Transcript
José Cabezón:
Good evening everyone. First I'd like to remind you to turn off cell phones if you have them on. Thank you all for coming. I'm José Cabezón. I teach Buddhism at the University of California, Santa Barbara. And it's a great pleasure to be able to introduce to you tonight my dear friend and colleague, Professor Laurie Patton. Laurie and I go a long way back, almost to a past life, or at least it seems that way now, 35 years since we first met on a Varanasi rooftop when we were both students, how time flies. And how hairstyles change.
Professor Patton, as you will see, is many things. But in my eyes at least, she is, first and foremost, a world renowned scholar of South Asian religions. After completing her bachelor's degree at Harvard in 1983 with a major in comparative religions and Celtic literature, she did an MA and then a PhD in the history of religions at the University of Chicago where she specialized in the religions of the Vedas, the ancient texts of Hinduism.
Her dissertation, "The Work of Language and the Vedic Ṛṣi," one of those massive dissertations that one rarely sees nowadays. One of the [Mary Haas 00:01:39] galla prize for best dissertation at the University of Chicago. The work evolved into an even more massive book, Myth as Argument, published by De Gruyter. It is widely considered one of the foundational scholarly works on the Vedas invaded commentary. After graduating from Chicago, Professor Patton taught first at Bard College. And then five years later, in 1996, moved to Emory University where she taught for 20 years, becoming first Winship Distinguished Research Professor in the Humanities, and later Candler Professor of Religions.
Among her many contributions to Emory, she is perhaps best known for her superb leadership as chair of Emory's religious studies department, which almost doubled in size during her tenure, becoming one of the top programs in the country. While department chair, Professor Patton published her second major book on early Indian religion, Bringing the Gods to Mind, in which, to quote a reviewer, she combines impeccable scholarship with refined aesthetic sensibilities to tease out the meaning Veda kins in the changing context of their actual use.
Two years later, Professor Patton published a new translation of the Bhagavad Gita, in the Penguin Classics Series. The translation has been characterized as graceful, elegant, and moving. Over her career, Professor Patton has also published many edited volumes each more important than the next on a wide variety of topics ranging from the study of myth to dialogue in ancient Indian religions to hinder women's relationship to textual authority. When she's not wearing her hat as an Indologist or administrator, Laurie Patton publishes poems in leading poetry journals, and since 2003 has published three books of poetry to great acclaim, I might add.
In 2011 Laurie Patton became dean of Arts and Sciences and Durden Professor of Religion at Duke University where she made important contributions to all aspects of university life, including a capital campaign that yielded 13 endowed chairs and even larger sums for student financial aid. Four years later, in 2015, Laurie Patton became professor of religion and president of Middlebury College, the 17th president of that institution, and the first woman to hold the position. Among her many accomplishments at Middlebury, she has led the board of trustees to begin divesting from fossil fuels, steered the college to carbon neutrality and renewable energy, and made the environment a core aspect of Middlebury's educational curriculum. The Sierra Club recently judged Middlebury to be among the 10 most ecologically friendly campuses in North America.
None of these extraordinary accomplishments, be it at Emory, Duke, or Middlebury come as a surprise to those of us who sit on the AAR Board for we have had the pleasure of experiencing firsthand what a smart, capable, and compassionate leader Laurie Patton is. Professor Patton's awards and honors are too numerous to mention. Instead of trying to list them all, will I? I present them, or at least a portion of them in visual form, it would actually take several slides to paint a complete picture, but let me at least acknowledge in words one of her most significant recent honors, her election in 2018 as fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Of course, I could go on and on about Laurie, but I won't. Tonight you're in for a treat. You will get a taste for Laurie Patton's range as a scholar and a sense for why she is such an important voice in the study of religion. Professor Patton's lecture, which draws from her most recent book, Who Owns Religion?, hot off the press I might end is entitled, "Are We Not of Interest to Each Other?: A Blueprint for the Public Study of Religion." Sit back now and enjoy the infinite second explode to borrow a line from one of Laurie's pones, and let Laurie Patton's amazing intellect and artistry take you on a fascinating tour through the landscape that we call the study of religion. Ladies and gentlemen, join me in welcoming the president of the American Academy of Religion, my dear friend, Laurie Patton.
