In Conversation: An OUP Podcast

What role do images play in the enlightenment experience? Can Buddha images, calligraphy, mandalas, and portraits function as nodes of access for a practitioner’s experience of enlightenment? Or are these visual representations a distraction from what ultimately matters? Pamela D. Winfield‘s recent award-winning monograph, Icons and Iconoclasm in Japanese Buddhism: Kukai and Dogen on the Art of Enlightenment (Oxford University Press, 2013), explores these major Japanese Buddhist figures artistic and textual productions in order to answer these questions. Bringing together her expertise in the fields of art history and Buddhist studies, Winfield guides the reader to more nuanced understandings of Kukai as a promoter of icons and Dogen’s seemingly iconoclastic stance. In addition, she offers a model for bridging textual studies and studies of material cultures that opens paths for further explorations of the relationship of practice, text, and image.

In How Repentance Became Biblical: Judaism, Christianity, and the Interpretation of Scripture (Oxford University Press, 2016), David A. Lambert, assistant professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, argues that repentance, as a concept, was read into the Bible by later interpretive communities.  He explains, for example, how ancient Israelite rituals, like fasting, prayer, and confession, had a different meaning in the Bible before they later viewed through what he calls the the “Penitential Lens.”  Interested in authors as well as readers, Lambert’s approach to Biblical study integrates the critical use of biblical texts with that of post-biblical literature and interpretation.

Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d. 1111) is one of the most famous Muslim thinkers in history. His autobiographical account, The Deliverer from Error, tells us of his spiritual crisis and transformative experience of journeying, which lead to his subsequent life as a pious recluse. From this experience al-Ghazali wrote his magnum opus, The Revival of the Religious Sciences, filled with mystical knowledge. At least that is how it has generally been read in the Euro-American tradition. Kenneth Garden, Associate Professor at Tufts University, reexamines al-Ghazali’s work from an historical hermeneutical in The First Islamic Reviver: Abu Hamid al-Ghazali and his Revival of the Religious Sciences (Oxford University Press, 2014). Garden outlines the social and political contexts al-Ghazali’s life demonstrating he was an active participant in Seljuk empire. A close reading of The Revival of the Religious Sciences reveals al-Ghazali’s promotion of a revivalist vision of the tradition, which he called “Science of the Hereafter.” Garden also presents the strategies al-Ghazali utilized to campaign for The Revival of the Religious Sciences, the tactics of his opponents, and the historical context that may force us to rethink the purpose of his autobiography, The Deliverer from Error. In our conversation we discussed al-Ghazali’s social and political life, his relationship to philosophy and mysticism, the connections between his early and later writings, the content of The Revival of the Religious Sciences, accusations against him and his legal trial, and what lead to the widespread popularity and influence of al-Ghazali’s work. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. His research and teaching interests include Theory and Methodology in the Study of Religion, Islamic Studies, Chinese Religions, Human Rights, and Media Studies. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him atkjpetersen@unomaha.edu.

The social sciences are about social entities – things like corporations and traffic jams, mobs and money, parents and war criminals. What is a social entity? What makes something a social entity? Traditional views hold that these things can be fully explained by facts about people – their bodies, their attitudes or some combination of these. In The Ant Trap: Rebuilding the Foundations of the Social Sciences (Oxford University Press, 2015), Brian Epstein argues that such views of social facts are untenably anthropocentric: social facts supervene on much more than just people. His model distinguishes two kinds of questions that a theory of social ontology must answer. When are social categories realized, or what grounds a social fact (such as the fact that someone is a war criminal)? And what explains how these categories get established, or what anchors the category? Epstein, an assistant professor of philosophy at Tufts University, also uses his model to provide a new analysis of group action and group intention. On his view, group action is not exhausted by the actions of members, and group intention depends on more than member attitudes.

