Relating smith

Journal of Religion

Volumn 86, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 287-297

  McCutcheon, Russell T ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61149524682     PISSN: 00224189     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/499634     Document Type: Review

References (19)

1. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1959);
2. Joseph M. Kitagawa, "The History of Religions at Chicago," in The History of Religions: Understanding Human Experience (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1987), 133-44.
3. Arnal opens his review as follows: "It may strike the reader as curious that such a slim volume . . . would merit a lengthy review in a journal devoted to method and theory in the study of religion. For Smith's book addresses itself to the very specific issues of Christian origins and the historiography thereof. . . . This limited focus, however, in no way diminishes the impact or importance of Drudgery Divine, and its relevance for the comparative, historical, or sociological approach to religion in general" (William E. Arnal, "Review of Jonathan Z, Smith. Drudgery Divine," Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 6 [1994]: 190).
4. See Jonathan Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1990). 9-11.
5. and Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press. 1995).
6. Jared Diamond's best-selling Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W. W. Norton. 1997) is an excellent example of a scholar working to theorize the role played by happenstance in human history-such as his suggestion that "latrines are merely one of the many places where we accidentally sow the seeds of the wild plants that we eat" (117)-that is, where the unintentional transplantation and subsequent germination might have first occurred, eventually leading to what we today, in hindsight, refer to as the domestication of plants. Diamond's book can therefore be read as an extended critique of an excessive emphasis on intentionality in the work of historians.
7. Smith, Relating Religion. 117.
8. Jonathan Z. Smith. Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
9. Those familiar with Smith's work will no doubt agree that he can, at times, be a bit cagey-not in the sense of being evasive but in my reading, in a profoundly strategic sense. Perhaps it was this strategic element that was not detected by Hugh B. Urban in his "Making a Place to Take a Stand: Jonathan Z. Smith and the Politics and Poetics of Comparison," Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 12 (1999): 339-78.
10. Smith, Imagining Religion, xi.
11. The first volume of papers from the "Ancient Myths and Modern Theories of Christian Origins" consultation, which includes chapter 15 of the book here under review, has recently been published: Ron Cameron and Merrill P. Miller, eds., Redescribing Christian Origins (Leiden: Brill, 2004).
12. Chapters 11-13 represent this: "Differential Equations: On Constructing the Other" (originally delivered in 1992 at Arizona State University);
13. "What a Difference a Difference Makes" (delivered in 1984 at a conference at Brown University);
14. This is quoted from an online essay of Smith's entitled "The Necessary Lie: Duplicity in the Disciplines" and posted at a University of Chicago Web site intended for incoming graduate teaching assistants: http://teaching.uchicago.edu/handbook/tac12.html. Elsewhere, Smith has spoken of "the cognitive power of distortion" ("Why Imagine Religion?" [keynote address. West Maryland College's conference, Reconstructing a History of Religions: Problems and Possibilities, Westminster, MD, November 7, 1996]).
15. For an example of Smith's efforts to historicize such universalist rhetorics, by placing them within their context of difference and conflict, see his essay "Nothing Human Is Alien to Me," Religion 26 (1996): 297-309.
16. Originally published in History of Religions 20 (1980): 112-37
17. it was also published in Imagining Religion, 53-65.
18. Apart from Urban's already cited essay, see Sam Gill. "No Place to Stand: Jonathan Z. Smith as Homo Ludens, the Academic Study of Religion as Sub Specie Ludi" Journal of the American, Academy of Religion 66 (1998): 238-312;
19. and Pia Altieri, "Close Encounters of the Smith Kind," Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 16 (2004): 61-71.