Jens Kreinath

Discursive Formation, Ethnographic Encounter, Photographic Evidence: The Centenary of Durkheim's Basic Forms of Religious Life and the Anthropological Study of Australian Aboriginal Religion in His Time

Historical research on the work of Émile Durkheim has often been confined to textual analysis aiming to reconstruct his research in the context of anthropological discourses at the turn of the 20th century. As radical changes in the visual culture of the late 19th century shaped the formation of anthropology as an academic discipline, the ambition of this article is to elaborate the ways Durkheims use of ethnographic data and visual material formed the foundation of the theoretical and methodological design of his approach to religion. By tracing features in his Basic Forms that emphasize visual material and prioritize religious practice, I submit that the photographic evidence given in Spencer and Gillens account of Aboriginal religion allowed Durkheim to theorize religion primarily through ritual. Photography, as a visual means of representation, enhanced the study of religion by focusing on ritual without necessarily demanding consideration of its mythical narratives and cosmological accounts. Based on a thorough analysis of his Basic Forms, this article argues that Durkheim used the photographs of the Aborigines of Central Australia systematically and that this use of photographs consequently guided his ethnographic depiction and his selection of theoretical concepts and methodological procedures.

Introduction: Politics of faith in Asia: Local and global perspectives of Christianity in Asia

This collection of papers is the result of research presented at the 2010 meeting of the American Academy of Religion in Atlanta, Georgia, sponsored by the Comparative Studies of Religion section. The set of papers resulting from the panel, Politics of Faith in Asia: Local and Global Perspectives of Christianity in Asia, presents findings from a diverse array of cultural areas and historical contexts across the Asian continent. All of these are connected by a focus on the intersection of Christianity and the political organisation in Asian societies. Although each paper focuses primarily on the continued encounter of Protestant, Evangelical Christianity and local religions, the definition and scope of the political milieu differ considerably. Moving from local communities in a small Indian town, through the growing global connections of religious groups in the Philippines, to the global and national politics of South Korea, the set addresses a multitude of political levels, be they governmental or the processes of everyday interactions.

Theorizing Rituals, Volume 2: Annotated Bibliography of Ritual Theory, 1966-2005

Volume two of Theorizing Rituals mainly consists of an annotated bibliography of more than 400 items covering those books, edited volumes and essays that are considered most relevant for the field of ritual theory.

Marriage, Kinship, and Transnational Identity: The “Community of the House” of the Turkish Alawis/Nusairis in Germany

