Religious Studieshttp://hdl.handle.net/10012/98942024-03-28T18:53:11Z2024-03-28T18:53:11ZThe Celebrity Imprint: "Religion" and Identity Among Fans of John Lennon and Johnny CashRiddell, Kathleenhttp://hdl.handle.net/10012/194642023-05-24T02:31:00Z2023-05-23T00:00:00ZThe Celebrity Imprint: "Religion" and Identity Among Fans of John Lennon and Johnny Cash
Riddell, Kathleen
Fandom-as-religion literature examines similarities between fandom and religion and, in particular, dimensions of the fan experience such as beliefs, emotion, and ritual. This area emerged in the last thirty years and includes perhaps twenty to thirty scholars who direct their attention to this phenomenon. A fundamental line of inquiry guiding this area of study is that scholars question why fandom looks so much like religion and why many fans use religious language and metaphors to describe the fan experience. This dissertation examines why fandom is often compared to religion, what scholars may learn from this comparison, and what similarities and differences of experience between fandom and religion say about fans experience as “religious” actors. “Religious” appears in quotation marks to signal that the fan experience complicates our understanding of the binary between the sacred and the profane by occupying an “in-between” space, in which fans find “direction, order, meaning and purpose.”
Given the fandom-as-religion argument is often made in the absence of sufficient field data, I address this limitation by participant observation in New York and Nashville among fans of John Lennon and Johnny Cash, respectively, along with follow-up interviews. I argue that the premise of fandom-as-religion should be reconceptualized as “fandom-as-lived-religion,” a reflection of the reality that fans of Lennon and Cash develop at least part of their fan identity through three “points of articulation”: (a) the extension of the self, an externalized reality that remains part of the fan’s self; (b) the growth of the fan-celebrity relationship in the fan’s religious imagination, an act of the extension, and (c) the celebrity’s death, often a turning point in the fan’s relationship with the celebrity. These points are the focus of the three published articles that serve as the focal point of this dissertation, which asks the question whether the imagined relationship the fan has with the celebrity does religious work, by providing a multi-faceted point of identification.
The concepts of the “religious,” the extension of the self, the religious imagination, and religious work come together to tell the story of how fans of Lennon and Cash create the fabric of fan identity that is of “religious” consequence. In the Introduction and Conclusion, I consider how the driving questions of lived experience of celebrity fans say something about the phenomena of religious “nones.” Concluding thoughts concern how celebrity fandom may help address modern religious experience and issues in religious studies as a field.
2023-05-23T00:00:00ZOut of the 'Broom Closet' and Into the Academy: The Development of Contemporary Pagan Studies and the Role of Scholarship in Shaping LegitimacyMiller, Chrishttp://hdl.handle.net/10012/183362022-05-31T02:31:00Z2022-05-30T00:00:00ZOut of the 'Broom Closet' and Into the Academy: The Development of Contemporary Pagan Studies and the Role of Scholarship in Shaping Legitimacy
Miller, Chris
Contemporary Pagan studies is an academic field that explores the beliefs, behaviours, practices, and identities of contemporary Pagans, borrowing lenses from such fields as religious studies, anthropology, sociology, history, archaeology, and folklore studies. This field emerged within the last roughly forty years, and contains perhaps one hundred scholars worldwide who direct their focus towards this religious community. Two fundamental lines of inquiry guide this critical historical analysis of the field: how do academic fields develop, and how do fields interact with the communities that they study?
Concerning the first cluster of questions – how fields develop – this dissertation explores how fields progress from a few scholars discussing their shared interests informally at a larger conference to having established hubs for sharing and presenting research, including conferences, peer-reviewed journals, university courses, and academic publications. This project documents the spaces where Pagan studies exists, traces how these hubs develop, and explores the pitfalls that scholars often experience during processes of institutionalization.
Concerning the second cluster of questions – how fields interact with communities – this dissertation explores how Pagan studies interacts with Pagans themselves. Engagement assumes various forms, from practitioners who read publications, informants who interact with scholars in the field, students taking an introductory course, and researchers who are Pagans themselves. I argue that through these different interactions, scholars legitimize those subjects about which they write. Legitimation – which can also be understood as validating or authorizing a particular perspective – can occur both implicitly and explicitly. Scholars discursively legitimize communities through the labels that they apply, by positioning the community in a certain (generally favourable) way, or asserting that particular characteristics are essential to all Pagans. More explicitly, scholars legitimize communities when they speak on behalf of Pagans before media, public institutions, or in legal proceedings. This dissertation explores how scholars perform this legitimizing work, and the debates that occur within and outside this field regarding appropriate relationships between scholarship and advocacy.
