Pub Date : 2019-10-18DOI: 10.1163/15700682-12341467
G. Larsson
In this short review and debate article I use Nicolas Meylan’s Mana: A History of a Western Category as a starting point for discussing the Swedish historian of religions Geo Widengren (1907-1996) and his theory of the so-called High God. Resembling mana, the High God theory is a second-order concept that is used to explain the origin of religion in the history of humankind.
{"title":"It’s Not mana, It’s High Gods!","authors":"G. Larsson","doi":"10.1163/15700682-12341467","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15700682-12341467","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000In this short review and debate article I use Nicolas Meylan’s Mana: A History of a Western Category as a starting point for discussing the Swedish historian of religions Geo Widengren (1907-1996) and his theory of the so-called High God. Resembling mana, the High God theory is a second-order concept that is used to explain the origin of religion in the history of humankind.","PeriodicalId":44982,"journal":{"name":"Method & Theory in the Study of Religion","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2019-10-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/15700682-12341467","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42980099","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-10-18DOI: 10.1163/15700682-12341445
Donald Bruce Woll
The central claim of this article is that Jonathan Z. Smith, in addition to his extensive contributions to the study of religion, makes a valuable contribution to the theory and responsible public exercise of cognitive power. This larger public concern is explicitly and repeatedly addressed in his writings on the academy in which he develops a theory of the academy that articulates the conditions essential to the responsible exercise of cognitive power. A further claim is that this theory constitutes the integrating standpoint of his study of religion. The failure to recognize the relationship between his theoretical writings on the academy and his study of religion, reflecting his two careers, has given rise to misunderstandings that have obscured the wider public significance of his entire oeuvre.
{"title":"Locating the Study of Religion in a Theory of the Academy","authors":"Donald Bruce Woll","doi":"10.1163/15700682-12341445","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15700682-12341445","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000The central claim of this article is that Jonathan Z. Smith, in addition to his extensive contributions to the study of religion, makes a valuable contribution to the theory and responsible public exercise of cognitive power. This larger public concern is explicitly and repeatedly addressed in his writings on the academy in which he develops a theory of the academy that articulates the conditions essential to the responsible exercise of cognitive power. A further claim is that this theory constitutes the integrating standpoint of his study of religion. The failure to recognize the relationship between his theoretical writings on the academy and his study of religion, reflecting his two careers, has given rise to misunderstandings that have obscured the wider public significance of his entire oeuvre.","PeriodicalId":44982,"journal":{"name":"Method & Theory in the Study of Religion","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2019-10-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/15700682-12341445","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43630433","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-10-18DOI: 10.1163/15700682-12341463
T. Cooper
This article documents a complex genealogy of objectivity discourse that has shaped the study of religion in the modern academy. Analyzing data derived from a 2015 survey administered to Big 10, Research 1, and Ivy League religious studies institutions in the United States, the study posits a provisional taxonomy of neutrality language. The debates about positionality and self-disclosure in religion classrooms, as explored in the taxonomy, is evidence of the pervasive epistemic framework of the “Protestant secular.” The article proposes that religious studies, as a hybrid discipline, may address the status of the academy as an agent of the secular state by acknowledging its complicity in regimes of power and engaging in the rigorously critical, robustly ethnographic, and concertedly reflexive study of its own institutions and practices. Rather than removing objectivity discourse from religious studies, the article concludes by arguing for retaining a modified form of objectivist realism as a productive, decolonized ideal.
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Pub Date : 2019-09-30DOI: 10.1163/15700682-12341469
S. Young
Mainstream New Testament Studies is often a space of repeating, elaborating on, identifying with, or valorizing the voices of NT writings. These common features of NT Studies resemble what scholars in Religious Studies refer to as protectionism: the privileging of a source’s own claims to such an extent that interpreters let them dictate academic analysis. Through examining debates about NT sources and both Greco-Roman ethnic rhetorics and Hellenistic philosophy, this article argues that protectionism structures the doxa of mainstream NT Studies—the commonsense that shapes what is thinkable and what questions / categories feel the most obvious. The field’s protectionism often manifests itself in confused rhetoric about “taking the text seriously” and in the invalidating of scholarship that does something other than describe (i.e., “exegesis”) or elaborate upon NT writings. Protectionism thus helps explain the gendered hierarchies of knowledge in NT Studies: “exegesis” and supposedly “objective Historical-Criticism” are dominant norms that reproduce the field as a masculine dominated space. As a result, critical and redescriptive research—especially by or about women—gets passed over since it seems “niche” or “political / agenda” driven by comparison. Interrogating the protectionism of NT Studies thus permits rethinking the politics of what kinds of scholarship seem the most obvious.
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Pub Date : 2019-06-25DOI: 10.1163/15700682-12341446
G. Anidjar
This essay is a response to readers and discussants with regard to Blood and to the limits and origins of Christianity. Deploying the Derridean idiom of mark and context, the singularity of blood in Christianity, of Christianity in its relation to blood, is what is here reiterated
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Pub Date : 2019-06-25DOI: 10.1163/15700682-12341449
F. Landy
This is an introduction to the special issue on Gil Anidjar’s book Blood, summarizing the book and the different responses to it.