of the Costa Rican resorts, as reported by fellow tourists, attests to the fact that the environments do not naturally indicate what a Euro-American, upper-middle-class, heterosexual male would find optimal with regard to developing their ecological potential. This, in Fletcher’s view, is why ecotourism, despite its foregrounding of natural environmental features, remains a culturally specific, rather than a purely economic and universally human, enterprise. Fletcher’s theoretical agenda is, by his own admission, ambitious. He adopts a Marxian perspective in order to analyze how ecotourism’s capitalist economy structures its social relations and worldviews. He employs a Foucauldian approach to analyze ecotourism’s environmentally oriented form of governmentality (“environmentality”). He also moves beyond these macro-oriented frameworks to address the “inner worlds” and individual behaviors of ecotourists, relying on the theories of Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Lacan in this regard. Bourdieu’s role is by far the more prominent. Bourdieu’s theory of habitus is employed to understand how capitalism’s larger social milieu translates itself into adventurous wilderness activity. Habitus, for Fletcher, constitutes the bridge connecting individual and (capitalist) social life, inner and outer symbolic/psychic worlds, and macro/global and micro/local events and processes. The human body is conceived as a “battleground” where capitalist forces meet environmental circumstances so as to determine how ecotourism is constituted as a meaningful subjective and cultural experience. Fletcher asserts, “I find that the anxiety and discontent identified as the inspiration for ecotourism may be provoked less by the social structure itself than by the particular habitus ecotourists bring to their experience of this society.” Habitus enables Fletcher to explain the central role bodily practices play in adventure ecotourism as being the consequence of social forces rather than innate personality traits—one of his main theoretical points. Fletcher’s Marxist/Foucauldian/Lacanian/Bourdieu-ian theoretical framework is intended to be comprehensive and to move toward a “unified theory” of ecotourism. However, its greatest strength—the combined breadth and depth of its explanatory power—is also its most problematic aspect from an ethnographic point of view. Complex as it is, it serves in many chapters to oversimplify the cultural realities in situ, reducing the social relations and subjective experiences at issue to just-so characterizations. This is particularly true in the early chapters that focus on why ecotourism subjects romanticize wilderness landscapes and embody the masculine, middle-class, and countercultural touristic subject positions that they do. Ethnography takes a back seat to theory as Fletcher gives priority to explaining the large-scale capitalist milieu rather than to analyzing the practices ecotourists cultivate. Ultimately, the habitus that Fletcher argues is so vital to his analysis—that which enables the paddling of a kayak through a class 5 rapid, or the descent on skis off the top of a Himalayan peak—is largely missing from his ethnographic record. Since the core characteristics of the athletic regimes enacted are nowhere clearly described, the heart of the experience that would be most representative of the distinctive subject position embodied is left all but invisible. The tantalizing vignettes of ecotouristic exploits Fletcher often uses to begin the narratives of various chapters do not succeed in illuminating the structure of the activities on which so much, in theory, depends; neither do the reports of general trends and values, gained from Fletcher’s albeit wide-ranging methods of investigation. The limits of his ethnographic analysis force Fletcher to remain at a surface level of cultural interpretation, even while his political-economic observations are accurate and finely tuned. He argues that adventure ecotourism’s cultural significance is its provision of short-term experiences of relief and escape, but also heroic training measures, in relation to the anxieties, ambivalence, restlessness, and risk taking that capitalism nowadays inevitably entails—at least as white-collar, North American male subjects cope with it. These temporary recuperative experiences (“fixes”) enable endless processes of capital accumulation through the marketing of bodily practices and their always-already-ultimately-unsatisfying subjective effects. If closer attention had been given to the bodily-environmental processes at play, Fletcher might have advanced significantly the understanding of the structures that give culturally specific human form to postindustrial feelings of desire, discontent, transcendence, and euphoric virtuosity (Csikszentmihalyi’s “flow”). He certainly possesses the bodily knowledge/power to articulate and analyze them. However, such an investigation must await future research, which Fletcher indicates is in the works. Hopefully, Fletcher will then be able to deliver fully on the admittedly great promise his theory portends.

Marriage, Kinship, and Transnational Identity: The “Community of the House” of the Turkish Alawis/Nusairis in GermanyDie “Gemeinschaft des Hauses”: Religion, Heiratsstrategien und transnationale Identität türkischer Alawi-/Nusairi-Migranten in Deutschland. [The “community of the house”: Religion, marriage strategies, and transnational identity of Turkish Alawi/Nusairi migrants in Germany]. By Laila Prager. Berlin: Lit, 2010.

