Paper by Ann Gold

Theory/Stuff Divide
Ann Gold, Department of Religion, Syracuse University

Stuff It
What is "theory"? What is "stuff"? In what ways are they interrelated or separated from one another? Is it accurate that to get a job in today's market one must do some sort of "stuff"? . . . .

the split
I address your conundrums using insights I have gained from my eleven years spent as an anthro among the religionists -- eleven years during which I have not shed my disciplinary identity. So I'm going to give you an anthropological perspective, an outsider view; a participant observer's view, of the problem. And let me say that I do see it as a problem, in the negative sense. In other words, not just interesting but bad. To coin a phrase: we need to interrogate the categories! They are invidious and worst of all, to use one of Charlie's favorite words, stupid.

I come from a discipline in which the split you are exploring, at least in the absolute terms set by your invitation to speak has no history and makes no sense. In anthropology we take for granted the intertwined nature of theory and that which is, to use a phrase common in my formative years, "on the ground." While as you can see there is still an evident hierarchical (high /low) value differentiating these, there is also a very clear "can't have one without the other" sensibility.

As I tried hard to prepare for this conference, and to take it seriously, I planned to talk about the premises of a theory/stuff split, in terms of disciplines, and in terms of invidious evaluation. I'll still do those two things. But I had a genuine epiphany in the process that I must set before you at the beginning. Here it is:

The split - when it is posed as mutually exclusive boxes -- grows out of our department's idiosyncratic history, dating before my arrival and rooted -here's my epiphany - in an almost comical conflation of theory with theology. Same first four letters after all. Max Muller defined religion as a "disease of language." I wouldn't hold to that, but I do think that the stuff / theory split is a diseased language. I have steadfastly pooh-poohed it for 11 years, but here we still are.

The reasons for this are twofold. First: God - at least in the monotheisms where religious studies was born -- is radically not stuff. Theology has no substance (and I do think substance is a far better word than stuff, for reasons that will become clear); at the center is the ineffable. Thus, although God and culture can both be theorized, these are different kinds of theorizing. One is responsible to substance, something exterior to it; the other is self-referential; it exists in a world of theory, and need not have any "on the ground" referentiality.

I remember the first prospectus I ever read just a month or so after joining this department. I honestly cannot recall who wrote it, but I know it was one of Charlie's students. And as I recollect, it did bewilder me, not because it was theoretical, but because it seemed to me to be, ever so elegantly, about nothing. It was about thinking about the non-existence of God. Thus I was introduced to substanceless theory; (or negative theology?) and I knew I had landed in a different place.

Now, the second part of the twofold situation is the way that philosophical theology of the type for which Syracuse has been justly famed, has drawn upon traditions of continental philosophy and literary criticism that also produce and sustain a gap; high theory versus (as Daniel Gold put it when we were discussing this) "dumb" textual analysis, for example.

So what I see is an overdetermination of the split arising, on the one hand, from the non-materiality of God in the Abrahamic traditions; and, on the other hand, from the elevation of Theory in continental philosophy and literary criticism - and the strong infusion of these intellectual currents into theology as practiced at Syracuse.

In the current configuration of the department, however, it seems to me a mistake, a hangover, which we may willingly shed along with the other odd folklore that surrounds us. According to the Dean, we wear black leather jackets, we are insular within the university, and we are afraid of internal debate; to these anachronisms I would add, we are split between theory and stuff. It is kind of like the way that villagers in Ghatiyali call a particular farmer's field the "berry jungle" because many years ago it used to be a thorny berry patch. Now it is a wheat field, but they still call it the "berry jungle." Memory is embedded in such linguistic usages, and they may have their poetic or evocative resonance. But if we act as if they were true, they can be very misleading; you might waste your time searching for berries or avoiding thorns that don't exist.

I consider the persistence of this language to be damaging. It may be more damaging (as revealed in the fearful job question you pose to us) to those in the theory box than to those degraded as stuff lovers -- for we are happy as pigs in shit, as the saying goes. I talked to my son, who is about to graduate from Swarthmore as an honors philosophy major, about this retreat and its themes, and he told me that at Swarthmore, where there is a tradition of social activism, students are deeply nervous about being branded as - these are my son's words - "aimless theory heads." They take theory courses out of intellectual excitement, but are defensive or even furtive about it! I don't know if this is a sign of the times in keeping with your nervousness. But I do think that for the health of the department we should not use this polarizing language; nor attempt to box up our faculty or our students in these boxes. Many successful students I have seen move through the department over the past decade have in any case avoided these labels. The image of the boxes simply does not match the reality of what we do here.

