“My theory of the brontosaurus”: Postmodernism and “theory” of religion

Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses

Volumn 26, Issue 1, 1997, Pages 3-23

  Mccutcheon, Russell T ^a  

^a MISSOURI STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84998146068     PISSN: 00084298     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/000842989702600101     Document Type: Article

References (51)

1. A good example can be found in George Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), and his new book
2. The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
3. Donald Wiebe is one of the better-known participants in these debates, whether in North America or Europe. For example, see his “Theory in the Study of Religion,” Religion, 13 (1983): 283–309, and
4. “History of Mythistory in the Study of Religion? The Problem of Demarcation,” in Michael Pye, ed., Marburg Revisited: Institutions and Strategies in the Study of Religion (Marburg: Diagonal Verlag, 1989), p. 31–46. Although I understand some of the issues differently from Wiebe, I am nonetheless deeply indebted to his work on the topic of demarcation.
5. Darlene Juschka, “Religious Studies and Identity Politics: Mythology in the Making,” Bulletin of the Council of Societies for the Study of Religion, 26, 1 (1997): 10. This issue of the Bulletin is devoted to papers examining the current job market, including Harold Remus' 1996 address to the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies, “By the Skin of Our Teeth.”
6. Garrett Green, “Challenging the Religious Studies Canon: Karl Barth's Theory of Religion,” Journal of Religion, 75 (1995): 473–86, 474.
7. Green's thoughts on the supposedly liberal consensus within the academy, which rules out such conservative positions as Barth's, brings to mind Stephen Carter's equally problematic thesis concerning the way liberal elites have supposedly trivialized religion in u.s. civil life. See Stephen Carter, The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion (New York: Doubleday, 1993).
8. See the Introduction to Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
9. Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. vii.
10. Michael Ryan, Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Articulation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984).
11. On the American Academy of Religion research survey, see my critique, “Classification and the Shapeless Beast: A Critical Look at the AAR Research Interest Survey,” Religious Studies News, 12, 3 (September 1997): 7, 9.
12. For a useful introductory survey of some of the theoretical and political issues involved in demarcating different ways of studying religion at the level of professional associations (e.g., the North American Association for the Study of Religion as opposed to the American Academy of Religion), see Charlotte Allen, “Is Nothing Sacred? Casting Out the Gods from Religious Studies,” Lingua Franca, 6, 7 (1996): 30–40.
13. Pauline Marie Rosenau, Postmodernism and the Social Sciences: Insights, Inroads, and Intrusions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 6.
14. Rodney Stark and William S. Bainbridge, A Theory of Religion (New York: Peter Lang, 1987; rpt. New Brunswick, nj: Rutgers University Press, 1996).
15. For an application of the theory to specific data, see Stark, The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).
16. E. Thomas Lawson and Robert N. McCauley, Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
17. Stewart E. Guthrie, Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
18. For a further elaboration of Guthrie's theory that religion is one instance of the human tendency to anthropomorphize, see his review essay, “Religion: What Is It?” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 35 (1996): 412–19.
19. Pascal Boyer, The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: A Cognitive Theory of Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
20. See Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, 8, 2 (1996), for a special issue dedicated to cognitive theorizing in the study of religion, including essays by McCauley and Lawson, Boyer, Dan Sperber and Brian Malley.
21. Walter Burkert, Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religions (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1996).
22. Burkert's study is an attempt to apply sociobiological theories to the study of religion's origins. For the views of the cognitive philosopher, Daniel Dennett, see his review essay of Burkert's book, “Appraising Grace: What Evolutionary Good Is Grace?” The Sciences, 37, 1 (1996): 39–45. It is important to note that four of the five recent theories just cited involve applications from cognitive psychology.
23. Green, “Challenging the Religious Studies Canon,” p. 473, 473, n. 2.