Laurie Patton:
Thank you José. I'm not sure how I feel about those first pictures, but you're right that the hairstyles have absolutely changed. Before I begin, I would like to acknowledge that we are standing on the land of the Kumeyaay, divided by the US-Mexican border and displaced from a vibrant community of villages into reservations outside the city. The Kumeyaay are active participants in many aspect of cultural and political life in San Diego.
What is a guild of scholars? In 2019, guild started as artisanal focused on common work and craft and local reality, 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 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 ensured a quality of work, and such a structure also made it impossible for women, immigrants and non-Christians, to enter the guild in any formal way.
Many craftsman skills were themselves modeled on the students' guild at the University of Bologna, or the masters or professors' guilds at the University of Paris, and in Cairo. The scholarly guild then is bound up with the formation of the university itself. How close and yet how far the American Academy of Religion is in 2019 from that definition. We think of our work as artisanal, craft like, individual, and yet using specific tools that we have learned through apprenticeship, tools that we alone control. We often think of ourselves as workers and yet we are also exclusive and privileged. We find it difficult when others use our tools as... if they have not been accredited through the guild. And we frequently write that we would like ownership of tools and supplies of materials. We are often no longer local. The city of the artisanal guild has been replaced by the continent of North America with a more and more international bent in population.
And important for my talk this evening, our guild has multiple patrons, universities, foundations, governments, businesses and multiple publics. And our guild has recently added something new, as we have a new commitment in our mission statement to the public understanding of religion. But this new thing is also traditional. The medieval guild also had an obligation to the public. If you charge 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 on their relationship with the public. And reflection about our relationship to the public is as old as the idea of the guild itself.
We might also ask what is a public? One of our major intellectual forebears who asked this was Jürgen Habermas. He wrote that a public sphere is a web of social developments in the 18th 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 conversations of the little café circles branched out into affairs of state administration and politics. For Habermas, coffee houses disregarded status entrusted in disclosivity and reason. And anyone with access to cultural technology like novels and journals for him had the potential to take the debate public. Habermas thought it was self-regulating. However exclusive the café might be, it was always open to more inclusive participation by propertied men and educators who could avail themselves of the market of objects that were subject to discussion.
In the spirit of intellectual generosity that I hope will characterize us as a 21st century guild, I want to say first that Habermas was not completely wrong. Encounters in coffee shops still startle us. We overhear conversations, we start revolutions. We are lonely, we know our own limitations and we are braver than we ever would be at home. The café still is a dance of associations rich in meetings, both chance and intentional, voluntary and involuntary.
And yet, the 18th century coffee shop of Europe assumed that people who entered them had access to market and to education. Their spaces were palatial to create a gesture of welcome and dignity, but only for some. Some didn't even dare to come into the seemingly inviting democratic space. Some came in men but stayed in the back. Many cafés were run by Jewish women who had no voice in the discussions out front. Habermas also did not acknowledge the rich dialogical local cultures all across Asia, Africa, and the Americas, the continents that we now try to welcome back.
Twenty-first century critics of Habermas argue that things might... argue things that might sound familiar to us. Nancy Fraser argues that Habermas left out several elements essential to building a more just and open public square. Differences in social equality might exist among seemingly equal participants and must be named. We should not assume a single liberal public sphere. Other competing public spheres can have significant influence. Fraser calls these subaltern counterpublics. And citizens may determine differently what counts as public and what counts as private. Some may ask that their private worlds be counted, that their private worlds have consequence.
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 religion, 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 English word religion and the study of religion. It's practices, beliefs, and acts of belonging associated with that word. Far from being in a crusted space, we have always been interrupted or been interrupters in 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 calls agonistic democracy.
