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Theater in a Crowded Fire: Ritual andSpirituality at Burning ManDouglas Osto aa Massey University , New ZealandPublished online: 08 Jul 2011.

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Book Reviews

Contesting Justice: Women, Islam, Law and Society by Ahmed E. Souaiaia, StateUniversity of New York: Albany, 2008, xiv + 195pp. ISBN 978 0 7914 7397 9, US$24.95 (pbk); ISBN 978 0 7914 7398 6, US$70.00 (hbk)

For one with much experience in Muslim countries, this exploration of social justicein the Qur’an, along with interpretative and legal traditions in Islam, is a veritableeye-opener. Although not intended as a textbook, it would in fact be quite useful foran advanced course dealing with women and Islam. The preface alone contains afour-page set of definitions useful to any student, and the appendices, consistingof a ‘Timeline of Scholars’, ‘Major Figures’ and a ‘Glossary of Key Arabic Termsand Their Derivatives’, are indispensable. Even if one is not familiar with Souaiaia’searlier hypotheses, this volume presents a wealth of information on Muslimjurisprudence, Qur’anic passages dealing with polygamy and inheritance, andproposals for relieving current practices demeaning to women.Previously, Souaiaia, along with a number of other scholars, notably women,

contended that Qur’anic passages dealing with polygamy and inheritance inher-ently emphasized justice and fairness, and that it was a male-dominated interpret-ation that disenfranchized women and produced the laws and practices whichdisadvantaged them. His new argument proposes that ‘justice and fairness arenot absolute values in the eyes of members of a religious community; rather,justice and fairness are time-specific social constructs manufactured by the prevailingunderstanding, local customs and practices’ (pp. 1–2). Thus, he insists, justice itselfis manufactured in that the concept was not normatively derived from primarysources of religious and legal teachings as claimed. Souaiaia explains that theIslamic concept of justice is essentially different from the Western view, whichposits an evolving social contract subject to change. The Islamic concept, alterna-tively, is locked in time, so that societal changes do not result in new understand-ings or applications of justice.In a fascinating chapter on legal absolutism and ethical relevance, the author

employs a story of ‘the Knower’ to lay the foundation of his argument againstlegal reform as the only possible solution to widespread discrimination againstwomen. Souaiaia’s point is that cultural and societal expectations can be moreoppressive than laws, and that to relieve women’s oppression, it would makemore sense to encourage a culture of diversity and pluralism that expandsethical and moral boundaries (p. 15). The status of women in Islam cannot beunderstood in the context of isolated legal rulings and limited practices butrather depends on a broader world view anchored in philosophy, theology, legaland practical considerations (p. 20). Souaiaia argues for the use of models, anec-dotes, paradigms, allegories and parables as a way of making the past relevantto today and imposing meaning on contemporary events.

ReligionVol. 41, No. 3, September 2011, 487–527

ISSN 0048-721X print/ISSN 1096-1151 online/11/030487–41 © 2011 Taylor & Francis

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In his second chapter, Souaiaia reviews the five categories of imperatives andpreponderants, as well as the spectrum of judgments in Islamic jurisprudence,noting that the body of law emphasizes ethical/moral obligation on one handand legal proof (authenticity) on the other. Because the Prophet’s mission was toperfect ethical norms for a society that did not know what was good and bad,legal principles were established to settle disputes when evidence was unclear.Only six crimes are described in the Qur’an as deserving of specific punishments,while many others fall under the jurisdiction of judges, imams and rulers. Faith,emotion and acts are linked in such a way that the faithful believer becomes partof a compliant community out of fear of tortuous punishment and anticipationof enticing incentives in the hereafter. The power of Islamic law is thus rooted ina vision of ‘communicative justice’, which delivers a thoroughgoing message ofself-restraint to the believer (p. 41).The third and fourth chapters deal with polygamy and inheritance, respectively,

with the understanding that ethics are posited ideas, rooted in a religious traditionproduced by men (and sometimes women) to satisfy social and cultural needs ofspecific communities (p. 44). Souaiaia believes that in the new era of humanrights, scholars are morally required to re-examine historical causes and legalreasoning related to traditional practices that injure women’s well-being. The prin-ciples of justice (adalāh), fairness (qist) and welfare (maslahah) should be activated toundo harm to women, and women should be included in conversations regardingchange. To justify these points, the author summarizes the methodologies and logicof Muslim scholarship from the formative time period to the codification era andrecreates historical contexts in order to generate debate concerning reasoningthat has guided Islamic legal scholars through history. The purpose of laws, heasserts, is to remove discomfort, redress injury and realize justice (p. 47), whichare methodological assumptions ultimately found at the heart of Islamic jurispru-dence and hermeneutics.Applying these ideas to polygamy, Souaiaia shows how various scholars have

generated alternative readings of Qur’anic passages. Relevant verses are showntomandate monogamousmarriages with orphans but make no statements on poly-gamous marriage not involving orphan women. It becomes clear that the Qur’an isnot definitive on the question of polygamy but that the historical interpretiveprocess has had a major impact on legal determination. With laws of inheritance,however, Souaiaia employs four different translations and the original Arabictext for the purpose of conducting 908 blind surveys to prove that the Qur’anconsistently and explicitly determined female inheritance in ratios and fractionsbut left male inheritance unstated or implied. In this study, the margin of deviationin interpretation was directly proportional to the level of explicitness in thetext. Thus, claims Souaiaia, oral tradition, not systematic understanding of theQur’an, played a major role in assigning meaning and confining the scope ofQur’anic verses on inheritance (pp. 73–75). He goes on to show how interpretationsfurther differ between Sunni and Shi’ite legal traditions and also between Sunnischools of law.In a final chapter dealing with modern times, Souaiaia explores the difficulty of

bringing Islamic law into line with evolving global world views. Rather than tryingto make changes to a tradition locked in time, he suggests, a no-legal-action stancewould be more effective in establishing justice for women than rigid legal rulings.The solution, therefore, lies in establishing Islamic civil society and civil institutions

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grounded in justice, fairness and welfare. Private arbitration agencies, communitycouncils, professional organizations and non-governmental organizations canprovide individual services without establishing precedents that will limit therights of others (p. 116). Another significant stepwould be to examine the connectionsbetween polygamy and inheritance: it is impossible to be fair by imposingpolygamous marriage on a woman, for doing so diminishes the inheritance factor,which inevitably has to do with the number of wives involved (p. 87). Of paramountimportance is the degree of subjugation of women by the state (legal discrimination)and by society (cultural devaluation of a woman’s sense of being). Although Islamiclaws were created according to the dictate that communal life supersedes thedemands of the individual, jurists often overruled Qur’anic laws (p. 120).Souaiaia ponders the fact that Muslim women have made no attempt to

‘reconstruct the language of their respective communities to include idioms andparadigms that represent their understanding of concepts and their standards ofassigning meaning’ (p. 120). Instead, he asserts, they have become ‘bilingual’,using their language and reference points when in women-only spaces andemploying the points of view and standards of men when in mixed spaces. As aresult, their achievements and even their sense of beauty are decided accordingto male standards. Lamenting this situation, the author instead proposes thatthe tyranny of ‘majoritism’, based on wealth, ethnicity, religion and ideology,should be replaced by ‘a culture of absolute respect for human dignity’ (p. 126).Would that all cultures and systems of law possessed such an ethic!In his post as Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Iowa,

Souaiaia teaches courses on Human Rights, Religion and Politics, Islamic PoliticalTheory, Comparative Islamic Thought, Women in Islamic Society and ModernIslamic Societies. His ideas are illuminating, but one wonders how such changescan be brought about without inspired leadership in Muslim countries. Thethoroughly decentralized character of global Islam means that individual govern-ments would have to take it upon themselves to ‘thicken’ civil society and bendtheir efforts in the direction of fairness and justice. In the face of increasing extremismon the part of Islamists, however, it seems unlikely that Souaiaia’s blueprint forsociety will find a foothold in the near future. Still, his examination of Qur’aniclaws, particularly those concerning women, should resonate well in the internationalcommunity. Moreover, he offers moderate Muslims a refreshing new approach to thesort of interpretations that have traditionally stifled women’s advancement.

Janet PowersGettysburg College (USA)

E-mail: jpowers@gettysburg.edu© 2011, Janet Powers

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2011.569688

Locations of Buddhism: Colonialism and Modernity in Sri Lanka, by AnneM. Blackburn, The University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London, 2010, xxii+ 237 pp. ISBN 978 0 226 05507 7, US$45 (cloth)

Taking a close look at the life and work of the Sri Lankan Buddhist monk,Hikkaduvē Sumangala (1827–1911), a major player in Buddhist activities in the

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second half of the 19th century who interacted with high-ranking colonial officialsas well as local and international Buddhist networks, Blackburn presents a newway of studying the impact of colonialism on colonised societies. Mostlydrawing on letters written by Hikkaduvē and other Buddhist monks, Blackburnmakes visible his ways of thinking and acting, as well as his personal relationships,social networks and modes of affiliation.Blackburn’s preface paints a vivid picture of the pressing problems of, and

opportunities for, Buddhist monks during British colonial rule, immediatelydrawing the reader into Hikkaduvē’s private world with a story about his birthhoroscope. According to Blackburn, the aim of the book is not only to presentthe reader with the English biography of Hikkaduvē long overdue, but also tooffer a new approach to colonial history by moving it to a more human scale, focus-ing on a single Buddhist and his personal background. Since the 1980s, under theinfluence of Foucault’s discourse analysis and Said’s Orientalism debate, studies ofSri Lanka’s colonial history have been shaped by a historiographical thinking thatemphasises the impact of colonial concepts and the European conceptual frame-work of colonised cultures; historians of Buddhism have so far focused on theradical transformations of Buddhist thought and practice during the time ofBritish colonial rule, showing that ‘modern’ Buddhism has been modelled afterProtestant Christian forms of religion. According to Blackburn, these approachesare not adequate since they disregard the stability of Buddhist thinking andactivities – an aspect she wants to show exemplarily.Chapter one explores the biographical background, local settings and social

relationships which led to Hikkaduvē’s rise as one of the leading figures in theVinaya manuscript edition project at the Pelmadulla council (1867–68), and asthe chief priest of Adam’s Peak, a famous pilgrimage site. Blackburn brieflypresents Hikkaduvē’s monastic career. Born in 1827 north of Galle into a wealthyhigh-caste (Goyigama) Buddhist family with connections to colonial officials,Hikkaduvē began his monastic life in childhood; in 1940 he was ordained as aBuddhist monk in a temple of the exclusive caste fraternity, Siyam Nikāya, nearHikkaduva. As a talented disciple of a leading monastic educator, he receivedhis higher ordination at Malvatu Vihāraya in Kandy and became a speaker inBuddhist debates, a teacher at two temples, an important author for the Buddhistpress in Galle, and an outstanding speaker in the Christian-Buddhist debate atBaddegama – a career furthered by the social network within the monastic commu-nity of Siyam Nikāya as well as by clusters of lay patrons in Lanka. Leading thereader through a variety of social and institutional settings, Blackburn showsconvincingly that ‘social identification, obligation, and alliance were driven byties of blood and caste, by local connections, by regional memory, and by intellec-tual conviction’ (pp. 32–33) – following patterns that were Lankan rather colonial.Drawing on private letters, diaries, newspapers, notarised documents, adminis-

tration reports and Buddhist magazines, Chapter two inquires into the circum-stances of Hikkaduvē’s rains retreat at Kotahēnē Paramānanda Purāna Vihārayaand his subsequent appointment as the principal chief of Vidyodaya Pirivena, aBuddhist educational centre for monks and laymen. It was the lay patron, Appu-hāmi, who played a key role in this process by establishing Buddhist spaces ofritual, sermon, teaching and publishing for the growing Buddhist population inthe colonial administrative capital of Colombo. Due to the absence of royalpatronage for education, Appuhāmi founded a society for the support of Buddhist

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learning, which led to the establishment of Vidyodaya Pirivena in Colombo in 1873.At that time Vidyodaya, receiving government grant-in-aid support, was the onlyinstitution for higher learning in languages and literatures of Pali, Sinhala andSanskrit (including śāstras like medicine, astrology and mathematics) – functioningas a place for the preservation of ‘Orientalistic’ literature in the view of the govern-ment, but providing ‘the foundation for a civilised education’ (p. 62) in the view ofHikkaduvē and the lay donors, an education ‘that would protect from harm(physically, morally, and intellectually) local residents … in the face of destructiveforeign pressures, some of which emanated from the very founders and patrons ofOrientalism’ (p. 62). Blackburn lucidly argues that Hikkaduvē and the foundingpatrons of Vidyodaya, although participating in an Orientalistic economy, showedintellectual autonomy, inspired by historical memories of a śāstra-based education.Chapter three presents Hikkaduvē’s most important scholarly projects under

British rule: with the patronage of Governor Gregory, Hikkaduvē and his colleagueBatuvantudāvē edited the second part of the Buddhist Pali historiography, Mahā-vamsa, and translated the whole Mahāvamsa into the Sinhala language. Drawingon the prefaces of these books published by the Government Printer in Colomboin the 1870s, Blackburn plausibly argues that in the Pāli edition the usefulness ofthe text for non-Buddhist reconstructions of South Asian history is emphasised,while the Sinhala translation focuses on a local perspective: the latter prefaceimplicitly criticises the colonial government which does not follow the duty of Bud-dhist royal lineage (supporting the Buddhist śāsana), and explicitly disapproves ofEuropean scholars’ chronologies like Kern’s and Oldenberg’s, which are construedaccording to Orientalist conceptions of historiographical investigation. In thesecond part of the chapter, Blackburn introduces the reader to the Lankan debateabout caste status between the traditional dominant Goyigama caste and thelower Karava in the 19th century, a time of growing social mobility broughtabout by colonial rule. In this debate, which can be traced in newspapers andpamphlets, monks of different Nikāyas and of different castes played an importantrole, basing their arguments on old textual sources as well as new British material.The third part of the chapter deals with the controversy on wearing robes (coveringeither one or two shoulders), which Hikkaduvē started within the Siyam Nikāya,basing his arguments on the study of texts of the monastic disipline, the Vinaya.Blackburn shows that ‘the exact colour of the robes, the manner of dressing them… serve as elements in visual arguments made for status in terms of purity, disci-pline, and lineage’ (p. 92) in this era of growing monastic diversity in the 1880s.In Chapter four, Blackburn first depicts Hikkaduvē’s cooperation with the Amer-

ican theosophist Olcott, who arrived in 1880 to ally with the Lankan Buddhistsagainst Christian missionaries in a time of increasing religious hostility. Hikkaduvēheld leading positions in Olcott’s newly founded Colombo Buddhist TheosophicalSociety, which was also supported by Hikkaduvē’s lay patrons. The society’s workcomplemented Hikkaduvē’s interests in preaching, publishing and anti-Christianeducation, although his ritualistic views on gods, images, offerings and astrologydiffered considerably from Olcott’s universalistic and rational understanding ofBuddhism. The second part of the chapter deals with Hikkaduvē’s connectionwith Dharmapāla, a son of his chief patron, follower of Olcott, and founder ofthe Maha Bodhi Society that had been established to bring Bodh Gaya, theIndian site of Sakyamuni Buddha’s enlightenment, under Buddhist protection.Blackburn makes clear that Hikkaduvē was disappointed in both Olcott and

