Bill Maher and the Bowl of Common Sense: White Atheism and Islamophobia, Part 2

Posted on May 22, 2013 by Donovan Schaefer

Maher 420

by Donovan Schaefer

Comedy makes me uncomfortable.  Comedy starts with the creation of a zone of common sense, then defines whatever happens outside that zone as laughable.  This boundary-line of common sense is not drawn through a patient elaboration of values between bodies in dialog, but in the striking of a match–through the voice, the face, and the body of the comedian.  As with all boundaries of common sense, comedic common sense is designed to prevent you from asking questions, to speed up the heartrate of shared knowledge to the point that it can’t be moved in any other direction.

What about when comedy is not just about entertainment, but brings with it a politics, an effort to reshape the bodies around it?  Then the circle of common sense has sloped borders.  It becomes bowl-shaped, designed to bring people into the zone of understanding.  These borders only slope in one direction.  It is impossible to argue with a comedian, to reposition them with follow-up questions, to reshape the tensely held landscape of common sense underneath them.  Jon Stewart has made an art of this method.  So has Bill Maher.

Bill Maher’s 2008 collaboration with Larry Charles, Religulous, a documentary splicing together interviews Maher carried out with a range of religious believers, is a case study of this method.  In the first half, he mostly addresses American Christians (white and black).  In the second half, he addresses primarily Jews and Muslims in Europe and the Middle East.

What is fascinating about Maher’s method is the way he cajoles the American bodies he encounters.  Rather than simply trying to hammer them with facts, he approaches them smiling, laughing, shaking his head, inviting them into the bowl of common sense.  His method is a ring of friendly questions, giving his conversation partners channels to slide down into the space of shared sensibilities.  When they refuse these channels, the penalty seems friendly: a chuckle or an eyeroll. To my eyes, the routine does not seem to be racialized: white and black American bodies are given identical treatment.

But the film takes on a decidedly different tone when Maher moves out of the American context.  Interviewing Muslims (and some Jews) in England and the Middle East, Maher’s method seems to shift away from friendly questioning to acidic mockery.  Maher is among the group of contemporary white atheists, including Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, who hold that Islam is a special case among religions–the worst among equals.  In Religulous, this prerogative to rage against Muslims comes across in the radically different tone of the second half of the film.  Maher’s body changes: he is no longer addressing a friendly “us” that can be cajoled, but a primitive “they” to be shamed.  The borders of common sense are closed.

What this doubling of the affects of atheism illustrates is that there is no neutral exercise of reason that can comfortably flow across borders.  Our own bodies insert themselves into those spaces–our own prerogatives and preferences, as well as a legible set of racialized histories.  An international conversation takes on a different affective cast than does an intra-national conversation, opening up a specific range of possible channels for dialog.  The slope of the bowl of common sense is shaped in different ways in different contexts of address.

When Americans–usually white Americans–start speaking about Islam it is almost always from a situation not only of ignorance but of distance from Muslim communities. It takes on a putatively neutral mantle of reason while actually reveling in the play and production of borders and binaries. This doesn’t mean that there can’t ever be cross-community conversations (and obviously the constitution of the boundaries of a community is always fluid and needs to be negotiated on the ground in ways that often hover beneath the range of possibilities of discourse alone), only that we need to be triply sensitive to the politics of addressing a plural “You” or “They”–especially when those perimeters are constituted inside racialized histories of colonialism and imperialism.

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Some Post-Colonial Narratives on Spirituality and Yoga

Posted on May 20, 2013 by mattsheedy

yoga_bums

by Matt Sheedy

A friend of mine recently tipped me to a website and Facebook group called Decolonizing Yoga. The group describes itself as committed to

Challenging racism, patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism, ableism, heteronormativity and privilege within yoga and spirituality. A place for radicals, queers, activists, anarchists, feminists & revolutionaries to unite.

A quick glance at the group’s homepage reveals a number of articles consistent with this general ethos, tackling topics such as “Countering Racism and Oppression in Holistic Healing,” “How Derrik Jensen’s Deep Green Resistance Supports Transphobia,” “Welcoming the Curvy Yogini,” and “Yoga: Not Just for Young, Skinny White Girls.” Curiously absent from these articles is any discussion on appropriations of Hindu identity.

While I found it interesting and indeed encouraging to come across a website that addresses issues not often found outside of academic circles, it struck me as I was surfing through this website that most critical narratives about yoga tend to focus their attention more on things like commercialization, materialism and a general lack of “spirituality” and have relatively little to say about cultural imperialism in relation to Hinduism. Indeed, it would seem that most of those who raise these concerns don’t tend to be Hindu at all, but rather Western practitioners who are variously concerned with questions of “authenticity” or, in the case of Decolonizing Yoga, with the realities of privilege and marginalization within yoga communities.