of the Costa Rican resorts, as reported by fellow tourists, attests to the fact that the environments do not naturally indicate what a Euro-American, upper-middle-class, heterosexual male would find optimal with regard to developing their ecological potential. This, in Fletcher’s view, is why ecotourism, despite its foregrounding of natural environmental features, remains a culturally specific, rather than a purely economic and universally human, enterprise. Fletcher’s theoretical agenda is, by his own admission, ambitious. He adopts a Marxian perspective in order to analyze how ecotourism’s capitalist economy structures its social relations and worldviews. He employs a Foucauldian approach to analyze ecotourism’s environmentally oriented form of governmentality (“environmentality”). He also moves beyond these macro-oriented frameworks to address the “inner worlds” and individual behaviors of ecotourists, relying on the theories of Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Lacan in this regard. Bourdieu’s role is by far the more prominent. Bourdieu’s theory of habitus is employed to understand how capitalism’s larger social milieu translates itself into adventurous wilderness activity. Habitus, for Fletcher, constitutes the bridge connecting individual and (capitalist) social life, inner and outer symbolic/psychic worlds, and macro/global and micro/local events and processes. The human body is conceived as a “battleground” where capitalist forces meet environmental circumstances so as to determine how ecotourism is constituted as a meaningful subjective and cultural experience. Fletcher asserts, “I find that the anxiety and discontent identified as the inspiration for ecotourism may be provoked less by the social structure itself than by the particular habitus ecotourists bring to their experience of this society.” Habitus enables Fletcher to explain the central role bodily practices play in adventure ecotourism as being the consequence of social forces rather than innate personality traits—one of his main theoretical points. Fletcher’s Marxist/Foucauldian/Lacanian/Bourdieu-ian theoretical framework is intended to be comprehensive and to move toward a “unified theory” of ecotourism. However, its greatest strength—the combined breadth and depth of its explanatory power—is also its most problematic aspect from an ethnographic point of view. Complex as it is, it serves in many chapters to oversimplify the cultural realities in situ, reducing the social relations and subjective experiences at issue to just-so characterizations. This is particularly true in the early chapters that focus on why ecotourism subjects romanticize wilderness landscapes and embody the masculine, middle-class, and countercultural touristic subject positions that they do. Ethnography takes a back seat to theory as Fletcher gives priority to explaining the large-scale capitalist milieu rather than to analyzing the practices ecotourists cultivate. Ultimately, the habitus that Fletcher argues is so vital to his analysis—that which enables the paddling of a kayak through a class 5 rapid, or the descent on skis off the top of a Himalayan peak—is largely missing from his ethnographic record. Since the core characteristics of the athletic regimes enacted are nowhere clearly described, the heart of the experience that would be most representative of the distinctive subject position embodied is left all but invisible. The tantalizing vignettes of ecotouristic exploits Fletcher often uses to begin the narratives of various chapters do not succeed in illuminating the structure of the activities on which so much, in theory, depends; neither do the reports of general trends and values, gained from Fletcher’s albeit wide-ranging methods of investigation. The limits of his ethnographic analysis force Fletcher to remain at a surface level of cultural interpretation, even while his political-economic observations are accurate and finely tuned. He argues that adventure ecotourism’s cultural significance is its provision of short-term experiences of relief and escape, but also heroic training measures, in relation to the anxieties, ambivalence, restlessness, and risk taking that capitalism nowadays inevitably entails—at least as white-collar, North American male subjects cope with it. These temporary recuperative experiences (“fixes”) enable endless processes of capital accumulation through the marketing of bodily practices and their always-already-ultimately-unsatisfying subjective effects. If closer attention had been given to the bodily-environmental processes at play, Fletcher might have advanced significantly the understanding of the structures that give culturally specific human form to postindustrial feelings of desire, discontent, transcendence, and euphoric virtuosity (Csikszentmihalyi’s “flow”). He certainly possesses the bodily knowledge/power to articulate and analyze them. However, such an investigation must await future research, which Fletcher indicates is in the works. Hopefully, Fletcher will then be able to deliver fully on the admittedly great promise his theory portends.

Transformations of a ‘religious’ nation in a global world: Politics, Protestantism and ethnic identity in South Korea

In an increasingly globalised world, matters of national identity are no longer confined solely to domestic politics. This paper proposes that Christianity in South Korea is engaged in a mutually reinforcing relationship with the construction of Korean national identity, particularly concerning historical dynamics of both Westernisation and the formation of nationalism. In positioning the role of religion in the creation of a national image, the conflicts and contestations between religious groups will become politically effective. As actors in the political and religious field attempt to reflexively create an image of Korea that transcends national borders and anticipates to overcome domestic and ethnic divides, religion becomes more than an article of faith through its entanglement with national politics. By recognising the impact of Westernisation and its historical implications for this process, it becomes possible to approach the formation of Korean identity from a new angle by accounting for the efficacy of the self-reflexive image.

