Exploring the Idea of Regionalism in Religion

One of the books I read over Christmas was Susan Vogel’s book on the Baule, based on an exhibition at Yale in 1997. It was not so much the art that struck me, or really the ethnographic details of the Baule, although that did illuminate certain elements of our visit to Ivory Coast back in 2019/20. What kept coming back to my mind was the question of regionalism in religion. For some reason this is something that has fixated me for many years and I am still not really sure what my answer is.

Moli masked dancers among the Baule, Cote d’Ivoire (MDS 2019)

What I mean by ‘regionalism in religion’ is the suggestion that religious principles, ideas, rituals etc. have a commonality across a wider area. The question, however, is how wide is that area, and how coherent do the ideas/acts etc. have to be to support the theory.

The principle goes back to my days in studying anthropology at Manchester in the 1980s and early 90s. The emphasis there was on specific cultures. The idea that cultures were fluid and merged into each other at the edges, or that they did not exist as coherent wholes, was part of the mainstream at the time, a reaction against the mosaic of distinct, and collectable, cultures of the previous generation. Fredrik Barth wrote a text about the fluidity and flexibility of culture in the middle east way back in 1969, and other writers were exploring regional ideas in New Guinea, the Pacific more generally and elsewhere. However, comparative analysis was certainly out and the idea that we could talk about wider linguistic or cultural regions was being frowned upon. I am still not sure whether this is an appropriate level in which to do such analysis or not, nor, if I am honest, whether it really matters.

Having travelled extensively in West Africa then the question of regionalism comes back, again raising questions about what kind of ‘region’ matters, and for what purpose. A distinction can be made between Francophone and Anglophone countries of the region, but that, as our latest visit to Ghana showed only too clearly, is very superficial (as is Christian vs Islamic). The traditional subdivision of anthropology is between the coastal peoples, the forest peoples, and the peoples of the savannah, but again that does not really work. My own reflections on religion in this area tend to focus on what is common across the whole region – West Africa – especially in terms of traditional religion, or the base level of thinking about spirits, souls and the like.

Vogel makes some interesting comments on the Baule. These people have traditionally been associated with the wider Akan, with stories that focus on the migration of ancestors from the Akan heartlands in Ghana. However, as Vogel makes clear, there are also stories of indigenous, autochthonous origin based around people who emerged from the earth in the area where the Baule are now based. Add to this traditions/dances that have been bought, or borrowed, from neighbouring, and clearly non-Akan, peoples and the particular mix of rituals, dances and art styles that form the current Baule corpus is a mixture of many different traditions and influences.

So do the Akan, in their wider form, which includes a certain linguistic commonality, form a region that shares a common approach to the spiritual? I don’t really think so. The ‘region’ that I would want to focus on is somewhat larger than this.

Vogel also draws attention to some of the cultural, or religious, principles underlying Baule thought processes. One is the distinction between village and the bush that can be seen across much of the West African region. I have come across this within the Dogon and many other peoples from very different parts of the ‘region’. Associated with this is the populating of the wild spaces, the bush, with amoral spirits and the need either to placate or tame these spirits in ritual, dance and masking. The particular form of these spirits may be very local or have wider application (and can be shared across peoples as Vogel illustrates) but they have a similar and consistent relationship with the humans of the village and are distinct from any kind of ancestor.

Likewise, there is a widespread assumption that the individual not only enters a different world at death, but comes out of that world at birth, and maintains links with that other world throughout their lives. This links to the idea of ancestors, a subgroup of those who pass into the other world, whose particular role can vary considerably, as can the depth of genealogy that is recognised. However, the place and recognition of ancestors in some shape or form is also widespread.

A final commonality is seen in a shared understanding of humans as being essentially both male and female. As Vogel notes, most societies in this area, especially those from further north, see the female part of the male in the foreskin, which is removed at circumcision, and the male part of the female in the clitoris, which is also often removed in traditional societies. For the Baule, however, this is reflected in a different way. Each person is said to have a spirit husband or wife in the other world, who can seek to influence an individual’s life. This spirit spouse then needs to be placated, or otherwise engaged with, most commonly through the commissioning of a statue to which offerings are made. Vogel notes that to her knowledge this view is unique to the Baule although she does say it only became apparent in the 1960s so there may be other societies who share it, but for whom it remains secret.

This leads on to a different kind of commonality, the hidden nature of much of the art, whether masks or statues, and the limited information those outside any one of these societies actually possess. There are so many overlaps here that I can see between the Baule and Dogon, and also know of in Nigerian and other West African societies.

