Smith’s Golden Bough

This chapter draws inspiration from the broad contributions of Jonathan Smith as well as the author’s in an extensive development of a new approach to a proper academic study of religion based on the philosophy and biology of human movement. The implications and advantages of this distinctive self-moving approach are discussed in terms of place, myth, ritual, comparison, body, and religion theory. The chapter presents a richly developed range of new perspectives and concepts, including aesthetic of impossibles, transduction, play, the corporeality of concepts, coherence as preferable to meaning, the essential role of metastability and nonlinearity in religion studies, gesture/posture/prosthesis as opening access to experience, religion as skill-based behavior, material/biological expansionism, biology of transcendence, and the challenges and goals to which a proper study of religion should be directed. The chapter concludes by proclaiming Jonathan Smith to be a major inspiration and resource for the creative and productive future of the study of religion.

No Place to Stand

Religion scholar Mircea Eliade held that the “question of character of place on which one stands is the fundamental question.” Smith engages the idea of place in developing a definition of religion as well as holding that the scholar’s selection of theory determines a study’s results. In a classic Smith position he outlined two kinds of maps common to religions, locative (place embracing) and utopian (place avoiding). The chapter shows that these are mirrors of one another and that neither is actually achievable. The chapter focuses then on Smith’s third unnamed mapping strategy that is akin to joke and play, arguing that play is fundamental to Smith’s theories of place, myth, and ritual. Religions are understood in terms of application and adjustment, the iterative, negotiative, interactive dynamics of play. Furthermore, the chapter argues that, following Smith, this same dynamic is at the core of a proper academic study of religion.

The Ordeal of Incongruity

By contrasting his own personal experience dancing with Smith’s preference for reading, the author engages a complex and far-reaching discussion of the role and importance of experience both in religious subjects studied and in the lives of the scholars. From a biologically and philosophically based theory of experience, the chapter examines the importance of repetition, feeling kinds of knowing, and gesture, among other aspects of being bodied, to posit that religion and also the study of religion are skills honed through long repetitive experience. The chapter also engages the implications that sensory-rich religious experience is transduced into written description that is often the only access scholars have to their subjects of study. Countering the common understanding that Smith is reluctant to value experience, the chapter shows that the core role of incongruity and difference Smith attributes to religion and its study amounts to, in his own terms, an ordeal or determining experience.

The Necessary Double-Face

The development of comparison as technique is essential to the development of a proper academic study of religion. Beginning with Smith’s groundbreaking study of James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, the several essays of Jonathan Smith are critically engaged to situate comparison in its long history as Smith documented it, including modes, styles, and classes. The chapter examines Smith’s careful consideration of the technical details and implications of the comparative method. Centrally, comparison must be motivated by difference to be interesting; things considered unique or sui generis are outside comparison. Comparison is engaged by the creative interests of the comparer rather than the naturalness of the items compared. Gill develops comparison as an ongoing iterative process, akin to joke and riddle, essential to persistent academic (and ordinary) engagement with the world, essential even to perception, classification, and the acquisition of all knowledge.

Storytracking the Academic Study of Religion

The shift toward a proper academic study of religion is tracked and articulated by the comparative consideration of the way two central scholars—Mircea Eliade and Jonathan Smith—approached the same culturally specific example. Eliade’s approach is heavy-handed, using the example to support his assumed academic theology. Smith, who critiqued Eliade’s approach, offered an alternative interpretation that foregrounded difference and incongruity, religion as ongoing processes of application and adjustments. Based on these comparative studies, the chapter turns to an extensive consideration of their sources to critically evaluate Eliade’s and Smith’s approaches. Developing an academic comparative method called storytracking, which is based on a multiperspectival approach, the chapter offers creative advancements to topics essential to a proper academic study of religion, including definition, comparison, interpretation, academic writing styles, and the importance of ensuring that the subject of study has an actual presence.

Introduction

The author’s relationship with Smith spanned fifty years, a period also correlating almost exactly with the study of religion developing in secular universities in the United States. This essay introduces Smith and Gill and their relationship. The importance of Smith to the study of religion since the 1960s to his 2017 death is outlined in some detail. His contributions are also presented in the context of the history of the development of the field. The author argues that it is at a crossroads at the present, making Smith’s legacy urgently important to follow. The chapter introduces the book with a description of each chapter, including how each is a distinct and independent contribution yet also how together they build toward the objectives of the book.