Robert Priest‘s The Gospel According to Renan: Reading, Writing, and Religion in Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford University Press, 2014) is a fascinating book about another fascinating book: Ernest Renan’s Vie de Jesus, published in 1863. Renan’s was a nineteenth-century non-fiction bestseller, but is far from widely read today. In a series of chapters that explore issues of authorship, content, and reception, Priest offers readers a contextual analysis of this “secular” life of Jesus within Renan’s own biography and oeuvre. He also examines the controversy surrounding the book in France, and traces its continuing impact and legacies into the early twentieth century. One of the major contributions of this work is its analysis of the popular reception of Vie de Jesus by French citizens across the political and religious spectrum. In addition to contemporary press and pamphlet discussion of the text, Priest also consulted hundreds of letters addressed to its author from men and women throughout France. This previously unexamined archival material gives us a glimpse of how “everyday” readers responded to Renan’s work, its spiritual and political meanings. The Gospel According to Renan illuminates the history of reading and writing under the Second Empire. Its in-depth analysis of La Vie de Jesus also reveals a great deal about the intersections of religion and politics in the years leading up to the Third Republic.  

Christian Olaf Christiansen is an associate professor in the history of ideas at Aarhus University, Denmark. His book Progressive Business: An Intellectual History of the Role of Business in American Society (Oxford University Press, 2015) offers a compelling history of the idea of a gentler capitalism, or of the “soulful” self-regulating corporation, that can flourish economically while doing social good. The idea of “market reformism” against a pure laissez-faire has been an important concept in three distinct periods of U.S. history. In the late nineteenth century, the nation experienced the first economic transformation toward large-scale industrial capitalism engendering “paternalistic market reformism” to alleviate the harshest elements of laissez-faire. The second period of change was the decades of the New Deal in which “political reformism” took hold. Advocates for self-regulation promoted a “managerial market reformism” in which professional managers were to play a key role in negotiating the needs of the corporation and multiple stakeholders. The third period is the most recent era of globalization in which neo-liberal ascendancy was met by a complimentary “entrepreneurial market reformism” in which capitalism is promoted as democratic, cool, revolutionary and egalitarian. All forms of self-regulation, as a third way that rejects both pure capitalism and state intervention, have been met with criticism. Some have held to the idea that the business of business is to maximize shareholder profits, not social engineering. Others advocating for political reform were skeptical of business acting against its own best interest and called for the countervailing power of government. Christiansen has provided a valuable roadmap for understanding the claims of corporate social responsibility in a neoliberal age.  

In his new book Going to the Palais: A Social and Cultural History of Dancing and Dance Halls in Britain, 1918-1960 (Oxford University Press, 2016), cultural historian James Nott charts the untold history of dancing and dance halls in Britain in the first half of the twentieth century. This exploration reveals the transformations of working-class communities, and of the changing notions of femininity, masculinity and leisure that occur in this period. To do so, Nott navigates us skillfully between the perspectives of the dance hall owners, dance teachers and innovators. He them leads us to consider the point of view of enthusiastic jiving individuals. Finally, we take our place on the sidelines with the onlookers and killjoys alarmed by this ‘craze.’ This kaleidoscope of voices and images illuminates the role of the dance hall as a social space. It is argued that the dance hall brought together men and women in search of fun, but also provided them with a safe space to try out identities and behaviors. Nott claims that the spread and success of the dance hall reached the whole country. He situates it within the democratization process of British culture that was led by commercialism in the 1920s and 1930s, and even more so after the Second World war. Nott points to the American origins of the music and dances that dominated the dance hall. But also suggest that a national style was forged on the dance-floor and via the business models and publicity methods of the institution. Consequently, he maintains, a uniquely British space was born. The story of the rise and fall of the dance hall is constructed through its economic history. Its financial success and decline are analyzed with sources from the day’s trade press, the archives of individual companies and the regulation and licensing records of towns and cities. The cultural role of the dance hall is revealed through its representation in local and national press. Oral interviews, contemporaneous social surveys and Mass Observation reports are woven together to construct the experience of going to the palais. The result is a superb analysis of gender and race relations, as well as a fascinating look at an industry that had once rivaled cinema as an ultimate pastime. Dr James Nott is a social and cultural historian at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of Music for the People: Popular Music and dance in Interwar Britain (OUP, 2002) and co-editor of Classes, Politics and Cultures: Essays in British History in Honour of Ross McKibbin (OUP, 2011).

