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AAR Presidential Address
2019 AAR Presidential Address: “And Are We Not of Interest to Each Other?” A Blueprint for the Public Study of Religion Laurie L. Patton*
WHAT IS A GUILD of scholars in 2020? According to common know- ledge sources, guilds started as artisanal, focused on common work and craft and on local realities—the cities where artisans lived and worked. They were “confraternities of tradesmen,” less often women, normally “operating in a single city and covering a single trade.” They had char- acteristics of “the professional association, a trade union, a cartel, and a secret society.” They had royal patrons who would guarantee the flow of business to their members, and they retained “exclusive ownership of the tools and supply of materials.” The privilege for guild members was that “they alone had the right to practice or sell within the city”; their controls on prices, hours, apprenticeships, and methods insured a quality of work. Such a structure also “made it impossible for women, immigrants, and non-Christians” to enter the guild in any formal way (see Wikipedia 2020;
*Laurie L. Patton, Office of the President, Middlebury, 9 Old Chapel Road, Middlebury, VT 05753, USA. Email: [email protected]. During 2018–2019, the AAR board provided extraor- dinary grounding for writing this talk: Alice Hunt, Leela Prasad, Zayn Kassam, Amir Hussein, Jose Cabezon, Kerry Danner, Kathy Downey, Rachel Toombs, Marla Frederick, Randall Styers, Kathryn McClymond, and Kimberly Rae Connor. Without them, I could not have created the connections be- tween policy and poetry that seemed appropriate for this moment. I am grateful that they understood and supported the connections and made so many inspirational ones of their own.
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, September 2020, Vol. 88, No. 3, pp. 639–663 doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfaa044 Advance Access publication on August 19, 2020
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Epstein 1991; Grafe and Gederblom 2010). Many craft guilds were them- selves modeled on the students’ guilds at the University of Bologna, and the masters, or professors’ guilds, at the University of Paris. The scholarly guild is bound up with the formation of the university itself.
How close and yet how far the American Academy of Religion today is from that encyclopedia definition. We think often of our work as arti- sanal—craft like, individual, yet using specific tools that we have learned through apprenticeship, tools that we alone control. The PhD is an inherit- ance of the medieval guild, not late capitalism. We often think of ourselves as workers, yet we are also exclusive and privileged; we find it difficult when others use our tools if they have not been accredited through the guild. We frequently write that we would like ownership of tools and supply of materials. Yet we are not local. The city of the artisanal guild has been replaced by the continent of North America in the American Academy of Religion, with a more and more international bent and popu- lation and, important for the present discussion, multiple patrons—uni- versities, foundations, governments, and businesses.
We look like a more complex and contemporary guild. And we have recently added something new. As we explain in our mission statement,1 we are now committed to the public understanding of religion. But this new commitment is also traditional. The medieval guild also had an ob- ligation to the public. If you charged too much or cheated on materials in your interactions with the public, you could no longer be part of the guild. Exclusive and secretive as guilds may have been, they still depended upon their relationship with the public. Reflection about, even regulation of, our connection to the public is as old as the idea of the guild itself.
WHAT IS A PUBLIC? So we also might ask, “What is a public?” One of our major intellectual
forbearers on the question of the public sphere is Jürgen Habermas (1989; 2006). He wrote that a public sphere is a web of social developments in eighteenth-century Europe, linked to the growth of urban culture, with new architectures, such as theaters and operas; new media, such as print culture; and new organizations, such as lending libraries.
Public culture found its primary symbol in a coffee house. The con- versations of little café circles branched out into affairs of state, adminis- tration, and politics. For Habermas, coffee houses disregarded status and trusted in discursive reason. Anyone with access to cultural technology
1This mission statement has done what we all hope mission statements should do: force us to re- define ourselves as we struggle to live up to it (https://www.aarweb.org/About).
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like novels and journals had the potential to take the debate public. Habermas thought this sphere was self-regulating, at least by the bour- geois men who participated; however exclusive the café might be, those who had access to mainstream cultural vehicles and objects under discus- sion could always participate.
In the spirit of intellectual generosity that I hope could characterize us as a twenty-first-century guild, I want to say first that Habermas was not wrong. Encounters in coffee shops still startle us. We overhear conversa- tions. We start revolutions. We are lonely. We know our own limitations, and we are braver than we would ever be at home. The café still is a dance of associations, rich in meetings both chance and intentional, voluntary and involuntary.
Yet. Yet. The eighteenth-century coffee shop of Europe assumed that people who entered them had access to the market, to education. The eighteenth-century coffee shop spaces were palatial to create a gesture of welcome and dignity, but only for some. Some did not even dare come in to the inviting democratic space. Some came in but stayed in the back. Many cafés were run by Jewish women who had no voice in the discus- sions out front. Habermas did not acknowledge the dialogical cultures of Asia, Africa, and the Americas (see Weyrauch, 1999; Calhoun et al. 2011).
Twenty-first-century critics of Habermas argue things that might sound familiar to us. Nancy Fraser (1990; 2003; 2008) argues Habermas left out several elements essential to building a more just and open public square. First, differences in social equality might exist among the partici- pants and must be named. Second, there may not be a single, liberal public sphere; other “competing” public spheres can also have significant influ- ence in public discourse. Fraser calls these subaltern spheres “counter- publics.” Third, such citizens may determine differently what counts as public and what counts as private. Members of subaltern counter-publics might determine that their own private interests and private matters should be counted in the public sphere.