Now that I've told you my revelation, I will do two more possibly anti-climatic things:
1) talk about the binary of theory / substance in terms of my own experiences and understandings from anthropology
2) explore the hierarchy lodged in the language; its semantics

anthropological perspective
I confess, that having dropped out of college to become a gypsy / hippie for a symbolic seven years during which I circled the globe, lived in a tipi, tried to build a cabin in Canada, and to be an herb farmer in California (and failed at both) when I then decided it was time to study anthropology in 1973 I thought it was about people, places, lives, rituals, stories. Once I caught up with my BA and began graduate training, I discovered that anthropology was profoundly about theory. Well, no, it was about theory that was about people, places lives, rituals, stories. And I confess, I never came to love theory, but I did come to love the headiness of mastering it: I loved the exercise for my brain (that after all had possibly been softened by drugs and motherhood and other diversions and disasters). Just as I've never belonged to any religious faith, I've never taken up any theoretical faith. Just as I like to learn about and teach diverse religious traditions, and appreciate their cosmic visions, so I like to learn about and teach diverse theory traditions.

We were taught in "systems" - the nickname for our intro course whose real title I believe was "Intro to social and cultural theory" -- all the things that were wrong with all the anthropological theories that came before us, except of course for the latest . . . . which happened largely to be written by our own professors. Of course this was social theory, rooted in Britain; not poststructuralist and postmodern and critical theory that are doubtless on the systems syllabus today and that have taken on the aura of Theory with a capital T.

What I learned as I struggled through Marxism, French sociology, cultural materialism, ecological determinism, functionalism, structural functionalism, structuralism, symbolic anthropology and who knows what all, is that theories come and go but ethnographic knowledge remains fascinating ( to borrow my husband's language - his book subtitled Modern Fascinations).

Functionalism, for example, Malinowski's rather silly, simple-minded, easy to demolish reductionist theory that all religious rituals serve useful psychological purposes, has long been totally without explanatory power or interest. Nonetheless, we continue to read and write and think about the Trobriand Islands and their inhabitants whose lives both past and present continue to fascinate generation after generation of Anthropology students and their teachers: Trobriand exchange patterns, Trobriand sexuality (erotic eyelash biting for example), Trobriand garden magic. Most astonishingly even after Malinowski's diary's publication damned him as a racist and in many ways, along with Said's Orientalism, launched anthropology's several decades of self-flagellation and anguish, his legacy [and I use that phrase conscious of its ponderous sound] has not been erased, subject though it has been to endless critiques and revisions. Why is this? Why haven't we buried it and good riddance? In part because we want to hear about garden magic and kula exchange.

Thirty years ago Levi Strauss defined anthropology as "conversation"; more recently Gupta and Ferguson describe it as a "field science"; these are the two vital elements: voices evoked in conversations that emerge from intimate and long term every day engagements with others. However difficult those conversations are to translate, however fissured and fraught that fieldwork is by power divides, it is something that enables a particular kind of knowledge to emerge that remains, I think, of worth.

These are what keep anthropology from dissolving into cultural studies or comp lit, whose theories we freely appropriate; our practices remain distinctive.

For myself, I have a strong interest in, and therefore teach courses in, postcolonial theory, gender theory, memory theory. This is because I do research in a country that was colonized, because I have worked extensively with women; because in 1993, having tried to understand environmental change, I came home from India with a suitcase full of tapes of old people's memories, and then realized there were books to read that would help me think about it. In short, my work has never been theory-driven. I seek to learn, and then to teach theory in order to frame, interpret, better present my ethnographic findings and to learn from the ways others do. Plenty of our students, including Ken Lokensgard who will speak shortly or Mary Keller, or many others in this room write in ways that engage current theoretical discourses, or offer original reconfigurations of them-- doing theory that illuminates substance; or to shift the priority even more, using substance to energize theory. But they deal with both.

If you try to put them in the impoverished theory / stuff boxes you do violence to their epistemological enterprises.

the troubled language of theory and stuff
Really all I have to do in this part of my talk is refer you to my four-sided handouts.

