|
Rel
201: Theories and methods in
religious studies Understanding homo religious? Fall 2020 |
K.E. Brashier, ETC 203 Online
office hours: W 9-10 a.m., 12.10-1 p.m.; F 9-10 a.m. or
by appointment (with link atop our Moodle page). |
Our traditions are
always alive among us,
even when we are
not dancing;
But we work only
that we may dance.
– Uito cannibals (cited by Eliade)
Welcome
to Religion 201, a course not so much focused on particular
religions as on the lenses through which we view religions. In our
exploration of how the field developed, we’ll read the
20th and 21st century “greats,” each with their own
insight as to what religion is and does, why all cultures have it and how we
ought to study it. Some of these authors are outsiders, explaining away
religious experience as a sociological, psychological, economic or (most
recently) physiological phenomenon. Others are insiders, defending spiritual
experience as a natural expression of the “really real.” Still others lament that the hunt for homo religiosus
is doomed because the outsiders cannot truly understand religious experience
and the insiders are biased, each being the protagonists of unrelated (and
unrelatable) stories. And then there are those who say “religion” really isn’t an independent category of anything – it’s not sui generis – and we shouldn’t separate
off such a discourse. Regardless, the hunt is on, and we will join it.
Religion 201 is one of the heaviest
reading courses you will experience because we will be closely reading the most
influential arguments of these greats in their own words. I’ll
give you plenty of introductory and contextual frames, and I’ll endeavor to
provide my own (limited) understanding of their theories while also weaving
each into a bigger tapestry of an ever-evolving “religious studies.” Please
keep up with the readings, videos and audios because
the conferences can be an engaging, thought-provoking experience. And they
usually tend to be lively because everyone has an opinion when it comes to
religion.
I. Objectives and outcomes
(While I support crystallizing our goals and objectives, I hope we don’t think of them as purchased commodities in the form of “The teacher sells X to the recipient student.” That downplays the student’s roll into being a consumer who eats the meal and pays the bill. I think education – and Reed education in particular – is about partners in search of knowledge, one guiding the hardworking other but at the same time benefiting from that hardworking other in a shared goal of learning. You teach me your ideas; you help me articulate my own. I don’t want you just in the dining room; I want you in the kitchen.)
Course objectives
A. As one of my several superiors in the department wrote of religious studies, “To remember what we have to say we study our own genealogy, the thought of our predecessors, rethinking with them the steps that arrived at us.”[1] I want you to learn how the field of religious studies historically evolved by directly reading its biggest contributors. But how do we objectively measure “biggest” here? One way is to simply note whether their arguments soon became extinct or instead survived over time. While some of their arguments are indeed dated, others still enjoy engagement both within and beyond our discipline. For examples,
1. Appearing several times on our syllabus, Catherine Bell may criticize many of the field’s greats, but she’ll also end one of her books highly praising Durkheim for capturing “the truth of ritually constructed power relations.”
2. Jerrold Seigel concludes his 700-page The idea of the self by praising Max Weber for understanding how social and economic considerations bias our conceptions and erase the possibility of a purely neutral observer.
3. Almost any modern study on mysticism still begins with William James’ four characteristics that qualify it.
And so, because many of their ideas persist, we’ll be reading Durkheim, Weber and James,[2] but at the same time, we now justifiably reject other conclusions they reached and naturally question whether their personal biases shaped their conclusions. In sum, this course will teach you the field’s history so that you can better understand what currently persists and what’s greatly changed.
B. Because some of their arguments are still “good to think with” today, I want you to be able to apply theories and methods to the religious traditions you yourselves currently study. While this course might best fit under the rubric “history of ideas” – I fully admit that – I want you to think about how their surviving ideas can still help you understand the religions you study via deconstruction, contextualization or using other disciplines to unpack them. (These are the three sections of the syllabus below.) Even if you don’t agree with all their conclusions – and you can’t as they themselves will disagree with one another! – you can challenge yourself to assemble a partial toolbox worthy for the present.
C. Theories are devised through methods … at least “in theory.” (Some theorists such as Durkheim have been charged with developing a theory first and only then selectively finding evidence to back it up.) But in this course – and in most writing about religious theory – “method” sadly becomes theory’s poor cousin. Yet there’s much to be garnered in terms of method when you think about how these theorists reached their conclusions via comparison, direct observation, surveys, anthropological reports, experimental psychology, revealed insight, history/literature searches, hermeneutics and (sometimes) wild conjecture. At the same time, all these methodologies can be disrupted if we observers forget to account for our own situatedness, for our own habits of mind, for our own “deutero-truths.” I want you to learn, not only about the methods each observer employs, but also about the unique setting in which these methods are employed when the worldviews of observer and observed potentially clash.[3]
Learning outcomes
A. Students will be able to abstract, interrogate and evaluate theories on religion.
B. Students will be able to historically and philosophically contextualize each of those theories relative to the rest of the field of religious studies since the late 19th century.
C. Students will demonstrate the ability to apply those theories to religious phenomena.
Two caveats
A. As dispassionate students in religious studies – and not as theologians – we of course form no judgements about those worldviews, either of the people we study or of one another.
B. Regarding the theorists themselves, we’ll clearly observe how this field arose (although not exclusively) out of a setting that’s Euro-American, male, elitist and Protestant. I personally struggle with this because, as we’ll read in one of my own syllabus contributions, China didn’t develop its own religious studies discipline and explicitly borrowed this Western discourse, denying the “Western” label even though I personally think such a discourse makes assumptions inappropriate to Chinese history. And yet I consider this Western bias, not a curse, but a useful challenge for us. We will be forced to think about the assumptions they – and we – make when studying religion.
