2010 Presidential Address: "Religion" in the Humanities and the Humanities in the University

Abstract

Two basic problems that scholars of religion routinely confront—specifying an object of study and figuring out how to study it—can be construed as opportunities. Scholars of religion typically overcome the difficulties inherent in specifying their object of study by offering a stipulative definition. Doing so, however, artificially stabilizes our object of study and obscures what I believe we ought to be studying: the processes of valuation whereby people decide on the meaning of events and determine what matters most. If we take processes of valuation as our subject matter, we can use historical methods to track how those processes unfold over time in various domains. In addition, as a subject-oriented discipline, we have the luxury of exploring how the processes that lead to the formation of our instable subject matter work at different, albeit connected, levels of analysis. This is an ability that I think at least some scholars in subject-oriented disciplines can and should cultivate as a contribution to interdisciplinary collaborative projects. An analysis of the making of “religion” in the modern university is offered as an example of how we might track a process of valuation over time. A twentieth century (neo-Darwinian) perspective on evolution is offered as a framework for understanding processes of valuation at multiple levels of analysis.