by jmarvin_ » Sun Nov 05, 2017 9:36 pm
EDIT: my intended title, "the FIRST BLAST of the TRUMPET against the Monstrous Regimen of Religion Distribution Problems" was too long, so you'll have to settle for the above
this post has been brewing and stewing for almost five years now, and as i’m entering the last year in my quest for my first shiny piece of paper intended to signify my qualifications on the subject, i feel finally like i can present these thoughts in a cogent and somewhat complete form. my purposes here are bivalent: first, to critique the problematic relationship between the mythology and religion distributions and their canons, and second, to criticize the contents of the religion distribution as a whole in a ‘back to the classroom’ spirit. i have the sense that the problems i want to call attention to here only exist because of a (statistically understandable) lack of religion scholars in the quizbowl community, and that were religious studies a field as widely popular as the other humanities and social sciences it would be an exemplary category. but as the token representative of the discipline i feel a sense of uncanny obligation to push the game forward insofar as i can
let us begin with the first topic: myth and religion. as it turns out, the questions of ‘what is myth’ and ‘what is religion’ are far from simple; in a sense, the entire discipline of religious studies is an inquiry into the parameters of these words. there is no simple or catchy definition for either category, and if you think there is one, i’d be glad to point out the issues undoubtedly present with it and all other definitions postulated through the history of the human sciences, but in the interest of keeping this post somewhat focused i’d like to leave a discussion of this for another place and time. the fact is, we don’t need concise definitions to properly organize our distributions and canons in these categories, and likewise we don’t need definitions to see troubling inconsistencies in the way we currently are doing so.
i’d like to focus in on a specific strain of inconsistency regarding how we sort some things into ‘myth’ and others into ‘religion.’ namely, how we treat the myths of abrahamic religions, which is to say, always as “religion” and rarely as “myth.” i don’t think it would be productive to back this up by assembling a litany of answerlines, and i don’t think exceptions to this disprove the problem. the broad sense i get from having played this game for years is that mythological stories from the quran, hadith, and history of islam; from the hebrew bible, the mishnah, and other rabbinic traditions*; and from the new testament, non-canonical gnostic texts, and even hagiographical lives of the saints are always tossed up as religion, and almost never as myth. on the other hand, stories from hinduism seem to be tossed up regularly as myth, so long as the answerline is not a text, in which case it may be tossed up as religion. myth content from other non-abrahamic religions like shintoism, chinese religion, polynesian religion, native american religion, greco-roman religion, and so forth are always tossed up as myth and likewise never as religion, perhaps unless the answer is a text.
mythology is a component of religions, and we already are comfortable designating mythological parts of religions as such and asking about these religious stories as their own category. so why aren’t we doing this with stories from the abrahamic religions? without suggesting that any independent quizbowl writer or editor has any such deliberate intent in their approach to writing, i am inclined to say that this is a product of systematic orientalism, internalized into the framework of the game. there is no need for any one writer to have such a disposition for this to be the case: the effect of constructing a difference in quality between the abrahamic and non-abrahamic religions’ stories is still the result. when rama stalks a golden deer, it must be ‘myth,’ yet when jesus walks on water, it is true ‘religion.’ one can permute this with any examples one likes and see the same dichotomy. this is an effect the religious studies academy has been trying to undo in its discourse for decades, a relic of its emergence from a culture of scholars, stretching as far back as the jesuit missionaries, who approach non-western religions as inherently false and ‘mythical,’ at best a distorted encounter with the perennial truths of christianity.
one could argue that this is more a product of how the questions about abrahamic religions are asked in their particularities: bible stories are typically asked about by tossing up their text of origin, and nobody would argue that a religious text should not be asked about in the religion distribution. to some extent this is true, and we see hindu or buddhist or whatever other texts tossed up as ‘religion’ even as the characters and events from these religions’ mythologies are usually asked as ‘myth.’ but consider how the typical bible tossup is written: with the exception of high difficulty tournaments, one rarely sees anything focused on the history of or scholarship about biblical texts, and instead the clues are a list of story elements from different parts of the book in decreasing order of obscurity. and note also that when tossups about biblical characters, say ‘moses’ or ‘david’ are asked using clues from multiple texts (almost never with clues from scholarship) they are still asked as religion and not as myth.
one line of argument for this treatment of abrahamic myths this would be the recognition of a simple fact: many quizbowlers are christians or jews, and many of these would not characterize the stories of the bible as ‘myths,’ as the word carries a negative connotation, implies factual untruth, and so forth. but how could we support the privileging of the majority at the expense of minorities not sharing in this systematic respect for sensibilities? surely nobody would argue for this.
