Published by the American Academy of Religion www.aarweb.org Vol. 18, No.3May 2003

The AAR Committee onTeaching and Learning(Eugene V. Gallagher, Chair),sponsors Spotlight on Teaching.It appears twice each year inReligious Studies News, AAREdition and focuses on teaching and learning around a particular theme, concern, or setting.

EditorTazim R. KassamSyracuse University

Guest EditorVivian-Lee NyitrayUniversity of California-Riverside

Teaching about Material Culture in

Religious Studies

IN THIS ISSUE

T YPICALLY, MUSLIMS have atasbih at hand to remember God.Tasbih means to exalt, praise and

glorify God; and the prayer beads usedto aid this glorification are also calledtasbih, subha or misbaha. Like Hinduand Buddhist malas and Catholicrosaries, their essential function is toconcentrate the mind to count devo-tions, prayers, and divine attributes.Each religious tradition has its ownlocal lore about the beads, their crafts-manship, and their talismanic powers.Tasbihs are made of ninety-nine beadsthat signify the asma al-husna, the nine-ty-nine most beautiful names of Godmentioned in the Qur’an.

The ubiquity of tasbihs in mosques,homes, and around the wrists ofMuslim men and women illustrates theimportance of dhikr or constant recol-lection of God in Islam. Always insearch of pictures and videos to use inclass, I found one of President HamidKarzai in a meeting with Afghan leaders

holding prayer beads in his hands andanother of Muslim men sitting in anEgyptian café talking while they fin-gered and counted their beads. A web-site called “Islam for Children” listsprayer beads among various essentialIslamic artifacts including the prayerrug, prayer compass to determine thedirection of Mecca, prayer caps, andQur’an stand (http://atschool.eduweb.co.uk/carolrb/islam/artefacts.html).

So much for simple descriptions andcatalogues of religious symbols in Islam.Things matter. At times, things mattermore than the ideas from which theytake shape. This hit home when Iheard an elderly Muslim womaninstruct her husband not to carry histasbih on their flight from Toronto toNew York a year after the tragic eventsof 9/11. This unexpected precautionpoignantly problematized the tensionand ambiguity of reckoning with reli-gious symbols and artifacts in differentcontexts. In between the idea (as inthought and desire) of the tasbih (toglorify God) and its materiality (prayerbeads) is a constructive and deconstruc-tive space, which continues to requirecritical reflection.

The focus of this issue of Spotlight onTeaching, guest edited by Vivian-LeeNyitray, is material culture in religiousstudies. A longstanding debate in thefield of religion has been the relation-ship between religious beliefs and prac-tices or the classic philosophical prob-lem of spirit and matter, essence andmanifestation, noumenon and phe-nomenon. In pedagogical terms, thedilemma surfaces in terms of strikingthe right balance between teachingabout a religious tradition’s ideas andprinciples versus teaching about its reli-gious practices and artifacts. It is possi-

ble to do one to the exclusion of theother as well as to address both withouttheorizing the intimate yet ambivalentrelationship between the two. Forinstance, until a few decades ago, occi-dentalist versions of Islam rooted exclu-sively in textual, normative sourcesmanaged to represent this cumulativehistorical tradition without any refer-ence to how Muslims in different partsof the world actually expressed theirfaith in everyday life and practice. Thependulum now swings in the otherdirection as attention is drawn to themany discrete and varied cultural mani-festations of Muslim life. This peda-gogy is founded on the assumption thatbeing Muslim, Hindu, Christian, and soon generates a particular type of materi-al culture which embodies and replicatesthe teachings and requirements of a spe-cific faith. It also emerges from thepressing need, voiced by our students,to understand other people’s religioussymbols in a pluralist society.

Yet, how to tackle both descriptivelyand theoretically the visible aspects ofreligion remains. The edifice of disci-plinary-specific language used to con-struct diverse explanations of religiousobjects itself requires constant re-exami-nation. Terms used in the classroom to“handle” religious objects includingmanifestation, sacred, hierophany, rep-resentation and so on are themselvesimplicitly structured on a dualisticmetaphysics of reality. Thus, within thecontext of coming to understand reli-gious life through, not in spite of, mate-rial culture, there is both opportunityand necessity to draw attention to thelimitations of epistemological notionsconstantly at work in the acts of explanation. ❧

Vivian-Lee NyitrayUniversity of California-Riverside

Guest Editor

Teaching about

Material Culturein Religious Studies

Spotlight on Teachingis published by the

American Academy of Religion825 Houston Mill Road

Atlanta, GA 30329Visit www.aarweb.org

Teaching Religion and Material Culture . . . . . . . . .ii

Vivian-Lee Nyitray

Material Culture and theVarieties of ReligiousImagination . . . . . . . . . . . .iii

Ivan Strenski

Teaching Religion andAmerican Film . . . . . . . . . . .v

Judith Weisenfeld

Teaching with Food . . . . . .viDaniel Sack

Teaching Biblical Archaeology and Material Culture as Part of Teaching Judaism . .vii

Richard A. Freund

Teaching Religion andLearning Religion throughMaterial Culture . . . . . . . . .ix

Jonathan Huoi Xung Lee

Complicating Things: Material Culture and the Classroom . . . . . . . . . . .x

Leslie Smith

Tazim R. KassamSpotlight on Teaching Editor

ii • May 2003 AAR RSN

Religious Studies News, AAR Edition

Teaching Religion and Material CultureVivian-Lee Nyitray

A S AN UNDERGRADUATE student at Syracuse University inthe early 1970s, I had the great

good fortune to enroll in several coursestaught by H. Daniel Smith. A consum-mate teacher, he fostered in me (andcountless others, without doubt) a lifelongfascination not just with “religion,” butwith the intellectual, emotional, and mate-rial totality of religious worlds. WhatSmith realized was that a student’s interestand attention span is fickle and fleeting —even in those pre-MTV days. To captureit, an instructor’s material had to be vital,and it had to appeal to more than ourintellectual curiosity. We had to be fullyengaged with the subject. We were thusunprepared for our initial class “meeting”:the classroom was closed and dark, and asign instructed us to report to the lan-guage lab and to request a particular item,

which turned out to be a tape-slide combi-nation. As we viewed the first slide — ashot of Professor Smith’s smiling face —we heard a man’s voice on the tape wel-come us to the course on Asian religiousclassics. As this genial voice then guidedus through the course manual, we sawillustrations drawn from the texts we’d bereading, saw photographs of sites relevantto the texts, and we listened to music,chant, and liturgy. Clearly, this would be— and was — a class like no other.

The impact that first “mediated” class hadon me lingers still. In other hands, such acourse would have been a straightforwardreading and discussion of The Analects,Ramayana, and other “great books.” ForSmith, texts were more than conceptualrepositories: they were manifest inspirationfor music, theater, art, sculpture, architec-ture — a seemingly endless array of

expressive cultural artifacts that could beseen, heard, and touched. Religion wasneither solely cerebral nor an affair of theheart; it was thoroughly embodied; anyonewho would hope to understand it had bestbe ready to study it in all its multifacetedglory. When the class read TheBhagavadgita, Smith brought in a set ofbronze Vaishnava devotional images thathe had acquired from friends in India.Oddly, at least to my eyes, each of the fig-ures had a small piece of cloth wrappedaround it. Smith explained that he’d beengiven the images on condition that hewould treat them with respect; thus, eventhough the images had been cast to showthe deities as clothed and bejeweled, theywere not considered to be decently dressedunless real cloth at least partiallyenveloped them. For me, in the momentof his explanation, those small twists ofcloth were suddenly and palpably imbuedwith the sacrality of deep devotion andrespectful friendship. These images werenot “gods,” but they were much morethan symbols; their physical presenceinvoked and made warmly real the prac-tice of bhakti devotionalism.

Since then, although trained in the tex-tual study of classical Chinese traditions,I have nonetheless come to practice thestudy of religion in a manner significant-ly influenced by anthropology, ethnogra-phy, art history, and archaeology.Perhaps not unlike other fields, the studyof Chinese religions has long been divid-ed into several camps: the historical-philosophical textualists, the anthropolo-gists, and the art historians. The art his-torians were always in a class by them-selves, but between the philosophers andthe ethnographers, well, it was clear whoclaimed the superior discipline! Scholarswhose “serious” textual work was paral-leled by observations on paper goods,food offerings, or other “popular” arti-facts were sometimes treated lightly inyears past. Recently, however, the histor-ical, aesthetic, and ethnographic value oftheir collections has become obvious,and their publications on popular beliefand practice are important source mate-rials in their own right. Confucian tradi-tions, for example, establish the family asthe locus of religious identity, and thusthe study of traditional Chinese homes

— their construction and orientation,their furnishings and adornment — nowseems a natural subject for investigation.Even Buddhism, a tradition that rejectsthe material world as so much “dust,”nonetheless has been responsible for theproduction of a vast array of materialgoods, all of which provide significantkeys to the interpretation of the traditionover time and across geographic space.Most importantly, the new considerationof materiality in Chinese traditions hasfacilitated conversations among scholars ofdiverse training and methodological orien-tation.

Scholars of the religions of indigenouspeoples worldwide would find none of thisnew or unusual. They have long been atthe forefront of material cultural studies,examining the ways in which textiles,food, architecture, personal adornment,

music, dance, and the production ofimplements all reveal aspects of a particu-lar religious worldview and its associatedpractices. Some of this focus was prompt-ed initially by the perceived paucity orabsence of the classic subject and/or objectof study in religion, texts or scriptures.Doctrinal discourses were then discernedin oral tradition, and also in the overarch-ing “narrative” of daily life. Belatedly buthappily, these insights have now come intothe analysis of other religious traditions,notably the study of Christianity in gener-al and its American variations in particu-lar. In this issue of Spotlight on Teaching, asampling of scholars and students sharetheir diverse experiences in mediatingmaterial culture in the religious studiesclassroom.

An instructor desirous of shifting pedagog-ical attention beyond words on a pagemight reasonably turn the classroom gazetoward other aspects of the page, namely,photographs and illustrations — an entryto the field of visual culture. Recent

scholarship on the relationship betweenvisual culture and religion reveals muchabout the role that images play, not onlyin the imagination or in ritual implemen-tation, but in the material reality of every-day religious life as well. Textual narra-tives also pave the way for consideration ofvisual narratives in media as discrete asarchitecture and film. Contributor JudithWeisenfeld encourages her students tomove between the realms of visual andmaterial culture in her course on Americanreligion and film; in addition to screeningfilms for discussion, she also directs stu-dent attention to the study of publishedcatalogs and movie memorabilia.

One might also move from sight to site, asit were, by engaging student attention out

in the field, as contributors Ivan Strenskiand Jonathan H. X. Lee suggest. Lee high-lights the questions that arise as studentsnavigate religion in three-dimensions, andhe points out the rich paths that can leadonward from a single field experience.Strenski, in addition to adumbrating a the-oretical perspective on the importance ofmaterial culture for the study of religion,shares the questions he has devised toguide his students’ forays into material reli-gious spaces. In a somewhat differentvein, contributor Richard A. Freund ana-lyzes some of the pitfalls of both mis- andoverinterpretation that await students andscholars alike in their encounters with theseemingly “objective” objects of biblicaland rabbinical archaeology.

One might also bring the outside worldinto the classroom. Contributor LeslieSmith recalls a guest practitioner: aWiccan who, in her choice of clothing andin the artifacts of The Craft that shebrought along for the students’ examina-tion, taught volumes about her tradition,

about the local community “shared” byeveryone present, and about the craft ofteaching as well. But bringing the materi-al culture of religion into the classroomcarries certain challenges with it. Strenskiasks, “Who lugs this stuff to class?” Theanswer is: I do, for one. I am the bag ladyof Religious Studies. In addition to themusic tapes and CDs that I carry to classfor aural illustration, I bring Hindu andBuddhist images, Chinese paper funerarygoods, Tibetan prayer flags, Soka Gakkaibumper stickers, Taoist merit books, andposters depicting everything from highlyunpleasant Hindu hells to the Chinese seagoddess Mazu hovering protectively overpleasure craft out for a day’s sail. I bring

See NYITRAY p.xi

Vivian-Lee Nyitray is an AssociateProfessor of Religious Studies at theUniversity of California, Riverside.Her research within the field ofChinese religions includes feminismand the Confucian tradition;Tianhou/Mazu studies; and the laymedical mission work of the Tzu ChiBuddhist Compassion Foundation.The Life of Chinese Religions, co-edited with Ron Guey Chu, isforthcoming from the University ofCalifornia Press.

