In Conversation: An OUP Podcast

What brings us together as scholars in Religious Studies? Are the various social phenomena commonly grouped together as religion really that similar? The Sacred Is the Profane: The Political Nature of “Religion” (Oxford University Press, 2012) adds to this ongoing debate over whether ‘religion’ is a useful explanatory term. In general, issues of classification and the constructed nature of the category ‘religion’ are now a repeated themes in many scholars work. William Arnal, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Regina, and Russell T. McCutcheon, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama, argue that we need to take our analysis even further and the common practice of historicizing the word ‘religion’ (or the habit of putting the word in quotation marks) generally fails to reveal the ordinariness of these social practices, and thus naturalizes the idea of the sacred. Ultimately, we need to stop employing ‘religion’ as an analytical category because it is a first-order folk classification derived from a particular historical setting. It is our job then to redescribe activity and explain the processes of social classification and identity construction. In our conversation we discuss definitions, Disney World, discursive products, theories of signification, genre,  the Cold War, secularism, estrangement, politics, Christian origins, being methodologically self-conscious, graduate study, the Toronto school of Religious Studies, and the relevance of our work’s minutiae in addressing larger educational and disciplinary objectives.

Are Islam and feminism inherently at odds? Is there a contradiction between piety and gender justice? This is the guiding theme for Rachel Rinaldo, professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, in her book Mobilizing Piety: Islam and Feminism in Indonesia (Oxford University Press, 2013). After more than eighteen months of fieldwork in the contemporary nation with the highest Muslim population, Indonesia, she found that global discourses on Islam and feminism were constantly in dialogue in this local context. Mobilizing Piety is an ethnography of women activists in Jakarta during a time of democratization, popular religious resurgence, and post-9/11 anxieties and suspicions. Rinaldo examined a feminist NGO, Muslim women’s organizations, and a Muslim political party to see how piety and politics intersected. In our conversation we discussed public aspects of piety, field theory, agency, polygamy, pornography, bodily politics, religion as cultural schema, and gender.

The prediction error minimization hypothesis is the first grand unified empirical theory about how the brain implements the mind. The hypothesis, which is as bold as it is controversial, proposes to explain the mind via one core mechanism: a process of comparing predicted sensory input with actual input, updating our hypotheses in light of the difference, and generating new predictions. In The Predictive Mind (Oxford University Press), Jakob Hohwy introduces this theory to a wider audience, develops the theory’s explanation of perception, and explores its potential for explaining consciousness, attention, representation, and mental illness. In this interview, Hohwy, who is associate professor of philosophy at Monash University, considers how the theory turns the traditional view of perception on its head and addresses its implications for the relation between cognition and perception and the possibility of knowledge of the external world.

Through some quirk of fate, the Hobbesian tag “filling, cheap, and familiar” is probably the defining phrase used when Americans think of Chinese food. Yet what could be less accurate a description of this cuisine, born halfway around the world, which had been evolving for well over a millennium before it was brought to California in the 1840s? The events that brought the Chinese and their food to our shores, to become so important a strand in the fabric of American eating, is the story Andrew Coe tells in his fascinating book, Chop Suey: The Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States (Oxford University Press, 2009). It takes the reader by ship and railroad from 1784, when the fledgling United States first focused its sights on China as a market, to the present day. Why the Chinese came, what reception they received, what they did, and what happened when their work ran out is part of the story. After arriving in 1848 for the California Gold Rush, the Chinese created ancillary businesses, first feeding themselves, then feeding Americans, both in prospecting camps and in the village of Yerba Buena (which would grow into a port called San Francisco). The Chinese were “other.” Their story as an ethnic group is not a familiar one to most Americans. The West Coast has a dark history regarding its treatment of residents of Far Eastern origin, and it begins with the Chinese in nineteenth-century California. Coe opens our eyes. And what is chop suey? Is it even Chinese? Will Americans ever graduate to authentic Chinese food? These questions, and many more, with be answered by some unlikely professors: Louis Armstrong, Richard Nixon, and a Peking duck. National Geographic interviewed Coe in May 2014 for their upcoming television documentary, “Eat: The Story of Food,” scheduled to air in November 2014.

Jay Carter‘s new book follows the life of one man as a way of opening a window into the lived history of twentieth-century China. Heart of Buddha, Heart of China: The Life of Tanxu, a Twentieth-Century Monk (Oxford University Press, 2011; paperback edition 2014) is less a traditional biography than a life of an emergent modern nation as told through the experiences of a single individual whose relationships embodied the history of that nation in flesh, bones, and blood. Born in 1875 as Wang Shouchun, the man who would become Tanxu worked various jobs as laborer, minor government official, fortune-teller, and pharmacist before finding his calling, leaving his family, and setting off on a journey to become a Buddhist monk. His travels spanned the physical and spiritual worlds – one of his earliest voyages took him beyond death to the underworld and back. After leaving home, Wang experienced treaty-ports in the aftermath of the Sino-Japanese War, the Boxer uprising, and Russo-Japanese tension over Manchuria. His life unfolded in a series of Chinese cities that were administered by foreigners, and the transformative power of Sino-foreign relations in this period becomes a recurring trope throughout his story. Ranging north and south, he eventually studied to become a Buddhist monk and, as Tanxu, helped to found temples across China. Carter’s own travels took him from the Bronx (to meet with a Dharma heir disciple of the monk) through more than a dozen Chinese cities, taking Tanxu’s own memoir and itinerary as guidebook and route-map. The resulting book is a beautifully written, historiographically self-reflexive, and humane account of the lived history of modern China.

