Religion: “While there is a staggering amount of data, of phenomena, of human experiences and expressions that might be characterized in one culture or another, by one criterion or another, as religious – there is no data for religion. Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Religion has no independent existence apart from the academy.” – Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion

History: While there is a staggering amount of data, of phenomena, of human experiences and expressions that might be characterized in one culture or another, by one criterion or another, as historical – there is no data for history. History is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. History has no independent existence apart from the academy.

Politics: While there is a staggering amount of data, of phenomena, of human experiences and expressions that might be characterized in one culture or another, by one criterion or another, as political – there is no data for politics. Politics is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Politics has no independent existence apart from the academy.

Capitalism: While there is a staggering amount of data, of phenomena, of human experiences and expressions that might be characterized in one culture or another, by one criterion or another, as capitalist – there is no data for capitalism. Capitalism is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Capitalism has no independent existence apart from the academy.

Truth: While there is a staggering amount of data, of phenomena, of human experiences and expressions that might be characterized in one culture or another, by one criterion or another, true – there is no data for truth. Truth is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Truth has no independent existence apart from the academy.

Meaning: While there is a staggering amount of data, of phenomena, of human experiences and expressions that might be characterized in one culture or another, by one criterion or another, as meaningful – there is no data for meaning. Meaning is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Meaning has no independent existence apart from the academy.

Reality: While there is a staggering amount of data, of phenomena, of human experiences and expressions that might be characterized in one culture or another, by one criterion or another, as real– there is no data for reality. Reality is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Reality has no independent existence apart from the academy.

Sex: While there is a staggering amount of data, of phenomena, of human experiences and expressions that might be characterized in one culture or another, by one criterion or another, as sexual – there is no data for sex. Sex is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Sex has no independent existence apart from the academy.

Death: While there is a staggering amount of data, of phenomena, of human experiences and expressions that might be characterized in one culture or another, by one criterion or another, as dead – there is no data for death. Death is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Death has no independent existence apart from the academy.

Intelligence: While there is a staggering amount of data, of phenomena, of human experiences and expressions that might be characterized in one culture or another, by one criterion or another, as intelligent – there is no data for intelligence. Intelligence is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Intelligence has no independent existence apart from the academy.

Elitism: While there is a staggering amount of data, of phenomena, of human experiences and expressions that might be characterized in one culture or another, by one criterion or another, as elitist – there is no data for elitism. Elitism is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Elitism has no independent existence apart from the academy.

Stupidity: While there is a staggering amount of data, of phenomena, of human experiences and expressions that might be characterized in one culture or another, by one criterion or another, as stupid – there is no data for stupidity. Stupidity is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Stupidity has no independent existence apart from the academy.

Humor: While there is a staggering amount of data, of phenomena, of human experiences and expressions that might be characterized in one culture or another, by one criterion or another, as humorous – there is no data for humor. Humor is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Humor has no independent existence apart from the academy.

Christopher Peterman, a now-expelled 23-year-old Bob Jones University student, initially entered the conservative Christian institution embracing its strict rules. They were “exactly what he signed up for,” according to this news report. Ostensibly, he flouted a few of them, received a series of demerits for his infractions, and was eventually expelled a few weeks before his scheduled graduation.  His offenses included updating his Facebook during class and linking contemporary Christian music lyrics (i.e. Christian rock) on his status updates. One of the most severe punishments came after he was caught watching the TV show “Glee” off campus, because the university deemed it “morally reprehensible” due to its sexual content, particularly its non-condemning portrayal of homosexuality in the form of gay characters. His final demerit was for “disrespecting authority.”

The administration at Bob Jones may have been more self-critically correct than they were aiming to be, considering the backstory Peterman was aiming to expose. While still a student, Peterman started a group called “Do Right BJU,” which aimed to raise awareness of sexual abuse. “That’s when all of my problems started,” he said, because Chuck Phelps, formerly a member of the Board of Trustees at Bob Jones University, was a target of one of the group’s protests for his role in the attempted cover up of the rape of Samantha Anderson, a former member of Trinity Baptist Church, an Independent Fundamental Baptist (IFB) church in Concord, NH, where Phelps was once pastor.  When Phelps discovered that Anderson was pregnant as a result of one of the assaults she endured from Ernest Willis, another member of Trinity Baptist Church, he had her confess her “sin” in front of the congregation, then arranged for her to relocate with another IFB family thousands of miles away and to give up the baby for adoption, all before a trial could be conducted. Willis too was forced to confess his “sin” of adultery in front of the congregation since he was married, but without having to admit the rape or that his victim was a member of the same church. Concord police reopened the case after being alerted to a Facebook campaign to bring Willis to justice, which was started by another former member of Trinity Baptist Church. Willis has since been tried and found guilty of the rape, and Phelps is now a pastor at a different IFB church.

The response from Bob Jones following the protest was at first non-combative and in accord with its purpose. A public promise was made that there would be no negative consequences for any students involved in the protest, Phelps was forced to step down from the Board of Trustees, and a Committee on Sexual Abuse was established. But then a darker side of the response emerged outside of the public eye, at first anyway, swiftly, persistently, and decidedly not in accord with Peterman’s intentions or Bob Jones’s promise. According to CNN, Peterman was required to attend counseling with dorm monitors and several deans, including the Dean of Men, and had his movements to and from campus monitored by a resident assistant at the order of BJU administration. In an online interview available on YouTube, embedded below, Peterman claims that he was that he was told that he needed “spiritual help because [he] was not a good Christian” for stepping against authority and “bringing shame on Bob Jones.”  He also describes his dorm monitors recording his behavior in order to accrue enough demerits against him for expulsion, as the CNN article also reports. Since he did not technically have enough demerits for the expulsion to hold, administrators decided that his final tactical move of consulting media outlets and Bob Jones’s accrediting agency for guidance prior to his final hearing with administrators provided the justification because he was trying to “intimidate” them.

BJU’s Public Relations department issued the following statement after officially expelling Christopher Peterman: “We expect students to obey the student covenant in the spirit and the letter. Our goal is to help him succeed, and we did everything we could to help him succeed.”

The first question that comes to mind is how watching “Glee” could be detrimental to student success. BJU students are also prohibited from seeing most movies, listening to most forms of music, and reading many periodicals. Shouldn’t students be exposed to culture outside of the BJU environment, even if only to learn to combat it? Isn’t restricting this exposure in contradistinction to their goal of “extend[ing] these objectives beyond the university campus”? And isn’t the sort of intimidation they decried leading up to Peterman’s expulsion akin to the threat of punishing someone for witnessing the same culture that Bob Jones is ultimately a part of?

