Freedom Fighter or Prophet

Indian Freedom Fighter“Look! . . . Up in the sky. . . . It’s a bird. . . . It’s a plane. . . . No, it’s Superman!” When someone points out something in the distance, like an object flying through the sky, it can be hard to recognize just what it is. We attempt to name it, place it in a clear category, but sometimes our categories don’t fit, especially when working with complex societies, and the category that we attempt to force it into often influences what we actually see.

Arkotong Longkumer, in Reform, Identity and Narrative of Belonging (a 2010 book on the Heraka movement in northeast India), analyzes an intriguing community and movement that engaged politics, economics, social change, ritual shifts, and ethnicity, to name a few areas of interest. The context of the movement was the increasing imposition of British rule in the region in the early twentieth century, including the British encouragement of immigration to the area that disrupted the traditional migration cycle and the agricultural system that required it. The simultaneous opportunity for education and government jobs combined with the necessity of alternative forms of labor in the wake of declining agricultural production. All of this required a revision in ritual practices and social restrictions to reduce the expense of animal sacrifices and the limitations on mobility and individual independence from the community, as they adapted to the changing environment. The contexts also fostered interest in uniting different groups politically in opposition to, at times, the British and other communities. In fact, the image above of one of the leaders is entitled “Indian Freedom Fighter”. Continue reading “Freedom Fighter or Prophet”

“I asked God to send me, right away, a hundred million moths that would eat up my Toronto Maple Leafs Sweater”

a picture of Roch Carrier when he was 10 years oldThat’s Roch Carrier, the Quebec author, when he was 10 years old, in 1947.

If you know anything about the history of Canada, or hockey, you’ll know that there’s something wrong with that picture once you hear it was taken in Sainte-Justine-de-Dorchester, Quebec — near Quebec City but also near the Maine border.

Or, to put it another way, it wasn’t taken in Toronto. Continue reading ““I asked God to send me, right away, a hundred million moths that would eat up my Toronto Maple Leafs Sweater””

“How do I pronounce it again?”

The Search For General TSOAt least here in North American, it’s likely you’ve had General Tso’s Chicken if you’ve got to a Chinese restaurant. (And fortune cookies, of course.)

chicken and broccoli on a dishBut who was General Tso? Did he really like chicken? And where’d the dish come from?

This new documentary would be really useful in classes interested in tackling just what it means to assume something is authentic or, better yet, to exemplify how identity is, in fact, a public and always ongoing collaborative exercise — in this case, between cooks, armed with certain sorts of recipes, and eaters, who arrive at their restaurants with very different tastes.

Whose Pain Wins?: Caitlyn, Courage, and the 2015 ESPY Awards

Caitlyn Jenner at the 2015 Espys

My children, like most, fight constantly.  Among the endless things that they find conflict-worthy, they repeatedly quibble over which one of them has endured the most injustice or physical pain. I am often accused of going easy on one of them for a particular disciplinary transgression, or of not properly acknowledging that one person’s bruise is more painful than another person’s papercut. Despite the normalcy of these behaviors, what is actually important about them is not the injury itself, but the power that each hopes to gain by having their injuries recognized as worse than their sibling’s, for like many people, my kids are keen on the idea that if something bad has happened to them, then they “deserve” something good. Continue reading “Whose Pain Wins?: Caitlyn, Courage, and the 2015 ESPY Awards”

Identifying Threats of Violence

Guns hanging on a wall in a storeWith discourses surrounding terrorism and gun violence, which have become prominent again in the wake of Charleston and Chattanooga, people want to find patterns that illustrate the source of the threats of violence. Looking for these patterns, people engage in an act of comparison, which, as we have discussed on this blog previously, is more about the person constructing the comparison than some reality outside of him/her. For example, I have seen various social media posts recently that include lists of acts of violence, ranging from 9/11 and the storming of the US Embassy in Iran to the Chattanooga shootings, all attributed to people who identified as Muslims. While these posts appear to be direct descriptions of reality, they reflect the choices of the creator of the list as to which acts of violence to include and which identifications to include. Continue reading “Identifying Threats of Violence”

Making the Case for the Critical Study of Religion

The cover of Writing Religion Edited by Steven W. RameySteven Ramey, one of the collaborators on Culture on the Edge, has published an edited volume with the University of Alabama Press that features contributions from a number of scholars whose work has influenced members of Culture on the Edge. With his Introduction and an Afterword from Russell McCutcheon, the volume as a whole demonstrates the potential of the critical study of religion for both relevant research and the development of a thriving academic department.

The volume has ten main chapters, written by each of the Aronov Lecturers over the first ten years of that series at the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama, where several of us teach. The Aronov Lecture each year features an internationally recognized scholar, selected by the Religious Studies faculty, whose work is considered widely relevant to the work in the field and related disciplines. Some of the figures included in the volume whose work has been especially helpful for the Culture on the Edge collaboration are Tomoko Masuzawa, Aaron Hughes, Bruce Lincoln, and Jonathan Z. Smith. The ten central chapters are the following.

God Save This Honorable Court: Religion and Civic Discourse
Jonathan Z. Smith

An Early Moment in the Discourse of “Terrorism:” Reflections on a Tale from Marco Polo
Bruce Lincoln 

“A Storm on the Horizon”: Discomforting Democracy and the Feeling of Fairness
Ann Pellegrini

Fear of Small Numbers
Arjun Appadurai

Developing a Critical Consciousness: A Feminist Approach to Religion
Judith Plaskow

Religious Practices and Communal Identity of Cochin Jews: Models, Metaphors, and Methods of Diasporic Religious Acculturation
Nathan Katz

Regarding Origin: Beginnings, Foundations, and the Bicameral Formation of the Study of Religion
Tomoko Masuzawa

De-Judaizing Jesus: Theological Need and Exegetical Execution
Amy-Jill Levine

How to Theorize with a Hammer, or, On the Destruction and Reconstruction of Islamic Studies
Aaron Hughes

“Can I Share a Personal Example?” Self-Disclosure, Religious Studies Pedagogy, and the Skeptical Mission of the Public University
Martin Jaffee

The Harm of World Religions

The map of the world religionsWhile discussions of “World Religions” often attempt to encourage appreciation of human diversity, these presentations have become the focus of scholarly critiques because of the harm that they cause. Such presentations appear to provide a clear way of describing the world (as illustrated in the map above), but the assumptions behind them often serve to promote European dominance that people present as simple descriptions. A recent animated presentation on Business Insider illustrating the spread of the five major world religions becomes the object of a range of critiques. Continue reading “The Harm of World Religions”

God Hates Procedural Crime Dramas: The Politics of Religion, Denigration, and Humor

God hates procedural crime dramas

As someone who lives only a few hours from their Topeka, Kansas headquarters, I have twice seen Westboro Baptist Church protesters in action. The group is probably best known for their ‘God Hates Fags’ signs posted visibly at public events. Their theology — as one might guess — centers on the idea that America is a cursed nation because it has tolerated homosexuality, a boundary breach that inexplicably spills over into a variety of other social venues that they also criticize. The first time I saw them was four or five years ago when they lined the streets surrounding a large high school near my home; they were there in response to the student body’s election of an openly gay prom king. The second time was just a couple of years later, at a Bon Jovi concert, wherein the throngs of concert go-ers were told in no uncertain terms about what the conditions of their collective afterlife will be like. Continue reading “God Hates Procedural Crime Dramas: The Politics of Religion, Denigration, and Humor”