The Week in Religion, Poetically
Posted: August 27, 2010 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: American Religion, blogging, Islam, religion dispatches, Religion Dispatches, religion news Leave a comment »A limit of two stories about the not-a-mosque not at Ground Zero: First,I can’t get “We’ve Got To Stop the Mosque at Ground Zero” out of my head. It’s mix of offensive lyrics and campy Toby Keith rip-off vocals makes it funny and pathetic at the same time. Plus, it’s catchier than the Bed Intruder song. Second, Miss USA, a Muslim herself, has taken a standagainst the Park51 project. So, there you have it.
The Salem Witch Trials: video game edition. It’s like a Hawthorne short story for your PC or Mac.
A Brooklyn rabbi has been approved to serve as a chaplain in the Army reserves but can’t because the Army wants him to shave his beard. As an older rabbi serving the Army put it, “Look at some of our past generals’ beards, like Ulysses Grant. In the Civil War, a lot of those guys in the military leadership looked like Hasidic individuals.” At Fort Eustis in Virginia, about 80 soldiers were punished for choosing not to attend an evangelical Christian concert organized by the camp’s commanders. A Muslim soldier is wants to leave the military as a conscientious objector.
Continue reading at Religion Dispatches >>>
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My “Hinduism: Colony, Metropole, and America” exam list
Posted: August 23, 2010 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: academia, exam reading, exams, grad school, Hinduism, Religion Leave a comment »This is the fourth of my four exam list I’ve been posting over the past couple of weeks. This exam is technically a “dissertation specific” exam and so it is a combination of readings on Hinduism in America and India as well as some studies of how Hinduism has been represented in America and Britain. There’s also some post-colonial stuff mixed in too. As with the others, if you see something you want to discuss let me know.
Dissertation Exam List
Hinduism: Colony, Metropole, and America
Balagangadhara, S. N. 1994. The Heathen in His Blindness: Asia, the West, and the Dynamic of Religion. Leiden: E.J. Brill.
Bean, Susan S, and Peabody Essex Museum. 2001. Yankee India: American Commercial and Cultural Encounters with India in the Age of Sail, 1784-1860. Salem, MA: Peabody Essex Museum.
Cohn, Bernard S. 1987. An Anthropologist Among the Historians and Other Essays. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Cohn, Bernard S. 1997. Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Davidson, Allan K. 1990. Evangelicals & Attitudes to India, 1786-1813: Missionary Publicity and Claudius Buchanan. S.l.: Sutton Courtenay Press.
Doniger, Wendy. 2009. “Hindus in America 1900-.” Pp. 636-653 in The Hindus: An Alternative History. New York: Penguin Press.
Fischer-Tine, Harald, and Michael Mann, eds. 2004. Colonialism as Civilizing Mission: Cultural Ideology in British India. London: Anthem Press.
Inden, Ronald B. 1990. Imagining India. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell.
Jackson, Carl T. 1994. Vedanta for the West: The Ramakrishna Movement in the United States. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Kejariwal, O. P. 1988. The Asiatic Society of Bengal and the Discovery of India‘s Past, 1784-1838. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Kopf, David. 1969. British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance; the Dynamics of Modernization, 1773-1835. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Kopf, David. 1979. The Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Modern Indian Mind. Princeton, N.J: Princeton Univerity Press.
Marshall, P. J. 1970. The British Discovery of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge [Eng.]: University Press.
Mitter, Partha. 1977. Much Maligned Monsters: History of European Reactions to Indian Art. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Narayan, Kirin. 1993. “Refractions from the Field at Home: American Representations of Hindu Holy Men in the 19th and 20th Centuries.” Cultural Anthropology 8:476-509.
Narayanan, Vasudha. 2006. “Creating the South Indian “Hindu” Experience in the United States.” Pp. 231-248 in The Life of Hinduism, edited by John Stratton Hawley and Vasudha Narayanan. London: University of California Press.
Oddie, Geoffrey A. 2006. Imagined Hinduism: British Protestant Missionary Constructions of Hinduism, 1793-1900. New Delhi: Sage Publications.
Oddie, Geoffrey A. 1995. Popular Religion, Elites, and Reform: Hook-Swinging and Its Prohibition in Colonial India, 1800-1894. New Delhi: Manohar Publishers & Distributors.
Pennington, Brian. 2005. Was Hinduism Invented?: Britons, Indians, and Colonial Construction Religion. New York: Oxford University Press.