The question remains, however, of whether all these commonalities actually reflect a specific, regional or West African approach to the sacred. There are undoubtedly societies in this region that share few, if any, of these traits, and were that the case then does that automatically negate the theory? The different traits may well have different distributions across the area. The traits form a kind of cluster that often, but not necessarily, come together, and are shared widely across a region, South of the Sahara and from the Atlantic coast in the West to … well where? Or is the distribution somewhat smaller than this. Is the western Atlantic coast different (I know far less about these societies)? Is Nigeria actually a very different region in religious terms? I don’t know, and that is what puzzles me. The West African way of thinking about religion and the spiritual (which consists of far more than the traits specified here) is very different from that of Northern Europe (whether considered traditional or Christian), but does that really tell us anything very significant?

Histories and Futures: A Reflection on the Generations

A new year, a new future. One of the things that struck me most forcefully in 2022 was the thought of my father’s age. On March 7th, 2022, he would have been 95. That is terrifying in so many ways.

My father was the youngest of six children, the only boy after five daughters. His eldest sister was over twenty years older than him and so his father, my grandfather, must have been born in the 1880s. I did know my grandmother, Grannie, as a child, but she must have been in her eighties even then, and she died when I was still young.

Sutton Scarsdale Hall, Derbyshire.

The world my grandparents had been bought up in was so very different from anything we can imagine today. The stories I have been told are almost Downtonesque. My grandfather, and my grandmother, entered service at Sutton Scarsdale in Derbyshire (which was closed, and asset stripped, in 1919). My grandfather was a chauffeur, and so, in the early years of the twentieth century somewhat ahead of the growing technology. I assume my grandmother worked in the kitchens or as a housemaid of some description. This is not a history that I have ever investigated. I am only aware of the stories as told by my aunts, and within those stories there are elements that were not spoken about. Some were dropped into conversation in hushed tones. Others are still gaps.

The earliest story is straight out of Downton Abbey as my grandfather and grandmother had to leave service because she became pregnant with my eldest aunt before they were married. It was clearly a love match, or grew into one, because the marriage lasted forty to fifty years and all the indications I have been given is that this was a happy family. My grandfather went on, eventually, to be chauffeur to Lord Kenning in the 1930s and 40s, a name that was still widely known in the car industry when I was child, but probably forgotten now. He also served in the First World War (we still have the postcards from the front, heavily censored of course) where, it is said, he was among the first to drive tanks. He died when my father was still a teenager, or young adult, but again this is a story that was never told, and I have never found out the circumstances of his death. For many years I had assumed that he had died in the Second World War, but I gather that that was not the case.

You can tell that I am not really into searching out my ancestors despite my love of Who do you Think You Are and similar programmes on TV. My fascination for such programmes, however, is more about the social history, seeing the events of the past through the eyes of individuals who played a part, and the uniqueness of those individual stories, rather than any larger interest in personal origins or my own inheritance.

My partner commented the other day that he felt that living in the contemporary world often felt like somebody born in the late Victorian era living through the 1960s and being confronted with miniskirts and sexual liberation. All the new technologies, global warming, the power of social media, conflicts over trans rights and what it is to be a woman etc. etc. mean that we now live in a very different world from the one in which we were bought up, and he, in particular, feels very much at sea within this new environment. Neither of us is entirely sure how to react and how to engage.

How far is that dislocation over the last sixty years equivalent to the one over the previous sixty years? We have lived through the last sixty years and, on the whole, the changes that we have experienced have been gradual. We did not experience two world wars, which are always said to have radically changed the social structure and values of our nation in the first half of the twentieth century. Nothing of that kind has happened in my lifetime, although the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union was very significant, as was the growth of neo-liberalism, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and the economic crash in 2008. All of these have changed the world we live in. More recently that change is speeding up, with the impact of the pandemic and now the war in Ukraine dominating, and changing, our world. Many of the certainties of my childhood and teenage years no longer hold true.

But it is more than this. My grandfather obviously watched, and participated in, a radical change in technology. As a chauffeur he was involved in the changes to cars, and less directly to planes and the impact of the combustion engine. He did not personally live to see the landing of men on the moon in the 1960s, but over his lifetime the technology of transportation, its democratisation, and its impact on trade, on leisure and on society must have been very apparent.

In our lifetimes that change has been within information technology. My mother worked with computers, preparing punch cards, in the 1950s. I took one of the very first ‘O’ levels in computer studies in the late 1970s, working at that time on a single BBC machine within the school. I wrote my PhD on a word processor, the latest technology of the time, and since then I have lost touch with the developments in gaming, personal technology and particularly in social media. Like the combustion engine for my grandfather the impact of information technology on society has been complete and in such a way that nobody could easily have predicted where it would lead. I live in a very different world from the one I was born into.

However, it is the values that have perhaps changed most dramatically, and which my partner was really drawing attention to when he said that he felt out of place within the contemporary world. My grandfather had to leave his job because he and my grandmother were to have a baby. The impact on my grandmother would have been even greater, and while they were married before the baby arrived, and therefore never really had the stigma of a child out of wedlock, the pressures on them both at the time must have been enormous.

