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This wide‐ranging chapter introduces key aspects of the argument to be discussed in greater detail in subsequent chapters. The chapter sets out the proposition that the formation of a category “religion” which appears as a distinct and autonomous reality of human experience and practice is a myth serviced by the corresponding formation of special departments for the study of religion. But this process is mirrored in the formation of “nonreligious” categories such as “politics” and “the secular state” which in turn appear as distinct and autonomous domains served by special departments of political science. These rhetorical constructions appear as though they are natural aspects of the world, and their ideological function in the mystification of capitalism and consumerism is disguised by the academic pretensions of secular objectivity. The chapter also makes a distinction between critical thinking that challenges these rhetorical constructions and “critical” thinking that merely recycles them as an undeniable part of the order of things.

This chapter appraises the ninety-year processes and contexts of performism surrounding The Old Men and Night of the Dead, reflecting on consequences of the trajectory in terms of essentialization, symbolic and economic production, relationships of power, and the construct of folklore, particularly engaging Néstor García Canclini's work on folk culture and popular culture. Analyzing the legacy of postrevolutionary policies and strategies, this chapter draws attention to implicit and explicit contexts of hierarchies, and inequities, discussing otherness, difference, and traditionalization; Ballet Folklórico ensembles; processes of self-designation and legitimization; and economic production, exchange value, commoditization, and tourism. Concluding with an account of a 2009 performance of The Old Men in the USA with a direct link to the island of Jarácuaro and the first appropriated event draws the focus to back to connections between the micro and the macro.

This chapter analyses racism in France and Australia. It shows how accusations of racism can mask an ontology of superiority in which the victims of racism, here a French Polynesian anticolonial writer, are themselves accused of being racist by people who identify with the colonial power. Indigenous people as well as migrants, especially Muslims or Gypsies in France, are accused of racism for laying claim to their history and culture while coming from past French colonies in Africa and Indochina or current French territories in the Pacific or Caribbean islands. In Australia despite a multicultural policy, refugees are incarcerated if they are not selected by the UN HCR channel. Aboriginal people are criminalised and many succumb to death-in-custody. Claims to difference are reduced to hierarchical models or denied recognition in the name of universalism as opposed to cultural relativism. Glowczewski, shows that a third option is possible. If France and Australia– each in their own way – deny their citizens the right to be different, initiatives emanating from civil society promote innovative ways of envisioning a multidimensional society in which the recognition of differences and specific rights have their place at the same time as universal human rights are respected. Unpublished keynote paper, 2012.

This chapter looks at the kinds of visual and textual representations that inform and influence ideas about “primitivity”. It provides an overview of the kinds of representations common in television and print for PNG as a whole, and for the Trobriands in particular. Documentary films, reality television programming, and the single feature film made on location are discussed. Also discussed are internet resources and the influence of the Lonely Planet guidebook in prefiguring the expectations of travelers.

This chapter argues that the psychodynamics of desire contribute to the transformation of “ordinary” individuals into those who directly and indirectly support or engage in genocide, mass atrocity, and their performative dramaturgies. The chapter describes the practices of the macabresque in terms of noir ecstasy and the psychodynamics of obscene surplus enjoyment in the transgressive theaters of human violation. Comparative depictions of the macabresque in the Guatemalan, Chilean, Sri Lankan, Congolese, Darfurian, and other cases are framed by Lacanian psychosocial theory and concepts focused on ideology, fantasy, and personality that analytically transitions from festivality and the carnivalesque to the macabresque. Human violation and the desire for absolute power drive perpetrator behavior in ways that normalize their anti-normative or anomic hatred and enemy-making relative to victims’ fixed, fixated, and frozen identitarian categories that become naturalized, and often racialized. Victims suffer racialization by means of forced displacement. This produces spatialized “islands” of demonization.

A martyrdom story can sound quite different depending on which side is telling it. Someone who supported the institution or power that the martyr challenged may be unable to see the martyr’s actions in the same light as those who sympathize with the martyr’s cause. For the side that oppressed the martyr, his actions might seem trivial, ambiguous, self-serving, or stupid. Just as martyrs can unite their followers, they can unite their opponents. A martyr’s peaceful example can produce violent conflict. Continuing with the Russia–Ukraine conflict that started with the 2014 Ukrainian revolution, this chapter details how martyrdom affected not only the pro-Ukrainian followers, but also pro-Russian opponents, uniting and radicalizing them.

The performative aesthetics of transgression occur as perpetrators “will” the unwillable desire of the introjected m(Other) experienced in fantasy in modes that include superegotistical enjoyment projected outward in forms of sadistic cruelty. Such macabresque pursuits assume surrogate forms of desire, in surplus cruelty, in the gratuitous sadism of absolute power. Superegotistical desire and its “enjoyment” are sustained by supererogatory reifications that revel in moral masochism and sadistic moralism. This leads to macabresque aesthetics and theatricality of performative transgression since the laws of jouissance, its prohibition and pursuit in substitute forms, must be repeated again and again. This chapter links a Lacanian theory of language to the psychic origins of collective perceptions in mass violence and human violation.

This chapter addresses theoretical critiques that have been raised and challenges with which comparison is confronted. It first demonstrates that comparison has been used in service of different and contradictory agendas—affirmative or critical of religion—and is therefore not tied to any specific ideological framework. It discusses the most common objections: that comparative studies decontextualize and essentialize religious phenomena. It then engages with postcolonialist and postmodernist critiques of the comparative method and their insistence on acknowledging difference. Turning to the opposite side of the academic spectrum, the chapter reviews the relation of naturalistic approaches (such as the cognitive science of religion) to comparison and their focus on universals and sameness. Acknowledging the critiques and challenges and recognizing their limitations sets the stage for the reflections about comparative methodology in Chapter 3.

This chapter introduces a comparative approach that the author calls discourse comparison. The approach focuses on the discursive context of the comparands and highlights the plurality of voices, tensions, and conflicts, or simply the heterogeneity of opinions that are expressed in the sources about the studied phenomenon. To exemplify this approach the chapter presents, as a case study, the author’s earlier work on ascetic discourses in early Brahmanical and early Christian texts. At the same time, it analyzes this study along the lines of the methodological framework proposed in Chapter 3 in order to demonstrate the ways in which the terminology of the framework can be applied to a concrete comparative study. A concluding section recapitulates the argument of the book and summarizes what the author regards as the contribution that it makes to the methodological discourse in the study of religion.