Constructing "Data" in Religious Studies; Examining the Architecture of the Academy; Leslie Dorrough Smith

Edited by

Leslie Dorrough Smith [+–]

Avila University

Leslie Dorrough Smith is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Avila University, USA, where she is also the Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program. She is the author of Compromising Positions: Political Sex Scandals and American Christianity (Oxford University Press, 2020), Constructing “Data” in Religious Studies: Examining the Architecture of the Academy (Equinox Publishing, 2019), and Righteous Rhetoric: Sex, Speech and the Politics of Concerned Women for America (Oxford University Press, 2014).

Constructing “Data” in Religious Studies provides a critical introduction to the ways in which the category “data” is understood, produced, and deployed in the discipline of religious studies. The volume is organized into four different sections, entitled “Subjects,” “Objects,” “Scholars,” and “Institutions,” with an epilogue by Russell McCutcheon and Aaron Hughes.

The volume’s aim is to reflect, first, on the problems, strategies, and political structures through which scholars identify (and therefore create) data, and second, on the institutions, extensions, and applications of that data. The first three sections are spearheaded by a key essay and followed by four responses, all of which consider how the politics of the academy determine the very nature of the things we purport to study. The fourth section considers what these concepts look like as they are applied and further institutionalized in college and university structures, and itself includes four essays on “teaching,” “departments,” “research,” and “labor.” Finally, the epilogue closes the volume with a consideration on the politics of scholarly collegiality, transforming the data-makers (scholars) into data themselves.

Series: NAASR Working Papers

Introduction

“If I had a Nickel for Every Time…”: Thinking Critically about Data [+–] 1-6

Leslie Dorrough Smith FREE

Avila University

It is commonplace for scholars in the field of Religious Studies to quote Jonathan Z. Smith’s phrase “….there is no data for religion” and yet simultaneously fail to take seriously the call to analytical rigor that such a phrase was intended to invoke regarding how and why we construct the concept “religion.” This introduction presents the reader several key theoretical and methodological issues scholars of religion must face as they consider what constitutes their data – that is, the object of their study — and provides an overview of the structure of the book.

Part I: Subjects

1. Partitioning “Religion” and its Prehistories: Reflections on Categories, Narratives and the Practice of Religious Studies [+–] 9-26

Annette Yoshiko Reed £17.50

New York University

Annette Yoshiko Reed is Associate Professor in the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies and Program in Religious Studies at New York University. Her research explores identity and difference among Jews and Christians, especially in Late Antiquity.

Research in Religious Studies has repeatedly emphasized the modern, contingent, and constructed character of the category of “religion(s).” This experimental essay seeks to move beyond the fixation on this category to consider how practices of categorization (including but not limited to genealogies and critiques of categories) function within the discipline of Religious Studies. Although much has been gained through genealogies that contextualize the modern theorization of difference through the taxonomic rubric of “religion(s),” it may be useful also to consider the power and limits of categories, not least by looking also to other modern and premodern practices of ordering knowledge, such as anthologizing and narrativization. A broader purview opens up other points of connection between premodern and modern discourses about difference, while also exposing some of what is effaced in the recent fixation on pinpointing the moment of the so-called “invention” of “religion.”

Part I Responses

2. A More Subtle Violence: The Footnoting of “the Aboriginal Principle of Witnessing” by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada [+–] 27-37

Adam Stewart £17.50

Crandall University

Adam Stewart is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Crandall University, Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada.

The author argues that—despite its manifest objective of contributing to the decolonization of Indigenous-Settler relations in Canada—the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada was guided by a latent taxonomy of Indigenous religion that essentialized inconvenient differences surrounding Indigenous practices of witnessing and perpetuated the colonial violence of homogenization. Adam Stewart recommends Annette Yoshiko Reed’s method of narrativization as an alternative strategy for use by scholars, bureaucrats, and politicians when studying, or developing or implementing public policy involving, religious data that similarly fails to neatly fit into existing scholarly taxonomies of religion. The author proposes that this methodology can help prevent the same kinds of totalizing mistakes as those made by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.