I am gay, something that would have been unthinkable to my grandfather’s generation, although only one of my father’s sisters married (something, in part, to do with the post-First World War generation) and two of them lived with close female partners for all their adult lives. The revolutions in sexual politics and the acceptance of homosexuality through the second half of the twentieth century have been something that has been very positive for my partner and myself. But do we understand the younger generation? Can I really make sense of a recent survey that said that over 50% of young people at Oxford University saw themselves as fluid sexually and only a very small percentage as gay/lesbian? Does the level of offence that some of the attitudes that were so normal in my own growing up now cause – about gender, sexuality, race etc. – really sit comfortably? This is a different world, and we can very easily feel alienated and somewhat out of our depth. But somehow, we still make sense of it, and perhaps even celebrate it.

And what of the next fifty years, the lives that our current students are going to experience? Who knows? One thing I am very sure about, however, is that I will not be around to see it. Roll on 2023…

A Sociology of the Story in the Study of Religion

My next writing project is to be a book on ‘myth’. This is part of the wider project to produce a ‘general theory of religion’ that I have been working on since the mid-nineteen-nineties. The overall structure of the project has hardly changed at all, the details of the individual elements continue to develop. At the heart of this project is the place of the story in relation to religion. In my first book, On the Perception of Worship, I outlined how the story plays such significant and central role within the worship of the Baptist Church that I studied, and by implication, in all worship. The essence of the story, I suggested, was that it could convey human experience without having to describe that experience explicitly. The story implicitly says, ‘it was like this …’ and expects the listener/reader to draw on their own experience, empathy, or emotions to communicate the core of the human experience/emotion being conveyed.

Hittite ruins in Eastern Turkey (MDS 2005).

Any standard of theory of religion would be expected, at some point, to engage with the idea of myth (or story), which, alongside ritual, religious experience, symbol, belief, and other elements, is understood to be part of the (Western, Christian) construction of religion. It is almost inevitable, therefore, that in a multi-volume work on the theory of religion, the concept of myth would be touched on, and discussed at length, at some point. That, therefore, is my next project.

After engaging with a series of theories of myth within the literature I am clear that I do not want to distinguish any particular set of stories as ‘myth’. Myth, like ‘religion’, has a Western, although far less obviously Christian, foundation and is not, in my view, particularly helpful in understanding the nature of religion in the world. My emphasis, therefore, will, throughout the new book, be on the ‘story’, and I am happy to include almost any story, or hint of a story, within the compass of my work. This will probably make it far too big and unwieldly to be manageable. However, that is my goal.

The starting point, however, will undoubtedly be the classic theories of myth, and it is in that context that I have been reading various works, classic and other, on myth, just to see what there is out there. The latest of these is Wendy Doniger’s The Implied Spider. I was somewhat frustrated by Doniger’s work at the start, not least because of her deliberately playful use of metaphor (including the implied spider of the title) which I felt distracted from the development of the ideas and appeared to be there just to look clever and well read. However, I soon got used to the rather overblown style and even began to enjoy it.

The other frustration was that for Doniger myth is primarily something that is written down, or perhaps more accurately, all the examples of myth that she draws on (and she does have a very wide definition, that seems to encompass fairy tales as the primary example) are literary. She is a specialist on India and Sanskrit literature, so this is perhaps not surprising. However, it does seem to limit the range and breadth of analysis that is possible.

Where Doniger is interesting, and what is the real focus of this book, is in her defence of the comparative in the study of myth. This is not a fashionable approach and Doniger is clear that she must defend her comparativist approach, both in method and in its underlying assumptions about the universality of the human condition (or of diffusion, that she attempts, but in a much more half-hearted fashion). Given that many of the classic theories of myth are fundamentally comparativist, and it is that comparative approach that has come in for the most sustained criticism, this is both a refreshing read and a powerful defence of what some might see as the indefensible.

The one thing that came out of reading this book for me, however, was a reinforcement of what my own book will be, and what it will not be. Much of Doniger’s approach, and her assumption about why we might be interested in myth in the first place, focuses on meaning, and hence on content, as the key element that needs to be investigated and compared across cultures. She is not naïve about this. Far from it, meaning is multivalent and constantly shifting, always context specific and probably undefinable for any particular telling of a myth/story. It is, however, content/meaning that she is constantly referencing and seeking in her defence of the comparative method.

