He wanted to breed grass. Not religion. Grass.
At sixteen he spent a summer on a farm, part of a program Cornell ran for city boys who thought they might want to work the land. The school made him prove he could stand in a barn before it let him near anything else. So they sent him to stand in cow manure for a while. He stood in it. He loved it. Decades later, an old man leaning on a cane, he still called that summer the best thing he ever did.
Then came the grasses. Agrostology, the botany of grasses, was the passion of his boyhood, and he meant to make a life of it. He learned to cross-pollinate with a brush that carried a single camel’s hair. Two hairs bruised the flower. The sex organs of some grasses were that fine. He would sit at a binocular microscope and move the brush back and forth, back and forth, a boy conducting the reproduction of a plant one delicate stroke at a time. He kept one of those brushes for the rest of his life. He never used it again. He kept it to remember.
Jonathan Zittell Smith (1938-2017) grew up in Manhattan, at Eighty-Sixth Street and Riverside Drive, in a home his childhood friend the attorney David Simpson remembered as ordinary and Jewish and secular, nothing like what the son became. The boy had something extra-worldly about him. He marched to his own drum. He read about animals and about other cultures, Native American cultures above all, and while the other children at Hunter College Elementary read what children read, he read Marx, and through Marx he found Lewis Henry Morgan and the comparative study of kinship, and through kinship he found the great fact that ordered his mind before he had a name for it. Human beings classify. They sort the world into kinds. A kinship system is one of the most elaborate sorting engines a people ever builds, and the anthropologists who mapped those systems produced some of the finest classifications in the human sciences.
That was the thread. How many kinds of grass there are. How many kinds of religion there are. How many kinds of Bible there are. The wonder at variety, and the hunger to sort it, ran unbroken from the boy with the camel’s-hair brush to the man who told a generation of scholars that they had never once asked themselves the only question that counted: how shall we compare?
There was a second thread, quieter, and he traced it back just as far. Before he was a teenager he had settled on a rule for himself, do no harm, and he lived it in the ways a serious boy of the late 1940s could, in vegetarianism, in an early sympathy for conscientious objection and passive resistance. He read Buddhism and Jainism and Gandhi. He looked at the western religious traditions he half knew and found nothing in them to support such an ethic, only a God who told men the earth was theirs to subdue. His plan to breed grass had a redemptive shape to it. He wanted to reclaim the deserts that human carelessness had made. The boy who would spend his life insisting that religion is a thing scholars build, not a thing they find, began by finding his own inherited religion wanting and going looking for better.
Cornell nearly ended it. He arrived for the agriculture program that a poor city boy could attend without cost, and he found himself in a course called elementary corn development, staring at corn roots the length of a fingernail, and learning that there were people ahead of him at the intermediate and advanced levels of the same thing. He wanted history. He wanted philosophy. The school told him no. A free agricultural education did not come with liberal arts, and if he wanted those he could enroll at Cornell University and pay. He asked whether he might pay a little. They said no. He went to the headmaster of his high school and told him the whole story. The headmaster looked at him.
“You’re such a stubborn son of a bitch,” he said. “It probably would have taken you two years to realize agriculture wasn’t for you. But that’s good. You’ll go to Haverford. They’ll figure you out there.”
The man made a phone call. This was the old-boy network that people worried about even then, and it worked. Smith never applied to college. Cornell took him as a junior. Haverford took a phone call. He went.
His first day on the Quaker campus he went hunting for a place to smoke. He found a room with deep armchairs, the kind you could stretch your legs across for six feet, and no sign that anyone had ever lit a cigarette there. He settled in, happy. The room turned out to be a shrine, a place where Quaker philosophers had studied, very likely the one spot in the college where no one had ever smoked before. While he sat there a man came in, and then some students, and a senior seminar convened on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind. The man was the philosophy professor Martin Foss. Smith had read a little Hegel through Marx and knew some of the vocabulary. He listened to Foss talk. He was enthralled. That afternoon he became a philosophy major. He met the great teacher of his life by accident, in a shrine, looking for somewhere to smoke.
When it came time for graduate school he had a problem that would not let him go, the old quarrel between myth and philosophy, the way philosophers shout at myths and then, if you read them with care, borrow from them. He wanted to work on it, but not through Greek myth, which everyone did. He went to a philosophy professor, Foss having retired, and asked where a man might go to study Greek myth.
“Why don’t you go to Yale Divinity School and study the New Testament,” the professor said. “It’s the biggest piece of Greek myth that’s still around.”
Smith took him at his word. He did not catch the joke until much later. He went to Yale Divinity School to study the New Testament, drawn by Rudolf Bultmann and the project of demythologizing, and he spent two years, as he put it, interacting daily with tribal Protestants, which he came to think was his version of an anthropologist’s fieldwork. Then he crossed into Yale’s new Department of Religion and became its first doctoral candidate in the history of religions. In 1969 he finished a dissertation of 574 pages on James George Frazer (1854-1941) and The Golden Bough, titled The Glory, Jest and Riddle. He meant to use Frazer’s vast comparative sprawl as a laboratory for comparison. He learned instead that Frazer was the wrong specimen and the right problem. The trouble lay neither in Frazer’s data nor in his weak and shifting theories. The trouble was that Frazer had no method, stated or hidden, for any of his thousands of comparisons. He never answered the question. The question stayed with Smith for the rest of his life.
He taught a year at Dartmouth, 1965 to 1966, covering courses that others had left behind, and sealed a friendship with the scholar of Judaism Jacob Neusner (1932-2016). Then California. He became the first new faculty hire in the just-founded Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He lectured to eight hundred students at a time. It was the Vietnam War, and grading carried a weight that had nothing to do with grades. Fail a young man and you might send him to the draft board. One term the department scored its exams by machine, and Smith insisted on standing beside the machine to watch it work. He could not grade it, he said, but he would watch. The machine skipped twenty questions. It skipped the same twenty all the way through. The students earning A’s had done well enough to survive the error. The students dropping to B’s were on their way to the selective service system. The engineer who chaired the committee called it a glitch. Smith never trusted a black box again. For the rest of his life he made his photocopies one page at a time, laying each sheet down, watching the light cross under the glass, taking it out, checking it against the original, then setting the next page down. What went in one end and came out the other without his seeing the middle, he would not trust.
His students at Santa Barbara wrote that he had the hottest nightclub act in town. He was offended by that for years. He spent ten hours preparing a fifteen-minute stretch of a lecture and all they remembered was that he told jokes. The jokes were parables. They always had a point. All the students could remember was that they laughed.
Word of him traveled. Hans Penner (1934-2012), a comparativist at Dartmouth who had known Smith during that single year, told Charles Long (1926-2020) at Chicago about the young man on the coast.
“I met this person who thought like we thought at Chicago,” Penner said.
Long was co-teaching World History of Religions in Chicago’s new and experimental New Collegiate Division, a fifth division stacked on top of the sciences and the humanities, and the classes were spilling out of Swift Hall into the common room. The founding master of the division, the classicist James Redfield (b. 1935), was still recruiting. Long thought Smith was the man. Redfield flew to Santa Barbara and came away certain. On the evening of February 14, 1968, the day after Smith’s interview trip to Chicago, Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) arrived at Santa Barbara for a visiting term and met Smith too. Eliade was then the most eminent figure at the Chicago Divinity School and the great theorist of the sacred, the man whose entire project Smith would spend a career dismantling. They liked each other at once.
That summer Smith wrote to Eliade to say he had taken the Chicago job. The letter, dated June 4, 1968, is careful and warm. He had delayed writing, he said, until he had definite news. He had accepted the position under Dean Wayne Booth (1921-2005). He and Elaine looked forward to seeing Eliade and his wife in the fall. The stay in Santa Barbara had given them both much happiness and a foretaste of what they hoped to continue.