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Dharmapāla as they did not assist himwith his most pressing concerns: ‘Olcott andDharmapāla could provide no stable resolution to the problems of monasticdisunity, nor could they address the challenges of institution building that droveHikkaduvē’s interest in the translocal networks of Asia and beyond. Neithercould they secure royal patronage for Lankan Buddhism from the royal courts ofAsia’ (p. 141).The fifth chapter centres on Hikkaduvē’s activities regarding the incorporation of

the Lankan śāsanawithin the larger Buddhist world of Southeast Asia, seeking helpfrom Siam, Burma and Cambodia in questions of monastic ordination and lineageto unite the Lankan fragmented fraternities, cultivating patron–client relationsoutside Lanka, and establishing a translocal pilgrimage network. Blackburnshows clearly that the veneration of the Buddha’s Tooth Relic in Kandy played amajor role in the process of connecting Lanka with other Buddhist countries.According to the conceptual framework as outlined in the preface, Blackburn

discusses in her last chapter the terms of ‘Buddhist modernism’, ‘BuddhistRevival’ and ‘Protestant Buddhism’ used in publications from the 1960s to the1980s to characterise the late 19th and early 20th-century changes in Buddhistsocial organisation and in the interpretation of doctrine as an answer to colonialimpact. Blackburn argues that her account of Hikkaduvē’s activities clearlycontrasts with this characterisation: instead of a substantial decline in monasticpower and prestige, we rather encounter a continuing collaboration betweenlaypeople and monks using monastic skills and contacts for new ventures; further-more there was stability in monastic preaching, education, editing and textualcanonical practice, as well as continuity in devotional and social practices. Forfuture studies on colonised societies Blackburn develops ‘an alternative line ofvision, on a scale small enough to recognise intellectual and social logics and strat-egies, as well as local relationships of care and obligation’ (p. 201). ‘This’, Blackburnstates, ‘brings into view activities undertaken by Buddhists in a colonized contextwithout assuming that all such significant and formative activities were addressedto problems directly or indirectly created by colonial rule or undertakenwithin intellectual frames of reference, and with reference to, visions of collectivebelongings that were transformed by colonial rule’ (pp. 201–202).After a summary of her preceding chapters, Blackburn argues against

the hitherto dominant understanding of the motivation of social action of19th-century Lankan Buddhists – a single dominant affiliation or identity like‘Sinhala’ or ‘Buddhist’; instead she suggests a local pluralism, since Hikkaduvē’slife shows a simultaneous involvement with several collectives and identities.Furthermore she rejects the terms ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ Buddhism as theyneglect the long, dynamic and contentious history of Lankan Buddhism in thepre-colonial period. Blackburn concludes her last chapter by emphasising theendurable Buddhist strategy of using translocal networks in times of pressure;within the Southeast Asian Buddhist world Lanka remains as ‘an arena for meritmaking and protective devotion, for the challenges and pleasures of intellectuallife, for social competition, and for the performance and arbitration of differencesamong monks and their lay patrons’ (p. 216).Historians of Buddhism as well as scholars of South Asian colonial history will

benefit considerably from Anne M. Blackburn’s well-organised book. Just as inher first book, Buddhist Learning and Textual Practice in Eighteenth-Century LankanMonastic Culture, (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2001), which showed the

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steadiness in Buddhist textual practice in the 18th century, her new study, Locationsof Buddhism: Colonialism and Modernity in Sri Lanka, demonstrates the stability ofsocial patterns, religious activities, habits of thought and communication withinnew forms of discourses, institutions and associations in 19th-century Lanka.Blackburn convincingly states: ‘This study of Hikkaduvē thus serves as a methodo-logical example, suggesting how one may achieve greater historical precision inevaluations of colonial impact on colonized persons and regions by developingsmall-scale histories of individuals and their networks’ (p. 203). In doing so, shegives us the tools with which future studies can investigate different historicalmoments, a variety of persons and their networks, ‘to see more clearly the force,and the limits, of colonial power in remaking local lives and social patterns’ (p.xiv). The close look at a singular location of Buddhism minimises the risk ofover-intellectualising materials selected from a wide range of resources. Blackburnproves that the analysis of a combination of formal and non-formal sources canresult in a differentiated, multi-layered picture of Buddhist thought and action,and that the investigation of the life and work of a single Buddhist monk maywell lead us to a better understanding of the local social logic and intellectualcreativity in the period of colonialism.

Silke K. Yasmin FischerLudwig-Maximilians-University (Germany)

E-mail: SilkeYasmin.Fischer@lrz.uni-muenchen.de© 2011, Silke K. Yasmin Fischer

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2011.584172

Women and Indigenous Religions, edited by Sylvia Marcos, Praeger: SantaBarbara, California, 2010, x + 256 pp. ISBN 978 0 27599 157 9, US$44.95 (hardback)

The academic field of women and religion began to take off in the late 1960s andearly 1970s, with the work of Christian and post-Christian historians and theolo-gians such as Rosemary Reuther and Mary Daly. Inspired by their insights intodisparities in the status of men and women or imagery of gods and goddesses,scholars of Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam developedtext-based critiques of how patriarchal world religions subordinate women andthe divine feminine. While rapidly gaining impetus among scholars in theHumanities, the study of women and religion lagged among anthropologists.This sluggishness is difficult to understand. Anthropologists are able to listen toand observe real, living women engaging in religious activities. Anthropologistsalso have the theoretical tools that allow us to think about women and religionin terms of broad social forces and intersecting hierarchies of class, age, race, andethnicity, as well as gender. Happily, we now have a growing library of excellentethnographic monographs documenting women’s religious lives in a variety ofsocieties. Still, until the publication of Women and Indigenous Religion there hasnot been much to offer students in the way of anthologies more recent thanNancy Auer Falk and Rita M. Gross’s classic Unspoken Worlds: Women’s ReligiousLives (San Francisco, Harper & Row, 1980).Women and Indigenous Religions providesa much-needed option for students and scholars looking for accessible writingsaddressing the lived religious experiences of women globally.

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Women and Indigenous Religions includes chapters by some scholars whose workis already well established in Western academe (e.g., Diane Bell, Laurel Kendall,Ana Mariella Baciagalupo) as well as scholars whose professional focus has beentheir own local communities (e.g., Nuvia Balderrana Vara, Darilyn Syiem). Thismixture of voices and subject positions makes for multiple intellectual perspectivesas well as plain good reading.Several of the chapters stand out for their richness of primary data, for their skill-

ful analysis, or for both. One of the strongest chapters is Diane Bell’s ‘NgarrindjeriWomen’s Stories: Kungun and Yunnan’. Opening with an explanation of theimportance of stories in Ngarrindjeri culture, she includes substantial oral textscollected from several women with whom she has developed ongoing relation-ships. The length and detail of these excerpts is crucial: by recording and publish-ing these stories verbatim, Bell makes sure we understand that this is sacredliterature worthy of the same careful attention given to the sacred literatures ofthe so-called ‘great’ traditions. Contextualizing women’s religiosity within politicalrealities, Bell ends with a plea: ‘Ngarrindjeri miminar’s stories offer insights con-cerning their priorities and cautions regarding how best to proceed. They needaccess to their places to gather materials, to be at peace in the home of the forebears… They need to be able to share the stories of their places under conditions of theirown making’ (p. 17).‘Authority and Ritual in the Caves of Tepoztlan, Mexico: Women Priestesses in

Popular Religion,’ by Ana Maria Salazar Peralta, is another very strong chapter.Focusing on women’s prominence in rain-invoking rituals in this precariousecosystem, Peralta explores how water shortages foster human creativity bothtechnologically and ritually. Following a beautifully detailed description of a rain-invoking ritual led by Dona Jovita, Peralta suggests that ‘the logic of ritual overridesand displaces patriarchal order’ (p. 86) in that ‘knowledge of ritual and ceremony isa form of cultural capital, a currency easily convertible in politics’ (p. 80).A long-time fan of Laurel Kendall’s work on Korean women and shamanism, I

was delighted to see her team up with Hien Thi Nguyen in a chapter on ‘Dressingup the Spirits: Costumes, Cross-Dressing, and Incarnation in Korea and Vietnam.’The authors’explication of the complexities and ambiguities of gender performancein these two cultural settings is nuanced and intriguing. Through multiple costumechanges, shamans incarnate the spirits ‘that make her who she is’ (p. 94). Carefulto contextualize the shamans’ rituals, the authors point out how shifting nationalpolicies towards elements of traditional culture (from labeling them as old-fashioned or primitive to treating them as national treasures) play out in termsof opportunities for men and women to engage in prominent religious roles.Especially intriguing are the brief references in the chapter to male shamanshipand the emerging gay male culture in Vietnam, and I look forward to readingthe authors’ future work on this topic.The chapter entitled ‘Women and SacredMedicines among the Khasis in the High-

lands of Northeast India’ by Darilyn Syiem (herself a Khasis) provides a windowinto a culture group about whom Western readers tend to know very little. Untilrecently, the matrilineal Khasis have resisted Christian missionaries, holding ontotraditional religious and healing systems that feature women both domesticallyand in larger, public settings. Syiem describes an array of healing rituals performedby Khasis women, and shares her concern that the role of these women ritualspecialists will decline in the wake of conversion to patriarchal Christianity.

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Janet Chawla also explores the deleterious impact of global technologies onwomen’s ritual and healing expertise in her chapter, ‘The Not-So-Subtle Body inDais’ Birth Imagery.’ Drawing upon data from the Motherhood and TraditionalResearch, Information, Knowledge and Action (matrika-india.org), Chawla chal-lenges ‘prevalent hierarchies that privilege the subtle body over the gross body andconsequently the male “spiritual” body over the female material, reproductive, andmaternal body’ (p. 127). Focusing on the work of traditional birth attendants inIndia, Chawla maps what she calls the birthing ‘relational body’ (p. 134) that linkshuman generations as well as the earth, its inhabitants, and cyclical cosmic processes.Other chapters in this volume explore colonialism, gender and shamanism

among the Mapuche, water rituals in Peru, the new participation of women inthe Reto al Tepozteco (Tepozteco Challenge), the suppression of Maya and TurtleIsland women’s traditional religious ways, and the First Indigenous Women’sSummit of the Americas.While the individual chapters that make up this volume are enlightening,

intelligent and well written, the book overall lacks an explicit theoretical frame-work that explains why indigenous women’s religion is a meaningful category:that is, why the particular examples the editor chose to collect in this volumemake sense as a whole. The reader is not offered working definitions of the threekey terms: indigenous, women, religion. It seems odd, for example, to use thecategory ‘women’ in an unproblematized manner (and indeed, several of thechapter authors do address this matter). Lack of engagement with gender – asopposed to women – leaves the door open for an unsavvy reader to assume thatthe book is making an essentialist argument about the universality of religionamong all indigenous women.Without guidance regarding the category ‘indigenous,’ I was left wondering why

all of the book’s examples deal with the Americas, Asia and Australia; why arethere no chapters looking at African or European women? Perhaps this wassimply a by-product of the particular scholars who could be called upon to writechapters for this book, but perhaps there was some other consideration regardingthe ‘indigenousness’of African or European women that the reader should be privyto. Given that all of the culture groups described in the volume have experiencedsome degree of outside contact and/or conquest, it would have been importantto at least acknowledge that the identity ‘indigenous’ is frequently contested.Marcos explains in her brief Introduction that ‘the description of the transform-ations of indigenous religions that do not occur through conversion, hybridization,or commodification, but through their own internal metamorphoses andmigrations, that is, through their own processes, is our main purpose in thisvolume’ (p. ix). Yet, I am hard pushed to envision how one can identify culturalprocesses that are purely internal in a world characterized by ceaseless culturecontact. And in fact, all of the chapters do engage with syncretism, colonialism,and conversion in one way or another.While I appreciate and concur with the reluctance to make a grand argument

about indigenous women’s religion, a more explicit theoretical framework laidout in the Introduction would help the reader engage more fully with some ofthe threads that run through several or most of the chapters. For example,almost all of the chapter authors observe the significance of the local environmentto indigenous women’s religion. Frederique Apffel-Marglin’s rich discussion of‘Feminine Rituality and the Spirit of the Water in Peru’ shows how for Andean

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women of Quispillacta, ‘community water is not a “natural resource”; it is alive, abeing that sings and speaks, whose birthday is celebrated’ (p. 21). Bell makes noteof Ngarrindjeri women’s struggle to stop the building of a bridge that woulddesecrate their sacred places (p. 13). Syiem describes the protected sacred grovesat the edge of every village (p. 119). Chawla uses the term ‘geomysticism’(p. 139) to convey the sacred nature of matter, mothers, and earth. I would haveliked to see the editor draw attention to this and a few other repeating themes.Spirit possession and healing, for instance, show up in enough chapters to callfor some sort of acknowledgment and analysis.Still, the chapters individually and taken together offer such extraordinarily

close-up views of under-studied religious life worlds that the lack of explicitconceptual framing should be seen more as an invitation to continue this workthan as critique of an overall excellent volume.

Susan SeredSuffolk University (USA)E-mail: ssered@suffolk.edu

© 2011, Susan Seredhttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2011.584173

Saint Francis and the Sultan: the Curious History of a Christian-MuslimEncounter, by John Tolan, Oxford University Press: New York, 2009, xvi + 382pp.ISBN 978 0 19 923972 6, US$55 (cloth)

John Tolan has written that rare scholarly book: brilliant, thoroughly researchedand eminently readable. He focuses on an event that has been interpreted indiverse ways over the centuries and explores shifting meanings of an encounterthat is of special interest today as Christians seek dialogue with Muslims. Intracing the slender evidence for, but long history of, a meeting between StFrancis of Assisi and the Sultan of Egypt, Malik al-Kāmil, probably in September1219, Tolan meticulously and vividly describes every encounter-related writtendocument and every piece of material artwork produced up to 2005. When oneconsiders the sheer volume of written accounts in several languages, beginningin 1120, and essential visits to museums and chapels in Europe and the HolyLand, one cannot help but admire the tenacity of this scholar. Moreover, eachdescribed work is firmly embedded in its historical context, so that the dynamicof the story is that of nearly eight centuries of lively interaction between theFranciscans, their European detractors, and their Muslim adversaries.The actual details of the encounter are few. In 1213, the Fifth Crusade was

launched by papal bull against Jerusalem, then in the hands of the Ayyubids, adynasty founded by Saladin, who had captured the holy city in 1187. The Popehad approved the Franciscan order in 1209/10 just before the Council of LateranIV (1215), which prohibited new religious orders. At the age of 37, Francis ofAssisi, founder of the Friars Minor, left the camp of the Fifth Crusade, which hadbeen camped for a year before the city of Damietta, unable to conquer it or chaseaway al-Kāmil and his army. In response to a major attack in late August, the cru-saders were soundly defeated. The Sultan sent back a prisoner with a proposal tonegotiate peace, offering the crusaders Jerusalem, along with money to create

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castles in the vicinity, if the troops would leave Egypt. The crusaders, in turn, wereat odds with each other over this offer. According to 13th-century Crusade chron-icles and hagiographical narratives, it was probably at this point that Franciscrossed enemy lines to speak with the Sultan. He arrived safely, conversed withthe Sultan, and returned unharmed to the crusader camp several days later.Yet no contemporary Arab author describes this encounter, perhaps considering

insignificant the arrival of ‘a barefoot Italian ascetic, a sort of Christian Sufi whosought an audience with the Sultan’ (p. 5). It was for Francis, however, a keymoment, essential to understanding him and the attitude of the new mendicantorders toward Islam. His encounter with the Sultan became a model for successiveFranciscan missions to the infidels in various parts of the world. Tolan examineshow succeeding generations interpreted the encounter, making much or little ofit, depending on the current agenda. Accordingly, changing portrayals of theevent illustrate evolving fears and hopes inspired by the meeting, as well as thedegree to which the success of the Franciscan order rested on celebration ofFrancis of Assisi’s mission to the infidels in 1219.The first records of the encounter with the Sultan (1220, 1223–25), were by

Jacques de Vitry, Bishop of Acre, whose attitude toward the Friars Minorchanged considerably between the setting down of his two accounts. In the firstversion, consisting of two sentences (Letter 6) not found in the version sent tothe Pope, Francis crosses over to the Egyptian army in search of the Sultan, towhom he preaches for a few days, making little progress: a mission ‘of little use.’In the second (Book II of Abbreviated History of Jerusalem, the Historia Occidentalis),Francis begins to convince the Sultan, who fears that some of his soldiers willconvert and go with the Christian army. Jacques states that the Saracens listenedgladly to the Franciscans’ sermons as long as they preached the gospel but beatthem when they insulted Mohammed. Thus, the encounter is portrayed as acentral event that might have achievedwhat the Crusade failed to do: gain convertsby preaching the gospel in a spirit of friendship.An anonymous Crusader chronicle (1227–29) tells of how the Franciscan del-

egation met with Al-Kamil in the presence of nobles, qadis and clerics whorefused to listen to Francis and his companions and left, advising the Sultan tocut off their heads. But Al-Kamil said he would not condemn them to death, anevil reward for those who had conscientiously risked death to save his soul forGod. He offered gifts and land, if they would stay, and gifts even if they wouldnot, but would not hear what they had to say, a typical trope in 13th-century Chris-tian versions of the story. Francis and his companions took nothing, since theycould not win the Sultan’s soul for God, but asked only for something to eat.After being well fed, they were escorted back to the Christian army. The villainof the piece is Cardinal Pelagius, pontifical legate, who refused Al-Kāmil’s offerto exchange Damietta for Jerusalem and initially refused Francis permission tovisit the Sultan. This account pits a royal, anti-Pelagian position against an eccle-siastical perspective, which emphasizes the lust and rapacity of the crusaders.Thomas of Celano, commissioned by Pope Gregory IX to write the official biogra-

phy of Francis after his canonization (Vita Prima, 1228), offers another version of thestory: glorifying Francis, intimating that the Sultan was ‘moved by his words andlistened to him very willingly’ (p. 54) and suggesting that Francis had a great thirstfor martyrdom. Indeed, he is described as torn between his desire to go on theCrusade to preach the gospel and his responsibilities as head of his new order.

