Adapted from chapter six of Russell T. McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion:
The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Notalgia.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Full references for each source quoted
in this portion of the site can be found here.

As suggested earlier, in the discussion of essentialism, there may be something at stake in classifying those behaviors we call religious as being merely the outward manifestation of an otherwise unseen, and therefore only felt, inner sentiment. What is at stake is that the context, the historical specificity of the act, is either lost or overlooked, as if it was merely the stage on which some spiritual drama was taking place. Perhaps, or so the materialist would argue, the historical stage is not some neutral set or mere background, but is itself the drama. Perhaps, then, there is something political at stake in studying any human action as anything but just that--an all too human action, with conflicting motives and unanticipated implications.

Although I've offered one brief example of a newspaper editor trying to classify a story (thereby making an event an item of discourse), consider another, offered in rather more detail: the case of the interpretations American media and intellectuals gave to the much publicized actions of several Vietnamese Buddhists who, beginning in mid-June of 1963, died by publicly setting themselves on fire.*

The first of these deaths occurred at a busy downtown intersection in Saigon on June 11, 1963, and was widely reported in American newspapers the following day, although the New York Times, along with many other newspapers, declined to print Malcolm Browne's famous, or rather infamous, photograph (see below) of the lone monk burning (Moeller 1989: 404). The monk, seventy- three year old Thich Quang Duc, sat at a busy downtown intersection and had gasoline poured over him by two fellow monks. As a large crowd of Buddhists and reporters watched, he lit a match and, over the course of a few moments, burned to death while he remained seated in what is known as the lotus position (a seated position used while meditating). In the words of U.S. journalist David Halberstam, who was at that time filing daily reports on the war with the New York Times:

"I was to see that sight again, but once was enough. Flames were coming from a human being; his body was slowly withering and shriveling up, his head blackening and charring. In the air was the smell of burning flesh; human beings burn surprisingly quickly. Behind me I could hear the sobbing of the Vietnamese who were now gathering. I was too shocked to cry, too confused to take notes or ask questions, too bewildered to even think.... As he burned he never moved a muscle, never uttered a sound, his outward composure in sharp contrast to the wailing people around him" (Halberstam 1965: 211).

After his funeral, where his remains were finally reduced to ashes, Quang Duc's heart, which had not burned, was retrieved, enshrined, and treated as a sacred relic (Schecter 1967: 179).

In spite of the fact that this event took place during the same busy news week as the civil rights movement in the United States was reaching a peak (with the enrollment of the first two black students at the University of Alabama and in the same week as the murder, in Jackson, Mississippi, of the civil rights leader Medgar Evers), as the week progressed Quang Duc's death and the subsequent demonstrations associated with his funeral were covered by the American media in greater detail. From the small initial article on page three of the New York Times on June 12 that reported the death accompanied only by a photograph of a nearby protest that prevented a fire truck from reaching the scene, the story was briefly summarized and updated on page five the next day and then was moved to the lead story on page one on June 14, 1963, accompanied by the following headline: "US Warns South Vietnam On Demands of Buddhists: [South Vietnamese President] Diem is told he faces censure if he fails to satisfy religious grievances, many of which are called just." The story, no longer simply involving the actions of a lone Buddhist monk but now concerned with the official US reaction, remained on page one for the following days, was reported in greater detail by Halberstam in the Sunday edition (June 16, 1963), and was mentioned for the first time in an editorial column on June 17, 1963, one week after it occurred. By the autumn of that year the images either of protesting or burning monks had appeared in a number of popular magazines, most notably in the onetime popular Life Magazine (in the June, August, September, and November issues).

Despite of the wide coverage these so-called "religious grievances" and the death by fire received in newspapers and the popular presses, it seems puzzling that it received relatively little or no treatment by scholars of religion. Apart from a few brief descriptions of these events in an assortment of books on world religions in general (such as Ninian Smart's The World's Religions, where it is interpreted as an "ethical" act [1989: 447]) or on Buddhism in South East Asia, only one detailed article was published at that time, in the well-known journal, History of Religions, written by Jan Yün-Hua (1965). This article was concerned with examining the medieval Chinese Buddhist precedents for Quang Duc's death, a death that quickly came to be interpreted in the media as an instance of self-immolation (from Latin, meaning to sprinkle, as in blessing a sacrificial victim) to protest persecution of the Buddhists in South Vietnam by the minority of politically and militarily powerful Vietnamese Roman Catholics. According to such accounts, the protest and, eventually, Quang Duc's death, was in response to a prior demonstration (on May 8, 1963) at which government troops aggressively broke up a Buddhist gathering in the old imperial city of Hue that was demonstrating for, among other things, the right to fly the Buddhist flag along with the national flag. The government, however, took no responsibility for the nine Buddhists who died in the ensuing violence at that time, blaming their deaths instead on Communists. Accordingly, outrage for what the Buddhists considered to be the unusually violent actions of the government troops at Hue was fueled over the following weeks, culminating, according to this interpretation, in Quang Duc's "sacrificial" death.