Of Death and Birth

This study is about the story and ritual of worship of a popular Tamil goddess, Icakkiyamman. Trained as an Indologist, Barbara Schuler did ethnographic fieldwork in 2002–2003 in Tamilnadu, southern India, to examine this ritual in its local context. Here she brings together the edition (and annotated translation) of the story of Icakkiyamman read during the performance of the ritual of the Velalas in Palavur, together with film documentation of some main parts of it. The first part of the book consists of the story of Icakkiyamman, where we read the complete story of Nili=Icakki as preserved in a main variant of the South Indian bow-song tradition (called villu pāt.u). The story is about the anger, vengeance and revenge of the goddess Icakkiyamman. Looking at earlier epochs and texts, Schuler traces the classical and popular traditions back to a common basis. After touching upon its genre, style and structure, she brings up some questions on the critical edition of the Icakkiyamman Kat.ai followed by its annotated translation. The second part gives a brief interpretation of the text, dealing with some of its main themes. In the third and last part, Schuler presents the context and performance of the ritual in the annual kot.t.ai festival held in spring to honor the goddess Icakki, during which local people read the story as presented in the film. According to the story as sung by a troupe, the goddess reacted with emotions of excitement and lust, taking the form of the possessed priest (pūcāri). In her interpretation, Schuler brings up a variety of topics, such as the name of the goddess, the people’s belief in her power, and the local Icakki stories. Subsequently Schuler reflects on her own first encounter with Icakki before giving an ethnographic account of her field experiences and elaborating on some theoretical perspectives on ritual in general. In ‘‘The Ritual System Observed,’’ Schuler outlines the different sequences of the ritual and shows how the ritual embodies the actions of the goddess, leading to blessings for childbirth. Schuler then returns to the main topic of this book, the relation between the text and the ritual, before summarizing the structure of the book in her conclusion. While the appendices primarily relate to the story and ritual, Appendix A is worth mentioning insofar as it gives a tabular summary Visual Anthropology, 24: 281–283, 2011 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0894-9468 print=1545-5920 online DOI: 10.1080/08949468.2010.509000

Ideologues of Martyrdom in Postwar Iran and the Culture of Mourning the Dead

ferred by the Maya, accounting for only 25% of the landscape but more than 80% of their settlements (Ford, Clarke, and Raines 2009:511). When these results were compared with those for arable lands of the Green Revolution model (Jenkin et al. 1976), they reveal the difference: the cultivable land of the Maya is not the arable land of Europeans (Ford, Clarke, and Raines 2009:512). So as we seek our ultimate answers, we must be cautious of our most basic assumptions. The archeology of environmental change is a knotty problem. A decade ago, a new nonprofit named Exploring Solutions Past (http://espmaya.org/) was formed with the explicit design of educating future generations on the remarkable legacies of our heritage. This volume shows the potential breadth of this innovative concept. Traditional knowledge palpably shaped North Atlantic development, African human-wildlife experience, Near Eastern neutrality of degradation, and Maya interactions with the climate, providing comparative histories that explore solutions past. By demonstrating our cocreative role in socionatural systems now and in ancient times, we gain the opportunity to apply this important knowledge to the future. While not wholly unified in approach and variably using the new vocabulary introduced at the outset, the authors of this collected volume successfully establish the interactive qualities of socionatural systems. The diversity of environmental contexts and the themes that link the discussions will provoke debate and encourage negotiations across disciplines. These authors have opened an important path to bring archaeology into the current environmental debate, as germane today as it was throughout prehistory. What we need now is our entree into the decision-making arena to share the news.

Imagining Religious WeepingHoly Tears: Weeping in the Religious Imagination. Edited by KimberleyChristine Patton and JohnStratton Hawley. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005. 317 pp.

