Abstract
Reviewed by Michael J Altman , University of Alabama, USA DOI: 10.1177/2050303217707247
There are at least two directions in which the production of theory can move. A theorist may begin with the data, the case study, the field, the details, and work her way up to larger theoretical claims. Such a “bottom up” strategy begins with the particular and uses it as an example to make claims about the general. Conversely, a theorist may also take a “top down” approach. She begins with a general theory and seeks to apply it to a variety of particular situations, cases, and contexts. Very often these two approaches are related. Emile Durkheim used the particulars of Australian totemism to theorize the “elementary forms” of religion and theorists since Durkheim have taken his general theory and deployed it in a variety of places and times.
Vincent L Wimbush’s edited volume Scripturalizing the Human: The Written as the Political takes a top down approach to Wimbush’s own “scripturalization” theory. Wimbush has developed and expanded on the notion of “scripturalization” across a number of monographs and edited volumes. Scripturalizing the Human emerged from a collaborative project at the Institute for Signifying Scriptures (ISS) at Claremont Graduate University. The book is an attempt to extend the theories of “scripture/scripturalizing/scripturalization” beyond Wimbush’s original work on African-American religion by asking specialists in other fields to apply it to their work on topics such as the Book of Mormon, Coptic Christianity, the Garden of Eden, and early modern Europe. The variety of topics in the nine essays that make up this collection give it an experimental and exciting feel as they attempt to apply, expand, and play with Wimbush’s ideas about scripture and see what comes of it.
Wimbush opens the book with an introduction summarizing the development of the ISS and bringing the reader up to speed about what exactly “scripturalizing” is and what is meant by the term. Wimbush makes a case that his approach to scriptures and the work of the ISS is academically innovative, even transgressive. As Wimbush puts it, crossing, scrambling, and confusing academic-intellectual boundaries, practices, prerogatives, and presuppositions, the ISS—now as independent organization—facilitates socially relevant, transgressive research on scriptures, not as texts narrowly understood, with the assumed interests and investments in the operations of religious/ethnic tribal historical critical exegesis, but in terms of social textures, as “sites of performance, power relations, and dis/closure” (through the appropriately expansive trans-disciplinary operations). (6)
Wimbush never gives a single definition for his terms scripture, scripturalization, or scripturalizing. Rather, he deploys a number of possible understandings as he circles past these terms in his introduction. Scriptures are “freighted shorthand for the ultimate politics of language and subjectivization,” scripturalization is “a politics of language, the ultimate politics of language, a language and representational regime that (over-)determines ways of knowing, the subjects and objects of knowing, the shape of consciousness, and authorized forms of communication,” and scripturalizing is the inspiring, provoking or structuring of “refractions, differentiation, alternatives, mimetics, resistances—other complex, denaturalized, and unstable (de-/re-constructive) practices, rituals, formations, and forms of conscientization” (1). But scripturalizing and scripturalization are also “the ‘work’…‘humans’ make ‘scriptures’ do” (3) and “scriptures and scripturalizing can be understood as sites and occasions for the poignancy of human veiling and unveiling, subjectivication or its opposites (fundamentalism; ideological slavery)” (4). The goal of the book is to connect these processes of scripturalizing to the construction of the human, to reveal “how we make the human by scripturalizing” (13). The ambiguity and broad reach of Wimbush’s introduction is summed up well near the end when he writes, “there are no humans without scriptures and no scriptures without humans” (16). Like the introductory essay as a whole, this statement gestures toward some theoretical argument without ever actually articulating it fully. Instead, this task is left to the book’s other essays. Indeed, they offer a chance to apply Wimbush’s ideas about scriptures to a variety of cases, texts, places, and times.
Some of the essays in the book focus on the construction, reading, and use of scriptures themselves. For example, Barbara A Holdrege focuses her chapter on the construction of the Sanskrit text the Bhāgavata Purāna. For Holdrege, the scripturalizing of the Bhāgava Purāna happened as the vernacular Tamil devotional text from South India was translated into an authorized Sanskrit text. This Sanskritization gave the Bhāgavata Purāna a new brahmanical pan-Indian authority and placed it alongside other authoritative texts in the Sanskrit canon. Once canonized, the geographical details of stories in the text scripturalized the landscape as pilgrims traveled to visit sites from the text. Through the physical movement of pilgrimage, devotees “engage the scripturalized landscape with their scripturalized bodies” (185). Thus, Holdrege offers an example of how the local text becomes an authorized canonical scripture and then how that authority extends beyond the text to people and places. In a similar vein, Brian Malley’s essay on the Bible in North American folklore examines how people put a canonical and authorized text like the Bible to varied uses. Malley gathers a broad set of examples that include uses of biblical texts and the artifact of the Bible itself. As Malley argues, both the Bible-as-text and the Bible-as-artifact derive their power from the authority communities invest in the Bible. For these chapters, scripturalization encompasses the authority and power communities and individuals invest in texts and how that authority exceeds the lexical meaning of the text itself.
