I am a sick man. I am a jealous man. Endowed with a certain Mediterranean vigor I am spiteful, sickened to death by Tom Brokaw’s shit-eating grin, disgusted with my family and former friends, fearful of aloof dot-commers in a Biblical way, their SUV’s, their palm pilots, their material stink swarming around me. But I will be honest with you. I harbor such strange opinions because I have fallen into the literary life. A noble calling, you might say. But I did not choose this hell, this torture that even the most vile of Chinese sadists couldn’t stomach. I have yet to find my own voice. I have yet to be original in any sense of the term. I am a garden-variety critic, a poetaster with no skill, only taste. I am a scab, aware at all times, night and day, that I am derivative, the new and improved version of what already came before. I want to be an artist, a sayer of truth. But I am blocked. Hindered and haunted by the words of another. To make a long story short, I am obsessed with Don DeLillo.

A confession, gentle reader, of what lies behind.

I have been in contact with others who share my obsession, chat room buddies, friends of friends who pick up used copies of White Noise to give away at parties, and last but not least, The Don DeLillo Society, an academic clique of which I was once a proud member. Founded in 1999, we organize and sponsor panels on DeLillo at various literary conferences. We are the gauntlet of DeLillo criticism. If you want to say something about DeLillo you must first go through us. We are in the know. Nothing that DeLillo writes, says, or does eludes our grasp. We understand how DeLillo relates to contemporary issues of race, gender, and class. We have come to realize the subtle workings of his mind and how they relate to our own.

I was recently forced to resign from the DeLillo Society after a colleague suggested that we write a book together about DeLillo’s depictions of media violence. I had thought of this already! So I punched him in the nose. I was soon fired from my University post and he is suing me. I am suing the University for wrongful termination. The Chronicle of Higher Education has gotten involved (too involved if you ask me!), milking the story for its salacious metacommentary.

I am now unemployed, a stay-at-home dad with no prospect of gainful employment. But in order to maintain appearances, I will let you in on my imaginary—where I am coming from and what I take for granted when I speak of things DeLillo. I have never been to prison. I was born in Akron, Ohio but tell people I’m from Cleveland. I love cats. When I was twenty-two I applied to law school but was rejected by every goddamn one, a sign, I believe, of things to come. I am quick to anger. A victim, plain and simple.

My life can be summarized by my cultural obsessions beginning with my mother’s soap operas in the summers between second and third grades—Days of Our Lives and Another World— intrigue, murder, and sex whose narrative was jointed and deferred. I quickly moved onto KISS—KISS tapes, KISS jacket, KISS dolls, KISS cards and the prized #18, a solitary Ace Frehley on guitar, a sparkling, spacey vision of silver and white. Only my friend Brett Beadow had been blessed with #18, at that time a point of contention and awkward jealousy. I then spent five years thinking about nothing but baseball cards, arranging and rearranging them in plastic pockets, stealing packs from the drug store, memorizing statistics and perfect mint prices, going to card shows and collecting every Pete Rose card there was, every year, all mint, all Charlie Hustle, from the 1963 rookie card to the 1984 Fleer update. After the cardboard heroes lost their luster, I moved onto more sophisticated fare. Before DeLillo there was Galaga, Prince, Led Zeppelin, and Bon Jovi, Civil War battle reenactments, Laurie Anderson, semiotics, and Moby-Dick to name only a few.

I fell into the words of Don DeLillo on November 16, 1997 (now a family holiday). That was the day I first began reading Underworld. It took eight days of slow, methodical turns, one page at a time, copious notes, tears, and illumination. I would read sections over and over again. I would spend hours on a single paragraph. The first line a coded message, a direct challenge to the reader, hanging there, waiting for me to decipher it.

He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful.

Since then I have read everything by DeLillo at least three times, collected all the first editions, written fan letters to DeLillo on a weekly basis (Don DeLillo, c/o Scribner, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY, 10020), lurked around chat rooms dedicated to his work under a myriad of user names, sometimes picking fights with myself in order to assure victory. I have a bumper sticker on my car that reads “If You Love Don DeLillo You’re Too Close.” I have used Americana (DeLillo’s first novel) as a bedtime story for my sons. I hope to pass on something special to them through DeLillo’s linguistic code. My orange tabby, Barbara, is named after DeLillo’s wife.

It seems as though I was born to be a critic, zeroing in on different chinks in the cultural armor, deconstructing them, looking for an opening, always searching for a way out. I am a tragic and pathetic figure, an angry young man who resents giving you, dear reader, the literary facts of the day:

Born on November 20, 1936, Don DeLillo was raised in the Bronx, attended Catholic high school and later Fordham University. Like Salman Rushdie, he worked as a copywriter for Ogilvy and Mather before moving onto fiction. Unlike Rushdie, however, DeLillo has never been the target of an Islamic fatwa. He has never been buddy-buddy with Bono or undergone cosmetic surgery. DeLillo usually passes on such pomp and circumstance for a reason. Great writers and their work, he says, are “too ready to be neutralized, to be incorporated into the ambient noise. This is why we need the writer in opposition, the novelist who writes against power, who writes against the corporation or the state or the whole apparatus of assimilation. We’re all one beat away from becoming elevator music.” In keeping with his professed outsider status, DeLillo rarely grants interviews. He does not appear on Charlie Rose. He doesn’t write book reviews or participate in writing workshops or the academic life.

Last summer my DeLillo mania grew progressively worse. I experienced unexplained blackouts, alternating episodes of depression and euphoria. In July I made a DeLillo kachina doll out of old New York Times and scraps of cloth, perfectly proportioned to his thin, 145 pound frame. I began to experiment with DeLillo scratch-n-sniffs, a different smell for each of his books. In August I set up a small lab in my basement, complete with beakers and Bunsen burners. I have yet to complete my chemistry project but I imagine a gamut of literary aromas, each sticker in its own way a summation of plot, characters, and denouement. Here is what Ratner’s Star smells like. Go ahead. Scratch your screen:

I know this smell.

You know this smell.

Because we have slipped into the stream of DeLillo’s sensorium—the writer who once described himself as a literary terrorist; the writer who does not ruminate over subtle emotional shifts or the minor grievances of domestic life; the writer who does not deal “painfully and honestly” with the latest political crisis.

But as DeLillo prophecies, the culture that contains us eludes our desire to mark it, to use its content to remind us of our formal freedom. We are ever haunted by visions of a more complete self, an identity fully realized—a kinder, gentler, more articulate version—someone who volunteers, who makes a difference, who sinks the three-pointer at the buzzer, who publishes brilliant tomes, who captures the zeitgeist, who is loved unconditionally and bravely chooses a fate. This is the “naked shitmost self” that we believe, desperately, tragically, is there, somewhere. “Even when you self-destruct,” cautions a DeLillo character, “you want to fail more, lose more, die more than others, stink more than others.”

I know exactly what he is talking about. Because I am a humble apprentice. Because I have absorbed and digested Don DeLillo. Because I am the fungus that lurks between his toes.

This is my demonic side, the part that goes without saying, the part that is controlled from without, the part that we, dear reader, don’t like to admit to ourselves because we can’t. Like Livia Majeski from Valparaiso, “We feel things. We become addicted to things because life, itself, is habit forming. We start things and can’t stop.”

We seek comfort in the never-ending stream of gadgets and digital doo-dads—all those products endowed with a life-force independent of the human touch. The NASDAQ soars or plummets, money talks, your new iMac works for you. All the while the individual is reduced to an inanimate object at the mercy of market forces. On your knees, beckons the radio man, bow down and breathe in that new car smell, the smell that soothes the wounds of childhood. This is what it’s all about, the otherworldly scent of densely pressed aluminum and vinylized leather that brings you closer to God.

This is the spiritual spiral that has led to my scratch-n-sniff experiments, breaking the world up into signifieds and signifiers, the way things smell and how I talk about these ways and these smells.

But I am ready to be healed, to begin to refuse analogy, to deny that everything is connected to everything else. To move across, away, and beyond DeLillo.

This condition, of course, was depicted brilliantly by DeLillo in chapter 39 of White Noise when the narrator Jack Gladney becomes aware of his own cynicism and confronts Willie Mink, the mysterious inventor of Dylar, an anti-death-anxiety drug to which Mink has become addicted. The main side effect of Dylar is linguistic decadence in extremis. When Jack says “Falling plane,” Mink panics and grabs the arms of his chair. When Jack whispers “Hail of Bullets,” Mink dives to the floor and begins “crawling toward the bathroom, looking back over his shoulder, childlike, miming, using principles of design but showing real terror.”

