Stanford University Press Blog

Encountering Traditions

What we can learn from exploring the dynamics between belief systems.

a Q&A with series board members JONATHAN TRAN, NICHOLAS ADAMS, and RUMEE AHMED

Books published in the Encountering Traditions series—see the all of the books published in this series.

Encountering Traditions, a book series inaugurated at Stanford Press by Emily Jane Cohen in 2010, explores and reveals the dynamism of encounters that occur between and within religious traditions when tradition comes into contact with other ideologies—whether secular or faith-based. Below series board members Nicholas Adams, Jonathan Tran, and Rumee Ahmed answer questions about the series, its relevance, and their future hopes for this milieu of scholarship.
 

Looking for Religion in Foucault

For Foucault, religion is distinguished by how it inscribes language on bodies.

by MARK JORDAN

Portrait of Michel Foucault, by Thierry Ehrmann. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.

Reading takes time. Its passing often leaves traces—in marginal scribbles, in typed outlines, in proud commentaries on collected works. Reading, no matter how cumulative, occupies different times. A reader moves through texts in segments of bodily life. Reading falls among other episodes—accomplishments, boredoms, traumas. It calls on other readings already done or set aside.

I began to read books by Foucault more than thirty-five years ago. I started to record my reading of Foucault on a warm Cambridge Saturday in June 2011 and finished that recording about two years later in San Francisco. The traces would have been different if I had recorded them over another interval. Before writing down this record of a reading, I “came out” as a gay man, fell away from Christian community, and returned to it. I spent most sunsets of a July watching fog over Kite Hill in San Francisco. I held men as they died from the “complications” of the unnamable virus that killed Foucault. I lived beyond the age at which he died.

Neither Freedom Fighter Nor Fanatic

How John Brown's legacy disrupted the state's monopoly on legitimate violence.

by TED SMITH

An 1856 daguerrotype of John Brown (Public Domain).

John Brown tested America. As the Irish poet William Allingham saw, the abolitionist who waged holy war against slavery was like a touchstone: a dense, opaque surface against which the metal of the nation could be rubbed to reveal its true composition. 

This post is part of a featured series. See other posts in this series:

AAR 2014: A Blog Series

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Americans have pressed the questions of the day against the hard memory of John Brown in every decade since his execution in 1859. Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Malcolm X all called upon memories of Brown to talk about slavery and its legacies in the United States. But Brown has also been used as a touchstone for other questions. Early in the twentieth century Eugene V. Debs made the case for socialism by calling for a “John Brown of wage slavery.” At mid-century C. Vann Woodward painted Brown as an extremist and used his image to criticize Cold War fanatics on every side. In the 1970s the Weather Underground named their journal Osawatomie to evoke memories of the place where Brown directed the killing of pro-slavery settlers in Kansas. Twenty years later Timothy McVeigh appealed to Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry as a precedent for his attack on the Murrah Federal Building. Christopher Hitchens, Barbara Ehrenreich, and a host of others have recalled Brown’s story in efforts to think through terrorist violence in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001. Most recently, Cornel West called upon Brown’s legacy to resist the security apparatus that has emerged in response to those attacks:

Brother Edward Snowden is the John Brown of the national security state. He's the canary in the mine. http://t.co/yVOqdnFMbP

— Cornel West (@CornelWest) June 28, 2013

Is Being Religious “Intellectually Dishonest”?

How the dialogue between believers and nonbelievers is changing—for the better.

by HANS JOAS

[Public Domain image via Pixabay].

“In this day and age, to be religious is to be intellectually dishon­est.” It was with this declaration that one of the best-known, most interna­tionally renowned German philosophers began his opening statement at a panel discussion on religion a few years ago, for which I had been selected as his co-debater. A poor basis for mutual understanding, I thought to myself, since it is surely one of the elementary preconditions for civilized dialogue that we refrain from immediately impugning our opposite num­ber’s honesty. But it was nothing personal. It is just that many people now­adays regard religious faith as so clearly outdated—its cognitive claims refuted by the sciences, the reality of its experiential dimension explained by psychology and neuroscience, and its social functions clearly under­stood—that they are unable to grasp how rational individuals can possi­bly be prepared to sacrifice their intellects in this way. There must, they presume, be interests at play, a lack of intellectual honesty, psychological problems, or simply a lack of intellectual consistency.

Why Religious Studies Matter

On shepherding a religious studies list into being.