Although based on a relatively small academic field (studying a small religious community), this dissertation offers insights into such broader processes as how knowledge systems are constructed and the power of academia to legitimize ideas.
2022-05-30T00:00:00ZMulti-sited Faith: Chinese Canadian, Young Adult Evangelicals and the Negotiation of Ethno-Religious Identity in the Greater Toronto AreaWall, Scotthttp://hdl.handle.net/10012/158332020-05-14T02:32:54Z2020-05-13T00:00:00ZMulti-sited Faith: Chinese Canadian, Young Adult Evangelicals and the Negotiation of Ethno-Religious Identity in the Greater Toronto Area
Wall, Scott
In 2016, Census Canada found that more than 1.5 million of Toronto, Ontario’s roughly 5.4 million total population were second-generation immigrants. As part of this significant cohort, Chinese Canadian young adults are coming of age in a diverse, multicultural landscape. This project investigates the experience of my 18-35 year-old Chinese Canadian participants as they negotiate their connection to both their Chinese heritage and their sense of being evangelical Christians. Drawing on 51 formal interviews, 18 months of participant observation using multi-site ethnographic methods, and analysis of material culture, I argue that Chinese Canadian, young adult evangelicals form a variety of identity combinations in order to build and maintain attachment to ethno-religious communities. I found that while some explore and use multi-ethnic congregations and ministries to form these combinations, a far larger contingent of Chinese Canadian young adult evangelicals are drawing from a network of institutions and organizations rooted in the Chinese evangelical community. This network constitutes one of the chief findings of the study and illustrates how the unique second-generation religious forms that it fosters and allows for may help sustain and strengthen continued involvement in immigrant congregations for years to come.
2020-05-13T00:00:00ZRenunciation and the Householder/Renouncer Relation in the New Kadampa TraditionEmory-Moore, Christopherhttp://hdl.handle.net/10012/145912019-05-01T02:31:08Z2019-04-30T00:00:00ZRenunciation and the Householder/Renouncer Relation in the New Kadampa Tradition
Emory-Moore, Christopher
Founded by the Tibetan-British monk Geshe Kelsang Gyatso in 1991, the New Kadampa Tradition – International Kadampa Buddhist Union (NKT-IKBU) is a fast-growing and controversial transnational Buddhist network that has enthusiastically embraced an expansionist business model and major monastic reform. Toward an improved understanding of the group and of Tibetan Buddhism’s diasporic modernization more broadly, this dissertation examines the practice of Buddhism’s traditionally monastic soteriology of renunciation (the abandonment of “worldly concerns” on the path to liberation from cyclic rebirth) by members of urban NKT meditation centres in Canada and the United States. When China declared its sovereignty over the Tibetan cultural region in 1951, twenty-year old Kelsang Gyatso was one of over 6,000 monks residing at the Geluk monastery of Sera near Lhasa. Forty years later when he founded the NKT in northern England, Gyatso decided it would have no monasteries, only congregational teaching and meditation centers designed to spread his interpretation of Geluk Buddhism. Without monasteries to institutionally support the Buddhist praxis of renunciation, what does renunciation look like in the NKT? My ethnographic study of the North American NKT addresses this question by engaging field interviews, participant observations, publications, teachings, and media through a conceptual apparatus prominent in both Buddhism and Buddhist Studies: the householder/renouncer relation. I argue that the NKT’s market-driven expansionism not only supersedes its funding of a monastic community but replaces monasticism as the principal institutional framework for renunciation in the form of full-time subsistence missionary work on the part of ordained and lay Kadampa Buddhist virtuosos. Whereas Tibetan clerical renunciation looks like the monastic community’s dual abandonment of the household activities of economic and sexual production, my analysis of NKT labour reveals that these have been bifurcated between ordained Kadampa monastics who renounce sexual reproduction but not economic production, and Kadampa missionary managers who renounce the latter but not necessarily the former. Celibate monastic ordination becomes an optional lifestyle, the suitability of which is primarily a matter of personal preference rather than ritual specialization, and the arduous and austere life of a missionary (lay or ordained) becomes the principal model of a consecrated life of renunciation. Finally, I suggest that this hybrid business model of “missionary monasticism” has been a major factor in the NKT’s external growth, producing a diverse and motivated labour force whose renunciation of economic remuneration provides the organization with the fruits of their economic production, but also in some of the movement’s more visible internal fault lines: labour shortage, turnover, and disgruntled former members.
2019-04-30T00:00:00Z