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Plato’s Ghost: Spiritualism in theAmerican Renaissance, by CathyGutierrez, Oxford University Press:New York, 2009, 218 pp. ISBN 978 0 19538835 0, US$55 (cloth)Martha L. Roberts aa University of California , Santa Barbara, USAPublished online: 05 Aug 2011.

To cite this article: Martha L. Roberts (2011) Plato’s Ghost: Spiritualism in the AmericanRenaissance, by Cathy Gutierrez, Oxford University Press: New York, 2009, 218 pp. ISBN 978 0 19538835 0, US$55 (cloth), Religion, 41:4, 688-691, DOI: 10.1080/0048721X.2011.592097

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2011.592097

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Book Reviews

Pascal Boyer, The Fracture of an Illusion: Science and the Dissolution of Religion,edited by Michael G. Parker and Thomas M. Schmidt, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht:Göttingen, 2010, 112pp. ISBN 978 3 525 56940 5, €39.95 (pbk)

This slim volume is a surprising publication, not so much in the contents (PascalBoyer’s contributions to the Cognitive Science of Religion being well known), asin the context it stems from: a series of talks given in Germany in 2008 as the ‘Tem-pleton Research Lectures’. This is an interesting occurrence, as anyone familiar withPascal Boyer’s previous work will know. The Templeton Foundation seeks tofurther the so-called ‘Constructive Engagement of Science and Religion’, andBoyer certainly does not do that, as this volume amply demonstrates.Boyer says in an introductory ‘cautionary note’ that the lectures were ‘delivered

in the form of sermons’ with very little on how the Cognitive Science of Religionhas come to know what it does (p. 5). Instead, he takes current results and exploressome questions that ensue: ‘Can there be a free civil society with religions? Does itmake sense to talk about religious experience? Do religions make people better? Iencourage readers who find some of these statements odd or implausible (and thestudy of religion is replete with surprises) to have a look at the studies mentioned inthe notes’ (p. 5).For the reader not familiar with Pascal Boyer’s truly groundbreaking work, this

text is a good place to start. Boyer was given the opportunity to present the insightsfrom his work to a different audience and his suggestions are as provocative asever. He takes on some of the usual (if not trivial) conjectures about religion andtwists them, turns them upside down or downright disposes of them on theheap of conceptual rubbish of yore. The title alone indicated this; whereSigmund Freud talked about religion in the ‘Future of an Illusion’, Boyer is moreradical in ‘The Fracture of an Illusion’ – a fracture that may (or must) even leadto ‘The Dissolution of Religion’.His arguments are presented in five relatively short chapters that deal with ques-

tions such as: ‘Is there such a thing as religion?’, ‘What is natural in religions?’, ‘Doreligions make people better?’, and ‘Is there a religious experience?’ The finalchapter bears the title: ‘Are religions against reason and freedom?’ Here, Boyer isclearly a normatively concerned intellectual, as well as a brilliant scientist. Hewas originally trained as an anthropologist, and he remains true to the maxim ofEdward Burnett Tylor that Anthropology is not only the science of culture butalso a ‘reformer’s science’. So, Boyer is apologetic – but against religion and forreason, freedom, and science, so here he seizes the occasion to propagate aninstantly recognizable French intellectual tradition. In the book, he does not wantto make the case that religious ideas are created by human minds because this

ReligionVol. 41, No. 4, December 2011, 685–716

ISSN 0048-721X print/ISSN 1096-1151 online/11/040685–32 © 2011 Taylor & Francis

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has already been ‘conclusively argued more than two centuries ago by Kant andother Afklärung scholars’ (p. 9). Here, lecturing in Germany, in the homeland ofLudwig Feuerbach, he excels in the line of critical scholarship on religion.Boyer’s work has a very strong emphasis on what has loosely and generally beencharacterized as ‘projection theory’ but now incorporates the methods and theoriesof much better science. Now we can discover the hidden mental properties andmechanisms that critical philosophers only intuited. Boyer happens to be amongthose who wish not only to explain matters religious but also to ‘show that thevery existence of some thing called “religion” is largely an illusion’ (p. 9). Wehabitually think of religion as a ‘package’ with super-human agents, beliefs,morals, rituals, and so on, and that is wrong, according to Boyer, because ‘thepackage does not really exist as such’ (p. 9). To invoke Kant here, this reviewerwould venture that it is the ‘as such’ notion that gives Boyer’s project away assomehow philosophically deficient. We shall come to that below, for if Boyerwere right then we would have to change large parts of our vocabulary, but fortu-nately this does not seem to be all that necessary.‘Religion’ is a rather recent concept and one that has been advanced by guilds,

priests, and others who operate in the marketplace of religion. For Boyer it is ‘anuncertain and unnecessary concept’ (p. 23), and he rightly points to the troubledpast of the study of religion with its ‘sui generis’ assumptions about religion, andmakes the case that religious thoughts and behaviors are just like other thoughtsand behaviors. Here, Boyer’s references to the condition of the study of religionare somewhat dated and so remarkably different from the up-to-date referencesto the Cognitive Science-related materials, that one wonders if this is rhetoricallyintended? And so, here is a sampling of the general taste of Boyer’s menu: ‘Cog-nitive accounts of religion even suggest that there is no good reason for theexistence of religious thoughts and behaviors’, and ‘there is no limit to therange of false concepts that people can sincerely and intuitively find plausible’(p. 75). Thus the scientific project is to investigate and explain why peopleacquire such beliefs in the first place and why they appear so widely inhuman cultures.In the five chapters, a long list of important points in the cognitive study of reli-

gion are offered, and among them are some that often become misinterpreted, e.g.,that universal psychological mechanisms should bring about universal anduniform cultural outputs (p. 27). One of the axiomatic points in Boyer’s ‘“standard”model of religious thought’ is that ‘religious concepts are a by-product of ordinarycognition’ (p. 27). And also here is his ingenious table or catalog of supernaturalconcepts and the interesting points about human ‘interaction with agents thatare not physically present’ (p. 32) – a very special human mental capacity.Additionally, there is his assertion of the human drive towards pro-sociality,cooperation, and morality and in the sections including and following ‘models ofcommitment’ (pp. 47–50) Boyer interestingly discusses some of the most recent dis-coveries in these highly remarkable and developing areas of research in moral psy-chology that suggest that humans really are good-natured creatures. (This partshould please the Templeton Foundation.) Chapter four deals with the nebulousissues of ‘religious experience’ and of ritual theory in thoughtful discussions –also of Boyer’s recent work in this area together with that of Pierre Liénard. Inother places Boyer moves like a modernist cultural critic, for instance in hisremarks on ‘the troubled consciousness of modern religions’ (pp. 78–80), which

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may then lead to fundamentalism or ‘spirituality.’ The big question – sponsoredagain by the Templeton Foundation – concerns the ‘dialog’ between science andreligion. In Boyer’s (and this reviewer’s) view that is ‘hopelessly confused’(p. 85), if it involves a comparison between theological doctrines and scientific the-ories. His final note of warning concerns those who propagate religion cum politics(widespread in some parts of the contemporary world) ‘since all theocratic societiesare versions of Hell on earth’ (p. 97).The theological responses in the volume are presented by Elisabeth

Gräb-Schmidt and Wolfgang Achtner, who discuss how contemporary (Lutheran)theology may cope with the consequences of Boyer’s work and the entire project ofthe naturalization of the study of religion. That makes for interesting reading.The main criticism that can be leveled against Boyer’s work concerns his reduc-

tionism (‘x is nothing but y’) and eliminative stance (‘x does not exist’), whichmay become somewhat tiresome exercises, but they are the logical corollary ofhis austere methodological individualism which often leads to what I wouldterm ‘Social eliminativism’. Here is an example against the view that humans‘share culture’: Boyer flaunts the argument, that you and I may have equalamounts of money in our wallets without sharing any of it and so likewise itis wrong to say that individuals ‘share culture’. (cf. Pascal Boyer, ReligionExplained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought [New York, Basic Books,2001, pp. 35–36]). For someone (such as this reviewer) with a penchant for thephilosophies of Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle, the answer is that forthe money in the pocket to be money, there surely has to be an economywhich we share – like it or not!On Boyer’s ingenious dissolution of the term or concept of religion as a some-

thing which does not exist, we can only reply that exactly the same can be saidabout sports, music, money, the academy, or, more ironically, even of ‘science’and ‘cognition’. The conviction that abstract concepts must mirror some realentity or object in the world in order to be valid is one of the last remnantsof positivism. Boyer could drive home his arguments and convincing scientificresults without making such type-token / word-object mistakes, as he does.One might also consider where his scientific prowess could lead to if he notonly took things apart (‘analysis’) but also considered putting them backtogether again (‘synthesis’). This he could do by more seriously investigatingwhat ‘culture’ does to cognition. Perhaps that is the task awaiting anthropolo-gists and scholars of religion.As for the so-called ‘science–religion dialogue’, this mostly seems to be a lop-

sided affair that is driven by religious interests more than scientific ones. In thisconnection one could reasonably quote Roberts Nozick’s remarks: ‘Some writersin physics report to us that physics support a spiritual view of the universe, butwhat is the non-expert to think if these writers themselves thirst for such spirituallessons? To what extent do their reports result from what the facts most plausiblyshow and to what extent from their own wishes and desires? What would beimpressive is some physicist reporting in distress that, despite what he wishedwere the case, against his own materialist preconceptions, he had been forced toconclude that contemporary physics pointed to the lesson that the universe is atbase spiritual. (To my knowledge, that has not yet occurred.)’ (See RobertNozick, The Nature of Rationality [Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1993,p. 101].) I think Boyer would concur.

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With these ‘cautionary notes’, I recommend the volume to anyone with an inter-est in where the study of religion is going, and so I would do to my students alsowere it not for the steep price of €39.95 for this slim paperback volume.

Jeppe Sinding JensenUniversity of Aarhus (Denmark)

E-mail: JSJ@teo.au.dk© 2011, Jeppe Sinding Jensen

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2011.592096

Plato’s Ghost: Spiritualism in the American Renaissance, by Cathy Gutierrez,Oxford University Press: New York, 2009, 218 pp. ISBN 978 0 19 538835 0, US$55(cloth)

In Plato’s Ghost, Cathy Gutierrez tells us that she ‘will argue that Spiritualism was arenaissance of the Renaissance, a culture in love with history as much as it trum-peted progress and futurity, a predominantly white, middle-class expression ofwhat constituted religious hope among burgeoning technology and colonialism’(p. 4). In the five chapters that follow, Gutierrez takes us on an alliterativelytitled journey through the memory, machines, marriage, medicine, and minds of19th-century Spiritualists, highlighting the emphasis on history and progress ineach of these facets of American life. The Spiritualist concept of time, itself aghost of Platonic ideas, quickly becomes the focus of her work. With its emphasison both tradition and progress, Spiritualists used Platonic recollection to come toterms with a quickly modernizing world. This same back-and-forth motion, thevacillation between past and future, also guides Gutierrez’s own argument aboutSpiritualist thought and experience.Chapter one, ‘Memory’, describes Spiritualism’s Platonic paradox of looking

forward by looking backward, a paradox that Gutierrez claims represented a per-vasive conflict in 19th-century America’s concept of time. Shifts in economy, familystructure, women’s roles, and theology characterized the period, and Spiritualistswere not alone in their need to reconcile progress with tradition. Memory’s rolein this reconciliation played out on the planes of living and dead. Gutierrezdetails the funeral industry and the memorialization of the dead in 19th-centurysociety as well as the specific discussions of memory that pervaded Spiritualistrhetoric of life and afterlife. In the name of progress, Spiritualists dismissed theidea of hell, and as a result heaven became a much more complicated landscape.In this newly democratized Spiritualist heaven, memory became the instrumentof ethics, acting as judge and punishment for individual spirits working towardsperfection. Using examples from Spiritualist writings, Gutierrez shows thatmemory was very real in heaven, where it served as a hurdle to the dead whoneeded to forget their earthly memories in order to progress. The situation onearth was quite opposite; memory was artifice and imitation of the real. Whilemany scholars claim that for Spiritualists heaven was a copy of earth, Gutierrezreverses this by claiming that instead, ‘earth is the poor copy of heaven’ (p. 44).In so doing, Gutierrez reveals the Platonic character of Spiritualist memory. In for-getting the artifice of life, the dead could realize the truth that they once forgot: thememory of heaven. Gutierrez sees here an implicit connection to Plato’s Phaedrus,