Taking all these factors into account, the public sphere is a fragile thing indeed. Those of us who study things associated with the English word re- ligion know deeply of the instability of the public sphere. We intuitively know the ways in which Habermas idealized the café. We know it because we have lived with the instability of the word religion, and the study of re- ligion, for a century. Far from being an encrusted space, we have always interrupted, or been interrupted by, the public sphere. Let me go even further: the study of religion has constantly lived in a space of controversy and scandal. And that is an opportunity for what Chantal Mouffe (2013) calls an agonistic democracy.
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We can barely articulate a different public sphere, yet I think we must begin to articulate it now. Today I want to offer a blueprint for that work. It revolves around four simple questions: First: “Who is around us?” Second, “Who are we talking to?” Third, “Who is seen and heard?” And fourth, “What work matters?”
I will call upon theory in the study of religion, philosophy of the public sphere, and poetry to draw the blueprint. As a gesture to another kind of collective that moves beyond the “magisterial voice of the leader,” this will involve poetry spoken by AAR voices other than my own. I believe we need nothing less than a poetics of a new public sphere, the space that we cross every day. We need poetry because we can barely begin to de- scribe that emerging, and emergent, public space. I will also be sharing the policy work that we did in 2018 and 2019—important progress that I do not want to relegate to business meetings attended by only the intensely faithful and the bureaucratically curious. I end with an exhortation to a newly energetic and different kind of curiosity as fundamental to our new commitment to the public understanding of religion.
Let me begin then with a more specific description of what an ideal- ized Habermasian public sphere has looked like for the scholar of religion. Our public space has traditionally been idealized as a place where univer- sities ply their analytical trades and religious communities ply theirs. Both religious and secular languages are spoken, but the two languages are sep- arate. They did not clash because they did not meet. And if they did meet, the ground rules were clearly on one side or the other.
But what of those moments when the languages may not be mutu- ally comprehensible? In the early twenty-first century, Habermas became interested in this idea, motivated by the resurgence of extremism and the clear historical connection scholars were making between religious and secular ideas. These interests led him to posit what he has called a “wild sphere” (Habermas 2006) in which members of religious communities could not enter the public sphere without becoming unintelligible, and it became necessary to translate religious reasons into secular ones in order to participate fully in the democratic sphere. As scholars of religion, we will have a variety of opinions as to whether that in itself is a reasonable claim. The characterization of “wild” itself could indeed reinforce a “civil- ized/wild” dichotomy, which seems to impose on the religious subject the burden to become “reasonable.” This is the reason I choose to call these moments of argumentation “eruptive public spaces” rather than “wild spheres.”
But then a key question emerges: If such translation is required, then how does participation in the public sphere occur for religious
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communities? The twenty-first-century critiques of Habermas by Nancy Fraser (1990; 2003; 2008), María Herrera Lima (2013), Thomas McCarthy (2013), and James Bohman (2010), among others, raise questions of who belongs, who is marginalized, and whose histories are accepted in the de- lineation of the public sphere. They also propose a stronger role for histor- ical studies in the reading of the public square “to understand the changed historical and social conditions for religious beliefs and practices in our secular age” (Herrera Lima, 2013, 51). They are versions of our four ques- tions mentioned above.
As I have recently noted, the controversies I have been living in and studying over the past decade and a half occur in the midst of these differ- ences in status, class, position, ethnicity, gender, race, sexuality, and phys- ical ability. Participants in these controversies are not necessarily able to find the public reason that can reconcile these differences. What is more, religious communities are shifting publics. They constitute, on the one hand, a set of doctrines and practices that should be protected by public reason’s “freedom of liberty and conscience,” yet, at the same time, they emerge as communities of readers constituted by race and ethnicity— and even as communities of protest to particular scholarly conversations. They may not always have these identities, or even take on such identities as “core,” but insofar as they participate in a controversy, they use these identities to achieve their ends in the public debate. In this sense, what- ever “intersections” of multiple identities might be present, one primarily religious identity is strategically used in the public debates and represen- tative rivalry (Patton 2019, 52).
Let me be very clear: These eruptive public spaces constitute our daily life in the twenty-first century. From the six case studies, I gathered add- itional numbers. No fewer than forty controversies around the study of religion have emerged in the first fifteen years of the twenty-first century. Some of them have been transnational; some have been local in nature. But they are no longer exceptions. They are a norm.
The historical study of controversies erupting between communi- ties and scholars demonstrate that Habermas could benefit from what Thomas McCarthy (2013, 116) calls “a still sharper descent from the heights of transcendental philosophy,” where modern discourse is open at multiple points to contestation. Moreover, they join Charles Taylor in emphasizing the fact that in its contemporary forms, religion is one factor among others in choice of identity. Thus, religious thought and practice cannot be a sole remedy, nor a sole cause, for the fracturing of the public sphere, given that it is appealed to as one cultural form of identity among many. These points of fracture in the public sphere are endless and in my view worthy of study in their own right. These controversies represent the
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failure of liberal culture to find “a third way between old antagonisms” (Herrera Lima 2013, 61).
