Friends, family, professors, and others weigh in.
“Outstanding presentation of Foucault…It seemed a little less frantic but still HIGHLY ENTERTAINING.”
--Professor Mark Given
“You need MORE BEATS in your music.”
--Brother, in conversation
"Though your son has requested to play percussion in the school orchestra, I feel his musical abilities are better suited for the trombone rather than the drums."
--Middle school music teacher
“A guy such as you was going to do outstanding things regardless of whether or not you had spent time with our team. Like Coach Hart said, ‘You can’t win without speed, and you can’t coach speed; you find it.’ I find speed, and YOU WERE ONE OF THE FASTEST.”
--Dr. Dave Ball, former employer
“I will agree to a movie night as long as Harrison doesn’t get to pick the movie.”
--Jay Wiles
“Are you always this quiet?”
--A young woman Harrison once had a crush on
“Perhaps OVERLY CYNICAL.”
--Professor Marcia Butler, in re: “Precis 5”
“Harrison King will destroy the world.”
--Sarah Bennett
“Well, you are PRETTY MUCH the awesome-est son and person.”
--Harrison's mother, in text message
“9.9/10—[A] very THOUGHTFUL ALTERNATIVE to underdeveloped literature.”
--Professor John Schmalzbauer, in re: “Field Report 5: Dietetics”
“C+.”
--Middle school art teacher
“[Exasperated expression].”
--Several friends, when Harrison began an excruciatingly detailed explanation of the difference between “determinants” and “determinism”
“Fuck yeah Harrison King is the baus.”
--Jenny Dimsho, in text message
“Your essay was REALLY DIFFICULT TO READ. Your thesis sentence (at least I think what I underlined is your thesis sentence) is over 41 words long.”
--Classmate, in a written in-class peer-review
“There’s something about you walking home by yourself in the middle of the night with an umbrella that just seems right.”
--Justin Vann
February 25, 2012
February 22, 2012
Some words I like
Try saying some of them aloud.
Conglobation
Upbraid
Ponder
Chautauqua
Lambaste
Castigate
Urchin
Surreptitious
x-monger (ex. fishmonger)
Yawp
Horchata
Gnome, gnomic, gnomish
Apophthegm
Scribble
Haberdasher
Confectionery
Clavicle
Follicle
Agleam
Vitamin
Dire
Crepuscular
(In)distinction
Effluvium
You're welcome.
Conglobation
Upbraid
Ponder
Chautauqua
Lambaste
Castigate
Urchin
Surreptitious
x-monger (ex. fishmonger)
Yawp
Horchata
Gnome, gnomic, gnomish
Apophthegm
Scribble
Haberdasher
Confectionery
Clavicle
Follicle
Agleam
Vitamin
Dire
Crepuscular
(In)distinction
Effluvium
You're welcome.
February 20, 2012
Book review: The Visual Culture of American Religions
David Morgan and Sally M. Promey (eds.). The Visual Culture of American Religions. Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
In divergence from the work of “philosophers, cultural theorists, and aestheticians” who “tend to ask what images are,” The Visual Culture of American Religions, edited by David Morgan and Sally M. Promey, is a collection of work by historians, folklorists, and ethnographers who feel it is “more fruitful to inquire what images do” (17; emphasis original). Despite this noted heuristic focus, starting their discussion with a gloss of the “is/are” question would have been helpful, since the authors do nothing to define the parameters of “visual culture” for this project. For a 400-page book ostensibly devoted to the subject, the editors, in an introductory chapter that might have attempted to provide a clearer theoretical or methodological grounding for the diverse collection of essays that follow it, do very little to answer the question “What is visual culture, and what visual media will be discussed in this book?” but rather seem to take it for granted that their readership is operating under a common definition of visual culture.
It was with some surprise, then, that I came to grapple the limited scope of the proceedings. For instance, other than Steward M. Hoover’s rather perfunctory contribution, “Visual Religion in Media Culture” (inexplicably placed in the second section of the book, “Religious Visual Culture and the Construction of Meaning” instead of the third section of the book, which deals specifically with modernity), no other author discusses advertising, television, film, or photography with sufficient thoroughness—much less video games, comic books, or the influence of the Internet. Rather, the authors, regrettably, tend to stick to “traditional” artistic media, leaving the reader with the absolutely mistaken feeling that American religious institutions and followers have done nothing to engage with the technological advances and cultural development of the last century or so. Whether this oversight was incidental or intentional, one cannot help but feel the editors are either constructing a vision of American religion with snobbish disdain for the trappings of mass culture or establishing religion as the anachronistic remains of a mythological past that is remarkably out of touch with contemporary movements in society and technology, both of which would be untrue, and both of which would run counter to their efforts at reclaiming the place of religion in public space (see section one, “Religious Visual Culture and Public Identity”).
Another criticism that could be just as easily leveled at the book is its profound bias in favor of Christian visual expression—indeed, the book might have been more accurately titled The Visual Culture of American Protestantism and Catholicism since almost all of the authors focus on sub-traditions and issues specific to these two religions, with only two truly notable exceptions (Harvey Markowitz’s excellent contribution, “From Presentation to Representation in Sioux Sun Dance Painting” and Ellen Smith’s “Greetings from Faith: Early-Twentieth-Century American Jewish New Year Postcards”). This is a fact that perhaps should not be surprising, since the majority of the authors in the volume are known for their contributions to this field; nevertheless, the inclusion of a Tibetan Buddhist prayer wheel on the upper left hand corner of the book’s cover seems quite puzzling and deliberately misleading, for when I finished the book, I could not recall a single mention of this tradition or, truth be told, much talk of American Buddhism at all (the index offers three references each for Buddhism and Buddhists, and four of these refer to a single three-page passage in Pomey’s omnibus chapter that opens the collection). Similarly, with the exception of a passing reference to the controversy surrounding the figural representation of Muhammad on the Supreme Court building in Pomey’s chapter (41), Islam is notably absent in the book, and no contributions to American visual culture by Muslims are treated. This seems especially irresponsible given today's willfully ignorant, Islamophobic political climate.
The editors seem to have anticipated this second criticism, however, for at the end of the introduction (where most scholars seem to place their list of concessions), they note, “virtually nothing on the visual cultures of American manifestations of Islam, Asian religions, Orthodox Christianity, Mormonism, indigenous religions such as Haitian vodou, or such noninstitutional religious forms as the occult, spiritualism, or New Age has been included” (23). Thus, it would be fairer to judge the book according to the editors’ own aim, which, adjusted accordingly to reflect the book’s considerable deficiencies, is merely to “demonstrate the importance of further study” while “suggest[ing] some key directions for future investigation” (24), two suitably modest goals that the compendium ably achieves. When read on an essay-by-essay basis, several of the contributions in the book succeed as excellent examples of methodological sophistication and, notably, break out of the editors’ artificial tripartite thematic division by approaching public expression, meaning, and modernity all at once, offering a fine example for emergent sociologists and historians of religion in their own research.