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where winged beings that had fallen to the earth had to gradually forget their newidentities and remember their previous true identities in order to see the Formsagain. For the Spiritualists, memory always operated on multiple levels: heavenand earth, real and ideal, dead and living. Gutierrez observes that this created adouble helix of time, a depiction of ‘time as being pulled in both directions atonce’ (p. 43). In the chapters that follow, Gutierrez relies heavily on this theoryof Platonic recollection as a driving force in Spiritualist logic.In Chapter two, Gutierrez investigates the machines that measured the invisible

forces of time and spirit. These machines represented larger cultural concerns abouttime evident in the drives to both valorize the past and anticipate a future utopia. Inthis chapter, and throughout the work, Gutierrez offers fascinating examples andexplanations of mid-century American culture and technology. Gutierrez discussestwo main classifications of ‘time machines’ that legitimated Spiritualism’s cause byallying science and religion: ‘those designed to improve contact with the dead andthose given from the spirits of the dead to improve the lives of the living’ (p. 48). ForGutierrez, the medium herself was a type of machine, but there were also machinesto test mediums (spiritoscopes), machines to talk to spirits, and machines that cap-tured the images of spirits. It is this final category of spirit photography that makesup the bulk of the chapter. Gutierrez proposes that this form of communicationwith spirits thoroughly redrew the rules of contact for living and dead. Whilemediums had been used to communicate with dearly departed loved ones, spiritphotos shifted the conventions of communication and recognition. Nowunknown, silent, needy spirits emerged in front of the lens to contact the living,and not the other way around. This reversal shifted memory itself. As peopletried to ‘recognize’ the spirits in the photos, they refashioned their memories ofloved ones. In the same way that she describes Spiritualist memory as a ‘double-helix’ of time, spirit photography revealed a ‘double-helix’ of neediness that botharticulated and displaced the living’s need for the dead. Spirit photos weremeant to capture the past in a maneuver of machinated progress. Each photo reiter-ated the confounding nature of time; ghosts were shown to exist side by side withthe living, thus severing ‘the simplicity of a straightforward march of time’ (p. 75).In Chapter three, we see the influence of both Plato and Swedenborg on Spiritu-

alist conceptions of love in an historical context where new social concerns shapedthe notions of relationships, romance, and marriage. Gutierrez also uses thischapter to venture into the subject of sex magic, esotericism, communal andutopian sexual projects, celibacy, and free love movements. Gutierrez shows thatwhile the opposing ends of this spectrum, monogamy and free love movements,were often at odds, both used Platonic reasoning to bolster their arguments. Byemploying Swedenborgian notions of Soul Mates and Platonic recollection, Spiritu-alists created new formulations of true love. Following Plato’s Symposium, the orig-inal state of human embodiment was one in which two halves were a whole: ‘Truelove must reach backward to find its source. The idea of union is not merely a sanc-tioning of marriage and sex but rather embodies a prior perfection – souls arereunited’ (p. 86). This need to discover the perfect pre-existing eternal unionamidst the political and social upheavals of the time punctuated the Spiritualistconcepts of love, which also follow Gutierrez’s double-helix form. For while theperfect relationship may have been impossible on earth, it had been possible inthe distant past and would again be in the future afterlife. Thus, Spiritualist loveworked backward and forward through time to fill the needs of the present.

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Those needs become particularly important in Gutierrez’s chapter onmedicine. Intheir pre-occupation with health and healing, Spiritualists turned their attentionaway from the dead and toward the embodied experience of the living. In doingso, they ‘inscribed cosmological significance on the body’ (p. 111). Once again, theSpiritualists’ conflicting notions of history and progress became evident in their rep-resentations of the body. The language of healing social ills stressed forward pro-gress and marked bodies with a trajectory of perfection; yet simultaneously thetelos of these bodies revealed the opposite of progress: decay and death (p. 112).Overcoming this conundrum required envisioning the body as interconnectedwith the world, spirit, and heaven. A close relationship between body and spiritmeant that the body could reveal the nature of spirit through manifestations ofdisease. This connectionmade the bodymore than just a vessel for the soul, a decay-ing vehicle of spirit.Moving from illness to healthwas amovement to a prior state ofperfection. For Gutierrez, the body played an integral role in the larger Spiritualistdramaof life anddeath (p. 120). The chapter continueswithdiscussions of influentialideas from Swedenborgianism, Kabbalism, alchemy, and esotericism and theirmanifestations in Spiritualist discourse on the body and health. Ultimately, this dis-course reveals that the natural worldwas ‘utterly shot throughwith the divine’, andfor Gutierrez this marked one of Spiritualism’smost influential and overlooked con-tributions toward democratizing American Christianity (p. 141). ‘Spiritualismrefused to accept a model whereby the body was the temporary prison of the soul,and argued instead for a form of enspirited matter in which the soul cast the lightin the lamp of the body . . . By creating a cartography of the corpus and thecosmos, Spiritualism reunited body and soul as they progressed together towardthe past’ (p. 141). Spiritualist conceptions ofmemory,machines,marriage, andmedi-cine all hinged on the relationship between past and future, tradition and progress.Ascension always seemed to involve recollection.Gutierrez ends her work with a discussion of the ways that the creation of the

American understanding of ‘mind’was a process that bound psychology and Spir-itualism together in an uncomfortable relationship. In this chapter, she examinesthe tension between the two fields, as well as the constructivist versus realistdebate on American madness. The fascinating details of the history of Americanasylums serve as a backdrop to this chapter, and the sharp rise in the cases of insan-ity and the number of asylums in the mid-19th century are evidence of the growingimportance of the topics of mind, madness, and self in American culture. Often thevictims of the asylum system, Spiritualists put much effort into distinguishingthemselves from the mad, often relying on Platonic thought to do so. Particularly,Gutierrez finds traces of Plato’s outline of divine madness as discussed in the Phae-drus: prophecy, the relief of grief by taking over the mind, possession by the Muses,and love (p. 147). The connection between madness and divinity was strong forSpiritualists, whose openness to alternative explanations of madness ‘shifted thereferent of the alternative consciousness outside of the self’ (p. 166). Rather thanseeing a disease of the mind, like schizophrenia, Spiritualists offered an alternativereading involving a ‘higher consciousness’. Although Spiritualism’s legacy is stillseen in alternative health and New Age ideology, for Gutierrez, its ‘lasting giftshave been to multiculturalism: the religion that opened heaven to all opened anew vista of ethical, not scientific, possibility. The ghosts that Spiritualism loosedupon the world were ultimately happy specters, visions of the past ushering in abrighter future’ (p. 171).

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Theghosts of Plato haunt not only the Spiritualistworld, but alsoGutierrez’s book,whichweaves togethermemoryand futurity through Spiritualist forms and contem-porary progressive themes. Gutierrez persuasively shows that the threads ofmemory and imagination are the creative principle that gave strength to theAmerican Renaissance. Through countless intriguing historical examples, theauthor demonstrates the ways Platonic recollection gave Spiritualists the toolsthey needed to move past old ideologies, see progress as continuity, and advanceprogressive social agendas that empowered individuals. Her final chapter praisesthe progressive notions of the Spiritualists as offering insight into our ownmulticul-tural issues. Gutierrez’s valorization of Spiritualism, however, has a bit of a salvificring to it, and one may question the author’s utilization of the Spiritualists’ ownappropriation of Platonic recollection. For Gutierrez, Neoplatonism created aspace for ethical advances by eschewing binary oppositions in favor of ascendancy,allowing Spiritualists to be ‘antagonists of oppositions and embracers of diversity’(p. 177). Gutierrez’s work ultimately looks to America’s Renaissance past in orderto recover a mode of time with ethical possibilities for its future. But while therewas a value in the Spiritualists’ability to see future and past as intimately connected,the supernatural content of their investigations was ultimately rejected in its owntime, leading one to wonder about its viability in the present.Notably, Plato’s Ghost does not focus on any one person in particular, and in fact,

the plentiful cast of characters is often less important than the group identificationof ‘Spiritualists’ or ‘Spiritualist thought’. At a time when books on Spiritualism arein vogue, Gutierrez’s work stands apart by focusing on the broad cultural logic atwork in 19th-century America. The strength of her work lies in tracing the Neopla-tonic language of the American Renaissance through the many parts of social life:life and death, technology, relationships, health, and thought. These parts of thesocial experience are shown, time and time again, to be interwoven withmemory and imagination. Gutierrez’s own use of historical imagination hasresulted in a work full of rich narratives and captivating descriptions of 19th-century American life that masterfully move the reader back and forth throughtime and vividly bring the past to life. Whether or not one finds them harbingersof contemporary American pluralism and multiculturalism, the ghosts of Platoand the Spiritualists of the American Renaissance highlighted in this workdeserve further attention and research.

Martha L. RobertsUniversity of California, Santa Barbara (USA)

E-mail: marthalroberts@umail.ucsb.edu© 2011, Martha L. Roberts

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2011.592097

Religion and Commodification: ‘Merchandizing’ Diasporic Hinduism, by VineetaSinha, Routledge: New York and London, 2011, xiii + 228pp. ISBN 978 0 41587363 5, US$125 (hbk)

Religion and Commodification is an ethnographic study of the varied markets –physical, cyber, spiritual, and cultural – that are formed around the ‘commodifica-tion’ (demand, production, distribution, marketing, and consumption) of wares

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employed in devotional practices (‘pūja items’) of the ‘Hindu’diaspora in Malaysia,Singapore, and India. In this manner, Sinha explores the embedded nature of‘everyday Hinduism’ in a diasporic context. This work attempts to show howthese objects that are imbued with ‘spiritual power and efficacy’ have multiplelayers of meaning that result from their role in the global marketplace in whichthey also operate as ‘commodities and goods with a price tag and are by-productsof cycles of production and distribution in a capitalist marketplace’ (p. 6).Chapter one of Religion and Commodification serves as the introduction to the

study in which Sinha provides a methodological and theoretical overview ground-ing the work in the contrast between materiality and spirituality – the primaryfocus of the book to which I will return. The author also introduces the reader toher concept of ‘everyday Hindu religiosity’, which for the most part is synonymouswith domestic practice. Highlighting the centrality of ‘everyday religion’, shederives the three objects that serve as the samples for her case studies – prayeraltars, material representations of deities, and fresh flowers. Chapter two continuesthe spirit of the first chapter and introduces the reader to the fields of inquirythrough a brief review of the history of the global Hindu diaspora and an introduc-tion to the Little India culture of the ‘common ethnographic space’of the MalaysianPeninsula, including the island of Singapore (p. 30).Sinha is at her best in her description of the production and consumption of

the ritual objects, especially in chapters three (‘Homes for Gods’) and four(‘Visual Representations of Hindu Deity’). In these two chapters, Sinha masterfullyelucidates the overlapping fields of religious life and material consumption. InChapter three, she offers insight into the domestic ritual space and its constructionthrough which she critiques Religious Studies scholars’ classical emphasis ontemple and textual traditions. She suggests that the home shrine serves as thelocus of religious continuity with the practices of the homeland (India) for the dia-sporic community by providing a ritual link to the multitude of non-āgamic shrines(what she calls ‘jungle temples’) that house the non-Sanskritic deities who arecentral to village life. In Chapter four, Sinha skillfully shows the process or lifecyclethrough which representations of deities are conceived through ‘spiritual’ insightor a vision of the deity and eventually become objects of devotion, despite theirembeddedness within a rather lucrative system of monetary transactions. In bothof these chapters, the author highlights the multivalent meanings containedwithin material objects used in ritual and devotional practice and the constantflux of sacrality that is highly (if not completely) constructed by the space inwhich the object is located. Chapter five is similar in arrangement and method asthe previous two, focusing on the processes of distribution and consumption offlowers by the Hindu community, but does not live up to the high bar set by thetwo previous chapters.Unfortunately, however, Sinha’s conclusion in Chapter six is underwhelming.