I want to someday say these words and know, in a visceral way, that they are not my own. I want to be redeemed, bathed in the blood of Latin letters. I want to jettison quaint, well-behaved narratives with neat plots and worked-out endings, to feel the incoherency of modern life on a deeper level, to write as a form of religious meditation in which language is the flawed and final recourse to enlightenment.

A version of this entry was originally published in SPEAK 20 (Fall 2000): 12-17.

I am not someone who likes to shop. In the past, when a girlfriend has invited me out to a Saturday shopping spree as a “fun” recreational activity, I have let it be known that I would find ritual seppuku a more attractive alternative to spending the day in and out of crowded stores. However, when my family and I recently moved out of the city and bought a 1920s home in small lakeside village, none of our modern stuff looked right in it. For both environmental and economic reasons, I decided to explore the world of estate sales and the realm of “pre-owned” everything. I expected of course to find a lot of old junk, but I did not expect the intimacy with which I would sift through peoples’ lives, nor did I predict the kind of stories my fellow tribe of estate sale hunters and I would share related to powerful assemblies of personal objects.

What hidden treasures or promising insights lurk in the mundane spaces where we don’t expect to find spirituality and religion—in the dark drawers we stumble upon where we might otherwise never think to look? How do objects, too often dismissed as “secular” and thus irrelevant to our research, possess a kind of spiritual power in people’s lives that offers us qualitatively different insights into the worlds they make and occupy? With essays on everything from espresso to cell phones, Frequencies addresses precisely these questions, but to colleagues who do not embrace this kind of approach, it may well seem a bit, well… eccentric. As I began to comb through the drawers and closets of strangers’ homes, their bathrooms and basements, sideboards and sun porches, I was taken into worlds of eccentricity, and became fascinated by what, through either downsizing or death, was left behind, especially the attentive care to various collections. What objects held some sort of compelling power in people’s lives to the point of inspiring devotional practice, if only for a time?

Since beginning my journey through the world of the “pre-owned,” I have poured over table after table of Lladro figurines, decorative spoons from destinations all over the world, assortments of “museum-quality” commemorative plates, and jumbo-sized plastic Container Store crates of Beanie Babies. Then there are the linens—the mountains beyond mountains of linens. This is how I met “Wendy,” who collects hand-embroidered linens from American estate sales and then sells them on the internet to her customers, mostly in China. “You’re sending linens to China?” I ask. “Isn’t that like coals to Newcastle? Aren’t most of them made there?” She explains that Chinese ladies want fine Irish linens with the real lace and hand-embroidery—the kind that would be handed down in American families. A tablecloth she picks up at estate sale for $2, for instance, she can turn around and sell for $25. “Americans don’t want them because you have to iron the darn things, and who has the time?” She tells me that there’s also a good resale market in Asia for more sentimental and hokey embroidered linens (a little girl with an umbrella, sun flowers, kittens, etc.). “Here, we think those things are kind of cheesy and in bad taste, but in Asia they are just crazy for the little girl sitting on the polka-dotted mushroom, or teddy bears having a tea party. And, oh my God, the shamrocks! They love anything with embroidered shamrocks. It adds value.” While contemplating shamrock-embroidered linens with soy sauce stains, I ask about dry cleaning instead of hand-ironing and why that might not be an option. “Well, it is except that it’s expensive and we don’t use nice tablecloths anymore anyway. Most people get them out once a year but have even switched that to nylon or polyester. In Asia they will hand wash and iron them, or at least the person working in their house will do it for them.” I ask if she resells any of the linens within the U.S. or if it’s all mail order to Asia. Wendy says almost none of her linens go to buyers here and declares America to be pretty much a post-linen tablecloth nation, adding “We just don’t have big formal events anymore, so they pile up and sit in the closet.”

In the wee hours of the morning, I have arrived three hours early at the door of a well-to-do woman in her late 90s who has recently passed away. It is a beautiful old home on a quiet hydrangea-lined lane of gracious Tudors and Georgians. I immediately make sure to get my name on “the list.” Turns out, I’m a latecomer. The hard-core hunters arrive at one and two in the morning at a promising sale site and start “the list.” They then sleep in their cars outside the house. When newcomers arrive, they must knock on car windows to find out who is guarding “the list.” The lore is that down in Chicago, anyone trying to “jump the list” gets shot by one of the dealers. Up here in the suburbs, you just get yelled at and shunned. No one ever lets you on the list ever again.

When the sale begins, entry numbers are given in order of who is on the list. Arriving only three hours in advance, I am number 27, but this still leaves a lot of waiting-around time to talk. Other hunters will ask you casually what you are looking for, and some of this chit-chat is “fishing” to see what kind of competition you are and whether they’ll have to hustle to beat you to an item. I have “newbie” written all over me, but I know enough to shrug and vaguely comment, “Oh, this and that . . . nothing in particular.” (In reality, I am b-lining for a 6×9 oriental rug that I suspect has been way under-valued.) I in turn ask the preppy blonde mom to my left what she is looking for. “Well, you can tell from the online photos that this lady just loved yellow, so that’s basically why I’m here. I think that shows, you know, a positive attitude—to fill your house with yellow. So, I knew her stuff would feel good in my house.” I end up buying two 1920s yellow formal living room chairs and an entire 1950s white wrought-iron sun porch dining set with six yellow cushions.

Photograph by Gina Bailey

On my various estate sale hunts, I routinely come across family Bibles, Books of Common Prayer, marriage licenses, old birth certificates, confirmation certificates, and First Holy Communion certificates with related memorabilia—all for sale. This surprised me at first because these seemed like intimate heirloom items that even retirees or the deceased’s family members would retain. But, in fact, these items appear fairly incidental and unremarkable in the topography of the seller’s home when compared to other carefully tended collections. In one home I sifted through, I found a few styles of Seder plates and menorahs in the dining room, mingled together in boxes with other holiday effects. I then turned the corner into the husband’s study and found it covered wall-to-wall in chest-high pillars of meticulously stacked Playboy magazines. It was like walking through one of those corn mazes we have here in the Midwest; this was a bumper crop of T&A as far as the eye could see. I marveled at the time and dedication it must have taken to amass this collection over the decades—the sheer devotion it took to obtain and retain each and every month of each and every year and to maintain it all in chronological order. The estate sale ad had said “downsizing sale,” so I knew that the seller was not deceased. I asked the estate sale monitor who was dutifully guarding the carefully curated playmates how someone could possibly part with something that had clearly been a decades-long devotion, involving so much of his life. He laughed and said, “He was really broken up about it. They’re moving down to Florida and the wife said that ‘the girls’ just couldn’t come. No room! But I think he rescued some favorites. I’ve been finding some gaps here and there, and this is not a guy who would be okay with gaps.” He then held up one of the covers and mimicked the playmate’s pouty-lipped face to express sympathy with the poor guy who had to leave “his girls” in order to follow his wife obediently down to a life of gray-haired retirement.

A few months into my estate sale crawl, I discovered that when sales are advertised as being a “real dig” or even “a bit of a dig,” this is code that the seller has been a something of a pathological collector along the lines of cartoonist R. Crumb. The old term for this was “pathological hoarding,” but the new and supposedly less pejorative term is “obsessive-compulsive collecting disorder.” The proposed description and diagnosis for this disorder in the upcoming fifth revised edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) offers the following description: “Persistent difficulty discarding or parting with possessions, regardless of the value others may attribute to these possessions. This difficulty is due to strong urges to save items and/or distress associated with discarding. The symptoms result in the accumulation of a large number of possessions that fill up and clutter active living areas of the home or workplace to the extent that their intended use is no longer possible. If all living areas are uncluttered, it is only because of the interventions of third parties (e.g., family members, cleaners, authorities). The symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning (including maintaining a safe environment for self and others).” I will confess that when it turned out that two of the three estate sale “digs” I first encountered happened to be the homes of retired college professors (seriously), I became a bit more self-conscious about my own home and office. On the other hand, that’s what we do—dig, sift, and collect; dig, sift, and collect. It is much neater and cleaner to focus on the self-evident realm of the religious—the family Bibles, the confirmation certificates, the menorahs, and the statues of Mary with the baby Jesus. I can compartmentalize and organize those things more readily. I know where to put them.

