New Books on “Fieldnotes in the Critical Study of Religion: Revisiting Classical Theorists”

Posted on by Richard Newton
Fieldnotes in the Critical Study of Religion: Revisiting Classical Theorists, edited by Vaia Touna & Richard Newton. Published by Bloomsbury. Part of the Critiquing Religion: Discourse, Culture, Power Series. The spine is a teal color and the cover design is a purple marble.

I had the pleasure of joining my Alabama “frolleague” and co-editor, Dr. Vaia Touna, on the New Books Network podcast to discuss our volume, Fieldnotes in the Critical Study of Religion: Revisiting Classical Theorists (Bloomsbury, 2023). Jacob Barrett, PhD student in University of North Carolina (and Alabama Religion in Culture, MA alum), hosted the conversation and did a fantastic job.

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Here’s a snippet about the book and the discussion.

Fieldnotes in the Critical Study of Religion: Revisiting Classical Theorists (Bloomsbury, 2023) introduces students to the so-called classics of the field from the 19th and 20th centuries, whilst challenging readers to apply a critical lens. Instead of representing scholars and their works as virtually timeless, each contributor provides sufficient background on the classic work in question so that readers not only understand its novelty and place in its own time, but are able to arrive at a critical understanding of whether its approach to studying religion continues to be useful to them today. Scholars discussed include Muller, James, Freud and Eliade. This volume therefore offers a novel way into writing both a history and ethnography of the discipline, helping readers to see how it has changed and inviting them to consider what-if anything-endures and thereby unites these diverse authors into a common field.

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I think Jacob does a fantastic job of “reading around” the book, taking into consideration the motivations, contexts, and stakes of the book. One thing his questions helped me realize is how my own view of the volume has changed. In the initial stages of putting it together, it was easy for me to think about it in terms of the classical theorists covered—the Ottos, the Jungs, the Freuds, the Eliades, etc. On this side of publication, I honestly have a hard time remembering which classical theorists we included or didn’t include because they aren’t really the focal point of the book. The action is happening around what contemporary scholars do with the classical legacy. This is a book that includes the brilliance of theorists like Russell McCutcheon, Aaron Hughes, Brent Nongbri, Emily Clark, Mitsutoshi Horii, Christopher M. Jones, Krista Dalton, Edith Szanto, Tenzan Eaghll, Martha Smith Roberts, Lauren Griffin, Brett Esaki, Joseph Winters, and Andrew Tobolowsky.

When I consider all the people involved in making this volume come together, I can’t help but get excited about the kind of discussions that can take place around theorizing religion with the classics. The book’s not about fidelity to the field’s history; it’s about telling and tilling it in a critical way. These scholars help us to do that in a promising way. I hope you’ll enjoy the book and the conversation.

Join the conversation!