Very cool out of the box thinking in "Religion of Trees" today. I'd divided the class into teams each charged with reading and giving a short presentation on an important book on our subject, together with a handout. A handout - how retro in the age of AI-assisted powerpoints!!!
The group entrusted with Mircea Eliade had handouts, but it turned out they were all different, each with some lines from the text on the top, some images below, and a number on the back. Students were invited to tape their sheet on the board in order, and before long we saw the outline of a tree which turned out to be a banyan! IThis was both a fun way to get people engaged and a quite brilliant illustration of Eliade's method, assembling examples from every place under the sun into supposedly universal patterns. These shared patterns were discernible only through the comparative method, he claimed; indeed the meaning of any given example was indiscernible without this larger comparative scaffolding.