“God is in control. So God has a plan for this,” Christopher Peterman said in one of his interviews, remaining upbeat and with his faith intact, which is decidedly not out-of-step with the mission of Bob Jones University. Samantha Anderson also continues to echo a strong profession of faith, in spite of the devastating experiences she has endured. In both of their cases, attempts at guilt through authoritative control were made to scuttle an institutional threat, and the consequences are on display in the very manner the institution was trying to avoid.  The fundamentalist atmosphere at Bob Jones is one that seeks “not [to] be conformed to this world,” as Romans 12:2 instructs, but in examples like the Christopher Peterman case, where the interests of individual powerbrokers and the reputation of the establishment seem to predominate, discerning “what is good and acceptable and perfect,” as another part of that passage also instructs, seems to be have been subsumed under notions of obedience to authority.

In Peterman’s case, it is noteworthy that he is embracing life outside of Bob Jones University’s code of conduct. In the recent YouTube interview alluded to above, he is visibly wearing a Hollister t-shirt, something that is expressly forbidden on page 32 of the school’s handbook.  Perhaps this indicates that he and others like him can still find ways to reconcile the conflict between one authoritative conception of what is required of a “good Christian” and their own formations of that identity.

By Deeksha Sivakumar

As early as next week, Burnside Brewery in Portland Oregon planned to release a spiced wheat beer, “Kali-Ma”.  Needless to say, the ‘cultural theft’ of a popular demonic form of a Hindu goddess has rubbed a number of Hindu Organizations the wrong way, provoking condemnations of Burnside’s choice on the grounds that it would “hurt the devotees.” In ways that mimic disputes over the appropriations of yoga earlier this year, and Heidi Klum’s dressing up as Kali-Ma for a 2008 Halloween Party, Burnside has argued that it was not their intent to offend devotees by using Kali-Ma.

Of course,it is not only commercial interests who appropriate cultural goods in ways that serve their own self-interest. Post colonial governments regularly do so. In 2008, for instance, the Egyptian government sought patents for the use of the image of pyramids . Their proprietary claim stemmed from a desire to identify certain images as cultural signifiers, and perhaps also the considerable revenues, and the ability to enforce limitations upon how such images are used by others, patents typically provide.

Such practices provoke questions about the appropriate contexts for determining when cultural images are used (or abused) and who gets to draw these boundaries. On the one hand, some devotees claim to be harmed by the ‘theft’ (and especially the commodification) of their cultural resources. It is worth noting that at least one other commercial vendor of alcohol, Sula, the winery from Nasik, India, use the image of the mustached Sun (also a Hindu god) to label their bottles.

Thus, it is worth inquiring further as to precisely how why Burnsides’ Kali-Ma beer might be construed as harmful. Kali, the black, naked, and terrifying goddess, is depicted in the Devi-Mahatmya (a Hindu devotional text from the Markandeya Purana) as drunk (on blood) and wielding tremendous power. Just as some followers of yoga sought to sanitize the practice and remove some of the tantric connotations associated with practices, do modern Hindus hope to sanitize representations of Kali? On the other hand, cultural images of all sorts quickly become part of an endless repertoire shared the world-over. With the Internet, culturally specific images from one community soon evoke sentimental value in those from others. Should we, then, expect their appropriation, even commodification?

Perhaps what irks the critics of Burnside (and Heidi) is that a non-Hindu may get to use and promote one particular image of the goddess, while they themselves hope to promote a “purer” image of Kali-Ma. However, this too stems from a need to polish Hindu gods, making the gods palatable to a non-Hindu gaze that may not understand the diverse stories of the Hindu goddess. I do not wish to marginalize the possible “suffering” Kali-Ma beer may cause some (sanitized) Hindus, but it does lead on to ask: when we stand up to lay claim to cultural signifiers, does this serve the purpose we have explicitly claimed? It may in fact have little to do with Kali-Ma beer offending Hindu sentiments, and much more to do with wanting to claim authority over the appropriate use of symbols, and the high that goes with wielding that power.

“They don’t really believe that, do they?” is a refrain that I find familiar, expected and, frankly, tiring. As someone who researches white supremacists and doomsday prophets, I should be used to it. The query confronts me in the classroom, at conferences, at the dinner table, and most often conspiratorially in the hallways.  It is often a hushed question in which the interrogator asks me beseechingly to say what s/he already wants (needs?) to hear.  Simply put, the interrogator wants me to say “no, of course, they don’t believe” that the world will end catastrophically, that reptoids inhabit caves under New Mexico, that Atlantis might rise, or that race war is the only way to redeem America. If I, the person who studies “weird” or “exotic” religion, will assure them that these people don’t believe, then maybe they can rest easy. I cannot assure them. And, if I am being truly honest, I really don’t want to. Instead, I emphasize that this “belief” is materialized in every prophetic utterance, billboard proclaiming the date of the end, online discussion of reptoid encounters, and each weapon purchased for the possibility of race war.

As Craig Martin notes in a previous post, belief is a problematic starting point for the study of religious people. It is an impoverished concept that ignores how people embody, enact, imagine, practice, participate, discuss, envision, hope, desire, want, and construct their religions. Religion is not simply belief, but is enmeshed in lives, materially and metaphysically. In a recent meditation on “belief,” Robert Orsi discusses the materiality of belief and the practice of religious life. Belief doesn’t quite explain what religious people do or even why they do what they do. It cannot encapsulate the messy richness of religious practice.

All of this is to say that I was excited to see Tanya Luhrmann’s contribution to Frequencies, the online genealogy of spirituality, and her new book, When God Talks Back.  (Here’s her interview with NPR). In her Frequencies article, “Magic,” Luhrmann discusses her research on Druids and their religious training to create worlds that were separate from the modern world and contained magic. She writes:

They practiced the exercises and read the books and participated in the rituals and then, out of the blue, they had seen something. They saw the Goddess, or a flash of light, or a shining vision of another world. They saw these as things in the world, not phantoms in the mind, although because the image vanished almost immediately, they knew that what they had seen was not ordinary. They said that their mental imagery had become sharper. They thought that their inner sense had become more alive.

The Druids trained. I guess we could say they “believed,” but why would we want to?

A recent thread on Facebook got me thinking about how scholars/instructors negotiate the boundaries between theory and politics and how these lines are always a little blurry, even at the best of times. Tim Murphy offers one way to think about this problem in his essay “Speaking Different Languages,” (2000) when he points out how debates in the public realm are different from debates in scholarship since they exist on different “temporal horizons.”
Whereas politics is driven by practical questions that concern the  ‘here and now’ and is typically framed in a narrow and partisan fashion, the scholar thrives on careful and subtle distinctions and thus have the luxury to “wait and see” without (ideally) an immediate
pressure to choose sides. (188) If it is true that most students come  to the classroom with an understanding of religion that has been filtered and homogenized through a particular cultural, historical and political lens (e.g., Anglo-American) then it stands to reason that drawing on examples from the public sphere (e.g., the news media) is a good way to illustrate the boundaries between theory and politics and to demonstrate how we might try to navigate this rocky terrain.