But what about the carefully kept shrines of tittie magazines and the holy sepulchres of Hummels? Where do I put them and the stories of their devotees? And what of the passing away of shrines over time, as with one woman’s reliquary of 165 pairs of fancy gloves, or closets stacked high with dusty embroidered linens—a vestige of holidays once celebrated in a way that no longer makes sense to most Americans. What was sacred once is no longer as lives shift and change and objects get discarded altogether, or they change hands and take on new meanings in new homes. Cast-off shamrocks that have lost their power in the U.S. take on a new life and become coveted symbolic treasures in their migration to Beijing tables. If, as Ray Browne has argued, popular culture studies are the “new humanities,” then what can cast-offs and collections tell us about American spiritualities and the religious dimensions of an ever-changing consumer culture?

I got a call late one Sunday night from an estate sale company letting me know that an antique library table I had put a low bid on never sold over the weekend, so my bid had won the item. I needed to pick it up immediately, as the house would be turned over to the new owners the following day. I arrived and picked up my prize table from the living room, and when I did, it left a dramatic pattern of the much-darker, much-older, presumably original floor finish it had been concealing beneath it. I was speculating on just how long this table had been sitting in the 90-plus-year-old woman’s home, when I realized that it rattled. Annoyed, I wondered what I had not seen in my initial inspection and worried about the drawer being broken. I brought the table home and when I took out the top drawer, I discovered the source of the rattle. At the very back of the drawer was what looked like a beautiful small hand-painted porcelain lady’s pillbox. When I opened it up, it turned out to be a small fancy matchbox instead. I tapped the antique gold-tipped matches into the palm of my hand and saw that there was a bit of folded paper lining the box. I opened it and read two words written on the slip of paper: “Yes. Promise.” In my romantic musings, I wondered if the box’s owner handed the little box to a suitor at a party to pass on this secret affirmative message (as in, “Yes. I’ll meet you. Promise.” Or, “Yes, I’ll marry you. Promise.”) or, perhaps this had been an issued mandate (“Yes. Take me away from all of this. Promise.”)

How many of us have shared the topics of our current research projects and heard the response, “But I thought you studied religion”? Scholars of religion must, and understandably so, appear at times to be compulsive collectors without rhyme or reason with our jumbled universe of sources creating a “bit of a dig.” Perhaps it is like being the R. Crumbs of Religious Studies. But, to paraphrase the DSM, “regardless of the value [the field] may attribute to these things,” and precisely because of the powerful meanings and stories people attach to them, these collections push our field to broaden, to move beyond the neatly-ordered Crate & Barrel versions that have conventionally defined our field to explore the recombinant culture of the estate sale. This kind of transgressive shift is always somewhat daunting. But it’s also exciting in the possibilities and yes, promise, it holds for reimaging what religion is, to naming it as the ultimate “remix culture.”

I lied to a dying man, although I meant every word. It’s a strange thing, to say you intend to do something that you don’t really intend to do, yet feeling as though the words themselves are embraced in such uncompromised truth that they actually exceed their indexical meaning. If there is spirituality in promises, prayers, and praise, can there also be spirituality in the excellence of the lie?

I had known Phil for barely over a year, while doing ethnographic research with evangelicals in Knoxville, Tennessee. We became close friends, despite a four-decade generation gap and even wider cultural differences. I was a New York academic with an agenda; a secular Jew sojourning in the lives of church folk. Phil was a committed Christian, with a lifelong dedication to his church and a passion for ministries of evangelization. He was an endearingly calm, quick-witted Tennessean, and an ebullient father and grandfather. When I met him, he was already fighting for his life.

The lymphoma that eventually killed him was gaining ground, and Phil was undergoing a series of chemo treatments at a local hospital. He had a steady, seemingly endless stream of visitors; family, friends, coworkers. On the afternoon I visited he was uncharacteristically alone, but characteristically upbeat and talkative. As I approached his bed he sat up and smiled, barely showing a hint of fatigue or concern. “This sucks,” I said, gesturing at the wires, tubes, and monitors that surrounded him but clearly referring to something more. He tilted his head back and laughed. “Yeah, it does kinda suck,” he said, still smiling, “Thank you! You’re the first person to come out and say it since I’ve been here.”

We talked for several minutes, perhaps an hour, mostly about news and gossip in the community. We talked about my research, which Phil supported by helping me make contacts among local pastors and churchgoers and putting a little friendly pressure on those who never invited me to their Bible study groups. I used to joke with Phil that he was like “my personal mob boss” in the church. On more than one occasion he turned the table, calling me his “personal rabbi.” It was novelty that drew us to friendship in the first place; it was a shared sense of humor that kept us there.

As I prepared to leave Phil’s bedside that afternoon my heart was heavy and my hands turned cold. I knew what I was about to say. I didn’t plan it ahead of time, but I could see it coming and chose not to stand in its way. In my relations with people who were part of my research, I never wanted to feel like I misled or deceived anyone. But this instant just felt different. It called for something novel.

“I’ll pray for you.”

I said it.

Phil stared back stunned. In those fleeting seconds I imagine he was both shocked and pleased: There was hope for me yet. He was never the kind of guy to be smug or self-congratulatory about such a thought. There was undoubtedly a part of Phil that reveled in my words, but he was far too mature in character, and in his faith, to have settled on a triumphal reading of our exchange, as though my spiritual indifference was finally conquered and that was that.

And what of my character? I lied. I told someone that I would do something for him that I could not do. I didn’t plan to set aside time to petition God on Phil’s behalf, or “lift him up” as evangelicals say, at least not in any way consistent in form or content with the prayer practices of the faithful. Perhaps I should have simply said, “I’ll keep you in my thoughts, Phil”? Why even invite the pretense of religiosity? Was I so eager to make Phil happy? Did I think my words, my simple unexpected words, could actually save him?

The fact is, by telling Phil that I would pray for him I spoke something of an indirect truth. My sincerity rested not in the content of the statement but rather the sentiment that inspired it. It was a sentiment that called out to be expressed in prefabricated words, conveyed in what for me were new wineskins (to put it biblically). I wanted to enter a new level of social exchange, to give him an inalienable gift, however disquieting and self-alienating it may have felt. I wanted him to know that I cared about him that much.

In this sense I was perhaps more like Phil and his churchgoing friends than I had ever been before. Prayer is an act of private supplication and public worship, but that is not all it is. Prayer is an artifact of value, something given and received. It can circulate among friends and strangers like currency, sometimes in the form of an act, often in the form of a promise. “I’ll pray for you.” The words invoke piety, but they also signify sociality. They cannot be empty words. They have the power to create bonds, to forge narratives of belonging, to convey or reciprocate emotions. I suspect I’m not the first person to say those words without meaning them in a literal sense. There are many self-aware evangelicals, for example, who could probably admit to neglecting promised prayers at one point or another in their lives, either by failing to make time or forgetting altogether. But that’s not my main point. That’s not really the point at all.

I am often asked if I was ever moved spiritually during my fieldwork, whether I experienced a “God moment” akin to that famously described by Susan Harding, when she suddenly found herself interpellated by the conversionist discourse of her fundamentalist-Baptist interlocutors. Of course, such questions usually rely on assumptions as various as they are loaded, with regard to what exactly constitutes a “spiritual” experience. Nonetheless, on most occasions I feel obliged to respond in the negative. While I certainly experienced profound revelatory episodes, uncanny coincidences, and flashes of emotion with visceral intensity that I could have internalized in a spiritual idiom, I rarely felt inclined or compelled to do so. This response may be well received by certain scholars who would applaud me for holding my ground, for not allowing myself to “cross a line” from an intellectual position posited to be secular to the faith of my subjects. But that would be a misguided conclusion, misguided in that it presumes that the line between belief and disbelief (or better yet, between those who pray and mean it and those who don’t pray at all) is the only line there is to be crossed.

The reality is that there are many lines that can be crossed when an avowedly non-spiritual person interacts with “people of faith,” and not all of them have to do with spirituality as conventionally understood. Lines of sociality—that is, the terms of when and how we perform our relational affinities with other people—make up an intrinsic part of what it means to be evangelical. For all their individualist rhetoric, evangelicals are often intensely social people, who celebrate and affirm their interpersonal bonds with routine diligence. Negotiating those lines offers a different point of entry into the realm of evangelical spirituality, a moral disposition that, among other things, relies on the richly paradoxical claim of privileging “relationships over religion.”

