In the Summer of 2004 I conducted research at the Pitt Rivers Museum Research Centre and the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford. My research was in response to the fact that scholars of religion have recently begun to look at themselves in the mirror in order to come to terms with their own vocabularies of analysis. The conversation about the cultural history of the study of religion is now in full swing as evidenced by the recent publication of articles, books, and conferences dedicated to sustained reflection on the "making" of the discipline.. Although the formation of the category of "religion" is the most obvious place to start this revisionist project, there remain a host of subsidiary categories—fetishism, mysticism, and survivals to name only a few—that are ripe for thick historicization. I am currently excavating one of the most haunted epistemological sites in the field of Religious studies—the category of culture. I am particularly interested in how the materials of American and English religious history offer new perspectives upon the formation of the culture  concept in the nineteenth century.

My ongoing research focuses on various sites in which the culture concept emerged within antebellum America—the anthropological writings of Lewis Henry Morgan, the feminist theologizing of Spiritualist mediums, Congregationalist minister Horace Bushnell’s ideas of "unconscious influence," the novels of Herman Melville, and the ethnological critiques of Frederick Douglass and William Welles Brown. In the summer of 2004 I plan to begin the process of looking at two parallel figures within nineteenth-century English history. In addition to charting the transatlantic histories of Transcendentalism, Spiritualism, and Theosophy, each integral to the emergence of culture as a metaphysical concept, I specifically plan to focus on (1) the life and letters of anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor, founder of the "science of culture," and (2) the life and work of Romantic landscape artist J.M.W. Turner. I am interested in exploring the degree to which personal religious concerns and religious discourses affected their respective projects of representing the "atmosphere" of modernity.

Bringing the culture concept under the purview of American and English religious history allows for a more fruitful comparison between the expression of the culture concept in early anthropology and other works such as Melville’s Moby-Dick and Turner’s haunted depictions of industrialization. If understood as alternative forms of religious inquiry into the numinous forces of social existence, one can better discern the similarities, but more importantly, the different assumptions various nineteenth-century figures brought to their investigations and the different kinds of questions they asked as a result. Through such thick historicization, one may begin not only to confront the religious assumptions buried within different vocabularies of cultural analysis, but also to appreciate the degree to which the very notion of culture is seeped in the residue of divinity, for better or for worse.

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Short Bibliography of Recent Works on the Cultural Historyof the Study of Religion and Theoretical Precursors

Asad, Talal. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.

Lardas, John. Specters of Moby-Dick: A Particular History of Cultural Metaphysics in America. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of California, Santa Barbara, 2003.

McCutcheon, Russell T. Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Orsi, Robert A. "Snakes Alive: Resituating the Moral in the Study of Religion." In Women, Gender, Religion: A Reader, edited by Elizabeth A. Castelli with the assistance of Rosamond C. Rodman, 98-118. New York: Palgrave, 2001.

Said, Edward. W. "Secular Criticism." Raritan 2 (Winter 1983): 1-26.

Schmidt, Leigh Eric. "The Making of Modern Mysticism." Journal of the American Academy of Religion 71:2 (June 2003): 273-302.

Smith, Jonathan Z. "Manna, Mana Everywhere and . . ." In Radical Interpretation in Religion, edited by Nancy K. Frankenberry, 188-212. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Taves, Ann. Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.

SEE, ALSO:

Reflections on the Study of Religion: A Conference in Honor of John F. Wilson
Friday, October 24th-Saturday, October 25th, 2003
Princeton University, Princeton, NJ

Cultural History of the Study of Religion Consultation, Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion. The Politics of Making "Religion" in the U.S. November 24, 2003. Atlanta, GA