Smith’s Golden Bough

This chapter draws inspiration from the broad contributions of Jonathan Smith as well as the author’s in an extensive development of a new approach to a proper academic study of religion based on the philosophy and biology of human movement. The implications and advantages of this distinctive self-moving approach are discussed in terms of place, myth, ritual, comparison, body, and religion theory. The chapter presents a richly developed range of new perspectives and concepts, including aesthetic of impossibles, transduction, play, the corporeality of concepts, coherence as preferable to meaning, the essential role of metastability and nonlinearity in religion studies, gesture/posture/prosthesis as opening access to experience, religion as skill-based behavior, material/biological expansionism, biology of transcendence, and the challenges and goals to which a proper study of religion should be directed. The chapter concludes by proclaiming Jonathan Smith to be a major inspiration and resource for the creative and productive future of the study of religion.