3. Categorization and its Discontents [+–] 38-47

M Adryael Tong £17.50

Fordham University

M Adryael Tong is a Ph.D. candidate in Theology at Fordham University. Engaging with contemporary theory and continental philosophy, her dissertation focuses on how early Christian and rabbinic Jewish discourses on circumcision shaped the cultural narrative of “The Parting of the Ways.”

In this response to Annette Yoshiko Reed’s paper, the author reflects on the ways Reed’s piece might be read as a philosophical critique of the current scholarly practices of categorization in the study of religion of late antiquity. Taking Reed’s analysis as a jumping-off point, the author then suggests four different research trajectories in the historical study of religion that have the potential to address some of the problematics in our current categorization practices: a (re)examination of various native methodologies and alternative categorization schemes; a continued study of the relationship between the scholar and time through cross-disciplinary research on the practice(s) of periodization; the development of more robust theories of difference between and among categories; and an emphasis on engaging with the fields of ethics and philosophy in our work.

4. Catagorizing Contrariety: Narrative and Taxonomy in the Construction of Sikhism [+–] 48-60

John Soboslai £17.50

Montclair State University

John Soboslai is an Assistant Professor in the department of Religion at Montclair State University. He holds an MA in the history of religion from Columbia University, and a PhD in religious studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Specializing in martyrdom and global religious violence, he was named Sherman Emerging Scholar of 2016, and in 2015 UC Press published his co-authored book God in the Tumult of the Global Square.

In response to the provocative essay by Annette Yoshiko Reed, this paper engages with some of her main ideas and the ways categorization operates as a practice in academic and cultural contexts. First interrogating some philosophical bases for approaching religion as a discrete category, the author proceeds to frame Reed’s approach in the nominalism of David Hume by which general ideas are formed by relations of impressions. After characterizing Reed’s efforts as the analysis of narrative constructions of contiguity, using the case of transnational Sikh groups striving for political recognition in the early to mid-twentieth century as a case study for another nominalist relation: contrariety. By analyzing the ways religion was used in a two-pronged attempt to distinguish Sikhism from its parent ‘religion’ Hinduism, this essay provides a complement to Reed’s model by considering how religious classification is employed in a specific socio-cultural context towards political ends. The author concludes with an encouragement to attend to the ‘why’ of categorization as much as the ‘how’.

5. Interrogating Categories with Ethnography: On the “Five Pillars” of Islam [+–] 61-69

Jennifer Selby £17.50

Memorial University of Newfoundland

Jennifer A. Selby is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and affiliate member of Gender Studies at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada. Her research, teaching, and supervision broadly consider Muslim life in contemporary France and Canada and the nature of secularism. She is the author of Questioning French Secularism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and co-editor of Debating Sharia: Islam, Gender Politics, and Family Law Arbitration (University of Toronto Press, 2012).

This response takes up Annette Yoshiko Reed’s attention to the power dynamics and the limits of categories and categorization in academic scholarship on religion. The author considers Reed’s warnings of anachronism and reification in relation to her work on texts in late antiquity in relation to the “five pillars,” a primary framework for categorizing the central beliefs and practices in Islam. More specifically Jennifer Selby considers the prevalence of this framework within contemporary social scientific research on Muslims in Canada and its purchase within a recent collaborative qualitative research project.

Part II: Objects

6. Objects and Objections: Methodological Reflections on the Data for Religious Studies [+–] 73-100

Matthew C. Baldwin £17.50

Mars Hill University

Matthew C. Baldwin is Professor and Coordinator of the Program in Religion and Philosophy at Mars Hill University. He teaches courses in Bible, ancient history, Biblical languages, the American intellectual tradition, and method and theory in religious studies. He is the author of Whose Acts of Peter? Text and Historical Context of the Actus Vercellenses (Mohr-Siebeck, 2005).