Please don't call it stuff:
we are talking about people, about rituals, about corpses, about mythologies, about poetry, about paintings, about women, about trees about rivers, about prayers . . . .

Do what's wrong with the shorthand? Check out semantics of stuff.

In the OED, we find, first: "The material out of which something is made or formed; substance." That's OK. But continue to the informal meanings, and you will see that these include the following:
Unspecified material: Put that stuff over there.
Worthless objects. Money; cash, a drug, especially one that is illegal or habit-forming.
When we get to the verbal forms they are even more vivid with dual implications of worthlessness and inflatedness.
To fill with an appropriate stuffing: stuff a pillow.
To fill (an animal skin) to restore its natural form for mounting or display.
To cram with food.
To fill (the mind): His head is stuffed with silly notions.
To put fraudulent votes into (a ballot box).
The transitive verb means "To overeat; gorge, eat greedily. The sexual aspects begin there and extend to female sexuality and sexual fluids.

I truly love the B 52s GOOD STUFF; a rather sweet song about cunnilingus:

Take me down where the love honey flows
Kiss you nice, nibble your toes
Take me down where the good stuff grows
Love you nice, tickle your nose
Good stuff, gimmie some of that good stuff
Good stuff, gimmie some of that good stuff
Good stuff, gimmie some of that good stuff
Good stuff, gimmie some of that good stuff
The big dipper sure ain't big enough
To hold all of your dang good stuff

and so forth . . . .

Turning to theory:
I have supplied two extracts from two astute commentaries on the ways theory produces status in academia, by two anthropologists who wield it with the best of them; these are not "sour grapes" voices critiquing what they don't possess. It would be safe to say that anyone who actually felt insecure wielding theory would never dare to critique it.

Lutz is a senior scholar at UNC Chapel Hill who has written on emotions in Micronesia, on the gaze in National Geographic, and most recently on the new militarization of America especially in the south. She is respected as a theorist, and her insightful essay, titled "The Gender of Theory" hits on some key epistemological problems. Here we must differentiate sex and gender, because plenty of women including Lutz herself would not be excluded from the "male" world of theory as she depicts it.

Lutz writes:

Theory is generally and informally seen as consisting of more rather than less abstract statements, widely relevant or universalistic or "deeper" statements of more ultimate or timeless value than others, and as statements that require more rather than less substantial intellectual "gifts" to compose.
….
Theory is often seen as more difficult reading than ethnography, although difficulty is an ideological notion, as has been pointed out
the argument is also sometimes made that theory's difficulty is inevitable if it articulates thoughts not spoken before, taken for granted, or hegemony. Theory becomes almost synonymous with the idea, the original thought. Difficult theory can have the effect - intended or unintended-of saying to some readers: "This is not for you," so it sorts readers into the privileged and the low brow.

Dominic Boyer, writing about 8 years later, finds very similar things ongoing in anthropology although he has dropped the gender angle. Because anthropologists are taught to hone their ethnographic skills, when they turn them on academia it can be rather embarrassing. Boyer defines the work of theory in a fashion very similar to Lutz, although he appears to appreciate its analytic powers more:

Theories do all sorts of things; they do what we commonly construe them as doing -- that is, they provide paradigms of analysis, key interpretive categories, analogical tools, and sources of inspiration for the formation of expert knowledge about the research object under consideration. But theoretical dialects also fulfill other kinds of communicative tasks: like "trade languages," they allow specialists in different academic disciplines with highly variable commitments, horizons, and connotational dispositions to muddle through communication to one another.

Boyer, like Lutz, points to the subtler politics at play.

And it is here that the exclusionary, connoisseurial, stratifying tendencies of theoretical dialects evince themselves. Theoretical expertise, like other kinds of professional expertise, necessarily involves cultivating sociolinguistic distinctions between those "in the know" and those "not in the know" (see my "Foucault in the Bush"). Since hermeneutic labors within economies of theoretical discourse tend to be gendered as elite forms of intellectual practice in anthropology (and elsewhere), competence in a wide range of theoretical dialects projects entitlement, status, and belonging in an elite discourse community. A theoretical dialect that was widely intelligible would be of little use to such a community of expert knowers -- such a language is precisely a plain speech register of "common wisdom" that theory is meant (via my favorite deictics) to either "rise above," "look behind," or "penetrate below." In the end, to paraphrase Bourdieu, what is politically at stake in the practice of theoretical communication and citation is the right to voice and to envision the disciplinary whole "on behalf" of the many who are not acknowledged to have this right.

