THEORY AND METHODS EXAM

Examiner: Prof. Anne Monius

Seth Powell

PART 1: HISTORIOGRAPHY
The first section of this exam provides a historical survey of scholarship concerning the
discipline, theory, and practice of history, particularly in relation to the study of religion. What
major questions, debates, and problems have animated the study of history, especially
following the so-called linguistic turn? How can we best understand the vexed relationship
between historians, their historical materials, and the historical narratives they write? As a
category rooted in western and European epistemologies, how might the concept and practice
of history dier within non-western contexts? Finally, what are the major challenges and
promises facing the contemporary scholar in writing a history of religion, and of medieval
South Asian religious traditions in particular?

Assmann, Jan. 1997. Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Barthes, Roland. 1981. The Discourse of History: With an Introduction by Stephen

Bann. Comparative Criticism 3 (January): 3.

Braudel, Fernand. 1980. On History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Breisach, Ernst. 1994. Historiography: Ancient, Medieval & Modern. 2nd ed. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.

Chartier, Roger. 1994. The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe Between
the Fourteenth and the Eighteenth Centuries. Translated by Lydia G. Cochrane.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

. 1997. On the Edge of the Cli: History, Language and Practices. JHU Press.

Collingwood, Robin George. 1994 [1946]. The Idea of History. Revised Edition. Oxford,
New York: Oxford University Press.

Eliade, Mircea. 2005 [1954]. The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History.
Translated by Willard R. Trask. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

. 1969. The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.

Eley, Geo. 2005. Is All the World a Text? From Social History to the History of Society
Two Decades Later. In Practicing History: New Directions in Historical Writing after
the Linguistic Turn, edited by Gabrielle M. Spiegel, 3561. Rewriting Histories. New
York, NY: Routledge.
Fulbrook, Mary. 2002. Historical Theory. London; New York: Routledge.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 2004 [1837]. The Philosophy of History. Translated by J.
Sibree. New York: Dover Publications.

Koselleck, Reinhart. 2002. The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing
Concepts. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

LaCapra, Dominick. 1983. Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language.

Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Le Go, Jacques. 1992. History and Memory. European Perspectives. New York: Columbia
University Press.

. 2015. Must We Divide History into Periods? European Perspectives. New York:
Columbia University Press.

Lofton, Kathryn. 2012. Religious History as Religious Studies. Religion 42 (3): 38394.

Ranke, Leopold von. 1885. Universal History: The Oldest Historical Group of Nations and the
Greeks. New York: Harper & Brothers.

Ricur, Paul. 1965. History and Truth. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Spiegel, Gabrielle M. 1997. The Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval
Historiography. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Surkis, Judith. 2012. When Was the Linguistic Turn? A Genealogy. The American
Historical Review 117 (3): 700722.

White, Hayden V. 1975. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century

Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

PART 2: RITUAL AND PRACTICE

The second section of this exam investigates contemporary conversations surrounding the
study of ritual and religious practice. Taking Catherine Bells landmark work as its starting
point, this list examines the following themes and questions: How do scholars define and
delimit the category of ritual, and how might ritual dier from other modes of religious
practice? How can we better understand the relation between ritual theory, prescriptive texts,
and the actual performance of ritual and bodily praxis? How have scholars conceived ritual
dierently across Western and Asian religious complexes? Is the term ritual still a productive
analytic category within the study of religion? And finally, what might the future possibilities
be for thinking ritually within the field of religious studies?

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Asad, Talal. 1993. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity
and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Bell, Catherine M. 1992. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. New York: Oxford University
Press.

. 1997. Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions. New York: Oxford University Press.

. 1998. Performance. In Critical Terms for Religious Studies, edited by Mark C.

Taylor, 20524. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bialecki Jon. 2015. Religion after Religion, Ritual after Ritual. In Companion to
Contemporary Anthropology, edited by S. Coleman , S. Hyatt, A. Kingsolver. London:
Routledge.

Frankiel, Tamar. 2001. Prospects in Ritual Studies. Religion 31 (1): 7587.

Grimes, Ronald L. 2012. Religion, Ritual, and Performance. In Religion, Theatre, and
Performance: Acts of Faith, ed. Lance Gharavi. New York: Routledge, 27-41.