Japanese ema, displaying a Shinto kami or shrine on one side; the other side is left blank for thewriting of petitions and wishes. (Photo courtesy of V.-L. Nyitray)

“”

For me, in the moment of his explanation, those small twists of cloth were suddenly and palpably imbued with the sacrality of deep

devotion and respectful friendship.

SPOTLIGHT ON TEACHING

O UTSIDE the venerable field ofarchaeology of religion, a rela-tively small troop of pioneering

colleagues have developed the field ofstudy of the materiality of religious life.Here, I list the likes of ColleenMcDannell, Thomas Kselman, LionelRothkrug, Rosalind Hackett, J. Z. Smith,Richard Hecht, Roger Friedland, CarolineWalker Bynum, Gary Laderman, andPeter Brown, among others. I wish to paytribute to them by pointing out some ofwhat I take to be implications of theirwork, and to offer the beginnings of sometheorizing of this work. I omit Eliadefrom this list, but certainly not because wecannot learn about certain modes of orga-nizing time and space from him. We can.I omit him because his gaze was alwaysfixed elsewhere than on this world, farover the horizon of “things.” WhileEliade was particularly sensitive to reli-gious space, and to a riotous array of con-crete sacred objects, such as trees, ropes,rocks, and such, I would be prepared toargue that he never really accepted reli-gious materiality on its own terms, in thereligiousness of its material historicity. ForEliade, material things were religious inspite of being material — because theytranscended their historicity and materiali-ty in being symbols of divine archetypes.But for the present author, at least, themateriality of religion needs no externaljustification to affirm its religiousness.Religion is fully and legitimately material— whatever else it may be — because reli-gion is, at the very least, part of beinghuman for many, if not all, people. Noexcuses therefore need to be made to focuson material religious culture. Instead, weneed aggressively to exploit the vastresources that exist for understanding reli-gion by studying material religious cul-ture. Within the brief compass of thisessay, I shall attempt both to make sometheoretical points about the study of mate-rial religious culture and to show somepreliminary results of how I have tried tooperationalize some of these theoreticalviewpoints in the classroom.

Reluctance about taking seriously themateriality of religious life is furthermore

stunning when one considers the tremen-dous quantity and quality of theseresources. Take first material religious cul-ture of a visual sort. Consider the massesof data from the graphic, plastic, or elec-tronic arts — both popular and “high,”the scads of artifacts of all sizes and shapes— the sculptures, scapulars, phylacteries,prayer rugs, and more, the masses ofarchitecture — everything from theCathedral of Chartres to the Ka’aba, fromheiaus to stupas, the numerous sacred sites— whether “spaces” or “places” — theholy cities, holy lands, and holy territorialdomains, the sacred springs, mountains,and precincts, the pilgrimage routes andtheir destinations, and so on.

Moreover, while visual materials andmedia have a way of pushing to the fore-front of our perceptions, we also need toextend the notion of material religiousculture to include all tactile or sensate reli-gious entities and events. The study ofmaterial religious culture would thereforeinclude all that we access by way of ourauditory abilities, e.g., music or the soundof one’s breathing in Vipassana medita-tion; or by way of our olfactory capacities,e.g., the smell of incense, the “odor ofsanctity”; or what we take in by means oftaste and touch, e.g., the bite of bitterherbs, the slickness of sweet rice, thevapors of communion wine, the feel of theeternal stone of the Wailing Wall or theKa’aba, or that sudden, if brief, chill of aritual bath or baptism, or the sharp blowon the back as one sits in imperfect zazen.Material religious culture is composed ofall the sensate entities and events of reli-gion. Until recently, by contrast, we havebeen spending most of our time thinkingabout thought.

This neglect of a wholehearted embrace ofthe material dimension of religion is notsurprising, given the somewhat iconoclas-tic, certainly intellectualist and textualist,Reformation roots of the modern study ofreligion. Linked as it naturally is and waswith a so-called “spiritual” — bloodless —conception of the nature of religion, mostof the nineteenth century founders of thestudy of religion decried those religions inwhich materiality thrived. Albert Réville,that well-placed contemporary ofDurkheim and founder of the “science ofreligion” in France, for example, wouldoften rail against “religious materialism.”Any implication that “religious forms”were “indispensable receptacles of thedivine reality” was to be rudely rejected.For Réville and other Protestant foundersof the study of religion, this condemna-tion of the “religious materialism” of ritualreally amounted to a theological polemicagainst Roman Catholicism, Judaism, andall the other “pagan” kindred religions thatembraced ritual. Any expression of reli-gious materialism, such as ritual, wasalways more or less “superstitious.” In thespirit of what sometimes seems like a still-vital Victorian moralistic religiosity,Réville argued that a really religious per-son would inform their sensibility with areligious “spiritualism,” which results froma “more elevated moral and religioussense.” “Real” religion was a matter of“spirit and truth.” An appreciation ofmaterial religious culture is, therefore, settotally against these spiritualist assump-tions about the nature of religion.Tellingly, these condemnations of materi-ality in religion are sometimes linkedexplicitly with a familiar list of terrors

concerning the body, sex and all the rest.For Albert Réville, ritual, in general, wasjudged as dangerously “sensuous!” Thenineteenth century Catholic cult of thesacred heart drove Réville into a perfectfrenzy of sexual terror about its deviantpsycho-physical causes. It represented tohim a clear clinical “case . . . of maniaerotico-religiosa, superinduced by a veryhysterical constitution.” [Réville,“Contemporary Materialism in Religion:The Sacred Heart.” Theological Review 44(January 1874): 138-156, see especially pp.148-152].

“Imagination Is Funny . . .” andEssentialHow, then, do we exploit the materialityof religious life for the study of religion?The first task before us is, I would claim,to provide a conceptual and theoreticalframework within which to generatedurable thinking about material religiousculture. How should we begin, at least, tolocate material religious culture within alarger conceptual and interpretive frame-work? And, how would we do that insuch a way that it would put such think-ing into fruitful relation with the otherdimensions of religion, such as myth,beliefs, social organization, experience, rit-ual, and morality? Perhaps because of thehold that the visual has on our conscious-ness, the modality of the “arts” seems par-ticularly to recommend itself as a place wemight begin. For me, this natural-seem-ing affinity with the arts recommends thatwe begin to think about material religiousculture in terms of its being a product ofthe imagination. We speak readily of theaesthetic imagination and even of themoral, civic, sexual, commercial, andpolitical imaginations and so on, so whynot take seriously the religious imagination?Why cannot religion be as much a locusin which the imagination can be seen tooperate as many other domains of life?

In this light, the materiality of religiouslife presents no great mystery or puzzle.When people imagine things, they typicallyrealize their imaginings in media. We canreadily recognize how religious beliefs havebeen a medium in which creative religiousthinkers have done a great deal of imagin-ing. There are Four Noble Truths. Butwhy four, and not eight, like the NobleEightfold Path, or three, like the ThreeBody Doctrine, and so on? Similarly, inmaterial terms, why are stupas made ingreat mounds and not four-square blockslike the Ka’aba? And why then, in EastAsia, are there not those familiar SouthAsian burial mounds, but those brilliantmultistoried pagodas? When the monksof old Ireland fashioned their hermitages,they did so in beehive shapes, rather thanin block houses or pyramids. Was thisonly an accident of limitations imposed bythe building materials? Or, is somethingelse going on? And, what might that be?The religious imagination is “funny” thisway. It can be as amazing and unpre-

dictable, but nonetheless as effective as theimaginative choice of a cigar by Churchillor the three-cornered hat by partisans ofthe Enlightenment. A good place to startto understand material religious culturethen is to see its contents as the playingout of an imagination that is religious.What are its rules? Why do some imagin-ings work, and others fall flat on theirfaces? Why do some things “capture theimagination” and other fail so to do —and for whom? Some sacred music keepsgetting sung year after year, and not, onesupposes, just out of inertia, but because itresonates in some important ways with

some folks. A celebrated new cathedralhas risen in Los Angeles at the cost ofmany millions of dollars and under thedirection of a world-class European archi-tect. Some, however, have judged it deadon arrival, and will only resort to itbecause there is no alternative. Why?Many, therefore, are the creations of thereligious imagination, but many as wellare those that fall into oblivion. Whichones? Why these and not others, and soon? These are only some of the questionsthat seeing material religious culture interms of the imagination might raise.Other theoretical “takes” will raise otherkinds of questions. That to me is all tothe good.

Interrogating MaterialReligion with a “Proactive Mind”Implied in my putting questions or “prob-lems” to the fore is that we need to domuch more than simply to present thedata of religion’s materiality. Yet, since itwould be easy to become seduced by theravishing imagery of the religious imagina-tion or grounded in place by contact withreal religious objects, we must take carenot to fall prey to the heresy of theImmaculate Perception. The theoreticaland conceptual dimension of our workshould go hand in hand with the empiri-cal. And, so, I am urging that we preparestudents for coming to the data of materi-al religious culture with a “proactive mind.”

Where teaching is concerned, we all rec-ognize that students will unavoidablycome to the data with their own “takes,”with their own principles and/or preju-dices, with their own set of questions andproblems, and at the risk of seeming pre-tentious, with their own theories. Theirperceptions will not be pure and innocent,nor need they be. But, we must strive tomake these a prioris explicit by expressingthem in some objective form — a coursejournal entry, a short “reaction” paper, anin-class “brainstorming” assignment inwhich lists are made in order to elicit thepreperceptual data of the minds of the stu-dents — as far as that is possible.Exposing students to material religiousculture, then, should not be like dumping

See STRENSKI p.iv

Ivan Strenski is the HolsteinFamily and Community Professorof Religious Studies at theUniversity of California, Riverside.In addition to being the NorthAmerican editor of Religion, he isthe author of five books andapproximately fifty articles. Hismost recent books are ContestingSacrifice: Religion, Nationalismand Social Thought (2002) andDurkheim and the Jews ofFrance (1997).

May 2003 AAR RSN • iii

Material Culture and the Varieties of Religious ImaginationIvan Strenski

“”

Material religious culture is composed of all the sensate entities and events of religion.

Until recently . . . we have been spending most of our time thinking about thought.

iv • May 2003 AAR RSN

Religious Studies News, AAR Edition

STRENSKI, from p.iii

them at the local antique shop, pleasinglycluttered with assorted curios. Theyshould be sent in with a “shopping list” ofsome sort, whether of their own or of theinstructor’s making. We might as wellaccept that they will have a secret list any-way. So, we might as well train them toacknowledge and encourage the proactivemind. One way to do this would be to doan inventory that would require formulat-ing questions about the data before thedata are encountered.

Interrogating MaterialReligion: A Check-listLet me refer the reader to the specificassignment that I use in a course on thesacred and taboo that I have taught for thepast two years to undergraduates at theUniversity of California, Riverside.Students are required to do a field visit toa sacred site and to write a short paperaddressed to the question of how itssacredness is engineered by the manipula-tion of space and selection of place.(Students are also encouraged to supplytheir own questions.)

In terms of this specific interrogation ofmaterial religious culture, I first concen-trate on getting students to “see” whatthey are “looking” at — carefully toobserve the sites chosen by them. To dothis, I simply pose a series of questionsthat force them to think in material termsabout the places and spaces visited. Thisinitial interrogation also invites studentsto incorporate the theoretical reading theywill have already done — but at this stagein an informal way. Systematic thinkingcan be left until a little later. Here is aselection from the present list of over twodozen questions that I provide to studentsabout the overall descriptive character ofthe site being observed. First are a seriesof questions about the overall site: its set-ing, location, and situation:

• What makes it obvious that this spaceor place is a sacred space or place?

• What’s nearby? What’s conspicuouslyfar away?

• What is the elevation of the site —high ground, low ground? Mounded,depressed or flat?