· For example, what happens when we don’t have the distinct category of (or even a word for) “religion” in the culture we study but we come to that culture with such a category in hand?
· Second, does the Euro-American Protestant background to the field make us assume that experience is what religion is all about?
· Third, I think the Judeo-Christian “creator above creation” may have led to our modern culture-wide mindset that a neutral position-less observer is possible. Does its Judeo-Christian roots lead religious theory to think it can climb up to and look down from an objective panopticon that hovers above any particular people?
Throughout this course, we need to learn how to weigh the theorist’s own cultural situatedness that might affect what the theorist saw. (“Situatedness” is a term I use a lot, having borrowed it from Nancy Jay whom we’ll also read.) That can extend to the race, gender, education and politics of the individual theorists. Is it possible to separate the theory from the theorist, or are they demonstrably a single thing forever?[4] This course is a fruitful opportunity to explore such questions in a thoughtful, respectful and constructive way. In several cases, we’ll directly look at the situatedness of the theorist – including one whose background is quite abhorrent – and ask how much the theorist’s situatedness matters in terms of the theory. Furthermore, you yourself are invited to expand the syllabus beyond the presented tradition because the last part of the syllabus is in your hands as you bring new voices and readings to the table for discussion. And if they help us achieve our three objectives, you might even see those new voices end up on future syllabi, just like your predecessors have contributed to this one.
II. But how do we achieve those objectives and
outcomes … online?
On 6 June 2020, NPR’s Peter Sagal on the news quiz “Wait, wait … don’t tell me” described how education will look this semester because of the pandemic pause:
So school administrators are already thinking about rules for the fall. The LA school district has said that kids won't be eating lunch together in the cafeteria but alone in their seats in the classroom. Congratulations, nerds. You're not the only ones now eating with the teacher…. Every student at recess will be given their own ball and – think of the great games…. you can play when everyone has a ball. Like, everyone stares sadly at their ball…. Can you imagine the humiliation for the kids like me who are going to be picked last for holding their own ball?
It may feel like we’ll all be holding our own ball this semester, and I myself am not very coordinated when it comes to any sports, even just holding things. When it comes to Zoom’s digital medium, my PhD thesis was on Chinese tombstone epigraphy from two thousand years ago, about as far as you can get from Wi-Fi and ethernet. So I’m not an internet-first person (much to the chagrin of my husband who’s an Intel software engineer); I’ve long argued against screen-based learning because less is retained; and I idealize Reed’s conference system of education through in-person contact because I like creating conditions in which students productively think on the spot. But … I’m simply not as young as I once was – I’m retiring at the end of the year – and Reed needs to thin out its interactive campus space to reduce risk. So … here’s your bouncing ball.
The student survey that many of you filled out this past summer gave me lots of useful insights. You generally like synchronous learning on a regular schedule. You want smaller groups and shorter sessions for Zoom discussions. You don’t want group projects. When there are professorial presentations, you like them recorded but not necessarily in long (i.e. boring) segments nor as voice-over PowerPoint presentations without seeing the teacher. You want departments to be relatively consistent in their online structure. You like handouts and outlines to go with the recordings. You want flexibility should the need arise.
I’ll try to do all of that, and in the process, maybe we can even generate a few pluses among the minuses. For example, in previous years I’ve devoted more time to lecturing and daily framing in this course than in any other I teach. That’s because theory is hard, at least for me. But this retreat into the virtual world will encourage me to consign my longer and shorter presentations to streaming videos and audio podcasts, which I’m dubbing “coVideos” and “covAudios” respectively, and I’ll assign those as homework alongside the primary readings. (The coVideos and covAudios won’t be on the syllabus because I’m still in the process of making them all, but they’ll be on our Moodle page which you need to check in your preparations for every conference.) Then we’ll meet three times a week in a regular schedule, but I’ll try to leave the discussion largely in your hands. (Over the past couple decades, I’ve come to realize I’m the worst of sinners when it comes to micromanaging and overpreparation, so this new format will be hard for me but a net gain in discussion time for you.) That’s not to say I won’t partake, but I’ll only guide your discussion along. So when it comes to what the survey recommends, I’ll try to do all that.[5]
“I’ll try to do all of that” … within reason. One thing I’m loathe to do is lower my standards, even if I’m willing to expand them a bit. That is, if you work hard, keep up with the readings and develop a sincere appreciation for learning this material – and any material that theorizes on “why religions exist” can easily engender appreciation – then you’ll get the full experience out of this material as you would in any normal year. Or at least I’ll try to make it so. I might “expand” my standards a bit by subjectively lowering the fail threshold a little if I see you legitimately struggling with the current situation, paying the very real costs of pandemic pressures. But before I lower that threshold, we’ll resort to making accommodations. For example, if it’s simply impossible to fully engage online for various reasons, we’ll find other ways for you to engage, such as through more writing assignments or even exams to ensure you’re up-to-speed and thinking about the material.[6] That is, I’ll be especially accommodating this year to get you to the finish line, but I still want everyone to cross the same finish line.
So …
some things I’ve been working on in this transition to online
teaching:
·
As noted, there will sometimes be either coVideos or covAudios – some long, some short – added to the Moodle
listings for any particular day, the latter usually
accompanied by a handout. I’m moving many of my
in-conference talks to recordings, thereby making them accessible for people
who can’t attend because of pandemic-related matters. Please view/listen to
them before the relevant conference.
·
My hope is to start each conference with a five- to
seven-minute PowerPoint statement so when you arrive at the meeting, you’ll first be greeted by a “slide” with the topic at hand
(if I can figure out how to do that), and that statement will end with a brief
“chat” question to answer relevant to the readings to get the conversation
going. (In truth, your answering the chat question
gives me the chance to leave share-screen and enter the communal view in the
handover – very clunky in Zoom.) And you can take the conversation from there.
