Wonderworking Power: Violence, Racial Difference and the Development of Pentecostal Religious Culture

Leslie Dawn Callahan
Assistant Professor of Religious Studies

How did a desire for power shape the religious and racial identities of early black Pentecostals prior to World War II? Callahan will study the development of the Black Pentecostal belief in empowerment through the Holy Spirit, which emerged against a backdrop of intense social, psychological, and physical violence, and may be read as a reflection of how many black Pentecostals dealt with their constant awareness of racial terror after Reconstruction.

While at the Forum, Callahan will focus on a study of the devotional life and ministry of Elizabeth J. Dabney in Philadelphia during the 1930s and 1940s. When Mother Dabney's husband began pastoral expansion into a "wicked" North Philadelphia neighborhood, she initiated an intensive three-year prayer ministry that would culminate in her success in "praying through," reaching the pinnacle of mystical contact with God. With this newfound entrée into God's glory, Mother Dabney translated her belief in God into the personal power to accomplish both spiritual and temporal goals, becoming a nationally recognized and financially prosperous evangelist. As Callahan proceeds with her research, she will trace how Mother Dabney's understanding of the threat of urban violence informed the development of this evangelical work.


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Ghosh's research examines the complex interrelations between migration, nationalism, and religious belief within the context of liberal political theory's claims about the nature of modern cultural expression. He is currently completing a book-length study of the 1947 Partition of British India into the Republics of India and Pakistan whose methodology represents such an engagement of ethnography with liberal political theory.

As a Forum Fellow, Ghosh will develop a related inquiry: why and in what ways do Indians in the United States, including second and third generations, define themselves increasingly as Hindu? This phenomenon, Ghosh argues, is inextricably linked to idioms of Hindu chauvinism and to the Internet, a mechanism crucial to the dissemination of this religious and national discourse. The emergent Hindu Diaspora invites a rethinking of liberal ideas of "nation" and "civilization" and necessitates, in particular, the elaboration of a robust theoretical model of human agency. Ghosh hopes to arrive at a formulation of liberal political theory that can account for this practice of cultural definition as one of polity formation that is neither entirely planned and "rational," nor spontaneous and "irrational," thus evading a pervasive and limiting theoretical dichotomy, in which the actors not only inhabit their identity, but also shape their history.

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Inside the Apple: A Comprehensive Reading of Yehuda Amichai's Poetry

Nili Gold
niligold@sas.upenn.edu
Assistant Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies

Gold is currently at work on a book-length study of Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai (1924-2000). Considered a peer of lyrical masters such as Eliot, Auden, and Pound, Amichai was widely celebrated and published in 37 languages. Despite his immense popularity and commitment to English-language writing, however, scholars in English have yet to produce a significant analytical inquiry into his deceptively accessible poetry or a study detailing the trajectory of his career.
Addressing both critical lacunae at once, Gold will formulate a literary reading of Amichai's work grounded in biographical considerations of his life. The study will have a tripartite structure, corresponding with three major periods: Amichai's youth, including the Jewish faith and rituals, synagogue, Hebrew, and German, his mother tongue; the aftermath of his 1935 flight from Germany that ended the "innocent" period of his life and devolved into the development of camouflage as a poetic principle; and, finally, his assimilation into the environment of Israel as poet and soldier, initiating a final phase when the need to camouflage himself--literally blend into his surroundings--diminished, allowing him to revisit his religious past and draw semi-theological conclusions in his work.

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Belief-Conscious and Unconscious

Steven Gross
Assistant Professor of Philosophy

Beliefs vary in degree of accessibility to consciousness. Current theory in cognitive science maps out a spectrum of accessibility in which beliefs accessible to consciousness (such as conscious ideas about occurrences) could be located at one extreme, with beliefs that are inaccessible to consciousness (such as tacit knowledge of complex syntactic rules governing language use) at the other.