Here I couldn’t help but think of Suzanne Owen’s book The Appropriation of Native American Spirituality (2008), as a useful point of contrast, where she looks to

provide a discourse analysis of the appropriation of Native American spirituality through presenting the different perspectives of practitioners, tribal leaders, scholars and activists who claim to have an indigenous, Native American or specifically Lakota perspective in opposition to that of a non-Native. (18)

Of particular interest is Owen’s discussion of how notions of “spirituality” have been recently taken up by many “Native” communities, especially following developments in the 1970s, where the American Indian Movement (AIM) was drawn to certain Lakota groups that utilized traditional practices as a form of political resistance. This politicization, Owen notes, helped to spurn a “pan-Indian” movement, where Aboriginal communities across North America came to borrow many Lakota ceremonial practices in order to revitalize their own fledgling traditions.

In this sense, the insider use of the term “spirituality” is meant to distinguish Native practices as “borrowings” between indigenous groups, with an emphasis on following certain protocols in a correct (read: traditional and appropriate) manner. Moreover, spirituality is seen as immanently social and political as opposed to the more individual or self-focused conception that is common in Western appropriations of certain Native practices and in many popular “New Age” traditions—a point that Owen takes up in chapter four of her book.

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While I find myself in agreement with Owen’s analysis of discourses about spirituality and colonization in relation to Native Americans, I find it both ironic and intriguing that a website promoting the decolonization of yoga should have nothing to say regarding Western appropriations of Hinduism.

One reason for this, perhaps, as a friend pointed out to me recently, is that many (though by no means all) South Asian communities in the Eurowest view Western yoga practices as “spiritual” and not “religious,” thereby simultaneously promoting Hindu-related practices while protecting their own cultural identity. Consider the following example from the website IndiaWest, commenting on the controversy in Encinitas, California that would allow yoga classes to be taught in local elementary schools.

Ashwini Surpur, director of yoga therapy at Yoga Bharati, stressed that yoga does not expressly support any religion, but is a method to alleviate stress and improve wellness through exercise.

“As far as I am concerned, there is nothing religious about yoga. Yoga cannot be religious. Because if it’s religious, it is not yoga, it’s a spiritual practice,” Surpur said.

“Spirituality is often confused with religion in many cultures,” she added.

Among other things that we might observe in these related-yet-distinct comparisons is how “spirituality” is marshaled differently in each instance. In the case of Decolonizing Yoga, notions of spirituality seem to imply a radical and ever-expanding inclusivity of those whose identities have been excluded from normative depictions of yoga (e.g. white, affluent, thin, etc.), while in the case of “Native” spirituality, insiders are almost always tied to a specific ethnic identity and a lived and historical experience of having their traditions or customs co-opted, marginalized and suppressed. Here the notion of “spirituality” is modified by the term “Native,” which enables a broad identification across distinct-yet-related Aboriginal cultures.

 

Last, for (at least) some Hindu communities, yoga is depicted as a form of spirituality that is seen to have a universal quality and is considered separate from more “religious” or cultural identifications with Hinduism. Here it is worth considering how this may be linked, as Richard King notes in his book Orientalism and Religion, to conceptions of “neo-Hinduism” and its emphasis on spirituality, which is not only Western-influenced, but has also allowed “Hindus to turn Western colonial discourses to their own advantage.” (142)

Central to all of these cases is how struggles for recognition amongst groups that have experienced colonization and/or marginalization shape how notions of spirituality are utilized differently—sometimes borrowing from and sometimes innovating ideas that have been imposed from the outside.

Matt Sheedy is a PhD. candidate in religious studies at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, and associate editor of the Bulletin for the Study of Religion. His research interests include critical social theory, theories of secularism, ritual and myth, and social movements. His dissertation offers a critical look at Juergen Habermas’s theory of religion in the public sphere and he is also conducting research on myths, rituals and symbols in the Occupy Movement, which includes fieldwork at Occupy Winnipeg.

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Method and Theory in the Study of Religion: An Interview with Aaron Hughes (Part 2)

Posted on May 17, 2013 by mattsheedy

AaronHughes

Interview by Matt Sheedy

This is the second and final instalment of an interview with Aaron Hughes, editor of Method and Theory in the Study of Religion. Part one of the interview can be found here.

 

Matt Sheedy: As a respected scholarly journal in the field and as the official journal of the North American Association for the Study of Religion, how do you see the relationship between MTSR and NAASR? Have there been any significant changes under your leadership and do you foresee any into the future?

Aaron Hughes: The relationship between MTSR and NAASR has been a strange one.  From what I can tell, this relationship was formed as one of mutual convenience when the University of Toronto graduate students who created the journal back in 1988 were looking for a press after having self-published it for a number of years.  NAASR was only listed formally as the sponsoring organization of MTSR on the cover of volume 5 (1993), the first volume published by Mouton de Gruyter. While NAASR-players had been involved in the early years there was, until this time, no formal relationship. The “Journal of the North American Association for the Study of Religion,” which to this day graces every cover of the journal, seems to have been encouraged to entice further Mouton de Gruyter to take the journal by showing that it had an institutional link.

