In his bio-bibliographical essay, J.Z. Smith wrote that he was fond of the expression “when the chips are down” in the sense of all being said and done. With his passing in December 2017, the phrase has gained an additional layer of sad finality – the chips are really down. Scholarship is not poker, however, which means that these chips not only can but in fact should be picked up and circulated. Imagining Smith brings together the contributions of scholars who do exactly that by considering theoretical and methodological issues central to J. Z. Smith’s oeuvre in the context of their own research. Through analyses of Smith’s own work as well as applications of his concerns to new situations, historic periods, and regions, the contributors test the adequacy and applicability of Smith’s ideas and thus provide an indirect assessment of his influence and legacy in the field of Religious Studies.

In the opening chapter of this book, Aaron W. Hughes answers the question of whether scholars should continue (or start) to think with J. Z. Smith with a resounding yes. What exactly does that mean, however? In Hughes’s view, Smith “encourages us to be aware of how our selves get in the ways of what we do and study, often in ways that we might not expect” and that “he forces us to become aware of where and how the questions and issues we tap—and all too often simply replicate—are neither innocent nor value-neutral.” This is the foundation of what Hughes calls “Smithian self-consciousness”: that we become cognizant of and then “reveal, to ourselves and to others, the structures that often lay dormant and that silently lurk behind our analyses and those of others.”

Sam D. Gill encourages us to pay more attention to the playful or ludic dimension of Smith’s writings. As he points out, the titles of Smith’s essays are often riddles and jokes that confound as well as delight. They often engage games and play, homophones, and double-entendres, even nursery rhymes. While clever and provocative, Gill argues, Smith’s titles are lumps of compressed theory radiating insights that he had developed throughout his studies persistently preoccupied by incongruity, difference, and gaps. Take, for example, Smith’s short essay “The ‘End’ of Comparison”. Its title is a riddle signaled by putting the word “end” in quotation marks. “Some have focused on this particular presentation of comparison,” Gill observes, “because it appears to outline a straight-forward linear comparison technique: description, comparison, redescription, rectification. My sense is that it is a serious error to consider this the culminating conclusion to Smith’s consideration of comparison”. If not the conclusion, however, then what is it? How should we read that little essay and other jests and riddles one encounters in Smith’s writings? Gill’s answer is: not as definitive statements or solutions—after all, these are not things we normally expect from riddles—but rather as clues initiating and emphasizing the ongoing play of difference.

In his chapter, Indrek Peedu rightly observes that like other influential scholars of religion from the past, Jonathan Z. Smith is not only an important voice we can choose to hear or ignore but also that he has become our data, and as such, an object of classification. Smith’s work has been read and interpreted in a variety of different—and occasionally—contradictory ways. Was he a nominalist, as some claim? Or maybe, as suggested by others, a pragmatist? Or a constructionist? Rather than proposing yet another classificatory label, Peedu argues that the real relevance and central importance of J. Z. Smith reveals itself in the how rather than the what of his thinking about the problems we face in the study of religion.

Craig R. Prentiss takes a closer and critical look at one of the topics Smith addressed – the birth of racial imagination – to conclude that in “Close Encounters” Smith conceptualizes race “in such a way as to render the ferocious subjugation of bodies, the organization of massive new labor forces, the plundering of resources, the expropriation of lands, and the production of an intellectual scaffolding necessary for the manufacture and maintenance of historically contingent authority structures, secondary to a set of logic games playing out in the minds of a comparatively small band of renegade intellectuals comfortable casting off the shackles imposed by the hegemonic status of biblical creation”. As such, Prentiss claims, the problem with Smith’s account of the birth of racial imagination is not that it is “wrong” but rather that its usefulness is very limited because it ignores power relations that are always a factor in any taxonomic enterprise, including the constitution of “difference”. Like a Tylorian intellectualist treatment of religion as emerging from the puzzling nature of death and dreams, Smith’s “Close Encounters of Diverse Kinds” treats “race” as springing from an apparently innocent human curiosity about difference.

By surveying the category of magic in J. Z. Smith’s work, and specifically by focusing on his essay “Trading Places,” Andrew Durdin argues that a closer engagement with Smith’s use of the category of magic can clarify his methodological concepts of redescription and rectification, and, in turn, usefully enlarge Smith’s theoretical contributions for future work in the study of religion. According to Durdin, “trading places” is another rendering of Smith’s notions of redescription and rectification, key components of his proposed method of comparison. By comparing different articulations Smith has given for redescription and rectification, Durdin shows that “trading places” can be understood as a more radical view of these two components, insofar as Smith calls for the full rejection of a standard academic term, magic, rather than simply suggest critical self-consciousness, as he does with religion.