What if we accepted a permanent place for conflict and channeled it for positive change? We can barely articulate the public sphere and yet I think we must begin to articulate it now. Today I want to offer a blueprint for that work, and it revolves around four simple questions that constitute the public understanding of religion. First, who is around us? Second, who are we talking to? Third, who is seen and heard? And fourth, what work matters?
Tonight, I would call upon theory and the study of religion, philosophy, and poetry to draw that blueprint. As a gesture to another kind of collective that moves beyond the magisterial voice of the leader, our time together will also involve poetry spoken by our voices, other than my own. I believe we need nothing less than a poetics of a new public sphere, a space that we cross every day. We need poetry because we can barely begin to describe that emerging and emergent public space.
I'll be also sharing the policy work that we have done in the past year. Important progress that I don't want to relegate to the 7:30 business meeting tomorrow, attended only by 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 continue with a specific description of what an idealized Habermasian public sphere has to look like for the scholar of religion. A public space has often been idealized as a place where universities ply their analytic trades and religious communities ply theirs. Both religious and secular languages are spoken, but the two languages are separate. They did not clash because they did not meet. And if they did meet, their ground rules were clearly on one side or the other.
But what of those moments when the languages may not be mutually comprehensible? In the early 21st 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 called in 2006 a wild sphere, 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 this itself is a reasonable claim. The characterization of wilds can indeed only reinforce a civilized wild dichotomy, which seems to impose on the religious subject the burden to become reasonable. This is why I choose to call these moments of argumentation eruptive public spaces, rather than wild spheres. But then a key question emerges. If such translation into reasonability is required, then how does participation in the public sphere occur at all for religious communities? The 21st century critiques of Habermas by Nancy Fraser, María Herrera Lima, Max Pensky, Thomas McCarthy, and James Bowman, among others raise questions of who belongs, who is marginalized and whose histories are accepted in the delineation of the public square. They have versions of our four questions above, who is around us, who are we talking to, who we seen and heard, and what work matters.
For the last 15 years, I've been living in and studying late 20th century controversies in the study of religion. And I have found that participants in these controversies are not necessarily able to find the Habermasian public reason that can reconcile these differences. There are controversies between scholars and communities, scandalous eruptions, controversial eruptions as one colleague put it this afternoon, an epistemology of hurt. What is more? I have learned that religious communities themselves who object to scholars' work are shifting public. They constitute on the one hand a set of doctrines and practices that should be protected by public reasons, freedom of liberty and conscious, and yet at the same time they emerge as communities of readers constituted by race, and ethnicity, and sexuality, and gender, and religious ideologies, 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 public debate. In this sense, whatever intersections of multiple identities might be present. One primarily religious identity is strategically used in public debates and representative rivalries. Through my study, which resulted in the book that José mentioned, I've come to think that these eruptive public spaces constitute our daily scholarly life in the 21st century. After studying the six case studies in the book I worked on, I gathered additional numbers from later decades. No fewer than 40 controversies in the study of religion have emerged in the last 15 years of the 21st century. And those are only the ones that I know about. Some have been translational, some have been local in nature, but they are no longer exceptions. They are our world.
The historical study of controversies, interruptive public spaces, show that Habermas could benefit from what Thomas McCarthy calls a still sharper descent from the heights of trends in dental philosophy where modern discourse is open at multiple points to contestation. They join Charles Taylor in emphasizing the fact that in its contemporary forms, religion is one factor among others in choice of identity.
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 failure of liberal culture to find a third way between old antagonisms. Habermas has an overly optimistic view that a post-secular world is one where religious and secular groups can engage, religious groups can translate themselves and therefore become comprehensible in largely secular terms of public reason.
These controversies also show that neither scholars nor community members can freely engage. The idea of that dialogue is not rich enough to take up the challenges of pluralism. These dialogues may help create communicative understanding, but they do not necessarily help engender what James Bowman calls communicative power, that is creating groups with genuine standing who can and will effectively persuade other groups.
