Of Taylor and Titanomachy
On Sunday, Marc C Taylor announced in The New York Times that graduate education is “the Detroit of higher learning.” Essentially he said what all graduate students know in their hearts but refuse to face: That we are being trained for jobs that do not exist and being exploited to keep university budgets low. This is nothing new. As a faculty brat, I have been hearing this since sometime in college. It’s the reason I got teaching certification. Taylor’s analysis is far less dour than an article that appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education earlier this month entitled, “Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don’t Go.” All graduate student have seen The Simpsons clip where Marge explains, “Don’t make fun of graduate students, they just made terrible life choices.”
I found it very refreshing to see a chaired baby-boomer admit this injustice in The New York Times. Furthermore, Taylor proposes actual improvements! I have now seen the Taylor article posted on facebook almost a dozen times. This is partly because my colleagues mostly study religion and Taylor edited that ubiquitous orange theory book we all had to read. But I also saw a lot of my peers mocking Taylor’s ideas to “end the university as we know it.” I found this shocking for two reasons:
First, I simply cannot understand anyone in my position having loyalty to the academic system. It’s a system that’s universally condemned and yet hasn’t changed since the Middle-Ages. Think about that for a second: everyone hates it, but it never changes. The only thing that sustains it is the empty promise of a tenure track position. Tenure has become the opiate of the masses. As an inner city teacher, I saw literally dozens of angry youth that had every reason to be engaged in social reform. They didn’t because they were going to be rap stars. There is little difference between a graduate student aspiring to get tenure and a rap fan aspiring to be a rap star. I spoke to a college administrator recently who told me that many colleges now have 60% adjunct faculty. So once you have accepted that you will probably never get a tenure track job, how can you not rage against the system? Realistically, there is almost no change you could make to academia that would not benefit me. If Taylor said all universities need to be put on stilts, I would support it: I’m not scared of heights and maybe some of the baby-boomers are.
Second and more importantly, everyone mocking Taylor fails to recognize that dissertations, circumscribed disciplines, all of the things Taylor wants to jettison are totally arbitrary, culturally constructed marks of intellectual achievement. If you don’t believe me, think of all the moronic people with PhDs you’ve met. They managed to jump through the same hoops. Like paper currency, dissertations are worth whatever value we ascribe to them. And right now that value is pretty low.
I can support Taylor’s changes based on personal experience: I went to Hampshire, a college that has already implemented a lot of these ideas: there were only four departments, no majors, no tests, no grades, no tenure, and while a year long project was required it did not have to be a thesis. Now I’m in a position to observe undergraduates in a giant university and I am more convinced than ever that I got a better undergraduate education.
One thing I learned is that tenure isn’t really the issue. Hampshire didn’t have tenure but faculty that had been there more than ten years were completely confident that they would never be fired. Accordingly, some of them engaged in all the worst abuses associated with tenured faculty: sexually harassing teenage advisees, showing up to work drunk, refusing to grade assignments, etc. (Ever since high-school, I have had the strange fortune of seeing the underbelly of institutions.) Furthermore, tenure is not really a guarantee of academic freedom. This is the real reason that Larry Summers was driven out of Harvard: He was micromanaging every department and the faculty rebelled against him (but not before we lost Cornell West.)
Now let’s talk about projects. This seemed to be the one item on Taylor’s list that my peers were most skeptical of. Hampshire students must spend a year doing a “serious” project. While many students wrote a thesis (my undergraduate thesis was longer than some dissertations), some of the non-thesis projects were astounding. The campus has solar cells, a windmill, and a skywalk that were all built by students. Many graduates have gone on to publish, market, or patent their respective project. Of course there were flops: one student filled a room with slashed up teddy bears soaked in red paint. I thought that was pretty cool but it should not have taken an entire year. Then again, art isn’t my discipline. Maybe the teddy bear massacre was incredibly significant.
By any normal criteria these projects are far more valuable than a typical dissertation. Taylor is right: What is the point of spending two years of your life to write a boring dissertation that will never be published, printed, or read? Projects are better for three reasons: First, they tend to acquaint the student with the outside world, making it more likely the student will find a job they love outside of academia. Second, an impressive project is more likely to earn renown. And although no one would ever admit it, I believe renown is an asset in fighting for teaching jobs, especially if the college or department doing the hiring is trying to pull more students. If you were hiring a professor for a small college, would you want Sid Myers, the creator of Civilization, or someone you have never heard of who wrote a thesis on early uses of zinc? (Before you decide, the second guy’s letter of recommendation says this a very important contribution to the study of Anatolian bronze production.) Third, these projects will attract the attention of the community and break down these disgusting walls between “town” and “gown.” How is it we wonder at the surge of anti-intellectualism in this country when we ourselves hate academia? Projects might prove to the public (and ourselves) that we so-called experts can actually do something of value.
Finally, I want to defend Taylor’s idea of project-based programs instead of permanent departments. Everyone panned him for suggesting “a water program.” (Obviously he was thinking more of the hard sciences with that idea.) The two most rewarding things I have ever done in academia are working for the Pluralism Project and the PRSE––both groups that have a strong sense of mission. Not surprisingly, my involvement with these groups is also what most impresses people reading my resume. No, I wouldn’t sign up for a “water program.” But I would rather be in an interdisciplinary “meaning program” than where I am now.
Who knows. Maybe a swine-flu pandemic will decimate all my peers and there will be plenty of jobs. It worked in the Middle-Ages, why should we think of a better solution now?
The Whedonverse Part II: Amazons to Echo
Joss Whedon has presented himself as a feminist and his characters are quite popular with women. I once heard a woman opine, “Buffy is totally female power.” I don’t know what “female power” means. I also don’t know what Joss Whedon means when he calls himself a feminist. What I do know is that I am highly suspicious of other men who claim the title of feminist. I think it is very odd that “female power” could be located within a long train of beautiful female warriors all of whom were invented and promoted by men.
I think I speak for most men of my generation when I confess that I find feminism a little bit frightening. In middle school I heard Rush Limbaugh declare that feminists were ruining the economy by getting jobs and devaluing labor. I knew immediately that this was insane: That it wasn’t true and that even if it was, it didn’t matter because working is a human right. What is frightening to men about feminism is the endless clashes between second-wave feminists, third wave feminists, and post-feminists: Camille Paglia compared Gloria Steinem to Joseph Stalin. Molly Ivans simply called Paglia, “an asshole.” As men, all we can do is throw up our hands and apologize for whatever it is that we did or neglected to do. I had a friend in high school who was taught to open doors for women. So, at age seven he opened the door for a woman at the mall. She slapped him and called him an oppressor. I think he cried. Feminism can be some scary shit.