The relationship has certainly morphed over the years.  Whereas in the beginning, MTSR needed NAASR members to provide the journal’s content, the situation is now such that MTSR, as an internationally respected journal, provides NAASR with a prestige that it would not otherwise have.  Many scholars in Europe, for example, know of MTSR without having heard of NAASR (other than the fact that this name appears on the cover of every issue).  In fact, I would have to say that today MTSR’s biggest readership is in Europe.  So while MTSR is an international journal, NAASR, by its very name, is a parochial organization, confined solely to North America.

Reflecting this tension, it was not until last year that NAASR memberships began to carry an automatic subscription to MTSR.  Before this coupling, subscriptions to the journal were separate from the actual membership in the organization.  Thankfully, this has now been rectified.

Let me now peer into the crystal ball and talk a little about the future.  I have only been Editor officially since the beginning of the year (though I apprenticed for most of last year under the interim editors, Russell McCutcheon and Willi Braun).  While the journal is only as good as the submissions it receives, my goal is to have more and more thematic issues or sections within issues.  A journal with 4 or 5 completely different articles, while certainly interesting, can sometimes appear as too ad hoc.  I would like to have pieces that bounce off of one another, argue with one another, and that respond to one another.  I have tried to encourage select panels at NAASR or even the AAR to submit their (short) papers to me.  Within this context, 25.4-5 will see the publication of the papers from last year’s NAASR Presidential Panel that was devoted to the future of the organization.

I have also instituted a “Book Review Symposium” in which I send out a book to 4 or 5 scholars, have them examine it critically, and then invite the author of the book to respond.  I think this worked fairly successfully for Bruce Lincoln’s most recent book in 25.2, and I am trying it again for The Sacred is the Profane by William Arnal and Russell McCutcheon next year.  The key, though, is not to send these books out to those who will have only good things to say, but to those who have perspectives that might have been overlooked (for various reasons) in the initial work.  My goal, in other words, is to facilitate dialogue and jump start conversations.

I hope your readers will agree with me that one of the crises currently facing the field of theory and method is the increasingly intractable debate between humanists and cognitivists in the field.  Is religious studies a humanities/social sciences discipline or is it a scientific one?  While my own work and temperament situates me in the former “camp” (if that is even the appropriate term for it), I see it as my goal as Editor to make sure that both points of view appear in MTSR.  Even more importantly, I see it as my job to help facilitate conversations between these two sides, hopefully even to show how they can crosspollinate one another.

The future, then, is, I hope, promising for MTSR.  I am not sure what the future of the field will be, but I can certainly say that I want MTSR to be at its center.

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MS: I was intrigued to hear you say that MTSR‘s biggest readership today comes from Europe, especially as the European religious studies scene, as a whole, often gets classed as more “theological” than the one in North America–though the situation in Great Britain may have a lot to do with this characterization. Could you say something about why you think there is a greater readership coming from Europe and mention which countries and institutions tend to be the biggest subscribers to the journal outside of North America? Are their any institutions/departments beyond the Eurowest that have shown an interest in MTSR?

AH: I think you are correct in having the English context in mind.  While there are certainly some excellent critical scholars of religion in Britain – I think of places like Kent, Glasgow, and Aberdeen – the tradition over there has historically been one of philosophy of religion, which for me is just another term for Christo-centric theology.  This is, unfortunately, the major way religion is studied in places like Oxford and Cambridge, where the order of the day seems to be the articulation and defense of truth claims.  Note that it is never the ideology of truth claims or how and why they are constructed, but truth claims plain and simple, as if they exist naturally in the world and can be uncovered by the pure or pristine human intellect (whatever that may be or look like).

By Europe I think primarily of the North, of Germany and Scandinavia.  There are many important scholars and centers in these countries.  I have tried to make my new Editorial Board half European.  Within this context I think, in particular, of places like the University of Aarhus or the University of Helsinki.  Recently I received an email from a highly respected colleague at the University of Munich, who told me that MTSR is, and I quote, one of “the best journals in our field and we are always advising our students to refer to it.”

Perhaps in this context, it is worth noting that the European Review Index for the Humanities, a sub organization of the European Science Foundation, lists MTSR as a “research-starred journal.” Within this context, MTSR is listed in their classification in the highest category (Int1), while the Journal of the American Academy of Religion is listed only in the second ranking (Int2).

Outside the “Eurowest” – no.  Very little interest.  I frequently receive papers on Islam from people in Saudi Arabia or Iran, but they are so apologetic and overtly theological that it is clear to me that they have no idea what the journal is about.  They probably also submit to multiple journals at the same time.  But I think the larger point here is that “theory and method” concerns – at least when it comes to the academic study of religion as we define it here and, by extension, in the pages of MTSR – are largely, as you put it, “Eurowestern.” I think this becomes clear at international venues such as the IAHR (International Association for the History of Religions).  Is this good?  I don’t know.  All I can say is that it is what it is.  My only hope is that MTSR might eventually make an impact in other countries.  I note recently a couple of very good submissions that I have received from Italy, a country that I (at least) have traditionally associated with a more theological and Catholic perspective.

MS: You mention that one of the crises currently facing debates over theory and method in the study of religion is that between humanists and cognitivists. Could you say something more about what you see as the major fault-lines in these debates and what kind of issues might be addressed in the pages of MTSR on this topic?