·
I’ve
been compiling a set of online discussion protocols that I’d like you to review
– they’re on our Moodle page – and I’d appreciate your own input here.
·
And I’ve also built our own
“fall break” of two sessions in the middle of the syllabus because I realize
that constant focus without some kind of pause will make zombies of all of us.
You can instead work on your mid-term papers if you haven’t
finished them yet.
This
semester, I’m just as much of a student as you are. I’ll try my best, and I’ll need your help.
III. Resources
We
will read the greats (and a couple not-so-greats) without the filters of later
summaries and commentaries, and in my recorded remarks, I’ll
note how each of these texts has been received in the field. The following five
books are required:
·
Bell,
Catherine. Ritual: Perspectives and dimensions (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1997).
·
Eliade,
Mircea. The sacred and the profane (Orlando,
FL: Harcourt Brace Jovanich, 1987 [originally
published in 1957]).
·
Freud,
Sigmund. The future of an illusion
(London: Penguin, 1991 [originally published in 1927]).
·
James,
William. The varieties of religious
experience: A study of human nature (New York: The modern library, 1994
[originally the Gifford lectures of 1901-1902].)
·
Pals,
Daniel L. Introducing religion: Readings
from the classic theorists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
There’s also an extensive collection of
e-materials on our Moodle page. (Always check the Moodle page before
doing a reading because, in addition to any possible coVideos
or covAudios I’ve made to
help you think about the material, I regularly create “reading maps” to foster
active [rather than passive] reading. Reading
maps are my introductions to the readings, any necessary background information and suggested themes you might consider
while reading – note the emphasis on “suggested” because I want you to take the
conference discussions where you want (within reason, of course) and I look
forward to you teaching me. Again: always consult the reading
map before doing the reading.)
But
let’s face facts: This semester will try our patience
in lots of ways, and I’m approaching it with some anxiety. In my opinion, our
biggest pedagogical obstacle may simply be that many of you will be interacting
with me using a single screen. That means unless you have a physical copy of
the books and articles, we can’t easily turn to
specific passages for us to analyze. (Printers are now amazingly cheap, and
physical copies are great for jotting your thoughts, noting your questions and underscoring the author’s key ideas.) I like
close reading and using the primary sources to launch meatier discussions, but
if you can’t access the text and stay
interconnected in the conference at the same time (as we would in in-person
conferencing), our conferences may suffer. This is all leading to a request
that I hope I’ve sufficiently justified: buy the
books and print the articles. I’ll try my
best to be ready with my own favorite passages for screen-sharing and
discussion – I usually have three monitors going on my computer at any time –
but of course I can’t predict what your own favorite discussion-worthy passages
will be. And while the books are on reserves in the library, remember that the
pandemic has basically eliminated that option because of lengthy disinfectant
times. Furthermore, I don’t want you to burn out from
over-engagement with screens. Books will inject variety into your studies.
IV. Requirements
Subject to modification as we adapt to our new circumstances, the course
requirements are currently envisioned as three P’s:
A.
Participation.
Please
note that active participation every day is intrinsic to this course,
especially as this is a smaller course. Please be prepared for each conference,
preparation consisting of both reading and
thinking about the materials. (Your full preparation really helps me out
a lot and makes conference much more pleasant all around, especially if I’m going to invest so much preparation in making all those
recordings outside of conference.) As we get a feel for our group dynamics, I
might schematize that participation in various ways:
1.
Discussion
sparkplugs. I might assign you a particular day to get the conference
started, asking you to develop your own argument with the material at hand (for
seven or eight minutes) and then follow that with questions we might address
and passages we might analyze. After that, we just let the conference range
where it will go (with, of course, a bit of light-handed guidance from me).
2.
Key passages. I like
staying close to the text, and I might ask you to each to be ready with what
you think is a key passage in the text – perhaps the best theory summary, or an
example where your lightbulb suddenly flickered to bright, or evidence of the
theorist’s situatedness coloring the theory, or something you didn’t understand and want us to discuss as a group.
3.
Incisions. I might ask
you to prep a question to pose to the conference, a question for which you
think you have the answer, thereby leading the discussion for a while before
then giving us your own answer to that question. That’s
how we can make small incisions into the text at hand.
4.
Exploratories. These are
bigger than incisions. I might ask you to send me your informal one-page
arguments the night before conference, and I’ll then
direct the conversation to weave these arguments together. (There’s
a fuller explanation of exploratories in “Section
VIII” below.)
Note most of these
strategies you could employ on your own if you ever feel you want to come to
conference better prepared to contribute. That is, instead of passively reading
a text and then putting it aside, you should think of ways to actively read it
(including by marking it up as you read) and to partake in understanding it. If
conference isn’t going well for you, please reach out,
and we can brainstorm strategies or indeed try these various options.
B.
Papers. At the middle and end of the semester, I
will ask you to choose one of our authors (or author sets) and
1.
Index the arguments (2-3 pages). This will be
shared with everyone so that, by the end of the semester, you will have built a
communal tool that’s useful for studying religious
phenomena in future situations such as the junior qual and senior thesis.
2.
Formulate an argument (7-10 pages). This will be
just for me and you. I prefer papers that begin with a solid question – because
I can then hold you to answering that question – and I can help you develop
that question. One possible strategy is applying that author’s theory to a
real-life religious phenomenon to test out both the theory’s shortcomings and longcomings (?), a phenomenon that most interests you and
that you can share with me (e.g. via a primary text, a
YouTube video or a report from direct observation). Note there are two
deadlines for the last paper: I’ll write comments on papers for those that meet the first. The
second is 5 p.m. [not midnight] of the semester’s last day, after which the
college allows no more work to be turned in.)