Three years later, on July 1, 1971, Eliade wrote to the dean of the Divinity School, Joseph Kitagawa (1915-1992), pressing for Smith’s promotion. He believed, he wrote, that Jonathan Smith would become one of the most important historians of religion in the United States. They had to help him realize his vocation. The promotion was not only imperative. It was overdue.
Smith made good on the prophecy and then turned on the prophet’s method, and did both without turning on the man. This was the thing colleagues remembered longest, harder to explain than the erudition. He could take an argument apart in front of its author and keep the friendship whole. He quoted Nietzsche as an epigraph when he had to speak about his own life, I am one thing, my writings are another, and he meant it as a working rule. He was in the business of taking down ideas. The people who held them were another matter.
The classicist Redfield learned this early, in the 1970s, when a Tutorial Studies student wrote a senior paper on the Holocaust that two faculty readers declined to recommend for honors. Redfield ran the program and was tired of accommodating the young man, who had, in Redfield’s flat judgment, no real ideas. He knew who could give the paper an honest read. He sent it to Smith. Smith, born Jewish and secular, handed back his verdict.
“This is the first time I have ever felt sympathetic to anti-Semitism,” he said.
That was the style. Wendy Doniger (b. 1940) who taught beside him for decades, said he did not suffer fools, on the page or in the room, and that his whole complaint against the study of religion came down to one charge, that it was not critical enough, that its paradigms went unexamined, that it wanted more cold blood. He wanted scholars to be more analytical about the sacred, not less.
A year or two into his Chicago appointment he walked into Redfield’s office and said he wanted to move to the Divinity School full time. Redfield had built the New Collegiate Division to hold men like Smith and could not believe he had failed to make something that worked for everybody.
“You may remember that the Creator had the same problem,” Smith said.
He did not last at the Divinity School either. By 1973 he had designed his own undergraduate program in the College, Religion and the Humanities, set up in part as a rival to the graduate machinery across the way. He saw religion as a conversation, an act of creation, and he had little use for the taxonomy of specialties the Divinity School prized. He resigned his Divinity School affiliation in 1977. The break cost him something. The last letter from Smith in Eliade’s papers, dated November 21, 1980, turns sad. Smith writes that he is pained Eliade felt touched by his rage, that problems he would not detail had reached such a pass by the previous December that he wanted no formal suggestion of any tie between himself and what the Divinity School was calling History of Religions. He clings to a naive hope. That for the two of them, none of this has happened.
He did not leave Chicago. Something changed his mind and the record does not say what. He stayed forty-five years.
From 1974 to 1977 he was master of the Humanities Collegiate Division, and from 1977 to 1982 he was dean of the College, a role that put a chain-smoking historian of dead religions in front of the Board of Trustees. He gave them two facts. The United States was the first country in the history of the world to employ more teachers than farmers. And education was the country’s largest business, four percent of the national product, more people at work in it than in any other trade. A nation had chosen to pour that much public and private wealth into it. They must think it does something. So what did they think it does? Not teach a man to turn a wrench. Even the schools that taught men to turn wrenches got asked to make better citizens. He wanted the trustees to sit with the size of the mystery.
He held strong and particular views about teaching and pressed them without apology. His iron law, colleagues came to call it: a student may not be asked to integrate what the faculty will not. Students will not be critical if the faculty is not. Students cannot be asked to be consequential while the faculty abstains. He wrote out every lecture by hand, three or four hours of work for one hour at the podium, and until near the end he threw his notes away on the last day of each quarter, to force himself to build the next course from nothing. He taught the College almost exclusively and would not take doctoral students, which for a man of his standing was close to unheard of. Graduate students, he thought, had already been socialized into saying what they believed their professors wanted to hear. You rarely learned what they thought. Undergraduates were more honest because they were still open to being moved. A first-year student would buy anything from anyone with authority. A second-year student would buy nothing from anyone, however authoritative. Only by the fourth year did they learn to take some and leave some, to weigh a text instead of pressing a red button or a green one. A teacher who did not know where his students stood in that arc had no business in the room.
He fought the shrinking of the Core his whole life, and he fought it on principle. A Core had to be a hard-won faculty consensus, not a treaty. Ten weeks, and you lose the first and the last, so eight, and a serious book takes two, so four books. A Core says these are the four books, out of all the books in the world, that you must read. If the faculty will not say that, they should shut up shop. And there should not be eight of them. You cannot hold these truths to be self-evident and then offer eight sets of truths and let the student pick. The word fundamental means something or it does not.
When he had to give the Aims of Education address to the first-year class in 1982, the assigned title trapped him. To speak of the aims of education he first had to define education, no small task, and then survive the plural, aims, which put the clarity at risk. He was ready to give up and ask for a new title when the etymology caught his eye. Aim came from an old French verb, to guess. He retitled the talk. He called it “A Guess About Education,” and told the entering class that a curriculum was a place of deliberate, collegial, institutionalized choice, and that this was what their common talk needed to be about. Then he stopped to worry the word interesting, and split it in two. There was interesting as amusing, the gossipy sense that governs the elective survey and the after-dinner story. And there was interesting as a thing you have a stake in, a thing that places you at risk, a thing that makes a difference. A course had to be interesting in the second sense. Students cannot be asked to be consequential while the faculty abstains.
The students loved him for reasons that had little to do with the Core. In 2000 the University’s Scavenger Hunt list carried item number 265: J. Z. Smith in a lawn chair on the quads, drinking a Miller Genuine Draft; what else? Twenty points. A team approached him. He said yes at once. Absolutely. He carried a lawn chair onto the grass in front of the administration building, sat down, and threw back a beer. He did not think it beneath his dignity. It was part of the life of the College, and he could see why it was funny.
By then he had made himself into a figure. Around the time his curly black hair began to go, he told Charles Long what he meant to do.
“I’m going to invent myself as this old guy,” he said.
He grew the beard down toward his navel. He put on huge glasses. He carried a cane cut from a rhododendron, and the cane had a story he liked because it was botanical. Rhododendron sends up a shoot from under the mother plant and works its way out from underneath, a natural staff. The spindly rhododendrons of the Midwest never grow to such a length, but in England they grow like trees. His uncle made it. The uncle had two hip operations, and after both succeeded he took up making canes as a hobby, which Smith thought only Freud could explain. The uncle had been a YMCA coach, and he cut the wood on a drive through Great Smoky Mountains National Park, where, in a phrase Smith had not heard used properly since the 1960s, he “liberated” it from federal land.
The beard and the cane and the glasses made him a character on campus, and the character drew people in, but the character was not the reason they stayed. They stayed because he was the most arresting speaker any of them had heard. Doniger remembered the cigarettes. He was a chain-smoker, and in a room full of people he would let the ash on his cigarette grow, and grow, and grow, and everyone would stop listening to the argument and watch the ash, waiting for it to fall. You could have heard a pin drop. Then he would talk, and you listened again, because he was simply smarter than anyone else in the room.
He lived a private life arranged to protect his reading and his thinking. He would not use a computer. He typed his papers or wrote them by hand, and he took Marx seriously enough to feel that the machine put a wall between the worker and his work. When he struck a typewriter key, the letter happened, and he had made it happen. He hated the telephone and thought the cell phone an abomination, could not grasp why a man would carry one so that anyone could reach him for a nickel at any hour. He owned one, in the kitchen, with an answering machine, and paid it no attention. He measured his good days by the bell of the typewriter carriage. A thirty-bell day. An eighty-bell day. When Elaine asked how the work was going he would call back, three more bells. His last typewriter had a small window that let you delete a line and decided on its own where to break a word, and both features offended him, the deletion because it was mysterious, the word-break because he wanted to place his own hyphens, since a badly broken word could cost him a whole syllable when he read the sentence aloud. When the machine finally died he was happy. Now he did everything by hand again. Now it was his.