In divergence from the work of “philosophers, cultural theorists, and aestheticians” who “tend to ask what images are,” The Visual Culture of American Religions, edited by David Morgan and Sally M. Promey, is a collection of work by historians, folklorists, and ethnographers who feel it is “more fruitful to inquire what images do” (17; emphasis original). Despite this noted heuristic focus, starting their discussion with a gloss of the “is/are” question would have been helpful, since the authors do nothing to define the parameters of “visual culture” for this project. For a 400-page book ostensibly devoted to the subject, the editors, in an introductory chapter that might have attempted to provide a clearer theoretical or methodological grounding for the diverse collection of essays that follow it, do very little to answer the question “What is visual culture, and what visual media will be discussed in this book?” but rather seem to take it for granted that their readership is operating under a common definition of visual culture.
It was with some surprise, then, that I came to grapple the limited scope of the proceedings. For instance, other than Steward M. Hoover’s rather perfunctory contribution, “Visual Religion in Media Culture” (inexplicably placed in the second section of the book, “Religious Visual Culture and the Construction of Meaning” instead of the third section of the book, which deals specifically with modernity), no other author discusses advertising, television, film, or photography with sufficient thoroughness—much less video games, comic books, or the influence of the Internet. Rather, the authors, regrettably, tend to stick to “traditional” artistic media, leaving the reader with the absolutely mistaken feeling that American religious institutions and followers have done nothing to engage with the technological advances and cultural development of the last century or so. Whether this oversight was incidental or intentional, one cannot help but feel the editors are either constructing a vision of American religion with snobbish disdain for the trappings of mass culture or establishing religion as the anachronistic remains of a mythological past that is remarkably out of touch with contemporary movements in society and technology, both of which would be untrue, and both of which would run counter to their efforts at reclaiming the place of religion in public space (see section one, “Religious Visual Culture and Public Identity”).
Another criticism that could be just as easily leveled at the book is its profound bias in favor of Christian visual expression—indeed, the book might have been more accurately titled The Visual Culture of American Protestantism and Catholicism since almost all of the authors focus on sub-traditions and issues specific to these two religions, with only two truly notable exceptions (Harvey Markowitz’s excellent contribution, “From Presentation to Representation in Sioux Sun Dance Painting” and Ellen Smith’s “Greetings from Faith: Early-Twentieth-Century American Jewish New Year Postcards”). This is a fact that perhaps should not be surprising, since the majority of the authors in the volume are known for their contributions to this field; nevertheless, the inclusion of a Tibetan Buddhist prayer wheel on the upper left hand corner of the book’s cover seems quite puzzling and deliberately misleading, for when I finished the book, I could not recall a single mention of this tradition or, truth be told, much talk of American Buddhism at all (the index offers three references each for Buddhism and Buddhists, and four of these refer to a single three-page passage in Pomey’s omnibus chapter that opens the collection). Similarly, with the exception of a passing reference to the controversy surrounding the figural representation of Muhammad on the Supreme Court building in Pomey’s chapter (41), Islam is notably absent in the book, and no contributions to American visual culture by Muslims are treated. This seems especially irresponsible given today's willfully ignorant, Islamophobic political climate.
The editors seem to have anticipated this second criticism, however, for at the end of the introduction (where most scholars seem to place their list of concessions), they note, “virtually nothing on the visual cultures of American manifestations of Islam, Asian religions, Orthodox Christianity, Mormonism, indigenous religions such as Haitian vodou, or such noninstitutional religious forms as the occult, spiritualism, or New Age has been included” (23). Thus, it would be fairer to judge the book according to the editors’ own aim, which, adjusted accordingly to reflect the book’s considerable deficiencies, is merely to “demonstrate the importance of further study” while “suggest[ing] some key directions for future investigation” (24), two suitably modest goals that the compendium ably achieves. When read on an essay-by-essay basis, several of the contributions in the book succeed as excellent examples of methodological sophistication and, notably, break out of the editors’ artificial tripartite thematic division by approaching public expression, meaning, and modernity all at once, offering a fine example for emergent sociologists and historians of religion in their own research.
February 17, 2012
Book review: Stephen Marini's Sacred Song in America
Stephen A. Marini. Sacred Song in America: Religion, Music, and Public Culture. Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2003.
With Sacred Song in America, Stephen A. Marini constructs a romanticist’s roadmap of American religious history through an exploration of the forms and functions of sacred song. To entrench this study in history, the first half of the book presents five case studies of musical traditions ostensibly selected for their far-reaching antecedents, while the second half of the book presents six additional case studies, in a point/counterpoint arrangement, that focus the reader’s attention on contemporary issues in American religion. The range of Marini’s writing is certainly striking—from richly textured ethnographic accounts to personal interviews to notes on theory and method—and the scope of his book is equally impressive; however, I find that Marini is a mediocre historian, and I am bothered by the shallowness of his secondary research and his superficial use of theory. Since my emphasis is in critical theory of religion, I wish to contain my discussion to the latter two points.
In an unanticipated reassertion of uncritical phenomenology, the ectoplasmic residue of comparative theology that still taints religious studies, Marini dismisses formalist analyses of music like Peter Kivy’s Music Alone and instead emphasizes the ability of music to evoke emotional and experiential response: “Despite the vogue of deconstructivist [sic] theory, emotivist or symbolic views of music remain attractive to Americans when applied to sacred music because of the importance we have traditionally attached to the emotions in interpreting the nature of religion itself” (4). Unfortunately for Marini, his attempted jab-in-passing at post-structuralist theory amounts to an embarrassing orthographic error: “Deconstructivism” is a movement within postmodern architecture that is a depoliticized response to Russian constructivism, while “deconstruction” is a term developed by Jacques Derrida to characterize his approach to reading text. Peter Kivy and Malcolm Budd, whose writings on music are concerned primarily with formal aesthetics, are not adequately identified by either of these terms. Such a basic mistake in identification should not come as a surprise, however, since for Marini critical theory of religion has not improved upon Clifford Geertz.
Geertz’s five-part definition of religion (which is reproduced on page 10) boils down to the equation of religion with “meaning,” a conception that is a lazily secularized version of Tillich’s theological definition of religion as one’s ultimate concern. Reading Geertz with particular interest in what Geertz called “moods and motivations”, Marini gives primacy to meaning, experience, the meaning of experience, and the experience of meaning, but, as Talal Asad has noted about Geertz’s crystalized view of culture, he ignores the processes by which meanings and experiences are generated and legitimized. Thus, in answer to the question of what gives a song its “sacredness,” Marini writes, “For a song to be sacred, it must possess not only belief content but also ritual intention and form.” (7) It is clear from the previous paragraph that Marini equates “belief content” with “mythic language” (6), and in the next paragraph, now channeling Turner, he explains what he means by “ritual”: “By ‘ritual action’ I mean symbolic behavior that moves participants out of everyday awareness into a state of shared mythic consciousness and creative community” (7).
