In academic circles, we have a half-joking-but-not-really saying: “All Research Is Me-Search,” and Leigh Cowart’s new book has taken that dictum to titanic new heights and visceral, evocative depths.
Cowart is a former ballet dancer, a biologist who researched Pteronotus bats in the sweltering jungles of Costa Rica, and a self-described “high-sensation-seeking masochist.” They wrote this book to explore why they were like this, and whether their reasons matched up with those of so many other people who engage is painful activities of their own volition, whether for the pain itself, or the reward afterward. Full disclosure: Leigh is also my friend, but even if they weren’t, this book would have fascinated and engrossed me.
Hurts So Good is science journalism from a scientist-who-is-also-a-journalist, which means that the text is very careful in who and what it sources, citing its references, and indexing terms to be easily found and cross-referenced, while also bringing that data into clear, accessible focus. In that way, it has something for specialists and non-specialists, alike. But this book is also a memoir, and an interior exploration of one person’s relationship to pain, pleasure, and— not to sound too lofty about it— the whole human race.
The extraordinarily personal grounding of Hurts So Good is what allows this text to be more than merely exploitative voyeurism— though as the text describes, exploitative voyeurism might not necessarily be a deal-breaker for many of its subjects; just so long as they had control over when and how it proceeds and ends. And that is something Cowart makes sure to return to, again and again and again, turning it around to examine its nuances and infinitely fuzzy fractaled edges: The difference between pain that we instigate, pain that we can control, pain we know will end, pain that will have a reward, pain we can stop when and how we want… And pain that is enforced on us.
In Ras Michael Brown’s African-Atlantic Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry Brown wants to talk about the history of the cultural and spiritual practices of African descendants in the American south. To do this, he traces discusses the transport of central, western, and west-central African captives to South Carolina in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,finally, lightly touching on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Brown explores how these African peoples brought, maintained, and transmitted their understandings of spiritual relationships between the physical land of the living and the spiritual land of the dead, and from there how the notions of the African simbi spirits translated through a particular region of South Carolina.
In Kelly Oliver’s The Colonization of Psychic Space, she constructs and argues for a new theory of subjectivity and individuation—one predicated on a radical forgiveness born of interrelationality and reconciliation between self and culture. Oliver argues that we have neglected to fully explore exactly how sublimation functions in the creation of the self,saying that oppression leads to a unique form of alienation which never fully allows the oppressed to learn to sublimate—to translate their bodily impulses into articulated modes of communication—and so they cannot become a full individual, only ever struggling against their place in society, never fully reconciling with it.
These works are very different, so obviously, to achieve their goals, Brown and Oliver lean on distinct tools,methodologies, and sources. Brown focuses on the techniques of religious studies as he examines a religious history: historiography, anthropology, sociology, and linguistic and narrative analysis. He explores the written records and first person accounts of enslaved peoples and their captors, as well as the contextualizing historical documents of Black liberation theorists who were contemporary to the time frame he discusses. Oliver’s project is one of social psychology, and she explores it through the lenses of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis,social construction theory, Hegelian dialectic, and the works of Franz Fanon. She is looking to build psycho-social analysis that takes both the social and the individual into account, fundamentally asking the question “How do we belong to the social as singular?”
Scott Midson’s Cyborg Theology and Kathleen Richardson’s An Anthropology of Robots and AI both trace histories of technology and human-machine interactions, and both make use of fictional narratives as well as other theoretical techniques. The goal of Midson’s book is to put forward a new understanding of what it means to be human, an understanding to supplant the myth of a perfect “Edenic” state and the various disciplines’ dichotomous oppositions of “human” and “other.” This new understanding, Midson says, exists at the intersection of technological, theological, and ecological contexts,and he argues that an understanding of the conceptual category of the cyborg can allow us to understand this assemblage in a new way.