He ate lunch in Cobb Hall before class and drank coffee in Swift Hall after, and he welcomed students to sit with him. He was a regular at Salonica, the corner diner near the Greystone house where he and Elaine lived. When the student journalist Supriya Sinhababu wanted to interview him in 2008, she had no way to reach a man with no email and an ignored phone, so she walked to his house and knocked. Elaine looked at her through the glass of the storm door, stared for a couple of seconds, and walked away without a word. But the door had a mail slot. Sinhababu dug a scrap of paper out of her backpack, wrote her request, and slid it through. He got it. The interview ran two hours and broke the newspaper’s character limit for an article, and readers wrote in for years asking why it cut off at the end.
There is a smaller story that colleagues told to show the kind of man he was. On May 4, 1979, the front page of the student paper carried two photographs, each one column wide. One was Jonathan Z. Smith, meant to sit under a headline about the Core review. The other was a police sketch of a man wanted for rape in Hyde Park. When the printer lined up the negatives with the slots, he crossed them. The editor called the dean at once so he would not learn it some other way. Smith took the call in good humor. For a while afterward he answered his phone as the friendly neighborhood rapist. The joke around the paper was that the real suspect was furious, because he did not want to look like Smith.
His idea, the one that runs through everything, is easy to state and hard to swallow. Religion is not a thing waiting in the world to be discovered. It is a category scholars build. “Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study,” he wrote in Imagining Religion in 1982. “It is created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Religion has no independent existence apart from the academy.” There is no data for religion, he liked to say, only data for human culture. People pray and sacrifice and keep the sabbath. Grouping those acts under one heading called religion is a judgment the scholar makes, not a fact he stumbles on. He did not deny that men worship. He denied that the box marked religion came free with the world.
He came to religion, he said, because these traditions are funny. They stand next to the world he lives in like a fun-house mirror. Something is off. It is recognizable and it is not his, and the gap held him. He specialized in dead religions first, and gave the practical reason with a straight face. The dead do not talk back. No one leaves a lecture on a Hellenistic cult and says that is not what I heard last Sunday. Everybody is dead, and he liked that. A living tradition is harder because it comes with living believers who hold their beliefs and also hold interpretations of their beliefs, and the scholar arrives with his own reading of both, and then the work turns into running back and forth, standing in for both sides of a conversation to figure out what it all means. That, he said, is what a historian does. He runs back and forth and makes both sides of the conversation happen. You get good at it with the dead, because you will never hear from them, so you have to do all of it yourself.
If you wanted one word from him for what he was, he gave it. A translator. He translated in both directions, and he warned that there is no original in the business, only other men’s translations of who they think they are, so the translator stands always in the middle, unable to force his own language on another’s and useless if he merely repeats it. He had colleagues who thought the job was to get believers to sign off on the scholar’s account of them. He thought that was nonsense, and he told the story of the other great Smith, Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1916-2000), the Islamicist who held that he could say nothing about Islam that a Muslim would not endorse.
“Wilfred,” Smith said, “the difference between you and me is that I’m at Harvard and you’re at Chicago. You’re rich, I’m poor. Who are you calling up? My God, what a phone bill.”
And how, he asked, did you pick the man you asked? You picked him because he talks just like you, and now you are asking a mirror how you look today.
His method of comparison was the thing he most wanted to fix, and he defended it by turning to the sciences that had shaped him as a boy. The human sciences cannot experiment on their subject. He could not hide a computer in the bushes and watch what modernization does to a tribe. Ethics committees stop that, and rightly. So the human scientist experiments the only way he can, with his mouth, by talking, by arguing, by trying a thing out to see what happens, and by comparing. Comparison is the experiment. There is no natural reason to set the Book of Mormon beside the Koran. You decide to do it. You throw two things that have no business in the same pond into one pond and you watch. The comparison does not uncover a hidden likeness sleeping in the world. It makes something new by putting unlike things into a relation the scholar has designed, and in doing so it changes each thing, because now the context of the one is the other he has dragged it next to. His 1982 essay “In Comparison a Magic Dwells” laid the charge that comparison in the study of religion had been done without rules, by a kind of magic, and it changed how the field worked. He set out the standards for responsible comparison that others then argued over for decades. His 1990 book, Drudgery Divine, took the case study of how scholars had compared early Christianity with the religions around it, and made the word drudgery a compliment. The labor of real comparison lies in refusing the easy analogy.
He had no patience for the grand simplifiers, and here too he kept the friendship and killed the idea. Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) was a friend who could drink like a fish and recite Finnegans Wake in a false Irish drawl for hours, and who, having written a key to the book, probably did know it letter-perfect. Ten minutes with Campbell and a couple of bourbons could pull Smith out of a black mood after a bad conference. But Campbell taught that all myths are one, that every myth tells the story of a hero who at a certain stage of his life does the same few things, and Smith thought this terrible. If all myths are one, why read more than one? Why not read only Campbell, which is exactly what Campbell had in mind. Campbell’s power did not come from the spirits. It came from an aura, from a gift for the story, and from a willingness to affirm anything a listener brought him. You like mushrooms? Let me tell you about mushrooms. It was a pleasure. It was also, to Smith, a betrayal of the one thing that made the material worth a life. The variety. He said that what he got from religion was the sense of the absolute wonder of the human imagination, unstoppable and unembarrassed, and that Campbell’s method condensed all of it down to a Reader’s Digest of itself. The stuff was too rich to do that to it. He would pick up a Brazilian myth in which the world is a web made of the dripping green semen of a cosmic spider, congealing here and there along the filaments, and it ran seven hundred paragraphs, and he would take his hat off to it. Whenever he thought he had seen it all, something like that arrived and sent him back to the drawing board, his definition never broad enough, one more strange thing to fit in.
The classifying that started with grasses never left him. Taxonomy, he held, is the fundamental act of the humanities. Every time you sort things into kinds you set up the likenesses and the differences and the borders that shape everything you say next. He argued that religions should not be defined by a single essential trait but recognized the way you recognize a family, by overlapping and crisscrossing likenesses, no one feature shared by all, the pattern still real. He argued that a canon works by staying closed. A fixed body of authoritative text forces each generation to reinterpret it to meet a changing world, so the stability of the canon drives the endless labor of commentary rather than freezing it. He argued in To Take Place in 1987 that sacred space is made, not found, that ritual carves a here out of a there by drawing boundaries and ordering acts, and he read Ezekiel’s temple and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to show it. He traced, in “Religion, Religions, Religious,” the way the very word religion grew up inside a particular European and colonial history and never described a timeless feature of mankind, an argument that opened the ground later worked by Talal Asad (b. 1932) and Timothy Fitzgerald. His first collection, Map Is Not Territory, published in 1975, held the image that named the whole project. A map is not the ground. Every classification simplifies. Maps stay indispensable, and they stay human. The danger is never in drawing the map. The danger is in forgetting you drew it.
His intellectual debts he named plainly: the neo-Kantian Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945), Émile Durkheim (1858-1917) on classification and on the elementary forms of religious life, Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) on the structures under the myth, and behind them the taxonomies of Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) and the grass beds of his youth. He gathered the essays of a lifetime in Relating Religion in 2004 and, near the end, turned the same tools on his own trade in On Teaching Religion in 2013, edited with his former student Christopher Lehrich, arguing that to build a syllabus is to do exactly what a scholar does when he builds a taxonomy, to decide what belongs with what, to draw the map and answer for it.
He collected the honors a career like his collects. The Quantrell Award for undergraduate teaching in 1986. Election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2000. Terms as president of the North American Association for the Study of Religion and, in 2008, of the Society of Biblical Literature, so that he became, as his colleague Margaret Mitchell said, the one figure who could speak across a field that had split into camps, the man almost everyone in the study of religion had read and thought with and argued against. Honorary lifetime membership in the International Association for the History of Religions in 2013. The Wilbur Cross Medal from Yale in 2015. He retired from Chicago in 2013 as the Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of the Humanities, and he kept teaching undergraduates almost to the end.
