How and Why Books Matter; Essays on the Social Function of Iconic Texts; Watts

James W Watts [+–]

Syracuse University

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James W. Watts is Professor of Religion at Syracuse University. His publications include How and Why Books Matter: Essays on the Social Function of Iconic Texts (Equinox, 2019) and Understanding the Bible as a Scripture in History Culture and Religion (Wiley, 2021).

Religious and secular communities ritualize some books in one, two, or three dimensions. They ritualize the dimension of semantic interpretation through teaching, preaching, and scholarly commentary. This dimension receives almost all the attention of academic scholars. Communities also ritualize a text’s expressive dimension through public reading, recitation, and song, and also by reproducing its contents in art, theatre and film. This dimension is receiving increasing scholarly attention, especially in religious studies and anthropology. A third textual dimension, the iconic dimension, gets ritualized by manipulating the physical text, decorating it, and displaying it. This dimension has received almost no academic attention, yet features prominently in the most common news stories about books, whether about e-books, academic libraries, rare manuscript discoveries, or scripture desecrations. By calling attention to the iconic dimension of books, James Watts argues that we can better understand how physical books mediate social value and power within and between religious communities, nations, academic disciplines, and societies both ancient and modern.

How and Why Books Matter will appeal to a wide range of readers interested in books, reading, literacy, scriptures, e-books, publishing, and the future of the book. It also addresses scholarship in religion, cultural studies, literacy studies, biblical studies, book history, anthropology, literary studies, and intellectual history.

Series: Comparative Research on Iconic and Performative Texts

Preliminaries

List of Figures [+–] vi

Acknowledgements [+–] vii-viii

Introduction

The Iconic Books Project [+–] 1-5

Religious and secular communities ritualize some books in one, two, or three dimensions. They ritualize the dimension of semantic interpretation through teaching, preaching, and scholarly commentary. This dimension receives almost all the attention of academic scholars. Communities also ritualize a text’s performative dimension through public reading, recitation, and song, and also be reproducing its contents in art, theatre and film. This dimension is receiving increasing scholarly attention, especially in religious studies and anthropology. A third textual dimension, the iconic dimension, gets ritualized by manipulating the physical text, decorating it, and displaying it. This dimension has received almost no academic attention, yet features prominently in the most common news stories about books, whether about e-books, academic libraries, rare manuscript discoveries, or scripture desecrations. By calling attention to the iconic dimension of books, this book argues that we can better understand how physical books mediate social value and power within and between religious communities, nations, academic disciplines, and societies both ancient and modern. How and Why Books Matter will appeal to a wide range of readers interested in books, reading, literacy, scriptures, e-books, publishing, and the future of the book. It also addresses scholarship in religion, cultural studies, literacy studies, biblical studies, book history, anthropology, literary studies, and intellectual history.

Chapter 1

How Books Matter: The Three Dimensions of Scriptures [+–] 7-29

The first chapter presents a model for understanding the ways in which scriptures function. Recent controversies over Ten Commandments monuments and desecrated Qur’ans involve the iconic function of scriptures. Yet traditional and modern scholarship on Jewish, Christian, or Muslim scriptures is ill-prepared to interpret these events because it has focused almost all its efforts on semantic interpretation. Even the increased attention to the expressive functions of scripture does not provide resources for understanding the iconic roles of scriptures. This chapter addresses that gap by theorizing the nature of scriptures as a function of their ritualization in three dimensions—semantic, expressive, and iconic. The model provides a way to understand how traditions ritualize scriptures and how they claim social power by doing so.

