Yes, REL videos are back for some of our ongoing series — such as the artifacts series, in which faculty are invited to talk a bit about something in their office. In this episode, Prof. Richard Newton, who first joined REL last year. See the whole artifacts series here. […]
Tag: Signification
The Sympathetic Magic of Advertising
There was a time, a hundred or more years ago, when scholars regularly used this term “sympathetic magic” to name the process by which one thing was thought to affect something else — but doing so not by means of the cause/effect relationships we usually take for granted. If, for example, I rub this stone in just this way then something will happen over there to that mountain, or if I treat this lock of hair in some fashion then […]
A Return to the Nacirema
Ryland Hunstad, a student in Prof. Simmons’s REL 100 this past semester, is a sophomore from Denver, Colorado majoring in finance & management information systems, with interests in politics, philosophy, & religion. In the following post he offers some further reflections on a group of people who were originally studied, in the mid-1950s, by the anthropologist, Horace Miner. Since the last expedition to the land of the Nacirema, anthropologists have had several more opportunities to visit these people and observe […]
Jim and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
In the close to Fabricating Origins — a recent collection of short essays, by a wide array of scholars, on the problem of origins — I used the example of Jim and Pam, from the U.S. adaptation of the British series, “The Office,” to illustrate how malleable, and thus useful, the archive of the past can be in our efforts to make sense of where we happen to find ourselves today. For all I know I’ve blogged about it before […]
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On Not Knowing Where to Look
Those who sustain this idealized image of culture do so … by mistaking the dominant fraction … of a given group for the group or “culture” itself. At the same time, they mistake the ideological positions favored and propagated by the dominant fraction for those of the group as a whole…. Scholarly misrecognitions of this sort replicate the misrecognitions and misrepresentations of those the scholars privilege as their informants. (Bruce Lincoln, “Theses on Method,” Method & Theory in the Study […]
The Politics of Misconceptions
In a recent blog post, my colleague, Mike Altman, makes a crucial point; after quoting a site that describes early European scholarship on Buddhism as being based on earlier “misconceptions, he writes: […]
It’s Not About the Whale
There’s a news report making its way around social media on an upcoming re-enactment of the biblical story of Jonah, including a fifty foot model of a whale, that has been judged by local officials in the U.K. as “too religious.” […]
Getting Our Hands on an Ungraspable Totality
Have you read Craig Martin‘s new interview with Talal Asad, just published in the Bulletin for the Study of Religion? […]
Working, Not Wonking
There’s an interesting moment near the end of a new online interview with the Duke University’s David Morgan, Chair of his Department, when he reveals far more than he might imagine. […]