What is more, as I have also recently written (Patton 2019, 59), these controversies show that the Habermasian understanding of “post-secular” society, discussed above, assumes a false equality—one whereby the “epi- stemic and attitudinal burdens” on citizens are more or less equal between religious and secular groups as they participate in the deliberative ex- change. In this overly optimistic view, a post-secular world is one where religious and secular groups can engage, religious groups can translate themselves and thereby become comprehensible in largely secular terms of public reason, and a modus vivendi might be found.
But these controversies show that neither scholars nor community members can freely engage. The idea of the post-secular dialogue is not rich enough to take up the challenges of pluralism. A post-secular delib- erative dialogue across religious and secular lines may help create com- municative understanding but does not necessarily help engender what James Bohman calls communicative power—that is, creating groups with genuine standing who can and will effectively persuade other groups. As Bohman argues, post-secularity should be less a condition of public delib- eration in democratic states and more “a critical standard for living with the permanent fact of increasing diversity of forms of life at all levels of international society” (Calhoun et al. 2013, 16).
Such diversity of forms of life mean that we will also be constantly occupying eruptive public spaces in contestations of cultural power. We as scholars are actors in those contestations. It is therefore important to ex- plore the role of cultural recognition in these eruptive public spaces and, relatedly, insider/outsider statuses in different religions as forms of cul- tural power. Is religion a public cultural identity or a private set of prac- tices and beliefs? Religion has frequently operated most effectively as a cultural identity or as a cultural resource for claiming power. Yet religion as a cultural resource is not just a matter of rearranging personally mean- ingful symbols. As a cultural resource, it still lays claim to the privacy of a protected sphere at the same time as it is understood as a cultural good to be shared. Even when religion is understood as a public cultural resource, the understanding of religion moves across definitional bound- aries (Patton 2019, 68).
WHO IS AROUND US? So, in this context of eruptive public spaces, let me begin with the first
simple question: Who is around us? This question is a form of ethical
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reflection about our scholarly contexts. What is the nature of the public sphere constituted by the academy itself ? Here is one idea of the scholar that still haunts us. In 1919, William Butler Yeats published this observa- tion of us in his collection The Wild Swans at Coole.
Bald heads forgetful of their sins,
Old, learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines
That young men, tossing on their beds,
Rhymed out in love’s despair
To flatter beauty’s ignorant ear.
They’ll cough in the ink to the world’s end;
Wear out the carpet with their shoes
Earning respect; have no strange friend;
If they have sinned nobody knows.
Lord, what would they say
Did their Catullus walk that way? (Yeats, 1919)
Yeats published this around a decade after the AAR was forming, when schools of religion were still attached to schools of theology, and when the profession was overwhelmingly, exclusively male. There are few eruptive public spaces in this poem and the scholarly world it represents. Our intellectual ancestors were not aware of the collective and individual fissures in the public sphere that we acknowledge today—and whatever wrongdoings they were aware of were usually, as Yeats also suggests, for- gotten or hidden. Nobody knew of them. They understood ourselves as learned and respectable, editing and annotating lines, coughing in the ink, outgoing and brotherly—they had no strange friend.
Such an idea of a scholarly context is something we still carry with us. An assumed stability. Of activity, of patronage, of collegiality, of friend- ship. That assumed a stability of patronage that, I would argue, we have never truly had in the study of religion. Asking “Who is around us?” means understanding first and foremost the instability of our scholarly contexts. We have always been interrupters—whether it was Robert Smith in the basement of the library understanding the connections between the Gilgamesh epic and the Biblical flood story, fifty years before Yeats was
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writing, or the most recent interruptions of the early twenty-first century, multiplying his experience fortyfold.
I further want to propose that since the late twentieth century, asking who is around us is and will always be a controversial, perhaps even scan- dalous, question. And I want to answer it the following way: The people around us in the study of religion are people whose authority will always be unstable, always be questioned. We know that the hope of the mid- twentieth century—that we could carve out an unquestioned secular sphere of reason-based inquiry into the study of religion—was never fully realized. We have departments, yes. We have fewer colleagues questioning the validity of our choice of topic. But the fact is that departments of reli- gion are still among the first to go when budgets are cut. We cannot ignore this part of our public sphere.
And the situation is even more complicated when it comes to other forms of authority. Religious communities have no agency in endowing scholars with the right to interpret; they can only endow members of their own community with such a right and take it away if necessary. They can, and often do, bestow upon scholars, after the fact, a “good list” and “bad list” status (Patton 2019 34, 41).
What is more, scholars of religion are not able to take on fully the art- istic authority of the writer or the painter or sculptor either. There is no social contract between religious communities and university communi- ties about an agreed-upon artistic construction as there is between artists and their audiences. There is no common understanding of artifice.
Thus, the area between universities and communities is especially fraught; it has no commonly understood norms, no agreed-upon standard as to who has the “right” to interpret, and several radically different com- mitments to the constitution of reality. Topical authority is questioned by the academy. Religious authority is questioned by the community. Artistic authority is not granted by anyone (Patton 2019, 41).
