 90, 111–​15, 117, 119, 124, 130, 137, 138, 139 Staal, Frits 67, 186 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady 33, 42, 181 Sternberg, Meir 41, 181 Stoller, Robert 145, 195 structuralism 31, 46, 51, 54, 57 structural power 8, 103 subjectivity 6, 65, 87, 89, 108, 146, 148, 151, 152, 157, 166 submission 46, 64, 69, 73, 152, 157, 159, 160 systems 17, 18, 22, 30, 88, 101, 129, 145, 147 taboo 18, 20, 21, 22, 24, 28, 30, 32, 87, 161, 162, 166 Tamar 37, 39 textual studies 10 theodicy 53, 54, 58 theology/​theological 5, 11, 34, 35, 38–​46, 53, 57, 69, 95–​105, 107, 113, 114, 117, 121, 162, 174 thought 23, 24, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 64, 65, 67, 78, 80, 85, 86, 88, 89, 97, 99, 100, 105, 107, 113, 119, 130, 141, 144, 157, 159, 163, 169 toolbox 42, 54, 59 Townes, Emilie 86, 89, 90, 187 translation 52, 56, 60, 90, 161, 164 Trible, Phyllis 9, 10, 11, 12, ch. 2

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Index Trinh, T. Minh-​ha 129 Turner, Victor 118, 134, 193 Tylor, E. B. 96, 174 typology/​typological 20, 23, 24, 25, 29, 30, 97 Twain, Mark 94 University of Chicago 50, 52, 63, 95, 99, 174 Valls, Manuel 5 veil 1, 160, 161 Vesely-​Flad, Rima L. 90 virtue 89, 141, 156, 158, 160, 170 Walker, Alice 9, 10, 11, 13, ch. 5

Weber, Max 8, 10, 96 werewolves 111 Williams, Delores 86, 188 womanism 9, 78, 79, 80, 83, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90 womanist 43, 44, 77, 78, 80, 81–​91 world religions 4, 5, 57​ Yoga 58 Zack, Naomi 141, 193 Zaehner, Edward 50 Ziedan, Youssef 166, 167 Žižek, Slavoj 152