Robertson, Bruce Carlisle. 1995. Raja Rammohan Ray: The Father of Modern India. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Singer, Milton B. 1980. “Passage to More than India: a Sketch of Changing European and American Images.” Pp. 11-38 in When a Great Tradition Modernizes: An Anthropological Approach to Civilization. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Singh, Maina Chawla. 2000. Gender, Religion, and the “heathen Lands”: American Missionary Women in South Asia, 1860s-1940s. New York: Garland Pub.
Stein, William Bysshe, ed. 1967. Two Brahman Sources of Emerson and Thoreau. Gainesville, Fla: Scholarsþ Facsimiles & Reprints.
Sugirtharajah, Sharada. 2003. Imagining Hinduism: A Postcolonial Perspective. London: Routledge.
Teltscher, Kate. 1995. India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India 1600-1800. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Urban, Hugh B. 2001. The Economics of Ecstasy: Tantra, Secrecy, and Power in Colonial Bengal. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Veer, Peter van der. 2001. Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press.
Waghorne, Joanne Punzo. 2004. Diaspora of the Gods: Modern Hindu Temples in an Urban Middle-Class World. New York: Oxford University Press.
Williams, Raymond Brady. 1988. Religions of Immigrants from India and Pakistan: New Threads in the an Tapestry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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My Outside Area Exam List: “Media Studies and Religion”
Posted: August 17, 2010 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: academia, anthropology, exam reading, exams, grad school, media, Religion, ritual, theory Leave a comment »This is the third of four posts which include my various exam lists for my preliminary exams. This exam is in my “outside area” of Media studies. There’s some great theory on here as well as a lot of stuff dealing with ethnography and representation. It is a little light on the religion side but that’s the point of the “outside” in the title, I guess. The anthropological emphasis of the exam really pushes it into a true “outside area” for a historian like me. As before, if you’re interested in conversation about something you see here, let me know.
Michael J. Altman
Outside Area Exam- Media Studies
I. Theory
Adorno, Theodor W, and M. Horkheimer. 1977. “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as mass deception.” Pp. 350-383 in Mass Communication and Society, edited by James Curran, Michael Gurevitch, and Janet Woollacott. London: Edward Arnold.
Appadurai, Arjun. 1991. “Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and Queries for a Transnational Anthropology.” Pp. 191-210 in Recapturing Anthropology, edited by Richard G. Fox. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.
Baudrillard, Jean. 1980. “The Implosion of Meaning in the Media and the Implosion of the Social in the Masses.” Pp. 137-148 in The Myths of Information: Technology and Postindustrial Culture, edited by Kathleen Woodward. Madison: Coda Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1993. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature / Re Bourdieu ; Edited and Introduced by Randal Johnson. edited by Randal Johnson. New York: Columbia University Press.
Fairclough, Norman. 1995. Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language / an Fairclough. London: Longman.
Fowler, Roger. 1991. Language in the News: Discourse and Ideology in the Press. London: Routledge.
Goffman, Erving. 1981. Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Hall, Stuart. 1980. “Encoding / Decoding.” Pp. 128-138 in Culture, Media, Language, edited by Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, and Paul Willis. London: Hutchinson.
McQuail, Denis. 2010. McQuail’s Mass Communication Theory. Sixth Edition. London: Sage Publications Ltd.
Spitulnik, Debra. 1993. “Anthropology and Mass Media.” Annual Review of Anthropology 293-315.
Spitulnik, Debra. 1999. “Media.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 9:148-151.
II. Discourse
Bakhtin, M. M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. edited by Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge ; and, The Discourse on Language. New York: Pantheon Books.
Richardson, John E. 2007. Analysing Newspapers: An Approach from Critical Discourse Analysis. Basingstoke [England]: Palgrave Macmillan.
Wodak, Ruth. 1999. The Discursive Construction of National Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Woods, Nicola. 2006. Describing Discourse: A Practical Guide to Discourse Analysis. London: Hodder Arnold.
III. Representation
Karp, Ivan, and Steven Lavine, eds. 1991. Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display / Ed by Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Lutz, Catherine, and Jane Lou Collins. 1993. Reading National Geographic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
MacCannell, Dean. 1992. Empty Meeting Grounds: The Tourist Papers. London: Routledge.
Pratt, Mary Louise. 2008. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. 2nd ed. London: Routledge.
Tomlinson, John. 1991. Cultural Imperialism: A Critical Introduction. London: Pinter Publishers.
IV. Religion
Hoover, Stewart M. 2006. Religion in the Media Age. London: Routledge.