Indeed, the offense of the controversies that I have been studying emerges because either (1) the scholar should have had another kind of au- thority (i.e., religious) but did not; or (2) the scholar is offensively treating the religion as an artist might, as a kind of fictive or simulated material that in the scholar’s mind, should not be taken as truth. In either case, the scholar is a theologian manqué or an artist manqué and ultimately un- satisfying in the cultural contracts that society is accustomed to making (Patton 2019, 42).
And now, we are people whose authority is questioned because we are new to the academy. We are no longer the men who are nodding, with no strange friend. Rather, we are people of color. Trans people. Queer
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people. Disabled people. People from countries whose agency has only recently been acknowledged. People who used to be “studied” and are now claiming a voice as scholars, long overdue to be heard. Disciplined and ethical reflection on our scholarly contexts involves being aware of long-term patterns within the academy that need to change, of giving voice and credit to those who have been denigrated, dismissed, and si- lenced. As Yeats said, we had forgotten and did not reflect on that wrong- doing—we did not even know we were doing so.
And so we turn to policy. As part of our commitment to this ques- tion “Who is around us?” and in the spirit of taking academic contexts seriously, this year we have completely revised our procedures for harass- ment and discrimination, including sexual harassment.2 In recent years, there has been a sea change in the way that our society and the univer- sity and other workplaces view discrimination. Those who have experi- enced discrimination and their allies have been speaking out against all forms of workplace harassment and unprofessional conduct. Behavior that was once tolerated is no longer tolerated but instead actively named. Perpetrators are being held accountable. Representatives of the AAR gen- erally believe that this change reflects a large-scale, long-overdue, and welcome cultural shift. Many organizations, including academic institu- tions, non-profit organizations, and scholarly societies, are working on improving their conduct procedures to create a fair, open, and compas- sionate process that encourages reporting and provides support for all those involved.
The American Academy of Religion is no exception. These new pro- cedures reflect best practices adopted by voluntary organizations across the country, including investigators trained in current questions of dis- crimination and in work with vulnerable populations and familiar with new contexts of discrimination previously not named. Additionally, our new procedures go a step further in providing alternatives for dispute resolution, an elected ombudsperson to facilitate and support the process, and an ethics committee. We think this promotes a deeper culture of re- spect and inclusion and invite you to work with us as we constantly seek to improve it.
Asking “Who is around us?” is an embrace of Thomas McCarthy’s 2013 request of Habermas to descend from the transcendental heights
2This work represented long months of painstaking research and work from a number of commit- tees and the board itself. In addition to the leading work of Alice Hunt in developing this document, the status committees were particularly helpful in getting us to a fair yet rigorous set of procedures (https:// www.aarweb.org/AARMBR/AARMBR/About-AAR-/Board-of-Directors-/Board-Resolutions-/ Professional-Conduct-Procedures.aspx).
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of philosophy and into the space of modern discourse of multiple, even endless, points of contestation. Asking for all the voices in the café, and listening for the silences, and the hushed arguments—even, and perhaps especially, at a seemingly democratic table.
WHO ARE WE TALKING TO? I turn now to asking “Who are we talking to?” We might describe
this question as ethical reflection on the nature of our scholarly publics. I begin with a conversation I had with a colleague many years ago about the nature of public scholarship. She was afraid that a turn to public schol- arship would mean the death knell of specialized research. When I argued with her, she said, “Next time you are spending your Friday nights in a church basement talking about the basics, let me know if you want to live that hell.” I responded, “I just spent my Thursday night in that very base- ment, explaining the basics of Indian tradition. I just lived the hell you described. And it wasn’t hell. It was inspiring. And I’m still a specialist.”
By ethical reflection on the nature of our scholarly publics, I mean simply asking who we are talking to and whether it matters. My answer to that question is that we have only barely begun to acknowledge our multiple publics. We need to be specific and descriptive of our publics in a way that we have never been before. If we do not, we will be lonely. We will isolate the academy, and the study of religion, even further. We will all come to a different conclusion in our answers to that scholarly question, but we will be connected in asking a common question, and reflecting about it.
In “Found Poem” (1987), the poet Howard Nemerov speaks the words of a completely uniform public and the cost of such a conception:
Found Poem
After information received in The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 4 v 86
The population center of the USA
Has shifted to Potosi, in Missouri.
The calculation employed by authorities
In arriving at this dislocation assumes
That the country is a geometric plane,
Perfectly flat, and that every citizen,
Including those in Alaska and Hawaii
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And the District of Columbia, weighs the same;
So that, given these simple presuppositions,
The entire bulk and spread of all the people
Should theoretically balance on the point
Of a needle under Potosi in Missouri
Where no one is residing nowadays
But the watchman over an abandoned mine
Whence the company got the lead out and left.
“It gets pretty lonely here,” he says, “at night.” (Nemerov 1987)
A perceived public, where every citizen, including those in Alaska and Hawaii, weighs the same leads to a conceptualization of the public that is so uniform as to lead to wrong conclusions, conclusions where all pub- lics should “theoretically balance on the point/ Of a needle under Potosi in Missouri.” Conclusions where one’s idea of a public is where no-one is residing, except perhaps us, like “watchmen over an abandoned mine.”