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Thomas sought to present Francis as a model for the Friars Minor but also as anexceptional saint worthy of devotion from pilgrims. Martyrdom did not occurbecause he was to experience the greater gift of stigmata. In a passage mademuch of by 20th-century historians, Thomas tells of a series of miracles in the cru-sader camp, where Francis received the gift of prophecy, foretelling the massacre atDamietta and defeat by the enemy, despite efforts to dissuade them. Tolan argueswith 20th-century hagiographers, saying that Thomas does not present Francis as apacifist: he merely foresees consequences of battle on a particular day and reserveshis compassion for Christian victims of this battle (p. 71).A new element, trial by fire, appears in the account by Bonaventure, Minister

General of the Franciscan order from 1257–74. In this version (Legenda Maior,1263), Francis proposes a trial by fire but is turned down by the Sultan, who offersgifts instead, which Francis rejects. In Sermo de Sancto Francisco (1267), the Sultanproposes a debate, which Francis rejects, in accord with a 13th-century controversyover university theology and argumentum. Francis, however, is depicted as afervent preacher, intelligent and strong of soul and spirit (p. 126), one in whomthe fire of spiritual love burns intensely. The fire motif, included by all laterwriters for the next two centuries, was complemented by the addition of two newideas, contributed by Angelo Clareno in 1326 (Chronicle or History of the SevenTribulations of the Order of Brothers Minor): Francis is alter Christus and the Franciscandelegation was allowed to visit the Holy Sepulchre without paying tribute.A 14th- century account (1327–37), The Deeds of Blessed Francis and his Companions

by Ugolino da Montegiorgio, adds another detail: Francis calms the desires of apagan woman by lying on a fiery bed, causing her to repent and convert.Ugolino also introduced the notion of the Sultan’s belated conversion. WhenFrancis tells Al-Kamil that he will return, the Sultan replies that he would willinglyconvert but men would kill him if he did. Francis promises to send two brothers tohim later to baptize him. Years later the Sultan falls ill, but the brothers arrive intime to baptize him; thus the Sultan’s soul is saved. This text was also the first toclaim that the Sultan had granted Francis the right to preach in that territory. In1684, Juan de Calahorra (Chrónica de la provincial de Syria y tierra santa de Gerusalen)writes in detail about Francis and the Sultan as part of a larger narrative of tribu-lations suffered by Franciscans in the Holy Land following the Ottoman conquestin 1517. In succeeding centuries, authors manipulated Francis’s voyage to Egypt forvarious purposes: to accentuate the violence and power of the infidel, but also tocondemn Protestant heretics, justify Franciscan presence in the Holy Land andrepresent Francis as an apostle of peace and opponent of the Crusades.A harsh attack against Franciscans came in the 16th century from Erasmus Alber,

who, in the Alcoran of the Franciscans (with preface by Martin Luther), ridiculespapists and the idea that Francis converted the Sultan. Protestants accused Francis-cans of idolizing Francis instead of Christ. Francois de Chateaubriand (1811), citingFrancis as his patron, defends the crusaders and notes the importance of the Frenchking’s ambassador in obtaining Turkish firmans, all the while lamenting the sadstate of Franciscans in Jerusalem. Among the more unusual versions of encounteraccounts is that of Idries Shah, a Sufi who, in The Sufis (1964), depicts Francis as anovice mystic who went to the Orient in search of Sufi adepts and learned Sufiideals from Al-Kāmil. It is not a coincidence, Shah suggests, that the Franciscanorder resembles strongly a dervish order and that the friars’ robes mirror thoseof Sufi dervishes.

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Nineteenth and 20th-century novelists (Kazantzakis, Bishop, Queffélec, Absire,Runciman, Powell, Fragoni) published hagiographical stories, some of whichemphasize the notion that Francis practiced peace, while the church preachedwar. Certain playwrights (Mitchell, Sabatier, Vilalta) portray the ‘sending’ ofFrancis to the Orient so that reformation of the order could take place in hisabsence. Most writers try to deny that Francis’s mission failed as an attempt togain martyrdom or to convert the Sultan, but late 20th-century writers (Green,Carretto, Jacguard) stress that when Al-Kāmil granted Jerusalem to the EmperorFrederick II ten years after meeting Francis, it was the fruit of the message ofpeace carried there earlier.Artistic and sculptural renditions of the encounter between Francis and the

Sultan build on motifs recorded in writing, beginning with the Bardi dossal (c.1240s) and one of 28 Assisi frescos (late 13th century). Manuscript illuminationsdevoted multiple panels to Francis’s trip to the East, but sculptors and paintersalmost always chose to represent the trial by fire, as did Giotto in the CapellaBardi of Santa Croce. Taddeo di Bartolo offers a simplified and dramatizedversion of trial by fire in his altarpiece (1403), in which Francis strides purposefullyinto the fire, while a Saracen Sultan retreats, book (the Quran?) in hand. In the early17th century, the Moors were enemies in Spain and the Ottomans threatenedEurope. Accordingly, the main altar of the Cathedral of Leon displays the Bañezaaltarpiece (1614) by Nicolás Francés, who shows Francis and Brother Illuminatusbeing roughly treated by ferocious and barbaric Muslims.Because of Tolan’s meticulous attention to historical details and unbiased discus-

sion of every work, his book is a masterful account of an incident that has servedmany purposes over the last nearly eight centuries. In the epilogue, the writerponders the problem of history based on subjective and incomplete sources.What inspired this impressive work of scholarship is the fact that so manyauthors and artists over such a long span have been fascinated by the encounterbetween Francis and the Sultan. Perhaps, he suggests, it is because Francis rep-resents not only an emblematic confrontation between East and West but is, inhis own right, a larger-than-life historical figure who ‘leaves no one indifferent’(p. 327), even his enemies.

Janet M. PowersGettysburg College (USA)

E-mail: jpowers0135@earthlink.net© 2011, Janet M. Powers

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2011.584174

Theater in a Crowded Fire: Ritual and Spirituality at Burning Man, by LeeGilmore, University of California Press: Berkeley, 2010, xvi + 237pp. ISBN 978 052026088 7, US$24.95 (paperback); ISBN 978 052 025315 5, US$60.00 (cloth) (includesDVD)

Lee Gilmore’s Theater in a Crowded Fire examines contemporary rituals and spiri-tuality in the context of ‘Burning Man,’ a week-long alternative gathering, whichtakes place each year in the barren plain of cracked clay known as the ‘Playa’ inthe Black Rock Desert of northern Nevada during the week leading up to Labor

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Day weekend at the beginning of September. The emergence of Burning Manwithin the last quarter century is truly worthy of scrutiny by scholars of con-temporary religion, ritual, culture, and society. Beginning in 1986 as little morethan a San Francisco beach party, Burning Man quickly evolved into a massiveweek-long alternative ‘happening,’ which has spawned a global community, andin 2010 alone had over 50,000 participants.BurningMan gains its name from the ritualized burning of ‘TheMan,’an abstract

wooden effigy of a human being which has grown in stature over the years, as thegathering has grown in size. Because Burning Man means so many different thingsto so many different people, it is impossible for any one study to do full justice to itscomplexity. However, by focussing on ritual and spirituality at Burning Man,Gilmore does an admirable job of providing her readers with an intelligible andsober account of some of the salient features of the festival as they relate tocontemporary alternative spiritualities.Gilmore is well suited to conduct such a study. Her association with Burning

Man began as a participant in 1996. From 1997–2000, she was actively involvedfirst in writing for Burning Man’s internal newspaper, the Black Rock Gazette, andthen as a member of the event’s Media Team. Following 2000, Gilmore withdrewfrom her Media Team participation to focus on her ethnographic study of theevent between 2001 and 2004. About the impact of her involvement in BurningMan on her scholarship, Gilmore writes, ‘I entered into Burning Man as a partici-pant first and as a participant observer second, and this insider position has hadinevitable and interesting consequences for shaping the perspectives that are indel-ibly stamped on this text’ (p. 6). As part of her fieldwork on Burning Man, Gilmoreconducted ‘… dozens of formal semistructured interviews and hundreds of infor-mal conversations about participants’ perceptions of and experiences at the festival’(p. 12). She also distributed a survey, which received over 300 responses, to onlinecommunities associated with Burning Man collecting further qualitative data anddemographic information (p. 12). In addition to interviews and the survey,Gilmore utilized media reports about the event as another major source of data.Gilmore’s approach is multidisciplinary, employing Anthropology, Sociology,

Media Studies, and particularly Ritual Studies. She finds especially useful someof the ideas developed by the anthropologist Victor Turner, such as separation,liminal realm, aggregation, communitas, and liminoid for investigating ritual activitiesat Burning Man (p. 13; italics in original). Gilmore sees Turner’s views on liminalityand communitas particularly useful for understanding many ritual and experientialaspects of Burning Man. She writes, ‘This festival can be seen as a quintessentiallypostindustrial liminoid event, as participants themselves tend to view it as a trans-gressive, marginal, and otherworldly space for “countercultural” resistence’ (p. 13).Moreover, Gilmore found Turner’s ideas being used by ‘Burners’ (participants atBurning Man) to describe their own activities at the festival, thereby demonstratinghow these concepts ‘… have permeated popular culture and now recursively reflectand shape our cultural conceptions of what the categories “ritual”, “religion”, and“spirituality” should be…’ (p. 14; italics in original). In the true zeitgeist of ourpostmodern age, we find new rituals being constructed at Burning Man basedon a prescriptive reading of modern scholarship on ritual.In Chapter one, Gilmore presents a history and overview of the event, discusses

some cultural antecedents and parallel events, and outlines the basic elements andfundamental ideological tenets behind the formation of the festival. Included in this

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chapter is the discussion of the desert environment of the Playa as a liminal realm‘betwixt and between’ the everyday, and as what some Burners have come tounderstand as a ‘Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ)’: a term adopted from thecultural critic Hakim Bey for a temporary guerrilla uprising that liberates an areafor a time and then dissolves it before the State has time to crush it (pp. 21–22).Although (as Gilmore points out) Burners have consciously avoided attachingany fixed dogma or ideology to the Burning of the Man or other events and hap-penings at the festival, Burning Man’s early founders emphasized certain corevalues, which have continued to exert a powerful influence on the event. Thesevalues expressing the ethos of Burning Man eventually were codified into the‘Ten Principles’ that serve as guidelines for the community’s behaviour: radicalinclusion, gifting, decommodification, radical self-reliance, radical self-expression,communal effort, civic responsibility, leave no trace, participation, and immediacy(pp. 38ff).In Chapter two, Gilmore investigates the Burners’ narratives and perspectives

concerning Burning Man and issues of spirituality and religion. While unsurpris-ingly there is quite a lot of diversity in these issues, Gilmore highlights acommon trope found at Burning Man and larger American contemporaryculture: being ‘spiritual but not religious.’ Over a third of Gilmore’s respondentsincluded themselves in this category demonstrating the influence of this ideaamong festival attendants (p. 50). Gilmore sees this designation as reflecting a ten-dency ‘to embrace fluid self-descriptions rather than fixed identities,’ which catersto individuals oriented toward ‘spiritualities of questing, seeking and reflexivity’(p. 67). In this regard, Burning Man has become a ‘ritualized space for those whoseek spirituality but not religion and thus appropriates and ritualizes symbolsfrom a variety of global cultures’ (p. 67).Chapters three to five further explore the various ritual activities of BurningMan,

Burning Man as a transformative pilgrimage, and the festival’s complex relation-ship to the media. A central concept discussed in Chapter three, is Burners’ under-standing of ‘ritual without dogma,’ a further elaboration of the trope of spiritualitywithout religion. Particularly significant in this regard has become the constructionof temporary ‘Temples,’which often serve as places of reflection and remembranceof the deceased, and which are burned on Sunday night (the final night of the eventand the night after the burning of the Man). Chapter four examines Burning Man inthe context of a desert pilgrimage. About this aspect of the festival, Gilmore writes,‘In this collective journey to a distant wilderness … many individuals encountertransformations of perspective and identity that reach deeply and unexpectedlyinto their lives in an enduring, even permanent fashion’ (p. 103). Chapter fivelooks at Burning Man as a ‘Media Mecca’ and the festival’s complex relationshipwith the mainstream Media. Included in Chapter five is Gilmore’s account of thecreation of her own DVD accompanying this study. While this viewer found theDVD somewhat amateurish, it does provide additional useful visual informationabout the event and its participants. Chapter six summarizes Gilmore’s argumentsand looks at some aspects of Burning Man’s broader cultural significance.Gilmore’s prior involvement in the Burning Man’s Media Team offers a unique

insider’s perspective to Theater in a Crowded Fire, but is somewhat problematic inthat it seems to have led her to go too ‘native.’ For example, in Chapter five,Gilmore writes about a media misrepresentation of the number of drug-relatedincidents at the festival, ‘Burning Man organizers are now much more careful to