Gross proposes a study of the nature of beliefs that are in principle inaccessible to consciousness and their relation to beliefs that are accessible to consciousness, particularly in light of the puzzlingly contradictory conclusions that can be drawn on both counts. Offering the case of linguistic meaning to illustrate these difficulties, Gross demonstrates how competing considerations can be adduced that would require beliefs about linguistic meaning to be both accessible and inaccessible to consciousness. On the one hand, the simple fact that language use is typically an instance of intentional action (e.g., "I'll pick up the tomatoes") requires that beliefs about linguistic meaning be accessible to consciousness, the propositions of current linguistic theory. On the other hand, it requires that beliefs about linguistic meaning be viewed as inaccessible to consciousness (e.g., the proposition that speakers have a tacit-but unconscious-knowledge of set theory in producing a sentence such as, "Some cats have no tails"). Empirical theory about language thus leads in two contradictory directions. Gross will explore parallel questions of the nature of unconscious belief and its problematic relation to conscious belief, such as the relation of religious belief to unconscious mental mechanisms posited by contemporary evolutionary psychologists.

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Belief in Humor

Arthur Kiron (Library Fellow)
kiron@pobox.upenn.edu
Curator of Judaica Collections University of Pennsylvania Library Belief and Humor

The notion of belief and the experience of believing are often associated with emotional states of gravitas, a physical furrowing of the brow, stances of intellectual seriousness, and profound, univocal meaning.  On the other hand, humor and its variants--irony, parody, satire, wit, practical jokes, physical laughter--are often associated with a certain lightness of being, triviality, and destabilized meaning. Both, however, must be considered integral to the human experience; what, then, is the nature of their relationship?  Are humor and belief compatible as simultaneous emotional, physical and intellectual events?
To probe the intersection of belief and humor, Kiron will analyze the Jewish holiday of Purim. Purim celebrates the threat and ultimate escape from a genocidal persecutor described in the biblical scroll of Esther, yet it also functions as a carnivalesque moment in the Jewish calendar cycle. The worlds of life and death, of ritual observance and transgression, are inverted.  Historically, celebrations of Purim feature inebriation and behavior that might otherwise exceed the limits of social acceptability. Yet the content of the Esther story belies the frivolity of this humor, bringing into focus the sobriety of abstract matters of conviction as well as of lived experiences of personal and communal suffering.

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Myth and Family Romance in the Art of Feudal Aquitaine

Robert A. Maxwell
Assistant Professor of Art History

The twelfth-century saw a dramatic awakening in historical consciousness. Chronicles, family genealogies, charters and cartularies, heroic and historicizing epics, and even fantastic myths and legends, flourished as never before. This hardly represented a Classical “rebirth” or “renaissance” as often claimed, but a heightened interest in historical time and in thinking about the past. Europe’s increasingly literate society–and increasingly bureaucratic when it came to the proliferating paperwork–demanded ever more from written documents to provide contemporary testimony to past events, people and actions. Although overlooked in modern discussions, the visual arts of the period similarly offered opportunities for comment on history and history making.
For this year’s Humanities Forum, Robert Maxwell explores historical self-consciousness in art works produced in eleventh- and twelfth-century Aquitaine. Focusing on the monumental sculpture and architecture of castle towns, particularly Parthenay, he investigates the ways in which the very processes of urban construction re-wrote past history for the present, and, at the same time, inscribed contemporary history in events of the past. Central to this concern was the active re-writing of family history and the production of timeless myths. Urbanization provided a richly complex discursive field for such expressions, for cities and towns enjoyed foundation myths of their own. Urban history and family genealogy were thus interwoven in texts and images, resulting often in fantastical ancestries for towns and lords alike.

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On Socratic Politics: Belief, Persuasion, and Political Judgment

Andrew Norris
Assistant Professor of Political Science

Arguing that politics are essentially defined by belief (in contrast to religion, whose epistemic posture is more properly described as one of knowing), Norris seeks to refine Hannah Arendt's like-minded vision of the political sphere. In the early 20th century, Arendt made the claim that the polis was and should be a public space that makes possible a distinctively human mode of action: public speech in a condition of plurality where the judgments of others constitute one's deed every bit as much as one's own intention. Arendt girded her understanding of politics with a defense of perspectival and relative judgment as doxa, "opinion" in its classical acceptation as the narrative rendering of dokei moi, "what appears to me;" that is, comprehension of the world as it opens itself up to the viewer.

