Claiming Identity in the Study of Religion

Edited by

Monica R. Miller [+–]

Lehigh University

Monica R. Miller is Assistant Professor of Religion and Africana Studies at Lehigh University (Fall 2013) and among other publications, author of Religion and Hip Hop (Routledge). Miller currently serves as a Senior Research Fellow with The Institute for Humanist Studies
(Washington, DC), is Co-Chair and founder of Critical Approaches to the Study of Hip Hop and Religion Group (American Academy of Religion) and member of the Culture on the Edge scholarly collective (University of Alabama). Miller is co-author of forthcoming volumes, Religion in Hip Hop: Mapping the New Terrain with Dr. Anthony B. Pinn and rapper Bun B (Bloomsbury Press), The Hip Hop and Religion Reader (with Dr. Anthony B. Pinn) (Routledge) as well as an edited volume on identity, Claiming Identity in the Study of Religion (Equinox). Her work has been featured in a host of regional and national print, radio, live video, and TV news outlets. She has presented her research at colleges, universities, and conferences throughout the U.S., Cuba and Canada.

Focusing on the academic study of religion, Claiming Identity in the Study of Religion is the first in a series that grapples with the historicity of identity and the social and rhetorical techniques that make claims to identity possible.

In this volume, six previously published essays by scholar of religion Russell T. McCutcheon are each coupled with a new substantive commentary by North American contributors. McCutcheon’s essays highlight different identifying claims within the work of a number of leading scholars of religion. The companion contributions analyze the strategies of identification employed by the scholars whom McCutcheon discusses. Monica R. Miller provides an introduction to the volume and Steven W. Ramey provides a concluding essay. The strategies of identification highlighted and exposed in this text are further explored in the second volume in the series, The Problem of Nostalgia in the Study of Identity through a set of detailed ethnographic and historical studies that press novel ways of studying identity as an always active and ongoing process of signification.

Series: Culture on the Edge: Studies in Identity Formation

Preliminaries

Acknowledgements [+–] vii-viii

Monica R. Miller FREE

Lehigh University

Focusing on the academic study of religion, Claiming Identity in the Study of Religion is the first in a series that grapples with the historicity of identity and the social and rhetorical techniques that make claims to identity possible. In this volume, six previously published essays by scholar of religion Russell T. McCutcheon are each coupled with a new substantive commentary by North American contributors. McCutcheon’s essays highlight different identifying claims within the work of a number of leading scholars of religion. The companion contributions analyze the strategies of identification employed by the scholars whom McCutcheon discusses. Monica R. Miller provides an introduction to the volume and Steven W. Ramey provides a concluding essay. The strategies of identification highlighted and exposed in this text are further explored in the second volume in the series, The Problem of Nostalgia in the Study of Identity through a set of detailed ethnographic/historical studies that press novel ways of studying identity as an always active and ongoing process of signification.

Sources [+–] ix-x

Monica R. Miller FREE

Lehigh University

Introduction: Culture, Religion, and the Fabrication of Identities [+–] 1-18

Monica R. Miller £17.50

Lehigh University

Beginning with and grounded upon Culture on the Edge’s theoretical reliance upon social theorist Jean Francois Bayart’s claim that “there is no such thing as identity, only operational acts of identification,” in this “Introduction” Miller explores and engages A “Culture” of Influence in Religious Studies” and the all-too-common thought-structure regarding the manner in which concepts, such as ‘culture,’ or here we might even add ‘religion,’ have often been treated, approached, and theorized as concrete entities, real concepts and self-evident constructs that alone are often thought to signify and illumine material experiences and tangible things. Within the study of religion, Miller argues, there is a certain sort of academic “culture” of attributing the irreducibility of difference to the influence and meaning of ‘religion’ as a separate and stand-alone entity unto itself – often assumedly divorced from identity and cultural affinity. Miller engages the complexity of this culture – and introduces this volume and the work of the Culture on the Edge scholarly collective – through an in-depth consideration of the need for attention towards how scholars in the study of religion, such theorist Russell T. McCutcheon (and others) have responded to this tendency within the field to cast religion/the sacred/etc. as sui generis—that is, of its own sort, irreducible—through careful criticisms meant to dislodge the social and political weight of what we call religion from the academic study of religion.