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… assiduously downplay the incidence of recreational drug use at the event.Instead the media are encouraged to explore story lines other than the obvious“sex, drugs and rock-and-roll” angle …’ (p. 134). However, Gilmore’s level-headed and extremely sober account of Burning Man appears to be influencedby the same desire as the festival’s organizers to downplay such a story line, andmay have gone too far in the other direction. Gilmore’s bias toward avoiding theissue of drug use at Burning Man is first revealed in her Introduction. Shewrites, ‘I should also state at this juncture that I have chosen to forgo a specificexamination of the consumption of either licit or illicit consciousness-altering sub-stances at BurningMan. Although such activities are for some an undeniable aspectof the festival…my observation has been that drug use is by no means a universalpractice in this context’ (p. 6). However, this is rather a weak argument given thediversity of activities at Burning Man; in other words, practically nothingGilmore discusses (and she freely admits this in other contexts) is a ‘universal prac-tice’ at the festival.Further justifying her choice to avoid the drugs issue, Gilmore states, ‘…

although there may indeed be some connection between the use of substancesthat have been called “entheogenic” – that is, engendering an awareness of Godor the divine – and participants’ reports of transformative or spiritual experiencesin this context, a focus on these questions would shift attention away from theinquires into ritual and cultural performances … that I find ultimately more com-pelling’ (p. 6). However, the fact that participants use such a term as ‘entheogenic’to describe certain psychoactive substances implies some religious context thatinvariably involves some ritualized use beyond mere recreation. This makesGilmore’s avoidance of the topic even more surprising. In a footnote attached tothe above statement, Gilmore clearly exposes her bias from working with BurningMan’s Media Team when she states, ‘this choice is also made in part out of respectfor the Burning Man organization, which prefers that public representations of theevent do not foreground the practice of consuming licit or illicit drugs’ (p. 183,n. 5). This seems a weak reason for an academic researcher who is attempting tounderstand and illuminate the rituals and spirituality at Burning Man.The question then remains as to the extent and importance of the role of psy-

choactive substances at Burning Man. Since I have never attended the festival,but have heard word that such substances are an integral part of Burning Manfor many people, I asked a long-time and devoted ‘Burner’ about this issue. Thisis what he had to say:

Purely as a matter of cultural history, the existence of Burning Man is impossibleto imagine without entheogens…Numerous scenes which thrive at Burning Manare basically organized around entheogens, including the rave communities, thethird-generation hippies, the festival traveller culture, and, to a lesser extent, therenegade punk/metal pyrotechnic fixer scene. Those groups … find a commondestination in Burning Man in part because of their shared value for entheogensand the qualities of experience they evoke. The core values of the Burning Mancommunity are precisely those that are brought to the fore by entheogens:serendipity, wonder, chaos, luminosity, prankster humor, openness, compassion,surrealism, transcendence. It may be a dirty little secret that the organizers of theevent cannot publicly acknowledge, but for a huge percentage of participants,entheogens are a magical key that unlock the heart and free it to hear themessage of the Playa.

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The above quote is of course only one person’s views; however, it does causethis reader to wonder if Gilmore’s conscious choice not to address the issue ofentheogens is a major weakness of her otherwise thoughtful study.In conclusion, Theater in a Crowded Fire is a solidly written and well researched

piece of scholarship that relates Burning Man to current trends in contemporaryalternative rituals and spirituality. Its only major weakness in my mind is itsover-cautious avoidance of discussing the use of ‘entheogens,’ at the event,which seem to play a significant role in the alternative, counterculture, and trans-gressive ethos of Burning Man. Nevertheless, Gilmore is to be commended forher erudite, balanced, and sensitive study of what has become one of the mostimportant manifestations of contemporary alternative festivals.

Douglas OstoMassey University (New Zealand)

E-mail: d.osto@massey.ac.nz© 2011, Douglas Osto

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2011.584175

Corporal Knowledge: Early Christian Bodies, by Jennifer A. Glancy, OxfordUniversity Press: New York, 2010, xi + 189pp. ISBN 978 0 19 532815 8, US$45 (cloth)

Foregrounding the role of the body in relation to the world, the self, and others,Jennifer Glancy paints a kind of anti-cerebral picture of early Christian culturefrom Paul to Augustine. Simply put, Glancy shows how epistemological and onto-logical orientations reside in and are expressed through bodies. Corporal Knowledge,then, is about how bodies (as modalities as well as presentations) both think andreveal thought through practice. In lockstep with Bourdieu’s discussion of thehabitus, however, this is less a study of conscientious performance and self-fashioning, and more a look at how bodies learn, internalize and naturalize theireducation, and create and are created by structuring structures. With Romanculture as the chief educator in this rendition, Glancy argues that early Christianscorporally inhabited their cues accordingly. In her words, ‘in the Roman Empiresocial identity was a kind of bodily knowledge, a knowledge that affected anindividual’s experience of being in the world and shaped his or her interactionswith other people’ (pp. 11–12).Glancy begins her argument in Chapter two with a social-scientific reading of a

passage in 2 Corinthians where Paul boasts of his beatings. Paul uses the experienceof his beatings – the scarification from them, and his accompanying narrative –she claims, to establish a connection with Jesus, a connection based in corporalknowledge. Paul suffered like Jesus suffered, so it goes. Furthermore, by utilizingthe common Roman practice of battle-scar display, Paul acknowledges his bodilytrauma as signifying his apostolic authority. But therein lay the irony. Unlike thedistinctly heroic battle scars on one’s chest that mark one’s valor and elevatedstatus, as Glancy reports, Paul’s whipped body would have been testament to hisdishonorable rank. Paul’s beatings were not boast-worthy, yet he boasts. Confusingthe logic of Roman battle-scar display, Paul makes use of this cultural formwhile simultaneously subverting it. Paul pragmatically and strategically used hisabused body, Glancy argues, as a source of and witness to the knowledge of

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Jesus’ abused body. As a conduit of Roman culture and pious co-sufferer, Paul’sbody knows in more ways than one.Pointing to yet another incidence of early Christian internalization of Roman

culture, in her third chapter Glancy turns to a discussion of slavery in antiquity.Manifesting particular influence, she writes, ‘the tenacious grip of a slaveholdinghabitus deformed Christian moral imaginations’ to the extent that ‘Christiansperpetuated modes of relating to one another that did not differ from the relationsof those outside the community’ (p. 3). With this in mind, Glancy examines theaccounts of two early Christian martyrs. As a person of rank, the 3rd-centurymartyr, Perpetua, boldly but implicitly revealed her social standing in during herexecution, Glancy argues, by virtue of her comportment – she directed it,guiding the very hand that yielded the sword which took her life. Blandina, a2nd-century martyr, in contrast, displayed her lowly status by simply but gra-ciously bearing the tortures of her demise. Thus, in Glancy’s reading, ‘the elitewoman commanded, the enslaved woman endured’ (p. 61). Acculturated to thefleshy core, Glancy argues that the accounts of Perpetua and Blandina suggest anunspoken somatic knowledge of class, a testament to and reinforcement of thelarger cultural norms. Even for the martyrs and their hagiographers, slavery andfreedom are known in the body.In her fourth chapter, Glancy historically situates another example of bodily

knowledge as she marshals a handful of apocryphal and pseudepigraphal textsthat detail Mary’s birth of Jesus. Rather than an aversion to such a topic, in this2nd and 3rd-century corpus of hagiographic literature Glancy finds a heightenedinterest in the goings on of Mary’s birthing body, specifically her genitalia. Notsurprisingly, purity and pollution were the underlying issues that drove thisearly Christian preoccupation. Since the neonate Jesus’ purity was a given,Glancy shows, these accounts grapple with status of Mary’s body as a possible(non)pollutant. So, for example, not only is Mary a virgin, but she birthed pain-lessly and had been spared the taint of menstruation. While explanations variedon how the holy veracity of baby Jesus remained untainted, however, Glancysuggests a common apologetic need to negotiate popular Roman conceptionsand theories of childbirth. Whether the concern was the integrity of Mary’s genitaliaor the close association between organs of gestation and organs of elimination,Glancy brings early Christian understandings of embodiment to the fore. Bywriting about Mary’s body, these texts divulge a spectrum of bodily knowledge.Throughout Corporal Knowledge, Glancy seeks to show that ‘the embodied inter-

actions and self-understandings of Christians were subject to the status-consciouscorporal pedagogy of the Roman Empire’ (p. 138). Her arguments in this respectare well crafted. And here, I suspect, debate will be fruitful. By emphasizing theresonances (or even reproductions) of Roman culture within early Christianpractices, Glancy’s work leaves less room for localized adaptations, subaltern idio-syncrasies, or alternate modes of embodied existence and expression. To be fair,Glancy does not neglect these issues, but her overall narrative stresses continuityover rupture. Michel de Certeau’s work would shed some theoretical light in thisregard. Where Glancy’s heavy use of Bourdieu has led her to focus on the internal-ization and replication of the ancient Roman world in early Christian bodies, deCerteau points us in a different direction, towards the makeshift creativity ofindividual activities in everyday life. While Glancy’s Bourdieuvian focus on thestructuring structures is edifying, a closer look at the networks of ‘antidisipline’

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would be equally illuminating, for early Christians were surely engaged indistinctly localized improvisations. Glancy’s study is ripe for conversation withresearch on early Christian pockets of innovation, unique in both time and space,where the Roman habitus may not have been so monolithic a hegemon. Perhapswe would find that Paul’s subversion of Roman scar-display practices was not sosubversive after all. I would open the conversation here. With a look to everydaytactics and the ‘art of the weak,’ what different story could we tell of ancientChristian embodiment? At the heart of the matter, then, is to what degree theseearly Christians were Roman, in what measure these early Christians wereChristians, and to what end these Christians were individuals.Given the overlap in topic and publication date, I expect that many scholars

enmeshed in body studies will be also reading Manuel A. Vasquez’s More ThanBelief: A Materialist Theory of Religion (2011). And a dialogue between these twoworks would be productive. In line with a relatively long tradition of work,what becomes immediately clear in Glancy’s contribution is her understanding/treatment of the ‘body’ as a kind of text, as something to be read. If we followVasquez’s review of the field, in so far as Glancy semiotically takes bodies to be‘telling stories,’ she aligns her work with a long-standing and dominant Geertzianconvention that understands ‘human practices through the prism of representationand signification’ (Vasquez 2011: 212). So, like a Balinese cockfight, Glancy ‘reads’her subjects. The problem here, as Vasquez point out, is that practices are taken tobe the enactments of texts, that ‘practices are essentially [treated as] media for theexternalization and internalization of texts’ (Vasquez 2011: 219). For Vasquez, thereis something missing when we hold embodied action to be representative of somecombination of public meaning and inner state. In this regard, it seems, Glancy isnot unaware; as she writes: ‘bodies exceed the stories they tell’ (p. 21). At animpasse, Glancy recognizes the limitations of ‘reading’ the body, particularly assuch a method is premised on the external legibility of enfleshed subjects.Turning inward, however, Glancy also notes that ‘the body knows more than itis willing to tell’ (p. 140). Cautious of reducing the body to mechanistic, biologicalprocesses, Glancy struggles for theoretical rigor here as she (like so many beforeher) points to ‘experience’ for answers. In her words, she seeks to ‘tell the truthabout the experience of being a body’ (p. 21). Informing Glancy’s hesitancytowards a supposed biological reductionism, then, is her favoring of Merleau-Ponty and subsequent phenomenological traditions within the field of ReligiousStudies. Having greatly influenced the study of lived religion and the body, thiscommon phenomenological appeal to experience is Glancy’s intellectual heir; andas Vasquez suggests (and Richard Rorty found), assumed in this theoreticaltradition is the notion of the self as a glassy essence, whereby external, embodiedactions signify inner states. Thus, the ‘more’ to this bodily story that Glancywishes to tell, for Vasquez, is symptomatic of her textual approach to the body.Glancy recognizes the potential for solipsism in her hermeneutics of the body,and perhaps finds her analytical insight at a dead end. There may be a wayaround this, however. If we follow Vasquez’s insight, the materiality of the bodyand its surroundings is what Glancy’s account ironically lacks. Where Glancy leftoff, perhaps cultural neurophenomenology and ecology could take up. In short,there may be room within Glancy’s ‘nonreductive corporal epistemology’ (p. 23)for Vasquez’s ‘non-reductive materialist framework’ (Vasquez 2011: 4).

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Overall, Corporal Knowledge is a short and insightful addition to the ever-expanding literature on the body. Those biblical scholars and historians whodabble within this timeframe should find Glancy’s focus illuminating, particularlyas she details conceptions of childbirth in ancient Roman culture, and calls intoquestion past readings of Paul boasting of his beatings as well as Perpetua andBlandina’s respective martyrdom accounts.

Miles Adam ParkFlorida State University (USA)

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

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2011.584176

Reference

Vasquez, Manuel A. 2011.More Than Belief: A Materialist Theory of Religion. New York: Oxford UniversityPress.

Europäische Religionsgeschichte. Ein mehrfacher Pluralismus, edited by HansG. Kippenberg, Jörg Rüpke and Kocku von Stuckrad, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht:Göttingen, 2009, xiv + 854pp. ISBN 978 3 8252 3206 1, €59.00 (paperback)

This impressive work deals with the religious history of the European continent asseen from a specific theoretical perspective that has largely been developed in aGerman academic context. The size of this book precludes a reviewof each individualcontribution; the discussion that follows will largely concentrate on the theoreticalperspective, which may be unfamiliar to scholars outside the German-speakingarea, and will exemplify this perspective by means of a selection of chapters.Based on the seminal paper, ‘Europäische Religionsgeschichte,’ published in

1995 by Burkhard Gladigow, two distinct modes of historiographic writing aredistinguished here. The first is a conventional or ‘additive’ perspective that seesEurope as a Christian continent, describes its religious history as that of itsChristian churches, and adds to this the histories of e.g. Judaism, Islam, and con-temporary religious movements in Europe as more peripheral phenomena. Thesecond, the one advocated by Gladigow and in the work under consideration, isthe ‘integrative’ perspective, which sees Europe as a religiously plural continentcharacterized by quite specific historical developments and characteristics.In this perspective, elements of religious discourses, practices and social

formations firstly migrate across the fluid and socially constructed boundariesbetween traditionally defined social arenas (e.g., ‘religion,’ ‘philosophy,’ and‘science’) and traditions (e.g., ‘Christianity,’ ‘Judaism,’ and ‘Islam’). European reli-gious history can only be understood by acknowledging and studying the manyinterchanges and interferences that have taken place between mainstream Chris-tian theologies and Arabic natural philosophy, between Christian currents in theRenaissance and Jewish Kabbalah, and so forth. The many innovations engenderedby such exchanges have been ubiquitous throughout the history of the Europeancontinent, and have resulted in societies where a plurality of religious discourses