She concludes that ‘meaning-making of a “religious object” has less to do withits exchange value but [is] rooted rather in the attitude with which it is approachedin its ritualistic use’ (p. 193). She also concludes that the value of these ‘pūja items’cannot be reduced to monetary value because they (especially flowers) are ren-dered valueless after ritual use. Instead, she suggests that materiality ‘slip[s] inand out of moments of sacrality and profanity’ (p. 195). She then takes this reason-able but hardly novel concept and lobbies criticism against the ‘assumption of dia-metrically opposed values’ of religious/sacred and material/profane (p. 204) – an

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‘assumption’ that has been refuted more often than not in Religious Studies for thepast few decades. This reviewer was left wanting a deeper theoretical position thatattempted to make sense of the multiplicity of meanings and explicates how reli-gious commodities are both spiritual and material and how those meaningsserve to build an overarching sense of identity in the diaspora through domestic(home) and public (market) performance instead of the dismantling of thistheoretical straw man.I will now return to the author’s notion of ‘everyday Hindu religiosity’. Though

Sinha never directly defines with any precision this phrase that she employsthroughout the book, the reader gets an initial sense of its spirit in the second sen-tence of the first chapter: ‘At the level of practice, everyday Hinduism is an embo-died religion and grounded in a materiality that makes the presence of specificmaterial objects and implements an indispensable part of its religious practices’(p. 1). Given this definition, any scholar of Hinduism would, at first glance,readily agree that Hinduism is ‘embodied’ and ‘grounded in materiality’ in away that we have only began to explore since the ethnographic turn in Religiousand Hindu Studies in the 1970s in which scholars begin to actively look at the tra-dition as a lived religion instead of only looking at its history of texts and ideas;however, this phrase is continually used throughout the book and becomes solarge and amorphous that it begins to lose all value – basically connoting everypart of religious or ritual life of a Hindu that does not take place in a temple, aswell as some that do.Futhermore, it is Sinha who reifies the Durkheimian contrast of the sacred/reli-

gious and the profane/material that becomes more and more pronounced as thebook moves along, and the embodied and material nature of ‘everyday Hindu reli-giosity’ that was mentioned on the opening page is forgotten. Sinha seems to workfrom a perspective that assumes religiosity manifests itself in pure form as aninternal belief system or spiritual phenomenon, and materiality is only a peripheralby-product. To put it another way, Sinha presents religion as a spiritual enterprisethat has been enveloped into a material and materialistic world. Because she carriesthis assumption that religion is a sui generis phenomenon as an undercurrentthroughout the entire work, she can conclude that ‘the idea that consumptionleads to debasement of religion cannot be sustained’ (p. 200). However, ‘religious’traditions have always resulted from their embeddedness within systems ofexchange and power and never exist as pure hierophanic entities. The idea that reli-gion is something that would be debased through its relationship with mundaneprocesses of local and international economies is an outdated lens through whichto look at the processes under discussion and yields disappointing conclusions.While this might be a result of her Sociology background and explain why sheattacks the theory of one of the founders of Sociology’s (antiquated but founda-tional) theory on the polarization of the sacred and profane so voraciously, but itcertainly limits the theoretical value of this otherwise superb study of MalaysianHinduism.Another smaller methodological critique is Sinha’s use of her ‘data’ to which she

often refers as if it was itself an entity with phrases like ‘my data suggests… ’or ‘mydata reveal’, both of which are more commonly used in a quantitative method,which is totally absent from this work. This reader was often left confused andcurious to which data she was referring, especially when the phrase was followedby a generalization about ‘Hindus’ or ‘Hinduism’ (i.e., Hindus in which country

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[Malaysia, Singapore, India]? What percentage of the interviews gave this point ofview that warrants a generalization of all Hindus or Malaysian Hindus?).Additionally, she occasionally provides portions of interviews without thehelpful context in which the interview took place or how the person relates tothe Hindu community that would have made the material more meaningful tothe reader.Religion and Commodification provides an excellent point of entry into the

interesting complexes of commodity and exchange in a thriving Hindu diasporiccommunity in the Malaysian peninsula and its relationship with the homeland inTamil Nadu, India. It is a crucial book for broadening the perspective of scholarsof Hinduism, especially those who are interested in issues of global Hinduism,Hindus, Indians, and Tamils in diaspora, and Hindu domestic space. The workis also important for scholars of religion interested in Malaysian and Singaporeanreligion and the broader field of material religion. It would make a great addition toa university library’s Southeast Asia or Religion collection.

Caleb SimmonsUniversity of Florida (USA)

E-mail: simmons@ufl.edu© 2011, Caleb Simmons

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2011.592098

Who Owns Jung?, edited by Ann Casement, Karnac Books: London, 2007, xvi +375pp. ISBN 978 1 85575 403 4, £20.99 (pbk)

This collection, the counterpart to Ann Casement’s edited Who Owns Psychoanaly-sis? (London, Karnac Books, 2004), consists of essays by eighteen Jungians fromall over the world. The essays are divided into five sections: academic, clinical,history, philosophy, and science. There is also a brief foreword by Hayao Kawaiand a brief epilogue by Roberto Gambini.In his foreword Kawai asserts that ‘modern science and the academy have made

huge progress in the last century at the cost of neglecting the feminine principle’(p. ix). He then credits Jungian psychology with helping to reverse this trend.Kawai neither explains what he means by the masculine tendency nor offers anyevidence for his claim, which at best plays upon crude, out-of-date stereotypes offemininity and masculinity.In the first of the four chapters on the academic, Toshio Kawai incisively surveys

the state of Jungian psychology in Japan. He contends that ‘Jung’s psychology isbetter accepted in Japanese society and the academy than in any other country’(p. 5). Freudian psychology has been less appreciated because it misses the non-assertiveness, ‘lack of clear verbalization’, and ‘ambiguous expression’ of Japaneseculture. But Kawai ignores the possibility that Freudian psychology might stillrecognize these qualities and simply account for them as disguises or defenses.Acceptance and persuasiveness are distinct issues. Like H. Kawai, T. Kawai setsJungian psychology against science.The essay closest to Toshio Kawai’s is Denise Ramos’ on the state of Jungian psy-

chology in Brazil. Like Kawai, Ramos maintains that Jungian psychology is in syncwith the psyche of her country. Unlike Kawai, she does not pit Jungian psychology

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against scientific psychology but on the contrary links the two. She stresses theacceptance of Jung by Brazilian academics.Refreshingly, Roderick Main focuses on the compatibility of Jungian psychology

not with academic psychology but with academic sociology. Both Jung and MaxWeber bemoaned the ‘disenchantment’ with the world that marks modernity.Insofar as both Jung and Weber lamented modern life for its elimination of religi-osity and thereby of meaningfulness, Jungian psychology would seem in tune withat least Weberian sociolology.But Main then contrasts Jung’s attempt at overcoming this with disenchantment

to with Weber’s resigned acceptance of it. Rather than citing the Jungian turn to theinner world as an antidote to the outer one, Main cites Jung’s effort at ‘re-enchant-ing’ the outer world through synchronicity. So radically different from ordinaryaccounts of outer events is synchronicity that the principle is bound to repel soci-ologists and thereby preclude compatibility. But then the radicalness of synchroni-city makes for an extreme case of incompatibility. A tamer topic, such as Jung’sposition on the relationship between the mind and the body, might offer a fairerchance of compatibility.Where Main commendably singles out a specific Jungian tenet, David Tacey

appeals to the Jungian focus on something vague called the ‘nonrational’ toexplain the supposed spurning of Jungian psychology by the academy. This argu-ment is preposterous. If anything, irrationality rather than rationality has capti-vated present-day academics. If Jung is not read, as Tacey assumes rather thandemonstrates, the reason may be not the subject matter of Jungian psychologybut Jung’s take on it. At the same time Tacey’s characterization of the Jungiansubject matter as the ‘numinous’ merely passes on a term that Jung took fromthe Protestant Rudolf Otto but that has been rejected as hopelessly ethnocentricby all scholars of religion for almost 100 years.To account for the purportedly sorry state of Jungian psychology in the academy,

Tacey appeals to the need to experience the Jungian unconscious to understand it.But Tacey, following other Jungians, confuses the study of the subject with thesubject itself. Just as a non-Buddhist can study and teach Buddhism, so a non-Jungian can study and teach Jungian psychology. Experience doubtless helps,but helpfulness is not indispensability. Must one experience God to be ableto study and teach religion? If not, then how has religious studies managedto thrive in the academy? One does not have to be taken up on a UFO to be ableto study those who claim to have been.Moreover, how has Jungian psychology succeeded in securing a place in the

academy in Japan, Brazil, North America, and elsewhere? Tacey’s sole evidencefor the difficulties faced by stalwart Jungian academics is that his own coursekept getting switched from one department to another. That, as he boasts, he hasnevertheless been able to teach his popular course at La Trobe University forover twenty successive years belies the point his saga is meant to confirm. (Jungiansnever hesitate to generalize from their lives to the state of the world.)There are three chapters on the clinical. Summing up his excellent book, Michael

Fordham (1995), James Astor describes Fordham’s efforts at filling in the theoreticalpicture bequeathed by Jung. Fordham investigated childhood from a Jungian per-spective, stressed transference and counter-transference, sought links with Freu-dians, and above all strived to make Jungian psychology scientific. On behalf ofFordham, Astor thereby rejects any opposition between Jungian psychology and

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science. Astor aptly notes Fordham’s turning away from myth to empirical evi-dence to figure out what makes humans tick. Astor’s essay would have benefitedfrom an assessment of the reception of Fordham across the Jungian world–hardly an excessive request for a book on the ‘ownership’ of Jung.In her chapter on the circumcision ritual for black South Africans, Astrid Berg

seeks to ‘contextualize’ Jungian psychology. Working out what Thomas Singerand others call a ‘cultural complex’, she argues for the retention of the ritual on‘culture-specific’ grounds, even while interpreting the ritual in universalisticJungian terms. Who, for her, owns Jung? Individual cultures as much as Jungianprofessionals.Writing primarily about a 1996 book on trauma by one Donald Kalsched, M.D.A.

Sinason and A.M. Cone-Farran praise Kalsched’s attempt to find proverbialcommon ground between Jungian psychology and object relations theory. Butthey fault him for unnecessarily limiting the application of the concept of asecond self that threatens to overpower the first self. This second self is likeJung’s No. 2 personality in his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections(New York, Random House, 1962). Who, for Sinason and Cone-Farran, ownsJung? Presumably, Kalsched plus the two of them.The historical section of the book consists of five essays. Mario Jacoby gives a

delightfully opinionated account of the history of the Zurich Institute. Who ownsJung here? Apparently the three factions in Zurich that claim the legacy of C.G.and that train their own analysts.Thomas Kirsch traces the competing claims to the ownership of Jung by the

clubs, then by the Zurich Institute and breakaway organizations, and finally bythe International Association for Analytical Psychology (IAAP). But factionalismpersists, for the IAAP, with ‘no official connection to either academia or to any gov-ernment’, ‘has no legal authority to decide who can call himself/herself a Jungiananalyst or not’ (p. 163). The Jung family, the ETH Archive, the Library of Congress,the Countway Library, and the Philemon Foundation all claim ownership of Jungbecause all possess still unpublished writings by the master.Ann Casement interviews Sonu Shamdasani about the creation of the Philemon

Foundation, which he heads or almost heads, and Shamdasani himself thendescribes the inadequacies of the present Collected Works. The editors, we learn,did not all know both English and German, did not all understand Jungian psy-chology, had their own opinions of Jung’s teachings, had scant familiarity withthe standards of a critical edition, left out much, and rushed to declare closed aset already known to be incomplete. Therefore whoever does own Jung cannotbase ownership on adherence to the Collected Works. By what can only be calledsynchronicity, Shamdasani then argues for the need for the Philemon editioninstead.The final chapter in the riveting historical section is Ann Casement’s reconstruc-

tion through letters of the history of the Journal of Analytical Psychology. No morethan the Collected Works does the journal turn out to be a neutral, universallyacknowledged forum for the study of Jungian psychology. On the contrary, itturns out to reflect the bias of the London-based Society of Analytical Psychology(SAP) and is looked on askance by Zurich.The section on philosophy consists of three essays. In the first, Joe (a.k.a. Joseph)