I claim for myself the negative title of “not sexist” but I am sure some feminists would dispute this––particularly my views on the sex trade (see previous blogs.) Furthermore, most wife beaters and rapists also think of themselves as “not sexist.” This brings me to men who describe themselves as “feminist.” Most men I have met who declare themselves as “feminists” seem to be blissfully ignorant of the debate over what this term means. I strongly suspect that when men claim this title, they assume that this will make them more appealing to women. However, I have also noticed that these male feminists seem to have a preoccupation with beautiful warrior women portrayed by Angelina Jolie, Mila Jovovich, and Sarah Michelle Gellar. I think there is an idea among men of the sci-fi/geek persuasion that if you can somehow look past Buffy’s kick-boxing skills and medieval weaponry to her blonde hair and nubile body––that this makes you a feminist. That’s fucked up.
THE WARRIOR BABE TRADITION
Buffy is clearly indebted to a tradition of female super-heroes, and is referred to as a “super-hero” on the show. Wonder Woman, created in 1941, is the matriarch from which all female super-heroes are descended. Wonder Woman is an amazon, which dates the warrior babe tradition back the ancient Greece. (In Buffy, Willow and Tara refer to themselves as Amazons.) Now there may have once been a culture––or more likely a military unit––on which the legend of the Amazons is based. But this is irrelevant. What matters is that the Greeks embraced this legend whole-heartedly. Achilles, Hercules, and Belleraphon all killed their share of Amazons. Greek art has numerous depictions of Amazonmachies––or battles against the Amazons. Notice in this picture how the Amazon’s mini-skirt highlights her pelvis gyrating against her steed.
Why were the Greeks so interested in Amazons? No one can be certain, but it should be remembered that Ancient Greece was one of the most misogynistic cultures in the world. Robert Meagher has suggested that the legend of the Amazons was not meant to empower women but to buttress a culture of misogyny. (One mural depicts Greek warriors dragging captured Amazons by their hair.) The defeat of Amazons seems strangely related to the suggestions of rape that appear throughout Buffy.
Now let’s look at Wonder Woman. Wonder Woman was created by William Moulton Marston, a psychologist at Tufts. Marston believed in the educational power of comic books and described Wonder Woman as “psychological propaganda” promoting the new type of empowered woman–that Marston thought ought to rule the world. So Wonder Woman was, in a very literal way, a man’s prescription for how women ought to be. Can that be feminist? I’ll return to this question later.
The comic has been credited with bringing bondage into American popular culture. Wonder Woman, originally called Suprema, was clearly the product of Marston’s masochistic––arguably Oedipal––fantasies. Wonder Woman was a sort of maternal dominatrix causing the world to submit to world peace under the yoke of her golden lasso. Marston is quoted: “The only hope for peace is to teach people who are full of pep and unbound force to enjoy being bound … Only when the control of self by others is more pleasant than the unbound assertion of self in human relationships can we hope for a stable, peaceful human society. … Giving to others, being controlled by them, submitting to other people cannot possibly be enjoyable without a strong erotic element.” And elsewhere “Give them an alluring woman stronger than themselves to submit to, and they’ll be proud to become her willing slaves!” Although the themes of bondage and domination have been toned down in Wonder Woman, I think male fans of the warrior babe tradition still harbor Marston’s fantasy of a dominatrix world order. What they call “feminism” seems to include an idealized concept of women as wiser and more moral than men. It also very telling that the Whedonverse is rife with bondage. The pilot of Dollhouse showed us glimpse of a naked Eliza Dushku lashing a man to bed. A detective mentions that the Dollhouse can produce, among other things, the perfect dominatrix. Why were these details included? What is the connection to Wonder Woman?
This brings us to the modern era of bad-ass beautiful women. I am thinking here specifically of Angelina Jolie in films like Tomb Raider and Mr. And Mrs. Smith and Mila Jovovich in The Fifth Element, Resident Evil, and Ultraviolet. It is odd that so many of these films are based on video games. This also seems to suggest that these warrior babes are being marketed to the geek feminist males. What is interesting about this new crop of warrior babes is that, unlike Amazons, they need the support of men. The traditional strengths of men and women have essentially been reversed: the women are the superior fighters and the men heal their wounds, encourage them when they’re down, and check their hubris. This dynamic is particularly strong in The Fifth Element where Bruce Willis is physically weaker but more mature emotionally than the film’s heroine. The modern warrior babes are strong and weak at the same time.
This brings me to Dollhouse, which seems to be the ultimate manifestation of the dependent warrior babe. The show is structured so that in each episode the heroine is given incredible skills and powers. (These powers are bestowed by a male technician, at the request of men.) Then, at the end of the episode, she is once again reduced to a helpless, mindless commodity. Dollhouse will either become the starkest expression of the warrior babe myth as something created by and for men––or it will evolve into a brilliant critique of this dynamic. In a final installment, I will attempt to look at how women have appropriated these warrior babes and try to figure out what it means for Buffy to personify “female power.”
The Whedonverse Part I: Rape
In a moment of boredom, I watched the pilot of Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse. Even if I hadn’t known this was a Joss Whedon project I would have immediately noticed certain Whedonesque elements––namely that kinky sex and rape were seamlessly and needlessly sublimated into the episode. This led me to ponder the Buffy phenomenon and to question Joss Whedon’s claim that he is a “feminist.” Let me back up: A reviewer of my forthcoming book excoriated me for not writing about Buffy: The Vampire Slayer. I was never opposed to Buffy, but I found the episodes utterly incomprehensible. (It also has nothing to do with my forthcoming book, but such is the guild.) So I did my duty as a researcher: I got a Netflix account and watched every single episode. It wasn’t a bad show, but I noticed that every teenager and vampire in Sunnydale seems to enjoy sado-masochistic sex. Even Willow appears in one episode as a vampire whose favorite activity is straddling a tied up Angel and throwing lit matches onto his bare chest.
I can also think of five episodes of Buffy in which the female characters are nearly raped. In the first season, Xander is possessed by a hyena spirit that fuels his animal instincts and gives him superhuman strength. So he does––what I assume Joss Whedon would do in this state––he tackles Buffy and begins pawing at her bra straps. At the end of the episode, Xander gets an exorcism and the incident is laughed off as “sexual assault.”
In season two, the swim coach is giving his team steroids that turn them into fish monsters. When Buffy finds out, he casts her into a flooded subterranean dungeon full of fish-men. He calls down to her, “I already fed them, but my boys have other needs.” Gang raped by fish monsters? This is what came on after Animaniacs?
