INTRODUCTION to the CRITICAL and INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDY of RELIGION
1. Defining the Indefinable: The Basic Grammar of Religion
What is “religion” in abstract? What are “religions” in practice? What makes a narrative “religious”? What is the “invention of tradition” and how does this affect religion? In this introductory class we will approach the origins of the word “religion”, its historical uses, and its relationships with what has been labelled as “non-religious.” Then, we will try and define together a selection of key words traditionally associated with certain specific ways of thinking and behaving – ‘ritual,’ ‘sacrifice,’ ‘prayers,’ ‘myth,’ etc. Depending on the students’ answers, my maieutic task will be to push back and offer some counterexamples to subvert the expectations of the students and make them think about the ambiguity of any clear-cut definition. We will also learn an important difference to make sense of how we approach religions, that is, the interpretive hiatus between ‘emic,’ meaning, an insider, non-challenging self-description of a worldview from within the same shared social system of beliefs, and ‘etic,’ that is, an outsider, often challenging, re-description of that worldview from a critical academic perspective.
2. Primates All the Way Down: The Evolution of Religion
This class deals primarily with the identification of the religious building blocks present in our closest evolutionary relatives – the living apes. After a quick live survey aimed at challenging the students so that they identify what these building blocks are following some clues and suggestions, I will offer some insights into primatology and comparative animal cognition. I will explain the cognitive and behavioural underpinnings of social and religious behaviours present in extant primates, and we will also get a glimpse into our deep evolutionary history. A concise history of evolutionary biology and its main theories will also be provided along with an overview of the extinct ancestors whose traces are still embedded in our own DNA. Hypotheses concerning the evolutionary forces that exerted a significant pressure on our cognitive abilities and our religious building blocks will be briefly discussed. The current trends and most exciting projects in the Evolutionary Science of Religion will be also recalled, warts-and-all.
3. Brains, Miracles, and Superheroes: The Cognition of Religion
How do we make sense of what the senses tell us? Why are we so prone to fall for fake news and strong leaders? Is it possible to read intentions and desires into the mind of someone else without any sci-fi gizmo? Why are there so many and often contradictory godheads and divinities all around the world past and present? What about all those stories about the paranormal and the supernatural? And why certain religious ideas seem more able to spread and survive while others perish without leaving any trace? Are those that survive more reliable? And if so, what does it all mean for our knowledge of how the world functions? In this class, the students will learn that our world is much messier than they could possibly imagine – and that’s because our brain’s computational power is limited and marred by our history, our innate biases, and our logical fallacies. All human cultural endeavours are socially and historically constrained: cognition is encultured, meaning that the brain processes data on the basis of expectations and ideas which are the result of historically determined and learned sets of beliefs, norms, and worldviews – regardless of their falsity or truth. Moreover, evolution is not perfect – and our brainpower is only good-enough. Religion – just like any other human endeavour – is part and parcel of this flawed thinking system. That’s why human beings devised a system to mitigate our innate biases and learn from our mistakes: science. We will delve deeper into the burgeoning field of the Cognitive Science of Religion, and we will discover what ties ancient godheads to modern superheroes, why we believe what we believe, and how can the mind-blowing cultural richness of humankind be born out of our mental limitations and constraints.
4. E Pluribus Unum? The History of Religions
How did religions come to be? Did they all follow the same developmental trends? Is a cult a religion? What about a sect? Is it true that Buddhism is not a religion? What is esotericism? And what about Abrahamic religions? This class is designed to supply a quick synopsis of past theories and systemizations about the historical and cultural evolution of religions, from theses about the extinct hominins’ alleged religiosity to current ideas concerning the Axial Age and human universals. We will briefly explore the historical diffusion of the so-called world religions, without forgetting the ancient past and the too-often underrepresented present (e.g., shamanism, hunter-gatherer worldviews, new religious movements). A significant portion of the class will be devoted to the failed disciplinary attempts of the past to discern direction and meaning in this seemingly chaotic religious diversity.