Cambray begins with Jung’s well-known aversion to being ‘imitated’ and thenexplains the concept of imitation in both Jungian and current scientific terms. He

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re-characterizes Jung’s position as, rather than ambivalent, simply an expression ofthe two sides of imitation. Imitation is simultaneously the avoidance of individual-ity and a spur to it. Who consequently winds up owning Jung is not clear.Next, Wolfgang Giegerich, the most professedly philosophical of living Jungians,

insists on a divide between earlier and later Jung. Earlier Jung is ‘psychological’,later Jung ‘logical’. Earlier Jung concentrates on the relationship between parts ofthe mind: ego and unconscious. Later Jung sees the ego and the unconscious asaspects of the ‘structure’ of the mind. The ‘logic’ of the ‘soul’ means the inherentpattern of its development. Why Giegerich, who cites Aristotle, does not call thelogic the telos, I do not fathom.Giegerich, for whom, in Continental fashion, being philosophical means being

ponderous, wants to make Jung himself philosophical. He would be more persua-sive if he matched up Jung with analytic philosophers, who ordinarily write of themind rather than of the soul, who are wary of attributing telos to things, but wholike later Jung shy away from the reification of concepts. Who, for Giegerich,owns Jung? Clearly, those who cultivate the later Jung.Finally, Hester Solomon first compares Jung’s transcendent function with Hegel’s

dialectic, then compares Freudian psychology as well with Hegel’s dialectic, andfinally compares the opposition between Jungian and Freudian psychology withthe opposing sides of Hegel’s dialectic. How Jungian psychology can by itselfmatch Hegel’s dialectic yet also do so only when juxtaposed with Freudian is notself-evident. How the opposition between these psychologies gets synthesized isnot self-evident either. Solomon notes that both Freud and Hegel were scornfulof Hegel and that ‘neither Freud nor Jung acknowledged a real debt to Hegel’(p. 267). How their psychologies can still derive from Hegel’s philosophy is evenless self-evident. The reigning view of intellectual history, epitomized by thework of Quentin Skinner, would be that they were thereby not indebted to him.In any event we are not told what the ramifications of this vaunted indebtednessfor the ownership of Jung are. Perhaps it is Hegel who owns Jung.The final section, on science, also consists of three essays. In one of the richest

essays in the book, Margaret Wilkinson both describes and prescribes the incorpor-ation of advances in neuroscience by Jungian psychologists. She combines hightheory with concrete cases. Her laudable desire to bring Jungian psychologyinto the 21st century by enlisting contemporary science puts her at odds withmost Jungians, who are science bashers.At the same time her essay skirts key issues. First, if Jungians need Jung’s

approval to link body with mind, as her citing of Jung implies, then she is com-mitted to ownership of Jung by Jung. Second, Jung’s own position on the relation-ship of the mind to the body is scarcely clear-cut, as the very statements she citesevince. Third, the issue is ultimately conceptual. Neuroscience can match thebody with the mind but cannot itself reduce mind to body, as Jung himselfusually did not want to do. Familiarity with the philosophy of mind wouldclarify, though not settle, the issue. Familiarity with earlier scientific attempts toroot the mind in the body, not least William James’, would also help.In his essay, George Hogenson, who actually has a PhD in philosophy, recognizes

the conceptual nature of his chosen topic: how analysis effects change. He seeks tocombine the emphasis on the change that an instant can effect, as shown in DanielStern’s studies of infants, with the long-term effect of that instant, as shown byJoseph Cambray. Hogenson argues that change ‘emerges’ in an ever-widening

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gyre, spatial as well as temporal. The analyst must take into account the broadestpossible ‘environment’ to fathom how change occurs. What is conceptual is Hogen-son’s effort at defining change and not merely at explaining it. To do so, he appealsto Jung’s concepts of the archetype and of the self. Like all of the other contributors,he writes in defense of Jung, whose insights have patiently awaited confirmation bysubsequent generations. Jung owns us.Like Hogenson, Jean Knox concentrates on the change produced by analysis.

Understanding change requires understanding the unconscious. Knox thusswitches the subject from who owns Jung to who owns the unconscious. She com-mends Jung for his far more dynamic, relational, and developmental conception ofthe unconscious than Freud’s, and as well for his far more dynamic conception ofanalysis. She berates Freudians for disdainfully ignoring Jung. But then she advo-cates an integrated view of ‘analytic goals and techniques’, which she presents withacuity and precision. Now not even Jung’s view suffices. Like various other contri-butors, Knox supports rather than opposes the enlistment of science. Who ownsJung? All those who, whatever their professional stripe, incorporate his insights.The flowery epilogue is hagiographical. Like Allah, Jung is great. Therefore ‘no

one owns Jung’. But there is a difference between claiming that no single schoolowns him and allowing that everyone owns him. If not everyone owns him, thenwho, at least, does not?Overall, this collection leaves the issue of ownership unresolved, as may well be

the intent. Of course, the choice of contributors presupposes a stand. The editor hassurely selected only contributors who in her view are entitled to offer their views.She excludes many others – for example, Theosophists and other perennialists whotake Jung as just one more thinker along the eternal line.Sociological and comparative considerations would have made the book even

better. For example, Weber’s celebrated analysis of authority would have suggestedvarying ways in which a founder’s charisma gets preserved. Comparison with theequally disputed ownership of Freud and of Marx would have helped. As unevenas the quality of the essays is, more than a few of them conspicuously display some-thing rare in Jungiana: thinking.

Robert A. SegalUniversity of Aberdeen (UK)

E-mail: r.segal@abdn.ac.uk© 2011, Robert A. Segal

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2011.592101

Rethinking Religion in India: The Colonial Construction of Hinduism, edited byEster Bloch, Marianne Keppens and Rajaram Hegde, Routledge: New York, 2010,xv + 192pp. ISBN 978 0 415 54890 8, US$130 (hbk), ISBN 978 0 203 86289 6, US$100 (e-book)

This book originated from a 2008 conference in New Delhi, and it ‘aims at re-con-ceptualizing the study of the Indian culture and its traditions and at developing analternative approach to the dominant framework of religious studies’ (p. xiii).Overall, the articles well represent an ongoing reconceptualization, though it isarguable whether they challenge the current dominant framework in Religious

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Studies (on ‘Hinduism’ if not ‘religion’), and they are certainly part of a long-stand-ing and powerful current within Hindu Studies. Few scholars in the field will notbe familiar with many of the contributors and most of the arguments. One’sresponse to the book will most likely turn on how novel and important onethinks it is to repeat the ideas that religion (and related Western terms) ‘fail tomake sense to Indian minds,’ and that the ‘Hinduism’ learned in school does notexist in most Indians’ lived experience. Outside the field, it may be the case thatmany are not aware that ‘Hinduism’ is a construction, but over (say) the lasttwenty years in Hindu Studies, it is simply not true that such a view ‘has notbeen taken seriously by most Indologists and scholars of religion who continueto study Hinduism as the ancient religion of India’ (p. 2).Having said this, it is good to have this collection of articles emphatically and effec-

tivelymaking the case for theproblematic and constructednature of suchcategories as‘religion’ and ‘Hinduism’ in one place. It is true that the European- and Christian-dominated model of Religious Studies has essentialized, brahminized, and textua-lized Hinduism, and that ironically, as this model has begun to be contested in theWestern scholarly community, many Indians have begun to accept it (and ‘religion’),andevenof course themselves start tousea terms like ‘Hinduism’andeven ‘Hindutva’(which also raises a variety of other issues). There is a legitimate debate about exactlywhen and where the ‘Hindu’ construction started and how it developed (my view isone of gradual change, and if not ‘invented’ by the British, certainly established bythem). It is also worth contemplating Balagangadhara’s challenging view that theconcept ofHinduismactually exists only inWestern (university)minds. I amsympath-etic to the idea that Euro-Americans see both ‘religion’ and ‘Hinduism’ a particularway because a Christian-based model trained them/us to look for and find certaincharacteristics (texts and practices) that ‘reveal’ them. Finally, it is an interesting ques-tion whether ultimately what was constructed was ‘just’ an idea or theoretical classi-fication system or an actual (new) religion, or both.It is not possible to do justice to all the issues the book takes up, but I will briefly

point out some key ideas discussed in the chapters, which start with a group con-taining historical arguments. D. Lorenzen contends that some Indians had a senseof identity as ‘Hindu’ before the colonial period, specifically referring to usages inmedieval Indian poetry of figures like Gorakh and Kabir. Further, contra manywriters here, he holds that ‘religion’ is a cross-cultural (beyond Abrahamic)phenomenon associated with powerful, supra-rational experiences and emotionsgiving authority to particular leaders and institutions.G. Oddie’s essay describes how an all-India Hindu identity first emerged during

the Mughal period and then developed and spread during colonial times. Hemakes the valuable point that the notion of a ‘religion’ seen in a text, belief, andpriest-based Brahminism was useful both for Christians as a point of referenceand Hindu modernists as a site of resistance for promotion of Hindu and Indianidentity. J. Zavos then summarizes well the views of various writers’ (such asKing, Frykenberg, Pennington, and Asad) about how the European concept of ‘reli-gion’developed in India through the colonial encounter. S. Sugirtharajah focuses oncolonalism as a state of mind in which the British saw themselves as a superior (and‘manly’) civilization offering a virtuous model for the material and spiritual benefitof the colonized. To them, Christianity’s (primarily) single text, god, and set of prac-tices were one aspect of Western rationality and modernity, standing in contrast to

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the complexity and heterogeneity of Hinduism, which signaled India’s culturalweakness and confusion.L. Patton shares some of her fascinating work on women as the dominant care-

takers of Sanskrit today. Her research (focused on Maharashtra) shows that olderwomen see Sanskrit study as part of the freedom struggle (more Gandhian thanreligious), while for younger ones it is a marker of Hindu identity (protecting San-skrit is part of stridharma, as men compete in the global economy).R. King’s essay begins the book’s second section, which contains primarily theor-

etical reflections. He points out that the Eurocentric constructions ‘religion’ and‘world religions’ still largely rule today despite some critique; they remain toooften seen as universal, cross-cultural categories and discrete entities, focused onscriptures, creeds, and beliefs. He further argues that while ‘Hinduism’ was nota Western invention simply imposed on India, it is a complex and diverse set ofphenomena still molded by Western and Christian ideas of religion. This chapterin particular made me wish for helpful hints about how to make these points effec-tively in an undergraduate classroom, where students know so little about anyother cultural construction. ‘Hinduism’ is an excellent ‘site’ to reveal the problemsof Western ‘categorical imperialism’ in the liberal arts college setting.T. Fitzgerald holds, contra Lorenzen, that there was no ‘religion’ in India indepen-

dent of the colonial intervention. While there was a long-standing group of beliefsand practices in India later called Hinduism, it was not a ‘religion’ until the colonialperiod. He shows well that religion is an imaginative abstraction (like ‘nation’ or‘society’), how various and value-laden usages of the term have been historically,and how these abstractions are still social facts with power.As indicated earlier, S.N. Balagangadhara takes the position that Hinduism and

religion are structures and ways of thinking created by Europeans, so ‘religions ofIndia’ exist, but only in Western minds (and especially universities). Further, theor-etical frameworks in Religious Studies are ‘secularized variants of Christian theol-ogy (p. 141),’ e.g., the ideas of ‘religious vs. secular’ or ‘church/state separation’ areProtestant theological doctrines. It is important to note that Balagangadhara seemsto define religion in such a way (or accepts a Eurocentric Christian way of definingit) that only theistic and perhaps Abrahamic traditions could be religions. Heargues a religion explains why God creates the world and why God gave religionto humans, so that religion’s existence ‘proves’ God’s existence and thus religion isalways investigated fromwithin a religion. Since Roman religion and (most) Indianreligions do not give such an explanatory account, or understand the description,they are not ‘religions.’ However, there are many other definitions of religion(see Lorenzen above, for example), which although created by and for theacademy, are not so bound to European Christianity.In the final essay, J. De Roover and S. Claerhout, students of Balagangadhara,

repeat and extend a variety of arguments made earlier, such as religion as analyticalcategory was created by scholars, ‘Hinduism’ rose within the framework of Chris-tian theology (which continues to structure reputedly post-Christian scholarlythought), and these terms (and others like ‘sacred,’ ‘worship,’ and ‘scripture’) arealready theory-laden. Thus, if Hinduism is a problem, it is a problem of Westernconceptualizing. As stated in the beginning of this review, many have madethese points and they are difficult to argue against. Still, is it really the case that‘puja rituals are not in any sense the equivalent of worship in Christianity’(p. 175)? Perhaps they are in some conceptualizations, but not in others. All

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attempts at cross-cultural theorizing distort, but they also can illumine, dependingon the context and audience. The authors then make the useful point that ‘Hindu-ism’ does exist now among various ‘religious’ traditions in India, in that someIndians (another problematizable category) have absorbed a Western way of think-ing, so look for the ‘true beliefs and practices’ of a ‘Hindu religion.’As a whole, these essays have the merit of making clear the residual Christian

theological categories still used in our discipline. They also, sometimes unwittingly,I believe, reinforce the importance of reflecting on howwe define our terms. What ifone offers a definition of religion that includes ‘human notions of celestial/divinebeings, and our relations with them,’ and Hinduism involves Indian discoursesabout that? Perhaps it is a Western construction to call such discourses ‘religion,’but having recently returned from Vrindavan, I must say that such notions and dis-courses are important, and have been long before the British arrived.