In the first episode of season six, a gang of demons on motorcycles has taken over the town. The biker demons corner Buffy’s female companions in an alley and announce that they are going to gang rape them for hours and that this will be extremely painful because they have enormous demon penises that are covered with thorny spikes. This was stated through innuendo but the meaning was unmistakable.
Later in season six, a group of occult minded geeks known as “the trio” find a way to turn women into sex slaves. Their first target breaks the spell to find herself dressed as a French maid, kneeling in front of a geek’s crotch. She announces, “You guys think this is a big joke but it’s rape!” I screamed at my television, “THAT’S WHAT I’VE BEEN SAYING!” I think this was actually the first use of the word “rape” in the series.
Then Spike attempts to date-rape Buffy. Now suddenly it’s a huge deal and all of the characters are outraged that Spike would do this. (Xander, who also attempted to rape Buffy is especially outraged.) Of course, date-rape is outrageous, but I would much rather be raped by a vampire I have already slept with than by a bunch of horny fish people. I have not covered here Sweet the musical demon, who attempts to abduct Buffy’s sister as “his queen” or Oz, who is coerced into sex against his will by a female werewolf, or the third episode of the series in which Xander is nearly raped and killed by a “She-Mantis.”
I have looked through several volumes of essays on Buffy and I have yet to encounter any analysis of rape. I’m sure it’s out there––dozens of essays on Buffy are written every year––but I think that fans may turn a blind eye to this seamy underbelly of the Whedonverse. What I find disturbing is that the first three episodes are not stories about the horrors of rape or overcoming an experience of rape––they seem to be fleeting chances to engage in fantasies of raping a super-heroine. The fact that Buffy always escapes being raped is irrelevant––it’s the threat of rape that is supposed to titillate the audience. This dynamic is more obvious in recent “torture porn” films like Hostel. The fact that the heroine ultimately escapes and slays her captors is meant to exonerate the audience for paying $9 to watch a woman being tortured.
This is enough for now. In a future installment I want to challenge the idea that female super-heroes are “feminist” and try to figure out what it means to watch a beautiful woman with super strength narrowly escape being raped by fish monsters.
The Obsolete Man
This clip is a synopsis of a Twilight Zone episode called “The Obsolete Man.” It was one of their best episodes and has been embraced by numerous individuals who find themselves at odds with their society. (This particular clip was posted by a Christian millennialist.) I think that everyone who has a stake in higher education must be shown The Obsolete Man. If you are reading this, e-mail it to the president and trustees of your college or university.
Let me preface this by saying that I recently learned that Harvard’s Program in Religion and Secondary Education has been put on hiatus due to funding issues. Granted, I have selfishly given up the fight as a teacher. But the PRSE was one of few entities in my life that I feel a sense of loyalty to. Everyone else at Harvard engaged in sparring and infighting, but not the PRSE—because we had a real fight and it lay outside of academia (I realize that my peers thought of this as “helping people” but for me, meaning and struggle are intimately linked.) So when I saw this notice posted on the PRSE website, I felt a little like Yoda watching the Jedi academy burn down.
Then last night I saw this New York Times article with the headline, “In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth.” (The article has been moved to archives, but subscribers can read it here.) Reading this made me angry and, after sleeping on it, I’m still angry. Whenever that happens I write. This article brought up a lot of long-standing issues I have with the myth of an American meritocracy, titanomachy, and my realization after college that I am what Charles Dickens called, “surplus population.” (See previous blog entry “If a Thousand People with Master’s Degrees Died.”)
I am going to take up the gauntlet of “justifying the worth” of humanities. But the fact that this must be done is an incredibly pathetic comment on our society. Imagine an anthropologist who asks a tribesman about their gods and sacred stories only to be told, “Oh I’m pretty sure we have lots of gods! And stories too! But I don’t know them because learning about them is foolish––anyone who doesn’t fish for sixteen hours a day is a fool.” The tribesman might then ask, “You not only learn your own stories but try to learn those of other tribes, also? Your tribe must be the weakest, laziest, most pathetic people in the world! We’ve been talking for five minutes now and you haven’t caught a single fish!” At the center of this tribal village, naturally, is a heaping pile of rotting fish.
We are rapidly becoming this tribe of demented fishermen. The humanities are under attack because of a misguided consumer model of education, failure on the part of educational institutions to defend their own principals, vague fears or losing our technocratic dominance, and a failure to understand the division of labor.
THE CONSUMER MODEL OF EDUCATION
The primary argument that humanities should not be taught comes from a market perspective on behalf of the students (and more importantly their parents). It goes like this: as consumers, students expect their education to result in a lucrative career. As producers, institutions are obligated to respond to consumer expectations or else the market will destroy them. Colleges that do not teach humanities will prosper: Those that do will have no enrollment and will perish from the earth.
There are so many things wrong with this argument I hardly no wear to start. While it is true that college graduates have higher average salaries, studying something “practical” is no guarantor of financial success. In 2001, I used my BA in religion to drift from temporary job to temporary job. But I stood in line with people who got their degrees in engineers and computer science. By the end of it, former Enron managers were interviewing for the same crappy office jobs as me. So nobody got a job, but at least I studied something interesting and had some wisdom to console me in my misery. The computer science majors didn’t even have that.
Furthermore, this is a country that prides itself on the success of its drop-outs. I once saw a CEO tell a room full of high school students that “the world is run by C students!” The people who praise Bill Gates for dropping out of Harvard to start his own company are the same people who expect college to guarantee financial success.
It actually may turn out that the higher salaries of college graduates are largely a result of networking while in college. Bill Gates did meet his future business partner Steve Ballmer before dropping out of Harvard. For many students, leaving their neighborhood and meeting people from around the country may be as much a boon to their careers as the education they receive.
It is also illogical for institutions to cater to this demand. In fact, I will go out on a limb and say that whenever educators alter their curriculum to accommodate the demands of parents, the result is a watered down curriculum, a devalued degree, and dumber graduates. If the consumers of education really believed that college was simply about vocation, they would send their children to technical colleges, which are far cheaper. But they don’t.
I once met a girl at a party who had just graduated from the University of Texas at Austin. She asked me what my major was and when I said, “religion,” she answered, “Whoooah!” I found out that her major had been communications. I asked, “What exactly do you learn as a communications major?” She said, “You know . . . like how to make a PowerPoint presentation and stuff.”
I couldn’t believe it. PowerPoint was designed so that anyone can teach themselves how to use it. Charging to teach someone PowerPoint is like charging to teach someone how to pee. The state of Texas owes this girl several thousand dollars and an apology. Why did her family send her to a university to learn something she could have learned at a community college or from her 13 year old neighbor? Clearly her family wanted her to learn something “practical” and yet she probably went to UT for reasons that have nothing to do with education—possibly because they have a good football team.