So while I may not have flirted with conviction in theological terms, I explored a space of indeterminacy that in my experience was no less implicating. When I “lied” to Phil about praying for him I did not separate myself from his religious world, as one might critically accuse me of doing, so much as adopt a communicative cue derived from a mode of religious sociality in which stated affections, expectations, and courtesies—indeed, words themselves—provide the channels through which “authentic” spirituality is made to appear real and tangible.

Maybe I’m deceiving myself. Maybe I’ve done little more than try to resolve an ethical lapse with an intellectual conceit, a half-truth at best. Or maybe, as opposed to centuries of Christian teachings insistent on transparency and objective sincerity in religious language (as Webb Keane has described), there are parallel, unspoken values attached to the art of well-intentioned words. Maybe Phil really knew what I really meant, and if he were still alive would understand why the memory of that afternoon both exhilarates and haunts me. Maybe I’m praying for him right now.

I am sure that I share this experience with many people who work in Native Studies, or in the study of indigenous religions at least. I often find myself meeting people and then having to field their inappropriate responses after hearing what I “do.” To be more specific, people seem to have absolutely no idea how their responses evidence a totalizing colonial mindset. A sample dialogue:

Oh, a professor, how interesting! What do you teach?

I primarily teach courses in Native Studies, or courses about indigenous peoples around the globe.

That’s interesting. I also feel deeply connected to American Indians. I love Sedona and Santa Fe. I guess I’m just a spiritual person.

The last sentence has some variation, including “I like how they have a spiritual connection to the earth.”

What makes this, in my mind, one of the most challenging of colonial mindsets is that such perceptions of native people are fostered by how indigenous people around the world represent themselves. Due to the on-going theft of native lands, indigenous people have used the linguistic framings of “sacred” property and “spiritual” connections to the land and to “nature” as key articulations of their own sovereignty. The thought was that such framing devices would help land claims cases. Whether a serious matter of internal colonization or simply the attempt to communicate to cultural outsiders in terms the outsiders might better understand, the connection between spirituality and indigenous people runs deep in history. Over and over, scholars have shown that the earliest representations of native people that circulated throughout the 17th and 18th centuries were that they lacked civilization and therefore were somehow untainted by the material concerns for possessions, laws, and capitalism. During these same early reports, indigenous peoples of the Americas (and other lands), were portrayed as some sort of animal-human hybrids, close to nature, more wild than fully evolved people. In the worse cases they were cannibalistic monsters; in more romantic characterizations, they were children of nature. Michael Taussig demonstrated how such projections excused the othering and killing of indigenous peoples in South America in one century, and then provided the “magic of primitivism” in a later era, both parts constituting the project of colonization. And yet, in the first quarter of the 21st century, little has changed. One can draw fairly quickly a direct line from the earliest and most racist views of indigenous peoples to the mascots, Navajo designed fashions of Urban Outfitters, Halloween costumes of American Indians, and the continued legal theft of indigenous lands across the globe.

Historically, we can now look back and see how modernity was perhaps defined by a yearning to make sense of everything in categorical and typological fashion. From Darwin’s desire to categorize everything to the creation of academic disciplines, the world not only could be understood, but there was a category for everything and everything belonged in its place. The most basic of these categorical distinctions is a binary: mind/body, body/spirit, us/them, knowledge/belief, black/white, straight/gay, etc. These dichotomies are often a sign of elementary thinking: we begin with basics, including basic ways to differentiate between two things.

But as our own lives prove time and time again: life is messy. Boundaries break down. Borders are porous. And still, these false binaries continue to frame legal practices and the sciences, and therefore have serious consequences for subjugated or marginalized peoples. Western man has logic; ethnic people have beliefs. Western man has History and Science and other people have folklore, mythology, and superstition.

I want to be very careful about terms that imply dichotomies, or binaries that falsely construct an order that then divide the world into one thing and then (vs.) another. Allow me to use a binary myself, that of spirit vs. matter, to illustrate my point. When non-indigenous people claim a connection to indigenous people due to their spirituality, they are almost never connected to indigenous people due to their materiality. In fact, this is exactly the allusion that people unconsciously mean to accentuate. They are saying that they are interested in, reading about, and consuming indigenous non-materiality: spirits, dreams, beliefs, legends, and myths. They are rarely interested in reading or sharing indigenous struggles for sovereignty, water rights, or political recognition. (I am adding here to the important work of both Andy Smith and Lisa Aldred).

I believe there is considerable force to Sherman Alexie’s argument that the market of non-Indian readers leads many writers (including indigenous authors) to continue misrepresenting Native Americans in romantically religious terms. There is real danger to this representation. Indians died in higher numbers than other soldiers when serving in Vietnam. They were put in the front lines because they were thought to be able to listen to the wind and have a natural ability to track prey. A market for Indian spirituality enables both retailers and consumers to feel good about supporting a subjugated group. They can sell, wear, perform, or symbolize their care for others by buying, consuming, and profiting from the Other, rather than real labor for human rights. They do not have to fight for native rights; but they can buy native purification for a weekend in a sweat lodge. Imagine if every dream catcher purchased also entailed a letter written to request Leonard Peltier’s freedom from prison. If we think of native peoples as somehow more spiritual, and thus less material, than we have to care less about their material needs.

Not considering the materiality of native communities helps colonial settlers (most readers of this essay) ignore the realities of life for the original Americans. Like an American version of the movie, Sarah’s Key, we choose not to look at those histories which evidence our continued complicity in the displacement and subjugation of humans. Frankly, it is a downer. Then again, so is living in dire poverty. Unemployment and poverty rates are higher in reservation communities than for any other group in the United States, four times the rate for the average American. Even among gaming tribes, unemployment afflicts a quarter or more of reservation populations. The image of the “rich Indian” was used to combat pro-gaming ballot initiatives in the ’90s, particularly in California. How could real Indians also have large houses and cars, plural? The contrast between a “real” Indian as spiritual and a “fake” Indian as a rich Indian was portrayed to some comic relief by Seth McFarland’s Family Guy episode, “The Son Also Draws.” However, as with other popular representations, I believe the laughs provide relief mostly for the colonizer. The main non-Indian characters have a gambling problem but try to convince the tribal casino management that they are from that tribe. The tribal members in the cartoon are mocked as being pretend Indians since they cannot simultaneously be rich, dress in contemporary fashion, AND also be indigenous people. Indians cannot win. They are invisible out on the reservation, or no longer Indian if they attempt to work within the capitalist system. In fact, the Occupy Wall Street movement has enabled me many chances to point out how Indians were the first that were, and generally speaking still are, left out of the system. And when they “occupied” Alcatraz, Wounded Knee and the offices of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, members of the American Indian Movement experienced the blunt repercussions of living in a police state.

The other side of the material/spiritual binary is that it elevates the Indian to a position of civilizational healer. Thinking of native people as having more access to all things spiritual, we fail to recognize that no one has the upper hand on deeply cosmological questions (not Buddhists, not Hindus, not Southern Baptists). However, settler colonizers do have the upper hand in legal and academic structures. And if we think of Indians as spiritual people, then their land claims and wisdom traditions are about sacred matters rather than rational science, and we have seen how those battles are lost. They are lost in courts of law and they are lost in what gets to count as History with a capital “H,” and Truth with a capital “T.” The real life implications of representing my research on native rituals and mythistory as “spiritual” are that I would be continuing to simplify the importance of indigenous lifeways as matters of the otherworldly. Because my first book dealt directly with the Yaqui people’s views of dreams, myths, and the afterlife, I committed myself to writing also about how such matters related to their struggle for land and the current debt-peonage in Mexico.

But of course, in colloquial settings, it gets a bit tricky; highlighting why settler colonialists might want to think of kokopelis and dream catchers makes people uncomfortable. Still, I like to do it. When I tell someone that I teach about indigenous peoples including American Indians, and they respond that they have visited a vortex or use Native American Tarot Cards, I graciously respond, “That’s interesting!” And then I immediately follow with a question about the last time they visited the tribe near to where they live. My point is that I want them to know, and I want them to consider, living Indians, not just the ones showing up to psychics in channeling sessions. I tend to ask if they agree with the indigenous contentions regarding Occupy Wall Street. I might throw in a trick question or two, such as “What do you think those Indian spirit guides have to say about that Keystone Pipeline?” Or laughing a bit maniacally, “I bet all those Indian spirits want back their land you’re living on!”