It has been argued that “there is no data for religion,” however, there do exist “data for Religious Studies” both in the sense that “Religious Studies” is a social formation within academia, and in the sense that scholars working in Religious Studies (and adjacent fields) have treated great masses of things in the world as givens (“data”) for purposes of their research. In spite of widespread theoretical objections which have questioned whether the category “religion” even names a distinct object of study, scholars continue to do “Religious Studies.” This essay examines the “data for religious studies,” in both senses of the phrase, concluding that scholars focused on “religion” are engaged in a colonialist and post-colonialist political/pedagogical project termed here the management of surprise. From this overview of the field and its data, the argument pivots to a closer examination of one current methodological trend, “material religion,” which emphasizes the peculiar value of material objects and artifacts as data for Religious Studies. Some prominent exponents of “material religion” (and its close cousin “lived religion”) are reviving a phenomenological, neo-Ottonian understanding of “religion” as a human response to manifestations of mysterious and transcendent non-human realities, in which they would argue material objects play an important mediatory role. Such exponents are here termed the school of the more. As an antidote to the mystifying metaphysics of presence advocated by the school of the more, this essay concludes with six theses on the study of “objects,” both material and ideal, within a “Religious Studies” conceived of as branch of the human sciences.

Part II Responses

7. The Red Hot Iron: Religion, Nonreligion and the Material [+–] 101-113

Petra Klug £17.50

Universität Bremen

Petra Klug obtained a Master’s degree in Sociology and Cultural Studies (Magister Artium), as well as a Master’s degree in the Study of Religion (Master of Arts), from University of Leipzig. She has received the doctorate scholarship of the German Research Foundation and was associated to the DFG-research group on Religious Non-Conformism. Klug has published a book on the German discourse on Islam, as well as several articles about religion, nonreligion, gender, and Human Rights. Currently she works as Research Associate at University of Bremen, Germany, Department for the Study of Religion and Religion Education completing her dissertation on the relationship between the Religious and the Secular in the United States.

The heightened attention to material manifestations of religion in the last decades of the 20th century has led to a new outburst of phenomenological scholarship. However, phenomenology is not intrinsic to the material approach. Petra Klug would go even further to state that the attention to material aspects of religion can be of benefit to a critical study of religion. The problem lies in the definition of religion, but the author doesn’t think that it is entirely encompassed in the distinction between emic and etic or through a critique of religion as a sui generis category. Common definitions of religion usually frame what is understood as religion through its meaning for the religious alone. What religion means for the rest of society—for the nonreligious or also for religious non-conformists, and in turn for the critical scholarship about religion—is not included, and leaves a blind spot in such a definition. A focus on the material manifestations of religion can help to make this impact visible if it overcomes the romantic idealization of religion through religious and academic discourse. However, this requires reflecting on some methodological challenges, which become more apparent through the focus on material manifestations of religion, but are inherent to the field in its entirety.

8. Surprised by History: Encountering Data in Religious Studies [+–] 114-126

Holly White £17.50

Holly A. White received her Ph.D. from Syracuse University in the Department of Religion. Her dissertation addressed the modern aesthetic figure of Utopia and its relationship to critical methods in religious studies. Her areas of research include material culture, social theory, and modern literature.

In this essay, the author draws attention to Matthew Baldwin’s suspicions of recent discourses on materiality as just one more phenomenology. Holly White agrees with his frame of discourse analysis but think he too quickly skips over the materiality of history that funds his argument. This response addresses the potentials of historicization–potentials Baldwin labels as “surprises.” By considering what informs scholarly surprise specifically, Holly White extends the term and relate it to how to describe the movements of political economy generally. In reflecting how the social field produces its objects, the author highlights that scholars are not the only site for object construction. Non-scholars, she argues, are under similar urgency to form objects; however it is the scholar who is tasked to give an account of these mechanisms of production. A more nuanced concept of history, what Fredric Jameson capitalizes as History, contributes to her own account of how materiality might appear as impersonal excess. It is this excess that is surprising and can occasion thought in scholars and non-scholars alike. To demonstrate the usefulness of broader notions of materialist surprises, the author reflects on two mundane objects relevant to popular religion to highlight how particularity can give way to the overwhelming substance of history.

9. Governance and Public Policy as Critical Objects of Investigation in the Study of Religion [+–] 127-135

Peggy Schmeiser £17.50

University of Saskatchewan

Peggy Schmeiser, Ph.D., is a faculty member at the Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy at the University of Saskatchewan. Prior to this, she worked for many years in university government affairs and with the federal government in domestic and international policy areas relating to culture, equality and the economy. Peggy has taught at four universities, is proficient in French, and has researched, published and lectured internationally on a wide range of topics relating to religion, secularism, governance, public policy, culture and gender.