A recent USA Today article entitled, “Secularists counter prayer day with National Day of Reason” provides a useful example. The article frames the National Day of Reason as “part protest, part celebration and totally godless,” and ends by quoting Paul Fidalgo,
communications director at the Center for Inquiry, who states: “We feel that having our chief elected officials proclaim a religious day to be a clear violation of the separation of church and state. Besides that, it is exclusionary not just for nonbelievers but to
everyone who does not buy into monotheism.”

On the level of politics, we may note how the language/rhetoric and framing of this issue encourages people to choose sides in relation to their preferences as they are presented with what appear to be logical propositions that require a yes or no response. Here I might
confess that I, as a non-theist and as a person with political interests, am sympathetic to secularist groups being able to voice their concerns in the public realm and am weary of politicians promoting such an exclusionary event as the National Day of Prayer. I
might also note, however, that I am uneasy with the way that many secularist groups tend to construct “religion” as the opposite of “reason,” which is one of several factors that makes me reluctant to choose sides. And the reason I think this is, in no small measure, because of my training in theory and how it has changed the way that I think about discourse in the public sphere.

Looking at this article with a more theoretical lens, we may note two structural dichotomies in the above quotation, that between religion and reason and that between church and state, both of which can be placed within the history of the Euro-West and its corresponding
emphasis on “belief” as something that is internal to the individual and is therefore a “private” affair that should not get caught-up in the “public” matters of the State. Pushing further we might locate religion in a contemporary American context, noting the particular
history of church/state relations and ask why this is such a heated matter, especially in light of such events as 9/11 or the historical marginalization of atheists from politics? We could also frame this event via comparison, looking at the Canadian National Prayer
Breakfast, which is held around the same time, and ask why it did not, to my knowledge, garner the same level of opposition (or media coverage) from secularist groups, despite its overwhelmingly male, conservative and Christian orientation?

After raising such careful and subtle distinctions it should be easier for students to see that issues in the public sphere are not so cut and dry, and that terms like “secular” and “religion,” or church/state boundaries have a history and must be situated in relation to other factors if they are to make any sense at all. While the “temporal horizons” of theory and politics are not likely to change any time soon, by stressing that knowledge is always caught-up with human interests and that we need not always choose sides (at least not right
away!) we create a space for critical thought to take shape as something more than mere fantasy, without falling into the trap of confession or advocacy. In this sense, Marx was right: philosophers and theorists don’t just interpret the world, but, through
critique and by presenting issues in a certain light, ultimately serve to change it if on a slightly smaller-scale than Marx had in mind, and with much less certainty as to what it all means for the future.

I think we are still teaching students how to do this, but I’m not sure it’s useful. As a scholar, I never go about research in religious studies by searching online databases, and the citation styles I use vary by context.

How do I do research, then? I ask peers what’s “essential reading” in a certain area, I ask who’s publishing recently on a certain topic, I sift through bibliographies in the books and articles recommended to me, and I read around in what looks to be relevant. The only time I use a library database is to look up and download an article I’ve already identified.

So the question is: are we teaching students skills that are not useful? What if, instead, we spent more time teaching students how to evaluate sources we readily shared with them (like we get from our peers), rather than focusing on how to physically find and cite find sources?

Of course, teaching students how to evaluate sources would draw us into ideological battles that would be more easily avoided if we merely focused on the numbers of sources cited rather than the contested value of various sources. We’d be talking about the value of some types of scholarship over others, the usefulness of some methods over others, and why they should avoid anything with “The Sacred” in the title.

Messy business—but isn’t that what research really involves?

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Were you to travel one segment of the Eisenhower Expressway in Illinois this morning, you might discover a curious billboard.  The display features a mugshot of Ted Kaczynski, the self-confessed “Unabomber,” coupled with the question, “I still believe in Global Warming.  Do You?”  The new billboard campaign lining various commuter routes is the latest initiative of the Chicago-based conservative think tank, the Heartland Foundation, to call into question prevailing scientific consensus around climate change.

Predictably, progressives have responded virulently, claiming that Heartland has sunk to a new low in its effort to undermine and politicize “mainstream” science.  In a scathing response, Andrew Sullivan of The Daily Beast characterizes the strategy as “a brutalist style of public propaganda that focuses on guilt by the most extreme association.”  In other words, by linking belief in global warming to the likes of Kaczynski, Castro, and Charles Manson, all of whom presumably agree with the thesis of climate change, Heartland implies that anyone subscribing to such views must also be degenerate.

While Sullivan’s critique is warranted, it also reveals something significant about the shape of American political discourse more generally.  To borrow a notion from Roland Barthes, esteemed scholar of twentieth-century myth, American political discourse has become depoliticized.  Barthes writes: “Myth is depoliticized speech… Myth does not deny things, on the contrary, its function is to talk about them; simply, it purifies them, it makes them innocent, it gives them a natural and eternal justification, it gives them a clarity which is not that of an explanation but that of a statement of fact.” (Mythologies, 143) Barthes wishes for us to see how myths transform historically situated and contested knowledge into concepts beyond the pale of critique.

At first glance, the billboard appears to perform precisely the opposite function of myth; After all, isn’t it calling into question something which “mainstream” science simply acknowledges as “a statement of fact?” Well, yes… and no.  Barthes also reminds us that all is not as it appears in myth.  He writes, “myth hides nothing and flaunts nothing: it distorts; myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.”  Similarly, these billboards clearly intend to question global warming, and to associate this view with various serial killers, dictators, and cult leaders.  Nothing is hidden here.  The mythic component, however, operates at a higher order: It is the underlying assumption, as Barthes suggests, which inflects the meaning of the billboard for the passerby.

By including Kaczynski, the billboard presents global warming as pathological rather than political.  At least in American popular discourse, his actions represent those of a sick and demented mind, rather than a politically motivated individual (despite the vast amount of evidence that the “Unabomber” saw himself as utterly political).  By extension, then, anyone who subscribes to the idea of man-made climate change must also be experiencing some form of mental illness.

Curiously, in his critique of the billboard campaign, Andrew Sullivan merely inverts the main characters, reproducing the same myth.  After carefully pointing out how the Heartland Foundation has rendered “the left” as some monolithic bloc of mentally deranged psychopaths for believing in global warming, Sullivan concludes: “Large sections of the American right are now close to insane as well as depraved.  And there is no Buckley to reign them in.  Just countless Jonah Golbergs seeking to cash in.” Here, he reduces the conservative audience towards whom these billboards are aimed to a mob of mentally deranged subjects.

What, then, does this analysis of political squabbling accomplish? Well, employing Barthes’ lens exposes contemporary American politics as pathological, even bipolar.  Each side deploys the language of pathology in order to construct an “other” that is neither political nor rational (perhaps not even human), but ill or evil.  This strategy insulates one’s position from critique, as it simultaneously depoliticizes the issue (in this case global warming).  “Something must be wrong with those people,” we say.