You can imagine why I do not get invited to a lot of new age events. I sent a PR letter to every new age bookshop in Los Angeles when my book was coming out, and not one bookstore replied. Yet their weekends are packed with presenters on Indian spirituality. I did wiggle my way into a book fair session in Tucson on spirituality. I felt a bit like an infiltrator, but to a packed room I was able to introduce the subversive idea that if you want to learn about Indians, you must encounter living Indians and their political struggles to be heard above the din of their commodification.

The conundrum is quite complex. On one hand, Indians probably do have ghosts just as any other human population does. And, I do think indigenous religiosity is important to study and understand for both native and non-native peoples. For all I know, dream catchers even work. I am even willing to admit that perhaps the Indian spirits roaming the forests and new age bookstores are laughing at me now. Perhaps they are able to see what really matters for us poor living folk and that we should pay more attention to the spiritual aspects of our lives.

I also know that indigenous people, even some well-meaning scholars, seemingly cannot help themselves from using “sacred,” “holy,” “spiritual,” and the like, when talking about indigenous worldviews and land claims. When asked during the research of the famous Maine Indian Land Claims case, a Passamaquoddy woman told a professor of mine that her relationship to the land was spiritual. As the conversation continued, she explained that she needed to communicate with the land, feed the land, and dance with the land. And she explained that if she did not do such activities, the land would cease to be in relation with her. But as my professor relayed to her, these very real, very physical responsibilities are not included in the concept of “spirituality.” “Spiritual” and “spirituality” do not get at the actuality of that relationship and those words often fail to address what is at stake. She agreed but added that there was a not direct translation for the word she used in her language to categorize such activities. When taught how to pick sage at sunrise, I was told by a Navajo friend to verbally ask for permission, to breathe on a pinch of corn pollen, and to put that pollen at the base of the plant where the sage comes out of the ground. He said these acts were “holy.” But, these are intensely physical acts that establish relations. And how does “holy” make sense in a generative linguistic system (as opposed to a representative linguistic system) that does not have a word for “profane” or “non-holy?”

One more example is in order from my own fieldwork. When Yoeme collaborators tell me about visiting ancestral worlds, or “aniam,” in the hills, they are talking about actual physical entrances. And if a visitor to these worlds fails the tests therein, the affects are physical in the most real sense, including sickness and death. The Yoemem characterize such worlds as “yo,” which earlier ethnographers translated as “enchanted.” But my research into this syllable has shown it means “ancient, respected, and/or elder,” which characterize aspects of culture without implying other aspects as profane. Rather than a dichotomous designation and evaluation, “yo” denotes importance in the spectral terms of something or someone’s aboriginalness or traditionalness.

The Passamaquoddy, Navajo and Yoeme examples, though only briefly described here, tell us that however respected, vital, and religiously considered, many indigenous connections to land are not without materiality, physicality, and substance. Many indigenous peoples do not maintain “spiritual” relations with the land if that term, “spiritual,” is in some way defined or co-constructed as non-physical. Indeed, one can argue that Indians and allies who use the word “spiritual” have been selling the boat to keep the sail. I have been thinking for a while now on the absurdity of calling something “spiritual” or “sacred” to win a land claim in a colonial court of law. Have you seen how non-Indians commodify, represent, and sell their sacred things? Colleen McDannell’s Material Christianity covers this latter ground quite well.

All of this reminds me when “spiritual” made it to the big time, when it had its own commercial practically. When Extra made it’s 1996 commercial for sugarfree, extra-lasting gum, viewers had to watch this poor woman miss her life-time dream of seeing the “elusive blue-back whale.” While looking for a piece of gum with more flavor, the crass lady who is portrayed to be doubtful of the whale’s impact, ends up having a moment of rapture and yelling out, “Oh, that is soo spiritual!” It still cracks me up. And like that lady who misses it, I am at a loss for how “spiritual” can come to mean so much and therefore mean so little. “Spirituality,” the term, has become my great white whale. This essay is just one part of my hunt.

“Spirit” has meant breath courage, desire, mind, soul, spirit, demon, energy, and succubus. The inability to use the word with specificity makes it all the more dangerous in a colonial context. If the post-Cartesian turn among the sciences is to mean anything, it should mean to “escape the materialist-spiritualist dualism that mistakenly constructs some humans as rational, and others as not.” Kenneth Morrison wrote that in a forthcoming essay. He adds, “Utopian dreams constituted a romantic impulse to ‘spiritualize’ both nature and indigenous peoples, and might be dismissed (as has animism) as unreal fantasy.”

We are served well to think about how non-Indians, and Americans in general, like their Indians. They seem to like them talking as Indian guides to psychics. They seem to like them as brave chiefs leading a football team to victory. They seem to like them as sad, downtrodden and droopy, losers on the Trail of Tears. They like them with six-pack abs and holding up half-naked princesses on top of ancient temples. They like them crying about pollution. And they like them selling hand-blown pipes and rolling papers on the Venice Beach Boardwalk.

But most of all, they like them spiritually. Like the blue-back whale, Indian spirituality comes to non-Indians, to remind them of something gloriously wild and free, something unfettered by materialism and modern day life. Like an eagle calling out its screech of liberty, the spirit of the Indian lets us know: we are a nation meant for great things. You can make this country better, just keep shopping. If only the living Indians, with their daily lives and struggles, would stop reminding us of reality.

The word spirituality fills me with anxiety. As the member of our department of religious studies who teaches contemporary religion, (New Age, popular culture, Asian religion in America, that sort of thing…) I should be a spirituality expert, ready to use the word as a clever retort for my cynical family members, as a piece of sage advice for my sincere, confused graduating majors, or as a contextualizing quote for the religion writer from our local paper.

In other words, I feel I should have a handle on this whole spirituality thing, but I really don’t. When I think about spirituality, I ask myself, throat tightening: what do I need to know? What conversations about it should I be injecting myself into? Who’s writing about it? Whose brilliant new definition of it is so broad, or so narrow, or so unexpected, or so obvious, or so self-conscious, or so un-self-conscious, that we academics can no longer talk meaningfully about spirituality without nodding metaphorically or literally in the direction of this exciting scholar?

I can toss off an article on a particular religious group in contemporary America, or put together a chapter about how some artifact of pop culture is, in fact, religious. But if I want the security of a tenured position at the best possible institution, and the prestige of having written a serious work of scholarship, I need to write a book whose title uses big words and that does not evoke any particular time or place.

I need to write an academic book about spirituality.

The word spirituality fills me with anxiety. Sometimes as I work on my laptop (or pretend to) late at night, my wife will ask what I am writing. An article or an entry or a book review, I’ll tell her.

“What are you doing that for?” she’ll ask.

“Well it’s part of my job.”

“So are you getting paid for it?”

“No, but I get to keep the book.” Or: “They should send me a copy of the encyclopedia when it comes out, plus $60!” That fails to impress, as does my monthly paycheck.

“You’re a good writer and you know a lot about religion. Write a book that will sell,” she says, “Make us some money. Get famous.”

Why not? If professors of economics serve as consultants to the very banks they study and professors of medicine are paid by the companies whose drugs they test, why can’t professors of religious studies financially exploit the subjects of our investigations? What is wrong with a little money and publicity? Why can’t we cash in too?

I need to write a popular book about spirituality.

The thought of writing a book about spirituality, whether academic or popular, fills me with anxiety. Shouldn’t these kinds of books just write themselves?

In the academic book I’d like to write, a smooth and vague language, full of whispered half-promises, conjures the free-floating theorizing that can only happen when the discipline of religious studies merges with postmodern theology and cultural studies. The popular book I’d like to write could be found in any of a dozen sections of the local bookstore: New Age, Self-Help, Eastern Religions, Psychology, Fitness, Humor. Or better yet: next to the cash register.

Shouldn’t these kinds of books just write themselves? Maybe not, but the titles can. And that’s a start.

So Louis, the Webmaster, and Laura, the Instructional Technologist, helped me create an automatic, random title generator, which has inside of it over one and a half million possible book titles about spirituality. At last I am no longer anxious about spirituality; I might even feel a little bit spiritual myself, for the first time. Because I have harnessed the power of randomness and automation, which are unthinking, productive, and modern, like spirituality itself.