AH: At stake, for me, is how we define the discipline: Is “religion” to be studied scientifically, social-scientifically, or in a manner that accords with the Humanities?  At a time when the Humanities are constantly under assault for their relevance in the modern university, we might find it unsurprising that many want to make religious studies into a science by studying it from the perspective of cognition, evolutionary biology, and the like.

Let me highlight this with an anecdote of sorts taken from a panel at the 2012 annual meeting of North American Association for the Study of Religion.  The panel in question – to be published in 25:4-5 of MTSR – was devoted to “The Identity of NAASR and the Character of the Critical Study of Religion.” The major debate, as seen in Don Wiebe’s reaction to Russell McCutcheon’s paper, revolved around who should be in NAASR. In his paper, McCutcheon argued, inclusively, that NAASR finally needs to recognize that it consists of two dominant groups, those that engage in, what he calls, “theory-as-explanation” (i.e., the more scientific based model that seeks to account for the various biological and cognitive origins of religion) and those who engage in, again what he calls, “theory-as-critique,” that is, those who wish to scrutinize the tools scholars use to go about their work (i.e., the study of their methods).

For Wiebe, however, NAASR was founded (and he, incidentally, was one of its founders) to establish, and I quote, “a scientifically sound basis for the study of religion—that is, a study that could be ‘vertically integrated’ with the other sciences.” He went on to argue that a “radical historicist agenda” – i.e., what McCutcheon had labeled as “theory–as-critique” – “threatens to ignore religion and instead substitute as its object of interest the hidden psychological, social and/or economic agendas of those interested in providing (rational or scientific) accounts of religious practices.”  In fact, he concluded that we should rename NAASR to NAASSR, “The North American Association for the Scientific Study of Religion.”

That two leading theorists in the field could have such radically different ideas of what constitutes the quiddity of “theory and method” is as problematic as it is telling.  Their debate, and now it is necessary to frame it less in terms of the actual debate and more in terms of the field taken as a whole, amounts to a set of mutually exclusive discourses.  Is religion to be studied theoretically, that is, scientifically, or is it to be studied methodologically, that is, from the perspective of the critical scrutiny of scholarly practices?  Theory and method, previously entangled in their generic coupling, now risk turning their venom on one another.  The politics of the so-called “theory wars,” like so much else in this country, risks becoming a veritable Kulturkampf.

My goal as Editor of MTSR is to make sure that this does not happen, and that these two sides remain in a mutually productive conversation.  And, to be honest, I am still trying to find ways of doing this.

MS: Thank you very much for taking the time to share your thoughts with our readers. We would like to wish you the very best as you continue your work with MTSR.

Aaron Hughes is the current editor of Method and Theory in the Study of Religion. He is professor of Religion, Jewish Studies, Islam, and Method and Theory in the department of Religion and Classics at the University of Rochester. Professor Hughes’s books include:  The Texture of the Divine (Indiana University Press, 2003), Jewish Philosophy A-Z (Palgrave, 2006), The Art of Dialogue in Jewish Philosophy (Indiana University Press, 2007), Situating Islam (Equinox Publishing, 2007), The Invention of Jewish Identity (Indiana University Press, 2010), Defining Judaism: A Reader (Equinox Publishing, 2010), Abrahamic Religions: On the Uses and Abuses of History (Oxford UP, 2012), and the forthcoming The Study of Judaism: Identity, Authenticity, Scholarship (SUNY Press, 2013), and Rethinking Jewish Philosophy: Beyond Particularity and Universality (Oxford UP, 2014).

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Method and Theory in the Study of Religion: An Interview with Aaron Hughes (Part 1)

Posted on May 15, 2013 by mattsheedy

AaronHughes

Interview by Matt Sheedy

Aaron Hughes is the current editor of Method and Theory in the Study of Religion and has generously agreed to talk with the Bulletin about his recent appointment and vision for the journal. He is professor of Religion, Jewish Studies, Islam, and Method and Theory in the department of Religion and Classics at the University of Rochester. Professor Hughes’s books include:  The Texture of the Divine (Indiana University Press, 2003), Jewish Philosophy A-Z (Palgrave, 2006), The Art of Dialogue in Jewish Philosophy (Indiana University Press, 2007), Situating Islam (Equinox Publishing, 2007), The Invention of Jewish Identity (Indiana University Press, 2010), Defining Judaism: A Reader (Equinox Publishing, 2010), Abrahamic Religions: On the Uses and Abuses of History (Oxford UP, 2012), and the forthcoming The Study of Judaism: Identity, Authenticity, Scholarship (SUNY Press, 2013), and Rethinking Jewish Philosophy: Beyond Particularity and Universality (Oxford UP, 2014).

Matt Sheedy: Could you tell us a little about yourself, your research interests, etc., and how these experiences have shaped your approach as an editor?

Aaron Hughes: The pleasure is mine.  Thank you for wanting to talk with me.  I’ll take a nod from Aristotle and work on the assumption that history is only interesting if repeatable or if others can see themselves reflected therein.