this is not to say that we should not be asking about religious texts and mythical narratives in the religion section, but rather just that we should be consistent about it. this consistency is not just for its own sake, but for the sake of not perpetuating harmful occidental bias that is ultimately backwards and disrespectful. i see two potential approaches to solving this problem:
1) starting to make the religion section exclusively focused on practices, rituals, theologies, moral codes, religious texts (treated as texts and not as stories), etc, and leaving all narratives for the myth section
2) merging the RM in RMP and loosely subdistributing them to reflect how the game already works, considering the abrahamic myths on equal footing with non-western ones
both of these have downsides. the second option is unappealing insofar as it changes the structure of a long-established distribution. it also threatens the status of non-religious myths (like US folklore, which has been in fashion to toss up for a few years now), though this could be accommodated. the first one requires us to force people to write tossups involving things like jesus, muhammad, and abraham for the ‘myth’ distribution even if this makes them uncomfortable. i think the community can productively discuss these and any other ideas, and come to agreement on a step to take forward.
my second grievance is about the content of the religion distribution as it already stands. for a long time we have been aware of the problems of ‘minor religions bowl’ and ‘jewish holidays bowl,’ but even after these glaring organizational problems are addressed, the religion distribution is still notably not reflective of what religion departments actually study. the “back to the classroom” movement has promoted the presence of topics and scholarship actually studied in the relevant fields in pretty much every category of quizbowl, but religion has for the most part been unaffected by the drive for realification
the religion academy is interested not merely in the content of religions, their practices, and texts, but in understanding these phenomena in a critical, anthropological, sociological, and philosophical way. as such, much of what religion students and scholars read is theoretical rather than factual in disposition. if we want the game to reflect and reward academic pursuits and to be built around real knowledge and scholarly study, we need to give attention to what the scholarship of religion actually does. of course, this is not to say that religious practices, doctrines, events, and figures should not still be the central object of the religion distribution. i am only suggesting that we promote asking about these things in a way that is conscious of the secondary work on them, and that this secondary work become an object of questions in its own right. i have added a small appendix of some important thinkers (incomplete and off the top of my head) whose work should certainly be included in in regular-difficulty quizbowl, as sources for clues about religions and religious things themselves and as things to be asked about.
another thing currently, for the most part, excluded in the religion distribution is religious thought. though old philosophers and theologians from the various religions sometimes make it into the philosophy distribution, modern thinkers working within religious traditions are not covered. in both the secular and religious academy, modern theologians are studied as thinkers and as objects of critical interest and manifestations of religious phenomena. yet i have almost never seen 19th-21st century theologians appear in quizbowl despite their ubiquity in the religious studies and theology departments of our universities. i think it is not unreasonable to suggest that this is something we should strive to rectify.
in the spirit of the above, tossups on stories from the bible and quran (and non-western mythological texts as discussed above) should more frequently incorporate the relevant scholarship. if one studies these texts in an academic context, outside of the occasional literary reading, one will study it in a historical-critical fashion, always engaging with scholarship and textual criticism, and not often preoccupied with memorizing the names of random obscure characters and irrelevant events. that’s not to say these random events should not be asked about, but rather that, as in other categories, the engaging parts of scholarship that are actually studied, as always, should be emphasized in favor of trivia.
at high school and easy college difficulties, there’s not much that could be done about all of these issues, and it’s probably not so important that anything be done anyway. at the highest difficulties, content is somewhat better on including actual scholarship and other relevant things. but this should quite certainly creep down to regular difficulty. naturally this would first have to occur in the tough end of tossups about things currently in the religion distribution, or in the hard parts of bonuses, but eventually this can become even more widespread than that. i have seen some efforts at regular difficulty and above to include clues from theorists’ approaches to religious phenomena, and these are praiseworthy - they should be the norm and not the exception.
i hope this still rushed and perhaps underexamined rallying cry for the improvement of the religion distribution is received not as an attack on the current state of the game but as looking forward to future perfections of our community project as quizbowl writers and players. for my part, i will keep trying to contribute good and interesting content for my writing in the distribution, and would be interested perhaps in editing work at some point to see this vision through.
appendix – a list of some thinkers that deserve coverage in a good, classroom-spirit religion distribution, at least in clues, if not as answers, entirely off the top of my head and thus incomplete and biased toward what i personally have encountered (some of these are already asked about in social sciences and/or philosophy):
old, outmoded thinkers, historically important enough to be asked about: james frazer, william james, emile durkheim, max weber, sigmund freud, mircea eliade, clifford geertz
theorists important to the constitution of the discipline of religious studies as it stands today: talal asad, catherine bell, timothy fitzgerald, russell mccutcheon, tomoko masuzawa, jonathan z smith, victor turner, pierre bordieu, wayne proudfoot
some current, active scholars in the field of particular note: amy hollywood, ilkka pyysaianen, kimberley patton, saba mahmood, robert orsi
the question of a potential canon of theologians (from various religions) is a completely different affair and one i’d like to be engaged in should the discussion occur, but which i don’t think there is space for here.
* one exception is that i recall seeing a myth tossup on hasidic stories, though i think that honestly makes the case i am about to make regarding cultural bias stronger
john marvin
university of chicago - m.a. divinity, 2020
boston college - b.a. theology, 2018