But in the controversies and scandals of recent decades, we have dis- covered that our publics are multiple, and colorful, and very much alive. Jane Schaberg (1987) found that the Roman Catholic community of Detroit mattered a great deal when she published her Illegitimacy of Jesus. Jeffrey Kripal (1995) found that the intellectual community of Kolkata was nearer than ever, even though thousands of miles away, when he published his Kali’s Child. We know that our readerships have changed, forever, and that the guild can no longer be part of the scholarly wink where we write primarily for each other, with a nod to the privileged few outsiders we let inside the guild. Whatever we think of those outside the guild—and they will range from the violently hostile to the loyally crit- ical to the empathetic fellow travelers to the uncritically sympathetic—we need to acknowledge them and think about them.
In the current moment, many scholars still assume a single public ra- ther than the multiple publics that actually can and do constitute their readerships. Such a public could be CNN, the church basement, the mosque, the Hindu temple, or the courthouse. A scholar’s assumption of a single public does influence whether and how he, she, or they become engaged in the walls beyond the university. We saw that dynamic in Tazim Kassam’s realization that her Ismaili readership would not be uniformly positive but multiple and polarized. We saw it in Jeffrey Kripal’s account of how the gay, the straight, the secular, and the Hindu communities in
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India had different responses to Kālī’s Child depending upon how they interpreted the relationship between sexuality and history. We saw it in Harjot Oberoi’s understanding of himself as a Sikh in the Delhi riots, and later as a Sikh in the diaspora, writing a secular history that his own com- munity rallied against. Oberoi confronted the radically different reading publics that even the single phrase “the Sikh community” presupposes (Patton 2019, 258).
However, since now a scholar’s readership will likely never reside in the academy alone, such scholars should have a philosophy about how, when, and why to interact with the inevitable interlocutors from “out- side” the academy. Indeed, some scholars could be quite eager to share research with different kinds of communities but have a clear philosophy that the normative implications of the work are not his, her, or their con- cern. Some might remain at a distance and even be critical of community concerns; nonetheless, they need a clear method of engagement once it is asked for. And there are the interesting and infinitely various stages in between (Patton 2019, 254).
Turning now to policy: In the spirt of those multiple publics, last year, the AAR focused on local knowledge and a renewed understanding of the regions. We adopted a new mission statement for the regions:
AAR fosters its mission through energetic cultivation of accessible regional intellectual networks and identities to serve members where they live and work, and to respond to local publics and concerns.3
We hope to build on this work in a variety of ways, thinking about the new ways in which local publics take up universal human issues and, in renewed partnership with the academy, can provide deep cre- ativity—both creative partnership and creative tension—in studying and addressing them.
We have always constituted multiple publics, and we are just begin- ning to name them. In our imagined café, we are more than one small group of intellectuals with access to public services. We argue over the furniture, wonder who gets the patio space, boycott the coffee brands without fair trade, and object to sitting next to the large company logo. Most importantly, we will not be in an imagined, self-calculated place like
3The board felt that this statement was particularly important now, for several reasons: first, public knowledge is often local knowledge; and second, the AAR’s hope to be more available and active 24/7, 12 months of the year, can partly be achieved through the AAR regions. https://www.aarweb.org/ AARMBR/About-AAR-/Regions.aspx.
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Potosi, but in a place of many voices, both real and imagined, deeply re- sistant to calculation of any kind.
WHO IS SEEN AND HEARD? Commitment to the public study of religion, to local publics, organ-
ically leads to the question, “Who is seen and heard?” We might also call this an ethical reflection about the nature of power and privilege in the study of religion. Power and privilege. Those are overly used words these days—perhaps they feel overly used because there is so little that seems to result by invoking them. I myself am tired of those words, but they are all we have. Perhaps a poem will get at it better. Jennifer Denrow’s 2011 poem about the nature of mind, of teaching, and of the passing on of knowledge is one that describes well the situation of privilege within the academy:
How the mind works still to be sure
You were the white field when you handed me a blank
sheet of paper and said you’d worked so hard
all day and this was the best field you could manage.
And when I didn’t understand, you turned it over
and showed me how the field had bled through,
and then you took out your notebook and said how each
time you attempted to make something else, it turned out
to be the same field. You worried that everyone
you knew was becoming the field and you couldn’t help
them because you were the one making them into fields
in the first place. It’s not what you meant to happen.
You handed me a box of notebooks and left. I hung the field
all over the house. Now, when people come over, they think
they’re lost and when I tell them they’re not, they say they’re
beginning to feel like the field and it’s hard because they know
they shouldn’t but they do and then they start to grow whiter
and whiter and then they disappear. With everyone turning
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into fields, it’s hard to know anything. With everyone turning
into fields, it’s hard to be abstract. And since I’m mostly alone,
I just keep running my hand over the field, waiting. (Denrow 2011)
Denrow’s poem was not intended as a description of how we think about reproducing ourselves as scholars of religion, but it could be. We have struggled with ideas of the field. We have struggled with making it less white. Despite our best intentions, and perhaps even without under- standing our intentions, we reproduce ourselves in ways we might hardly recognize—“with everyone turning into fields, it’s hard to know anything.”
