Religions Reviewed

Challenges to customary ideas about agency and causality are central to Foucault’s approach to history. Even his history writings still find narrative forms indispensable, in keeping with Munslow’s explanation that Foucauldian constructivism results in a view of a process through which “we create and live out our own narratives.”[1] Moreover, Foucault even assumed the role of a seemingly omniscient third-person narrator for the bulk of a work like Discipline & Punish.[2] His synchronic analysis of the relations among delinquency, policing, and incarceration overcomes a customary narrative in which the latter elements emerge causally from the earlier ones, but explaining the difference of this system from those historically prior to it, and deflating its humanitarian conceits, required that Foucault establish new narratives. Foucault’s examinations of ‘births’ and ‘beginnings’ wrestle with the ‘post-modern’ dilemma codified by Fredric Jameson: “how to do without narrative by means of narrative itself?”[3]

            One of the most routine ways of defining narrative form is to point to its division into beginning, middle and end. While Foucault did self-consciously “end a book” in his study of The Birth of the Prison, he simultaneously insisted that he had only started a historical understanding of the carceral system and its analogues, for which he had simply painted a “background.”[4] He had completed the ‘problematization’ of his subject matter. Without claiming even that sense of completeness, this paper emulates his approach by concluding without a final answer or a last word. 

[1] Munslow, “Michel Foucault and History,” p. 134.

[2] Ironically, this tactic may stem from (or at least be rationalized by) his contempt for the “author function” as a traditional “unity of discourse.” See Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, pp. 92-5.

[3] Jameson, Frederic. Foreword to The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge by Jean-François Lyotard (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1989), p. xix.

[4] Foucault, Discipline & Punish, p. 308.

These three characters might also be called much less accurately by the titles of the book’s three parts: Discipline, Punishment, and Torture. They are ‘inhabitants’ of three epistemes (the ‘settings’ of the narrative): the Modern, the Classical, and the Renaissance; and as such, they are mutually incompatible, being founded in distinct “systems of thought,” segregated by the implicit functioning of language and meaning itself. Even so, they have coexisted and interpenetrated. There was no apocalyptic “twinkling of an eye” in which Punishment gave way to Discipline; there was a long conversation, in which, if we are to believe Foucault, neither ever understood the other.[1] By personifying the three penal systems treated in Discipline & Punish, we perhaps run a risk of violating central tenets of Foucault’s method: to deny a priori status to any subject, and to view allegorical relations as problems rather than solutions.  Yet it is profoundly difficult to think about agency without personification.

Causality is similarly hard to do without, and while Foucault may have succeeded in his own mind, there are certainly passages in Discipline & Punish which invite the reader to see the ‘series of regularities’ as a function of cause and effect. Concerning the transition from Torture to Punishment, he abjures the idea that penality became more temperate in direct response to a reduction in crime. But he then turns to economic and legal details in a way that makes them look very much like possible ‘causes.’[2] Sometimes he appears to propose a sort of circular causality which would take the place of linear causality, as in the collaborative relationship among delinquency, policing, and incarceration.[3] In an even more perplexing move, he disavows “that the human sciences emerged from the prison.” Yet he immediately insists, “The carceral network constituted one of the armatures of this power-knowledge that made the human sciences historically possible.”[4] Foucault’s vaguely-reified ‘power-knowledge’ seems always on the verge of acquiring the sort of transcendental properties that his method disclaims.

[1] Op. cit., pp. 114-5, e.g.

[2] Op. cit., p. 76.

[3] Op. cit., pp. 280-2.

[4] Op. cit., p. 305.

Elsewhere in The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault was indeed scornful of “simple causality,” and he associated “endless processes of causality” with a “continuous history” which he rejected.[1] Munslow claims that “Foucauldian history does not evolve diachronically, but is best understood synchronically, as an explosive discursive structure.”[2] And yet, for all that Foucault insisted on ruptures and discontinuities, he still worked in a narrative form.[3] (The association between history and narrative is of course much stronger in Continental discourses where the words themselves—histoire, geschichte—fully embrace both meanings.) If not “simple causality,” there must nevertheless be some associative principles by which events are organized into the temporal ‘series’ which form the basis of “general history.”[4] And, for all of his effort to break with convention, Foucault’s titles still show his willingness to begin at a beginning.