For me the content, as such, is not that relevant, and hence I have less interest in the comparative, and none at all in its diffusionist version. What interests me is the social context of the story, its place in society and the way in which it acts (not ‘functions’) to mould, or reinforce, or transform social actions. From my perspective, the story is an active player in society, something that I must think through and aim to articulate in a better way than I am managing at this point. It is not as a literary element, or even as a plot or a narrative, that I have a particular interest in stories, it is the sociology of the story that I want to write, a rethinking of myth in a very down to earth, and yet at the same time, utterly transformative fashion. It goes back, in my own mind, to the idea that the story (any story, but equally a well-chosen story, or a story that is plucked from a bank of possible stories) is the means of communicating experience/emotion, that which cannot be spoken, that begins to make the story so important to a wider theory, or understanding, of religion.

Being in the Top One Hundred: and why I will never get there.

Last week I attended what I think was my first live dance event since the end of COVID. It was a performance by the 2 Faced Dance Company at the Taliesin Arts Centre in Swansea. The three pieces were very different, and the final item, Reduxed, which is noted as the companies most successful work to date, was incredible, having real energy and danger as the young dancers threw themselves and each other around the stage. However, it was the first work, The Qualies, that has stuck in my mind. This was based on moves within a tennis tournament was danced to a spoken text, an article by a sports reporter visiting the qualifications round of a major tennis event.

Playing Quidditch on the Meadow at Swansea University 2015 (MDS).

The text was almost as interesting, perhaps even more interesting, than what the dancers were doing on stage. One phrase in particular stuck with me. Towards the beginning of the text, the author asks whether any of us has the possibility of ever being in the top one hundred of anything in the world. The tennis players he is watching are all in the top one hundred, and part of the text focused on just how utterly different this is from the national championship games that he was involved in as a youth. It is a qualitatively different game and while he considered himself a good tennis player, he was never, ever at this standard. On the other hand, these qualifiers, however good they might appear to be, had very little hope of breaking into the real championships, there was another qualitative leap from this, albeit the top one hundred, and the really famous, celebrity, tennis circuit.

This set me thinking. Is there anything that I could be said to be in top one hundred in the world for? I might be considered among the top one hundred sociologists of religion in the world. That is certainly a possibility, but I am conscious that the sociology of religion has moved on since I last wrote anything or attended an international conference, and many people may have forgotten that I exist. Swansea University is not among the top one hundred universities in the world, and probably never will be, although we recognise that we really should be higher than the top 300-400 which is where we are currently positioned. This probably means that I could not be considered among the top one hundred PVC Education in the world. And, quite frankly, I cannot think of any other context in which I could sensibly be considered among the top one hundred in the world.

What this led me to contemplate, however, is what it takes to be among those top one hundred, and why my own chances are probably very limited. It also relates, in a less direct way, to what it might take to get one of the top one hundred leadership roles in the UK Higher Education sector.

At one level I would, of course, need to demonstrate innate talent, experience, ability, personality and so on. I am going to take it for granted that I have all those, especially when it comes to the ability to run a University (I clearly do not have what it takes to be among the top one hundred public intellectuals, novelists, composers or whatever else I might dream of being among the top one hundred in, but I do at least have a chance of being top one hundred in University leadership).

Given the innate talent etc., there are still four other elements where I think I lack what it really takes to be in the top one hundred: Focus, Networking, Self-Promotion, Selfishness or Self-Centredness.

I have never been good at focus. I have always tried to do too much. The fact that this blog series is framed as a quartet says that I cannot easily focus on one thing. I do not have obsessions and I have never gone out of my way to make myself the best in one field at the expense of all other interests and concerns. I have often thought about whether I should concentrate on one activity, or one agenda, and become a recognised ‘expert’ in that. That might be urban religion in my academic work, civic mission, EDI or student voice in my role as PVC education, or perhaps as a writer or artist of some other kind, leaving the academic and the university roles behind. I can dream, but when it comes down to it, I have too many interests, far too many interests for my own good, and I find it very difficult to focus, to concentrate on one and say ‘no’ to the others. I end up being a jack of all trades and a master of none (to use what now seems a very sexist phrase) and I end up not being known more widely for anything in particular. That will never help me become the top one hundred at anything.

Networking is something that I know I am not very good at. The idea of meeting up with, and initiating conversations with, other people, especially if it is simply for the purpose of ‘getting on’, is something that I find very difficult. This is the one area where I have worked most systematically through coaching and otherwise, and I have improved. I can do it, but it is so much hard work. It goes against my natural shyness, or latent asperges, I really do not enjoy it. Being online does not help. Cold calling by email, even to seek help from others, is something I continually put off and need to psych myself up to do. This is a real handicap, but in the contemporary world, you need to be known in the right networks if you are ever going to advance within any of those networks, that is to become one of the top one hundred in the world within those networks.