Taking the attitude that “you can’t reason with a crazy person,” however, seems troubling to me, as I look out on a world filled with violence, suffering, and increasingly concentrated undemocratic power in the form of transnational corporations. Democracy, I was always taught, requires that we accord human dignity to others, even those with whom we disagree politically.  It demands that we take our adversaries as thinking individuals; it asks that we assume that they, despite our differences, believe that they have the best interests of society at hand, and finally, it challenges us to engage in reasoned debate with one another to establish the grounds for practical solutions. Contemporary political actors on all sides instead engage in competing forms of myth-making, designed to dehumanize the opposition and depoliticize the issues.

Of course, Barthes might claim that I am merely constructing a myth of my own, one that naturalizes all humans as reasonable and well-intentioned.  But as he states, “the best weapon against myth is perhaps to mythify it in its turn, and to produce an artificial myth: and this reconstituted myth will in fact be a mythology.”

The idea of arranging marriages seems like an exotic thing even for modern Indians who see their relationship problems as very different from those of their parents’. India has changed considerably over the past few decades. Indian singles who have grown up this side of 1990 did so  in a decade of rapid economic and infrastructural development, with professional opportunities for men and women alike due  primarily to the growth of IT. From this milieu have emerged young men and women with hopes of selecting their own partners or “settling down,” and trying to rationalize their personal expectations with what the larger culture expects.

Kamna Mittal and her husband recently shared their experience of creating new, 21^st century, options for arranged-marriage practices. Combining both parents’ and children’s wishes, Mittal offers “social mixers” as informal gatherings. While this may seem novel, it suggests continuities with some traditional Indian practice, as the arranging of marriages (traditionally understood as a communal, rather than an individual, responsibility) frequently occurred in informal ways, among “aunties” who would provide contacts from extensive kinship networks. By combining speed-dating with traditional expectations, the Mittals hope to attract more Indian-American singles who are perhaps uncertain as to how, when, and where, they might mingle with other Indian-American singles given their often times exceptionally busy lifestyles

The Mittals hope to make the marriage selection process “safer” for all of those parties who may be involved in arranging a big Indian wedding and required to do so in a contemporary American context, in large part by delimiting the parameters of who gets to participate in the mixer. The parents may call it “safe” because they would approve of the potential mates being Indian at least if not Hindu. This is interesting since speed-dating is usually associated with the thrill of meeting an unlikely match from a very diverse pool of people.

India-American parents and children are willing to forgo traditional caste-based considerations and opt for broader criteria such as “being Hindu” and/or “being of Indian-origin.” As we might expect, the ambiguities associated with the categories “Hindu” and “Indian” are imported into this new social practice. As one matchmaker queries, if a woman says she wants to marry a Hindu,  does that mean  someone who goes to temple each week, someone who is simply “being spiritual,” or something else entirely? Of course, as in much Indian discourse, heterosexuality is implied among other normative standards that are implicitly shared. And while it isn’t considered “prejudiced” to avoid potential mates from other religious backgrounds, it is considered unseemly to do so based on physical appearance. Such norms, though, are more difficult to maintain in American contexts, with so many dating websites and even Indian arranged marriage web portals where one may customize one’s “search” for a soul mate according to caste, dietary habits, and physical preferences.

Of course, in the non-Indian, American gaze explicit talk of “arranging marriages” may be perceived as a bizarre social practice. Still, arranging may not be so far removed from what virtually all American young adults experiences. When young people meet and are attracted to each other, each evaluates the other on all sorts of grounds. If things become serious, family and friends are likely consulted, who in turn bring with them considerations that reach beyond concerns of the moment, e.g., bank balances and economic potential, education, comportment, the perceived quality of friends and family, cleanliness, to name just a few.

Thus, arranged marriages may render the deliberative aspects of this complex social practice more explicitly than do contemporary dating rituals. If, however, we probed either set of cultural practices, considering the heavy-handed roles that nature and social conditioning play, we may wonder whether, in coming to end up with our soul mates, “choice” plays any role at all.

Yesterday I was walking down the hall past the two main computer labs at my college. One lab is open to all students; the second is set aside for graphic design majors. When I walked by I noted that the main lab was almost entirely full with minority students—primarily African-American students and students who probably identify as Puerto Rican or Dominican. By contrast, the graphics design lab, full of brand new and expensive Apple computers, was almost entirely empty: there was only one white student in it.

It got me wondering: what social structures could account for this disparity?

Possibilities that came to mind (which might be completely wrong—I’m just brainstorming here):

1. On average minority students are less likely to come from wealthy families and are therefore less likely to have their own computers in their dorm rooms.
2. White students are more likely to be drawn to graphic design than minorities, because—growing up with more wealth (again, on average)—they are more likely to arrive at college “comfortable” with advanced computer applications.

Possible effects:

1. White students disproportionately benefit from the more expensive and nicer computers in the graphic design computer lab.
2. Minority students are disadvantaged because they are more likely to have to wait to use a computer—and one that is probably considerably older than the ones in the design lab.

Whatever the reason, it’s unlikely that random chance sufficiently explains why the computer labs are racially divided in this manner—and it seems that this phenomenon deserves our attention. Where is your campus racially divided?

Arjun Appadurai’s book, Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (2006), albeit a small physical text (153 pages including the index), castes a colossal shadow over the landscape of multidisciplinary discourse on globalization and violence.  Appadurai, a social anthropologist, plants his analysis of communal violence in fecund ground when he repeats reporter Philip Gourevitch’s brutal aphorism about genocide in Rwanda; that “genocide, after all, is an exercise in community building” (7). In this, Appadurai focuses his attention on the social productivity of violence and the “we/they” dialectic of which genocide is but one possible outcome. However, Appadurai’s self-made Sisyphean task is to unravel what seems to be a paradox… the existence of violence against minorities in self-proclaimed liberal societies which have embraced the values of human rights. While violence against minorities is hardly a new phenomenon, Appapurdai claims that this genocidal violence and rage against minorities, previously primarily associated with totalitarian regimes and rogue nation-states (Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Russia, etc.), has manifested itself in unlikely territory, bastions of liberal democracy. The author links this rage with a number of factors: globalization and the economic anxiety it creates as well as the unease regarding minorities and their (special) interests (financial, religious, ethnic, and political allegiances to outside communities).