Boyer, like Lutz, sees not only a knowledge hierarchy but a power hierarchy vividly at play here. He goes on to depict brilliantly and wickedly the ritual of the job interview. Boyer is far from being anti-theory; in fact, it is the sign under which he operates at Cornell, as you can tell from his style. But he nonetheless displays with ethnographic acuity that might make you squirm, the ways young scholars have what he calls a "neurotic relationship to theory."

what about jobs?
As Boyer makes clear, although the dichotomy is peculiar to our department, the nervousness you are experiencing is familiar enough. I work with many students in anthropology; I was talking about this conference with a few of them and they were mightily amused, or bemused; because many of them are terrified that they won't have enough theory to get a job. They come back from the "field" rich in ethnographic data and scramble around to embroider this with theory - often, I fear, in a contrived or false fashion. I've heard them say, " I need theory"; or "I'm trying to get my theory together"; while you all are worried that you might be lacking substance. It might only confirm your fears to learn that in the last two years Syracuse has placed three new anthropology Ph.D.s in tenure lines in religion departments (I was on all their committees): Dept. of Religious Studies, DePaul University in Chicago; Religion Dept. at Furman University in Greenville SC, and at Department of Religious Studies, Canisius College in Buffalo. These are schools similar to those where our Religion students most often get hired.

I hasten to add that this doesn't make me a traitor; for in all three cases these were defined as positions in Asian Religions and as far as I know none of this department's religion students applied for them.

These new assistant professors work, respectively, on the ways Hindu nationalism affects women's agency; on a marginal group of poets / singers / beggars in Bengal who practice Tantric sexuality within marriage and call it renunciation; on an Islamic tradition of poetic composition that flourishes in a Hindu holy city. They talk about people, about values, about creativity, about politics, about bodies, about art, about rituals. Do they do theory? Of course. Their work is concerned with agency, with space, with gender, with hegemony, with subalternity, . . . Theory abstracts and gives conceptual power; in the process, as Lutz warns, substance may be reduced. The trick, no the art, the beauty, of anthropology, and I would say of much of religious studies as well (and here I'm not speaking of philosophical theology, which has quite different aims), is to keep your rich substance while bringing conceptual power to bear on it. (again see D. Gold)

Could the rich union of theory and ethnography be the reason these candidates were selected over Religion PhDs? I have no idea.
The lesson I do want to offer, the thing I learned in the process of preparing this little talk, is that before most of our times, the Syracuse department, due to its particular historical trajectory, may have conflated theory with theology and thus opposed it to substance, leaving an uncomfortable and untenable split that you do well to probe and mend.

Appendices (handouts)

on theory

Web Results 1 - 10 of about 31,500,000 for theory [definition]. (0.11 seconds)

The Official String Theory Web Site
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Representation Theory
Representation Theory. Representation Theory. Journals Home; Search; Author Info; Subscribe; Tech Support; Help. ISSN 1088-4165. Most recent volume | All volumes. ...
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[ More results from www.tc.cornell.edu ]

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Number Theory Web. (Australian Site). ...
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on stuff