In addition to consideration of our own scholarly contexts and pub- lics, I ask us to think about our publics in terms of the public squares our own members must constantly navigate. Those who cannot visit us often. A scathing sociology of knowledge from the southern hemisphere, A. Suresh Canagarajah’s A Geopolitics of Academic Writing (2002) out- lines how difficult it is for a scholar in urban Sri Lanka to apply for a Fulbright, as distinct from the experience of someone in a small college in the United States. Furthermore, our social practices may create conditions in which those who visit us and are trained by us have not have yet found the courage to speak.
The focus of the eruptive public space, then, falls on the role of indi- vidual scholars, their respect for the traditions they study, and the privilege of the academic worlds from which they come. The balance of power may or may not lie with academic institutions in these cases, but all of them force such institutions to reflect on their status, privilege, and ability to in- terpret in this new environment. Hence their eruptive, scandalous nature.
The institutions caught up in the scandals I have been studying are academic ones (colleges or universities), and the publics are communi- ties related to the academies and ones who identify as the “subjects” of a published work. What is at issue, and what causes the “breakdown,” is a particular community’s doubts about its own representation within the “sanctioned” halls of the classroom and the pages of the books pub- lished by prestigious presses. The understanding of the university’s ability and obligation to represent a religious tradition is at harsh odds with the community’s understanding of the university’s privilege. The social strain comes from their perception of the relative privilege and position from which those in universities can speak about a tradition and the access to public venues those speakers have (Patton 2019, 35).
Yet we might not stop there in our understanding of the enduring whiteness and conceptual uniformity of the academic page. Even more important is the fact that we are currently a population with a majority
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of non-tenure track members. We all know this. Yet we still act as if the norm—the unmarked position, as a linguist would call it—is the tenure track job—a position with the power and the privilege to speak. What is more, if we are honest with ourselves, many of us still act as if the best jobs are at about ten universities.
Tenure protections were given to people to protect them from the abuse of power and privilege, not to help them consolidate their power and privilege. In the spirit of embracing local publics, I want to ask: What if we dismantled this prestige ladder? What if we democratized prestige as many of us advocate that we should democratize wealth in this age of unprecedented wealth inequality? What if we stopped trying to reproduce ourselves, creating the field in white sheets of paper, and invoked other forms of production? What if we did not bleed into the previous sheet of paper but encouraged an entirely different color on the paper, an entirely different world of intellectual production?
I commend to you, and think that scholars of religion are especially equipped to embark upon, the acts of local solidarity with adjunct profes- sors that faculty can embark upon, outlined recently by Herb Childress in his recent book (Childress 2019a) and in the Chronicle of Higher Education (Childress 2019b). Hire without regard to prestige, but to stated need of your program. Track grad student placements. Reallocate departmental technology budgets ($200B/year in higher education), travel budgets, and institutional membership budgets toward adjunct pay. Prioritize hiring adjuncts already teaching within your program. Allocate introductory courses to senior permanent faculty to lighten the load and allow adjuncts to share their expertise. If you have a graduate program, admit only the number of graduate students you know you can place.
I am also happy to share with you that at its meeting in September 2019, the board unanimously voted no longer to use the term “alternative career” in describing career paths in any of its official programs, publica- tions, or forums. We encourage all of you to do the same—with your col- leagues, with your students, of whatever kind you might have.
The board also encouraged the AAR staff to expand employment services to include multiple and diverse career paths, including opportun- ities from administration, libraries, professional schools, non-profit, civic, media, arts, and business sectors. This is a small gesture, but an important one, whereby all labor counts. All labor should be seen in the study of religion, not one form of labor—that done within the university—being more “seen” than the rest. It will take a long time to reach this parity in our minds, but we are already there in our demographics.
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Even within the academy, we must acknowledge the differential nature of labor. Given that tenure does create a kind of privilege, might it allow public engagement or the refusal of public engagement to be perceived differently? Given that tenured professors are increasingly in the minority, in religious studies as well as in the humanities more generally, it is, I be- lieve, a moral obligation for the tenured professoriate to support adjunct instructors in their public engagements and to protect them if they have written controversial research. I would like to call on all tenured profes- sors, and in the near future, I will be calling on you personally as past president to work within your departments to create a set of policies and protocols that do exactly this. In addition, I am making a donation to the AAR that will create a fund that acknowledges this wealth and prestige in- equity, asking those with tenure and with salaries over $100k to contribute to a fund that will make the AAR more affordable for those whose labor is often not “seen.”
Indeed, by the nature of their work, adjunct professors are workers in the public sphere—more likely to be more engaged with multiple pub- lics. They should be given more communicative and institutional power, protected in their intellectual work, and understood as deep resources for thinking through important public questions.
Habermas’ critic James Bohman (2010) writes about communicative power as a form of prestige in the public sphere. So too we might ask in the newly imagined café: whose seat is always reserved for them? Whom do the staff rush to greet? Whose voice is always heard first, even though others are also speaking? Most importantly, what would it look like to greet each other differently? For some to stop talking?
WHAT WORK MATTERS? Access and privilege also create an implicit understanding of labor.