He liked to end a course on an unfinished sentence. He said so, and he did it, and he had a reason drawn from the object he loved. He noted that the first page of the Babylonian Talmud is not page one. The text begins on the reverse of the second leaf, and he took this, half in earnest, as a teaching, that we join the conversation in the middle and that forty-seven volumes later the conversation is still not done. He was sorry that political conservatives had taken the phrase the great conversation to mean only the books they approved. He thought the conversation was the thing the university sold, the thing worth the money, and he hated efficiency because it finished things too fast.
Jonathan Z. Smith died of lung cancer on December 30, 2017, at seventy-nine. He asked for cremation and left orders that there be no funeral and no memorial service. He was survived by his wife Elaine, his daughter Siobhan, his son Jason, a granddaughter, Hazel van Wijk, and a sister, Pamela Hanson.
He spent his life telling scholars that the categories they trusted were maps of their own making, that comparison was an experiment they performed and not a discovery they received, and that the task was never to erase the human hand in the work but to make it plain, and disciplined, and accountable. He asked the only question Frazer never asked. How shall we compare. He did not think the answer closed. He thought a good course, like a good canon, and like the tradition he studied, should stop in the middle of a sentence and leave the student holding the rest, because
The Last Essence: Jonathan Z. Smith and the Norm of Responsible Comparison
Smith spent a career dissolving essences. Religion had none. It was a box the scholar built, filled by his own acts of comparison, empty of any nature waiting in the world to be found. He ran the same acid over every essence he met, the sacred, the holy, the timeless pattern under the myth, and watched each one fail to hold. Then, at the level of his own method, he stopped. He kept one thing back from the acid. He demanded that comparison be responsible. He said it had been done for a century by magic, without agreed rules, and he set out to found criteria for doing it well. The man who let nothing be essential made good scholarship the exception. Stephen P. Turner (b. 1951) is the reader who walks up to that exception and asks the question Smith spent his life asking everyone else. What is this thing you will not dissolve, and where does it live?
Turner’s target, across The Social Theory of Practices, Brains/Practices/Relativism, and above all Explaining the Normative, is normativism, the habit of treating norms, reasons, obligations, and collective oughts as real objects with binding force. Normativists themselves grant that a non-causal realm of normative facts is a spooky thing to posit. Turner calls the results Good Bad Theories. They coordinate behavior and confer authority, and they dress preference as obligation while wearing the face of neutral description. His deflation is austere. To explain what men do, a researcher needs the causal facts and the beliefs men hold about what is correct. He does not need to certify those beliefs as true. He does not need a parallel normative world. Where the normativist finds a binding standard, Turner finds habituation, feedback, correction, and enforcement, a rough uniformity of performance produced not by a shared substance passed between minds but by many separate trainings that land close enough together. He read this pattern in Kelsen on legal validity, in Winch on social rules, in Brandom on the norms of language, and in every place a thinker takes ground back from ordinary social-science explanation by redescribing a habit as a norm.
Run it on Smith and the first surprise is how much of Smith is already Turner’s ally. Smith refuses the smuggled essence exactly as Turner does. His polythetic account of religion, families of overlapping likeness with no trait shared by all, is a refusal of the hidden something that normativists and essentialists both want doing the work. His line that there is no data for religion, only data for human culture, is deflation of the purest kind. The category adds nothing to the practices it gathers except the scholar’s decision to gather them. And Smith the translator sounds at moments like a man who has read Explaining the Normative in advance. He said there is no original in the business, that he translates other men’s translations, that he stands always in the middle and can never impose his language or merely repeat theirs. He mocked his colleague Wilfred Cantwell Smith for holding that a scholar must get believers to sign off on his account of them, must secure their validation before he may speak. That demand for a court of correctness is a normativist demand, and Smith swatted it away. Translation changes things, he said, and no author ever signs off, and there is no one to ask. He refused, in his own field, the idea that interpretation answers to a binding standard of validity floating above the work. So far Turner has found a friend.
Then the friend reaches for the one word he will not give up. Smith’s essay “In Comparison a Magic Dwells” is the hinge. He charged that comparison in the study of religion ran on no rules, that scholars set two things side by side and pronounced a likeness by a kind of conjuring, and he meant to replace the conjuring with method. Margaret Mitchell credits him with founding the criteria for responsible comparison the field now uses. Hold those words up to the light. Responsible. Rigorous. Accountable. Disciplined. Self-conscious. Each one carries an ought. Each one says a scholar is bound to compare in this manner and fails if he does not. And here Turner asks the whole battery of his questions at once. What is responsible comparison? What kind of fact is that standard? Where does the bindingness come from? Smith has already told us, in the same body of work, that comparison is arbitrary, that no two things have any reason in creation to sit in one pond, that the scholar simply decides to drop them there. If there is no natural fact of likeness, there is no natural fact of good likeness-making either. So when Smith calls one comparison responsible and another magical, he is not reporting a standard he found. He is enforcing one he prefers.
This is the normativist pattern in Turner’s sense, run by a man who would have recognized it in anyone else. Smith takes ground back from mere taste and mere convention by redescribing them as a norm. The habits of careful, historically attentive, essence-refusing scholarship, the habits he was himself trained into and then trained others into, get renamed as responsibility, as rigor, as a duty the field owes. The criteria look like discovered standards. Turner’s deflation says they are the guild’s conventions, Smith’s own habituated taste, and the reward-and-punishment of the history of religions as a trade, and that describing those three things leaves no work for a fourth thing called the norm. There are causal facts about how a historian of religion gets made. There are the beliefs such scholars hold about what counts as a correct comparison. There is what the field promotes and what it declines to publish. Lay those out and you have explained every instance of responsible and irresponsible comparison that has ever occurred. You never once need to certify responsible comparison as a real standard with force. The criteria for responsible comparison are a Good Bad Theory. They coordinate a scholarly field, they confer authority, above all Smith’s own, and they dress his preference for a certain style of work as an obligation binding on all who would study religion.
The iron law of teaching shows the same move at a smaller scale. A student may not be asked to integrate what the faculty will not. Smith stated it as law and colleagues repeated it as law. Turner asks what makes it one. Nothing binds a faculty to it except persuasion and Smith’s standing. It is a maxim, an expression of his commitments, enforced by his authority and by the pull of his example, and calling it a law is the act of dressing a strong preference as a compulsion. The revealing detail is that Smith half knew it. He titled his most-quoted talk on education “The Necessary Lie,” and he grew angry when it circulated as if it were doctrine, insisting the thing was situational, written for one evening with one rival in the room, notes and not scripture. A man who calls his own prescription a necessary lie is a man who senses that his oughts are rhetoric and taste rather than standards he has read off the world. Turner would credit the flash of honesty and press on the word he still would not surrender.
The deepest instance is the slide Smith runs without marking it. Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study is a descriptive sentence. From it Smith draws, in the same movement, a set of duties. Therefore the scholar ought to be self-conscious about his making. He ought to own the construction. He ought to hold his categories accountable and make his map explicit and never mistake it for the ground. Not one of those oughts follows from the description without a normative premise Smith never states and never defends. Why ought a scholar be transparent about his category-making? Smith treats intellectual honesty as binding on its face, a duty that needs no argument. Turner’s answer is flat. That ought is no fact hovering above the practice of scholarship. It is a value Smith holds and his community rewards, and it can be given in full as a causal and empirical story, this is what the trade honors, this is the taste Smith was habituated into by his tribal Protestants at Yale and passed to his own students, with nothing left over that a normative fact would have to supply. Transparency is a virtue in Smith’s tribe. It is not a truth about the world that scholars are bound to obey.