Brrrr!
All right
Bum bum-Bum bum (in combinations)
Ooo baby!
What?
How about givin' me some of that good stuff
Well...
Here it 'tis
Here it 'tis
Here it 'tis
Here it 'tis
Are you lookin' for it?
Are you lookin' for it?
You'll hear it from me
Good stuff baby
Do you want it?
Do you know how to get it?
That good stuff baby
Good good stuff
I got sincerity that's bonifide
And a heart so fine it's certified
So let your good stuff rain down on me
Your dang good stuff that's true and tried
Are you lookin' for it?
Are you lookin' for it?
You'll hear it from me
Good stuff baby
Do you want it?
Do you know how to get it?
That good stuff baby
Good good stuff
What's the use of gettin' if you ain't sharin'
My eyes are strainin' from all the starin'
You've become my magnificent obsession
So how's about joinin' my lovin' session?
Are you ready? I'm ready
Are you ready? Uh yeah
Are you ready for this? I guess so
Come on baby
Say whoa!
Take me down where the love honey flows
Kiss you nice, nibble your toes
Take me down where the good stuff grows
Love you nice, tickle your nose
Good stuff, gimmie some of that good stuff
Good stuff, gimmie some of that good stuff
Good stuff, gimmie some of that good stuff
Good stuff, gimmie some of that good stuff
The big dipper sure ain't big enough
To hold all of your dang good stuff
So let the people say we're down right nasty
I just say we're down right
That good stuff that I am seekin'
It's got me peakin' and it's got me freakin'
Watch my lips I am speakin'
It's got me trickin' and it's got me treatin'!
I got sincerity that's bonifide
So come on now and let your good stuff rain down on me
(Take me down)
I want the stuff
(Take me up)
That's tried and true
Take me to the place they have the good stuff
Yeah
Take me down where the love honey flows
Kiss you nice, nibble your toes
Take me down where the good stuff grows
Love you nice, tickle your nose
Take me down where the love honey flows
Kiss you nice, nibble your toes
Take me down where the good stuff grows
Love you nice, tickle your nose
Good stuff, gimmie some of that good stuff
Good stuff, gimmie some of that good stuff
Good stuff, gimmie some of that good stuff
Good stuff, gimmie some of that good stuff
Don't leave me hangin'
I wanna be dangin'
With your dang good stuff!
Don't leave me hangin'
I wanna be dangin'
With your dang good stuff!
Hey ladies, do you want it? yeah!
Hey fellas, you got to have it, yeah!
Gonna wallow in the lovin' hollow
Gonna wallow in your dang good stuff!
Gonna wallow in the lovin' hollow
Gonna wallow in your dang good stuff!
Hey ladies, do you want it? yeah!
Hey fellas, you got to have it, yeah!
That good good good good good good good stuff!
That good good good good good good good stuff!

B 52s GOOD STUFF

on theory

Theory is generally and informally seen as consisting of more rather than less abstract statements, widely relevant or universalistic or "deeper" statements of more ultimate or timeless value than others, and as statements that require more rather than less substantial intellectual "gifts" to compose (p. 253).

. . . the argument is also sometimes made that theory's difficulty is inevitable if it articulates thoughts not spoken before, taken for granted, or hegemonic. Theory becomes almost synonymous with the idea, the original thought. Difficult theory can have the effect - intended or unintended-of saying to some readers: "This is not for you," so it sorts readers into the privileged and the low brow (p. 254).

Catherine Lutz, "The Gender of Theory" in Women Writing Culture (University of California Press, 1995)

Theories do all sorts of things; they do what we commonly construe them as doing -- that is, they provide paradigms of analysis, key interpretive categories, analogical tools, and sources of inspiration for the formation of expert knowledge about the research object under consideration. But theoretical dialects also fulfill other kinds of communicative tasks: like "trade languages," they allow specialists in different academic disciplines with highly variable commitments, horizons, and connotational dispositions to muddle through communication to one another

Citationality not only signifies the lineaments of disciplinary wholeness but also provides a medium of value fixture and transfer. In moments of communicative clarity, citations provide legitimacy to the citers' own knowledge works; and, even moments of opacity invite productive hermeneutic labors of challenge, clarification and elaboration. Of course, to conduct legitimacy, the "right" citations must be employed. And it is here that the exclusionary, connoisseurial, stratifying tendencies of theoretical dialects evince themselves. Theoretical expertise, like other kinds of professional expertise, necessarily involves cultivating sociolinguistic distinctions between those "in the know" and those "not in the know" (see my "Foucault in the Bush"). Since hermeneutic labors within economies of theoretical discourse tend to be gendered as elite forms of intellectual practice in anthropology (and elsewhere), competence in a wide range of theoretical dialects projects entitlement, status, and belonging in an elite discourse community. A theoretical dialect that was widely intelligible would be of little use to such a community of expert knowers -- such a language is precisely a plain speech register of "common wisdom" that theory is meant (via my favorite deictics) to either "rise above," "look behind," or "penetrate below." In the end, to paraphrase Bourdieu, what is politically at stake in the practice of theoretical communication and citation is the right to voice and to envision the disciplinary whole "on behalf" of the many who are not acknowledged to have this right.

Dominic Boyer 2003 The Medium of Foucault in Anthropology The Minnesota Review n.s. 58-60.

on stuff

See the Stuff Magazine website.