Appadurai, inverting Samuel Huntington’s controversial summation that terrorism is born from the clash of civilizations, states that terrorism is rather a product of a civilization of clashes. By this, the author means that the nation-state (as a structure) is losing its monopoly on war. To Appadurai, the ‘new game’ is not primarily dictated by differences among civilizations (the East vs. West formula) but is rather due to uncertainty generated by two kinds of political systems (vertebrate vs. cellular). A vertebrate system is based upon “the large and growing body of protocols, institutions, treaties, and agreements that seek to ensure that all nations operate on symmetrical principles in relation to their conduct with one another, whatever their hierarchies in power or wealth” (25). The modern system of nation-states embodies many of these characteristics. A cellular system, on the other hand, is global in scope and thereby not as limited by national regulation, is heavily dependent on the rapid transfer of money and information electronically, and is remarkably portable. The global capitalist model on which the world increasing operates reflects the cooperation, as well as the disjunction, between these two kinds of systems. The seismic shifts dictating this ‘civilization of clashes’ demands the exigent attention of all disciplines… but this text may best be utilized by a well-educated populous unnerved by recent global strife and academics in the social sciences whose research demands critical reflection on group dynamics and the production of ‘identities’ and communities via various discursive practices and the ideology of enumeration (the belief that one can ultimately measure and objectively categorize people based on seemingly significant demographics).

The ‘newness’ which Appadurai ascribes to globalization is due to the invasive nature of financial speculation, the information revolution in which regulatory bodies are many steps behind the technological industries they are meant to regulate, and the new forms of wealth generated by the two aforementioned characteristics. This ‘newness’ of globalization means there is no solid precedent for this transformation and this creates instability in world markets.  All three aspects which generate this uncertainty also widen the gap between the rich and the poor. Terrorism, the epitome of a cellular system, is fueled by not only the disparate divide between rich and poor but is often (ironically) funded and sustained via a global capitalistic structure… a structure it seems desperate to disrupt.

Appadurai defines terrorism as “the rightful name of any effort to replace peace with violence as the guaranteed anchor of everyday life” and he claims that terrorism is an “epistemological assault on us all” because it challenges our assumptions about social order, the role and abilities of the nation-state, and generally blurs our categories (military/civilian, war/peace, etc.)(31-33). In reaction to these radical tectonic shifts in economic, political, and ideological systems, nation-states may shift their own anxieties about being marginalized in an increasingly global society onto their own minorities. Minorities, in such cases, become metaphors… physical reminders of failed national projects and while globalization cannot be eradicated… symbols of globalization, such as minorities, can be (43-44). Building upon the elementary sociological theory of the “creation of collective others,” Appadurai extends the “we/they” dialectic further and describes what he calls predatory identities. Predatory identities are those “whose social construction and mobilization require the extinction of other, proximate social categories, defined as threats to the very existence of some group, defined as we” (51).

Who’s afraid of a minority group? Appadurai puzzles out this question by stating that since “minorities and majorities are recent historical inventions,” tied up with ideas about the nation-state, then the discourses of modern politics hinge upon categorization and demographic construction (49). Modern nationalism often “provides the basis for the emergence of predatory identities” and “predatory identities are almost always majoritarian identities” (based on “claims about, and on the behalf of a threatened majority”) (52). So under what circumstances do identities ‘turn’ predatory? They do not morph simply by being invoked by a large group but rather when a group strives to “close the gap between the majority and the purity of the national whole” (reacting to what is described as ‘the anxiety of incompleteness’) (52). Predatory identities thrive in the gap between the “the sense of numerical majority and the fantasy of natural purity and wholeness” (53). The minority’s mere existence represents an obstacle to ‘total purity’… this makes the minority a site of social rage. This rage and the anxiety generated by economic, ideological, and political uncertainty creates a social context more likely to result in genocide.

The number one is a critical number in the liberal social imagination because it represents the individual. Even large groups are seen in liberal thought as “aggregations of individuals” (“infinite combinations of the number one”) (60-61). Historically, liberal thought has been suspicious of democracy’s potential to produce the “political legitimacy of large numbers” (the dreaded masses) (61). Appadurai cites Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses description of the masses as collections of individuals who have lost “the rationalities embedded in the individual,” as the offspring of fascism and totalitarianism and as a terrifying phantasm conjured up by outside forces. So if liberal thought sacralizes the image of the individual and fears the idea of masses… where does the fear of small numbers emerge?

Small numbers have historically been associated with elites and tyrannies (small groups which horde resources and privileges). As Appaduria aptly states, “small numbers are also a worry because they raise the specter of conspiracy, of the cell, the spy, the traitor, the dissident, or the revolutionary” (62). Appadurai’s case studies are primarily focused in India, Iraq, Nazi Germany, Rwanda, and Africa… but the implications of his theories can be applied globally (given the proper contextualization). The image of the suicide bomber is the site of all of the above mentioned anxieties. The image itself is a perversion of the martyr archetype, so prevalent in the religious landscapes of Christianity and Islam (and I would include Judaism in this list as well). The image blurs the boundaries between body and weapon. The antithesis of the “liberal individual acting in her own interest,” the suicide bomber, is the individual become the mass (the crazed mob incarnate in the flesh of the individual) (78).

Terror, as method, Appadurai describes as a “kind of metastasis of war, war without spatial of temporal bounds” which “opens the possibility that anyone may be a soldier in disguise, a sleeper among us, waiting to strike at the heart of our social slumber” (92). This text illustrates for me why some portion of the American population’s rhetoric against President Obama is not primarily based on his political record or public identity but rather on the political rhetoric claiming he is deceptive (a ‘secret’ Muslim), a criminal (foreign born and posing as an American citizen), and working as an agent for his ‘secret’ religious identity (Islam). In the eyes of these Americans, President Obama is the paramount terrorist… he is the single most important individual in the Western world (the president), at the same time he represents an amalgamation of minorities and ‘special interests’, and could, at any moment, be ‘activated’ by the outside powers which, ultimately, control him.

This issue includes a sample of the book notes that have been appearing here on the Bulletin’s blog. We invite those interested in contributing to the BookNotes to contact the editors. And this issue includes a new feature of the Bulletin, the “Field Notes” – which will include announcements, call for papers, etc. that are of interest to the discipline of religious studies. We encourage readers to send us such announcements for inclusion in this new section as well as for posting here on the blog.

Bulletin for the Study of Religion Volume 41, Number 2 – April 2012

Editorial: New Challenges, New Directions, by Philip L. Tite

“The Stars Down to Earth”: Why Educated Women in the Western World Use Astrology, by Kirstine Munk

Sexual Liberality as Othering: The Case of Islam in Late Antiquity and Modernity, by Thomas Hoffmann

Romania’s Saving Angels: “New Men,” Orthodoxy, and Blood Mysticism in the Legionary Movement, by Cecilie Endresen

Christus Virgo: Representations of Christ as a Virgin in Early Christianity and Late Antiquity, by Sissel Undheim

Divinity Manifest in a Female Body: Guglielma of Milan as the Holy Spirit, Female Deity, and Female Leadership in the Later Middle Ages, by Britt Istoft

Online: SORAAAD Book Notes with the Bulletin

Field Notes: News and Announcements in the Discipline

Announcement: Reed M. N. Weep Retirement

It seems that, no matter how insistently I stress to my students in my “Introduction to the World Religions” course that each religious tradition that we cover exhibits tremendous diversity both synchronically and diachronically, I am always beset with a stack of blue books whose authors have failed to recognize this fundamental point. In struggling to describe what Christians do or what Buddhists believe, my students consistently end up making untrue generalizations that make me profoundly uneasy. However, the source of my angst comes less from their penchant for pigeonholing, than from the fact that they are simply reproducing what they heard in lecture or read in the textbook. To adapt James Loewen’s memorable phrase, these are “lies their teacher told them.”