Even the appeal to science, which Smith loved, falls under the same reading. He wanted the human sciences to hold something analogous to experiment, and he cast comparison as interference, the scholar dropping one thing into another to see what happens, borrowing the model from experimental biology. Turner would grant that this is a fertile picture and deny that it settles anything normative. To say good scholarship ought to look like an experiment is to choose a standard, not to find one, and the choice draws its force from the prestige of natural science rather than from any fact that makes the experimental analogy correct for the study of dead gods. Smith conceded that comparison was magic he hoped to convert into rules. Turner’s verdict is that you cannot launder a convention into a norm by calling it a rule and pointing at physics. The magic did not leave. It changed its name to responsibility.
How aware was Smith of the trade he was making? More than most, and never all the way, which is the human center of the case. He was Turnerian to the marrow wherever he was dissolving essences and refusing courts of validation. He turned normativist only at the one place where the full deflation frightened him, the standing of his own method, because to say plainly that responsible comparison names only a habituated regularity of the guild, enforced by reward and imitation and correction, would be to say that the study of religion rests on taste, and Smith had built a life and a program and a field on its resting on something firmer. The anti-essentialist needed one essence to go on, the essence of good scholarship, and he guarded it the way a man guards the last thing he cannot afford to lose. He ended his courses on unfinished sentences to refuse closure everywhere else, and here alone he wanted the sentence finished. Responsible comparison, full stop.
Strip the surplus and Smith is not diminished. He is relocated. What remains, in Turner’s terms, is a true and considerable description. Smith trained a generation into a set of scholarly habits, and those habits produce a rough uniformity in how careful comparison gets done, not through a shared normative substance transmitted intact from master to student, which is the thing Turner denies can be transmitted at all, but through imitation, feedback, and the steady correction of a field that rewards some performances and declines others. Responsible comparison is the name that regularity wears. It is real the way a custom is real and binding the way a custom binds, by enforcement and habituation, and no further. Smith the translator was right that there is no original, and the principle turns on his own work. There is no original standard of good comparison, no master text of rigor, only the endless middle he described so well, scholars rendering and re-rendering what counts as responsible, with no one able to sign off. He built his method to escape the magic that dwells in comparison. It rests on a magic of its own, the one syllable he would not translate, and Turner is the man who asks him, gently and without malice, to say the spell aloud and tell us where it gets its power.
Notes
The organizing thread follows the one Jonathan Z. Smith drew himself. The boy who wanted to breed better grasses became the scholar who argued that “religion” is a category constructed by scholars in much the same way that Linnaeus constructed a system for classifying grasses. Taxonomy runs from the camel’s-hair brush to the question, “How shall we compare?” I therefore opened with the farm and the brush rather than the ideas because it is the most surprising documented fact about his life and it prepares the intellectual payoff later. The ending mirrors Smith’s own habit of concluding classes in mid-sentence, so the final word is intentional.
The scenes and dialogue all come from the historical record. The story of his fascination with grass breeding, the summer spent spreading cow manure, the single camel’s-hair brush, and his youthful “do no harm” vegetarian ethic all come from his autobiographical chapter in Relating Religion and his 2008 interview: University of Chicago Press excerpt and Chicago Maroon interview.
His childhood at 86th Street and Riverside Drive, Hunter College Elementary School, his description of himself as “extra-worldly,” and his friendship with David Simpson come from the Chicago Maroon‘s 2018 profile: Chicago Maroon. The same profile is the source for the Robert Redfield episode involving alleged sympathy toward anti-Semitism, the remark that “the Creator had the same problem,” the advice to Charles Long to “invent myself as this old guy,” the Scavenger Hunt lawn chair (item 265), Wendy Doniger’s memory of cigarette ash, the Walkman exchange with Kathryn Lofton, the “friendly neighborhood rapist” photograph mix-up, and Arindam Sinhababu’s story about the mail slot. Each quotation is brief. If you decide to quote any of them at greater length, the complete wording appears in that article.
The Cornell headmaster’s description of Smith as a “stubborn son of a bitch,” the Haverford smoking-shrine episode with Martin Foss and the Hegel seminar, the Yale Divinity School remark about “the biggest piece of Greek myth,” the typewriter bells and Karl Marx, the machine-scored examination that skipped twenty questions, the description of one speaker as “the hottest nightclub act in town,” the Wilfred Cantwell Smith exchange over the telephone bill, the Joseph Campbell and bourbon story, the argument that comparison functions as experiment, and the Babylonian Talmud observation that one must “join the conversation in the middle” all come from the full 2008 interview linked above. I paraphrased most of this material and kept direct quotations brief. The original interview contains the complete wording if you wish to quote it more extensively.
Hans Penner’s observation that Smith “thought like we thought at Chicago,” Robert Redfield’s visit to Santa Barbara, the February 14, 1968 meeting with Mircea Eliade, Smith’s letter to Eliade dated June 4, 1968, Eliade’s promotion letter of July 1, 1971, and the poignant letter of November 21, 1980 are all documented in the same Chicago Maroon profile, which reproduces the correspondence from the University of Chicago Special Collections. If you intend to quote the letters directly, it would be worthwhile to consult the originals, since I compressed their contents.
The history of Smith’s walking cane, carved from rhododendron by his uncle using wood “liberated” from Great Smoky Mountains National Park, comes from Russell McCutcheon’s memorial for the American Academy of Religion and from the 2008 interview: American Academy of Religion.
The details of his death, cremation, absence of a memorial service, and surviving family members come from the University of Chicago obituary. General biographical facts were checked against Wikipedia.
I added only self-evident descriptive details without separate citations, including the physical texture of a barn and a binocular microscope, the atmosphere of a Quaker college campus, the feel of a lecture hall and a neighborhood diner, and the weight of the Vietnam era hanging over a classroom. These additions do not introduce new factual claims. They simply evoke settings already established by the sources.
I reproduced Smith’s statement that “religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study” in full because the exact wording is essential to his argument and remains the single most frequently cited sentence he wrote.
The Dead Do Not Loop: Jonathan Z. Smith and Ian Hacking on Making Up Kinds
Smith said there is no data for religion, only data for human culture. Religion arrives when a scholar decides that this prayer and that sacrifice and the other festival belong in one box, and the box is his, built for his purposes by his own acts of comparison and generalization. Ian Hacking (1936-2023), working three time zones north and in a different discipline, said something with the same shape about people. We make them up. A classification comes into the world, and a kind of person comes into the world with it, and the two grow together. Neither man read the other on this, as far as the record shows. Put their two sentences side by side and you have the strongest single pairing available for reading Smith, because Hacking supplies the metaphysics Smith carried in his pocket all his life and never wrote down, and Smith supplies Hacking a fifty-year worked case from a field Hacking never worked.
Start with the frame, stated as Hacking stated it. He called his position dynamic nominalism and set it against the static kind. The static nominalist says only particulars exist and the names we give them are labels laid over a world that does not care what we call it. Hacking agreed that the names are ours and disagreed that the world stays put under them. His interest was in how the name interacts with the named. He traced the idea to a line in Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, that more depends on what things are called than on what they are, and that new names can be enough to make new things. The cases Hacking built were cases of persons. Multiple personality, which appeared, spread, and grew more alters per patient as the diagnosis took hold. The fugueur, the compulsive wanderer of 1890s France, who existed as a kind of man for about a decade and then stopped. Autism, child abuse, obesity, suicide, homosexuality as a species rather than a set of acts. In each, a category made in the human sciences did not sit quietly over its objects. It reached down and changed them. People learned they had been sorted, and the knowing altered how they behaved, and the altered behavior fed back and bent the category, which bent the people again. He named this the looping effect of human kinds, and he split the world of kinds in two to hold it. Indifferent kinds, the electron, the mud, the mountain, do not know they are classified and do not answer. Interactive kinds, the kinds of people, know and answer. The study of a human kind is a conversation between the scientist and a subject who can talk back and, in talking back, change what there is to study.
