week on religion, response paper by K.

This week’s readings on religion raised a number of issues for me, specifically:
(1) what are the effects of “folklorization”?
(2) how is the concept of hegemony manifested through divergent religious practices and their relationship with the state or other power-brokers? (relatedly, why am I obsessed with hegemony?)
(3) how do we appropriately write about religion/spirituality? is it okay to portray it these belief systems as a “stand-in” for other concerns (socio-economic, political, etc.), or do we need to take them on their own terms, however we may construe them?
(4) what is the role of “outside” social actors in the representation of religious movements, such as academics, journalists, politicians, and the state?

I do not pretend to have neat answers to any of the questions outlined above, at least not yet. Regarding the first question about folklorization, I think it’s important to complicate any notion of the “corruption” of a belief system when it is marketed for tourists. While this notion has a certain intuitive appeal, it’s appeal is to an idealized and “pure” concept of culture that could possibly be corrupted by exposure to the outside world. On the other hand, how does it change one’s concept of their own culture when one comes to see it as a marketable commodity? Does the produce a kind of “double” looking whereby one comes to see oneself the way a tourist does? And does that matter? Stephan Palmie takes issue with this “theme-park” approach to cultural origins for two reasons, namely that it diverts attention from the questions of why we need to distinguish “pure” cultures from one another, and because it masks the diversity of cultural practice (160-1). I’m going to jump to the third question, because this is more important for me (and Im running out of time…). I especially appreciated Patricia Pessar’s foregrounding of the religiosity of the Pedro Batista movement, refusing to reduce its appeal to mere structural considerations. This is something I don’t think Reinaldo Roman did particularly well in his “Governing Spirits.” I was mildly frustrated with his account because I wanted to know more about the content of different belief systems, especially of Spiritism. He called this a “science-religion”; and I really wished he’d elaborated more on what he meant by that, particularly in light of Palmie’s argument about the interdependence of the science-magic binary. But the broader\n issue with this question is about representation, and about when and how academics pull epistemological rank on the objects of their study, and relate what a religious movement is really about. I’m not sure how problematic this is, because I tend to view an academic study as an act of translation, of relaying a story from one epistemological tradition to another, with the inevitable distortions a translation always implies. At any rate, I look forward to hearing other people’s take on this problem.
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I’m going to jump to the third question, because this is more important for me (and I’m running out of time…). I especially appreciated Patricia Pessar’s foregrounding of the religiosity of the Pedro Batista movement, refusing to reduce its appeal to mere structural considerations. This is something I don’t think Reinaldo Roman did particularly well in his “Governing Spirits.” I was mildly frustrated with his account because I wanted to know more about the content of different belief systems, especially of Spiritism. He called this a “science-religion”, and I really wished he’d elaborated more on what he meant by that, particularly in light of Palmie’s argument about the interdependence of the science-magic binary. But the broader issue with this question is about representation, and about when and how academics pull epistemological rank on the objects of their study, and relate what a religious movement is really about. I’m not sure how problematic this is, because I tend to view an academic study as an act of translation, of relaying a story from one epistemological tradition to another, with the inevitable distortions a translation always implies. At any rate, I look forward to hearing other people’s take on this problem.

Tags: millenarianism, religion