• Is it bounded? How are boundariesmarked? Against what do the bound-aries protect? Are they (merely) sym-bolic or do they prevent entry/escape?

• Is the site open and public? Orrestricted, private, closed? Free entryor an admission charge? If a charge,who gets the proceeds? If free, whosubsidizes the site?

Then come questions about the insides ofthe site, its contents:

• How is the space within configured?Any contours?

• Is there decoration or lack thereof?How are these used, designed, situated?

• What is the social context of thecontents of the space? Who is it for? Who is included, who exclud-ed? Who owns it? What are theterms of ownership? What about theeconomic value of the contents —cheap, expensive?

• What senses are engaged? Is it quietor noisy inside? Is it light or darkinside? Any odors typical of the

place? Tastes? Colors? Images?Tactile surfaces?

Finally, all students are required to answertwo fundamental questions about thesacred status of the sites chosen. Here, ofcourse, is where they are in effect beinginvited to employ and defend various the-oretical viewpoints in answering this finalpair of questions. I ask them to considerthe following questions in terms both oftheir own idea of sacred, in terms of oursociety’s general and common ideas ofsacred, and in terms of any of the authorswe have read:

• What would make this site or someaspect(s) of its interior more sacredthan it is now in its present condition?

• What would make this site or someaspect(s) of its interior less sacred —more profane — than it is now in itspresent condition, even to the pointof a total loss of sacredness?

Remarks on SomeResults of InterrogatingMaterial ReligionIn their assignments, most students chosestandard sacred sites such as churches,California mission sites, local temples,mosques, synagogues, cemeteries, andsuch. Others have gone off on more orig-inal ventures, such as focusing on roadsideaccident site shrines that are so commonhere in the Southwest. Another studentexplored the sacredness of the family din-ner table — a particularly charged sitegiven the widespread practice today ofindividual family members drifting offwith their individual trays of supper to sitalone gazing at their own individual TVsets!

Notable here is how the students display-ing the most originality in selecting theirprojects revealed how fruitful it is to studyreligious materiality as a work of the imag-ination. Religion can emerge in unexpect-ed and novel forms, and it is the creativestudent who will observe it. Such a stu-dent grasps the way the religious imagina-tion works and is open to its oftenunprecedented efflorescence. Indeed, reli-gious folk themselves may be among thelast to comprehend the fuller extent ofmuch of what they are doing. Historiansof Christianity, like Peter Brown, haveshown how popular pre-Christian spiritualfashions for visions or care of the deadhave at times had a great vogue, were thentaken up by Christians and, as it were,“baptized” into respectability, only later tofade as the religious imagination turnedtowards other devices.

In this connection, let me draw the read-er’s attention to a project undertakenalong with this course on the sacred andtaboo. This is the Spontaneous Shrineswebsite and digital project, located atwww.shrines.ucr.edu. Funded by theUniversity of California, Riverside’sInformation Technology grant, this sitehas begun to assemble and archive thedata of what I call “spontaneous shrines,”such as became so much a part of thenational reaction to the attacks ofSeptember 11. Although the website isstill under construction, major parts of itare ready for visits. There, readers willfind not only World Trade Center imagesfrom New York City and Venice,California, but also a set of images of aspontaneous shrine from Honolulu inhonor of a beloved local citizen. In com-ing months, in addition to links and inter-pretive tools, I shall also be adding a col-lection of images taken by one of the stu-

dents from my sacred and taboo coursedepicting roadside accident spontaneousshrines in the Inland Empire region ofSouthern California. The site is open andI invite interested parties to contributepostings to the site or just to visit the siteto view our work as it progresses.

The main point to be noted in connectionwith popular material religious culture isagain its often unpremeditated character.Just as there is a pop art or folk art thatsimply and spontaneously appears in pub-lic spaces — like certain fashions in dressand personal adornment (backwards hats,piercing, long or short hair, etc.), or thegraffiti art of modern cities — so there isalso a parallel phenomenon of sponta-neous, mostly urban, popular folk reli-gion. Like these representations of popu-lar imagination, folk spirituality or reli-gion just “happens” too.

One theoretical consequence of myapproach in the spontaneous shrines pro-ject is to destroy the distinction, oftentouted popularly these days, between reli-gion and so-called “spirituality.” Thus,although “spirituality” is often opposed to“religion,” their similarities strike one asfar more prominent than their supposeddifferences. Both move in a world thathonors reverence, sacredness, and holiness,or the transgressive, taboo, and forbidden;both suggest realms of being not exhaust-ed by the world of everyday quantifiablelife; both imagine a cosmic, rather thanmerely local, frame of reference for humanaction, whether that be the karmic realmof samsara and release from it, the uni-verse, natural world, or some other vastreference of existence. For this reason, Iconsider “religion” and “spirituality” suffi-ciently related terms, and leave it to othersto quibble about the differences.

A second distinction that this approachoffends is that between the so-called “fine”religious artifacts from that abundance ofhumble, often mass-produced artifacts ofthe “popular” religious imagination. Ibelieve it is necessary to take seriously lit-erally everything from the “fine” grave-stones or lavish shrines of “high” religiousculture to their poor “cousins” such as“plastic Jesuses” or Kuan-yin playing cards.Each has a role to play in making up thesum of religious data, the tangible expres-sion of the religious imagination. Forthese purposes, the distinction between“fine” and popular art, useful perhaps inother contexts, serves no purpose. By pay-ing little or no heed to this distinctionbetween “high” and “popular” religion, weare also well placed to exploit the insightsof radical movements in the study of reli-gion, such as the Collège de Sociologie,and its investigators of the “sacredness ofeveryday life,” Michel Leiris or RogerCaillois.

Practical Problems: TheIncredible Heaviness ofMaterial ReligionMaterial religious culture can thus be soattractive as data, both for research andteaching, that it may be easy to overlookits drawbacks. This is to say that a majorpractical problem encountered in studyingthe products of the material religiousimagination is, of course, its very material-ity. Anyone who has ever envied one’scolleagues in art history or film studies,for example, with their ability to transfixstudents with lectures enhanced by color-ful images and cinematic drama, onlyneeds to spend some time with them asthey labor to map strategy about whatmaterials to use, how to sequence them,how to shift between lecture and visual

presentation, and so on. Most of us are,of course, familiar with these issues. But,with the increased reference to materialreligious culture, the problems we alreadycomprehend here will only magnify andproliferate in often unpredictable direc-tions. With the data of material religiousculture, unlike that of beliefs, for instance,we encounter inventory and stocking prob-lems. Slides and videos may be problemenough. But what of family Bibles, cen-sors, ghee, frangipani blossoms? Wheredo we stash this stuff that “has weight andtakes up space,” as our high school physicstextbooks were keen to remind us? Wholugs it to class, and so on? We may evenbe tempted to revert to simple talk, withall its blessed lightness of being, and tothose tried and true, eminently portabletexts. Some may even be tempted only totalk about religious talk (beliefs, texts, andsuch) and forget cumbersome materialreligious culture altogether. Variousstrategies will simply have to be devised tomanage these problems, knowing full wellthat there is no way in advance to judgewhether advantages outweigh problems.We will want to be alert and to plot howthese two curves — advantages and draw-backs — intersect and veer off in theirown directions.

One strategy to deal with the problem ofthe “incredible heaviness of material reli-gion,” is to transform it into a lightermedium. While there’s nothing quite likethe “really real,” sometimes the virtuallyreal is the best one can do. We sometimesneed therefore to overcome the inconve-nience of the very materiality of religionthat we seek to represent. If I cannot visitHsi Lai Temple in Hacienda Heights,California, because I am in Mt. Vernon,Iowa, I would at least like to be there “vir-tually.” If I do not have the Rustavi choirfrom Georgia around the corner, I wouldat least like to be able to hear them “virtu-ally.” This, if anything, is a job for digitaltechnology — for the digital camera andvideo, for MP3 technology, and for all thepossibilities now being unleashed for web-based publishing. The Web includes anincreasingly growing list of possible kindsof “sites” — not only the standard “bul-letin board” where information is posted,but digital media albums, where the sightsand sounds of religion in material formcan be accessed, or “tours” of actual orimagined places, ideally in three-dimen-sions, whether interactive or not.Overcoming the incredible heaviness (and,often, long distance) of material religiousculture, my Spontaneous Shrines websiteand digital project may serve as an exam-ple of one way that I have tried to makethings better for students of religiousmateriality. ❧

Resources

Lawson, E. Thomas. “On Interpreting theWorld Religiously.” In RadicalInterpretation in Religion, edited by NancyK. Frankenberry, 117-28. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Leiris, Michel. “The Sacred in EverydayLife.” In The College of Sociology, 1937-39,edited by Denis Hollier, 24-31, 98-102.Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress, 1988.

Liu, Hsin-ju. Silk and Religion: AnExploration of Material Life and the Thoughtof People, AD 600-1200. Delhi: OxfordUniversity Press, 1998.

SPOTLIGHT ON TEACHING

Teaching Religion and American FilmJudith Weisenfeld

Judith Weisenfeld is an AssociateProfessor in the Department ofReligion at Vassar College, whereshe teaches courses on religion inAmerica, African-American reli-gious history, and religion andAmerican film. She is at work ona project on African-Americanreligion in American film, 1929-1950, to be published by theUniversity of California Press.

I T GOES WITHOUT saying thatmost of our students respond favorablyto the use of movies as part of their

academic work and many instructors haveincorporated films as a component ofcourses on religion in America. Our stu-dents can be sophisticated interpreters ofvisual culture and are eager to engage filmsboth as entertainment and as objects forserious intellectual inquiry. In a course Ihave developed on “Religion andAmerican Film,” I have chosen to placefilm at the center rather than employing itsimply to illustrate or raise issues aboutsignificant moments or characters inAmerican religious history. Over thecourse of the semester, my students and Iengage film as a case study for thinkingabout the history of relationships betweenreligion and popular culture in Americaand examine a set of films as material arti-facts of particular historical moments.While it is neither a conventional filmstudies course, nor a traditional survey ofAmerican religious history, I have struc-tured the course so that my studentsbecome familiar with scholarly approachesto the study of religion and film, learnhow to analyze and discuss films in histor-ical context, and, most importantly, havean opportunity to explore ways in whichrepresentations of religion help to shapeour understandings of Americanness, espe-cially in relation to ethnicity, race, class,gender, and national origin.

The course is organized chronologically,beginning in 1915, to emphasize changingrelationships between American religiousinstitutions and sensibilities and the filmindustry. One of my primary goals in tak-ing students through this history is to con-vey the complexity of the interactions, notallowing them to assume that filmmakersand studios were uninterested in or scorn-ful of religion, nor that religious institu-tions and individuals were unequivocallysuspicious of the power of the mediumand of the interests of filmmakers. To thisend, we devote considerable attention tothe use of film and film-related artifacts byreligiously grounded social reformers andby churches. We consider the incorpora-tion of films into the work of churches,both to provide informal entertainmentand to complement or enhance ministers’sermons. Along with viewing segments ofearly Bible films, we also examine cata-logues, such as the 1923 Catalogue of Non-

Theatrical Motion Pictures, Inc., throughwhich distributors marketed these films andused testimonials to argue for the inclusionof motion pictures in the religious practicesof American Protestants, Catholics, andJews. We also look at broadsides, like onefor a Bible Chautauqua lecture in NewHaven, Connecticut in 1926 at which thelecturers screened Martin Luther, His Lifeand Time, promoted as offering “8 stupen-dous reels on the Reformation.” Socialreformers also saw film as useful for high-lighting social problems like crime, pros-titution, corruption in the Americanlegal system, and corporate greed. RaoulWalsh’s 1915 film, Regeneration, based onthe memoir of New York gang leaderOwen Kildare and his story of transfor-mation under the guidance of a settle-ment house worker, serves to introducestudents to the genre of the social prob-lem film.