The topic of comparison, another of J. Z. Smith’s persistent preoccupations, is addressed also by Mark Q. Gardiner and Steve Engler. As they note in their chapter, “comparison as a method in the study of religion has had a bumpy history. At one time it was the method; more recently it has been attacked in various ways” and J. Z. Smith’s perceived position in this history is quite ambiguous: “on the one hand, he is widely regarded to have launched a formidable, if not decisive, assault on comparison. On the other, he is widely regarded as one of its modern-day champions”. This ambiguity, in Gardiner’s and Engler’s opinion, stems from a misunderstanding of Smith’s starting point on which, as they point out, he was never quite explicit. Smith’s work, Gardiner and Engler argue, presupposes a specific view of the nature of meaning: interpretationism. Pairing Smith’s ideas on comparison, redescription, and rectification with interpretive methodology proposed by philosopher Donald Davidson, they submit, not only helps us make sense of the somewhat sketchy account of comparison in Smith’s work but additionally it increases Smith’s ongoing relevance by bringing to light his particular semantic presuppositions.

Jeppe Sinding Jensen defends the use of the term “religion”—at least as it is a practical “epistemic placeholder”—and argues that there really is something “out there” for the study of religion to study, namely social constructions of many different kinds. Inviting Karl R. Popper and John R. Searle into his conversation with Jonathan Z. Smith, Jensen argues not only that the category of religion should be preserved in our scholarly work but also that there indeed is data for religion thus understood. And plenty of it. Referring to the distinction between maps and territories and to Smith’s declaration that “all we have is maps”, Jensen observes that to say that “need not lead to the conclusion that all our knowledge is similarly or totally unfettered. The very history of the intersubjective academic and scientific community demonstrates that”.

Lewis Doney describes how reading Smith prompted him to reassess his earlier work on Old Tibetan prayer which betrayed, as Doney admits, a “search for origins, for causality and for specialness”. Taking clues from Smith, Doney reorganized, reassessed, and recontextualized his data—an epigraph on a bronze bell and a song of praise captured in a single manuscript copy—to then redescribe them as largely elite constructions of ideal Buddhist worlds, or “maps” whose divergence from each other suggests that both may be seen (or again, redescribed) as reflecting the movement of Tibetan religious literature from a more locative to an increasingly utopian map of reality.

Seth Schermerhorn tests the adequacy and applicability of J. Z. Smith’s thoughts on locative and utopian spatial orientations as well as religion(s) of “here,” “there” and “anywhere” in the context of his ethnographic study of contemporary O’odham Catholics and their travels to Magdalena, Sonora, Mexico to visit Saint Francis. These pilgrimages seem to suggest that O’odham could be described as operating within the “locative” spatial orientation with a clearly defined “sacred” center. Things are, however, more complex. It is not only that there are no fewer than four rival destinations for O’odham to travel to in addition to, or in lieu of, traveling to Magdalena, each with its own Saint Francis, there is also a movable feast of Saint Francis that travels each year across the eleven districts of the nation. In a strong statement about the importance of the emic perspective, Schermerhorn points out that in their own thinking about the multiple Magdalenas, O’odham easily “alternate between ‘locative’ and ‘utopian’ orientations, variously emphasizing and deemphasizing place” suggesting both the limitations of Smith’s early and the usefulness of his later topographic thought.

Following Smith’s description of ritual as “creation of a controlled environment” Nicholas Witkowski in his chapter proposes a new interpretation (a redescription?) of how early Indian Buddhist monastics navigated the forces of Brahmanization at work in the early centuries of the Common Era. As Witkowski observes, recent scholarship in the field has tended to view the Brahmanizing forces as authoritative in Indian society, and thus, as a force the Buddhist monastic order was compelled to reckon with, and ultimately submit to. Questioning this narrative and using the example of Buddhist monastic resistance to Brahmanical attempts to enforce a totalizing purity regime in everyday society, Witkowski argues that in fact ritual practice was limited to the “controlled environment” of Brahmanical circles of social authority and did not spread to the field of “ordinary” or “everyday” life in the India of the early centuries CE.

I use my recent comparative project in which I analyze a variety of Jewish theological responses to the Holocaust to discuss advantages and limitations of what I see as Smithian approach to comparative endeavors. While I would find it impossible to deny the importance of Smith’s critique of various comparative projects as well as what I take as his strong emphasis on scholar’s agency, I find it equally impossible to reconstruct something akin to a recipe for a successful comparison from Smith’s comments on the topic. To complete my project, I had discovered, I needed to reach for other, more systematic scholarly accounts of comparisons as well as other, literary and quite unexpected sources.