A public sphere encircles and embraces what work counts. Those em- powered in the public sphere determine what work they choose to see. But, with participatory parity in the public sphere, members of sub- altern counter-publics might ask that their own private interests and private matters should be counted in the public sphere. The rhetoric of privacy could well be used to restrict the universe of legitimate public contestation. To take a religious instance, if a religious matter is understood as “personal or “domestic” and public discourse is chan- neled into specialized institutions of family law or social work, then this categorization often reproduces gender dominance and subordin- ation. In other words, creating participatory inclusion does not solve
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all the issues because newly licensed participants might be hedged by conceptions of economic or domestic privacy and therefore delimit the scope of the debate. Here too we need poetry to imagine something dif- ferent. Jamaican-born poet James Berry’s 1979 poem “Outsider” names it eloquently:
Outsider
If you see me lost on busy streets,
my dazzle is sun-stain of skin,
I’m not naked with dark glasses on
saying barren ground has no oasis:
it’s that cracked up by extremes
I must hold self
together with extreme pride.
If you see me lost in neglected
woods, I’m no thief eyeing trees
to plunder their stability
or a moaner shouting at air:
it’s that voices in me rule
firmer than my skills, and sometimes
among men my stubborn hurts
leave me like wild dogs.
If you see me lost on forbidding
wastelands, watching dry flowers
nod, or scraping a tunnel
in mountain rocks, I don’t open
a trail back into time:
it’s that a monotony
like the Sahara seals my enchantment.
If you see me lost on long
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footpaths, I don’t set traps
or map out arable acres:
it’s that I must exhaust twigs
like limbs with water divining.
If you see me lost in my sparse
room, I don’t ruminate
on prisoners and falsify
their jokes, and go on about
prisons having been perfected
like a common smokescreen of mind:
it’s that I moved
my circle from ruins
and I search to remake it whole. (Berry 1979)
This is a beautiful comment on unseen work in the public sphere— what is ostensible is not what is real. For Berry, someone who is standing rigid is not prophesying loss but holding himself together with extreme pride; someone who is alone, but talking, is not an insane moaner but someone whose voices overrule his skills; someone who is in the woods may not be setting traps, but forced by his situation to water divine; and someone who is alone in a room is not a prisoner, but someone who is working on making his circle whole again. Our world, like Berry’s, is a melody of play on seen work and unseen work, on assumptions and rationales being exploded by realities far more filled with pathos.
At the 2019 AAR, we reflected on seen work and unseen work. Thanks to the publications task force, we set up a new standard for publication, which asks us to reflect ethically on methods and topics.
We encourage AAR members—institutional and individual—to ac- knowledge that the rapidly changing economics of academic publishing and changes in the nature of in faculty work in higher education are
4This statement reflects the courage of the AAR in helping departments change their own stand- ards of publishing to reflect twenty-first-century realities. Rather than departments waiting for scholarly guilds and scholarly guilds waiting for departments and nothing getting done, the AAR has “gone first” (https://www.aarweb.org/AARMBR/AARMBR/About-AAR-/Board-of-Directors-/ Board-Resolutions-/Evaluating-Scholarship-in-Religious-Studies-for-Promotion-and-Tenure.aspx).
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challenging the effectiveness of traditional standards for evaluating the nature of scholarly work in the promotion and tenure process. As the use of term and contingent faculty labor grows, the system of tenure and promotion also becomes more contested; publishing standards related to promotion should take these changes and specific institutional contexts into account.4
We are asking that members take seen and unseen work into account in their basic activity of the guild: the evaluation of scholarship.
Evaluating bodies should distinguish publishing standards among dif- ferent types of institutions, and recognize that the importance of and cri- teria for research publication for tenure varies significantly by type, size, location, demographic, and mission of each institution.
We ask that members question and consider again an exclusive com- mitment to the monograph as the primary form of thought. We have asked that members question and consider again their definitions of rigor—not because they want to abandon it, but that every definition needs to be interrogated in light of new and emerging contexts; even if we end up reasserting rigor at the end of our inquiry, we will have a deeper under- standing of its contours and its relationship to justice and inclusion. We need to ask ourselves: have we dismissed a new and equally rigorous form of scholarship because of our old definitions? Have we dismissed a new and even more vibrant group of practitioners because of our old defin- itions? Have we done so, even as we think we find no strange friend, for- gotten or ignored?
Put in the words of James Berry, whose work do we mistakenly define as rigid, when in fact they are holding themselves together with pride? Whose working conditions create a monotony of academic life that seals, and kills, their enchantment?
Relatedly, given the new demographics of the humanities, it should not be a foregone conclusion that a scholar’s work can only be seen within the academy, or that a scholar’s place of employment is with an academic institution. If one is with a non-governmental organization or think tank, then the commitment to research as a way of making the world a better place is more clearly front and center. At a non-govern- mental organization, a scholar’s publics are already multiple, and the scholar would more regularly reflect on the connection between re- search and the mission statement of the organization. Although the mission itself might be different, many of the same dynamics would
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apply to scholars working at a for-profit institution, such as a company or a consulting firm.
Habermasian critic Max Pensky (2013) writes about opacity in public—those who must make themselves opaque in order to be seen. Who in the religious studies café can come out of the kitchen and sit for a coffee? Who must still abide by our own unacknowledged rules, and make work that remains invisible, erased by our genteel practices?