Topic I: Claiming Identity

1. Well, Isn’t That Special?’: What We Talk about When We Talk about Identity [+–] 19-27

K. Merinda Simmons £17.50

University of Alabama

View Website

K. Merinda Simmons is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Graduate Director of the Religion in Culture MA Program at the University of Alabama. Her books include Changing the Subject: Writing Women across the African Diaspora (Ohio State UP, 2014), The Trouble with Post-Blackness (co-edited with Houston A. Baker, Jr., Columbia UP, 2015), and Race and New Modernisms (co-authored with James A. Crank, Bloomsbury, 2019). She is editor of the book series Concepts in the Study of Religion: Critical Primers (Equinox).

The first section presents Russell T. McCutcheon’s discussion of Ann Taves’ Religious Experience Reconsidered (2011) by way of K. Merinda Simmons’ application of McCutcheon’s critical methodology to a discussion of Reza Aslan’s Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (2013). In this chapter, Simmons questions and explores what’s at stake in the medias’ interest in Aslan’s “Muslim identity” and furthermore, why and how the conversation involving such an identity is problematic in its own right but, is also indicative of, a certain sort of “academic culture” where connections between one’s data and one’s own “identity” are seemingly taken for granted, expected, or troubled. Taken together, these writings suggest that new approaches to scholarship do not necessarily mean solutions to old issues of reliance and ordering based on assumptions about identity and data. Rather, Simmons calls attention away from assumptions of exceptionalism born from the plastic nature of the sui generis and instead, shifts our focus towards the context and interests of such manufacturing.

2. Will Your Cognitive Anchor Hold in the Storms of Culture? [+–] 28-45

Russell T. McCutcheon £17.50

University of Alabama

Russell T. McCutcheon is Professor and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama. His major publications include Manufacutring Religion (Oxford University Press, 1997), The Guide to the Study of Religion (Bloomsbury, 2000), Critics not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion (State University of New York Press, 2001) and The Discipline of Religion: Structure, Meaning, Rhetoric (Routledge, 2003).

McCutcheon’s discussion of Ann Taves’ Religious Experience Reconsidered (2011).

Topic II: Behind the ‘A-historical’

3. Everything is a Cemetery: On the History Behind the ‘Ahistorical’ [+–] 46-51

Leslie Dorrough Smith £17.50

Avila University

Leslie Dorrough Smith is Professor of Religious Studies at Avila University and a member of the Women’s and Gender Studies faculty.

In this chapter Leslie Dorrough Smith considers the social, cultural and nostalgic weight of (and given to) sites like Gettysburg Cemetery and its historical situativity to suggest that behind every “American” claim to exception, or other sorts of exceptionalism – as discussed thickly in Russell T. McCutcheon’s article “The Melancholy Empire Builder: The Life and Works of Mircea Eliade” which criticizes Mircea Eliade’s turn to the sacred – a certain sort of historical arrangement is unduly relied upon. Here, Dorrough Smith demonstrates that narratives—like those attached to and arriving in the wake of the Battle of Gettysburg—often play an integral role in the normalization of spaces and places as cohesive, particular, and significant. Such, as highlighted in McCutcheon’s essay from which Smith engages, has been true also of the legacy and work of scholars in religion such as Mircea Eliade. These two pieces together demonstrate how narratives, as much as people, places, and times, heavily rely on the (re)telling of history for their foundational social and cultural weight and significance.

