Not long ago I was telling a music-savvy friend about a new CD I’d heard, the debut offering of a band I thought she’d like. She asked me to categorize the band. “Well, they’re kind of a distorted retro folk-punk rockabilly outfit with a bleak outlook. Oh, and Scottish. They’re good.”
To the music connoisseur, just saying “rock and roll” isn’t enough. That can mean just about anything, from the Sex Pistols to Matchbox 20, so when talking to a connoisseur, you have to define the categories pretty narrowly. I mean, I’ve heard of friendships ending because someone suggested that a punk-rock-loving friend should give Rob Thomas a listen.
I find that I often have to go to similar lengths to describe my scholarly work, as none of the readymade subcategories of my area -- religious studies -- seem to fit my work perfectly. When I’m talking with close friends and colleagues, that isn’t a big problem. We all know where the other is coming from. But inevitably, at a conference or over a meal with a visiting lecturer, I have to face the (dreaded) default academic small-talk opening line, “So, what do you work on?”
While most people I meet can answer that question straightforwardly -- Tibetan Buddhist ritual, Catholics and the civil-rights movement, postmodern Jewish ethics -- my response sometimes changes over the course of an hourlong cocktail reception, and I rarely seem to satisfy whoever asks me.
Part of the problem lies in my field’s own identity crisis. My doctoral diploma says “religious studies” on it, but I teach in a department of “theology.” That difference might seem negligible to some readers -- like the difference between garage rock and post-punk to some listeners -- but religion scholars fight over those labels all the time.
Our field is of its very nature interdisciplinary, united (such as it is) only by a common subject matter. The possible combinations of categories for religion scholars are endless: What religion? What region? What period? What method (historical, sociological, philosophical, etc.)? Do you study texts, artifacts, people? Are you an adherent to the religion you study? A critic? An indifferent bystander?
By turning that disciplinary Rubik’s Cube, you end up with seemingly as many ways to study religion as there are scholars of religion.
As a result, there is little agreement among scholars about what, exactly, the field is. Different graduate schools divide the field differently, and many schools self-consciously do not train students either in “theology” or in “religious studies,” believing that you either can’t study a religion unless you adhere to that religion or that you can’t study religion honestly if your confessional commitments bear on your scholarship. To add to the confusion, our professional organization divides the field in other ways entirely.
Because any scheme of classifying religion scholars is bound to be somewhat limited and arbitrary, some of us feel like there is no true home for us in the field. Many people -- most important, my colleagues in my department -- are sympathetic to disciplinary vagabonds like me, but I’ve encountered some suspicion.
Once, in a job interview, someone asked me to specify which of the traditional slots in the field of theology I fit into. I stumbled for an answer. Halfway through a sentence, my mouth was wide open, with no sound coming out. I flubbed a similar question a few minutes later, and I wasn’t surprised when I learned that the search committee was not planning to interview me on campus. (I should add, out of fairness, that the department head was nice enough to call me to break that news, rather than send a form letter three months after the fact.)
That search committee was certainly dissatisfied with my answers to questions it surely thought were softballs. After all, who doesn’t know how to describe his own work? Although I wished I had done a better job in that interview, the questions I faced told me that I wasn’t the right fit for that department anyway, given its fairly rigid view of how the field is divided and my unwillingness to come to terms with those divisions.
I complain about how my field of study doesn’t have a readymade slot for me to fit into, but the field is not entirely to blame. My own intellectual interests are broad. I realize that by saying so I run the risk of being forever labeled a surface-skimming dilettante by an academy that values depth and narrow specialization. But I’ve never wanted to focus my intellectual energies on just one thing.
As a kid, I never had only one favorite subject -- I liked them all. (Though in high school, I despised religion class. Health, too.) In college, I double-majored in religion and physics, with a minor in English. Graduate school forced me to narrow things down to one subject, but even then, when someone asked me once what my favorite century was, I said it was a tie between the 19th and the 4th.
As I continue to form my professional identity in my first year on the tenure track, my interests are still all over the map. Just a few weeks ago, I presented a paper on two 19th-century European philosophers to the philosophy of religion group in my professional organization. So maybe I’m a philosopher of religion.
But later this spring, I am presenting a paper -- on a modern Afro-Brazilian religious practice and a 4th-century Christian ritual -- to the history of Christianity group in a different professional organization. So maybe I’m really a historian of Christianity. That all makes a kind of sense to me, but I wonder what image I present to others.
I have the same problem with my teaching style, by the way. Lecturing, awkwardly discussing a book while sitting in a big circle, putting students to work in small groups, I keep the students guessing day by day. And I don’t coordinate the secret accessory to teaching style -- my attire -- with my pedagogy, either: I might take the “OK, let’s rap” approach in a blazer and wool slacks and the next day lecture without interruption with my shirt untucked and my sleeves rolled up.
Although I haven’t surveyed the sartorial styles of current A-list academic celebrities thoroughly enough to know who to imitate, I take some comfort in knowing that in their research, many of the big names in the humanities deal with a broad range of topics. If resisting easy categorization is good enough for Martha Nussbaum (she of the 25-page CV), then it’s good enough for me.
But closer examination of the big names’ publication lists reveals that their earliest work was almost always on very narrow topics. It seems still to be true that you first must cut your teeth on specialized research before you can devour broader fields.
And if contending with the specialization question isn’t enough to make this young professor punchy, there is in academe today the question of audience. There has been increasing foment among academics who like to write for wider audiences than you typically get for a journal article. They (or is it we?) insist that academics have an obligation to bring the best insights in the field to the general public, inviting more and more people to the life of the mind.
Could writing for a nonacademic audience be a way out of my dilemma? I can’t seem to settle on one neat subcategory for my research, but that could be a boon if I attempted to write for the growing “academic trade” market. Popularizing encourages scholars to make the less-than-obvious connections between phenomena and ideas, rather than focus on the divisions that allow their study to reach greater depths. But then I’m back to the issue of whether I’ll be taken seriously by my peers.
My music-aficionado friend liked the CD I told her about, incidentally. For her, “They’re good” trumped all the other adjectives I tossed out. My hope is that even if I never fit obviously into any particular category, my work will be good enough for that not to matter much.
Jonathan Malesic, who earned his Ph.D. in religious studies from the University of Virginia, started this fall as an assistant professor of theology at King’s College, in Wilkes-Barre, Pa.