This factor is closely related to ‘self-promotion’, but the two are not the same. You can promote yourself, get your name out there, let others know about your existence and achievements, ideas, hopes and dreams, without ever networking. The same factors, however, limit my motivation to do either. I am not sure which comes first, a real distaste for self-promotion, or a significant fear of engaging with others. Ironically this blog, and other similar techniques, are part of my own attempt to overcome that drive against self-promotion. I am doing this on my own terms, and I am, perhaps, convincing myself that there is nobody out there who is reading this stuff. However, you are never going to be in the top one hundred in the world if nobody else knows who you are and what you can achieve. And, quite frankly, in today’s world nobody is ever going to know that unless you tell them yourself. Reputation in the social media world is self-built, you simply cannot rely on others, or the wider grapevine, to do this for you. That is one thing I have learnt very clearly.

So that brings me to ‘selfishness’. I guess the real term I should use here is the more morally acceptable ‘self-centeredness’. If you want to be in the top one hundred you must put yourself first, sell yourself certainly, but also focus, single-mindedly, on that attribute that you want to be recognised for, and, by implication, ignore all calls to help others. As noted in the previous blog, that is not my style. I will always credit others with their achievements. I will always help other to grow, to develop and to flourish. I will always put others before myself unless I am part of an application or interview process, where such activity really does not work, and that, in the aim to be top one hundred, is clearly a failing.

Perhaps, in the end, other things are more important than being in the top one hundred. Perhaps I have also been in higher education too long if I am consistently asking myself if I need to be better in this or that league table. Perhaps I should be asking a different question.

I am Approaching Sixty: Thinking about the Creative in Myself.

I am currently reading two rather bizarre and somewhat eccentric travel books (and yes, I always end up reading more than one book at any one time, it comes with living in two different places). The first is Rose Macaulay’s Towers of Trebizond. The opening sentence, with its reference to both high mass and camels, had me hooked. The second is David Fanshawe’s African Sanctus. My father introduced me to the music of African Sanctus, I have a feeling that we might even have seen it live, but I really cannot remember that. It is the recording (an LP) that has stayed with me, the combination of African, Arabic and Western music that grows out of Fanshawe’s travels around the gulf and the northeast of Africa. It might even have been my first introduction to African music, but whatever it was it was the combination of Africa, and the Latin text of the mass, that really hit home, not to mention the sheer enthusiasm and the rhythms that drive through it.

Fanshawe’s book is so much more than an account of the music, or even of the travels that inspired it. It is in part a fantasy – framed as a trial of the composer by the witchdoctor in Northern Kenya – and it is in part an autobiography, from school days to the production of the African Sanctus itself. Fanshawe tells how he came to music, and particularly composing, late, in his twenties. He was never a ‘budding composer’, he did not even think he was a very good composer, but his piano teacher saw something of genius in him, and he persevered. He is still not convinced, as he writes the book, that he is very good, but he is certainly sure that he is a composer (and a ‘potato’, but that is another story).

I am approaching sixty and as I look back, I sometimes wonder what might have been. I wrote my first opera at the age of ten (and while it was nothing to write home about, to give Dad his due he did encourage the other kids at school to sing it through and learn the parts!). I started to write a novel at age twelve (inspired by War and Peace of all things) but never got beyond the opening chapter (which mum thought had promise, although she admitted that she didn’t think the hero was anything like handsome enough). At secondary school I studied neither English nor Music partly because those were my sister’s strengths and my parents did not want us to compete, partly because of my dyslexia, but primarily because the school structure and timetable ended up forcing us to choose between the sciences and the arts, and at that stage I found science easier.

At university, however, I wrote a symphony and took it to some Professor in the Music Department to look at. He realised that I had had no training in music, but he was really impressed that I had thought through a whole structure for a symphonic work. He suggested that I should get to know the work of Steve Reich and two or three weeks later I sat next to the composer in a concert of his music at the Royal Northern College of Music. It blew my mind, but also perhaps convinced me that I was probably never going to be a composer.

Somewhat later, as a local community worker and part time member of a local amateur dramatic society, I showed a play that I had written to the director of the play we were currently working on (Ibsen’s Ghost). She was very kind, read it through, and then pointed out that it had no ‘drama’ and while it was very well plotted, did not really engage with the emotions. As with music, I was somewhat disillusioned and chose to concentrate on the day job.

Incidentally both ‘experts’ as well as commenting on my ability to handle plot and structure, also noted that there was one element in both works that was entirely impractical. The play needed a dead body to lie under a table throughout the whole piece. The first movement of the symphony needed all the bass instruments to play the same note as a constant beat in an extended funeral march for fifteen to twenty minutes. I am not sure now that I would take the fact that my work was ‘impractical’ as a reason to give up. The fact that I had no training in music and/or drama and did not have the basics of the craft was, however, a serious drawback. I did not, therefore, do what Fanshawe did and take negative criticism as a call to work harder and learn the craft, to prove to the Professor and the Director, that I could, in fact, write music and/or drama.