As O’Brien observes, Foucault’s intellectual project was in many respects highly traditional: a history of Western civilization.[5] But the narrative of the most traditional histories involves not only causal plot, but characters, whether they are leaders, thinkers, peoples, states, or classes. Foucault was willing to illustrate his narrative with vivid anecdotes centered on individuals, such as the torture and execution of the regicide Damiens in Discipline & Punish, and the “Dossier” that makes up the body of I, Pierre Rivière, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother….[6] But Foucault’s accounts typically lack the sort of individual or collective characters common to historical narrative, in contrast to Bertrande in Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre, or white male workers in Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness. The principal agents in Foucault’s narrative are developments of power/knowledge evident in constellations of effects on institutions, personal practices, artifacts, architecture, and documentation by which humans develop and define themselves and others. Thus Foucault wrote a story in which the prison (or, as we finally come to know it, the “carceral archipelago”[7]) is the protagonist, overcoming the “punitive city” in competition to take its place as the penal system of the modern West.[8] Another principal character of Discipline & Punish is the old spectacular and corporeal penal system of the avenged sovereign.

[1] Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, pp. 7, 203.

[2] Munslow, “Michel Foucault and History,” p. 132.

[3] Munslow is particularly insistent on the importance of narrative for Foucault: “Michel Foucault and History,” pp. 134-7.

[4] Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, pp. 9-10.

[5] O’Brien, “Foucault’s History of Culture,” p. 33. Foucault himself might well have disdained this conclusion, since he set himself against the efficacy of the notion of an author’s ouvre (The Archaeology of Knowledge, pp. 23-4).

[6] Foucault, Discipline & Punish, pp. 3-5. Ibid. (ed.). I, Pierre Rivière, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother… (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982).

[7] Foucault, Discipline & Punish, p. 298.

[8] Op. cit., pp. 130-1.

Michel Foucault’s histories of the modern institutions of the hospital and the prison each carry the term ‘Birth’ (Naissance) in their titles.[1] Of course, the word can only be read in a metaphorical sense in these cases, and Foucault used it more loosely than would have been expected in the sort of history that might point to a founding personality as a ‘parent,’ or to a nation as a ‘cradle.’ Still, the metaphor is consistent with his project of ‘genealogy,’ a term taken up from Nietzsche to describe an inquiry into past systems of thought, understood as flexible power relations with consequences for the present.[2] A ‘birth,’ no matter how metaphorical, is a first instance, and indicates a set of formative conditions. Any historian might have both rhetorical and practical interests in the beginning of an object of historical study. In fact, Foucault once described the history of ideas—which his ‘archaeology’ was overtly intended to supersede—as the “analysis of silent births.”[3]

In her overview of the genealogical method in “Michel Foucault’s History of Culture,” Patricia O’Brien presents Foucault’s “essential distinction” between beginnings and origins. According to O’Brien, the distinction is that beginnings are the crucial evidence of difference, while origins implicate the idea of causation.[4] Both O’Brien and Alan Munslow characterize Foucault’s approach as hostile to causality as a category of analysis, which seems to raise some immediate problems for the work of history.[5] In The Archaeology of Knowledge, however, Foucault provided a somewhat different distinction between beginning and origin. There, he explicitly renounced any desire to appeal to the “real event” as a “secret origin” which has been thought to underlie and motivate “any apparent beginning.”[6] Foucault was not rejecting the idea of causality in this case: he was instead denying any realist epistemology which would place a hidden noumenal order at the back of the discursive phenomena of history, “to cleanse [history] of all transcendental narcissism.”[7] So, to return to the idea of ‘birth,’ Foucault would likely set himself methodologically against any extension of the metaphor to include a ‘conception’ that would be the ‘real cause’ of the cultural and discursive effects that he grouped as carceral in Discipline & Punish, for example.

[1] Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic: An Achaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (
London, 1972). Ibid. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979).

[2] Ibid. “Prison Talk,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), p. 53

[3] Ibid. The Archaeology of Knowledge, translated by A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), p. 138.

[4] O’Brien, Patrica. “Michel Foucault’s History of Culture,” in The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 37.

[5] O’Brien, “Foucault’s History of Culture,” p. 44. Munslow, Alan. “Michel Foucault and History,” in ibid., Deconstructing History (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 132.

[6] Foucault. The Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 25.

[7] Op. cit., p. 203. In this respect he was still working on his extension of the Nietzschean project. See e.g. the section on “‘Reason’ in Philosophy” in Nietzsche, Friedrich, Twilight of the Idols: Or, How One Philosophizes with a Hammer, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. & trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1982), pp. 485-6.