The point is: if Americans were going to abandon the university model in favor of cheap, “practical” education they would have done this long ago. The fact that everyone does not attend a technical or community college proves that institutions do not need to cater to this perceived “market.”
THE ROLE OF EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS
The point of education has NEVER been as a means to making money––this is at best a pleasant side effect. The desire to learn seems to be part of the human condition and there is no consensus as to the nature and purpose of education. Free public education was instituted in this country because it was seen as necessary to the survival of a republic. Socrates said that, “Education does what it does.” Educational institutions are aware of this and it is their duty to explain this debate to the American public. That they have capitulated towards a consumer model of education is cowardly, pathetic, and shameful.
If thousands of families were willing to save for a generation to send their students to a college that taught courses on the history of NASCAR––would Harvard rush to start a NASCAR program? Would Yale cut its English department to hire experts on stock cars? If institutions are really following the consumer model of education, then logically they would.
Institutions of higher learning are supposed to stave off barbarism, not cater to it. If Americans really don’t want their minds to be challenged, or to think about life’s larger questions, then colleges and universities rightfully should be destroyed. At least then they would die with honor. Better no university at all than a university that teaches only PowerPoint.
People still want to go to universities: maybe for the network, maybe for the football parties, maybe to get stoned and go to drum circles. Who knows what draws the masses? But as long as they are coming, institutions should defend their philosophy of education. Not to do so is to be guilt of huckstering.
This doesn’t mean that universities should continue to do what they have always done. The Ivory Tower has fueled this wave of anti-intellectualism. This is not defending humanities–this is taking a stand on the nature and purpose of education. Universities must produce and support public intellectuals and must emphasize that their work fosters a strong republic.
TECHNOCRATIC DOMINANCE
What I found most upsetting about the New York Times article was the suggestion that the humanities are a luxury that our country can no longer afford. This is a separate argument from the consumer argument but it is equally absurd.
Let me start with the article’s use of the phrase “technologically complex world.” The implication is that students trained in humanities will lack the technical skills to compete in the job market. This suggestion seems to come from the same school of thought that would charge thousands of dollars to teach someone PowerPoint.
It also implies that America’s technocratic superiority is a function of our number of science majors. This is a fallacy too. Technological breakthroughs are achieved by individuals with natural talent, intelligence, and creativity. In 1954, the federal government spent millions on math and science education in secondary schools. They spent this money because the Soviets had launched Sputnik and they wanted to train a generation of Tony Starkes––children that would build futuristic weapons to protect us from the Russians. But all this curriculum did was inundate students with tedious lab work that taught them to hate science. The result is that many graduate programs in the sciences have empty spaces. However, our military-industrial complex still manages to produce things like death rays and goats that make spider silk (see previous blogs). They can do this, because technological advances are still made by individuals––those few who loved science in spite of the tedious lab work. This emphasis on science over the humanities has brought this country to its current situation: a weak republic with devastating weapons.
OUR SURPLUS POPULATION
The national unemployment rate for January was 8.5%. However that number doesn’t factor in people who work only a part-time job that doesn’t pay the bills or people who have simply stopped looking for work. The actual number of unemployed people is probably over 10%. So 1 in 10 Americans isn’t going to work and we are supposed to think this has something to with the humanities? Does anyone actually believe that if these people had studied PowerPoint instead of Plato they would have jobs?
What these unemployment rates tell us is not that humanities are a luxury but that EVERYTHING is a luxury! We can fire millions of people and society still functions more or less the same. No one is essential, everyone is expendable. This really should not come as a surprise. Tibet was a technologically backwards country with absolutely terrible agricultural resources. And yet Tibetan farmers could support themselves as well as thousands of monks who––economically speaking––contributed nothing whatsoever. If Tibet could do that, how many useless philosophers could America support with our industrial farm equipment and our amber waves of grain?
We cling to the idea that our major in college will determine our financial success because we insist that this country is a meritocracy: The idea that all of our talents and training are ultimately useless and not needed by anyone terrifies us. But we cannot move forward as a society until we realize we have this surplus population and make logical solutions about what to do with it. What ought millions of unnecessary people do all day?
Traditionally, war has been the best way of getting rid of surplus population. In fact, ever since I graduated from college the military was the only entity that was always willing to take me. First they wanted me as a soldier, then as a chaplain. I always interpreted the army’s pitch as, “You are young and male, and we have too many young males. We want to kill you. You and all your brothers.” I have also noticed how many people from my high school are now lawyers. Maybe instead of wars we can simply occupy our surplus population with endless litigation.
Logically, the only thing to do in the face of this surplus population is to support as many bizarre and specialized pursuits as possible. If someone can read Latin and wants to spend their life reading old books––God bless them, that’s one less person you have to compete with for that PowerPoint job. This is the lesson of the Twilight Zone: The humanities professor, the president of the university, the engineers building the death-rays, the bankers who created this financial crisis, the journalists who report on it––they can all drop dead and the world will go on fine without them. We are all obsolete men and women.
Do you know what a rhetorical question is?
This past semester was a strange experience: I have spent two years learning pedagogical theory, three years teaching in experimental high-schools, and now I found myself once again on the other side of the classroom. Almost daily I observe both an incredible anxiety over teaching from other graduate students and a general disregard from faculty for the fact that teaching is an art. This semester, sitting in a “discussion” with 50 undergraduates, it becomes increasingly obvious that most professors have no idea how to teach.
What follows is a short treatise on the types of questions teachers ask and what can be accomplished by asking them. The people I wish would read this––namely my current professors––never will. However, this may be of value to peers as they prepare for teaching fellowships and job interviews. (Local hiring committees *claim* they care a great deal about teaching ability.) Teachers frequently ask questions of their students. Generally students do not like being asked these questions and it makes them uncomfortable. The source of this discomfort is that neither the student nor the teacher knows what purpose the question serves. There is no pedagogical theory that informs these questions––it’s simply part of our Western culture of teaching: You got asked questions when you were a student, and now you have to do it too in order to “feel like a teacher.”
In fact, there is a fairly short list of what can be accomplished by asking questions to students. I have made taxonomy of four types of questions.
Questions you don’t know the answer to:
1. Asking students for information
2. The Socratic Method.
Questions you do know the answer to:
3. Rhetorical questions to assess knowledge.
4. Rhetorical questions to force engagement.
Of these four goals, the fourth motivates the overwhelming majority of teacher’s questions. This is also the sort of question that students most hate. In fact, the goals behind 3 and 4 can be better accomplished through a variety of creative solutions instead of with rhetorical questions.