But although specialists in any particular tradition may be able to impress the tremendous internal diversity of Christian rituals or Buddhist doctrines upon their students over the course of a semester, how nuanced of an approach is possible in teaching a survey class based on a pluralistic discourse that presupposes clear distinctions between natural kinds? This is my denomination blues, quite opposed to Washington Phillips’ call in Jesus’ name, though we both decry the production of “educated fools”. My blues come from wondering how to communicate to our students, and to the public more broadly, the insights of the last two or three decades of scholarship: that religions are not natural categories but discursive ones that are mobilized strategically; that traditions are invented, communities imagined, both by insiders and outsiders.

Tomoko Masuzawa’s celebrated The Invention of World Religions (2005) provides a genealogy for the construction of the “world religions” discourse propagated in our introductory courses. This discourse presents a list of roughly ten to twelve religions, each linked to ethnic and geographical markers, which are concretized in the map that has become a standard feature in world religions’ textbook. “As a rule,” she writes, the map admits to “situations of ‘significant overlap,’ that is, the situations of coexistence or intermixture of traditions that are in principle—so it is implied—distinct.

“In this respect,” she writes, “East Asia traditionally, and North America increasingly, represent   especially challenging situations for visual representation, being regions known for a greater degree of coexistence, admixture, and even syncretism. Yet the difficulty of representation may be more than a matter of mixed population or multiple affiliations. For, in some localities, being religious—or to put it more concretely, practicing or engaging in what has been deemed ‘religious’—may be related to the question of personal and group identity in a way altogether different from the one usually assumed. In some cases, for that matter, religion and identity may not relate at all.” (5-6)

Masuzawa’s words speak to broad populations, from the majority of Japanese who identify as “nonreligious” but offer prayers and buy amulets at both Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines, to the “spiritual, but not religious” in the U.S. and Canada who believe in angels and non-medical healing, to the practitioners of “tribal,” “indigenous,” or “primal” religions (to use three common phrases from contemporary world religion textbooks, Masuzawa, 43). Where do they fit into the pluralistic model? Moreover, what of the diasporic and transnational subjects who frustrate the neat distinctions of such maps?

My denomination blues were also taken up in an article in the current issue of Teaching Theology and Religion, in which Reid Locklin, Tracy Tiemeier, and Johann Vento present ways of “Teaching World Religions without Teaching ‘World Religions’”. While their specific approaches are specifically tailored for Christian theology programs, their goals of promoting “student engagement with the questions and empirical study of a plurality of religious traditions without, insofar as possible, engaging in the rhetoric of pluralism or the reification of the category religion” (160) is a sensible goal for those considering how to improve their approach to the introductory course in religious studies departments as well.

In preparing my students for the essay question on their final exam, which asked them to compare and contrast three religions—one “Western,” one “Indic,” and one “East Asian”—they were stunned when I confirmed in tutorial that Sikhism and Mahayana Buddhism frustrated this neat tripartite division. My advice to them on this issue was that they could perhaps use one of these religions in their introduction or conclusion of the essay, to demonstrate the artifice of matching religious families to territories by considering cases of “in betweenness”. In marking their papers, I have to say, I was unsurprised that none of them made the move of deconstructing the validity of the question itself.

To illustrate the gap between so-called “belief” and behavior, I taught J.Z. Smith’s essay “The Bare Facts of Ritual” this semester (see Imagining Religion, University of Chicago Press 1982). The essay is about paleo-Siberian bear hunters who claim to “believe” that the “animal freely offers itself to the hunter’s weapon” (59), that the bears throw themselves upon the hunters’ spears and knives.

Smith asks, are we as scholars to believe this? One can guess that hunters who sat around waiting on a bear to impale itself on their spears might have to wait a long time. In fact, such hunters more likely would be killed by any bears they come across. ”[N]ot only ought we not to believe many of the elements in the description of the hunt as usually presented,” Smith writes, “but we ought not to believe that the hunters, from whom these descriptions were collected, believe it either” (61).

Smith argues that they might report the hunts this way because that is how the hunt ought to be performed. However—if they are to eat—they have to know that the animal actually has to be hunted out and killed against its will. Thus, the ritual reporting “provides the means for demonstrating we know what ought to have been done, what ought to have taken place” (63).

My students, of course, objected: if they don’t really believe it why would they say it?! My co-teacher came up with the perfect modern point of comparison: high school athletes ritually shake hands with the members of the opposite team at the end of a game, in an “expression” of mutual respect, while saying things like “good game.” And, they perform this ritual even when they have no respect for the other team and even when it was not, in fact, a good game.

Why? Because, as Smith points out, in some cases ritual “provides the means for demonstrating we know what ought to have been done, what ought to have taken place.” The ritual need not be an “expression” of an interior “belief.” And, in fact, the idea that the ritual expresses an inner belief might be wrong or even, in the case of the hunters, dead wrong.

Jonathan Haidt’s, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, (2012) offers is a wide-ranging study that blends elements of philosophy and politics, with arguments from his own field of moral, cultural, and evolutionary psychology. In this sense, the book is perhaps best classified as a fusion of primary research in an area that he is well versed-in and well-respected, spiced with a more popular appeal to political sensibilities in the contemporary US, which includes the provocative thesis that conservatives are equipped with a broader “moral matrix” than liberals.

Haidt begins by rejecting the rationalist notion of the mind as a “blank slate” that is capable of being nurtured in the ways of reason. He argues that this common fallacy ignores the ways in which human beings are guided by their intuitions (emotions), and thus, for the most part, use their reasoning skills as post-hoc constructions in the service of justifying group-related moral preferences, be they liberal, conservative or libertarian. (xvi) Motivated in part to promote civility amongst people from diverse backgrounds, he argues that promoting good behavior is not simply a matter of producing good thinking, as with rationalism, but requires an understanding of social intuitionism, the idea that moral judgments are largely guided by innate impulses like disgust, shame and disrespect. (22) Rejecting the popular evolutionary paradigm that holds humans to be essentially
selfish primates (e.g., Dawkins’ “selfish genes”), Haidt follows the likes of E. O. Wilson in arguing that morality is a group-related adaptation (199), which, among other things, has enabled the expansion of “parochial love” beyond kinship ties towards creating bonds with
those who share enough in common with one another (e.g., a shared sense of fate) and are willing to punish free riders who deviated too much from the fold. (245) Enter politics.

