Constructing "Data" in Religious Studies
Examining the Architecture of the Academy
Edited by
Leslie Dorrough Smith [+–]
Avila University
Leslie Dorrough Smith is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies and Philosophy at Avila University (Kansas City, MO), where she is also the Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program. She is the author of Righteous Rhetoric: Sex, Speech, and the Politics of Concerned Women for America (Oxford, 2014) and is working on a manuscript on the social significance of political sex scandals in the United States. Her research interests focus on American conservative Protestants, critical theory, and the use of method and theory in both religious studies and gender studies.
Constructing “Data” in Religious Studies provides a critical introduction to the ways in which the category “data” is understood, produced, and deployed in the discipline of religious studies. The volume is organized into four different sections, entitled “Subjects,” “Objects,” “Scholars,” and “Institutions,” with an epilogue by Russell McCutcheon and Aaron Hughes.
The volume’s aim is to reflect, first, on the problems, strategies, and political structures through which scholars identify (and therefore create) data, and second, on the institutions, extensions, and applications of that data. The first three sections are spearheaded by a key essay and followed by four responses, all of which consider how the politics of the academy determine the very nature of the things we purport to study. The fourth section considers what these concepts look like as they are applied and further institutionalized in college and university structures, and itself includes four essays on “teaching,” “departments,” “research,” and “labor.” Finally, the epilogue closes the volume with a consideration on the politics of scholarly collegiality, transforming the data-makers (scholars) into data themselves.
Series: NAASR Working Papers
Table of Contents
Part I
Chapter 1 [+–]
University of Pennsylvania
Annette Yoshiko Reed is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the Center for Ancient Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
-This chapter considers the mechanisms scholars use to determine that something is (or is not) worthy of study. Central to this inquiry are the politics of what we call “data.” Although many scholars who claim methodological sophistication recognize that the tangible subjects that make possible the field of religious studies are humans (over against those who claim that we study, instead, sui generis essences), a significant proportion of the same scholars balk at the labeling of humans as “data,” claiming that such a move unethically objectifies humans by reducing them to rote biological and/or political operations that collectively fail to recognize aspects of humanity often called “the human spirit.” The purpose of this chapter is thus to explore how the category of “human spirit” and other related taxons help generate a sort of hidden essentialism that naturalizes the split between humans and their behaviors.
Chapter 2 [+–]
Crandall University
Adam Stewart is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Crandall University, Moncton, New Brunswick.
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Chapter 3 [+–]
Fordham University
M Adryael Tong is a Theology Ph.D. candidate in the field of Christianity in Antiquity at Fordham University with research interests in Jewish-Christian relations, gender and sexuality in late antiquity, and continental philosophy, especially queer and post-colonial theory. She is particularly interested in intersectionality and the ways in which group identities shape late antique theological discourse. M’s dissertation on the early Christian and rabbinic Jewish circumcision debate argues that although rabbinic Jews and proto-orthodox Christians disagreed on the practice of circumcision, their texts often exhibit remarkable similarities in their modes of theological argumentation, especially in places where the rabbis and Church Fathers deploy circumcision as a means of addressing particular questions of theological anthropology and embodiment.
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Chapter 4 [+–]
Montclair State University
John Soboslai is an Assistant Professor in the department of Religion at Montclair State University. He holds an MA in the history of religion from Columbia University, and a PhD in religious studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Specializing in martyrdom and global religious violence, he was named Sherman Emerging Scholar of 2016, and in 2015 UC Press published his co-authored book God in the Tumult of the Global Square.
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Chapter 5 [+–]
Memorial University of Newfoundland
Jennifer A. Selby is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and affiliate member of Gender Studies at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada. Her research, teaching, and supervision broadly consider Muslim life in contemporary France and Canada and the nature of secularism. She is the author of Questioning French Secularism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and co-editor of Debating Sharia: Islam, Gender Politics, and Family Law Arbitration (University of Toronto Press, 2012).
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Part II
Chapter 6 [+–]
Mars Hill University
Matthew C. Baldwin is Professor and Coordinator of the Program in Religion and Philosophy at Mars Hill University. He teaches courses in Bible, ancient history, Biblical languages, the American intellectual tradition, and method and theory in religious studies. He is the author of Whose Acts of Peter? Text and Historical Context of the Actus Vercellenses (Mohr-Siebeck, 2005).