I created this generator for myself. In using it, I have noticed that in all these potential book titles, the word “spirituality” stands like the eye of the hurricane, the vacant signifier, the placeholder, the empty vessel…

And now I invite everyone to partake.

http://sieglere.people.cofc.edu/title.php

One of the risks of doing anthropological fieldwork among fundamental Baptists is that you might undergo spiritual experiences similar to theirs. This is simply because you spend a lot of time with them, doing the things they do, listening very carefully and as generously as possible to the things they say, and learning to converse with them in their own terms. That’s what fieldwork requires, and it amounts to a compressed version of how fundamental Baptists themselves come to have their spiritual experiences.

I have admitted having one such fundamental Baptist-like experience while doing fieldwork among the Reverend Jerry Falwell’s church people in Lynchburg during the 1980s. That was when “God spoke to me” and I “came under conviction.” But other experiences I have mostly kept to myself. Like the time the devil got a hold of me. Or the time I had a feature-length, technicolor, premillennialist vision of the end of the world. Nor do I much discuss the fact that, after I came under conviction, I was twice (or was it thrice?) stricken by a powerful spiritual hunger, a craving for “something more,” that each time possessed me for weeks (or was it months?).

I wrote about coming under conviction because it taught me so much about how some orthodox Protestants are “born again” and come to inhabit their spiritually specific world, but that was all I dared visit upon my colleagues and readers. I held my tongue partly because the severe secular scrupulosity that my chosen field site aroused made me wary of revealing my site-specific spiritual experiences, lest I lose my audience. I was also enacting a constituitive disavowal – the refusal to “go native,” especially where anything religious is concerned—that is intrinsic to the modern practice of ethnography.

The irony is that while I lived and worked among the fundamental Baptists I often mused that I was engaged in another kind of spiritual practice, albeit a secular one. Or more precisely, that the profession of anthropology had contrived a complex of practices called ethnographic fieldwork that cultivated a particular state of mind in the individuals carrying it out and that gave them special access to otherwise invisible realities, such as “ritual,” religion,” and “culture.” And it was that set of ethnographic practices that led me to interrupt and rework the inward effects of fundamental Baptist-like practices, saying to myself things like, “Oh, that’s what they mean when they say ‘God spoke to me’, or ‘the devil got a hold of me’, or ‘the end is near’, or ‘my soul yearns for God’, rather than saying something like ‘God is real’, or ‘I’ve got to get right with God now’.”

When I underwent these experiences I did not completely merge with them. I, or some part of me, remained “outside” them, shaken and confused, but detached, observing. I was eavesdropping on my fundamental Baptist-shaped experiences. I listened to them with a second pair of ears and looked at them with a second pair of eyes given me by my secular professional spiritual practices.

But what’s the point of thinking about the act of ethnography as a spiritual practice?

Not to suggest that it produces a truth or subjectivity that is somehow religious rather than secular, but to call attention to the resonance, the uncanny likeness, of some of the practices that produce those respective truths and subjectivities. Ethnography is a spiritual practice if by that we mean a pious practice, or an embodied discipline, that gives one entry into another reality and invisible realms and that produces a kind of subjectivity, a particular sense of “self” in the process. In these two senses, ethnography is like religious practices. But in the case of the anthropological ethnographic act, the reality and realms accessed and the subject who is produced by experiencing them is specifically “not religious,” hence, in that narrow sense of the term, “secular.”

When Harry West carried out fieldwork on the Mueda plateau in rural Mozambique, both he and Muedans noticed the resonance between his research practice and the sorcery and countersorcery practices he was studying. Sorcerers cross over into the invisible world and become or create “sorcery lions” that bring ruin on individuals in the visible world. Countersorcerers, or healers, also cross over into the invisible world but attempt to undo –invert, overturn, negate, or annul—a sorcerer’s destructive work. Both sorcerers and countersorcerers, “by rendering themselves invisible, [transcend] the world inhabited by ordinary people, producing and inhabiting an invisible realm from which they gain a powerful perspective on the visible.”

As West became more conversant in the language of sorcery, he began to hear people say of him, “That one knows a little something!,” a euphemism that indicated he was a sorcerer or a countersorcerer. Muedans recognized that the tools of West’s trade—pen, notebook, recorder, and camera—were different but that he shared with them an urge to get outside their life-world in order to gain a perspective on it. They contested his versions of what they were doing in sorcery, but at the same time he and they came to see the resemblance between his stories and theories and theirs. He and they both were trying to gain interpretive ascendancy in and over the world around them through what West calls transcendent maneuvers. Muedans were making and remaking their world in line with their vision of the forces defining visible and invisible domains, and West was (re)making Muedens and their world in the terms of a vision of his own elaboration. When they saw “sorcery lions,” he saw “embodied (or literal) metaphors.”

Other anthropologists have noted the resemblance between their own interpretive practice and the story telling, sorcery, witchcraft, shamanistic, and religious practices of the people they study, but Harry West pushed his insight further than most, even calling his book Ethnographic Sorcery. Still many more anthropologists acknowledge—in fact it’s all but required—moments of perceptual crisis in which one inhabits the world from the point of view of another culture. In our writing, such moments are sometimes fraught, especially when we find ourselves entangled with, or “caught” in, practices and perceptions that we have been trained to think of as religious. On the one hand, we are discovering for ourselves anthropology’s founding principle of cultural relativism. On the other, we must take a step back; we may not “go native.” We must somehow disavow the cultural other’s point of view that we have just discovered to be equally “valid” as our own. Thus it becomes a moment of tender yet fierce secular subject making—anthropology’s contribution to secular modernity as a way of being in the world.

Although some anthropologists may think that a secular (aka scientific or “outside”) point of view is the only alternative to going “going native” after undergoing culturally relativizing ethnographic experiences, it is not. Nor did anthropologists invent what we now call fieldwork. According to Christopher Herbert, evangelical Protestant missionaries, among others, invented the practice, along with the contradictory subjectivity that emerged from it and “the culture doctrine,” in the course of living among and writing copiously about the natives of Tahiti, Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, New Zealand, and other islands of the South Pacific in the early 19th century. Decades later, anthropologists would name and codify the concept of culture and fieldwork as a research practice, but early missionaries in their writings had already revealed an awareness that they were “unfolding a new technique of scientific study—one that made at best an uneasy fit with their mission as evangelizers.” The technique also led them to an unstated awareness of “the homology” of native superstitions and their own Protestant beliefs, and, inadvertently, to undermine the very doctrine of innate sinfulness that had led them into their mission fields.

Early 19th century Protestant missionaries went to the South Pacific not only to save souls but also to document and portray the natural depravity of savage life, of life without the saving grace of Jesus Christ. The missionaries documented what they called idolatry, superstitions, cannibalism, promiscuity, sadistic violence, infanticide, the ritual killing of widows and aged parents, and many other “abominations” as evidence of the unbridled passions, lust, wickedness, sensual appetites, and evil tendencies that guided the lives of savages. However, even as the missionaries clung to their doctrines of man’s “sin nature,” they produced de facto cultural accounts of the wretched practices they witnessed, and, in the process, they discovered the cultural sources of their own practices. In the words of the missionary Thomas Williams, for example, the Fijians were “a people living, for many generations, under the uninterrupted power of influences different from any which we daily feel” and were “strangers to those motives and forces which have, more than anything else, modified the development of our own individual and social character.”

The early missionaries’ apprehension of culture included the relativizing recognition of oneself as well as the native as culturally formed. The recognition emerged from their having to learn savage languages virtually from scratch over an extended period of time in order to spread the gospel of Christ. The experience of firsthand language learning and analysis immersed the missionaries in everyday native lives and “almost inescapably” required them “to begin to conceive the society in all its bearings as a ‘culture’ of inseparably interlocked symbolic elements and to think of the language and the whole economy of extralinguistic cultural materials…as exact equivalents of one another.” All the missionaries stressed that their accounts were based on knowledge acquired experientially and to varying degrees articulated the de facto method of modern fieldwork based on long-term immersion in the everyday life of natives, linguistic competence, minute and comprehensive descriptions of all customs, and verbatim quotation of native statements.

So there is nothing inherently secularizing in this mix of what Clifford Geertz called “experience near” (immersion/participation) and “experience far” (observation/description) research practice. Early 19th century evangelical missionaries came to a de facto cultural understanding of the different ways of life they investigated but still condemned those ways of life as morally depraved. Their meticulous accounts, at times filled with admiration for native imagination and ingenuity, were no less bent on justifying the rapid dismantling of local rites, customs, and taboos by colonial authorities. The missionaries were re-enacting in their mission fields their own struggle with and victory over the human capacity for sin.