That is, all of the categories of “human,” “animal,” “technological,” “natural,” and more are far more porous than people tend to admit and their boundaries should be challenged; this understanding of the cyborg gives us the tools to do so. Richardson, on the other hand, seeks to argue that what it means to be human has been devalued by the drive to render human capacities and likenesses into machines, and that this drive arises from the male-dominated and otherwise socialized spaces in which these systems are created. The more we elide the distinction between the human and the machine, the more we will harm human beings and human relationships.
Midson’s training is in theology and religious studies, and so it’s no real surprise that he primarily uses theological exegesis (and specifically an exegesis of Genesis creation stories), but he also deploys the tools of cyborg anthropology (specifically Donna Haraway’s 1991 work on cyborgs), sociology, anthropology, and comparative religious studies. He engages in interdisciplinary narrative analysis and comparison,exploring the themes from several pieces of speculative fiction media and the writings of multiple theorists from several disciplines.
An Eye for Odin? Divine Role-Playing inthe Age of Sutton Hoo Neil Price & Paul Mortimer This paper presents some new observations concerning the construction of the Sutton Hoo helmet, as a point of entry to a wider discussion of pre-Christian religious and ideological links across Scandinavia. It will be argued that in certain circumstances and locations, such as the firelit interior of the…
My hot take is that it’s cartoonishly evil how one of the core pillars of christianity is that their goal is to convert the entire world & they explicitly state this very frequently & everybody’s just like yeah that’s normal
Fantasy story where The Empire is very polite about their intentions when they’re not actively literally mass-murdering people if they refuse to join them so nobody questions it
The book gets criticized for being unrealistic while the united states of america exists
Isn’t that every religions goal? Correct me if I’m wrong but doesn’t every religion think to some extent that everyone should be a part of their religion?
No. Most religions don’t. It’s just that the ones people are most likely to be familiar with, namely xtianity and Islam, are “universal” religions, meaning they proselytise. It makes sense that these would become the biggest and most well-known religions, because of this very thing – religion was used as an excuse/justification for imperialism – and so people often assume that’s just what religion is, but it’s not true for really most of the religions of the world.
Historically, polytheistic cultures, upon encountering other polytheistic cultures, would just assume that those gods are those people’s local gods and so on. It wasn’t a threat to them. But even among monotheistic religions, it’s really mostly just xtianity and Islam. Judaism does not care about making non-Jews Jewish; there are some basic moral principles Judaism expects non-Jews to adhere to, like not murdering, but in orthodox Judaism it is still customary to turn away potential converts three times before even considering them. The Druze religion is even more tightly closed. In order to be considered Druze, both of your parents must be Druze, and conversion and proselytism have been expressly forbidden for almost a thousand years. I’m not sure what the Bahá’í view on proselytism is, but they generally believe that the other world religions have the same core truths.
Many, probably most by number, world religions are ethnoreligions, not universal religions. That means that religion and culture are tied together. Judaism and the Druze religion are examples of ethnoreligions. That is why a person can be, say, an atheist Jew. Most indigenous/folk religions don’t care about what other groups believe and have no interest in making other people outside their culture conform to their beliefs. By number of religions, the idea that you hold an absolute truth that you must make other people believe (and the idea that you must do this because if you don’t they will not be “saved” and will suffer punishment) is very uncommon. It’s just that this belief has enabled a small handful of religions to dominate through colonialism and war and so those are the ones people think of when they think about “what religion is.”
I encourage you to read about indigenous/folk religions to understand this more. Here is a list of ethnic religions, to see the sheer number (and this is not necessarily complete, because there is some argument about terms like folk religion vs ethnoreligion vs indigenous religion and so on). I appreciate the politeness of the question, because there are a LOT of ex-evangelical atheists (or people who grew up in what we call “cultural xtianity”: you may not be religious yourself, but you grew up in a society that was heavily xtian, had xtian holidays as the mainstream, and absorbed xtian values/philosophies as part of cultural norms, and because this all seems normal to you, you have a blind spot, because it’s hard to see our own culture from inside, especially when it’s the majority) who are very keen to disparage all religions as being identical to the brand of fundamentalist xtianity they are familiar with, and it’s a racist and harmful position that they are VERY reluctant to give up. Because a lot of these religions are ethnoreligions and inseparable from culture, wanting to eradicate all religious practice/belief is the same as cultural genocide. It’s important to understand that A. you have this blind spot, and B. that most religions are not like xtianity, and religion is not synonymous with right-wing politics, homophobia, sexism, violence, controlling rules etc.
Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism are the only missionary religions that became powerful enough to exert significant political control, and once a religion can do that it tends to get more aggressive about proselytization and conversion, but Buddhism allows for syncretization in a way that Christianity and Islam don’t and generally functions very differently from both (although persecution of non-Buddhists by Buddhists is a thing). Basically you generally don’t get the goal “convert the entire world” until it looks like you might be able to (or at least your corner of it).
There’s plenty of missionary religions out there and I’d imagine most of them have the potential to start wanting to take over the world even if they don’t now.
normal-horoscopes talking shit about the (very much real and historically important late Classical pagan) idea of gods being inerrant and the bad things they do in myths being allegories that have to be interpreted through complex exegesis, and all the hellenics in the notes shocked and appalled that anyone would think something like that and calling them all Christians forced the following into my head:
virgin þorraborinn: learning about classical philosophy in hope of ultimately contributing to movements that undermine and mitigate the damage it’s caused
My brain is not engaging because I’ve just finished night shifts this morning and have had like 3 hours of sleep. May I get an incredibly dumbed down version so I can have a basic understanding of what’s being said?
Beginning already in pre-Christian times, an important belief for interpreting Greek and Roman mythology was that, while the myths depict the gods doing a lot of morally reprehensible things, in real life the gods can’t do anything wrong, so those myths are depicting things allegorically.
normal-horoscopes made a post making fun of this idea. I agree with normal-horoscopes about it but from reading that post and the responses to it, one would get the impression that this is a recent idea invented by ex-Christian converts to paganism. It’s not, it’s an idea from before 0 AD. It’s from a much later period than a lot of myths, but many of the philosophers who upheld it are also the interlocutors of earlier ideas.
I was surprised that so few people knew this because I have always assumed that anyone who engages with Hellenism or Religio Romana would at least be aware of this idea and the philosophers who upheld it, as it includes some of the most important philosophers in the so-called “western canon.” I have difficulty comprehending worshiping Greek or Roman gods without also learning about classical philosophy, even if it’s to disagree with what’s being said. I don’t even worship Greek or Roman gods, and even I feel compelled to learn about Classical philosophy. In fact, I have often wondered whether there are Hellenics out there now developing theology against ideas like this and whether their projects have anything in common with mine and whether we can learn from each other. The impression that I got from that post, which is admittedly very shallow, is that most pagans just completely ignore all of this and/or don’t know it exists and I wish that could be me.
Okay, so I keep seeing pagan and witchcraft posts talking about closed traditions (usually referring to Judaism but sometimes to indigenous religions). So, what’s an example of an open tradition?
That is definitely a sensitive and controversial topic. Many practicioners feel that the neopagan revivals of dead religious traditions, like Hellenism, are open in their modern revival context, but that’s certainly not a universal position. There is also disagreement on what counts as closed; Christianity might be considered open because it is a universalizing religion, for instance, or closed because certain rituals are only open to the initiated (i.e. the baptized). Not sure if anyone has studied these terms in an academic context.
So, genuine question, but wouldn’t it make more sense to talk about particular practices within traditions as being open or closed? It seems reductive to declare entire traditions to be “open” or “closed” to me.
More specifically, I guess I can imagine a full tradition that could be fully closed off to non-initiates, but I have a very hard time identifying any group that is totally and unambiguously open - maybe Quakers and Unitarians?
As I understand it Judaism is called closed because you cannot convert to it if you’re a gentile. Because it’s an ethno-faith. If you’re not a Jew you can’t practice it.
But even that isn’t wholly true because there are sects of Judaism that allow it. I’ve heard practicing Jews both be very passionate about the fact that gentiles aren’t allowed and I’ve also heard the opposite so idk.
i thought there were provisions in the OT for a gentile to become a Jew. like circumcision.