1. Asking students for information
These are simple inquiries that you might ask a peer: What is your favorite Dostoyevsky novel? Did they teach you about Vietnam in high school? Students LOVE to be asked this sort of question––partly because there is no pressure to give a “correct” answer, but also because these questions break the power dynamic of the classroom. Instead of what Paul Friere called “the banking model,” now there is a two-way exchange of knowledge and information. Now here’s what few people realize: Asking these sorts of questions is ALSO a good way to encourage engagement from the students (Item 4 in the taxonomy).
In my experience, the more students get to talk about themselves, the more they will contribute to discussion, and the more they will like the teacher. The art of teaching is funneling that energy into the course material. Finally, these sorts of questions are quite relevant to many disciplines. I study religion, so it always useful and interesting to ask questions of students with different religious and ethnic backgrounds. Students who know a foreign language are also a source of useful information. This is not “an ice-breaker,” but can actually lead a richer classroom experience.
2. The Socratic Method
One of the biggest problems in education is that teachers themselves do not appreciate the difference between the Socratic method and rhetorical questions. Although it is a gross overgeneralization, I often muse that Western education is founded on Socrates and Asian education is founded on Confucius. The Greek philosophers believed that an individual should take credit for his ideas. Furthermore, the Socratic method is founded on the idea that student and teacher can produce new knowledge by working together in a dialectic. Confucius, although he had many brilliant insights, never took credit for any of them. He attributed all the knowledge in the universe to the ancestors. A Confucian scholar, was someone who dutifully collected and memorized all of the Classics. It was impossible to make a new discovery, but you could sometimes “rediscover” something through exegesis.
Today, Chinese and Korean students consistently memorize the entire GRE. (I know people at ETS who have investigated this.) To Americans, this seems impossible. But this is only because we are descendents of Socrates and not Confucius. I am by no means a Socrates expert, but I don’t think he would have approved of the GRE. Modern Western education is simultaneously jealous of China and perpetuating a badly perverted version of the Socratic method: Bascially, we want our children to test as well as the Chinese, and we try to accomplish this with a grueling barrage of rhetorical questions. This is insane.
If you are going to use the Socratic method––or you think that you might be using the Socratic method already, there are three things you have to consider.
A. Are you using the banking model?
B. How big is the class?
C. Do the students understand what you’re trying to do?
Some professors just want to lecture and could care less what the student knows or thinks. There is nothing wrong with this. One of my favorite classes is a history lecture: he talks, I listen, and he doesn’t stop the lecture to ask questions. Teachers should ask themselves if they have anything to learn from their students––if the answer is “no,” then you are in fundamental disagreement with Socrates and have no business using his method! Emulate Socrates or emulate Confucius, but don’t aim for mediocrity.
You can only do the Socratic method properly if you have 15 students of fewer. More than 20 and it becomes impossible. There are studies proving this. I could not believe the first week of the semester when a professor told us that our class of 50 would be having “discussions” and that we would be graded on participation. Madness.
If you have 50 people and want to have a discussion, you have to break the class up into a lecture and discussion sections. That goes without saying. In lieu of a proper discussion, there are other methods to gain student input in a large class. One such technique is called “the chalk talk.” (Secondary teachers have excellent teaching methods, but they all have dumb names.) If you want fifty people to answer a question like “How is Hegel relevant to anthropology?” (Yes, I witnessed this) have lots of chalk ready at the start of class and have take 10 minutes so that everyone can write a short answer on the board. This way everyone can provide input and the professor will have plenty of fodder to chew over with the class.
The average American student has spent over a decade in an environment where the hallmark of teaching is a series of rhetorical questions. Most teachers mix both Socratic questions with rhetorical questions. The students are often confused by this and even teachers sometimes don’t know why they are asking the question. I realized how bad this was when I was teaching high school history. We were studying Socrates and I asked my students, “What is evil?” Someone said, “Like killing people and stuff.” So I asked if it was evil to kill someone in war or in self-defense. This led a girl to demand, “Why don’t you just tell us what evil is?!” I explained that the point of the exercise is that I don’t know what evil is either and we are trying to figure it out together. But these students had sat through so many hours of teachers asking rhetorical questions for no reason, that they assumed I just toying with them.
So if you are going to initiate the Socratic method, you should begin by telling students that you don’t have all the answers and that you need their insights and opinions. It also helps to remind them that Socrates’ students weren’t getting a grade and had slaves bringing them copious amounts of wine. (My high school students agreed school would be more fun if we had wine.) Furthermore, you can say things like, “This isn’t a rhetorical question, someone tell me what think about . . .”
3: Rhetorical Questions to Assess Knowledge
This is one of the most common uses of questions, and it is also a fairly useless exercise. Teachers should be constantly assessing their students knowledge, but only so that they can modify their lesson accordingly. Rhetorical questions are a poor way to assess student knowledge and there is no point in making this assessment if you are unable or unwilling to act on the knowledge you acquire.
In this anthropology class I keep harking on, I watched the professor ask a series of rhetorical questions, trying to get the students to say a particular buzzword. When several answers failed to give him the buzzword he wanted, he actually started playing hangman on the blackboard. “It starts with an ‘h’ . . . . and it is has ‘t” in it. Sheer insanity. If you use three minutes of class time on something, it ought to serve some sort of purpose. What is the purpose of getting students to say a certain buzzword? (See, now this has me asking rhetorical questions.) Asking rhetorical questions can tell you if the smartest student in the class understands something. But that really is not a very useful piece of information for a teacher to have. Frequently, the smartest students in the class understand most things. Meanwhile, you have no idea what all the silent students know or don’t know.
Once you have this assessment, you still have to do something with it. When I first started teaching US History, I was supposed to start out teaching them Reconstruction. Then I found out my class didn’t know what the Civil War was. I asked a rhetorical question: “Why was the Civil War fought?” Someone answered, “Land?” So I threw out my lesson plan for the day and told them about the Civil War. Then I reworked all my lesson plans for the entire week so that we could catch up. Now some professors have the attitude that this is not their problem and that students who cannot keep up deserve to flunk. To each their own, but professors with this attitude have no business asking rhetorical questions. If you don’t feel you ought to reassess your lesson plans, than shouldn’t waste time grilling your class.
4. Rhetorical Questions to Force Engagement
I think that this is the actual reason why teachers ask questions and why our culture has such a strong association between teaching and asking. It’s emotional: the teacher desperately wants to make some kind of connection with the students. They want to know that they are being listened to, that they are communicating to fellow beings and not being observed like Charlton Heston in Planet of the Apes. Asking questions is one way to do this. It is hard to understand this need for connection if you have never taught. The first class I ever taught I called “The Village of Damned.” It was an honors class and the kids all just sat up perfectly straight and stared at me. I would ask questions and they would continue to stare in silence, not being rude but also not being quite human.