Such diversity of forms of life mean that we will always be constantly occupying eruptive public spaces in contestations of cultural power. And what is more, we as scholars are actors in those contestations. We need to understand the role of cultural recognition in these eruptive public spaces and insider outsider statuses and different religions as forms of cultural power.
Is religion a public cultural identity or a private set of practices and beliefs? And how, as a cultural identity, is it a cultural resource for claiming power? And if we know religion as a cultural resource, we also know it is just a matter of rearranging personally... It is not just a matter of rearranging personally meaningful symbols. As a cultural resource, the English word religion still lays claim to the privacy of a protected sphere at the same time as it is understood as a good to be shared. In other words, our understanding of religion, even in the public cultural space moves across definitional boundaries.
In this context of eruptive public spaces then, let me begin with the first simple question. Who is around us? This question is a form of ethical reflection about our scholarly contexts. What is the nature of the public sphere constituted by the Academy itself? I'm going to share some poems with you now and you should have a group of poems, if nothing else, you can take them with you to share with friends, and family, and students.
Here's one idea of the scholar that still haunts us. In 1919, William Butler Yeats published this observation 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 published this around a decade after the precursor to the AAR was forming, when schools of religion were still attached to schools of theology and biblical studies, and when the profession was overwhelmingly exclusively male. There are few eruptive spaces in the 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, forgotten or hidden. Nobody knew of them. They understood themselves as learned and respectable, editing and annotating lines, coughing in the ink, outgoing and brotherly. They had no strange friend.
Such an idea of scholarly context is something we still carry with us, and assume stability of activity, of patronage, of collegiality, of friendship, that assumed stability of patronage 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 context. We have always been interrupters, whether it was George Smith in the basement of the British library understanding the connections between the Gilgamesh Epic and the biblical flood story, 50 years before Yeats was writing, or the most recent interruptions of the early 21st century that scholars from many colonial and post-colonial environment still experience, multiplying this experience of George Smith 40 fold.
I further want to propose that since the late 20th century, asking who is around us will always be a controversial and perhaps even scandalous 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. Let me outline those ways. We know that the hope of the mid 20th century that we 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 religion are still among the first to go when budgets are cut. We cannot ignore this part of our public sphere. And second, the situation is even more complicated when it comes to other forms of authority. Scholars do not have authority granted by religious communities with the right to interpret. Religious communities often 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 outside the community, but after the fact. And some of these controversies I have studied have reduced good lists and bad lists status. And we know what happens after good lists and bad lists.
Third, scholars of religion are not able to take on fully the artistic authority of the writer, or the painter, or the sculptor either. There is no social contract between religious communities and university communities, or secular communities, about an agreed upon artistic construction, as there is between artists and their audiences. There is no common understanding of artifice in the study of religion. Thus the public space 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 commitments 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. And now, we are also people whose authority is often questioned in a new way because we are new to the Academy. We are no longer the men who were nodding with no strange friend. Rather we are people of color, trans people, queer 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 context involves being aware of longterm patterns within the Academy that need to change, of giving voice and credit to those who have been denigrated, dismissed, and silenced. As Yeats says, if we have sinned, nobody has known. We didn't even know we were doing so. And so we turn to policy. As part of our commitment to this question who is around us, and in the spirit of taking academic context seriously, this year we have completely revised our procedures for harassment and discrimination, including sexual harassment. In recent years, there has been a sea change in the way that society, and the university, and other workplaces view discrimination. Those who have experienced discrimination and their allies have been speaking out against all forms of workplace harassment. Behavior that was once tolerated is no longer tolerated, but instead actively named. People are being held accountable, and the American Academy of Religion is no exception.
Our new procedures reflect best practices adopted by voluntary organizations across the country, including investigators trained in current questions of discrimination and in work with vulnerable populations, and familiar with new context of discrimination previously not named. Additionally, our new procedures go a step further in providing alternatives for dispute resolution. We also provide for an elected ombudsperson to facilitate and support the process. And we provide a committee on professional conduct which adjudicates the claims. We think this new process encourages reporting and promotes a deeper culture of respect and inclusion.
