Retooling the Study of Religion by Rectifying Our Bias Toward the “Unique”
On the Continued Relevance of Jonathan Z. Smith’s Drudgery Divine 1
Dados Bibliográficos
| ID | 20176410 |
|---|---|
| Autores | Russell T Mccutcheon (0009-0008-7590-9370, University of Alabama Tuscaloosa AL 35486‐0264 USA, autor correspondente) |
| Ano | 2025 |
| Volume | 51 |
| Fascículo | 3 |
| Páginas | 652-659 |
| Data de publicação | 2025-09-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Sim |
| Open Access | Sim |
| Tipo | ARTICLE |
| Periódico | Religious Studies Review (JOURNAL) |
| Identificadores do periódico | ISSN: 0319-485X • E-ISSN: 1748-0922 |
| Editora | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/rsr.18156 |
| OpenAlex | W4416357915 |
| Idioma | EN |
| Referências citadas | 24 |
DRUDGERY DIVINE: ON THE COMPARISON OF EARLY CHRISTIANITIES AND THE RELIGIONS OF LATE ANTIQUITY. By Jonathan Z. Smith. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990. Pp. xvi + 147. Paperback, $30.00. Yes, Jonathan Z. Smith’s Drudgery Divine continues to be relevant today ... His insights into the nature of ritual, the concept of “religion,” and the ways in which scholarly approaches can shape our understanding of religious practices offer a critical lens that is still applicable in contemporary discussions ... In an increasingly globalized world, where diverse religious expressions interact, his work invites ongoing dialogue about meaning, context, and the complexities of belief systems. Now, I admit that, once you get past what some may still find to be the book’s odd opening digression into John Adams and Thomas Jefferson’s correspondence concerning what they curiously called “the Christian system”—an opening, for example, that astute readers likely understand to be setting the table for all that is to come9—Drudgery Divine seems itself to be rather tightly focused piece of specialized scholarship; after all, it is on, as the subtitle put it, early Christianities (again, in the plural) and the religions of late antiquity. But it was not too much of a leap for those of us reading it when it first came out (even for me, one who was hardly trained in this subspecialty) to see the far wider implications of Smith’s critique of genealogical comparison (i.e., the common preoccupation with questions of origins, lineage, and similarity) and his recommendation that it be replaced by scholarship with analogical comparison and a focus on difference.10 Seeing the book as being primarily about this methodological point, and not about some obviously interesting content (content that, in fact, merely provided him with a useful site where his proposals could be applied and tested), means that, despite appearances, Drudgery Divine becomes a study not of Christian origins or even scholarship specifically on it but, instead, a book devoted to, as astutely phrased by Averil Cameron in her review of the book, “the project of comparison in general” (1991, 575)—what Ivan Strenski correctly, I think, once called “the heart of [Smith’s] intellectual efforts” (2016, 7).11 In fact, this is precisely how Smith, writing in an essay first published a decade later, referred to the book, describing it as “an essay on methodological issues in comparison” that used specific content “as the privileged example” (Smith 2004, 197; a point Smith had already made plain in the preface to Drudgery Divine [1990, vii]; for more recent works focusing on comparison see Hughes 2017; Freiberger 2019)—a project that preoccupied him at least since his dissertation at Yale where, near the opening of his concluding chapter he wrote: “the question is no longer ‘what’” [to compare, as it was with an earlier generation of scholars] but ‘how’” (1969, 405). Thus, despite the work largely being concerned with, as Howard Eilberg-Schwartz once succinctly put it, “historiciz[ing] the comparative study of early Christianity and show[ing] how it arises in the context of, and is used to sustain, various polemical [i.e., Protestant ant-Catholic] positions” (1993, 301), such an alternate reading animated Arnal’s own review of the book in MTSR back in 1994: “It may strike the reader as curious,” he opened, “that such a slim volume ... would merit a lengthy review in a journal devoted to method and theory in the study of religion” (190). However, agreeing with Cameron, Arnal went on to argue that the specificity of Smith’s data, “in no way diminishes the impact or importance ... [of the book] for the comparative, historical, or sociological approach to religion in general.” Simply put, Smith’s privileged, for example, is hardly the only, for example, and thus the book’s argument is certainly applicable elsewhere. But that’s just the lesson that I fear too many have not yet to learn from the book (including many of those who claim to benefit from reading Smith)—one that now comes with implications far wider than anyone might have imagined thirty years ago. Whether revealed in the logical grouping of classes, in the poetic similes and metaphors, in magical mimesis, etc., comparison, the bringing together or two or more objects, for the purpose of noting either similarity or dissimilarity, is the omnipresent structure of human thought and language. (405–406) And it is on the wider implication for our field of this Smithian pivot that I wish to focus as I work toward the close of this brief paper; for at this moment in higher education, scholars of religion must either adapt or, to put it frankly, be prepared to go extinct. Anyone paying attention to the Humanities job market since at least the 2008 mortgage collapse (if not earlier) should know that the point of entering graduate school in many fields is no longer to become a tenured university professor—a development that certainly includes our own field. Yet, as far as I can tell, grad schools continue as if they are training future faculty members, all while our disciplinary house is burning all around us.14 For example, while there was once an annual high of just over 700 jobs advertised annually on SBL/AAR’s joint openings site,15 that number had dropped to about 320 total ads