In advance and as a group, we might divvy
up the authors so that our indices cover as much of the syllabus as possible.
C.
Presentations. As noted above, I’d
like you to add to the syllabus, perhaps expanding the diversity of theorists
or exploring other ways of understanding religion, by finding your own
theorists to bring to the table. (I learn a lot from this exercise and indeed
improve later syllabi as a result.) You’ll assign a
reading (no more than thirty or forty pages) and lead a discussion on your
chosen author. To find that author, you can ask other faculty – both within and
outside the department – about their favorite theories regarding religion, you
can peruse the contents of various journals devoted to religious theory, or you
can of course search the internet for suggestions (e.g.
religious theory syllabi from other educational institutions) as long as you
have reasons for judging the quality of the theory. And when I say “theory,”
feel free to replace that word with “method.” It would be wonderful to learn
more about different ways to collect and analyze the data.
V.
The syllabus
In
the earlier history of our field – roughly the twentieth century through the
1960s and 70s – scholars sought out universals regarding religion regardless of
culture. All humans were naturally
religious in similar ways, and all religions evolved in a unidirectional
manner, the accidents of particular times and places
relatively inconsequential. We don’t think like that
anymore. Postmodernism or poststructuralism – I prefer the latter term because it’s more descriptive – denounced the “totalizing
meta-narratives” of the past, and that new perspective and awareness of
difference greatly impacted the field of comparative religions (and for the
most part, rightfully so). Because of poststructuralism and the information
explosion, most scholars deserted any attempt to compare, instead holing-up in
their own pockets of research. They no longer endeavor to explain away religion
but only to “thickly” describe it. The few that did compare did so more
carefully. That’s not to say we don’t have scholars
propounding universals today – we do, and we’ll read some – but they now tend
to look for pre-cultural reasons for
comparison, ranging from biological and linguistic theory to logical and
theological explanations.
Hence, I like to think of the history of
our field as having a ditch in the middle of it, the ditch being
poststructuralism. On the far side of the ditch is “old school” religious
studies, and on the near side is “new school.” (Caveat: This is only an
abstract analogy and too tidy in the telling. We’ll
encounter various scholars on both sides of the ditch who strayed into their
neighboring meadow.) In our syllabus, we’ll play in
both fields and try to highlight the differences between old and new school,
ever cognizant of the fact that there’s a growing body of theorists wanting to
return to the far field as we learn more about the brain and as we accumulate
more and more data for comparison. (Maybe I should replace the metaphor of “two
fields” with the metaphor of a pendulum? Only time will tell.)
If our overall question is “How are we to
understand religion,” the first couple weeks are about how we pose that
question – from within or without religion, from defining “religion,” from
contextualizing “religious studies.” Then there are (in my opinion) three
general ways theorists approach that question:
1.
We
understand religion by deconstructing.
2.
We
understand religion by contextualizing.
3.
We
understand religion by explaining it via something else we already understand.
And
that’s the structure of our syllabus, each section
subdivided between the aforementioned old and new schools with that
poststructuralism ditch between them.
So over the course
of this semester, we’ll read how some authors explain away religion into
another discourse such as sociology or biology; others will argue that religion
is sui generis, worthy as a
discipline in its own right; still others will say outsiders to religion will simply
never get it. (I think ours is the only discipline in which the subjects of
scrutiny flatly deny the validity of that scrutiny and in which the
scrutinizers aren’t sure their scrutiny belongs to an
actual, identifiable discipline…. Why didn’t I study math instead?) To help you
develop your own opinions about “religiology” – I
made that word up – I will provide you with many (recorded) insights about our
authors and assign them as homework, handing the conference discussion over to
you with only limited guidance.
(Please note that, in this shift to online teaching,
I’ve only included my new audio and video recordings
for the first few weeks [because that’s how far I got before putting this
syllabus on Moodle]. Always check Moodle and the reading maps for later
recordings.)
|
Introduction: How are
we to understand “religion”? |
||
|
31 Aug |
Introductions |
·
Course introduction video
(in three parts). |
|
2 Sep |
Stories about stories I |
·
Tweed, “Itineraries,” “Boundaries,”
and “Crossing (partial),” 1-53, 143-150, 187-207, 241-243. (Moodle.) |
|
4 Sep |
The emic, the etic and
the panoptic I |
·
“A fivefold spectrum on theory
types” (audio). ·
Orsi,
“Introduction: Real presence” and “The obsolescence of the gods (partial),” History and presence, 1-11, 32-44,
256, 266-271 (moodle). ·
Orsi,
“Introduction to the second edition,” The
Madonna of 115th Street, ix-xxxviii (moodle). |
|
9 Sep |
The emic, the etic and
the panoptic II |
·
Proudfoot, “Explanation,” 190-227. ·
Orsi,
“Have you ever prayed to Saint
Jude?”, Between heaven and earth,
146-176. (All Moodle.) |
|
11 Sep |
Defining “religion” |
·
Braun, “Religion,” 3-18. ·
Arnal,
“Definition,” 21-34. ·
Smith, “Classification,” 35-44. ·
Martin, “Comparison,” 45-56. ·
Penner, “Interpretation,” 57-71. (All Moodle.) |
|
14 Sep |
Before our “religion”
category |
·
The Western situatedness of
“religion(s)” (audio). ·
Sharpe, “The antecedents of
comparative religion,” 1-26 (moodle). ·
Brashier, “The early Chinese endeavor to interpret
early Chinese religions.” (Search for “Oxford Handbooks Online” in our
library catalogue or our Religion
Research Guide on the library website.) ·
Campany.