Here, Marini is suggesting that sacredness is not an intrinsic value of music, but his sui generis conception of sacredness implies that there is a specific and universal set of conditions that allow music to be sacralized and experienced as “sacred.” The politics of religious experience in consumer capitalism is irrelevant when it comes to defining what sacredness is and what it does. Materialist analysis is only relevant to Marini inasmuch as it disturbs his ability to retain an uninterrogated ideology of sacredness, a tension in his thesis that becomes increasingly apparent in the later chapters of the book when he is led to discuss the problems commercialization and popularization pose for sacred song as a category. Even then, this body of theory is either dismissed as overly reductive or merely tentatively engaged (see, for instance, his simplified use of Adorno in chapter 11).
Despite its numerous problems, I would insist that there is some value in Sacred Song in America, for even if it is buried in a meaning-centric Geertzian framework, Marini’s text, especially when it focuses on contradiction and performance, actually consistently undermines this approach. Marini, too, briefly recognizes this point: in the conclusion, Marini bemoans theories of religion for a perceived inability to “address the problem of how different aspects of religion might relate to one another” (238), despite the promise of Geertz’s theory to do just that. What the author is getting at here is a fundamental flaw in Geertz’s theory of “cultural systems,” which defines “religion” as an ideologically enclosed text that is penetrable from the outside and logically coherent in the inside rather than a jumbled profusion of competing, overlapping discourses and power relationships. On the other hand, when Marini speaks, in his closing paragraph, of an irreducible, untheorizable “voice” whose “archetypal power” speaks through sacred song to guide religions with messages of “order” or “change” and guide scholars to “think about religious culture as a dynamic whole” (239), he introduces an unwelcome, deeply problematic metaphysic of teleology that is hardly an improvement over the “mechanical” theories of religion he dislikes. In the end, the contradictions Marini finds in the history of American religion cannot overcome his desire to manufacture a perfected image.
With Sacred Song in America, Stephen A. Marini constructs a romanticist’s roadmap of American religious history through an exploration of the forms and functions of sacred song. To entrench this study in history, the first half of the book presents five case studies of musical traditions ostensibly selected for their far-reaching antecedents, while the second half of the book presents six additional case studies, in a point/counterpoint arrangement, that focus the reader’s attention on contemporary issues in American religion. The range of Marini’s writing is certainly striking—from richly textured ethnographic accounts to personal interviews to notes on theory and method—and the scope of his book is equally impressive; however, I find that Marini is a mediocre historian, and I am bothered by the shallowness of his secondary research and his superficial use of theory. Since my emphasis is in critical theory of religion, I wish to contain my discussion to the latter two points.
In an unanticipated reassertion of uncritical phenomenology, the ectoplasmic residue of comparative theology that still taints religious studies, Marini dismisses formalist analyses of music like Peter Kivy’s Music Alone and instead emphasizes the ability of music to evoke emotional and experiential response: “Despite the vogue of deconstructivist [sic] theory, emotivist or symbolic views of music remain attractive to Americans when applied to sacred music because of the importance we have traditionally attached to the emotions in interpreting the nature of religion itself” (4). Unfortunately for Marini, his attempted jab-in-passing at post-structuralist theory amounts to an embarrassing orthographic error: “Deconstructivism” is a movement within postmodern architecture that is a depoliticized response to Russian constructivism, while “deconstruction” is a term developed by Jacques Derrida to characterize his approach to reading text. Peter Kivy and Malcolm Budd, whose writings on music are concerned primarily with formal aesthetics, are not adequately identified by either of these terms. Such a basic mistake in identification should not come as a surprise, however, since for Marini critical theory of religion has not improved upon Clifford Geertz.
Geertz’s five-part definition of religion (which is reproduced on page 10) boils down to the equation of religion with “meaning,” a conception that is a lazily secularized version of Tillich’s theological definition of religion as one’s ultimate concern. Reading Geertz with particular interest in what Geertz called “moods and motivations”, Marini gives primacy to meaning, experience, the meaning of experience, and the experience of meaning, but, as Talal Asad has noted about Geertz’s crystalized view of culture, he ignores the processes by which meanings and experiences are generated and legitimized. Thus, in answer to the question of what gives a song its “sacredness,” Marini writes, “For a song to be sacred, it must possess not only belief content but also ritual intention and form.” (7) It is clear from the previous paragraph that Marini equates “belief content” with “mythic language” (6), and in the next paragraph, now channeling Turner, he explains what he means by “ritual”: “By ‘ritual action’ I mean symbolic behavior that moves participants out of everyday awareness into a state of shared mythic consciousness and creative community” (7).
Here, Marini is suggesting that sacredness is not an intrinsic value of music, but his sui generis conception of sacredness implies that there is a specific and universal set of conditions that allow music to be sacralized and experienced as “sacred.” The politics of religious experience in consumer capitalism is irrelevant when it comes to defining what sacredness is and what it does. Materialist analysis is only relevant to Marini inasmuch as it disturbs his ability to retain an uninterrogated ideology of sacredness, a tension in his thesis that becomes increasingly apparent in the later chapters of the book when he is led to discuss the problems commercialization and popularization pose for sacred song as a category. Even then, this body of theory is either dismissed as overly reductive or merely tentatively engaged (see, for instance, his simplified use of Adorno in chapter 11).
Despite its numerous problems, I would insist that there is some value in Sacred Song in America, for even if it is buried in a meaning-centric Geertzian framework, Marini’s text, especially when it focuses on contradiction and performance, actually consistently undermines this approach. Marini, too, briefly recognizes this point: in the conclusion, Marini bemoans theories of religion for a perceived inability to “address the problem of how different aspects of religion might relate to one another” (238), despite the promise of Geertz’s theory to do just that. What the author is getting at here is a fundamental flaw in Geertz’s theory of “cultural systems,” which defines “religion” as an ideologically enclosed text that is penetrable from the outside and logically coherent in the inside rather than a jumbled profusion of competing, overlapping discourses and power relationships. On the other hand, when Marini speaks, in his closing paragraph, of an irreducible, untheorizable “voice” whose “archetypal power” speaks through sacred song to guide religions with messages of “order” or “change” and guide scholars to “think about religious culture as a dynamic whole” (239), he introduces an unwelcome, deeply problematic metaphysic of teleology that is hardly an improvement over the “mechanical” theories of religion he dislikes. In the end, the contradictions Marini finds in the history of American religion cannot overcome his desire to manufacture a perfected image.