Andrew O. FortTexas Christian University (USA)

E-mail: a.fort@tcu.edu© 2011, Andrew O. Fort

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2011.592102

Earthly Paradise: Myths and Philosophies, by Milad Doueihi, Harvard UniversityPress: Cambridge, MA, 2009, xiii + 171 pp. ISBN 978 0 674 03285 9, US$39.95 (cloth)

Many readers will be familiar with a genre of intellectual history that flourished inthe middle decades of the last century. Thick books offered summary accounts ofprogressive authors from the Enlightenment through Soviet Communism, pro-pounding in each case a link between the various political thinkers of the Leftand old ideas of paradise and utopia. This link – asserted over and over again –was taken to demonstrate a confusion intrinsic to the far Left: the abandonmentof the real for the ideal, in the pursuit of which ideal the proprieties of liberalsociety would of necessity be murderously disregarded. Authors of these largevolumes sometimes turned out to be recipients (frequently at second or thirdhand) of Central Intelligence (CIA) money, and the genre has largely vanishedwith the Cold War. But it is useful to bring it to mind in approaching Milad Douei-hi’s often elegant little book, whose nature, intention, and procedure may becharacterized as in every way the opposite of those blustering tomes. Doueihimoves through Western texts from Augustine to Nietzsche, looking at differentstances assumed toward the story of Adam and Eve in the biblical Paradise.The volume advances chronologically through seven chapters, the first of which

presents Augustine’s handling of ‘Adamic difficulties’, in particular those raised bythe Manicheans’ ‘objections [to the Old Testament story] regarding God’s responsi-bility for evil’ (p. 1). The second chapter looks especially at Rabelais’ mockingaccount of the serpent that seduced Eve in theQuart Livre and at Leone Ebreo’s ‘Pla-tonic fable’ of a ‘rebellious androgyne’ whose initial state was one of ‘blessednessand immunity from seduction and sin. It is only after the divine incision that theweak half, the woman, succumbs to the serpent. Earthly paradise, in that secrethistory of the androgyne, is the site of an absolute freedom for man, but also thesite of the loss of freedom and the beginning of his efforts to recover his primitive

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state. For certain illuminists and utopians, therefore, to locate earthly paradise isonly to restore that first Adam in his integrity’ (p. 18).The jump from Augustine into the early 16th-century theories of androgyny

(Leone, Böhme, and their followers) becomes clearer in the excellent thirdchapter entitled ‘The Return of the Manicheans’, where it is shown that thesefigures were cited and discussed probingly by Bayle in his brilliant Dictionnaire,which ‘can be defined as the book that celebrates error in all its possible manifes-tations’ (p. 40). Bayle’s ‘discursive strategy’ combining extensive compilation ofsources subjected to multiple critique (implicitly a model for Doueihi’s procedures)‘establishes the autonomy of a discourse that, while appearing to be merely thepresentation of another, stands as the only legitimate discourse and calls into ques-tion the validity as well as the intelligibility of certain forms of knowledge and ofthe cultural practices that support them’ (p. 41). In his entries on Adam and onEve, Bayle ‘disputes all interpretations that assume that the father of humankindpossessed all learning and knowledge from his creation on’, insisting (this isBayle now), ‘those who infer from that imposition of names that Adam was agreat philosopher do not reason well enough to merit being refuted’ (p. 45).Doueihi explains that since ‘he wishes to be faithful to the text of the Bible, Bayledistinguishes himself from Leibniz and Arnauld who, each in his own way, sawAdam as the prototype and paradigm for humanity and for all potential humanknowledge. His critical discourse, radically historical – and as a result skepticalin this context – in separating the texts from their interpretations, opens a particularpath that allows him to exploit the errors of others and to present his own thinking,always polemical, within the framework of a practice that combines doubt and eru-dition’ (p. 45).Doueihi lays stress repeatedly on the ‘extreme radicality characteristic of Bayle’s

method’ (p. 46), not least in the ‘long polemical commentary, added as a postface tothe last volume of the Dictionnaire under the title . . . “Clarification on the Mani-chaeans”’ (p. 48). As ‘a heresy, that is, a history compiled in large part by itsenemies’ (p. 49), Manicheanism emerges as ‘the double and twin of Christianity’(p. 53), ‘as a practice of faith and of belief historically parallel to Christianity’(p. 51), whose plausibility seems no weaker, and perhaps even stronger, thanthat of Orthodoxy. Since Manicheanism was one of the critiques applied by Catho-lics to Protestants, Bayle here implicitly comments on confessional disputes. As toParadise, Bayle asserts: ‘It is . . . apparent that the dogma of Adam’s sin, and whatdepends on it, is of all the mysteries inconceivable to our reason and inexplicableaccording to its maxims, the one that requires of the greatest necessity that wesubmit to the revealed truth, notwithstanding all the objections of philosophicaltruth’ (p. 55). Doueihi concludes: ‘For Bayle, the origin remains repressed andunknown once and for all, and that distance from the origin guarantees the validityof and the need for history as human science, as the privileged science of humanity’(p. 56).The fourth chapter explores Leibniz and Spinoza. For Leibniz, ‘Adam is no longer

devoted to a nostalgic quest . . . for his lost earthly paradise. Leibniz’s virtual Adamis a man of the world. He is also a man of reason; he is a man of action capable ofchoosing’ (p. 74). For Spinoza, by way of contrast, Adam embodies ignorance andsuperstition. And fatally so: ‘Adam alone is responsible for that denaturalization ofdivine nature and for the representation of the figure of God as a lawmaker and aprince, that is, as the founder and guarantor of a specific political structure’ (p. 77).

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From the various enlightened thinkers covered in the fifth chapter let me quotethe seaman Robert Challe, who assures us: ‘The tale of Adam’s sin falls apart on itsown . . . . Adamwasmaster of his passions, a perfect being, in short, and in a state ofuncorrupted nature: that supposition is manifestly false. Men today are of a moreperfect nature, none would succumb to such a temptation under such a threat’(p. 90). To Challe, and Paine and Volney: ‘Earthly paradise is only a chimera. Forthe philosopher-Ideologue, there are only facts, ideas, and realities to be deci-phered’ (p. 102). The fourth and fifth chapters offer few surprises, though theyabundantly illustrate Doueihi’s eye for the telling passage, the adept paraphrase.The sixth chapter (‘Paradise of Reason’), though, is vital for the book as a whole,

preparing with its treatment of Kant for the emergence of the antithetical figure(Nietzsche) in the seventh chapter – and Nietzsche will in effect serve as thesecond Bayle, the great resurrector of Manichean and Gnostic strains of critique.Drawing on a number of Kantian texts, in particular the ‘Conjectural Beginningof Human History’, Doueihi shows that for the Sage of Königsberg: ‘Paradise isno longer the place of the origin or of the primal scene. It belongs rather to therealm of what is henceforth inaccessible once and for all. But that inaccessibilitygives rise to the natural development of reason and the deployment of its effectsin the history of humankind’ (p. 106). Dryly, Kant reads the story of the fruit as exhi-biting the interaction of reason with the natural world. Kant characterizes Adam’sfig leaf as an even ‘greater manifestation of reason’ (p. 110). And the Genesis nar-rative as a whole is voided of guilt and read as an account of the emergence ofchoice (the fruit) and ethical norms (the fig leaf).Nietzsche would have none of it, as Doueihi explains in his pungent final

chapter, ‘God’s Hell’. The seventh chapter finds the German rereading the Paradisestory from the point of view of God: ‘a God who fails in his attempt to create anentertainment for himself’ (p. 126). A theme for ‘a great poet’, Nietzsche wrote,‘would be God’s boredom on the seventh day of creation’ (p. 133). Indeed, ‘itwas God himself who at the end of his days’ work lay down as a serpent underthe tree of knowledge . . . . The devil is merely the leisure of God on that seventhday’ (p. 127). Where Kant read the Genesis story as evincing the emergence ofrationality and civility, Nietzsche takes it as exhibiting the start of man’s battleagainst God (p. 126). In so doing, Doueihi tells us, Nietzsche ‘adapts for his ownends the main line of the Manichaean (or Gnostic) analysis of the Biblical narrative.The biblical fall is not that of the first couple but rather that of God, and paradise isonly the deity’s hell, a result of error and fear. Moreover, the Manichaean thesesemphasizing the divine origin of evil correspond to Nietzsche’s analysis situatingevil not in man and his relationship with God but in the perversity of a deitywho refuses to admit his errors’ (p. 132).The very brief conclusion guardedly, almost cryptically, asserts that ‘[t]he tran-

sition from utopia to ethics does not entail the abandonment of the utopian,which has itself always been ethical’. So: ‘In a period when we are facing a sup-posed return of the religious in our societies, it may be useful to revisit the pathsopened to thought by the location of earthly paradise’ (p. 135). (The French originalreads ‘soi-disant’, which might better be rendered alleged or self-proclaimed;nuances here matter.) The next sentence also proves tricky, though not throughany oddity of translation: ‘Although utopia is a nonplace or a neutral place, it con-tinues to foster constructions of the social and of sociability by informing the articu-lation of modes of membership in collectivities, forms of citizenship, specific

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languages, andways of acting and being’. My understanding here is that this talk ofUtopia as neutral alludes implicitly to Louis Marin’s outstanding study of Utopi-ques, the implication of which seemed that Utopia marked the place where thesciences of man in general, and socialism in particular, would emerge andreplace Utopia. Doueihi will not accept that truncation: the various ‘paths’opened by paradisal thinking over the millennia remain, vitally, open — notleast for a scholar who tells us on the page from which I have been quoting inthis paragraph that he was himself born in a Lebanese village called Ehden, oneof the candidates over the centuries for the site of earthly paradise (p. 135).The translation merits praise, though I would quarrel with the rendering of ‘le

délassement’ in the Nietzsche chapter (e.g., p. 126) as ‘recreation’; ‘relaxation’would avoid the hint at re-Creation not present in the French original. There wasan occasional passage where this reviewer found it necessary to consult the Seuiltext to make sense of Doueihi. Thus, when (on p. 74) we read that Leibniz’s‘Adam is actual, and as such does not mingle the apparent with the true’, ithelps to know that the French verb is ‘confond’ — to confound or confuse, ratherthan mingle. My main peeve with the Harvard book, though, cannot be laid atthe translator’s door. At two key points — before the preface, and facing the firstpage of the seventh chapter — we find in the French publication plates fromWilliam Blake’s wonderfully weird little emblem book The Gates of Paradise(1793): one depicting the climber on a ladder to the moon, the other the rebelagainst the Father. The Seuil volume alerts its readers right up front that we areinvolved with Romantic Rebellion. Why these Blakean images are omittedwithout mention in the English rendering is a question that deserves an answer.