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and practices have always coexisted, i.e., long before (post)modern social forcessuch as globalization and migration created the present multi-religious context.Whenever there have been attempts to construct a religious monoculture, this

has been achieved only through an intense disciplining, and the efforts havenever been entirely successful. Europe’s preferred mode of disciplining has resultedin a characteristic dialectic between the claim to absolute authority of a centralpower (e.g., the Catholic Church, various states) and the centrifugal force ofvarious dissenting movements and currents. Not least important in this respectare the various forms of Western esotericism, whose representatives have nego-tiated difficult religio-political waters. A key element in this history has been theprofessionalization of religion, the fact that many competing institutions withfull-time professionals have attempted to define ‘acceptable religion’ and combatwhat they have seen as excessively unorthodox.Texts, and the collective memory that selectively reads, comments on, and reuses

texts, have played key roles in religious history. Whereas numerous other traditionsregard ritual and orthopraxy as fundamental, European religions have beenremarkably preoccupied with the written word, and with the intellectual contentsof their writings. Furthermore, texts are in the modern period used in ways that areunique to the European context (see especially the contribution by VolkhardKrech). Besides their universal employment as liturgical and devotional objectsand as sources of religious doctrine, religious texts have become the object ofsecond-order (philological and historical) studies, which in turn influence the pro-duction of new forms of religion. Vedic and Hindu religious texts remain liturgicaltexts in their original settings; in the European context, they are also criticallyinvestigated, the results of scholarship are popularized and are recycled, e.g., bytheosophical and New Age currents.The reuse of past texts takes many forms, including literary and iconographic

representations of ‘pagan’elements throughout historical epochs when presumablynobody was an active member of a pagan group. A major theoretical insight of theeuropäische Religionsgeschichte approach is that the seeming Christian monocultureof the European past is not least due to a myopic Protestant understanding of‘religion’ as defined by the inner states and beliefs of individual people. Since theset of data constituted by ‘religion’ is defined by scholars, discourses and imagesthat refer to postulated transcendent agents and so forth can be reclaimed by ourdiscipline, whether or not anybody actually ‘believed’ in these agents (see thesophisticated discussion in the chapter by Michael Stausberg).Themany religious innovations need to be seen against a double backdrop.On the

one hand, a cultural longue durée lets certain elements of discourse emerge again andagain over the centuries: religious relativism and skepticism existed inAntiquity, arefound in the early Christian era, survived in subdued form, and re-emerged as astrong voice in the 16th century. On the other hand, the desire of the religious literatito distance themselves from the past has made each new generation insist on itsown uniquely modern outlook (cf. the chapter by Gustavo Benavides). Historicalperiodizations have cemented this view of the past as radically different: theMiddleAgeswere set apart either as an epoch of unmitigated obscurantism, or alter-natively, as an era of Gemeinschaft and of true spirituality, nostalgically contrastedwith a purportedly materialistic time when Gesellschaft, ‘the system,’ rules. In thecontemporary period, we have witnessed the rise of theories of postmodernityand of secularization, that in variousways continue to demarcate our own historical

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period as fundamentally different. As the contributions by Hartmut Lehmann andDetlef Pollack usefully demonstrate, when it come to the secularization of Europe,the empirical data neither clearly support nor unambiguously undermine theconcept of a major shift in religious affiliation. Different countries and regionshave pursued very different paths, leading to a continent with some staunchlyreligious populations (Ireland, Poland, Malta) and some where people are, if notirreligious, at least only nominally members of a church and thus prototypicalexamples of ‘belonging without believing’ (Sweden, Denmark).After usefully presenting the essentials of the europäische Religionsgeschichte

approach in the first section, the next section discusses the modalities of religiouspluralism. The contributions once again point at the enduring structures of theEuropean religious landscape. Hans Kippenberg describes the polemics and thelegal steps taken by representatives of state-supported majority religions againstdissenting groups. His data are mainly taken from classical Rome, but the juridicalmeans described bear a striking resemblance to contemporary debates. Whethertargeting Roman cults or present-day ‘alternative’ religions, the range of accusa-tions is remarkable stereotypical: the minority groups are not ‘real religions,’their members are deluded and immoral, their gatherings clandestine and presum-ably the locus of secret and malevolent activities, and their very existence thereforea threat against the stability of the society. The ultimate weapon is proscription, inthe Roman case famously exemplified by the senatus consultum in bacchanalibusof 186 BC. After the Roman Empire adopted Christianity as its sole religion, allcompeting religions were lumped in a few legal categories, a typology of bannedorganizations modeled on classical prototypes.Subsequent chapters in that section reflect on similar oppositions between reli-

gious centers and peripheries, inter alia in the Middles Ages, the age of confessio-nalization and the contemporary period. Two chapters on pluralism in theMiddle Ages (by Otto Gerhard Oexle and Christoph Auffath) are particularlygood examples of how the integrative approach deconstructs longstanding precon-ceptions. It is still a common view, at least among non-specialists, that the MiddleAges were the apogee of Christian religious monoculture, flanked on each side bythe complex religious ecology of late Antiquity and the ruptures provoked by theReformation. Inspired by the work of Max Weber, Oexle demonstrates how variedmedieval forms of religion could be, given that society in the Middle Ages wasdivided into a myriad of hierarchically ranked social groups. Auffarth’s chapterproceeds to survey the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion that generatedthis plurality of options, but also the exchange of religious elements that tookplace between the various currents. His example of the various uses of the themeof the heavenly ladder in medieval Christian, Jewish, and Muslim traditionsdemonstrates the modalities and advantages of the integrative approach in just afew condensed pages. Two further chapters explore specific case studies, the argu-ably best-known examples of religious exclusion within the religious ecology of theHigh Middle Ages: the Cathars (discussed by Daniela Müller) and the witch trials(by Günter Jeroushek). The final chapters of the second section address furtherwell-known historical processes that have contributed to shaping a religiouslyplural Europe: the age of confessionalization (Heinz Schilling), of colonialism(Ulrike Brunotte), migration (Astrid Reuter) and renewed religious conflict in thecontemporary age, as exemplified by the troubled recent history of the Balkanarea (Dariuš Zifonun and Miranda Jakiša).

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The third section discusses some of the many exchanges between ‘religion’ andother social dimensions. Religious elements have interacted in manifold wayswith philosophy, literature, the natural sciences and many other cultural forms.The chapters in this section include inter alia contributions on the relationbetween religion and the sciences (Kocku von Stuckrad), political philosophyand civil religion (Jürgen Manemann), national and secular discourses (DieterLangewiesche and Vasilios N. Makrides, respectively). If religion is viewed as adiscourse by means of which people make sense of themselves, and of their socialand natural surroundings, it is clear that religion, as conventionally defined,competes on the same ground where political and scientific discoursescirculate. Makrides’ chapter shows how quite a few political ideologies – Fascism,Nazism, and Marxism-Leninism in particular – have developed mythologies andrituals that functionally resemble and play the role of their religious counterparts.As for the sciences, von Stuckrad’s chapter reminds us, via examples stretchingchronologically from John Dee to Ernst Haeckel, of how recent the history of‘science’as a separate social institution is, and how putatively scientific and religiousdiscourses have coexisted and formed various constellations throughout the ages.The fourth section presents the forms and ‘sites’ of religious communication,

plurality, and exchange, and is basically a quite mixed selection of themes and associ-ated case studies. Material culture is especially important as a ‘site’: ideas can onlyinteract via concrete manifestations, and dominant ideas become dominant bybeing grounded in imposing architecture, commanding iconic representations, keygeographic centers and vital social institutions from which discourses and practicescan emanate. Contributions of this kind include discussions of popular gatherings(Jörg Rüpke), iconic (Peter Bräunlein), and literary representations (BerndU. Schipper). Other chapters interpret the theme of ‘forms of communication’differ-ently, and address the specific sources of inspiration, terms, and concepts that persistthroughout the longue durée of European religious history. Here we find a chapter onthe ever-recurring references to classical Antiquity and its theologies, philosophiesand learned confraternities (Hubert Cancik). Another deals with the concept of‘the pagan’ and its many ‘renaissances,’ from the Renaissance to the rise ofmodern paganisms (Michael Stausberg). Yet others discuss the historical transform-ation of terms such as ‘piety’ and ‘confession’ (Lucian Hölscher), and the persistenceof ‘lay religion’ or personal religious devotion over the centuries (Bernard Lang).This very substantial work presents a strong case for seeing the dynamics of

European history of religions as a regionally specific phenomenon. Specialists onvarious epochs, regions, or currents may wish that their areas of the Europeanreligious history had been given fuller attention. More attention could have beendevoted to e.g., the 19th century, with its mix of liberal and conservativeChristianities, and its spiritualist, theosophical, and occultist dimensions. However,some basic limitations must be imposed on any edited volume.More important is the still largely unresolved need to grapple with some funda-

mental issues. Firstly, there is the question of the ‘control group.’ To truly substanti-ate the claim that Europe presents a specific dynamics (rather than the much lessbold suggestion that it constitutes an illustrative example of a quasi-universalway in which religious currents interact), contrastive examples are required.Does religion in, e.g., South Asia or China present a truly different picture thanreligion in Europe? The question is only tangentially addressed here, and a fullerdiscussion would have been valuable.

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Secondly, there is the question of the chronological, social, and geographicaldemarcation. ‘Europe’ is in the perspective of many of the authors a rather morecircumscribed site than the geographical term would seem to imply. The fact thata very significant part of Europe extends beyond Western Christendom and wassplit off from the West already in late Antiquity by the linguistic divide betweenLatin and Greek-speaking areas, and later, at least nominally, by the ‘GreatSchism’ of 1054, often serves merely as a subdued, contrastive backdrop to theevents in the West that seem to be the main focus of interest. It is symptomaticthat the largest in size of the European countries, Russia, is not even listed in theindex. Eastern European traditions surely deserve more attention than is given here.Perhaps just as surprisingly, the space allotted to Judaism is quite meager, despite

the fact that Judaism, from the first waves of diaspora in Roman times to theemergence of the state of Israel, has been a European religion. Jewish nationalistaspirations are treated in the chapter by Langewiesche, and the field of JewishStudies as an academic discipline is extensively discussed by Volkhard Krech,but little else is to be seen here of the many and very visible manifestations onthe European continent of lived Jewish religion and Jewish thought.Western-centeredness also results in the occasional unbalanced treatment of

Islam. The Muslim diaspora is discussed, and the role of Muslim philosophers inthe history of the European continent is given due credit. Nevertheless, thechapter by Oexle that attributes variability and change to medieval Europe bycontrast characterizes Sunni Islam as a inert tradition that in perpetuity looksback on the brief golden age from Muhammad to the death of the last of thefour ‘rightly guided Caliphs’ in 661 AD. Surely, rather than constituting a majordifferences this is a manifestation of a significant similarity in religious rhetoric:just as Sunni Islam has been a malleable tradition that has legitimized change byconstructing (spurious or actual) links with the past, one of the most commonstrategies of innovation in the West has also been the purported return to anearlier, formative period, whether conceived of as, e.g., the truth of the Bible, orthe insights of Plato or Aristotle.Furthermore, ancient Europe has a history outside the Classical heritage – rich

prehistoric sites, and areas with ethnic groups speaking Germanic, Slavic, Baltic,Celtic, and Uralic languages. These lie outside the perimeter of the presentvolume, but have also been integrated in wider networks of religious exchange,sometimes in quite surprising ways. The small Buddha statuette originating inpresent-day Pakistan and unearthed in 1955 by archaeologists at a Viking site inSweden is as good an example as any that even the outermost rim of Europewas part of a vast web of cultural and religious interrelations.Europe has also had and continues to have many and complex layers of what

could be called folk religion, from themagical papyri in Antiquity to NewReligiousMovements, occult currents and ‘New Age’ forms of religiosity in the present.Plurality is for most authors exclusively an interchange of religious ideas andpractices between professionalized elite groups. Even the attention given to layreligiosity in Bernhard Lang’s chapter focuses on Gottesbeziehung, i.e., a piousChristian discourse ultimately defined by the canonized doctrines of the Church.The very common lay religiosity of people who believe in reincarnation, watchTV shows where mediums purportedly contact the spirits of the dead, consulttheir horoscopes, or read significance into apparent coincidences, leaves fewtraces in this book.

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Thirdly, and closely related to these issues of demarcation, there is the question ofthe relation of the German academic tradition of europäische Religionsgeschichte toother ways of understanding cultures (and therefore religions) as dynamic, inter-acting, and trans-national bodies. Jörg Rüpke laconically notes in his opening state-ment that History of Religions as an academic discipline enters late into the debate,and it is easy to concur in this judgment. The social sciences have well beforeGladigow’s 1995 article abandoned once-current models of bounded cultureswith specific local characteristics that, in Clifford Geertz’ famous formulation, actas models of and models for the lives of people within a given ethnicity. Anthropo-logical literature has since at least the 1980s resisted the tendency to reify culture,has acknowledged the porous boundaries between traditions and social domainsmentioned above, and has proposed various theoretical models to account forthe insight that cultural exchange respects no ethnic or nation-state boundaries.Finally, the spread of the ‘quintessentially European’ to other parts of the globe,

and the resulting relation between Europe and ‘the rest’ merits more sustaineddiscussion. Rather than insisting on a religiously distinct European continent,one might see the entire globe as integrated into a vast world system, a networkwith unequal components made up of one or several core regions from whichimpulses emerge, and several peripheries. Two to three centuries ago, NorthAmerica was at the receiving end of the world system, and the plurality of religiousalternatives created in Europe was largely exported across the Atlantic. Today,much of the plurality of European religion is the effect of imports. Contemporaryfolk religion in Europe would be vastly different without the net effect of Americaninfluences mediated by New Thought preachers, talk show hosts, and popularwriters from James Redfield to Dan Brown.All of this, however, should be seen as food for further discussion rather than as

criticism. Europäische Religionsgeschichte is one of the most stimulating worksto have come to the present reviewer’s attention in the last years. To judge from refer-ence lists in much contemporary academic writing, the comfort zone of mosttheoreticians of the study of religion lies within their own mother tongue. This,perhaps, explains the limited impact so far onAnglophone scholarship of Gladigow’sarticle and the discussion that he set in motion. Anglophone scholars will, however,neglect the present work to their own detriment, and we can over the coming yearsno doubt expect a plethora of studies carried out in the vein of this book.

Olav HammerUniversity of Southern Denmark (Denmark)

E-mail: ohammer@ifpr.sdu.dk© 2011, Olav Hammer

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2011.584177

Infant Milk or Hardy Nourishment? The Bible for Lay People and Theologiansin the Early Modern Period, by W. François and A.A. Den Hollander, Peeters:Louvain, 2009, xviii + 488pp. ISBN 978 90 429 2144 3, €80 (hardback)

Paul distinguishes (at 1 Cor. 3:2) between ‘milk’ and the less readily assimilated‘meat,’ repeating the idea (at Heb. 5: 12–14) where he speaks of ‘milk’ and‘strong meat’ – which may or may not be precisely the same contrast. Patristic

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interpreters read the milk as ‘the sermons through which the Church passes acomprehensible and digestible message to the rude and common people.’ SomeFathers specified that the milk was drawn ‘from the twin breasts as praised inthe Song of Songs . . . interpreted symbolically as the Old and the New Testament.’While some commentators held that certain books of Scripture required advancedspiritual insight and were to be ‘reserved to the little circle of “perfecti,”’ Origen’sview was that ‘everybody could take advantage of reading . . . Scripture [which]offered at the same time milk for the weak and hardy nourishment for theadvanced’ (pp. 135–136, n. 75, 78).King James and Rheims do not differ in their handling of the terms milk and

meat, but it will come as no surprise to seiziémistes that the Pauline doublet wasmuch debated, explicitly and implicitly, throughout their period of study. The 18learned papers collected here were delivered mainly at meetings of the SixteenthCentury Society and Conference, though the initial three deal in whole or in partwith Dutch Bibles of the 15th century, and the final four advance into the 17th

century. Sessions at which these talks were given were held under the auspicesof the Dutch-Flemish research group Biblia Sacra; the collection appears in theseries Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium edited at theUniversité Catholique de Louvain/Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, so it will notoccasion surprise that much attention is devoted to the Low Countries. Mosttexts are in English (with two each in French and German); and while some ofthe scholars clearly are not writing in a native tongue, the contributions proveuniformly clear. Even the occasional archaism such as the use of the word‘tenants’ (p. 94) – early-modern English would spell this ‘tenents,’ where we say‘tenets’– lends a certain period charm to the prose.Several of these pieces are furnished with abundant and sharply reproduced

black-and-white illustrations; all of them are richly, sometimes very richly, anno-tated. Any scholar of the period will find material that instructs and delights —and refers through to the relevant professional literature in multiple tongues. Letme first give a few examples of the nifty lore on offer here and then discuss ahalf-dozen essays that I found particularly attractive in light of my own interests.Students of censorship will enjoy observing the fate of Apocalypse illustrations

by Lucas Cranach in Bibles of 1522 and 1523, deftly presented by Nelly deHommel-Steenbakkers: ‘In the September edition the beast coming up out of theabyss on the eleventh print, the beast spitting the unclean spirits on the sixteenthprint, and the whore of Babylon on the seventeenth print, all wear a papal tiara.The mocking of the pope was not well received by the authorities and in theDecember edition the tiaras were cut away. However, the criticism apparent inthree other prints was left untouched [so that in prints of] the announcement ofthe fall of Babylon and the burning of Babylon . . . the town of Babylon is unmis-takably Rome.’ In 1523, Hans Holbein the Younger ‘re-instated the papal tiaraworn by the beast out of the abyss and the whore of Babylon’ (p. 192). Comparablylively, though in this instance the illustrations are purely textual, proves MarkW. Elliott’s investigation of early-modern readings of Leviticus 16. Cornelius àLapide suggests that ‘the goat which is made the sin offering stands for Christsuffering and dying on the cross, whereas the goat which is sent out signifies thedeity of Christ, which was unable to suffer during the passion and remainedfree’ (p. 456). By way of contrast, William Estius of Douai ‘held that the first goatin the temple stood for Christ suffering from the uproar of the Jews in the city.