这是对吉尔·安尼加的《血》的特刊的介绍，总结了这本书和对它的不同反应。
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Pub Date : 2019-06-25DOI: 10.1163/15700682-12341451
F. Landy
Gil Anidjar begins his immensely ambitious bookBloodwith a strange statement/question “Why I am Such a Good Christian.” I begin by examining this question for its implications for cultural hybridity, for myself as well as for Anidjar, through the lens of Anidjar’s concluding discussion of Freud’sMoses and Monotheism. On the way I critically explore Anidjar’s insistence that blood is not a signifier of kinship or ancestry in the Hebrew Bible or in Judaism, and argue that both are in fact much more complex. I suggest also that Christianity has other elements than blood, such as the bread of the Eucharist, and that Anidjar devotes little attention to the differences between Protestant and Catholic Christianity. I conclude by reverting to Freud’s account of an experience of innocence inThe Interpretation of Dreams, as indicative of Freud’s ambivalent position between Judaism and Christianity.
Gil Anidjar以一个奇怪的问题开始了他雄心勃勃的书《血》:“为什么我是一个如此好的基督徒?”我首先考察了这个问题对文化混杂的影响，对我自己和对Anidjar，通过Anidjar对弗洛伊德的哲学和一神论的最后讨论的镜头。在此过程中，我批判性地探讨了Anidjar的坚持，即在希伯来圣经或犹太教中，血液不是亲属关系或祖先的象征，并认为两者实际上都要复杂得多。我还认为基督教除了血还有其他元素，比如圣餐中的面包，而且Anidjar几乎没有注意到新教和天主教之间的差异。最后，我回到弗洛伊德在《梦的解释》中对纯真经历的描述，以此来表明弗洛伊德在犹太教和基督教之间的矛盾立场。
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Pub Date : 2019-06-25DOI: 10.1163/15700682-12341444
Malory Nye
I have two ambitions in this paper. The first is to explore a framework for talking about the intersections between the categories of race and religion, particularly with reference to critical race and critical religion approaches. The second is to discuss how discourses on religion are a particular type of racial formation, or racialization. The premise for this discussion is the historic, colonial-era development of the contemporary categories of race and religion, and related formations such as whiteness. Both religion and race share a common colonial genealogy, and both critical studies of race and religion also stress the politically discursive ways in which the terms create social realities of inequality. Although the intersections between these terms are often discussed as the ‘racialization of religion’, in this paper I follow Meer (2013) and others by concluding that the category of religion is in itself a form of racialization.
{"title":"Race and Religion: Postcolonial Formations of Power and Whiteness","authors":"Malory Nye","doi":"10.1163/15700682-12341444","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15700682-12341444","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000I have two ambitions in this paper. The first is to explore a framework for talking about the intersections between the categories of race and religion, particularly with reference to critical race and critical religion approaches. The second is to discuss how discourses on religion are a particular type of racial formation, or racialization. The premise for this discussion is the historic, colonial-era development of the contemporary categories of race and religion, and related formations such as whiteness. Both religion and race share a common colonial genealogy, and both critical studies of race and religion also stress the politically discursive ways in which the terms create social realities of inequality. Although the intersections between these terms are often discussed as the ‘racialization of religion’, in this paper I follow Meer (2013) and others by concluding that the category of religion is in itself a form of racialization.","PeriodicalId":44982,"journal":{"name":"Method & Theory in the Study of Religion","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2019-06-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/15700682-12341444","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43097288","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-06-25DOI: 10.1163/15700682-12341436
Liane Carlson
This article explores the relationships between the critical and persuasive claims of genealogy. It begins by contesting a recent trend in scholarship that insists genealogies are meant to dismantle metaphysical ideas, not persuade concrete individuals to give up their beliefs. It argues such an interpretation conflates genealogical critique into Kantian, excises the role of the reader, and illegitimately allows genealogists to escape the question of whether the method’s efficacy is historically contingent. The second section investigates the assumptions about the historical position and normative commitments of both the genealogist and the reader that must be in place for genealogy’s critical work to become persuasive. It then questions whether those assumptions are compatible with the basic commitments of genealogy as outlined by Nietzsche and Foucault. The final section asks whether structures of authority such that genealogy as a tool still addresses the authority structures of the present moment.
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Pub Date : 2019-06-25DOI: 10.1163/15700682-12341447
A. Gow
Anidjar’s Blood can be read, with Amy Hollywood, as a political intervention designed to alienate and creatively reuse the familiar terms ‘blood’ and ‘Christianity’ to mean quite different things, namely a set of biologically, emotionally, and politically charged metaphors circulating within and fuelling a hegemonic cultural world system. While this is a clear possible reading throughout, Anidjar provides an explicit key to justify these meanings only on page 258, allowing that he has used each term as ‘catachresis’— to command our attention but also to redirect it. Contrary to Francis Landy’s wish that Andijar provide an accounting of how (actual) blood in (actual) Christian tradition relates to blood in Judaism, I suggest that Anidjar’s project requires nothing of the sort, working as it does at an entire level of abstraction above the plane of paratactically organized and comparable ‘religions’.
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