“On the very idea of religions (in the modern West and in early medieval
China),” 287-319 (moodle). |
|
16 Sep |
Defining “religious
studies” |
· Wasserstrom, “Nine theses on the study of religion,” 9-14. · Orsi, “Snakes alive,” Between heaven and earth, 177-204. ·
Brashier, “Playing in the majors”
(supplementary). (All Moodle.) |
Can outsiders understand
an insider’s experience?
|
A. We understand
“religion” by deconstructing…. |
||
|
18 Sep |
Early deconstructions I |
·
Tylor, in Introducing religion, 1-35. (Book.) ·
Frazer, in Introducing religion, 37-70. (Book.) |
|
21 Sep |
Early deconstructions
II |
·
“Rudolf Otto” (audio). ·
Otto, in Introducing religion, 205-235. (Book.) ·
Orsi,
“The problem of the holy,” 84-105. (Moodle.) |
|
23 Sep |
Middle deconstructions
I |
·
Eliade, The sacred and the profane,
chaps 1-3. (Book.) |
|
25 Sep |
Middle deconstructions
II |
·
Eliade, The sacred and the profane,
chap 4. (Book.) ·
Frank, “Eliade, Cioran,
Ionesco: The treason of the intellectuals,” 136-140, 142-144 (i.e. part “III”), 148 (from 2nd paragraph)-151.
(JSTOR.) ·
McCutcheon, “The imperial dynamic
and the discourse of religion,” 158-191. (Moodle.) |
|
28 Sep |
Later deconstructions |
·
Rappaport,
“Simultaneity and hierarchy (partial),” 263-76. (Moodle.) ·
Geertz, “Religion as a cultural
system,” 87-125. (Moodle.) |
|
30 Sep |
Focal building blocks: Symbol |
· Geertz, “Ethos, world view, and the analysis of sacred symbols,” 126-141. · Ricoeur, “The Hermeneutics of symbols and philosophical reflection: I,” 287-314. ·
Frankenberry, “A ‘mobile army of metaphors’,”
171-187. (All Moodle.) |
|
2 Oct |
Focal building blocks: Ritual I |
·
Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and
dimensions, Part 1 (Book.) |
|
5 Oct |
Focal building blocks: Ritual II |
·
Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and
dimensions, Part 2 (Book.) |
|
7 Oct |
Focal building blocks: Ritual III |
·
Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and
dimensions, Part 3 (Book.) |
|
9 Oct |
Focal building blocks: Ritual IV |
·
Rappaport,
“Introduction” and “The ritual form,” 1-22, 23-68, 462-475. (Moodle.) |
|
12 Oct |
Focal building blocks:
Mysticism |
·
Katz, “Language, epistemology, and
mysticism,” 22-74. ·
Forman, “Introduction: Mysticism,
constructivism, and forgetting,” 3-49. (All Moodle.) |
|
14 Oct |
Thunderous silence 1 |
Fall
break: Rest. |
|
16 Oct |
Thunderous silence 2 |
Mid-term paper due (11.59 p.m.) |
|
B. We understand
“religion” by contextualizing…. |
||
|
19 Oct |
Via early society I |
·
Durkheim, in Introducing religion, 99-142. (Book.) |
|
21 Oct |
Via early society II |
·
Durkheim, “The positivist cult,”
330-391. (Moodle.) ·
Seigel, The idea of the self,
480-493. (Moodle.) |
|
23 Oct |
Via later society I |
·
Parsons, “Introduction,” The
sociology of religion [by Max Weber], xix-lxvii.
(Moodle.) ·
Weber, in Introducing religion, 237-255. (Book.) ·
Marx, in Introducing religion, 143-153. (Book.) |
|
26 Oct |
Via later society II |
·
Weber, The sociology of religion,
1-79 (i.e.
chapters one through five). (Moodle.) |
|
28 Oct |
Via genders in society |
·
Jay, “Social-scientific
interpretation of ritual” and “Theories of sacrifice,” 1-16, 128-146. ·
Juschka,
“Gender,” 229-242. ·
Shaw, “Feminist anthropology and
the gendering of religious studies,” 65-76. (All Moodle.) |
|
30 Oct |
Via other religions |
· Doniger, “Post-modern and –colonial –structural comparisons,” 63-74. · Holdrege, “What’s beyond the post? Comparative analysis as critical method,” 77-91. · Sullivan, “American religion is naturally comparative,” 117-130. · Patton, “Juggling torches: Why we still need comparative religion,” 153-171. · Paden, “Elements of a new comparativism,” 182-192. ·
Smith, “The ‘end’ of comparison:
Redescription and rectification,” 237-241. (All Moodle.) |
|
|
Paul Noth, New Yorker
Magazine (2014) |
|
C. We understand
“religion” by explaining it via something else we already understand…. |
||
|
2 Nov |
Via the mind I |
·
James, The varieties of religious experience, lectures 1-7 (Book.) |
|
4 Nov |
Via the mind II |
·
James, The varieties of religious experience, lectures 8-13. (Book.) |
|
6 Nov |
Via the mind III |
·
James, The varieties of religious experience, lectures 14-20. (Book.) |
|
9 Nov |
Via the mind IV |
·
Freud, The future of an illusion. (Book.) |
|
11 Nov |
Via the mind V |
·
Boyer, Religion explained, 1-91 (Moodle.) |
|
13 Nov |
Via projection |
· Guthrie, Faces in the clouds, 62-90. · Boyer, Religion explained, 137-167. (All Moodle.) |
|
16 Nov |
Via surveillance |
· Norenzayan, Big gods, 13-54. ·
Brook, Bourgan
and Blue, “Tormenting the dead,” 122-151. (All Moodle.) |
|
18 Nov |
Via narrative |
· Hauerwas, “The self as story,” 68-89. · MacIntyre, “The virtues, the unity of a human life and the concept of a tradition,” 204-225. ·
Ricoeur,
“Life: A story in search of a narrator,” 425-437. (All Moodle.) |
|
D. And how do you
understand “religion”? |
||
|
20 Nov |
Stories about stories
II |
·
Bell, Ritual theory, ritual
practice, 19-66. · Flood, Beyond phenomenology, 123-132, 137-142, 263-266. (All Moodle.) |
|
30 Nov |
Presentations I |
Diana and Natalie |
|
2 Dec |
Presentations II |
Antonia and Alaina |
|
4 Dec |
Presentations III |
Cameron and Tyler |
|
7 Dec |
Presentations IV |
Birch and Peri (and
Gemma as a recorded presentation) |
|
Final
paper due 11 December (11.59 p.m.) if you want comments. Otherwise it must be turned in by 5 p.m.,
15 December, and no work will be considered after that deadline. |
||
|
|
David Sipress, New Yorker Magazine
(2010) |
VI. Incompletes, absences,
accommodations, extensions – the draconian stuff
As the great early Chinese legalist Han Feizi
warned, indulgent parents have rowdy kids and overly lenient rulers have
inefficient subjects; by extension, a permissive teacher can’t
maximize a student’s learning potential. By laying down the law now, we’ll also never need to raise it again in the future, and I
can pretend to be a kindly Confucian rather than a draconian legalist.