But a grueling barrage of rhetorical questions is one of the worst ways to make this connection because it places pressure on the students. In a very real way, you are transferring your own performance anxiety onto the class.
Lorand Matori at Harvard had a much better way of making this connection: he simply asked the class, “Are you with me?” Matori is a professor of Afro-Atlantic religions and he may have been drawing on black preaching cultures, in which the congregation does not sit in silence but actively encourages the preacher. Students loved being asked “Are you with me?” There was no pressure and students who said, “We’re with you!” seemed to form an emotional bond with Matori. Furthermore, this gave the students the opportunity to say, “No, I’m confused.” You don’t get that opportunity from a rhetorical question.
Rhetorical questions are also used to enforce compliance with the syllabus and to shame students into doing the reading. Students should do the reading and, since most professors assign too much of it, students are always calculating what reading they can get away with skipping. I know I do. But once again, rhetorical questions are not the best way to go about this. Often students cannot answer these sorts of questions even if they have done the reading, because the questions are highly subjective or overly specific. I’ve seen questions like, “What is argument of this book?”
Kimberly Patton, who has published articles on pedagogy, had a better method of inferring compliance. At the start of class, she would simply ask each student to give an insight into the assigned reading. She would usually move in circle starting to her right. This created a sense of pressure in that you had to say something and didn’t want to appear foolish, but unlike the rhetorical question you didn’t have to be a mind-reader: any insight would do.
Alright that’s it. If you’ve read this far, you now know more about teaching then the average university professor or at the very least have some pretty banter to waggle at your next job interview. Remember: What is teaching? Hmmm. OK, but that’s not really what I’m looking for. Well it starts with an ‘A’ . . . No, not awesome, but thank you . . . It rhymes with “fart” . . . .
The War: The Revolution Has Begun . . .
On Thursday my students were subjected to a massive drug raid. From what information I have been able to glean, the raid was planned for weeks and involved collaboration between the police, the principal, school security, and local business owners. They even came up with a special code name. (The actual code name would further compromise the anonymity of this blog. We’ll call it “Operation X.”)
Operation X went something like this: On Monday two narcotics officers posing as students began hanging around the local convenience store. One of the narcs, according to my students was “very, very, very, very attractive.” Her job was to sweetly approach teenage boys and ask if they had any weed. If they did not, she asked them if they were interested in purchasing some. When she had gathered enough information and evidence to make the raid profitable, a date was set. The raid occurred at lunch time when the maximum number of our students would be at the convenience store.
According to the students, school security was actually encouraging students to visit the convenience store prior to the raid, telling them that they were giving away free sodas. I’m not a lawyer, but I imagine a lot of pesky entrapment laws can be avoided if you have civilians assisting you in a sting.
When the target of the raid was present—along with as many other students as possible—the trap was sprung. The two narcotics officers pulled guns on our students. Two paddy wagons arrived and around twenty police rushed out with their weapons drawn. These were gang division police in black uniforms. My students, who know a respectable amount about guns, said they thought their handguns were .38 caliber or higher.
All of the students were ordered to get down on the ground. One student from my afternoon class reported being told, “Get on the fucking ground or I’m going to shoot you in your fucking face.” The next morning, a different student in a different class described an officer telling him, “Don’t talk or I’m going to kick your teeth down your throat.”
The students were searched for contraband and their sleeves were rolled up to look for gang tattoos. A sizable pile of contraband was assembled on the hood of a police car. (It seems to me that putting everything in a pile would make very difficult to determine what was taken from whom.) At any rate, the pile seemed to mostly contain pot taken from the one drug dealer who was the target of the raid and at least one knife taken from a student.
If students cooperated they were released. If they offered any resistance they were taken to jail and given a $100 fine for loitering. These tickets seemed to have been a form of selective enforcement. Students complained that immigrant construction workers typically spend their entire lunch break sitting in the front of the convenient store––an act that could be construed as loitering. Apparently the female students were allowed to leave after a light pat-down and were not taken to jail. One of my three white students complained the next day, “I’m offended that I WASN’T arrested.”
When the area had been secured our principal appeared. He shook hands with the police, told them they were doing a fine job, and that each of the students arrested would be expelled from school.
I did not witness any of this. I have tried to piece together what happened by talking with about ten different students who were there. After the fact, the principal gave a debriefing of “Operation X” to the department chairs. I was not privy to this report but managed to catch a glimpse at it on the sly. It is possible that my students exaggerated, but I believe that for the most part they did not. People exaggerate police brutality when they expect someone will care, which my students did not.
I spoke with colleagues about the raid. Some supported it while others seemed to regard it as an unfortunate event–like a hail storm. I seemed to be the only one who thought our students had been subjected to police brutality.
My students and I spent about an hour of our afternoon class discussing the raid. One of my students was absent––he had spent the afternoon in jail for telling the police they had no right to do this and for refusing to sign a loitering ticket. The first thirty minutes were needed simply to get the students to calm down and tell their story one at a time. When they had finished I asked them, “Why exactly are you upset? Why do you feel this was unfair?” They came up with several answers. I helped to define what they were describing and we made a list on the black board: excessive force, selective enforcement, etc. When we were done, I gave the students a hint.
“Most people are going to hear this story, hear that a drug-dealer was caught, and say ‘Well, that’s good.’ You have to come up with a an argument that outweighs the arrest of a drug-dealer.”
Then I asked them, “Do you think something like this would happen at a white high school?”
This was met with guffaws. Of course, it was unthinkable that this would happen at a white high school.
“I’m going to be honest with you,” I said, “I went to a very rich, white high school and we had drug-dealers too. And they weren’t selling pot, they were selling cocaine and heroin. But the police were never involved.”
I turned to one of my students who had been raising the Black Power fist in the initial excitement of describing the raid. I had also noticed him doing this during lunch in the immediate aftermath.
“You’ve been raising the Black Power fist all day. Are you actually going to do something about this or not?”
The students initial response was typical, “No one cares what we think.”
“It’s probably not even legal for us to go to the media.” said one.
Interestingly, this is more or less the same response I got from teachers who did not want to organize to get a working copier. No one cares and there’s nothing we can do. It feels a lot better to think of your oppressors as omnipotent then to think of yourself as cowardly and lazy. The students are different though––they are not as cowardly as the teachers because they have nowhere near as much to lose.
“America is a democracy.” I said, “But it won’t be one if you don’t fight for it.”
“Yeah, today was to-tal-uh-tarianism.” Said one student.
(I taught the students that no government ever admits to being totalitarian. As long as they know that, I’m not too concerned with their pronunciation.”
“Persecution by the state always starts with minorities.” I continued. “If police in black uniforms are allowed point guns at African-American teenagers and get away with it, I will be next.”