as of the 2019–2020 hiring season, roughly 175 of which were tenure-track (sadly, at least as of the time of writing this paper, the last period for which the SBL/AAR had produced an annual report from the data that they continue to collect from their job ad site) and by now, in our post-COVID world, it has dropped so low as to find a total of just 50 positions posted as of late October of 2024, otherwise known as the peak of the hiring season in our profession (most of which were not at all relevant for the students that our field trains, even if that field is understood broadly).16 Yet doctoral programs have, by and large, not yet implemented creative ways to train advanced researchers who will largely need to find careers either outside of academia or in perpetually contingent positions within it.17 Overhauling and retooling a curriculum that once trained would-be professors (making plain that the degree was always involved in vocational training, by the way) is therefore long overdue. (I recognize that those who were independently wealthy [and thus able to chase that avocational myth that, somewhat surprisingly, still goes by name of “the life of the mind”] might have also pursued this degree; what is fascinating is the manner in which what I might just call class aspirations have allowed that myth to be consumed by everyone earning the degree, to this day, such that practical recommendations on how to revise the degree to prepare students for diverse futures is often greeted by some current faculty as “selling out” and “watering down” the profession. The trouble is, of course, that such faculty have naturalized the hard-won privileges that took generations of their predecessors to put into place and then fight to protect, that is, tenure and faculty governance, but which, in many colleges, are now crumbling.18 But, instead, we have programs today that claim to be preparing their doctoral students by offering CV workshops and holding mock interviews for those who will instead need to craft resumes and who may never actually visit a campus as part of a job search. If we add to this the many undergrad programs that each month announce their merger or outright closure let alone those who still inspire their best and brightest to dream of earning a Ph.D. and become professors,19 then you arrive at the imperfect storm in which the Humanities or even the broader Liberal Arts (both domestically and internationally) now finds itself—if, that is, we’re not denying the situation or waiting it out in hopes that our program will be among the lucky few that are left standing once the dust settles.20 My utter frustration with this moment, to return now to Drudgery Divine, is that, whether intended or not, it turns out that Smith provided us with a roadmap to try to grapple with just such a situation. For in our rush to single out our data, hoping that supposedly unique content requiring unique interpretive methods would sufficiently justify an autonomous institutional setting for its study—an argument that, it is true, seemed to have won the day just a few academic generations ago21—we ended up stranding ourselves alone in the university; for the study of religion that resulted, even when practiced in the public university, turned out to be so special, requiring such delicate care and craft, that we now have few cross-disciplinary friends and our work seems to many to have limited, if even that, practical relevance (especially a problem when the instrumental logic of today’s professionalized university came into full view).22 But had we heeded Smith’s advice, had we understood that, all along and like many of our colleagues across campus, we too studied something human, historical, and cultural, that our tools therefore had wide relevance because our comparisons were promiscuously provocative, prompting us to study unexpected things from all across culture—not because they were implicitly religious, as some might have once asserted, but because so-called religious things were always thoroughly human, historical and cultural—then our students might have been empowered by understanding that their work was relevant to studying how any group worked (i.e., how families, corporations, institutions, and nation-states all worked), thereby suiting them for an array of futures where their tools (and not necessarily their supposedly special content) could be applied, both in and certainly well outside of the university. Come to think of it, this is something that our undergraduate students, the vast majority of whom did not go on to careers in our field but who nonetheless valued what they learned in our classes, have been doing for decades—those who escaped the content specialist pretense that has animated our graduate training. Had we adjusted at the graduate level when we had time, starting a decade or more ago—say, back when Smith offered that SBL address—then we might not be in the position in which we now find ourselves, trying to persuade a Dean or a Provost as to how important it is that religion be studied, either because of the improper role that some of us think it now plays in our politics or maybe in our effort to make citizens more tolerant (to name two of the more popular rationales now being cited).23 Such claims of the special contributions of our content, therefore, strike me as far less effective than focusing on the wide and, at least to some, surprising applicability of the tools that we have been honing and using all along.24 [a] postcritical approach to the study of religion promises to recharge scholarship on religion, religions, and religious phenomena, making room for the possibility that close engagements of the religious kind might blow our minds, might even change our lives—and not as a departure from disciplinary norms but as an extension of them (248)
Digression · Scholarship · Subtitle · Globalization, Historical Perspectives, and International Relations · Religion and Society Interactions · Study and Philosophy of Religion
| Velocidade de citação | historical |
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| Altamente citado | Não |