Asking who is around us, and it's an embrace of Thomas McCarthy's request of Habermas to descend from the transcendental heights of philosophy and into the space of modern discourse of multiple, even endless, points of contestation, including our voices in the AAR, including patterns of behavior where we used to think we had no strange friend and now we've realized we are making strangers out of friends. Asking for all voices in the café and listening for silences and hushed arguments even and perhaps especially at a seemingly democratic table, this is where we need to go in this first public understanding of religion.
I turn now to the second question. Who are we talking to? We might call this question 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 scholarship would mean the death now of specialized research in the humanities. 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 basement explaining the basics of Indian religions. I just live the hell that 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 are we 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 don't, we will be isolated. And 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 of who are we talking to, but we will be connected and asking a common question and reflecting about it. The poet Howard Nemerov speaks the words of a completely uniform public and the cost of such a conception. You have it in your handout and the poem Found Poem is read by David Gushee.
David Gushee:
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, 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."
Laurie Patton:
Citizens, including those in Alaska and Hawaii weighs the same. Leads to a conceptualization of the public, which is so uniform as to lead to the wrong conclusions. Conclusions where all public 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.
In the controversies and scandals of recent decades, we have discovered that our publics are multiple, and colorful, and very much alive. Jane Schaberg found that the Roman Catholic community of Detroit mattered a great deal when she published The illegitimacy of Jesus. Jeff [Krypo 00:35:20] found that the intellectual community of Kolkata was nearer than ever, even though a thousand miles of way. We know that our readerships have changed and the guild can no longer be part of the scholarly link where we write primarily for each other. Whatever we think of those outside the guild. And their voices will range from the violently hostile, to the loyalty critical, to the empathetic fellow travelers, to the uncritically sympathetic. We need to acknowledge that they exist and think about them. We have the right to engage in any way we think appropriate, but we no longer have the right to be surprised.
In our current moment, many scholars still assume a single public rather than the multiple publics that actually can and do constitute their readerships. That could be a CNN, a church basement, a mosque, a courthouse, a post office. And 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 Jeff [Krypo's 00:36:36] account of how the gay, the straight, the secular and the Hindu communities in India had different responses to collies child, depending on how they interpreted the relationship between sexuality and history. We saw it in Harjot Singh Oberoi's understanding of himself as a Sikh in the Delhi riots, and later as a Sikh in the diaspora, writing a secular history which his own community rallied against. However, since now a scholars 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 outside.
Turning now to policy, this means that local publics matter. In the spirit of those local multiple publics, this year the AAR has focused on local knowledge and a renewed understanding of the regions. We have 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.
We hope to build on this work in a variety of ways, thinking about the new ways in which local publics can take up universal human issues and in renewed partnership with the Academy, providing both deep creativity and deep tension in studying and addressing them. We have always constituted multiple publics and we are just beginning to name them. In our imagined café, we are more than one small group of intellectuals with access to multiple 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. And most importantly, we will not be an imagined self calculated place like Potosi, but a place of many voices, both real and imagined, deeply resistant to calculation of any kind.
Commitment to the public study of religion to local publics organically leads us to the question who is heard and seen. We might also call this ethical reflection about the nature of power and privilege in the study of religion. Power and privilege. These 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, I'm tired of these words, but they are all we have. Perhaps a poem will get at it better. Jennifer Denrow's poem about the nature of mind and of teaching and a passing on of knowledge is one that describes well the situation of privilege within the Academy. Read by Eddie Glaude.
Eddie Glaude:
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 you 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 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.
Laurie Patton:
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 and despite our best intentions and perhaps without understanding 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 context and publics, I ask us to think about our publics in terms of the public squares our own members must constantly navigate. Think of those who cannot visit us often. A scathing sociology of knowledge from the Southern hemisphere, A. Suresh Canagarajah's A Geopolitics of Academic Writing outlines how difficult it is for a scholar in Sri Lanka to apply for a Fulbright as distinct from the experience of someone in a small college in the US. Think of those who visit us, but infrequently because of our own social practices may create conditions in which those trained by us have not yet found the courage to speak.