“An
Incomplete [IN] is permitted in a course where the level of work done up to the
point of the [IN] is passing, but not all the work of a course has been
completed by the time of grade submission, for reasons of health or extreme
emergency, and for no other reason,” according to the Reed College Faculty Code
(V A). “The decision whether or not to grant an IN in a course is within the
purview of the faculty for that course.”
Like many of my colleagues, I read this as restricting incompletes to
acute, extreme emergencies and health crises that have a clear beginning date and
a relatively short duration only, that are outside the control of the student,
and that interrupt the work of a student who was previously making good
progress in a course. Needless to say, we’ll be a bit
more tolerant during the pandemic pause, but incompletes aren’t simply
automatic and must be justified. Now more than ever, we all need things we can
depend on, and in teaching, we can benefit by maintaining our expectations
regarding the timeliness and quality of our work. You must stay in communication
with me if there’s a problem in participation, papers
or presentations.
Regular,
prepared, and disciplined conferencing is intrinsic to this course, and so at a
certain point when too many conferences have been missed – specifically nine
which translates into a “fail” for the course[7] –
it would logically be advisable to drop or withdraw and to try again another
semester.[8]
There’s no shame in that. Longer-term emergencies indeed happen, and you ought
to make use of Student Services when they do. In sum, I’ll
help you out as much as I can to get you across the finish line, but as noted,
it’s the same finish line for everyone and to be fair to your colleagues I need
to have you there in the race. To that end, I would ask that you please email me whenever you are absent just
to let me know you’re okay. (More and more students
seem to be doing this without prompting anyway, perhaps because we’ve all become increasingly dependent upon virtual
connectivity.)
I’m happy to give paper extensions for medical
problems and emergencies, and you should take advantage of the Health and
Counseling Center in such circumstances. I’m well
aware that, during the pandemic pause, we’ll need to be more flexible, and as
already noted, we can try to find accommodations to make up for gaps that might
occur. But out of fairness to everyone, “not doing the work” can’t
be one of those accommodation options. Please note that here, too, the honor
principle provides a standard for expectations and behavior, meaning that none
of us (including myself) should resort to medical reasons when other things are
actually impeding our work. (Please just be honest. It’s as simple as that.) In non-medical situations, late
papers will still be considered, but the lateness will be taken
into account and no comments given. Ken’s Subjectivity Curve: The later
it is, the more subjective Ken becomes. It's a gamble.
I’m not a legalist like Han Feizi,
but even the Confucians resorted to hard law when ritualized conduct and
exemplary leadership failed.
VII. The exploratory
Sometimes conferences sing. Yet just
when I would like them to sing glorious opera, they might merely hum a bit of country-western. After my first year of teaching at Reed, I
reflected upon my conference performance and toyed with various ideas as to how
to induce more of the ecstatic arias and lively crescendos, and I came up with
something I call an "exploratory."
Simply
put, an exploratory is a one-page, single-spaced piece in which you highlight
one thought-provoking issue that caught your attention in the materials we are
considering. This brief analysis must show thorough reading and must show your own thoughtful extension –
·
Your own informed, constructive criticism of the author
(and not just a bash-and-trash rant);
·
Your own developed, thoughtful
question (perhaps even inspired by readings from other classes) that raises
interesting issues when seen in the light of the author's text;
·
Your own application of theory and
method to the primary source;
·
Your own personal conjecture as to
how this data can be made useful; or (best of all)
·
Your own autonomous problem that you
devised using the same data under discussion.
I am not here looking for polished
prose or copious (or any) footnotes – save all that for our formal papers. (I
do not return exploratories with comments unless a
special request is made.) Exploratories are not full, open-heart surgeries performed
on the text. Instead, exploratories tend to be
somewhat informal but focused probes on one particular aspect
in which you yourself can interact with the text and can enter into the
conversation.
What
is not an exploratory? It is not
merely a topic supported by evidence from the book, nor is it a descriptive
piece on someone else's ideas, nor is it a general book report in which you can
wander to and fro without direction. Bringing in
outside materials is allowed, but the exploratory is not a forum for ideas
outside that day's expressed focus. (Such pieces cannot be used in our
conference discussions.) Also, don’t give into the temptation of just reading the first few
pages of a text and then writing your exploratory. (What would you conclude if you received a lot of exploratories that all coincidentally tackled an issue in
the first five or six pages of the reading?)