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The second was Christ as sent out to be eaten by wild beasts, that is his sufferingand crucifixion “outside,” that is, among the Gentiles’ (p. 464).Three very fine consecutive essays deal with Erasmus and the intellectual wars of

his age. Jean-François Cottier explores Erasmus’ answer to the question of whetherScriptural paraphrasing was an otiose exercise like the proverbial lighting of a lampin the midday sun. It turns out that Erasmus felt optimally at home in this genre,which for him presumed a self-purification on the part of the philologist (p. 81).The paraphrase is obliged ‘to speak otherwise without saying anything different’;this sounds better in Cottier’s French (‘parler autrement sans pourtant dire autrechose’), let alone the original (‘hoc est aliter dicere ut tamen non dicas alia’[p. 77]). In sum, the work of paraphrase generates a ‘transformation’ which is‘un texte nouveau, qui veut interpréter en imitant, suivre en dépassant, éclairer enilluminant’ (p. 85).Paolo Sartori’s paper usefully compares Erasmus’ critical views on the nature

and authority of the received Latin version of the New Testament with those ofsuch defenders of its status as the French Carthusian Petrus Sutor. ‘Since theChurch, states Sutor, does not require a new translation of the Bible, the HolySpirit was not involved in it because He does not inspire anyone who devoteshimself to a superfluous endeavor’ (p. 105). Sartori documents the extent towhich traditionalists went in defending the philologically vulnerable receivedversion. Sutor also plays a major role — here under his French name, PierreCousturier — in Wim François’ instructive account of ‘The Condemnation ofVernacular Bible Reading by the Parisian Theologians’ (1523–31).The longest and certainly among the strongest contributions is M.W.F. Stone’s on

Ruard Tapper (1487–1559), a Professor of Theology at Louvain. One might havefeared an exercise in filiopiety here, with a Lovaniensis of our own day (Stone)unearthing a predecessor of the mid-16th century. What one finds instead is arichly nuanced account of a philosophically sophisticated academic thinkerwho believed himself, not without some justification, to maintain fidelity both toAugustine and to Thomas Aquinas, while nonetheless (as Stone demonstrates)taking account of philosophical developments in post-Thomist scholasticism.Stone explains that ‘in saying that liberum arbitrium needs Christ as a liberatorfrom slavery, Tapper means that Christ is needed as a liberator not from externalforce or internal necessity, but rather from the inevitability of free and voluntarysinning and from the guilt and punishment due to sin’ (p. 290). Tapper holds‘that in fallen man there exists both free will and some necessity of sinning. Butthis necessity does not imply for Tapper that man cannot avoid individual sins;it only means that he will sometimes inevitably and freely choose to sin’ (p. 291).Stone admirably makes his case that Tapper’s ‘temperate theological anthropology. . . emphasized those vestiges of the divine still present in fallen human life, and theidea that all persons possess a power to choose freely among alternatives, a powernever blighted nor vanquished by the deleterious effects of sin’ (p. 295).Two papers late in the volume on the Jesuit emblematist Jerome Nadal were of

particular interest to this reviewer as a literary historian. Walter Melion andRalph Dekoninck (the latter in French) movingly characterize the nature andprocedures employed by Nadal in his 1595 volume, Adnotationes et meditationes inEvangelia, whose 153 chapters generally combine an image, lexical annotations,and a figurative meditation, the entire ensemble functioning ‘in tandem to teachthe order’s members…how to read the liturgical Gospels, visualize the chief

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events and personalities from the life of Christ, and discern the itineraria (itineraries,that is, sequences of thought, word, and deed) to be assimilated and ultimatelyimitated by the votary’ (p. 370). Dekoninck formulates the Jesuit trajectory ofthought in this way: ‘méditer à partir d’images en vue de devenir soi-même àl’image de ce qui est donné à imiter. On compose des images pour les incarner,suivant ainsi l’exemple de la plus authentique Image qui soit, le Christ’ (p. 395).The exposition of Nadal’s meditative procedures at the end of the 16th centuryrecalls Cottier’s account of Erasmus’s practice of paraphrase early in the century,in both of which distinctions between milk and meat evanesce, whether for theperhaps semi-educated reader of the paraphrase or the scholastically trainedJesuit votary served by Nadal.

Eugene D. HillMount Holyoke College (USA)

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

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2011.584178

The Messiah of Shiraz: Studies in Early and Middle Babism, by DenisM. MacEoin, Brill Academic Publishers: Leiden and Boston, 2009, xxxvii + 738pp.ISBN 978 90 04 17035 3, US$293 (hardback)

Since the passing of such celebrated 19th and early 20th-century diplomats, scholarsand Orientalists as Mirza Muhammad-`Ali, Aleksandr Kazim-Beg (d. c. 1870),Joseph A. Comte de Gobineau (d. 1882), Baron Victor Rosen (d. 1908), AleksandrTumansky (d. 1920), Louise (A. L. M.) Nicholas (d. 1939) and the CambridgePersianist Edward G. Browne (d. 1926), very few modern academics have beenbold enough to write about the life or translate and comment upon the complexwritings of Sayyid `Ali Muhammad Shirazi (d. Tabriz 1850), widely knowntoday as the Bab (the Gate). The lives of his Shi`i-Shaykhi Islamic precursors,Shaykh Ahmad al-Ahsa’i (d. Jeddah, or Medina 1826) and his successor SayyidKazim Rashti (d. Karbala 1843), not to mention the many often arcane texts theseprolific writers bequeathed to posterity, were likewise virtually unknown andunstudied during the previous centuries, save to a limited degree in select publi-cations of the French writers Nicholas (see above) and the Iranist Henri Corbin(d. 1978).From 1844, the Persian-born, early Qajar-era messianic claimant the Bab claimed

to be in communication with, and subsequently to be, the Shi`i hidden Imam andexpected Qa’im (messianic ‘Ariser’). He came to represent himself as amazhar-i ilahi(Manifestation of God) capable of wahy (‘divine revelation’) in both the Arabic andPersian languages. For modern Baha’is he is viewed as an elevated Messenger ofGod and a harbinger to Mirza Husayn `Ali Nuri Baha’-Allah (d. Acre 1892), aPersian-born follower of the Bab who, from mid-1863 near Baghdad, foundedthe now globally diffused Baha’i religion.Throughout the 1970s, Denis M. MacEoin gradually established himself as

perhaps the most brilliant Western-trained academic to make a detailed study ofthe short-lived though revolutionary religion of the Bab and of his abovementionedShìi-Shaykhi Islamic forbearers. A bold, outspoken and sometimes strongly

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opinionated scholar, he furthered the academic study of early Qajar Shìism, itsShaykhi manifestations, and their historical relationship to the neo-Shìi religionof the Bab. His massive volume The Messiah of Shiraz incorporates much (thoughby no means all!) of his lifelong scholarly engagement with Shaykhi and Babi-Baha’i studies. His often excellent grasp of the notoriously complex and idiosyn-cratic Arabic and Persian of the Bab meant that he could go way beyond mostother scholars in this field in referring to and analyzing numerous often unpub-lished, uncatalogued, and little-known primary sources. His erudite use of thesesource materials is amply illustrated in his two seminal and foundational booksof the 1990s, The Sources for Early Babi Doctrine and History: A Survey (Brill, 1991)and Rituals in Babism and Baha’ism (I.B. Tauris, 1995) as well as in the magisterialvolume reviewed here.The Messiah of Shiraz opens with various preliminaries, including a foreword and

an old and a new preface to its Part I which consists of a ‘lightly edited’ version ofits author’s 1979 King’s College, Cambridge, doctoral dissertation entitled ‘FromShaykhism to Babism: a Study in Charismatic Renewal in Shi`i Islam.’ This disser-tation was completed 30 years before its first publication here, and in some respectsremains unsurpassed. In his thesis, MacEoin examines the changing and sometimesparadoxical nature of Shaykhi and early Babi relationships, relative to modes ofShi`i Islamic orthodoxy. These movements exhibit varying attempts to furtherchanging patterns of ‘charismatic and legal authority’ (p. xi).The first chapter touches upon aspects of ‘The Religious Background,’ including

‘Charismatic and Legal Authority in Imami Shi`ism’ (pp. 1–58). Chapter twoconsists of a detailed biography of Shaykh Ahmad al-Ahsa’i, who was born nearal-Ahsa’ (or Hasa’) in May 1753, from whom al-Shaykhiyya (Shaykhism) isderived. His extended periods in Iraq (1790s–1806) and Iran (1806–22) are sketched.The final years following the 1822 takfir (‘excommunication’) by the ‘strongly-opinionated’ Mulla Muhammad Taqi Baraghani (d. 1847) are analyzed as are thecircumstances surrounding his death in 1826 in the vicinity of Medina where heis buried (pp. 59–105).Chapter three provides a detailed biography of Sayyid Kazim Rashti, the little-

studied Persian second head of al-Shaykhiyya. The meager sources about himare insightfully and critically considered, as are key issues touching upon hisclose relationship with and succession to al-Ahsa’i. MacEoin has it that Rashti‘regarded himself as empowered by al-Ahsa’i’ to develop and expound deep‘inner realities’ communicated to him from on high (p. 119). Though for severalmonths a teacher of the Bab, relatively little is said about Rashti’s undoubtedstylistic and doctrinal influence upon his youthful pupil.Chapter four deals with the transition ‘From Shaykhism to Babism’ in terms of

the succession to Rashti, who died on the first day of 1844 without havingappointed a successor. The subsequent multi-faceted claims of the Bab and thecompeting, increasingly orthodox, pronouncements of Hajji Mirza MuhammadKarim Khan Kirmani (d. 1871) and other contemporary Shaykhi notables are setout in considerable detail. Emergent Babism became an identifiable target ofvirulent polemic or concerted attack. Aspects of the biography and positions ofKarim Khan Kirmani are ably sketched (p. 146ff). He gradually establishedKirman as the locus of a more orthodox Shaykhism. From there, Karim Khanwrote a succession of anti-Babi treatises commencing with his trenchant RisalaIzhaq al-batil (‘The Crushing of Falsehood’, 1845). Ultimately he succeeded in his

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claim to lead the Shaykhis. He drew many followers away from the Bab as thedeveloped claims and purposes of the young Sayyid became better known.The last section in chapter four (pp. 155–171) is undoubtedly the most erudite

succinct biography of the Bab and his first disciples the huruf al-hayy (Letters ofthe Living) or sabiqun (precursors) written before the onset of the 21st century.Entitled ‘Some Aspects of Early Babi Doctrine,’ chapter five (pp. 173–201)focuses upon the nature, content, and implications of the early writings, doctrinalperspectives, and claims of the Bab as often cryptically set out in such works as theTafsir Sura Yusuf or Qayyum al-asma’ (mid-1844) and select other early works listedin the Kitab al-fihrist (written June 1845). Here, several things need correcting orupdating, including, perhaps, the alleged extended dating of the (mid-1844)Qayyum al-asma’ (see esp. pp. 173–175, cf. p. 203 n. 2) and the confused issue ofthe relationships between the Kitab al-fihrist, the Sahifa-yi radawiyya (its openingsection being the Khutba dhikriyya in 14 sections) and the Risala-yi dhahabiyya (seepp. 181–182 and Sources, 50ff; App. 4, p. 207). Good, although selective, use ismade of manuscripts of the Bab’s chronologically and doctrinally seminal(though complex and neglected) Khutba ‘written in Jidda’ (p. 182). What is saidby MacEoin about the still unpublished, but now partly available, Kitab al-ruh(Book of the Spirit) and the now printed (in Afnan` Ahd-ia`la ) Khasa’il-i sab`a(Seven Directives) also requires considerable revision. Chapter five ends with anexcellent and detailed summation of the multi-faceted early claims of the Bab.The interplay of his frequent, simultaneous voicing low-level and high theophano-logical claims seems more complex than MacEoin allows.The final chapter is titled ‘The Babi Dàwa [Mission] among the Shaykhis and the

Break with Shaykhism.’ It contains details about the Babi presence in Karbala,incorporating a useful consideration of the person and role of Fatima Baraghani(d. 1852), the famous and only female ‘Letter of the Living,’ poet, erudite scholar,and Babi martyr better known as ‘Qurrat al-`Ayn’ (‘Solace of the Eyes’) andTahira (‘The Pure One’). Her increasingly radical charismatic role as head of theKarbala-based Babi Qurratiyya had a legitimacy confirmed by the Bab himself(pp. 232–234). From the summer of 1846 her faction blazed a trail for the abrogationof the Islamic shari`a (see pp. 214–218, 228ff).Bypassing further details about the polymathic Karim Khan Kirmani, his doc-

trinal perspectives and his gaining the support of the Babi apostate Mulla JavadVilyani (a maternal cousin of Tahira) (see also Part II, pp. 308–313), we may noteMacEoin’s discussion of the existence of six or more of Kirmani’s virulent Arabicand Persian anti-Babi polemical works in which the Bab is declared a kafir(infidel) who claimed illicit wahy (divine inspiration) and acted outside thebounds of the Islamic shari`a (law) (pp. 218–227). A final section, ‘The Babi Rejec-tion of Shaykhism,’ examines how the Bab gradually differentiated his emergentreligion from that of the first two Shaykhi leaders, the two ‘previous gates’whom he continued to both respect and transcend. He yet condemned in nouncertain terms their followers and the Shaykhism of Karim Khan Kirmani(pp. 246–249).The first part of the Messiah of Shiraz and associated work has established

MacEoin as the key Western authority on Shaykhism after Henri Corbin (d.1978). This is confirmed by reprints in part two of many of his major articles onShaykhism from the Encyclopedia of Islam (= EI2; 2nd ed. 1954–2005) and the stillongoing (since 1982) Yarshater (et al., ed.) Encyclopedia Iranica (= EIr., see esp.