Richardson, John E. 2004. (Mis)representing Islam: The Racism and Rhetoric of British Broadsheet Newspapers. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Pub.
Rothenbuhler, Eric W. 1998. Ritual Communication: From Everyday Conversation to Mediated Ceremony. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.
Rothenbuhler, Eric W, and Mihai Coman, eds. 2005. Media Anthropology. Thousand Oaks, Calif: Sage.
Silk, Mark. 1995. Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Walton, Jonathan L. 2009. Watch This!: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Black Televangelism. New York: New York University Press.
V. Ethnogprahy / Anthropology
Abu-Lughod, Lila. 2005. Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Couldry, Nick. 2007. Media Consumption and Public Engagement: Beyond the Presumption of Attention. New York, N.Y: Palgrave Macmillan.
Dornfeld, Barry. 1998. Producing Public Television, Producing Public Culture. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press.
Hannerz, Ulf. 2004. Foreign News: Exploring the World of Foreign Correspondents. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kosnick, Kira. 2007. Migrant Media: Turkish Broadcasting and Multicultural Politics In Berlin. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Mankekar, Purnima. 1999. Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood, and Nation in Postcolonial India. Durham, N.C: Duke University Press.
Peterson, Mark. 2003. Anthropology and Mass Communication : Media and Myth in the New Millenium. Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Radway, Janice. 1974. “Interpretive Communities and Variable Literacies.” Daedalus 113:49-73.
Radway, Janice. 1988. “Reception Study: Ethnographyand the problem of disperesed audiences and nomadic subjects.” Cultural Studies 2:359-376.
Spitulnik, Debra. 1993. “Anthropology and Mass Media.” Annual Review of Anthropology 293-315.
Spitulnik, Debra. “Thick Context, Deep Epistemology: A Meditiation on Wide-Angle Lenses on Media, Knowledge Production, and the Concept of Culture.” in Theorising Media and Practice, edited by B. Brauchler and J. Postill. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Spitulnik, Debra. 1998. “Mediated Modernities: Encounters with the Electronic in Zambia.” Visual Anthropology Review 14:63-84.
Spitulnik, Debra. 2002. “Mobile Machines and Fluid Audiences: Rethinking Reception through Zambian Radio Culture.” in Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain, edited by Faye Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian Larkin. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Tacchi, Jo. 1998. “Radio Texture: Between Self and Others.” Pp. 25-45 in Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter, edited by Daniel Miller. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
VI. Post-Print Media
Baron, Naomi S. 2008. Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press.
Morley, David. 1980. The Nationwide Audience: Structure and Decoding. London: British Film Institute.
Tolson, Andrew. 2006. Media Talk: Spoken Discourse on TV and Radio. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
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My “American Religious History” Exam List
Posted: August 16, 2010 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: American history, American Religion, exam reading, exams, grad school, open access, Religion, religious history 1 Comment »Continuing where I left off on Friday, here’s the second of four exam lists. I think it’s important we help each other out with these sorts of things so that our doctoral programs can be as useful to us as possible. So, hopefully this is a help to some other struggling Americanist. It’s a bit more of an “old school” list than the theory one from last week.
Again, if anyone out there is interested in talking about or exchanging outlines of any of these either locally or via the inter-webs let me know.
American Religious History Exam List
Surveys:
Ahlstrom, Sydney E. 2004. A religious history of the American people. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Albanese, Catherine L. 2007. America, religions and religion. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth Pub. Co.
———. 2007. A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religoin. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Evans, Curtis J. 2008. The burden of Black religion. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press.
Holifield, E. Brooks. 2003. Theology in America: Christian thought from the age of the Puritans to the Civil War. New Haven [Conn.]: Yale University Press.
McLoughlin, William Gerald. 1978. Revivals, awakenings, and reform : an essay on religion and social change in America, 1607-1977. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Tweed, Thomas A. ed. 1997. Retelling U.S. Religious History. Berkley: University of California Press.
Tradition Focused Surveys:
Dolan, Jay P. 2002. In search of an American Catholicism : a history of religion and culture in tension. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press.
McGreevy, John T. 2003. Catholicism and American freedom: a history. 1st ed. New York: W.W. Norton.
Sarna, Jonathan D. 2004. American Judaism : a history. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Seager, Richard Hughes, 1999. Buddhism in America. New York: Columbia University Press.