He gave the larger project a name after Foucault (1926-1984): historical ontology, the study of how the objects a science can know come into being in time. Not the history of a thing already there. The history of the coming-to-be of the very thing, category and object at once.
Now read Smith through it. His central claim is dynamic nominalism raised one storey. Hacking made up the multiple and the fugueur, kinds of persons. Smith made up religion, a second-order genus under which the scholar files the kinds. “Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study,” he wrote in Imagining Religion, “created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization.” That is a nominalist sentence, and the nominalism is the moving kind, not the static one, because Smith did not say the word religion is an idle tag on a fixed reality. He said the category does work, organizes data, draws the boundaries that decide what a scholar sees next, and that the category has no life outside the academy that keeps making it. His essay “Religion, Religions, Religious” does in miniature what Hacking called historical ontology and calls it nothing, because Smith had no such term to hand. He traces the concept religion back through its European and colonial formation and shows that it names no timeless feature of mankind but a thing that came to be, in particular rooms, for particular reasons. Category and object emerge together, in history, from the classifying act. This is Hacking’s method, arrived at from the far side of the humanities, a decade or so apart, with no shared citation.
The polythetic move fits the same glove. Smith argued that religions share no single essential trait and hang together the way a family hangs together, by overlapping likenesses with no one feature running through all. Hacking spent his career refusing to let a kind be defined by a hidden essence that did the causal work, and preferred to watch how the kind actually got assembled and used. Two men allergic to the same thing, the smuggled essence, the natural kind pretending it grew in the ground when a person put it there.
Smith had the intuition, the practice, the aphorism, the map that is not the territory. He never built the ontology under it, and the gap left him open to a cheap reading, that if religion is made in the scholar’s study then religion is a fiction and the scholar a conjuror. Hacking closes that door. His whole labor on social construction, gathered in The Social Construction of What?, was to separate the claim that a thing is constructed from the claim that a thing is fake. Made does not mean unreal. The multiple personality, once made, is real in the ward, real in the insurance code, real in the suffering, and none of that reality is touched by the true account of how the kind came to be. Bring this to Smith and his position stops sounding like debunking. Religion made in the study is still real in the world, real in what people do, real enough to organize a life or start a war, and the scholar’s making of the category is a separate fact from the reality of the practices the category gathers. Smith knew this in his bones. He said he did not deny that men worship, only that the box marked religion came free with the world. Hacking gives him the argument that keeps the two apart under pressure.
The second gift is stranger. Hacking was not only a nominalist about human kinds. About the entities of physics he was a realist, and a particular sort, the kind who located reality at the point of use. If you can spray it, if you can fire it down a column and manipulate something else with it, it is real, whatever your theories about it do or do not survive. He argued this in Representing and Intervening. Reality lives at the manipulable end of the apparatus, in intervention, not in representation. Set this beside Smith on comparison and the fit is close to exact. Smith refused to treat comparison as the discovery of a likeness already sleeping in the world. Comparison, for him, is intervention. He called Frazer’s The Golden Bough a laboratory for comparison. He defined the act of comparing as the human scientist’s only available experiment, since he cannot hide a recorder in the bushes and run modernization on a live tribe, so he does the one thing left, he takes two things that have no reason in creation to sit together, the Book of Mormon and the Koran, throws them in one pond, and watches. The comparison interferes. It changes the context of each thing by placing the other beside it. This is the intervention idiom, and Hacking is its most careful theorist. The made category, for both, becomes real the way the electron becomes real, at the working end, in the handling, in the study where the scholar drops one thing into another and sees what happens.
Hacking’s looping effect requires an interactive kind, a subject who can hear the classification and answer it. The living religions loop. A scholar labels a practice, the practitioners learn the label, some adopt it, some resist it, some sharpen their self-description against it, and the category the scholar carries back to his desk is already a different category from the one he took out. Smith saw this whole loop and described it in plain speech before anyone handed him the vocabulary. The believer, he said, holds his beliefs and also holds interpretations of those beliefs, and the scholar arrives with his own interpretations of both, so the work becomes running back and forth, standing in for both sides of a conversation to find out what it is about. That is a looping-effect account. Subject and student revise each other in a feedback loop, and the object will not hold still.
So Smith fled. He chose to specialize in dead religions, and he gave the reason with a straight face. The dead do not talk back. Nobody leaves a lecture on a Hellenistic mystery cult and says that is not what I heard last Sunday. Everybody is dead, and he liked that. Read through Hacking, this stops being a charming quirk and becomes a methodological decision of the first order. Smith went looking for the one region of the human sciences where the human kind behaves like an indifferent kind. A dead religion cannot learn it has been classified. It cannot adopt the scholar’s category, cannot resist it, cannot loop. The Mithraist is not going to revise his Mithraism in response to a 1971 monograph. Smith found the corner of the study of religion where looping switches off, and he built his life there, precisely because it let him run the experiment clean, with a specimen that could not react to the instrument. He identified the boundary condition of Hacking’s theory from inside the practice, and he did it as a working choice about what to study rather than as a thesis, which is why nobody has said it back to him. The dead do not loop. That is the sentence this pairing produces, and it is, as far as I can find, unpublished.
What Smith gives Hacking runs the other way. Hacking drew his cases from psychiatry, from statistics, from the medicalized human sciences of the last two centuries, the fugueur and the multiple and the abused child. He rarely reached into the study of religion, which is the oldest and largest workshop of made kinds we have, running for as long as there have been scholars sorting other men’s gods. Smith hands him a case that spans a whole scholarly career and a whole master category, watched by the man building it, tested to failure and rebuilt again and again, from Frazer’s laboratory through the polythetic turn to the historical ontology of the word itself. And Smith adds the demand Hacking sometimes let go soft. Hacking studied how experts make up kinds, mostly from a step back, the historian of the making. Smith stood inside it and would not let the classifier out of the loop. The scholar is not the neutral cartographer of a sacred country. He draws the map, and the drawing is an imaginative act, and the honest thing, the disciplined thing, the accountable thing, is to say so and show your hand. Hacking told a true story about other people’s kind-making. Smith made a kind, used it for fifty years, and confessed the making in every book. He is the historical ontologist who is also the specimen.
Kuhn (1922-1996) sits close by, and Smith’s standing complaint against his field, that its paradigms went unexamined and it wanted more cold blood, is a Kuhnian charge. Latour (1947-2022) sits closer still. Smith’s laboratory, his comparison-as-interference, his debt to Claude Bernard’s experimental biology, all speak the construction-of-facts idiom years before Latour made it a movement, and they carry the exact caution Latour spent a career issuing and being misheard on, that to say a fact is made in the workshop is not to say it is false. Smith would have signed that without a pause. He said the map is made and the map is indispensable in the same breath.
Then the reflexive turn because Smith theorized the act of framing and would have classified this essay the moment it reached him. Bring Hacking to Smith and Smith asks what the framer gains by the sort, what the pairing lets me see and what it lets me miss, and whose study the category Hacking-and-Smith gets built in. The pairing survives the question, and survives it better than most, because the two men already hold the position the reflexive turn is trying to force. Both say the category is made. Both say the making is real and not a trick. Both say the one clean move left to an honest scholar is to own the making and discipline it rather than hide it under a claim to have found the thing lying in nature. Behind both stands the same figure. Hacking names Nietzsche the first dynamic nominalist. Smith took his epigraph from Nietzsche when he had to speak about his own life. Two nominalists, one dead and one newly so, who agreed that naming makes things and that the maker owes the world an account of the naming.