Judah repeatedly cites Frank Podmore’s history of Spiritualism, Charles J. Ryan on Theosophy, Horatio Dresser on New Thought, and several secondary sources on Christian Science. For all of the movements surveyed, he makes extensive use of their own doctrinal literature, and in several cases he has interviewed key leaders or their families. Perhaps it is significant that no secondary sources appear in different sections of the book, since Judah appears to have been the first to tie these various groups and teachings into a coherent tradition.

Judah’s theory of religion is partly formulated in his closing chapter, where he insists that all religions can be analyzed in terms of three chief components: mental/philosophical, conative (relating to aspiration and conduct), and emotional. He insists that the conative component, the religious will as such, must be powered by an emotional experience, and he suggests that the historical transformations in American religion have resulted from the waxing and waning of emphasis on emotional experience. He points to the metaphysical movements as offering an orientation to the religious experiences of the individual during periods when mainline Protestantism has become abstracted into concerns about social justice. (pp. 291-2)

A significant part of Judah’s methodology in The Metaphysical Movements might be best characterized as comparative theology, even though that term has not been in vogue since the mid-20^th century. He consistently attends to comparing the theological elements in the various metaphysical movements against each other, and against an implicitly normative mainline American Protestantism. But he has no evident chip on his shoulder, and his foreword includes an accounting of his own past engagements in the study and practice of Theosophy, yoga, New Thought, Spiritualism, and other “metaphysical” systems. The frankness of this passage shows a sort of scholarly reflexivity that is admirable in the early and mid-1960’s when Judah was writing. He cautions that any seemingly negative evaluations of the religions in his book “should be considered as constructive criticism offered in the same spirit in which the writer has also criticized the Protestant churches.” (p. 9) He does in the end refrain from offering either praise or condemnation of the metaphysical movements as a whole, but he opines that there would be ample justification for different parties to view them as revolutionary, restorative, or subversive of more customary institutional religions in America.

Writing in the 1990s, Wouter Hanegraaff refers to this book as a “standard work” on the topic, and notes that Judah coined the term “metaphysical movements.”[1] (See Judah, p. 7) The volume treats a set of “religious philosophies” in the United States, beginning in the 1840s, and progressing up until the date that the book was written. Although Judah provided no evidence for the claim, he asserted that these religions were growing in popularity at the time of his writing. (p. 12) He characterized these metaphysical movements by family resemblance, with a set of fifteen chief features, including: gnostic anthropology, divine monism, pragmatism, psychological interpretation, optimism, mental or spiritual healing, and preferring “principles” to creed. Even when explicitly Christian, these groups tended to view Jesus as a teacher, rather than as the unique human incarnation of God.

During World War II, Judah had helped reorganize the library centers at the Japanese Relocation Centers. He attended Japanese Language School and learned how to speak and write Japanese. He also served in US Navy Intelligence as a Lieutenant while working for the Pacific School of Religion as its librarian. He began the Western Theological Library Association in 1954.[2] In 1955, the World Council of Churches sent Judah to Europe to organize the International Association of Theological Libraries. In his book on the history of PSR, Christian Seed in Western Soil, Harlan Hogue says of Judah, he “made available in one place the total listing of all the theological libraries of the Bay Area…. From 1963 to 1965, Dr. Judah was the major resource technician in the establishment of the Bibliographical Center for the GTU.”[3] Judah wrote two sympathetic treatments of ISKCON and the Hare Krishna movement. He died in 2000.

Judah’s first chapter is devoted to inventorying some aspects of the germinal milieu of the American metaphysical movements. Besides the transcendentalist school and its effects, which he remarks as their foremost precedent and influence, he observes the importance of American religious pluralism, revivalism, deism, Swedenborgianism, Puritan utilitarianism, and occultism (i.e. hermeticism and kabbalah). He then goes on to provide historical sketches, with representations of doctrines and practices, for each of the following metaphysical movements: Spiritualism (with its various institutions and sects), Theosophy “and its allies” (i.e. the Arcane School and the Astara Foundation), New Thought (with the precedent teachings of Quimby and Evans, and the progeny of the Divine Science Church and the Church of Religious Science), the Unity School of Christianity, and Christian Science. A closing chapter treats the effect of the metaphysical movements on Protestantism, especially through the avenue of notions of health and mental healing.