Sometimes, the focus of the eruptive public space falls on the role of individual scholars, and their respect or lack of it for the traditions they study, and the privilege of the academic worlds from which they come. Yeah, we might not stop here in our understanding of the enduring whiteness and conceptual uniformity of the academic page. Even more important is the community's understanding of the university's privilege. The social strain in the controversies we know comes from the perception of relative privilege from which those in universities can speak about a tradition and the access to public venues the speaker have.
But even more important is the privilege within. We are currently a majority non tenure track membership. We all know this and 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 privilege to speak. What is more, if we are honest with ourselves? Many of us still act and feel as if the best jobs are in about 10 universities. But tenure protections were given to people in order to protect them from the abuse, and 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 democratize prestige as many of us advocate that we should democratize wealth in this age of unprecedented inequality? What if we stop trying to reproduce ourselves, creating the field into whiter and whiter sheets of paper, and invoked other forms of production?
Laurie Patton:
What if we didn't 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 you and think that scholars of religion are especially equipped to embark upon acts of local solidarity with adjunct professors outlined recently by Herb Childress in The Chronicle of Higher Education. I'm also happy to share with you, at its board meeting in September, the board unanimously voted to no longer use the term alternative career in describing career paths in any of its official programs, publications, or forums. We encourage all of you to do the same with your colleagues, with your students, whatever kind you might have. The board also encouraged the AAR staff to expand employment services to include multiple and diverse career paths, including opportunities for administrators, librarians, nonprofit civic, media, arts, and business workers. 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 that... done within the tenure track of the university being more seen than the rest. And it will take a long time to reach this parody in our minds, but we are already there in our demographics. Surely we do not want to be a minority rule association. And even within the Academy, we must acknowledge the different nature of labor, given that tenure does create a kind of privilege which might allow public engagement or the refusal of public engagement to be perceived differently. And given that tenured professors are increasingly in the minority. And that religious studies as well as in the humanities more generally, it is I believe, a moral obligation for the tenured professoriat to support adjunct instructors in their public engagements, and to protect them at all times. But especially if they have written controversial research.
This year, I would like to call on all tenured professors, and in the near future I will be calling on you personally as past president to work with your departments to create a set of policies and protocols that create these conditions of support for our contingent workers. I also hope as a past president to develop a fund that acknowledges this wealth and prestige inequity, asking those with resources to contribute that will make the AAR more affordable for all whose labor is not seen.
Indeed, by the nature of their work, adjunct professors are indeed workers in the public sphere and as such, more likely to be engaged with multiple publics. 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. Two, 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 in our café, what would it look like to greet each other differently, for some to stop talking without worrying that they will completely disappear. And finally, what work matters?
Access and privilege also create an implicit understanding of labor where a public sphere embraces what work counts. Those empowered in the public sphere determine what work they choose to see. To take a religious instance, if a religious matter is understood as personal or domestic and public discourse is channeled into specialized institutions of family law or social work, then this categorization often reproduces dominance and subordination. In other words, creating participatory inclusion in the public sphere does not solve all the issues because newly licensed participants might be hedged and somehow limited by conceptions of economic or domestic privacy, and therefore unable to speak freely. But here too, we need poetry to imagine something different. Jamaican born poet James Berry's poem names it eloquently. And it is read by José Cabezón, called Outsider.
José Cabezón:
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, it's a moaner shouting at air. It's that voices in me rule firmer than my skill, 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 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 the 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.
Laurie Patton:
This is a beautiful commentary on unseen work in the public sphere. What is ostensible? It's 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 divine water. 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 and unseen work, on assumptions and rationales being exploded by hidden realities. At the AAR, this year we have been reflecting on seen work and unseen work. Thanks to the publications task force, we have set up a new standard for publication which asks us to reflect ethically on methods and topics.
