Touna Presents at Canadian Conferences

vaiacssrconfIn early June 2013, Culture on the Edge’s Vaia Touna presented her research at the Canadian Society for the Study of Religion‘s annual meeting, as well as at the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies–both held in Victoria, BC. The papers–one rethinking the common modern reading of Euripides’s “Hippolytos” as an expression of individualism and the other redescribing the notion of ancient mystery cults, seeing them not as sites for expressing religious experience (as they are usually described by scholars) but as places where marginal members of the city-state were integrated.

New Books in Religion: Religion and Hip Hop

edgemillerbookCheck out an online interview posted at New Books in Religion with Culture on the Edge’s Monica Miller, about her recent book, Religion and Hip Hop (Routledge, 2012). “She does not perform a theological or religious analysis of music or lyrics as a search for meaning but rather examines the material productions of Hip Hop culture and the manufactured zones of significance within various discourses.”

“Sacred” and “the Sacred”: False Cognates

sacred“Sacred” is an adjective; “the Sacred” is a noun. In The Ideology of Religious Studies, Tim Fitzgerald discusses the adjectival use:

If by ‘sacred’ we mean those things, ideas, places, people, stories, procedures and principles that empirical groups of people value, deem to be constitutive of their collective identity, or will defend to the death, then it seems likely that we have a relatively meaningful crosscultural concept. (19) Continue reading ““Sacred” and “the Sacred”: False Cognates”

Silencing the Past

Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Beacon Press, 1995).

A practical series of case studies (e.g., the Hatian Revolution) by the late (d. 2012) University of Chicago Professor of Anthropology/Social Sciences on how discourses on the past are not about recovering or remembering enduring items from history so much as deploying techniques in the present continually to limit what in the archives will count as the past. As such, how does one write a history of the forgotten, “a history of the impossible”–a genealogy of the choices that led to this or that narrative of “the past.”

The Sacred is the Profane

edgesacredistheprofaneRussell McCutcheon, along with his co-author William Arnal, just published a collection of essays entitled The Sacred is the Profane: The Political Nature of “Religion” with Oxford University Press. The book presses forward the thesis that the category “religion” is one of our own group’s ways of classifying, sorting, and thereby understanding the world around us rather than, as is most often thought, being a natural and thus permanent feature of that world.

Culture on the Edge Podcast

relstproj2During its working session in Chicago, in November 2012, the members of Culture on the Edge (pictured below) took some time to record a conversation on identity creation and its study, for The Religious Studies Project (RSP)–a series of podcasts created and maintained by UK grad students that is devoted to the work of scholars of religion from around the world.

Click here to listen to our conversation.

Apart from thanking RSP’s Christopher Cotter and David Robertson for their interest in our work, we would like to thank Andie Alexander, then a student in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama, for assisting with the technology, and also thank the Department for supporting the group.)

groupedge2

The Yoga of Definition

jzsquoteSo writes Jonathan Z. Smith in his article, “Religion, Religions, Religious,” in Mark Taylor’s well-known edited book, Critical Terms for Religious Studies (1998). Because most scholars presume (mistakenly, I think) religion to exist prior to, and outside of, their studies of it, few understand their definitions to be stipulative–specifying the limits of the object in advance, e.g., “For the purposes of this study, religion is defined as…” Instead, definitions are most often assumed merely to describe, after careful observation, the limits of an already established item in the world that we, as scholars, have somehow just stumbled upon. Continue reading “The Yoga of Definition”

Accidental Favorites

Steven Ramey was the 2012-13 President of the Southeast Region of the American Academy of Religion (AAR). Here he gives the Presidential Plenary Address for its annual (held in South Carolina in March of 2013) entitled, “Accidental Favorites: The Implicit in the Study of Religions.” Although not referencing Culture on the Edge explicitly, the themes Ramey discusses are directly related to many of the group’s–as Jonathan Z. Smith named them in his own career–persistent preoccupations.

Presidential Plenary Address for the 2013 Southeastern AAR from UA Religious Studies on Vimeo.

(Thanks to Andie Alexander, a graduate of the University of Alabama’s Department of Religious Studies, for filming Steven.)