[1] Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought (1996), pp. 455-6. (Note the similarity of Wouter’s title to the first chapter in
Judah: “The Mirror of American Culture.)

[2] GTU Library website - http://library.gtu.edu/archives/history.html  (consulted 10 Jan 2008)

[3] http://ucblibraries.colorado.edu/archives/collections/jlsp/interpreter71.doc (consulted 10 Jan 2008)

[4] Vaishnava News Network obituary

Part II tomorrow…

Place, rather than time, forms another analytic category for authors trying to characterize new religions. Ahlstrom notes, and John Dillenberger emphasizes, the extent to which California provides a raised dais for new religious phenomena. Such a focus is consistent with the extent to which imported Asian religions are seen as an essential dimension of the new religions in America. Charles Prebish offers a set of “Reflections on the Transmission of Buddhism to America,” in which he makes a plea for distinguishing between faddish neo-Buddhism and “honest Buddhism” (p. 172) in the US, acknowledging in both cases their relationship to the American context, but suggesting that the element of exoticism highlighted in the former reduces its value and viability. In Mark Juergensmeyer’s case study of Radhasoami, on the other hand, he points to the “trans-national” character of the religion as one of its key strengths, and he notes the effective disinterest of adherents in exotic culture as such. On a related note, Robert Wuthnow advances the condition of international polity or “world order” as a determinant of the activity of religious movements, a theoretical principle which is then applied by Dick Anthony and Thomas L. Robbins in their paper on the Unification Church and its regard for ethical “ambiguity” in the diplomatic and strategic situation of the United States.

Unlike some of the other themes and problems treated in this book, race and gender are regrettably sequestered off into a token paper for each. Neither paper is especially helpful on its own terms, although either (and the editorial arrangement of both) could be used as an indicator of the state of the field in the late 1970s. Archie Smith, Jr. is perfectly correct in his criticisms that a) the “new religions” investigated tend to neglect developments in African-American religion, and b) a proper understanding of new religions in the US should account for differences in appeal across racial boundaries, but he takes no concrete steps in either of these directions. Emily Culpepper’s paper on “The Spiritual Movement of Radical Feminist Consciousness” is laden with quaint “gynergy” and admits to being a piece of evangelism, rather than scholarship. (“My concern is to spread the word among women….” p. 221) Its presentation of feminist witchcraft is, alas, an instance of misleading propaganda in those points where it is offered as accurate history.

Needleman’s preface and Baker’s final paper frame the volume in terms of puzzles regarding teaching about new religions. Robert Bellah suggests that the discipline of religious studies, by providing a pluralistic context for the teaching of religion—and not merely teaching about religion—has begun to constitute itself as a new religion, seriously engaging religious symbol systems (what Needleman calls “contemplative ideas” on p. xiv) while operating outside the received institutions of religious authority. These pedagogical concerns also shade into discussions regarding theories and methods of research. Walter Capps, while providing support for Bellah’s claim regarding the properly religious aspect of the discipline, points out that different theoretical premises are required in order to study new religions as dynamic social phenomena, distinct from the Enlightenment concept of religions as codified traditions. Richardson, Stewart and Simmonds’ paper on “Researching a Fundamentalist Commune” proposes that ethnographers in the field can benefit from a greater level of personal candor and reciprocity in interacting with their subjects. Langdon Gilkey’s paper offers the most overtly theological treatment in the volume, actually deploying the word “pagan” (albeit in scare quotes, p. 137) to characterize the destabilizing influences that engender new religious movements, and suggesting that they are part of a dialectic which will historically clarify the will of the Christian God.

This volume is largely the product of a conference on new religions undertaken by the Graduate Theological Union of Berkeley in 1977 to inaugurate its program for the “Study of New Religious Movements in America.” Needleman and Baker represent the program as its directors, while the twenty-odd further contributors are scholars of religion, theology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, and history from institutions across the country.  This venue appears to have been a principle epicenter of the first effort to advance the “NRM” label (abbreviated thus nowhere in the volume) in contradistinction to the pejorative “cult”—an effort which sometimes smacks of euphemism when writers focus on controversy regarding the allegedly threatening or ethically problematic aspects of “new religions.” (In particular, J. Stillson Judah’s paper on deprogramming is evidently a reaction to the counter-cult movement of the 1970s.) Needleman, in contrast to the title of both the book and the GTU program, refers to the “new religions movement,” as though there were a basic unity among the phenomena treated, other than the level and quality of provocation that they afford to both secularism and “traditional” or establishment religion.