Shipps, Jan. 1985. Mormonism : the story of a new religious tradition. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Pre-20th Century:
Bonomi, Patricia U. 2003. Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America, Updated Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Brekus, Catherine. 1998. Strangers Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740-1845. Chapel Hill.: University of North Carolina Press.
Butler, Jon. 1990. Awash in a sea of faith: Christianizing the American people, Studies in cultural history. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Hall, David D. 1989. Worlds of wonder, days of judgment: popular religious belief in early New England. New York: Knopf.
Hatch, Nathan O. 1989. The democratization of American Christianity. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Jackson, Carl T. 1981. The Oriental Religions and American Thought: Nineteenth Century Explorations. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press.
Kidd, Thomas S. 2007. The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press
Morgan, Edmund Sears. 1963. Visible saints: the history of a Puritan idea. [New York]: New York University Press.
Orsi, Robert A. 1985. The Madonna of 115th Street: faith and community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Raboteau, Albert. 1980. Slave Religion: “The Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.
Schmidt, Leigh Eric. 2005. Restless souls: the making of American spirituality. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco.
Seager, Richard Hughes. 1995.The World’s Parliament of Religions: The East/West Encounter, Chicago 1893. Bloomington: Indiana University Press
Tweed, Thomas A. 1992. The American encounter with Buddhism, 1844-1912 : Victorian culture and the limits of dissent, Religion in North America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Wilson, Charles Reagan. 1980. Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920. Athens: The University of Georgia Press.
20th Century:
Allitt, Patrick. 2003. Religion in America since 1945: a history, Columbia histories of modern American life. New York: Columbia University Press.
Chidester, David. 2005. Authentic fakes: religion and American popular culture. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press.
Huthcinson, William R. 1976. The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Marsden, George M. 2006. Fundamentalism and American Culture.Oxford.: Oxford University Press.
Marty, Martin E. 1986. Modern American Religion. 3 vols. Chicago.: University of Chicago Press. [SKIM]
McDannell, Colleen. 1995. Material Christianity: religion and popular culture in America. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.
Roof, Wade Clark. 1999. Spiritual marketplace: baby boomers and the remaking of American religion. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Wacker, Grant. 2001. Heaven below : early Pentecostals and American culture. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Wuthnow, Robert. 1998. After heaven: spirituality in America since the 1950s. Berkeley: University of California Press.
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My “Theory and Method In the Study of Religion” Exam List
Posted: August 13, 2010 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: exam reading, exams, grad school, Religion, theory 5 Comments »Over the next couple of days I’m going to be posting the various exam lists I’ve been working through and will continue to work through until my preliminary exams in November. If anyone out there is also studying for exams or just likes these books and wants to chat, talk, exchange outlines, or whatever let me know.
Theory and Method Exam List
Michael J. Altman
Religion / Society / Culture
Asad, Talal. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press.
Asad, Talal. 1993. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Bataille, Georges. 1992. Theory of Religion. New York ;Cambridge MA: Zone Books ;;Distributed by MIT Press.
Chidester, David. 1996. Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
Durkheim, Emile. 1995. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: Free Press.
Forbes, Bruce David, and Jeffrey H Mahan, eds. 2005. Religion and Popular Culture in America. Rev. ed. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1999. Religion and Culture. edited by Jeremy R. Carrette. New York: Routledge.
Freud, Sigmund. 1964. The Future of an Illusion. Rev. Anchor Books ed. Garden City, N.Y: Anchor Books.
Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books.
King, Richard. 1999. Orientalism and Religion : Postcolonial theory, India and ‘the mystic East’. London ;;New York: Routledge.
Masuzawa, Tomoko. 2005. The Invention of World Religions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
McCutcheon, Russell T. 2001. Critics Not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion. Albany: State University of New York Press.
McGrane, Bernard. 1992. Beyond Anthropology : Society and the Other. Columbia U.P.
Mizruchi, Susan. 2001. Religion and Cultural Studies. Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Orsi, Robert A. 2005. Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press.
Preus, James. 1996. Explaining religion : criticism and theory from Bodin to Freud. Atlanta Ga.: Scholars Press.
Smith, Jonathan. 1982. Imagining Religion : from Babylon to Jonestown. Chicago (Ill.) London: the University of Chicago press.
Smith, Jonathan Z. 1978. Map Is Not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions. Leiden: Brill.
Taylor, Mark C, ed. 1998. Critical Terms for Religious Studies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Tweed, Thomas. 2006. Crossing and Dwelling : a theory of religion. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Tweed, Thomas A, ed. 1997. Retelling U.S. Religious History. Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press.