When Emily Jane Cohen joined Stanford University Press over eight years ago, there was virtually no focus in the publishing program on religion. There was no dedicated editor acquiring in religious studies, and where religious topics and the press’s publishing program did elide, the titles were rolled under the imprimatur of other lists, into philosophy, history or Jewish Studies. 

Religious studies offer invaluable inroads into understanding the complicated fabric of human cultures.

Without a dedicated focus on this widely encompassing field, Cohen felt something was lacking from the press’s résumé of publications. Having focused on early Christianity as an undergraduate and having begun her graduate career as a medievalist studying apocryphal saints, Cohen believes theology and religious studies offer invaluable inroads into understanding the complicated fabric of human cultures—both past and present.

In particular, Americans as a group, Cohen points out, espouse higher levels of belief and religious participation than equivalent cultures in the West. That belief expresses itself in myriad guises from televangelism to orthodoxy to multifarious new ageism. Delving into the composition and modus operandi of beliefs, faiths, traditions, and related ideologies, unlocks avenues for understanding that are perhaps richer than other pathways, because such studies tap into mindsets that are at once deeply personal and eminently political.

AAR 2014: A Blog Series

Religious studies scholars discuss book series, Foucault, John Brown, and more. 

The world's largest gathering of scholars interested in the study of religion will convene in San Diego this weekend at the American Academy of Religion's annual meeting. Exhibit attendees can find Stanford Press at booth 319 and early arrivers can join us and author Ted Smith on Friday night at the Cat-Eye Club for a Poltical Theology Party (clearly, the best kind of party). To tide you over until then, this week the Stanford Press blog presents a lineup of pieces spotlighting SUP editors and authors integral to the press's publishing program in religious studies. 

Why Religious Studies Matter ⇨

On shepherding a religious studies list into being.

Monday

 

Is Being Religious "Intellectually Dishonest"? ⇨

How the dialogue between believers and nonbelievers is changing—for the better.

by HANS JOAS

Tuesday

Neither Freedom Fighter Nor Fanatic ⇨

How John Brown's legacy disrupted the state's monopoly on legitimate violence.

by TED SMITH

Wednesday

Looking for Religion in Foucault ⇨

For Foucault, religion is distinguished by how it inscribes language on bodies.

by MARK JORDAN

Thursday

Encountering Traditions ⇨

What we can learn from exploring the dynamics between belief systems.

a Q&A with series board members JONATHAN TRAN, NICHOLAS ADAMS, and RUMEE AHMED

Friday

Political Theology Party ⇨

Join us this Friday to celebrate a great year of discussion and debate in political theology.

Friday

 

 

To Make A Book (Circa 1960)

In which we take a moment to appreciate the craftsmanship of old school printing.

Before computer typesetting, before Photoshop, before iPads and epubs, and Amazon CreateSpace, it took a small army of artisans and craftspeople—not to mention leviathan machinery—to make a book. In most cases, the “presses” to which publishing house names refer have long since been outsourced to external printing agencies, but printing remains, for many publishers, an integral part of the house’s genesis. In fact, Stanford University Press used to be just that—a press, whose printing apparatus predated its publishing mission by thirty-odd years.

This post is part of the University Press Week Blog Tour.

Follow #upweek on Twitter & click here to see other posts in the tour.

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Born in an on-campus woodworking shop in 1892, the earliest iteration of the press printed the Stanford student paper and a handful of book-length articles penned by faculty. By the 50s this lean operation had ballooned to encompass a publishing division and a modern, efficient printing plant, ranking seventh nationally among university presses with respect to title output.

In the late 50s and early 60s the press published annual reports to the University, describing its mission and process. These reports featured center spreads detailing how a manuscript moved though the printing plant to emerge a finished book—typeset, bound, and redolent of new-book-smell.

 

7 Things You Didn’t Know About Tequila

The worm, the salt, the lime, the machismo—all of your questions will finally be answered.

by MARIE SARITA GAYTÁN

¡Tequila! author, Marie Sarita Gaytán offers a handful of lesser-known facts about the national spirit of Mexico, tailor-made to impress at your next cocktail hour.

1.Tequila does not have a worm in its bottle.

 

The worm, or gusano, is associated with certain types of mezcal. Mezcal is a name that has multiple meanings—it’s the term for all distilled agave drinks (thus tequila is technically a type of mezcal), but since 2005, it also signifies its own distinct drink category with a denomination of origin (protective legislation that recognizes the influence that place has on product taste and quality). Although mezcal has a long history of production in nearly all of Mexico, with dozens of types of agave as ingredients, today it can only legally be produced in eight states.