At the same time that we acknowledgeand explore some of the ways in whichreligious institutions and individualsmade productive use of the movies in theperiod of early film, we also devoteattention to censorship, arguably the

topic most written about in film historiesthat engage religion. Here we consider theinformal mechanisms of censorshipemployed in the 1930s by such groups asthe International Federation of CatholicAlumnae, the Legion of Decency, theWomen’s Christian Temperance Union, andthe General Federation of Women’s Clubs,as well as the development of formal mech-anisms of censorship in the National Boardof Review, the Studio Relations Committeeof the Motion Picture Producers andDistributors Association (MPPDA), andlater the Production Code Administrationof the MPPDA. We examine as well theinfluence of clergy and lay people in thedevelopment of censorship guidelines inthis period. As a case study, I ask studentsto interpret Frank Capra’s 1934 film, TheMiracle Woman, which takes Pentecostalrevivalist Aimee Semple McPherson as themodel for its main character, in the contextof discourses about “the fallen woman” filmof the early 1930s.

Another theme that runs throughout thecourse is the contribution of Americanmovies to the process of constructing ofreligion, race, and ethnicity. Such films asD. W. Griffith’s 1919 Broken Blossoms, AlanCrosland’s 1927 The Jazz Singer, KingVidor’s 1919 Hallelujah, Leo McCarey’s1945 The Bells of St. Mary’s, and Elia Kazan’s1947 Gentleman’s Agreement serve well toencourage students to consider how filmicrepresentations of the religious practicesand lives of ethnic and racialized groupscontributed to the process of making mean-ing of race and ethnicity in the Americancontext and projected ideas about appropri-

ate and inappropriate religion. Older filmslike Spencer Williams’s 1941 The Blood ofJesus and his 1944 Go Down, Death, both ofwhich fall into the genre of race films pro-duced for black audiences, and later filmssuch as Charles Burnett’s 1990 To Sleepwith Anger and Julie Dash’s 1993 Daughtersof the Dust allow students to think aboutthe responses of African-American film-makers to mainstream Hollywood uses ofblack religious practices.

The course also gives the students anopportunity to take up a number of othertopics in the history of religion inAmerican film, including changingapproaches to filming biblical stories (fromCecil B. DeMille’s 1956 The TenCommandments to Martin Scorsese’s 1998The Last Temptation of Christ), the relation-ship between religion and horror films(Roman Polanski’s 1968 Rosemary’s Baby,William Friedkin’s 1973 The Exorcist, andRichard Donner’s 1976 The Omen), and theuses of film by contemporary evangelicalsand Mormons to reach a new market audi-ence (Robert Marcarelli’s 1999 The OmegaCode, Victor Sarin’s 2000 Left Behind, andRichard Dutcher’s 2001 Brigham City).

Teaching this course has presented a num-ber of challenges. Although it is easy tograb students by placing film at the centerof a course, I have found that they some-times become frustrated in dealing with thedemand that they think carefully about his-torical context, our primary methodologicalapproach. In addition, some students havedifficulty engaging films that rely on narra-tive and visual conventions that differ fromthose to which they are accustomed, partic-ularly given the ubiquity of MTV style andpace in contemporary media culture. I havealso encountered difficulty in finding read-ings that deal with the particular films inwhich I am interested and that situate thefilms in historical context as opposed toanalyzing their mythic or archetypal reli-gious structures. Nevertheless, it has been arewarding experience developing and teach-ing the course; I have learned from my stu-dents as they have contributed a great dealto my own understanding, both of the his-tory of religion in American film and offilm in the history of American religion. ❧

Poster to accompany the showing ofMartin Luther, His Life and Time, touting‘8 Stupendous Reels on the Reformation’(Photo courtesy of J. Weisenfeld)

“

”

My students and I engage film as a case study forthinking about the history ofrelationships between religion

and popular culture inAmerica and examine a set offilms as material artifacts of

particular historical moments.

Past Spotlight onTeaching Topics

November 1992 General Issues ofTeaching ReligiousStudies

May 1993 Teaching AfricanReligions

February 1995 The IntroductoryCourse

February 1996 General Issues ofTeaching ReligiousStudies

November 1996 Alter(ed) Sexualities:Bringing Lesbianand Gay Studies tothe ReligionClassroom

May 1997 Cases and CourseDesign

November 1997 Insider, Outsider,and GenderIdentities in theReligion Classroom

May 1998 Teaching ReligionUsing Film

November 1998 Teaching the Bible:Initiations andTransformations

May 1999 Syllabi Development

November 1999 Teaching for theNext Millennium:Top Choices ofSignificant Workson Teaching andPedagogy

May 2000 Theory/PracticeLearning: Models inViolence Studies andConflict Resolution

September 2000 Teaching about theHolocaust

Spring 2001 Teaching Religionand Music

Fall 2001 Issues in TeachingReligion andTheology in GreatBritain

March 2002 Multiculturalismand the AcademicStudy of Religion inthe Schools

October 2002 Teaching ReligiousStudies andTheology inCommunityColleges

May 2003 Teaching aboutMaterial Culture inReligious Studies

May 2003 AAR RSN • v

vi • May 2003 AAR RSN

Religious Studies News, AAR Edition

Teaching with FoodDaniel Sack

E VERYONE EATS. It’s a truism, butit’s a truism useful in teaching aboutreligion. Eating is essential for

human survival, and thus about as close toa universal as we can get. But, as anthro-pologist Mary Douglas (a guru for materi-al culture studies) points out, “Food is afield of action. It is a medium in whichother levels of categorization becomemanifest.” (Douglas, 30) People showwho they are and what they believethrough their food. Eating is universal,

but what people eat and the way they eatit reveals a culture’s significant particulari-ties. Everyday acts display a community’scommitments, beliefs, and practices. Allof this means that food is a great way toteach about religion.

I’ll illustrate a few of the advantages ofusing food as a focus for teaching about

religion. Given my background andteaching experience, most of my examplesare drawn from Christian traditions, butyou can probably come up with parallelsin the tradition you are teaching.

Teaching with food provides a comparativeperspective. As the truism notes, everyoneeats. And just about everyone endowsfood with some religious meaning. Thatmeans you can compare and contrast reli-gious traditions, with food as the commontheme. How are the Christian Eucharistand Hindu offerings different? What doJewish kosher law and African taboos havein common? What does it mean whenBuddhists start having American-stylepotlucks? You can do the same thingacross time as well — looking at howcommunion practices changed from thefirst century to the present, for instance.This comparative perspective shows ourstudents that religion is of variety.

The topic also allows teachers to maketheir classes more experiential. Recentpedagogical practices call for engaging stu-dents through their own experiences. Ihave found that almost everyone has astory to tell about religion and food — afamily potluck story, or something aboutcommunion. Encourage your students totell their story. When they connect theirexperience with the theory and content ofyour course, they understand it in a deep-er way. They can also connect with otherpeople’s experience through observer-par-ticipation exercises. Require them toattend a food-centered ritual. Ask themto analyze a family meal. Such assign-ments encourage your students to see reli-gion in action. With food, as with otherforms of material culture, learning

becomes more immediate when it isdirectly experienced.

A food-centered perspective offers a thickdescription of religious life. Food has mul-tiple roles in a religious community. Itcan be the center of a ritual, as with thePassover Seder. It can be part of an

important community-shaping event, likea youth group pizza party. Its preparationcan be an ethical action, in the form ofvegetarian cooking or serving at a soup

kitchen. A focus on food reminds ourstudents that religion is more than justtheology, ethics, ritual, or practice; it is acomplex mixture of behaviors and beliefs.

Because food involves so much of religiouslife, it connects with a variety of issues.For instance, food has clear links to reli-gion and gender concerns. Ask your stu-dents, who cooks and who eats?Traditionally, women have done most ofthe cooking in Christian churches. Therehas also been a great deal of recent schol-arship about gender, body issues, and food— ranging from medieval nuns to con-temporary teenagers. How does genderaffect what we eat? Consider, for exam-ple, this passage from How to Plan ChurchMeals (1962), “Sandwiches for the teatable are quite a different thing from the‘he-man’ sandwiches you want for a pic-nic, or the meal-in-one you serve to teen-agers. They are delicate, made for nib-bling-and looking pretty is far moreimportant that providing nourishment.”This paragraph reveals a worldview, full ofgender relations and social expectations.

Similarly, food raises questions about reli-gion and class. Many American religiouscommunities are involved in some way infeeding the hungry. But what do theyprovide, and why? What do they expectof the hungry people that they feed?Some soup kitchens, for instance, requiretheir clients to attend prayer services andgo through Christian-based recovery pro-grams. Others simply provide the foodand hope that the guests pick up somefaith from the atmosphere. There is alsogreat variety in the menu. Many soupkitchens serve food gleaned from leftoversand donations, while others prepare mealsto order from fresh ingredients. What dothese differences tell us about those reli-gious communities?

Obviously, food has implications for ethicsas well. What do you eat and why? Evenin Christianity, a tradition with few offi-cial food taboos, eating is fraught with

rights and wrongs. In the nineteenth cen-tury, food reformers like Sylvester Grahamadvised Americans to change their diets forthe sake of their souls, and GoodHousekeeping told readers “How to Eat,Drink, and Sleep as Christians Should.”In the twentieth, hunger activists urgedChristians to become vegetarians so thatthe world’s hungry would have enough.Many religious traditions have similar sys-tems of food taboos — formal or informal.

As Douglas says, food is a field of action.It reveals a great deal about who peopleare and what they believe. As a result, afocus on food can be a creative way toengage students in the study of religion.Food is ubiquitous, so there’s alwayssomething students can connect with. It’sno wonder that the study of food hasbecome hot across academia, resulting in arich scholarship. It also has real promisein the religion classroom.

Here are a few classic resources to start with.

Bynum, Carolyn Walker. Holy Feast andHoly Fast: The Religious Significance of Foodto Medieval Women. Berkeley: Universityof California Press, 1987.

Counihan, Carole and Penny Van Esterik,eds. Food and Culture: A Reader. NewYork: Routledge, 1997.

Douglas, Mary. “Standard Social Uses ofFood,” in Food in the Social Order: Studiesof Food and Festivities in Three AmericanCommunities. New York: Russell SageFoundation, 1984.

Feeley-Harnik, Gillian. The Lord’s Table:The Meaning of Food in Early Judaism andChristianity. Washington and London:Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981. ❧

Daniel Sack is Program Officerfor the Associated Colleges of theMidwest. He was the AssociateDirector of the Material Historyof American Religion Project(www.materialreligion.org) andis the author of WhitebreadProtestants: Food and Religionin American Culture (St.Martin’s, 2000).

“”

Eating is universal, but what people eat and the way they eat it reveals a culture’s

significant particularities.

“ ”A food-centered perspective offers a thick description of religious life.

Dinner, ushers association of St. Paul’s Church, Chicago, 1940 (Photo cour-tesy of D. Sack)

Church sign in River Falls, AL,September 1999. (Photo courtesy

of James Hudnut-Beumler)

May 2003 AAR RSN • vii

SPOTLIGHT ON TEACHING

Teaching Biblical Archaeology and Material Culture as Partof Teaching JudaismRichard A. Freund

Archaeology, MaterialCulture, and Judaism

IDO NOT WANT to miss the big pic-ture about the use of archaeology andmaterial culture in the study of the

Bible and Ancient Judaism. If Judaism isa construct that has developed over thepast two-to-three thousand years frombiblical religion it is important to showhow these developments take place.Often it is a fairly subtle interpretive liter-ary journey that takes the students from abiblical institution to a post-biblical ritualor law. Biblical Judaism is not the same aspost-biblical Judaism, and simple foraysinto the material culture of the Bible andpost-biblical Judaism can drive home thispoint much quicker than semesters of lit-erary analysis. In-class slides, videos, andInternet visuals help but lack the concrete-ness of demonstrative material culture.Field (excavation) studies provide a differ-ent form of learning than can be experi-enced in the classroom. I have beenteaching ancient Judaism using archaeolo-gy and field excavations for almost twodecades with amazing results and enthusi-asm from my students. My work has beenalmost exclusively in Israel, but I havetoured with my students in Jordan andEgypt to fill out their educations.Archaeology is an exciting and hands-on

way to introduce often skeptical and jadedstudents to an exciting and “real” study ofthe Bible and Judaism. It is impossible togive them the same “feeling” for the realityof the history they study only throughbooks and from sitting in a classroom.