There are, and most Jewish groups, even haredi (ultra-orthodox) ones, accept converts. A handful don’t usually for reasons specific to their community.
Okay, so I keep seeing pagan and witchcraft posts talking about closed traditions (usually referring to Judaism but sometimes to indigenous religions). So, what’s an example of an open tradition?
That is definitely a sensitive and controversial topic. Many practicioners feel that the neopagan revivals of dead religious traditions, like Hellenism, are open in their modern revival context, but that’s certainly not a universal position. There is also disagreement on what counts as closed; Christianity might be considered open because it is a universalizing religion, for instance, or closed because certain rituals are only open to the initiated (i.e. the baptized). Not sure if anyone has studied these terms in an academic context.
Okay, so I keep seeing pagan and witchcraft posts talking about closed traditions (usually referring to Judaism but sometimes to indigenous religions). So, what’s an example of an open tradition?
I just… there are multiple religious traditions that Islam draws on… none of which are Hinduism. I mean… I guess you could make a case for the proto-Indo-Aryan religious base that Zoroastrianism and Hinduism share???
And Hindu and Muslim practices and theologies, while obviously syncretizible (hence Sikhism) are also not even sort of similar.
I find it quite ironic that it is the clergy and church workers who believe least in God. They know that the truth regarding his existence but decide to act as a medium through which God reaches the people and people reach God.
This thought came to me when a textbook talked about Freud’s criticism of religion: people use religion as a coping mechanism. If this is assumed to be true then that would mean that the Church workers know that it is all a façade but act as if it is true to keep their position etc.
Okay, let’s talk about this. Well, not so much the second part; if the upper clergy of a given religious organization know the religion is a scam, the edifice should come crumbling down to allow the dawn from on high to break upon us. But I doubt there’s any big conspiracy going on.
I’m curious as to why you think agreeing to act as a physical intermediary for God somehow means they somehow distrust in God?
There are, and likely always have been, secret nonbelievers among the clergy of most religions, who keep quiet out of fear (of persecution, loss of community/family, loss of a job, etc), greed, or belief in the “noble lie,” but I doubt it’s ever been anywhere close a majority of any given religion’s clerics. That said, going to seminary (or its equivalent) does challenge a lot of people’s faith, both because they get exposed to new ways of reading and understanding their scriptures and traditions and because ministry practicums expose you to an extent and depth of suffering (and failed/unanswered prayer) that most seminary students weren’t really aware of before.
As a side note, The Clergy Project is an organization that helps clergy who no longer believe transition into alternative careers.
I’ve seen this meme in a few different forms since the Paris attacks, but as clever as it seems, it is a false equivalent.
The KKK, in its three incarnations, is primarily about “White Supremacy”. Founded during Reconstruction out of anger over the results of the Civil War, the actions of the KKK were focused on intimidating the Black population–to prevent free Black people from enjoying the liberties granted to them. The group eventually faded only to emerge again in the early 20th century as immigration to the US swelled. This time Jews and Catholics (many from the poorer parts of Europe) were the target of their racism. As immigration slowed, so to did the influence of the KKK. They emerged for the third time in response to the Civil Rights movement. They pushed to maintain segregation; once again hoping to keep Black Americans from achieving equality.
For the KKK Christianity has always been subservient to racial ideology. They were not founded as a Christian group. They were/are a Nationalist movement focused on “preserving White rule” and protecting “the White race”. Christianity is read and understood in support of that basic premise. This is an important distinction to understand.
ISIS on the other hand, as difficult as it is to state without backlash, is primarily about Islam. Their every motivation is rooted in their theology. While the KKK’s actions were dictated by racialism, ISIS’s actions are dictated by their reading of Islam. As Graeme Woodexplains,
The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic. Yes, it has attracted psychopaths and adventure seekers, drawn largely from the disaffected populations of the Middle East and Europe. But the religion preached by its most ardent followers derives from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam.