Making up religion, done Smith’s way and read through Hacking, is not the debunker’s move it gets mistaken for. It is the opposite. It is the claim that the category is ours, that it works, that it is real in its effects, and that the scholar who wields it is standing inside the loop he is describing and had better say so. The dead do not loop, which is why Smith could study them clean. The living loop, which is why he ran back and forth. And the category religion loops through the man who made it, which is the one loop Smith never tried to step outside of, because
Notes
The central claim is that “the dead do not loop.” Ian Hacking’s looping effect requires an interactive kind, a subject who can hear a classification and respond to it. Jonathan Z. Smith chose dead religions because, as he put it, “nobody talks back.” Read through Hacking, that stops looking like a personal quirk and instead becomes Smith’s practical decision to work in the one corner of the human sciences where a human kind behaves like an indifferent kind. I could not find this argument explicitly stated in print.
The second argument that earns its place is the bridge to Hacking’s entity realism, which is why I flagged the correction at the outset. If Smith is read only alongside Hacking’s work on “making up people,” the discussion stops at nominalism. But Hacking was also a realist about manipulable entities, as argued in Representing and Intervening, and Smith’s treatment of comparison as intervention, through Frazer’s “laboratory,” the pond example, and Claude Bernard, belongs to that same vocabulary of experimental interference. Both sides of Hacking therefore map onto Smith. He is nominalist about the category but realist about the practical work scholars perform. That combination answers the superficial criticism that if religion is “made,” then it must therefore be fake, a misunderstanding that Smith never fully addressed.
To keep the essay conceptually unified, I used Hacking as the central framework. Thomas Kuhn and Bruno Latour appear only briefly, and only insofar as they clarify the Hacking argument.
The Hacking framework is grounded in the published literature. Dynamic and static nominalism, the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, and the idea that “names interact with the named” come from Hacking’s own essay “Making Up People,” reprinted in Historical Ontology (Harvard University Press, 2002). The original version is available at the London Review of Books. Looping effects and the distinction between interactive and indifferent kinds are discussed in secondary sources including Tsou’s paper, Hacking on the Looping Effects of Psychiatric Classifications, and the history of medicine article on Munchausen syndrome: National Library of Medicine. Hacking’s principal examples, including multiple personality disorder, the fugueur, autism, and child abuse, come from Rewriting the Soul (1995), Mad Travelers (1998), and The Social Construction of What? (1999).
The biographical details are straightforward. Ian Hacking (1936-2023) was born on February 18, 1936, in Vancouver and died of heart failure on May 10, 2023, in Toronto. His entity realism, often summarized by the idea that “if you can spray them, they are real,” is documented in Wikipedia, the University of Toronto memorial, and the Washington Examiner obituary.
The Smith material comes from sources already cited elsewhere in this project.
I treat Smith’s preference for dead religions as a deliberate methodological choice. Smith himself explicitly says that he preferred them because “nobody talks back.” The further claim that he selected this field partly because it avoids Hacking-style looping effects is my own inference rather than Smith’s stated intention. I think the inference is well supported, but a skeptical reader could reasonably describe it as an anachronistic interpretation rather than an explicit claim by Smith.
The Same Kind: Jonathan Z. Smith on Ritual, Canon, and What Gets Transmitted
Smith learned from grass that sameness is a decision. He sat at a microscope as a boy and moved a single camel’s hair across the sex organs of one grass and then another, and he learned that the kinds are many and that a man with a system decides where one kind stops and the next begins. Linnaeus gave him a way to talk about the diversity of grasses, and the way was a choice, not a discovery in the soil. He carried that into religion whole. His polythetic classification refuses the single shared trait and lets a family hang together by overlapping likeness. His map is not the territory. The same kind, for Smith, is the classifier’s making. He knew this in his hands before he knew it in his prose.
Stephen Turner built a whole argument on that one word. In The Social Theory of Practices he takes the collective nouns of the human sciences, tradition, culture, community, shared values, background presuppositions, forms of life, and the newer analogues, paradigms after Kuhn (1922-1996), tacit knowledge after Michael Polanyi (1891-1976), habitus after Bourdieu (1930-2002), and shows that each names a supposed object that is tacit, shared, and the same across many people. He asks the question that sinks them. If a practice is a thing held in common and identical from head to head, it has to get from one person to another, has to be reproduced in each new member. There is no plausible route by which such an object travels. You cannot pour a tacit possession from one mind into the next. What you can do is train a man, correct him, let him watch and try and fail and try again, until his performance lands close enough to the others. That is habit, built separately in each person, made to look like a shared thing by common exposure and steady feedback. Turner’s line is the blade. Without the notion of sameness, the concept of practice collapses into the concept of habit. Drop the shared object and all that is left is many people doing similar things for reasons that never coincide.
Bring this to Smith and the first thing to see is how far Smith already stands on Turner’s side of the field, further than he stood on any other question. His long war was against Eliade, and the thing he fought was the collective tacit in its grandest form. Eliade’s sacred is a shared substrate, a single human experience of the holy that all religious men are supposed to carry in common and that surfaces in their myths and symbols across every age. That is a collective object endowed with causal powers, the exact article on Turner’s list, and Smith spent decades refusing it. He would not search for the timeless essence under the variety. He would not explain a rite by a shared cosmology or a shared inner state. When he built his own account of ritual in To Take Place, he put the weight on the doing. Ritual makes sacred space by ordering action and drawing a line between here and there, by placement and repetition, and not by broadcasting a meaning that every worshipper holds alike inside him. He located the thing in the performance and the arranged ground, in what a man can point to, and he took it off the shared interior where Eliade had lodged it. That is Turner’s move, made a generation early and inside the study of religion, against the most powerful tacit-theorist the field had.
The translator sounds the same note. Smith said there is no original in the business, that he renders other men’s renderings and stands always in the middle, unable to hand his language to anyone or to give theirs back untouched. Sameness is the thing he denies. No master version sits behind the translations for all of them to be the same as. There are only the separate acts of rendering, and they never fall on top of one another. And Smith had the field data before he had the theory. He used to carry his students’ books home and study what they had underlined, and he found that the one lecture and the one text had landed as many different things in many different heads. One student blacked out a whole page of Durkheim (1858-1917) and left the single word totem standing, which told Smith the student had received nothing the book was built to give. The grad students, he thought, were worse than the undergraduates, because years of training had taught them to perform the agreement their professors wanted to hear, so that what looked like shared understanding was a shared act of saying the expected thing. Similar exposure, divergent uptake, a surface of agreement over private habits that do not match. Smith kept meeting Turner’s thesis in his own classroom and writing it down without naming it.
Then the tension. The first is comparison. His method turns on recognizing a recurring form across cultures, a morphology, a resemblance, the same shape of rite or myth showing up in Babylon and in the Pacific. Turner presses on the word same. When Smith says two rituals share a form, has he found a shared object out in the world, or has he made a judgment of similarity from two performances that different setups produced? Smith’s polythetic hedge softens this, since he already gave up the single shared trait, but resemblance still has to carry the load, and Turner asks what resemblance is once sameness is no longer a fact of the matter but a decision of the observer. Smith half-answered by admitting the decision was his, that comparison puts two things in one pond because the scholar chose to, that nothing in creation set them side by side. To that extent he is safe. The exposure is that he still needed the reader to grant that the forms he lined up were forms and not just his own likeness-judgments dressed as findings.
The second and deeper place is canon and tradition, and here Smith is both most exposed and most ingenious. A tradition, a community, a canon, these are Turner’s collective nouns, the quasi-objects he denies. A theory of canon is a theory of how a thing persists and reproduces across centuries, which is the very thing Turner says has no route of transmission. Watch what Smith does with it. He does not locate the shared thing in a tacit understanding passed from believer to believer. He locates it in the explicit external object, the closed list, the fixed text on the page. The canon is stable because it is material and shut, and its stability is what forces each generation to reinterpret it. The shared thing sits in the artifact, which anyone can go back to and read again, and the variation sits in the separate acts of interpretation, which never coincide. This sidesteps Turner’s problem with some elegance. You do not have to transmit a hidden collective object if the object is a book on a shelf and the readings are individual labor. His ritual theory works the same way, putting the persistent thing in the ordered place and the repeated script, both external, both pointable, rather than in a shared inner meaning. Smith kept faith with the grass. He put the sameness where you can see it and left the interior alone.
