Strategic Acts in the Study of Identity

Edited by

Vaia Touna [+–]

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.

Strategic Acts in the Study of Identity is a multi-authored work that tackles the problem of how to examine the historicity of identity. Six scholars of religion, all members of the Culture on the Edge group, engage in a constructive dialogue mediating and critically cross-examining issues of identity formation, suggesting ways of achieving greater theoretical clarity in the study of identity—or better, identity claims—as it takes shape over time and space. The volume is divided into three sites, or what we might call three situations, each of which is representative of a specific act, such as for example, the strategic acts of classification, appropriation, and comparison. Each site then consists of a main chapter, a response from another scholar (who presses further the point of the main chapter while inviting its author to reflect upon their initial argument) and a reply from the author of the main chapter.

Additionally, the volume includes an appendix with a series of posts that originally appeared at the blog for Culture on the Edge. These theoretically challenging posts, also investigating the volume’s three main areas, further exemplify and model a different way of approach in the study of identity. Although Strategic Acts in the Study of Identity is not a textbook, and while challenging for any reader, it can serve as a great pedagogical tool for professors who wish to use the book in their classes not only within religious studies but in any class that touches on issues of identity.

Series: Culture on the Edge: Studies in Identity Formation

Preliminaries

Preface [+–] ix-xvii

Vaia Touna FREE

University of Alabama

This multi-authored work tackles the problem of how to examine the historicity of identity. Through four discrete case studies, seven scholars of religion expose the disconnects in the academic discourse on diaspora, identity, and creolization, and suggests ways of achieving greater theoretical clarity in the study of identity-or better, identity claims-as it takes shape over time and space.

Introduction

On the Strategies of Identity Formation [+–] 1-17

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).

Site I: Acts of Classification

1. Nostalgia and the Discourse Concerning ‘Nones’ [+–] 21-47

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.

Discussions about those who respond to surveys as having no religion intensified when survey results reported an increase in these responses. The common identification of these respondents as “Nones” did not arise from the survey respondents themselves but involved sociologists and the media in the construction of a group from diverse respondents. This label traces back to the 1960s when Glenn Vernon encouraged greater attention to these respondents, and has been a topic of analysis ever since. Multiple surveys employ different questions and response options, and the characteristics of those identified as nones show significant diversity in practice and belief, yet many still gloss this variety as “Nones.” Various organizations and institutions have used this newly constructed group for their own purposes. The formation of the nones also reflects various ideological assumptions such as individualism and nostalgia for a time with clear religious identifications. The attempt in this chapter is to understand the dynamics of the construction of the nones, which illustrates the ways identifications and groups come into existence.

2. Response to Steven Ramey: The Constitutive Discourse of Description [+–] 48-56

Vaia Touna £17.50

University of Alabama

Descriptions, as Steven Ramey convincingly argued in his chapter, are never neutral, they are always selective, contingent, and invested with interests; yet, even in his attempt to demonstrate the constructive nature of discourses via the use of descriptions Ramey, unavoidably, engages in descriptions as well. So, in this chapter I want to press him further by asking: when are descriptions mere descriptions and when are they constitutive of a discourse themselves?

3. Reply to Vaia Touna: Situated Descriptions [+–] 57-70

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.

Building on Vaia Touna’s response to my chapter on the construction of the nones, I argue that our academic descriptions should reflect the contingent nature of descriptions that Touna emphasizes. Any description of past actions, an item, or a scholar’s work makes selections and emphases that create the object of its discussion. Rather than arguing that some descriptions are true and others are false, I suggest that descriptions can be more or less convincing and valuable. I propose three ways of analyzing any description’s incompleteness, including its correspondence to evidence, the coherence of the connections presented, and the classifications employed. Then I propose three strategies to be more self-reflexive about the contingency of descriptions and their role in constituting the object of their discourse, and I demonstrate some of those strategies by rewriting a paragraph of my original chapter in which I failed to acknowledge the limited nature of the narrative.

Site II: Acts of Appropriation

4. Strategizing Subjectivity: Creolization and Intentionality in Studies of Caribbean Religions [+–] 73-95

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).

This chapter looks at academic discourses on hybridity and creolization in the context of Caribbean religious traditions. A major emphasis in these discourses is the perceived strategic and subversive patterning of hybrid belief systems by slaves in the Caribbean under Christian colonial rule. Using the text Creole Religions of the Caribbean: An Introduction from Vodou and Santería to Obeah and Espiritismo, by Margarite Fernández Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, as a point of departure, I argue for scholarly consideration of the implications of the articulated impulses of projects like this, projects that are prevalent in academic discussions of identity and migration within African diasporas.

5. Response to K. Merinda Simmons: When is it OK to Borrow? Discourses on Syncretism and Cultural Appropriation [+–] 96-105

Craig Martin £17.50

St. Thomas Aquinas College

Leftist criticisms of “cultural appropriation” negatively value a cultural phenomenon that is structurally analogous to what other leftist discourses laud as subversive creolization or hybridity. This chapter compares the two phenomena and their competing evaluations in political discourses and suggests that an alternative set of critical questions would provide a more sophisticated point of entry for cultural critique.