Not, that is, until I am turning sixty. I know that I will never be able to play music well. My fingers won’t let me do that, not to mention the issues of reading music with dyslexia, and a total inability to stay in tune. I will never make a good, or even a moderately passable, actor. I will never fully grasp emotion, drama, and character. I don’t do ‘emotion’ and although I have never been diagnosed with autism or any related disability, I do recognise a great deal of the autistic in my engagement with others.

What I do very well, however, is structure, pattern, and plot. Building an extended piece of work from a few simple principles gives me the opportunity – if I do learn about the basics of putting notes together in a meaningful fashion, or of writing simple, clear, and powerful language – of writing symphonies, novels, plays and goodness only knows what else (more than a few eccentric travel books as well I am sure). Perhaps retirement is the right time to think about this. It is certainly about time that I sought the creative in myself rather than (or perhaps as well as) spending my life encouraging the creative in others.

Playing with the Big Boys (and Girls)

Last week in the Life Scientific on Radio 4, the interviewee spoke of his early career following troops of chimpanzees in Uganda. He was particularly struck by one young male, who was named Jingo. This chimp was not particularly large, but he was fast, and he played a particular role in the hunting parties of the group. As a fast, young, agile male, Jingo’s role was to chase the prey (usually monkeys) through the treetops and, because of his size and speed, he was usually the first to arrive at the kill.

Normal chimp behaviour suggested that at this point Jingo would either start to eat the kill, which would have been a challenge to the dominant males, or make a point of subservience and protect the kill until the dominant males arrived to claim it. Jingo did neither. He stood back and allowed all the chimps, and particularly the younger males and females, to have their fill of the kill before the dominant males finally arrived to find nothing left. The dominant males, the big boys as stated in the interview, were often furious at this turn of events but there was little they could do. Meanwhile Jingo picked up a following among the younger males and females and, while he was never big enough to challenge to big boys directly, ended up leading the troop for many years through what can only be described as careful political manoeuvring.

Apart from giving a really interesting insight into chimpanzee behaviour this story struck a particular chord with me because so much of my own behaviour and activities within the University have followed the path as set out by Jingo.

In almost thirty years of work within a university setting I have always been very conscious of not being able, or willing, to play with the ‘big boys’. I am fundamentally opposed to the macho approaches to management and would not contemplate competing with those who engage in this activity on their own terms. I was significantly bullied while at school and learnt very early on to match aggression and violence with an offer of help and support. I won the bullies over by ignoring their threats and offering to help them in their schoolwork, or otherwise, making myself somewhat essential to them if they were to avoid the humiliation of the school system. In doing that I am fully aware that I probably endorsed their violence and did little to challenge the system itself.

In moving to a university lecturing role bullying once again became very visible, directed at myself on occasion, but more commonly at my female colleagues or others who were less able to defend themselves (or who cared more for the consequences) than I ever did. On only one occasion did a line manager threaten me directly with adverse consequences if I did not co-operate in a culture of bullying. That person did not last long in the job as I found other ways to have them moved on. Taking on particular individuals, however, does not, of itself, challenge the system that from the mid-1990s through to the current environment, has always been dominated by what might be called ‘the big boys’ and increasingly also by the ‘big girls’. And it is always the case that these dominant, and dominating, individuals always seem to end up getting to top jobs and the significant roles within the university.

My policy and practice in this environment is not dissimilar to that of Jingo, and the story of his rise to power, and methods of achieving that power, resonated immediately with my own story.

I am not sure that I would really describe myself as either ‘quick’ or ‘agile’ in any physical sense, but intellectually and particularly politically I have often been able to side step, manipulate and outwit many of those who have competed with me for senior academic roles. I rose through the ranks of academic leadership relatively quickly at Birmingham, taking advantage of restructurings and the uncertainty that these created to position myself in a series of ever more significant roles, ending up as acting PVC and Head of the College of Arts and Law. It was not so much the means by which I was able to achieve that rise (largely a case of being in the right place at the right time) but what I would always do to consolidate each step up that ladder that was significant, and which relates more clearly to Jingo’s narrative.

I used each position, director of learning and teaching or head of department/ school/college, to support and enable others. That has always been my way. It is not necessarily a deliberate policy and to describe this action as a political strategy probably gives it far too much weight. I would always support others, encourage them to develop their skills, fight their corner when I had to, and provide opportunities for growth and development. I have always felt that by encouraging others to flourish things develop and grow within an institution, where bearing down on them, demanding compliance and measuring against an increasing number of KPIs will only diminish and discourage and lead to conformity and stagnation. It has not always been easy, however, to continue that policy within a culture where compliance, micromanagement and KPIs are still the dominant mode of authority.

As with Jingo, sharing the spoils of the hunt, in my case supporting peers and those who I have been responsible for, has always led to tensions with the ‘big boys’ who expected me to play a very different game, and has also led to significant popular support that I have been able to use at times as leverage against the big boys in order to develop my own agenda. I have survived a number of attacks from those above (or more commonly around) me and, by many criteria, I have thrived and carved out a very successful career for myself in university leadership. Having reached a certain point in that career, however, I am not really sure whether the practices and policies that I have followed will now take me any further.

