Invited my Theorizing Religion students to join me at the American Museum of Natural History to marvel at just how much religion is on show in their galleries of non-western cultures. In a natural history museum?!
The absence of galleries on, um, white people is damning. (In fact it would be hard to find a better illustration of the things we've been reading about in Tomoko Masuzawa and Sylvia Wynter, the racialization of non-western cultures as "natural" phenomena whose pith is religion.) But Christianity sneaks in, in the little vitrine in the "Asian Peoples" gallery devoted to Georgians, a minority tradition barely worthy of description.