-Some currently popular trends in religious studies—approaches identified variously as “material religion,” “lived religion,” etc.—purport to correct for allegedly longstanding deficiencies in religious studies methodology by focusing on cultural artifacts (“objects”) and social practices, as opposed to the verbal, discursive, or written evidence that often dominates scholarship. The result is that “objects” and material artifacts have come to be represented in such scholarship as especially valuable forms of non-verbal data revealing sites that mediate such numinous experiences of “the sacred,” which, for many of this camp, is the supposedly true object of religious studies. In response to this trend, this chapter uses an historiographic method to examine and critique some of the ways that key scholars of religion have written about the “object” of religious studies and about “objects” as the data of religious studies. The aim is to demonstrate that all forms of evidence available to “religious studies” must already be conceptualized as “objects,” that every “object” which becomes data for the study of “religion” is of interest only because it is humanly significant—i.e. a part of a discursive world—and finally that the only objects available to “religious studies” (or any other social science) are the puzzles of human behavior.
Chapter 7 [+–]
Universität Bremen
Petra Klug obtained a Master’s degree in Sociology and Cultural Studies (Magister Artium), as well as a Master’s degree in the Study of Religion (Master of Arts), from University of Leipzig. She has received the doctorate scholarship of the German Research Foundation and was associated to the DFG-research group on Religious Non-Conformism. Klug has published a book on the German discourse on Islam, as well as several articles about religion, nonreligion, gender, and Human Rights. Currently she works as Research Associate at University of Bremen, Germany, Department for the Study of Religion and Religion Education completing her dissertation on the relationship between the Religious and the Secular in the United States.
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Chapter 8 [+–]
Holly A. White received her Ph.D. from Syracuse University in the Department of Religion. Her dissertation addressed the modern aesthetic figure of Utopia and its relationship to critical methods in religious studies. Her areas of research include material culture, social theory, and modern literature.
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Chapter 9 [+–]
University of Saskatchewan
Peggy Schmeiser, Ph.D., is a faculty member at the Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy at the University of Saskatchewan. Prior to this, she worked for many years in university government affairs and with the federal government in domestic and international policy areas relating to culture, equality and the economy. Peggy has taught at four universities, is proficient in French, and has researched, published and lectured internationally on a wide range of topics relating to religion, secularism, governance, public policy, culture and gender.
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Chapter 10 [+–]
University of California at Santa Barbara
Lucas Scott Wright is a PhD student in the Religious Studies Department at the University of California at Santa Barbara with a research focus in the area of Jewish Studies. His research explores the relations between German idealism, Modern Jewish Thought in Germany, and Contemporary Continental Philosophy of Religion. His current project is a study of the use of the concepts of ‘factuality’ and ‘virtuality’ in Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption, in relation to gnosticism, dialectics, and phenomenology.
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Part III
Chapter 11 [+–]
St. Thomas Aquinas College
Craig Martin, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at St. Thomas Aquinas College. His work focuses on method and theory in the study of religion, as well as discourse analysis and ideology critique of modern rhetoric on religion. His recent works include Capitalizing Religion: Ideology and the Opiate of the Bourgeoisie and A Critical Introduction to the Study of Religion.
What is a scholar’s relationship to her objects of study? One ideal from the European enlightenment is that scholars passively mirror and collate already-existing empirical data available to the senses. Anti-realist critiques of this ideal—dating roughly from Kant’s “Copernican revolution”—suggest, by contrast, that scholars actively construct their objects of study; on this view perhaps scholars are more like emperors than mirrors, creating their objects of study by controlling, commanding, and ruling over the imperium they bring into existence. Realists might object to the latter perspective on a number of grounds. First, on ethical grounds, does our scholarship risk becoming imperialistic? Second, on epistemological grounds, what does it mean to say we create rather than discover our objects of study? Do we risk becoming naked fools who think we have new clothes merely because we’ve said we have new clothes? Do we risk the illusion that we can construct our objects of study ex nihilo? This chapter will defend the anti-realist perspective, arguing that the epistemological objection depends on a fundamental misunderstanding of the anti-realist position, and that the realist perspective is the one more likely to run afoul of the ethical charge.