In assembling 14 essays written by scholars of religion, Holy Tears aims to venture into a new field of research: the comparative study of weeping in the religious imagination. The editors’ goal is twofold: (1) to examine “in social and historical context the role played by tears, weeping, and lamentation in the life of religion” and (2) to chart “theoretical grounds for approaching the category of weeping in the comparative and historical study of religion” (p. 4). They summarize the thematic issues of this volume as follows: “Weeping: Spontaneous vs. Scripted; Private vs. Public,” “Ritual Weeping as Social or Existential Protest,” “The Genders of Weeping,” “Absence and Presence,” “Weeping as Generation of Water,” “Weeping vs. Crying,” and “The Weeping of God.” Although some of these issues are addressed in the subsequent essays, others, such as “the weeping of god” and whether weeping can be considered a coded language serving communicative purposes, receive little or no attention. In addition, the thematic issues are not conceptually related, and, as a consequence, the articles seem to follow an arbitrary order. This would be excusable if the aim of the volume were not so ambitious, but abstract schematics are not suitable for establishing or organizing a field of research in an analytically responsible or heuristically useful way. The loose order and unexplained selection of essays indicate a conviction that historically grounded, comparatively motivated, and theologically inspired essays will all fit well within a diffuse field of religious studies. In “The Poetics and Politics of Ritualized Weeping in Early and Medieval Japan” (pp. 25–51), Gary L. Ebersole uses historical analyses of three textual examples to raise questions about the use of the comparative method in the study of tears. He takes ritualized weeping as “a culturally choreographed act, stylized, not spontaneous, expression of emotion” (p. 25) and argues that “we must pay attention to both the weeper and the intended audience for these affective displays” (p. 26) In “Productive Tears: Weeping Speech, Water, and the Underworld in the Mexica Tradition” (pp. 52–66), Kay A. Read shows how tears can be seen as generating “a carefully formed, nonverbal, but nevertheless noisy language that was intended to both express emotion and create or recreate morally good order on a number of cosmic and human levels” (p. 59). In “‘Why Do Your Eyes Not Run Like a River?’ Ritual Tears in Ancient and Modern Greek Funerary Traditions” (pp. 67–82), Gay O. Lynch addresses the contribution of tears to the cultivation and dissemination of aesthetic form and creativity. In “‘Sealing the Book with Tears’: Divine Weeping on Mount Nebo and in the Warsaw Ghetto” (pp. 83–93), Nehemia Polen introduces the motive of the weeping god and shows how this motive was seen shortly before the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto. In “The Gopis’ Tears” (pp. 94–111), John S. Hawley postulates that religious tears are enacted, communicated, gendered, and frequently about death and concludes from the Hindu poetic material under consideration that tears are first and foremost “markers of transcendence” (p. 110). In “Hsuan-tsang’s Encounter with the Buddha: A Cloud of Philosophy in a Drop of Tears” (pp. 112–31), Malcolm D. Eckel argues that it was the landscape that shaped the pilgrim’s understanding of Buddha and that his tears are to be seen as “the deepest emotional response” of “a bodhisattva’s encounter with the vision of the reality represented by the Buddha” (p. 127). In “Weeping in Classical Sufism” (pp. 132–44), William C. Chittick argues that the Qur’ān conceives weeping as “the natural response to the human awareness of distance from the Creator” (p. 138). Amy Bard, in “‘No Power of Speech Remains’: Tears and Transformation in South Asian Majlis Poetry” (pp. 145–64) explores ritual weeping as “a transformative process” in a Shi‘i mourning assembly and addresses the question “how crying can concretize feelings and align multiple perspectives and complex emotional claims” (p. 145) In “Ekun Iyawo: Bridal Tears in Marriage Rites of Passage among the Oyo-Yoruba of Nigeria” (pp. 165–77), Jakob K. Olupona and Sola Ajibade argue that performance of the ekun iyawo ritual provides the bride an avenue for expressing her “deep emotions at the time of marriage” (p. 165) and at the same time enables the playing out of the cultural and social issues surrounding her new role and reflection on her preparation for it (p. 173). In “A Love for All Seasons: Weeping in Jewish Sources” (pp. 178–200), Herbert W. Basser explores “the tension between tears as a ritual expression of remorse and loss that is culturally regulated and tears as personal grief” (p. 180). In “‘Pray with Tears and Your Request Will Find a Hearing’: On the Iconology of the Magdalene’s Tears” (pp. 201–28), Diane Apostolos-Cappadona argues that an analysis of the iconography of Mary Magdalene as weeper through the religious gaze may bring one closer to the believed reality of earlier Christian understandings. In “Tears and Screaming: Weeping in the Spirituality of Margery Kempe” (pp. 229–41), Santha Bhattacharji looks at the medieval Western tradition of compassionate religious weeping through the figure of a fifteenthcentury English mystic and argues that “it is, paradoxically, not the absence of the physical Christ through his human death that provokes her mourning and weeping but fleeting glimpses of his presence, mediated to her by other physical means: crucifixes, peoples, animals, events” (p. 237). “‘An Obscure Matter’: The Mystery of Tears in Orthodox Spirituality” (pp. 242–54) by Kallistos Ware is about “the mystery of weeping” in Eastern Christian sources and functions as an introduction to the concluding essay, “‘Howl, Weep and