Virtually every major decision and law promulgated by the Islamic State adheres to what it calls, in its press and pronouncements, and on its billboards, license plates, stationery, and coins, “the Prophetic methodology,” which means following the prophecy and example of Muhammad, in punctilious detail. Muslims can reject the Islamic State; nearly all do. But pretending that it isn’t actually a religious, millenarian group, with theology that must be understood to be combatted, has already led the United States to underestimate it and back foolish schemes to counter it. We’ll need to get acquainted with the Islamic State’s intellectual genealogy if we are to react in a way that will not strengthen it, but instead help it self-immolate in its own excessive zeal.
Please understand, I am not saying that simply because ISIS isIslamic, that allMuslims are terrorists. I am most definitely not!
What we have is a very difficult academic query: Would ISIS exist without Islam? Some say ‘yes’–their situation is such that Islam just happens to be the ideology they are using. If Islam didn’t exist they would use a different ideology. Others argue ‘no’. Either way, they are simply not comparable to the KKK. The KKK could most definitely exist without Christianity. They wouldn’t have to use a different ideology, because they are not rooted in Christianity. This comparison obscures what the KKK is really about.
What would a fair comparison be? Perhaps the Westboro Baptist Church, perhaps Bodu Bala Sena, perhaps individuals such as Yigal AmirorShelley Shannon. Religious extremism underpins these groups and individuals. They are motivated by their deeply-held religious beliefs.
In academic circles, we have a half-joking-but-not-really saying: “All Research Is Me-Search,” and Leigh Cowart’s new book has taken that dictum to titanic new heights and visceral, evocative depths.
Cowart is a former ballet dancer, a biologist who researched Pteronotus bats in the sweltering jungles of Costa Rica, and a self-described “high-sensation-seeking masochist.” They wrote this book to explore why they were like this, and whether their reasons matched up with those of so many other people who engage is painful activities of their own volition, whether for the pain itself, or the reward afterward. Full disclosure: Leigh is also my friend, but even if they weren’t, this book would have fascinated and engrossed me.
Hurts So Good is science journalism from a scientist-who-is-also-a-journalist, which means that the text is very careful in who and what it sources, citing its references, and indexing terms to be easily found and cross-referenced, while also bringing that data into clear, accessible focus. In that way, it has something for specialists and non-specialists, alike. But this book is also a memoir, and an interior exploration of one person’s relationship to pain, pleasure, and— not to sound too lofty about it— the whole human race.
The extraordinarily personal grounding of Hurts So Good is what allows this text to be more than merely exploitative voyeurism— though as the text describes, exploitative voyeurism might not necessarily be a deal-breaker for many of its subjects; just so long as they had control over when and how it proceeds and ends. And that is something Cowart makes sure to return to, again and again and again, turning it around to examine its nuances and infinitely fuzzy fractaled edges: The difference between pain that we instigate, pain that we can control, pain we know will end, pain that will have a reward, pain we can stop when and how we want… And pain that is enforced on us.
Elizabeth A Wilson’s Affect and Artificial Intelligence traces the history and development of the field of artificial intelligence (AI) in the West, from the 1950’s to the 1990’s and early 2000’s to argue that the key thing missing from all attempts to develop machine minds is a recognition of the role that affect plays in social and individual development. She directly engages many of the creators of the field of AI within their own lived historical context and uses Bruno Latour, Freudian Psychoanalysis, Alan Turning’s AI and computational theory, gender studies,cybernetics, Silvan Tomkins’ affect theory, and tools from STS to make her point. Using historical examples of embodied robots and programs, as well as some key instances in which social interactions caused rifts in the field,Wilson argues that crucial among all missing affects is shame, which functions from the social to the individual, and vice versa.