I am from Edmonton, AB, and was attracted to religious studies probably for the reasons that many of us were: I found the study of religions different from my own to be fascinating and, in many ways, liberating.  I still remember when I was a first-year undergraduate and being mesmerized by the PBS series with Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers on the power of myth.  (I think today, however, that my take would be somewhat different!)  I studied religious studies at the University of Alberta in the early 1990s, and the faculty in the department there was composed of two different and distinct types: (1) phenomenologists who had been trained in the History of Religions program at the University of Chicago; and (2) those who were informed by a different set of theoretical issues that emerged from, for example, continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literary criticism.   This was, although I had no idea of it at the time, fairly typical of most departments of religious studies throughout North America during these years.

My interest in disciplinarity, meta-questions, and theory – though I doubt I would have framed it in this manner at the time – was deeply informed by my experience as an undergraduate.  I remember taking a full-year “Theories” class with an eccentric and now deceased Japanese professor, Manabu Waida, who had studied History of Religions at Chicago with Kitagawa and Eliade (he even had big framed pictures of them on his desk).  He would always talk about the “irreducibility of the sacred,” and we must have spent a good three months reading, in agonizing detail, Eliade’s Patterns in Comparative Religion.  Although I say “agonizing,” this is perhaps me looking back from the present.  To be fair, I was intrigued and his vision – at the time, however, I don’t think I realized just how problematic it was – was inspiring to me.  It was not Eliade’s book that I found to be the most interesting in the class, however.  I was most attracted to Weber’s Sociology of Religion, especially after it became clear to me what he was doing or trying to do therein.  The idea of taking a question – the emergence of rational bourgeois capitalism – and using it as the prism with which to look at, and compare, various religions was fascinating.  This was not the kind of essence/manifestation model seen in the likes of Eliade, but something entirely different.

But the individual that left the biggest impression on me as an undergraduate was a professor of Jewish Studies, and now my good friend, Francis Landy.  We would read Jewish texts together – Bible, Talmud, works in Jewish philosophy and kabbalah – and his interest was in wrestling with these texts, trying to figure out what they were saying (and not saying), and how they were full of indeterminacy and multivocality.  We would read, in good Jewish fashion, these texts closely, in dialogue with one another, and, when possible, in their original languages.  I began to find this sort of close textual and imaginative work more interesting and meaningful at the time than I did the explicitly theoretical work of religious studies.

When I applied to go to graduate school, I had no idea of what I was doing.  As a first generation college student, it seemed like an indulgence, but I loved learning so much!  When the dust settled I found myself starting an MA program at Indiana University in Bloomington (and a little bitter that not a single Canadian program thought I was worthy of funding).  It turned out to be an excellent fit.  It enabled me to work on the three areas that I now actively publish in: Jewish philosophy, Islamic Studies, and theory and method.  Graduate school for me was primarily about language work in Arabic and Hebrew.  While I had begun both as an undergraduate, they now occupied a lot of my time and energy.  Luckily I had an advisor who believed (correctly!) that one could not work in medieval Judaism and Islam without a solid grounding in Hebrew, Arabic, and the theological/philosophical histories of both traditions.  I was, thus, firmly grounded in two different religious traditions.  And, because of my temperament, the various theoretical models supplied by religious studies provided the means by which I tried to situate them and their complex interactions both in my own mind and in my writing.

The program at Indiana was so amenable to my intellectual growth that I decided to stay there for my PhD.  During these years, I actually spent more time away from Bloomington – at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and at the Bodleian Library in Oxford – than I did in it.  My dissertation (published as Texture of the Divine: Imagination in Medieval Islamic and Jewish Thought [Indiana UP, 2004] enabled me to combine all my areas – Islamic Studies, Jewish Studies, philosophy, and theoretical questions – in ways that, in retrospect, I am quite pleased with.

After a year teaching at Miami University of Ohio, I went to the University of Calgary in the summer of 2001.  It was a move that, in hindsight, was bound to end in frustration.  Although at the time my primary area of interest was in Jewish Studies, I was hired there as an Islamicist.  My experiences there proved formative: (1) my first week on the job was the week of 9/11; and (2) my colleagues there were absolute luddites, if not downright hostile, when it came to theory.  Being the contrarian that I am I began to engage in and think about theory quite a lot, and I felt that the best data to use was the discourses then being actively created by those in Islamic Studies after 9/11 to apologize for the tradition (e.g., “Islam couldn’t possibly condone…”).  Here I have to single out Russell McCutcheon for encouragement to develop this further and not just rant about my frustrations whenever I saw him.  The immediate result of this was my Situating Islam: The Past and Future of an Academic Discipline (Equinox, 2007) that appeared in his series.  I guess the rest is history.  Since then I have published actively in Judaism, Islam, and theory.  Sometimes these three areas overlap (e.g., my Abrahamic Religions: On the Uses and Abuses of History [Oxford UP, 2012]; my forthcoming The Study of Judaism: Identity, Authenticity, Scholarship [SUNY Press, 2013]); other times, they don’t (e.g., my The Art of Dialogue in Jewish Philosophy [Indiana UP, 2007], and my forthcoming Rethinking Jewish Philosophy: Beyond Particularity and Universality [Oxford UP, 2014]).