For students, the fact that objects andwritings from antiquity can be found intheir original and pristine state means thatthey are “objective” objects, i.e., verifiable,quantifiable, and therefore true. Nothingcould be farther from the reality of the sit-uation in the study of material culture.

The “rocks, linens, wood, beads, metals”do not really “speak”; objects and writingsare only intelligible through the process ofsubjective interpretation, and this processis open to speculation and reasonablehypothesizing. But alas, the “imagined”notion of archaeology is so much strongerthan the actual study of archaeology thatit gives archaeology a more objective feelthan, say, the thousands of years of inter-pretation that biblical and rabbinic textshave enjoyed. As a teacher, I wish toexploit students’ inherent interest in theunknown (“mystery”) aspects of archaeol-ogy but at the same time to lower theexpectation level by telling students thatinterpretation is a part of the process.

The other aspect is to realize that themain “nuts and bolts” of archaeology arenot the big discoveries but the small piecesof evidence: research in ceramics, petrolo-gy, dating through paleography (whenwritten materials are available), or C14studies (for organic matter remains). Allthese are analyzed through comparativeand complex mixes of anthropology, soci-ology, biology, chemistry, and related sci-ences that add up, slowly, to a larger pic-ture of group, a society, a city, a tribe, oran individual. The cumulative argumentof archaeology, often missed by the cine-ma and popular culture, creates a picturethat, unlike the interpreted model of therabbis and later Jewish historians, isalmost always an unknown to the archae-ologist at the beginning but which ulti-mately becomes clear through hypothesisand evaluation. It is a wonderful modelfor teaching about religion and how reli-gious research accumulates to give a pic-ture of a whole group.

From Theory toPracticeArchaeology usually means the study ofantiquities or ancient artifacts as ends inthemselves. Biblical archaeology is thestudy of these artifacts in light of the liter-ary texts that are associated with the Bible.My definition of the “Bible” is somewhatunorthodox: I include in my course anytexts that may affect our understanding ofthe Bible’s meaning and, especially, ourunderstanding of the material culture atthe sites at which we work. Our “archae-ology” often involves anthropologicalstudies of local indigenous customs andlife, but the main part of our study in thefield involves teaching what artifacts tellus about our site. The sustained interac-

tion — seven hours per day, five days perweek — in close working environments inthe field-classroom lends itself to teachingnot only about the artifacts but also abouthow texts relate to artifacts.

While some archaeology is done in labora-tories and some in libraries, the corner-stone of all biblical archaeology is fieldexcavation. The whole sense of “discov-ery” that we try to animate our students tounderstand in our courses in the classroomis the goal of this process of field excava-tions. This is not the place to exploresome of the traditional goals of archaeolo-gy but certainly into the very recent past,the goals of field excavation were gearedmore for pure research ends rather thanteaching. Professional archaeologistswould hire laborers and often just super-vise their work in the field. They thenwould take the finds back to a lab, analyzethem with the help of experts who often

were not with them in the field, and thenwrite up the results for the archaeologist ofrecord who ultimately would write a finalreport. These results were used in turn byliterary scholars of the Bible.

This was a very inefficient way to get theresults out to the public, and theworkers/students were seen as one of theleast important links in the chain of infor-mation collection. Even when massivenumbers of volunteer student laborershave been used in some major archaeologi-cal projects of the past thirty years, such asthe excavating of Masada, the City ofDavid in Jerusalem, and Caesarea, oftenthe educational or teaching possibilitieswere subordinated to the research goals ofthe excavation. Today the situation is dif-ferent: the value of educated student labor-ers increases research goals. Archaeology isa tremendous opportunity for teachingand learning about the past and about thescientific method of how we know any-thing about anything in the modernworld.

There is no misleading those of you whohave never been on an excavation.Excavations are carried out by manuallabor; we may be assisted by a tractor forheavy-duty jobs but the bulk of the workis done by individuals who lift, sift, clean,and sometimes remove rocks and dirt.Work in the field consists of excavating,recording, photographing, and surveying.With proper supervision and training, stu-dents can do any of these tasks. A tell(mound) is divided into a network ofsquares measuring five by five meters.Each square or architectural unit is known

as a locus. As soon as architectural unitsare observed, the excavation is carried onaccordingly. Walls, floors, etc., are careful-ly excavated and cleaned for reconstruc-tion. Finds are collected in baskets.Preliminary analysis of finds is done dailyat the site. Finds, baskets, and the devel-opment of each locus are recorded on alocus card and a field diary. Individualstudents work their way through the dif-ferent tasks so that at the end of a three-week session they have done almost everytask from lifting rocks, excavating, measur-ing, recording, and surveying, to record-ing, pottery analysis, and explaining finds.

Three to five students are assigned to alocus. Each has an advanced student orstaff member who is a locus supervisor.Each area in the mound has a faculty areasupervisor skilled in the techniques ofkeeping the daily log, supervising the actu-ally digging, and doing on-site evaluationsof the thousands of pottery pieces foundevery day. Pottery is cleaned and sorteddaily and students take part in this taskalso. Students with more years of experi-ence and training are assigned square andarchitectural unit responsibilities under thedirection of faculty area supervisors.Students leading other students may seemto some of us as a very poor model forwork, but having students involved indecision-making and role modeling forother students is a very effective tool in thefield. Above the area supervisor is thechief archaeologist or director of excava-tion. The expedition staff also includes aphotographer, a surveyor, an architect, arecorder, a restorer, and a variety of expertsfrom different disciplines including geog-raphy, geology, botany, zooarchaeology,history, and biblical scholarship. The pro-ject director oversees all of the differentdisciplines, research agendas, faculty andstudent assignments, and frees the directorof excavation to assess archaeology ratherthan monitor educational and research assignments.

In the excavations in which I have beeninvolved, first as staff and later as director,education of students has been the prima-ry issue, with the research agenda ulti-mately served by this new method. Weeklysurveys of work on the tell are made, dur-ing which the current progress in each areais summarized by student representativesof individual loci. Students are oftentrained to do even the “crucial” daily log.It is the detail-oriented jobs that give thestudents the sense of what material cultureis and how archaeology is an interpretativediscipline that starts with an objectiveassessment of the piece under examina-tion. It is also a new type of “discovery.”I often tell students that their field excava-tion locus is a laboratory unlike any otherlab that they will ever encounter. It is alab where the experiments may never berun again: the moment that a piece ofphysical evidence is uncovered is the onlymoment that it will be in that position forinterpretation ever again. So they mustlearn to get it right the first time. We donot require that student volunteers haveprevious training in archaeology, andtrained students or professionals are wel-come as long as they are able to work inthe collaborative atmosphere withuntrained students.

See FREUND p.viii

Richard A. Freund is Director ofthe Maurice Greenberg Center forJudaic Studies at the University ofHartford and Professor of JewishHistory. He has served as Directorof the Bethsaida ExcavationsProject, the John and Carol MerrillCave of Letters Excavations Project,and the Qumran ExcavationsProject in Israel. For the past sixyears (1996-2002), he was Editorin Chief of Spotlight onTeaching.

“

”

The “rocks, linens, wood, beads, metals” do notreally “speak”; objects and

writings are only intelligiblethrough the process of

subjective interpretation,and this process is open tospeculation and reasonable

hypothesizing.

“

”

Work in the field consists of excavating,

recording, photographing,and surveying. With

proper supervision andtraining, students can do

any of these tasks.

viii • May 2003 AAR RSN

Religious Studies News, AAR Edition

FREUND, from p.vii

Biblical andTalmudic/RabbinicArchaeologyWhile the word “Bible” or “biblical” in acourse catalogue tends to bring studentsinto an archaeology course, it is the on-going tradition of literary information suchas “talmudic” or “rabbinic” that more accu-rately defines the relationship between bib-lical texts and the material culture weemploy in understanding Judaism at sitesaround Israel and the Middle East. TheBible and archaeology have an unusual rela-tionship. The Bible gives literary informa-tion that describes a material culture andtime period and talmudic/rabbinic archae-ology attempts to do the same thingthrough the lens of literature that may behundreds (or thousands) of years later thatthe original “biblical” period. It is the lensthat is both misleading and enormouslyimportant to understanding the develop-ment of Judaism. Biblical archaeologystretches over thousands of years of chang-ing literary texts and influences; talmudicarchaeology is Roman period archaeology(in Israel) reflected through the lens of laterliterary references in post-biblical rabbinicsettings of Babylonia, Egypt, North Africa,and elsewhere as the rabbinic texts wereedited, redacted, and placed into their finalform. Post-biblical Judaism is the interpre-tive exercise of later rabbinic figures com-menting on earlier biblical traditions andattempting to define biblical material cul-ture in this new interpretive setting.

I first read about talmudic archaeology inthe paperback book Archaeology, the Rabbisand Early Christianity by Eric M. Meyersand James F. Strange (1981). It is a smallbook that attempts to systematically explainthe archaeological method in relation to thedevelopment of rabbinic Judaism. In theearly twentieth century, Samuel Krauss hadproduced his two-volume TalmudischeArchaeologie (1910-1911) and his SynagogueAltertümer (1922), and Samuel Klein hadpublished Beiträge zur Geographie undGeschite Galiläas (1909), but in these works,one finds a familiar problem also found inbiblical archaeology, viz., the linkage ofexact talmudic stories and information withplaces and artifacts identified at a site orvice-versa. This type of identification sys-tem proves to be inadequate or theological-ly weighted in the case of the Bible and iseven more problematic in the case of talmudic information.

The importance of the comparison is thatit allows for the student to see for him- orherself the possibilities of how traditionsmay be retrojected into the past to give alater development in Judaism greaterauthority. Sometimes it does the opposite,by preserving a significant piece of infor-mation about an artifact that is only main-tained within the later literature. An exam-ple from my own excavations at Bethsaidawill clarify my position and show how ithas provided us not only with excellentteaching moments in archaeology but also apedagogic model for how archaeology andespecially field studies allows students toparticipate in the greatest gifts that the aca-demic study of religion can provide: discov-ery, and the critical reasoning skills forinterpreting the discovery.

Bethsaida: A “Jewish”City by the NorthShore of the Sea ofGalileeBethsaida presents a case in biblical andrabbinic archaeology that has no parallel

thus far. We rediscovered the site in 1987and have spent the past sixteen years tryingto understand its significance. At the startof the excavations we discovered largequantities of Roman pottery, indicatingthat this was an active site in the first cen-tury. It is perhaps the best example of avillage — later a city — in which mostscholars believe Jesus had been active, thathas been accessible to total archaeologicalinvestigation. Many other sites that havesuch a close relationship with Jesus and theapostles were identified by the Church inthe fourth century CE and made into “reli-gious sites” with Byzantine churches andmonasteries attached. Bethsaida apparentlywas abandoned in the third century CEand its location lost for a variety of differ-ent geological and geographic reasons thatwe have been unraveling with our studentsover the past decade.

It is a city that may have been critical tothe rise of the early Jesus group since, bysome accounts, as many as six of the apos-tles are placed there in the first century, andthe New Testament places many of the mir-acles and Jesus’ earliest activities there. Ourrediscovery of the site has been a wonderfulopportunity to have students share in the

discovery not only of the site but of howone assesses the significance of material cul-ture when a city has not been continuouslyoccupied for nearly two thousand years.We have been bringing students to ourBethsaida Excavations Project since 1987and one question that continually has beenasked is “What makes this a Jewish city inantiquity?” The city is mentioned in theancient Jewish historian Josephus Flavius’swritings, in the New Testament, in rabbinicwritings from the Mishnah through theTalmudim, and even perhaps the HebrewBible, so it is clearly connected to Jewishlife. But what specific artifacts make a cityJewish? The answer to this question mayhelp us understand the larger religiousquestions that are of interest to the academ-ic study of Judaism and Christianity: how“Jewish” was early Christianity in Israel,and what was the nature of Jewish life inplaces far from Jerusalem in the SecondTemple period?

