AAR + SBL: Toward an Anthropological Study of Scriptures

Each November, droves of Religious Studies educators leave their students to attend the jointly held meetings of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature. Maybe it’s the nametags. Maybe it’s the S.W.A.G. Or maybe it’s just the mutual acknowledgement that in order to catch a pre-conference nap, we too lied to a seatmate about where we are going for the week. The camaraderie that exudes the meeting hall defies definition.

 Rivals Without a Cause?

At the same time, the two separate professional organizations sequester themselves like rival teams. On one side of the convention hall are those interested in studying that complex thing called the Bible. On the other side are those interested in studying that elusive thing called “religion.”  I mean…have we already forgotten the #AARSBL v. #SBLAAR Twitter debate of 2014?

I attended my first SBL annual meeting as a prospective PhD student. I could upload a picture, but I look like a kid wearing his dad’s suit. Anyway, it was the 2008 Boston meeting, one of those peculiar years where AAR and SBL met separately, in no small part to the politics to which I’m pointing.

Though the two organizations are simpatico once again, I find myself asking the same question I’ve been asking since my college days: Isn’t the study of the Bible a subset of the study of religion?

If you think that your undergraduate students wouldn’t raise these questions, ask yourself the following:

• How many of your students come with literature, social science, or history backgrounds?
• When those classes discuss the issue of religion, don’t they include the Bible?

If your department operates on the World Religions paradigm, does its courses contain a unit on Bible reading, or is that relegated to another track of classes?

 Reframing the Discipline

Interestingly, between the years 2007 and 2010, the SBL Presidential Addresses challenged biblical scholars to reframe the discipline in terms of a more comparative and human-centered approach.

While scholars of various stripes and generations have called for such a turn, Katharine Doob Sakenfield sounded the clarion call with great clarity and precision. In her 2007 address to the society at San Diego, she had us consider the “place… readers from other cultural and religious traditions have at the table of biblical interpretation…what responsibility do Christian and Jewish biblical scholars have to become more engaged with other religious texts and traditions.” This began a deeper conversation about the means and ends of biblical studies.

At the 2008 Boston meeting, Jonathan Z. Smith invited biblical scholars to “reinsert biblical and other canonical scriptures into the general history of the study of religion.” His address sought to “make a beginning at a redescription of biblical studies with the aim of reducing the tensions as to style by emphasizing that more attention to matters of comparison as well as to what Jonathan Boyarin usefully terms the “ethnography of reading.” The following year, David A. Clines would take to heart this and Smith’s most famous dictum—that “religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study..”

Cline’s 2009 address in New Orleans turned the scholar’s gaze back to our own syllabi, damning evidence that we are much more willing to teach according to “our professional expertise” than to “the needs of students.” “How different curricula look,” Cline says, “when student projects are work related or real-life related, when they address the questions and issues students will encounter when they leave the classroom rather than manipulating materials created by the scholarly tradition.”

Attendees were left to inquire about the tenor of not only 21^st century teaching and learning, but the future of biblical studies.

And in 2009, Vincent L. Wimbush offered a challenging vision of what this might look like. “How can we in this big international tent in this century of globalization not include as our focus the problematics of “Scriptures” of all the other major social-cultural systems of the world as well the older dynamic systems of scripturalizing of the so-called smaller societies?” What will come of this charge remains to be seen.

 Questions and Apprehensions

To be sure, this line of questioning has been met with good questions and understandable apprehension about the implications of such broadening. But I think Seminarium has proven that it can have a deepening effect—in contrast to a shallowing one—in the biblical studies classroom.

Nathan Loewen’s post on authentic assessment has gotten us thinking about the fruit of our labor—whether it be in the fields of ancient history, philosophy of religion, or biblical studies. What workplace will benefit from having the knowledge and skills that we have supposedly produced?

For Reed Carlson, training in biblical Hebrew and Hellenistic Greek can provide students with a more expansive terrain for thinking about ancient and modern comparison. Rather than having linguistic tools operate as an end unto themselves, he encourages an approach to language study that takes into consideration the social movement that accompanies interpretive flow.

Gregory Cuéllar has shown that the practices (i.e. translation, publication, interpretation), places (i.e. schools, archives, museums), and persons (i.e. scholars, clerics, laity) that constitute the study of the Bible are not peripheral but central to biblical studies. When we erase the stories and politics that go along with this, we miss out on power dynamics that make biblical texts into scripture.

Anthropological Study of Scriptures

In my view, this on-going conversation points toward a more anthropological study of scriptures. This is not a dismissal of a historical or exegetical approach to the Bible, but a study of the Bible as a textual field in and around which we can observe the social dynamics we associate with religion. The question becomes what do these dynamics look like in relationship to those found elsewhere—other times, other spaces, other objects, other people. Isn’t that what we are going for in cultivating diversity, global awareness, and liberative educational spaces?

So Seminarium readers, where might we go from here? Chart our direction by sharing your thoughts and experiences below.

Photo Credit: “Surfing Left, Swimming Right, San Diego” by Geraint Rowland – CC by 2.0

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