Haidt links Bentham’s utilitarianism with Durkheim’s emphasis on the power of group-belonging as a counter-weight to the Western, rational, liberal focus on the foundations of care and fairness. Drawing on his own Moral Foundations Theory, he argues that educated liberals (i.e., his readers) need to first understand and then find ways to speak to those other Moral Foundations such as loyalty, authority, sanctity, and liberty/oppression that conservatives have long valorized and been able to tap-into when it comes to winning people over to their side. Enter religion.

Haidt sides with the likes of Atran and Heinrich, among others, who see religions less as parasitic memes (e.g., Dennett and Dawkins) and more as cultural innovations in their ability to bind groups together and make them more cooperative. (255) Accordingly, Haidt seeks to move away from models of religion that focus on belief (250), and move toward ones that account for the interplay between belonging, believing and doing, where social groups and practices are seen the driving force. (251)

As there is much to commended and critique in this book, I’ll limit myself to two points for each. On the critical side: Haidt hypostatizes such categories as “liberal” and “conservative”
without accounting for their social construction and contingent nature in relation to particular cultures/histories. Among other things, the critical scholar might ask, what is being privileged by his exclusion of such positions as the varieties of anarchism, Marxism, or even fascism and explore whether his psychological theory is compromised by his argument in favor of a more tolerant version of the (American) status quo?

Similarly, when talking about religion, Haidt does not acknowledge the history of the term, which leads to some familiar problems, such as the privileging of certain traditionalist understandings of sacredness (104), and the collapsing of religion into morality and
vice versa, without attempting to explain how it may be different from
other social formations.

On the positive side: Haidt offers a wide-ranging look at recent innovations and
controversies in the fields of moral, cultural and evolutionary psychology, including discussions on neuroscience, empathy and group-related adaptation and presents them in relation to questions of politics and religion.

The book marks an innovation/evolution of sorts from cruder popular
treatments of religion as with the New Atheists, by broadening the
analysis from “belief” to “social facts” (see footnotes 11, p.336) and
attempts to create bridges between a variety of fields, including
cognitive and evolutionary psychology with sociology and anthropology.
As a part of a broader group of influential public intellectuals
interested in religion, Haidt’s book also represents an important aspect of “data” when it comes to discourses about religion in the public sphere that scholars would be foolish to
ignore.

How do I connect with the ancient world by performing in a modern world a play written many centuries ago? This past Friday, I performed the ancient playwright Bhāsa’s Karnabhāram, or ”Karna’s Burden.”  Written well before the 5^th Century, this play is still performed in some Southern Indian cities, and was performed most recently right here in America, by the 2^nd year Sanskrit class of Emory University.  Taken out of its cultural context, an ancient performance brought to light several layers of meaning.  The script was the same, the characters and their lines the same, the circumstances however were quite different, and the people even more so.

Several important characters from the epic  Mahabharata emblematize many ethical issues that compete for relevance with a texts’ audience. For example, Arjuna and Krishna’s discourse in the Bhagavad Gita is popularly taken out of the epic and read alone for lessons on dharma.  So, by writing a play on a particular character, Bhāsa brought to the forefront a hero otherwise buried under the shifting sands of the epic’s text and its many appropriations.  His play elaborated on Karna, a tragic hero figure from the Mahabharata, the oldest Pāndava, abandoned by his young mother, and raised by charioteers. Unaware of his true role as a warrior, he loyally serves the Kurus in their battle against their Pāndava cousins, knowing his own brothers are on the other side.

In this play Karna’s benevolent character is epitomized.  Indra, the king of gods, appears as a wandering brahmin, demanding alms and showering praises upon Karna.  But Indra, by the command of the gods, deceives Karna and thus ensures his defeat in the upcoming battle.  Erudite and virtuous, Karna recognizes his fate, and makes the ultimate offering of his most cherished possessions – the armor and earrings born with his body to protect him – while still hungering to wage war against the Pāndavas.  Why does Karna make the ultimate sacrifice when he knows it may spell his defeat?

Professor Elliott McCarter introduced the play with these words, “like so much great literature in Sanskrit, Bhāsa’s play expands a singular moment and provides us with a vision of, in the words of William Blake, “the whole world in a grain of sand.”  This weekend’s Karnabhāram symbolized more simply the reiteration of the play itself.  Performing such an ancient character with a troubled history and a tragic tale, I struggled to give Karna a voice, to an audience from a different time period, perhaps unfamiliar with Sanskrit poetic and dramatic conventions or with the concerns of Bhāsa’s era.  Whether the plot had relevance to us today is hardly of importance, but what is significant is what the doing did for the performers as well as the audience.

Performing the play meant something special to us.  As Emory threatens to downsize its’ Middle East and South Asian Studies (MESAS) department cutting the Sanskrit language program, this play conveyed a special burden.  Just like Karna, we too courageously went forth into our performance, hoping our skills would display the importance of our language program and what it means for us as students from diverse backgrounds.  As Karna contested his intentions within a larger text, we too competed for attention from an audience who came to support the Hindi and Persian classes.

To the audience, our voices seemed to express an unfamiliar language but perhaps with relatable concerns.  Our loud voices boomed through the student center, displaying our enthusiasm for a laborious, highly grammatical Sanskrit language.  Our audience may not have connected with Karna’s burden, but they witnessed an ancient performance, rendered by a modern American class, riddled with institutional concerns.  We didn’t offer the ultimate alms as Karna did, but we did share the gift of communicating our enthusiasm for the fight to keep Sanskrit alive.

Sanskrit may be dead according to the Emory decision makers, but indeed it was never a dead language.  Veiled by cumbersome linguistic compounds and embellished with Bhāsa’s poetic imagination, this performance held a powerful significance to us as much as it did to its ancient performers.  The language, once spoken, communicated more than its grammatical meanings. Perhaps the audience didn’t care much for Karna’s burden, but they may have been aware of our burden.  If they didn’t know of either they came together for other reasons and each person took away more than we intended to convey.

In the study of indigenous religions, one of the issues a scholar faces is the gap between self-representation and scholarly classification, particularly with regard to the concept of ‘religion’. So how does the scholar of religion approach this issue? Shamanism is an interesting example, one which illustrates this problem, as this term was also coined by scholars, derived from one group in Siberia and applied cross-culturally to others, which then influenced diverse peoples to adopt the term when describing their traditions to outsiders, often in distinction to what is regarded as ‘religion’.

‘Shaman’, from šamān, a specialist among the Evenki (Tungus), became the prototype, the model, on which to judge similar roles in other societies. Mircea Eliade’s Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy was published in English in 1964, and it has been difficult to get away from his conception of shamanism ever since. He employs a comparative approach that draws examples from a wide range of cultures. Since then, ‘shaman’ has been used as a ‘catch-all’ designation for a variety of specialists among indigenous communities from Siberia to South America. For Eliade, shamanism is a ‘technique’ rather than a religion per se, emphasizing its universality as a set of practices found in many traditions.