First, we always assumed that it was a“Jewish” city because of its location in closeproximity to other Galilean and GolanJewish cities of the same time period locat-ed along the same roads and pathwaysaround the Sea of Galilee. Although thereare non-Jewish cities in the area, our identi-fication became a working hypothesis. Wedid not know whether Bethsaida ever had aJewish majority population and thereforethe search for its Jewishness was complicat-ed. We asked basic questions of ourselvesand of the students, such as what makesthe material culture at Bethsaida “Jewish”or “pagan” (since there were presumably no“Christians” in the first-century city)?What type of Jews were these BethsaidaJews? Were they “rabbinic Jews” who sawrabbinic law as the defining factor for theirlives or were they a marginally Jewish pop-ulation who rarely encountered rabbis?Were rabbis as we know them from the

texts even distinguishable in this regionduring the Hellenistic and Roman periodwhen Bethsaida flourished, or is this termi-nology anachronistic?

These became issues not only for theresearchers but also questions posed to stu-dents, who every year are asked to choose a

topic for a research paper. They can choosealmost anything and throughout the yearswe have had standard research papers onindividual finds, thematic papers on thelarger social and religious issues, as well asphoto essays, movies, audiotapes, and evenpoetry and songs evoked by the experience.One research question that has been thesubject both of scholarly and studentpapers has to do with the obvious absenceof standard Jewish institutions such as asynagogue (a singular and significant“Jewish building” for worship and study)and a mikveh (a uniquely Jewish bath andbuilding complex used to fulfill ritual puri-ty statutes in biblical and rabbinic texts) ata “Jewish” city such as Bethsaida. While Igenerally tell students that “absence of evi-dence is not evidence of absence,” theabsence of a synagogue structure and amikveh at the site raises the pedagogicalquestion of defining “Jewish” in the periodof Bethsaida’s existence. I sometimes call

the search for Jewish institutions such assynagogues and mikvehs an “edifice com-plex,” but it is an issue that students readilyunderstand and which therefore presents anopportunity to teach. The existence of asynagogue or a mikveh site has become one“litmus test” for the Jewishness of a site;however, our students quickly discoverthrough lectures and conversations withstaff that the whole concept and terminolo-gy of standard categories such as “the syna-gogue” and “the mikveh” are not as stan-dard as they thought. Therefore the lack ofa synagogue or “Jewish” building on thesite should not rule out the possibility thatJews lived there. In fact, all indications arethat Bethsaida may have ceased to be activewhen formal synagogue structures cameinto fashion in the third and fourth centuryCE in the Golan. [For more on the syna-gogue and mikveh problems, see D.Urman, “The House of Assembly and theHouse of Study: Are They One and theSame?” Journal of Jewish Studies 44.2(1993); and Jacob Neusner, The Judaic Lawof Baptism (University of South Florida,1995).]

The development of the mikveh was anattempt to create a rather specific ritual foron-going, non-Temple-oriented Judaismand it succeeded. When we are atBethsaida, I will often take students toother sites nearby with mikveh structuresand ask them to measure and understandtheir construction; I then ask them whythey think we haven’t discovered one. Inthe past, some students have responded,“Perhaps because we have only excavated10 percent of the site in fifteen years, andthe mikveh is located elsewhere on thesite.” Other students made the argument:“. . . perhaps they just bathed in the nearbyJordan River, and that sufficed for ritualand non-ritual purposes.” In fact, thatwould have sufficed according to rabbinictexts. This type of learning and discoveryis impossible to achieve in the classroom,but it is the basic stuff of the academic studyof religion. I could never really teach all ofthis in a classroom, and it is for this reasonalone that I advocate taking students outinto the field for this experience.

Smaller artifacts can help us determine eth-nicity as well. Hebrew inscriptional infor-mation (we have some at Bethsaida butvery little) is also important for the deter-mination of “Jewishness,” but again, maynot be decisive in a location so far fromJerusalem. No obviously Jewish symbolssuch as menorahs, Temple images, or bibli-cal scenes have been discovered at the exca-vations at Bethsaida but again only 10 per-cent of the site has been uncovered. Wehave identified other types of what hasbeen called “Jewish” Hellenistic and earlyRoman Jewish art that have taught usabout the relationship between text andmaterial culture. A few different geometricornaments — identified at other very clear-ly defined Jewish cities as “Jewish” symbolsof the Second Temple period — have beenfound at Bethsaida on lintels and massivestone pieces scattered around the site andon pottery. They include the rosette, theinhabited double meander, and the five- orsix-pointed star. An understanding ofJewish art in this period, its place in reli-gious worship, and its relationship to liter-ary prohibitions against pagan art allows usto teach about a key issue of Judaism’s reli-gious system. Similarly, a uniquely decorat-ed stone stele at a city gate religious cultlocation from the Iron Age level atBethsaida stands next to an undecoratedstele. While this city gate conjures up alltypes of biblical citations, it is the totalcontext of material culture that teaches ourstudents about the relationship between theBible and our archaeology: researchers have

See FREUND p.xii

Bethsaida excavations: site overview (Photos courtesy of R. Freund)

“ ”What specific artifacts make a city Jewish?

May 2003 AAR RSN • ix

SPOTLIGHT ON TEACHING

IWILL SHARE with you my encounterswith material culture as a student and asa graduate student instructor (GSI) in a

classroom. There is tremendous potentialin using material culture as a pedagogicalinstrument for teaching religion at theuniversity level. This fact has been madereal to me as an undergraduate, as a gradu-ate student, and as a graduate studentinstructor.

While an M.A. student at the GraduateTheological Union (GTU), I was fortu-nate enough to be a graduate studentinstructor at the University of California,Berkeley in Asian-American Studies. Inmy first year teaching in Asian-AmericanHistory, I brought in Ansel Adams’s BornFree and Equal, a collection of his pho-tographs depicting Japanese Americans intheir daily life at Manzanar. I mentionedto my students that the book, publishedamidst wartime prejudice against JapaneseAmericans, received a negative reactionand was burned in public displays of anti-Japanese sentiment. In addition, I pre-sented replicas of government documentsordering the internment of JapaneseAmericans, e.g. Executive Order 9066 andCivilian Exclusion Order No. 108, and Ipresented photo-postcards produced byRoger Shimomura, a Japanese-Americanartist who depicted his memories and rep-resentations of life in the camps.

My students engaged with the artifacts atonce. They may have known the facts ofinternment, but these documents andimages gave those historical facts an imme-diate reality. Through the artifacts, wewere transported back in time and beyondthe confines of our real surroundings.History was not in the past; it was in ourclassroom. I had wanted to provide stu-dents with tools to negotiate the past withthe present, to provide them with a way tosynthesize textbook information with lec-ture and discussion, and it worked.

After this lesson, I took my students on afield trip to the Berkeley Buddhist Churchon Channing Way, to show physical cultur-al changes and adaptation in JapaneseBuddhism in America after World War II.I recall they were all “super-shocked” to

Teaching Religion and Learning Religion through MaterialCultureJonathan Huoi Xung Lee

Jonathan H. X. Lee is currently a doctoralstudent in Religious Studies at theUniversity of California, Santa Barbara;his fields of interest and research are EastAsian Religions, and American Religions:the Chinese Diaspora. He is also a projectphotographer and archivist for the ReligiousPluralism in Southern California Project,and he is the author of several forthcomingarticles on religion in Chinese andVietnamese-American communities.

find that the interior of the churchlooked exactly like a Protestantchurch, except that there was animage of the Buddha on the mainaltar instead of Jesus. The architec-tural display and traditional images inthe Berkeley Buddhist Church provid-ed me with a compelling narrativespace in which to explain the role ofJapanese Buddhism in the construc-tion of Japanese-American communityand in the (re)configurations of aJapanese-American identity.

While at GTU, I was often asked tolecture on Chinese ancestral venera-tion. Sometimes I offered to presenta slideshow lecture on Chinese popu-lar religion to provide my classmateswith a way to experience the syn-cretistic expression of Chinese popu-lar religion in Chinese culture. In myshow-and-tell, I presented paper [funerary]goods, gold and silver spirit money, helldollars, incense, ritual divination blocks,along with pictures of their use, all ofwhich I passed around for everyone toexamine. The Christian seminarians toldme appreciatively that the slide show andartifacts gave them a better understandingof ancestral veneration, because it providedthem a way of imagining it in fuller detailsin their own minds. The syncretisticnature of Chinese popular religion is diffi-cult to teach because it is full of contradic-tions and tensions, but this unique tenden-cy is expressed in religious rituals and ismanifest in the material expression of cul-tural artifacts. One can see the syncreticelements working together in practical har-mony.

The last experience I want to share withyou concerns the impact of using materialculture in my current academic researchand studies. While at the GTU, Professors

Nakasone and Yee took our class to SanFrancisco Chinatown to visit several tem-ples. Because I have a long standing inter-est in the Chinese sea goddess widelyknown as Tianhou, or “the Empress ofHeaven,” and I had heard that there was aTianhou Temple in Chinatown, I askedProfessor Yee to take us there. The templewas amazing. The smell of incense, thedisplay of offerings, the multicoloredshrines, the lanterns covering the entireceiling, the images of Tianhou, Guanyin,and other deities, and the crowdedness ofthe room, all compelled us to ask ques-tions. Why are there red lanterns coveringthe ceiling? Why is the image so dark?Who is this? Why are there so manyimages of Guanyin? Why does Guanyinhave a mustache in this picture? Why?Why? Why? This was an example ofactive, three-dimensional, fully sensorial,experiential learning at its best.

This temple provided a truly unique,engaging, and powerful learning tool onboth historical and contemporary Chinesereligious life. Professor Yee explained thesymbolic use of architectural space andhow it communicates Chinese religious,philosophical, social, and moral values.We all gained invaluable insight that dayat the Tianhou Temple. I came out of theexperience with more questions thananswers. These questions fueled my ongo-ing research interests, including a projectdocumenting the contemporary life of theTianhou Temple. In the process of doingfieldwork at the Tianhou Temple, I discov-ered there was a second temple in SanFrancisco dedicated to Tianhou, who isalso worshiped under an affectionateTaiwanese epithet, Mazu. Hence I startedresearching the Mazu Temple U.S.A.,located several blocks away. It became thetopic of my now-completed master’s the-sis, but I feel that I have only just begunto appreciate the temple’s riches.

Using material culture as a pedagogicaltool will be a key element in my futureteaching. I have collected several artifactsin my travels: ritual implements, icons andother examples of religious art, picturesand videos of temples and monasteries,and clothing, in addition to taking manypictures of people engaged in rituals andworship. In Taiwan, I bought a papermodel of a Walkman, and I collected tem-ple booklets and merit cards;in Hong Kong Ibought a pair of divinationblocks andbamboo wor-shipingstrips in abamboocanister,with thethoughtof illus-tratingtheir use ina futureclassroom.In Cambodia, Ibought a Theravadasaffron robe with a beg-ging bowl, and in Thailand, Ibought a pictorial representa-tion of the life of the Buddha. Icontinue to collect religious-culturalartifacts as I travel, but one need nottravel abroad to buy these things, especial-ly in California where ethnic communitiesthrive.

Teaching religion and learning religionrequires more than memorizing factsabout beliefs from a textbook. Imagesfrom art, material examples of religious rit-uals and other expressive practices — allprovide important experiences in teachingand learning about religion as a lived expe-rience. Religion is practiced. And Ibelieve that the importance and sophistica-tion of practice can only be fully taughtand learned through the incorporation ofmaterial culture into the religious studiesclassroom.❧

Resources

Adams, Ansel. Born Free and Equal: TheStory of Loyal Japanese Americans, ManzanarRelocation Center, Inyo County, California.Spotted Dog Press, 2002.

“

”

I recall they were all “super-shocked” to find thatthe interior of the church

looked exactly like aProtestant church, except

that there was an image ofthe Buddha on the main

altar instead of Jesus.

Chinese offering paper in the form of a note from the Bank of Hell. (Photo courtesy of V.-L. Nyitray)

Chinese ‘joss’ or offering paper (Photo courtesy

ofV.

-L.N

yitra

y)

x • May 2003 AAR RSN

Religious Studies News, AAR Edition

T HIS IS THE TALE of how all theparticipants in an “Introduction toReligion” course gained a new appre-

ciation for pedagogy and learning throughthe use of material culture. Moreover, becauseof the simple efforts of one guest speaker, bothstudents and instructor alike learned animportant lesson on the complexity of socialsystems and how material culture can trans-form classroom analysis of these subjects.