February 15, 2012
Book review: Susan Bales' When I Was a Child
Susan Ridgely Bales. When I Was a Child: Children’s Interpretations of First Communion. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.
Two parts scholarly rigor and one part Kids Say the Darndest Things, Susan Ridgely Bales’ When I Was a Child: Children’s Interpretations of First Communion studies three Catholic churches striking in their ethnic and cultural diversity but rich in parallels. As the title of her monograph suggests, Bales is not interested in official church teachings about what first communion represents, but she is interested in the understandings of children, whose subjective imaginings of the event can hardly be suppressed by the rote memorization of doctrine. Fundamentally, Bales argues for a revaluation of the research on children’s initiation rituals as well as a major amendment to the study of lived religion. By shifting to a “child-centered” orientation, Bales opens a fresh avenue for future research, even if her results are not entirely consistent or successful.
Throughout the book, Bales relies heavily on the now largely ignored anthropological theory of Arnold van Gennep, whose Rites of Passage had a considerable influence on Victor Turner’s own structural analysis of ritual. Bales seems to take the tripartite structure of the rite of initiation for granted, but with a couple important divergences from the cookie-cutter models constructed van Gennep and Turner. For one, Bales shies away from committing hasty generalizations, which gives her ethnography a sense of nuance and subtlety that eluded the old masters like van Gennep and Turner, even if her book, with its constant reminders of the basic dignity and autonomy of human subjects, sometimes threatens to lapse into the other extreme—soft humanism. Another key difference is that Bales takes issue with the “adultist” orientation of scholarship on ritual, which, even when it takes children’s bodies into account, rarely listens to children’s “voices.” Indeed, Bales affirms again and again that children are capable of defining themselves on their own terms and articulating (however crudely) their concerns and interpretations of the outside world. If this claim is true, and not just a necessary precondition for Bales to conduct her research, it is fair to ask why scholars always speak about children and for children, but never to children. Bales suggests that perhaps the exclusion of children’s own interpretations from scholarship on ritual has not been an egregious oversight on the part of “adultist” scholars—perhaps their exclusion has always been a deliberate attempt to preserve a particular understanding of “childhood.”
Bales argues in her introduction that because childhood is a socially constructed category, the way childhood is defined and the language and attitudes used to characterize and identify children have varied over time and across cultures: Piaget’s stages of development is only one of several possible models for considering the cognitive capabilities of children (9). What these theories of childhood have in common, Bales suggests, is that they are all guilty of understanding children in “adultist” terms. This significant and pervasive problem in the literature on children leads to an inevitable but difficult question: how should a scholar working with children theorize the thought processes of children, especially when what children are thinking during a rite of passage is of the utmost concern to the scholar and is an essential component of her argument? Bales starts with the assumption that the structure of a child’s mind is not functionally equivalent to that of an adult, and this allows her to affirm the uniqueness of their insights and interpretations; yet she ultimately regards these children the same way she regards the adults in her book: as autonomous subjects with the ability to define themselves in relation to the outside world, which grants the children’s insights and interpretations the validity normally reserved for adults (11).
With her paradoxical approach, which simultaneously stresses and denies the distinctiveness of her subject, Bales evokes Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who in the late 80s famously posed the endlessly debated question, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Similarly, Bales spends passages of the book wondering whether it is possible for a child to articulate her own position relative to that of the adults who constructed the rite of first communion, not to mention the language of which the children barely have a working grasp. Though the children in Bales’ book have imaginative and sometimes thought provoking views of complex religious doctrines, the fact remains that no child has yet constructed a substantial theory as to how children think. This admittedly obvious observation makes one thing clear: so long as categories like “childhood” are defined by adults, children will always be spoken for. Bales’ book does not disturb that conclusion but rather reinforces it.
Two parts scholarly rigor and one part Kids Say the Darndest Things, Susan Ridgely Bales’ When I Was a Child: Children’s Interpretations of First Communion studies three Catholic churches striking in their ethnic and cultural diversity but rich in parallels. As the title of her monograph suggests, Bales is not interested in official church teachings about what first communion represents, but she is interested in the understandings of children, whose subjective imaginings of the event can hardly be suppressed by the rote memorization of doctrine. Fundamentally, Bales argues for a revaluation of the research on children’s initiation rituals as well as a major amendment to the study of lived religion. By shifting to a “child-centered” orientation, Bales opens a fresh avenue for future research, even if her results are not entirely consistent or successful.
Throughout the book, Bales relies heavily on the now largely ignored anthropological theory of Arnold van Gennep, whose Rites of Passage had a considerable influence on Victor Turner’s own structural analysis of ritual. Bales seems to take the tripartite structure of the rite of initiation for granted, but with a couple important divergences from the cookie-cutter models constructed van Gennep and Turner. For one, Bales shies away from committing hasty generalizations, which gives her ethnography a sense of nuance and subtlety that eluded the old masters like van Gennep and Turner, even if her book, with its constant reminders of the basic dignity and autonomy of human subjects, sometimes threatens to lapse into the other extreme—soft humanism. Another key difference is that Bales takes issue with the “adultist” orientation of scholarship on ritual, which, even when it takes children’s bodies into account, rarely listens to children’s “voices.” Indeed, Bales affirms again and again that children are capable of defining themselves on their own terms and articulating (however crudely) their concerns and interpretations of the outside world. If this claim is true, and not just a necessary precondition for Bales to conduct her research, it is fair to ask why scholars always speak about children and for children, but never to children. Bales suggests that perhaps the exclusion of children’s own interpretations from scholarship on ritual has not been an egregious oversight on the part of “adultist” scholars—perhaps their exclusion has always been a deliberate attempt to preserve a particular understanding of “childhood.”
Bales argues in her introduction that because childhood is a socially constructed category, the way childhood is defined and the language and attitudes used to characterize and identify children have varied over time and across cultures: Piaget’s stages of development is only one of several possible models for considering the cognitive capabilities of children (9). What these theories of childhood have in common, Bales suggests, is that they are all guilty of understanding children in “adultist” terms. This significant and pervasive problem in the literature on children leads to an inevitable but difficult question: how should a scholar working with children theorize the thought processes of children, especially when what children are thinking during a rite of passage is of the utmost concern to the scholar and is an essential component of her argument? Bales starts with the assumption that the structure of a child’s mind is not functionally equivalent to that of an adult, and this allows her to affirm the uniqueness of their insights and interpretations; yet she ultimately regards these children the same way she regards the adults in her book: as autonomous subjects with the ability to define themselves in relation to the outside world, which grants the children’s insights and interpretations the validity normally reserved for adults (11).