Similarly, Merete Demant Jakobsen defines shamanism as ‘a flexible configuration of behavior patterns, including magical flight, trance and, first and foremost, mastery of spirits’ (Shamanism: Traditional and Contemporary Approaches to the Mastery of Spirits, Oxford; New York: Berghahn Books, 1999, x). She cites Ake Hultkranz, who also states that shamanism is not a religion in its own right. Jakobsen herself categorizes shamanism as a ‘spirituality’ (Jakobsen 1999, viii-ix).

In contrast, Piers Vitebsky sees ‘shamanism as a religion, or rather a name given to a collection of religions’ (‘Shamanism, in Graham Harvey, ed. Indigenous Religions: A Companion, New York; London: Cassell, 2000, 55). Here he also describes shamanism as ‘the world’s oldest religion’, which implies that indigenous traditions are ‘primal’ or foundational, as well as ‘primitive’. That aside, scholars are caught between employing the term ‘shamanism’ as it is understood by the practitioner, influenced by popular and scholarly constructions, and the need to deconstruct it.

In the case of the Cofán of Ecuador, ‘shamanism’ is a term they are comfortable employing when speaking to outsiders about their traditions. According to one Cofán leader, Fidel Aguinda (pc), communication is a three-way process with the shaman (na’su) acting as the link. The shaman communicates with the ‘hidden’ world while the leaders communicate with the external world, and both report to each other about what is going on in their respective realms. To the question about whether shamanism is a religion, Aguinda insists that ‘it is not a religion’ and that he has no religion, because, to him, Catholicism is ‘religion’ while shamanism is ‘tradition’.

This reluctance on the part of indigenous peoples to equate their traditions with ‘religion’ stems from its association with missionary activity. Anthropologists have generally been complicit in this by using a variety of other labels – ‘life-way’, ‘tradition’, ‘culture’ and, when trying to be specific, ‘ritual’ – rather than ‘religion’ – supporting the indigenous view that what they are doing is not religion. We could point out, of course, that they are assuming a Protestant Christian model of ‘religion’, which does not match indigenous traditions. Also, their rejection of ‘religion’ is not surprising bearing in mind they were at first told they had no religion due to the absence of churches and scriptures, an argument employed to justify colonization.

Religion is not a universal concept; it is just as historically contingent as any other concept. According to Timothy Fitzgerald, ‘“Religion”, rather than being a kind of neutral category which can be created by the scholar for his or her own purposes, is laden with cultural and ideological assumptions and interests’ (Religion and the Secular: Historical and Colonial Formations. London: Equinox, 2007, 40). If we describe an indigenous tradition as ‘religion’, we are likely imposing a category onto those who are intentionally rejecting it and its colonial associations. It may be useful instead to employ the classifications used by practitioners to avoid imposing categories where they are not wanted, but, even so, emic or insider constructions would need to be defined and understood cross-culturally, thereby becoming etic. As Russell McCutcheon noted, there is no emic perspective until it is explained to or constructed by an outsider (Studying Religion: An Introduction. London: Equinox, 2007, 51). The reverse is also true – that etic or outsider constructions derive from emic ones and therefore an etic construction could well be privileging one particular emic perspective – that of the western European. ‘Religion’ is one emic term among many that are employed etically, that is, cross-culturally. Done unconsciously, imposing one culturally-derived category onto another can be regarded as a form of cultural imperialism.

How does one avoid this? One could just acknowledge the differences in categorization, or another approach would be to employ discourse analysis to determine how terms are understood and employed or rejected. Whether one takes Tylor’s definition of religion as belief in spiritual beings or a Durkheimian one that sees it as relating to things set apart – sacred things – definitions of religion tell us more about the definer and their assumptions than it does about ‘religion’. One reason why religion is hard to define is that religion is not a ‘thing’; it is not something out there in distinction to other things. So, religion becomes something voluntary, of which one can opt in or out. Jonathan Z Smith indicates that religion should be treated instead as a linguistic, conceptual tool, as definitions made by those employing the term are ‘intimately linked to their interests’ (McCutcheon 2007, 68).

This is illustrated by the case of the Druid Network in England, who went against the trend by registering as a charity for the advancement of religion when in general Druids do not regard what they are doing as ‘religious’. The Charity Commission for England and Wales (http://www.charity-commission.gov.uk/Library/about_us/druiddec.pdf ) agreed initially with the general view until the Druid Network convinced them that ‘nature’ was a form of deity and that respect for nature was a form of worship (to simplify the complex negotiation between the two parties). Daily Mail columnist, Melanie Philips (‘Druids as an official religion? Stones of Praise here we come,’ 2010), responded to the decision by saying it ‘is an attack upon the very concept of religion itself.’ She stated that ‘Druidry is simply not a religion’, though admitting that ‘religion is notoriously difficult to define. But true religions surely rest on an established structure of traditions, beliefs, literature and laws. Above all, they share a belief in a supernatural deity (or more than one) that governs the universe.’

Public recognition as a religion, according to Druid Network sources, legitimates Druidry and gives them acceptance and validity in society. Perhaps other groups will move away from the ‘we’re spiritual not religious’ and say, ‘yes, we’re a bona fide religion and therefore should be taught in schools’. However, as scholars, we need not take sides in the debate about whether one tradition or another is a religion or not, but we can try to understand the assumptions, interests and intentions of those who employ or reject the term.

Discussing the enforcement of shariah in Aceh, Indonesia, a student (at my home institution, the University of Alabama) asked how police would know if the rule-breaker was Muslim, since some claimed the law only applied to Muslims. My impromptu explanation that the officer probably relied on the alleged offender’s name generated puzzled looks. (Later research suggests that identification cards in parts of Indonesia designate the holder’s religion.) In response to their confused looks, I turned to South Asia, where surnames can signify a person’s ethnicity, social status, and religious heritage. Most Patels, for example, have an upper caste Gujarati heritage and claim a Hindu ancestry, while a Varghese typically is an upper caste Christian from Kerala.

Only later did I ponder the assumptions behind my students’ surprise. While many students identify with the religion of their parents and grandparents, they assume that religious identification is about individual choice and assent to particular propositions, not one’s heritage. Religious identification in India, however, has traditionally operated based on one’s familial heritage. The way one’s family conducts life cycle rituals can be more important for self-identification than individual beliefs or other practices.

For example, in my first trip to India, the owner of the guest house where I stayed graciously allowed me to observe her evening rituals, surrounded by images of different deities. She also regularly visited a Hanuman temple and an Arya Samaj temple, among others. Although the Arya Samaj tenets rejected traditional temples and devotion before images of deities, she still identified as an Arya Samaji because she and her family conducted their weddings and funerals according to Arya Samaj rites.

So, I should add the question of names as another way to illustrate the cultural assumptions about religion and identity that we often hold.