Unlike a troop of chimpanzees, the major difficulty with the university world is that the various ‘troops’ or institutions, are connected, and it is not just a case of rising to the top within a sealed political unit. If the top jobs in the university were handed out on the basis of the wishes of the staff, something perhaps a little more democratic than we currently have, then I could well have been in a good position to retain, or gain, a leadership role above the one that I now have. However, that is not the case. It is always possible for the big boys, or girls, to move between institutions and the macho leader is still (even in these days of EDI and more ‘humane’ management) a preferred candidate. It is not the staff of the institution, the members of the chimpanzee troop, who have to be convinced, it is other ‘big boys’ and ‘big girls’ on Councils and Senior Leadership Teams. They are still, to a very large extent, playing the game of league table performance and management by KPI, something that I have considerable experience of, and an unenviable track record in, but something that ultimately is not in my nature. I still feel like the smaller – albeit more agile, and more politically astute – contender, and I am not at all sure I will ever, now, get that top job where a real difference can be made.

Celebrating Easter 2020

Just before Easter I had a zoom conversation with a Muslim professional. He said that he had read that I was a man of faith and therefore asked how I was going to celebrate Easter. I replied that Easter was the highlight of the Christian year, more so than Christmas, and that it was a season that I had always enjoyed. Not least, it was the arc of the liturgy, over four days, taking us through the story of the death and resurrection of Jesus, that I found most inspiring. I wished him well for Ramadan and Eid and we both agreed that it was a change to have the opportunity to talk of faith in today’s world.

Now, on the Tuesday after Easter, I realise just how privileged and honoured I am to have been able to celebrate Easter at a church that continues to use the extraordinary form, the unrevised Latin rite from 1962. Unlike many in the congregation I do not believe for one moment that this is the only form that should be used. I am not particularly committed to it theologically or ecclesiologically. I just find it so much more satisfying, ritually and liturgically, than any of the modern alternatives. And, as with any liturgy or worship, from whatever tradition, when it is undertaken with commitment and enthusiasm, in the best possible way that it can be celebrated (with full complement of clergy and servers, with a professional choir, and with all the relevant beauty and dignity that could be employed) then it creates an experience of holiness and worship that, for me, is beyond compare. While the Easter vigil, for example, took two and three-quarter hours, it was, in my view, perfect and a fitting celebration of the depth and complexity, emotionally and spiritually, of the feast.

I don’t share what I assume to be the very conservative moral and social values of many of the congregation at the church I attend, but I would not expect to differ on any of the essentials theologically. The sermon on Easter morning, drawing out the biblical allusions to bread, wine and the lamb from the first Passover meals, through the Last Supper, to Jesus’ words on the Cross was a wonderful expression of core of the Catholic faith. I think it is sad that the Pope has chosen to conduct a campaign against the conservative wing of the Church through their commitment to a particular form of liturgy. I am sure there is nothing in the rite itself that the Pope can find objectionable, it is those who choose to use it as a badge if identity, and opposition to current trends in the Vatican, that he appears to have difficulties with. As I say, I think this is sad, but I am still grateful for the opportunity to worship using that rite in a church that does it so well.

On Easter morning I also listened to the liturgy from Canterbury Cathedral as broadcast on Radio 4. It was the Archbishop’s sermon that has caught the headlines and created controversy, asking once again whether church and politics meet. I have no objection to that sermon and support much of what the Archbishop was saying. A very different sermon to that in my own church, but equally profound and theologically appropriate. My difficulty was with much of the rest of the service. It appeared to seek ‘relevance’ in a way that led it to be almost humanist in tone. There is, of course, a place for humanism in the church, and perhaps in the liturgy. However, in my view not at Easter, when we celebrate what God has done for us, not what we have done for God, or for each other.

Where I and many Muslims would probably be in agreement is that the worship of God is not about ‘relevance’. Whether that worship is in Latin or Arabic is not important. It is an attitude of devotion and subservience to the power that created us, loves us, and brought about our salvation, that is pre-eminent. That demands a certain detachment from the things of this world, a glimpse of heaven, as the Anglo-Catholic slum priests of the early twentieth century East End churches would stress. It is the ability to take us out of ourselves and present us with something totally other, utterly divine, that worship comes into its own.

And I am clearly not the only one who thinks like this. At a time when church attendance continues to decline across all the denominations, the church I attended over Easter was full every day, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday, congregations of two to three hundred, and much to my surprise, different on each day. There are, of course, some regulars, and the weekly Sunday liturgy has itself maintained a full church every week since the end of lock down, but over the feast there were clearly people who had travelled in from miles around to share the experience, to worship in the traditional ways, and probably some new people, returnees who remembered something of this in their childhood, whether in the UK, or in Poland or other European, Asian and African nations, but also young families who believe this is the right environment to bring up a new generation of Christian youth. There is something here that is clearly attractive, and clearly not only to me.