With her paradoxical approach, which simultaneously stresses and denies the distinctiveness of her subject, Bales evokes Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who in the late 80s famously posed the endlessly debated question, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Similarly, Bales spends passages of the book wondering whether it is possible for a child to articulate her own position relative to that of the adults who constructed the rite of first communion, not to mention the language of which the children barely have a working grasp. Though the children in Bales’ book have imaginative and sometimes thought provoking views of complex religious doctrines, the fact remains that no child has yet constructed a substantial theory as to how children think. This admittedly obvious observation makes one thing clear: so long as categories like “childhood” are defined by adults, children will always be spoken for. Bales’ book does not disturb that conclusion but rather reinforces it.
February 13, 2012
Book review: Howard Dorgan's Giving Glory to God in Appalachia
Howard Dorgan. Giving Glory to God in Appalachia: Worship Practices of Six Baptist Subdenominations. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990.
An extensive research project with a gestative period of thirteen years, Dorgan’s Giving Glory to God in Appalachia is a thoughtfully organized ethnography that provides a critique of the totalizing stereotypes of Appalachian religion and analyzes the structural makeup of six Baptist subdenomminations and the Appalachian region as a whole. The first and longest chapter carefully distinguishes each of the six subdenominations from one another and includes relevant historical material and helpful information about doctrinal divergences. The next four chapters, together making up most of Dorgan’s ethnography, analyze rhetoric and content in Baptist sermonizing and describe various traditions that, while not unique to Appalachia, take on some distinctive attributes in these Baptist congregations. In the final chapters, Dorgan expands his reach to examine the roles of religious radio (chapter 7) and death (chapter 8) in fostering a sense of community and fellowship. However, despite Dorgan’s meticulousness and valuable insights into this sadly overlooked region, the book is unfulfilling as academic writing, and I cannot help but feel puzzled as to Dorgan’s intentions.
Most of the difficulty in making sense of Dorgan’s research is that it does not appear, on the surface at least, to be organized around a coherent thesis; rather, Dorgan’s collection of observations about Baptist subdenominations seems to function as a guidebook of his selected region, which problematically reduces Appalachian culture to a curiosity. Though Dorgan’s book seems to lack a central argument, there are themes that emerge consistently throughout the text. The recurrent theme that comes closest to being Dorgan’s thesis has to do with social cohesion and the role of religion in maintaining stability and negotiating conflicts. Unfortunately, though, it is unclear how Dorgan wants his readers to interpret the relationship between cohesion and religion, and perhaps it is Dorgan’s indecisiveness that makes him hesitant to foreground his preoccupation with social cohesion into an explicitly stated thesis.
Clearly religion does not guarantee social harmony, as Dorgan himself has occasion to point out; and since we could easily imagine a culture that practices only “secular” types of conflict resolution, surely Dorgan is not suggesting that cohesion depends upon religion. Indeed, Dorgan at times reveals a certain disapproval of the “narrow provincialism and rigid orthodoxy that isolates as it insulates, excludes as it coheres” (215), even though he endeavors to present the region and its religions in the best light. Rather, it seems Dorgan is making the somewhat safer assertion that this is the particular form that cohesion and resolution have taken in this particular culture. Dorgan’s analysis of Appalachia, then, is structuralist, even if his argument is unfocused. In the following paragraph, I want to use an interesting passage to show how the imprecision of Dorgan’s argument allows his book to take on a polysemic character.
The first section of chapter five, “The Flower Service at Mount Paran,” is central to Dorgan’s purpose. In it, he theorizes that this flower service has undergone the “slow fusion of two symbolic meanings of the flower” over time—first, “the flower as sacrificial gift for reconciliation,” a reading which again emphasizes the dependence of social cohesion on the organizing principle of the congregational unit; second, “the flower as statement of praise and love,” a conciliatory (not re-conciliatory) reading that emphasizes how rare the need for conflict resolution is (151). The dual meaning Dorgan expounds here also strikes me as the perfect metaphor for the polysemic function of his book. Dorgan’s book is also a “sacrificial gift for reconciliation”; the thirteen years Dorgan spent researching and writing the book is a sacrifice, and the book itself intends to reconcile the Appalachian region, this frequently misunderstood and misrepresented object, with the academy, whose unfortunate cultural elitism has contributed to the denigrated image of the Appalachian region in popular culture. Yet Dorgan’s book is also a “statement of praise and love” to the region and its churches, as Dorgan himself iterates in the three-page epilogue: “It has been my inclination, therefore, to depict these groups’ practices in a light that is more rosy-hued than not… Nevertheless, the bias had a purpose, that of building within my readers a degree of empathy for these folks who have held so tenaciously to the past” (216).
The tone Dorgan takes in the above quoted passage—in its disconcerting mixture of paternal familiarity (notice the obvious rhetorical design in the forcedly casual use of the homey-sounding word “folks”) and judgmental observation (“who have held so tenaciously to the past”)—is eerily reminiscent of another famous ethnographer of a similarly mischaracterized region. But while Vance Randolph foregrounded his normalizing, modernist assumptions about progress and culture as he maintained his sickly sweet sentimentalizing of the Ozarks as a region, Dorgan, with the advantage of hindsight and a half century of crucial developments in critical theory separating them, desperately tries to avoid Randolph’s mistakes. He does not succeed. Still, he puts up an excellent fight, recalling to me the words of Samuel Beckett in his 1983 short novel, “Worstward Ho”: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” As researchers “on the ground,” we must learn from previous mistakes even as we attempt to correct them, which is a cumbersome but not, I hope, insurmountable task. We cannot expect to undo all of the mistakes of previous scholars with a more appropriate amount of caution or a few critical strokes of the pen. Maybe we can only expect to fail better.
An extensive research project with a gestative period of thirteen years, Dorgan’s Giving Glory to God in Appalachia is a thoughtfully organized ethnography that provides a critique of the totalizing stereotypes of Appalachian religion and analyzes the structural makeup of six Baptist subdenomminations and the Appalachian region as a whole. The first and longest chapter carefully distinguishes each of the six subdenominations from one another and includes relevant historical material and helpful information about doctrinal divergences. The next four chapters, together making up most of Dorgan’s ethnography, analyze rhetoric and content in Baptist sermonizing and describe various traditions that, while not unique to Appalachia, take on some distinctive attributes in these Baptist congregations. In the final chapters, Dorgan expands his reach to examine the roles of religious radio (chapter 7) and death (chapter 8) in fostering a sense of community and fellowship. However, despite Dorgan’s meticulousness and valuable insights into this sadly overlooked region, the book is unfulfilling as academic writing, and I cannot help but feel puzzled as to Dorgan’s intentions.
Most of the difficulty in making sense of Dorgan’s research is that it does not appear, on the surface at least, to be organized around a coherent thesis; rather, Dorgan’s collection of observations about Baptist subdenominations seems to function as a guidebook of his selected region, which problematically reduces Appalachian culture to a curiosity. Though Dorgan’s book seems to lack a central argument, there are themes that emerge consistently throughout the text. The recurrent theme that comes closest to being Dorgan’s thesis has to do with social cohesion and the role of religion in maintaining stability and negotiating conflicts. Unfortunately, though, it is unclear how Dorgan wants his readers to interpret the relationship between cohesion and religion, and perhaps it is Dorgan’s indecisiveness that makes him hesitant to foreground his preoccupation with social cohesion into an explicitly stated thesis.