Thirty years after a trip to the GDR, Soviet cardiologist V.I. Metelitsa still remembered mistakenly trying to buy a dress for a ten-year-old daughter in a maternity shop: ‘In our country I couldn’t even imagine that such a specialized shop could exist’.” Well-stocked shops, attractive cafes, and medieval streets were among the many discoveries that Soviet citizens made in their trips abroad. After decades of closed borders and rumors of life abroad, the 1950s ushered in a new era — an era in which Soviet citizens would be able to participate in the transnational circulation of people, ideas, and items. In All This is Your World: Soviet Tourism at Home and Abroad After Stalin (Oxford University Press, 2011), Anne Gorsuch discusses the varied experiences of Soviet citizens traveling at home, to the “near abroad” of Estonia, and to Eastern and Western Europe, in the Khrushchev era. For many, this travel was no holiday but a purposeful excursion. Tourists were to learn about other parts of the world, but most importantly, they were to represent the Soviet Union in a Cold War struggle over culture. The Soviet tourist was an actor and the world his stage. If tourism was an olive branch and propaganda tool, however, it was also an opportunity for personal encounter and pleasure, including shopping on Oxford Street in London and enjoying the French Riviera. These experiences did not inevitably lead to anti-Soviet opinions or actions. For many elite travelers in the late 1950s and 1960s, it was possible for them to admire, purchase, and envy Western consumer goods, and still believe in the future of Soviet socialism. Dr. Gorsuch examines new opportunities for cultural exchange and transnational encounter, exploring the meaning of travel and exploration for a country breaking the chains of Stalinization.

The twentieth-century West witnessed a revolution in childbirth. Before that time, most women gave birth at home and were attended by family members and midwives. The process was usually terribly painful for the mother. Beginning in the nineteenth century, however, doctors started to “medicalize” childbirth. Physicians began to think of ways to ease the pain of childbirth. Two main options were explored. One–drugs–is quite familiar to us, for it is the primary tool used by doctors to make women comfortable during the birth process today. The other–“psychoprophylaxis”–has now passed into memory. The most famous form of psychoprophylaxis, and the subject of Paula A. Michaels’ excellent book Lamaze: An International History (Oxford University Press, 2014), is known as the “Lamaze method.” Its history is fascinating and surprising: born in the Soviet Union (or was it the United Kingdom?), it migrated to France, and then to much of Europe. It then jumped the Atlantic and became a quasi-political force in the United States (“natural childbirth”). And Lamaze is still with us, though in a form hard to recognize. Listen in.

In As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality (Oxford, 2012), historian Michael Saler explores the precursors of the current proliferation of digital virtual worlds. Saler challenges Max Weber’s analysis of modernity as the disenchanting of the world, and demonstrates that modernity is deeply “enchanted by reason.” Saler demonstrates this argument by examining a new phenomenon: adult engagement with and immersion in fictional worlds. He argues that from the 1880s, a growing number of individuals both in Britain and in the US were enticed by fictional characters such as Sherlock Holmes to “communally and persistently” inhabit worlds of the imagination. Readers were drawn in particular to a new literary genre “The New Romanticism” that rose in Britain in the 1880s. The genre combined the objective style of realism with the fantastic content of romance. Novels such as “Drakula” and “Treasure Island” made the fantastic seem plausible through the use of scientific detail and the inclusion of maps, photographs and footnotes. Victorian readers had acquired a sophistication that enabled them to immerse themselves in the fiction while keeping an ironic distance from it. Their delight was derived from their awareness to the fabrication rather than from being deluded by it. In addition to a theoretical framework, Saler provides an in-depth and enjoyable exploration of the work of authors that dominated the genre, and of the communities they inspired. Three chapters explain contemporary fascination with the novels of Arthur Conan Doyle, H.P. Lovecraft and J.R.R Tolkien. The chapters also elaborate the important role of readers in sustaining their success. As such they provide an important contribution to the history of fan culture. Finally, Saler offers a defense against labeling the engagement with imaginary and virtual worlds as escapism. He argues that imagined worlds should be valued as safe havens to reflect on the ‘real’ world and consider social and cultural change. A space to practice empathy and tolerance that teaches us to think of the world not in “just so” terms but through the more forgiving “as if” perspective. Imagined and virtual worlds are a reminder that the ‘real world’ too is a social construct that can and should be questioned.

The Oxford University Press series on digital politics has produced several new books that we have featured on the podcast. Interviews with Dave Karpf, Dan Kreiss, and Muzammil Hussain are available in previous podcasts. One of the latest from the series is Jennifer Stromer-Galley new book Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age (OUP 2014). Stromer-Galley is associate professor in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University. This excellent new book is a bit of a walk down memory lane. Do you remember the early search features on Yahoo! and those slow loading webpages of the late 1990s? Stromer-Galley pieces together the use of the internet from 1996 through 2012. We learn about some of the ways the promise of the internet to democratize the presidential campaign process has largely failed. Presidential websites have nearly always sent information out, but rarely invited information back in. And even when they have, that information has never been as central to the campaign as often promised.

Digital Communications Technologies, or DCTs, like the Internet offer the infrastructure and means of forming a networked society. These technologies, now, are a mainstay of political campaigns on every level, from city, to state, to congressional, and, of course, presidential. In her new book, Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age  (Oxford University Press, 2014), Jennifer Stromer-Galley, an associate professor in the iSchool at Syracuse University, discusses the impact of DCTs on presidential campaigning. In particular, Stromer-Galley takes a historical look at the past five presidential campaigns and the use of the Internet by incumbents and challengers to win the election. The promise of DCTs with respect to political campaigning was greater citizen participation in the democratic process. Stromer-Galley analyzes whether DCTs have lived up to this promise, or if the idea of the Internet promoting great political engagement is merely a myth.