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The Pieces Finally Fit Together. Sort of.
You’ll have to excuse me, but after having spent three days intermittently perusing the publishers’ exhibition at the American Academy of Religion meeting, I feel like I have just emerged from an alternate universe in which all my wishes have been granted (except for the money and time to enjoy the fulfilled wishes).
Almost every topic I have been puzzling through on the joculum blog, even the most ludicrously obscure of them, now has become the purview of some subset of university-approved scholarship. If there isn’t a book yet answering my specific questions, there will be four of them by June 2011. (This is not a joke. It is an observation.)
And there are now scholarly journals, mostly from E. J. Brill, devoted to nearly every subtopic of the obscure questions to which I have been trying to tease out answers painfully, working from half-baked hints in disreputable compendia or unreliable anecdotes in travelers’ tales. (Indo-Iranian cross-cultural assimilations in antiquity? Check. Alternate religio-cultural currents in Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, North America, or South America? history of the scientific study of religion, history of Western esotericism, aspects of the literary and artistic dimensions of all of the foregoing? Check, ten or so separate times. Religion and the cognitive sciences today? Of course, twice over. And the list goes on. I shall spare you.)
A good many of my speculations, including re-evaluations of thinkers no longer much thought of (and/or no longer thought much of, as the case may be), appear to be well within the freshly developing scholarly consensus. Some, of course, are not, not least because not even I believe they make any sense.
Maybe a Ph.D. in one multidisciplinary field, when combined with an M.A. in an even more multidisciplinary one, really is sufficient to avoid gross embarrassment except when reading too fast, which I do often, or when approaching topics that require a type of expertise I will never possess, also often.
Now that others have arranged and annotated the factual materials on every topic about which I have complained, “Why isn’t somebody doing research on…?”, I feel I should go back and check my work. I may be more self-congratulatory than I have any right to be.
But I was left with the feeling, as the weekend at AAR progressed, that I had finally finished the puzzle, probably with a few pieces of sky stuck where the river is supposed to be and vice versa.
More accurately, I have been working with a 500-piece puzzle when I ought to have been working with a 2500-piece one. To quote the teaching story again from The Psychology of Consciousness, "Ha, is there any number higher than one hundred?"
2500-piece version to come once I have figured out how to display the 500-piece one.
My larger concerns, about which I have bloviated too often, turn out to be turning into veritable industries; at a moment when bookstore chains are selling upscale teddy bears to stay in business and magazines are folding under the impact of the internet and the iPhone app, I had no idea there were so many new books and journals that were effectively invisible to Google searches. (Searches for which one thinks one knows the keywords, that is.)
How are all these books and magazines finding their audience? I’m not just talking about the scholarly books and journals, I’m talking about niche-market popular titles.
You’ll have to excuse me, but after having spent three days intermittently perusing the publishers’ exhibition at the American Academy of Religion meeting, I feel like I have just emerged from an alternate universe in which all my wishes have been granted (except for the money and time to enjoy the fulfilled wishes).
Almost every topic I have been puzzling through on the joculum blog, even the most ludicrously obscure of them, now has become the purview of some subset of university-approved scholarship. If there isn’t a book yet answering my specific questions, there will be four of them by June 2011. (This is not a joke. It is an observation.)
And there are now scholarly journals, mostly from E. J. Brill, devoted to nearly every subtopic of the obscure questions to which I have been trying to tease out answers painfully, working from half-baked hints in disreputable compendia or unreliable anecdotes in travelers’ tales. (Indo-Iranian cross-cultural assimilations in antiquity? Check. Alternate religio-cultural currents in Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, North America, or South America? history of the scientific study of religion, history of Western esotericism, aspects of the literary and artistic dimensions of all of the foregoing? Check, ten or so separate times. Religion and the cognitive sciences today? Of course, twice over. And the list goes on. I shall spare you.)
A good many of my speculations, including re-evaluations of thinkers no longer much thought of (and/or no longer thought much of, as the case may be), appear to be well within the freshly developing scholarly consensus. Some, of course, are not, not least because not even I believe they make any sense.
Maybe a Ph.D. in one multidisciplinary field, when combined with an M.A. in an even more multidisciplinary one, really is sufficient to avoid gross embarrassment except when reading too fast, which I do often, or when approaching topics that require a type of expertise I will never possess, also often.
Now that others have arranged and annotated the factual materials on every topic about which I have complained, “Why isn’t somebody doing research on…?”, I feel I should go back and check my work. I may be more self-congratulatory than I have any right to be.
But I was left with the feeling, as the weekend at AAR progressed, that I had finally finished the puzzle, probably with a few pieces of sky stuck where the river is supposed to be and vice versa.
More accurately, I have been working with a 500-piece puzzle when I ought to have been working with a 2500-piece one. To quote the teaching story again from The Psychology of Consciousness, "Ha, is there any number higher than one hundred?"
2500-piece version to come once I have figured out how to display the 500-piece one.
My larger concerns, about which I have bloviated too often, turn out to be turning into veritable industries; at a moment when bookstore chains are selling upscale teddy bears to stay in business and magazines are folding under the impact of the internet and the iPhone app, I had no idea there were so many new books and journals that were effectively invisible to Google searches. (Searches for which one thinks one knows the keywords, that is.)
How are all these books and magazines finding their audience? I’m not just talking about the scholarly books and journals, I’m talking about niche-market popular titles.