Between the late 1940s and the early 1960s, hundreds of thousands of people from the British Commonwealth migrated the United Kingdom with plans to settle and find work. Kennetta Hammond Perry‘s new book, London is the Place for Me: Black Britons, Citizenship, and the Politics of Race (Oxford University Press, 2015), is a political history of postwar Caribbean migration. Perry shifts our attention away from the response of white Britons and focuses it instead on the politics of black Caribbean migrants. As Perry notes, migration itself was a practice of citizenship, and Afro-Caribbeans saw moving to the UK not as immigration but as their right as British citizens. Furthermore, Perry demonstrates that as black political activists organized against racial discrimination, racist violence, and legislation designed to limit migration, their shared belief that living in Britain was one of their citizenship rights was the foundation of their activism.

Chances are that at this very moment, you are either looking at a computer screen, holding a digital device, or listening to my voice through plastic earphones. Our computers and these other devices are constructed out of materials that have their origins in lands across the globe. And oil plays a central and early role in the causal story of how we came into possession of them. Oil also plays a leading role in the major global conflicts of our day. Much of the world’s oil is sold to us by brutal tyrants who use the monetary proceeds to strengthen their tyranny. But it is arguable that tyrants who control a territory have no legitimate claim to ownership of the territory’s resources; the oil belongs to the people, not to the tyrant. So the oil that goes into creating the objects that we now possess and use is likely stolen. How is it then that your computer, which is made of oil in the form of plastic, is your property? And what can be done about the fact that out ordinary consumption habits so directly place large sums of money into the pockets of the world’s most brutal men? In Blood Oil: Tyranny, Violence, and the Rules that Run the World (Oxford University Press, 2016), Leif Wenar examines the history, sociology, and politics of the global oil trade. Although the reality depicted in the book is bleak and disturbing, Wenar’s message is ultimately uplifting. He argues that, despite all of the prevailing injustices in the world, the tools of radical reform are close at hand.

El Sistema, the massive Venezuelan youth orchestra program, has been hailed in some quarters as the next big idea in music education (if not as the savior of classical music itself). Any who have found the press coverage of El Sistema suspiciously rosy, however, will find quite another account in Geoffrey Baker‘s engrossing and at times sharply critical book, El Sistema: Orchestrating Venezuela’s Youth (Oxford University Press, 2014). Baker takes an ethnographic approach to El Sistema, investigating the daily lives and experiences of students and teachers, while simultaneously drawing on recent research in music pedagogy to subject the structure and history of the program to an ideological critique. El Sistema describes itself as an organization devoted to the “pedagogical, occupational, and ethical rescue” of children through orchestral music, dedicated to protecting and healing the most vulnerable ranks of Venezuelan society. To this, Baker raises troubling questions. Is it really the case that the average student in El Sistema comes from a precarious economic background? Supposing that musical training can foster social development, is the symphony orchestra, with its rigid hierarchies of command, really the best way to train model citizens? And in the long run, can Venezuela — or indeed, any country — provide long term employment for such a large cohort of professionally trained musicians? Further Listening/Viewing/Reading: Gustavo Dudamel conducting the Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra here. Lawrence Scripp’s interview with Luigi Mazzocchi: “The Need to Testify: A Venezuelan Musician’s Critique of El Sistema and his Call for Reform” (Full version here) (Shorter, journalistic version here) https://van-us.atavist.com/all-that-matters Geoffrey Baker’s El Sistema blog here. Special issue of Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education on El Sistema here.