Jonathan Z. Smith
There is perhaps no more widely influential scholar of religion currently working than the University of Chicago's Jonathan Z. Smith--a widely published essayist and respected senior scholar who is also known for his strong commitment to undergraduate teaching and the place of the liberal arts curriculum in the modern university. Raised in Manhattan, New York, Smith earned his B.A. in the late 1950s from Haverford College in Pennsylvania, and went on to earn his Ph.D. from what was then Yale's newly established Department of Religion (which, in 1962, was instituted separate from Yale's Divinity School). Early in his career he worked briefly at the recently established religious studies department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, but joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in 1968, where he has remained throughout his career. Although the focus of his doctoral dissertation was James G. Frazer's classic work on myth and ritual, The Golden Bough, it is evident that even at this early stage he was primarily concerned with the problem of method, that is, how to go about doing comparative work. Since that time, much of Smith's data has derived from the religions of antiquity, including ancient Judaism and the earliest forms of Christianity, though his academic interests have taken his work to any number of different historical periods, languages, and cultures--evident in his wide ranging essays that often open by juxtaposing two seemingly unrelated pieces of data from human history. His ability to work in such diverse data domains has more than likely led to his considerable influence among a diverse number of scholars, many of whom find themselves drawn to Smith's attention to detail, his unwillingness simply to assume that cultural difference is secondary to some presumed deep similarity that awaits detection, as well as his efforts to put before his colleagues the fact that scholarship is always an act of choice, selection, and focus rather than an exercise in interpreting timeless meanings of texts or symbols. This attention to choice (along with its various motivations and implications) places Smith's work at the heart of the field's recent turn toward emphasizing theory and the study of politics in the study of religion--for selection presuppose viewpoints and the use of criteria that in turn presuppose interests (whether hidden or apparent, whether intellectual or political).
Major Works
Map is not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions (1978)
Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (1982)
To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (1987)
Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the
Religions of Late Antiquity (1990)
The Harpercollins Dictionary of Religion (1995; editor and contributor)
Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion (2004)
Quotation
"If we had understood the archaeological and textual record correctly,
man has had his entire history in which to imagine deities and modes of
interaction within them. But man, more precisely western man, has had
only the last few centuries in which to imagine religion. That is to say,
while there is a staggering amount of data, phenomena, of human experiences
and expressions that might be characterized in one culture or another,
by one criterion or another, as religion--there is no data for religion.
Religion is solely the creation of the scholar's study. It is created
for the scholar's analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison
and generalization. Religion has no existence apart from the academy.
For this reason the student of religion, and most particularly the historian
of religion, must be relentlessly self-conscious. Indeed, this self-consciousness
constitutes his primary expertise, his foremost object of study. For the
self-conscious student of religion, no datum possesses intrinsic interest.
It is of value only insofar as it can serve as exempli gratia [
or e.g.] of some fundamental issue in the imagination of religion. The
student of religion must be able to articulate clearly why 'this' rather
than 'that' was chosen as an exemplum. His primary skill is concentrated
in this choice. This effort at articulate choice is all the more difficult,
and hence all the more necessary, for the historian of religion who accepts
neither the boundaries of canon nor of community in constituting his intellectual
domain, in providing his range of exempla."
- from Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jamestown
(1982)
Select Web Resources on Smith
University
of Chicago faculty web page for Jonathan Z. Smith
"The Necessary Lie: Duplicity in the Disciplines," by Jonathan
Z. Smith
"God Save This Honorable Court: Religion and Civic Discourse,"
video of the second annual Ninian Smart Lecture, delivered by Jonathan
Z. Smith at the University of California, Santa Barbara (requires
RealPlayer);
read a description of this same lecture as it was presented at the University
of Alabama on September 23, 2003
Secondary Literature on Smith
Benjamin C. Ray, "The Koyukon Bear Party and the 'Bare Facts' of
Ritual," Numen 38 (1991): 151-176.
Takeshi Kimura, "Bearing the 'Bare Facts' of Ritual. A Critique Of
Jonathan Z. Smith's Study of the Bear Ceremony Based On a Study of the
Ainu Iyomante," Numen 46 (1999): 86-114.
Hugh B. Urban, "Making a Place to Take a Stand: Jonathan Z. Smith
and the Politics and Poetics of Comparison," Method & Theory
in the Study of Religion 12 (1999): 339-378.
Kimberley C. Patton and Benjamin C. Ray (eds.), A Magic Still Dwells:
Comparative Religion in the Postmodern Age. University of California
Press, 2000.
Malory Nye, Religion: The Basics, p.p. 16-17. Routledge, 2003.
Pia Altieri, "Close Encounters of the Smith Kind," Method
& Theory in the Study of Religion 16 (2004): 61-71.