Some thoughts after reading Markus Davidsen’s review of the Handbook of Contemporary Paganism—and, by extension, of the entire field of Pagan studies.
Part of his critique does resonate with me. It raises an issue that I have thought about too.
When I saw that the first authority cited was Russ McCutcheon, I had a pretty good idea of where it was going. McCutcheon is a former editor of the journal in which the essay appeared, among other things.
Davidsen himself identifies with the critical theorists such as McCutcheon who “no longer study religion or religious activity as such, but aim to analyze how people talk about religion, which social constructions people label religion, and how the resulting discourses serve to legitimate power structures.”
He stumbles in a couple of spots. For example, he seems to think that Unitarians, despite their name, are Christians, and therefore the Wiccans in Unitarian congregations must not be purely Pagan but somehow Christian as well. Yes, all of you in CUUPS are Christians—or so Markus Davidsen thinks.
Here we simply have a Danish scholar who does not know the history of an American religious denomination.
To move on to the substance, however—Davidsen regrets that so much study of religion takes place in by “religionists” who are “field-directed.” Of course, some of that is rooted in history and some is the job market: institutions often want someone to “teach Asian religions” or whatever.
Davidsen notes the absence of Ronald Hutton from the handbook, but given Hutton’s emphasis on the history of ideas and such chapters titles as “Finding a Goddess,” he would probably have dismissed him as a descriptive religionist as well.
But now the resonance. He faults much of the writing in that Brill Handbook (including mine) as being too “descriptive.” Nolo contendere. I have often wondered if in Pagan studies (and in the study of new religious movements in general) we regard descriptive work as (a) necessary and (b) easier—or at least more obvious, easier to think about.
Necessary because, after all, don’t we have to adequately describe something before we can theorize about it? Of course, the horizon of the perfect description is always receding before us. 🙂
But how would the sort of critical theory that Davidsen calls for be applied to Pagan studies, and who is doing it? Certainly I would never say that Pagan studies should be immune to critical theory. Yes, talk and write about “which social constructions people label [Pagan] religion, and how the resulting discourses serve to legitimate power structures,” or whatever you like. But it won’t be the only way that people do Pagan studies.
The Unitarian Churches in Denmark are *very* (at least to U.S. eyes) Christian in their theology and practice – somewhat akin to US Unitarians prior Emerson and Thoreau. Perhaps Davidsen conflated his local congregation with what’s happening in North America….
Interesting thought, David. Did the Danish Unitarians develop separately from the American church, which split from the Puritan/Congregational church back whenever?
In regards to critical religion studies, clearly relational information is necessary to impose an interpretation on the requirement that branching is not tolerated within the dominance scope of a complex symbol. To provide a constituent structure for T(Z,K), the theory of syntactic features developed earlier is rather different from nondistinctness in the sense of distinctive feature theory.
I have not read Davidsen — and probably won’t — but I think the criticisms in the abstract are correct in several cases that I have come across, and I don’t think he is necessarily criticizing description in general.
I think “field-directed” “religionists” ‘being too “descriptive”‘ refers to academics who adopt the ‘folk-models’ of their research subjects and engage in ‘theology’ (even if unintentionally). This is something that I’ve seen criticized regarding New Age Studies*, and I thought the same criticisms were true of much in Pagan Studies as well.
Describing a Pagan religion as if it were a concrete objective structure (essentialism) rather than a set of diverse and contradictory social behaviors is an act that will have consequences within the religion. Describing a religion can define it, which draws the academic into participation within the religion. Consider this:
“Wiccans believe in a god and a goddess, and these deities have distinct personalities — they are not archetypes.”
“Jack told me that he believes there is a god and a goddess with distinct personalities. He said, “it’s not the ‘all goddesses are one goddess’ thing.”
Both are the sorts of description I’ve seen recently in Pagan Studies, but the first is participating in the theology of the religion and the second is describing social behavior. This has particular relevance to Pagan Studies because pagan communities often engage with scholarly publications (arguably) at a higher level than other religious communities, which places academics unwittingly into the strategies of participants struggling for authority and religious capital.
Another example: I once was involved with putting undergrad student research on-line for a college project. One student had illustrated their paper with an example of a page from a “book of shadows.” When a professor within Pagan Studies from another institution found the website sometime later, they wrote to say that the illustration could not be a “book of shadows” because it contained an I-Ching hexagram. The email was spread around and eventually had the effect of shaming the owner of the “book of shadows,” who was another student. It was inappropriate for an academic to be defining what is or is not allowed within a “book of shadows” — that is an example of an insider struggle. That professor was displaying both exclusivism (assuming that their definition of “book of shadows” was correct), loyalism (privileging one groups definition of “book of shadows” over another), and essentialism (assuming that a “book of shadows” is an objective thing rather than a fluid and contradictory discourse). They used a position of cultural authority to alter the religious practice that they claim to study.
Mere description from academia can have consequences within a religion unless the description is very carefully crafted to anchor its claims to specific, relative observations that are not assumed to be representative of a larger objective structure. (In other words, the description must be framed by a sound methodology.)
* For a good detailed discussion of the lack of methodology in New Age Studies, see chapter 2 of Matthew Wood’s ‘Possession, Power and the New Age,’ Ashgate, 2007.
Well, I read the article and tried to post another over-long response, but I think WordPress ate it. Or maybe marked it as spam. Whatever the case, the article can be found online by googling the title — the author shared it on academia.edu. Many of the points it makes are correct, but the whole thing seems flawed by a bias against academics who are personally involved in religion that comes across in the pedantic tone and occasionally hypocritical lack of method in his criticisms. On the whole, Davidsen is addressing the sort of lack of method that I described in my initial post. He has some good points, even if his generalizing them as a condemnation of Pagan Studies is a stretch.
You should invite him to submit to Pomegranate 🙂
Yes, he makes good points, yet is coming from the position where one not only “brackets” supernatural claims but rather denies any essence whatsoever to the term “religion.” There there is only, to quote McCutcheon again, “the complex world of intention and structure, of agency and accident, where textual and doctrinal artifacts are tips of competitive social economies…”
I do wonder if that advice works against something that I picked up from reading W. Cantwell Smith, that you should not make a picture of a religion (oops, that word) that an adherent would not recognize.