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When I was approached to be the Editor of MTSR in 2012 I was working in a History department at SUNY, Buffalo.  Although earlier in my career I had tried to make the case that religious studies is an artificial discipline, predicated as it is on the reification of an amorphous concept (“religion”), being in a History department made me wistful for a return.  I realize, though, that this might just have been due to the fact that I found myself in a rather flat-footed and border-patrolling department.  I would certainly hope that other departments of History would not share the unfortunate myopia of this department.

After this rather long-winded and meandering narrative, I now find myself ensconced in the present: back in religious studies, as Editor-in-Chief of MTSR, and on the verge of becoming a senior (!!) scholar.

How have these experiences shaped my approach as an editor?  I hope it should be clear from what I have said, but let me try to tease them out a little.  While in graduate school, I thought that everyone was interested in issues of theory and method, but when I got to the University of Calgary I realized, to my amazement, that this was not the case at all.  (This, of course, is also reinforced by a quick perusal of any AAR annual meeting program book.)  The faculty there was so mistrustful and openly hostile and this mistrust and hostility had, unfortunately, seeped into the graduate students.  No one was interested in theorizing their data or asking questions about the genealogy of the categories that they employed.  They simply wanted to be left alone.  Their “data,” for them, existed naturally in the world and they wanted to describe it for all and sundry.  I find this – the assumption that our language and its categories do not admit of distortion – just ludicrous.  I am, thus, very interested in receiving submissions to the journal that reflect upon how data is created, formed, imagined, and manufactured.  Although my own work puts a high priority on language and texts, my goal is to publish pieces in MTSR that cannot be published elsewhere because they emphasize questions of theory over questions of data, and issues of analysis over those of description.

In this regard, I envisage MTSR as the anti-JAAR.  I am not interested in description, theology (crypto or any other variety), or ecumenicism.  If someone has written something on theory and method (regardless of whether they are a member of NAASR) I want MTSR to be the first journal that pops into their heads for places to submit.  I’m not there yet, but, with each new issue I produce, I hope that slowly and gradually this will be the case.

MS: You mention that you envision MTSR as “the anti-JAAR,” and that you’d like MTSR to be the first journal that scholars think of when they’re considering submitting an essay on theory and method. While it is certainly the case that JAAR is committed to publishing both theological and non-theological voices in its pages (see Philip Tite’s interview with current JAAR Editor Amir Hussain) and does not dedicate itself to the interrogation of, as you put it, “how data is created, formed, imagined, and manufactured,” it does contain essays that take a social scientific approach and even some (and I would argue increasingly so) that seek to theorize their data. While it may be entirely speculative, do you think MTSR has had a role in helping to change the conversation toward a greater inclusion of these concerns in the field, even in the pages of JAAR? Lastly, do you think, perhaps, that MTSR could be viewed less an “anti-JAAR” and more of a contrarian family relation (however uncompromising) who might act as an ally in disguise by helping to keep it honest (i.e. critical)?

AH: Thank you for getting me to clarify here.  For me, it is a very difficult issue.  The more I think about it, the less I want MTSR (or NAASR for that matter) to define itself in terms of an other.  Although perhaps sociologically this cannot be helped, I think that the moment we define ourselves in terms of what the AAR/JAAR is not, we let the latter organization set the parameters for how we understand ourselves.  I think that this impulse must be resisted at every level.  I said as much in my inaugural editorial, which appeared in MTSR 25.1

Having said this, however, it becomes necessary to articulate that I, and others in the field, understand MTSR as the journal for method and theory in the academic study of religion that is produced on a consistent and uncompromising basis.  The AAR has such a diverse and large audience that method and theory as I defined it above will only ever be a niche or specialized market there.  I cannot tell you how many articles I have received from potential authors that tell me that the JAAR rejected them because they “did not reflect the AAR’s diverse readership.”  Some of them are very, very good and will, in coming issues, appear in MTSR.  So the issue is neither nearly as straightforward nor as transparent as it may appear on the surface.

Certainly the JAAR will publish the occasional piece on the types of issues that interest MTSR readers (I think of the very good special issue last year devoted to an essay by Wiebe and Martin; or McCutcheon’s frequent rejoinders).  And I am certainly glad that they do.  But I would have to say that such articles are definitely the minority.  Indeed, they have to be given the AAR’s various and manifold interests.  I don’t have the numbers, but I would like to venture anecdotally that something in the range of 85-90% of the JAAR’s contents in any given issue is devoted to data description or why and how the academic study of religion should make room for constructive theology.  I certainly have nothing wrong with this (well maybe I do), because, again, such contents reflect the AAR’s membership.  But when the JAAR presents itself as the place for theoretical and methodological issues in the way that MTSR understands these terms, then I begin to get bugged.