Eugene D. HillMount Holyoke College (USA)

E-mail: ehill@mtholyoke.edu© 2011, Eugene D. Hill

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2011.592104

Conceiving God: The Cognitive Origin and Evolution of Religion, by David Lewis-Williams, Thames and Hudson: London, 2010, 320pp. ISBN 978 0 500 05164 1,£18.95 (hbk)

Lewis-Williams’s Conceiving God: The Cognitive Origin and Evolution of Religionessentially recapitulates themes he developed in two earlier volumes – The Mindin the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art (London, Thames and Hudson,2002) and Inside the Neolithic Mind: Consciousness, Cosmos and the Realm of theGods (London, Thames and Hudson, 2005). He acknowledges his earlier discoverythat there are ‘underlying neurophysiological structures’ in the human brain thatpoint to something innate in human beings that – from at least Paleolithic times– produced what we today recognize as religion, but switches his focus in thelatest book to questions about the veridicality of religious claims, the question ofthe possibility of a two-way interaction between science and religion, and thesocio-political implications of religious experience, belief, and behavior.Reaffirming his earlier claim that ‘[p]eople seem always to have believed in twodomains’, namely ‘the material world in which they conduct their daily lives and

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a spirit realm that they try to contact’ (p. 7), Lewis-Williams raises the question ofwhether ‘there really [is] a spirit realm occupied by supernatural beings and forcesthat are concerned with human life on earth’ (p. 7). ‘Was the God of present-daymonotheistic religions trying to get through to these ancient hunters?’ he asks.‘Or were they struggling to come to terms with something quite different, some-thing going on in their own brains’ (p. 7)? And he subsequently raises the questionof the relationship of science to religion as a focal concern when he asks why is it‘that belief in religious revelation continues alongside rational thinking’ (p. 22)? Thesocio-political theme is woven into his argument throughout the book even thoughit does not seem to receive the same attention as the truth-question in relation to thegods and the question of the science–religion relationship.With respect to Lewis-Williams’s focal themes, it seems to me that he may well be

responding to J. Wentzel Van Huyssteen’s Gifford Lectures of 2004 published underthe title: Alone in the World: Human Uniqueness in Science and Theology (Grand Rapids,Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2006). Van Huyssteen, that is, attempts to use Lewis-Williams’swork on the origin of religion – as well as that of other cognitive archaeologistsand anthropologists like Steven Mithen, Paul Mellars, Terrence Deacon, and IanTattersall – in the service of theology. According to Van Huyssteen, Lewis-Williams’swork provides strong support for an argument in defence of ‘the naturalism andrationality of religious faith’ (pp. 86–87, 214) and, therefore, for an ‘intellectuallysatisfying way to believe in Godwithwhomwe can have a humanly comprehensiblepersonal relationship’ (p. 193). As van Huyssteen puts it, the thought and practice ofour ancient forebears can help theology ‘to revision its own notion of the imago Dei asemerging from nature itself,’ which suggests that humans have ‘a specific task andpurpose to set forth the presence of God in this world’ (p. 215).Lewis-Williams attends first to the ‘science and religion’ issue in the first three chap-

ters of the volume. It is in ancient Ionia (Chapter one), he argues, thatwefind the originof critical thinking and the origin of the distinction between scientific knowledge andother types of knowledge (p. 25) – and particularly so with respect to knowledge thatcomes ‘bywayof inner, religious experience’ (p. 37). Rather than choose between thesetwo modes of thought, he claims, people experienced little cognitive dissonance intrying to reconcile them since, as he puts it, they were just ‘emerging from thecocoon of a superseded form of knowledge’ (p. 43). Despite the dominance of Platon-ism, and its affinity with religiousmodes of thought, however, he maintains that untilof late, the ‘torchofGreeksciencewasnot extinguished’ (p. 57).More recently,hepointsout, evolutionary theory has made it impossible to believe in a supernatural worldinterested in human life and ready to intervene in human affairs (p. 86). Yet in his‘tale of two scientists’ (Chapter three) – a comparison of Charles Darwin with AlfredRussell Wallace, Lewis-Williams suggests that religion is resurgent and now poses athreat to scientific thought (p. 113). Nevertheless, in Chapter four on ‘Explaining Reli-gion’ he maintains that there cannot be a mutually supportive relationship betweenscience and religion since theology can do no more than merely reproduce religion(p. 116).In the following four chapters (four through seven) Lewis-Williams provides a

recapitulation of his theory of religion as generated by the brain. In ‘Explaining Reli-gion’ (Chapter four) he argues that conscious experience, not theology, provides thefoundation for understanding religion, an experience that derives from a neurologi-cal substrate of mental states that are ‘daily and necessarily generated by the electro-chemical functioning of the human brain’ (p. 137). These brain states include entoptic

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phenomena (i.e., visual images originating inside the eye) as well as overwhelminghallucinations which, he argues in Chapter five, bring people to ‘the threshold offaith’ (p. 149) because the experiences involved may be interpreted as ‘religious’since they seem to call for explanation in a different fashion from everyday practicalexperiences in the world (p. 157). Attempts to develop shared understandings ofthese ‘religious experiences’ in a particular cultural context and in local social circum-stances, he maintains in Chapter six, then become the foundation of a religion and itsparticular theological superstructures (p. 161).In Chapter eight, Lewis-Williams finds traces of ancient peoples’ religious prac-

tices in the archaeological record that provide support for his view on the neurop-sychological origin of religion. And then in Chapter nine, while comparing thereligious experience of Hildegard of Bingen and the San hunter-gatherer ofsouthern Africa, he maintains that we can see, as he puts it, that ‘[c]ulture doesnot swamp neurology’ (p. 232), since one sees here that religions in differentplaces and times exhibit parallels that one would expect if the theory were correct.In the final chapter of the book, and in his epilegomena, Lewis-Williams recounts

the response of believers who see science as having become ‘a run-away humanendeavor’ that (a) ignores reasonable arguments ‘on behalf of religion,’ and (b)claims that with the loss of supernaturalism we must also lose all that has beenuplifting and wonderful in music, literature, art, and architecture inspired byreligion and that has sustained our culture. Lewis-Williams nevertheless, rejectsthe claims of these ‘denialists’ because, he claims, they fail to see the real clashbetween religion and science. Unlike most of the recent ‘professional’ atheists(e.g., Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris),however, he is more tactful and refuses to ridicule the deeply held beliefs ofdevoutly religious people, and he advises atheists not to ignore the good thatreligion has achieved (p. 264; see also, pp. 69, 123). Nevertheless, Lewis-Williamsstill insists that intellectual honesty demands recognition of the neurological under-pinnings of religion, and he claims that despite the fact that inner experience isthe foundation of religion it ‘is not a persuasive argument for the existence of thesupernatural realm’ (p. 266). Moreover, even though religion has produced muchthat is good, Lewis-Williams also points out that religion can be, and often hasbeen, a social scourge and that there is an inevitable relationship between religionand social discrimination (p. 9), ‘that supernaturalism inevitably leads to oppres-sive government and the destructive notion of benign dictatorship’ (p. 31), aswell as to elitism (p. 51), to the desire for political power (p. 128), the formationof political and social hierarchies (pp. 138, 159), and to fanaticism (p. 6), all ofwhich he finds detrimental to a well-functioning society.Unlike the arguments Lewis-Williams marshals in his earlier books, the material

in this volume is not as well organized, nor always clearly argued. Nevertheless,this volume will be of considerable value to scholars interested in Lewis-Williams’stheory of religion as well as to those interested in the philosophical, social, andpolitical implications of religion.

Donald WiebeUniversity of Toronto (Canada)

E-mail: dwiebe@trinity.utoronto.ca© 2011, Donald Wiebe

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2011.592107

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Faith in the Fight: Religion and the American Soldier in the Great War, byJonathan H. Ebel, Princeton University Press: Princeton, 2010, xi + 253pp. ISBN978 0 691 13992 0, US$35.00 (cloth)

Looking to soldiers and war workers, Jonathan Ebel’s Faith in the Fight unveils theintimate and palpable connection between Christian ideology and martial combatduring the First World War. To expose this relationship, he highlights an array ofaccounts from a variety of detailed voices. Ebel shows that in the chaotic midstof violence and death, religion gave order and purpose to the horrors of theGreat War and, in symbiotic fashion, the War gave worth to religion. As hewrites: ‘Religion provided a vocabulary to help render war experiences meaningfuland war provided an arena in which faith could be lived out, tested, and animated’(p. 16). Religion, war, and experience therefore work together in this narration.Within the assortment of Christian meanings that Americans ascribed to theatrocities of the First World War, Ebel argues, redemption was key. Describingthe Great War (as well as an individual’s involvement in it) as redemptive operatedto infuse the ordeal with metaphysical dimensions, ‘theologizing combat’ as itwere. The big picture here is that of ‘a military impulse suffused with, andframed by, Christianity’ (p. 1).Ebel’s history inclusively draws from a range of public and private sources:

letters, diaries, memoirs, and state-sponsored surveys, as well as writings andimages from newspapers and periodicals. While he does keep a close eye on thelarger cultural and political context of Progressive Era America, however, Ebelalso navigates his history at a deeply personal, individual level. Boots on theground loom large in Ebel’s telling, which is apropos since his project hinges onthe religious beliefs and experiences surrounding the Great War. Therefore, whenredemption emerges as a shared meaning among these beliefs and experiences,Ebel adds some dynamic by bringing African-American soldiers and female warworkers into the discussion (alongside the numerically dominant white males).Experiences of the War clearly varied, and Ebel deftly handles the plurality.Marshaling the classic model of DuBoisian double-consciousness, for instance,Ebel uses his fourth chapter to exhibit how African-American soldiers were threa-tened on two fronts: one racial, the other martial. Further diversifying his accountof war experiences in his fifth chapter, Ebel details how female war workers wereable to enter into and participate within a largely male homosocial sphere whilestill enacting an appropriately domesticated role; their war experiences remainedappropriately ‘feminine’. Nevertheless, while on-the-ground experiences differed,Ebel does well to emphasize the common conceptual confrontation with thecarnage of war. Ultimately, for white and black soldiers and female war workers,this is a story of religious meaning making in the face of unprecedented violence.Ebel’s most obvious contribution in this work is his addition to the relatively

sparse body of literature on religion and war in America. As he rightly claims:‘Studies of America’s wars tend to ignore religion. Studies of American religiontend to ignore war’ (p. 3). In this regard, Ebel’s work may be read alongside thatof individuals like Harry S. Stout, Diane Winston, or Mark Silk. There is certainlyan unfilled historiographic niche here that Ebel alleviates. For good reason, Ebelalso differentiates his work within this small corpus. Ebel’s previously mentionedinterest in the everyday man (and woman) therefore adds a relatively novel take