It is instead a problematique, an issue with
attitude.
The
best advice that I can give here is simply to encourage you to consider why I am requesting these exploratories from you: I want to see what ignites your
interest in the text so I can set the
conference agenda. That is why they are due the evening before a conference. Thus
late exploratories are of no use. (Being handed a
late exploratory is like being handed your salad after you've
eaten dessert and are already leaving the restaurant.) I base roughly a third to half my conferences
on exploratories, and I will use them to draw you in,
parry your perspective against that of another, and build up the discussion
based on your views. Exploratories help me turn the
conference to issues that directly interest you. They often lead us off on
important tangents, and they often return us to the core of the problem under
discussion. So if you are struggling with finding
"something to say," simply recall why I ask for these exploratories in the first place. Is there something in the
text you think worthy of conference time? Do you have an idea you want to take
this opportunity to explore? Here is your chance to draw our attention to it.
Your perspectives are important, and if you have them crystallized on paper in
advance, they will be easier to articulate in conference.
Since
I began using exploratories, most students have
responded very favorably. Students like the fact that it is a different form of
writing, a bit more informal and more frequent, somewhat akin to thinking
aloud. It forces one not just to read a text but to be looking for something in
that text, to engage that text actively. And it increases the likelihood that
everyone will leave the conference singing Puccini.
VIII. Pandemic? Don’t
smash your gourd over it.
There’s Chinese proverb that simply goes: “The
five-bushel gourd” 五石之瓠. Once upon a time, a man planted a seed that produced the biggest gourd
ever seen – the size of a five-bushel basket – but because it was so big, he didn’t know what to do with it. So
he just broke it up. Afterward, Zhuangzi tsk-tsked and chastised the man for
his conventional ideas of usefulness. After all, he could have carved a boat
out of the gourd and leisurely floated down the river in it on an autumnal
afternoon. The moral is to take advantage of what you’ve
got, even if it looks like a disadvantage at first.
So I want to end on a positive note. Yes, it’s
going to be an awkward year for you and me. I’m
dreading the online aspect of this course because it’s so foreign to my world.
(Fortunately, I have a stand-alone writing studio in my backyard with an
ethernet connection where I’ll be joining you.) I’m also told to expect a lot more email from everyone –
please be gentle if I don’t get back to you within five minutes of your sending
a question! – and I’m going to miss the campus, the canyon and the company.
Yet
one thing I’ve learned in life – yep, here comes the
sagely wisdom from someone about to retire – is that you indeed play the hand
you’re dealt, and if you play it well, you might even create new opportunities
among the myriad difficulties. For example, I see myself making my recorded
observations via Zoom as my farewell to the field, solidifying my final
thoughts about it, and you’re going to help me
solidify those final thoughts. I wouldn’t be doing
that in a non-pandemic Zoom-less year. So … what new opportunities can you
take away from the awkward year ahead? As you work through the difficulties,
can you creatively find your own plus among the minuses? Will you be leisurely
floating down the river on a beautiful autumnal afternoon?
Various
religious icons
IX. Course
bibliography (both purchase texts and Moodle articles)
Alasdair MacIntyre, “The virtues, the unity of a human life and the concept of a tradition,” in After virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), 204-225.
Arnal, William E. “Definition,” in Guide to the study of religion, Willi Braun and Russell T. McCutcheon, eds. (London: Cassell: 2000): 21-34.
Bell, Catherine. Ritual theory; ritual practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 19-66.
Bell, Catherine. Ritual:
Perspectives and dimensions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
Boyer, Pascal, Religion explained: The evolutionary origins of religious thought (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 1-91.
Boyer, Pascal, Religion explained: The evolutionary origins of religious thought (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 137-167.
Brashier, K.E. “Playing in the majors.” (Unpublished.)
Brashier, K.E. “The early Chinese endeavor to interpret early Chinese religions,” in Oxford Handbooks Online. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Braun, Willi. “Religion,” in Guide to the study of religion, Willi Braun and Russell T. McCutcheon, eds. (London: Cassell: 2000): 3-18.
Brook, Timothy, Jerome Bourgan and Gregory Blue, “Tormenting the dead,” in Death by a thousand cuts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 122-151.
Campany, Robert Ford. “On the very idea of religions (in the modern West and in early medieval China),” History of religions 42.4: 287-319.
Doniger, Wendy. “Post-modern and –colonial –structural comparisons,” in A magic still dwells: Comparative religion in the postmodern age, Kimberley C. Patton and Benjamin C. Ray, eds. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), 63-74.
Durkheim, Emile. “The positivist cult,” in The elementary forms of religious life (New York: The free press, 1995): 330-391.
Eliade, Mircea. The
sacred and the profane (Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace Jovanich,
1987 [originally published in 1957]).
Flood, Gavin. Beyond phenomenology: Rethinking the study of religion (London: Cassell, 1999), 123-132, 137-142, 263-266.
Forman, Robert K.C. “Introduction: Mysticism, constructivism, and forgetting,” in The problem of pure consciousness: Mysticism and philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990: 3-49.
Frank, Joseph. “Eliade, Cioran, Ionesco: The treason of the intellectuals,” Responses to modernity: Essay in the politics of culture (Fordham University Press, 2012), 136-140, 142-144 (i.e. part “III”), 148 (from 2nd paragraph)-151.
