Yes, cosmonauts apparently all pee on the back right tire of the bus that carries them to the launch pad, before they take off. At least the guys do; but the ladies are said to bring a vial of urine to pour on the tire. It’s a ritual. […]
Tag: theory
The Hegemony of Normalcy and the Academic Study of Religion
Daniel Jones is a graduate student in the Department of Religious Studies at Missouri State University. His research focuses on critical discourse analysis of the intersections of religion, nature, science, and humanity. His research interests also pertain to theories of religion, culture, communication, and anthropology. “The hegemony of normalcy is, like other hegemonic practices, so effective because of its invisibility.”-Lennard Davis “We must… take account of the persistence of a model of interpretation and the inversion of its sense, if […]
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Why Do They Touch the Phallus? Or, Diverging Theories of Ritual
One night during my fieldwork among Brazilian migrant communities in Japan, I was invited to a dinner at Daniel’s apartment. He and his girlfriend frequented a local Brazilian evangelical church that I was studying. After the dinner, they started talking about the “strange festival” in Komaki, a city one-hour drive away from where they lived. The festival took place the previous week (on March 15 2014) and they came across its footage online. The Hōnen Festival at Tagata Shrine is best known […]
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Messing Up at Starbucks, or the Ritual Order of Choice
I’m a regular customer at Starbucks. Several times a week, I walk into one, order a drink, wait for it, say thank you, and walk out. I’m sure many of you do the same thing pretty often, if not every day, without even thinking about it. But I once failed miserably at this banal procedure. It was my first year in the US and I had just arrived from Japan, so many things were still new to me. But Starbucks […]
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The Right Question
The other day I received an email asking where, in my work, I think with the category religion instead of just thinking about it. It’s a common distinction; do we, as scholars, use the word religion, defined however we might define it, to name things in the world that we then describe, compare, interpret, and maybe even explain, or, instead, do we study how social actors use that very word in going about their own daily lives, i.e., examining its […]
The Problem with “Misrepresentation”
Anastasiya Titarenko is a rising Junior pursuing a Bachelor’s Degree in Religious Studies and minoring in Educational Studies. She is currently living in Accra, Ghana, and will be spending the next six months traveling to Ukraine, Italy, and New Zealand. “YOU’RE going to AFRICA?!” “Wow, I’ve always wanted to go to Africa and help the poor.” “Where is Ghana?” “Are you going to go on a safari? You better send me pictures.” There are just a few of the responses […]
Lecture on Evolution & Religion
On March 31, Dr. William Lee McCorkle presented his research as part of the Alabama Lectures on Life’s Evolution (ALLELE) series, sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences. His lecture, titled “Religion, a Cultural Virus,” offered a crash-course on the academic study of religion and focused on the advantages of an evolutionary theory of religion, as well as highlighting his work at LEVYNA, the Laboratory for the Experimental Research of Religion, which he helped to establish. […]
So what’s your theory of religion?
If you’ve been following what’s going on in Oregon over the past few days then you know about the armed stand-off that involves members of the Bundy family, among other ranchers, occupying the headquarters of a federal wildlife refuge, as their stand against the federal government’s land-use policies (maybe even the federal government’s legitimacy). […]
How Your Phone Defines Religion
As the Faculty Technology Liaison to the College of Arts and Sciences at UA, I am part of a Mac Administrators forum. I was surprised to notice the exclusion of deities from emoji eligibility while glancing over an update notice. After some investigation, I was surprised to learn about the selection factors of the Unicode Consortium. In fact, the Unicode Consortium has produced a very detailed report, “Emoji and Symbol Additions – Religious Symbols and Structures,” for which “The objective has been […]
Explaining Nags, Witches, and Evil Stepmothers
Did you hear the radio story this morning on folklorists attempting to explain why, all across culture, old women so often appear as evil characters in fairy tales and myths…? […]
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