6. Reply to Craig Martin: “The Other Is Not”: Mediating Specialness and Specificity [+–] 106-114

K. Merinda Simmons £17.50

University of Alabama

View Website

This reply to Craig Martin’s “When Is It OK to Borrow?” returns to the discussion of power dynamics involved in narrative acts that describe particular histories of race and experience. Those dynamics are likewise at work in classifying whether various depictions and narratives are nuanced introspections or, following up on Martin’s response, cultural appropriations. The question of what kind of priority is given to various identifications—and who gets engage in such ranking—should be considered in relation to Martin’s helpful challenge to think in terms of the “material consequences of such scholarly claims about syncretism.” In taking up this question, I argue that the problem is not with appropriation so much as it with the authenticity claims contained therein.

Site III: Acts of Comparison

7. Writing Women out of Women’s Movements: The Discursive Boundaries of Feminism [+–] 117-141

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.

Over the past several decades, various attempts have been made by feminist scholars to describe the activism of many international women’s groups as “feminist” even though such groups often heavily resemble many American conservative women’s groups that have often been labeled by the same scholars as “anti-feminist.” Using the work of Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Uma Narayan as a frame of reference, I discuss how some scholars of “global feminism” use certain rhetorical techniques to make this identity labeling possible in order to fit a series of specific political interests, even though such techniques may depend on a philosophical double standard to achieve the appearance of consistency.

8. Response to Leslie Dorrough-Smith: Transgressions [+–] 142-154

Russell T. McCutcheon £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).

Using the recent scholarly controversy of suggesting that our approach to understanding transgender identities may have implications for studies of what some call transracial identities, this chapter invites Leslie Dorrough Smith to consider the wider implications of the sorts of comparisons that are necessary for scholars to carry out their work—comparisons exemplified in her chapter.

9. Reply to Russell T. McCutcheon: Navigating the Politics of Comparison [+–] 155-165

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 the main chapter of this section, I argued that many Western feminist scholars are often quite willing to overlook the conservative political interests of many international women’s groups by calling such groups “feminist” so as to create the sense of a diverse and multicultural feminist movement. Mine is not a popular conclusion to reach, I note, since making such a statement reveals a clear double standard that is still present in some feminist activism. In response, Russell McCutcheon pondered whether my unpopular argument was like another controversial piece of scholarship from scholar Rebecca Tuvel, who infamously claimed that if a transgender identity is possible, then we must logically acknowledge the possibility of a transracial identity as well. In the present chapter, I consider the nature of McCutcheon’s comparison between my conclusion and Tuvel’s, and maintain that their similarities reveal the enduring life of certain unspoken biases in scholarship today

Afterword

10. Strategic Acts I and II [+–] 167-178

Russell T. McCutcheon £17.50

University of Alabama

[T]he history of religions is destined to play an important role in contemporary cultural life. This is not only because an understanding of exotic and archaic religions will significantly assist in a cultural dialogue with the representatives of such religions. It is more especially because, by attempting to understand the existential situations expressed by the documents he is studying, the historian of religions will inevitably attain to a deeper knowledge of man. It is on the basis of such a knowledge that a new humanism, on a world-wide scale, could develop. We may even ask if the History of Religions cannot make a contribution of prime importance to its formation. For, on the one hand, the historical and comparative study of religions embraces all the cultural forms so far known, both the ethnological cultures and those that have played a major role in history; on the other hand, by studying the religious expressions of a culture, the scholar approaches it from within, and not merely in its sociological, economic, and political contexts. In the last analysis, the historian of religions is destined to elucidate a large number of situations unfamiliar to the man of the West. It is through an understanding of such unfamiliar, “exotic” situations that cultural provincialism is transcended. (Eliade 1961: 2–3)

End Matter

Appendix [+–] 179-266

Vaia Touna,K. Merinda Simmons,Craig Martin,Steven W Ramey,Leslie Dorrough Smith,Russell T. McCutcheon FREE

University of Alabama

View Website

St. Thomas Aquinas College

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.

Avila University

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

University of Alabama

The volume includes an appendix with a series of posts that originally appeared at the blog for Culture on the Edge. These theoretically challenging posts, also investigating the volume’s three main areas, further exemplify and model a different way of approach in the study of identity.

Index [+–] 267-275

Vaia Touna FREE

University of Alabama

Strategic Acts in the Study of Identity is a multi-authored work that tackles the problem of how to examine the historicity of identity. Six scholars of religion, all members of the Culture on the Edge group, engage in a constructive dialogue mediating and critically cross-examining issues of identity formation, suggesting ways of achieving greater theoretical clarity in the study of identity—or better, identity claims—as it takes shape over time and space. The volume is divided into three sites, or what we might call three situations, each of which is representative of a specific act, such as for example, the strategic acts of classification, appropriation, and comparison. Each site then consists of a main chapter, a response from another scholar (who presses further the point of the main chapter while inviting its author to reflect upon their initial argument) and a reply from the author of the main chapter. Additionally, the volume includes an appendix with a series of posts that originally appeared at the blog for Culture on the Edge. These theoretically challenging posts, also investigating the volume’s three main areas, further exemplify and model a different way of approach in the study of identity. Although Strategic Acts in the Study of Identity is not a textbook, and while challenging for any reader, it can serve as a great pedagogical tool for professors who wish to use the book in their classes not only within religious studies but in any class that touches on issues of identity.

Reviews

With this volume, the Culture on the Edge research group has presented readers with many helpful analytical questions that may guide us in our scholarly endeavors.
Numen

Contains a great deal of material that is both technical, informative, and readily accessible, and I could easily see using it in a classroom setting as an example of good peer critique and by interacting with the Culture on the Edge entries as conversation prompts and starting points for the method McCutcheon describes.
Reading Religion

x

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Vaia Touna [+–]

University of Alabama

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