24. Bruce Lincoln, Authority: Construction and Corrosion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). For my assessment of this creative and insightful book, see the forthcoming review in Religion.
25. Demystification, rather than mere description, translation and colour commentary is precisely our most important contribution to public debates. On this, see my essay, “A Default of Critical Intelligence? The Scholar of Religion as Public Intellectual,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 65, 2 (1997): 443–68.
26. Martin Jay, “On Theory,” Theory and Society, 25 (1996): 171.
27. See, for example, Robert Campany, “Xunzi and Dūrkheim as Theorists of Ritual Practice,” in Frank Reynolds and David Tracy, eds., Discourse and Practice (Albany, ny: suny Press, 1992), p. 197–225, 227–31;
28. reprinted in Ronald Grimes, ed., Readings in Ritual Studies (Upper Saddle River, nj: Prentice Hall, 1996), p. 86–103. Only because he fails to distinguish between “theory” and “philosophy” (on this, see his n. 4), is he able to compare the ritual “theories” of the third—century b.c.e. Confucian Xunzi to that of Emile Dūrkheim. They both have “theories” primarily because Campany understands “theory” in its classical sense as being the view of the self-reflective spectator (p. 89 and n. 6).
29. Emile Dūrkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sodology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952), p. 41.
30. Stark and Bainbridge, A Theory of Religion, p. 13.
31. “Theory,” in Jonathan Z. Smith, ed., The HarperCollins Dictionary of Religion (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1995), p. 1068.
32. See also the entry for “Religion, Explanation of,” p. 894–96.
33. Catherine Bell, “Modernism and Postmodernism in the Study of Religion,” Religious Studies Review, 22, 3 (1996): 188.
34. Jonathan Z. Smith, “Map Is Not Territory,” in his Map Is Not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 289–303.
35. See in particular his comments on the way in which myths and rituals “which belong to a locative map of the cosmos labor to overcome all incongruity by assuming the interconnectedness of all things” (p. 308–9). Naturalist and postmodern scholars of religion are generally in agreement with Smith in presuming that “maps are all we possess” (p. 309).
36. For instance, the literary critic Paul de Man, Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), argued that theories resist the multiple interpretations favoured by many postmodernists.
37. Rosenau, Post-Modemism and the Social Sciences, p. 83.
38. Bell, “Modernism and Postmodernism in the Study of Religion,” p. 188.
39. For an attempt to distinguish clearly the different logical levels involved in explanation and description, see Jeffrey R. Carter, “Explanation Is Not Description: A Methodology of Comparison,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, 10 (1998): forthcoming.
40. Jay, “On Theory,” p. 171.
41. Terry Eagleton, The Significance of Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 26.
42. Tomoko Masuzawa, In Search of Dreamtime: The Quest for the Origin of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
43. For a review symposium on this book, including a response from the author, see Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, 8 (1996): 291–325.
44. In the last chapter of Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), I failed explicitly to distinguish between these two distinct yet interrelated notions of theory.
45. Green, “Challenging the Religious Studies Canon,” p. 476, 477, 480, 482.
46. During his remarks at a 1996 American Academy of Religion panel on the relations between theology and the study of religion (organized by Arvind Sharma), Jonathan Z. Smith wryly asked when someone would finally study Barth's Dogmatics as one of the most successful mythic constructs of the 20th century. This simple yet profound leap from seeing Barth as colleague to seeing Barth as data is one that few scholars of religion seem to understand. See Jonathan Z. Smith, “Are Theological and Religious Studies Compatible?” Bulletin of the Coundl of Societies forthe Study of Religion, 26, 3 (1997): 60–61.
47. John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).
48. For a helpful discussion of Freud's and Durkheim's theories of religion, see Daniel Pals, Seven Theories of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). Although it clearly has many intended audiences, I have found Pal's book to be very useful as an undergraduate text.
49. Jay, “On Theory,” p. 178.
50. Burton L. Mack, “On Redescribing Christian Origins,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, 8 (1996): 248.
51. Russell T. McCutcheon, “Ideology and the Problem of Naming,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, 3 (1991): 256.