This “conflicted emotional structure,” which Herbert argues is “the distinctive sign of a characteristic religious sensibility,” is later reworked by anthropologists as they name and codify the practice of “fieldwork” and the concept of “culture” as a “complex whole” that emerges from fieldwork. Instead of condemning native ways, anthropologists insist on their validity, struggle to accept them while they are in the field, write accounts bent on describing, explaining, understanding them as testaments to human diversity and creativity, and direct their critical ire at persons and forces who would diminish that diversity and creativity in any way. The object and effect of disavowal changes, but disavowal remains at the heart of the practice. The mission ethnographer had to come to know native life firsthand and reject it as evil. For him, ethnography was a religious practice, and it produced him as an evangelical missionary. The anthropological ethnographer has to come to know native culture firsthand and accept it as “equally valid” but reject it as her point of view on native life. Going native, that is, adopting native modes of interpretative ascendancy, is taboo for both evangelical and anthropological ethnographers. But anthropologists have a second disavowal tucked away in their validation of native cultures, namely, a disavowal of the Victorian evangelical Protestantism and its presumption of moral superiority, and that is the disavowal that produces us as specifically secular anthropologists.

It is this second disavowal that draws the thin line between evangelical and anthropological ethnography, and it was probably the way in which my fundamental Baptist project muddied that line that so agitated my colleagues. Harry West’s colleagues asked him repeatedly whether or not he “believed” in the sorcery he studied, and all of us who examine religious topics are scrutinized for any evidence that our interpretative maneuvers were inappropriately contaminated by our close encounter with religious others. But in my case, the obligation to construe my native culture as “equally valid” contradicted the disavowal of evangelicalism hidden in that obligation, and, I now think, made it harder to construe my project—and me—as properly secular.

Still, even though I was occasionally caught in fundamental Baptist-like experiences I was always more thoroughly caught, both in the field and when writing about fundamental Baptists, in an anthropological drive for an interpretative ascendency that was secular and secularizing. I tried to do so in ways that troubled the terms of modern secular hegemony, but, nonetheless, I (re)made fundamental Baptists and their world in terms of an intellectual vision that was specifically secular. I (re)produced them as objects of a secular gaze and myself as a secular subject, and I added a drop to the ocean of American secularity. We like to think of that ocean as naturally occurring, but it’s not. The secular world we swim in is produced by millions of little practices, and the anthropological ethnographic act is one of them.

I am an anthropologist (and sometimes a psychologist) and what I do is figure out how people learn to experience what they have to imagine as real. Many years ago, as a young ethnographer beginning my dissertation research, I set out to study people who practiced magic in present-day Britain. Most of the people that I interviewed thought of themselves as worshiping an ancient goddess under the full and pendulous moon. For them the earth was alive, and they sought to feel its power pulsing beneath their feet. They thought of themselves as shamans, druids, witches, and warlocks, responsive to the subtle rhythms of the earth. Meanwhile, these magicians lived in the very modern city of London. They held modern jobs and had modern lives. But they imagined themselves into a time that they understood as not modern, with practices they sourced in ancient wisdom. To understand how they came to believe in magic, I joined their groups. I read their books and novels. I practiced their techniques and I participated in their rituals.

For the most part, the rituals depended on techniques of the imagination. You shut your eyes, and saw with your mind’s eye the story told by the leader of the group.

In the late afternoons, I practiced these techniques following the instructions I was given. Here is an example from one of my early lessons (with credit to one of my early teachers, Marian Greene), which I did, in some form, for thirty minutes a day for nine months:

Work through these exercises, practicing one of them for a few minutes each day, either before or after your meditation session.

1. Stand up and examine the room in which you are working. Turn a full circle, scanning the room. Now sit down, close the eyes and build the room in the imagination. Note where the memory or visualizing power fails. At the end of the exercise briefly re-examine the room and check your accuracy. Note the results in your diary.

2. Carefully visualize yourself leaving the room in which you are working, going for a short walk you know well, and returning to your room. Note clarity, breaks in concentration, etc, as you did before.

3. Go for an imaginary walk. An imaginary companion, human or animal, can accompany you. Always start and finish the walk in the room that you use for the exercises. Note the results, etc, as before.

4. Build up in your imagination a journey from your current physical plane home to your ideal room. Start the journey in real surrounds then gradually make the transition to the imaginary journey by any means you wish. Make the journey to and from the room until it is entirely familiar.

What startled me, as a young ethnographer, was that this training worked. At least, it seemed to shift something in the way I used my senses and my internal sensory awareness. After about a year of this kind of training, spending thirty minutes a day in an inner world structured in part by external instructions, my mental imagery did seem to become clearer. I thought that my images had sharper borders, greater solidity and more endurance. They had more detail. I felt that my senses were more alive, more alert. I began to feel that my states of concentration were deeper and more sharply different from those of my everyday experience. One morning, I woke early after an evening in which I had read a book by a magician. The book was about Arthurian Britain and the early Celtic isles. Reading late into the night, I had allowed myself to get deeply involved with the story, reading not the way I read a textbook but the way I read books like The Secret Garden as a child. I gave way to the story and allowed it to grip my feelings and to fill my mind. As I woke that next morning I saw six druids standing against the window, above the stirring London street below my window. I saw them and they beckoned to me.

I stared for a moment of stunned astonishment, and then I shot up out of bed. Before I could capture the moment again, they were gone. Had they been there in the flesh? I thought not. But my memory of the experience is still very clear. I do not remember that I had imagined them, or that I had wanted to see them, or that I had pretended to see them. I remember that I saw them as clearly and distinctly and as external to me as I saw the notebook in which I recorded the moment, my sentences underlined and marked by exclamation points. I remember it so clearly because it was so singular. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before.

But other people in the magical world had experiences like that. They practiced the exercises and read the books and participated in the rituals and then, out of the blue, they had seen something. They saw the Goddess, or a flash of light, or a shining vision of another world. They saw these as things in the world, not phantoms in the mind, although because the image vanished almost immediately, they knew that what they had seen was not ordinary. They said that their mental imagery had become sharper. They thought that their inner sense had become more alive.

That’s what the training does. It shifts attention from the external to the internal, and blurs the line we draw between the mind and the world. And, as I have argued in my scholarship and teaching, this shift alters the lines we draw. The mind bleeds into the world. Not predictably, and not on demand, and for some more than others, but when it happens, the senses experience what is not materially present.

2. Central Park West, New York City, 1963
skipping through mounds of crisp autumn leaves, I experience mortality

3. Brandeis University, Waltham, 1970
rolling down a summer green hill, I experience wonder

4. Jutland, Denmark, 1971
psychedelically altered on Easter morning, I experience at-one-ness

5. Jerusalem, Israel, 1971
watching “The Fixer,” Joel explains the history of blood libel and European anti-Semitism to me, I experience belonging

6. Museum of Modern Art, New York City, 1980
sitting in front of “Guernica,” I experience transcendence

7. Greensboro, North Carolina, 1987
attending back-to-back Springsteen concerts, I experience full-ness

8. Princeton, New Jersey, 1992
facing the impossibility of biological parenthood, I experience desolation

9. Princeton, New Jersey, 1995
praying, I hear a soft voice telling me to take care of others. I experience immanence, then rebellion

10a. Guatemala City, Guatemala, 1999
holding my infant daughter, I experience a leap of faith

10b. Ramallah, West Bank, 2010
traveling with students, I hear them intelligently discuss politics and religion, I experience gratitude

My throat hurts. If I tried to hum with the muezzin or call with the cats, it would hurt. I get up and take eight tablets of yin chiao from a friend who does acupuncture. It will, as she puts it, push the sickness back out through the skin. It worked the last time.

Later, I go out for more provisions, past the Baptist church with minarets; it used to be a Masonic temple. At Tony’s health food store I greet Khan who, like several sons of the owner, works there six days a week. I compliment him on his Om tattoo and he is delighted that I know about Shiva. I tell him that Shiva is actually very important to me and that Shiva Natajara is on my mantel and another Shiva adorns my Christmas tree. His face clouds over. “Wait,” I quickly explain why I think Shiva would be okay being a Christmas ornament. I redirect the conversation to finding broth. But now Khan follows me around the store, entreating me to take that ornament down. He keeps moving to front shelves in my vicinity and is now frankly warning about disrespecting Shiva. I feel like a total idiot religion professor.

