A Peer Reviewed Blog
Russell McCutcheon is one of the three series editors for a newly founded monograph series with Brill of the Netherlands: Supplements to MTSR.
The series considers books for publication that explicitly address issues of theory (whether explanatory or critique) and methodology (the study, not simply the use, of method) in the academic study of religion. The first volume contracted in the series is a retrospective volume celebrating MTSR‘s 25th anniversary.
“intellectuals are holders of cultural capital and, even if they are the dominated among the dominant, they still belong among the dominant. That is one of the foundations of their ambivalence….”
So wrote the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (d. 2002), in the closing lines to a 1996 address entitled “The Myth of ‘Globalization’ and the European Welfare State” (published in his little book, Acts of Resistance [29-44]). I think these lines are well wroth remembering when we read scholarship that writes against the grain, as some call it, or which undermines elite narratives by doing history from the ground up (what we once called social history). For, despite what they likely see as their own noble goals, the supposedly silenced voices that they recover are the products of their own travel grants, sabbaticals, and the privilege that comes with earning ones living by writing and talking about features of other people’s lives that strike us as interesting. Continue reading “The Ambivalence of Intellectuals”
Louis Althusser’s (d. 1990) essay collection, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (1968; English translation 1971), in particular the essay entitled “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation),” is crucial for anyone interested in rethinking the common perception of identity-as-expressed-quality as instead being the interiorized result of prior and assorted (i.e., among actors of varying authority) social acts of identification and interaction (as briefly suggested in this post). As Althusser wrote in that essay:
I shall then suggest that ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’
National Public Radio’s science correspondent, Shankar Vedantam, reported yesterday on some empirical research on the effects of people doing those patterned and repetitive, rule governed behaviors that we call rituals.
You can listen to the story here.
The punchline is that, according to researchers at the Harvard Business School (hardly the only place doing empirical, experimental research on ritual, of course), rituals like singing “Happy Birthday to You” and blowing out candles on the cake prompt people to report that, when they later eat it, the cake is more satisfying and tastes better (and that they’re even willing to pay more for it). As Vedantam sums up the findings: “Rituals seem to increase anticipation and make people more mindful of what they were eating. Performing a ritual before you eat a carrot apparently makes the carrot more tasty than it was before.” Continue reading “You Made Me What I Am Today”
Have you heard of Nestlé’s new product “Resource”? With bottled water a competitive $11.8 billion international industry in 2012 alone, it makes sense that suppliers will work very hard to dress up their products to give them any advantage in the marketplace. Keeping in mind that they’re selling water, they’re doing this by dressing it down: its simpler, more authentic, and there’s green, yellow and blue on the label. “Resource” is so natural, in fact, that you can see right through it, like there’s nothing there. Maybe that’s because they use 50% less plastic in the bottles. How much purer can it get? Continue reading “But Which is Hip to Drink?”
Perhaps one of the more important articles demonstrating, in a practical situation (the production and sales of so-called Oriental carpets), how discourses on authenticity are ways of managing an otherwise unregulated economy of signification (both meaning and value), is Brian Spooner‘s long but rich essay in Arjun Appadurai’s edited volume, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 1986: 195-235).
In a recent exchange between the spoiled, impetuous young King (who, on this occasion, was angered by a disrespectful comment from his uncle) and his far more seasoned, politically powerful grandfather, in season three of the TV series Game of Thrones, viewers heard the following:
Joffrey Baratheon: I am the king! I will punish you.
Tywin Lannister: Any man who must say, “I am the king” is no true king.
The rule of thumb that I would propose is that as soon as we switch from just doing something ourselves to talking about doing it–telling someone else how to do it or comparing the various ways in which it is done–then whatever it was that we were doing is no longer what it’s all about. That this applies doubly when it comes to talking about someone else’s doings, no matter how fair and balanced we think we’re being, cannot be overlooked.
After all, here in Alabama people just call it “food” and eat it.
In early September 2013 there’s a conference in Liverpool, hosted by the European Association for the Study of Religions (EASR) and the International Association for the History of Religions (IAHR). The description of the event–entitled “Religion, Migration, and Mutation”–starts as follows:
In preparation for the first meeting of Culture on the Edge, at the University of Alabama, the group looked at some resources that purport to study identity in a more dynamic, theoretically-engaged way–e.g., works devoted to studies of diaspora, hybridity, syncretism, etc.–in hopes of finding models for how to study the production and movement of identity but without (unintentionally, perhaps) reproducing the very thing one means to study. Continue reading “Blurred Boundaries”
As part of an event marking the contributions to the study of religion made by (the now late) Wilfred Cantwell Smith, held at the University of Toronto in the Spring of 1992, Jonathan Z. Smith presented a paper entitled “Scriptures and Histories.” Soon published in a special issue of Method & Theory in the Study of Religion (and recently included as chapter 3 of Smith’s On Teaching Religion), it deftly picks up on themes in the former Smith’s work but expands on them considerably since, as the latter Smith writes near the opening of his essay: “We share last names, but not much else.” Continue reading “Writing a History of Origins”
