THIS SCHEDULE IS TENTATIVE AND SUBJECT TO CHANGE. ANY CHANGES TO THE SCHEDULE OF READINGS WILL BE ANNOUNCED ON BLACKBOARD (http://ilearn.ucr.edu/) AND ON THE HOME PAGE OF THIS WEBSITE.

 

Items marked with an asterisk (*) are available in PDF format through the Blackboard site ([link removed]). If you are already logged into Blackboard, you can click directly on the links below to access the readings. You will need Adobe Acrobat Reader to read these files (available here.)

 

Week one: October 3: Writing the Other

How does the scholar of religion use geo-ethnic concepts (“people,” “culture,” “others”) in the task of studying religions? How has the history of “writing others” also formed the history of religious studies?

 

Readings

Mark C. Taylor, “Introduction”; Tomaka Masuzawa, “Culture”; Jonathan Z. Smith, “Religion, Religions, Religious”; and Sam Gill, “Territory,” all from Critical Terms for Religious Studies

* David Chidester, “Colonialism,” Guide to the Study of Religion, ed. Willi Braun and Russell T. McCutcheon (Continuum, 2000), 423-437

* Catherine Bell, “Paradigms Behind (and Before) the Modern Concept of Religion,” History and Theory 45 (December 2006): 27-46

 

No in-class presentation

 

 

Week two: October 10: Anthropology and Innocence

What are the profits and pitfalls of the anthropological inscription of “other cultures”? Can observation, and participant observation, create a screen of objectivity, or is it the tool of intellectual colonization?

 

Readings

Catherine Bell, “Performance,” from Critical Terms for Religious Studies

* Michael Lambeck, “Introduction” from A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion

* Clifford Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System,” from The Interpretation of Cultures (repr. and edited in Michael Lambeck, ed., A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion)

* Talal Asad, “The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category,” from Genealogies of Religion (repr. and edited in Michael Lambeck, ed., A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion)

(begin reading Edward Said, Orientalism)

 

Presentation: Catherine Bell, Ritual Practice, Ritual Theory

 

 

Week three: October 17: Orientalism and its Discontents

Is “the East” (in political, cultural, and religious terms) merely a product of “the West”? Do travel writings--along with journalistic writings, narrative fiction, and other cultural productions--merely encode power relations, or do they convey “the other”? Does Said’s Orientalism demand we reevaluate our use of sources in studying religion(s)?

 

Readings

Edward Said, Orientalism (finish)

 

Presentation: Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory; John MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory, and the Arts; Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory

 

 

Week four: October 24: Postcolonial Religions

To what extent does our analysis of travel literature depend on a cognitive map of “world religions,” and what is the source of that map? To what extent is the modern discovery of “world religions” bound up in the expansion and collapse of Western imperialism? Is the academic study of religion a product of imperialism, or a site of resistance? Is postcolonialism the problem, or the solution?

 

Readings

David Chidester, Savage Systems

 

Presentation: Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions; David Chidester, “‘Classify and Conquer’: Friedrich Max Müller, Indigenous Religions in the Academic Study of Religion,” in Beyond Primitivism: Indgenous Religious Traditions and Modernity, ed. Jacob K. Olupona (Routledge, 2004), 71-88; Charles H. Long, “A Postcolonial Meaning of Religion: Some Reflections From the Indigenous World,” in Beyond Primitivism: Indgenous Religious Traditions and Modernity, ed. Jacob K. Olupona (Routledge, 2004), 89-98

 

midterm distributed in class

 

 

Week five: October 31: “Over There”: Transplanting Religions

How have modern politics and the creation of a “global society” (especially in a technological sense: rapid transportation of persons and goods) transformed the terrain of world religions? What does it mean to “import,” “export,” or “translate” religion from one site to another?

 

Readings

Rodger Kamenetz, The Jew in the Lotus

Donald Lopez, “Belief” from Critical Terms for Religious Studies

 

Presentation: Donald Lopez, Prisoners of Shangri-La; various response essays (esp. Robert Thurman’s) to Prisoners of Shangri-La in Journal of the American Academy of Religion 69 (2001): 163-214

 

 

Week six: November 7: Passing/Conversion

How is the space of religious travel-writing constructed as transformative? Does the religious “other” exert influence in the sphere of religious travel-writing, or is he/she merely the catalyst for a transformation of “the self”? How is religious identity blurred in the context of travel writing--as “passing” or even as “conversion”?

 

Readings

Sir Richard Burton’s Travels

 

Presentation: Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad; Autobiography of Malcom X; Dane Kennedy, The Highly Civilized Man: Richard Burton and the Victorian World (Harvard University Press, 2005); Parama Roy, “Oriental Exhibits: Englishmen and Natives in Burton’s Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah & Meccah,” boundary 2 22 (1995): 185-210

 

midterm due in class

 

 

Week seven: November 14: Mission and Redemption

To what extent has the colonial context created the conditions for reimagining religion in the metropolis? Is the object of “mission” the religious “other,” or the religious “self”? Are the mechanisms of religious politics in missionary context different from that of the other contexts we’ve looked at (pilgrimage, investigation, etc.)?

 

Readings

Bartolomé de las Casas, Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies

 

Presentation: Diaries of Matthew Ricci; Gauri Viswanathan, Outside the Fold; Blackrobe (film presentation); Sabine MacCormack, “A House of Many Mansions: Aspects of Christian Experience in Spanish America,” in How Should We Talk About Religion? Perspectives, Contexts, Particularities, ed. James Boyd White (Notre Dame, 2006), 55-86

 

 

Week eight: November 21: NO CLASS (AAR/SBL Annual Meeting)

 

 

Week nine: November 28: Stranger in a Strange Land

What is the audience of the travel text? What tools do we--as modern students of religion--possess for “decoding” the travel literature of another time, place, culture, religious context? What is the value of textual analysis, and what are its dangers (for example: how do we distinguish fact from fiction)? How are “others” represented, and how is the religious “self” made strange in the context of premodern travel literatures?

 

Readings

* Benjamin of Tudela, Itinerary

* Selections from Ibn Jubayr, Travels

 

Presentations: Travels of Marco Polo; Linda Lomperis, “Medieval Travel Writing and the Question of Race,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 21 (2001): 148-64; D. O. Morgan, “Ibn Baṭṭūṭa and the Mongols,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 3.11 (2001): 1-11

 

 

Week ten: December 5: “In his Footsteps”: Christian Pilgrims

How does a space retain its “otherness” while becoming a locus of religious self-fashioning? What is a “pilgrim”? What is “pilgrimage”? How is it different from tourism? How do text, landscape, and ritual intersect in the production of religiocultural identities?

 

Readings

* Egeria, Diary of a Pilgrimage

* Piacenza Pilgrim

* Blake Leyerle, “Landscape as Cartography in Early Christian Pilgrimage Narratives,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 64 (1996): 119-43

* Selection from Andrew Jacobs, Remains of the Jews

 

Presentation: Conrad Rudolph, Pilgrimage to the End of the World; reports on final projects

 
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