Chapter 12 [+–]
University of Alabama
Vaia Touna is Assistant Professor at the Department of Religious Studies at The University of Alabama, USA. Her scholarly interests range widely, from looking at specific concepts of religion in the Greco-Roman world to methodological issues concerning the study of religion in general.
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Chapter 13 [+–]
Dennison University
Martha Smith Roberts is Assistant Professor of Religion at Denison University. Her primary research is a critical analysis of post-racial and post-ethnic theories of American religious pluralism. Roberts is also working on a co-authored manuscript with Jenna Gray-Hildenbrand, which analyzes the various spiritualities emerging within the hula hooping subculture. She sits on the Executive Committee for the North American Association for the Study of Religion, and she also serves on the Board of Directors for the Institute for Diversity and Civic Life in Austin, Texas.
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Chapter 14 [+–]
Dalhousie University/ University of Prince Edward Island
Jason W. M. Ellsworth, a doctoral student in the Social Anthropology at Dalhousie University, is a lecturer in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Prince Edward Island. His research interests include the anthropology of food, Buddhism in Canada, marketing and economy, transnationalism, and Orientalism.
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Chapter 15 [+–]
Northwestern University
Joel Harrison is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at Northwestern University. His work focuses on the intersection between social theory, theology, and philosophy of religion at the turn of the twentieth century in Germany and questions of theory and method in religious studies.
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Part IV
Chapter 16: Teaching [+–]
Elizabethtown College
Richard Newton is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Elizabethtown College. He curates the student-scholar media collaborative, Sowing the Seed: Fruitful Conversations in Religion, Culture, and Teaching (sowingtheseed.org).
This section furthers the conversation begun in parts 1-3 by focusing specifically on the role that university institutions play in the creation of how we envision “data” as a category.
Middle Tennessee State University
Rebekka King, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Middle Tennessee State University. Her research focuses on the negotiation of boundaries within North American Christianity. Her first book (under contract with NYU Press) charts the development of progressive Christianity in North America as a movement that spurned Christian orthodoxy in pursuit of a resolutely skeptical faith. She teaches courses on method and theory, anthropology of religion, and contemporary Christianity.
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Chapter 18: Research [+–]
McDaniel College
Gregory D. Alles is Professor of Religious Studies at McDaniel College in Westminster, Maryland.
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Chapter 19: Labor [+–]
Emory University
James Dennis LoRusso is a Doctoral Candidate in American Religious Cultures at Emory University
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Part V
University of Alabama
Russell T. McCutcheon is Distinguished Research Professor and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama. His major publications include Manufacturing Religion (Oxford University Press, 1997), The Guide to the Study of Religion(Bloomsbury, 2000), Critics not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion (State University of New York Press, 2001) and The Discipline of Religion: Structure, Meaning, Rhetoric (Routledge, 2003). His most recent book, co-authored with William Arnal, is The Sacred is the Profane: The Political Nature of ‘Religion’ (Oxford University Press, 2013).
University of Rochester
Aaron W. Hughes is the Philip S. Bernstein Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Rochester. His research and publications focus on both Jewish philosophy and Islamic Studies. He has authored numerous books, including Situating Islam: The Past and Future of an Academic Discipline (Equinox, 2007); Theorizing Islam: Disciplinary Deconstruction and Reconstruction (Equinox, 2012); Muslim Identities: An Introduction to Islam (Columbia, 2012); and Abrahamic Religions: On the Uses and Abuses of History (Oxford, 2012). He currently serves as the editor of the journal Method and Theory in the Study of Religion.
Part 6 functions as both a case study and a conclusion. It features an essay (along with a short, concluding postscript) on the politics of collegiality in shaping our field, written by two prominent scholars. Despite the credentials of its authors, this essay was rejected outright (without any review) by a major religious studies journal on the grounds that it is irrelevant to academic study, ironically proving the essay’s very point that the politics of the academy often directly determine what is appropriate “data.”
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