4. The Melancholy Empire Builder: The Life and Works of Mircea Eliade [+–] 52-85

Russell T. McCutcheon £17.50

University of Alabama

Russell T. McCutcheon’s article “The Melancholy Empire Builder: The Life and Works of Mircea Eliade” which criticizes Mircea Eliade’s turn to the sacred From the Present Volume: Although originally published in 1993, the version that is included here was originally revised (and probably doubled in size) sometime in 2002, when I had considered including an updated version of it in the essay collection, The Discipline of Religion (2003). It is hardly a definitive overview of Eliade’s life and the controversies surrounding it and his work (see McCutcheon 2001 for additional commentary on the controversies), but it has been cited in the literature around Eliade (inasmuch as it came out not long after the controversy on Eliade’s life and work first developed); given the manner in which the depoliticized approach to his story often wins the day—as it often does with any tale purporting to tell an origins story or which addresses the exploits of someone considered to be a founder—this earlier essay also served as a useful springboard into a few wider issues, such as the manner in which those interested in such topics as religion and violence—a research area that has picked up speed considerably since the early 2000s—employ the same sort of rhetoric in their work on the causes of certain sorts of violent acts. For all of these reasons—plus the fact that it is not difficult to find people, twenty years after critiques like this were being first leveled, still aestheticizing our field’s past—it seemed worth including here. Russell T. McCutcheon, 2014

Topic III: Theoretical and Methodological Cake

5. Who Is the Nigger?: Strategies of Using the ‘N’ Word and Having it Both Ways [+–] 86-96

Monica R. Miller £17.50

Lehigh University

In this section, Monica R. Miller looks to past and contemporary cultural conversations over the “N-word”—who can say it, why, and when has a lot to do with various groups wanting to outline who can say what and when, so that certain groups can retain an option to have it both ways. Such tendencies are as much present in scholarship, not necessarily where a contentious word like “nigger” is concerned, but in other arenas. In this instance, the vignette helps to site and cite some of the more palpable implications of McCutcheon’s critique of Jeffrey Kripal’s The Serpents Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion (2006) in “A Gift with Diminished Returns: On Jeff Kripal’s The Serpent’s Gift.”

6. A Gift with Diminished Returns: On Jeff Kripal’s The Serpent’s Gift [+–] 97-117

Russell T. McCutcheon £17.50

University of Alabama

McCutcheon’s critique of Jeffrey Kripal’s The Serpents Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion (2006).

Topic IV: Cost of Conceptual Colonialism

7. Conceptual Colonialism: How Descriptions Carry Explanations [+–] 118-123

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).

Here Craig Martin discusses the American documentary Outrage (2009) which suggests the Republican party has a large number of closeted homosexuals, who often vote against legislation that would support gay rights in order that they remain closeted. Here, Martin argues that the film represents a brand of “conceptual colonialism,” presented as the application of concepts onto foreign social contexts where those concepts are used in the service of the interests of those applying the concepts. Looking to Russell T. McCutcheon’s “It’s a Lie. There’s No Truth in It! It’s a Sin!”: The Cost of Saving Others from Themselves”, that critiques Robert Orsi’s Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them (2006) on the grounds of positing a foreign explanation for something not so similar – Martin highlights (and suggests accountability for) the sleight-of-hand tactics so embedded within the arena of conspiratorial American political theater and domain of the academic study of religion among the American terrain.

8. It’s a Lie. There’s No Truth in It! It’s a Sin!”: The Cost of Saving Others from Themselves [+–] 124-161

Russell T. McCutcheon £17.50

University of Alabama

McCutcheon critiques Robert Orsi’s Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them (2006).

Topic V: Cost-Benefit Analysis

9. Authorizing Identifications, Disciplining Techniques: The Affinities of Public Advocacy [+–] 162-168

Steven W Ramey £17.50

University of Alabama

Steven W. Ramey is a Professor in Religious Studies at the University of Alabama, where he also directs the Asian Studies Program.

Here, Steven Ramey looks to the upheaval upon celebrity Selena Gomez donning an accessory of clothing traditionally ascribed to “Hindu” culture for introduction to an essay, “Affinities, Benefits, and Costs: The ABCs of Good Scholars Gone Public” where Russell T. McCutcheon critiques historian of religion Bruce Lincoln for having failed to attend to Lincoln’s own stated suggestions about identity, authority, and who and how it is wielded. As Ramey suggests, “asserting an identification can serve as the basis for asserting authority over assets, information, and membership, but those assertions of authority frequently cloak the promotion of affinities for particular ideas with the illusion that the identification is stable, rather than an ephemeral construction that also reflects some of those affinities.” The end result is a chapter indicative of the varied discursive structures that constitute authority and disciplines for those communities of affinity regarded as “cultures.”

10. Affinities, Benefits, and Costs: The ABCs of Good Scholars Gone Public [+–] 169-190

Russell T. McCutcheon £17.50

University of Alabama

McCutcheon critiques the notion of the scholar of religion ‘qua’ public intellectual and engages with the work of the scholar Bruce Lincoln in particular.