This article builds on Matthew Baldwin’s critique on the current “data” of religious studies to explore the historical and biased origins of notions about the category of “religion” and “world religion” currently employed in academic and political circles. Reflecting recent trends within the field, this paper challenges assumptions about a universal, identifiable and distinct component of society and human experience called “religion” that can somehow bestow on us the tangible items and goods that are all too often presumed to be the necessary objects of our analysis. Recognizing that it is the state, particularly through public policy and law, that plays the central role in identifying what is or is not “religion” for the purposes of social governance, this paper argues for greater focus on the “data” to be found in legislation, policy documents and court rulings that can illuminate the way that “religion” is deployed to perpetuate certain privileges and social hegemonies. In so doing, it argues that scholars of religion should turn a critical eye to the “data” of recent global events that reveal the perpetual tensions that exist between the category of “religion” and broader social movements and conflict.

10. Negative Dialektik and the Question Concerning the Relation between Objects and Concepts [+–] 136-148

Lucas Wright £17.50

University of California at Santa Barbara

Lucas Scott Wright is a PhD student in the Religious Studies Department at the University of California at Santa Barbara with a research focus in the area of Jewish Studies. His research explores the relations between German idealism, Modern Jewish Thought in Germany, and Contemporary Continental Philosophy of Religion. His current project is a study of the use of the concepts of ‘factuality’ and ‘virtuality’ in Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption, in relation to gnosticism, dialectics, and phenomenology.

In his piece, Matthew Baldwin lays bare the key epistemological issues pertaining to the question regarding subjects and objects in the study of religion, focusing particular attention upon the intersubjective character of objects. In this response, the author attempts to illustrate through an explication of a shared source – Theodor Adorno – the ways in which Baldwin’s account of intersubjectivity fails to capture an essential element of the intersubjective relation between objects and subjects – namely, the fact of contingency. Rather than attempting to juxtapose mystification and “what is going on,” object and subject, Lucas Wright shows how, for Adorno, an element of objective unknowability phenomenologically conditions subjective positing. The result of this formulation is neither a primacy of subject, nor of object. Rather, Lucas Wright’s analysis of Adorno yields a dialectical conception of the subject as always already objectively conditioned, and objects for-thought as always already figured by the so conditioned subject. There is, in the final instance, only the oscillation between objectivity and subjectivity – the real always remains unknowable in any total sense precisely because it conditions, the constructed positing of the subject arrests the fluctuation between condition and conditioned in a circumscribed sense through the use of concepts. In the end, this chapter argues, what is at stake in the theoretical and methodological discussion regarding objects in the study of religion is nothing less than the larger epistemological and existential question concerning how to conceive the conditions of thinking, the interplay between freedom and necessity. As such, it is both possible and necessary to reconceive the problems and debates in religious studies theory and method as specific occasions for thought, open to a larger range of theoretical and philosophical inquiry.

Part III: Scholars

11. “The Thing itself Always Steals Away”: Scholars and the Constitution of their Objects of Study [+–] 151-174

Craig Martin £17.50

St. Thomas Aquinas College

Craig Martin, Ph.D., is Professor of Religious Studies at St. Thomas Aquinas College. He writes on discourse analysis and ideology critique; his most recent books include Capitalizing Religion: Ideology and the Opiate of the Bourgeoisie (Bloomsbury, 2014) and A Critical Introduction to the Study of Religion, 2nd Edition (Routledge, 2017).

Poststructuralists have long since argued that scholars constitute their objects of study, in part through the use of discourses that construct reality. Critics often argue that this sort of anti-realism entails a fundamental, dualist opposition between reality-as-it-appears-in-discourse and reality-in-itself. According to their critics, poststructuralists imagine themselves locked into a prison house of language, from which reality-in-itself is inaccessible. In this paper I argue that this critique grossly misrepresents poststructuralism, and that more careful attention to poststructuralist, anti-realist arguments is necessary before dismissing them.

