I was sitting on the bus today, listening to
The Mekons' Rock 'n' Roll and reading Catherine Bell's densely-theoretical but much-heralded book
Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, which I read for the first time as a first-year seminarian back in 2004 and did not understand in the slightest. I'm rereading it now because I discovered my class notes from the day that we discussed it, and frankly I was disgusted by the fact that I didn't even know enough to take any decent notes on the book. No work of religious studies theory is going to call me a chump.
I didn't get too far because I got to thinking about how The Mekons construct a whole ideology around rock 'n' roll on the album I was listening to, and that (somehow) got me to thinking about the purpose of theory. Here at UW Madison's Dept of Hebrew and Semitic Studies, we are hesitant about theory. There are good reasons for this: theory often causes sloppy, uninformed scholars to think that, by applying a theoretical model to a phenomenon they otherwise do not understand, they can say something radical about it.
My favorite example of this is the "peasant revolt" model for the Israelite conquest of Canaan. Recall that, according to the Book of Joshua, the Israelites came up from Egypt and massacred the whole population of the Promised Land, sans a few tricky hangers-on. Judges, by contrast, depicts a more piecemeal settlement. Neither model accords perfectly with the extant historical evidence, and this led some scholars to use a mixture of Marxist political theories and 60s-era Zeitgeist to posit that the "conquest" of Canaan was actually a peasant uprising, spurred by a ragtag bunch of renegade Egyptian Yahwists, that led to the overthrow of the local Canaanite despots and the creation of an egalitarian commonwealth that became the political model for later Israelite covenant ideology.
There is no direct evidence that overtly contradicts this theory, though the Bible certainly does not present it in this way. But there is also scant evidence that supports it. The main reason it caught on was because it had theoretical underpinings and a connection to the fashionable contemporaneous political ideologies of the late 60s.
This is not how theory should work. Theory, on a cognative level, seems to operate in the same way that metaphor does. Metaphor works by allowing you to "map" your knowledge of something you actually do know onto something that you do not know. Take death, for instance. Death is the cessation of all life. But since we have no direct experience of that, we understand death in terms of other things: it is a journey from which you do not return, or a sleep from which you do not wake, or a thief that comes upon you suddenly and takes your most valuable possession (your life).
Theory ought to work in the same way in biblical studies. One of the most persistent problems in studying ancient texts is the lack of evidence. We have the texts themselves, we have some extant inscriptions, and we have some physical evidence. This does not, in itself, add up to a systematic understanding of the ancient world. Theory becomes useful because it allows us to observe human communities and political structures that are available to us, abstract certain general principles from them, and apply these principles to what evidence we do have from the ancient world.
Coming up: a review of
Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice.
Comments (7)
I hope I get smarter just by reading what you write. *feels infinitely inferior*
This is something that someone should have probably told me when I was a Freshman in college. Ughh, I must have said a lot of stupid things having grasped the theoretical framework but not the discrete phenomena of a subject. The funny thing is that sometimes a shot in the dark will hit the mark. I seem to recall some ancient Christian thinker (Aquinas?) having a standard of credence that accorded varying weights to various sources based on their "expert" status. I think he said that the lay person may hit upon an understanding every once in a while, but on the whole should be ignored and should not be allowed to shape understanding. He was talking about access to Christian theology of course, and upholding the church hierarchy as arbiters of truth... but it holds up well on a personal level for philosophy and academia in general. I recall at the time I was feeling insecure and revolutionary and said that that was complete nonsense, but now it seems increasingly like a very good model.
Damn. I wish I had my Great Texts notes around.
Thanks for paralleling theory and metaphor for me. I’ve often been frustrated with the way metaphors and parables get myriads of strange interpretations. Now I can see that theories can easily, simply be dry metaphors that miss the point.
I've observed that sometimes academia breeds a race of intellectuals who feed off each other's writings, assumptions and conclusions without ever checking such against reality, a sort of intellectual inbreeding. I know nothing about this work you mention, but it has that kind of feel to it from your description.
@blonde_apocalypse - Very true. Academia is incredibly competitive and demanding, and scholars often seem to lose sight of the connection that their work might have to the world outside of the academy. It's a bad thing--it makes scholarship incestuous and irrelevant.
Any theory, especially when used/abused by the uninformed, runs the risk of anachronism. As you (somewhat) said, though, we can only work with what we have. We simply need to be aware of the discrepencies between our world and that of the text (and yes, the text is, in itself, its own world).
Hurray for your incestuous academy comment. To be fair, some of the outside world (SBC) doesn't look to kindly upon scholarship, so it's quite understandable when the academy circles their wagons. Unacceptable (in my opinion) but understandable.
I like the way that you parallel theory and metaphor. And making me stop and think about the word 'theory' means - not just one of those words that becomes so used and overused it ceases to have meaning.
I've been on a xanga haitus for about a semester, but it feels nice to come home and see that people are still here.