Clearly religion does not guarantee social harmony, as Dorgan himself has occasion to point out; and since we could easily imagine a culture that practices only “secular” types of conflict resolution, surely Dorgan is not suggesting that cohesion depends upon religion. Indeed, Dorgan at times reveals a certain disapproval of the “narrow provincialism and rigid orthodoxy that isolates as it insulates, excludes as it coheres” (215), even though he endeavors to present the region and its religions in the best light. Rather, it seems Dorgan is making the somewhat safer assertion that this is the particular form that cohesion and resolution have taken in this particular culture. Dorgan’s analysis of Appalachia, then, is structuralist, even if his argument is unfocused. In the following paragraph, I want to use an interesting passage to show how the imprecision of Dorgan’s argument allows his book to take on a polysemic character.
The first section of chapter five, “The Flower Service at Mount Paran,” is central to Dorgan’s purpose. In it, he theorizes that this flower service has undergone the “slow fusion of two symbolic meanings of the flower” over time—first, “the flower as sacrificial gift for reconciliation,” a reading which again emphasizes the dependence of social cohesion on the organizing principle of the congregational unit; second, “the flower as statement of praise and love,” a conciliatory (not re-conciliatory) reading that emphasizes how rare the need for conflict resolution is (151). The dual meaning Dorgan expounds here also strikes me as the perfect metaphor for the polysemic function of his book. Dorgan’s book is also a “sacrificial gift for reconciliation”; the thirteen years Dorgan spent researching and writing the book is a sacrifice, and the book itself intends to reconcile the Appalachian region, this frequently misunderstood and misrepresented object, with the academy, whose unfortunate cultural elitism has contributed to the denigrated image of the Appalachian region in popular culture. Yet Dorgan’s book is also a “statement of praise and love” to the region and its churches, as Dorgan himself iterates in the three-page epilogue: “It has been my inclination, therefore, to depict these groups’ practices in a light that is more rosy-hued than not… Nevertheless, the bias had a purpose, that of building within my readers a degree of empathy for these folks who have held so tenaciously to the past” (216).
The tone Dorgan takes in the above quoted passage—in its disconcerting mixture of paternal familiarity (notice the obvious rhetorical design in the forcedly casual use of the homey-sounding word “folks”) and judgmental observation (“who have held so tenaciously to the past”)—is eerily reminiscent of another famous ethnographer of a similarly mischaracterized region. But while Vance Randolph foregrounded his normalizing, modernist assumptions about progress and culture as he maintained his sickly sweet sentimentalizing of the Ozarks as a region, Dorgan, with the advantage of hindsight and a half century of crucial developments in critical theory separating them, desperately tries to avoid Randolph’s mistakes. He does not succeed. Still, he puts up an excellent fight, recalling to me the words of Samuel Beckett in his 1983 short novel, “Worstward Ho”: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” As researchers “on the ground,” we must learn from previous mistakes even as we attempt to correct them, which is a cumbersome but not, I hope, insurmountable task. We cannot expect to undo all of the mistakes of previous scholars with a more appropriate amount of caution or a few critical strokes of the pen. Maybe we can only expect to fail better.
February 10, 2012
Book review: Mark Chaves' Congregations in America
Mark Chaves. Congregations in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.
Mark Chaves’ Congregations in America is a valuable if uneven contribution to the sociological study of religion. The book uses national survey data to construct a meaningful and useful contextual background for congregational studies. The first two chapters provide the necessary theoretical and methodological grounding to make sense of the quantitative analysis that follows them. In departure from pseudo-theological approaches to congregational studies that seek to grant churches a metaphysical status, Chaves shows how congregations are shaped by earthly concerns, including, especially, financing. Chapters three and four, the longest and best in the book, provide an excellent, sustained critique of the romanticized view of religious congregations as activist centers of social service and political engagement. Rather, Chaves goes on to argue in the next chapter, the primary function of congregations—by definition (pp. 1-2)—is to bring people together into a carefully structured space for worship.
But Chaves is careful not to suggest that a congregation’s primary function is its only function, and he uses the remaining chapters to detail other uses of a congregation. Unfortunately, it is in these remaining chapters that Chaves’ brilliance begins to falter. For one, the pacing of the later chapters is much too brisk, particularly when compared to the previous expositions on service, politics, and worship; indeed, the short cautionary notes in chapter eight feel more like a rushed afterthought than a fully developed extension of Chaves’ thesis. Additionally, the argumentation in chapters six and seven, on art and culture respectively, is noticeably less elegant than the preceding chapters.
Chapter six begins with the intriguing argument that congregations are responsible for exposing more people to live art than other social institutions. In preparation for this ill-fated excursion, Chaves asks his readers to abandon the distinction between low and high culture (pp. 168), which, having long since suspected this artificial distinction was hegemonic rather than an intrinsic aspect of “art” itself, I am only too happy to oblige him. But having disturbed the frail structure of cultural elitism, Chaves goes on to disturb the delicate balance of mutually exclusive conceptions of art that he tries to uphold simultaneously: art as a socially constructed category and art as an ontological object. “I do not mean to imply,” Chaves acknowledges to the detriment of his own argument, “that all, or even most, of the artistic activity occurring inside congregations is experienced subjectively as art” (p. 178). What does this sentence mean? Does Chaves mean to say that there is a “normal” way to experience art, or is he trying to argue that art does not need to be experienced in any particular way to be art? The phrasing is ambiguous, perhaps deliberately so, and thus it lacks the lucidity of earlier sections of the book. If I take him to mean that congregants do not usually think of their musical and visual culture as art, then this leads to a thornier question: If the congregants do not subjectively experience a performance or object as “art” in what way can it “be” art—or “be said to be” art? The short answer is that, in this critical blunder, Chaves reduces “art” to an arbitrary and meaningless signifier.
The penultimate chapter is too reliant on the frail postulations of the previous chapter, and in attempting to show the reflexive interrelationship of congregations and “culture,” Chaves continues to unravel his thesis. Already having reduced “art” to an empty signifier, Chaves ultimately does the same to the category “culture,” leaving the reader with the unfortunate feeling that Chaves has taken the last forty pages to say, approximately, nothing. Chaves’ mistake in these two chapters is looking for a unity of purpose in American congregations, especially when in the earlier chapters he seemed to be working to problematize these sorts of unexamined, romanticized claims about the universal functionality of congregations. Functionalist analysis, I would argue, will be much more successful in case studies where the ability to universalize one’s findings is checked by methodological limitations. After all, beyond the obvious categorization of congregations as places of worship, I have serious doubts as to whether it is possible or even desirable to generalize about the way congregations function in society.