. 2013. The Craft of Ritual Studies. Oxford University Press.

Husken, Ute, and Christiane Brosius, eds. 2012. Ritual Matters: Dynamic Dimensions in
Practice. Routledge [selections].

Hutt, Curtis. 2009. Catherine Bell and Her Davidsonian Critics. Journal of Ritual
Studies 23 (2): 6976.

Lofton, Kathryn. 2010. Piety, Practice, and Ritual. In The Blackwell Companion to
Religion in America, edited by Philip Go. Wiley-Blackwell, 24253.

McClymond, Kathryn T. 2016. Ritual Gone Wrong: What We Learn from Ritual Disruption.
Oxford Ritual Studies. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.

Rappaport, Roy A. 1999. Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. New York:
Cambridge University Press.

Robbins, Joel. 2001. Ritual Communication and Linguistic Ideology: A Reading and
Partial Reformulation of Rappaports Theory of Ritual. Current Anthropology 42 (5):
591614.

Sax, William S. 2010. Ritual and the Problem of Ecacy. In The Problem of Ritual
Ecacy, edited by William. S. Sax, J. Quack, and J. Weinhold. New York: Oxford
University Press, 316.

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Schechner, Richard. 1993. The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance.
Routledge.

Schilbrack, Kevin. 2004. Ritual Metaphysics. Journal of Ritual Studies 18 (1): 7790.

Schilbrack, Kevin, ed. 2004. Thinking through Rituals: Philosophical Perspectives. New
York: Routledge [selections].

Seligman, Adam B., Robert P. Weller, Michael J. Puett, and Bennett Simon. 2008. Ritual
and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity. Oxford; New York: Oxford
University Press.

Tomlinson, Matt. 2014. Ritual Textuality: Pattern and Motion in Performance. Oxford; New
York: Oxford University Press.

PART 3: TWO THEORISTS

The third section of this exam treats the major works of Jonathan Z. Smith and a selection of
the oeuvre of Michel Foucault. In reading Smith, I will examine his key notions of ritual,
taxonomy, map versus territory, history of religions as a discipline, and the utility of the
category of religion itself. Reading Foucault, I will continue to think critically about writing
history, his archeology of knowledge, and examining his notions of the body, discipline, text,
and power. Reading his later lectures, I will consider his understanding of religion, the idea of
technologies of the self, and his hermeneutics of self and subject, to explore if these might
prove useful theoretical tools for conceiving South Asian yogic praxis in my own work.

Jonathan Z. Smith

Smith, Jonathan Z. 1982. Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown. Chicago Studies
in the History of Judaism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

. 1987. To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual. Chicago Studies in the History of
Judaism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

. 1990. Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions
of Late Antiquity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

. 1993. Map Is Not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions. University of

Chicago Press ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

. 2004. Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press.

. 2013. On Teaching Religion: Essays by Jonathan Z. Smith. New York: Oxford

University Press.

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Urban, Hugh B. 2000. Making a Place To Take a Stand: Jonathan Z. Smith and the
Politics and Poetics of Comparison Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 12 (1):
33978.

Michel Foucault

Carrette, Jeremy R. 2000. Foucault and Religion: Spiritual Corporality and Political
Spirituality. London; New York: Routledge.

Foucault, Michel. 1994 [1966]. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences.
Reissue edition. New York: Vintage.

. 2010 [1969]. Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language. Princeton,

NJ: Vintage Books.

. 1971. Nietzsche, Genealogy, History. In Hommage Jean Hyppolite. Paris:

Presses Universitaires de France, 145-72.

. 1988 [1976]. The History of Sexuality. Volume 1. Translated by Robert Hurley. New
York: Vintage Books.

. 1999 [1980]. Religion and Culture. Manchester Studies in Religion, Culture, and
Gender. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

. 2016. About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Lectures at Dartmouth
College, 1980. Translated by Graham Burchell. Chicago; London: The University of
Chicago Press.

. 2005. The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collge de France, 1981-82.
Edited by Frdric Gros. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.

. 1988 [1982]. Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. Edited by
Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton. Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press.

58 Total

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