Many of the papers collected in Understanding the New Religions more directly approach this question of an underlying unity, with answers that are by no means conclusive. Barbara Hargrove discusses the extent to which various new religions present diametrically opposed features, which she groups under the labels of “integrative” and “transformative.” (A less even-handed treatment might call them reactionary and progressive.) She suggests that the simultaneous development of both types during the 1970s indicates a basic bankruptcy in preexisting religious forms as an outcome of secularization and individualization of religion. So in her study, the locus of the single “problem” turns out to reside in the religious establishment rather than among the new religions which have arisen as responses. Similarly, Theodore Roszak on “Ethics, Ecstasy, and the Study of New Religions” sees the new religions as a response to the spiritual void and despair in modern culture, but he indicates that they share a common remedy in the reintroduction of ecstatic awareness into religious life. (This particular paper seems to be a “think piece,” with no source citations and a huge, barely grounded metanarrative. For all that I like his rhetorical style and sympathize with his soaring final pages, I question whether Roszak’s generalizations about new religions are empirically sound.)

One approach to the unity or disunity of new religions is the historical, which is offered by Robert S. Ellwood, among others. Ellwood advocates the diachronic emphasis in examining new religions, and like most who look at these religions in that manner, he concludes that “new” is something of a misnomer, preferring “emergent” in his case. And yet while he can point to the diachronic continuity of individual religions, he is skeptical of the sort of synchronic theories evident in Hargrove and Roszak, which are traceable to the original framings by Weber and Troeltsch. In part, this disagreement of theory seems to stem from diverging preferences for historical or sociological methods. Sydney Ahlstrom’s contribution, written after his Religious History of the American People, casts “newness” in terms of centuries, by describing the “extraordinary pluralism” and “unremitting fecundity” in American religion as a “venerable tradition” in its own right. (p. 19) In a similar vein, Sheldon Ernst points to a gradually expanding “range of the new” over the course of American religious history, with a pluralist dynamic as the cause of the overall trend. (p. 44)  Joseph P. Chinnici, on the other hand, points to the persistence of the Protestant declination narrative in Ahlstrom’s account, and contrasts it with a perspective which rejects not only the original coherence of “Protestant America” but the presumed unity of medieval Catholicism. Harvey Cox’s paper on “Deep Structures in the Study of New Religions” straddles the diachronic and synchronic by pointing to a set of recurrent myths used to characterize deviant and minority religions throughout Western history.

Tomorrow Part II…

There’s no ambiguity of approach in this study, “Consecrating Consumer Culture” is very clearly an analysis of religion in popular culture. Thompson’s thesis is that the idiosyncratic genre of the television musical variety show is an especially well-adapted form for appropriating religious sentiment to the ends of commercial consumption. He remarks the manner in which the shows deploy Christian hymns in ambivalently secular contexts, as part of an effort to appeal to a wider demographic than pious Christians; and he focuses on the idealized family images which they offer. This latter feature he represents as inspiring an underlying “Christmas spirit” of guilt, which consumers then assuage by purchasing gifts for those relations and acquaintances with whom they have had less-than-fond ties.

Not only are explicit definitions of religion absent in Thompson’s study, but he makes some implicit categorizations that are rather frustrating. He begins—well before any particular consideration of Christmas—by rhetorically equating ‘religion’ with ‘God’ (and “talk about God”), which may be a convenient shorthand, but leaves something to be desired in terms of a pluralistic appreciation of contemporary American religion. Much worse is his later claim that Christianity is “a religion based on the word, not the image, and which rejects wealth, acquisitiveness, and conspicuous consumption.” (p. 48) I don’t think that that generalization is even adequate to American Protestantism, and certainly not to Christianity as a whole!

When viewed in terms of the theoretical problematics framed in Jolyon Mitchell’s “Questioning Media and Religion,” Thompson’s study is planted pretty squarely in the iconoclastic “Dangers?” frame, as one might easily infer from the characterization of Christianity quoted above. While his theory of guilt as the proximate media effect of the Christmas specials (and consumption as their ultimate goal) does partake of the “Resources?” approach, it still sees the consumer as passively manipulated, and unlike the Rycenga study on Precious Moments, Thompson fails to see any functional complementarity or effective collusion between the religious and commercial motives. He does offer a paragraph acknowledging Mitchell’s “Opportunites?” question, suggesting that the benevolent dimensions of cheerful winter television can “carry messages not entirely hostile to the Christian system.” (p. 53) Alas, that only makes me wonder, “Which ‘Christian system,’ pray tell?”