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pp. 559–645). No one with an interest in Twelver Shìism and its Shaykhi manifes-tations can ignore MacEoin’s work in this field.Entitled ‘Reflections on Babism and Shaykhism,’ the massive second part of The

Messiah of Shiraz (pp. 253–738) reprints nine lengthy and valuable essays and manyof MacEoin’s contributions to EI2 and EIr (see pp. 559–647), along with a full trans-lation of the exordium and first two vahids (sections) of the difficult and importantBayan-i farsi (Persian Bayan) of the Bab (pp. 659–704). A lengthy and almost com-plete bibliography of MacEoin’s contributions to the field of Babi and Baha’istudies along with other pertinent materials by others fills more than 30 densepages (pp. 705–738).Only a few succinct comments can be made on the form and content of select

articles within part two of MacEoin’s magnum opus. Especially foundational forBabi doctrinal studies is the article on ‘The Babi Concept of Holy War,’ which tosome degree balances the popular notion that the Bab had nothing to do withjihad (pp. 451–493). Foundational also is ‘Nineteenth Century Babi Talismans’(pp. 537–557) which brilliantly clarifies aspects of the `ilm al-huruf (`science of theletters’) and other esoteric aspects of the thought of the Bab. This latter articlecontains scattered errors such as the description of what the Bab says in hisKhasa’il-i sab`a (Seven Directives) about talismans, and so on. In this latter article,inadequate use is made of the Asrar-i Qasimi, an important Persian esoteric com-pendium of Kamal al-Din Husayn Sabzivari, Vàiz Kashifi (d. 1504). Absent alsois reference to the Bab’s Khutba `ilm al-huruf and other important associated writingssuch as those of Sayyid Jaf`ar ibn Abi Ishaq Kashfi (d. 1851). The probable PersianJewish background to aspects of the Bab’s complex talismanry is not taken up.Unfortunate textual errors (e.g., ‘Oeeultation’ for Occultation [p. 259 n. 21]) evi-

dencing lack of adequate proof-reading crop up quite frequently, including theerroneous (‘search and replace’) insertion of (the name) Bāb within miscellaneouswords containing its three successive letters (`bab’), especially the word probably(p. 137 as well as pp. 181, 186, 188 n. 211–212, and others) and, for example,ArBābīlī [sic.] for Ardabīlī (p. 204). Errors of transliteration are relatively few,examples being al-samat and not al-simat (in Sharh Du`a al-simat [p. 111]) and hurqalyafor hūrqalyā / hawaqalyā (not that these are anything but speculative, bowdlerizedtransliterations [pp. 98, 541, 615, and so on]). MacEoin’s use of Shirazi (and otherplace of origin or residence designations) for the Bab and other prominent Babis(e.g., Barfurushi =Mirza Muhammad `Ali Quddus) can be confusing in view ofthe numerous other Babi, Islamic and other individuals with such identifications.In his preface to Messiah of Shiraz, MacEoin more or less invites the reader to

believe that he is almost the khatam (‘seal’) of Shaykhi and Babi studies. The impli-cation is that little or nothing of value in the field has or could be written. Thisshows him to be out of touch and unappreciative of new work in this still develop-ing field with its immense primary, secondary, and tertiary source materials, manyof which remain unstudied, undiscovered, or unpublished. At this stage of the fastevolving field of Babi and Baha’i studies, MacEoin certainly does not have the lastword in either Shaykhi or Babi-Baha’i studies. Yet hisMessiah of Shirazwill for sometime to come be an indispensable addition to any library claiming comprehensive-ness in the fields of Iranian, Shi`i-Shaykhi and Babi-Baha’i studies. Compared toMacEoin’s work, non-specialist standards have declined when one finds currentwriters giving the name of the Bab incorrectly (e.g., Garthwaite, The Persians[2005, p. 195]) or who present garbled accounts of the Babi-Baha’i history in

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major reference works (e.g., the entry `Babism’ by Gavin Picken in the 2008 Ency-clopedia of Islamic Civilization and Religion edited by Ian Richard Netton).

Stephen N. LambdenUniversity of California, Merced (USA)

E-mail: slambden@ucmerced.edu© 2011, Stephen N. Lambden

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2011.584179

Religion and the Critical Mind: a Journey for Seekers, Doubters, and theCurious, by Anton K. Jacobs, Lexington Books: Lanham, MD, 2010, viii + 211pp.ISBN 978 0739 14774 0, US$65.00 (hardback)

The title of this book is well chosen. In these pages, Anton K. Jacobs, a Sociologyscholar but also an ordained Protestant minister who has remained in the pastoralministry, invites the contemporary seekers, doubters, and the curious to consideralong with him the possibilities for religious belief and commitment. In thisprocess, above all else, Jacobs is most careful to respect the fact that contemporaryseekers, doubters, and such people have minds, critical and educated minds, and itis within this context that he presents his ideas. In some ways, one is reminded ofSchleiermacher’s attempts to address the ‘cultured despisers’ of religion in the 19th

century. However, Jacobs recognizes that in our time, among the educated sector ofsociety, the default position is not so much to despise religion as it is somewherebetween tolerant curiosity and indifference. Jacob’s aim is to fan the spark ofcuriosity.The book consists of 12 well-conceived chapters, each of a length meant to be

read in one sitting. The language and erudition is about the level of a goodchurch sermon or undergraduate course lecture (which I suspect most or all ofthese chapters were at one point or another). This is wise; while covering anenormity of scholarship, it remains accessible throughout to readers who are notreligious specialists, without ever a hint of pedantry or condescension. Lecturersin Religion and Social Sciences looking for a textbook should in particular takenotice of Jacobs’s book.The unitary theme of Jacobs’s approach is that of religious ‘criticism.’ While we

think of religious criticism as a rather modern field, Jacobs highlights that it hasbeen going on for at least as long as we have record. Although he does focusmainly on 18th, 19th and 20th-century criticism, he employs four full chapters toset the stage. He does this by highlighting religious ‘dissenters’ from the biblicalprophets on up through to radical reformers and free thinkers of the continentaland English Reformations. Of course, the early ‘critics’ of religion saw themselvesas inveighing against ‘false’ religion rather than presenting criticism of religion ingeneral. Nevertheless, as Jacobs presents them with his keen sociologicallytrained eye, we see that in the criticisms against the fallacies of the establishedreligion in their particular historical contexts, these dissenters were voicingoppositional issues similar to those that appear later in the modern era.The heart of this book is found in chapters five through eleven, in which Jacobs

lays out the views of some of the most influential modern critics of religion.Voltaire, Marx, Nietzsche, Durkheim, Freud, and Russell are given a chapter each,

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while Chapter 11 presents more generally the epistemic cacophony concerning reli-gion endemic to the ‘postmodern turn.’ The chapters focused on individual critics aremasterpieces of writing, presenting learned snapshots of the life and thought of each,highlighting the elements of their writings most focused on the criticism of religion,but bringing in just enough of each writer’s broader theories and ideas to give thiscriticism context and to make clear that the criticism of religion is not isolated, butpart of a more far-reaching criticism of human social structures and social relation-ships in general. In my view, this is especially worthy in our time, because somuch of the more popular religious criticism we have been treated to lately invarious media associated with the ‘new atheism’ has been so narrowly focus onthe purely intellectual question of the ‘existence of God,’ as if that is what onwhich a well-rounded criticism hinges. This dovetails neatly with the ‘crossfire,’back-and-forth, sound-bite argumentation style so loved and privileged currentlyin the media. But in contrast, as Jacobs’s book chapters make clear by comparison,this narrow intellectual focus on God’s ‘existence’ is very truncated, intellectuallypoverty-stricken, and at least ten steps backward from the full and well-roundedcriticism of the past two centuries.As noted, the chapters on Voltaire through Russell are strong and useful. In each

case Jacobs’s readings are balanced and fair, taking note of the various conflictingviews of other interpreters where needed without losing sight of the larger picture.Each chapter ends with a short page or two in which Jacobs suggests how, in hisevaluation, we can profit from acquaintance with the criticism of each of thesewhile at the same time pointing to places in which a religious interpretation oflife might conflict with certain of their key assumptions. In other words, whilenever blunting the critical edge each of these writers present in relation to theircriticism of religion, Jacobs always emphasizes what we can learn from each andhow acquaintance with each will help us clear away the idols of our own time.The chapter on the postmodern turn does an adequate job of outlining the wildly

disparate character of the religious scene today, but in my view it is less successfulthan the previous chapters. I think this is mainly because he chose to highlight thesundry ‘skirmishes’ of religion in our time, rather than focus on any particular con-temporary writers. Perhaps this was indeed the best way to pack an enormouslycomplex set of ideas into a short chapter, but nevertheless it does not comeacross as containing intellectual ‘heft’ equal to the preceding chapters. In his finalchapter, Jacobs comes around to making his own ‘case for faith and religion.’Here he emphasizes that we do have, as human beings, a sense of the sacred, anawe in face of the incomprehensible, and are drawn to matters of ultimateconcern. Granted, we may not feel these things in exactly the same measure, andwe are prone to understand and interpret these deep longings differently. Butmost of us would not be satisfied to simply have these deep longings erased andextinguished. They are in large measure the basis on which we feel ourselves sub-jectively as ‘human.’ This far I think Jacobs brings most of his curious seekers anddoubters. He may begin to lose a few as he then moves to speak of religion as avaluable social institution that, at its best, emerges from and mutually supportshuman community, which becomes itself the sustainer of faith and the pathwayof living life religiously in our time (here Jacobs-the-Durkheim-scholar is mostclearly on display!).This book would be easy to dismiss using the shibboleths of popular academia

today. It is a piece of writing produced by a privileged and educated white

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Western male, mainly explicating the thought and ideas of other privileged andeducated white Western males, pretending to investigate ‘religion,’ all the whileremaining largely within the confines of Euro-American Protestant Christianity. Ihave no doubt that some reviews of this book will not reach much farther thanthis facile criticism. I want to emphasize here, however, that this would be agrave mistake and a lost opportunity. First of all, Jacobs himself (a sociologist,after all) is explicitly aware of his ‘place’ in terms of the ongoing conversationabout religion in our society. He discusses this specifically in his introductorymaterial and poses himself the most critical questions concerning his perspective.Yet he finally concludes that, after all, he has only his own perspective to offer.The real sham would be for him to pose as something other than he is. He doesnot expect to dominate the conversation, he has no intention of drowning outother voices, he has every desire to listen to and learn from the voices of others.In a significant way, therefore, this book is an important social artifact. This book

lays out neatly and clearly the current perspective of a sincere American mainlineProtestant minister of the early 21st century, who has watched and gracefullyaccepted the decline of influence and social power of his ‘kind’ in support of theincreasing influence and social power of others. He lays out his perspective, hiscredo, with humility and grace. And what we find there is a statement of faithand religious commitment that is gentle, kind, open-minded, concerned withpeace and social justice, deeply spiritual, learned without undue display, passio-nate, and in the very best sense a fine representative of two centuries of Christian‘tenderizing’of the violently savage Euro soul and spirit, which I fear lay just underthe surface of much of our civilized societies. If we as a species are ever to getbeyond the evolutionary impasse that apparently blocks us now (that is, if ourmoral sensitivity begins to keep pace with our technological instruments ofdestruction, as Einstein might have put it – and there is certainly no guarantee ofthis) our species needs a rapid multiplication of voices such as Jacobs’s, andthese especially couched in the language best understood by those of his own(and my own) socioeconomic class.In closing, I would like to raise one issue of significant concern. It does seem to me

that in formulating his understanding of the human religious urge, Jacobs (followingDurkheim) downplays to the point of ignoring the key role of deep-seated anxietyas a root motivator in just about every social activity, including especially religion.We are a fundamentally nervous and anxious species. The cognitive ability to thinkabstractly, combined with at least as much of a ‘survival instinct’ as any other livingspecies, leaves us potentially vulnerable to a more or less constant highly arousedphysical state of fight/freeze/flight. As such a constant state of high stress wouldquickly overwhelm our animal nervous system, we have had to develop myriadcoping mechanisms to calm ourselves and keep an awareness of our extreme vulner-ability out of immediate consciousness. Thus our species has a highly developed‘unconscious’ mind largely composed of the ‘unacceptable/threatening’ material –mainly actual and symbolic reminders of our weakness, vulnerability, animality,mortality and death – being kept from consciousness by the many psychological‘defense’mechanisms. Likewise, the central function of most of our social institutionsas well is clearly that of bestowing upon us a sense of meaning; that we are significantactors in a consequential pageant of transcending (sacred) importance, and thuskeeping this same ‘unconscious’ material at bay. This general coping function ofsocial institutions is on display in religion par excellence.

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Although Jacobs approaches this recognition in his chapters on Nietzsche andFreud, he never faces it directly and explicitly. Without in any way detractingfrom the value of what Jacobs does have to say, my sense is that without a ground-ing in this critical social psychological perspective, he risks exhibiting the anemia of‘liberal’ philosophy in general: an inability to fundamentally account for theviciousness of human beings, not in purposely perpetrating evil, but exactly indefending their own most sacred values, values which to an ‘outsider’ oftenwould appear to obviously and directly contradict the vicious behavior employedin their defense. Yes, human viciousness is largely ‘irrational,’ and if we are tounderstand and overcome it, this will surely entail replacing irrationality withrationality (‘… where Id was, let Ego be …’). But I am not at all convinced thatthis recognition gets at any more than the very surface of human viciousness.For there is undoubtedly a potentially ferocious ‘worm at the core’of human ration-ality, which can never be underestimated, even as we invite ourselves and others to‘come, let us reason together.’ More traditional theologies had a category that atleast pointed in the right direction: the taint of Original Sin. In rejecting thatview, modern theologies often overlook something very important tenaciouslyholed up in this doctrine that we ignore too easily and at our own peril.