“Yeah, but to help those kids who went to jail today we’d have to call all kinds of people and spend all kinds of money and by then they’d probably already be locked up.”
“That’s why its called ‘fighting’ for freedom.” I said, “It’s not like paying the electric bill. We may not be able to help the people who went to jail today, but we can make it so that they think twice before doing another raid like this.”
From here we made a list of actions the students could take. It looked something like this:
-contact the local news
-write a letter to the editor of the Atlanta Journal Constitution
-contact the county board of education
-contact the NAACP
-contact the ACLU
As I explained what the ACLU is, and what a “letter to the editor is”, I could not help but feel little like Paul Atreides from Dune, preaching to the Fremen. This was handing the arsenal of Democracy to some very angry teenagers.
When the students saw this list (next to the list of their grievances against the police) they got excited. We were scheduled to go to the library on Thursday so that students could do independent research. Instead, some of them got on the internet and began gathering phone numbers and e-mail addresses.
This was big. Very big. One of the reasons I became a teacher––and the reasons I have not yet quit being a teacher, is because it gives me a change to do something like this. In 1984, Orson Wells wrote that “If the Proles ever woke up, they could shake off Big Brother like so many flies.” If every impoverished black teenager in America had the ability to correctly identify the enemy, believed they could fight that enemy, and knew how to fight that enemy, the neo-cons would melt away overnight. But despite their excitement in the immediate aftermath of the raid, I was still skeptical.
The next day, the class clown made a dramatic entrance into the doublewide trailer that serves as my classroom. The class-clown was kicked out of the 9th grade for throwing Skittles at his teacher. Despite being intelligent and having at least a passing interest in history, he is failing the class.
“Let me tell you about my phone call with these niggahs at the Board of Education!”
(The class-clown refers to everyone as a niggah. Famous niggahs throughout world history have included “this niggah Napolean,” “that niggah Issac Newton,” “Grigori Rasputin the creepy fucking niggah”, and of course myself.)
“You called the Board of Education?” I asked.
He produced the call log from his cell phone.
“I’m gonna fax in a full mutha-fucking REPORT to those niggahs.”
Hopefully he refrained from using the n-word in that report . . .
“I’m very proud of you.” I said.
Another student drafted a letter to the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, which I am now editing.
“You know,” said a student, “When they find out who taught us how to do all this stuff, you’re probably gonna get fired.”
I smiled.
“I know.”
Spiritual Warfare
A good friend recently e-mailed me this. Note to all my other friends: yes, articles about people battling witches need to be sent to me. I am, after all, “the wandering anthropologist of the occult.”) I think this group is absolutely fascinating. In fact, an excellent dissertation could be written on them by someone like me. If I’m ever in DC, I definitely want to attend a service.
One an aesthetic level, I find this type of service is very moving. The early Christian church was engaged in a supernatural battle against evil. Mainline Protestants have emasculated Christianity to the point where only talking lions and hobbits get to battle spiritual evil. In fact, one reason I’m proud of the Catholic Church is their position on the supernatural: “Yes, these things happen. They just don’t happen to you. Here is the number of a good psychiatrist.”
And midnight shadow-boxing sessions in the church? I have already stated that if I were to start my own church, boxing would be an essential element of the spiritual training. Good religious experiences like good pedagogical experiences should incorporate the kinesthetic. Bodhidharma and the Shaolin monks knew that.
The theology beneath the service is more troubled. I found it very telling that the founders are Congolese. Death and The Invisible Powers by Simon Bockie describes just how prevalent the tradition of witches and sorcerers is in the indigenous religions of the region. Traditionally, some people are just born with powers. All such being are dangerous, but they part of the world and you also need to have a few in your village as protection. The idea of witches as servants of the devil who are wholly antagonistic to the community is a Christian idea.
Bockie also explains that most Congolese Christians practice an amalgam of Christianity and indigenous beliefs. However, the Spiritual Warfare church seems to have some highly unusual elements—namely the idea that Africa, and indeed, Africans are cursed because their ancestors were not Christian.
I ponder how the church leaders arrived at such a conclusion. It is easy to imagine how someone who has not studied colonialism and neo-colonialism might see Africa as cursed. As Sarah Silverman said, “It’s like they took everything bad and put it on one continent!” Spiritual Warfare has clearly turned to religion for an explanation to this problem, but unlike most colonized people, they seem to place all of the blame on themselves and none on the colonizers.
Now, I am better acquainted with the invisible powers than with critical theory, but this seems to me like perfect manifestation of Foucauldian power. You have a whole church of Congolese immigrants who have bought into the imperialist narrative that they are pagan children of the devil. And why do they buy it? Because it empowers them! They now have an explanation of all their misfortune and a way to combat it. I can’t imagine going to a midnight service four nights a week. This level of dedication shows just how bad this community’s problems must be. As Professor Olupona states, their religion is utilitarian.
Finally, with some guilt, I cannot help but speculate if the shadow-boxing will spill over into actual violence. Bockie states that Congolese witches are not abstract forces—they are your neighbors. What would happen if this church found out that a Santero or Palermo lived next door? Would they pray for them or kill them?
Vampires and Academics
I was first groomed for the AAR when I was seventeen. You see, when I was seventeen I joined an organization called the Camarilla and began playing to live-action role-playing (LARP) game Vampire: the Masquerade. Let me briefly describe the game and it will immediately make sense to anyone who has ever attended an academic conference.
The premise of the game is this: vampires (read: academics) are not human but can usually pass for human. When you become a vampire, your soul is essentially turned inside out producing a new aspect to your personality called “the beast.” The beast drives all vampires to be ruthless killing machines. Every time you give in to the beast, it becomes more powerful, until you have lost all of your humanity and are nothing but a blood-drenched animal. As such, younger vampires have retained most of their humanity while older vampires are more dominated by the beast.
Wait, it gets better.
Vampires are divided into clans. The clans more or less hate each other but have agreed to an uneasy truce in order to keep the real world from learning about vampires and exterminating them. Vampires who have no clan (read: independent scholars, i.e. me) are known as caitiff (from the Old French “a captive.”) Caitiff are basically ignored and treated like crap by vampire society.
Wait, it gets better.
Elder vampires (read: tenured professors) are engaged in petty rivalries and feuds that have gone on for hundreds of years. Of course, they would never directly attack each other. Instead, they just harbor grudges and look for subtle ways to cause pain and misery to their opponents.
But you don’t get to play an elder vampire. No, you play a recently turned “neonate” vampire (read: graduate student.) Neonates were created to be the pawns of the elders and typically stumble their way through the feuds of the elders. It is not uncommon during the game for an elder to kill a neonate simply to spite the elder who sired her. Neonates survive primarily by being very cynical, picking up on gossip quickly, and making themselves useful to the right elders.
