Dominic Wetzel’s reading of John Greyson’s film Fig Trees, similarly works through dislocaiton to undo the strict division between the secular and the religious. Fig Trees does so by appropriating the religious imagery of saints and sinners into a narrative about the struggle to make AIDS treatment available around the world. We might ask why a global struggle for AIDS treatment was necessary once the scientific battle of developing effective drugs had been won, (even if the war of preventing and curing the disease had not). How can treatment for an otherwise fatal disease be available and yet not be accessible? Why would life-saving treatment be out of reach for millions and millions of people? To truly take on such questions requires capabilities—for conceptualization alone—that are nearly otherworldly, and Fig Trees turns to religious imagery in ways that are admittedly dislocating of that imagery, but that also reconnect it to the struggle for life. Just as passing can open doors to new possibilities, this dislocation of religious imagery onto the ground of an all too secular battle to make the fruits of science available on an equitable basis, helps us to remember the stakes of life and death over which that battle has been fought. Moreover, such dislocations open the door not just of our memories about the AIDS epidemic, but also of new ways to change the world.
Laura Levitt analyzes some of the reasons that the stakes of how we understand the relation of religion and secularism can be so high. She argues that accepting the commonsense story of secularization can lead us to participate in and even promote forms of inclusion that actually box in those who are different from dominant norms. She shows, for example, how inclusion in the dominant U.S. narrative that separates the secular from the religious or the church from the state, actually makes it difficult to be a secular Jew: if Jews are secular, they’re like everyone else, making the claim for distinctive Jewishness harder to maintain. To be included in the dominant narrative of secularism can erase distinctiveness, and to be included in the dominant narrative of religion can have similar effects. Levitt shows, for example, that when Jews are included in the Judeo-Christian religiosity of the United States, the distinctive text and the specific interpretive tradition of the Hebrew Bible are ignored in favor of incorporation into the dominant arc of Judeo-Christianity. For Levitt, the response to these conundrums of liberalism in which inclusion is also exclusion, is to not to deride the promise and allurement of such dominant narratives, but to take up embodied practices that can address the affective aspects of the longing for inclusion. Neither analysis nor critique will do away with the allure of inclusion in dominant narratives. Embodied practices at both the individual and social levels—including grief and mourning—might offer hope for alternative possibilities. Levitt advocates opening “a space that allows for more than simply a melancholic iteration … [and] risks imagining inclusion in new and more powerful ways.” Here taking up embodied practices can shift our ability to conceptualize the relation between religion and secularism.
In the end, “Religion and the Body,” concludes that there is much to be gained from undoing settled understandings of the relation between religion and the body. Certainly, refusing the standard divisions—that between religion and secularism and many, many more—might create new ways of understanding social relations, including relations that are currently conflictual, difficult and painful. But, this striking collection of essays also suggests that we take a step beyond simply refusing to go along with the usual narratives and the divisions that they enforce on our understandings of the world.
So, why think about religion and the body? Because, these essays propose, to think about religion and the body together opens up multiple possibilities for new understandings of the world around us and for new imaginings of how that world might be differently organized. And these possibilities do not run down any single path. In fact, these essays demonstrate the variability of relations between religion and the body: embodied practice might loosen our presumptions about religion (Levitt), while understanding embodiment in a framework of religious ritual might loosen our presumptions about bodily practices (Wilcox). Filmic representations might shift our sense of embodiment and its possibilities (Moallem) or they might take up religious representation to new ends (Wetzel). Religious expectations of how the state will respond to issues of embodiment may be confounded (Toor), even as science may turn out to be more religious than originally expected (Burlein). “Religion and the Body” advocates new critical practices, including practices that are embodied. Along with analysis and critique we might consider passing and playfulness, as well as mourning and militancy, openness and vision. In so doing, the topic of religion and the body (and the world itself) may get a whole lot more varied, more inclusive, and more interesting.
