Table Of ContentAmerican Examples
American Examples
New Conversations about Religion
1
volume
EDITED BY MICHAEL J. ALTMAN
THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS TUSCALOOSA
The University of Alabama Press
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Hannah Scheidt’s chapter “Atheist Indoctrination?: Practicing
Atheism in Parenthood” was originally published in Hannah
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Contents
Foreword
An Experiment in Comparative Analogy
Steven Ramey and vaia touna vii
Preface
michael J. altman xi
Introduction
Something Someone Calls Religion
Somewhere Someone Calls America
michael J. altman 1
The Rivers That Divide Us
Creolization, Caribbeanness, and Other Categories
in the Study of Caribbean Hinduism
PRea PeRSaud 25
Atheist Indoctrination?
Practicing Atheism in Parenthood
hannah Scheidt 43
Spatial Hierarchy and Religious Distinction
in an American Architectural Utopia
tRaviS WaRRen cooPeR 73
What Makes Humor Muslim?
Samah choudhuRy 106
vi CONTENTS
Pregnancy as Prosperity, Fertility as Faith
Three Proposals on Women’s Reproductive Bodies
in Nigerian Pentecostal Churches
emily d. cReWS 125
Afterword
RichaRd neWton 147
Bibliography 153
Contributors 173
Index 175
Foreword
An Experiment in Comparative Analogy
What are we doing here? What can two scholars whose fields of spe-
cialty are ancient and modern Greece, on the one hand, and contem-
porary India, on the other, contribute to a workshop featuring schol-
ars of religions of America? When we were invited to be the mentors
for the first American Examples (AE) workshop, the specific point of
our selection was clear. Because we do not focus on the United States,
we bring a different perspective that disrupts the insularity that some-
times develops within any specialized field—in this instance, the per-
ception of the United States as a unique context—and thus our task
was to ask different questions, to see the research projects as examples
of broader processes and questions that intersect with our own areas of
specialty. Vaia Touna’s field of expertise is ancient and modern Greece,
with an interest in discourses of religion and the past in general, and
Steven Ramey’s field of expertise is South Asia, with an interest in the
formation of religious identities through contestations. We used our
areas of specialization to encourage all of us to consider the “so what?”
question more broadly.
These connections were not superficial comparisons, such as archi-
tectural styles or parenting attitudes in India, Greece, and the United
States. Our objective was to identify questions that these scholars
raise, perhaps implicitly, in their research that also have relevance in
other geographical contexts. This objective is based also on our mu-
tual engagement with Jonathan Z. Smith’s work, and more specifically
his 1990 book Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christiani-
ties and the Religions of Late Antiquity, which also served as the starting
viii RAMEY AND TOUNA
point of the AE workshop’s discussions. In the way we understand
Smith’s argument of the importance of analogy in comparative work,
we saw our presence in the workshop as one way we could apply his
arguments—as an experiment, in other words, in comparative anal-
ogy, taking seriously his statement that comparison “is never dyadic,
but always triadic; there is always an implicit ‘more than,’ and there
is always a ‘with respect to.’ In the case of academic comparison, the
‘with respect to’ is most frequently the scholar’s interest, be this ex-
pressed in a question, a theory, or a model—recalling, in the case of
the latter, that a model is useful precisely when it is different from that
to which it is being applied.”1 We saw our role as trying to encour-
age exactly that—to elicit the underlying scholarly interest, be it a ques-
tion, a theory, or a model, and to demonstrate the usefulness of such
an interest by bringing examples from our own work and applying
those interests there. A usefulness that further illustrates that whether
someone is working in India, Greece, or America, or in ancient, colo-
nial, or contemporary time periods, their work is not unique and their
conversation partners could be in areas they had not anticipated. Our
outsider reading and reflection pushed the conversation from consid-
ering what is unique in American religious history to highlighting in-
sights from these studies that became examples of what also happens
in other contexts—insights about power and gender dynamics, identi-
fications, social formation, or classification, to name just a few. Then,
these scholars considered ways to bring out those questions and is-
sues more directly, at points reframing or even “redescribing,” to use
Smith’s terminology, their own work.
Such framing consists of more than the first paragraph and the con-
clusion. The questions and assumptions, as we all know, that we bring
to our research determine what elements we find significant and what
bits of information we ignore, what questions we ask and what ideas
we take for granted. Our role in the workshop was to disrupt some of
those assumptions to help scholars focus their work on broader ques-
tions and issues that sometimes get lost in specialized studies in Amer-
ican religions and other subfields.
The workshop proved to be an insightful and stimulating experi-
ence for us. We spent considerable time as a group discussing each pa-
per. The format had one of us starting the discussion, and each author
being asked simply to listen to the first half of the discussion. In that
way, they could ponder the comments before moving into a response.
Our first question, both to the author and to the other members of
FOREWORD ix
the group, was always the same: “What is the paper an example of?” It
might, for example, involve an issue of classification, identity, power,
or authority. Here again our motivation was to steer the discussions
away from a common American exceptionalism approach. After we
started discussing the interesting points in each paper and the ques-
tions that we thought were valuable to bring out further, other par-
ticipants also offered their observations of the paper being discussed.
Then the author responded, asking further questions and clarifying
points. This format provided a lengthier focus on each paper than is
common in conferences and graduate seminars, and generated a range
of new insights and ideas for further consideration. Furthermore, by
highlighting various points in the paper as they relate to theory rather
than to description, and asking broader questions that could be of rel-
evance to the rest of the members, we aimed to ensure that everyone
would be equally invested in the discussions, even though the partic-
ular dataset that a given paper was looking at might not have been
initially of interest to everyone. Authors also found the experience re-
freshing, as they listened to a group of scholars taking their work seri-
ously and identifying ways that their work was relevant beyond their
specific data domain.
Additionally, the format of the workshop, and Mike Altman’s idea
to invite us to participate in this experiment, has proven to be of equal
importance to us because the discussions made clear that the bene-
fit of this workshop was not a one- way street. The interaction with
scholars outside our own specific subfields, and the discussions that
followed, proved to be beneficial for our own work as well. In fact,
we can say that the experiment worked, and that comparison by anal-
ogy proved particularly useful. Furthermore, participating in American
Examples has definitely confirmed our understanding—which also
dominates in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of
Alabama—that our conversation partners extend beyond those who
work on similar data or historical periods, to include those who are
willing to ask questions as they pertain to issues of method and theory
in the study of religion, questions that help us see discourses (whether
or not related to religion) as instances of ordinary human behavior.
Steven Ramey and vaia touna
NOTE
1. Jonathan Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities
and the Religions of Late Antiquity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 51.