Daniel LiechtyIllinois State University (USA)

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

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2011.584180

Gender andMission Encounters in Korea: NewWomen, OldWays, by HyaeweolChoi, University of California Press: Berkeley, 2009, 296pp. ISBN 978 0 520 09869 5,US$29.95 (paperback)

Hyaeweol Choi’s Gender and Mission Encounters in Korea is an impressive study ofthe competing narratives that shaped ‘modern womanhood’ in Korea in the late19th and early 20th century. In seven chapters, this work analyses the efforts ofAmerican Protestant missionary women, Korean women, and Korean intellectualsto define the direction and meaning of female advancement in Korea. This fascinat-ing historical narrative reveals the different motivations and circumstances that ledeach group to support national women’s education in the midst of Korea’sformation as a modern nation-state and encroaching Japanese colonialism.Choi focuses most of her study on the period between 1885 and 1910, beginning

with the arrival of American female missionaries up to Korea’s colonization byJapan. She is able to navigate complex relationships between Americans andKoreans because she draws from a variety of English and Korean languagesources, including accounts of Korean converts to Protestantism, the Koreanpress, missionary reports, and missionary fiction. Gender is the key analyticalconcept of this work, which is used to reveal the tensions between Victorian andConfucian gender norms, as well as between the domestic and public roles forwomen within Christianity itself. Choi claims that centering the conversation ongender also serves as an important intervention in Korean historiography, which

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has been primarily male-focused and has only recently included the burgeoningfield of Korean gender studies (p. x).As the title suggests, this is a story of multiple mission encounters. In addition to

recognizing the differences between Methodist and Presbyterian missionaryexperiences, she explores four main groups with whom the female missionariesinteracted: (1) Korean female converts; (2) American missionary men; (3) Koreanmale nationalists; and (4) the New Korean Women of the 1920s and 30s. Eachencounter enriches the portrayal of the ‘mission field’ and elaborates the variousdiscourses that shaped Korean modernity and gender norms.Choi’s description of the first encounter, between missionary women and female

converts, complicates the popular view that American Protestant missionariesbrought ‘modern womanhood’ to Korean women. This view – supported in scholar-ship and missionary literature – portrays American missionaries as the liberators ofKorean women from Confucian gender norms (p. 2). Significantly, Choi’s account ofKorean women’s active participation in Christianity challenges their portrayal aspassive recipients of Western ideology. Some Korean women took advantage ofthe new opportunities to do mission work by becoming Bible women, who touredthe country spreading Christian literature and Bible instruction. Training tobecome Bible women was particularly appealing because it offered literacy skills,leadership roles, social interactions, and adventure (p. 65).In addition to opportunities, conversions also came with challenges. Korean

Christian women who attended Christian services, enrolled in mission schools,or became Bible women endured strong disapproval from family and neighborswho remained committed to the tradition of women’s seclusion. The pull theyexperienced between cultural customs and missionary expectations was especiallystrong regarding issues of marriage. While some missionaries had accommodatedKorean customs regarding dress and hygiene in order to gain local support, mostwould not tolerate local customs of concubinage and arranged child marriage.Arranged marriages threatened the work of the mission schools because familiesoften took betrothed girls out of school – and therefore out of the reach of themissionaries – and paired them with non-Christian men. Some missionariesresponded to this situation by offering scholarships to young girls who were setto be married, hoping that the financial reward would entice them to continuetheir Christian education and, eventually, to marry Christian men (p. 78).Choi further complicates the missionary-brought-modernity paradigm through

a close analysis of the model of womanhood that Christians actually taught.While missionaries introduced progressive opportunities to previously secludedwomen, including formal education, they did so for a conservative goal: to createbetter wives and mothers for Christian homes. This model of modern womanhoodwas decidedly different than the models promoted by secular feminists. It wasforged through missionary interactions with Korean women – who were viewedas pre-modern – and upheld Victorian Protestant ideals, which situated patriarchalfamilies, educated motherhood, and domestic virtues as the foundations of civi-lized Christian nations. The tension between domestic ideals and public acts oflearning and teaching Christianity was nowhere more evident than the lives ofthe missionary women in Korea.The second encounter, between missionary women and missionary men, was

shaped by the patriarchal hierarchy of the missions. Female missionaries reliedupon ‘womanly politics’ to get things done without stepping on the toes of male

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missionaries (p. 59). This included portraying themselves as fragile, attributingsuccesses to God, and working primarily within the separate realm of ‘women’swork for women.’ While male missionary authorities bemoaned the fact thatmale missionaries were in the minority, they recognized the necessity of femalemissionaries to gain access to half of the Korean population in a society thatsecluded middle-class and affluent women from the public sphere. They alsorelied upon the female missionaries to staff the educational institutions thatbecame central to the mission movement in Korea.The third encounter, between missionary women and Korean nationalists, was

framed by each group’s common interest in female education. While the mission-aries promoted female education to, among other goals, lift Korean women outof heathendom, nationalists endorsed female education because they believedthat it would contribute to modernization and national strength in the face ofJapanese colonization. The teaching of the written Korean language was ofcentral importance to both parties. As a simple language, it assisted the Christiangoal of spreading the Gospel to those without advanced education. The national-ists, on the other hand, promoted it to counter Chinese as the language of choicefor educated Koreans, empowering a Korean ‘linguistic nationalism’ (p. 113).Perhaps the most important factor underlying the cooperation between mission-aries and nationalists was the fact that America was not aligned with the colonialpower of the region, Japan. American mission schools could therefore be endorsedas tools for Korean nationalism.The fourth and last major encounter, between missionary women and the first

generation of New Korean Women, began in the 1920s. New Women in Koreaemerged from the education of the mission schools, but they varied in theircontinued commitments to Christianity and Christian gender norms. Some ofthose who sounded the call for gender equality and actively engaged in careersand public leadership roles rejected Christianity for its patriarchy and domesticideals. They utilized the more progressive ideals and skills provided by themissionaries to pursue secular aims. In contrast, some of the New Women whoremained dedicated to Christianity rose to be leaders in Korea’s growing numberof Christian organizations, including the Korean YWCA (p. 149).This study makes significant contributions to several areas of scholarly interest.

Building upon Dana L. Robert’s American Women in Mission (Macon, GA, MercerUniversity Press, 1997), Choi’s work provides a vivid case study of Americanwomen’s missionary thought and practice. In a compelling chapter, she usesmissionary fiction to explore the diverse ways that missionaries imagined theKorean women that they encountered. Because missionary fiction was theprimary way that most Americans at home learned about the mission fields andforeign cultures, these images were significant for their transnational currency.This work also goes a step beyond Robert’s seminal study by including thevoices of Koreans, although further sources are needed for a more completeunderstanding of the experience of Korean Bible women.This book also enriches the growing literature on Korean Protestantism. It pro-

vides a solid history of the early Methodist and Presbyterian missions, includinginstitution building, alliances, and points of cultural contact. Choi’s work hints atthe 20th-century shift from missionary Christianity to Korean-led Christianity,which is taken up in Timothy S. Lee’s book on Korean evangelical revivals, BornAgain: Evangelicalism in Korea (Honolulu, University of Hawai’i Press, 2010).

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Choi’s inclusion of early Korean foreign-mission work foreshadows anotherimportant development in Korean Protestantism, the ‘reverse mission trend,’which is currently being explored by scholars such as Rebecca Y. Kim.Lastly, this work should be praised for addressing many concerns raised by

previous studies of mission history and global Christianity. These concernsincluded flat portraits of missionaries, the silencing of locals’ voices and agency,inattention to the wider social context of the mission encounter, and inattentionto gender issues. Choi makes great strides in these areas with her detailed attentionto dynamic interactions and her multiple layers of analysis.However, it is a mistake to think that this book is of use only to those interested in

mission history, global Christianity, or Korea. I consider this work pertinent forgeneral scholars of American religion, who often gesture to the greater significanceof American religion but rarely trace their topics beyond the boundaries of theUnited States. By including this research in seminars and published conversationson American religion, scholars can contribute to a more complicated understand-ing of the influence of American religion in other countries, including the processesof its exchanges and the results of its partial successes and failures.

Kristy L. SlominskiUniversity of California, Santa Barbara (USA)

E-mail: slominski@umail.ucsb.edu© 2011, Kristy L. Slominski

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2011.590108

Der Koran als Text der Spätantike. Ein europäischer Zugang, by AngelikaNeuwirth, Verlag der Weltreligionen: Berlin, 2010, 859 pp. ISBN 978 3 458 71026 4,€39.90 (hbk)

The contemporary popular media’s treatment of the Qur’an often seems to be sen-sationalist and derogatory. Responsible scholars continue to labour at providingmore accurate descriptions and meaningful analyses of the text that can serve tohelp counter the polemical tone of these public discussions. No one has workedharder at that in a more consistent and more perceptive manner than AngelikaNeuwirth, Professor of Arabic at the Freie Universität Berlin. Over the pastthirty-five years, Neuwirth has published scores of articles in German and increas-ingly in English, treating structural, thematic and historical issues related to theQur’an. Deeply informed by biblical studies, she has evolved her own scholarlypicture of the development and emergence of the Qur’an within its historicalcontext that is carefully enunciated and abundantly documented in her writings.That is not to say that all scholars are totally convinced by her theories (or thatthe picture would be acceptable to Muslims unacquainted with academicapproaches to Scripture), but the evidence of immense learning and perceptivereading of the Qur’an is evident throughout her work. Neuwirth has also gatheredaround herself a team of young scholars within some well-funded research projects(Corpus Coranicum – Textdokumentation und historisch-kritischer Kommentarzum Koran; see http://koran.bbaw.de/) that truly are attempting to set theagenda of Qur’anic studies for the next generation. Evidence of this may be seenin the impressive collection of essays that appeared recently in Angelika Neuwirth,

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Nicolai Sinai and Michael Marx (eds), The Qur’ān in Context. Historical and LiteraryInvestigations into the Qur’ānic Milieu (Leiden, Brill, 2010).The current book is not only a summary of Neuwirth’s work up to this point

(some sections of it will be familiar to readers of her earlier writings); it is alsopositioned as an introduction to one of the major projects within her researchagenda, a detailed commentary on the Qur’an that will place the text in thehistorical and cultural context of Late Antique society (a terminology that hasquickly gained acceptance in the English-speaking Islamic Studies world especiallyin the wake of Peter Brown’s work). This book thus serves to whet our appetite forwhat will follow, but, as a scholarly tome on its own, it is a major enunciation of ascholarly approach to the Qur’an, unrivalled by any other work that has appearedfor probably the past 100 years, at least in its overall scope, analytical depth, unifiedvision and intellectual rigour.Neuwirth’s book is structured with a substantial introduction setting out the

basic dimensions of the Qur’an, followed by thirteen chapters dealing with the fun-damentals of studying the Qur’an and its emergence. History, and not Theology,governs the topics covered, clearly distinguishing it from other contemporaryand highly influential classic works of Quranic Studies, such as those of FazlurRahman, Major Themes of the Qur’an (Minneapolis, Bibliotheca Islamica, 1980)and Toshihiko Izutsu, Ethico-Religious Concepts of the Qur’ān (Montreal, McGill Uni-versity Press, 1966). In the first chapter, methodological issues are discussed, cover-ing the major trends and controversies of recent decades. Next, the Qur’an itself istreated through the theme of ‘writing’ and the understanding of revelationsuggested by that idea: key indicators of the status of the text as ‘scripture’, asthe Qur’an itself argues. Then, the nature of history in the Qur’an in the sense ofhow the text refers to the past and what it tells us about history is discussed. Thehistory of actual text is then raised in Chapter four, emphasising a basic theme ofNeuwirth’s work in which she distinguishes between the development of theQur’an during Muhammad’s lifetime and the process of redaction after Muham-mad’s death. The historical theme of inner-Qur’anic development then flows intoChapter five with an overview of the structure of the individual chapters of theQur’an and their chronological ordering. The focus of Chapter six is on theliturgical and cultic function of the text, a central thesis for Neuwirth’s conceptionof the development of the Qur’an in the process of the formation of the Muslimcommunity. From there, the next three chapters deal in more detail with thestages that can be observed in the Qur’an of the process of community buildingduring the earliest period in Mecca, in the (so-called) middle and late Meccanperiods, and then in Medina. Next, Chapter ten deals with the relationshipbetween the Qur’an and the Bible, with some more specific aspects – Noah,Abraham and Moses – dealt with in the following chapter. The last two chaptersthen treat the relationship between the Qur’an and poetry (and the image of thepoet) and the rhetorical perspective and impact of the text.It is certainly possible to see in this book the progression of scholarly thinking that

commenced with Neuwirth’s earliest major work, Studien zur Komposition der mekka-nischen Suren (Berlin, de Gruyter, 1981 [2nd ed. 2007]). A critical issue lingers here,however, as in her earlier work (and as Neuwirth acknowledges on p. 108), aboutthe ability to draw historical conclusions from observations of style. The logic ofthe historical reconstruction can only be intuitive although, arguably, those intuitionsmight be confirmed by the observation of consistent repetition of patterns. Such is

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also the argument of the recent article by Behnam Sadeghi, ‘The Chronology of theQur’ān: a Stylometric Research Program’ (Arabica 58 [2011]: 210–299), whichattempts to put the analysis of chronology on a ‘scientific’ basis by using the prin-ciples of stylometrics. Neuwirth’s approach is less systematic than Sadeghi’s use ofwhat he calls the ‘criterion of concurrent smoothness’ to produce a seven-phasechronological progression through which he ‘examine[s] whether markers of styleother than verse length also vary in a smooth fashion’ (p. 219) as corroborativeelements for the division of the text into historical segments. For Neuwirth, on theother hand, the continued employment of the four-fold division popularised inthe 19th-century work of Theodor Nöldeke is confirmed by factors that focus onthe development of the community in terms of thematic treatments, cultic orientationand audience considerations, as well as form.Neuwirth pays little attention to the Muslim discipline of Qur’an interpretation,

acknowledging it primarily for what it can provide in terms of material that can behelpful in understanding the later history of the text and similar marginalia. Ofcourse, that does not mean that her work is not indebted to the Muslim traditionbut such is certainly not the focus of her analysis (and, in fact, she isolates the emer-gence of the academic study of the Muslim commentarial tradition rather than theQur’an itself as one of the critical failings of the discipline). However, the difficultquestion of the extent to which modern philology can escape the assumptions ofthe Muslim tradition remains a contentious one and a real problem for Neuwirth’sapproach: any study of the Qur’an is indebted to the great lexicographers andgrammarians of classical Muslim times and that simply cannot be avoided. Themanner in which the work of those ancient specialists in language conveys layersof Muslim dogma within it has been documented on many occasions and thatfact continues to provide a significant stumbling block to any effort to read theQur’an purely within its historical context of origination and development.Two major points, embedded in the contents and reflected in the full title of the

book, deserve comment. One is, of course, the viewing of the text as a manifestationof the fullest sense of the Late Antique context. This approach to the Qur’an has cer-tainly become more widespread in recent decades, as a much broader and dynamicrelationship between the text and its world has become accepted. Gone from scho-larly works are the reductive catalogues of passages in the Qur’an that reflect thetext of the Bible or even of later Jewish and Christian writings. Rather, theQur’an is understood as an emanation of a particular and unique theological andrhetorical expression within a broadly conceived cultural and social context. Thisapproach has reinvigorated the field of study and Neuwirth’s work is, to a signifi-cant extent, responsible for that accomplishment. This book is the first effort to givean integrated overview of what the approach really means and looks like.The other aspect that needs comment is contained in the subtitle, ‘a European

approach’, although that must be understood as linked directly to the ‘LateAntique’ context. Neuwirth argues that the contemporary popular attitude toIslam as a whole – situated as the ‘other’ of European civilisation – must be coun-tered by an acknowledgement of the integral nature of Islam and Muslims within ashared cultural heritage of the Late Antique period of the Mediterranean world.The failure of scholars to have approached the Qur’an in the same criticalmanner as they have biblical texts manifests the shortcoming of the discipline asit stands today, especially the absence of following through on the insights of itsfounder figures such as Abraham Geiger. As a result of that failure, the status of

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the Qur’an and Islam as outside the conceptual world of European civilisation hasimplicitly been reaffirmed. The question of what marks the approach of this bookas particularly ‘European’, then, is embedded within these methodological obser-vations. The revolution in Quranic Studies spurred by English advances in the1970s was, for Neuwirth, a destructive act, moving attention away from closeanalysis of the text of the Qur’an itself. The American approach of the (complacent)irenic attitude only cemented the lack of critical engagement. There is, then, inNeuwirth’s appeal to a European approach, a strong sense of the tradition ofGerman philology which will save the day for scholarship while also fostering amore constructive attitude towards Islam and Muslims. Ironically, perhaps, thebiggest challenge within the contemporary European scholarly communitydevoted to the study of the Qur’an comes from within and this gives Neuwirth’stitle its particular political punch: the attempts by some German academics whoare marginal to the discipline to propound theories that stand well outside estab-lished trends and who then gain media attention for their efforts in a mannerthat encourages fear-mongering about Muslims in Europe by talk of ancient con-spiracies and fabricated histories (see pp. 96–104 on Lüling, Luxenberg, Ohligand others, along with Neuwirth’s response).Overall there is no doubt that this book represents an impressive expression of

the state of the art in the scholarly study of the Qur’an. It is also worthy of notethat among the many remarkable elements in this book is its extensive bibli-ography, detailed not only on academic studies of the Qur’an but also full ofrelated works that show the breadth of Neuwirth’s reading and also shouldserve to encourage all those interested in the Qur’an to broaden their intellectualhorizons. An English translation of this book would allow the work to haveaccess to the significantly expanded audience it clearly deserves.

Andrew RippinUniversity of Victoria (Canada)

E-mail: arippin@uvic.ca© 2011, Andrew Rippin

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2011.592090

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