We encourage AAR members, we say institutional and individual, to acknowledge that the rapidly changing economics of academic publishing and changes in the nature of faculty work in higher education are 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 context into account. We are asking that AAR members take seen and unseen work into account into the basic activity of the guild, the evaluation of scholarship. And we ask that AAR members and departments recognize the importance of, and criteria for research and publication for tenure vary significantly by type, size, location, demographic and mission of each institution. In fact, it varies for all hiring practices.
We ask that members consider again an exclusive commitment to the monograph as a primary form of thought, that members question and consider again their definitions of rigor, not because they want to abandon it, but because every definition needs to be interrogated by new and emerging context. Even if we end up reasserting it at the end of our inquiry. We need to ask ourselves, what is the relationship between justice, inclusion, and rigor? 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 definitions? Have we done so even as we think we find no strange friend forgotten 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. It should not be a foregone conclusion that a scholar's work can only be seen within the Academy or that a scholars place of employment is within an academic institution. Whether we are at an NGO, an ethicist at a business, a worker at a library, or a freelance artist, we and our work need to be seen differently.
The Habermasian critic Max Pensky writes about opacity in public. Those who 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 and acknowledge rules and make work that remains invisible and raced by our genteel practices?
I leave you with the following thoughts. The definitions of readers, and writers, and scholars, and critics, and outsiders in the public sphere are even more fluid and controversial than were in the 1990s when I began this work. But I believe that this is an opportunity for us to create the conditions 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 is not enough, nor is simple intellectual resistance to structures of power. These are utterly necessary, but they are not sufficient.
Another form of activity is necessary for the public understanding of religion, reflection about an understanding of our publics, the forms of pluralism that consist, and that constitute the worlds both within and outside the Academy. It is no longer a luxury, this reflection, or even an important scholarly pursuit. It is a democratic necessity. The controversial cases of the late 20th and early 21st century have opened up new fissures and opportunities in the cultural roles of scholars and it is now scholars' jobs to reimagine how they might win their way through them. That work of imagination goes something like what Katha Pollitt describes in her poem, Archeology, a slightly edited version, of which is read by Marla Frederick.
Marla Frederick:
"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 moment you first saw or thought you saw beneath the heat-struck plains, the outline of buried cities. A thousand to one you'd turn up nothing more than the rubbish heap. 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 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.
Laurie Patton:
Let us imagine a public sphere by piecing together the shards, by asking the simple questions, the basic pieces of random rubble, which 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 jars come to share their wares, which 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 questions constitute the public understanding of religion. Who is around us? Who are we talking to? Who is seen and heard? And, what work matters?
The poet Elizabeth Alexander gives shape to that curiosity, 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) is not all love, love, love. And I'm sorry the dog died. Poetry (and here I hear myself loudest) is the human voice, and are we not of interest to each other?
We have been asked to reimagine our guild. To reconnect with an old commitment begun in the 11th century at those learning communities in places we now call France, and Spain, and Egypt. We must, as Elizabeth Alexander writes, imagined where we are ourselves. In 2019, I answer, we are scandalous, we are controversial, we are fragmented. These are the truths that reflection about our public spheres tell us about the AAR in 2019.
But here too is a poetics of the public sphere. Let us gather up our fragments and create another world, fragment by fragment. Since we are already controversial, we have a particular strength and that we can break down old structures more readily instead of recreating them more anxiously. Because we are already scandalous, we might cultivate a new curiosity amongst potential equals. We might ask again about things within the study of religion we think we are separate from, or we've criticized in the past, or assumed we knew. Where we don't only ask, how can I possibly comment on that? I'm not trained in that field. But ask also, what does your field look like? And, what is it like to work there?
Where we don't only ask who is your publisher, but ask also what are you thinking about and how do you want to share it? Where we don't only ask do you have graduate students in your programs? But ask 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 and build the foundation for the public understanding of religion. We begin again that dance of associations in the dusty market with cafés whose borders are more porous than ever before. Let us re-imagine our own public spheres, where we are all strong, veiled women, bearing perfect jars. And if we begin with a simple task of gathering those fragments up, we are asking in a new way, are we not of interest to each other? Thank you.