If MTSR nudges AAR types to become more sophisticated when it comes to theory and method, excellent.  However, this is not my concern.  My concern is turning out consistently good issues by individuals who put issues of theory and method at the forefront of their analyses for others who think the same way.

(To be continued in Part 2)

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“I have tried to recover a sense of humanity…”

Posted on May 13, 2013 by mattsheedy

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* Note: this piece was originally posted in Religion in American History.

by Kelly J. Baker

Last week, I wrote a post for The Christian Century‘s Then and Now, curated by Edward J. Blum, on the label “evil” religion. As some might suspect, this label is often applied to the movements and people that I study (the Ku Klux Klan, doomsday cults, and new religious movements) among many other groups. The label, to put it mildly, is a problem, and the post catalogs my unease with quick judgments about the nature of “evil” religious movements versus other “good” religious movements (those that make us comfortable rather than uneasy). I wrote:

When people label religion “evil,” they almost always include Jonestown, Aum Shinrikyo and the Branch Davidians (who are represented here in an image accompanying Blake’s article). The common assumption follows that these religious groups can be marked as evil because they are imbricated in violence, death and destruction. We can cluck our tongues sympathetically at the supposedly brainwashed people deluded into joining these movements, and we can rest easier at night by assuming that our religious commitments must be the safe kind.

Moreover, we can hold onto the vision of “healthy religion” that [John] Blake espouses. If only we were versed in these four signs, the argument goes, then maybe these tragedies wouldn’t happen.

If only it were this easy. Such an understanding of “evil” religion is predicated on a sense that religion is inherently “good.” Blake even writes that “religion is supposed to be a force of good,” as if claiming this aloud necessarily makes it so. 

Unsurprisingly, I am increasingly wary of labels like “good,” “healthy,” “authentic,” “bad,” “evil,” or “illegitimate” when they function as modifiers for religion. The normative bounds of how we wish the world is/was present themselves in such labels. Yet, what does that do for analysis? I have spent much of my career thinking about how assumptions about religion and religious people guide our narratives. Villainy, as I tell my students, might make a good story, but it does not provide analysis. To claim the “evilness” of some religions marks others as safe and good, and in both instances, it ignores the sheer ambiguity and ambivalence of that thing we call religion. We lose something with every normative claim.

More and more, I find myself returning to David Chidester’s Salvation and Suicide: Jim Jones, the Peoples Temple, and Jonestown to think through his claim of religion as “being a human person in a human place” (xviii), even if that means engaging and analyzing revolutionary suicide and mass death. This book prompts us to think about how to make the incomprehensible (the mass suicide of 913 members of the Peoples Temple) into something comprehensible. How do we make sense of these tragic events? Can we avoid the urge to moralize, to label “good” and “evil,” or to rely on easy narratives of villainy, destruction, and madness? Can we approach instances of violence and terror with empathy? How do we humanize victims and perpetrators? Or can we? (Or do we want to?)

Chidester writes, “I have tried to recover a sense of humanity of the people who died in Jonestown” (xvii-xviii). Rather than provide another caricature of Jim Jones or Jonestown, Salvation and Suicide provides a more complicated portrait of the lives and deaths of 913 people in the Guyana jungle. No easy labeling of “evil” or “good” appear in its pages. Instead, we are left with haunting images of corpses littering the ground without easy explanations as to why. His book, then, works against dehumanization of the Jonestown dead in media coverage, scholarship, and public perception. To do this, he relies upon Ninian Smart’s concept of “structured empathy,” which is empathy structured by categories like symbol, myth, classification, orientation, and ritual that allows engagement with the worldview of another (xiv). I find this concept compelling as I employed it in my work on the Klan, but it is also unsettling. What might it mean to engage Jonestown or the Klan empathetically? What do we gain by emphasizing the humanity of our historical actors? What kind of scholars are we if we ignore their humanity? This question, in particular, appears and reappears in every research project of mine. I can’t escape it, nor do I want to.

What this means is that Salvation and Suicide lingers with me. Maybe, it even haunts me. The book forces me to think carefully about the methods I use to study religious people. It warns me to be careful and considerate. It presents the perils of dehumanization. It gives me pause. It keeps me awake at night. It gives me hope about scholarship. Chidester writes:

Perhaps I have taken the method of “structured empathy” to the breaking point here. However, if I had to push this brief observation on method a step further, I would argue that the method of structured empathy is already a moral strategy. It requires the recognition of the irreducible humanity of others upon which any ethics of the interpretation of otherness must be based (xv).

To recognize the “irreducible humanity of others,” on the surface, appears not to be a radical claim, but it is. Chidester’s careful reconstruction of the worldview of Peoples Temple represents the allure and appeal of a utopian commune in Guyana, in which members could escape the dehumanizing forces of American life, capitalism and racism, and remake themselves. Chidester demonstrates how suicide became a choice of being human or becoming subhuman. In the end, the Jonestown dead emerge as both. In heartbreaking detail, he guides us through the last moments that result in mass suicide, a choice of humanity, and the resulting interpretations of the event that make the Peoples Temple subhuman again. Finding humanity is not always an uplifting journey or a tale of liberation. Sometimes, finding humanity means confronting violence, terror, and death. We can be left haunted rather than inspired.