The class to which I’ve alluded took place at alarge, midwestern university where most stu-dents were overwhelmingly white andChristian. Of those who took religious studiesclasses, most did so for all of the typical rea-sons: it fulfilled their general requirements; itwas offered at a time they liked; they had aninterest in world religions, or at least an inter-est in the issues posed by their own religiouscommitments. In this sense, my class wasprobably like many other religious studiescourses across the country.

With this particular class, however, a couple ofthings were noticeably different. First, as agraduate student-turned-brand-new teacher, Iwas hoping that my speaking skills and song-and-dance routines would compensate for thehuge holes in my knowledge. As countlessothers have undoubtedly experienced, my firstlecture was met with a barrage of questionsthat I simply could not answer. Adding tothis was a local community debate involvingreligion and the constitutionality of its expres-

sion that had gained national media attention;it would become a particularly volatile topicthat framed the entire semester.

The circumstances inspiring the controver-sy involved a woman in a small, neighbor-ing town who had challenged the use of aChristian symbol on the town’s flag, callingit an unconstitutional display. The subse-quent uproar amongst the community’smembers (who had no intention of remov-ing the symbol) grew only more heatedwhen it was discovered that this womanwas a practicing Wiccan. The issue madeits way boldly into the media and into ourclassroom. One student hailed from thetown where this controversy raged, andconsistently expressed strong opinionsagainst the woman’s “right to assault” hiscommunity by “forcing her religiousviews” where they were not wanted.Many others commented that her chal-lenge was nothing more than an attention-getting device, since the symbol, theyinsisted, wasn’t hurting anyone. Fewspoke up to defend her actions, and fewwere willing to (verbally) question howthings might have been different had thewoman identified with any other religiousgroup. My attempts to analyze media rep-resentations of this issue fostered furtherclassroom tension.

I had already planned to discuss Wicca dur-ing part of the semester, and I had asked alocal Wiccan priestess to be a guest speaker.More than one student approached me toindicate that they were uncomfortable withher planned visit. I was continually sec-ond-guessing my decision to have hercome, as I wanted to avoid her marginaliza-tion at a time when she and others fearedfor their safety. I was also concerned thather religious beliefs and practices had beeneither exoticized or demonized, despite mybest efforts to couch my description ofWicca and its historical/cultural contextwithin a larger discussion on the processesby which dominant groups construct an“other.”

On the day of her presentation, the majori-ty of the students were already in their seatsas class began; this was one time when Iwas convinced that punctuality was not apositive trait. When the speaker arrived,several of the students were visibly sur-prised (and, they would tell me later,relieved) to find an intelligent, eloquent,funny woman who wore neither robes norany other garb that might distinguish herfrom anyone else in our campus communi-ty. A number of students gathered aroundher during the break, eager to ask questions

about and handle the artifacts she broughtfor their viewing, including books, candles,a set of runes, multiple decks of tarot cards,wands, and crystals. Chatting revealed thatshe was a mother, and that she worked forone of the city’s major employers. Some ofthe tension that existed dissipated when aclass member asked where she got her can-dles. Nervous laughter filtered through theroom at her answer: “Wal-Mart.”

Special interest was directed toward thewands, runes, and tarot cards. A coupleof students mentioned that they had expe-rienced physical objects as purely symbolic

ingredients in Christian ritual, heighten-ing their interest in these implements towhich physical, practical claims wereattached. As the speaker described her useof each item, she provided us with ahands-on basis to broaden and furthercomplicate our discussion on the problemsinvolved in defining “religion.” We wereno longer theorizing about purely ideolog-ical issues; we now had to wrestle with thesignificance of materiality in our discus-sions, and whether the distinction betweenthe two was an artificial one.

The debriefing that followed the presenta-tion reflected an interest in the speaker thatdid not wane. Her presentation initiatedan ongoing dialogue between the class andmembers of a local coven, and a few of theclass members used the data gathered fromher presentation as a stepping stone fortheir final projects. The speaker’s visit thusallowed students to investigate some aca-demic areas of interest while trying theirhand at ethnography. From a pedagogicalperspective, I was also pleased to have acontext in which to engage the class in self-analysis, asking questions like the follow-ing: “Why did you feel relief when you sawthat she appeared, as we’ve called it, ‘nor-mal,’ and what’s at stake in that word?”;“How might this conversation be differenthad she been wearing black robes?”; and —the question I could not ask before, “Howwould our responses to the ‘town flag’ con-troversy be different had the person speak-ing out been a Christian? Does this experi-

ence change things, and if so, in whatway(s)?” On a much simpler level, thepresence and discussion of material objectssparked questions that a straight lecturewould not have, and we spent weeks e-mailing with her about the significance ofthe objects she brought for our viewing.

Because the class was able to interact with areligious participant and the materialaspects of her practice, we were afforded anexcellent confrontation with the complexityof social labels. This is, perhaps, the mostimportant point. Textbook representationsof social groups are just that; we must all,

inevitably, use generalization as an impor-tant part of what we do. As a new teacher,I had expected that, at the end of thecourse, all students would have added sub-stantially to their factual database via thistextbook format. After the speaker’s pre-sentation, however, I understood how myfocus on facts obscured a much moreimportant goal: my students should comeaway from the class able to grasp a bit ofthe complexity of society, the categories weuse to describe it, and, in light of the “townflag” controversy, the various negotiationsthat go on between groups for the right touse its most valued monikers — “normal-cy” being among them. The speaker pro-vided me a context in which to evaluate myown expectations of student learning whenI saw the ways in which she was able tomake it happen. My most detailed lectureon Wicca could not compare to the con-founding of social categories provided byher presence: she effectively equated“Wiccan” with a working mother who fre-quents Wal-Mart.

I am indebted, then, to one Wiccan priest-ess and to forty-five students for demon-strating how the use of material culture canprovide a significant lesson on the utterintricacy of society while providing a forumto introduce and investigate some of thecentral questions of religious studies. Of allof the lessons I learned during those firstfew semesters of teaching, this was one ofthe most valuable. ❧

Complicating Things: Material Culture and the ClassroomLeslie Smith

Leslie Smith taught for four years asan adjunct instructor at twoMidwestern universities before begin-ning her doctoral work in ReligiousStudies at the University ofCalifornia, Santa Barbara. Herresearch emphasizes social theory, gen-der, and American culture. “

”We were no longer theorizing about purely ideological

issues; we now had to wrestle with the significance ofmateriality in our discussions, and whether the

distinction between the two was an artificial one.

Testamints™ and heat-sensitive yin-yang pencil (Photo courtesy of V.-L. Nyitray)

May 2003 AAR RSN • xi

SPOTLIGHT ON TEACHING

NYITRAY, from p.ii

slides and videos as well, but, as Smith’sessay documents, the physical presence ofactual objects is often supremely catalyticfor class discussion. Tactile teaching was astaple of our own early childhood educa-tion, introducing us to new worlds of expe-rience; why now do we abandon it, particu-larly in “introductory” courses?

Introductions come through a variety ofmedia. The Spring 2001 issue of Spotlighton Teaching focused on aurality, in the formof music, in the classroom. In the currentissue, contributor Daniel Sack focuses on amaterial aspect of orality — discussing theuses of food and notions of eating in teach-ing the material culture of religion.Through the study of this most basichuman activity, Sack illustrates the multipleperspectives students gain into the socialand doctrinal assumptions of a religious tra-dition and its institutions.

The importance of treating food, textiles,toys, music, and so forth is also asserted byStrenski: “Material religious culture is com-posed of all the sensate entities and events ofreligion.” I would add that an overlookedaspect of these entities and events is theirinterlocking nature. For example, in a

study of radio and religion in Appalachia,Howard Dorgan was led to describe meet-ing houses and tent revivals as sites for livebroadcasts; this led in turn to a discussionof “swooning in the spirit,” in which listen-ers fall to the ground, bodies frozen inplace; this introduced the topic of carpetsupon which to fall and of the need for“coverlets” to protect a woman’s modestyonce she’s hit the ground — and thus werewoven together everything from AM radiosto portable organs to squares of velveteen.

Over the years, as colleagues and studentshave tumbled to my predilection for reli-gious objects, I have been helped to buildup quite a collection. In addition to anheirloom Buddhist rosary of perfectlyround hand-carved beads, I have vials ofholy water and bags of healing soil, devo-tional cards, yarrow stalks, festival lanterns,shadow puppets, and, most dramatically, aball studded with nails — used byTaiwanese shamans to beat themselves in

order to draw blood for the production ofamulets and medicines. I treasure my trea-sures, but I am sometimes troubled whenstudents admire them. How can I helpthem steer clear of the tendency to eitherexoticize or trivialize a tradition, to carica-ture someone else’s faith as infantile orprimitive? How are they to understand theuse and misuse of the material culturalproducts of others’ religious imaginations?Both Freund and Strenski pose useful ques-tions for enabling students to examine theira priori assumptions about material mani-festations of religion.

Popular items and religious kitsch yield dif-ferent interpretive issues relative to naiveart, mass consumption, humor, and cyni-cism. My crowded office is home to musi-cal Marys, garish Guanyins, and Buddhasqueaky toys. I have soap bars that promiseto “wash away sins”; votive candles dedicat-ed to “Our Lady of Deadlines” and “OurLady of Perpetual Housework”; light-updevotional shrines to Ganesh and to St.Anthony; Christian “testamint” candies;heat-sensitive, color-changing yin-yangpencils; and yes, I do have a plastic Jesus“sitting on the dashboard of my car.” I amnot always sure what Hindu students makeof the Kali lunchbox I use to carry white-board markers to class, but perhaps when

they notice my sparkle-red Jesus earrings —his visage embedded in acrylic that’s beenpoured into Diet Coke bottle caps — theycan at least see that I am an equal-opportu-nity collector of such goods. I see theseartifacts as evidence of the deeply rootednature of religion in human culture. If themanufacture and use of tools are central tothe definition of ourselves as human, it isnatural for us to create tools for the expres-sion — whether devotional, ritual, practi-cal, or satirical — of our religious and spiri-tual realities, however we embrace or rejectthem. To leave the evidence of materialculture out of the teaching of religion is,then, to eviscerate our humanity. ❧

Selected Resources

Bringéus, Nils-Arvid, ed. Religion in

Everyday Life: Papers Given at a Symposiumin Stockholm, 13-15 September 1993.Stockholm: Kungl. Vitterhets, 1994.

Buddhanet. Online at www.buddhanet.net/e-learning/history/buddhist-art/monastery.htm. Provides basic introductionto structure and contents of a typicalChinese Buddhist temple. A link towww.buddhanet.net/e-learning/ temple/c-tem-ple.html provides a detailed look at a partic-ular temple in Singapore. Although the siteis still under construction, it is a fine exam-ple of a virtual lesson in temple architectureand symbolic meaning.

Caldwell, Mark. “Church Signs 4 You.”Online collection of church signs (“We’renot Dairy Queen but we have greatSundays!”) and billboards (“You think it’shot here?” -God)www.members.truepath.com/churchsigns

Chester, Laura. Holy Personal: Looking forSmall Private Places of Worship.Bloomington: University of Indiana Press,2000.

Cort, John E. “Art, Religion, and MaterialCulture: Some Reflections on Method.”Journal of the American Academy of Religion64 (Fall 1996).

Dorgan, Howard. The Airwaves of Zion:Radio and Religion in Appalachia. Knoxville:University of Tennessee Press, 1993.

Hartel, Heather. Online collection ofgravestones, of which she notes a contem-porary shift from images of the afterlife andreminders of the transience of this life, e.g.,angels, a handshake, and various momentomori images to those that “celebrate theperson’s life on earth, remembering themfor the things they liked while alive,”including, it seems, Garfield and MickeyMouse. angelfire.com/ny5/mediamedusa/ projects/gravestones/index.html

Kieschnick, John. The Impact of Buddhismon Chinese Material Culture. Princeton:Princeton University Press, 2003.