Chapter 2

Iconic Books and Texts [+–] 31-54

There has been a surge in published scholarship on the ritualization of iconic books and other texts in the second decade of the twenty-first century. This chapter draws on these studies to describe the phenomenon of iconic books and texts. Most have focused on scriptures and other sacred text that provide the most extreme examples of iconic ritualization. As a group, these studies covered ritualized texts from a wide range of the world’s religious traditions. They also discussed the classification of such texts, the visual effects of their scripts and fonts, and the social effects of their public and private ritualization. Writing continues to legitimize people, institutions, academic disciplines, nations and religions. These studies show that recognizing the iconic dimension of written texts and how they get ritualized should play an essential part in describing the motives and methods for writing, publishing, marketing, buying, handling, displaying and storing books in any literate culture in the world.

Chapter 3

Relic Texts [+–] 55-69

Relic texts tend to be ritualized only in the iconic dimension. They are rare, if not one-of-a-kind, and are in theory not reproducible. Their chief function is legitimation. Owning relic texts legitimizes individuals and communities and conveys a sense of empowerment. Owners use their relic texts to legitimize themselves, their institutions, their nations, and their religions. Losing them can threaten group identity. Individuals, private institutions, and governments sometimes go to great lengths to gain and to keep particular relic texts for themselves.

Chapter 4

Iconic Digital Texts: How Rituals Materialize Virtual Texts [+–] 71-81

In contrast to the increasing interest in bodies and materials in humanistic research, digital culture celebrates the fantasy that people (as avatars in virtual reality) and texts (as e-books) can escape their material constraints. Ritual, however, by drawing sustained attention to practices with texts, inevitably draws attention to their material forms. In doing so, it destroys the illusion that digital texts are “virtual.” The more a digital text is ritualized, the more physical and less virtual it appears. I demonstrate this thesis by examining two kinds of ritualized digital texts: those whose digitization has been used to expand or restrict the ritual uses of digitized texts and those whose digitization has permitted new ways of seeing and manipulating their original material form. These examples draw attention either to the physical nature and location of digital devices or to the physical form of the material texts that digital images reproduce.

Chapter 5

Desecrated Scriptures and the News Media [+–] 83-98

News media regularly report desecrations of books of scripture because of religious and political conflicts in various Western, Middle Eastern, African, and South Asian countries. Though political tensions also arise from desecrating sacred sites, objects, and persons, books of scripture have emerged as particularly potent objects of contestation. That is because, as a very old form of media themselves, scriptures encapsulate the religious experiences of many people who are used to handling the physical book with veneration. News of such a book’s desecration thus inverts a common religious experience and can arouse strong and widespread reactions. This chapter describes the effects of ritualizing books of scripture and compares their ritualization in four religious traditions in order to contextualize the phenomenon of desecrating scriptures cross-culturally and explain the political furors aroused by media coverage of particular incidents.

Chapter 6

Ancient Iconic Texts [+–] 99-115

This chapter probes the origins of iconic textuality in the ancient Near East, informed by post-colonial perspectives on iconic texts. The need to create material artifacts as proof of economic transactions motivated the invention of writing in Mesopotamia. The surviving art and texts from ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia exhibit at least four forms of iconic textuality: monumental inscriptions, scribal portraiture, displays and manipulations of ritual texts, and beliefs in heavenly texts. Iconic ritualization was also a key factor in creating the first Western scripture, the Jewish Torah. It narrates the gift of divinely written tablets to Moses that are enshrined in a book reliquary (the Ark of the Covenant) that represents God’s presence with Israel. Simultaneously, Moses writes scrolls of Torah (law or instruction) that accompany the Ark of the Covenant and report on the tablets’ origins and contents. Jewish tradition soon came to regard the Torah, too, as written in heaven. In this way, iconic display joined ritualized expression and semantic interpretation to scripturalize Torah in antiquity, as well as later bibles that incorporate it.

Chapter 7

Rival Iconic Texts: Ten Commandments Monuments and the U.S. Constitution [+–] 117-134

The legal and political controversy over Ten Commandments monuments in the United States revolves around iconic texts holding a discrete symbolic value compared to texts whose function is primarily to be read. A comparative perspective on iconic texts reveals that the nation’s founding documents, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, have also been increasingly turned into monumental icons over the last half-century. The Ten Commandments controversy can therefore be understood as the competition between iconic texts for symbolic supremacy. At stake in this struggle is how the nation will represent the government’s relationship to the many religions represented within its population.