Frankenberry, Nancy. “A ‘mobile army of metaphors’,” in Radical interpretation in religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 171-187.Rappaport, Roy A., “Introduction” and “The ritual form,” in Ritual and religion in the making of humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1-22, 23-68, 462-475.
Freud, Sigmund. The future of an illusion (London:
Penguin, 1991 [originally published in 1927]).
Geertz, Clifford, “Ethos, world view, and the analysis of sacred symbols,” The interpretations of cultures (Hammersmith, U.K.: Fortana Press / HarperCollins: 1973), 126-141.
Geertz, Clifford, “Religion as a cultural system,” in The interpretations of culture (London: Fontana Press, 1993), 87-125.
Guthrie, Stewart Elliott, Faces in the clouds: A new theory of religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 62-90.
Holdrege, Barbara. “What’s beyond the post? Comparative analysis as critical method,” in A magic still dwells: Comparative religion in the postmodern age, Kimberley C. Patton and Benjamin C. Ray, eds. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), 77-91.
James, William. The varieties of religious experience: A
study of human nature (New York: The modern library, 1994 [originally the
Gifford lectures of 1901-1902].)
Jay, Nancy. “Social-scientific interpretation of ritual” and “Theories of sacrifice,” in Throughout your generations forever: Sacrifice, religion, and paternity (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1992): 1-16, 128-146.
Juschka, Darlene M. “Gender,” in The Routledge companion to the study of religion (London: Routledge, 2005): 229-242.
Katz, Steven. “Language, epistemology, and mysticism,” in Mysticism and philosophical analysis, Katz, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978): 22-74.
Martin, Luther H. “Comparison,” in Guide to the study of religion, Willi Braun and Russell T. McCutcheon, eds. (London: Cassell: 2000): 45-56.
McCutcheon, Russell T. “The imperial dynamic and the discourse of religion,” in Manufacturing religion: The discourse on sui generis religion and the politics of nostalgia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997): 158-191.
Norenzayan, Big gods: How religion transformed cooperation and conflict (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 13-54.
Orsi, Robert A. “The problem of the holy,” in The Cambridge companion to religious studies, Robert A. Orsi, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012): 84-105.
Orsi, Robert A., “Have you ever prayed to Saint Jude?” in Between heaven and earth: The religious worlds people make and the scholars who study them (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press: 2005), 146-176.
Orsi, Robert A., “Introduction to the second edition,” in The Madonna of 115th Street 2nd ed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), ix-xxxviii.
Orsi, Robert A., “Introduction: Real presence” and “The obsolescence of the gods (partial),” in History and presence (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: 2016), 1-11, 32-44, 256, 266-271.
Orsi, Robert A., “Snakes alive,” in Between heaven and earth: The religious worlds people make and the scholars who study them (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press: 2005), 177-204.
Paden, William E. “Elements of a new comparativism,” in A magic still dwells: Comparative religion in the postmodern age, Kimberley C. Patton and Benjamin C. Ray, eds. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), 182-192.
Pals, Daniel L. Introducing religion: Readings from the
classic theorists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
Parsons, Talcott. “Introduction,” in The sociology of religion [by Max Weber] (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), xix-lxvii.
Patton, Kimberley C. “Juggling torches: Why we still need comparative religion,” in A magic still dwells: Comparative religion in the postmodern age, Kimberley C. Patton and Benjamin C. Ray, eds. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), 153-171.
Penner, Hans H. “Interpretation,” in Guide to the study of religion, Willi Braun and Russell T. McCutcheon, eds. (London: Cassell: 2000): 57-71.
Proudfoot, Wayne. “Explanation,” in Religious experience (Berkeley, CA: University of California, 1985): 190-227.
Rappaport, Roy A., “Simultaneity and hierarchy (partial),” in Ritual and religion in the making of humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 263-276.
Ricoeur, Paul. “‘The Hermeneutics of symbols and philosophical reflection: I,” The conflict of interpretations (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 287-314.
Ricoeur, Paul. “Life: A story in search of a narrator,” A Ricoeur reader: Reflections and imagination, Mario J. Valdés, ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 425-437.
Sharpe, Eric J. “The antecedents of comparative religion,” in Comparative religion: A history (London: Duckworth, 1986): 1-26.
Shaw, Rosalind, “Feminist anthropology and the gendering of religious studies,” in Religion and gender, Ursula King, ed. (Oxford: Blackwell: 1995): 65-76.
Seigel, The idea of the self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 480-493.
Smith, Jonathan Z. “Classification,” in Guide to the study of religion, Willi Braun and Russell T. McCutcheon, eds. (London: Cassell: 2000): 35-44.
Smith, Jonathan Z. “The ‘end’ of comparison: Redescription and rectification,” in A magic still dwells: Comparative religion in the postmodern age, Kimberley C. Patton and Benjamin C. Ray, eds. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), 237-241.
Stanley Hauerwas, “The self as story: A reconsideration of the relation of religion and morality from the agent’s perspective,” in Vision and virtue: Essays in Christian ethical reflection (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 68-89.
Sullivan, Winnifred Fallers. “American religion is naturally comparative,” in A magic still dwells: Comparative religion in the postmodern age, Kimberley C. Patton and Benjamin C. Ray, eds. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), 117-130.
Tweed, Thomas, “Itineraries,” “Boundaries,” and “Crossing (partial),” in Crossing and dwelling: A theory of religion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 1-53, 143-150, 187-207, 241-243.
Wasserstrom, Steven M. “Nine theses on the study of religion,” in All religion is inter-religion, Kambiz GhaneaBassiri and Paul Robertson, eds. (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 9-14.
Weber, Max. The sociology of religion [by Max Weber] (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), 1-79 (i.e. chapters one through five).
Foat and I (in our younger years) at the state fair