So, Why Tequila?

On researching the national spirit of Mexico.

a Q&A with MARIE SARITA GAYTÁN

Enter to win this shot glass and a copy of ¡Tequila! by Marie Sarita Gaytán ⇨

In 2006 UNESCO declared the tequila-producing region of western Jalisco a protected cultural site—on par with the pyramids of Egypt—a designation that not only solidified tequila’s symbolic import for Mexico, but also catapulted it to an artifact of global importance. As a UNESCO site, western Jalisco and its most prominent export has been deemed part of a cultural and natural heritage so significant that it “belong[s] to all peoples of the world.” Prestigious as this acknowledgement is, it arrives as a direct result of how culturally resonant tequila has been, and continues to be, for Mexico, in particular. As recently as the turn of the 20th century, tequila, though well-poised to become Mexico’s national drink, had not yet earned that distinction. It was only in the ensuing years of the Mexican Revolution, and in the bevy of corridos and midcentury films that followed, that it became enshrined not only as a crucial prop for Mexican narratives, but as a symbol of Mexican identity itself.

In ¡Tequila! Distilling the Spirit of Mexico, Marie Sarita Gaytán traces tequila’s trajectory from one of a handful of native spirits to the prominent standing it enjoys today as a decisive symbol of lo mexicano. Below she discusses what drew her to this spirited field of inquiry.

On Pancho Villa, Tequila, and Mexicanidad

How the teetotaling hero of the Mexican Revolution became a tequila-swilling gunslinger.

by MARIE SARITA GAYTÁN

General Pancho Villa. By Bain News Service [Public Domain] via Wikimedia Commons.

In The New American Bartender’s Guide, mixologist John Poister describes the “original” way to order tequila: “Walk into any Mexican cantina, belly up to the bar and say, ‘Tequila, estilo Pancho Villa por favor,’” (Tequila, Pancho Villa style, please). Poister is not alone in making the association between Pancho Villa and tequila. Indeed, there are dozens of Pancho Villa–themed tequila brands. Besides Tequila Pancho Villa and La Leyenda Tequila 30–30 (The Leg­end Tequila 30-30), which refers to the 30–30 rifle used by Villa and his army, there is Viva Villa Tequila; Pancho Villa Viejo Tequila (Old Pancho Villa); Hijos de Villa Tequila (Children or Sons of Villa); 7 Leguas (7 Leagues), which is the name of Pancho Villa’s horse; and Tequila Los Arango, which is a refer­ence to Doroteo Arango, Pancho Villa’s given name. There are even several tequila-based cocktails that draw on Villa’s namesake (the Pancho Villa, the Pancho Villa shooter, and the Pancho Villa #2).

Pancho Villa was a teetotaler who spearheaded alcohol prohibition in Mexico.

Simply put, no other figure is as closely coupled with the culture of tequila. However, there is a large discon­nect between this popular perception and historical evidence. Pancho Villa was a teetotaler who spearheaded alcohol prohibition in Mexico. So why is he so strongly associated with tequila? The answer to this question lies in both tequila’s and Pancho Villa’s symbolic ties to the Mexican Revolution.

Book Giveaway: ¡Tequila!

Enter to win a shot glass and a copy of ¡Tequila! (actual tequila sold separately).

Italy has grappa, Russia has vodka, Jamaica has rum. Around the world, certain drinks—especially those of the intoxicating kind—are synonymous with their peoples and cultures. For Mexico, this drink is tequila. For many, tequila can conjure up scenes of body shots on Cancún bars and coolly garnished margaritas on sandy beaches. Its power is equally strong within Mexico, though there the drink is more often sipped rather than shot, enjoyed casually among friends, and used to commemorate occasions from the everyday to the sacred. Despite these competing images, tequila is universally regarded as an enduring symbol of lo mexicano.

¡Tequila! Distilling the Spirit of Mexico traces how and why tequila became and remains Mexico's national drink and symbol, starting in Mexico's colonial era and tracing the drink's rise through the present day. Enter your name and email below for a chance to win a free copy of the book along with your very own customized ¡Tequila! shot glass (pictured above). Three winners will be selected at random and notified via email by the end of the week—¡buena suerte!