Despite the critical hiccups in the concluding chapters, the practical uses of this book compensate for its shortcomings. It is easy to see how the rigorous scholarship and challenging insights contained in the first two-thirds of this book could be applied in researching a local congregation on the ground. Chaves’ pioneering collection of data and analysis will help locate the often insular congregations of the Ozarks within the broader context of national trends. In conclusion, though, I must stress that Chaves, at his most successful, does not so much give readers a new way to think about congregations as much as he challenges our assumptions: Chaves asks us to refine our ideas about what congregations are—or at least what we take them to be. In attempting to go farther than that, Chaves falls into the familiar trap of a scholar who is overeager to found a new paradigm with insufficient research.
Mark Chaves’ Congregations in America is a valuable if uneven contribution to the sociological study of religion. The book uses national survey data to construct a meaningful and useful contextual background for congregational studies. The first two chapters provide the necessary theoretical and methodological grounding to make sense of the quantitative analysis that follows them. In departure from pseudo-theological approaches to congregational studies that seek to grant churches a metaphysical status, Chaves shows how congregations are shaped by earthly concerns, including, especially, financing. Chapters three and four, the longest and best in the book, provide an excellent, sustained critique of the romanticized view of religious congregations as activist centers of social service and political engagement. Rather, Chaves goes on to argue in the next chapter, the primary function of congregations—by definition (pp. 1-2)—is to bring people together into a carefully structured space for worship.
But Chaves is careful not to suggest that a congregation’s primary function is its only function, and he uses the remaining chapters to detail other uses of a congregation. Unfortunately, it is in these remaining chapters that Chaves’ brilliance begins to falter. For one, the pacing of the later chapters is much too brisk, particularly when compared to the previous expositions on service, politics, and worship; indeed, the short cautionary notes in chapter eight feel more like a rushed afterthought than a fully developed extension of Chaves’ thesis. Additionally, the argumentation in chapters six and seven, on art and culture respectively, is noticeably less elegant than the preceding chapters.
Chapter six begins with the intriguing argument that congregations are responsible for exposing more people to live art than other social institutions. In preparation for this ill-fated excursion, Chaves asks his readers to abandon the distinction between low and high culture (pp. 168), which, having long since suspected this artificial distinction was hegemonic rather than an intrinsic aspect of “art” itself, I am only too happy to oblige him. But having disturbed the frail structure of cultural elitism, Chaves goes on to disturb the delicate balance of mutually exclusive conceptions of art that he tries to uphold simultaneously: art as a socially constructed category and art as an ontological object. “I do not mean to imply,” Chaves acknowledges to the detriment of his own argument, “that all, or even most, of the artistic activity occurring inside congregations is experienced subjectively as art” (p. 178). What does this sentence mean? Does Chaves mean to say that there is a “normal” way to experience art, or is he trying to argue that art does not need to be experienced in any particular way to be art? The phrasing is ambiguous, perhaps deliberately so, and thus it lacks the lucidity of earlier sections of the book. If I take him to mean that congregants do not usually think of their musical and visual culture as art, then this leads to a thornier question: If the congregants do not subjectively experience a performance or object as “art” in what way can it “be” art—or “be said to be” art? The short answer is that, in this critical blunder, Chaves reduces “art” to an arbitrary and meaningless signifier.
The penultimate chapter is too reliant on the frail postulations of the previous chapter, and in attempting to show the reflexive interrelationship of congregations and “culture,” Chaves continues to unravel his thesis. Already having reduced “art” to an empty signifier, Chaves ultimately does the same to the category “culture,” leaving the reader with the unfortunate feeling that Chaves has taken the last forty pages to say, approximately, nothing. Chaves’ mistake in these two chapters is looking for a unity of purpose in American congregations, especially when in the earlier chapters he seemed to be working to problematize these sorts of unexamined, romanticized claims about the universal functionality of congregations. Functionalist analysis, I would argue, will be much more successful in case studies where the ability to universalize one’s findings is checked by methodological limitations. After all, beyond the obvious categorization of congregations as places of worship, I have serious doubts as to whether it is possible or even desirable to generalize about the way congregations function in society.
Despite the critical hiccups in the concluding chapters, the practical uses of this book compensate for its shortcomings. It is easy to see how the rigorous scholarship and challenging insights contained in the first two-thirds of this book could be applied in researching a local congregation on the ground. Chaves’ pioneering collection of data and analysis will help locate the often insular congregations of the Ozarks within the broader context of national trends. In conclusion, though, I must stress that Chaves, at his most successful, does not so much give readers a new way to think about congregations as much as he challenges our assumptions: Chaves asks us to refine our ideas about what congregations are—or at least what we take them to be. In attempting to go farther than that, Chaves falls into the familiar trap of a scholar who is overeager to found a new paradigm with insufficient research.
February 8, 2012
Book review: Robert Wuthnow's Growing Up Religious
Robert Wuthnow. Growing Up Religious: Christians and Jews on Their Journeys of Faith. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000.
In Growing Up Religious, Robert Wuthnow takes as his starting point the idea that spirituality finds its source in “personal histories,” such as the (heteronormative) family (see esp. 56-65) and congregational life (see esp. 69-84). But by “personal histories” Wuthnow signifies much more than a static backlog of memories and familial/social conditioning: as Wuthnow later insists, the act of memory—the ongoing processes of reconstruction, revision, and reinterpretation of one’s past—is the primary way for spiritual people to “mak[e] sense of their lives” in their “continuing quest for the sacred” (xxxi). Growing up Religious, then, is the narrative Wuthnow constructed of the narratives his interviewees shared, which he organizes into a series of thematically-linked chapters dealing with different topics in memory, life, and religion. In the reflection that follows, I wish to discuss briefly an aspect of Wuthnow’s book that I find troubling: Wuthnow’s hesitancy to engage his ethnographic research in a critical capacity.
To his human subjects, Wuthnow romantically attributes an unanticipated amount of agency in constructing their identities through the act of memory. Conceptualizing these narratives as generated from (and therefore belonging to) no one but the individual is an attempt by Wuthnow to convince his readers of the authenticity of the narratives—to endow them with “aura” in the Benjaminian sense. To achieve this level of authenticity, Wuthnow feigns objectivity and thus deemphasizes his (and his interviewers’) role in shaping the content and context of the interviews and molding those interviews into the book he subsequently authored. However, I do not wish to argue that Wuthnow is necessarily being dishonest. What is lacking in the book is not honesty, for Wuthnow’s beliefs relative to his subjects are mentioned, at least in passing, several times throughout the text; rather, it is critical awareness of his role as a scholar that seems to be lacking.