Part III Responses

12. Scholars and the Framing of Objects [+–] 175-182

Vaia Touna £17.50

University of Alabama

Vaia Touna is Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. She is author of Fabrications of the Greek Past: Religion, Tradition, and the Making of Modern Identities (Brill, 2017) and editor of Strategic Acts in the Study of Identity: Towards a Dynamic Theory of People and Place (Equinox, 2019). Her research focuses on the sociology of religion, acts of identification and social formation, methodological issues concerning the use of the category of “religion” in the study of the ancient Graeco-Roman world, as well as the study of the past in general.

Scholars who study the ancient world often assume that material artifacts from the past have a meaning, an identity, and the role of the scholar is to access those meanings as much, or as closely and accurately, as possible. Despite this common assumption and in response—as well as in agreement—to Craig Martin’s chapter, who argues that reality is mind-dependent and that scholars produce what they study, this essay further looks at how artifacts, such as for example terracotta figurines, became meaningful objects from the past and consequently items worth studying through scholarly discourses.

13. Serial Killers and Scholars of Religion [+–] 183-191

Martha Smith £17.50

Fullerton College

Martha Smith is Professor of Religious Studies at Fullerton College in Southern California. Her current research and teaching interests include North American religious diversity and pluralism, race and ethnicity studies, diversity and social justice. Her courses focus on the diversity of the American religious landscape, especially the ways in which race, gender, and ethnicity are connected to religious identities and the significance of material culture and lived religious experience in American life.

This chapter responds to Craig Martin’s discussion of the realist/anti-realist debate and its importance to the academic study of religion. Building on Martin’s call to take anti-realism seriously, this response begins to imagine how an anti-realist theoretical framework could become a part of the field’s self-definition. Could anti-realism provide a foundation for the academic study of religion to construct itself as a field that acknowledges the strength of second-order critical thought as its central form and content? As a framework that renders visible the creation of both religion and scholars of religion, the author suggests that anti-realism can be generative of the field’s value.

14. Caffeinated and Half-baked Realities: Religion as the Opium of the Scholar [+–] 192-201

Jason W.M. Ellsworth £17.50

Dalhousie University/ University of Prince Edward Island

Jason W. M. Ellsworth, a doctoral student in the Social Anthropology at Dalhousie University, is a lecturer in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Prince Edward Island. His research interests include the anthropology of food, Buddhism in Canada, marketing and economy, transnationalism, and Orientalism.

In the following chapter the author opens with a discussion on food labels – or more specifically claims of fair trade. This type of terminology is meant to persuade consumers that the food they are buying and consuming is in some way socially just. However, as can be seen in many studies on tea and coffee, fair trade is not a homogenous label, but rather a contested name that can be manipulated in bureaucratic fashions for the purpose of capitalist accumulation. Jason W.M. Ellsworth uses this as a segue into Martin’s work on anti-realism, and particularly his own interest in the study of “religion.” He argues that “religion” as a category is the opium of the scholar, where a categorical tool acts like opium to conceal underlying symptoms in society, constructs realities, and obscure the scholar’s involvement in this very construction. The chapter ends with a few notes on how commodity chain studies might offer insight on how one might approach the study of religion.

15. On the Seminal Adventure of the Trace [+–] 202-217

Joel Harrison £17.50

Northwestern University

Joel Harrison is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at Northwestern University. His work focuses on the intersection between social theory, theology, and philosophy of religion at the turn of the twentieth century in Germany and questions of theory and method in religious studies.

This chapter argues the work of Jacques Derrida, particularly his concept of “deconstruction,” ought not be connected to debates over whether or not reality is in part mind-dependent. Derrida’s work on the nature of language cannot be connected to these debates because, for Derrida, language only refers to itself, not an external reality. This claim has no bearing on the nature of reality or our relationship to reality; it only refers to our discourse about reality. Drawing this distinction is important for understanding the stakes of Derrida’s project and the implications of his conclusions. For religious studies, Derrida shows us that debates over how to define “religion” should not revolve around the kinds of empirical data that might fit, exceed, or contest a proper definition; rather, our interest ought to be in the ways that our discourse about religion slips away from us the moment we think we have it pinned down. In other words, the problem of how scholars can speak about religion is a problem exclusively of language rather than experience.