Vaia Touna takes Smith’s idea of religion as an act of a second order reflective imagination and explores the idea of “the past” as a similar discursive act. As a case study she looks at a contemporary archaeological excavation, near the village of Narthaki, in central Greece, and the often-unnoticed collaborations between a variety of participants (e.g., archaeologists and local residents, museum visitors and curators, etc.), who each have their own narratives about, and investments in the archaeological finds. Touna’s goal is to investigate how these collaborations (implicit or explicit) between so called outsiders (e.g., archaeologists) and insiders (e.g., local residents) impact the way the material artifacts found in archaeological sites are imagined. What kind of meanings they acquire? How are they discussed and historicized not only within the framework of local communities and their larger ethnic discourses but also within archaeological and historical disciplinary discourses.

Lech Trzcionkowski, builds on Smith’s reflection on classification, taxonomy, and comparison to investigate the genealogy of “Orphism”—a name ostensibly referring to a Hellenistic mystery religion. Trzcionkowski traces the history of the term created in the 19th century in an atmosphere of a quest for deeper spirituality and purporting to refer to a kind of pagan mystique church The concept, he points out, was built on arguments used in the polemics between Catholic and Protestant scholars and, as with other –ism formations, suggests a whole that actually never existed, but was created out of existing fragments.

Whether or not J. Z. Smith himself was in fact an excellent or even a good instructor, it is crucial, argues Andie Alexander, that we do not fail to acknowledge his profound contribution to pedagogy in the undergraduate classroom, considering specifically the introductory course. In her chapter, Alexander mines Smith’s writings and talks on pedagogy, scattered throughout his oeuvre, to ascertain his methods for approaching the classroom and then asks, using several current, popular introductory texts as case studies, whether Smith’s work has had an impact on pedagogy in the study of religion, if any, and how we might apply Smith’s principles to introductory classes today. After working through several such examples, Alexander then tackles the larger task of applying Smith’s pedagogical principles to both the role of the humanities (as well as the so-called crisis of) in higher education, particularly with regard to the emphasis on individualism, to begin exploring the effectiveness and limitations of this understanding according to Smith’s principles.

Gabriel Levy questions the usefulness of J. Z. Smith both for teaching and for the study of religion. The first point brought up by Levy has to do with the playful character of Smith’s prose. Simply put, this dimension of Smith’s writings is often lost on non-native English speakers. If Gill is right in arguing for the importance of riddles and jests in Smith’s essays, then those of us functioning outside the English-speaking environment are faced with the question: how to translate Smith. Is it at all possible? And perhaps a more fundamental question is, would such a translation be in fact worthwhile? Against scholars in whose opinion Smith’s contributions to both method and theory in the study of religion should make his oeuvre a crucial part of the syllabi we design as well as our own research practice, Levy argues that there may be no coherent method to be found in Smith and that his theoretical contributions to the study of religion are less useful than some tend to argue.

Jack C. Laughlin and Kornel Zathureczky link J. Z. Smith’s views on undergraduate college education with those expressed by Richard Rorty and argue that we should see Smith as firmly positioned within the tradition of American Pragmatism. They posit a “Rortyan-Smithian pragmatism” and point out the extent to which Smith’s imagining religion is informed by Pragmatism, especially by the work of the Rortyan “redescribing ironist” acutely aware of the contingency of her work. In their opinion, Smith’s “confession to the Rortyan imperative of acculturation before edification is an admission that the unsettling of commonplace ideas—about religion—is parasitic upon their very reproduction. And to the extent that that’s the case, there is never a critic then, without a caretaker” (below: xx). It is in this context that Laughlin and Zathureczky then analyze the Éthique et culture religieuse (ECR) program in the Canadian province of Québec.

A conversation between Andie Alexander and Aaron W. Hughes in which they touch on several issues that kept returning in our conversations in Trondheim. Translation is one of them. The conversation was recorded on location during the conference and subsequently published as a podcast by The Religious Studies Project (2019). The version included here is an edited transcript of the podcast.

Willi Braun wrote a response to that podcast episode for The Religious Studies Project, which he has kindly edited and expanded for this volume. As he observes, “it remains lamentable that there are many scholars who seem not to read Smith’s work seriously. True, his writings and arguments are complex and difficult. I recall an old pronouncement by the classical Athenian orator and rhetorician, Isocrates: ‘The roots of education are bitter, but its fruit is sweet.’ The aphorism applies to the work, and it is work, of reading, thinking with and translating Smith for our students.”