5. Sex, Power, Empire, and the Patriarchy: The Neurosociology of Religion
The present class confronts the entanglements between religions past and present and political power. Patriarchal systems have often engendered, supported, and exploited traditional religious norms to control the sexual behaviours of subordinates and exert coercive control over minorities’ behaviours. Explosions of uncontrollable ideological violence, political riots, xenophobia, genocidal massacres all figure prominently in the history of humankind. As a species, we are a hierarchical social ape apparently incapable of extending empathy beyond a certain point – religions, myths, and storytelling unite us but they can just as easily be exploited to weaponize out-group hostility. Every time a religion managed to extend a fictive in-group kinship to all human beings, regardless of its success, new demarcations between in-groups and out-groups creeped back in. We will try to understand this puzzling outcome by bridging the gap between social sciences, poststructural criticism, evolutionary biology, and cognition. Again, we will look back at our evolutionary history and investigate the primatological underpinnings of hominins’ behaviours. As a comparative exercise, we will look for historical instances resulting from the interaction between recurrent behavioural patterns, unique social triggers, and political outcomes by contrasting social and economic unrest in (post-)industrial, mass media-led societies with case studies from the ancient Mediterranean. The whole class doubles as an exercise in criticizing past assumptions and categorizations.
6. QAnon, MAGA, and Neocreationism: The Conspirituality of Religion
On 6 January 2021 we watched aghast the attempted radical-right coup against the US Capitol promoted by a thousand-strong cult believers and alt-right supporters. We will revisit the cascade of events that led to the Capitol storming and delve deeper into the legitimization of radical-right policies, police brutality, and white suprematism by the Trump presidency. We will also discuss the disturbing photo op in front of Ashburton House, on 1 June 2020, the enforcement of the Muslim travel ban, the deportation policies, and the contradictions and justifications of the core evangelical electoral base in the light of what we have learnt so far. To make sense of all this I will also introduce and explain the concept of “political religion” offered by Comparative Fascist Studies, provide a wider neurosociological context, and delve deeper into the eerie parallels between the Interwar period – characterised by toxic fake news affecting the burgeoning world of mass media and antiscientific esotericism spreading in religious thought – and the current conspirituality fade.
7. Corporations, Hero’s Journeys, and Lightsabers: Between Fandom and Fiction-based Religions
How many times have we read or heard “it’s just a movie!” or “it’s kids’ stuff!” by naysayers eager to downplay the importance of visual storytelling? The present class will prove them all wrong. From gossip to Netflix binge-watching, stories are a virtual gym for simulating reality, suggesting ways to enhance cooperation, learning and reminding social norms, and pondering possibilities within our hypersocial primate brains. As such, stories provide the backbone of our social and mental world. In particular, far from being “just movies”, kids’ feature films of today are the adult memories of tomorrow. After a brief evolutionary introduction in which we will recap the ultimate causes for our addiction to storytelling, we will investigate the demarcation - if any - between fandom and fiction-based religions, that is, new religious movements based on corporate intellectual properties. The complicated relationship between fandom and contemporary entertainment corporations will be analysed through the lenses of the Walt Disney Co. 2012 acquisition of Lucasfilm and the post-George Lucas management of Star Wars. Lucas’ space opera will also provide an engaging case study to trace and assess the influence of troublesome Comparative Religion scholars like Joseph Campbell and Carlos Castaneda on our contemporary entertainment and storytelling landscapes.
8. Everything is Religious, Nothing is Religious: The Metamodernist Turn
The final class will provide a platform for a thorough reflection about the current state of the art in the academic field(s) that study religion(s). A starting point will be provided by the fact that the major actors in the field of the academic study of religions seem keen on abandoning the distinction between “religion” and “non-religion” we already anticipated earlier in this course. While this suggestion seems to have solid neuroscientific bases, we cannot but ask ourselves, what do we lose in the process? Is this proposal epistemologically warranted – that is, does it have legs? What are the alternatives, if any? We will discuss the advent of metamodernism as a new philosophical framework and its diffusion in Religious Studies, the rise of the New Sacred, and the concept of “worldviews” as an emerging paradigm in the field. We will also reflect critically on the influence of external funds provided by religious philanthrocapitalistic donors able to exploit the 2008 financial crisis and eager to reinvent themselves as science-supporting entities while advancing their own political and theocentric agendas.
Notes
DISCLAIMER: Although I have already tested some of these topics in the classroom years ago, this is very much a mental experiment and a work in progress. My goal is to improve the existing layout, update and shuffle the existing items, and add new material, references, and classes each time I come up with an interesting angle on something useful or a new topic, so that at the end I can have at least 12-15 classes. Right now, I’m just toying with the idea of adding a class on horror studies and religion… stay tuned!
