Sixth Annual Aronov Lecture

On Tuesday, March 12, 2008, the Department of Religious Studies once again hosted its annual Aronov Lecture. This year's guest was the noted anthropologist, Prof. Arjun Appadurai, from The New School in New York--an internationally recognized authority on social theory and globalization.

As part of his visit, Prof. Appadurai was hosted at a lunchtime discussion and, that evening, delivered a public lecture, in Smith Hall, to seventy faculty and staff. His visit to campus was co-sponsored by the College of Arts & Sciences, along with the Departments of Anthropology, English, History, Women's Studies, the African American Studies Program, and New College.

As part of his visit, Prof. Appadurai kindly pre-circulated a brief paper that he had originally presented in 2006 in Paris, at a UNESCO conference, on the topic of "The Risks of Dialogue" (PDF; available with Bama ID/Password). This paper was the basis for a Religion in Culture lunchtime discussion, prior to his evening public lecture.

Anthropology graduate students were able to attend the lunch along with Prof. Marysia Gabraith (far left) of Anthropology and New College (both co-sponsors of Prof. Appadurai's visit). Prof. Galbraith delivered a Religion in Culture lecture of her own in April of 2002.

Prof. Appadurai, here listening intently to reports from graduate students working with English as a Second Language students in public schools as well as trying to bridge the gap between health care providers and local populations for whom the health care system may be unfamiliar. His paper's focus on dialogue between social groups--a dialogue that ought to be focused on small, achievable goals among parties who have equal stakes in the exchange--had applications to both of these areas.

Along with the assistance of Ms. Betty Dickey and Ms. Donna Martin, in the main office, Prof. Steven Ramey (left) plans all of the Department's public events. Here he is joined by Prof. McCutcheon, the Chair of the Department.

That evening's lecture, entitled "The Offending Part: Sacrifice and Ethnocide in the Era of Globalization," drew on the work of René Girard (b. 1923) to develop a new way to account for the kinds of large scale violence we now sometimes see enacted on minority groups during conflicts around the world.

Girard's influential study of sacrifice, Violence and the Sacred (1972), drew on literary theory, Freudian theory, as well as data from the literature of antiquity, to argue that sacrifice plays a crucial role in how social groups manage the inevitable violence in their midst. Girard proposed that by identifying members of the group who stand in a marginal position--so-called scapegoats with no one to avenge any violence done to them--groups could curtail the otherwise unending cycle of retribution that follows all acts of social violence (i.e., an eye for an eye for an eye, etc.). By "sacrificing" the scapegoat, groups find a victim upon whom its violence can be enacted without retaliation.

Applying Girard's work, Prof. Appadurai argued that if we see conflict as a basic element of modern social life, then we can understand why groups sometimes turn on their own members--or, better put, why minorities are sometimes victimized.

We can also understand why this violence sometimes takes the form of severe scarification rather than ethnocide (such as widespread amputations in Sierra Leone's civil war in the 1990s); evidence of the "offending part" must remain so that those who form the majority have a concrete reminder of the "Other" against whom they have defined themselves. Dominant groups require minorities to persuade their own members of their identity. But because majorities always contain competing sub-groups, conflict and violence are bound to re-occur. A scapegoat must therefore be found if the myth of dominance is to be perpetuated.

Thanks to Dan Mullins, President of the Religious Studies Student Association for his introduction of Prof. Appadurai at lunch and for his photographicological expertise. Thanks also to Adam Smith, photographer with the Crimson White, for permission to use his photos from the evening's lecture.