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on the study of religion and war. By sidestepping discussion of religion’s role in theWar in terms of civil religion, what Ebel gives us is a look not at some oblique formof national piety, but rather of a kind of individually varied and collectively similartheology of warfare. Latent implications of Durkheimian social self-sacralizing takea back seat in Ebel’s interpretation as he looks instead to a religion born of necessity,where existence is jeopardized on an individual and national scale. By foreground-ing the ‘ordinary men and women’, as he asserts, Ebel deeply mines the intricaciesof the experiences that enrich this work (p. 3). Lived religion fans will enjoy.Ebel’s reliance on ‘religious experience’ as a heuristic, however, will likely leave

his work open to criticisms from those less friendly to the phrase as well as fromthose more inclined to bring biological explanations into the fold. ‘Experience’does not seem to be a theoretical or historiographic problem for Ebel. Nevertheless,Rudolf Otto’s understanding of religious experience is instrumental in Ebel’shistorical contextualization of the soldiers’ conceptual frameworks in this regard,which he makes most clear in his chapter on the ‘combat numinous’. In thistelling, exposure to war was like exposure to the holy, i.e., non-rational, ineffable,and overwhelming. A continental Romantic tradition also seems to inform Ebel’sown understanding of religious experience as he characterizes such experiencesby their indescribable qualities; in fact, this is the quality that both religious andwar experiences share in Ebel’s treatment (p. 15). In short, Ebel does not theoreti-cally interrogate ‘experience’, nor does he draw from the literature that problema-tizes it. While it may not be a fair critique to ask for a second-order questioning of‘religious experience’ in this work, Faith in the Fight will nevertheless be subjectto Wayne Proudfoot’s findings as well as more recent insights from individualslike Russell McCutcheon or Ann Taves.Also adding to the list of works on American manhood, this work begins with

discussion of a turn-of-the-century ‘crisis’ in masculinity. Effeminacy, sentimental-ism, and over-civilization, so it went for many historical persons, threatened themiddle- and upper-class, white, male constitution and culture. Progressive-Eracritics like G. Stanley Hall, Theodore Roosevelt, and muscular Christians, Ebelshows, called for a reclamation of lost and endangered manhood. Ebel arguesthat such love for all things strenuous and assertive was the cultural backdropfor America’s eventual rejection of Wilsonian neutrality and entry into the war.Particularly through muscular Christianity, then, the First World War had religiousbacking, according to Ebel. There were righteous benefits to be had in this struggle.The Great War was, at least initially, a stage upon which Christian masculinitycould be asserted and, thereby, saved. As such, Faith in the Fightmakes for interest-ing conversations when paired with the work of Ann Douglas, Gail Bederman, orClifford Putney.Ebel’s handling of war, however, is much more complex than a straightforward

discussion of male bravado performed on the world’s battle stage. Drawing fromElaine Scarry, Ebel highlights the impact and function of war at the individualand social level. Like Scarry, Ebel is concerned with the representation of interiority.Those who have experienced the War (like pain) are perplexed by the indescrib-ability of the experience, as Ebel points out. There is a solipsistic break betweenan individual’s inner state and the means by which that state is communicated.For Ebel, this is where Christianity has taken up cause. He writes: ‘At the sametime that the Great War unmade language and worlds though pain, it evokedlanguage, analogies, and theologies’ (p. 15). In this way, the pains of war experience

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reveal a peculiarly vulnerable moment when subjects are at their most pliable, givento the cultural (re)formatting of the ‘victors’ as it were, which Ebel makes most clearin his discussion of the transformative nature of such exposure. As war strippedindividuals of their cultural orientation, then, Christianity provided a conceptualstockpile for individual soldiers to (re)acquire direction and purpose. Using Scarry,Ebel shows that as war unmade individuals, Christianity made them.Integral to this process as Ebel describes it is a kind of social competition. Since

the structure of war in Scarry’s terms is fundamentally a contest over which socialgroup gets to define reality, Ebel does well to underscore the combative inclinationto inscribe meaning upon the GreatWar and all that it entailed. By defining the FirstWorld War in terms of a Christian reality, Americans could not only signify theirtriumph (however tenuous), but also establish a normative interpretive paradigmwhereby involved individuals could orient their experiences. Ebel makes thiscase most strongly in his final chapter on the continued propagandistic efforts ofthe American Legion during the inter-war period. Indeed, the battle persistedover the right to interpret the lessons of the First World War, and while it maynot seem surprising that there was a skirmish to explain the meaning of theGreat War, Ebel suggests a deeper point. Perhaps Ebel’s chief insight here is thatgiven war’s violent nature, there is a singularly unique and curiously appropriateplace for religion in warfare. Given the unmaking of encultured selves that invari-ably follows from encounters with the pains of war, or the ‘combat numinous’ inEbel’s preferred terminology, religion provides a means through which individualsand collectives may appropriate new identities and allocate new meanings. Thedistinctively calamitous effects of warfare render the skirmish itself (and all thoseinvolved) susceptible to religious infusion.Overall, this dissertation-turned-book is well transitioned, providing a thought-

ful narrative to a neglected topic. Historians of war and historians of religion alikecould benefit from taking note of Ebel’s research here. And for those American reli-gious historians whose classes are shamefully lacking content between the World’sParliament of Religions and the Scopes Trial, this book should prove eminentlygratifying.

Miles Adam ParkFlorida State University (USA)

E-mail: mapark@fsu.edu© 2011, Miles Adam Park

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2011.592777

The New Holy Wars: Economic vs. Environmental Religion in ContemporaryAmerica, by Robert H. Nelson, Pennsylvania State University Press: UniversityPark, 2010, xxi + 388pp. ISBN 978 0 271 03582 6, $24.95 (pbk)

Robert Nelson’s The New Holy Wars (henceforth Holy Wars) continues his provoca-tive line of thought in the field of ‘secular religion’ and ‘secular theology’ from pre-vious publications, including, Economics as Religion (Pennsylvania State UniversityPress, 2001) and Reaching for a New Heaven on Earth (Rowman and Littlefield, 1991).In this new work, Nelson contends that environmentalism and progressiveeconomics are competing secular religions with antagonistic underlying theologies.

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Part one of Holy Wars explores progressive economics as a religion. This sectiondoes recap some arguments from previous publications; however, the material isgiven a fresh environmental spin. Nelson unravels the philosophical assumptionsand value judgements within progressive economic thought and analyses these astheologies rooted in Christian traditions. For example, material deprivation is takenas the cause of sin, and the economic value of ‘progress’ is evaluated as presenting‘the correct route to the salvation of the world’ (p. 36). This theology is argued to bethe best way to explain, for instance, the selection of ‘costs’ that are taken intoaccount in economic theory (pp. 30–32). Chapters three and four study environ-mental economics with an interesting focus on ‘existence values’ as an economicattempt to answer the religious questions shared with environmentalism. Insome ways reminiscent of Grace Davie’s sociological concept of ‘vicarious religion’(‘Vicarious Religion: AMethodological Challenge’, in N. Ammerman, ed., EverydayReligion, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007, pp. 21–36), the value of theexistence of churches and wilderness (the church of environmentalism) couldtheoretically be given a monetary value and incorporated into economic analyses.However, Nelson convincingly argues that such a synthesis is theologically unsuc-cessful, since economics rejects ‘the idea that some things are literally “priceless”’in dollar value terms’ (p. 71). The section concludes with the critical observationthat the pursuit of economic progress has a variety of victims – including theenvironment – that are often ignored, introducing contradictions into a theologicalrendering of progress as a route to salvation.Parts two and three turn to environmentalism, arguing that American environ-

mental thought has ‘Calvinist roots’ (p. 111) and contains creation stories. Thelink between Calvinism and environmentalism is most clearly articulated inChapter seven, where we are shown a lineage from the Book of Nature to deepecology: ‘Calvinism minus God’ (p. 132). Nelson picks out an interesting inconsis-tency within environmental religion’s theology of original sin: although environ-mentalism outwardly suggests that humanity must become reintegrated withnature, the ‘actual goal . . . is the opposite: to inculcate a new morality withrespect to the natural world that is found nowhere else in nature’ (p. 126). There-fore, upon close inspection, environmental goals surprisingly conform moreclosely to Christian creationist accounts of Eden and the fall than Darwinianlaws of nature. Nelson can therefore uncover a theology of ‘the proper relationshipof man and nature’ that is surprisingly similar for both Calvinism and environ-mentalism (p. 218). Overall, American and European environmental creationismis gauged as ‘a period of theological regression’ (p. 160) that has led to many illeffects, including the displacement of indigenous populations in colonial effortsto ‘save Africa from Africans’ (p. 260).Finally, part four advances a tentative solution to the ‘war’ between environ-

mental and economic religion, suggesting that they may be synthesised into a‘libertarian environmentalism’ oriented around the ethical value of humanfreedom by appealing to less mainstream Calvinist forms of economics as outlinedby thinkers such as Frank Knight, rather than the progressive Catholic mainstream(p. 281). Nelson volunteers some steps for how this synthesis might be achieved,for example, by identifying federal government as a shared adversary in a newholy war akin to the Reformation: the central religious authority that the Protestantreligions will rebel against (pp. 328–329).

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Although the idea that secular religions in the West can be traced to Christiansources is not entirely new, Nelson is correct that there has been less detailedanalysis of the theologies therein. Focusing on concepts such as an ‘originalcreation . . . the sources of sin in the world . . . salvation . . . [linear] history . . .[and eschatology]’ (pp. 333–334), Holy Wars is able to advance some interestinganalyses of the inconsistences within economic and environmental thought.Nelson clearly sees the disorder as much more serious in the case of environ-mentalism. One of the most insightful analyses of environmental theology is thatwhilst environmentalism seems to condemn ‘playing God’ with nature, the goalof ‘re-creating the creation’ (p. 222) actually requires significant human interven-tion – perhaps ‘playing God’ even more than previous exploitations of the environ-ment stemming of progressive economics (pp. 239–240). This is just one instanceof Nelson’s fascinating insight that environmentalism and economics begin toask theological questions when they rethink ‘the basic relationship betweenhuman beings and nature’ (p. 3). By ‘doing secular theology’ we are able to seethe ways in which ‘modern religion is really old religion disguised in superficiallynew – typically scientific and economic – language’ (p. 339). This often permitsdeeper analyses of contemporary manifestations of religion than would be possiblewere theologies ignored. It also crucially encourages us to question the neutralityof scientific and quasi-scientific knowledge that has so often been pitted as thestandard against which religious claims are measured for validity.As a whole, the hypothesis that American secular religions are rooted in various

forms of Christianity is persuasively argued. There must, however, be a few reser-vations that ultimately seem to stem from arguments being overstated. Regardingenvironmental religion, Nelson acknowledges that there are various interpretationsof Calvinism, and that there are likely to be other non-Christian influences insecular religions and theologies. He may be correct that Calvinism neverthelesscomprises the ‘essential character’ of contemporary environmentalism in anAmerican cultural and historical context (p. 132), but as this assertion forms thebasis of his work, some exploration of alternative interpretations might havebeen a valuable addition. It may be the case that secular movements are muchmore religiously eclectic than Holy Wars accounts for, with influences from ‘non-Christian’ sources. Indeed the influence of non-Christian religions in the contextof globalisation is increasingly pertinent to Nelson’s American context. If takingthe line of ‘globalisation as hybridisation’, following Pieterse (‘Globalisation asHybridisation’, International Sociology 9/2 [1994]: 161–184), we might be able toanalyse contemporary secular religions as eclectic interstices between a variety ofworldviews. Instead, Nelson argues too exclusively for contemporary secularisedChristian formations.More importantly, however, it is not clear precisely what Nelson has in mind

when speaking of ‘religion’ throughout the work. Whether or not we agree thateconomics and environmentalism are ‘religions’ (let alone specifically Christianones) will depend in part upon what wemean by the analytical concept of ‘religion’itself. Nelson does provide two explicit definitions of the term ‘religion’, but theseare broad, open to debate, and appear late into the work. The first is that religion issomething that provides ‘a framework for understanding and making judgmentsabout the world’, which implies that ‘virtually everyone has a religion, whetherthey call it one or not’ (p. 276). The second definition is that environmentalismand economics are religions ‘in the sense that they have comprehensive

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worldviews and myths that provide human beings with the deepest sense ofmeaning’ (p. 348). Can we call anything that conforms to these descriptions a reli-gion, and if not, what is it that makes Nelson’s ‘secular religions’ religions? Thisis another area of Holy Wars that really needed to be argued by Nelson ratherthan assumed and would have been appropriately discussed in some depth atthe very outset of the work. Nevertheless, we can, I think, agree that the branchesof thought that Nelson examines are often concerned with questions that religionhas traditionally dealt with.One of the confusions that this omission seems to create is the distinction

between worldviews, philosophies and ‘religion’. These terms are often tooeasily equated with one another without any discussion of the possible distinctionsbetween them. For example, the question of whether moral schemes and philoso-phical values are sufficient to qualify economics or environmentalism as ‘religions’is left unaddressed. In fact, it appears that Nelson sees no possibility of coherentmoralities without religion and, more specifically, without reference to a god as ulti-mate source and arbiter. However, it is not always convincing that adding a trans-cendent referent is philosophically required or even the only solution, and we endup not being able to give contemporary ‘secular religions’much distinctiveness atall. Some of Nelson’s identifications of theological confusions, then, are perhapsoverstated to fit secular theologies relatively neatly with Christian traditions.Perhaps a more obvious point for clarification is Nelson’s invocation of the term