Wait, it gets better.
Vampire: the Masquerade is a live action role-playing game. So the game typically consists of renting out a large institutional looking building (usually part of a college campus.) There is very little actual fighting, so most of the game entails wandering around the building speaking to vampires. You pretend you’re having a friendly conversation but actually your forming alliances and trying to fuck over your rivals. Outright murder is forbidden in vampire society as in human society, so a lot of time is spent spreading rumors about people, hampering other people’s projects, and so on. A skilled player can create a situation where a rival will be killed without them having to do anything.
The Anne Rice piece comes in too. Her novels feature young girls who beg the vampire to embrace them. They are rebuffed being told that vampirism is the most horrible existence imaginable. This is a speech I’ve heard probably over a hundred times during my life: “I’m an academic and, trust me, you don’t want to be an academic.”
Vampires and academics even dress similarly. There is an over representation of black and dark colors. Slightly dressy clothes are the norm but both groups have a tendency to bohemian and religious accessories. The witch at the pagan panel in her black dress and silver pentagram would have fit right in at a LARP (and probably has.) There was also the ubiquitous graduate-student-turned-crazy-homeless-man. That too, reminded me of the Vampire: the Masquerade.
I played this game when I was seventeen and for some reason I never made the connection until this weekend. But Saturday night as I was gliding around a hotel room in my black blazer, glass of merlot in hand, advancing my agenda through calculated Machiavellian conversations, it all suddenly seemed familiar. And oddly, that connection was comforting to me. I was still doing what I had been doing before, but now I was having a lot more fun. A spoon full of sugar helps the medicine go down, in the most dee-light-ful way. (You know Mary Poppins is pretty goth too.)
Vampires and academia are both horrible things in real life, but as a game they’re quite fun. The difference is that when we were done being vampires, we would all go to Denny’s together. Academics never get a respite from their games. And as I’ve said before in this blog, the best way to spot an immoral institution is when someone justifies it as “just a game.”
Still, as a coping strategy and a “technology of happiness” the life as LARP perspective has much to offer. It bring me back to my favorite passage from the Hagakure (a text for samurai):
“It is a good viewpoint to see the world as a dream. When you have something like a nightmare, you will wake up and tell yourself that it was only a dream. It is said that the world we live in is not a bit different from this.”
Robert Orsi is a bad-ass 9/4/06
Forward: I have not updated this blog in a while. That’s mainly because I’ve been a lot busier and a lot happier. I am working my ass off coming up with 15 hours of lesson plans every week and trying to adjust to a new school where I have 75 students and have to push all my belongings around on a cart through two city blocks of hallways crowed with black teenagers.
Also, I have friends in Atlanta. In Indianapolis, I would spend most Friday nights sulking in the corner of the Abbey coffee-shop writing in my blog. Now I actually interact with other people most Friday nights. So there will not be a weekly blog again for at least another month. I’m sure both my readers are very disappointed.
Now, what I actually wanted to talk about: For Christmas this year, my parents gave me a copy of Between Heaven and Earth by Robert Orsi. The book is only 200 pages but I wasn’t able to finish it until today. Eight months. In fairness, I’ve been very, very busy.
I was only able to take one class with Robert Orsi while I was at Harvard but I really enjoyed the opportunity to work with him. The course was a lecture and most professors I had for lecture wouldn’t even recognize my face. I had several conversations with Robert Orsi even after the course had ended.
But it wasn’t until reading his book that I realized what a bad-ass he is. If you’ve read some of my earlier blogs such as “Fuck Academia” you’ll notice I’ve become rather jaded towards the academy. Robert Orsi has paid his dues and now is bringing hammer blow criticism to the academic study of religion. It’s just awesome.
One of the first criticisms he brings up is the taboo about bringing your own religious beliefs into the work of a religious scholar. It’s never stated, but of course he’s right: scholars are traditionally supposed to be subjective by pretending they are beings totally incapable of religious experience.
This is ridiculous. Why do people become scholars of religion in the first place? If they really weren’t concerned with experiencing religion, they would be in a different field. Robert Orsi breaks character and admits that he was raised Italian Catholic but that his personal experience of Catholicism has been shaped by modernity and academia to the point where many Italian Catholics would call it a loss of faith. With that in mind, he asks how he can go about studying Catholicism in America. This not only makes logical sense, it makes the rest of the academy look stupid.
Robert Orsi also talks a lot about Presence–the idea that entities such as the saints or the Holy Spirit are literally and almost physically present. The academy seems to assume you can study a religious tradition while patronizingly disavowing their belief in presence. And that this makes for a good, objective study.
Orsi wrestles with this problem when he describes his notes on studying Saint Jude (patron saint of hopeless causes) in Chicago. He admits that he cannot really understand the practice of praying to Saint Jude as he has never done it. Furthermore, he is incapable of doing it because of his own religious experience–see how that becomes relevant? What he decided to do was somewhat shocking: in an empty office he verbally recited his desires out loud. He did not direct these desires to anyone because he could not believe there was anyone to hear it. Orsi described this ritual as an analog: the closest he could come to experiencing the cult of St. Jude. He admits this is a poor substitute, but short of the Vulcan Mind Meld, what else can be done?
If a grad student did an analog ritual, the academy would come down on them with a ton of bricks for being subjective and breaking the rules. But Orsi has paid his dues and is beyond punishment. Fucking brilliant!
Finally, Orsi shows how this supposed subjectivity has been used by the academy to construct “Religion” as the religious modality of the Protestant middle class: it is mental rather that physical, deals with abstract essences rather personal entities, and is strictly monotheistic with no room for saints, ancestors, etc. By contrast, anything that cannot be fit into this modality: the religious modalities of Catholics, African-Americans, immigrants, and the lower class is lesser “religion.”
Orsi shows how this suppression was first carried out very deliberately and now is continued by the academic tradition.
Anyone in the academy who attempts to describe these other religious modalities in their own terms: through physical experience, emotional experience, the experience of Presence, etc. is labeled as subjective, journalistic or theological.
I took deep satisfaction from Orsi’s criticism as these terms are exactly the ones that are used to make young academics toe-the-line. When I wrote my thesis at Hampshire I was told that it was too theological. When I submitted some of my work to a journal last year I was told it was journalistic. They thought my article was too journalistic for their journal? Academia is a constant scramble to find something critical to say and the accusation of being journalistic is always within reach.
I’m sure I’ve misread Orsi a little bit here–that tends to happen when it takes you eight months to read a book. But this book really made him one of my personal heroes. Excelsior.