Weber, Max. 2001. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. London: Routledge.
Weber, Max. 1964. The Sociology of Religion. Boston: Beacon Press.
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Peter Berger, “Easternizing Spirituality,” and the Colonial Difference
Posted: August 3, 2010 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: 19th century, American history, American Religion, Berger, Hinduism, Religion, religious history, spirituality Leave a comment »
In case you haven’t stumbled upon it yet, sociologist Peter Berger has a new blog, Religion Other Curiosities, at the American Interest Online. It’s a great blog and worth checking out on a regular basis. Berger has keen insights into Religion and culture and it’s great that he’s decided to jump into the blogosphere. (EDIT- See Stephen Prothero’s brief review of Berger’s blog here)
What caught my eye today was his post on Sai Baba and the spread of Eastern religions to the West. Berger rightly notes that Asian religions have tended not to missionize in the West, a few Buddhist groups and Swami Vivekananda aside, but rather that Asian religions have floated into Western culture through various means:
But the much more significant impact of Asian religiosity on the West has not come by way of missionary organizations. It has been much more diffuse, seeping into the culture through miscellaneous informal channels—books, periodicals, electronic media, small groups of friends and acquaintances, and last but not least through the influence of celebrities (“Hollywood Buddhism” and the like). The diffusion probably dates from the late 19th century, when the alleged wisdom from the East attracted wide interest in Europe and America. Later this trend grew into the so-called New Age movement, then burst into prominence with the counter-culture of the 1960s and 1970s, and today can be found in the many cases when people say that they are “not religious, but spiritual”.
The diffusion dates earlier than Berger notes-I would trace it to the turn of the 19th century-but his brief history sums things up nicely. It also points out the difficulties of trying to write a history of Asian religious influences in America. Catholics and Jews came to America in rather set patterns of immigration and brought institutions and communities with them. Asian religions, and specifically for me Hinduism, traveled through diffuse networks, across a myriad of media, and was represented and imagined in all sorts of ways starting in the late eighteenth century.
Berger then takes his post in a different direction than I had hoped, following Colin Campbell in his book The Easternization of the West, Berger sees the “Easternizing spirituality” as a challenge to the core beliefs of “the West.”
In think that Campbell is correct in seeing this last complex of ideas as offering the sharpest challenge to core Western values. If one goes back in history, everywhere, one comes on what may be called the mythic matrix of all human cultures—a worldview in which the individual is embedded in a community that includes humans, animals, nature and the gods. I think that Eric Voegelin’s philosophy of history has given the best descriptions of what he called “leaps in being”—ruptures in this fabric of cosmic unity. Two ruptures have been seminal for Western civilization—those of ancient Israel and ancient Greece—the exodus of the people of Israel from the mythic world of the surrounding cultures of the Near East—and the different but equally powerful force of Greek reason in challenging the compact universe of myth. Of course these two ruptures did not immediately bring about what we now call Western individualism. It took centuries for this to happen. Perhaps the best metaphor of the original rupture is that moment in Greek sculpture when individual human figures stepped out of the archaic friezes and stood free, by themselves. “Easternization” in all its forms implies the suggestion that we should step back into the frieze. This would be a far-reaching reversal of the entire course of our civilization. We should think very carefully before we recommend such a step.
A “far-reaching reversal?” Berger invokes a standard piece of colonial discourse. There is the rational Hebraic-Greek West which has stepped out of the mythical world and then there is the mythic East that is still locked in the imaginative and dreamy land of myth where the individual is “embedded in a community that includes humans, animals, nature and the gods.” The Easternization of spirituality then becomes a backsliding by rational Westerners into the “frieze,” a euphemism for mythic life. Berger’s image of the mythic and spiritual East versus a demytholigized and individualized West draws on a series of Western contrasts built before and during colonialism to help the West make sense of itself and of its Others. Richard King outlines the properties of the West and East nicely in his Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India, and the Mystic East. The West: Public / Society / Science / Institutional Religion / Secular / Rational / Male and the East: Private / Individual / Religion / Personal Religion (Mysticism?) / Sacred / Irrational or Non-rational / Female. These essentialist distinctions were born in the Enlightenment and worked out in the colonies, especially in India. The “Easternization” of the West, or America, is a problem only insofar as the West imagines itself in these terms and in contrast to the East. The need for an Other against which America or the West could construct and imagine itself requires the East to remain mystical and irrational. To step out of the frieze we must keep the frieze in a museum somewhere.