And then he let one word stand that the whole argument should have pulled down, and it was the word he loved most. The great conversation. He liked to say we join the conversation in the middle, that the first page of the Babylonian Talmud opens on the reverse of the second leaf to teach us the talk was already going when we arrived and will not be finished forty-seven volumes on. It is his most beautiful image and his most exposed. The conversation, held across centuries, is a collective object if anything is, a tradition treated as a thing that continues and that a man can enter. Turner deflates it without raising his voice. There is no conversation as an object. There are people talking, each rendering the ones before him, and the look of a single continuous conversation is produced by feedback and mutual correction, by later voices reworking earlier ones, not by a shared possession anyone holds. The tradition is the name we give to a long chain of separate renderings that feed on one another. And Smith supplied the premise for his own deflation when he said there is no original. If there is no original, there is no conversation for all the voices to be contributions to the same of. There are only the voices, and the correcting, and the rough continuity that correcting makes.
How aware was Smith of the trade? More than on any other question, which is why the tension here is fine rather than gross. He led the attack on the field’s largest collective tacit and won it. He engineered his two central theories, ritual and canon, so that the durable thing hangs on explicit external objects and escapes the transmission problem by design. He even resisted the idea that his own teaching was a transferable object, refusing to let his method harden into a doctrine others could hold in common, insisting his talks were built for one room on one night. He acted, again and again, like a man who did not believe a tacit possession could be shared or passed down. What he never did was turn the insight on the warm words, tradition, community, consensus, the conversation, the words he reached for when he stopped arguing and started loving his subject. He dissolved the sacred and banked on the tradition. He denied the shared interior and kept the shared talk.
Strip the last collective noun and Smith is not smaller. He is clearer, and closer to himself. Without a shared sacred, religion is what men severally do, ordered by rites they perform and texts they severally read, held together by resemblance the scholar draws and enforcement the community supplies, and not by a holy substance every worshipper carries. Without a shared tradition, the great conversation is many voices across the centuries, each one rendering the last, made to look like one long talk by the endless correcting Smith described so well and called the middle. The grass breeder knew from the start that the same kind is the classifier’s decision. He spent that knowledge on the sacred and would not spend it on the conversation, because the conversation was the thing he could not bear to lose to habit. Turner asks him to spend it there too, and the surprise is how little Smith loses when he does. What remains is the middle, which is where he always said we live, and the separate renderings, which is all he ever claimed to make.
The Great Delusion
If John J. Mearsheimer’s anthropology is right, the radical historical and comparative scholarship of historian of religions Jonathan Zittell Smith (1938–2017) provides the exact structural blueprint for how tribes construct and police their cultural perimeters.
J. Z. Smith is famous for foundational essay collections like Map Is Not Territory, Imagining Religion, and To Take Place. His central thesis revolutionized religious studies: religion is not a passive response to the “sacred” or a series of raw, unmediated encounters with the divine. Instead, religion is an act of human imagination, a highly deliberate system of classification, map-making, and boundary-enforcement designed to create order out of chaos. Smith famously noted that “religion has no existence apart from the academy,” meaning it is an analytical category used to compare how groups organize their worlds.
Mearsheimer’s framework in The Great Delusion validates Smith’s entire body of work, elevating it from a critique of religious history into a primary logic of human survival.
First, Smith argues that humans are obsessed with differences, and that identity is generated by drawing hard lines between the inside and the outside. In his analysis of ritual, Smith showed that things become sacred or clean not because of their inherent qualities, but because of where they are placed within a group’s conceptual map.
This matches Mearsheimer’s anthropological claim that humans are inherently tribal and bound by a long childhood of intense value infusion. The ritual maps Smith describes are the precise instruments used by a tribe to execute this value infusion. A society does not leave its members to navigate the world as atomistic, rational individuals; it uses myths, taboos, and sacred spaces to contain them. These maps dictate who belongs, what is dangerous, and what must be defended at all costs.
Second, Smith’s famous dictum—”map is not territory”—exposes the fatal flaw of the liberal crusade. Smith demonstrated that human groups confuse their provincial, culturally constructed mental maps with the actual structure of reality.
Mearsheimer argues that liberalism suffers from this exact cognitive distortion. Liberal states build a conceptual map based on universal human rights, individual autonomy, and rule-bound global governance, and then mistake this map for the actual territory of human nature. When they attempt to superimpose this liberal map onto societies with entirely different historical value infusions, the map shatters against the real territory of local tribal loyalties. Smith’s work explains the cognitive mechanism behind the “great delusion”: the tragic human tendency to believe our group’s specific mode of organization is a universal law of mankind.
Finally, Smith focused heavily on how groups handle incongruity—what happens when the map fails to match reality. He showed that when a ritual fails or a prophecy is disappointed, tribes do not abandon their map; they engage in sophisticated, hyper-rational secondary adjustments to patch the map and keep the system intact.
Under Mearsheimer’s lens, this explains the behavior of foreign policy elites. When liberal interventions produce chaos instead of democracy, the technocratic tribe does not abandon its universalist framework. It uses complex rationalizations—claiming the intervention failed only because of poor execution, bad timing, or insufficient funding—to preserve its ideological map. Reason is deployed not to find objective truth, but to protect the internal cohesion and authority of the group.
If Mearsheimer is right, J. Z. Smith was not just analyzing ancient myths and obscure rituals. He was documenting the permanent, defensive operation of the human mind. Humans are map-making animals because they are tribal animals, and they must constantly police their conceptual borders to survive an chaotic and indifferent world.
‘A Big Misunderstanding’
If David Pinsof is right, the brilliant historical and theoretical work of Jonathan Zittell Smith (1938-2017) serves as a supreme example of an intellectual transforming fierce coalitional struggles over the supernatural into a polite, high-status academic exercise in classification.
Smith spent his career arguing that religion is not a native category but an invention of the scholar. In foundational books like Map is Not Territory and Imagining Religion, he argues that human ritual and myth are not irrational brain-farts. Instead, he presents them as sophisticated cognitive experiments in taxonomy, where human groups build mental maps to manage the gap between the messy realities of life and the ideal world. To his followers, his work changed the field by showing that religious differences are problems of human classification and definition.
A Pinsofian analysis strips away this elegant, cognitive framework. Human groups do not invent gods, perform complex rituals, and enforce taboos because they want to reconcile maps with territories. They build religious systems as functional, self-serving weapons to secure finite resources, police ingroup loyalty, and dominate rival coalitions. The strict boundaries of a ritual space are not a conceptual thought experiment designed to reflect on reality. Those rules function as coalitional badges that signal absolute commitment to the group and warn outsiders away. The actors know their incentives.
By asserting that religion is an artificial category created by academics rather than a distinct human instinct, Smith creates an ideal mission statement for his own guild. This stance positions the historian of religion as the elite mapmaker who stands above the cultural fray. It provides university circles with a sophisticated platform to look down upon the instinctual, zero-sum religious conflicts of history, treating those conflicts as data points in a taxonomy lesson rather than raw struggles for dominance.
Smith did not discover a universal, intellectual engine for human myth-making. He executed a highly successful status strategy within the modern university, using sharp historical analysis to secure immense prestige and a legendary legacy at the University of Chicago. His work provides an elite academic audience with a beautiful framework to classify the prejudices of mankind, proving that treating a fierce coalitional conflict as a taxonomic misunderstanding is the best way to secure institutional authority.