Knapp, Ronald G. China’s Living Houses:Folk Beliefs, Symbols, and HouseholdOrnamentation. Honolulu: University ofHawai’i Press, 1999.

Lee, Jonathan H. X. “Journey to the West:Tianhou in San Francisco.” UnpublishedM.A. thesis, Graduate Theological Union,2002.

Macaulay, David. Motel of the Mysteries.Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979. An illus-

trated, tongue-in-cheek cautionary tale offuture archaeologists who discover a“motel,” whose sealed chambers (“Do NotDisturb”) reveal personal altars and ablu-tion chambers containing sacred papyrus(folded into a “sacred point”) and a “musi-cal instrument” that relies on periodicflushes of water.

Material History of American Religion pro-ject. materialreligion.org. Working from1995 through 2001, this Lilly-fundedProject studied the history of American reli-gion through examining material objectsand economic themes. Although the pro-ject has concluded its work, the website hasbeen maintained; it houses an archive of itse-journal, interviews with project partici-pants, documents and objects collected bythe project, and links to other internetresources. On the dangers of interpreta-tion, see especially independent scholarMary Ann Clark’s electronic journal article,“Seven African Powers: Hybridity andAppropriation,” for a discussion of the mis-interpretation of devotional candles. materialreligion.org/journal/candles

McDannell, Colleen. Material Christianity:Religion and Popular Culture in America.New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,1995.

McKee, Susan. Material Culture of ReligionGlossary, ed. 6 (August 1998). Online atwww.religionatlas.org/TeacherResources/Glossary.A work of the Project on Religion andUrban Culture at the Polis Center atIndiana University-Purdue UniversityIndiana (itself a good resource); only onesection is operational at present, providingdefinitions of architectural terms relevant toreligious sites, from abutment to zendo.

Morgan, David. Protestants and Pictures:Religion, Visual Culture, and the Age ofAmerican Mass Production. New York:Oxford University Press, 1999.

Visual Piety: A History and Theory of PopularReligious Images. Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1998.

Strenski, Ivan. “Why It Is Better to HaveSome of the Questions Than All of theAnswers.” Method and Theory in the Study ofReligion 14 (in press, Winter 2002).

Judith Weisenfeld’s syllabus can be reviewedonline at the AAR Syllabus Project:www.aarweb.org/syllabus/syllabi/w/weisenfeld/rel160/film_site.html. Teachingreligion and film was also the theme for theMay 1998 issue of Spotlight on Teaching,archived online at www.aarweb.org.

“”

Tactile teaching was a staple of our own early childhood education, introducing us to newworlds of experience; why now do we abandon it,

particularly in “introductory” courses?

Published by the American Academy of Religion Vol. 16, No.3

Fall 2001

The AAR Committee onTeaching and Learning(Thomas Peterson, AlfredUniversity, Chair), sponsorsSpotlight on Teaching. Itappears twice each year inReligious Studies News, AAREdition as a special pulloutsection focusing on teaching

and learning around a particular theme, concern, or setting. Richard A. FruendUniversity of HartfordEditor.

Laurie L. PattonEmory UniversityAssociate EditorHugh Pyper,University of Leeds,Guest Editor

Teaching Religionand Theology inGreat Britain

IN THIS ISSUE

is no single representative body for the-

ology and religious studies that corre-sponds to the AAR, finding this infor-

mation and tracking down contacts has

been time-consuming. It has involvedsearching through the individual websites of British universities, colleges, and

related bodies.This edition of Spotlight on Teachingintroduces a new project that, amongother things, offers a one-stop site foraccess to the whole field of theology and

religious studies in Britain. The project is

particularly concerned to foster the communication of effective practice inteaching and learning. The new site isadministered by the Philosophical andReligious Studies Subject Centre of the

Learning and Teaching SupportNetwork, or PRS-LTSN. Links to all the

British institutions teaching theologyand religious studies, and to British col-

leagues teaching in a particular field, are

available at http://www.prs-ltsn.leeds.ac.uk.

The site also offers discussion groups,web-based publications, and news ofconferences. It offers a new possibilityfor sharing best practice and teachinglearning, not just within Britain, butbetween Britain and the rest of theworld. In the following pages, we hope

to introduce this project to you and tosuggest some topics this new dialoguemight cover.

The web site is the most accessible part

of the LTSN, but behind it is a greatdeal of other activity. LTSN offers work-

shops for teachers involved in particular

subjects or facing particular problems.

Research projects into topics such as the

use of Web material in teaching, theproblems of particular disadvantagedstudent groups, and creative ways todeal with increasing student numbers,

are sponsored by the PRS-LTSN. We are

shortly to launch a journal to provide a

forum for publication of such material.

The aim of the PRS-LTSN is to bringabout a change of culture so that talking

and writing about teaching becomes as

accepted a part of the life of academics

as the discussion of research. We aredelighted to offer readers of ReligiousStudies News an invitation to learn more

about the PRS-LTSN’s work, and tobecome involved in the exciting possibilities

of pooling resources and teaching strate-

gies internationally.Some issues are specific to the British situation, of course, but the basic problems of teaching students to thinkcreatively in these subjects, and of finding

and assessing teaching materials to use,cross national boundaries. Commonproblems exist, for instance, in coming to

terms with the proper use of the Internet,

the changing educational experience ofstudents at the school level, and the ten-

sion between teachers’ independence and

the need to ensure proper standards.Broadening the dialogue can only help us

all. The PRS-LTSN has already benefited

from strong links with the Wabash Center

for Teaching Theology and Religion based

at Wabash College, Crawfordsville,Indiana. The two bodies are co-operating

in a Special Session at this year’s

AAR/SBL Annual Meeting. The Teaching

and Learning Committee of the AAR has

been very supportive, and the possibilities

of exchange are very promising.This edition falls into six sections, written

by a variety of people involved with the

LTSN and its work. Together, they give a

window into the teaching of theology and

religious studies in Britain today. We hope

to explain some of the characteristic features of the educational traditions and

systems in Britain in a way that may give

food for thought for those in othercountries — whether as a source of inspiration or as a cautionary tale.We begin with a general description of

the PRS-LTSN and its purposes written

by Hugh Pyper, the Associate Director

of the Centre with special responsibility

for theology and religious studies. He is

also Senior Lecturer in Biblical Studies

at the University of Leeds. We thenmove on to Denise Cush’s discussion of

teaching religion at school level inBritain, which has some important differences from the situation in theUnited States. Gary Bunt addresses the

role of the Internet in British religious

studies education. This is followed bythree personal views on teaching religious studies and theology in modern

Britain. The first is by Dr ChakravatiRam-Prasad of the University ofLancaster, the second by Professor David

Fergusson of the University ofEdinburgh, and the third by BillCampbell, Associate Director of thePRS-LTSn in Lampeter.

Hugh Pyper, guest editor of Spotlight on Teaching, is Senior Lecturer in Biblical Studies at the University of

Leeds and Associate Director for Theology and Religious Studies.T HE UNITED KINGDOM has a long record of high-quality teaching in theology and religious studies,

with highly respected institutions, and world-class teachers and scholars. It is also home to rich resources

in its libraries, its heritage, and in the increasing cultural diversity of the country. Until now, because there

Fall 2001 AAR RSN • 1

Issues inTeachingReligion& Theologyin Great Britain

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . .2Hugh Pyper

Teaching Systematic Theology Today . . . . . . . . .3David Ferguson

Teaching South Asian Religions . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3Chakravarthi Ram-PrasadReligious Studies and the

Internet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4Gary Bunt

Teaching about religion in theschools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5Denise Cush

Teaching biblical studies . . .7Bill Campbell

In the next Spotlight on

TeachingTeaching about Peace

and Violence in Religions

xii • May 2003 AAR RSN

Religious Studies News, AAR Edition

FREUND, from p.viii

tried to connect the decorated stone tonon-Israelite influences in a mixed IronAge settlement at the site, while the lackof symbols on the undecorated stone isseen as evidence of an Israelite population.

The most ubiquitous find at any archaeo-logical site is pottery: cooking pots, stor-age pots, vessels for grinding, oil lamps,etc. At a site such as Bethsaida, potteryfinds usually are not intact and requirerestoration but they are uncovered everyday in every locus. They are the “nutsand bolts” of our material culture study,actually providing us with a window intothe lives of the people that lived at a site.This is the most important lesson that weteach in different ways every day, from themoment that students begin working inthe field loci to the lectures in theevening. From the washing of the potteryfind, the recording of each shard in thedaily log, the designation of the find andits elevation on the site on the map grid,and the marking of location numbers ofeach shard in the lab, to the photograph-

ing and drawing of the piece, it is a fulllearning environment that involves manydifferent skill sets that bring a student intoencounters with multiple disciplines andfaculty. At our afternoon “pottery read-ings,” we teach students how to “read” apiece of pottery like a text and how to dis-tinguish every aspect of pottery produc-tion from elements used in the prepara-tions of the clay to style changes and use-all crucial for dating a site since potterytypes are so particular to time and place.

Limestone vessels and pottery become amajor teaching opportunity, and the lessonsgo way beyond the standard archaeologyclassroom. Pottery seemed to us to be theplace to actually engage the students in thelarger questions of ethnicity and religion.Since purity laws are an important definingmark of a Jewish life, the discovery of whitelimestone vessel pieces and pottery typesmade from the clay and style of a rabbiniccenter of pottery in Galilee become enor-mously important. According to biblicaland, especially, rabbinic texts, stone vesselsare unlike pottery vessels in that they do notcontract ritual impurity; therefore, basalt

vessels and limestone vessels are seen as“Jewish.” Limestone vessels are particularlymeaningful in this context; they are not easyto make and are impractical, breaking easily,so limestone ware “special” pieces atBethsaida suggest a Jewish presence thatcared about such matters. Daily ware pot-tery may also raise ritual purity issues. Ourdaily ware pottery finds suggest that a goodproportion of these vessels were made at awell-known Galilean rabbinic site calledKefar Hanaya. If this is so, it would alsosuggest a Jewish rabbinic presence. Wespend time in evening lectures discussingrabbinic texts and purity laws in the hopesthat we can train students not only to “look”for subtle differences in pottery but to “see”the possibilities that even a minor discoverymakes to scholarship. I often worrywhether all of this work in the details of dis-covery makes students unable to see the larg-er perspective of “Ancient Judaism” in themidst of all of the details of pottery, architec-ture, coins, glass and metal studies, etc. Ihave not found this to be the case. In fact, Ifind that students can appreciate the largerquestions even more by understanding howthe collection process for data really does

work. All of these experiences make fieldstudies a unique learning environment.

In the past few years, planning for theseexpeditions has become more difficult aspolitical and social conditions in theMiddle East and Israel have become morecomplex. I have found that these complex-ities also provide important teaching andlearning opportunities both before andafter the expedition to the field is complet-ed. One of the most significant additions Ihave made to the student assignments infield studies in archaeology has been thedaily journal. Originally it was intended tomimic the site log and included excavationinformation, pottery readings, lab experi-ences, and lectures. Students are now toldto record not only the scientific findings ofevery day at the site but also the experi-ences and learning opportunities that occuroutside of the excavations. The momentsof insight recorded in the student journalshave convinced me that despite the com-plexities that field studies present, they areworth the effort that both students and fac-ulty expend to make them successful. ❧

Buddhist/Hindu Mala (Photo courtesy of V.-L. Nyitray)

Spotlight on TeachingSolicits Guest Editors

and Articles

AAR members interested in guest editing an issueof Spotlight on Teaching are invited to submit thetitle of a theme focusing on teaching and learningin the study of religion, along with a succinctdescription (500 words) of the theme’s merit andsignificance, to Spotlight’s general editor, Tazim R.Kassam. In addition to issues devoted to specificthemes, problems and settings, Spotlight on Teachingwill also occasionally feature a variety of indepen-dent articles and essays critically reflecting on peda-gogy and theory in the field of religion. Pleasesend both types of submissions to:

Tazim R. Kassam, EditorSpotlight on TeachingDepartment of Religion Syracuse UniversitySyracuse, NY 13210E-MAIL: tkassam@syr.eduTEL: 1-315-443-5722

Tasbih (Photo courtesy of Online Islamic Store, www.store.talkislam.com)