On the way home, I pass churches of Pentecostals, Adventists, and Daddy Grace, as well as another masjid. It is February 3, 2011, and no one is surprised that someone walking around in Brooklyn would run into so many brands of religion. What might surprise is that the run-ins pierce and balm in so many ways. The neighborhood does this to some bodies and not others, I guess. But if you have a body that feels like the skin does not hold things in or keep them out, if you are made partly of memories of cuts and sutures, it might do this to you.

Religion is a chain of memory, says the sociologist Danièle Hervieu-Léger, and catholicité is a palimpsest. Bedford-Stuyvesant used to be all Catholic, and still the most and biggest churches are Catholic. Seven within ten blocks of my apartment. Now I pass one where a few women enter through the side door, the main door being locked on weekdays.

Thirty years ago, I lived far from Bed-Stuy, in a place where every town had a view of cornfields. Thirty years ago, I was going to school at St. Mary’s in Lebanon, Pennsylvania. Probably standing in a line. We were always in lines. Lines for changing classes, lines for going to lunch, lines for visiting the lavatory, lines for school assemblies, lines for going to Mass, lines for waiting for the bus at the end of the day. Lines on weekends, too. Line up for your heat at the swim meet. Line up for Rice Krispie treats at the bake sale table. Line up for confession. Line up for communion. In lines, you waited. Waiting was normal and so was the transaction at the end of the line.

But some lines were different, and you anticipated unusual things while waiting. In line to get ashes on your forehead, for example. There was always an emotional chill as the priest spoke mortal words about dust, and a physical flinch to feel fine black palm ash fleck the bridge of your nose. Or, in line to kiss the cross on Good Friday. Making sure to get behind Mrs. Viozzi who is ancient and four feet tall but still kneels on both knees and grasps the cross with both hands and kisses the wood with two full lips, a juicy smack that sounds across the whole nave. In line to have your throat blessed on the feast of St. Blaise…

Crossing Marcy Avenue now, I catch native son Jay-Z’s music blasting out an apartment window three stories up.

Can I hit it in the morning without givin you half of my dough,

and even worse if I was broke would you want me? …

If I couldn’t flow futuristic, would ya

put your two lips on my wood and kiss it, could ya…

I don’t know. Is love deeper than deep pockets? The neighborhood that used to be “Bed-Stuy/do or die” is now “Bed-Stuy/too late to buy” and churches turn into yoga studios at Washington Avenue.

Line up to go to the auditorium to see Jesus Christ Superstar. It was the monthly school movie some winter Friday in 1977. Eight years old, watching girls in sequined hotpants gyrate as the heavenly host, watching Yvonne Elliman as Mary Magdalene drag herself after wooden beams as if she herself were lashed to them, I wanted to dance, I wanted to be lashed, I wanted to kneel and kiss that wood.

When we lined up to get our throats blessed on the feast of St. Blaise, this too was different waiting for an unusual transaction. Frankly, it was scary. At the end of two lines advancing up the auditorium center aisle stood two priests. They each held a pair of thick white candles, tied together at a right angle to make a cross, and secured at the crux with red ribbon. When it was your turn, you stepped up and the priest held the crux at your throat and said, “Through the intercession of St. Blaise, bishop and martyr, may God preserve you from ailments of the throat and from every other evil.” Then, making the sign of the cross, you peeled away.

Scary. First of all, the wax against your neck was scented and tacky-cold and felt like a funeral. Then, why was this saint’s day of all saints’ days so important to take time out? Was there imminent danger to all human throats, as opposed to other body parts? Shouldn’t we also have blessings for eyes and brains and hands? I asked this. No. Only the throat. It made you think of things that could crush or slice you there. It made you pay attention to movies where after a quick yank and flash, someone’s jugular was spurting. It made you retain a vocabulary word like garrot. It made you notice when you had a sore throat.

Many years later, when I wasn’t in school and wasn’t going to Mass and the millennium turned and I just wanted to get through my first year of teaching, I still noticed in particular when I had a sore throat. In fact the one I got during finals week of that fall semester soon turned into a cough. But I was busy. And homesick. No time for a doctor’s visit. I left Texas for a trip back east. I wanted to see my family in Pennsylvania and my love in North Carolina. I packed it all into a mad visit with lots of long-distance driving. When I got back to Fort Worth, I felt much better.

Except I still had a cough, and swallowing had started to feel funny. Spring teaching commenced and I coughed through the first class. Finally I visited the doctor and was sent home with antibiotics. But that night my chest exploded with pain and my throat hurled back anything I tried to swallow. The next morning I presented at the doctor’s again. A more thorough exam revealed that some unknown problem had already resulted in severe pneumonia, one collapsed lung, a swollen heart lining, and infection blooming throughout my chest cavity. I was taken by ambulance to All Saints Hospital and did not leave for over a month.

The first two weeks, nothing happened. My sister Mary flew in from Atlanta and virtually moved into my hospital room. The chair of my department, Daryl, visited every day. Tests were run but no one could find the problem. Antibiotics slowed the infection but didn’t kill it off. A brown bacterial stew that smelled like raw sewage had begun to burble up into my mouth. One day, finally, it started to drown me. Mary and a friend, Leah, frantically alerted the nurse. I lost consciousness as doctors cut notches between my ribs on both sides to insert chest tubes. When I woke up, I was in the ICU, lung fluid still draining into canisters on the floor.

My doctor would come see me and talk. His name was Noble. Noble Ezukanma, internist, point person for an array of specialists. Nigerian, Christian, married with three kids, beautiful and wise. I asked him all the questions I could think of. “This diagnostic process, we are trying things, you know, but it is really more an art than a science,” he would say. “We have to wait.” He didn’t know how things were going to turn out. He said so. He was an artist in process. It was comforting.

But it was another doctor who arrived early one morning, when I was alone, to tell me that one test had finally nailed it: prolonged coughing—or a fishbone accidentally swallowed, or vomiting, or chance?—had torn a hole in my larynx. Everything I ate or breathed was feeding the infection. They required my signature for surgery. Immediately.

What happened next, I am not sure how. I was frightened and teary plus high on morphine. Did I remember what day it was? Did Daryl somehow know? Did the hospital chaplain staff piece it together despite no checked box on the intake form? I don’t know. But within a few hours, Daryl had brought the campus priest to my bedside. Fr. Charlie carried two white candles, crossed and tied with red ribbon. It was February 3, 2001, and I got my throat blessed.

So, as you see, were it not for St. Blaise, I would not be here to tell you this story. I would not have returned to my classes that semester, would not be chewing over the meaning of spirituality for an online collection, would not be remembering waiting in lines, would not be walking home from Tony’s in Bed-Stuy with good broth for a sore throat.

But wait … this is no way to end the story. Don’t mess with people, people in the guild, my guild, my people. Don’t mess with my head. Leave out suggesting that St. Blaise was actually involved. Leave out hinting that without St. Blaise I would be dead. It was doctors who operated and sewed me whole. If St. Blaise supposedly saved my life, then why didn’t all those blessings years earlier work? If I am having a fit of wanting to thank a saint, I can do it on my own time. Would I say this stuff in the classroom? Do I really believe … ?

I do believe … in religion as a social construction with a long history, and in spirituality, too, begotten not made, one in being with religion. And in experience, and the self, and pluralism, and God, and any story any of us could possibly tell, all of them truly assumed, asserted and produced in very complex genealogies. Credo.

But sometimes I forget to care. My skin does not hold things in or keep them out. And having this kind of body—a body of memories of cuts, not all my own—goes back long before the hospital, long before I was born, long before St. Blaise himself. Still, I have faith. Tell the children that they can see through the powers that be. Tell the children that they can choose to believe this and not that. Tell them that their bodies are theirs for the making. That if something goes wrong the doctors can slice through layers and suture back out and then you are whole again.

Yet I keep bumping into religions and they don’t bounce off. Why live? Why sicken? Why call for ravishment? Why calm at the touch of red-ribboned candles? I have nothing against stitches. The rows run across my neck and over my heart. There are little crosses that closed chest tube holes and a big stripe under each shoulder blade. They saved my life. But some bodies are pounds of flesh with oozing edges and no fix for that. Meanwhile, I teach, I write, I walk around and see what happens. “This process, you know, we are trying things, but it is more art than science,” the good doctor said. “We have to wait.”