Academia sure is weird.
Here is an excerpt from Carson Bay’s review of Theorizing “Religion” in Antiquity (Roubekas 2019) published on Reading Religion, a website of the American Academy of Religion:
“Leonardo Ambasciano applies the cognitive/evolutionary study of religion to ancient Rome, producing the most ‘religious’ essay of the volume inasmuch as it presumes to explicate ancient mysteries (‘the deep history of the human species,’ 332) via reference to inscrutable specialists (e.g., neuroscientists) as a way of as a way of projecting a cosmic explanation of human religious existence (the Darwinian Cognitive Science of Religion/Evolutionary Science of Religion, CSR/ESR).”
This passage offers a most idiosincratic reading of my chapter [1]. First of all, there is nary a single mention of “neuroscientists” in my chapter. I merely limited myself to recall some key cognitive scholars and psychologists in the field. As we can read from the brief abstract of my contribution available on the publisher website,
the chapter offers a detailed discussion of the history as well as the latest developments in the field of cognitive study of religion (CSR), and applies the theories and methods of that sub-discipline to the study of ancient religions – with Roman religion acting as a case study.
I know that it can be very difficult for humanist scholars to conceptually grasp the difference between neuroscience and cognitive science (see my post here), but such ignorance should not be excused, nor should it go unacknowledged. They should know better.
Secondly, upon reading this passage I was under the impression that the author was not just poorly acquainted with cognitive science, but with evolutionary biology as well. Why should the “deep history of the human species” be analogically considered as one of the “ancient mysteries”? In which sense? Am I supposed to play the role of a mystagogue in this metaphor? Am I supposed to find it funny? Why on Earth the application of cognitive science to ancient history should be thought of as “as a way of projecting a cosmic explanation of human religious existence”? Is this all a joke and a waste of time? Does this passage betray some sort of crypto-neocreationism? The more I thought about it, the worse it got.
Bay didn’t even seem to know much about the status quo in Roman History. According to the most accomplished scholars in this field (Beard, Price, North, Scheid, and Turcan, among dozens of other renowned scholars), the ancient Graeco-Roman peoples were ontologically unable to engage in metacognitive beliefs (a bit like cognitively impaired zombies à la David Chalmers) and limited themselves to robotic orthopraxy. This position led to a whole set of most serious problems and ontological cul de sacs that have been increasingly contested within the field (see Mackey 2022; see my take on this topic in Ambasciano 2023).
My takeaway is that Bay was probably epistemologically unable to judge my contribution and felt mistakenly justified in poking fun at my chapter to elicit some cheap laughs from his colleagues. To be clear, this does not mean that I think that my contribution was the be-all and end-all on the topic, far from it. Indeed, I reworked my initial argument and refined it for two subsequent publications (one is Ambasciano 2023; the other is a contribution for a forthcoming Oxford Handbook). Still, at that time I was pretty satisfied with my efforts to tackle the topic; it’s inconvenient, and quite annoying, that Bay wasn’t able to provide any serious and constructive criticism.
But then, out of left field, the author acknowledges that my contribution was also “quite good”!
“the contributions of Nongbri, Mason, Davies, Lucarelli, Ambasciano, Rollens, and Salvo are also quite good.”
I don’t even know what to think now. I’m not even sure there is a way to properly end this post after such a sincerely unexpected, paradoxical, and brain-melting statement. Well, I guess the bottom line is that academia can be a pretty weird place.
Note
This post was originally written on 31 May 2021 and rewritten on 26 May 2024. Text corrected and note added on 18 February 2025.
[1] Several other chapters are targeted by Bay with similarly disconcerting criticism. Rita Lucarelli’s contribution on Egyptian magic, for instance, is decried by Bay as a “topic […] only only half-fitting in a volume on religion” (Bay 2021), which is, again, quite idiosyncratic to say the least and totally dismissive of several decades of cutting-edge Religious Studies works on the dichotomy “religion”/”magic”, which in turn built on more than a century of Comparative Religion research on the topic.
Refs.
Ambasciano, Leonardo. 2019. “The Cognitive Study of (Ancient) Religions”. In Theorizing Ancient Religion, edited by N. P. Roubekas, 327-360. Sheffield and Bristol, CT: Equinox. https://doi.org/10.1558/equinox.27979
Ambasciano, Leonardo. 2023. “Zombies Roaming Around the Pantheon: Reconsidering Ancient Roman Belief.” Implicit Religion 25 (1-2): 33–75. https://doi.org/10.1558/imre.24338
Bay, Carson. 2021. Review of Roubeaks, N. (2019) (ed.). Theorizing “Religion” in Antiquity. Sheffield and Bristol, CT: Equinox. Reading Religion, 5 March. https://readingreligion.org/9781781793572/theorizing-religion-in-antiquity/.
Mackey, Jacob L. 2022. Belief and Cult: Rethinking Roman Religion. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.