J.Lorand Matory’s The Fetish Revisited looks at a particular section of the history of European-Atlantic and Afro-Atlantic conceptual engagement, namely the place where Afro-Atlantic religious and spiritual practices were taken up and repackaged by white German men. Matory demonstrates that Marx and Freud took the notion of the Fetish and repurposed its meaning and intent, further arguing that this is a product of the both of the positionality of both of these men in their historical and social contexts. Both Marx and Freud, Matory says, Jewish men of potentially-indeterminate ethnicity who could have been read as “mulatto,” and whose work was designed to place them in the good graces of the white supremacist, or at least dominantly hierarchical power structure in which they lived.
Matory combines historiography,anthropology, ethnography, oral history, critical engagement Marxist and Freudian theory and, religious studies, and personal memoir to show that the Fetish is mutually a constituting category, one rendered out of the intersection of individuals, groups, places, needs, and objects. Further, he argues, by trying to use the fetish to mark out a category of “primitive savagery,” both Freud and Marx actually succeeded in making fetishes of their own theoretical frameworks, both in the original sense, and their own pejorative senses.
In Ras Michael Brown’s African-Atlantic Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry Brown wants to talk about the history of the cultural and spiritual practices of African descendants in the American south. To do this, he traces discusses the transport of central, western, and west-central African captives to South Carolina in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,finally, lightly touching on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Brown explores how these African peoples brought, maintained, and transmitted their understandings of spiritual relationships between the physical land of the living and the spiritual land of the dead, and from there how the notions of the African simbi spirits translated through a particular region of South Carolina.
In Kelly Oliver’s The Colonization of Psychic Space, she constructs and argues for a new theory of subjectivity and individuation—one predicated on a radical forgiveness born of interrelationality and reconciliation between self and culture. Oliver argues that we have neglected to fully explore exactly how sublimation functions in the creation of the self,saying that oppression leads to a unique form of alienation which never fully allows the oppressed to learn to sublimate—to translate their bodily impulses into articulated modes of communication—and so they cannot become a full individual, only ever struggling against their place in society, never fully reconciling with it.
These works are very different, so obviously, to achieve their goals, Brown and Oliver lean on distinct tools,methodologies, and sources. Brown focuses on the techniques of religious studies as he examines a religious history: historiography, anthropology, sociology, and linguistic and narrative analysis. He explores the written records and first person accounts of enslaved peoples and their captors, as well as the contextualizing historical documents of Black liberation theorists who were contemporary to the time frame he discusses. Oliver’s project is one of social psychology, and she explores it through the lenses of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis,social construction theory, Hegelian dialectic, and the works of Franz Fanon. She is looking to build psycho-social analysis that takes both the social and the individual into account, fundamentally asking the question “How do we belong to the social as singular?”
Scott Midson’s Cyborg Theology and Kathleen Richardson’s An Anthropology of Robots and AI both trace histories of technology and human-machine interactions, and both make use of fictional narratives as well as other theoretical techniques. The goal of Midson’s book is to put forward a new understanding of what it means to be human, an understanding to supplant the myth of a perfect “Edenic” state and the various disciplines’ dichotomous oppositions of “human” and “other.” This new understanding, Midson says, exists at the intersection of technological, theological, and ecological contexts,and he argues that an understanding of the conceptual category of the cyborg can allow us to understand this assemblage in a new way.
That is, all of the categories of “human,” “animal,” “technological,” “natural,” and more are far more porous than people tend to admit and their boundaries should be challenged; this understanding of the cyborg gives us the tools to do so. Richardson, on the other hand, seeks to argue that what it means to be human has been devalued by the drive to render human capacities and likenesses into machines, and that this drive arises from the male-dominated and otherwise socialized spaces in which these systems are created. The more we elide the distinction between the human and the machine, the more we will harm human beings and human relationships.
Midson’s training is in theology and religious studies, and so it’s no real surprise that he primarily uses theological exegesis (and specifically an exegesis of Genesis creation stories), but he also deploys the tools of cyborg anthropology (specifically Donna Haraway’s 1991 work on cyborgs), sociology, anthropology, and comparative religious studies. He engages in interdisciplinary narrative analysis and comparison,exploring the themes from several pieces of speculative fiction media and the writings of multiple theorists from several disciplines.