Part IV: Institutions

16. Labor: Finding the Devil in Indiana Jones: Mythologies of Work and the State of Academic Labor [+–] 221-234

James Dennis LoRusso £17.50

Independent Scholar

James Dennis LoRusso currently serves as Vice President of the North American Association for the Study of Religion. He is a former Associate Research Scholar in the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University, USA and is the author of Spirituality, Corporate Culture, and American Business: The Neoliberal Ethic and the Spirit of Global Capital (Bloomsbury, 2017).

This chapter approaches “the academy” as form of data in order to interrogate and evaluate the current state of academic labor, particularly in twenty-first century North America. Drawing on discourse analysis, the essay examines how governing academic norms and practices sustain and exacerbate the structural and material challenges facing the most vulnerable academic laborers today. In particular, the author explores how academic labor is socially constructed through the mobilization of various “mythologies of work” and even through critical genres such as “quit lit” that seek to expose perceived injustices. The enactment of these discourses, the chapter argues, ultimately reinforces the status quo and serves the interests of academic elites.

17. Teaching: Teaching in the Ideological State of Religious Studies: Notes Towards a Pedagogical Future [+–] 235-245

Richard W. Newton, Jr. £17.50

University of Alabama

Richard Newton is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama. He is author of Identifying Roots: Alex Haley and the Anthropology of Scriptures(Equinox Publishing Ltd., 2020) and former editor of the Bulletin for the Study of Religion. Newton is also curator of the social media professional development network, Sowing the Seed: Fruitful Conversations in Religion, Culture and Teaching (SowingTheSeed.org).

Higher education in North America increasingly implores teachers to adopt frameworks of values education, pre-professional student-learning, and assessment backed by the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). Teacher-scholars in religious studies have reason to question whether such initiatives put a critical understanding of our data at odds with the ideological state apparatuses within which our institutions are situated. Thinking with the work of Louis Althusser, this chapter historicizes classroom tensions and outlines an alternative way for theoretically-minded scholars to negotiate the task of pedagogy.

18. Departments: Competencies and Curricula: The Role of Academic Departments in Shaping the Study of Religion [+–] 246-255

Rebekka King £17.50

Middle Tennessee State University

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Rebekka King, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Middle Tennessee State University. Her research focuses on the negotiation of boundaries within North American Christianity. Her first book (under contract with NYU Press) charts the development of progressive Christianity in North America as a movement that spurned Christian orthodoxy in pursuit of a resolutely skeptical faith. She teaches courses on method and theory, anthropology of religion, and contemporary Christianity.

This chapter proposes that the foundation of a university department is its curriculum. Using the recent development of the Religious Studies major at Middle Tennessee State University as a case study, it explores how a shift to competency-focused program design avoids noteworthy pitfalls related to content-based and theory/method-based models. Beginning with a brief outline of the development of religious studies departments, this chapter shows how our pedagogy and representations of the discipline should take seriously the context of our institutions and students. At Middle Tennessee State University, we have eschewed coverage models such as the world religions model or an explicitly method and theory driven model in favor of a curriculum that promotes skills sets or competencies. This curriculum centered on areas of description, analysis, and critique allows the department to organically expand in dialogue with broader social shifts within the academic study of religion, student learning needs, and the research expertise and pedagogical interests of its faculty.

19. Research: Religious Studies Research in an Era of Neoliberalization [+–] 256-266

Gregory D. Alles £17.50

McDaniel College

Gregory Alles is professor of religious studies at McDaniel College in Westminster, Maryland. He is co-editor of Numen, the journal of the International Association for the History of Religions, and a member of the steering committee of the Indigenous Religious Traditions Unit of the American Academy of Religion. Dr. Alles has served as President of the North American Association for the Study of Religions. His research has focused widely on rhetoric in Greek and Sanskrit epic, the history of the study of religions in Germany, particularly the work of Rudolf Otto, the study of religions in a global context, and most recently on adivasi (tribal) people in Gujarat, India, known as Rathvas. He edited Religious Studies: A Global View and is author of The Iliad, The Ramayana, and the Work of Religion: Failed Persuasion and Religious Mystification as well as a number of articles.