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS The definitions of readers, writers, scholars, critics, insiders, and out-
siders in the public sphere are even more fluid and controversial than they were in the 1990s. I believe this is an opportunity for us to create the con- ditions of a vibrant, inclusive public sphere—one where more and more voices are included and fundamental freedoms are preserved.
It is clear to me that advocacy for the study of religion to exist in the academy, no matter how broadly rooted, is not enough. Nor is the simple intellectual resistance to academic structures of power that may threaten the study of religion. Another form of activity is also necessary: reflection about, and understanding of, our publics—the forms of pluralism that constitute the worlds both within and outside the academy.
Such reflection is no longer a luxury, or even an important scholarly pursuit: it is a democratic necessity. Ongoing inquiry into the nature of our publics, our scholarly contexts, and our individual positions within those contexts is necessary not only so that we might have a coherent sense of our topics of study, as scholars of the mid-twentieth century ar- gued, or of our subjective positions, as scholars of the late twentieth cen- tury argued. Rather, such reflection is necessary because we need analyses of the “spaces between,” where contact between academic institutions and the communities they study occurs in all of its richness, controversy, and eruptive power.
Because humanistic scholars of religion exist in the in-between of arti- fice and truth, the humanities’ potential ability to navigate publics should be developed, engaged, and featured as part of this vibrancy. Leela Prasad (2017) has argued forcefully for this in her proposal that a failure of public life is one where negotiations are based on intellectual transactions, not on navigations of common democratic experience.
The controversial cases of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century have opened up new fissures in the cultural roles of scholars; it is now scholars’ jobs to reimagine how they might wend their way through
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them. That work of imagination goes something like what Katha Pollitt (1981) describes in her poem, “Archaeology”:
Archaeology
“Our real poems are already in us, and all we can do is dig.”
–Jonathan Galassi
You knew the odds on failure from the start
that morning you first saw or thought you saw,
beneath the heatstruck plains of a second-rate country
the outline of buried cities. A thousand to one
you’d turn up nothing more than the rubbish heap
of a poor Near Eastern backwater:
a few chipped beads,
splinters of glass and pottery, broken tablets
whose secret lore, laboriously deciphered,
would prove to be only a collection of ancient grocery lists.
Still, the train moved away from the station without you.
How many lives ago
was that? How many choices?
Now that you’ve got your bushelful of shards
do you say, give me back my years
or wrap yourself in the distant
glitter of desert stars,
telling yourself it was foolish after all
to have dreamed of uncovering
some fluent vessel, the bronze head of a god?
Pack up your fragments. Let the simoom
flatten the digging site. Now come
the passionate midnights in the museum basement
when out of that random rubble you’ll invent
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the dusty market smelling of sheep and spices,
streets, palmy gardens, courtyards set with wells
to which, in the blue of evening, one by one
come strong veiled women, bearing their perfect jars. (Pollitt 1981)
We imagine a public sphere by piecing together the shards. By asking the simple questions—the basic pieces of random rubble that are simple in their composition—to build a new dusty market, with sheep and spices and courtyards with newly enfranchised citizens—all of them like those strong women, bearing their jars, come to share their wares that can nourish the whole.
In that new dusty market, I ask us to be newly curious. To want to know about the people and places in and around our academy. Four ques- tions constitute the public understanding of religion: “Who is around us?” “Who are we talking to?” “Who is seen and heard?” “What work matters?” Poet Elizabeth Alexander (2005) gives shape to that curiosity in her poem “Ars Poetica #100: I Believe”:
Poetry, I tell my students,
is idiosyncratic. Poetry
is where we are ourselves
(though Sterling Brown said
“Every ‘I’ is a dramatic ‘I’”),
digging in the clam flats
for the shell that snaps,
emptying the proverbial pocketbook.
Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner,
overhear on the bus, God
in the details, the only way
to get from here to there.
Poetry (and now my voice is rising)
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is not all love, love, love,
and I’m sorry the dog died.
Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)
is the human voice,
and are we not of interest to each other? (Alexander, 2005)
We have been asked to reimagine our guild. To reconnect with an old commitment, begun in the eleventh century at those learning com- munities in places we now call France and Egypt. We must, as Elizabeth Alexander writes, imagine “where we are ourselves.” In 2019: We are scan- dalous. We are fragmented. These are the truths that reflection about our public spheres tell us about the AAR in this present cultural moment.
Here is our poetics of the public sphere: Let us gather up our frag- ments and create another world—fragment by fragment. Since we are al- ready scandalous, we have a particular strength in that we can break down old structures more readily instead of recreating them more anxiously. Because we are already scandalous, we might cultivate a curiosity amongst potential equals. We might ask again about things within the study of reli- gion we have written against, or think we are separate from, or criticized, or assumed we knew. Where we do not only say, “I can’t comment on that, I’m not trained in that field,” but say also, “What does your field look like and what is it like to walk there?” Where we do not only say, “Who is your publisher?” but say also, “What are you thinking about and how do you want to share it?” Where we do not only say, “Do you have graduate stu- dents in your programs?” but say also, “Who are your students, and how are they and you changed when you study religion?”
The fragments. The dirt in the corner. The poetic imagination is what we have right now to reimagine our own public spheres—where we are all strong veiled women, bearing perfect jars. And if we began the simple task of gathering those fragments up, we are asking, in a new way, “Are we not of interest to each other?”
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