In Norris's view, Arendt failed to thematize her own model of politics as being overwhelmingly informed by philosophical currents—principally Heidegger's phenomenology—and was therefore unable to bridge the hierarchical Platonic division between the disciplines that relegates politics to a position of subordinate "irrationality" with respect to philosophy. Norris proposes a revision of Arendt's ideas that will overcome this shortcoming, making political dialogue capable of more than the revelation of how its interlocutors see things, thereby allowing it to account for the way we prize our political beliefs, comparatively valorizing some perspectives as richer, fuller, or more reasonable than others.

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Protestant Vibrations? Reggae, Rastafarianism, and Conscious Evangelicals

Timothy Rommen
Assistant Professor of Music

Rommen is drawn to spaces of inter-religious and inter-cultural contact as contexts in which faith in theological systems and belief in cultural, social, and political systems (convictions, customs, ethics, etc.) are juxtaposed and overlapped, producing complex and interesting patterns of belief. Specifically, while at the Forum, Rommen will undertake a study of five Protestant reggae bands/artists of diverse national origin (United States, Trinidad and Tobago, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica). Each of these groups must negotiate the intersection of Rastafarian and Christian ideologies, yet Rommen observes that the farther removed they are geographically from Jamaican cultural or geopolitical space, the greater the proportion of Rastafarian elements within their music. While the artists profess the same faith, they perform this faith in different ways.

Defining faith as the act of believing in which multiple layers of belief constitutive of our larger views—theological, social, and cultural—are collapsed and melded together, Rommen proposes to analyze the artists' divergent expressions of faith as an outgrowth of their embodied and predominantly unvoiced beliefs, thereby minimizing the artificial compartmentalization of individual and community life that can occur through strict analysis of cultural, racial, and political discourse. Ultimately, Rommen hopes to develop belief as a cross-cutting and central theoretical tool capable of enriching more archetypal paradigms within cultural studies (e.g., hybridity, globalization, creolization, syncretism), thereby nuancing and dramatically expanding current modes of inquiry in the humanities.

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Fashionably Godless

Bethany Wiggin
bwiggin@sas.upenn.edu
Assistant Professor of German

The German seventeenth century witnessed a proliferation of publications inveighing against the spread of fashions. Figured as a virulent pestilence corrupting the German body, various fashions were consistently depicted in a metaphorical language indebted to Livy’s notions of Eastern luxury. Wiggin’s research examines the construction of fashion as external and essentially foreign to the native German body, seeking to uncover both the alleged origins of various fashions and the ways in which the materials of fashion were believed to transform the body. She has completed a study of fashionable novels in the late-seventeenth century and is currently at work on a study of coffee drinking, both intended as parts of a study tentatively entitled The Geography of Fashionability in Early Modern Germany. While at the Humanities Forum, Wiggin will investigate the ways in which the materials of fashion were thought not only to transform the body but were believed to transfigure the soul. Her work probes questions such as: Why did the materials of fashion impinge upon one’s faith in the divine? Why were so-called fashionable men and women consistently portrayed as godless? Were all fashions thought to be equally devilish? Which individuals were believed more capable of withstanding fashions’ exotic allures?

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Like Truth: Lies, Deceit and the Suspension of Disbelief in Ancient Drama

Emily Wilson
Assistant Professor of Classical Studies

Fifth-century rhetorician Gorgias remarked that in tragedy, "the deceiver is more just than the non-deceiver, and the deceived is wiser than the undeceived." More than a witticism, Gorgias's reflection on dramatic deception would seem to indicate its valorization as a kind of wisdom: the tragedian is a propagator of "just" deceit in which the audience is "wisely" deceived. Tragedy, then, wields the ambiguous moral and epistemological power of generating multiple beliefs in the audience.

This year at the Forum, Wilson will work on a book-length study of the dramatic representation of lying and deceit that takes as its central point of departure the premise that the traditional interpretive contrast between "truth" and "fiction" in ancient drama is too stark. Wilson will approach the question of fictionality—and these intermediary states between belief and disbelief—from a metatheatrical perspective, arguing that deception as represented in drama draws attention to the larger deceptions of the theatrical experience. The inclusion of lies may serve many purposes, from the undermining of the audience's belief to the very reinforcement of its belief in the main narrative, which may seem the more convincing for containing and distancing itself from internal falsehoods. Wilson will seek to show how ancient drama demonstrates a self-conscious awareness of the multiple kinds of belief generated by the theatre, and the role that deception plays in their generation.

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