Chapter 8

Book Aniconism: The Codex, Translation and Beliefs about Immaterial Texts [+–] 135-159

This chapter explores the old and powerful resistance in both academic and popular culture to seriously considering the significance of the material forms and uses of books. The view that what matters about a text is only what it says may seem like a rationalistic and modern perspective, but it actually dates back to ancient times. Believers in the immateriality of sacred texts criticize people who value the material form and appearance of scripture as superstitious, even idolatrous. They claim that ritualizing the iconic dimension of scriptures interferes with true religious piety which should focus on spiritual rather than material realities. This attitude is book aniconism. Book aniconism develops within a religious tradition as an attempt to purify and protect it. For believers in the immateriality of texts, the dichotomy between semantic meaning and material text represents the mystical dichotomy between the human spirit and body. Book aniconism was reinforced in Western culture by two tendencies in Christian tradition: the adoption of the codex as the primary form of the book, and translations of Christian scripture into every language possible. Thus both the material and linguistic forms of the Bible reinforced the belief that its importance lay only in its immaterial and infinitely translatable message.

Chapter 9

Mass Literacy and Scholarly Expertise [+–] 161-166

The spread of literacy did not displace the social prestige of scribal expertise that was established in antiquity. The every-growing number and complexity of texts account for the continuing cultural authority of scholarly expertise. The tension between expert and non-specialist uses of texts, however, also reinforced scholars’ avoidance of the subject of iconic books and texts while drawing constant attention to semantic interpretation instead. Scholarly ignorance about iconic texts allows us to insist that a text’s real meaning lies in its semantic interpretation alone, which we are the experts at elucidating. But many of our texts mediate power and legitimacy in ways that semantic interpretation alone cannot understand, much less control.

Chapter 10

Why Books Matter: Preservation and Disposal [+–] 167-188

Contemporary debates over the nature and function of libraries and the books that they contain are cast in a different light by the study of iconic books. Because iconic ritualization reinforces the legitimacy of individuals, institutions, nations and religions, its study inevitably becomes a study in social values and expediency. An iconic books perspective highlights the values that societies have invested in books and libraries. It helps us understand the values attached to browsing stacks, to physical books, to book disposal, and to library architecture. The study of iconic books therefore provides a new assessment of the common feeling today that these values are being threatened by technological, economic, and political changes.

End Matter

Bibliography [+–] 189-204

Author Index [+–] 205-209

Subject Index [+–] 210-218

Reviews

This important collection of essays from James W. Watts fills in many gaps left by previous studies of books in general, and religious scriptures in particular, that prioritize meaning in influence of specific words without consideration for the physical media and performative affects surrounding those words.
The wide range of topics addressed and examples used in this volume demonstrate its usefulness to scholars in multiple fields that deal with how and why the phenomena of books and texts, especially those with the status of scripture, exert influence and authority in individual lives and social groups. For those who are already familiar with Watts' writing, this volume adds additional nuance to his previous studies and the numerous illustrations act as a helpful resource for further investigations.
Anthropos

This is an immensely important work that brings together a vast array of information that is sure to challenge widely shared assumptions and stimulate deep thought. The breadth of the author’s knowledge and insights is stunning, and his juxtaposition of different traditions cannot help but draw attention to how much we have in common, even with those from whom we most firmly differentiate ourselves. It will be hard for anyone to come away from this book, or even its individual chapters, without having learned something about other traditions and, often, one’s own.
Biblical Theology Bulletin

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Books and Journals in Humanities, Social Science and Performing Arts

How and Why Books Matter

Essays on the Social Function of Iconic Texts

James W Watts [+–]

Syracuse University

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