Bibliography
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Ambasciano, L. (2019). An Unnatural History of Religions. London and New York: Bloomsbury.
Ambasciano, L. (2021). “An Evolutionary Cognitive Approach to Comparative Fascist Studies: Hypermasculinization, Supernormal Stimuli, and Conspirational Beliefs.” Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture 5(1): 23-39. https://doi.org/10.26613/esic.5.1.208
Ambasciano, L. (forthcoming). “The Trials and Tribulations of Luke Skywalker: How The Walt Disney Co. and Lucasfilm Have Failed to Confront Joseph Campbell’s Troublesome Legacy.” Implicit Religion
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Suggested readings, selected chapters & class materials
Bourdieu, P. (2001). Masculine Domination. Trans. R. Nice. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Braterman, P. (2021). “Why Creationism Bears All the Hallmarks of A Conspiracy Theory.” The Conversation, 4 February. https://theconversation.com/why-creationism-bears-all-the-hallmarks-of-a-conspiracy-theory-153831
Carney, J., R. Dunbar, A. Machin, T. Dávid-Barrett, and M. Silva Júnior (2014). “Social Psychology and the Comic-Book Superhero: A Darwinian Approach.” Philosophy and Literature 38 (1A): A195-A215. https://10.1353/phl.2014.0019
Franek, J. (2020). Naturalism and Protectionism in the Study of Religions. London and New York: Bloomsbury.
Geertz, A. W. (2010). “Brain, Body and Culture: A Biocultural Theory of Religion.” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 22 (4): 304-321. https://doi.org/10.1163/157006810X531094
Geertz, A. W. (2014). “Whence Religion? How the Brain Constructs the World and What This Might Tell Us About the Origins of Religion, Cognition and Culture.” In Origins of Religion, Cognition and Culture, ed. A. W. Geertz, 17-70. London and New York: Routledge.
Griffin, R. (2018). Fascism. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Guthrie, S. E. (2002). “Animal Animism: Evolutionary Roots of Religious Behavior.” In Current Approaches in the Cognitive Science of Religion, eds. I. Pyysiainen and V. Anttonen, 38-67. London: Continuum.
Lincoln, B. (2000). “Culture”. In Guide to the Study of Religion, ed. W. Braun and R. T. McCutcheon, 409-22. London: Cassell.
Martin, C. (2017). A Critical Introduction to the Study of Religion. Second Edition. London and New York: Routledge.
Martin, L. H. (2004). “Religion and Cognition,” in The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion, ed. J. R. Hinnells, 473-486. London and New York: Routledge.
Martin, L. H. & D. Wiebe (2012). “Religious Studies as a Scientific Discipline: The Persistence of a Delusion.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 80(3): 587-597. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23250713; Religio: revue pro religionistiku 20(1): 9-18. Stable URL: http://hdl.handle.net/11222.digilib/125392
McGoey, L., D. Thiel, and R. West (2018). “Philanthrocapitalism and Crimes of the Powerful.” Politix (1): 29-54. https://doi.org/10.3917/pox.121.0029
Smail, D. L. (2010). “An Essay on Neurohistory.” In Emerging Disciplines: Shaping New Fields of Scholarly Inquiry in and beyond the Humanities, M. Bailar ed, 201-28. Houston, TX: Rice University Press. http://cnx.org/contents/8aa30a5e-9484-4d55-87e3-d53c1cbfb8b2@1.4
Smith, J. Z. (2004). “Religion, Religions, Religious.” In Relating Religion, 179-197. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
Taves, A., E. Asprem, and E. Ihm (2018). “Psychology, Meaning Making, and the Study of Worldviews: Beyond Religion and Non-religion.” Psychology of Religion and Spirituality 10(3): 207-17. https://doi.org/10.1037/rel0000201
van der Akker, R. and T. Vermuelen (2017). “Periodising the 2000s, or, The Emergence of Metamodernism.” In van der Akker, R., A. Gibson, and T. Vermuelen eds, Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect and Depth after Postmodernism, 1-20. London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield.
Ward, C. and D. Voas (2011). “The Emergence of Conspirituality.” Journal of Contemporary Religion 26(1):103-121. https://doi.org/10.1080/13537903.2011.539846
Wiebe, D. (2021). The Learned Practice of Religion in the Modern University. London and New York: Bloomsbury.