The Fickleness of Scholarship

Religion, the first of the four strands, is what I research. Religion is what I write about, and it is what I have been writing about for thirty or more years. I have five books to my name and numerous papers, enough to make sure I am recognised as something of a leader in my discipline. I have written the sixth book and have spent the year trying (unsuccessfully) to get it published. I am currently writing the seventh (on stories and on myth as I have mentioned many times in these blogs). However, I somehow feel as though I am just at the start of my career and that I am, after almost ten years in senior leadership roles, having to make an academic name for myself all over again.

I am currently reading a wonderful thesis from a Lebanese scholar, Rima Nasrallah, who achieved her PhD from the Protestant University in Amsterdam in 2015. It is a study of the worshiping lives of women in Lebanon who have grown up Orthodox or Maronite and have married men who belong to the Lebanese Protestant Church. This is a work that is based on ethnography and that has a real eye for detail within the daily lives of these women as they negotiate their various liturgical traditions. I would highly recommend it, I can immediately think of three colleagues to whom I would have liked to send a copy for Christmas, and I will certainly be using it in teaching later in the year.

This is a thesis about the ethnography of worship, and it is a study of lived religion. These are both areas in which I have written, and they are both areas where I would like to think of myself as something of a pioneer. None of my books, however, appear in the bibliography. That does not worry me as such. Rima is not dealing with quite the same areas of experience that I was writing about. However, in both cases Rima references other works that have become recognised as the founding texts of these two sub-sub-disciplines, other writers whose work has, in some way superseded my own.

Earlier in the year I helped a colleague at the University of Birmingham to teach on a course on Lived Religion in Birmingham. The course itself is the direct inheritor of a very similar course that I taught in the years before I left Birmingham, also in 2015. What is interesting, however, is that my own work was completely overlooked in the previous version of the course and the two books that are most directly related, one on lived religion and one on religion in Birmingham, were not included in the bibliography.

I can prove, very easily, that the work done by the student in Amsterdam has a direct line of descent from my own writing, through the work of colleagues in the Netherlands, Rima’s supervisors, who have always recognised their debt to my work. They are now the leading exponents of this kind of approach, and I am proud of the part I have played in supporting them and encouraging them to develop far beyond my initial exploration of this world. Likewise, the course in Birmingham, is a direct inheritor of my previous work, both in the department and in the city.

The work that is quoted, in all these cases, as the core texts and perhaps even the founding mothers and fathers of the sub-sub-disciplines, were texts that were being written at about the same time as my own books, and in most cases in the States. These were career academics who continued to write, to attend conferences and to publicise their work. This is related to what has been called the ‘Matthew effect’. Once one person has quoted them, others follow, quoting them in turn as the definitive work, and so it continues. The texts that surrounded them and that often inspired them have therefore largely been forgotten. You can see that happening throughout the history of scholarship. This has enabled certain scholars to be established as the ‘founders’ or ‘core texts’ of the discipline. I am perhaps just a little surprised at how quickly this has happened in this particular context.

So, do I want to rebuild my reputation, shout from the roof tops ‘look at me’, ‘over here’, ‘it is my ideas that you are using!’? No, I don’t. Scholarship moves on and I continue to be very proud of the very wide range of scholarship, in the UK, in the Netherlands, in Scandinavia and even in Australia, Canada and the States that my own work has made possible. I am not looking for recognition in that sense.

The point for me, here and now, however, is how to move forward. Because I am no longer being referenced, it is much more difficult for me to get published. Once I get back into the machine, however, with a book in publication and a series of papers based on collaborations and conference presentations then I will hopefully be back in circulation, and I can begin to plan out the next stage of my goal.

Lived religion, still less the ethnography of worship, was never what I wanted to be known for. Both are simply steps along the way. The reason I stepped back from my role at Swansea University was, in part, to give me the space and the time to get back to that bigger project, the development of a ‘general theory of religion’. That may also sink without trace, almost inevitably so, in time. However, I do believe there is something of value to be said about the nature and working of religion. I have written three volumes of this already, I am working on the fourth, and I will continue to work on the other volumes that go to make up the general theory over the next few years. Only five more volumes to write so I had probably better get on with it…