‘God’ itself. It is rarely clear what the ‘God’ of either economics or environmental-ism is, since a variety of concepts seem to be presented as God analogues. This is animportant point for clarification in future work, since, according to Nelson, many ofenvironmentalism’s theological inconsistencies cannot be solved without incorpor-ating a Christian God into the equation (p. 160). Even substitute concepts such asearth or nature do not suffice – roses by other names apparently do not smell astheologically sweet! However, it is unclear that even if progress for mainstreameconomics, or nature / Earth for environmentalism, does function much like agod, then this necessarily needs to be made consistent with Christianity. Why isit that ‘mother Earth’ in some environmental thought must be translated to a Chris-tian creator God? Is environmentalism, as Nelson argues, ‘really’ about ‘a newhuman unity with God’ rather than unity with nature (p. 128)? At times thereseems to be a leap to the conclusion that economists and environmentalists suchas the Earth First! movement (p. 158) are ‘really’ talking about Christian con-ceptions of God, but that this is either not realised or intentionally concealed.However, even when the essential messages of environmentalismmight be consist-ent with some Calvinist thought, it is nonetheless possible that there is somethingdistinctive about nature religions, e.g., mother Earth as goddess or nature as anobject of reverence without any concept of a ‘creator’ god.Similarly Nelson suggests that the affinity between accounts of environmentalist

experiences of nature and Protestant Christian encounters with the creation are sosimilar that the former are really ‘experiencing . . . a direct connection to God – itis just that many environmentalists are unwilling to say so explicitly’ (p. 344).Although experiences of nature may well be included under the analyticalbanner of religious experience, wemight be able to treat the referent more distinctlyrather than reducing all such experiences into a strictly Christian scheme. How canwe, for example, privilege communication with God in Christian thought andsimply determine that for environmentalists, nature itself ‘is saying nothing’

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(p. 158)? Again, the concept of hybridity might be useful to delineate more clearlythe similarities between environmental and Calvinist worldviews without attempt-ing to force environmental movements into an exclusively Calvinist mould. Never-theless what these analyses do underscore is that it is often fruitful to go behindexplicit statements to discover other possible hidden grounds of thought. Thismakes Nelson’s work a crucial demonstration of a scholar of religion going‘behind the scenes’ of secular movements, often bringing to light a wide array ofinsightful contributions.Holy Wars is an essential read for anyone interested in contemporary religion and

the relationship between Christianity, economics and environmentalism. Many ofthe arguments are compelling and often controversial, making this work aprimer for rewarding debates. Throughout the work it is emphasised that secularreligion presents more than just an intellectual puzzle. Secular versions of religionare arguably more influential in everyday life than ‘traditional’ Christianity, andthey have vast political implications too. Nelson’s final conclusion is thereforeone that all scholars in the field of religion must surely heed: ‘It is time to takesecular religion seriously’ (p. 349).

Sarah MaidmanUniversity of Kent (UK)

E-mail: sm552@kent.ac.uk© 2011, Sarah Maidman

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2011.592779

The Fundamentalist Mindset: Psychological Perspectives on Religion, Violenceand History, edited by Charles B. Strozier, David M. Terman and James W. Jones,Oxford University Press: New York, 2010, xxii + 274pp. ISBN 978-0195379662, US$19.95 (pbk)

This very interesting and timely collection of fifteen chapters had its origin in anonline discussion group begun in 2003. Out of this discussion group, thereemerged a series of monthly gatherings to hear and react to more formalized pre-sentations of each others’work, along with that of a few invited guests. This collec-tion, in turn, was produced as a document of this process of discussion. It issignificant to note this genesis from online discussion to more formalized meetingsand finally to a published book, as it demonstrates howmuch the Internet itself hasbecome a player in current scholarly work. It is conceivable that in the future theend product of such discussion as well will be made available largely through Inter-net download rather than as paper-between-covers. Which would mean, of course,that it is no end product at all, but only a documentary segue into even moreongoing conversation.As essays emerging from conference papers, this book has all of the strengths

and many of the weaknesses associated with such collections. A major strength,definitely on exhibit in this book, is the ability to see how contributors of verydifferent backgrounds, experiences, and expertise react to and integrate similarsources and events. However, this leads more or less inexorably to a great dealof overlap and repetition, which is also on display aplenty in this book. The goalof the editors of this book is to look at the ‘fundamentalist mindset’ from a

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primarily psychological perspective, to elucidate its undercurrent of strongly apoc-alyptic themes, and finally to emphasize the connection between fundamentalistthinking and violence. On the whole, they accomplish this well, yet in manyplaces serious questions are left unattended.The book is divided into four major sections of three or four chapters each. The

first section is a general look at the ‘fundamentalist mindset.’Does it exist, and if so,what are its characteristics? The consensus is that, while the term ‘fundamentalist’applies in the most strict sense only to a specific tradition of American ChristianProtestantism, there is a discernable constellation of mental characteristics, of‘ways of thinking,’ that can be abstracted and are sufficiently present in other move-ments to justify its application beyond this more restricted usage. This ‘fundamen-talist mindset’ is outlined slightly differently in various sections of the book, but inthis section it is depicted as a way of thinking that is dualist, conversionist, defen-sive, literalist, subservient to authority and tending toward apocalyptic endism.The second section analyzes the ways in which this fundamentalist ‘gestalt’ is

vulnerable to becoming a catalyst for violence. Although this can occur for anumber of reasons, the common element appears to be the presence of a strongsense of unaddressed and only indirectly acknowledged shame and humiliation.This festering pool of shame and humiliation easily spills into a deep-seated urgefor revenge. When this urge for revenge is filtered through the lens of religion,what emerges is an attachment to a wrathful and vengeful God who identifieswith the shame and humiliation suffered by the faithful and promises redemption.Subsequent dualistic splitting divides the world keenly between good and evil, andredemption of good from evil is fused with images of violence, such as war, sacri-fice, and ‘cleansing’ rituals. This cumulative brew produces a positive religioussanction for violence that essentially has no rational satiation point. If Goddemands redemption and vindication, and redemption comes through violence(therefore even those against whom violence is perpetrated benefit from it eitheras personal or world redemption), any sense of rational limits on the levels ofviolence required for the redemption process is completely lost.Section three applies this model to some recent manifestations among American

Christians. Here I foundmost useful the analysis of the dispensationalist Left Behindseries of books and movies. Assuming many readers of this review are like myself,recognizing the cultural importance of the Left Behind phenomenon but simplyunable to muster adequate personal impetus for the chore of slogging throughthe many books or sitting through the films, I draw special attention to thissection. Section four rounds out the book with more general treatments of religiousviolence as manifested in contemporary global ‘jihadism’ in Islam; the nationalisticHindutva movement; and in secular ‘religious’movements of Nazism in Germanyand Jacobist fanaticism in the time of the French Revolution.As stated, this as a very interesting and timely book deserving of wide attention.

On the other hand, there is much to be criticized here. In the first place, the titlesubject itself is very elusive and never gets adequately nailed down. Although itis valid to extend the category of ‘fundamentalist’ beyond its specific historicalorigins in American Protestant Christianity, it is not always clear, then, to whatother groups this designation should or should not apply. In a number of placesthe contributors insist on a distinction between fundamentalism and religious/doc-trinal orthodoxy, but that distinction is not uniformly held in the subsequent argu-mentation. I grew up in a Christian fundamentalist environment and I certainly

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recognize the fundamentalist gestalt presented in various chapters of this book.However, while a mental gestalt can be neatly outlined, it gets more messy applyingthat gestalt to actual people. The ‘Princeton’ fundamentalists, such as Warfield andMachen, who did the intellectual heavy lifting for the early movement, were largelyamillennialist, as far from disruptive apocalypticism as one can get on the conti-nuum of eschatological doctrine. There is, of course, a recurrent use of violentimagery in fundamentalist preaching, but this is largely because such imagery isso prominent in the Jewish and Christian Bible, as well as the holy books and writ-ings of most world religions. You find reliance on the same imagery in explicitlypacifist preaching, for example, that of early Quakers such as George Fox andJames Naylor. In short, I do not think the connection between fundamentalismand apocalyptic violence is nearly as close as many sections and chapters of thisbook imply.Furthermore, when we look at the basic gestalt leading to religious violence pre-

sented in the book, it may well be that we are looking at it exactly backwards. All ofthe characteristics found in the writings and preaching of those who have crossedthe line into religiously sanctioned violence (revenge rooted in shame/humiliation,dualistic splitting between good and evil, magnifying both the evil and potentialpower of the enemy, a fascination with redemptive violence, and so on) areexactly what is found in the writings and preaching of mainline Protestant andCatholic ministers, priests, and theologians before and during the two worldwars (cf., for example, Ray H. Abrams, Preachers Present Arms, [1969]). Are we toimagine that all of these high-church Anglican and Presbyterian ministers andtheologians periodically and regularly become fundamentalists in times of war?Or might we not rather hypothesize that the basic gestalt outlined in these pagesmore likely represents the stereotypical themes that emerge whenever peopleattempt to justify massive violence against other human beings on religiousgrounds? I am not saying I know this (though I strongly suspect it) but am faultingthis book for not even noticing it as a needed avenue of investigation.The very same can be said of fundamentalist depiction of the enemy as radical

evil incarnate, demonic and dehumanized: God’s own enemies. This is exactlythe same imagery found in all wartime propaganda on both sides of the conflict(cf., for example, Sam Keen, Faces of the Enemy [1976]). It seems less likely thatadhering to a fundamentalist mindset provokes violence than that the desire toprovoke self and others to violence pushes one toward exhibiting elements ofthis fundamentalist mindset. Again, while stating this only as an hypothesis, Iam faulting this book for not even noticing it as a needed avenue of investigation.The psychology of this book leans heavily toward attachment theory. Attach-

ment theory hypothesizes that habitual styles of adult attachment are rooted inearly attachment experiences with parents and other close caregivers. Thus, uponanalyzing the attachment style of a person, one can make relatively reliable predic-tions about what kind of parenting that person experienced, and vice versa. A fewplaces in this book (and countless places in the general mass of religion-and-psychology literature) a connection is made between the picture of God/parentthat emerges in fundamentalism and the adult attachment style of those whowould be drawn to such religion. Since in fundamentalism God/parent is depictedas wrathful, demanding, highly conditional in bestowing approval, and so on, theconnection is made between fundamentalist religion and ‘preoccupied’ and ‘inse-cure’ attachment styles. In my view, this is really stretching and unjustified by

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even a cursory look beyond theory to actual evidence. There we will see that theentire spectrum of attachment styles is spread very evenly across society, anddoes not congregate among people of particular religious subgroups. Furthermore,even if we were to entertain a connection between adult attachment style andhigher interest in certain cultural phenomena (for example, avoidant attachmentand professional wrestling), such higher interest would have to be at least asstable over time as is a person’s attachment style (which, once contoured andgelled by early attachment experience, is seen to be very stable across the lifespan).But interest in and adherence to fundamentalist-type religion has been shown inempirical studies to wax and wane considerably. Most people who join fundamen-talist churches, for example, do not remain there, but move on to other churches.Both education and socioeconomic status are much better predictors of stabilityin this area of life. This simple fact should raise all kinds of critical questions regard-ing the ways in which attachment theory is used to analyze religious group adher-ence, in this book and elsewhere, and suggests that a stage-theory model ratherthan an ethological model is more likely to assist in understanding such groupadherence.In voicing these significant criticisms, however, I do not want to detract from the

value of this collection. These are intelligent people, dealing intelligently with avery serious but slippery subject. What these people have to tell us about thefirst eight years of their discussion is more than worthy. Perhaps the mainproblem is that there was such a focus on psychology, which highlights equivalen-cies much more quickly than it notices subtle differences. Perhaps in the comingyears this discussion will broaden to include focus on the social, cultural, and econ-omic dimensions, the environment(s) that seem to foster emergence of fundament-alisms of various stripes, and the relationship between beliefs, culture andsanctioned/unsanctioned violence in our world. As a starting point for that discus-sion, this book is of great value.

Daniel LiechtyIllinois State University (USA)

E-mail: dliecht@ilstu.edu© 2011, Daniel Liechty

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2011.592781

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