Creative Encountersms
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Creative Encounters Appreciating Difference And How the Study of Religion Might Contribute Sam Gill University of Colorado 2017 Creative Encounters 2 Table of Contents Table of Contents ................................................................................................................... 2 Abstract and Chapter Summaries ........................................................................................... 3 Abstract ........................................................................................................................................... 3 Section and Chapter Summaries ....................................................................................................... 4 Preface ................................................................................................................................... 7 I: Appreciating Difference: Encountering, Moving, Mapping, Naming .................................... 10 1: Moving Beyond Place ................................................................................................................ 10 2: Territory .................................................................................................................................... 16 3: Not by Any Name ....................................................................................................................... 23 II: Creations of Encounter ..................................................................................................... 31 4: Mother Earth and Numbakulla .................................................................................................. 31 5: Storytracking the Arrernte through the Academic Bush .............................................................. 39 6: Mother Earth: An American Myth ............................................................................................... 61 7: Creative Encounter Stories ......................................................................................................... 73 III: Aesthetic of Impossibles ................................................................................................... 82 8: Story and an Aesthetic of Impossibles ........................................................................................ 82 9: “MaKing Them SpeaK”: Colonialism and the Study of Mythology ................................................ 90 IV: Gesture ......................................................................................................................... 104 10: Gesture Posture Prosthesis .................................................................................................... 104 11: They Jump Up of Themselves .................................................................................................. 111 12: As Prayer Goes So Goes Religion ............................................................................................ 119 V: Play ................................................................................................................................. 136 13: No Place to Stand: Jonathan Z. Smith as homo ludens, the Academic Study of Religion sub specie ludi .................................................................................................................................... 137 14: Go Up Into the Gaps: Play of Native American Religions ........................................................ 161 VI: Creative Encounters ....................................................................................................... 174 15: Creative Encounters ................................................................................................................ 174 Sam Gill – Curriculum Vitae ................................................................................................. 185 Books ........................................................................................................................................... 185 Articles ......................................................................................................................................... 185 Creative Encounters 3 Abstract and Chapter Summaries Abstract History, culture, drama, and life itself are animated by encounters. Only difference energizes and defines encounters; the greater the difference the more complex and often the more significant the encounter. Difference is commonly valued negatively. Most strategies of encounter focus on overcoming or diminishing difference. A common objective is often stated in terms of somehow tolerating difference. This book is based on the premise that difference is not to be approached primarily as something to be overcome or explained away or somehow tolerated; difference is to be appreciated for its capacity for creativity and vitality. Even encounters that are apparently harmful and negatively valued (arguments, conflict, war, oppression) usually heighten the potential for creativity, innovation, movement, action, and identity. Drawing on classic encounters that have occurred in history that have played a significant role in the founding of the academic study of religion and the social sciences, this book explores in some depth the dynamics of encounter to reveal both its problematic and creative aspects. The two examples most extensively considered from a variety of perspectives across the various sections of this book are encounters of the peoples already in the American landscape when Europeans arrived to make it their home and encounters of the same sorts of people in the Australian landscape with new arrivals from Europe. These encounters are recognized as fundamental to the identity creation of not only Native Americans and European Americans and Australian Aborigines and European Australians, but also the distinctive theories that fundamentally shaped the social sciences and the academic study of religion. Revealed in these examples is the remarkable revelation that academic encounters with their subjects often involve creative constructions (concoctions) of primary examples required to establish and give authority to their proposed theories and definitions. While it is tempting to either dismiss certain works as “bad scholarship” or to damn the whole academic enterprise as “colonialist” or “elitist,” this book considers these examples as encounter engendered creative constructions that are distinctive to academia. Since these historical examples engage highly relevant at present concerns —the distinction of real and fake, truth and lie, map and territory—the threading essays, written for this publication, show how these more or less classic examples might contribute to appreciating these contemporary concerns that are generated in the presence of difference. Since the author’s research has been located mostly in the academic study of religion, his career spanning the full history of the field in its modern phase, there is a threading discussion of how this field might take advantage of its heritage as well as its location among the humanities to offer a distinctive contribution to the appreciation of difference. Sam Gill, Professor at the University of Colorado, is the author of many books and articles most recently Dancing Culture Religion. His research has engaged him in fieldwork in Africa, Australia, Indonesia, Latin America, and Native America. Recent work includes Into the Future: Making, Gender, Technology, and Religion from Adam to Androids & Galatea to Tomorrow’s Eve and Creative Encounters: Appreciating Difference; and How the Study of Religion Might Creative Encounters 4 Contribute. His current research is related to perception, conception, gesture/posture/prosthesis, movement, dancing, and body distinctively approached by integrating a wide range of academic and cultural perspectives as well as the experience he has acquired in his long career dancing and moving. Section and Chapter Summaries The one hundred-thousand-word book is organized into seven sections, most with multiple chapters. Seven of fifteen chapters have been written for this book. “Section I: Appreciating Difference: Encountering, Moving, Mapping, Naming” introduces, in three chapters, the importance of appreciating difference and establishes some basic parameters and objectives for the book. The first chapter, “Moving beyond Place,” based on the current research of the author against the background of half a century of experience as a scholar of religion, introduces many of the key aspects and the threading objective of the book which is to shift attention from a primary goals of articulating place, revealing meaning, establishing categories, and finding a categorical label toward appreciating creative encounters, those often-disruptive conjunctions that raise questions, challenge definitions, and occasionally lead to insight and new more interesting questions. Chapter Two, “Territory” excerpts a previously published work that focuses on Australian Aboriginal (Central Australia) understandings of land, territory, country, maps in order to demonstrate that there are alternatives to the customary understandings of territory as bounded spaces with much focus on borderlands. Aboriginal territory is understood as storied tracks across the land defined by crossings ripe for encounter. Difference is fundamental to the core way in which identity is linked to territory. Newly written for this book is the next chapter “Not by Any Name.” At one level this chapter is a critical examination