“Neoliberalization” is a convenient term for a number of changes that have taken place in higher education especially since the 1980s. The changes are broadly associated with the application of market principles to the operation of colleges and university. This chapter first identifies the author’s professional location within the study of religions and then turns to a concentrated consideration of the impact of these changes. It sees some positive value in the neoliberal turn, for example, in its emphasis on globalization and even in the much maligned concern with a quantitative assessment of research output. Nevertheless, it also identifies areas where a neoliberal approach has been detrimental: conceiving of higher education as a private rather than a public good, judging the importance of fields of study in terms of the number of students they attract, relying increasingly on poorly compensated contingent or adjunct faculty as an economizing measure, and determining the value of reserach on the basis of its economic return either to the academic institution or to private business. Although all academic fields are subject to these pressures, the humanities, including religious studies, are at a particular disadvantage in comparison with the STEM fields.

Epilogue

The Gatekeeping Rhetoric of Collegiality in the Study of Religion [+–] 267-291

Russell T. McCutcheon,Aaron W. Hughes £17.50

University of Alabama

Russell T. McCutcheon is University Research Professor and, for 18 years, was the Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama. He has written on problems in the academic labor market throughout his 30-year career and helped to design and run Alabama’s skills-based M.A. in religion in culture. Among his recent work is the edited resource for instructors, Teaching in Religious Studies and Beyond (Bloomsbury 2024).

University of Rochester

Aaron W. Hughes is the Dean’s Professor of the Humanities and the Philip S. Bernstein Professor in the Department of Religion and Classics at the University of Rochester. His research and publications focus on both Jewish philosophy and Islamic Studies. He has authored numerous books, including Situating Islam: The Past and Future of an Academic Discipline (Equinox, 2007); Theorizing Islam: Disciplinary Deconstruction and Reconstruction (Equinox, 2012); Muslim Identities: An Introduction to Islam (Columbia, 2012); and Abrahamic Religions: On the Uses and Abuses of History (Oxford, 2012). He currently serves as the editor of the journal Method and Theory in the Study of Religion.

Using as a test case the membership requirements of a longstanding private association for scholars of religion—but also noting such other diverse sites as tenure and promotion criteria and ongoing debates on method in the study of religion—this article examines the practical, gatekeeping function of the discourse on collegiality as it is practiced in the academic study of religion. Given its generally undefined nature and undisclosed criteria, this value is argued to conserve an orthodoxy in the field, inasmuch as it can be used in the service of unprofessional criteria that are strategically useful in patrolling the boundaries of dominant discourses.

End Matter

Index [+–] 293-300

Leslie Dorrough Smith FREE

Avila University

Constructing “Data” in Religious Studies provides a critical introduction to the ways in which the category “data” is understood, produced, and deployed in the discipline of religious studies. The volume is organized into four different sections, entitled “Subjects,” “Objects,” “Scholars,” and “Institutions,” with an epilogue by Russell McCutcheon and Aaron Hughes. The volume’s aim is to reflect, first, on the problems, strategies, and political structures through which scholars identify (and therefore create) data, and second, on the institutions, extensions, and applications of that data. The first three sections are spearheaded by a key essay and followed by four responses, all of which consider how the politics of the academy determine the very nature of the things we purport to study. The fourth section considers what these concepts look like as they are applied and further institutionalized in college and university structures, and itself includes four essays on “teaching,” “departments,” “research,” and “labor.” Finally, the epilogue closes the volume with a consideration on the politics of scholarly collegiality, transforming the data-makers (scholars) into data themselves.

Reviews

This exemplary edited volume takes J.Z. Smith’s famous dictum, “there is no data for religion” as an insight to be elaborated and applied rather than a contention to be debated, and proceeds to interrogate how, why, and for whom religious “data” are created through scholarly identification, as well as the theoretical and institutional implications of the construction and deconstruction of religion.
Constructing “Data” is dedicated to J.Z. Smith, who passed away a month after the NAASR papers were given, and models the productive theoretical and methodological insights that can emerge when scholars of religion heed his advice to take their own self-consciousness as their primary expertise.
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Constructing "Data" in Religious Studies

Examining the Architecture of the Academy

Leslie Dorrough Smith [+–]

Avila University

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