Kelly J. Baker is the author of Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America (Kansas 2011), which employs the 1920s Ku Klux Klan as a case study to explore the intersection of Protestantism, nationalism, whiteness and gender. Her recent work includes articles on the Klan’s robes and fiery crosses as material religion, “Rapture readiness” in contemporary Christian apocalypticism and zombie apocalypses in contemporary film and literature. In addition to these commitments, Kelly is also an editor of the Religion in American History blog and co-editor of the Bulletin for the Study of Religion.

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NEW BOOK SERIES! “Studies in Ancient Religion and Culture”

Posted on May 10, 2013 by Philip L. Tite

Equinox Publishing has launched a new book series for its line of books in the study of religion and invites manuscripts and book proposals. Both single author and multi-author works are welcome.

“Studies in Ancient Religion and Culture” (SARC), edited by Philip L. Tite (University of Washington), is concerned with religious and cultural aspects of the ancient world, with a special emphasis on studies that utilize social scientific methods of analysis. By “ancient world”, the series is not limited to Greco-Roman and ancient Near Eastern cultures, though that is the primary regional focus. The underlying presupposition is that the study of religion in antiquity needs to be located within cultural and social analysis, situating religious traditions within the broader cultural and geopolitical dynamics within which those traditions are located.

Rome1This series also encourages cross-disciplinary research in the study of the ancient world. Due to the historical development of various academic disciplines, there has arisen a set of largely isolated and competing fields of study of the ancient world. Often this fragmentation in academia results in outdated or caricatured scholarly products when one discipline does use research from another discipline. A key goal of this series is to help facilitate greater cross- and inter-disciplinary work, bringing together those who study ancient history (especially social history), archaeology (of various methods and geographic focuses, as well as theorists in archaeology), ancient philosophy, biblical studies, early patristics/church history, Second Temple and formative Judaism, Greek and Roman classics, philologists, etc.

Given the focus on the social and cultural context within which religion functions, the series also invites projects that explore the various social locations in which real people in antiquity practiced or interacted with their religious traditions. For instance, the domestic cult, food production and consumption, temple worship, funerary practices/monuments, development of social networks, military cult, ancient medicine, etc.

Finally, the series encourages a broader application of theoretical and methodological tools to the study of the ancient world. While the main perspective is social scientific (understood broadly), specific analyses from the reservoir of critical theory, narrative theories, economic theory, bio-archaeology, gender analysis, anthropology of religion and cognitive theory are welcome.

Those interested in submitting a book proposal for the series should contact the series editor at philip.tite@mail.mcgill.ca or titep@uw.edu.

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Disciplining the Violent

Posted on May 8, 2013 by mattsheedy

by Steven Ramey

Monks in Myanmar encouraging violence, while that image challenges common assumptions about those who identify as Buddhists, accounts of such events often actually reinforce those assumptions. On April 30 people identified as Buddhists burned mosques and homes of a minority group identified as Muslim, reportedly resulting in injuries and one death. A recent BBC account of this ongoing conflict in Myanmar reiterates the trope that Buddhists follow a non-violent tradition. The author, a fellow at Brasenose College of Oxford who has studied conflict in Sri Lanka, drew parallels with Sri Lanka to argue that political interests corrupted the ideal teachings of nonviolence and justified violent action to protect position and power.

Three days before this particular attack on mosques and homes in Myanmar, another conflict between three European climbers and a group of Sherpas on Mount Everest raised similar issues. One account of the conflict particularly emphasized its unusual nature, asserting that the Sherpas are Buddhists who usually refrain from violent emotions or actions because such emotions pollute the mountain, which the Sherpas consider sacred. The account characterized the Sherpas as generally accepting with equanimity the economic disparity between themselves and the climbers who hire them because the Sherpas see themselves as existing in “a parallel universe.” The authors certainly reinforced a romanticized image of Mount Everest and the communities involved, while simultaneously explaining the conflict as a factor of economic disparity and tense labor relations.

In explaining these events, both accounts reflect the persistence of the trope that religion, at least in its purportedly pure, original form, is a force for good. Political and material interests generate the violence that challenges this idealized image. Thus, the Buddha, among others to whom teachings such as non-violence are attributed, remain idealized, free from any political or material interests. Dividing society between good aspects that we commonly label religious and problematic aspects that we label political constructs the first as an idealized, incorruptible space for the good and thus disciplines those who respond with violence (at least violence that we deem inappropriate) as corrupting their own religious identity, as we have constructed it and ascribed it to them.

 

Steven Ramey is Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama, where he also directs the Asian Studies program. He received his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, where his work focused on contemporary religions and identity in India. His book Hindu Sufi or Sikh (Palgrave 2008) analyzes issues of identity within Sindhi Hindu communities. 

Posted in Politics and Religion, Religion and Society, Religion and Theory, Religion in the News, Steven Ramey, Theory in the Real World | Tagged | Leave a comment