Of all places, I find the most helpful analogue for this situation in the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which, among other things, states that the more one knows about the current position of a particle, the less one knows about its momentum (and vice-versa), for the very act of measuring one of the particle’s properties inhibits our ability to measure the other accurately. Wuthnow’s investigation into the spiritual lives and backgrounds of some 200 “ordinary Americans” has effectively caused him to reshape (perhaps subtly) those lives and backgrounds—and not just in the process of writing the book; the act of inquiring about those stories at all affected the way the participants presented and communicated “their” stories. The resultant book, which masquerades as the objective reportage of unfiltered, undistorted human voices, is quite different from the book Wuthnow thinks he has written. This is not to say that Wuthnow is intentionally misleading his readers; it is just to say that Wuthnow, apparently, hasn’t been studying his quantum physics.
In addition to underestimating his sphere of influence, which I argued betrays a lack of critical self-awareness, Wuthnow likewise downplays the importance of critical theory in making sense of his findings. For example, Wuthnow mentions in the preface that most of his respondents were middle class (xii), but his research does not seem to show any intimation of class consciousness. In one irritating passage (18-23), Wuthnow states that, based on his interviews, “there is still an important material dimension” to his respondents’ religious memory (19), going on to mention jewelry, paintings, statues, and plaques with religious significance (21-22). Those items are not just symbols of spirituality, however; they are also symbols of capital. But far from interrogating the relationship between social class and how religion is lived, Wuthnow’s catalogue of bourgeois articles allows a particular kind of (privileged) practice to construct a normalizing judgment of American religious culture. Wuthnow’s lack of critical engagement with his research causes him to miss the opportunity to discover economic disparities and relationships of power that are subtly embedded in the fabric of religious experience.
Reading this book has made me realize how cautious scholars of religion must be when dealing directly with human beings. Though it is tempting to grant qualitative studies like Wuthnow’s Growing Up Religious preponderance over quantitative analyses (if only for the idea that qualitative studies somehow intrinsically preserve an authentic “human voice”), both qualitative and quantitative studies can be exploited as a platform for making generalizations and confirming the author’s biases. Of course, the scholar’s biases will always be reflected in the object of his or her analysis, but this resultant parallax view decisively points to why theory is necessary—not relegated to a handful of slapdash endnotes but in the center of scholarly inquiry. Still, theory should not be conceived of as a screen that protects the world from the destructive impulses of scholars; rather, theory is the only means scholars have of interacting with the world and producing meaningful results. What I suggest, then, is that good scholarship is always interrogative—not only of the object of study but of the scholar’s own ability to apprehend and comprehend that object.
In Growing Up Religious, Robert Wuthnow takes as his starting point the idea that spirituality finds its source in “personal histories,” such as the (heteronormative) family (see esp. 56-65) and congregational life (see esp. 69-84). But by “personal histories” Wuthnow signifies much more than a static backlog of memories and familial/social conditioning: as Wuthnow later insists, the act of memory—the ongoing processes of reconstruction, revision, and reinterpretation of one’s past—is the primary way for spiritual people to “mak[e] sense of their lives” in their “continuing quest for the sacred” (xxxi). Growing up Religious, then, is the narrative Wuthnow constructed of the narratives his interviewees shared, which he organizes into a series of thematically-linked chapters dealing with different topics in memory, life, and religion. In the reflection that follows, I wish to discuss briefly an aspect of Wuthnow’s book that I find troubling: Wuthnow’s hesitancy to engage his ethnographic research in a critical capacity.
To his human subjects, Wuthnow romantically attributes an unanticipated amount of agency in constructing their identities through the act of memory. Conceptualizing these narratives as generated from (and therefore belonging to) no one but the individual is an attempt by Wuthnow to convince his readers of the authenticity of the narratives—to endow them with “aura” in the Benjaminian sense. To achieve this level of authenticity, Wuthnow feigns objectivity and thus deemphasizes his (and his interviewers’) role in shaping the content and context of the interviews and molding those interviews into the book he subsequently authored. However, I do not wish to argue that Wuthnow is necessarily being dishonest. What is lacking in the book is not honesty, for Wuthnow’s beliefs relative to his subjects are mentioned, at least in passing, several times throughout the text; rather, it is critical awareness of his role as a scholar that seems to be lacking.
Of all places, I find the most helpful analogue for this situation in the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which, among other things, states that the more one knows about the current position of a particle, the less one knows about its momentum (and vice-versa), for the very act of measuring one of the particle’s properties inhibits our ability to measure the other accurately. Wuthnow’s investigation into the spiritual lives and backgrounds of some 200 “ordinary Americans” has effectively caused him to reshape (perhaps subtly) those lives and backgrounds—and not just in the process of writing the book; the act of inquiring about those stories at all affected the way the participants presented and communicated “their” stories. The resultant book, which masquerades as the objective reportage of unfiltered, undistorted human voices, is quite different from the book Wuthnow thinks he has written. This is not to say that Wuthnow is intentionally misleading his readers; it is just to say that Wuthnow, apparently, hasn’t been studying his quantum physics.
In addition to underestimating his sphere of influence, which I argued betrays a lack of critical self-awareness, Wuthnow likewise downplays the importance of critical theory in making sense of his findings. For example, Wuthnow mentions in the preface that most of his respondents were middle class (xii), but his research does not seem to show any intimation of class consciousness. In one irritating passage (18-23), Wuthnow states that, based on his interviews, “there is still an important material dimension” to his respondents’ religious memory (19), going on to mention jewelry, paintings, statues, and plaques with religious significance (21-22). Those items are not just symbols of spirituality, however; they are also symbols of capital. But far from interrogating the relationship between social class and how religion is lived, Wuthnow’s catalogue of bourgeois articles allows a particular kind of (privileged) practice to construct a normalizing judgment of American religious culture. Wuthnow’s lack of critical engagement with his research causes him to miss the opportunity to discover economic disparities and relationships of power that are subtly embedded in the fabric of religious experience.
Reading this book has made me realize how cautious scholars of religion must be when dealing directly with human beings. Though it is tempting to grant qualitative studies like Wuthnow’s Growing Up Religious preponderance over quantitative analyses (if only for the idea that qualitative studies somehow intrinsically preserve an authentic “human voice”), both qualitative and quantitative studies can be exploited as a platform for making generalizations and confirming the author’s biases. Of course, the scholar’s biases will always be reflected in the object of his or her analysis, but this resultant parallax view decisively points to why theory is necessary—not relegated to a handful of slapdash endnotes but in the center of scholarly inquiry. Still, theory should not be conceived of as a screen that protects the world from the destructive impulses of scholars; rather, theory is the only means scholars have of interacting with the world and producing meaningful results. What I suggest, then, is that good scholarship is always interrogative—not only of the object of study but of the scholar’s own ability to apprehend and comprehend that object.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)