Other chapters in the book deploy scripturalization as a term for construction and imagination beyond the text itself. In his essay on the concept and design of Ark Encounter, a theme park that creates a life-sized literalist interpretation of the biblical story of Noah’s Ark, James S Bielo approaches “Ark Encounter as a grand act of scripturalizing…Ark Encounter is scripturalizing imagined, sketched, colored, sculpted, materialized, and engineered” (21). As designers make creative decisions about the park, Bielo finds that biblical literalism is not a narrow creative channel, as is often assumed, but a logic for creating and designing. Designers move between the authority of the text itself and their vision for an entertaining and engaging experience for park-goers. Likewise, Daymon Mickel Smith argues in his chapter that 19th and early 20th century Mormon writers engaged in their own scripturalizing process when they imagined the Book of Mormon World. This Book of Mormon World is Smith’s term for the imagined world and history behind the text of the Book of Mormon contained in various Mormon publications. In these chapters, scripture becomes the jumping off point for a process of scripturalization that constructs new texts beyond the original. The Book of Mormon and the book of Genesis beget the Book of Mormon World and Ark Encounter.
Finally, some chapters use scripturalization to make space for alternative forms of scripture or alternative ways of authorizing texts as scriptures from the usual Western form. José Rabasa uses the 16th century Mesoaerican indigenous painting Mapa de Cuauhtinchan núm. 2 (MC2) to “interrupt…the ease with which the human and social science proceed as if their categories were transparent” (107). Also using indigenous scriptures from the Americas, Lars Kirkhusmo Pharo outlines a number of “scriptural technologies” such as wampum or Maya logosyllabic writing that disrupt the traditional Western understanding of scripture and its authority. Saad Michael Saad and Donald Westbrook’s chapter on Coptic Christianity fits in this same vein insofar as they argue that Coptic scriptures are central to the construction of an alternative Coptic identity for Copts in the diaspora. In all of these cases, the authors push to expand the category scripture to include forms beyond the standard textual model of Western Christianity.
As these various authors attempt to think with the theoretical terms scripture/scripturalization/scripturalizing, the results are uneven. Wimbush argues that “scriptures as a term absolutely begs to be exploded into a larger framework for analysis, to be looked at through a rather different lens” (7). But what is left after the explosion remains unclear. Many of the chapters read as if they could stand on their own without using scripturalization as a theoretical lens. Their claims do not rest on any theory of scripture but on their own internal logic and argument. Take out the paragraphs about scripture tacked on to the introduction and conclusion and they would remain coherent scholarly analyses. A few essays, however, do a good job of using and extending Wimbush’s theory. Miles P Grier’s essay on “inkface,” his term for the “shared field of blackface performance, tattooing, writing, and printing,” stands out in this regard. For Grier, the authority of scripture in the West carries its own racial hierarchy that was made manifest in early modern print culture. Racial representation in ink inscribed racial difference and white supremacy in Western society and culture. But Grier’s project is also the one most closely connected to Wimbush’s own work on the African-American Bible and perhaps it is that proximity in subject matter that makes the theoretical connection more fruitful.
The central question before the various authors of the book and Wimbush, their entrepreneurial CEO, is whether the categories of scripture/scripturalization/scripturalizing are useful theoretical terms for analyzing texts? The answer is a solid “maybe.” At no point does any case study in the chapters or argument in Wimbush’s introduction make a convincing argument that the term “scripture” is preferable to “text” or “discourse.” To be sure, there are certain texts that communities have labeled “scripture” and that they treat differently than others. But as scholars, we need not defer to this insider category. The use of “scripture” gets even more complicated when we move outside of those communities and traditions that use the term and begin to translate other terms people use to categorize texts into “scripture.” For example, is the Bhāgavata Purāna “scripture”? Holdrege quickly renders the Sanskrit word s
Readers familiar with Wimbush’s work or invested in the ISS project of theorizing with the category “scripture” will find the book a welcome addition to their ongoing conversation. Likewise, specialists will find the particular chapters that touch on their areas of interest worthwhile. But because of the esoteric nature of the theoretical conversation, those outside the scripturalizing conversation will be either frustrated or nonplussed by the theoretical reliance on the category scripture among all the other possible theories of language, text, and culture.