Topic VI: Limiting Engagements

11. What’s New is Old Again: The Αναπαλαίωση of Tradition [+–] 191-199

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.

Vaia Touna looks to and uses the data of a small village in Central Macedonia, Greece to introduce Russell T. McCutcheon’s “The Resiliency of Conceptual Anachronisms: On the Limits of “the West” and “Religion” wherein this essay and Touna’s introduction engage seemingly distinct data sets to suggest that scholars, and their use of tradition, rely on and make possible various authorizing acts. Looking to two villages—one that closes at night and where pretty much no one really lives — Touna suggests “that we may now begin to understand about claims of tradition” work and furthermore, how strategic social actors construct their representations of the past to suit their present social, economic, political needs. That is, how they authorize their present by linking it to a past that suits these practical interests. Tradition is not a thing unto itself, but a notion offered through reification and manipulations of time, and uncritical, unreflexive, anachronistic uses of methodologies inherited from disciplinary silos.

12. The Resiliency of Conceptual Anachronisms: On the Limits of ‘the West’ and ‘Religion’ [+–] 200-222

Russell T. McCutcheon £17.50

University of Alabama

In the previous chapter, Vaia Touna looked to a small village in Central Macedonia to introduce this chapter by McCutcheon. The two chapters engage seemingly distinct data sets, to suggest that scholars, and their use of tradition, rely on and make possible various authorizing acts. Tradition is not a thing unto itself, but a notion offered through reification and manipulations of time, and uncritical, unreflexive, anachronistic uses of methodologies inherited from disciplinary silos.

Afterword

Accidental Favorites: The Implicit in the Study of Religion [+–] 223-238

Steven W Ramey £17.50

University of Alabama

Steven W. Ramey is a Professor in Religious Studies at the University of Alabama, where he also directs the Asian Studies Program.

“Accidental Favorites,” written by Steven Ramey, asks what scholars of the academic study of religion can do to reorder their teaching and research in light of a shift away from topical treatments of data towards critical assessments of processes of classification and identification. This “Afterword” offers final words of guidance that methodological applicability is difficult, daunting, and nearly impossible without reflexive recognition that the work done by scholars often plays favorites within contemporary culture wars. So what to do? As much inspired by the ideas giving purchase to this volume, while at the same time offering more guidance on how such ideas might find fertile methodological soil, the Afterword concludes by arguing for an attempt to avoid the many labels (i.e. Hindu/Sikh, black/white, religious/secular) that take such focus on the study of religion historically and today. Many scholars play “accidental favorites”—with their data, their discourses. Scholars of the academic study of religion, therefore, should be wary and cautious of their accidental favorites moving forward.

End Matter

Index [+–] 239-243

Monica R. Miller FREE

Lehigh University

Reviews

Miller and her contributing authors remind us that concepts such as "identity," "culture," and "religion," are anything but self-evident. Rather than tangible material entities, they are ghosts given form by the writer's desires.
Sean McCloud, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, University of North Carolina, Charlotte

Claiming Identity in the Study of Religion tackles some of the most formidable questions relating to the discursive construction of identity that scholars and students struggle to negotiate. Whether you find yourself nodding in agreement with these essays, or eagerly searching for weaknesses in their arguments, the book provides an accessible and invaluable entryway into theoretical challenges religious studies scholars face when making identity claims and points toward fruitful methods of dealing with questions of classification. This is a "must read" for anyone interested in identity formation.
Craig Prentiss, Professor of Religious Studies, Rockhurst University, Missouri

When religion, culture, society, identity, and other such concepts are destabilized and revealed to be dynamic, manufactured constructs, what is the academic study of religion to do? One answer, as represented by the essays in this provocative volume, is to turn to the study of processes of classification. The studies of strategies of identification contained within exemplify recent attempts to rethink the study of religion as the reflexive examination of “battles for capital and positions".
Richard J. Callahan, Jr., Associate Professor of Religious Studies, University of Missouri

This book undoubtedly… has merit as a classroom text, whether at the graduate or undergraduate level.
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Lehigh University

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