I've discovered a fun new map, water vapor - even more fun if you animate it. You can see things stream and flow and swirl, nothing stable, everything connected. It's uniting and unnerving at once.
Fun to peruse in a new way this semester where I have students spread so far - this map conveniently names where we all are: United States, Nigeria, Georgia ("in Eastern Europe," they explain), India, Malaysia, China. I suppose I've had students from across the seven seas before, but not as they were across these seas. It's more than time-zone troubling.
I expected this international spread to matter for what went on in the "Religion and the Anthropocene" course (a Hindu Indian told us their father calls the Anthropocene the Kali Yuga and assures them it's happened twenty-seven times before!) but not "Theorizing Religion." Yet it's in the latter course that I'm feeling most acutely provincial. I find myself saying "western religious studies" and "European and American scholarship" and "religious studies in the United States" where I would in past years have just mentioned scholars and disciplines - even as I was trying to contextualize them. It's a great reality check. No more unquestioned center for understanding the human, these are ideas developed in one region of the globe at one recent point in history, in part to buttress delusions of a more than local significance fleetingly anchored in colonial and neocolonial power. Absent that power, how do we justify focusing on them?
The realities aren't always happy ones. It's fun when a Nigerian Christian runs with a Buddhist-inflected definition of religion from D. T. Suzuki or a student in Malaysia tells me about discovering Shusaku Endo's Silence (even of that's in lieu of the actually assigned reading). Less fun when a Muslim student in India describes the terror of the Hindu nationalist government's short-circuiting of the secular commitments of the Indian state. (Not the time to focus on the conceptual confusions of secularism...) And what about us in the Untied (sic!) States? A student north of San Francisco can taste the ash on his tongue, as many of the rest of us see it giving our sunsets an end of the world aura; the religious language of a "time of reckoning," too, blankets the land.
Squalls and storms of demagoguery, religious chicanery and violent vigilantism stream and swirl across the seven seas. God help us all.