Happy Easter, and may the peace of the risen Lord be with us all…

Once Upon a Time

As I begin this blog, I have just finished reading Tomoko Masuzawa’s In Search of Dreamtime, The Quest for the Origin of Religion. So, what better place to begin than on origins.

Masuzawa wonders at the way in which the modern study of religion has rejected the nineteenth century obsession with origins as an explanation of religion, often violently denying the possibility of ever grasping the ‘origin’. Alongside this rejection of intellectual, or scientific, or literal origins, however, Masuzawa notes that the thing that has no origin, religion, or more correctly, myth, is itself defined by its focus on origins (at least in Eliade’s reading of myths). So while the academic purifies themselves from the taint of origins, the people the academic is studying, the religious, or the myth makers, are seen to be obsessed by origins.

In the book Masuzawa presents a series of close readings of the work of Durkheim, Muller and in particular Freud, showing that, for each author, their particular obsession with origins is not, in fact, all that it seems. In each case the origin that is identified is not in fact the real origin of religion, it is a gap, a fiction, a dream, a transference of the sign. The book is highly theoretical and written in a very clever and sophisticated analytic language. Essentially, however, the origin of religion, in the writing of each author is itself presented as a kind of myth, the home of ‘origins’, that exists not in historical time, but in the time of once upon a time.

As I was reflecting on this work, and the ideas that were circulating throughout Masuzawa’s book, my mind kept coming back to the idea of time and of origins as a form of explanation. Post modernism, we are told, saw the death of the grand narrative, the idea of a teleological understanding of history, or progress. As such it must also have seen the death of origins, playing, as Lyotard puts it, in the ruins of history, but ruins that never were a building, and never were built, that had no origin. Without progress there is no end, and likewise, no place to start, no origin worth mentioning.

One area where this is very apparent in today’s world is in the whole field of identity politics. The emphasis on ‘identity’ sits almost at odds with the concept of ‘origins’. Identity is about the hear and now, about my feelings, my imminent response to my sense of being. It is entirely about the present, even to the point of rejecting, and wanting to overturn, history. This is glaringly obvious in terms of Trans identity, which points to a reality that is felt by the individual at a fundamental, essentialist, level, to the point that origins, sex at birth, has to be denied and even destroyed, often with a violence or vehemence that it terrifying to the observer. The same principle, however, can be seen in all identity politics, the felt reality of the now always trumps any critical view of the past, and origins become irrelevant in the play of self-construction.

The point, however, is not that there are no ‘origins’ in identity politics. It is the rejection of origins in terms of historical narrative time that is at question here, origins in terms of the structures imposed on the individual by their past, by history, by society. Identity is found in a different, much deeper, and much more personal form of ‘origin’, what it is to be fundamentally the self, the person I am today. Narrative is still essential, but the starting point is not biology, or sociology, or even history, it is not who I was, it is much more meaningful, it is who I am, in the here and now, and in my very being, a more fundamental kind of origin, the origin of my sense of self.

Of course, there is far more to identity politics than the simple denial of origins, and this is a topic that I will inevitably come back to time and time again within this blog.

In the book that I am just completing, on the academic appropriation of the Dogon from Mali in western thought, I end the final chapter by noting that my approach has been rigorously historical. I track the ‘history’ of the anthropological discourse on the Dogon, the history of the art historical discourse on the Dogon, the history of the popular appropriation of the Dogon and the history of the tourist discourse on the Dogon. In doing this, however, I have noted, throughout the text, the importance of myth, and narrative, to the Dogon themselves, or perhaps more accurately to those who write about the Dogon. I ask therefore whether even to write a history of the appropriation of the Dogon in western thought is itself an appropriation, the use of western analytic methods (history) to represent a people who do not think in those analytic frames about themselves and their world. I ask what a mythic presentation of the Dogon, as presented by the Dogon, might actually look like.

In asking this, however, I find myself back inside Masuzawa’s somewhat circular argument. Myth, in Masuzawa’s perspective, and that of Eliade before her, is all about origins. Western academic writing rejects the mythic narrative of origins, even perhaps denying the validity of such analysis in disciplines such as post-colonial studies. And yet history, which must be about origins if it is about anything, is the western analytic frame that I am seeking to reject in place of mythic reflection. Is this any more than rejecting one statement of origins, one form of myth, for another statement of origins, another form of myth? Or is it, perhaps, recognising that all forms of academic analysis, all forms of explanation, are ultimately little more than once upon a time?

And so I begin: Once upon a time…