Mitchell highlights an observation about the musical variety show format and its peculiar persistence among Christmas special programming, as contrasted with the regular weekly fare from which such variety shows disappeared long decades ago. And yet he fails to capitalize on this interesting point in his analysis. One possible consideration is the ideological function of tradition which Rycenga points to as a very effective cultural solvent that can immerse the individual in commercialization. The shopworn format is maintained because it is shopworn. Not only the format, but the geriatric celebrities too, serve to create multigenerational mystique and to validate the ex illo tempore framing of the holiday which can psychologically exempt viewers from their shopping budgets and other mundane constraints, while providing the balm (or goad) of apparently universal community.

An even more obvious advantage of the musical variety show, and one which doubtless supported its former ubiquity as a programming format, is the extent to which the musical vignettes acquire a uniform texture with the alternating short production numbers that are generated by advertising studios. It seems strange that Thompson would fail to point out such a key phenomenon, particularly in light of his central assertion that the Christmas commercials share a symbiotic tone and content with the specials that is unmatched in other television programming (p. 53) (I would say that stiff competition is provided by the late night comedy sketch genre—also a vignette form—especially when mock advertisements form a staple sketch type.)

The opening and closing passages of Thompson’s study address the presence of religious content in routine prime-time television entertainment programming. (He exempts from consideration at the outset the “fringe” of expressly religious broadcasters.) After discussing “God’s” customary absence from the era dominated by three or four broadcast networks, he eventually suggests that the proliferation of channels in the new environment of cable and satellite television has encouraged risk-taking among executives that accommodates religious content.

I found Thompson’s allusion to William Butler Yeats’ “The Second Coming” in his final sentence to be clumsy and off-putting. Yeats finishes his poem:

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards
Bethlehem to be born?

As nearly as I can sleuth it out, we are to understand television as the “rough beast” in Thompson’s account. While the accustomed Christmas specials slouch “towards Bethlehem” in the sense of making superficial obeisance to the Nativity for their own mercenary ends, “some of this new programming” approaches a different, more genuine “Bethlehem” in the form of “a real and more mature conversation about the nature of God.” (p. 55) Thompson certainly succeeds in closing the textual circle of his study: we are returned to the sense of his initial remarks reducing religion to theology, along with a partial comparison of television to a sort of apocalyptic Antichrist.  

            The sources cited for this study are startlingly thin: a tiny handful of academic studies (including a basically irrelevant one on televangelism), an article in TV Guide, and a long quote from a New York Times article that had been reprinted in an anthology of television criticism. Thompson has evidently watched many more Christmas specials than I would care to, and he has written a fair number of volumes of television criticism himself (per his contributor bio on p. 308). But he doesn’t really seem to be engaging any existing academic conversation in this particular study, and I don’t see it as producing a new one either. In fact, the weaknesses of this study might be taken to vindicate David Morgan’s remarks about the importance of interdisciplinarity when the subject matter demands it. 

In contrast with her critique of Turner’s liminality, Bynum praises his proposals regarding “dominant symbols,” with “their many facets.” [1] Although it is more understated here, the metaphor is the same as the one that she employed in the “crystalline structure” in her female saints’ lives.  And the nature of that gem may actually be most clearly explained by Geertz, who writes,

“Our double task is to uncover the conceptual structures that inform our subjects’ acts, the “said” of social discourse, and to construct a system of analysis in whose terms what is generic to those structures, what belongs to them because they are what they are, will stand out against the other determinants of human behavior.”[2]

These “conceptual structures” are the “dominant symbols,” arrayed and anchored in such a fashion as to create what Geertz with his own natural and geometric metaphor calls “webs of significance.”[3] Their exposure and explication can create an assurance of integrated meaning sufficiently compelling as to make a specific cultural matrix seem not only lucid, but inevitable. The theoretical danger and difficulty for the historian lies in becoming frozen in the crystal or trapped in the web. There is a hazard of being confined by a “synchronic” sensibility, which, if it has the virtue of avoiding stereotyped storylines, may not be able to accommodate or account for the transformative events of history.

[1] Bynum, Fragmentation, pp. 15, 28.

[2] Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 27.

[3] Op. cit., p. 5.