Riting the Life Cycle: Academic Approaches and Conceptual Considerations

Mathew  N. Schmalz,

Riting the Life Cycle: Academic Approaches and Conceptual Considerations

Discipline: Religion

Abstract:

In this short article, I would like to offer some reflections and commentary on various academic approaches to understanding the life cycle.1 I would specifically like to consider what kinds of questions scholars can ask about the rites or rituals that mark the life cycle—questions that can perhaps help us see and feel afresh the shape and texture of otherwise familiar practices. What grounds PASR is its commitment to collegial scholarly inquiry, and that shared commitment necessarily includes openness to different methodological approaches and backgrounds: some members of PASR are theologians, some are sociologists or anthropologists, and some members are from disciplines in the humanities that focus on the learning of languages and the careful study of texts. I happen to be from a religious studies background, and have found that the way in which religious studies is understood varies depending upon the academic culture in which it is situated. And so, in the spirit of dialogue that PASR seeks to foster, I would like to share something from my academic background as a scholar of religion, trained in an American setting, Religious Studies as a discipline embraces a variety of methods. Its origins can be traced to the work of Max Müller in the later part of the 19th century.2 In wake of Europe’s destructive religions wars and the scientific pivot marked by the Enlightenment, Müller sought not just to find the common ground of all religions but also develop a veritable science of religion that would encompass religion’s diverse forms throughout culture and history. While contemporary scholars of religion have abandoned this search for some kind of shared historical origin of religions, there is consistent and sustained academic focus on shared themes in religion. Among these themes are the sacred--how it’s manifested—as well as power, particularly how dynamics and relations of power shape religious structures and categories of religious expression.

References:

This is an edited version of a paper that I delivered, with the same title, at the conference “From the Cradle to the Grave: Catholicism and Stages of Life in the Philippines,” University of Santo Tomas, Manila, Philippines, January 18, 2016. I would like to thank Dr. Esmeralda Sanchez and all those at Santo Tomas who made the conference possible.
See Max Müller, Natural Religion (London: Longman, Green and Co., 1907)
Émile Dukheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (New York: The Free Press, 1954), 47.
The most compact articulation of Geertz’s interpretation of religion is in his essay, “Religion as a Cultural System.” See Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 87-125
On this theme, see Frits Stall, “The Meaninglessness of Ritual,” Numen 26 (1979): 2-22