Andrew Buckser

SECULARIZATION, RELIGIOSITY, AND THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF JEWRY

This paper explores recent anthropological studies of Jewish culture and their implications for our understanding of Jewish secularization. Studies of Jewish secularization have often depicted the process in black and white terms, as a choice between the survival and the dissolution of the Jewish people. Anthropological research, by contrast, has demonstrated a great deal of variability in the meaning, development, and outcomes of the concept. The paper focuses on three emerging themes in anthropological studies of secularization: the role of human agency, the embodiment of religious action, and the cultural construction of secularism. Drawing on recent ethnographies of Jewish communities, the paper argues that these approaches allow a much richer understanding of the process of Jewish secularization, as well as a more complex and optimistic vision of its outcome. The study of Jewish religious change also carries implications for secularization theory more broadly.

Religion and Spans of Ambiguity on a Danish Island

Over the past half century, northern Europe has seen a striking decline of belief in God and the supernatural. Yet the churches there have not died, and in some cases they remain strong and active. Whence does the vitality of these churches derive, if belief has eroded ? This paper examines one such church, an independent Lutheran congregation in northwestern Denmark. It suggests that the churchs importance stems from its span of ambiguity, the broad range of meanings which it expresses in its local context. Its ability to integrate meanings from a variety of social arenas gives it a powerful role in a rapidly changing society. The paper argues that religious systems generally have an unusual capacity for such expression and integration. It is the extent to which they can maintain their spans of ambiguity, rather than the extent to which they can maintain belief, which accounts for their persistence or decline

The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity

forced to break with kinship ties and to sell their labor. This development should have meant the end to the cooperative/communal agricultural system. Evidence shows, however, that this system was in place at the time of U.S. annexation in 1846. How could it have survived? Via the Brotherhood. Carroll hypothesizes that the Brotherhood was born in the midst of this kin-based crisis. In fact, its popularity was a response to that crisis: “[Penitente] internal organization and the imagery their rituals evoked were well suited to establishing and stabilizing the male-to-male authority relations” (p. 119). Hence, the movement was able to temper in pre-annexation New Mexico the damaging side-effects of the Bourbon Reforms and permit the continuation of cooperative/communal land use. However, with annexation, everything changed through Hispano dispossession: “By the early 1900s Hispano farmers had lost 80 percent of the land they had controlled at annexation” (p. 180). How could so much be lost and, according to Carroll, with so little resistance? It is here that the author introduces his most radical thesis: The Brotherhood with its emphasis on social disciplining and respect for authority gave rise to a Hispano male personality type that “facilitated the very domination that was depriving them of their land” (p. 188). It did so through a legitimization of and cooperation with Anglo designs. Hence he posits the surprising conclusion of an elective affinity between a Penitente-engendered personality type and U.S. expansionism. The Brotherhood that had stabilized Hispano society in pre-annexation New Mexico, in post-annexation years facilitated its dismantling. In sum, Carroll’s multifaceted recounting of Hispano Catholicism in historic New Mexico is well written and compelling. Indeed, all things were not as “we thought they were.” Sociologist of religion and those interested in Southwestern historiography would benefit from this book’s insights. One methodological limitation is the confidence that the reader must place in the author in order to trust his accounting. For he proposes a “gestalt shift” (p. 88) in the way previous researchers perceived the data, and he adds: “I can only say that the story I am about to tell is at least as consistent with the available historical evidence as the more familiar stories you may already have heard about New Mexico” (p. 4). Hence, in the end, it is a tossup. However, this reader enthusiastically grants Carroll the benefit of the doubt.